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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works
+of Charles Dickens, by G. K. Chesterton
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens
+
+Author: G. K. Chesterton
+
+Release Date: August 20, 2007 [EBook #22362]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DICKENS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Sigal Alon, LN Yaddanapudi and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+  [Illustration: Charles Dickens, Circa 1840
+  From an oil painting by R. J. Lane.]
+
+APPRECIATIONS AND CRITICISMS OF THE WORKS OF CHARLES DICKENS
+
+BY
+
+G. K. CHESTERTON
+
+[Illustration]
+
+1911
+
+LONDON: J. M. DENT & SONS, LTD.
+NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO.
+
+_All rights reserved_
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+  CHAPTER                             PAGE
+
+     I. INTRODUCTION                   vii
+    II. SKETCHES BY BOZ                  1
+   III. PICKWICK PAPERS                 13
+    IV. NICHOLAS NICKLEBY               26
+     V. OLIVER TWIST                    38
+    VI. OLD CURIOSITY SHOP              50
+   VII. BARNABY RUDGE                   65
+  VIII. AMERICAN NOTES                  76
+    IX. PICTURES FROM ITALY             87
+     X. MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT               90
+    XI. CHRISTMAS BOOKS                103
+   XII. DOMBEY AND SON                 114
+  XIII. DAVID COPPERFIELD              129
+   XIV. CHRISTMAS STORIES              140
+    XV. BLEAK HOUSE                    148
+   XVI. CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND     160
+   XVII. HARD TIMES                    169
+  XVIII. LITTLE DORRIT                 178
+    XIX. A TALE OF TWO CITIES          188
+     XX. GREAT EXPECTATIONS            197
+    XXI. OUR MUTUAL FRIEND             207
+   XXII. EDWIN DROOD                   218
+  XXIII. MASTER HUMPHREY'S CLOCK       229
+   XXIV. REPRINTED PIECES              239
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+                                                                    PAGE
+
+  CHARLES DICKENS, CIRCA 1840                             _Frontispiece_
+    From an oil painting by R. J. Lane.
+
+  CHARLES DICKENS, 1842                                               76
+    From a bust by H. Dexter, executed during Dickens's
+    first visit to America.
+
+  CHARLES DICKENS, 1844                                               90
+    From a miniature by Margaret Gillies.
+
+  CHARLES DICKENS, 1849                                              130
+    From a daguerreotype by Mayall.
+
+  CHARLES DICKENS, 1858                                              184
+    From a black and white drawing by Baughiet.
+
+  CHARLES DICKENS, 1859                                              188
+    From an oil painting by W. P. Frith, R.A.
+
+  CHARLES DICKENS, CIRCA 1860                                        198
+    Photograph by J. & C. Watkins.
+
+  CHARLES DICKENS, 1868                                              218
+    From a photograph by Gurney.
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+These papers were originally published as prefaces to the separate books
+of Dickens in one of the most extensive of those cheap libraries of the
+classics which are one of the real improvements of recent times. Thus
+they were harmless, being diluted by, or rather drowned in Dickens. My
+scrap of theory was a mere dry biscuit to be taken with the grand tawny
+port of great English comedy; and by most people it was not taken at
+all--like the biscuit. Nevertheless the essays were not in intention so
+aimless as they appear in fact. I had a general notion of what needed
+saying about Dickens to the new generation, though probably I did not
+say it. I will make another attempt to do so in this prologue, and,
+possibly fail again.
+
+There was a painful moment (somewhere about the eighties) when we
+watched anxiously to see whether Dickens was fading from the modern
+world. We have watched a little longer, and with great relief we begin
+to realise that it is the modern world that is fading. All that universe
+of ranks and respectabilities in comparison with which Dickens was
+called a caricaturist, all that Victorian universe in which he seemed
+vulgar--all that is itself breaking up like a cloudland. And only the
+caricatures of Dickens remain like things carved in stone. This, of
+course, is an old story in the case of a man reproached with any excess
+of the poetic. Again and again when the man of visions was pinned by the
+sly dog who knows the world,
+
+    "The man recovered of the bite,
+    The dog it was that died."
+
+To call Thackeray a cynic, which means a sly dog, was indeed absurd; but
+it is fair to say that in comparison with Dickens he felt himself a man
+of the world. Nevertheless, that world of which he was a man is coming
+to an end before our eyes; its aristocracy has grown corrupt, its middle
+class insecure, and things that he never thought of are walking about
+the drawing-rooms of both. Thackeray has described for ever the
+Anglo-Indian Colonel; but what on earth would he have done with an
+Australian Colonel? What can it matter whether Dickens's clerks talked
+cockney now that half the duchesses talk American? What would Thackeray
+have made of an age in which a man in the position of Lord Kew may
+actually be the born brother of Mr. Moss of Wardour Street? Nor does
+this apply merely to Thackeray, but to all those Victorians who prided
+themselves on the realism or sobriety of their descriptions; it applies
+to Anthony Trollope and, as much as any one, to George Eliot. For we
+have not only survived that present which Thackeray described: we have
+even survived that future to which George Eliot looked forward. It is no
+longer adequate to say that Dickens did not understand that old world of
+gentility, of parliamentary politeness and the balance of the
+constitution. That world is rapidly ceasing to understand itself. It is
+vain to repeat the complaint of the old Quarterly Reviewers, that
+Dickens had not enjoyed a university education. What would the old
+Quarterly Reviewers themselves have thought of the Rhodes Scholarships?
+It is useless to repeat the old tag that Dickens could not describe a
+gentleman. A gentleman in our time has become something quite
+indescribable.
+
+Now the interesting fact is this: That Dickens, whom so many considered
+to be at the best a vulgar enthusiast, saw the coming change in our
+society much more soberly and scientifically than did his better
+educated and more pretentious contemporaries. I give but one example out
+of many. Thackeray was a good Victorian radical, who seems to have gone
+to his grave quite contented with the early Victorian radical
+theory--the theory which Macaulay preached with unparalleled luminosity
+and completeness; the theory that true progress goes on so steadily
+through human history, that while reaction is indefensible, revolution
+is unnecessary. Thackeray seems to have been quite content to think that
+the world would grow more and more liberal in the limited sense; that
+Free Trade would get freer; that ballot boxes would grow more and more
+secret; that at last (as some satirist of Liberalism puts it) every man
+would have two votes instead of one. There is no trace in Thackeray of
+the slightest consciousness that progress could ever change its
+direction. There is in Dickens. The whole of _Hard Times_ is the
+expression of just such a realisation. It is not true to say that
+Dickens was a Socialist, but it is not absurd to say so. And it would
+be simply absurd to say it of any of the great Individualist novelists
+of the Victorian time. Dickens saw far enough ahead to know that the
+time was coming when the people would be imploring the State to save
+them from mere freedom, as from some frightful foreign oppressor. He
+felt the society changing; and Thackeray never did.
+
+As talking about Socialism and Individualism is one of the greatest
+bores ever endured among men, I will take another instance to illustrate
+my meaning, even though the instance be a queer and even a delicate one.
+Even if the reader does not agree with my deduction, I ask his attention
+to the fact itself, which I think a curiosity of literature. In the last
+important work of Dickens, that excellent book _Our Mutual Friend_,
+there is an odd thing about which I cannot make up my mind; I do not
+know whether it is unconscious observation or fiendish irony. But it is
+this. In _Our Mutual Friend_ is an old patriarch named Aaron, who is a
+saintly Jew made to do the dirty work of an abominable Christian usurer.
+In an artistic sense I think the patriarch Aaron as much of a humbug as
+the patriarch Casby. In a moral sense there is no doubt at all that
+Dickens introduced the Jew with a philanthropic idea of doing justice to
+Judaism, which he was told he had affronted by the great gargoyle of
+Fagin. If this was his motive, it was morally a most worthy one. But it
+is certainly unfortunate for the Hebrew cause that the bad Jew should be
+so very much more convincing than the good one. Old Aaron is not an
+exaggeration of Jewish virtues; he is simply not Jewish, because he is
+not human. There is nothing about him that in any way suggests the
+nobler sort of Jew, such a man as Spinoza or Mr. Zangwill. He is simply
+a public apology, and like most public apologies, he is very stiff and
+not very convincing.
+
+So far so good. Now we come to the funny part. To describe the high
+visionary and mystic Jew like Spinoza or Zangwill is a great and
+delicate task in which even Dickens might have failed. But most of us
+know something of the make and manners of the low Jew, who is generally
+the successful one. Most of us know the Jew who calls himself De
+Valancourt. Now to any one who knows a low Jew by sight or hearing, the
+story called _Our Mutual Friend_ is literally full of Jews. Like all
+Dickens's best characters they are vivid; we know them. And we know them
+to be Hebrew. Mr. Veneering, the Man from Nowhere, dark, sphinx-like,
+smiling, with black curling hair, and a taste in florid vulgar
+furniture--of what stock was he? Mr. Lammle, with "too much nose in his
+face, too much ginger in his whiskers, too much sparkle in his studs and
+manners"--of what blood was he? Mr. Lammle's friends, coarse and
+thick-lipped, with fingers so covered with rings that they could hardly
+hold their gold pencils--do they remind us of anybody? Mr. Fledgeby,
+with his little ugly eyes and social flashiness and craven bodily
+servility--might not some fanatic like M. Drumont make interesting
+conjectures about him? The particular types that people hate in Jewry,
+the types that are the shame of all good Jews, absolutely run riot in
+this book, which is supposed to contain an apology to them. It looks at
+first sight as if Dickens's apology were one hideous sneer. It looks as
+if he put in one good Jew whom nobody could believe in, and then
+balanced him with ten bad Jews whom nobody could fail to recognise. It
+seems as if he had avenged himself for the doubt about Fagin by
+introducing five or six Fagins--triumphant Fagins, fashionable Fagins,
+Fagins who had changed their names. The impeccable old Aaron stands up
+in the middle of this ironic carnival with a peculiar solemnity and
+silliness. He looks like one particularly stupid Englishman pretending
+to be a Jew, amidst all that crowd of clever Jews who are pretending to
+be Englishmen.
+
+But this notion of a sneer is not admissible. Dickens was far too frank
+and generous a writer to employ such an elaborate plot of silence. His
+satire was always intended to attack, never to entrap; moreover, he was
+far too vain a man not to wish the crowd to see all his jokes. Vanity is
+more divine than pride, because it is more democratic than pride. Third,
+and most important, Dickens was a good Liberal, and would have been
+horrified at the notion of making so venomous a vendetta against one
+race or creed. Nevertheless the fact is there, as I say, if only as a
+curiosity of literature. I defy any man to read through _Our Mutual
+Friend_ after hearing this suggestion, and to get out of his head the
+conviction that Lammle is the wrong kind of Jew. The explanation lies, I
+think, in this, that Dickens was so wonderfully sensitive to that change
+that has come over our society, that he noticed the type of the oriental
+and cosmopolitan financier without even knowing that it was oriental or
+cosmopolitan. He had, in fact, fallen a victim to a very simple fallacy
+affecting this problem. Somebody said, with great wit and truth, that
+treason cannot prosper, because when it prospers it cannot be called
+treason. The same argument soothed all possible Anti-Semitism in men
+like Dickens. Jews cannot be sneaks and snobs, because when they are
+sneaks and snobs they do not admit that they are Jews.
+
+I have taken this case of the growth of the cosmopolitan financier,
+because it is not so stale in discussion as its parallel, the growth of
+Socialism. But as regards Dickens, the same criticism applies to both.
+Dickens knew that Socialism was coming, though he did not know its name.
+Similarly, Dickens knew that the South African millionaire was coming,
+though he did not know the millionaire's name. Nobody does. His was not
+a type of mind to disentangle either the abstract truths touching the
+Socialist, nor the highly personal truth about the millionaire. He was a
+man of impressions; he has never been equalled in the art of conveying
+what a man looks like at first sight--and he simply felt the two things
+as atmospheric facts. He felt that the mercantile power was oppressive,
+past all bearing by Christian men; and he felt that this power was no
+longer wholly in the hands even of heavy English merchants like Podsnap.
+It was largely in the hands of a feverish and unfamiliar type, like
+Lammle and Veneering. The fact that he felt these things is almost more
+impressive because he did not understand them.
+
+Now for this reason Dickens must definitely be considered in the light
+of the changes which his soul foresaw. Thackeray has become classical;
+but Dickens has done more: he has remained modern. The grand
+retrospective spirit of Thackeray is by its nature attached to places
+and times; he belongs to Queen Victoria as much as Addison belongs to
+Queen Anne, and it is not only Queen Anne who is dead. But Dickens, in a
+dark prophetic kind of way, belongs to the developments. He belongs to
+the times since his death when Hard Times grew harder, and when
+Veneering became not only a Member of Parliament, but a Cabinet
+Minister; the times when the very soul and spirit of Fledgeby carried
+war into Africa. Dickens can be criticised as a contemporary of Bernard
+Shaw or Anatole France or C. F. G. Masterman. In talking of him one need
+no longer talk merely of the Manchester School or Puseyism or the Charge
+of the Light Brigade; his name comes to the tongue when we are talking
+of Christian Socialists or Mr. Roosevelt or County Council Steam Boats
+or Guilds of Play. He can be considered under new lights, some larger
+and some meaner than his own; and it is a very rough effort so to
+consider him which is the excuse of these pages. Of the essays in this
+book I desire to say as little as possible; I will discuss any other
+subject in preference with a readiness which reaches to avidity. But I
+may very curtly apply the explanation used above to the cases of two or
+three of them. Thus in the article on _David Copperfield_ I have done
+far less than justice to that fine book considered in its relation to
+eternal literature; but I have dwelt at some length upon a particular
+element in it which has grown enormous in England after Dickens's death.
+Thus again, in introducing the _Sketches by Boz_ I have felt chiefly
+that I am introducing them to a new generation insufficiently in
+sympathy with such palpable and unsophisticated fun. A Board School
+education, evolved since Dickens's day, has given to our people a queer
+and inadequate sort of refinement, one which prevents them from enjoying
+the raw jests of the _Sketches by Boz_, but leaves them easily open to
+that slight but poisonous sentimentalism which I note amid all the
+merits of David Copperfield. In the same way I shall speak of _Little
+Dorrit_, with reference to a school of pessimistic fiction which did not
+exist when it was written, of _Hard Times_ in the light of the most
+modern crises of economics, and of _The Child's History of England_ in
+the light of the most matured authority of history. In short, these
+criticisms are an intrinsically ephemeral comment from one generation
+upon work that will delight many more. Dickens was a very great man, and
+there are many ways of testing and stating the fact. But one permissible
+way is to say this, that he was an ignorant man, ill-read in the past,
+and often confused about the present. Yet he remains great and true, and
+even essentially reliable, if we suppose him to have known not only all
+that went before his lifetime, but also all that was to come after.
+
+From this vanishing of the Victorian compromise (I might say the
+Victorian illusion) there begins to emerge a menacing and even monstrous
+thing--we may begin again to behold the English people. If that strange
+dawn ever comes, it will be the final vindication of Dickens. It will be
+proved that he is hardly even a caricaturist; that he is something very
+like a realist. Those comic monstrosities which the critics found
+incredible will be found to be the immense majority of the citizens of
+this country. We shall find that Sweedlepipe cuts our hair and
+Pumblechook sells our cereals; that Sam Weller blacks our boots and
+Tony Weller drives our omnibus. For the exaggerated notion of the
+exaggerations of Dickens (as was admirably pointed out by my old friend
+and enemy Mr. Blatchford in a _Clarion_ review) is very largely due to
+our mixing with only one social class, whose conventions are very
+strict, and to whose affectations we are accustomed. In cabmen, in
+cobblers, in charwomen, individuality is often pushed to the edge of
+insanity. But as long as the Thackerayan platform of gentility stood
+firm all this was, comparatively speaking, concealed. For the English,
+of all nations, have the most uniform upper class and the most varied
+democracy. In France it is the peasants who are solid to uniformity; it
+is the marquises who are a little mad. But in England, while good form
+restrains and levels the universities and the army, the poor people are
+the most motley and amusing creatures in the world, full of humorous
+affections and prejudices and twists of irony. Frenchmen tend to be
+alike, because they are all soldiers; Prussians because they are all
+something else, probably policemen; even Americans are all something,
+though it is not easy to say what it is; it goes with hawk-like eyes and
+an irrational eagerness. Perhaps it is savages. But two English cabmen
+will be as grotesquely different as Mr. Weller and Mr. Wegg. Nor is it
+true to say that I see this variety because it is in my own people. For
+I do not see the same degree of variety in my own class or in the class
+above it; there is more superficial resemblance between two Kensington
+doctors or two Highland dukes. No; the democracy is really composed of
+Dickens characters, for the simple reason that Dickens was himself one
+of the democracy.
+
+There remains one thing to be added to this attempt to exhibit Dickens
+in the growing and changing lights of our time. God forbid that any one
+(especially any Dickensian) should dilute or discourage the great
+efforts towards social improvement. But I wish that social reformers
+would more often remember that they are imposing their rules not on dots
+and numbers, but on Bob Sawyer and Tim Linkinwater, on Mrs. Lirriper and
+Dr. Marigold. I wish Mr. Sidney Webb would shut his eyes until he _sees_
+Sam Weller.
+
+A great many circumstances have led to the neglect in literature of
+these exuberant types which do actually exist in the ruder classes of
+society. Perhaps the principal cause is that since Dickens's time the
+study of the poor has ceased to be an art and become a sort of sham
+science. Dickens took the poor individually: all modern writing tends to
+take them collectively. It is said that the modern realist produces a
+photograph rather than a picture. But this is an inadequate objection.
+The real trouble with the realist is not that he produces a photograph,
+but that he produces a composite photograph. It is like all composite
+photographs, blurred; like all composite photographs, hideous; and like
+all composite photographs, unlike anything or anybody. The new
+sociological novels, which attempt to describe the abstract type of the
+working-classes, sin in practice against the first canon of literature,
+true when all others are subject to exception. Literature must always be
+a pointing out of what is interesting in life; but these books are
+duller than the life they represent. Even supposing that Dickens did
+exaggerate the degree to which one man differs from another--that was at
+least an exaggeration upon the side of literature; it was better than a
+mere attempt to reduce what is actually vivid and unmistakable to what
+is in comparison colourless or unnoticeable. Even the creditable and
+necessary efforts of our time in certain matters of social reform have
+discouraged the old distinctive Dickens treatment. People are so anxious
+to do something for the poor man that they have a sort of subconscious
+desire to think that there is only one kind of man to do it for. Thus
+while the old accounts were sometimes too steep and crazy, the new
+became too sweeping and flat. People write about the problem of drink,
+for instance, as if it were one problem. Dickens could have told them
+that there is the abyss between heaven and hell between the incongruous
+excesses of Mr. Pickwick and the fatalistic soaking of Mr. Wickfield. He
+could have shown that there was nothing in common between the brandy and
+water of Bob Sawyer and the rum and water of Mr. Stiggins. People talk
+of imprudent marriages among the poor, as if it were all one question.
+Dickens could have told them that it is one thing to marry without much
+money, like Stephen Blackpool, and quite another to marry without the
+smallest intention of ever trying to get any, like Harold Skimpole.
+People talk about husbands in the working-classes being kind or brutal
+to their wives, as if that was the one permanent problem and no other
+possibility need be considered. Dickens could have told them that there
+was the case (the by no means uncommon case) of the husband of Mrs.
+Gargery as well as of the wife of Mr. Quilp. In short, Dickens saw the
+problem of the poor not as a dead and definite business, but as a living
+and very complex one. In some ways he would be called much more
+conservative than the modern sociologists, in some ways much more
+revolutionary.
+
+
+LITTLE DORRIT
+
+In the time of the decline and death of Dickens, and even more strongly
+after it, there arose a school of criticism which substantially
+maintained that a man wrote better when he was ill. It was some such
+sentiment as this that made Mr. George Gissing, that able writer, come
+near to contending that _Little Dorrit_ is Dickens's best book. It was
+the principle of his philosophy to maintain (I know not why) that a man
+was more likely to perceive the truth when in low spirits than when in
+high spirits.
+
+
+REPRINTED PIECES
+
+The three articles on Sunday of which I speak are almost the last
+expression of an articulate sort in English literature of the ancient
+and existing morality of the English people. It is always asserted that
+Puritanism came in with the seventeenth century and thoroughly soaked
+and absorbed the English. We are now, it is constantly said, an
+incurably Puritanic people. Personally, I have my doubts about this. I
+shall not refuse to admit to the Puritans that they conquered and
+crushed the English people; but I do not think that they ever
+transformed it. My doubt is chiefly derived from three historical
+facts. First, that England was never so richly and recognisably English
+as in the Shakespearian age before the Puritan had appeared. Second,
+that ever since he did appear there has been a long unbroken line of
+brilliant and typical Englishmen who belonged to the Shakespearian and
+not the Puritanic tradition; Dryden, Johnson, Wilkes, Fox, Nelson, were
+hardly Puritans. And third, that the real rise of a new, cold, and
+illiberal morality in these matters seems to me to have occurred in the
+time of Queen Victoria, and not of Queen Elizabeth. All things
+considered, it is likely that future historians will say that the
+Puritans first really triumphed in the twentieth century, and that
+Dickens was the last cry of Merry England.
+
+And about these additional, miscellaneous, and even inferior works of
+Dickens there is, moreover, another use and fascination which all
+Dickensians will understand; which, after a manner, is not for the
+profane. All who love Dickens have a strange sense that he is really
+inexhaustible. It is this fantastic infinity that divides him even from
+the strongest and healthiest romantic artists of a later day--from
+Stevenson, for example. I have read _Treasure Island_ twenty times;
+nevertheless I know it. But I do not really feel as if I knew all
+_Pickwick_; I have not so much read it twenty times as read in it a
+million times; and it almost seemed as if I always read something new.
+We of the true faith look at each other and understand; yes, our master
+was a magician. I believe the books are alive; I believe that leaves
+still grow in them, as leaves grow on the trees. I believe that this
+fairy library flourishes and increases like a fairy forest: but the
+world is listening to us, and we will put our hand upon our mouth.
+
+
+OUR MUTUAL FRIEND
+
+One thing at least seems certain. Dickens may or may not have been
+socialist in his tendencies; one might quote on the affirmative side his
+satire against Mr. Podsnap, who thought Centralisation "un-English"; one
+might quote in reply the fact that he satirised quite as unmercifully
+state and municipal officials of the most modern type. But there is one
+condition of affairs which Dickens would certainly have detested and
+denounced, and that is the condition in which we actually stand to-day.
+At this moment it is vain to discuss whether socialism will be a selling
+of men's liberty for bread. The men have already sold the liberty; only
+they have not yet got the bread. A most incessant and exacting
+interference with the poor is already in operation; they are already
+ruled like slaves, only they are not fed like slaves. The children are
+forcibly provided with a school; only they are not provided with a
+house. Officials give the most detailed domestic directions about the
+fireguard; only they do not give the fireguard. Officials bring round
+the most stringent directions about the milk; only they do not bring
+round the milk. The situation is perhaps the most humorous in the whole
+history of oppression. We force the nigger to dig; but as a concession
+to him we do not give him a spade. We compel Sambo to cook; but we
+consult his dignity so far as to refuse him a fire.
+
+This state of things at least cannot conceivably endure. We must either
+give the workers more property and liberty, or we must feed them
+properly as we work them properly. If we insist on sending the menu into
+them, they will naturally send the bill into us. This may possibly
+result (it is not my purpose here to prove that it will) in the drilling
+of the English people into hordes of humanely herded serfs; and this
+again may mean the fading from our consciousness of all those elves and
+giants, monsters and fantastics whom we are faintly beginning to feel
+and remember in the land. If this be so, the work of Dickens may be
+considered as a great vision--a vision, as Swinburne said, between a
+sleep and a sleep. It can be said that between the grey past of
+territorial depression and the grey future of economic routine the
+strange clouds lifted, and we beheld the land of the living.
+
+Lastly, Dickens is even astonishingly right about Eugene Wrayburne. So
+far from reproaching him with not understanding a gentleman, the critic
+will be astonished at the accuracy with which he has really observed the
+worth and the weakness of the aristocrat. He is quite right when he
+suggests that such a man has intelligence enough to despise the
+invitations which he has not the energy to refuse. He is quite right
+when he makes Eugene (like Mr. Balfour) constantly right in argument
+even when he is obviously wrong in fact. Dickens is quite right when he
+describes Eugene as capable of cultivating a sort of secondary and false
+industry about anything that is not profitable; or pursuing with passion
+anything that is not his business. He is quite right in making Eugene
+honestly appreciative of essential goodness--in other people. He is
+quite right in making him really good at the graceful combination of
+satire and sentiment, both perfectly sincere. He is also right in
+indicating that the only cure for this intellectual condition is a
+violent blow on the head.
+
+
+DAVID COPPERFIELD
+
+The real achievement of the earlier part of _David Copperfield_ lies in
+a certain impression of the little Copperfield living in a land of
+giants. It is at once Gargantuan in its fancy and grossly vivid in its
+facts; like Gulliver in the land of Brobdingnag when he describes
+mountainous hands and faces filling the sky, bristles as big as hedges,
+or moles as big as molehills. To him parents and guardians are not
+Olympians (as in Mr. Kenneth Grahame's clever book), mysterious and
+dignified, dwelling upon a cloudy hill. Rather they are all the more
+visible for being large. They come all the closer because they are
+colossal. Their queer features and weaknesses stand out large in a sort
+of gigantic domesticity, like the hairs and freckles of a
+Brobdingnagian. We feel the sombre Murdstone coming upon the house like
+a tall storm striding through the sky. We watch every pucker of
+Peggotty's peasant face in its moods of flinty prejudice or whimsical
+hesitation. We look up and feel that Aunt Betsey in her garden gloves
+was really terrible--especially her garden gloves. But one cannot avoid
+the impression that as the boy grows larger these figures grow smaller,
+and are not perhaps so completely satisfactory.
+
+
+CHRISTMAS BOOKS
+
+And there is doubtless a certain poetic unity and irony in gathering
+together three or four of the crudest and most cocksure of the modern
+theorists, with their shrill voices and metallic virtues, under the
+fulness and the sonorous sanity of Christian bells. But the figures
+satirised in _The Chimes_ cross each other's path and spoil each other
+in some degree. The main purpose of the book was a protest against that
+impudent and hard-hearted utilitarianism which arranges the people only
+in rows of men or even in rows of figures. It is a flaming denunciation
+of that strange mathematical morality which was twisted often unfairly
+out of Bentham and Mill: a morality by which each citizen must regard
+himself as a fraction, and a very vulgar fraction. Though the particular
+form of this insolent patronage has changed, this revolt and rebuke is
+still of value, and may be wholesome for those who are teaching the poor
+to be provident. Doubtless it is a good idea to be provident, in the
+sense that Providence is provident, but that should mean being kind, and
+certainly not merely being cold.
+
+_The Cricket on the Hearth_, though popular, I think, with many sections
+of the great army of Dickensians, cannot be spoken of in any such
+abstract or serious terms. It is a brief domestic glimpse; it is an
+interior. It must be remembered that Dickens was fond of interiors as
+such; he was like a romantic tramp who should go from window to window
+looking in at the parlours. He had that solid, indescribable delight in
+the mere solidity and neatness of funny little humanity in its funny
+little houses, like doll's houses. To him every house was a box, a
+Christmas box, in which a dancing human doll was tied up in bricks and
+slates instead of string and brown paper. He went from one gleaming
+window to another, looking in at the lamp-lit parlours. Thus he stood
+for a little while looking in at this cosy if commonplace interior of
+the carrier and his wife; but he did not stand there very long. He was
+on his way to quainter towns and villages. Already the plants were
+sprouting upon the balcony of Miss Tox; and the great wind was rising
+that flung Mr. Pecksniff against his own front door.
+
+
+TALE OF TWO CITIES
+
+It was well for him, at any rate, that the people rose in France. It was
+well for him, at any rate, that the guillotine was set up in the Place
+de la Concorde. Unconsciously, but not accidentally, Dickens was here
+working out the whole true comparison between swift revolutionism in
+Paris and slow evolutionism in London. Sidney Carton is one of those
+sublime ascetics whose head offends them, and who cut it off. For him at
+least it was better that the blood should flow in Paris than that the
+wine should flow any longer in London. And if I say that even now the
+guillotine might be the best cure for many a London lawyer, I ask you to
+believe that I am not merely flippant. But you will not believe it.
+
+
+BARNABY RUDGE
+
+It may be said that there is no comparison between that explosive
+opening of the intellect in Paris and an antiquated madman leading a
+knot of provincial Protestants. The Man of the Hill, says Victor Hugo
+somewhere, fights for an idea; the Man of the Forest for a prejudice.
+Nevertheless it remains true that the enemies of the red cap long
+attempted to represent it as a sham decoration in the style of Sim
+Tappertit. Long after the revolutionists had shown more than the
+qualities of men, it was common among lords and lacqueys to attribute to
+them the stagey and piratical pretentiousness of urchins. The kings
+called Napoleon's pistol a toy pistol even while it was holding up their
+coach and mastering their money or their lives; they called his sword a
+stage sword even while they ran away from it. Something of the same
+senile inconsistency can be found in an English and American habit
+common until recently: that of painting the South Americans at once as
+ruffians wading in carnage, and also as poltroons playing at war. They
+blame them first for the cruelty of having a fight; and then for the
+weakness of having a sham fight. Such, however, since the French
+Revolution and before it, has been the fatuous attitude of certain
+Anglo-Saxons towards the whole revolutionary tradition. Sim Tappertit
+was a sort of answer to everything; and the young men were mocked as
+'prentices long after they were masters. The rising fortune of the South
+American republics to-day is symbolical and even menacing of many
+things; and it may be that the romance of riot will not be so much
+extinguished as extended; and nearer home we may have boys being boys
+again, and in London the cry of "clubs."
+
+
+THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER
+
+_The Uncommercial Traveller_ is a collection of Dickens's memories
+rather than of his literary purposes; but it is due to him to say that
+memory is often more startling in him than prophecy in anybody else.
+They have the character which belongs to all his vivid incidental
+writing: that they attach themselves always to some text which is a fact
+rather than an idea. He was one of those sons of Eve who are fonder of
+the Tree of Life than of the Tree of Knowledge--even of the knowledge of
+good and of evil. He was in this profoundest sense a realist. Critics
+have talked of an artist with his eye on the object. Dickens as an
+essayist always had his eye on an object before he had the faintest
+notion of a subject. All these works of his can best be considered as
+letters; they are notes of personal travel, scribbles in a diary about
+this or that that really happened. But Dickens was one of the few men
+who have the two talents that are the whole of literature--and have them
+both together. First, he could make a thing happen over again; and
+second, he could make it happen better. He can be called exaggerative;
+but mere exaggeration conveys nothing of his typical talent. Mere
+whirlwinds of words, mere melodramas of earth and heaven do not affect
+us as Dickens affects us, because they are exaggerations of nothing. If
+asked for an exaggeration of something, their inventors would be
+entirely dumb. They would not know how to exaggerate a broom-stick; for
+the life of them they could not exaggerate a tenpenny nail. Dickens
+always began with the nail or the broom-stick. He always began with a
+fact even when he was most fanciful; and even when he drew the long bow
+he was careful to hit the white.
+
+This riotous realism of Dickens has its disadvantage--a disadvantage
+that comes out more clearly in these casual sketches than in his
+constructed romances. One grave defect in his greatness is that he was
+altogether too indifferent to theories. On large matters he went right
+by the very largeness of his mind; but in small matters he suffered from
+the lack of any logical test and ready reckoner. Hence his comment upon
+the details of civilisation or reform are sometimes apt to be jerky and
+jarring, and even grossly inconsistent. So long as a thing was heroic
+enough to admire, Dickens admired it; whenever it was absurd enough to
+laugh at he laughed at it: so far he was on sure ground. But about all
+the small human projects that lie between the extremes of the sublime
+and the ridiculous, his criticism was apt to have an accidental quality.
+As Matthew Arnold said of the remarks of the Young Man from the Country
+about the perambulator, they are felt not to be at the heart of the
+situation. On a great many occasions the Uncommercial Traveller seems,
+like other hasty travellers, to be criticising elements and institutions
+which he has quite inadequately understood; and once or twice the
+Uncommercial Traveller might almost as well be a Commercial Traveller
+for all he knows of the countryside.
+
+An instance of what I mean may be found in the amusing article about the
+nightmares of the nursery. Superficially read it might almost be taken
+to mean that Dickens disapproved of ghost stories--disapproved of that
+old and genial horror which nurses can hardly supply fast enough for the
+children who want it. Dickens, one would have thought, should have been
+the last man in the world to object to horrible stories, having himself
+written some of the most horrible that exist in the world. The author of
+the Madman's Manuscript, of the disease of Monk and the death of Krook,
+cannot be considered fastidious in the matter of revolting realism or of
+revolting mysticism. If artistic horror is to be kept from the young, it
+is at least as necessary to keep little boys from reading _Pickwick_ or
+_Bleak House_ as to refrain from telling them the story of Captain
+Murderer or the terrible tale of Chips. If there was something appalling
+in the rhyme of Chips and pips and ships, it was nothing compared to
+that infernal refrain of "Mudstains, bloodstains" which Dickens himself,
+in one of his highest moments of hellish art, put into _Oliver Twist_.
+
+I take this one instance of the excellent article called "Nurse's
+Stories" because it is quite typical of all the rest. Dickens (accused
+of superficiality by those who cannot grasp that there is foam upon deep
+seas) was really deep about human beings; that is, he was original and
+creative about them. But about ideas he did tend to be a little
+superficial. He judged them by whether they hit him, and not by what
+they were trying to hit. Thus in this book the great wizard of the
+Christmas ghosts seems almost the enemy of ghost stories; thus the
+almost melodramatic moralist who created Ralph Nickleby and Jonas
+Chuzzlewit cannot see the point in original sin; thus the great
+denouncer of official oppression in England may be found far too
+indulgent to the basest aspects of the modern police. His theories were
+less important than his creations, because he was a man of genius. But
+he himself thought his theories the more important, because he was a
+man.
+
+
+
+
+SKETCHES BY BOZ
+
+
+The greatest mystery about almost any great writer is why he was ever
+allowed to write at all. The first efforts of eminent men are always
+imitations; and very often they are bad imitations. The only question is
+whether the publisher had (as his name would seem to imply) some
+subconscious connection or sympathy with the public, and thus felt
+instinctively the presence of something that might ultimately tell; or
+whether the choice was merely a matter of chance and one Dickens was
+chosen and another Dickens left. The fact is almost unquestionable: most
+authors made their reputation by bad books and afterwards supported it
+by good ones. This is in some degree true even in the case of Dickens.
+The public continued to call him "Boz" long after the public had
+forgotten the _Sketches by Boz_. Numberless writers of the time speak of
+"Boz" as having written _Martin Chuzzlewit_ and "Boz" as having written
+_David Copperfield_. Yet if they had gone back to the original book
+signed "Boz" they might even have felt that it was vulgar and flippant.
+This is indeed the chief tragedy of publishers: that they may easily
+refuse at the same moment the wrong manuscript and the right man. It is
+easy to see of Dickens now that he was the right man; but a man might
+have been very well excused if he had not realised that the _Sketches_
+was the right book. Dickens, I say, is a case for this primary query:
+whether there was in the first work any clear sign of his higher
+creative spirit. But Dickens is much less a case for this query than
+almost all the other great men of his period. The very earliest works of
+Thackeray are much more unimpressive than those of Dickens. Nay, they
+are much more vulgar than those of Dickens. And worst of all, they are
+much more numerous than those of Dickens. Thackeray came much nearer to
+being the ordinary literary failure than Dickens ever came. Read some of
+the earliest criticisms of Mr. Yellowplush or Michael Angelo Titmarsh
+and you will realise that at the very beginning there was more potential
+clumsiness and silliness in Thackeray than there ever was in Dickens.
+Nevertheless there was some potential clumsiness and silliness in
+Dickens; and what there is of it appears here and there in the admirable
+_Sketches by Boz_.
+
+Perhaps we may put the matter this way: this is the only one of
+Dickens's works of which it is ordinarily necessary to know the date. To
+a close and delicate comprehension it is indeed very important that
+_Nicholas Nickleby_ was written at the beginning of Dickens's life, and
+_Our Mutual Friend_ towards the end of it. Nevertheless anybody could
+understand or enjoy these books, whenever they were written. If _Our
+Mutual Friend_ was written in the Latin of the Dark Ages we should still
+want it translated. If we thought that _Nicholas Nickleby_ would not be
+written until thirty years hence we should all wait for it eagerly. The
+general impression produced by Dickens's work is the same as that
+produced by miraculous visions; it is the destruction of time. Thomas
+Aquinas said that there was no time in the sight of God; however this
+may be, there was no time in the sight of Dickens. As a general rule
+Dickens can be read in any order; not only in any order of books, but
+even in any order of chapters. In an average Dickens book every part is
+so amusing and alive that you can read the parts backwards; you can read
+the quarrel first and then the cause of the quarrel; you can fall in
+love with a woman in the tenth chapter and then turn back to the first
+chapter to find out who she is. This is not chaos; it is eternity. It
+means merely that Dickens instinctively felt all his figures to be
+immortal souls who existed whether he wrote of them or not, and whether
+the reader read of them or not. There is a peculiar quality as of
+celestial pre-existence about the Dickens characters. Not only did they
+exist before we heard of them, they existed also before Dickens heard of
+them. As a rule this unchangeable air in Dickens deprives any discussion
+about date of its point. But as I have said, this is the one Dickens
+work of which the date _is_ essential. It is really an important part of
+the criticism of this book to say that it is his first book. Certain
+elements of clumsiness, of obviousness, of evident blunder, actually
+require the chronological explanation. It is biographically important
+that this is his first book, almost exactly in the same way that it is
+biographically important that _The Mystery of Edwin Drood_ was his last
+book. Change or no change, _Edwin Drood_ has this plain point of a last
+story about it: that it is not finished. But if the last book is
+unfinished, the first book is more unfinished still.
+
+The _Sketches_ divide themselves, of course, into two broad classes. One
+half consists of sketches that are truly and in the strict sense
+sketches. That is, they are things that have no story and in their
+outline none of the character of creation; they are merely facts from
+the street or the tavern or the town hall, noted down as they occurred
+by an intelligence of quite exceptional vivacity. The second class
+consists of purely creative things: farces, romances, stories in any
+case with a non-natural perfection, or a poetical justice, to round them
+off. One class is admirably represented, for instance, by the sketch
+describing the Charity Dinner, the other by such a story as that of
+_Horatio Sparkins_. These things were almost certainly written by
+Dickens at very various periods of his youth; and early as the harvest
+is, no doubt it is a harvest and had ripened during a reasonably long
+time. Nevertheless it is with these two types of narrative that the
+young Charles Dickens first enters English literature; he enters it with
+a number of journalistic notes of such things as he has seen happen in
+streets or offices, and with a number of short stories which err on the
+side of the extravagant and even the superficial. Journalism had not
+then, indeed, sunk to the low level which it has since reached. His
+sketches of dirty London would not have been dirty enough for the modern
+Imperialist press. Still these first efforts of his are journalism, and
+sometimes vulgar journalism. It was as a journalist that he attacked the
+world, as a journalist that he conquered it.
+
+The biographical circumstances will not, of course, be forgotten. The
+life of Dickens had been a curious one. Brought up in a family just poor
+enough to be painfully conscious of its prosperity and its
+respectability, he had been suddenly flung by a financial calamity into
+a social condition far below his own. For men on that exact edge of the
+educated class such a transition is really tragic. A duke may become a
+navvy for a joke, but a clerk cannot become a navvy for a joke.
+Dickens's parents went to a debtors' prison; Dickens himself went to a
+far more unpleasant place. The debtors' prison had about it at least
+that element of amiable compromise and kindly decay which belonged (and
+belongs still) to all the official institutions of England. But Dickens
+was doomed to see the very blackest aspect of nineteenth-century
+England, something far blacker than any mere bad government. He went not
+to a prison but to a factory. In the musty traditionalism of the
+Marshalsea old John Dickens could easily remain optimistic. In the
+ferocious efficiency of the modern factory young Charles Dickens
+narrowly escaped being a pessimist. He did escape this danger; finally
+he even escaped the factory itself. His next step in life was, if
+possible, even more eccentric. He was sent to school; he was sent off
+like an innocent little boy in Eton collars to learn the rudiments of
+Latin grammar, without any reference to the fact that he had already
+taken his part in the horrible competition and actuality of the age of
+manufactures. It was like giving a sacked bank manager a satchel and
+sending him to a dame's school. Nor was the third stage of this career
+unconnected with the oddity of the others. On leaving the school he was
+made a clerk in a lawyer's office, as if henceforward this child of
+ridiculous changes was to settle down into a silent assistant for a
+quiet solicitor. It was exactly at this moment that his fundamental
+rebellion began to seethe; it seethed more against the quiet finality of
+his legal occupation than it had seethed against the squalor and slavery
+of his days of poverty. There must have been in his mind, I think, a dim
+feeling: "Did all my dark crises mean only this; was I crucified only
+that I might become a solicitor's clerk?" Whatever be the truth about
+this conjecture there can be no question about the facts themselves. It
+was about this time that he began to burst and bubble over, to insist
+upon his own intellect, to claim a career. It was about this time that
+he put together a loose pile of papers, satires on institutions,
+pictures of private persons, fairy tales of the vulgarity of his world,
+odds and ends such as come out of the facility and the fierce vanity of
+youth. It was about this time at any rate that he decided to publish
+them, and gave them the name of _Sketches by Boz_.
+
+They must, I think, be read in the light of this youthful explosion. In
+some psychological sense he had really been wronged. But he had only
+become conscious of his wrongs as his wrongs had been gradually righted.
+Similarly, it has often been found that a man who can patiently endure
+penal servitude through a judicial blunder will nevertheless, when once
+his cause is well asserted, quarrel about the amount of compensation or
+complain of small slights in his professional existence. These are the
+marks of the first literary action of Dickens. It has in it all the
+peculiar hardness of youth; a hardness which in those who have in any
+way been unfairly treated reaches even to impudence. It is a terrible
+thing for any man to find out that his elders are wrong. And this
+almost unkindly courage of youth must partly be held responsible for the
+smartness of Dickens, that almost offensive smartness which in these
+earlier books of his sometimes irritates us like the showy gibes in the
+tall talk of a school-boy. These first pages bear witness both to the
+energy of his genius and also to its unenlightenment; he seems more
+ignorant and more cocksure than so great a man should be. Dickens was
+never stupid, but he was sometimes silly; and he is occasionally silly
+here.
+
+All this must be said to prepare the more fastidious modern for these
+papers, if he has never read them before. But when all this has been
+said there remains in them exactly what always remains in Dickens when
+you have taken away everything that can be taken away by the most
+fastidious modern who ever dissected his grandmother. There remains that
+_primum mobile_ of which all the mystics have spoken: energy, the power
+to create. I will not call it "the will to live," for that is a priggish
+phrase of German professors. Even German professors, I suppose, have the
+will to live. But Dickens had exactly what German professors have not:
+he had the power to live. And indeed it is most valuable to have these
+early specimens of the Dickens work if only because they are specimens
+of his spirit apart from his matured intelligence. It is well to be able
+to realise that contact with the Dickens world is almost like a physical
+contact; it is like stepping suddenly into the hot smells of a
+greenhouse, or into the bleak smell of the sea. We know that we are
+there. Let any one read, for instance, one of the foolish but amusing
+farces in Dickens's first volume. Let him read, for instance, such a
+story as that of _Horatio Sparkins_ or that of _The Tuggses at
+Ramsgate_. He will not find very much of that verbal felicity or
+fantastic irony that Dickens afterwards developed; the incidents are
+upon the plain lines of the stock comedy of the day: sharpers who entrap
+simpletons, spinsters who angle for husbands, youths who try to look
+Byronic and only look foolish. Yet there is something in these stories
+which there is not in the ordinary stock comedies of that day: an
+indefinable flavour of emphasis and richness, a hint as of infinity of
+fun. Doubtless, for instance, a million comic writers of that epoch had
+made game of the dark, romantic young man who pretended to abysses of
+philosophy and despair. And it is not easy to say exactly why we feel
+that the few metaphysical remarks of Mr. Horatio Sparkins are in some
+way really much funnier than any of those old stock jokes. It is in a
+certain quality of deep enjoyment in the writer as well as the reader;
+as if the few words written had been dipped in dark nonsense and were,
+as it were, reeking with derision. "Because if Effect be the result of
+Cause and Cause be the Precursor of Effect," said Mr. Horatio Sparkins,
+"I apprehend that you are wrong." Nobody can get at the real secret of
+sentences like that; sentences which were afterwards strewed with
+reckless liberality over the conversation of Dick Swiveller or Mr.
+Mantalini, Sim Tappertit or Mr. Pecksniff. Though the joke seems most
+superficial one has only to read it a certain number of times to see
+that it is most subtle. The joke does not lie in Mr. Sparkins merely
+using long words, any more than the joke lies merely in Mr. Swiveller
+drinking, or in Mr. Mantalini deceiving his wife. It is something in
+the arrangement of the words; something in a last inspired turn of
+absurdity given to a sentence. In spite of everything Horatio Sparkins
+is funny. We cannot tell why he is funny. When we know why he is funny
+we shall know why Dickens is great.
+
+Standing as we do here upon the threshold, as it were, of the work of
+Dickens, it may be well perhaps to state this truth as being, after all,
+the most important one. This first work had, as I have said, the faults
+of first work and the special faults that arose from its author's
+accidental history; he was deprived of education, and therefore it was
+in some ways uneducated; he was confronted with the folly and failure of
+his natural superiors and guardians, and therefore it was in some ways
+pert and insolent. Nevertheless the main fact about the work is worth
+stating here for any reader who should follow the chronological order
+and read the _Sketches by Boz_ before embarking on the stormy and
+splendid sea of _Pickwick_. For the sea of _Pickwick_, though splendid,
+does make some people seasick. The great point to be emphasised at such
+an initiation is this: that people, especially refined people, are not
+to judge of Dickens by what they would call the coarseness or
+commonplaceness of his subject. It is quite true that his jokes are
+often on the same _subjects_ as the jokes in a halfpenny comic paper.
+Only they happen to be good jokes. He does make jokes about drunkenness,
+jokes about mothers-in-law, jokes about henpecked husbands, jokes (which
+is much more really unpardonable) about spinsters, jokes about physical
+cowardice, jokes about fatness, jokes about sitting down on one's hat.
+He does make fun of all these things; and the reason is not very far to
+seek. He makes fun of all these things because all these things, or
+nearly all of them, are really very funny. But a large number of those
+who might otherwise read and enjoy Dickens are undoubtedly "put off" (as
+the phrase goes) by the fact that he seems to be echoing a poor kind of
+claptrap in his choice of incidents and images. Partly, of course, he
+suffers from the very fact of his success; his play with these topics
+was so good that every one else has played with them increasingly since;
+he may indeed have copied the old jokes, but he certainly renewed them.
+For instance, "Ally Sloper" was certainly copied from Wilkins Micawber.
+To this day you may see (in the front page of that fine periodical) the
+bald head and the high shirt collar that betray the high original from
+which "Ally Sloper" is derived. But exactly because "Sloper" was stolen
+from Micawber, for that very reason the new generation feels as if
+Micawber were stolen from "Sloper." Many modern readers feel as if
+Dickens were copying the comic papers, whereas in truth the comic papers
+are still copying Dickens.
+
+Dickens showed himself to be an original man by always accepting old and
+established topics. There is no clearer sign of the absence of
+originality among modern poets than their disposition to find new
+themes. Really original poets write poems about the spring. They are
+always fresh, just as the spring is always fresh. Men wholly without
+originality write poems about torture, or new religions, of some
+perversion of obscenity, hoping that the mere sting of the subject may
+speak for them. But we do not sufficiently realise that what is true of
+the classic ode is also true of the classic joke. A true poet writes
+about the spring being beautiful because (after a thousand springs) the
+spring really is beautiful. In the same way the true humourist writes
+about a man sitting down on his hat, because the act of sitting down on
+one's hat (however often and however admirably performed) really is
+extremely funny. We must not dismiss a new poet because his poem is
+called _To a Skylark_; nor must we dismiss a humourist because his new
+farce is called _My Mother-in-law_. He may really have splendid and
+inspiring things to say upon an eternal problem. The whole question is
+whether he has.
+
+Now this is exactly where Dickens, and the possible mistake about
+Dickens, both come in. Numbers of sensitive ladies, numbers of simple
+æsthetes, have had a vague shrinking from that element in Dickens which
+begins vaguely in _The Tuggses at Ramsgate_ and culminates in
+_Pickwick_. They have a vague shrinking from the mere subject matter;
+from the mere fact that so much of the fun is about drinking or
+fighting, or falling down, or eloping with old ladies. It is to these
+that the first appeal must be made upon the threshold of Dickens
+criticism. Let them really read the thing and really see whether the
+humour is the gross and half-witted jeering which they imagine it to be.
+It is exactly here that the whole genius of Dickens is concerned. His
+subjects are indeed stock subjects; like the skylark of Shelley, or the
+autumn of Keats. But all the more because they are stock subjects the
+reader realises what a magician is at work. The notion of a clumsy
+fellow who falls off his horse is indeed a stock and stale subject. But
+Mr. Winkle is not a stock and stale subject. Nor is his horse a stock
+and stale subject; it is as immortal as the horses of Achilles. The
+notion of a fat old gentleman proud of his legs might easily be vulgar.
+But Mr. Pickwick proud of his legs is not vulgar; somehow we feel that
+they were legs to be proud of. And it is exactly this that we must look
+for in these _Sketches_. We must not leap to any cheap fancy that they
+are low farces. Rather we must see that they are not low farces; and see
+that nobody but Dickens could have prevented them from being so.
+
+
+
+
+PICKWICK PAPERS
+
+
+There are those who deny with enthusiasm the existence of a God and are
+happy in a hobby which they call the Mistakes of Moses. I have not
+studied their labours in detail, but it seems that the chief mistake of
+Moses was that he neglected to write the Pentateuch. The lesser errors,
+apparently, were not made by Moses, but by another person equally
+unknown. These controversialists cover the very widest field, and their
+attacks upon Scripture are varied to the point of wildness. They range
+from the proposition that the unexpurgated Bible is almost as unfit for
+an American girls' school as is an unexpurgated Shakespeare; they
+descend to the proposition that kissing the Book is almost as
+hygienically dangerous as kissing the babies of the poor. A superficial
+critic might well imagine that there was not one single sentence left of
+the Hebrew or Christian Scriptures which this school had not marked with
+some ingenious and uneducated comment. But there is one passage at least
+upon which they have never pounced, at least to my knowledge; and in
+pointing it out to them I feel that I am, or ought to be, providing
+material for quite a multitude of Hyde Park orations. I mean that
+singular arrangement in the mystical account of the Creation by which
+light is created first and all the luminous bodies afterwards. One could
+not imagine a process more open to the elephantine logic of the
+Bible-smasher than this: that the sun should be created after the
+sunlight. The conception that lies at the back of the phrase is indeed
+profoundly antagonistic to much of the modern point of view. To many
+modern people it would sound like saying that foliage existed before the
+first leaf; it would sound like saying that childhood existed before a
+baby was born. The idea is, as I have said, alien to most modern
+thought, and like many other ideas which are alien to most modern
+thought, it is a very subtle and a very sound idea. Whatever be the
+meaning of the passage in the actual primeval poem, there is a very real
+metaphysical meaning in the idea that light existed before the sun and
+stars. It is not barbaric; it is rather Platonic. The idea existed
+before any of the machinery which made manifest the idea. Justice
+existed when there was no need of judges, and mercy existed before any
+man was oppressed.
+
+However this may be in the matter of religion and philosophy, it can be
+said with little exaggeration that this truth is the very key of
+literature. The whole difference between construction and creation is
+exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is
+constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists, as the
+mother can love the unborn child. In creative art the essence of a book
+exists before the book or before even the details or main features of
+the book; the author enjoys it and lives in it with a kind of prophetic
+rapture. He wishes to write a comic story before he has thought of a
+single comic incident. He desires to write a sad story before he has
+thought of anything sad. He knows the atmosphere before he knows
+anything. There is a low priggish maxim sometimes uttered by men so
+frivolous as to take humour seriously--a maxim that a man should not
+laugh at his own jokes. But the great artist not only laughs at his own
+jokes; he laughs at his own jokes before he has made them. In the case
+of a man really humorous we can see humour in his eye before he has
+thought of any amusing words at all. So the creative writer laughs at
+his comedy before he creates it, and he has tears for his tragedy before
+he knows what it is. When the symbols and the fulfilling facts do come
+to him, they come generally in a manner very fragmentary and inverted,
+mostly in irrational glimpses of crisis or consummation. The last page
+comes before the first; before his romance has begun, he knows that it
+has ended well. He sees the wedding before the wooing; he sees the death
+before the duel. But most of all he sees the colour and character of the
+whole story prior to any possible events in it. This is the real
+argument for art and style, only that the artists and the stylists have
+not the sense to use it. In one very real sense style is far more
+important than either character or narrative. For a man knows what style
+of book he wants to write when he knows nothing else about it.
+
+_Pickwick_ is in Dickens's career the mere mass of light before the
+creation of sun or moon. It is the splendid, shapeless substance of
+which all his stars were ultimately made. You might split up _Pickwick_
+into innumerable novels as you could split up that primeval light into
+innumerable solar systems. The _Pickwick Papers_ constitute first and
+foremost a kind of wild promise, a pre-natal vision of all the children
+of Dickens. He had not yet settled down into the plain, professional
+habit of picking out a plot and characters, of attending to one thing at
+a time, of writing a separate, sensible novel and sending it off to his
+publishers. He is still in the youthful whirl of the kind of world that
+he would like to create. He has not yet really settled what story he
+will write, but only what sort of story he will write. He tries to tell
+ten stories at once; he pours into the pot all the chaotic fancies and
+crude experiences of his boyhood; he sticks in irrelevant short stories
+shamelessly, as into a scrap-book; he adopts designs and abandons them,
+begins episodes and leaves them unfinished; but from the first page to
+the last there is a nameless and elemental ecstasy--that of the man who
+is doing the kind of thing that he can do. Dickens, like every other
+honest and effective writer, came at last to some degree of care and
+self-restraint. He learned how to make his _dramatis personæ_ assist his
+drama; he learned how to write stories which were full of rambling and
+perversity, but which were stories. But before he wrote a single real
+story, he had a kind of vision. It was a vision of the Dickens world--a
+maze of white roads, a map full of fantastic towns, thundering coaches,
+clamorous market-places, uproarious inns, strange and swaggering
+figures. That vision was _Pickwick_.
+
+It must be remembered that this is true even in connection with the
+man's contemporaneous biography. Apart from anything else about it,
+_Pickwick_ was his first great chance. It was a big commission given in
+some sense to an untried man, that he might show what he could do. It
+was in a strict sense a sample. And just as a sample of leather can be
+only a piece of leather, or a sample of coal a lump of coal, so this
+book may most properly be regarded as simply a lump of Dickens. He was
+anxious to show all that was in him. He was more concerned to prove that
+he could write well than to prove that he could write this particular
+book well. And he did prove this, at any rate. No one ever sent such a
+sample as the sample of Dickens. His roll of leather blocked up the
+street; his lump of coal set the Thames on fire.
+
+The book originated in the suggestion of a publisher; as many more good
+books have done than the arrogance of the man of letters is commonly
+inclined to admit. Very much is said in our time about Apollo and
+Admetus, and the impossibility of asking genius to work within
+prescribed limits or assist an alien design. But after all, as a matter
+of fact, some of the greatest geniuses have done it, from Shakespeare
+botching up bad comedies and dramatising bad novels down to Dickens
+writing a masterpiece as the mere framework for a Mr. Seymour's
+sketches. Nor is the true explanation irrelevant to the spirit and power
+of Dickens. Very delicate, slender, and _bizarre_ talents are indeed
+incapable of being used for an outside purpose, whether of public good
+or of private gain. But about very great and rich talent there goes a
+certain disdainful generosity which can turn its hand to anything. Minor
+poets cannot write to order; but very great poets can write to order.
+The larger the man's mind, the wider his scope of vision, the more
+likely it will be that anything suggested to him will seem significant
+and promising; the more he has a grasp of everything the more ready he
+will be to write anything. It is very hard (if that is the question) to
+throw a brick at a man and ask him to write an epic; but the more he is
+a great man the more able he will be to write about the brick. It is
+very unjust (if that is all) to point to a hoarding of Colman's mustard
+and demand a flood of philosophical eloquence; but the greater the man
+is the more likely he will be to give it to you. So it was proved, not
+for the first time, in this great experiment of the early employment of
+Dickens. Messrs. Chapman and Hall came to him with a scheme for a string
+of sporting stories to serve as the context, and one might almost say
+the excuse, for a string of sketches by Seymour, the sporting artist.
+Dickens made some modifications in the plan, but he adopted its main
+feature; and its main feature was Mr. Winkle. To think of what Mr.
+Winkle might have been in the hands of a dull _farceur_, and then to
+think of what he is, is to experience the feeling that Dickens made a
+man out of rags and refuse. Dickens was to work splendidly and
+successfully in many fields, and to send forth many brilliant books and
+brave figures. He was destined to have the applause of continents like a
+statesman, and to dictate to his publishers like a despot; but perhaps
+he never worked again so supremely well as here, where he worked in
+chains. It may well be questioned whether his one hack book is not his
+masterpiece.
+
+Of course it is true that as he went on his independence increased, and
+he kicked quite free of the influences that had suggested his story. So
+Shakespeare declared his independence of the original chronicle of
+Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, eliminating altogether (with some wisdom)
+another uncle called Wiglerus. At the start the Nimrod Club of Chapman
+and Hall may have even had equal chances with the Pickwick Club of young
+Mr. Dickens; but the Pickwick Club became something much better than any
+publisher had dared to dream of. Some of the old links were indeed
+severed by accident or extraneous trouble; Seymour, for whose sake the
+whole had perhaps been planned, blew his brains out before he had drawn
+ten pictures. But such things were trifles compared to _Pickwick_
+itself. It mattered little now whether Seymour blew his brains out, so
+long as Charles Dickens blew his brains in. The work became
+systematically and progressively more powerful and masterly. Many
+critics have commented on the somewhat discordant and inartistic change
+between the earlier part of _Pickwick_ and the later; they have pointed
+out, not without good sense, that the character of Mr. Pickwick changes
+from that of a silly buffoon to that of a solid merchant. But the case,
+if these critics had noticed it, is much stronger in the minor
+characters of the great company. Mr. Winkle, who has been an idiot
+(even, perhaps, as Mr. Pickwick says, "an impostor"), suddenly becomes a
+romantic and even reckless lover, scaling a forbidden wall and planning
+a bold elopement. Mr. Snodgrass, who has behaved in a ridiculous manner
+in all serious positions, suddenly finds himself in a ridiculous
+position--that of a gentleman surprised in a secret love affair--and
+behaves in a manner perfectly manly, serious, and honourable. Mr.
+Tupman alone has no serious emotional development, and for this reason
+it is, presumably, that we hear less and less of Mr. Tupman towards the
+end of the book. Dickens has by this time got into a thoroughly serious
+mood--a mood expressed indeed by extravagant incidents, but none the
+less serious for that; and into this Winkle and Snodgrass, in the
+character of romantic lovers, could be made to fit. Mr. Tupman had to be
+left out of the love affairs; therefore Mr. Tupman is left out of the
+book.
+
+Much of the change was due to the entrance of the greatest character in
+the story. It may seem strange at the first glance to say that Sam
+Weller helped to make the story serious. Nevertheless, this is strictly
+true. The introduction of Sam Weller had, to begin with, some merely
+accidental and superficial effects. When Samuel Weller had appeared,
+Samuel Pickwick was no longer the chief farcical character. Weller
+became the joker and Pickwick in some sense the butt of his jokes. Thus
+it was obvious that the more simple, solemn, and really respectable this
+butt could be made the better. Mr. Pickwick had been the figure capering
+before the footlights. But with the advent of Sam, Mr. Pickwick had
+become a sort of black background and had to behave as such. But this
+explanation, though true as far as it goes, is a mean and unsatisfactory
+one, leaving the great elements unexplained. For a much deeper and more
+righteous reason Sam Weller introduces the more serious tone of
+Pickwick. He introduces it because he introduces something which it was
+the chief business of Dickens to preach throughout his life--something
+which he never preached so well as when he preached it unconsciously.
+Sam Weller introduces the English people.
+
+Sam Weller is the great symbol in English literature of the populace
+peculiar to England. His incessant stream of sane nonsense is a
+wonderful achievement of Dickens: but it is no great falsification of
+the incessant stream of sane nonsense as it really exists among the
+English poor. The English poor live in an atmosphere of humour; they
+think in humour. Irony is the very air that they breathe. A joke comes
+suddenly from time to time into the head of a politician or a gentleman,
+and then as a rule he makes the most of it; but when a serious word
+comes into the mind of a coster it is almost as startling as a joke. The
+word "chaff" was, I suppose, originally applied to badinage to express
+its barren and unsustaining character; but to the English poor chaff is
+as sustaining as grain. The phrase that leaps to their lips is the
+ironical phrase. I remember once being driven in a hansom cab down a
+street that turned out to be a _cul de sac_, and brought us bang up
+against a wall. The driver and I simultaneously said something. But I
+said: "This'll never do!" and he said: "This is all right!" Even in the
+act of pulling back his horse's nose from a brick wall, that confirmed
+satirist thought in terms of his highly-trained and traditional satire;
+while I, belonging to a duller and simpler class, expressed my feelings
+in words as innocent and literal as those of a rustic or a child.
+
+This eternal output of divine derision has never been so truly typified
+as by the character of Sam; he is a grotesque fountain which gushes the
+living waters for ever. Dickens is accused of exaggeration and he is
+often guilty of exaggeration; but here he does not exaggerate: he merely
+symbolises and sublimates like any other great artist. Sam Weller does
+not exaggerate the wit of the London street arab one atom more than
+Colonel Newcome, let us say, exaggerates the stateliness of an ordinary
+soldier and gentleman, or than Mr. Collins exaggerates the fatuity of a
+certain kind of country clergyman. And this breath from the boisterous
+brotherhood of the poor lent a special seriousness and smell of reality
+to the whole story. The unconscious follies of Winkle and Tupman are
+blown away like leaves before the solid and conscious folly of Sam
+Weller. Moreover, the relations between Pickwick and his servant Sam are
+in some ways new and valuable in literature. Many comic writers had
+described the clever rascal and his ridiculous dupe; but here, in a
+fresh and very human atmosphere, we have a clever servant who was not a
+rascal and a dupe who was not ridiculous. Sam Weller stands in some ways
+for a cheerful knowledge of the world; Mr. Pickwick stands for a still
+more cheerful ignorance of the world. And Dickens responded to a
+profound human sentiment (the sentiment that has made saints and the
+sanctity of children) when he made the gentler and less-travelled
+type--the type which moderates and controls. Knowledge and innocence are
+both excellent things, and they are both very funny. But it is right
+that knowledge should be the servant and innocence the master.
+
+The sincerity of this study of Sam Weller has produced one particular
+effect in the book which I wonder that critics of Dickens have never
+noticed or discussed. Because it has no Dickens "pathos," certain parts
+of it are truly pathetic. Dickens, realising rightly that the whole tone
+of the book was fun, felt that he ought to keep out of it any great
+experiments in sadness and keep within limits those that he put in. He
+used this restraint in order not to spoil the humour; but (if he had
+known himself better) he might well have used it in order not to spoil
+the pathos. This is the one book in which Dickens was, as it were,
+forced to trample down his tender feelings; and for that very reason it
+is the one book where all the tenderness there is is quite
+unquestionably true. An admirable example of what I mean may be found in
+the scene in which Sam Weller goes down to see his bereaved father after
+the death of his step-mother. The most loyal admirer of Dickens can
+hardly prevent himself from giving a slight shudder when he thinks of
+what Dickens might have made of that scene in some of his more expansive
+and maudlin moments. For all I know old Mrs. Weller might have asked
+what the wild waves were saying; and for all I know old Mr. Weller might
+have told her. As it is, Dickens, being forced to keep the tale taut and
+humorous, gives a picture of humble respect and decency which is manly,
+dignified, and really sad. There is no attempt made by these simple and
+honest men, the father and son, to pretend that the dead woman was
+anything greatly other than she was; their respect is for death, and for
+the human weakness and mystery which it must finally cover. Old Tony
+Weller does not tell his shrewish wife that she is already a
+white-winged angel; he speaks to her with an admirable good nature and
+good sense:
+
+     "'Susan,' I says, 'you've been a wery good vife to me altogether:
+     keep a good heart, my dear, and you'll live to see me punch that
+     'ere Stiggins's 'ead yet.' She smiled at this, Samivel ... but she
+     died arter all."
+
+That is perhaps the first and the last time that Dickens ever touched
+the extreme dignity of pathos. He is restraining his compassion, and
+afterwards he let it go. Now laughter is a thing that can be let go;
+laughter has in it a quality of liberty. But sorrow has in it by its
+very nature a quality of confinement; pathos by its very nature fights
+with itself. Humour is expansive; it bursts outwards; the fact is
+attested by the common expression, "holding one's sides." But sorrow is
+not expansive; and it was afterwards the mistake of Dickens that he
+tried to make it expansive. It is the one great weakness of Dickens as a
+great writer, that he did try to make that sudden sadness, that abrupt
+pity, which we call pathos, a thing quite obvious, infectious, public,
+as if it were journalism or the measles. It is pleasant to think that in
+this supreme masterpiece, done in the dawn of his career, there is not
+even this faint fleck upon the sun of his just splendour. Pickwick will
+always be remembered as the great example of everything that made
+Dickens great; of the solemn conviviality of great friendships, of the
+erratic adventures of old English roads, of the hospitality of old
+English inns, of the great fundamental kindliness and honour of old
+English manners. First of all, however, it will always be remembered for
+its laughter, or, if you will, for its folly. A good joke is the one
+ultimate and sacred thing which cannot be criticised. Our relations
+with a good joke are direct and even divine relations. We speak of
+"seeing" a joke just as we speak of "seeing" a ghost or a vision. If we
+have seen it, it is futile to argue with us; and we have seen the vision
+of _Pickwick_. _Pickwick_ may be the top of Dickens's humour; I think
+upon the whole it is. But the broad humour of _Pickwick_ he broadened
+over many wonderful kingdoms; the narrow pathos of _Pickwick_ he never
+found again.
+
+
+
+
+NICHOLAS NICKLEBY
+
+
+Romance is perhaps the highest point of human expression, except indeed
+religion, to which it is closely allied. Romance resembles religion
+especially in this, that it is not only a simplification but a
+shortening of existence. Both romance and religion see everything as it
+were foreshortened; they see everything in an abrupt and fantastic
+perspective, coming to an apex. It is the whole essence of perspective
+that it comes to a point. Similarly, religion comes to a point--to the
+point. Thus religion is always insisting on the shortness of human life.
+But it does not insist on the shortness of human life as the pessimists
+insist on it. Pessimism insists on the shortness of human life in order
+to show that life is valueless. Religion insists on the shortness of
+human life in order to show that life is frightfully valuable--is almost
+horribly valuable. Pessimism says that life is so short that it gives
+nobody a chance; religion says that life is so short that it gives
+everybody his final chance. In the first case the word brevity means
+futility; in the second case, opportunity. But the case is even stronger
+than this. Religion shortens everything. Religion shortens even
+eternity. Where science, submitting to the false standard of time, sees
+evolution, which is slow, religion sees creation, which is sudden.
+Philosophically speaking, the process is neither slow nor quick since
+we have nothing to compare it with. Religion prefers to think of it as
+quick. For religion the flowers shoot up suddenly like rockets. For
+religion the mountains are lifted up suddenly like waves. Those who
+quote that fine passage which says that in God's sight a thousand years
+are as yesterday that is passed as a watch in the night, do not realise
+the full force of the meaning. To God a thousand years are not only a
+watch but an exciting watch. For God time goes at a gallop, as it does
+to a man reading a good tale.
+
+All this is, in a humble manner, true for romance. Romance is a
+shortening and sharpening of the human difficulty. Where you and I have
+to vote against a man, or write (rather feebly) against a man, or sign
+illegible petitions against a man, romance does for him what we should
+really like to see done. It knocks him down; it shortens the slow
+process of historical justice. All romances consist of three characters.
+Other characters may be introduced; but those other characters are
+certainly mere scenery as far as the romance is concerned. They are
+bushes that wave rather excitedly; they are posts that stand up with a
+certain pride; they are correctly painted rocks that frown very
+correctly; but they are all landscape--they are all a background. In
+every pure romance there are three living and moving characters. For the
+sake of argument they may be called St. George and the Dragon and the
+Princess. In every romance there must be the twin elements of loving and
+fighting. In every romance there must be the three characters: there
+must be the Princess, who is a thing to be loved; there must be the
+Dragon, who is a thing to be fought; and there must be St. George, who
+is a thing that both loves and fights. There have been many symptoms of
+cynicism and decay in our modern civilisation. But of all the signs of
+modern feebleness, of lack of grasp on morals as they actually must be,
+there has been none quite so silly or so dangerous as this: that the
+philosophers of to-day have started to divide loving from fighting and
+to put them into opposite camps. There could be no worse sign than that
+a man, even Nietzsche, can be found to say that we should go in for
+fighting instead of loving. There can be no worse sign than that a man,
+even Tolstoi, can be found to tell us that we should go in for loving
+instead of fighting. The two things imply each other; they implied each
+other in the old romance and in the old religion, which were the two
+permanent things of humanity. You cannot love a thing without wanting to
+fight for it. You cannot fight without something to fight for. To love a
+thing without wishing to fight for it is not love at all; it is lust. It
+may be an airy, philosophical, and disinterested lust; it may be, so to
+speak, a virgin lust; but it is lust, because it is wholly
+self-indulgent and invites no attack. On the other hand, fighting for a
+thing without loving it is not even fighting; it can only be called a
+kind of horse-play that is occasionally fatal. Wherever human nature is
+human and unspoilt by any special sophistry, there exists this natural
+kinship between war and wooing, and that natural kinship is called
+romance. It comes upon a man especially in the great hour of youth; and
+every man who has ever been young at all has felt, if only for a moment,
+this ultimate and poetic paradox. He knows that loving the world is the
+same thing as fighting the world. It was at the very moment when he
+offered to like everybody he also offered to hit everybody. To almost
+every man that can be called a man this especial moment of the romantic
+culmination has come. In the first resort the man wished to live a
+romance. In the second resort, in the last and worst resort, he was
+content to write one.
+
+Now there is a certain moment when this element enters independently
+into the life of Dickens. There is a particular time when we can see him
+suddenly realise that he wants to write a romance and nothing else. In
+reading his letters, in appreciating his character, this point emerges
+clearly enough. He was full of the afterglow of his marriage; he was
+still young and psychologically ignorant; above all, he was now, really
+for the first time, sure that he was going to be at least some kind of
+success. There is, I repeat, a certain point at which one feels that
+Dickens will either begin to write romances or go off on something
+different altogether. This crucial point in his life is marked by
+_Nicholas Nickleby_.
+
+It must be remembered that before this issue of _Nicholas Nickleby_ his
+work, successful as it was, had not been such as to dedicate him
+seriously or irrevocably to the writing of novels. He had already
+written three books; and at least two of them are classed among the
+novels under his name. But if we look at the actual origin and formation
+of these books we see that they came from another source and were really
+designed upon another plan. The three books were, of course, the
+_Sketches by Boz_, _the Pickwick Papers_, and _Oliver Twist_. It is, I
+suppose, sufficiently well understood that the _Sketches by Boz_ are, as
+their name implies, only sketches. But surely it is quite equally clear
+that the _Pickwick Papers_ are, as their name implies, merely papers.
+Nor is the case at all different in spirit and essence when we come to
+_Oliver Twist_. There is indeed a sort of romance in _Oliver Twist_, but
+it is such an uncommonly bad one that it can hardly be regarded as
+greatly interrupting the previous process; and if the reader chooses to
+pay very little attention to it, he cannot pay less attention to it than
+the author did. But in fact the case lies far deeper. _Oliver Twist_ is
+so much apart from the ordinary track of Dickens, it is so gloomy, it is
+so much all in one atmosphere, that it can best be considered as an
+exception or a solitary excursus in his work. Perhaps it can best be
+considered as the extension of one of his old sketches, of some sketch
+that happened to be about a visit to a workhouse or a gaol. In the
+_Sketches by Boz_ he might well have visited a workhouse where he saw
+Bumble; in the _Sketches by Boz_ he might well have visited a prison
+where he saw Fagin. We are still in the realm of sketches and
+sketchiness. _The Pickwick Papers_ may be called an extension of one of
+his bright sketches. _Oliver Twist_ may be called an extension of one of
+his gloomy ones.
+
+Had he continued along this line all his books might very well have been
+note-books. It would be very easy to split up all his subsequent books
+into scraps and episodes, such as those which make up the _Sketches by
+Boz_. It would be easy enough for Dickens, instead of publishing
+_Nicholas Nickleby_, to have published a book of sketches, one of which
+was called "A Yorkshire School," another called "A Provincial Theatre,"
+and another called "Sir Mulberry Hawk or High Life Revealed," another
+called "Mrs. Nickleby or a Lady's Monologue." It would have been very
+easy to have thrown over the rather chaotic plan of the _Old Curiosity
+Shop_. He might have merely written short stories called "The Glorious
+Apollos," "Mrs. Quilp's Tea-Party," "Mrs. Jarley's Waxwork," "The Little
+Servant," and "The Death of a Dwarf." _Martin Chuzzlewit_ might have
+been twenty stories instead of one story. _Dombey and Son_ might have
+been twenty stories instead of one story. We might have lost all
+Dickens's novels; we might have lost altogether Dickens the novelist. We
+might have lost that steady love of a seminal and growing romance which
+grew on him steadily as the years advanced, and which gave us towards
+the end some of his greatest triumphs. All his books might have been
+_Sketches by Boz_. But he did turn away from this, and the turning-point
+is _Nicholas Nickleby_.
+
+Everything has a supreme moment and is crucial; that is where our
+friends the evolutionists go wrong. I suppose that there is an instant
+of midsummer as there is an instant of midnight. If in the same way
+there is a supreme point of spring, _Nicholas Nickleby_ is the supreme
+point of Dickens's spring. I do not mean that it is the best book that
+he wrote in his youth. _Pickwick_ is a better book. I do not mean that
+it contains more striking characters than any of the other books in his
+youth. The _Old Curiosity Shop_ contains at least two more striking
+characters. But I mean that this book coincided with his resolution to
+be a great novelist and his final belief that he could be one.
+Henceforward his books are novels, very commonly bad novels. Previously
+they have not really been novels at all. There are many indications of
+the change I mean. Here is one, for instance, which is more or less
+final. _Nicholas Nickleby_ is Dickens's first romantic novel because it
+is his first novel with a proper and dignified romantic hero; which
+means, of course, a somewhat chivalrous young donkey. The hero of
+_Pickwick_ is an old man. The hero of _Oliver Twist_ is a child. Even
+after _Nicholas Nickleby_ this non-romantic custom continued. The _Old
+Curiosity Shop_ has no hero in particular. The hero of _Barnaby Rudge_
+is a lunatic. But Nicholas Nickleby is a proper, formal, and ceremonial
+hero. He has no psychology; he has not even any particular character;
+but he is made deliberately a hero--young, poor, brave, unimpeachable,
+and ultimately triumphant. He is, in short, the hero. Mr. Vincent
+Crummles had a colossal intellect; and I always have a fancy that under
+all his pomposity he saw things more keenly than he allowed others to
+see. The moment he saw Nicholas Nickleby, almost in rags and limping
+along the high road, he engaged him (you will remember) as first walking
+gentleman. He was right. Nobody could possibly be more of a first
+walking gentleman than Nicholas Nickleby was. He was the first walking
+gentleman before he went on to the boards of Mr. Vincent Crummles's
+theatre, and he remained the first walking gentleman after he had come
+off.
+
+Now this romantic method involves a certain element of climax which to
+us appears crudity. Nicholas Nickleby, for instance, wanders through the
+world; he takes a situation as assistant to a Yorkshire schoolmaster;
+he sees an act of tyranny of which he strongly disapproves; he cries out
+"Stop!" in a voice that makes the rafters ring; he thrashes the
+schoolmaster within an inch of his life; he throws the schoolmaster away
+like an old cigar, and he goes away. The modern intellect is positively
+prostrated and flattened by this rapid and romantic way of righting
+wrongs. If a modern philanthropist came to Dotheboys Hall I fear he
+would not employ the simple, sacred, and truly Christian solution of
+beating Mr. Squeers with a stick. I fancy he would petition the
+Government to appoint a Royal Commission to inquire into Mr. Squeers. I
+think he would every now and then write letters to newspapers reminding
+people that, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, there was a
+Royal Commission to inquire into Mr. Squeers. I agree that he might even
+go the length of calling a crowded meeting in St. James's Hall on the
+subject of the best policy with regard to Mr. Squeers. At this meeting
+some very heated and daring speakers might even go the length of
+alluding sternly to Mr. Squeers. Occasionally even hoarse voices from
+the back of the hall might ask (in vain) what was going to be done with
+Mr. Squeers. The Royal Commission would report about three years
+afterwards and would say that many things had happened which were
+certainly most regrettable; that Mr. Squeers was the victim of a bad
+system; that Mrs. Squeers was also the victim of a bad system; but that
+the man who sold Squeers his cane had really acted with great
+indiscretion and ought to be spoken to kindly. Something like this would
+be what, after four years, the Royal Commission would have said; but it
+would not matter in the least what the Royal Commission had said, for by
+that time the philanthropists would be off on a new tack and the world
+would have forgotten all about Dotheboys Hall and everything connected
+with it. By that time the philanthropists would be petitioning
+Parliament for another Royal Commission; perhaps a Royal Commission to
+inquire into whether Mr. Mantalini was extravagant with his wife's
+money; perhaps a commission to inquire into whether Mr. Vincent Crummles
+kept the Infant Phenomenon short by means of gin.
+
+If we wish to understand the spirit and the period of _Nicholas
+Nickleby_ we must endeavour to comprehend and to appreciate the old more
+decisive remedies, or, if we prefer to put it so, the old more desperate
+remedies. Our fathers had a plain sort of pity; if you will, a gross and
+coarse pity. They had their own sort of sentimentalism. They were quite
+willing to weep over Smike. But it certainly never occurred to them to
+weep over Squeers. Even those who opposed the French war opposed it
+exactly in the same way as their enemies opposed the French soldiers.
+They fought with fighting. Charles Fox was full of horror at the
+bitterness and the useless bloodshed; but if any one had insulted him
+over the matter, he would have gone out and shot him in a duel as coolly
+as any of his contemporaries. All their interference was heroic
+interference. All their legislation was heroic legislation. All their
+remedies were heroic remedies. No doubt they were often narrow and often
+visionary. No doubt they often looked at a political formula when they
+should have looked at an elemental fact. No doubt they were pedantic in
+some of their principles and clumsy in some of their solutions. No
+doubt, in short, they were all very wrong; and no doubt we are the
+people, and wisdom shall die with us. But when they saw something which
+in their eyes, such as they were, really violated their morality, such
+as it was, then they did not cry "Investigate!" They did not cry
+"Educate!" They did not cry "Improve!" They did not cry "Evolve!" Like
+Nicholas Nickleby they cried "Stop!" And it did stop.
+
+This is the first mark of the purely romantic method: the swiftness and
+simplicity with which St. George kills the dragon. The second mark of it
+is exhibited here as one of the weaknesses of _Nicholas Nickleby_. I
+mean the tendency in the purely romantic story to regard the heroine
+merely as something to be won; to regard the princess solely as
+something to be saved from the dragon. The father of Madeline Bray is
+really a very respectable dragon. His selfishness is suggested with much
+more psychological tact and truth than that of any other of the villains
+that Dickens described about this time. But his daughter is merely the
+young woman with whom Nicholas is in love. We do not care a rap about
+Madeline Bray. Personally I should have preferred Cecilia Bobster. Here
+is one real point where the Victorian romance falls below the
+Elizabethan romantic drama. Shakespeare always made his heroines heroic
+as well as his heroes.
+
+In Dickens's actual literary career it is this romantic quality in
+_Nicholas Nickleby_ that is most important. It is his first definite
+attempt to write a young and chivalrous novel. In this sense the comic
+characters and the comic scenes are secondary; and indeed the comic
+characters and the comic scenes, admirable as they are, could never be
+considered as in themselves superior to such characters and such scenes
+in many of the other books. But in themselves how unforgettable they
+are. Mr. Crummles and the whole of his theatrical business is an
+admirable case of that first and most splendid quality in Dickens--I
+mean the art of making something which in life we call pompous and dull,
+becoming in literature pompous and delightful. I have remarked before
+that nearly every one of the amusing characters of Dickens is in reality
+a great fool. But I might go further. Almost every one of his amusing
+characters is in reality a great bore. The very people that we fly to in
+Dickens are the very people that we fly from in life. And there is more
+in Crummles than the mere entertainment of his solemnity and his tedium.
+The enormous seriousness with which he takes his art is always an exact
+touch in regard to the unsuccessful artist. If an artist is successful,
+everything then depends upon a dilemma of his moral character. If he is
+a mean artist success will make him a society man. If he is a
+magnanimous artist, success will make him an ordinary man. But only as
+long as he is unsuccessful will he be an unfathomable and serious
+artist, like Mr. Crummles. Dickens was always particularly good at
+expressing thus the treasures that belong to those who do not succeed in
+this world. There are vast prospects and splendid songs in the point of
+view of the typically unsuccessful man; if all the used-up actors and
+spoilt journalists and broken clerks could give a chorus, it would be a
+wonderful chorus in praise of the world. But these unsuccessful men
+commonly cannot even speak. Dickens is the voice of them, and a very
+ringing voice; because he was perhaps the only one of these unsuccessful
+men that was ever successful.
+
+
+
+
+OLIVER TWIST
+
+
+In considering Dickens, as we almost always must consider him, as a man
+of rich originality, we may possibly miss the forces from which he drew
+even his original energy. It is not well for man to be alone. We, in the
+modern world, are ready enough to admit that when it is applied to some
+problem of monasticism or of an ecstatic life. But we will not admit
+that our modern artistic claim to absolute originality is really a claim
+to absolute unsociability; a claim to absolute loneliness. The anarchist
+is at least as solitary as the ascetic. And the men of very vivid vigour
+in literature, the men such as Dickens, have generally displayed a large
+sociability towards the society of letters, always expressed in the
+happy pursuit of pre-existent themes, sometimes expressed, as in the
+case of Molière or Sterne, in downright plagiarism. For even theft is a
+confession of our dependence on society. In Dickens, however, this
+element of the original foundations on which he worked is quite
+especially difficult to determine. This is partly due to the fact that
+for the present reading public he is practically the only one of his
+long line that is read at all. He sums up Smollett and Goldsmith, but he
+also destroys them. This one giant, being closest to us, cuts off from
+our view even the giants that begat him. But much more is this
+difficulty due to the fact that Dickens mixed up with the old material,
+materials so subtly modern, so made of the French Revolution, that the
+whole is transformed. If we want the best example of this, the best
+example is _Oliver Twist_.
+
+Relatively to the other works of Dickens _Oliver Twist_ is not of great
+value, but it is of great importance. Some parts of it are so crude and
+of so clumsy a melodrama, that one is almost tempted to say that Dickens
+would have been greater without it. But even if he had been greater
+without it he would still have been incomplete without it. With the
+exception of some gorgeous passages, both of humour and horror, the
+interest of the book lies not so much in its revelation of Dickens's
+literary genius as in its revelation of those moral, personal, and
+political instincts which were the make-up of his character and the
+permanent support of that literary genius. It is by far the most
+depressing of all his books; it is in some ways the most irritating; yet
+its ugliness gives the last touch of honesty to all that spontaneous and
+splendid output. Without this one discordant note all his merriment
+might have seemed like levity.
+
+Dickens had just appeared upon the stage and set the whole world
+laughing with his first great story _Pickwick_. _Oliver Twist_ was his
+encore. It was the second opportunity given to him by those who had
+rolled about with laughter over Tupman and Jingle, Weller and Dowler.
+Under such circumstances a stagey reciter will sometimes take care to
+give a pathetic piece after his humorous one; and with all his many
+moral merits, there was much that was stagey about Dickens. But this
+explanation alone is altogether inadequate and unworthy. There was in
+Dickens this other kind of energy, horrible, uncanny, barbaric, capable
+in another age of coarseness, greedy for the emblems of established
+ugliness, the coffin, the gibbet, the bones, the bloody knife. Dickens
+liked these things and he was all the more of a man for liking them;
+especially he was all the more of a boy. We can all recall with pleasure
+the fact that Miss Petowker (afterwards Mrs. Lillyvick) was in the habit
+of reciting a poem called "The Blood Drinker's Burial." I cannot express
+my regret that the words of this poem are not given; for Dickens would
+have been quite as capable of writing "The Blood Drinker's Burial" as
+Miss Petowker was of reciting it. This strain existed in Dickens
+alongside of his happy laughter; both were allied to the same robust
+romance. Here as elsewhere Dickens is close to all the permanent human
+things. He is close to religion, which has never allowed the thousand
+devils on its churches to stop the dancing of its bells. He is allied to
+the people, to the real poor, who love nothing so much as to take a
+cheerful glass and to talk about funerals. The extremes of his gloom and
+gaiety are the mark of religion and democracy; they mark him off from
+the moderate happiness of philosophers, and from that stoicism which is
+the virtue and the creed of aristocrats. There is nothing odd in the
+fact that the same man who conceived the humane hospitalities of
+Pickwick should also have imagined the inhuman laughter of Fagin's den.
+They are both genuine and they are both exaggerated. And the whole human
+tradition has tied up together in a strange knot these strands of
+festivity and fear. It is over the cups of Christmas Eve that men have
+always competed in telling ghost stories.
+
+This first element was present in Dickens, and it is very powerfully
+present in _Oliver Twist_. It had not been present with sufficient
+consistency or continuity in _Pickwick_ to make it remain on the
+reader's memory at all, for the tale of "Gabriel Grubb" is grotesque
+rather than horrible, and the two gloomy stories of the "Madman" and the
+"Queer Client" are so utterly irrelevant to the tale, that even if the
+reader remember them he probably does not remember that they occur in
+_Pickwick_. Critics have complained of Shakespeare and others for
+putting comic episodes into a tragedy. It required a man with the
+courage and coarseness of Dickens actually to put tragic episodes into a
+farce. But they are not caught up into the story at all. In _Oliver
+Twist_, however, the thing broke out with an almost brutal inspiration,
+and those who had fallen in love with Dickens for his generous
+buffoonery may very likely have been startled at receiving such very
+different fare at the next helping. When you have bought a man's book
+because you like his writing about Mr. Wardle's punch-bowl and Mr.
+Winkle's skates, it may very well be surprising to open it and read
+about the sickening thuds that beat out the life of Nancy, or that
+mysterious villain whose face was blasted with disease.
+
+As a nightmare, the work is really admirable. Characters which are not
+very clearly conceived as regards their own psychology are yet, at
+certain moments, managed so as to shake to its foundations our own
+psychology. Bill Sikes is not exactly a real man, but for all that he is
+a real murderer. Nancy is not really impressive as a living woman; but
+(as the phrase goes) she makes a lovely corpse. Something quite childish
+and eternal in us, something which is shocked with the mere simplicity
+of death, quivers when we read of those repeated blows or see Sikes
+cursing the tell-tale cur who will follow his bloody foot-prints. And
+this strange, sublime, vulgar melodrama, which is melodrama and yet is
+painfully real, reaches its hideous height in that fine scene of the
+death of Sikes, the besieged house, the boy screaming within, the crowd
+screaming without, the murderer turned almost a maniac and dragging his
+victim uselessly up and down the room, the escape over the roof, the
+rope swiftly running taut, and death sudden, startling and symbolic; a
+man hanged. There is in this and similar scenes something of the quality
+of Hogarth and many other English moralists of the early eighteenth
+century. It is not easy to define this Hogarthian quality in words,
+beyond saying that it is a sort of alphabetical realism, like the cruel
+candour of children. But it has about it these two special principles
+which separate it from all that we call realism in our time. First, that
+with us a moral story means a story about moral people; with them a
+moral story meant more often a story about immoral people. Second, that
+with us realism is always associated with some subtle view of morals;
+with them realism was always associated with some simple view of morals.
+The end of Bill Sikes exactly in the way that the law would have killed
+him--this is a Hogarthian incident; it carries on that tradition of
+startling and shocking platitude.
+
+All this element in the book was a sincere thing in the author, but none
+the less it came from old soils, from the graveyard and the gallows, and
+the lane where the ghost walked. Dickens was always attracted to such
+things, and (as Forster says with inimitable simplicity) "but for his
+strong sense might have fallen into the follies of spiritualism." As a
+matter of fact, like most of the men of strong sense in his tradition,
+Dickens was left with a half belief in spirits which became in practice
+a belief in bad spirits. The great disadvantage of those who have too
+much strong sense to believe in supernaturalism is that they keep last
+the low and little forms of the supernatural, such as omens, curses,
+spectres, and retributions, but find a high and happy supernaturalism
+quite incredible. Thus the Puritans denied the sacraments, but went on
+burning witches. This shadow does rest, to some extent, upon the
+rational English writers like Dickens; supernaturalism was dying, but
+its ugliest roots died last. Dickens would have found it easier to
+believe in a ghost than in a vision of the Virgin with angels. There,
+for good or evil, however, was the root of the old _diablerie_ in
+Dickens, and there it is in _Oliver Twist_. But this was only the first
+of the new Dickens elements, which must have surprised those Dickensians
+who eagerly bought his second book. The second of the new Dickens
+elements is equally indisputable and separate. It swelled afterwards to
+enormous proportions in Dickens's work; but it really has its rise here.
+Again, as in the case of the element of _diablerie_, it would be
+possible to make technical exceptions in favour of _Pickwick_. Just as
+there were quite inappropriate scraps of the gruesome element in
+_Pickwick_, so there are quite inappropriate allusions to this other
+topic in _Pickwick_. But nobody by merely reading _Pickwick_ would even
+remember this topic; no one by merely reading _Pickwick_ would know what
+this topic is; this third great subject of Dickens; this second great
+subject of the Dickens of _Oliver Twist_.
+
+This subject is social oppression. It is surely fair to say that no one
+could have gathered from _Pickwick_ how this question boiled in the
+blood of the author of _Pickwick_. There are, indeed, passages,
+particularly in connection with Mr. Pickwick in the debtor's prison,
+which prove to us, looking back on a whole public career, that Dickens
+had been from the beginning bitter and inquisitive about the problem of
+our civilisation. No one could have imagined at the time that this
+bitterness ran in an unbroken river under all the surges of that superb
+gaiety and exuberance. With _Oliver Twist_ this sterner side of Dickens
+was suddenly revealed. For the very first pages of _Oliver Twist_ are
+stern even when they are funny. They amuse, but they cannot be enjoyed,
+as can the passages about the follies of Mr. Snodgrass or the
+humiliations of Mr. Winkle. The difference between the old easy humour
+and this new harsh humour is a difference not of degree but of kind.
+Dickens makes game of Mr. Bumble because he wants to kill Mr. Bumble; he
+made game of Mr. Winkle because he wanted him to live for ever. Dickens
+has taken the sword in hand; against what is he declaring war?
+
+It is just here that the greatness of Dickens comes in; it is just here
+that the difference lies between the pedant and the poet. Dickens enters
+the social and political war, and the first stroke he deals is not only
+significant but even startling. Fully to see this we must appreciate the
+national situation. It was an age of reform, and even of radical reform;
+the world was full of radicals and reformers; but only too many of them
+took the line of attacking everything and anything that was opposed to
+some particular theory among the many political theories that possessed
+the end of the eighteenth century. Some had so much perfected the
+perfect theory of republicanism that they almost lay awake at night
+because Queen Victoria had a crown on her head. Others were so certain
+that mankind had hitherto been merely strangled in the bonds of the
+State that they saw truth only in the destruction of tariffs or of
+by-laws. The greater part of that generation held that clearness,
+economy, and a hard common-sense, would soon destroy the errors that had
+been erected by the superstitions and sentimentalities of the past. In
+pursuance of this idea many of the new men of the new century, quite
+confident that they were invigorating the new age, sought to destroy the
+old sentimental clericalism, the old sentimental feudalism, the
+old-world belief in priests, the old-world belief in patrons, and among
+other things the old-world belief in beggars. They sought among other
+things to clear away the old visionary kindliness on the subject of
+vagrants. Hence those reformers enacted not only a new reform bill but
+also a new poor law. In creating many other modern things they created
+the modern workhouse, and when Dickens came out to fight it was the
+first thing that he broke with his battle-axe.
+
+This is where Dickens's social revolt is of more value than mere
+politics and avoids the vulgarity of the novel with a purpose. His
+revolt is not a revolt of the commercialist against the feudalist, of
+the Nonconformist against the Churchman, of the Free-trader against the
+Protectionist, of the Liberal against the Tory. If he were among us now
+his revolt would not be the revolt of the Socialist against the
+Individualist, or of the Anarchist against the Socialist. His revolt was
+simply and solely the eternal revolt; it was the revolt of the weak
+against the strong. He did not dislike this or that argument for
+oppression; he disliked oppression. He disliked a certain look on the
+face of a man when he looks down on another man. And that look on the
+face is, indeed, the only thing in the world that we have really to
+fight between here and the fires of Hell. That which pedants of that
+time and this time would have called the sentimentalism of Dickens was
+really simply the detached sanity of Dickens. He cared nothing for the
+fugitive explanations of the Constitutional Conservatives; he cared
+nothing for the fugitive explanations of the Manchester School. He would
+have cared quite as little for the fugitive explanations of the Fabian
+Society or of the modern scientific Socialist. He saw that under many
+forms there was one fact, the tyranny of man over man; and he struck at
+it when he saw it, whether it was old or new. When he found that footmen
+and rustics were too much afraid of Sir Leicester Dedlock, he attacked
+Sir Leicester Dedlock; he did not care whether Sir Leicester Dedlock
+said he was attacking England or whether Mr. Rouncewell, the
+Ironmaster, said he was attacking an effete oligarchy. In that case he
+pleased Mr. Rouncewell, the Iron-master, and displeased Sir Leicester
+Dedlock, the Aristocrat. But when he found that Mr. Rouncewell's workmen
+were much too frightened of Mr. Rouncewell, then he displeased Mr.
+Rouncewell in turn; he displeased Mr. Rouncewell very much by calling
+him Mr. Bounderby. When he imagined himself to be fighting old laws he
+gave a sort of vague and general approval to new laws. But when he came
+to the new laws they had a bad time. When Dickens found that after a
+hundred economic arguments and granting a hundred economic
+considerations, the fact remained that paupers in modern workhouses were
+much too afraid of the beadle, just as vassals in ancient castles were
+much too afraid of the Dedlocks, then he struck suddenly and at once.
+This is what makes the opening chapters of _Oliver Twist_ so curious and
+important. The very fact of Dickens's distance from, and independence
+of, the elaborate financial arguments of his time, makes more definite
+and dazzling his sudden assertion that he sees the old human tyranny in
+front of him as plain as the sun at noon-day. Dickens attacks the modern
+workhouse with a sort of inspired simplicity as of a boy in a fairy tale
+who had wandered about, sword in hand, looking for ogres and who had
+found an indisputable ogre. All the other people of his time are
+attacking things because they are bad economics or because they are bad
+politics, or because they are bad science; he alone is attacking things
+because they are bad. All the others are Radicals with a large R; he
+alone is radical with a small one. He encounters evil with that
+beautiful surprise which, as it is the beginning of all real pleasure,
+is also the beginning of all righteous indignation. He enters the
+workhouse just as Oliver Twist enters it, as a little child.
+
+This is the real power and pathos of that celebrated passage in the book
+which has passed into a proverb; but which has not lost its terrible
+humour even in being hackneyed. I mean, of course, the everlasting
+quotation about Oliver Twist asking for more. The real poignancy that
+there is in this idea is a very good study in that strong school of
+social criticism which Dickens represented. A modern realist describing
+the dreary workhouse would have made all the children utterly crushed,
+not daring to speak at all, not expecting anything, not hoping anything,
+past all possibility of affording even an ironical contrast or a protest
+of despair. A modern, in short, would have made all the boys in the
+workhouse pathetic by making them all pessimists. But Oliver Twist is
+not pathetic because he is a pessimist. Oliver Twist is pathetic because
+he is an optimist. The whole tragedy of that incident is in the fact
+that he does expect the universe to be kind to him, that he does believe
+that he is living in a just world. He comes before the Guardians as the
+ragged peasants of the French Revolution came before the Kings and
+Parliaments of Europe. That is to say, he comes, indeed, with gloomy
+experiences, but he comes with a happy philosophy. He knows that there
+are wrongs of man to be reviled; but he believes also that there are
+rights of man to be demanded. It has often been remarked as a singular
+fact that the French poor, who stand in historic tradition as typical
+of all the desperate men who have dragged down tyranny, were, as a
+matter of fact, by no means worse off than the poor of many other
+European countries before the Revolution. The truth is that the French
+were tragic because they were better off. The others had known the
+sorrowful experiences; but they alone had known the splendid expectation
+and the original claims. It was just here that Dickens was so true a
+child of them and of that happy theory so bitterly applied. They were
+the one oppressed people that simply asked for justice; they were the
+one Parish Boy who innocently asked for more.
+
+
+
+
+OLD CURIOSITY SHOP
+
+
+Nothing is important except the fate of the soul; and literature is only
+redeemed from an utter triviality, surpassing that of naughts and
+crosses, by the fact that it describes not the world around us or the
+things on the retina of the eye or the enormous irrelevancy of
+encyclopædias, but some condition to which the human spirit can come.
+All good writers express the state of their souls, even (as occurs in
+some cases of very good writers) if it is a state of damnation. The
+first thing that has to be realised about Dickens is this ultimate
+spiritual condition of the man, which lay behind all his creations. This
+Dickens state of mind is difficult to pick out in words as are all
+elementary states of mind; they cannot be described, not because they
+are too subtle for words, but because they are too simple for words.
+Perhaps the nearest approach to a statement of it would be this: that
+Dickens expresses an eager anticipation of everything that will happen
+in the motley affairs of men; he looks at the quiet crowd waiting for it
+to be picturesque and to play the fool; he expects everything; he is
+torn with a happy hunger. Thackeray is always looking back to yesterday;
+Dickens is always looking forward to to-morrow. Both are profoundly
+humorous, for there is a humour of the morning and a humour of the
+evening; but the first guesses at what it will get, at all the
+grotesqueness and variety which a day may bring forth; the second looks
+back on what the day has been and sees even its solemnities as slightly
+ironical. Nothing can be too extravagant for the laughter that looks
+forward; and nothing can be too dignified for the laughter that looks
+back. It is an idle but obvious thing, which many must have noticed,
+that we often find in the title of one of an author's books what might
+very well stand for a general description of all of them. Thus all
+Spenser's works might be called _A Hymn to Heavenly Beauty_; or all Mr.
+Bernard Shaw's bound books might be called _You Never Can Tell_. In the
+same way the whole substance and spirit of Thackeray might be gathered
+under the general title _Vanity Fair_. In the same way too the whole
+substance and spirit of Dickens might be gathered under the general
+title _Great Expectations_.
+
+In a recent criticism on this position I saw it remarked that all this
+is reading into Dickens something that he did not mean; and I have been
+told that it would have greatly surprised Dickens to be informed that he
+"went down the broad road of the Revolution." Of course it would.
+Criticism does not exist to say about authors the things that they knew
+themselves. It exists to say the things about them which they did not
+know themselves. If a critic says that the _Iliad_ has a pagan rather
+than a Christian pity, or that it is full of pictures made by one
+epithet, of course he does not mean that Homer could have said that. If
+Homer could have said that the critic would leave Homer to say it. The
+function of criticism, if it has a legitimate function at all, can only
+be one function--that of dealing with the subconscious part of the
+author's mind which only the critic can express, and not with the
+conscious part of the author's mind, which the author himself can
+express. Either criticism is no good at all (a very defensible position)
+or else criticism means saying about an author the very things that
+would have made him jump out of his boots.
+
+Doubtless the name in this case _Great Expectations_ is an empty
+coincidence; and indeed it is not in the books of the later Dickens
+period (the period of _Great Expectations_) that we should look for the
+best examples of this sanguine and expectant spirit which is the
+essential of the man's genius. There are plenty of good examples of it
+especially in the earlier works. But even in the earlier works there is
+no example of it more striking or more satisfactory than _The Old
+Curiosity Shop_. It is particularly noticeable in the fact that its
+opening and original framework express the idea of a random experience,
+a thing come across in the street; a single face in the crowd, followed
+until it tells its story. Though the thing ends in a novel it begins in
+a sketch; it begins as one of the _Sketches by Boz_. There is something
+unconsciously artistic in the very clumsiness of this opening. Master
+Humphrey starts to keep a scrap-book of all his adventures, and he finds
+that he can fill the whole scrap-book with the sequels and developments
+of one adventure; he goes out to notice everybody and he finds himself
+busily and variedly occupied only in watching somebody. In this there is
+a very profound truth about the true excitement and inexhaustible poetry
+of life. The truth is not so much that eternity is full of souls as that
+one soul can fill eternity. In strict art there is something quite lame
+and lumbering about the way in which the benevolent old story-teller
+starts to tell many stories and then drops away altogether, while one of
+his stories takes his place. But in a larger art, his collision with
+Little Nell and his complete eclipse by her personality and narrative
+have a real significance. They suggest the random richness of such
+meetings, and their uncalculated results. It makes the whole book a sort
+of splendid accident.
+
+It is not true, as is commonly said, that the Dickens pathos as pathos
+is bad. It is not true, as is still more commonly said, that the whole
+business about Little Nell is bad. The case is more complex than that.
+Yet complex as it is it admits of one sufficiently clear distinction.
+Those who have written about the death of Little Nell, have generally
+noticed the crudities of the character itself; the little girl's
+unnatural and staring innocence, her constrained and awkward piety. But
+they have nearly all of them entirely failed to notice that there is in
+the death of Little Nell one quite definite and really artistic idea. It
+is not an artistic idea that a little child should die rhetorically on
+the stage like Paul Dombey; and Little Nell does not die rhetorically
+upon the stage like Paul Dombey. But it is an artistic idea that all the
+good powers and personalities in the story should set out in pursuit of
+one insignificant child, to repair an injustice to her, should track her
+from town to town over England with all the resources of wealth,
+intelligence, and travel, and should all--arrive too late. All the good
+fairies and all the kind magicians, all the just kings and all the
+gallant princes, with chariots and flying dragons and armies and navies
+go after one little child who had strayed into a wood, and find her
+dead. That is the conception which Dickens's artistic instinct was
+really aiming at when he finally condemned Little Nell to death, after
+keeping her, so to speak, so long with the rope round her neck. The
+death of Little Nell is open certainly to the particular denial which
+its enemies make about it. The death of Little Nell is not pathetic. It
+is perhaps tragic; it is in reality ironic. Here is a very good case of
+the injustice to Dickens on his purely literary side. It is not that I
+say that Dickens achieved what he designed; it is that the critics will
+not see what the design was. They go on talking of the death of Little
+Nell as if it were a mere example of maudlin description like the death
+of Little Paul. As a fact it is not described at all; so it cannot be
+objectionable. It is not the death of Little Nell, but the life of
+Little Nell, that I object to.
+
+In this, in the actual picture of her personality, if you can call it a
+personality, Dickens did fall into some of his facile vices. The real
+objection to much of his pathos belongs really to another part of his
+character. It is connected with his vanity, his voracity for all kinds
+of praise, his restive experimentalism and even perhaps his envy. He
+strained himself to achieve pathos. His humour was inspiration; but his
+pathos was ambition. His laughter was lonely; he would have laughed on a
+desert island. But his grief was gregarious. He liked to move great
+masses of men, to melt them into tenderness, to play on the people as a
+great pianist plays on them; to make them mad or sad. His pathos was to
+him a way of showing his power; and for that reason it was really
+powerless. He could not help making people laugh; but he tried to make
+them cry. We come in this novel, as we often do come in his novels, upon
+hard lumps of unreality, upon a phrase that suddenly sickens. That is
+always due to his conscious despotism over the delicate feelings; that
+is always due to his love of fame as distinct from his love of fun. But
+it is not true that all Dickens's pathos is like this; it is not even
+true that all the passages about Little Nell are like this; there are
+two strands almost everywhere and they can be differentiated as the
+sincere and the deliberate. There is a great difference between Dickens
+thinking about the tears of his characters and Dickens thinking about
+the tears of his audience.
+
+When all this is allowed, however, and the exaggerated contempt for the
+Dickens pathos is properly corrected, the broad fact remains: that to
+pass from the solemn characters in this book to the comic characters in
+this book, is to be like some Ulysses who should pass suddenly from the
+land of shadows to the mountain of the gods. Little Nell has her own
+position in careful and reasonable criticism: even that wobbling old
+ass, her grandfather, has his position in it; perhaps even the
+dissipated Fred (whom long acquaintance with Mr. Dick Swiveller has not
+made any less dismal in his dissipation) has a place in it also. But
+when we come to Swiveller and Sampson Brass and Quilp and Mrs. Jarley,
+then Fred and Nell and the grandfather simply do not exist. There are no
+such people in the story. The real hero and heroine of _The Old
+Curiosity Shop_ are of course Dick Swiveller and the Marchioness. It is
+significant in a sense that these two sane, strong, living, and lovable
+human beings are the only two, or almost the only two, people in the
+story who do not run after Little Nell. They have something better to do
+than to go on that shadowy chase after that cheerless phantom. They have
+to build up between them a true romance; perhaps the one true romance in
+the whole of Dickens. Dick Swiveller really has all the half-heroic
+characteristics which make a man respected by a woman and which are the
+male contribution to virtue. He is brave, magnanimous, sincere about
+himself, amusing, absurdly hopeful; above all, he is both strong and
+weak. On the other hand the Marchioness really has all the
+characteristics, the entirely heroic characteristics which make a woman
+respected by a man. She is female: that is, she is at once incurably
+candid and incurably loyal, she is full of terrible common-sense, she
+expects little pleasure for herself and yet she can enjoy bursts of it;
+above all, she is physically timid and yet she can face anything. All
+this solid rocky romanticism is really implied in the speech and action
+of these two characters and can be felt behind them all the time.
+Because they are the two most absurd people in the book they are also
+the most vivid, human, and imaginable. There are two really fine love
+affairs in Dickens; and I almost think only two. One is the happy
+courtship of Swiveller and the Marchioness; the other is the tragic
+courtship of Toots and Florence Dombey. When Dick Swiveller wakes up in
+bed and sees the Marchioness playing cribbage he thinks that he and she
+are a prince and princess in a fairy tale. He thinks right.
+
+I speak thus seriously of such characters with a deliberate purpose; for
+the frivolous characters of Dickens are taken much too frivolously. It
+has been quite insufficiently pointed out that all the serious moral
+ideas that Dickens did contrive to express he expressed altogether
+through this fantastic medium, in such figures as Swiveller and the
+little servant. The warmest upholder of Dickens would not go to the
+solemn or sentimental passages for anything fresh or suggestive in faith
+or philosophy. No one would pretend that the death of little Dombey
+(with its "What are the wild waves saying?") told us anything new or
+real about death. A good Christian dying, one would imagine, not only
+would not know what the wild waves were saying, but would not care. No
+one would pretend that the repentance of old Paul Dombey throws any
+light on the psychology or philosophy of repentance. No doubt old
+Dombey, white-haired and amiable, was a great improvement on old Dombey
+brown-haired and unpleasant. But in his case the softening of the heart
+seems to bear too close a resemblance to softening of the brain. Whether
+these serious passages are as bad as the critical people or as good as
+the sentimental people find them, at least they do not convey anything
+in the way of an illuminating glimpse or a bold suggestion about men's
+moral nature. The serious figures do not tell one anything about the
+human soul. The comic figures do. Take anything almost at random out of
+these admirable speeches of Dick Swiveller. Notice, for instance, how
+exquisitely Dickens has caught a certain very deep and delicate quality
+at the bottom of this idle kind of man. I mean that odd impersonal sort
+of intellectual justice, by which the frivolous fellow sees things as
+they are and even himself as he is; and is above irritation. Mr.
+Swiveller, you remember, asks the Marchioness whether the Brass family
+ever talk about him; she nods her head with vivacity. "'Complimentary?'
+inquired Mr. Swiveller. The motion of the little servant's head
+altered.... 'But she says,' continued the little servant, 'that you
+ain't to be trusted.' 'Well, do you know, Marchioness,' said Mr.
+Swiveller thoughtfully, 'many people, not exactly professional people,
+but tradesmen, have had the same idea. The excellent citizen from whom I
+ordered this beer inclines strongly to that opinion.'"
+
+This philosophical freedom from all resentment, this strange love of
+truth which seems actually to come through carelessness, is a very real
+piece of spiritual observation. Even among liars there are two classes,
+one immeasurably better than another. The honest liar is the man who
+tells the truth about his old lies; who says on Wednesday, "I told a
+magnificent lie on Monday." He keeps the truth in circulation; no one
+version of things stagnates in him and becomes an evil secret. He does
+not have to live with old lies; a horrible domesticity. Mr. Swiveller
+may mislead the waiter about whether he has the money to pay; but he
+does not mislead his friend, and he does not mislead himself on the
+point. He is quite as well aware as any one can be of the accumulating
+falsity of the position of a gentleman who by his various debts has
+closed up all the streets into the Strand except one, and who is going
+to close that to-night with a pair of gloves. He shuts up the street
+with a pair of gloves, but he does not shut up his mind with a secret.
+The traffic of truth is still kept open through his soul.
+
+It is exactly in these absurd characters, then, that we can find a mass
+of psychological and ethical suggestion. This cannot be found in the
+serious characters except indeed in some of the later experiments: there
+is a little of such psychological and ethical suggestion in figures like
+Gridley, like Jasper, like Bradley Headstone. But in these earlier books
+at least, such as _The Old Curiosity Shop_, the grave or moral figures
+throw no light upon morals. I should maintain this generalisation even
+in the presence of that apparent exception _The Christmas Carol_ with
+its trio of didactic ghosts. Charity is certainly splendid, at once a
+luxury and a necessity; but Dickens is not most effective when he is
+preaching charity seriously; he is most effective when he is preaching
+it uproariously; when he is preaching it by means of massive
+personalities and vivid scenes. One might say that he is best not when
+he is preaching his human love, but when he is practising it. In his
+grave pages he tells us to love men; but in his wild pages he creates
+men whom we can love. By his solemnity he commands us to love our
+neighbours. By his caricature he makes us love them.
+
+There is an odd literary question which I wonder is not put more often
+in literature. How far can an author tell a truth without seeing it
+himself? Perhaps an actual example will express my meaning. I was once
+talking to a highly intelligent lady about Thackeray's _Newcomes_. We
+were speaking of the character of Mrs. Mackenzie, the Campaigner, and in
+the middle of the conversation the lady leaned across to me and said in
+a low, hoarse, but emphatic voice, "She drank. Thackeray didn't know it;
+but she drank." And it is really astonishing what a shaft of white light
+this sheds on the Campaigner, on her terrible temperament, on her
+agonised abusiveness and her almost more agonised urbanity, on her
+clamour which is nevertheless not open or explicable, on her temper
+which is not so much bad temper as insatiable, bloodthirsty, man-eating
+temper. How far can a writer thus indicate by accident a truth of which
+he is himself ignorant? If truth is a plan or pattern of things that
+really are, or in other words, if truth truly exists outside ourselves,
+or in other words, if truth exists at all, it must be often possible for
+a writer to uncover a corner of it which he happens not to understand,
+but which his reader does happen to understand. The author sees only two
+lines; the reader sees where they meet and what is the angle. The author
+sees only an arc or fragment of a curve; the reader sees the size of the
+circle. The last thing to say about Dickens, and especially about books
+like _The Old Curiosity Shop_, is that they are full of these
+unconscious truths. The careless reader may miss them. The careless
+author almost certainly did miss them. But from them can be gathered an
+impression of real truth to life which is for the grave critics of
+Dickens an almost unknown benefit, buried treasure. Here for instance is
+one of them out of _The Old Curiosity Shop_. I mean the passage in which
+(by a blazing stroke of genius) the dashing Mr. Chuckster, one of the
+Glorious Apollos of whom Mr. Swiveller was the Perpetual Grand, is made
+to entertain a hatred bordering upon frenzy for the stolid, patient,
+respectful, and laborious Kit. Now in the formal plan of the story Mr.
+Chuckster is a fool, and Kit is almost a hero; at least he is a noble
+boy. Yet unconsciously Dickens made the idiot Chuckster say something
+profoundly suggestive on the subject. In speaking of Kit Mr. Chuckster
+makes use of these two remarkable phrases; that Kit is "meek" and that
+he is "a snob." Now Kit is really a very fresh and manly picture of a
+boy, firm, sane, chivalrous, reasonable, full of those three great Roman
+virtues which Mr. Belloc has so often celebrated, _virtus_ and
+_verecundia_ and _pietas_. He is a sympathetic but still a
+straightforward study of the best type of that most respectable of all
+human classes, the respectable poor. All this is true; all that Dickens
+utters in praise of Kit is true; nevertheless the awful words of
+Chuckster remain written on the eternal skies. Kit is meek and Kit is a
+snob. His natural dignity does include and is partly marred by that
+instinctive subservience to the employing class which has been the
+comfortable weakness of the whole English democracy, which has prevented
+their making any revolution for the last two hundred years. Kit would
+not serve any wicked man for money, but he would serve any moderately
+good man and the money would give a certain dignity and decisiveness to
+the goodness. All this is the English popular evil which goes along with
+the English popular virtues of geniality, of homeliness, tolerance and
+strong humour, hope and an enormous appetite for a hand-to-mouth
+happiness. The scene in which Kit takes his family to the theatre is a
+monument of the massive qualities of old English enjoyment. If what we
+want is Merry England, our antiquarians ought not to revive the Maypole
+or the Morris Dancers; they ought to revive Astley's and Sadler's Wells
+and the old solemn Circus and the old stupid Pantomime, and all the
+sawdust and all the oranges. Of all this strength and joy in the poor,
+Kit is a splendid and final symbol. But amid all his masculine and
+English virtue, he has this weak touch of meekness, or acceptance of the
+powers that be. It is a sound touch; it is a real truth about Kit. But
+Dickens did not know it. Mr. Chuckster did.
+
+Dickens's stories taken as a whole have more artistic unity than appears
+at the first glance. It is the immediate impulse of a modern critic to
+dismiss them as mere disorderly scrap-books with very brilliant scraps.
+But this is not quite so true as it looks. In one of Dickens's novels
+there is generally no particular unity of construction; but there is
+often a considerable unity of sentiment and atmosphere. Things are
+irrelevant, but not somehow inappropriate. The whole book is written
+carelessly; but the whole book is generally written in one mood. To take
+a rude parallel from the other arts, we may say that there is not much
+unity of form, but there is much unity of colour. In most of the novels
+this can be seen. _Nicholas Nickleby_, as I have remarked, is full of a
+certain freshness, a certain light and open-air curiosity, which
+irradiates from the image of the young man swinging along the Yorkshire
+roads in the sun. Hence the comic characters with whom he falls in are
+comic characters in the same key; they are a band of strolling players,
+charlatans and poseurs, but too humane to be called humbugs. In the same
+way, the central story of _Oliver Twist_ is sombre; and hence even its
+comic character is almost sombre; at least he is too ugly to be merely
+amusing. Mr. Bumble is in some ways a terrible grotesque; his apoplectic
+visage recalls the "fire-red Cherubimme's face," which added such horror
+to the height and stature of Chaucer's Sompnour. In both these cases
+even the riotous and absurd characters are a little touched with the
+tint of the whole story. But this neglected merit of Dickens can
+certainly be seen best in _The Old Curiosity Shop_.
+
+The curiosity shop itself was a lumber of grotesque and sinister things,
+outlandish weapons, twisted and diabolic decorations. The comic
+characters in the book are all like images bought in an old curiosity
+shop. Quilp might be a gargoyle. He might be some sort of devilish
+door-knocker, dropped down and crawling about the pavement. The same
+applies to the sinister and really terrifying stiffness of Sally Brass.
+She is like some old staring figure cut out of wood. Sampson Brass, her
+brother, again is a grotesque in the same rather inhuman manner; he is
+especially himself when he comes in with the green shade over his eye.
+About all this group of bad figures in _The Old Curiosity Shop_ there is
+a sort of _diablerie_. There is also within this atmosphere an
+extraordinary energy of irony and laughter. The scene in which Sampson
+Brass draws up the description of Quilp, supposing him to be dead,
+reaches a point of fiendish fun. "We will not say very bandy, Mrs.
+Jiniwin," he says of his friend's legs, "we will confine ourselves to
+bandy. He is gone, my friends, where his legs would never be called in
+question." They go on to the discussion of his nose, and Mrs. Jiniwin
+inclines to the view that it is flat. "Aquiline, you hag! Aquiline,"
+cries Mr. Quilp, pushing in his head and striking his nose with his
+fist. There is nothing better in the whole brutal exuberance of the
+character than that gesture with which Quilp punches his own face with
+his own fist. It is indeed a perfect symbol; for Quilp is always
+fighting himself for want of anybody else. He is energy, and energy by
+itself is always suicidal; he is that primordial energy which tears and
+which destroys itself.
+
+
+
+
+BARNABY RUDGE
+
+
+_Barnaby Rudge_ was written by Dickens in the spring and first flowing
+tide of his popularity; it came immediately after _The Old Curiosity
+Shop_, and only a short time after _Pickwick_. Dickens was one of those
+rare but often very sincere men in whom the high moment of success
+almost coincides with the high moment of youth. The calls upon him at
+this time were insistent and overwhelming; this necessarily happens at a
+certain stage of a successful writer's career. He was just successful
+enough to invite offers and not successful enough to reject them. At the
+beginning of his career he could throw himself into _Pickwick_ because
+there was nothing else to throw himself into. At the end of his life he
+could throw himself into _A Tale of Two Cities_, because he refused to
+throw himself into anything else. But there was an intervening period,
+early in his life, when there was almost too much work for his
+imagination, and yet not quite enough work for his housekeeping. To this
+period _Barnaby Rudge_ belongs. And it is a curious tribute to the quite
+curious greatness of Dickens that in this period of youthful strain we
+do not feel the strain but feel only the youth. His own amazing wish to
+write equalled or outstripped even his readers' amazing wish to read.
+Working too hard did not cure him of his abstract love of work.
+Unreasonable publishers asked him to write ten novels at once; but he
+wanted to write twenty novels at once. All this period is strangely full
+of his own sense at once of fertility and of futility; he did work which
+no one else could have done, and yet he could not be certain as yet that
+he was anybody.
+
+_Barnaby Rudge_ marks this epoch because it marks the fact that he is
+still confused about what kind of person he is going to be. He has
+already struck the note of the normal romance in _Nicholas Nickleby_; he
+has already created some of his highest comic characters in _Pickwick_
+and _The Old Curiosity Shop_, but here he betrays the fact that it is
+still a question what ultimate guide he shall follow. _Barnaby Rudge_ is
+a romantic, historical novel. Its design reminds us of Scott; some parts
+of its fulfilment remind us, alas! of Harrison Ainsworth. It is a very
+fine romantic historical novel; Scott would have been proud of it. But
+it is still so far different from the general work of Dickens that it is
+permissible to wonder how far Dickens was proud of it. The book,
+effective as it is, is almost entirely devoted to dealings with a
+certain artistic element, which (in its mere isolation) Dickens did not
+commonly affect; an element which many men of infinitely less genius
+have often seemed to affect more successfully; I mean the element of the
+picturesque.
+
+It is the custom in many quarters to speak somewhat sneeringly of that
+element which is broadly called the picturesque. It is always felt to be
+an inferior, a vulgar, and even an artificial form of art. Yet two
+things may be remarked about it. The first is that, with few
+exceptions, the greatest literary artists have been not only
+particularly clever at the picturesque, but particularly fond of it.
+Shakespeare, for instance, delighted in certain merely pictorial
+contrasts which are quite distinct from, even when they are akin to, the
+spiritual view involved. For instance, there is admirable satire in the
+idea of Touchstone teaching worldly wisdom and worldly honour to the
+woodland yokels. There is excellent philosophy in the idea of the fool
+being the representative of civilisation in the forest. But quite apart
+from this deeper meaning in the incident, the mere figure of the jester,
+in his bright motley and his cap and bells, against the green background
+of the forest and the rude forms of the shepherds, is a strong example
+of the purely picturesque. There is excellent tragic irony in the
+confrontation of the melancholy philosopher among the tombs with the
+cheerful digger of the graves. It sums up the essential point, that dead
+bodies can be comic; it is only dead souls that can be tragic. But quite
+apart from such irony, the mere picture of the grotesque gravedigger,
+the black-clad prince, and the skull is a picture in the strongest sense
+picturesque. Caliban and the two shipwrecked drunkards are an admirable
+symbol; but they are also an admirable scene. Bottom, with the ass's
+head, sitting in a ring of elves, is excellent moving comedy, but also
+excellent still life. Falstaff with his huge body, Bardolph with his
+burning nose, are masterpieces of the pen; but they would be fine
+sketches even for the pencil. King Lear, in the storm, is a landscape as
+well as a character study. There is something decorative even about the
+insistence on the swarthiness of Othello, or the deformity of Richard
+III. Shakespeare's work is much more than picturesque; but it is
+picturesque. And the same which is said here of him by way of example is
+largely true of the highest class of literature. Dante's _Divine Comedy_
+is supremely important as a philosophy; but it is important merely as a
+panorama. Spenser's _Faery Queen_ pleases us as an allegory; but it
+would please us even as a wall-paper. Stronger still is the case of
+Chaucer who loved the pure picturesque, which always includes something
+of what we commonly call the ugly. The huge stature and startling
+scarlet face of the Sompnour is in just the same spirit as Shakespeare's
+skulls and motley; the same spirit gave Chaucer's miller bagpipes, and
+clad his doctor in crimson. It is the spirit which, while making many
+other things, loves to make a picture.
+
+Now the second thing to be remarked in apology for the picturesque is,
+that the very thing which makes it seem trivial ought really to make it
+seem important; I mean the fact that it consists necessarily of
+contrasts. It brings together types that stand out from their
+background, but are abruptly different from each other, like the clown
+among the fairies or the fool in the forest. And his audacious
+reconciliation is a mark not of frivolity but of extreme seriousness. A
+man who deals in harmonies, who only matches stars with angels or lambs
+with spring flowers, he indeed may be frivolous; for he is taking one
+mood at a time, and perhaps forgetting each mood as it passes. But a man
+who ventures to combine an angel and an octopus must have some serious
+view of the universe. The man who should write a dialogue between two
+early Christians might be a mere writer of dialogues. But a man who
+should write a dialogue between an early Christian and the Missing Link
+would have to be a philosopher. The more widely different the types
+talked of, the more serious and universal must be the philosophy which
+talks of them. The mark of the light and thoughtless writer is the
+harmony of his subject matter; the mark of the thoughtful writer is its
+apparent diversity. The most flippant lyric poet might write a pretty
+poem about lambs; but it requires something bolder and graver than a
+poet, it requires an ecstatic prophet, to talk about the lion lying down
+with the lamb.
+
+Dickens, at any rate, strongly supports this conception: that great
+literary men as such do not despise the purely pictorial. No man's works
+have so much the quality of illustrating themselves. Few men's works
+have been more thoroughly and eagerly illustrated; few men's works can
+it have been better fun to illustrate. As a rule this fascinating
+quality in the mere fantastic figures of the tale was inseparable from
+their farcical quality in the tale. Stiggins's red nose is distinctly
+connected with the fact that he is a member of the Ebenezer Temperance
+Association; Quilp is little, because a little of him goes a long way.
+Mr. Carker smiles and smiles and is a villain; Mr. Chadband is fat
+because in his case to be fat is to be hated. The story is immeasurably
+more important than the picture; it is not mere indulgence in the
+picturesque. Generally it is an intellectual love of the comic; not a
+pure love of the grotesque.
+
+But in one book Dickens suddenly confesses that he likes the grotesque
+even without the comic. In one case he makes clear that he enjoys pure
+pictures with a pure love of the picturesque. That place is _Barnaby
+Rudge_. There had indeed been hints of it in many episodes in his books;
+notably, for example, in that fine scene of the death of Quilp--a scene
+in which the dwarf remains fantastic long after he has ceased to be in
+any way funny. Still, the dwarf was meant to be funny. Humour of a
+horrible kind, but still humour, is the purpose of Quilp's existence and
+position in the book. Laughter is the object of all his oddities. But
+laughter is not the object of Barnaby Rudge's oddities. His idiot
+costume and his ugly raven are used for the purpose of the pure
+grotesque; solely to make a certain kind of Gothic sketch.
+
+It is commonly this love of pictures that drives men back upon the
+historical novel. But it is very typical of Dickens's living interest in
+his own time, that though he wrote two historical novels they were
+neither of them of very ancient history. They were both, indeed, of very
+recent history; only they were those parts of recent history which were
+specially picturesque. I do not think that this was due to any mere
+consciousness on his part that he knew no history. Undoubtedly he knew
+no history; and he may or may not have been conscious of the fact. But
+the consciousness did not prevent him from writing a _History of
+England_. Nor did it prevent him from interlarding all or any of his
+works with tales of the pictorial past, such as the tale of the broken
+swords in _Master Humphrey's Clock_, or the indefensibly delightful
+nightmare of the lady in the stage-coach, which helps to soften the
+amiable end of Pickwick. Neither, worst of all, did it prevent him from
+dogmatising anywhere and everywhere about the past, of which he knew
+nothing; it did not prevent him from telling the bells to tell Trotty
+Veck that the Middle Ages were a failure, nor from solemnly declaring
+that the best thing that the mediæval monks ever did was to create the
+mean and snobbish quietude of a modern cathedral city. No, it was not
+historical reverence that held him back from dealing with the remote
+past; but rather something much better--a living interest in the living
+century in which he was born. He would have thought himself quite
+intellectually capable of writing a novel about the Council of Trent or
+the First Crusade. He would have thought himself quite equal to
+analysing the psychology of Abelard or giving a bright, satiric sketch
+of St. Augustine. It must frankly be confessed that it was not a sense
+of his own unworthiness that held him back; I fear it was rather a sense
+of St. Augustine's unworthiness. He could not see the point of any
+history before the first slow swell of the French Revolution. He could
+understand the revolutions of the eighteenth century; all the other
+revolutions of history (so many and so splendid) were unmeaning to him.
+But the revolutions of the eighteenth century he did understand; and to
+them therefore he went back, as all historical novelists go back, in
+search of the picturesque. And from this fact an important result
+follows.
+
+The result that follows is this: that his only two historical novels are
+both tales of revolutions--of eighteenth-century revolutions. These two
+eighteenth-century revolutions may seem to differ, and perhaps do
+differ in everything except in being revolutions and of the eighteenth
+century. The French Revolution, which is the theme of _A Tale of Two
+Cities_, was a revolt in favour of all that is now called enlightenment
+and liberation. The great Gordon Riot, which is the theme of _Barnaby
+Rudge_, was a revolt in favour of something which would now be called
+mere ignorant and obscurantist Protestantism. Nevertheless both belonged
+more typically to the age out of which Dickens came--the great sceptical
+and yet creative eighteenth century of Europe. Whether the mob rose on
+the right side or the wrong they both belonged to the time in which a
+mob could rise, in which a mob could conquer. No growth of intellectual
+science or of moral cowardice had made it impossible to fight in the
+streets, whether for the republic or for the Bible. If we wish to know
+what was the real link, existing actually in ultimate truth, existing
+unconsciously in Dickens's mind, which connected the Gordon Riots with
+the French Revolution, the link may be defined though not with any great
+adequacy. The nearest and truest way of stating it is that neither of
+the two could possibly happen in Fleet Street to-morrow evening.
+
+Another point of resemblance between the two books might be found in the
+fact that they both contain the sketch of the same kind of
+eighteenth-century aristocrat, if indeed that kind of aristocrat really
+existed in the eighteenth century. The diabolical dandy with the rapier
+and the sneer is at any rate a necessity of all normal plays and
+romances; hence Mr. Chester has a right to exist in this romance, and
+Foulon a right to exist in a page of history almost as cloudy and
+disputable as a romance. What Dickens and other romancers do probably
+omit from the picture of the eighteenth-century oligarch is probably his
+liberality. It must never be forgotten that even when he was a despot in
+practice he was generally a liberal in theory. Dickens and romancers
+make the pre-revolution tyrant a sincere believer in tyranny; generally
+he was not. He was a sceptic about everything, even about his own
+position. The romantic Foulon says of the people, "Let them eat grass,"
+with bitter and deliberate contempt. The real Foulon (if he ever said it
+at all) probably said it as a sort of dreary joke because he couldn't
+think of any other way out of the problem. Similarly Mr. Chester, a
+cynic as he is, believes seriously in the beauty of being a gentleman; a
+real man of that type probably disbelieved in that as in everything
+else. Dickens was too bracing, one may say too bouncing himself to
+understand the psychology of fatigue in a protected and leisured class.
+He could understand a tyrant like Quilp, a tyrant who is on his throne
+because he has climbed up into it, like a monkey. He could not
+understand a tyrant who is on his throne because he is too weary to get
+out of it. The old aristocrats were in a dead way quite good-natured.
+They were even humanitarians; which perhaps accounts for the extent to
+which they roused against themselves the healthy hatred of humanity. But
+they were tired humanitarians; tired with doing nothing. Figures like
+that of Mr. Chester, therefore, fail somewhat to give the true sense of
+something hopeless and helpless which led men to despair of the upper
+class. He has a boyish pleasure in play-acting; he has an interest in
+life; being a villain is his hobby. But the true man of that type had
+found all hobbies fail him. He had wearied of himself as he had wearied
+of a hundred women. He was graceful and could not even admire himself in
+the glass. He was witty and could not even laugh at his own jokes.
+Dickens could never understand tedium.
+
+There is no mark more strange and perhaps sinister of the interesting
+and not very sane condition of our modern literature, than the fact that
+tedium has been admirably described in it. Our best modern writers are
+never so exciting as they are about dulness. Mr. Rudyard Kipling is
+never so powerful as when he is painting yawning deserts, aching
+silences, sleepless nights, or infernal isolation. The excitement in one
+of the stories of Mr. Henry James becomes tense, thrilling, and almost
+intolerable in all the half hours during which nothing whatever is said
+or done. We are entering again into the mind, into the real mind of
+Foulon and Mr. Chester. We begin to understand the deep despair of those
+tyrants whom our fathers pulled down. But Dickens could never have
+understood that despair; it was not in his soul. And it is an
+interesting coincidence that here, in this book of _Barnaby Rudge_,
+there is a character meant to be wholly grotesque, who, nevertheless,
+expresses much of that element in Dickens which prevented him from being
+a true interpreter of the tired and sceptical aristocrat.
+
+Sim Tappertit is a fool, but a perfectly honourable fool. It requires
+some sincerity to pose. Posing means that one has not dried up in
+oneself all the youthful and innocent vanities with the slow paralysis
+of mere pride. Posing means that one is still fresh enough to enjoy the
+good opinion of one's fellows. On the other hand, the true cynic has not
+enough truth in him to attempt affectation; he has never even seen the
+truth, far less tried to imitate it. Now we might very well take the
+type of Mr. Chester on the one hand, and of Sim Tappertit on the other,
+as marking the issue, the conflict, and the victory which really ushered
+in the nineteenth century. Dickens was very like Sim Tappertit. The
+Liberal Revolution was very like a Sim Tappertit revolution. It was
+vulgar, it was overdone, it was absurd, but it was alive. Dickens was
+vulgar, was absurd, overdid everything, but he was alive. The
+aristocrats were perfectly correct, but quite dead; dead long before
+they were guillotined. The classics and critics who lamented that
+Dickens was no gentleman were quite right, but quite dead. The
+revolution thought itself rational; but so did Sim Tappertit. It was
+really a huge revolt of romanticism against a reason which had grown
+sick even of itself. Sim Tappertit rose against Mr. Chester; and, thank
+God! he put his foot upon his neck.
+
+  [Illustration: Charles Dickens, 1842
+  From a bust by H. Dexter, executed during Dickens's first visit to
+  America.]
+
+
+
+
+AMERICAN NOTES
+
+
+_American Notes_ was written soon after Dickens had returned from his
+first visit to America. That visit had, of course, been a great epoch in
+his life; but how much of an epoch men did not truly realise until, some
+time after, in the middle of a quiet story about Salisbury and a
+ridiculous architect, his feelings flamed out and flared up to the stars
+in _Martin Chuzzlewit_. The _American Notes_ are, however, interesting,
+because in them he betrays his feelings when he does not know that he is
+betraying them. Dickens's first visit to America was, from his own point
+of view, and at the beginning, a happy and festive experiment. It is
+very characteristic of him that he went among the Americans, enjoyed
+them, even admired them, and then had a quarrel with them. Nothing was
+ever so unmistakable as his good-will, except his ill-will; and they
+were never far apart. And this was not, as some bloodless moderns have
+sneeringly insinuated, a mere repetition of the proximity between the
+benevolent stage and the quarrelsome stage of drink. It was a piece of
+pure optimism; he believed so readily that men were going to be good to
+him that an injury to him was something more than an injury: it was a
+shock. What was the exact nature of the American shock must, however, be
+more carefully stated.
+
+The famous quarrel between Dickens and America, which finds its most
+elaborate expression in _American Notes_, though its most brilliant
+expression in _Martin Chuzzlewit_, is an incident about which a great
+deal remains to be said. But the thing which most specially remains to
+be said is this. This old Anglo-American quarrel was much more
+fundamentally friendly than most Anglo-American alliances. In Dickens's
+day each nation understood the other enough to argue. In our time
+neither nation understands itself even enough to quarrel. There was an
+English tradition, from Fox and eighteenth-century England; there was an
+American tradition from Franklin and eighteenth-century America; and
+they were still close enough together to discuss their differences with
+acrimony, perhaps, but with certain fundamental understandings. The
+eighteenth-century belief in a liberal civilisation was still a dogma;
+for dogma is the only thing that makes argument or reasoning possible.
+America, under all its swagger, did still really believe that Europe was
+its fountain and its mother, because Europe was more fully civilised.
+Dickens, under all his disgust, did still believe that America was in
+advance of Europe, because it was more democratic. It was an age, in
+short, in which the word "progress" could still be used reasonably;
+because the whole world looked to one way of escape and there was only
+one kind of progress under discussion. Now, of course, "progress" is a
+useless word; for progress takes for granted an already defined
+direction; and it is exactly about the direction that we disagree. Do
+not let us therefore be misled into any mistaken optimism or special
+self-congratulation upon what many people would call the improved
+relations between England and America. The relations are improved
+because America has finally become a foreign country. And with foreign
+countries all sane men take care to exchange a certain consideration and
+courtesy. But even as late as the time of Dickens's first visit to the
+United States, we English still felt America as a colony; an insolent,
+offensive, and even unintelligible colony sometimes, but still a colony;
+a part of our civilisation, a limb of our life. And America itself, as I
+have said, under all its bounce and independence, really regarded us as
+a mother country. This being the case it was possible for us to quarrel,
+like kinsmen. Now we only bow and smile, like strangers.
+
+This tone, as a sort of family responsibility, can be felt quite
+specially all through the satires or suggestions of these _American
+Notes_. Dickens is cross with America because he is worried about
+America; as if he were its father. He explores its industrial, legal,
+and educational arrangements like a mother looking at the housekeeping
+of a married son; he makes suggestions with a certain acidity; he takes
+a strange pleasure in being pessimistic. He advises them to take note of
+how much better certain things are done in England. All this is very
+different from Dickens's characteristic way of dealing with a foreign
+country. In countries really foreign, such as France, Switzerland, and
+Italy, he had two attitudes, neither of them in the least worried or
+paternal. When he found a thing in Europe which he did not understand,
+such as the Roman Catholic Church, he simply called it an old-world
+superstition, and sat looking at it like a moonlit ruin. When he found
+something that he did understand, such as luncheon baskets, he burst
+into carols of praise over the superior sense in our civilisation and
+good management to Continental methods. An example of the first attitude
+may be found in one of his letters, in which he describes the
+backwardness and idleness of Catholics who would not build a Birmingham
+in Italy. He seems quite unconscious of the obvious truth, that the
+backwardness of Catholics was simply the refusal of Bob Cratchit to
+enter the house of Gradgrind. An example of the second attitude can be
+found in the purple patches of fun in _Mugby Junction_; in which the
+English waitress denounces the profligate French habit of providing new
+bread and clean food for people travelling by rail. The point is,
+however, that in neither case has he the air of one suggesting
+improvements or sharing a problem with the people engaged on it. He does
+not go carefully with a notebook through Jesuit schools nor offer
+friendly suggestions to the governors of Parisian prisons. Or if he
+does, it is in a different spirit; it is in the spirit of an ordinary
+tourist being shown over the Coliseum or the Pyramids. But he visited
+America in the spirit of a Government inspector dealing with something
+it was his duty to inspect. This is never felt either in his praise or
+blame of Continental countries. When he did not leave a foreign country
+to decay like a dead dog, he merely watched it at play like a kitten.
+France he mistook for a kitten. Italy he mistook for a dead dog.
+
+But with America he could feel--and fear. There he could hate, because
+he could love. There he could feel not the past alone nor the present,
+but the future also; and, like all brave men, when he saw the future he
+was a little afraid of it. For of all tests by which the good citizen
+and strong reformer can be distinguished from the vague faddist or the
+inhuman sceptic, I know no better test than this--that the unreal
+reformer sees in front of him one certain future, the future of his fad;
+while the real reformer sees before him ten or twenty futures among
+which his country must choose, and may, in some dreadful hour, choose
+the wrong one. The true patriot is always doubtful of victory; because
+he knows that he is dealing with a living thing; a thing with free will.
+To be certain of free will is to be uncertain of success.
+
+The subject matter of the real difference of opinion between Dickens and
+the public of America can only be understood if it is thus treated as a
+dispute between brothers about the destiny of a common heritage. The
+point at issue might be stated like this. Dickens, on his side, did not
+in his heart doubt for a moment that England would eventually follow
+America along the road towards real political equality and purely
+republican institutions. He lived, it must be remembered, before the
+revival of aristocracy, which has since overwhelmed us--the revival of
+aristocracy worked through popular science and commercial dictatorship,
+and which has nowhere been more manifest than in America itself. He knew
+nothing of this; in his heart he conceded to the Yankees that not only
+was their revolution right but would ultimately be completed everywhere.
+But on the other hand, his whole point against the American experiment
+was this--that if it ignored certain ancient English contributions it
+would go to pieces for lack of them. Of these the first was good manners
+and the second individual liberty--liberty, that is, to speak and write
+against the trend of the majority. In these things he was much more
+serious and much more sensible than it is the fashion to think he was;
+he was indeed one of the most serious and sensible critics England ever
+had of current and present problems, though his criticism is useless to
+the point of nonentity about all things remote from him in style of
+civilisation or in time. His point about good manners is really
+important. All his grumblings through this book of _American Notes_, all
+his shrieking satire in _Martin Chuzzlewit_ are expressions of a grave
+and reasonable fear he had touching the future of democracy. And
+remember again what has been already remarked--instinctively he paid
+America the compliment of looking at her as the future of democracy.
+
+The mistake which he attacked still exists. I cannot imagine why it is
+that social equality is somehow supposed to mean social familiarity. Why
+should equality mean that all men are equally rude? Should it not rather
+mean that all men are equally polite? Might it not quite reasonably mean
+that all men should be equally ceremonious and stately and pontifical?
+What is there specially Equalitarian, for instance, in calling your
+political friends and even your political enemies by their Christian
+names in public? There is something very futile in the way in which
+certain Socialist leaders call each other Tom, Dick, and Harry;
+especially when Tom is accusing Harry of having basely imposed upon the
+well-known imbecility of Dick. There is something quite undemocratic in
+all men calling each other by the special and affectionate term
+"comrade"; especially when they say it with a sneer and smart inquiry
+about the funds. Democracy would be quite satisfied if every man called
+every other man "sir." Democracy would have no conceivable reason to
+complain if every man called every other man "your excellency" or "your
+holiness" or "brother of the sun and moon." The only democratic
+essential is that it should be a term of dignity and that it should be
+given to all. To abolish all terms of dignity is no more specially
+democratic than the Roman emperor's wish to cut off everybody's head at
+once was specially democratic. That involved equality certainly, but it
+was lacking in respect.
+
+Dickens saw America as markedly the seat of this danger. He saw that
+there was a perilous possibility that republican ideals might be allied
+to a social anarchy good neither for them nor for any other ideals.
+Republican simplicity, which is difficult, might be quickly turned into
+Bohemian brutality, which is easy. Cincinnatus, instead of putting his
+hand to the plough, might put his feet on the tablecloth, and an
+impression prevail that it was all a part of the same rugged equality
+and freedom. Insolence might become a tradition. Bad manners might have
+all the sanctity of good manners. "There you are!" cries Martin
+Chuzzlewit indignantly, when the American has befouled the butter. "A
+man deliberately makes a hog of himself and _that_ is an Institution."
+But the thread of thought which we must always keep in hand in this
+matter is that he would not thus have worried about the degradation of
+republican simplicity into general rudeness if he had not from first to
+last instinctively felt that America held human democracy in her hand,
+to exalt it or to let it fall. In one of his gloomier moments he wrote
+down his fear that the greatest blow ever struck at liberty would be
+struck by America in the failure of her mission upon the earth.
+
+This brings us to the other ground of his alarm--the matter of liberty
+of speech. Here also he was much more reasonable and philosophic than
+has commonly been realised. The truth is that the lurid individualism of
+Carlyle has, with its violent colours, "killed" the tones of most
+criticism of his time; and just as we can often see a scheme of
+decoration better if we cover some flaming picture, so you can judge
+nineteenth-century England much better if you leave Carlyle out. He is
+important to moderns because he led that return to Toryism which has
+been the chief feature of modernity, but his judgments were often not
+only spiritually false, but really quite superficial. Dickens understood
+the danger of democracy far better than Carlyle; just as he understood
+the merits of democracy far better than Carlyle. And of this fact we can
+produce one plain evidence in the matter of which we speak. Carlyle, in
+his general dislike of the revolutionary movement, lumped liberty and
+democracy together and said that the chief objection to democracy was
+that it involved the excess and misuse of liberty; he called democracy
+"anarchy or no-rule." Dickens, with far more philosophical insight and
+spiritual delicacy, saw that the real danger of democracy is that it
+tends to the very opposite of anarchy; even to the very opposite of
+liberty. He lamented in America the freedom of manners. But he lamented
+even more the absence of freedom of opinion. "I believe there is no
+country on the face of the earth," he says, "where there is less freedom
+of opinion on any subject in reference to which there is a broad
+difference of opinion than in this. There! I write the words with
+reluctance, disappointment, and sorrow; but I believe it from the bottom
+of my soul. The notion that I, a man alone by myself in America, should
+venture to suggest to the Americans that there was one point on which
+they were neither just to their own countrymen nor to us, actually
+struck the boldest dumb! Washington Irving, Prescott, Hoffman, Bryant,
+Halleck, Dana, Washington Allston--every man who writes in this country
+is devoted to the question, and not one of them _dares_ to raise his
+voice and complain of the atrocious state of the law. The wonder is that
+a breathing man can be found with temerity enough to suggest to the
+Americans the possibility of their having done wrong. I wish you could
+have seen the faces that I saw down both sides of the table at Hartford
+when I began to talk about Scott. I wish you could have heard how I gave
+it out. My blood so boiled when I thought of the monstrous injustice
+that I felt as if I were twelve feet high when I thrust it down their
+throats." Dickens knew no history, but he had all history behind him in
+feeling that a pure democracy does tend, when it goes wrong, to be too
+traditional and absolute. The truth is indeed a singular example of the
+unfair attack upon democracy in our own time. Everybody can repeat the
+platitude that the mob can be the greatest of all tyrants. But few
+realise or remember the corresponding truth which goes along with
+it--that the mob is the only permanent and unassailable high priest.
+Democracy drives its traditions too hard; but democracy is the only
+thing that keeps any traditions. An aristocracy must always be going
+after some new thing. The severity of democracy is far more of a virtue
+than its liberty. The decorum of a democracy is far more of a danger
+than its lawlessness. Dickens discovered this in his great quarrels
+about the copyright, when a whole nation acted on a small point of
+opinion as if it were going to lynch him. But, fortunately for the
+purpose of this argument, there is no need to go back to the forties for
+such a case. Another great literary man has of late visited America; and
+it is possible that Maxim Gorky may be in a position to state how far
+democracy is likely to err on the side of mere liberty and laxity. He
+may have found, like Dickens, some freedom of manners; he did not find
+much freedom of morals.
+
+Along with such American criticism should really go his very
+characteristic summary of the question of the Red Indian. It marks the
+combination between the mental narrowness and the moral justice of the
+old Liberal. Dickens can see nothing in the Red Indian except that he is
+barbaric, retrograde, bellicose, uncleanly, and superstitious--in short,
+that he is not a member of the special civilisation of Birmingham or
+Brighton. It is curious to note the contrast between the cheery, nay
+Cockney, contempt with which Dickens speaks of the American Indian and
+that chivalrous and pathetic essay in which Washington Irving celebrates
+the virtues of the vanishing race. Between Washington Irving and his
+friend Charles Dickens there was always indeed this ironical comedy of
+inversion. It is amusing that the Englishman should have been the
+pushing and even pert modernist, and the American the stately
+antiquarian and lover of lost causes. But while a man of more mellow
+sympathies may well dislike Dickens's dislike of savages, and even
+disdain his disdain, he ought to sharply remind himself of the admirable
+ethical fairness and equity which meet with that restricted outlook. In
+the very act of describing Red Indians as devils who, like so much dirt,
+it would pay us to sweep away, he pauses to deny emphatically that we
+have any right to sweep them away. We have no right to wrong the man, he
+means to say, even if he himself be a kind of wrong. Here we strike the
+ringing iron of the old conscience and sense of honour which marked the
+best men of his party and of his epoch. This rigid and even reluctant
+justice towers, at any rate, far above modern views of savages, above
+the sentimentalism of the mere humanitarian and the far weaker
+sentimentalism that pleads for brutality and a race war. Dickens was at
+least more of a man than the brutalitarian who claims to wrong people
+because they are nasty, or the humanitarian who cannot be just to them
+without pretending that they are nice.
+
+
+
+
+PICTURES FROM ITALY
+
+
+The _Pictures from Italy_ are excellent in themselves and excellent as a
+foil to the _American Notes_. Here we have none of that air of giving a
+decision like a judge or sending in a report like an inspector; here we
+have only glimpses, light and even fantastic glimpses, of a world that
+is really alien to Dickens. It is so alien that he can almost entirely
+enjoy it. For no man can entirely enjoy that which he loves; contentment
+is always unpatriotic. The difference can indeed be put with approximate
+perfection in one phrase. In Italy he was on a holiday; in America he
+was on a tour. But indeed Dickens himself has quite sufficiently
+conveyed the difference in the two phrases that he did actually use for
+the titles of the two books. Dickens often told unconscious truths,
+especially in small matters. The _American Notes_ really are notes, like
+the notes of a student or a professional witness. The _Pictures from
+Italy_ are only pictures from Italy, like the miscellaneous pictures
+that all tourists bring from Italy.
+
+To take another and perhaps closer figure of speech, almost all
+Dickens's works such as these may best be regarded as private letters
+addressed to the public. His private correspondence was quite as
+brilliant as his public works; and many of his public works are almost
+as formless and casual as his private correspondence. If he had been
+struck insensible for a year, I really think that his friends and family
+could have brought out one of his best books by themselves if they had
+happened to keep his letters. The homogeneity of his public and private
+work was indeed strange in many ways. On the one hand, there was little
+that was pompously and unmistakably public in the publications; on the
+other hand, there was very little that was private in the private
+letters. His hilarity had almost a kind of hardness about it; no man's
+letters, I should think, ever needed less expurgation on the ground of
+weakness or undue confession. The main part, and certainly the best
+part, of such a book as _Pictures from Italy_ can certainly be
+criticised best as part of that perpetual torrent of entertaining
+autobiography which he flung at his children as if they were his readers
+and his readers as if they were his children. There are some brilliant
+patches of sense and nonsense in this book; but there is always
+something accidental in them; as if they might have occurred somewhere
+else. Perhaps the most attractive of them is the incomparable
+description of the Italian Marionette Theatre in which they acted a play
+about the death of Napoleon in St. Helena. The description is better
+than that of Codlin and Short's Punch and Judy, and almost as good as
+that of Mrs. Jarley's Wax Works. Indeed the humour is similar; for Punch
+is supposed to be funny, but Napoleon (as Mrs. Jarley said when asked if
+her show was funnier than Punch) was not funny at all. The idea of a
+really tragic scene being enacted between tiny wooden dolls with large
+heads is delightfully dealt with by Dickens. We can almost imagine the
+scene in which the wooden Napoleon haughtily rebukes his wooden jailor
+for calling him General Bonaparte--"Sir Hudson Low, call me not thus; I
+am Napoleon, Emperor of the French." There is also something singularly
+gratifying about the scene of Napoleon's death, in which he lay in bed
+with his little wooden hands outside the counterpane and the doctor (who
+was hung on wires too short) "delivered medical opinions in the air." It
+may seem flippant to dwell on such flippancies in connection with a book
+which contains many romantic descriptions and many moral generalisations
+which Dickens probably valued highly. But it is not for such things that
+he is valued. In all his writings, from his most reasoned and sustained
+novel to his maddest private note, it is always this obstreperous
+instinct for farce which stands out as his in the highest sense. His
+wisdom is at the best talent, his foolishness is genius. Just that
+exuberant levity which we associate with a moment we associate in his
+case with immortality. It is said of certain old masonry that the mortar
+was so hard that it has survived the stones. So if Dickens could revisit
+the thing he built, he would be surprised to see all the work he thought
+solid and responsible wasted almost utterly away, but the shortest
+frivolities and the most momentary jokes remaining like colossal rocks
+for ever.
+
+  [Illustration: Charles Dickens, 1844
+  From a miniature by Margaret Gillies.]
+
+
+
+
+MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT
+
+
+There is a certain quality or element which broods over the whole of
+_Martin Chuzzlewit_ to which it is difficult for either friends or foes
+to put a name. I think the reader who enjoys Dickens's other books has
+an impression that it is a kind of melancholy. There are grotesque
+figures of the most gorgeous kind; there are scenes that are farcical
+even by the standard of the farcical license of Dickens; there is humour
+both of the heaviest and of the lightest kind; there are two great comic
+personalities who run like a rich vein through the whole story,
+Pecksniff and Mrs. Gamp; there is one blinding patch of brilliancy, the
+satire on American cant; there is Todgers's boarding-house; there is
+Bailey; there is Mr. Mould, the incomparable undertaker. But yet in
+spite of everything, in spite even of the undertaker, the book is sad.
+No one I think ever went to it in that mixed mood of a tired tenderness
+and a readiness to believe and laugh in which most of Dickens's novels
+are most enjoyed. We go for a particular novel to Dickens as we go for a
+particular inn. We go to the sign of the Pickwick Papers. We go to the
+sign of the Rudge and Raven. We go to the sign of the Old Curiosities.
+We go to the sign of the Two Cities. We go to each or all of them
+according to what kind of hospitality and what kind of happiness we
+require. But it is always some kind of hospitality and some kind of
+happiness that we require. And as in the case of inns we also remember
+that while there was shelter in all and food in all and some kind of
+fire and some kind of wine in all, yet one has left upon us an
+indescribable and unaccountable memory of mortality and decay, of
+dreariness in the rooms and even of tastelessness in the banquet. So any
+one who has enjoyed the stories of Dickens as they should be enjoyed has
+a nameless feeling that this one story is sad and almost sodden. Dickens
+himself had this feeling, though his breezy vanity forbade him to
+express it in so many words. In spite of Pecksniff, in spite of Mrs.
+Gamp, in spite of the yet greater Bailey, the story went lumberingly and
+even lifelessly; he found the sales falling off; he fancied his
+popularity waning, and by a sudden impulse most inartistic and yet most
+artistic, he dragged in the episode of Martin's visit to America, which
+is the blazing jewel and the sudden redemption of the book. He wrote it
+at an uneasy and unhappy period of his life; when he had ceased
+wandering in America, but could not cease wandering altogether; when he
+had lost his original routine of work which was violent but regular, and
+had not yet settled down to the full enjoyment of his success and his
+later years. He poured into this book genius that might make the
+mountains laugh, invention that juggled with the stars. But the book was
+sad; and he knew it.
+
+The just reason for this is really interesting. Yet it is one that is
+not easy to state without guarding one's self on the one side or the
+other against great misunderstandings; and these stipulations or
+preliminary allowances must in such a case as this of necessity be made
+first. Dickens was among other things a satirist, a pure satirist. I
+have never been able to understand why this title is always specially
+and sacredly reserved for Thackeray. Thackeray was a novelist; in the
+strict and narrow sense at any rate, Thackeray was a far greater
+novelist than Dickens. But Dickens certainly was the satirist. The
+essence of satire is that it perceives some absurdity inherent in the
+logic of some position, and that it draws that absurdity out and
+isolates it, so that all can see it. Thus for instance when Dickens
+says, "Lord Coodle would go out; Sir Thomas Doodle wouldn't come in; and
+there being no people to speak of in England except Coodle and Doodle
+the country has been without a Government"; when Dickens says this he
+suddenly pounces on and plucks out the one inherent absurdity in the
+English party system which is hidden behind all its paraphernalia of
+Parliaments and Statutes, elections and ballot papers. When all the
+dignity and all the patriotism and all the public interest of the
+English constitutional party conflict have been fully allowed for, there
+does remain the bold, bleak question which Dickens in substance asks,
+"Suppose I want somebody else who is neither Coodle nor Doodle." This is
+the great quality called satire; it is a kind of taunting
+reasonableness; and it is inseparable from a certain insane logic which
+is often called exaggeration. Dickens was more of a satirist than
+Thackeray for this simple reason: that Thackeray carried a man's
+principles as far as that man carried them; Dickens carried a man's
+principles as far as a man's principles would go. Dickens in short (as
+people put it) exaggerated the man and his principles; that is to say
+he emphasised them. Dickens drew a man's absurdity out of him; Thackeray
+left a man's absurdity in him. Of this last fact we can take any example
+we like; take for instance the comparison between the city man as
+treated by Thackeray in the most satiric of his novels, with the city
+man as treated by Dickens in one of the mildest and maturest of his.
+Compare the character of old Mr. Osborne in _Vanity Fair_ with the
+character of Mr. Podsnap in _Our Mutual Friend_. In the case of Mr.
+Osborne there is nothing except the solid blocking in of a brutal dull
+convincing character. _Vanity Fair_ is not a satire on the City except
+in so far as it happens to be true. _Vanity Fair_ is not a satire on the
+City, in short, except in so far as the City is a satire on the City.
+But Mr. Podsnap is a pure satire; he is an extracting out of the City
+man of those purely intellectual qualities which happen to make that
+kind of City man a particularly exasperating fool. One might almost say
+that Mr. Podsnap is all Mr. Osborne's opinions separated from Mr.
+Osborne and turned into a character. In short the satirist is more
+purely philosophical than the novelist. The novelist may be only an
+observer; the satirist must be a thinker. He must be a thinker, he must
+be a philosophical thinker for this simple reason; that he exercises his
+philosophical thought in deciding what part of his subject he is to
+satirise. You may have the dullest possible intelligence and be a
+portrait painter; but a man must have a serious intellect in order to be
+a caricaturist. He has to select what thing he will caricature. True
+satire is always of this intellectual kind; true satire is always, so
+to speak, a variation or fantasia upon the air of pure logic. The
+satirist is the man who carries men's enthusiasm further than they carry
+it themselves. He outstrips the most extravagant fanatic. He is years
+ahead of the most audacious prophet. He sees where men's detached
+intellect will eventually lead them, and he tells them the name of the
+place--which is generally hell.
+
+Now of this detached and rational use of satire there is one great
+example in this book. Even _Gulliver's Travels_ is hardly more
+reasonable than Martin Chuzzlewit's travels in the incredible land of
+the Americans. Before considering the humour of this description in its
+more exhaustive and liberal aspects, it may be first remarked that in
+this American part of _Martin Chuzzlewit_, Dickens quite specially
+sharpens up his own more controversial and political intelligence. There
+are more things here than anywhere else in Dickens that partake of the
+nature of pamphleteering, of positive challenge, of sudden repartee, of
+pugnacious and exasperating query, in a word of everything that belongs
+to the pure art of controversy as distinct not only from the pure art of
+fiction but even also from the pure art of satire. I am inclined to
+think (to put the matter not only shortly but clumsily) that Dickens was
+never in all his life so strictly clever as he is in the American part
+of _Martin Chuzzlewit_. There are places where he was more inspired,
+almost in the sense of being intoxicated, as, for instance, in the
+Micawber feasts of _David Copperfield_; there are places where he wrote
+more carefully and cunningly, as, for instance, in the mystery of _The
+Mystery of Edwin Drood_; there are places where he wrote very much more
+humanly, more close to the ground and to growing things, as in the whole
+of that admirable book _Great Expectations_. But I do not think that his
+mere abstract acuteness and rapidity of thought were ever exercised with
+such startling exactitude as they are in this place in _Martin
+Chuzzlewit_. It is to be noted, for instance, that his American
+experience had actually worked him up to a heat and habit of argument. A
+slave-owner in the Southern States tells Dickens that slave-owners do
+not ill-treat their slaves, that it is not to the interest of
+slave-owners to ill-treat their slaves. Dickens flashes back that it is
+not to the interest of a man to get drunk, but he does get drunk. This
+pugnacious atmosphere of parry and riposte must first of all be allowed
+for and understood in all the satiric excursus of Martin in America.
+Dickens is arguing all the time; and, to do him justice, arguing very
+well. These chapters are full not merely of exuberant satire on America
+in the sense that Dotheboys Hall or Mr. Bumble's Workhouse are exuberant
+satires on England. They are full also of sharp argument with America as
+if the man who wrote expected retort and was prepared with rejoinder.
+The rest of the book, like the rest of Dickens's books, possesses
+humour. This part of the book, like hardly any of Dickens's books,
+possesses wit. The republican gentleman who receives Martin on landing
+is horrified on hearing an English servant speak of the employer as "the
+master." "There are no masters in America," says the gentleman. "All
+owners are they?" says Martin. This sort of verbal promptitude is out of
+the ordinary scope of Dickens; but we find it frequently in this
+particular part of _Martin Chuzzlewit_. Martin himself is constantly
+breaking out into a controversial lucidity, which is elsewhere not at
+all a part of his character. When they talk to him about the
+institutions of America he asks sarcastically whether bowie knives and
+swordsticks and revolvers are the institutions of America. All this (if
+I may summarise) is expressive of one main fact. Being a satirist means
+being a philosopher. Dickens was not always very philosophical; but he
+had this permanent quality of the philosopher about him, that he always
+remembered people by their opinions. Elijah Pogram was to him the man
+who said that "his boastful answer to the tyrant and the despot was that
+his bright home was the land of the settin' sun." Mr. Scadder and Mr.
+Jefferson Brick were to him the men who said (in cooperation) that "the
+libation of freedom must sometimes be quaffed in blood." And in these
+chapters more than anywhere else he falls into the extreme habit of
+satire, that of treating people as if there were nothing about them
+except their opinions. It is therefore difficult to accept these pages
+as pages in a novel, splendid as they are considered as pages in a
+parody. I do not dispute that men have said and do say that "the
+libation of freedom must sometimes be quaffed in blood," that "their
+bright homes are the land of the settin' sun," that "they taunt that
+lion," that "alone they dare him," or "that softly sleeps the calm ideal
+in the whispering chambers of imagination." I have read too much
+American journalism to deny that any of these sentences and any of these
+opinions may at some time or other have been uttered. I do not deny
+that there are such opinions. But I do deny that there are such people.
+Elijah Pogram had some other business in life besides defending
+defaulting postmasters; he must have been a son or a father or a husband
+or at least (admirable thought) a lover. Mr. Chollop had some moments in
+his existence when he was not threatening his fellow-creatures with his
+sword-stick and his revolver. Of all this human side of such American
+types Dickens does not really give any hint at all. He does not suggest
+that the bully Chollop had even such coarse good-humour as bullies
+almost always have. He does not suggest that the humbug Elijah Pogram
+had even as much greasy amiability as humbugs almost invariably have. He
+is not studying them as human beings, even as bad human beings; he is
+studying them as conceptions, as points of view, as symbols of a state
+of mind with which he is in violent disagreement. To put it roughly, he
+is not describing characters, he is satirising fads. To put it more
+exactly, he is not describing characters; he is persecuting heresies.
+There is one thing really to be said against his American satire; it is
+a serious thing to be said: it is an argument, and it is true. This can
+be said of Martin's wanderings in America, that from the time he lands
+in America to the time he sets sail from it he never meets a living man.
+He has travelled in the land of Laputa. All the people he has met have
+been absurd opinions walking about. The whole art of Dickens in such
+passages as these consisted in one thing. It consisted in finding an
+opinion that had not a leg to stand on, and then giving it two legs to
+stand on.
+
+So much may be allowed; it may be admitted that Dickens is in this sense
+the great satirist, in that he can imagine absurd opinions walking by
+themselves about the street. It may be admitted that Thackeray would not
+have allowed an absurd opinion to walk about the street without at least
+tying a man on to it for the sake of safety. But while this first truth
+may be evident, the second truth which is the complement of it may
+easily be forgotten. On the one hand there was no man who could so much
+enjoy mere intellectual satire apart from humanity as Dickens. On the
+other hand there was no man who, with another and more turbulent part of
+his nature, demanded humanity, and demanded its supremacy over
+intellect, more than Dickens. To put it shortly: there never was a man
+so much fitted for saying that everything was wrong; and there never was
+a man who was so desirous of saying that everything was right. Thus,
+when he met men with whom he violently disagreed, he described them as
+devils or lunatics; he could not bear to describe them as men. If they
+could not think with him on essentials he could not stand the idea that
+they were human souls; he cast them out; he forgot them; and if he could
+not forget them he caricatured them. He was too emotional to regard them
+as anything but enemies, if they were not friends. He was too humane not
+to hate them. Charles Lamb said with his inimitable sleek pungency that
+he could read all the books there were; he excluded books that obviously
+were not books, as cookery books, chessboards bound so as to look like
+books, and all the works of modern historians and philosophers. One
+might say in much the same style that Dickens loved all the men in the
+world; that is he loved all the men whom he was able to recognise as
+men; the rest he turned into griffins and chimeras without any serious
+semblance to humanity. Even in his books he never hates a human being.
+If he wishes to hate him he adopts the simple expedient of making him an
+inhuman being. Now of these two strands almost the whole of Dickens is
+made up; they are not only different strands, they are even antagonistic
+strands. I mean that the whole of Dickens is made up of the strand of
+satire and the strand of sentimentalism; and the strand of satire is
+quite unnecessarily merciless and hostile, and the strand of
+sentimentalism is quite unnecessarily humanitarian and even maudlin. On
+the proper interweaving of these two things depends the great part of
+Dickens's success in a novel. And by the consideration of them we can
+probably best arrive at the solution of the particular emotional enigma
+of the novel called _Martin Chuzzlewit_.
+
+_Martin Chuzzlewit_ is, I think, vaguely unsatisfactory to the reader,
+vaguely sad and heavy even to the reader who loves Dickens, because in
+_Martin Chuzzlewit_ more than anywhere else in Dickens's works, more
+even than in _Oliver Twist_, there is a predominance of the harsh and
+hostile sort of humour over the hilarious and the humane. It is absurd
+to lay down any such little rules for the testing of literature. But
+this may be broadly said and yet with confidence: that Dickens is always
+at his best when he is laughing at the people whom he really admires. He
+is at his most humorous in writing of Mr. Pickwick, who represents
+passive virtue. He is at his most humorous in writing of Mr. Sam
+Weller, who represents active virtue. He is never so funny as when he is
+speaking of people in whom fun itself is a virtue, like the poor people
+in the Fleet or the Marshalsea. And in the stories that had immediately
+preceded _Martin Chuzzlewit_ he had consistently concerned himself in
+the majority of cases with the study of such genial and honourable
+eccentrics; if they are lunatics they are amiable lunatics. In the last
+important novel before _Martin Chuzzlewit_, _Barnaby Rudge_, the hero
+himself is an amiable lunatic. In the novel before that, _The Old
+Curiosity Shop_, the two comic figures, Dick Swiveller and the
+Marchioness, are not only the most really entertaining, but also the
+most really sympathetic characters in the book. Before that came _Oliver
+Twist_ (which is, I have said, an exception), and before that
+_Pickwick_, where the hero is, as Mr. Weller says, "an angel in
+gaiters." Hitherto, then, on the whole, the central Dickens character
+had been the man who gave to the poor many things, gold and wine and
+feasting and good advice; but among other things gave them a good laugh
+at himself. The jolly old English merchant of the Pickwick type was
+popular on both counts. People liked to see him throw his money in the
+gutter. They also liked to see him throw himself there occasionally. In
+both acts they recognised a common quality of virtue.
+
+Now I think it is certainly the disadvantage of _Martin Chuzzlewit_ that
+none of its absurd characters are thus sympathetic. There are in the
+book two celebrated characters who are both especially exuberant and
+amusing even for Dickens, and who are both especially heartless and
+abominable even for Dickens--I mean of course Mr. Pecksniff on the one
+hand and Mrs. Gamp on the other. The humour of both of them is
+gigantesque. Nobody will ever forget the first time he read the words
+"Now I should be very glad to see Mrs. Todgers's idea of a wooden leg."
+It is like remembering first love: there is still some sort of ancient
+sweetness and sting. I am afraid that, in spite of many criticisms to
+the contrary, I am still unable to take Mr. Pecksniff's hypocrisy
+seriously. He does not seem to me so much a hypocrite as a rhetorician;
+he reminds me of Serjeant Buzfuz. A very capable critic, Mr. Noyes, said
+that I was wrong when I suggested in another place that Dickens must
+have loved Pecksniff. Mr. Noyes thinks it clear that Dickens hated
+Pecksniff. I cannot believe it. Hatred does indeed linger round its
+object as much as love; but not in that way. Dickens is always making
+Pecksniff say things which have a wild poetical truth about them. Hatred
+allows no such outbursts of original innocence. But however that may be
+the broad fact remains--Dickens may or may not have loved Pecksniff
+comically, but he did not love him seriously; he did not respect him as
+he certainly respected Sam Weller. The same of course is true of Mrs.
+Gamp. To any one who appreciates her unctuous and sumptuous conversation
+it is difficult indeed not to feel that it would be almost better to be
+killed by Mrs. Gamp than to be saved by a better nurse. But the fact
+remains. In this book Dickens has not allowed us to love the most absurd
+people seriously, and absurd people ought to be loved seriously.
+Pecksniff has to be amusing all the time; the instant he ceases to be
+laughable he becomes detestable. Pickwick can take his ease at his inn;
+he can be leisurely, he can be spacious; he can fall into moods of
+gravity and even of dulness; he is not bound to be always funny or to
+forfeit the reader's concern, for he is a good man, and therefore even
+his dulness is beautiful, just as is the dulness of the animal. We can
+leave Pickwick a little while by the fire to think; for the thoughts of
+Pickwick, even if they were to go slowly, would be full of all the
+things that all men care for--old friends and old inns and memory and
+the goodness of God. But we dare not leave Pecksniff alone for a moment.
+We dare not leave him thinking by the fire, for the thoughts of
+Pecksniff would be too frightful.
+
+
+
+
+CHRISTMAS BOOKS
+
+
+The mystery of Christmas is in a manner identical with the mystery of
+Dickens. If ever we adequately explain the one we may adequately explain
+the other. And indeed, in the treatment of the two, the chronological or
+historical order must in some degree be remembered. Before we come to
+the question of what Dickens did for Christmas we must consider the
+question of what Christmas did for Dickens. How did it happen that this
+bustling, nineteenth-century man, full of the almost cock-sure
+common-sense of the utilitarian and liberal epoch, came to associate his
+name chiefly in literary history with the perpetuation of a half pagan
+and half Catholic festival which he would certainly have called an
+antiquity and might easily have called a superstition? Christmas has
+indeed been celebrated before in English literature; but it had, in the
+most noticeable cases, been celebrated in connection with that kind of
+feudalism with which Dickens would have severed his connection with an
+ignorant and even excessive scorn. Sir Roger de Coverley kept Christmas;
+but it was a feudal Christmas. Sir Walter Scott sang in praise of
+Christmas; but it was a feudal Christmas. And Dickens was not only
+indifferent to the dignity of the old country gentleman or to the genial
+archæology of Scott; he was even harshly and insolently hostile to it.
+If Dickens had lived in the neighbourhood of Sir Roger de Coverley he
+would undoubtedly, like Tom Touchy, have been always "having the law of
+him." If Dickens had stumbled in among the old armour and quaint folios
+of Scott's study he would certainly have read his brother novelist a
+lesson in no measured terms about the futility of thus fumbling in the
+dust-bins of old oppression and error. So far from Dickens being one of
+those who like a thing because it is old, he was one of those cruder
+kind of reformers, in theory at least, who actually dislike a thing
+because it is old. He was not merely the more righteous kind of Radical
+who tries to uproot abuses; he was partly also that more suicidal kind
+of Radical who tries to uproot himself. In theory at any rate, he had no
+adequate conception of the importance of human tradition; in his time it
+had been twisted and falsified into the form of an opposition to
+democracy. In truth, of course, tradition is the most democratic of all
+things, for tradition is merely a democracy of the dead as well as the
+living. But Dickens and his special group or generation had no grasp of
+this permanent position; they had been called to a special war for the
+righting of special wrongs. In so far as such an institution as
+Christmas was old, Dickens would even have tended to despise it. He
+could never have put the matter to himself in the correct way--that
+while there are some things whose antiquity does prove that they are
+dying, there are some other things whose antiquity only proves that they
+cannot die. If some Radical contemporary and friend of Dickens had
+happened to say to him that in defending the mince-pies and the
+mummeries of Christmas he was defending a piece of barbaric and brutal
+ritualism, doomed to disappear in the light of reason along with the
+Boy-Bishop and the Lord of Misrule, I am not sure that Dickens (though
+he was one of the readiest and most rapid masters of reply in history)
+would have found it very easy upon his own principles to answer. It was
+by a great ancestral instinct that he defended Christmas; by that sacred
+sub-consciousness which is called tradition, which some have called a
+dead thing, but which is really a thing far more living than the
+intellect. There is a dark kinship and brotherhood of all mankind which
+is much too deep to be called heredity or to be in any way explained in
+scientific formulæ; blood is thicker than water and is especially very
+much thicker than water on the brain. But this unconscious and even
+automatic quality in Dickens's defence of the Christmas feast, this fact
+that his defence might almost be called animal rather than mental,
+though in proper language it should be called merely virile; all this
+brings us back to the fact that we must begin with the atmosphere of the
+subject itself. We must not ask Dickens what Christmas is, for with all
+his heat and eloquence he does not know. Rather we must ask Christmas
+what Dickens is--ask how this strange child of Christmas came to be born
+out of due time.
+
+Dickens devoted his genius in a somewhat special sense to the
+description of happiness. No other literary man of his eminence has made
+this central human aim so specially his subject matter. Happiness is a
+mystery--generally a momentary mystery--which seldom stops long enough
+to submit itself to artistic observation, and which, even when it is
+habitual, has something about it which renders artistic description
+almost impossible. There are twenty tiny minor poets who can describe
+fairly impressively an eternity of agony; there are very few even of the
+eternal poets who can describe ten minutes of satisfaction.
+Nevertheless, mankind being half divine is always in love with the
+impossible, and numberless attempts have been made from the beginning of
+human literature to describe a real state of felicity. Upon the whole, I
+think, the most successful have been the most frankly physical and
+symbolic; the flowers of Eden or the jewels of the New Jerusalem. Many
+writers, for instance, have called the gold and chrysolite of the Holy
+City a vulgar lump of jewellery. But when these critics themselves
+attempt to describe their conceptions of future happiness, it is always
+some priggish nonsense about "planes," about "cycles of fulfilment," or
+"spirals of spiritual evolution." Now a cycle is just as much a physical
+metaphor as a flower of Eden; a spiral is just as much a physical
+metaphor as a precious stone. But, after all, a garden is a beautiful
+thing; whereas this is by no means necessarily true of a cycle, as can
+be seen in the case of a bicycle. A jewel, after all, is a beautiful
+thing; but this is not necessarily so of a spiral, as can be seen in the
+case of a corkscrew. Nothing is gained by dropping the old material
+metaphors, which did hint at heavenly beauty, and adopting other
+material metaphors which do not even give a hint of earthly beauty. This
+modern or spiral method of describing indescribable happiness may, I
+think, be dismissed. Then there has been another method which has been
+adopted by many men of a very real poetical genius. It was the method of
+the old pastoral poets like Theocritus. It was in another way that
+adopted by the elegance and piety of Spenser. It was certainly expressed
+in the pictures of Watteau; and it had a very sympathetic and even manly
+expression in modern England in the decorative poetry of William Morris.
+These men of genius, from Theocritus to Morris, occupied themselves in
+endeavouring to describe happiness as a state of certain human beings,
+the atmosphere of a commonwealth, the enduring climate of certain cities
+or islands. They poured forth treasures of the truest kind of
+imagination upon describing the happy lives and landscapes of Utopia or
+Atlantis or the Earthly Paradise. They traced with the most tender
+accuracy the tracery of its fruit-trees or the glimmering garments of
+its women; they used every ingenuity of colour or intricate shape to
+suggest its infinite delight. And what they succeeded in suggesting was
+always its infinite melancholy. William Morris described the Earthly
+Paradise in such a way that the only strong emotional note left on the
+mind was the feeling of how homeless his travellers felt in that alien
+Elysium; and the reader sympathised with them, feeling that he would
+prefer not only Elizabethan England but even twentieth-century
+Camberwell to such a land of shining shadows. Thus literature has almost
+always failed in endeavouring to describe happiness as a state. Human
+tradition, human custom and folk-lore (though far more true and reliable
+than literature as a rule) have not often succeeded in giving quite the
+correct symbols for a real atmosphere of _camaraderie_ and joy. But
+here and there the note has been struck with the sudden vibration of the
+_vox humana_. In human tradition it has been struck chiefly in the old
+celebrations of Christmas. In literature it has been struck chiefly in
+Dickens's Christmas tales.
+
+In the historic celebration of Christmas as it remains from Catholic
+times in certain northern countries (and it is to be remembered that in
+Catholic times the northern countries were, if possible, more Catholic
+than anybody else), there are three qualities which explain, I think,
+its hold upon the human sense of happiness, especially in such men as
+Dickens. There are three notes of Christmas, so to speak, which are also
+notes of happiness, and which the pagans and the Utopians forget. If we
+state what they are in the case of Christmas, it will be quite
+sufficiently obvious how important they are in the case of Dickens.
+
+The first quality is what may be called the dramatic quality. The
+happiness is not a state; it is a crisis. All the old customs
+surrounding the celebration of the birth of Christ are made by human
+instinct so as to insist and re-insist upon this crucial quality.
+Everything is so arranged that the whole household may feel, if
+possible, as a household does when a child is actually being born in it.
+The thing is a vigil and a vigil with a definite limit. People sit up at
+night until they hear the bells ring. Or they try to sleep at night in
+order to see their presents the next morning. Everywhere there is a
+limitation, a restraint; at one moment the door is shut, at the moment
+after it is opened. The hour has come or it has not come; the parcels
+are undone or they are not undone; there is no evolution of Christmas
+presents. This sharp and theatrical quality in pleasure, which human
+instinct and the mother wit of the world has wisely put into the popular
+celebrations of Christmas, is also a quality which is essential in such
+romantic literature as Dickens wrote. In romantic literature the hero
+and heroine must indeed be happy, but they must also be unexpectedly
+happy. This is the first connecting link between literature and the old
+religious feast; this is the first connecting link between Dickens and
+Christmas.
+
+The second element to be found in all such festivity and all such
+romance is the element which is represented as well as it could be
+represented by the mere fact that Christmas occurs in the winter. It is
+the element not merely of contrast, but actually of antagonism. It
+preserves everything that was best in the merely primitive or pagan view
+of such ceremonies or such banquets. If we are carousing, at least we
+are warriors carousing. We hang above us, as it were, the shields and
+battle-axes with which we must do battle with the giants of the snow and
+hail. All comfort must be based on discomfort. Man chooses when he
+wishes to be most joyful the very moment when the whole material
+universe is most sad. It is this contradiction and mystical defiance
+which gives a quality of manliness and reality to the old winter feasts
+which is not characteristic of the sunny felicities of the Earthly
+Paradise. And this curious element has been carried out even in all the
+trivial jokes and tasks that have always surrounded such occasions as
+these. The object of the jovial customs was not to make everything
+artificially easy: on the contrary, it was rather to make everything
+artificially difficult. Idealism is not only expressed by shooting an
+arrow at the stars; the fundamental principle of idealism is also
+expressed by putting a leg of mutton at the top of a greasy pole. There
+is in all such observances a quality which can be called only the
+quality of divine obstruction. For instance, in the game of snapdragon
+(that admirable occupation) the conception is that raisins taste much
+nicer if they are brands saved from the burning. About all Christmas
+things there is something a little nobler, if only nobler in form and
+theory, than mere comfort; even holly is prickly. It is not hard to see
+the connection of this kind of historic instinct with a romantic writer
+like Dickens. The healthy novelist must always play snapdragon with his
+principal characters; he must always be snatching the hero and heroine
+like raisins out of the fire.
+
+The third great Christmas element is the element of the grotesque. The
+grotesque is the natural expression of joy; and all the Utopias and new
+Edens of the poets fail to give a real impression of enjoyment, very
+largely because they leave out the grotesque. A man in most modern
+Utopias cannot really be happy; he is too dignified. A man in Morris's
+Earthly Paradise cannot really be enjoying himself; he is too
+decorative. When real human beings have real delights they tend to
+express them entirely in grotesques--I might almost say entirely in
+goblins. On Christmas Eve one may talk about ghosts so long as they are
+turnip ghosts. But one would not be allowed (I hope, in any decent
+family) to talk on Christmas Eve about astral bodies. The boar's head of
+old Yule-time was as grotesque as the donkey's head of Bottom the
+Weaver. But there is only one set of goblins quite wild enough to
+express the wild goodwill of Christmas. Those goblins are the characters
+of Dickens.
+
+Arcadian poets and Arcadian painters have striven to express happiness
+by means of beautiful figures. Dickens understood that happiness is best
+expressed by ugly figures. In beauty, perhaps, there is something allied
+to sadness; certainly there is something akin to joy in the grotesque,
+nay, in the uncouth. There is something mysteriously associated with
+happiness not only in the corpulence of Falstaff and the corpulence of
+Tony Weller, but even in the red nose of Bardolph or the red nose of Mr.
+Stiggins. A thing of beauty is an inspiration for ever--a matter of
+meditation for ever. It is rather a thing of ugliness that is strictly a
+joy for ever.
+
+All Dickens's books are Christmas books. But this is still truest of his
+two or three famous Yuletide tales--The _Christmas Carol_ and _The
+Chimes_ and _The Cricket on the Hearth_. Of these _The Christmas Carol_
+is beyond comparison the best as well as the most popular. Indeed,
+Dickens is in so profound and spiritual a sense a popular author that in
+his case, unlike most others, it can generally be said that the best
+work is the most popular. It is for _Pickwick_ that he is best known;
+and upon the whole it is for Pickwick that he is best worth knowing. In
+any case this superiority of _The Christmas Carol_ makes it convenient
+for us to take it as an example of the generalisations already made. If
+we study the very real atmosphere of rejoicing and of riotous charity in
+_The Christmas Carol_ we shall find that all the three marks I have
+mentioned are unmistakably visible. _The Christmas Carol_ is a happy
+story first, because it describes an abrupt and dramatic change. It is
+not only the story of a conversion, but of a sudden conversion; as
+sudden as the conversion of a man at a Salvation Army meeting. Popular
+religion is quite right in insisting on the fact of a crisis in most
+things. It is true that the man at the Salvation Army meeting would
+probably be converted from the punch bowl; whereas Scrooge was converted
+to it. That only means that Scrooge and Dickens represented a higher and
+more historic Christianity.
+
+Again, _The Christmas Carol_ owes much of its hilarity to our second
+source--the fact of its being a tale of winter and of a very wintry
+winter. There is much about comfort in the story; yet the comfort is
+never enervating: it is saved from that by a tingle of something bitter
+and bracing in the weather. Lastly, the story exemplifies throughout the
+power of the third principle--the kinship between gaiety and the
+grotesque. Everybody is happy because nobody is dignified. We have a
+feeling somehow that Scrooge looked even uglier when he was kind than he
+had looked when he was cruel. The turkey that Scrooge bought was so fat,
+says Dickens, that it could never have stood upright. That top-heavy and
+monstrous bird is a good symbol of the top-heavy happiness of the
+stories.
+
+It is less profitable to criticise the other two tales in detail because
+they represent variations on the theme in two directions; and variations
+that were not, upon the whole, improvements. _The Chimes_ is a monument
+of Dickens's honourable quality of pugnacity. He could not admire
+anything, even peace, without wanting to be warlike about it. That was
+all as it should be.
+
+
+
+
+DOMBEY AND SON
+
+
+In Dickens's literary life _Dombey and Son_ represents a break so
+important as to necessitate our casting back to a summary and a
+generalisation. In order fully to understand what this break is, we must
+say something of the previous character of Dickens's novels, and even
+something of the general character of novels in themselves. How
+essential this is we shall see shortly.
+
+It must first be remembered that the novel is the most typical of modern
+forms. It is typical of modern forms especially in this, that it is
+essentially formless. All the ancient modes or structures of literature
+were definite and severe. Any one composing them had to abide by their
+rules; they were what their name implied. Thus a tragedy might be a bad
+tragedy, but it was always a tragedy. Thus an epic might be a bad epic,
+but it was always an epic. Now in the sense in which there is such a
+thing as an epic, in that sense there is no such thing as a novel. We
+call any long fictitious narrative in prose a novel, just as we call any
+short piece of prose without any narrative an essay. Both these forms
+are really quite formless, and both of them are really quite new. The
+difference between a good epic by Mr. John Milton and a bad epic by Mr.
+John Smith was simply the difference between the same thing done well
+and the same thing done badly. But it was not (for instance) like the
+difference between _Clarissa Harlowe_ and _The Time Machine_. If we
+class Richardson's book with Mr. Wells's book it is really only for
+convenience; if we say that they are both novels we shall certainly be
+puzzled in that case to say what on earth a novel is. But the note of
+our age, both for good and evil, is a highly poetical and largely
+illogical faith in liberty. Liberty is not a negation or a piece of
+nonsense, as the cheap reactionaries say; it is a belief in variety and
+growth. But it is a purely poetic and even a merely romantic belief. The
+nineteenth century was an age of romance as certainly as the Middle Ages
+was an age of reason. Mediævals liked to have everything defined and
+defensible; the modern world prefers to run some risks for the sake of
+spontaneity and diversity. Consequently the modern world is full of a
+phenomenon peculiar to itself--I mean the spectacle of small or
+originally small things swollen to enormous size and power. The modern
+world is like a world in which toadstools should be as big as trees, and
+insects should walk about in the sun as large as elephants. Thus, for
+instance, the shopkeeper, almost an unimportant figure in carefully
+ordered states, has in our time become the millionaire, and has more
+power than ten kings. Thus again a practical knowledge of nature, of the
+habits of animals or the properties of fire and water, was in the old
+ordered state either an almost servile labour or a sort of joke; it was
+left to old women and gamekeepers and boys who went birds'-nesting. In
+our time this commonplace daily knowledge has swollen into the enormous
+miracle of physical size, weighing the stars and talking under the sea.
+In short, our age is a sort of splendid jungle in which some of the most
+towering weeds and blossoms have come from the smallest seed.
+
+And this is, generally speaking, the explanation of the novel. The novel
+is not so much the filling up of an artistic plan, however new or
+fantastic. It is a thing that has grown from some germ of suggestion,
+and has often turned out much larger than the author intended. And this,
+lastly, is the final result of these facts, that the critic can
+generally trace in a novel what was the original artistic type or shape
+of thought from which the whole matter started, and he will generally
+find that this is different in every case. In one novel he will find
+that the first impulse is a character. In another novel he will find
+that the first impulse is a landscape, the atmosphere of some special
+countryside. In another novel he will find that the first impulse is the
+last chapter. Or it may be a thrust with sword or dagger, it may be a
+theology, it may be a song. Somewhere embedded in every ordinary book
+are the five or six words for which really all the rest will be written.
+Some of our enterprising editors who set their readers to hunt for
+banknotes and missing ladies might start a competition for finding those
+words in every novel. But whether or no this is possible, there is no
+doubt that the principle in question is of great importance in the case
+of Dickens, and especially in the case of _Dombey and Son_.
+
+In all the Dickens novels can be seen, so to speak, the original thing
+that they were before they were novels. The same may be observed, for
+the matter of that, in the great novels of most of the great modern
+novelists. For example, Sir Walter Scott wrote poetical romances before
+he wrote prose romances. Hence it follows that, with all their much
+greater merit, his novels may still be described as poetical romances in
+prose. While adding a new and powerful element of popular humours and
+observation, Scott still retains a certain purely poetical right--a
+right to make his heroes and outlaws and great kings speak at the great
+moments with a rhetoric so rhythmical that it partakes of the nature of
+song, the same quite metrical rhetoric which is used in the metrical
+speeches of Marmion or Roderick Dhu. In the same way, although _Don
+Quixote_ is a modern novel in its irony and subtlety, we can see that it
+comes from the old long romances of chivalry. In the same way, although
+_Clarissa_ is a modern novel in its intimacy and actuality, we can see
+that it comes from the old polite letter-writing and polite essays of
+the period of the _Spectator_. Any one can see that Scott formed in _The
+Lay of the Last Minstrel_ the style that he applied again and again
+afterwards, like the reappearances of a star taking leave of the stage.
+All his other romances were positively last appearances of the
+positively last Minstrel. Any one can see that Thackeray formed in
+fragmentary satires like _The Book of Snobs_ or _The Yellowplush Papers_
+the style, the rather fragmentary style, in which he was to write
+_Vanity Fair_. In most modern cases, in short (until very lately, at any
+rate), the novel is an enormous outgrowth from something that was not a
+novel. And in Dickens this is very important. All his novels are
+outgrowths of the original notion of taking notes, splendid and
+inspired notes, of what happens in the street. Those in the modern
+world who cannot reconcile themselves to his method--those who feel that
+there is about his books something intolerably clumsy or
+superficial--have either no natural taste for strong literature at all,
+or else have fallen into their error by too persistently regarding
+Dickens as a modern novelist and expecting all his books to be modern
+novels. Dickens did not know at what exact point he really turned into a
+novelist. Nor do we. Dickens did not know, in his deepest soul, whether
+he ever really did turn into a novelist. Nor do we. The novel being a
+modern product is one of the few things to which we really can apply
+that disgusting method of thought--the method of evolution. But even in
+evolution there are great gaps, there are great breaks, there are great
+crises. I have said that the first of these breaks in Dickens may be
+placed at the point when he wrote _Nicholas Nickleby_. This was his
+first serious decision to be a novelist in any sense at all, to be
+anything except a maker of momentary farces. The second break, and that
+a far more important break, is in _Dombey and Son_. This marks his final
+resolution to be a novelist and nothing else, to be a serious
+constructor of fiction in the serious sense. Before _Dombey and Son_
+even his pathos had been really frivolous. After _Dombey and Son_ even
+his absurdity was intentional and grave.
+
+In case this transition is not understood, one or two tests may be taken
+at random. The episodes in _Dombey and Son_, the episodes in _David
+Copperfield_, which came after it, are no longer episodes merely stuck
+into the middle of the story without any connection with it, like most
+of the episodes in _Nicholas Nickleby_, or most of the episodes even in
+_Martin Chuzzlewit_. Take, for instance, by way of a mere coincidence,
+the fact that three schools for boys are described successively in
+_Nicholas Nickleby_, in _Dombey and Son_, and in _David Copperfield_.
+But the difference is enormous. Dotheboys Hall does not exist to tell us
+anything about Nicholas Nickleby. Rather Nicholas Nickleby exists
+entirely in order to tell us about Dotheboys Hall. It does not in any
+way affect his history or psychology; he enters Mr. Squeers's school and
+leaves Mr. Squeers's school with the same character, or rather absence
+of character. It is a mere episode, existing for itself. But when little
+Paul Dombey goes to an old-fashioned but kindly school, it is in a very
+different sense and for a very different reason from that for which
+Nicholas Nickleby goes to an old-fashioned and cruel school. The sending
+of little Paul to Dr. Blimber's is a real part of the history of little
+Paul, such as it is. Dickens deliberately invents all that elderly
+pedantry in order to show up Paul's childishness. Dickens deliberately
+invents all that rather heavy kindness in order to show up Paul's
+predestination and tragedy. Dotheboys Hall is not meant to show up
+anything except Dotheboys Hall. But although Dickens doubtless enjoyed
+Dr. Blimber quite as much as Mr. Squeers, it remains true that Dr.
+Blimber is really a very good foil to Paul; whereas Squeers is not a
+foil to Nicholas; Nicholas is merely a lame excuse for Squeers. The
+change can be seen continued in the school, or rather the two schools,
+to which David Copperfield goes. The whole idea of David Copperfield's
+life is that he had the dregs of life before the wine of it. He knew
+the worst of the world before he knew the best of it. His childhood at
+Dr. Strong's is a second childhood. Now for this purpose the two schools
+are perfectly well adapted. Mr. Creakle's school is not only, like Mr.
+Squeers's school, a bad school, it is a bad influence upon David
+Copperfield. Dr. Strong's school is not only a good school, it is a good
+influence upon David Copperfield. I have taken this case of the schools
+as a case casual but concrete. The same, however, can be seen in any of
+the groups or incidents of the novels on both sides of the boundary. Mr.
+Crummles's theatrical company is only a society that Nicholas happens to
+fall into. America is only a place to which Martin Chuzzlewit happens to
+go. These things are isolated sketches, and nothing else. Even Todgers's
+boarding-house is only a place where Mr. Pecksniff can be delightfully
+hypocritical. It is not a place which throws any new light on Mr.
+Pecksniff's hypocrisy. But the case is different with that more subtle
+hypocrite in _Dombey and Son_--I mean Major Bagstock. Dickens does mean
+it as a deliberate light on Mr. Dombey's character that he basks with a
+fatuous calm in the blazing sun of Major Bagstock's tropical and
+offensive flattery. Here, then, is the essence of the change. He not
+only wishes to write a novel; this he did as early as _Nicholas
+Nickleby_. He wishes to have as little as possible in the novel that
+does not really assist it as a novel. Previously he had asked with the
+assistance of what incidents could his hero wander farther and farther
+from the pathway. Now he has really begun to ask with the assistance of
+what incidents his hero can get nearer and nearer to the goal.
+
+The change made Dickens a greater novelist. I am not sure that it made
+him a greater man. One good character by Dickens requires all eternity
+to stretch its legs in; and the characters in his later books are always
+being tripped up by some tiresome nonsense about the story. For
+instance, in _Dombey and Son_, Mrs. Skewton is really very funny. But
+nobody with a love of the real smell of Dickens would compare her for a
+moment, for instance, with Mrs. Nickleby. And the reason of Mrs.
+Skewton's inferiority is simply this, that she has something to do in
+the plot; she has to entrap or assist to entrap Mr. Dombey into marrying
+Edith. Mrs. Nickleby, on the other hand, has nothing at all to do in the
+story, except to get in everybody's way. The consequence is that we
+complain not of her for getting in everyone's way, but of everyone for
+getting in hers. What are suns and stars, what are times and seasons,
+what is the mere universe, that it should presume to interrupt Mrs.
+Nickleby? Mrs. Skewton (though supposed, of course, to be a much viler
+sort of woman) has something of the same quality of splendid and
+startling irrelevancy. In her also there is the same feeling of wild
+threads hung from world to world like the webs of gigantic spiders; of
+things connected that seem to have no connection save by this one
+adventurous filament of frail and daring folly. Nothing could be better
+than Mrs. Skewton when she finds herself, after convolutions of speech,
+somehow on the subject of Henry VIII., and pauses to mention with
+approval "his dear little peepy eyes and his benevolent chin." Nothing
+could be better than her attempt at Mahomedan resignation when she feels
+almost inclined to say "that there is no What's-his-name but Thingummy,
+and What-you-may-call-it is his prophet!" But she has not so much time
+as Mrs. Nickleby to say these good things; also she has not sufficient
+human virtue to say them constantly. She is always intent upon her
+worldly plans, among other things upon the worldly plan of assisting
+Charles Dickens to get a story finished. She is always "advancing her
+shrivelled ear" to listen to what Dombey is saying to Edith. Worldliness
+is the most solemn thing in the world; it is far more solemn than
+other-worldliness. Mrs. Nickleby can afford to ramble as a child does in
+a field, or as a child does to laugh at nothing, for she is like a
+child, innocent. It is only the good who can afford to be frivolous.
+
+Broadly speaking, what is said here of Mrs. Skewton applies to the great
+part of _Dombey and Son_, even to the comic part of it. It shows an
+advance in art and unity; it does not show an advance in genius and
+creation. In some cases, in fact, I cannot help feeling that it shows a
+falling off. It may be a personal idiosyncrasy, but there is only one
+comic character really prominent in Dickens, upon whom Dickens has
+really lavished the wealth of his invention, and who does not amuse me
+at all, and that character is Captain Cuttle. But three great exceptions
+must be made to any such disparagement of _Dombey and Son_. They are all
+three of that royal order in Dickens's creation which can no more be
+described or criticised than strong wine. The first is Major Bagstock,
+the second is Cousin Feenix, the third is Toots. In Bagstock Dickens has
+blasted for ever that type which pretends to be sincere by the simple
+operation of being explosively obvious. He tells about a quarter of the
+truth, and then poses as truthful because a quarter of the truth is much
+simpler than the whole of it. He is the kind of man who goes about with
+posers for Bishops or for Socialists, with plain questions to which he
+wants a plain answer. His questions are plain only in the same sense
+that he himself is plain--in the sense of being uncommonly ugly. He is
+the man who always bursts with satisfaction because he can call a spade
+a spade, as if there were any kind of logical or philosophical use in
+merely saying the same word twice over. He is the man who wants things
+down in black and white, as if black and white were the only two
+colours; as if blue and green and red and gold were not facts of the
+universe. He is too selfish to tell the truth and too impatient even to
+hear it. He cannot endure the truth, because it is subtle. This man is
+almost always like Bagstock--a sycophant and a toad-eater. A man is not
+any the less a toad-eater because he eats his toads with a huge appetite
+and gobbles them up, as Bagstock did his breakfast, with the eyes
+starting out of his purple face. He flatters brutally. He cringes with a
+swagger. And men of the world like Dombey are always taken in by him,
+because men of the world are probably the simplest of all the children
+of Adam.
+
+Cousin Feenix again is an exquisite suggestion, with his rickety
+chivalry and rambling compliments. It was about the period of _Dombey
+and Son_ that Dickens began to be taken up by good society. (One can use
+only vulgar terms for an essentially vulgar process.) And his sketches
+of the man of good family in the books of this period show that he had
+had glimpses of what that singular world is like. The aristocrats in his
+earliest books are simply dragons and griffins for his heroes to fight
+with--monsters like Sir Mulberry Hawk or Lord Verisopht. They are merely
+created upon the old principle, that your scoundrel must be polite and
+powerful--a very sound principle. The villain must be not only a
+villain, but a tyrant. The giant must be larger than Jack. But in the
+books of the Dombey period we have many shrewd glimpses of the queer
+realities of English aristocracy. Of these Cousin Feenix is one of the
+best. Cousin Feenix is a much better sketch of the essentially decent
+and chivalrous aristocrat than Sir Leicester Dedlock. Both of the men
+are, if you will, fools, as both are honourable gentlemen. But if one
+may attempt a classification among fools, Sir Leicester Dedlock is a
+stupid fool, while Cousin Feenix is a silly fool--which is much better.
+The difference is that the silly fool has a folly which is always on the
+borderland of wit, and even of wisdom; his wandering wits come often
+upon undiscovered truths. The stupid fool is as consistent and as
+homogeneous as wood; he is as invincible as the ancestral darkness.
+Cousin Feenix is a good sketch of the sort of well-bred old ass who is
+so fundamentally genuine that he is always saying very true things by
+accident. His whole tone also, though exaggerated like everything in
+Dickens, is very true to the bewildered good nature which marks English
+aristocratic life. The statement that Dickens could not describe a
+gentleman is, like most popular animadversions against Dickens, so very
+thin and one-sided a truth as to be for serious purposes a falsehood.
+When people say that Dickens could not describe a gentleman, what they
+mean is this, and so far what they mean is true. They mean that Dickens
+could not describe a gentleman as gentlemen feel a gentleman. They mean
+that he could not take that atmosphere easily, accept it as the normal
+atmosphere, or describe that world from the inside. This is true. In
+Dickens's time there was such a thing as the English people, and Dickens
+belonged to it. Because there is no such thing as an English people now,
+almost all literary men drift towards what is called Society; almost all
+literary men either are gentlemen or pretend to be. Hence, as I say,
+when we talk of describing a gentleman, we always mean describing a
+gentleman from the point of view of one who either belongs to, or is
+interested in perpetuating, that type. Dickens did not describe
+gentlemen in the way that gentlemen describe gentlemen. He described
+them in the way in which he described waiters, or railway guards, or men
+drawing with chalk on the pavement. He described them, in short (and
+this we may freely concede), from the outside, as he described any other
+oddity or special trade. But when it comes to saying that he did not
+describe them well, then that is quite another matter, and that I should
+emphatically deny. The things that are really odd about the English
+upper class he saw with startling promptitude and penetration, and if
+the English upper class does not see these odd things in itself, it is
+not because they are not there, but because we are all blind to our own
+oddities; it is for the same reason that tramps do not feel dirty, or
+that niggers do not feel black. I have often heard a dear old English
+oligarch say that Dickens could not describe a gentleman, while every
+note of his own voice and turn of his own hand recalled Sir Leicester
+Dedlock. I have often been told by some old buck that Dickens could not
+describe a gentleman, and been told so in the shaky voice and with all
+the vague allusiveness of Cousin Feenix.
+
+Cousin Feenix has really many of the main points of the class that
+governs England. Take, for an instance, his hazy notion that he is in a
+world where everybody knows everybody; whenever he mentions a man, it is
+a man "with whom my friend Dombey is no doubt acquainted." That pierces
+to the very helpless soul of aristocracy. Take again the stupendous
+gravity with which he leads up to a joke. That is the very soul of the
+House of Commons and the Cabinet, of the high-class English politics,
+where a joke is always enjoyed solemnly. Take his insistence upon the
+technique of Parliament, his regrets for the time when the rules of
+debate were perhaps better observed than they are now. Take that
+wonderful mixture in him (which is the real human virtue of our
+aristocracy) of a fair amount of personal modesty with an innocent
+assumption of rank. Of a man who saw all these genteel foibles so
+clearly it is absurd merely to say without further explanation that he
+could not describe a gentleman. Let us confine ourselves to saying that
+he did not describe a gentleman as gentlemen like to be described.
+
+Lastly, there is the admirable study of Toots, who may be considered as
+being in some ways the masterpiece of Dickens. Nowhere else did Dickens
+express with such astonishing insight and truth his main contention,
+which is that to be good and idiotic is not a poor fate, but, on the
+contrary, an experience of primeval innocence, which wonders at all
+things. Dickens did not know, anymore than any great man ever knows,
+what was the particular thing that he had to preach. He did not know it;
+he only preached it. But the particular thing that he had to preach was
+this: That humility is the only possible basis of enjoyment; that if one
+has no other way of being humble except being poor, then it is better to
+be poor, and to enjoy; that if one has no other way of being humble
+except being imbecile, then it is better to be imbecile, and to enjoy.
+That is the deep unconscious truth in the character of Toots--that all
+his externals are flashy and false; all his internals unconscious,
+obscure, and true. He wears loud clothes, and he is silent inside them.
+His shirts and waistcoats are covered with bright spots of pink and
+purple, while his soul is always covered with the sacred shame. He
+always gets all the outside things of life wrong, and all the inside
+things right. He always admires the right Christian people, and gives
+them the wrong Christian names. Dimly connecting Captain Cuttle with the
+shop of Mr. Solomon Gills, he always addresses the astonished mariner as
+"Captain Gills." He turns Mr. Walter Gay, by a most improving
+transformation, into "Lieutenant Walters." But he always knows which
+people upon his own principles to admire. He forgets who they are, but
+he remembers what they are. With the clear eyes of humility he perceives
+the whole world as it is. He respects the Game Chicken for being
+strong, as even the Game Chicken ought to be respected for being strong.
+He respects Florence for being good, as even Florence ought to be
+respected for being good. And he has no doubt about which he admires
+most; he prefers goodness to strength, as do all masculine men. It is
+through the eyes of such characters as Toots that Dickens really sees
+the whole of his tales. For even if one calls him a half-wit, it still
+makes a difference that he keeps the right half of his wits. When we
+think of the unclean and craven spirit in which Toots might be treated
+in a psychological novel of to-day; how he might walk with a mooncalf
+face, and a brain of bestial darkness, the soul rises in real homage to
+Dickens for showing how much simple gratitude and happiness can remain
+in the lopped roots of the most simplified intelligence. If scientists
+must treat a man as a dog, it need not be always as a mad dog. They
+might grant him, like Toots, a little of the dog's loyalty and the dog's
+reward.
+
+  [Illustration: Charles Dickens, 1849
+  From a daguerreotype by Mayall.]
+
+
+
+
+DAVID COPPERFIELD
+
+
+In this book Dickens is really trying to write a new kind of book, and
+the enterprise is almost as chivalrous as a cavalry charge. He is making
+a romantic attempt to be realistic. That is almost the definition of
+_David Copperfield_. In his last book, _Dombey and Son_, we see a
+certain maturity and even a certain mild exhaustion in his earlier
+farcical method. He never failed to have fine things in any of his
+books, and Toots is a very fine thing. Still, I could never find Captain
+Cuttle and Mr. Sol Gills very funny, and the whole Wooden Midshipman
+seems to me very wooden. In _David Copperfield_ he suddenly unseals a
+new torrent of truth, the truth out of his own life. The impulse of the
+thing is autobiography; he is trying to tell all the absurd things that
+have happened to himself, and not the least absurd thing is himself. Yet
+though it is Dickens's ablest and clearest book, there is in it a
+falling away of a somewhat singular kind.
+
+Generally speaking there was astonishingly little of fatigue in
+Dickens's books. He sometimes wrote bad work; he sometimes wrote even
+unimportant work; but he wrote hardly a line which is not full of his
+own fierce vitality and fancy. If he is dull it is hardly ever because
+he cannot think of anything; it is because, by some silly excitement or
+momentary lapse of judgment, he has thought of something that was not
+worth thinking of. If his joke is feeble, it is as an impromptu joke at
+an uproarious dinner-table may be feeble; it is no indication of any
+lack of vitality. The joke is feeble, but it is not a sign of
+feebleness. Broadly speaking, this is true of Dickens. If his writing is
+not amusing us, at least it is amusing him. Even when he is tiring he is
+not tired.
+
+But in the case of _David Copperfield_ there is a real reason for noting
+an air of fatigue. For although this is the best of all Dickens's books,
+it constantly disappoints the critical and intelligent reader. The
+reason is that Dickens began it under his sudden emotional impulse of
+telling the whole truth about himself and gradually allowed the whole
+truth to be more and more diluted, until towards the end of the book we
+are back in the old pedantic and decorative art of Dickens, an art which
+we justly admired in its own place and on its own terms, but which we
+resent when we feel it gradually returning through a tale pitched
+originally in a more practical and piercing key. Here, I say, is the one
+real example of the fatigue of Dickens. He begins his story in a new
+style and then slips back into an old one. The earlier part is in his
+later manner. The later part is in his earlier manner.
+
+There are many marks of something weak and shadowy in the end of _David
+Copperfield_. Here, for instance, is one of them which is not without
+its bearing on many tendencies of modern England. Why did Dickens at the
+end of this book give way to that typically English optimism about
+emigration? He seems to think that he can cure the souls of a whole
+cartload, or rather boatload, of his characters by sending them all
+to the Colonies. Peggotty is a desolate and insulted parent whose house
+has been desecrated and his pride laid low; therefore let him go to
+Australia. Emily is a woman whose heart is broken and whose honour is
+blasted; but she will be quite happy if she goes to Australia. Mr.
+Micawber is a man whose soul cannot be made to understand the tyranny of
+time or the limits of human hope; but he will understand all these
+things if he goes to Australia. For it must be noted that Dickens does
+not use this emigration merely as a mode of exit. He does not send these
+characters away on a ship merely as a symbol suggesting that they pass
+wholly out of his hearer's life. He does definitely suggest that
+Australia is a sort of island Valley of Avalon, where the soul may heal
+it of its grievous wound. It is seriously suggested that Peggotty finds
+peace in Australia. It is really indicated that Emily regains her
+dignity in Australia. It is positively explained of Mr. Micawber not
+that he was happy in Australia (for he would be that anywhere), but that
+he was definitely prosperous and practically successful in Australia;
+and that he would certainly be nowhere. Colonising is not talked of
+merely as a coarse, economic expedient for going to a new market. It is
+really offered as something that will cure the hopeless tragedy of
+Peggotty; as something that will cure the still more hopeless comedy of
+Micawber.
+
+I will not dwell here on the subsequent adventures of this very
+sentimental and extremely English illusion. It would be an exaggeration
+to say that Dickens in this matter is something of a forerunner of much
+modern imperialism. His political views were such that he would have
+regarded modern imperialism with horror and contempt. Nevertheless there
+is here something of that hazy sentimentalism which makes some
+Imperialists prefer to talk of the fringe of the empire of which they
+know nothing, rather than of the heart of the empire which they know is
+diseased. It is said that in the twilight and decline of Rome, close to
+the dark ages, the people in Gaul believed that Britain was a land of
+ghosts (perhaps it was foggy), and that the dead were ferried across to
+it from the northern coast of France. If (as is not entirely impossible)
+our own century appears to future ages as a time of temporary decay and
+twilight, it may be said that there was attached to England a blessed
+island called Australia to which the souls of the socially dead were
+ferried across to remain in bliss for ever.
+
+This element which is represented by the colonial optimism at the end of
+_David Copperfield_ is a moral element. The truth is that there is
+something a little mean about this sort of optimism. I do not like the
+notion of David Copperfield sitting down comfortably to his tea-table
+with Agnes, having got rid of all the inconvenient or distressing
+characters of the story by sending them to the other side of the world.
+The whole thing has too much about it of the selfishness of a family
+which sends a scapegrace to the Colonies to starve with its blessing.
+There is too much in the whole thing of that element which was satirised
+by an ironic interpretation of the epitaph "Peace, perfect peace, with
+loved ones far away." We should have thought more of David Copperfield
+(and also of Charles Dickens) if he had endeavoured for the rest of his
+life, by conversation and comfort, to bind up the wounds of his old
+friends from the seaside. We should have thought more of David
+Copperfield (and also of Charles Dickens) if he had faced the
+possibility of going on till his dying day lending money to Mr. Wilkins
+Micawber. We should have thought more of David Copperfield (and also of
+Charles Dickens) if he had not looked upon the marriage with Dora merely
+as a flirtation, an episode which he survived and ought to survive. And
+yet the truth is that there is nowhere in fiction where we feel so
+keenly the primary human instinct and principle that a marriage is a
+marriage and irrevocable, that such things do leave a wound and also a
+bond as in this case of David's short connection with his silly little
+wife. When all is said and done, when Dickens has done his best and his
+worst, when he has sentimentalised for pages and tried to tie up
+everything in the pink tape of optimism, the fact, in the psychology of
+the reader, still remains. The reader does still feel that David's
+marriage to Dora was a real marriage; and that his marriage to Agnes was
+nothing, a middle-aged compromise, a taking of the second best, a sort
+of spiritualised and sublimated marriage of convenience. For all the
+readers of Dickens Dora is thoroughly avenged. The modern world (intent
+on anarchy in everything, even in Government) refuses to perceive the
+permanent element of tragic constancy which inheres in all passion, and
+which is the origin of marriage. Marriage rests upon the fact that you
+cannot have your cake and eat it; that you cannot lose your heart and
+have it. But, as I have said, there is perhaps no place in literature
+where we feel more vividly the sense of this monogamous instinct in man
+than in David Copperfield. A man is monogamous even if he is only
+monogamous for a month; love is eternal even if it is only eternal for a
+month. It always leaves behind it the sense of something broken and
+betrayed.
+
+But I have mentioned Dora in this connection only because she
+illustrates the same fact which Micawber illustrates; the fact that
+there is at the end of this book too much tendency to bless people and
+get rid of them. Micawber is a nuisance. Dickens the despot condemns him
+to exile. Dora is a nuisance. Dickens the despot condemns her to death.
+But it is the whole business of Dickens in the world to express the fact
+that such people are the spice and interest of life. It is the whole
+point of Dickens that there is nobody more worth living with than a
+strong, splendid, entertaining, immortal nuisance. Micawber interrupts
+practical life; but what is practical life that it should venture to
+interrupt Micawber? Dora confuses the housekeeping; but we are not angry
+with Dora because she confuses the housekeeping. We are angry with the
+housekeeping because it confuses Dora. I repeat, and it cannot be too
+much repeated that the whole lesson of Dickens is here. It is better to
+know Micawber than not to know the minor worries that arise out of
+knowing Micawber. It is better to have a bad debt and a good friend. In
+the same way it is better to marry a human and healthy personality which
+happens to attract you than to marry a mere housewife; for a mere
+housewife is a mere housekeeper. All this was what Dickens stood for;
+that the very people who are most irritating in small business
+circumstances are often the people who are most delightful in long
+stretches of experience of life. It is just the man who is maddening
+when he is ordering a cutlet or arranging an appointment who is probably
+the man in whose company it is worth while to journey steadily towards
+the grave. Distribute the dignified people and the capable people and
+the highly business-like people among all the situations which their
+ambition or their innate corruption may demand; but keep close to your
+heart, keep deep in your inner councils the absurd people. Let the
+clever people pretend to govern you, let the unimpeachable people
+pretend to advise you, but let the fools alone influence you; let the
+laughable people whose faults you see and understand be the only people
+who are really inside your life, who really come near you or accompany
+you on your lonely march towards the last impossibility. That is the
+whole meaning of Dickens; that we should keep the absurd people for our
+friends. And here at the end of _David Copperfield_ he seems in some dim
+way to deny it. He seems to want to get rid of the preposterous people
+simply because they will always continue to be preposterous. I have a
+horrible feeling that David Copperfield will send even his aunt to
+Australia if she worries him too much about donkeys.
+
+I repeat, then, that this wrong ending of _David Copperfield_ is one of
+the very few examples in Dickens of a real symptom of fatigue. Having
+created splendid beings for whom alone life might be worth living, he
+cannot endure the thought of his hero living with them. Having given his
+hero superb and terrible friends, he is afraid of the awful and
+tempestuous vista of their friendship. He slips back into a more
+superficial kind of story and ends it in a more superficial way. He is
+afraid of the things he has made; of that terrible figure Micawber; of
+that yet more terrible figure Dora. He cannot make up his mind to see
+his hero perpetually entangled in the splendid tortures and sacred
+surprises that come from living with really individual and unmanageable
+people. He cannot endure the idea that his fairy prince will not have
+henceforward a perfectly peaceful time. But the wise old fairy tales
+(which are the wisest things in the world, at any rate the wisest things
+of worldly origin), the wise old fairy tales never were so silly as to
+say that the prince and the princess lived peacefully ever afterwards.
+The fairy tales said that the prince and princess lived happily ever
+afterwards: and so they did. They lived happily, although it is very
+likely that from time to time they threw the furniture at each other.
+Most marriages, I think, are happy marriages; but there is no such thing
+as a contented marriage. The whole pleasure of marriage is that it is a
+perpetual crisis. David Copperfield and Dora quarrelled over the cold
+mutton; and if they had gone on quarrelling to the end of their lives,
+they would have gone on loving each other to the end of their lives; it
+would have been a human marriage. But David Copperfield and Agnes would
+agree about the cold mutton. And that cold mutton would be very cold.
+
+I have here endeavoured to suggest some of the main merits of Dickens
+within the framework of one of his faults. I have said that _David
+Copperfield_ represents a rather sad transition from his strongest
+method to his weakest. Nobody would ever complain of Charles Dickens
+going on writing his own kind of novels, his old kind of novels. If
+there be anywhere a man who loves good books, that man wishes that there
+were four _Oliver Twists_ and at least forty-four _Pickwicks_. If there
+be any one who loves laughter and creation, he would be glad to read a
+hundred of _Nicholas Nickleby_ and two hundred of _The Old Curiosity
+Shop_. But while any one would have welcomed one of Dickens's own
+ordered and conventional novels, it was not in this spirit that they
+welcomed _David Copperfield_.
+
+_David Copperfield_ begins as if it were going to be a new kind of
+Dickens novel; then it gradually turns into an old kind of Dickens
+novel. It is here that many readers of this splendid book have been
+subtly and secretly irritated. Nicholas Nickleby is all very well; we
+accept him as something which is required to tie the whole affair
+together. Nicholas is a sort of string or clothes-line on which are hung
+the limp figure of Smike, the jumping-jack of Mr. Squeers and the twin
+dolls named Cheeryble. If we do not accept Nicholas Nickleby as the hero
+of the story, at least we accept him as the title of the story. But in
+_David Copperfield_ Dickens begins something which looks for the moment
+fresh and startling. In the earlier chapters (the amazing earlier
+chapters of this book) he does seem to be going to tell the living truth
+about a living boy and man. It is melancholy to see that sudden fire
+fading. It is sad to see David Copperfield gradually turning into
+Nicholas Nickleby. Nicholas Nickleby does not exist at all; he is a
+quite colourless primary condition of the story. We look through
+Nicholas Nickleby at the story just as we look through a plain pane of
+glass at the street. But David Copperfield does begin by existing; it is
+only gradually that he gives up that exhausting habit.
+
+Any fair critical account of Dickens must always make him out much
+smaller than he is. For any fair criticism of Dickens must take account
+of his evident errors, as I have taken account of one of the most
+evident of them during the last two or three pages. It would not even be
+loyal to conceal them. But no honest criticism, no criticism, though it
+spoke with the tongues of men and angels, could ever really talk about
+Dickens. In all this that I have said I have not been talking about
+Dickens at all. I say it with equanimity; I say it even with arrogance.
+I have been talking about the gaps of Dickens. I have been talking about
+the omissions of Dickens. I have been talking about the slumber of
+Dickens and the forgetfulness and unconsciousness of Dickens. In one
+word, I have been talking not about Dickens, but about the absence of
+Dickens. But when we come to him and his work itself, what is there to
+be said? What is there to be said about earthquake and the dawn? He has
+created, especially in this book of _David Copperfield_, he has created,
+creatures who cling to us and tyrannise over us, creatures whom we would
+not forget if we could, creatures whom we could not forget if we would,
+creatures who are more actual than the man who made them.
+
+This is the excuse for all that indeterminate and rambling and sometimes
+sentimental criticism of which Dickens, more than any one else, is the
+victim, of which I fear that I for one have made him the victim in this
+place. When I was a boy I could not understand why the Dickensians
+worried so wearily about Dickens, about where he went to school and
+where he ate his dinners, about how he wore his trousers and when he cut
+his hair. I used to wonder why they did not write something that I could
+read about a man like Micawber. But I have come to the conclusion that
+this almost hysterical worship of the man, combined with a comparatively
+feeble criticism on his works, is just and natural. Dickens was a man
+like ourselves; we can see where he went wrong, and study him without
+being stunned or getting the sunstroke. But Micawber is not a man;
+Micawber is the superman. We can only walk round and round him wondering
+what we shall say. All the critics of Dickens, when all is said and
+done, have only walked round and round Micawber wondering what they
+should say. I am myself at this moment walking round and round Micawber
+wondering what I shall say. And I have not found out yet.
+
+
+
+
+CHRISTMAS STORIES
+
+
+The power of Dickens is shown even in the scraps of Dickens, just as the
+virtue of a saint is said to be shown in fragments of his property or
+rags from his robe. It is with such fragments that we are chiefly
+concerned in the _Christmas Stories_. Many of them are fragments in the
+literal sense; Dickens began them and then allowed some one else to
+carry them on; they are almost rejected notes. In all the other cases we
+have been considering the books that he wrote; here we have rather to
+consider the books that he might have written. And here we find the
+final evidence and the unconscious stamp of greatness, as we might find
+it in some broken bust or some rejected moulding in the studio of
+Michael Angelo.
+
+These sketches or parts of sketches all belong to that period in his
+later life when he had undertaken the duties of an editor, the very
+heavy duties of a very popular editor. He was not by any means naturally
+fitted for that position. He was the best man in the world for founding
+papers; but many people wished that he could have been buried under the
+foundations, like the first builder in some pagan and prehistoric pile.
+He called the _Daily News_ into existence, but when once it existed, it
+objected to him strongly. It is not easy, and perhaps it is not
+important, to state truly the cause of this incapacity. It was not in
+the least what is called the ordinary fault or weakness of the artist.
+It was not that he was careless; rather it was that he was too
+conscientious. It was not that he had the irresponsibility of genius;
+rather it was that he had the irritating responsibility of genius; he
+wanted everybody to see things as he saw them. But in spite of all this
+he certainly ran two great popular periodicals--_Household Words_ and
+_All the Year Round_--with enormous popular success. And he certainly so
+far succeeded in throwing himself into the communism of journalism, into
+the nameless brotherhood of a big paper, that many earnest Dickensians
+are still engaged in picking out pieces of Dickens from the anonymous
+pages of _Household Words_ and _All the Year Round_, and those parts
+which have been already beyond question picked out and proved are often
+fragmentary. The genuine writing of Dickens breaks off at a certain
+point, and the writing of some one else begins. But when the writing of
+Dickens breaks off, I fancy that we know it.
+
+The singular thing is that some of the best work that Dickens ever did,
+better than the work in his best novels, can be found in these slight
+and composite scraps of journalism. For instance, the solemn and
+self-satisfied account of the duty and dignity of a waiter given in the
+opening chapter of _Somebody's Luggage_ is quite as full and fine as
+anything done anywhere by its author in the same vein of sumptuous
+satire. It is as good as the account which Mr. Bumble gives of out-door
+relief, which, "properly understood, is the parochial safeguard. The
+great thing is to give the paupers what they don't want, and then they
+never come again." It is as good as Mr. Podsnap's description of the
+British Constitution, which was bestowed on him by Providence. None of
+these celebrated passages is more obviously Dickens at his best than
+this, the admirable description of "the true principles of waitering,"
+or the account of how the waiter's father came back to his mother in
+broad daylight, "in itself an act of madness on the part of a waiter,"
+and how he expired repeating continually "two and six is three and four
+is nine." That waiter's explanatory soliloquy might easily have opened
+an excellent novel, as _Martin Chuzzlewit_ is opened by the clever
+nonsense about the genealogy of the Chuzzlewits, or as _Bleak House_ is
+opened by a satiric account of the damp, dim life of a law court. Yet
+Dickens practically abandoned the scheme of _Somebody's Luggage_; he
+only wrote two sketches out of those obviously intended. He may almost
+be said to have only written a brilliant introduction to another man's
+book.
+
+Yet it is exactly in such broken outbreaks that his greatness appears.
+If a man has flung away bad ideas he has shown his sense, but if he has
+flung away good ideas he has shown his genius. He has proved that he
+actually has that over-pressure of pure creativeness which we see in
+nature itself, "that of a hundred seeds, she often brings but one to
+bear." Dickens had to be Malthusian about his spiritual children.
+Critics have called Keats and others who died young "the great
+Might-have-beens of literary history." Dickens certainly was not merely
+a great Might-have-been. Dickens, to say the least of him, was a great
+Was. Yet this fails fully to express the richness of his talent; for
+the truth is that he was a great Was and also a great Might-have-been.
+He said what he had to say, and yet not all he had to say. Wild
+pictures, possible stories, tantalising and attractive trains of
+thought, perspectives of adventure, crowded so continually upon his mind
+that at the end there was a vast mass of them left over, ideas that he
+literally had not the opportunity to develop, tales that he literally
+had not the time to tell. This is shown clearly in his private notes and
+letters, which are full of schemes singularly striking and suggestive,
+schemes which he never carried out. It is indicated even more clearly by
+these _Christmas Stories_, collected out of the chaotic opulence of
+_Household Words_ and _All the Year Round_. He wrote short stories
+actually because he had not time to write long stories. He often put
+into the short story a deep and branching idea which would have done
+very well for a long story; many of his long stories, so to speak, broke
+off short. This is where he differs from most who are called the
+Might-have-beens of literature. Marlowe and Chatterton failed because of
+their weakness. Dickens failed because of his force.
+
+Examine for example this case of the waiter in _Somebody's Luggage_.
+Dickens obviously knew enough about that waiter to have made him a
+running spring of joy throughout a whole novel; as the beadle is in
+_Oliver Twist_, or the undertaker in _Martin Chuzzlewit_. Every touch of
+him tingles with truth, from the vague gallantry with which he asks,
+"Would'st thou know, fair reader (if of the adorable female sex)" to the
+official severity with which he takes the chambermaid down, "as many
+pegs as is desirable for the future comfort of all parties." If Dickens
+had developed this character at full length in a book he would have
+preserved for ever in literature a type of great humour and great value,
+and a type which may only too soon be disappearing from English history.
+He would have eternalised the English waiter. He still exists in some
+sound old taverns and decent country inns, but there is no one left
+really capable of singing his praises. I know that Mr. Bernard Shaw has
+done something of the sort in the delightfully whimsical account of
+William in _You Never Can Tell_. But nothing will persuade me that Mr.
+Bernard Shaw can really understand the English waiter. He can never have
+ordered wine from him for instance. And though the English waiter is by
+the nature of things solemn about everything, he can never reach the
+true height and ecstasy of his solemnity except about wine. What the
+real English waiter would do or say if Mr. Shaw asked him for a
+vegetarian meal I cannot dare to predict. I rather think that for the
+first time in his life he would laugh--a horrible sight.
+
+Dickens's waiter is described by one who is not merely witty, truthful,
+and observant, like Mr. Bernard Shaw, but one who really knew the
+atmosphere of inns, one who knew and even liked the smell of beef, and
+beer, and brandy. Hence there is a richness in Dickens's portrait which
+does not exist in Mr. Shaw's. Mr. Shaw's waiter is merely a man of tact;
+Dickens's is a man of principle. Mr. Shaw's waiter is an opportunist,
+just as Mr. Shaw is an opportunist in politics. Dickens's waiter is
+ready to stand up seriously for "the true principles of waitering,"
+just as Dickens was ready to stand up for the true principles of
+Liberalism. Mr. Shaw's waiter is agnostic; his motto is "You never can
+tell." Dickens's waiter is a dogmatist; his motto is "You can tell; I
+will tell you." And the true old-fashioned English waiter had really
+this grave and even moral attitude; he was the servant of the customers
+as a priest is the servant of the faithful, but scarcely in any less
+dignified sense. Surely it is not mere patriotic partiality that makes
+one lament the disappearance of this careful and honourable figure
+crowded out by meaner men at meaner wages, by the German waiter who has
+learnt five languages in the course of running away from his own, or the
+Italian waiter who regards those he serves with a darkling contempt
+which must certainly be that either of a dynamiter or an exiled prince.
+The human and hospitable English waiter is vanishing. And Dickens might
+perhaps have saved him, as he saved Christmas.
+
+I have taken this case of the waiter in Dickens and his equally
+important counterpart in England as an example of the sincere and genial
+sketches scattered about these short stories. But there are many others,
+and one at least demands special mention; I mean Mrs. Lirriper, the
+London landlady. Not only did Dickens never do anything better in a
+literary sense, but he never performed more perfectly his main moral
+function, that of insisting through laughter and flippancy upon the
+virtue of Christian charity. There has been much broad farce against the
+lodging-house keeper: he alone could have written broad farce in her
+favour. It is fashionable to represent the landlady as a tyrant; it is
+too much forgotten that if she is one of the oppressors she is at least
+as much one of the oppressed. If she is bad-tempered it is often for the
+same reasons that make all women bad-tempered (I suppose the
+exasperating qualities of the other sex); if she is grasping it is often
+because when a husband makes generosity a vice it is often necessary
+that a wife should make avarice a virtue. All this Dickens suggested
+very soundly and in a few strokes in the more remote character of Miss
+Wozenham. But in Mrs. Lirriper he went further and did not fare worse.
+In Mrs. Lirriper he suggested quite truly how huge a mass of real good
+humour, of grand unconscious patience, of unfailing courtesy and
+constant and difficult benevolence is concealed behind many a
+lodging-house door and compact in the red-faced person of many a
+preposterous landlady. Any one could easily excuse the ill-humour of the
+poor. But great masses of the poor have not even any ill-humour to be
+excused. Their cheeriness is startling enough to be the foundation of a
+miracle play; and certainly is startling enough to be the foundation of
+a romance. Yet I do not know of any romance in which it is expressed
+except this one.
+
+Of the landlady as of the waiter it may be said that Dickens left in a
+slight sketch what he might have developed through a long and strong
+novel. For Dickens had hold of one great truth, the neglect of which
+has, as it were, truncated and made meagre the work of many brilliant
+modern novelists. Modern novelists try to make long novels out of subtle
+characters. But a subtle character soon comes to an end, because it
+works in and in to its own centre and dies there. But a simple
+character goes on for ever in a fresh interest and energy, because it
+works out and out into the infinite universe. Mr. George Moore in France
+is not by any means so interesting as Mrs. Lirriper in France; for she
+is trying to find France and he is only trying to find George Moore.
+Mrs. Lirriper is the female equivalent of Mr. Pickwick. Unlike Mrs.
+Bardell (another and lesser landlady) she was fully worthy to be Mrs.
+Pickwick. For in both cases the essential truth is the same; that
+original innocence which alone deserves adventures and because it alone
+can appreciate them. We have had Mr. Pickwick in England and we can
+imagine him in France. We have had Mrs. Lirriper in France and we can
+imagine her in Mesopotamia or in heaven. The subtle character in the
+modern novels we cannot really imagine anywhere except in the suburbs or
+in Limbo.
+
+
+
+
+BLEAK HOUSE
+
+
+_Bleak House_ is not certainly Dickens's best book; but perhaps it is
+his best novel. Such a distinction is not a mere verbal trick; it has to
+be remembered rather constantly in connection with his work. This
+particular story represents the highest point of his intellectual
+maturity. Maturity does not necessarily mean perfection. It is idle to
+say that a mature potato is perfect; some people like new potatoes. A
+mature potato is not perfect, but it is a mature potato; the mind of an
+intelligent epicure may find it less adapted to his particular purpose;
+but the mind of an intelligent potato would at once admit it as being,
+beyond all doubt, a genuine, fully developed specimen of his own
+particular species. The same is in some degree true even of literature.
+We can say more or less when a human being has come to his full mental
+growth, even if we go so far as to wish that he had never come to it.
+Children are very much nicer than grown-up people; but there is such a
+thing as growing up. When Dickens wrote _Bleak House_ he had grown up.
+
+Like Napoleon, he had made his army on the march. He had walked in front
+of his mob of aggressive characters as Napoleon did in front of the
+half-baked battalions of the Revolution. And, like Napoleon, he won
+battle after battle before he knew his own plan of campaign; like
+Napoleon, he put the enemies' forces to rout before he had put his own
+force into order. Like Napoleon, he had a victorious army almost before
+he had an army. After his decisive victories Napoleon began to put his
+house in order; after his decisive victories Dickens also began to put
+his house in order. The house, when he had put it in order, was _Bleak
+House_.
+
+There was one thing common to nearly all the other Dickens tales, with
+the possible exception of _Dombey and Son_. They were all rambling
+tales; and they all had a perfect right to be. They were all rambling
+tales for the very simple reason that they were all about rambling
+people. They were novels of adventure; they were even diaries of travel.
+Since the hero strayed from place to place, it did not seem unreasonable
+that the story should stray from subject to subject. This is true of the
+bulk of the novels up to and including _David Copperfield_, up to the
+very brink or threshold of _Bleak House_. Mr. Pickwick wanders about on
+the white English roads, always looking for antiquities and always
+finding novelties. Poor Oliver Twist wanders along the same white roads
+to seek his fortune and to find his misfortune. Nicholas Nickleby goes
+walking across England because he is young and hopeful; Little Nell's
+grandfather does the same thing because he is old and silly. There is
+not much in common between Samuel Pickwick and Oliver Twist; there is
+not much in common between Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby; there is
+not much in common (let us hope) between Little Nell's grandfather and
+any other human being. But they all have this in common, that they may
+actually all have trodden in each other's footprints. They were all
+wanderers on the face of the same fair English land. _Martin Chuzzlewit_
+was only made popular by the travels of the hero in America. When we
+come to _Dombey and Son_ we find, as I have said, an exception; but even
+here it is odd to note the fact that it was an exception almost by
+accident. In Dickens's original scheme of the story, much greater
+prominence was to have been given to the travels and trials of Walter
+Gay; in fact, the young man was to have had a deterioration of character
+which could only have been adequately detailed in him in his character
+of a vagabond and a wastrel. The most important point, however, is that
+when we come to _David Copperfield_, in some sense the summit of his
+serious literature, we find the thing still there. The hero still
+wanders from place to place, his genius is still gipsy. The adventures
+in the book are less violent and less improbable than those which wait
+for Pickwick and Nicholas Nickleby; but they are still adventures and
+not merely events; they are still things met on a road. The facts of the
+story fall away from David as such facts do fall away from a traveller
+walking fast. We are more likely perhaps, to pass by Mr. Creakle's
+school than to pass by Mrs. Jarley's wax-works. The only point is that
+we should pass by both of them. Up to this point in Dickens's
+development, his novel, however true, is still picaresque; his hero
+never really rests anywhere in the story. No one seems really to know
+where Mr. Pickwick lived. Here he has no abiding city.
+
+When we come to _Bleak House_, we come to a change in artistic
+structure. The thing is no longer a string of incidents; it is a cycle
+of incidents. It returns upon itself; it has recurrent melody and
+poetic justice; it has artistic constancy and artistic revenge. It
+preserves the unities; even to some extent it preserves the unities of
+time and place. The story circles round two or three symbolic places; it
+does not go straggling irregularly all over England like one of Mr.
+Pickwick's coaches. People go from one place to another place; but not
+from one place to another place on the road to everywhere else. Mr.
+Jarndyce goes from Bleak House to visit Mr. Boythorn; but he comes back
+to Bleak House. Miss Clare and Miss Summerson go from Bleak House to
+visit Mr. and Mrs. Bayham Badger; but they come back to Bleak House. The
+whole story strays from Bleak House and plunges into the foul fogs of
+Chancery and the autumn mists of Chesney Wold; but the whole story comes
+back to Bleak House. The domestic title is appropriate; it is a
+permanent address.
+
+Dickens's openings are almost always good; but the opening of _Bleak
+House_ is good in a quite new and striking sense. Nothing could be
+better, for instance, than the first foolish chapter about the genealogy
+of the Chuzzlewits; but it has nothing to do with the Chuzzlewits.
+Nothing could be better than the first chapter of _David Copperfield_;
+the breezy entrance and banging exit of Miss Betsy Trotwood. But if
+there is ultimately any crisis or serious subject-matter of _David
+Copperfield_, it is the marred marriage with Dora, the final return to
+Agnes; and all this is in no way involved in the highly-amusing fact
+that his aunt expected him to be a girl. We may repeat that the matter
+is picaresque. The story begins in one place and ends in another place,
+and there is no real connection between the beginning and the end
+except a biographical connection.
+
+A picaresque novel is only a very eventful biography; but the opening of
+_Bleak House_ is quite another business altogether. It is admirable in
+quite another way. The description of the fog in the first chapter of
+_Bleak House_ is good in itself; but it is not merely good in itself,
+like the description of the wind in the opening of _Martin Chuzzlewit_;
+it is also good in the sense that Maeterlinck is good; it is what the
+modern people call an atmosphere. Dickens begins in the Chancery fog
+because he means to end in the Chancery fog. He did not begin in the
+Chuzzlewit wind because he meant to end in it; he began in it because it
+was a good beginning. This is perhaps the best short way of stating the
+peculiarity of the position of _Bleak House_. In this _Bleak House_
+beginning we have the feeling that it is not only a beginning; we have
+the feeling that the author sees the conclusion and the whole. The
+beginning is alpha and omega: the beginning and the end. He means that
+all the characters and all the events shall be read through the smoky
+colours of that sinister and unnatural vapour.
+
+The same is true throughout the whole tale; the whole tale is symbolic
+and crowded with symbols. Miss Flite is a funny character, like Miss La
+Creevy, but Miss La Creevy means only Miss La Creevy. Miss Flite means
+Chancery. The rag-and-bone man, Krook, is a powerful grotesque; so is
+Quilp; but in the story Quilp only means Quilp; Krook means Chancery.
+Rick Carstone is a kind and tragic figure, like Sidney Carton; but
+Sidney Carton only means the tragedy of human nature; Rick Carstone
+means the tragedy of Chancery. Little Jo dies pathetically like Little
+Paul; but for the death of Little Paul we can only blame Dickens; for
+the death of Little Jo we blame Chancery. Thus the artistic unity of the
+book, compared to all the author's earlier novels, is satisfying, almost
+suffocating. There is the _motif_, and again the _motif_. Almost
+everything is calculated to assert and re-assert the savage morality of
+Dickens's protest against a particular social evil. The whole theme is
+that which another Englishman as jovial as Dickens defined shortly and
+finally as the law's delay. The fog of the first chapter never lifts.
+
+In this twilight he traced wonderful shapes. Those people who fancy that
+Dickens was a mere clown; that he could not describe anything delicate
+or deadly in the human character,--those who fancy this are mostly
+people whose position is explicable in many easy ways. The vast majority
+of the fastidious critics have, in the quite strict and solid sense of
+the words, never read Dickens at all; hence their opposition is due to
+and inspired by a hearty innocence which will certainly make them
+enthusiastic Dickensians if they ever, by some accident, happen to read
+him. In other cases it is due to a certain habit of reading books under
+the eye of a conventional critic, admiring what we expect to admire,
+regretting what we are told to regret, waiting for Mr. Bumble to admire
+him, waiting for Little Nell to despise her. Yet again, of course, it is
+sometimes due to that basest of all artistic indulgences (certainly far
+baser than the pleasure of absinthe or the pleasure of opium), the
+pleasure of appreciating works of art which ordinary men cannot
+appreciate. Surely the vilest point of human vanity is exactly that; to
+ask to be admired for admiring what your admirers do not admire. But
+whatever be the reason, whether rude or subtle, which has prevented any
+particular man from personally admiring Dickens, there is in connection
+with a book like _Bleak House_ something that may be called a solid and
+impressive challenge. Let anyone who thinks that Dickens could not
+describe the semi-tones and the abrupt instincts of real human nature
+simply take the trouble to read the stretch of chapters which detail the
+way in which Carstone's mind grew gradually morbid about his chances in
+Chancery. Let him note the manner in which the mere masculinity of
+Carstone is caught; how as he grows more mad he grows more logical, nay,
+more rational. Good women who love him come to him, and point out the
+fact that Jarndyce is a good man, a fact to them solid like an object of
+the senses. In answer he asks them to understand his position. He does
+not say this; he does not say that. He only urges that Jarndyce may have
+become cynical in the affair in the same sense that he himself may have
+become cynical in the affair. He is always a man; that is to say, he is
+always unanswerable, always wrong. The passionate certainty of the woman
+beats itself like battering waves against the thin smooth wall of his
+insane consistency. I repeat: let any one who thinks that Dickens was a
+gross and indelicate artist read that part of the book. If Dickens had
+been the clumsy journalist that such people represent, he never could
+have written such an episode at all. A clumsy journalist would have
+made Rick Carstone in his mad career cast off Esther and Ada and the
+others. The great artist knew better. He knew that even if all the good
+in a man is dying, the last sense that dies is the sense that knows a
+good woman from a bad; it is like the scent of a noble hound.
+
+The clumsy journalist would have made Rick Carstone turn on John
+Jarndyce with an explosion of hatred, as of one who had made an
+exposure--who had found out what low people call "a false friend" in
+what they call "his true colours." The great artist knew better; he knew
+that a good man going wrong tries to salve his soul to the last with the
+sense of generosity and intellectual justice. He will try to love his
+enemy if only out of mere love of himself. As the wolf dies fighting,
+the good man gone wrong dies arguing. This is what constitutes the true
+and real tragedy of Richard Carstone. It is strictly the one and only
+great tragedy that Dickens wrote. It is like the tragedy of Hamlet. The
+others are not tragedies because they deal almost with dead men. The
+tragedy of old Dorrit is merely the sad spectacle of a dotard dragged
+about Europe in his last childhood. The tragedy of Steerforth is only
+that of one who dies suddenly; the tragedy of old Dombey only that of
+one who was dead all the time. But Rick is a real tragedy, for he is
+still alive when the quicksand sucks him down.
+
+It is impossible to avoid putting in the first place this pall of smoke
+which Dickens has deliberately spread over the story. It is quite true
+that the country underneath is clear enough to contain any number of
+unconscious comedians or of merry monsters such as he was in the custom
+of introducing into the carnival of his tales. But he meant us to take
+the smoky atmosphere seriously. Charles Dickens, who was, like all men
+who are really funny about funny things, horribly serious about serious
+things, certainly meant us to read this story in terms of his protest
+and his insurrection against the emptiness and arrogance of law, against
+the folly and the pride of judges. Everything else that there is in this
+story entered into it through the unconscious or accidental energy of
+his genius, which broke in at every gap. But it was the tragedy of
+Richard Carstone that he meant, not the comedy of Harold Skimpole. He
+could not help being amusing; but he meant to be depressing.
+
+Another case might be taken as testing the greater seriousness of this
+tale. The passages about Mrs. Jellyby and her philanthropic schemes show
+Dickens at his best in his old and more familiar satiric manner. But in
+the midst of the Jellyby pandemonium, which is in itself described with
+the same _abandon_ and irrelevance as the boarding-house of Mrs. Todgers
+or the travelling theatre of Mr. Crummles, the elder Dickens introduced
+another piece of pure truth and even tenderness. I mean the account of
+Caddy Jellyby. If Carstone is a truly masculine study of how a man goes
+wrong, Caddy is a perfectly feminine study of how a girl goes right.
+Nowhere else perhaps in fiction, and certainly nowhere else in Dickens,
+is the mere female paradox so well epitomised, the unjust use of words
+covering so much capacity for a justice of ultimate estimate; the
+seeming irresponsibility in language concealing such a fixed and
+pitiless sense of responsibility about things; the air of being always
+at daggers-drawn with her own kindred, yet the confession of incurable
+kinship implied in pride and shame; and, above all, that thirst for
+order and beauty as for something physical; that strange female power of
+hating ugliness and waste as good men can only hate sin and bad men
+virtue. Every touch in her is true, from her first bewildering outbursts
+of hating people because she likes them, down to the sudden quietude and
+good sense which announces that she has slipped into her natural place
+as a woman. Miss Clare is a figure-head, Miss Summerson in some ways a
+failure; but Miss Caddy Jellyby is by far the greatest, the most human,
+and the most really dignified of all the heroines of Dickens.
+
+With one or two exceptions, all the effects in this story are of this
+somewhat quieter kind, though none of them are so subtly successful as
+Rick Carstone and Caddy. Harold Skimpole begins as a sketch drawn with a
+pencil almost as airy and fanciful as his own. The humour of the earlier
+scenes is delightful--the scenes in which Skimpole looks on at other
+people paying his debts with the air of a kindly outsider, and suggests
+in formless legal phraseology that they might "sign something" or "make
+over something," or the scene in which he tries to explain the
+advantages of accepting everything to the apoplectic Mr. Boythorn. But
+it was one of the defects of Dickens as a novelist that his characters
+always became coarser and clumsier as they passed through the practical
+events of a story, and this would necessarily be so with Skimpole, whose
+position was conceivable even to himself only on the assumption that he
+was a mere spectator of life. Poor Skimpole only asked to be kept out
+of the business of this world, and Dickens ought to have kept him out of
+the business of _Bleak House_. By the end of the tale he has brought
+Skimpole to doing acts of mere low villainy. This altogether spoils the
+ironical daintiness of the original notion. Skimpole was meant to end
+with a note of interrogation. As it is, he ends with a big, black,
+unmistakable blot. Speaking purely artistically, we may say that this is
+as great a collapse or vulgarisation as if Richard Carstone had turned
+into a common blackguard and wife-beater, or Caddy Jellyby into a comic
+and illiterate landlady. Upon the whole it may, I think, be said that
+the character of Skimpole is rather a piece of brilliant moralising than
+of pure observation or creation. Dickens had a singularly just mind. He
+was wild in his caricatures, but very sane in his impressions. Many of
+his books were devoted, and this book is partly devoted, to a
+denunciation of aristocracy--of the idle class that lives easily upon
+the toil of nations. But he was fairer than many modern revolutionists,
+and he insisted on satirising also those who prey on society not in the
+name of rank or law, but in the name of intellect and beauty. Sir
+Leicester Dedlock and Mr. Harold Skimpole are alike in accepting with a
+royal unconsciousness the anomaly and evil of their position. But the
+idleness and insolence of the aristocrat is human and humble compared to
+the idleness and insolence of the artist.
+
+With the exception of a few fine freaks, such as Turveydrop and
+Chadband, all the figures in this book are touched more delicately, even
+more faintly, than is common with Dickens. But if the figures are
+touched more faintly, it is partly because they are figures in a
+fog--the fog of Chancery. Dickens meant that twilight to be oppressive;
+for it was the symbol of oppression. Deliberately he did not dispel the
+darkness at the end of this book, as he does dispel it at the end of
+most of his books. Pickwick gets out of the Fleet Prison; Carstone never
+gets out of Chancery but by death. This tyranny, Dickens said, shall not
+be lifted by the light subterfuge of a fiction. This tyranny shall never
+be lifted till all Englishmen lift it together.
+
+
+
+
+CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND
+
+
+There are works of great authors manifestly inferior to their typical
+work which are yet necessary to their fame and their figure in the
+world. It is not difficult to recall examples of them. No one, for
+instance, would talk of Scott's _Tales of a Grandfather_ as indicating
+the power that produced _Kenilworth_ and _Guy Mannering_. Nevertheless,
+without this chance minor compilation we should not really have the key
+of Scott. Without this one insignificant book we should not see his
+significance. For the truth was that Scott loved history more than
+romance, because he was so constituted as to find it more romantic than
+romance. He preferred the deeds of Wallace and Douglas to those of
+Marmion and Ivanhoe. Therefore his garrulous gossip of old times, his
+rambles in dead centuries, give us the real material and impulse of all
+his work; they represent the quarry in which he dug and the food on
+which he fed. Almost alone among novelists Scott actually preferred
+those parts of his historical novels which he had not invented himself.
+He exults when he can boast in an eager note that he has stolen some
+saying from history. Thus _The Tales of a Grandfather_, though small, is
+in some sense the frame of all the Waverley novels. We realise that all
+Scott's novels are tales of a grandfather.
+
+What has been said here about Scott might be said in a less degree
+about Thackeray's _Four Georges_. Though standing higher among his works
+than _The Tales of a Grandfather_ among Scott's they are not his works
+of genius; yet they seem in some way to surround, supplement, and
+explain such works. Without the _Four Georges_ we should know less of
+the link that bound Thackeray to the beginning and to the end of the
+eighteenth century; thence we should have known less of Colonel Esmond
+and also less of Lord Steyne. To these two examples I have given of the
+slight historical experiments of two novelists a third has to be added.
+The third great master of English fiction whose glory fills the
+nineteenth century also produced a small experiment in the
+popularisation of history. It is separated from the other two partly by
+a great difference of merit but partly also by an utter difference of
+tone and outlook. We seem to hear it suddenly as in the first words
+spoken by a new voice, a voice gay, colloquial, and impatient. Scott and
+Thackeray were tenderly attached to the past; Dickens (in his
+consciousness at any rate) was impatient with everything, but especially
+impatient with the past.
+
+A collection of the works of Dickens would be incomplete in an essential
+as well as a literal sense without his _Child's History of England_. It
+may not be important as a contribution to history, but it is important
+as a contribution to biography; as a contribution to the character and
+the career of the man who wrote it, a typical man of his time. That he
+had made no personal historical researches, that he had no special
+historical learning, that he had not had, in truth, even anything that
+could be called a good education, all this only accentuates not the
+merit but at least the importance of the book. For here we may read in
+plain popular language, written by a man whose genius for popular
+exposition has never been surpassed among men, a brief account of the
+origin and meaning of England as it seemed to the average Englishman of
+that age. When subtler views of our history, some more false and some
+more true than his, have become popular, or at least well known, when in
+the near future Carlylean or Catholic or Marxian views of history have
+spread themselves among the reading public, this book will always remain
+as a bright and brisk summary of the cock-sure, healthy-minded,
+essentially manly and essentially ungentlemanly view of history which
+characterised the Radicals of that particular Radical era. The history
+tells us nothing about the periods that it talks about; but it tells us
+a great deal about the period that it does not talk about; the period in
+which it was written. It is in no sense a history of England from the
+Roman invasion; but it is certainly one of the documents which will
+contribute to a history of England in the nineteenth century.
+
+Of the actual nature of its philosophical and technical limitations it
+is, I suppose, unnecessary to speak. They all resolve themselves into
+one fault common in the modern world, and certainly characteristic of
+historians much more learned and pretentious than Dickens. That fault
+consists simply in ignoring or underrating the variety of strange evils
+and unique dangers in the world. The Radicals of the nineteenth century
+were engaged, and most righteously engaged, in dealing with one
+particular problem of human civilisation; they were shifting and
+apportioning more equally a load of custom that had really become
+unmeaning, often accidental, and nearly always unfair. Thus, for
+instance, a fierce and fighting penal code, which had been perfectly
+natural when the robbers were as strong as the Government, had become in
+more ordered times nothing but a base and bloody habit. Thus again
+Church powers and dues, which had been human when every man felt the
+Church as the best part of himself, were mere mean privileges when the
+nation was full of sects and full of freethinkers. This clearing away of
+external symbols that no longer symbolised anything was an honourable
+and needful work; but it was so difficult that to the men engaged in it
+it blocked up the perspective and filled the sky, so that they slid into
+a very natural mental mistake which coloured all their views of history.
+They supposed that this particular problem on which they were engaged
+was the one problem upon which all mankind had always been engaged. They
+got it into their heads that breaking away from a dead past was the
+perpetual process of humanity. The truth is obviously that humanity has
+found itself in many difficulties very different from that. Sometimes
+the best business of an age is to resist some alien invasion; sometimes
+to preach practical self-control in a world too self-indulgent and
+diffused; sometimes to prevent the growth in the State of great new
+private enterprises that would poison or oppress it. Above all it may
+sometimes happen that the highest task of a thinking citizen may be to
+do the exact opposite of the work which the Radicals had to do. It may
+be his highest duty to cling on to every scrap of the past that he can
+find, if he feels that the ground is giving way beneath him and sinking
+into mere savagery and forgetfulness of all human culture. This was
+exactly the position of all thinking men in what we call the dark ages,
+say from the sixth to the tenth century. The cheap progressive view of
+history can never make head or tail of that epoch; it was an epoch
+upside down. We think of the old things as barbaric and the new things
+as enlightened. In that age all the enlightened things were old; all
+the barbaric and brutally ignorant things were new and up to date.
+Republicanism was a fading legend; despotism was a new and successful
+experiment. Christianity was not only better than the clans that
+rebelled against it; Christianity was more rationalistic than they were.
+When men looked back they saw progress and reason; when they looked
+forward they saw shapeless tradition and tribal terror. Touching such
+an age it is obvious that all our modern terms describing reform or
+conservation are foolish and beside the mark. The Conservative was then
+the only possible reformer. If a man did not strengthen the remains of
+Roman order and the root of Roman Christianity, he was simply helping
+the world to roll downhill into ruin and idiotcy. Remember all these
+evident historical truths and then turn to the account given by
+Charles Dickens of that great man, St. Dunstan. It is not that the
+pert cockney tone of the abuse is irritating to the nerves: it is that
+he has got the whole hang of the thing wrong. His head is full of the
+nineteenth-century situation; that a priest imposing discipline is a
+person somehow blocking the way to equality and light. Whereas the
+point about such a man as Dunstan was that nobody in the place except he
+cared a button about equality or light: and that he was defending what
+was left of them against the young and growing power of darkness and
+division and caste.
+
+Nevertheless the case against such books as this is commonly stated
+wrong. The fault of Dickens is not (as is often said) that he "applies
+the same moral standard to all ages." Every sane man must do that: a
+moral standard must remain the same or it is not a moral standard. If we
+call St. Anthony of Padua a good man, we must mean what we mean when we
+call Huxley a good man, or else there is no sense in using the word
+"good." The fault of the Dickens school of popular history lies, not in
+the application of a plain rule of right and wrong to all circumstances,
+but in ignorance of the circumstances to which it was applied. It is not
+that they wrongly enforce the fixed principle that life should be saved;
+it is that they take a fire-engine to a shipwreck and a lifeboat to a
+house on fire. The business of a good man in Dickens's time was to bring
+justice up to date. The business of a good man in Dunstan's time was to
+toil to ensure the survival of any justice at all.
+
+And Dickens, through being a living and fighting man of his own time,
+kept the health of his own heart, and so saw many truths with a single
+eye: truths that were spoilt for subtler eyes. He was much more really
+right than Carlyle; immeasurably more right than Froude. He was more
+right precisely because he applied plain human morals to all facts as he
+saw them. Carlyle really had a vague idea that in coarse and cruel
+times it was right to be coarse and cruel; that tyranny was excusable in
+the twelfth century: as if the twelfth century did not denounce tyrants
+as much or more than any other. Carlyle, in fact, fancied that Rufus was
+the right sort of man; a view which was not only not shared by Anselm,
+but was probably not shared by Rufus. In this connection, or rather in
+connection with the other case of Froude, it is worth while to take
+another figure from Dickens's history, which illustrates the other and
+better side of the facile and popular method. Sheer ignorance of the
+environment made him wrong about Dunstan. But sheer instinct and good
+moral tradition made him right, for instance, about Henry VIII.; right
+where Froude is wildly wrong. Dickens's imagination could not re-picture
+an age where learning and liberty were dying rather than being born: but
+Henry VIII. lived in a time of expanding knowledge and unrest; a time
+therefore somewhat like the Victorian. And Dickens in his childish but
+robust way does perceive the main point about him: that he was a wicked
+man. He misses all the fine shades, of course; he makes him every kind
+of wicked man at once. He leaves out the serious interests of the man:
+his strange but real concern for theology; his love of certain legal and
+moral forms; his half-unconscious patriotism. But he sees the solid bulk
+of definite badness simply because it was there; and Froude cannot see
+it at all; because Froude followed Carlyle and played tricks with the
+eternal conscience. Henry VIII. _was_ "a blot of blood and grease upon
+the history of England." For he was the embodiment of the Devil in the
+Renascence, that wild worship of mere pleasure and scorn, which with its
+pictures and its palaces has enriched and ruined the world.
+
+The time will soon come when the mere common-sense of Dickens, like the
+mere common-sense of Macaulay (though his was poisoned by learning and
+Whig politics), will appear to give a plainer and therefore truer
+picture of the mass of history than the mystical perversity of a man of
+genius writing only out of his own temperament, like Carlyle or Taine.
+If a man has a new theory of ethics there is one thing he must not be
+allowed to do. Let him give laws on Sinai, let him dictate a Bible, let
+him fill the world with cathedrals if he can. But he must not be allowed
+to write a history of England; or a history of any country. All history
+was conducted on ordinary morality: with his extraordinary morality he
+is certain to read it all askew. Thus Carlyle tries to write of the
+Middle Ages with a bias against humility and mercy; that is, with a bias
+against the whole theoretic morality of the Middle Ages. The result is
+that he turns into a mere turmoil of arrogant German savages what was
+really the most complete and logical, if not the highest, of human
+civilisations. Historically speaking, it is better to be Dickens than to
+be this; better to be ignorant, provincial, slap-dash, seeing only the
+passing moment, but in that moment, to be true to eternal things.
+
+It must be remembered, of course, that Dickens deliberately offers this
+only as a "child's" history of England. That is, he only professes to be
+able to teach history as any father of a little boy of five professes to
+be able to teach him history. And although the history of England would
+certainly be taught very differently (as regards the actual criticism of
+events and men) in a family with a wider culture or with another
+religion, the general method would be the same. For the general method
+is quite right. This black-and-white history of heroes and villains;
+this history full of pugnacious ethics and of nothing else, is the right
+kind of history for children. I have often wondered how the scientific
+Marxians and the believers in "the materialist view of history" will
+ever manage to teach their dreary economic generalisations to children:
+but I suppose they will have no children. Dickens's history will always
+be popular with the young; almost as popular as Dickens's novels, and
+for the same reason: because it is full of moralising. Science and art
+without morality are not dangerous in the sense commonly supposed. They
+are not dangerous like a fire, but dangerous like a fog. A fire is
+dangerous in its brightness; a fog in its dulness; and thought without
+morals is merely dull, like a fog. The fog seems to be creeping up the
+street; putting out lamp after lamp. But this cockney lamp-post which
+the children love is still crowned with its flame; and when the fathers
+have forgotten ethics, their babies will turn and teach them.
+
+
+
+
+HARD TIMES
+
+
+I have heard that in some debating clubs there is a rule that the
+members may discuss anything except religion and politics. I cannot
+imagine what they do discuss; but it is quite evident that they have
+ruled out the only two subjects which are either important or amusing.
+The thing is a part of a certain modern tendency to avoid things because
+they lead to warmth; whereas, obviously, we ought, even in a social
+sense, to seek those things specially. The warmth of the discussion is
+as much a part of hospitality as the warmth of the fire. And it is
+singularly suggestive that in English literature the two things have
+died together. The very people who would blame Dickens for his
+sentimental hospitality are the very people who would also blame him for
+his narrow political conviction. The very people who would mock him for
+his narrow radicalism are those who would mock him for his broad
+fireside. Real conviction and real charity are much nearer than people
+suppose. Dickens was capable of loving all men; but he refused to love
+all opinions. The modern humanitarian can love all opinions, but he
+cannot love all men; he seems, sometimes, in the ecstasy of his
+humanitarianism, even to hate them all. He can love all opinions,
+including the opinion that men are unlovable.
+
+In feeling Dickens as a lover we must never forget him as a fighter, and
+a fighter for a creed; but indeed there is no other kind of fighter. The
+geniality which he spread over all his creations was geniality spread
+from one centre, from one flaming peak. He was willing to excuse Mr.
+Micawber for being extravagant; but Dickens and Dickens's doctrine were
+strictly to decide how far he was to be excused. He was willing to like
+Mr. Twemlow in spite of his snobbishness, but Dickens and Dickens's
+doctrine were alone to be judges of how far he was snobbish. There was
+never a more didactic writer: hence there was never one more amusing. He
+had no mean modern notion of keeping the moral doubtful. He would have
+regarded this as a mere piece of slovenliness, like leaving the last
+page illegible.
+
+Everywhere in Dickens's work these angles of his absolute opinion stood
+up out of the confusion of his general kindness, just as sharp and
+splintered peaks stand up out of the soft confusion of the forests.
+Dickens is always generous, he is generally kind-hearted, he is often
+sentimental, he is sometimes intolerably maudlin; but you never know
+when you will not come upon one of the convictions of Dickens; and when
+you do come upon it you do know it. It is as hard and as high as any
+precipice or peak of the mountains. The highest and hardest of these
+peaks is _Hard Times_.
+
+It is here more than anywhere else that the sternness of Dickens emerges
+as separate from his softness; it is here, most obviously, so to speak,
+that his bones stick out. There are indeed many other books of his which
+are written better and written in a sadder tone. _Great Expectations_ is
+melancholy in a sense; but it is doubtful of everything, even of its
+own melancholy. _The Tale of Two Cities_ is a great tragedy, but it is
+still a sentimental tragedy. It is a great drama, but it is still a
+melodrama. But this tale of _Hard Times_ is in some way harsher than all
+these. For it is the expression of a righteous indignation which cannot
+condescend to humour and which cannot even condescend to pathos. Twenty
+times we have taken Dickens's hand and it has been sometimes hot with
+revelry and sometimes weak with weariness; but this time we start a
+little, for it is inhumanly cold; and then we realise that we have
+touched his gauntlet of steel.
+
+One cannot express the real value of this book without being irrelevant.
+It is true that one cannot express the real value of anything without
+being irrelevant. If we take a thing frivolously we can take it
+separately, but the moment we take a thing seriously, if it were only an
+old umbrella, it is obvious that that umbrella opens above us into the
+immensity of the whole universe. But there are rather particular reasons
+why the value of the book called _Hard Times_ should be referred back to
+great historic and theoretic matters with which it may appear
+superficially to have little or nothing to do. The chief reason can
+perhaps be stated thus--that English politics had for more than a
+hundred years been getting into more and more of a hopeless tangle (a
+tangle which, of course, has since become even worse) and that Dickens
+did in some extraordinary way see what was wrong, even if he did not see
+what was right.
+
+The Liberalism which Dickens and nearly all of his contemporaries
+professed had begun in the American and the French Revolutions. Almost
+all modern English criticism upon those revolutions has been vitiated
+by the assumption that those revolutions burst upon a world which was
+unprepared for their ideas--a world ignorant of the possibility of such
+ideas. Somewhat the same mistake is made by those who suggest that
+Christianity was adopted by a world incapable of criticising it; whereas
+obviously it was adopted by a world that was tired of criticising
+everything. The vital mistake that is made about the French Revolution
+is merely this--that everyone talks about it as the introduction of a
+new idea. It was not the introduction of a new idea; there are no new
+ideas. Or if there are new ideas, they would not cause the least
+irritation if they were introduced into political society; because the
+world having never got used to them there would be no mass of men ready
+to fight for them at a moment's notice. That which was irritating about
+the French Revolution was this--that it was not the introduction of a
+new ideal, but the practical fulfilment of an old one. From the time of
+the first fairy tales men had always believed ideally in equality; they
+had always thought that something ought to be done, if anything could be
+done, to redress the balance between Cinderella and the ugly sisters.
+The irritating thing about the French was not that they said this ought
+to be done; everybody said that. The irritating thing about the French
+was that they did it. They proposed to carry out into a positive scheme
+what had been the vision of humanity; and humanity was naturally
+annoyed. The kings of Europe did not make war upon the Revolution
+because it was a blasphemy, but because it was a copy-book maxim which
+had been just too accurately copied. It was a platitude which they had
+always held in theory unexpectedly put into practice. The tyrants did
+not hate democracy because it was a paradox; they hated it because it
+was a truism which seemed in some danger of coming true.
+
+Now it happens to be hugely important to have this right view of the
+Revolution in considering its political effects upon England. For the
+English, being a deeply and indeed excessively romantic people, could
+never be quite content with this quality of cold and bald obviousness
+about the republican formula. The republican formula was merely
+this--that the State must consist of its citizens ruling equally,
+however unequally they may do anything else. In their capacity of
+members of the State they are all equally interested in its
+preservation. But the English soon began to be romantically restless
+about this eternal truism; they were perpetually trying to turn it into
+something else, into something more picturesque--progress perhaps, or
+anarchy. At last they turned it into the highly exciting and highly
+unsound system of politics, which was known as the Manchester School,
+and which was expressed with a sort of logical flightiness, more
+excusable in literature, by Mr. Herbert Spencer. Of course Danton or
+Washington or any of the original republicans would have thought these
+people were mad. They would never have admitted for a moment that the
+State must not interfere with commerce or competition; they would merely
+have insisted that if the State did interfere, it must really be the
+State--that is, the whole people. But the distance between the common
+sense of Danton and the mere ecstasy of Herbert Spencer marks the
+English way of colouring and altering the revolutionary idea. The
+English people as a body went blind, as the saying is, for interpreting
+democracy entirely in terms of liberty. They said in substance that if
+they had more and more liberty it did not matter whether they had any
+equality or any fraternity. But this was violating the sacred trinity of
+true politics; they confounded the persons and they divided the
+substance.
+
+Now the really odd thing about England in the nineteenth century is
+this--that there was one Englishman who happened to keep his head. The
+men who lost their heads lost highly scientific and philosophical heads;
+they were great cosmic systematisers like Spencer, great social
+philosophers like Bentham, great practical politicians like Bright,
+great political economists like Mill. The man who kept his head kept a
+head full of fantastic nonsense; he was a writer of rowdy farces, a
+demagogue of fiction, a man without education in any serious sense
+whatever, a man whose whole business was to turn ordinary cockneys into
+extraordinary caricatures. Yet when all these other children of the
+revolution went wrong he, by a mystical something in his bones, went
+right. He knew nothing of the Revolution; yet he struck the note of it.
+He returned to the original sentimental commonplace upon which it is
+forever founded, as the Church is founded on a rock. In an England gone
+mad about a minor theory he reasserted the original idea--the idea that
+no one in the State must be too weak to influence the State.
+
+This man was Dickens. He did this work much more genuinely than it was
+done by Carlyle or Ruskin; for they were simply Tories making out a
+romantic case for the return of Toryism. But Dickens was a real Liberal
+demanding the return of real Liberalism. Dickens was there to remind
+people that England had rubbed out two words of the revolutionary motto,
+had left only Liberty and destroyed Equality and Fraternity. In this
+book, _Hard Times_, he specially champions equality. In all his books he
+champions fraternity.
+
+The atmosphere of this book and what it stands for can be very
+adequately conveyed in the note on the book by Lord Macaulay, who may
+stand as a very good example of the spirit of England in those years of
+eager emancipation and expanding wealth--the years in which Liberalism
+was turned from an omnipotent truth to a weak scientific system.
+Macaulay's private comment on _Hard Times_ runs, "One or two passages of
+exquisite pathos and the rest sullen Socialism." That is not an unfair
+and certainly not a specially hostile criticism, but it exactly shows
+how the book struck those people who were mad on political liberty and
+dead about everything else. Macaulay mistook for a new formula called
+Socialism what was, in truth, only the old formula called political
+democracy. He and his Whigs had so thoroughly mauled and modified the
+original idea of Rousseau or Jefferson that when they saw it again they
+positively thought that it was something quite new and eccentric. But
+the truth was that Dickens was not a Socialist, but an unspoilt Liberal;
+he was not sullen; nay, rather, he had remained strangely hopeful. They
+called him a sullen Socialist only to disguise their astonishment at
+finding still loose about the London streets a happy republican.
+
+Dickens is the one living link between the old kindness and the new,
+between the good will of the past and the good works of the future. He
+links May Day with Bank Holiday, and he does it almost alone. All the
+men around him, great and good as they were, were in comparison
+puritanical, and never so puritanical as when they were also atheistic.
+He is a sort of solitary pipe down which pours to the twentieth century
+the original river of Merry England. And although this _Hard Times_ is,
+as its name implies, the hardest of his works, although there is less in
+it perhaps than in any of the others of the _abandon_ and the buffoonery
+of Dickens, this only emphasises the more clearly the fact that he stood
+almost alone for a more humane and hilarious view of democracy. None of
+his great and much more highly-educated contemporaries could help him in
+this. Carlyle was as gloomy on the one side as Herbert Spencer on the
+other. He protested against the commercial oppression simply and solely
+because it was not only an oppression but a depression. And this protest
+of his was made specially in the case of the book before us. It may be
+bitter, but it was a protest against bitterness. It may be dark, but it
+is the darkness of the subject and not of the author. He is by his own
+account dealing with hard times, but not with a hard eternity, not with
+a hard philosophy of the universe. Nevertheless, this is the one place
+in his work where he does not make us remember human happiness by
+example as well as by precept. This is, as I have said, not the saddest,
+but certainly the harshest of his stories. It is perhaps the only place
+where Dickens, in defending happiness, for a moment forgets to be
+happy.
+
+He describes Bounderby and Gradgrind with a degree of grimness and
+sombre hatred very different from the half affectionate derision which
+he directed against the old tyrants or humbugs of the earlier nineteenth
+century--the pompous Dedlock or the fatuous Nupkins, the grotesque
+Bumble or the inane Tigg. In those old books his very abuse was
+benignant; in _Hard Times_ even his sympathy is hard. And the reason is
+again to be found in the political facts of the century. Dickens could
+be half genial with the older generation of oppressors because it was a
+dying generation. It was evident, or at least it seemed evident then,
+that Nupkins could not go on much longer making up the law of England to
+suit himself; that Sir Leicester Dedlock could not go on much longer
+being kind to his tenants as if they were dogs and cats. And some of
+these evils the nineteenth century did really eliminate or improve. For
+the first half of the century Dickens and all his friends were justified
+in feeling that the chains were falling from mankind. At any rate, the
+chains did fall from Mr. Rouncewell the Iron-master. And when they fell
+from him he picked them up and put them upon the poor.
+
+  [Illustration: Charles Dickens, 1858
+  From a black and white drawing by Baughiet.]
+
+
+
+
+LITTLE DORRIT
+
+
+_Little Dorrit_ stands in Dickens's life chiefly as a signal of how far
+he went down the road of realism, of sadness, and of what is called
+modernity. True, it was by no means the best of the books of his later
+period; some even think it the worst. _Great Expectations_ is certainly
+the best of the later novels; some even think it the best of all the
+novels. Nor is it the novel most concerned with strictly recent
+problems; that title must be given to _Hard Times_. Nor again is it the
+most finely finished or well constructed of the later books; that claim
+can be probably made for _Edwin Drood_. By a queer verbal paradox the
+most carefully finished of his later tales is the tale that is not
+finished at all. In form, indeed, the book bears a superficial
+resemblance to those earlier works by which the young Dickens had set
+the whole world laughing long ago. Much of the story refers to a remote
+time early in the nineteenth century; much of it was actually recalled
+and copied from the life of Dickens's father in the old Marshalsea
+prison. Also the narrative has something of the form, or rather absence
+of form, which belonged to _Nicholas Nickleby_ or _Martin Chuzzlewit_.
+It has something of the old air of being a string of disconnected
+adventures, like a boy's book about bears and Indians. The Dorrits go
+wandering for no particular reason on the Continent of Europe, just as
+young Martin Chuzzlewit went wandering for no particular reason on the
+continent of America. The story of _Little Dorrit_ stops and lingers at
+the doors of the Circumlocution Office much in the same way that the
+story of Samuel Pickwick stops and lingers in the political excitement
+of Eatanswill. The villain, Blandois, is a very stagey villain indeed;
+quite as stagey as Ralph Nickleby or the mysterious Monk. The secret of
+the dark house of Clennam is a very silly secret; quite as silly as the
+secret of Ralph Nickleby or the secret of Monk. Yet all these external
+similarities between _Little Dorrit_ and the earliest books, all this
+loose, melodramatic quality, only serves to make more obvious and
+startling the fact that some change has come over the soul of Dickens.
+_Hard Times_ is harsh; but then _Hard Times_ is a social pamphlet;
+perhaps it is only harsh as a social pamphlet must be harsh. _Bleak
+House_ is a little sombre; but then _Bleak House_ is almost a detective
+story; perhaps it is only sombre in the sense that a detective story
+must be sombre. _A Tale of Two Cities_ is a tragedy; but then _A Tale of
+Two Cities_ is a tale of the French Revolution; perhaps it is only a
+tragedy because the French Revolution was a tragedy. _The Mystery of
+Edwin Drood_ is dark; but then the mystery of anybody must be dark. In
+all these other cases of the later books an artistic reason can be
+given--a reason of theme or of construction for the slight sadness that
+seems to cling to them. But exactly because _Little Dorrit_ is a mere
+Dickens novel, it shows that something must somehow have happened to
+Dickens himself. Even in resuming his old liberty, he cannot resume his
+old hilarity. He can re-create the anarchy, but not the revelry.
+
+It so happens that this strange difference between the new and the old
+mode of Dickens can be symbolised and stated in one separate and simple
+contrast. Dickens's father had been a prisoner in a debtors' prison, and
+Dickens's works contain two pictures partly suggested by the personality
+of that prisoner. Mr. Micawber is one picture of him. Mr. Dorrit is
+another. This truth is almost incredible, but it is the truth. The
+joyful Micawber, whose very despair was exultant, and the desolate
+Dorrit, whose very pride was pitiful, were the same man. The valiant
+Micawber and the nervous, shaking Dorrit were the same man. The defiant
+Micawber and the snobbish, essentially obsequious Dorrit were the same
+man. I do not mean of course that either of the pictures was an exact
+copy of anybody. The whole Dickens genius consisted of taking hints and
+turning them into human beings. As he took twenty real persons and
+turned them into one fictitious person, so he took one real person and
+turned him into twenty fictitious persons. This quality would suggest
+one character, that quality would suggest another. But in this case, at
+any rate, he did take one real person and turn him into two. And what is
+more, he turned him into two persons who seem to be quite opposite
+persons. To ordinary readers of Dickens, to say that Micawber and Dorrit
+had in any sense the same original, will appear unexpected and wild. No
+conceivable connection between the two would ever have occurred to
+anybody who had read Dickens with simple and superficial enjoyment, as
+all good literature ought to be read. It will seem to them just as
+silly as saying that the Fat Boy and Mr. Alfred Jingle were both copied
+from the same character. It will seem as insane as saying that the
+character of Smike and the character of Major Bagstock were both copied
+from Dickens's father. Yet it is an unquestionable historical fact that
+Micawber and Dorrit were both copied from Dickens's father, in the only
+sense that any figures in good literature are ever copied from anything
+or anybody. Dickens did get the main idea of Micawber from his father;
+and that idea is that a poor man is not conquered by the world. And
+Dickens did get the main idea of Dorrit from his father; and that idea
+is that a poor man may be conquered by the world. I shall take the
+opportunity of discussing, in a moment, which of these ideas is true.
+Doubtless old John Dickens included both the gay and the sad moral; most
+men do. My only purpose here is to point out that Dickens drew the gay
+moral in 1849, and the sad moral in 1857.
+
+There must have been some real sadness at this time creeping like a
+cloud over Dickens himself. It is nothing that a man dwells on the
+darkness of dark things; all healthy men do that. It is when he dwells
+on the darkness of bright things that we have reason to fear some
+disease of the emotions. There must really have been some depression
+when a man can only see the sad side of flowers or the sad side of
+holidays or the sad side of wine. And there must be some depression of
+an uncommonly dark and genuine character when a man has reached such a
+point that he can see only the sad side of Mr. Wilkins Micawber.
+
+Yet this is in reality what had happened to Dickens about this time.
+Staring at Wilkins Micawber he could see only the weakness and the
+tragedy that was made possible by his indifference, his indulgence, and
+his bravado. He had already indeed been slightly moved towards this
+study of the feebleness and ruin of the old epicurean type with which he
+had once sympathised, the type of Bob Sawyer or Dick Swiveller. He had
+already attacked the evil of it in _Bleak House_ in the character of
+Harold Skimpole, with its essentially cowardly carelessness and its
+highly selfish communism. Nevertheless, as I have said before, it must
+have been no small degree of actual melancholia which led Dickens to
+look for a lesson of disaster and slavery in the very same career from
+which he had once taught lessons of continual recuperation and a kind of
+fantastic freedom. There must have been at this time some melancholy
+behind the writings. There must have existed on this earth at the time
+that portent and paradox--a somewhat depressed Dickens.
+
+Perhaps it was a reminiscence of that metaphorical proverb which tells
+us that "truth lies at the bottom of a well." Perhaps these people
+thought that the only way to find truth in the well was to drown
+oneself. But on whatever thin theoretic basis, the type and period of
+George Gissing did certainly consider that Dickens, so far as he went,
+was all the worse for the optimism of the story of Micawber; hence it is
+not unnatural that they should think him all the better for the
+comparative pessimism of the story of _Little Dorrit_. The very things
+in the tale that would naturally displease the ordinary admirers of
+Dickens, are the things which would naturally please a man like George
+Gissing. There are many of these things, but one of them emerges
+pre-eminent and unmistakable. This is the fact that when all is said and
+done the main business of the story of _Little Dorrit_ is to describe
+the victory of circumstances over a soul. The circumstances are the
+financial ruin and long imprisonment of Edward Dorrit; the soul is
+Edward Dorrit himself. Let it be granted that the circumstances are
+exceptional and oppressive, are denounced as exceptional and oppressive,
+are finally exploded and overthrown; still, they are circumstances. Let
+it be granted that the soul is that of a man perhaps weak in any case
+and retaining many merits to the last, still it is a soul. Let it be
+granted, above all, that the admission that such spiritual tragedies do
+occur does not decrease by so much as an iota our faith in the validity
+of any spiritual struggle. For example, Stevenson has made a study of
+the breakdown of a good man's character under a burden for which he is
+not to blame, in the tragedy of Henry Durie in _The Master of
+Ballantrae_. Yet he has added, in the mouth of Mackellar, the exact
+common sense and good theology of the matter, saying "It matters not a
+jot; for he that is to pass judgment upon the records of our life is the
+same that formed us in frailty." Let us concede then all this, and the
+fact remains that the study of the slow demoralisation of a man through
+mere misfortune was not a study congenial to Dickens, not in accordance
+with his original inspiration, not connected in any manner with the
+special thing that he had to say. In a word, the thing is not quite a
+part of himself; and he was not quite himself when he did it.
+
+He was still quite a young man; his depression did not come from age.
+In fact, as far as I know, mere depression never does come from mere
+age. Age can pass into a beautiful reverie. Age can pass into a sort of
+beautiful idiocy. But I do not think that the actual decline and close
+of our ordinary vitality brings with it any particular heaviness of the
+spirits. The spirits of the old do not as a rule seem to become more and
+more ponderous until they sink into the earth. Rather the spirits of the
+old seem to grow lighter and lighter until they float away like
+thistledown. Wherever there is the definite phenomenon called
+depression, it commonly means that something else has been closer to us
+than so normal a thing as death. There has been disease, bodily or
+mental, or there has been sin, or there has been some struggle or
+effort, breaking past the ordinary boundaries of human custom. In the
+case of Dickens there had been two things that are not of the routine of
+a wholesome human life; there had been the quarrel with his wife, and
+there had been the strain of incessant and exaggerated intellectual
+labour. He had not an easy time; and on top of that (or perhaps rather
+at the bottom of it) he had not an easy nature. Not only did his life
+necessitate work, but his character necessitated worry about work; and
+that combination is always one which is very dangerous to the
+temperament which is exposed to it. The only people who ought to be
+allowed to work are the people who are able to shirk. The only people
+who ought to be allowed to worry are the people who have nothing to
+worry about. When the two are combined, as they were in Dickens, you are
+very likely to have at least one collapse. _Little Dorrit_ is a very
+interesting, sincere, and fascinating book. But for all that, I fancy
+it is the one collapse.
+
+The complete proof of this depression may be difficult to advance;
+because it will be urged, and entirely with reason, that the actual
+examples of it are artistic and appropriate. Dickens, the Gissing school
+will say, was here pointing out certain sad truths of psychology; can
+any one say that he ought not to point them out? That may be; in any
+case, to explain depression is not to remove it. But the instances of
+this more sombre quality of which I have spoken are not very hard to
+find. The thing can easily be seen by comparing a book like _Little
+Dorrit_ with a book like _David Copperfield_. David Copperfield and
+Arthur Clennam have both been brought up in unhappy homes, under bitter
+guardians and a black, disheartening religion. It is the whole point of
+David Copperfield that he has broken out of a Calvinistic tyranny which
+he cannot forgive. But it is the whole point of Arthur Clennam that he
+has not broken out of the Calvinistic tyranny, but is still under its
+shadow. Copperfield has come from a gloomy childhood; Clennam, though
+forty years old, is still in a gloomy childhood. When David meets the
+Murdstones again it is to defy them with the health and hilarious anger
+that go with his happy delirium about Dora. But when Clennam re-enters
+his sepulchral house there is a weight upon his soul which makes it
+impossible for him to answer, with any spirit, the morbidities of his
+mother, or even the grotesque interferences of Mr. Flintwinch. This is
+only another example of the same quality which makes the Dickens of
+_Little Dorrit_ insist on the degradation of the debtor, while the
+Dickens of _David Copperfield_ insisted on his splendid
+irresponsibility, his essential emancipation. Imprisonments passed over
+Micawber like summer clouds. But the imprisonment in _Little Dorrit_ is
+like a complete natural climate and environment; it has positively
+modified the shapes and functions of the animals that dwell in it. A
+horrible thing has happened to Dickens; he has almost become an
+Evolutionist. Worse still, in studying the Calvinism of Mrs. Clennam's
+house, he has almost become a Calvinist. He half believes (as do some of
+the modern scientists) that there is really such a thing as "a child of
+wrath," that a man on whom such an early shadow had fallen could never
+shake it off. For ancient Calvinism and modern Evolutionism are
+essentially the same things. They are both ingenious logical blasphemies
+against the dignity and liberty of the human soul.
+
+The workmanship of the book in detail is often extremely good. The one
+passage in the older and heartier Dickens manner (I mean the description
+of the Circumlocution Office) is beyond praise. It is a complete picture
+of the way England is actually governed at this moment. The very core of
+our politics is expressed in the light and easy young Barnacle who told
+Clennam with a kindly frankness that he, Clennam, would "never go on
+with it." Dickens hit the mark so that the bell rang when he made all
+the lower officials, who were cads, tell Clennam coldly that his claim
+was absurd, until the last official, who is a gentleman, tells him
+genially that the whole business is absurd. Even here, perhaps, there is
+something more than the old exuberant derision of Dickens; there is a
+touch of experience that verges on scepticism. Everywhere else,
+certainly, there is the note which I have called Calvinistic; especially
+in the predestined passion of Tattycoram or the incurable cruelty of
+Miss Wade. Even Little Dorrit herself had, we are told, one stain from
+her prison experience; and it is spoken of like a bodily stain; like
+something that cannot be washed away.
+
+There is no denying that this is Dickens's dark moment. It adds
+enormously to the value of his general view of life that such a dark
+moment came. He did what all the heroes and all the really happy men
+have done; he descended into Hell. Nor is it irreverent to continue the
+quotation from the Creed, for in the next book he was to write he was to
+break out of all these dreams of fate and failure, and with his highest
+voice to speak of the triumph of the weak of this world. His next book
+was to leave us saying, as Sydney Carton mounted the scaffold, words
+which, splendid in themselves, have never been so splendidly quoted--"I
+am the Resurrection and the Life; whoso believeth in Me though he be
+dead yet he shall live." In Sydney Carton at least, Dickens shows none
+of that dreary submission to the environment of the irrevocable that had
+for an instant lain on him like a cloud. On this occasion he sees with
+the old heroic clearness that to be a failure may be one step to being a
+saint. On the third day he rose again from the dead.
+
+  [Illustration: Charles Dickens, 1859
+  From an oil painting by W. P. Frith, R.A.]
+
+
+
+
+A TALE OF TWO CITIES
+
+
+As an example of Dickens's literary work, _A Tale of Two Cities_ is not
+wrongly named. It is his most typical contact with the civic ideals of
+Europe. All his other tales have been tales of one city. He was in
+spirit a Cockney; though that title has been quite unreasonably twisted
+to mean a cad. By the old sound and proverbial test a Cockney was a man
+born within the sound of Bow bells. That is, he was a man born within
+the immediate appeal of high civilisation and of eternal religion.
+Shakespeare, in the heart of his fantastic forest, turns with a splendid
+suddenness to the Cockney ideal as being the true one after all. For a
+jest, for a reaction, for an idle summer love or still idler summer
+hatred, it is well to wander away into the bewildering forest of Arden.
+It is well that those who are sick with love or sick with the absence of
+love, those who weary of the folly of courts or weary yet more of their
+wisdom, it is natural that these should trail away into the twinkling
+twilight of the woods. Yet it is here that Shakespeare makes one of his
+most arresting and startling assertions of the truth. Here is one of
+those rare and tremendous moments of which one may say that there is a
+stage direction, "Enter Shakespeare." He has admitted that for men weary
+of courts, for men sick of cities, the wood is the wisest place, and he
+has praised it with his purest lyric ecstasy. But when a man enters
+suddenly upon that celestial picnic, a man who is not sick of cities,
+but sick of hunger, a man who is not weary of courts, but weary of
+walking, then Shakespeare lets through his own voice with a shattering
+sincerity and cries the praise of practical human civilisation:
+
+    If ever you have looked on better days,
+    If ever you have sat at good men's feasts,
+    If ever been where bells have knolled to church,
+    If ever from your eyelids wiped a tear
+    Or know what 'tis to pity and be pitied.
+
+There is nothing finer even in Shakespeare than that conception of the
+circle of rich men all pretending to rough it in the country, and the
+one really hungry man entering, sword in hand, and praising the city.
+"If ever been where bells have knolled to church"; if you have ever been
+within sound of Bow bells; if you have ever been happy and haughty
+enough to call yourself a Cockney.
+
+We must remember this distinction always in the case of Dickens. Dickens
+is the great Cockney, at once tragic and comic, who enters abruptly upon
+the Arcadian banquet of the æsthetics and says, "Forbear and eat no
+more," and tells them that they shall not eat "until necessity be
+served." If there was one thing he would have favoured instinctively it
+would have been the spreading of the town as meaning the spreading of
+civilisation. And we should (I hope) all favour the spreading of the
+town if it did mean the spreading of civilisation. The objection to the
+spreading of the modern Manchester or Birmingham suburb is simply that
+such a suburb is much more barbaric than any village in Europe could
+ever conceivably be. And again, if there is anything that Dickens would
+have definitely hated it is that general treatment of nature as a
+dramatic spectacle, a piece of scene-painting which has become the
+common mark of the culture of our wealthier classes. Despite many fine
+pictures of natural scenery, especially along the English roadsides, he
+was upon the whole emphatically on the side of the town. He was on the
+side of bricks and mortar. He was a citizen; and, after all, a citizen
+means a man of the city. His strength was, after all, in the fact that
+he was a man of the city. But, after all, his weakness, his calamitous
+weakness, was that he was a man of one city.
+
+For all practical purposes he had never been outside such places as
+Chatham and London. He did indeed travel on the Continent; but surely no
+man's travel was ever so superficial as his. He was more superficial
+than the smallest and commonest tourist. He went about Europe on stilts;
+he never touched the ground. There is one good test and one only of
+whether a man has travelled to any profit in Europe. An Englishman is,
+as such, a European, and as he approaches the central splendours of
+Europe he ought to feel that he is coming home. If he does not feel at
+home he had much better have stopped at home. England is a real home;
+London is a real home; and all the essential feelings of adventure or
+the picturesque can easily be gained by going out at night upon the
+flats of Essex or the cloven hills of Surrey. Your visit to Europe is
+useless unless it gives you the sense of an exile returning. Your first
+sight of Rome is futile unless you feel that you have seen it before.
+Thus useless and thus futile were the foreign experiments and the
+continental raids of Dickens. He enjoyed them as he would have enjoyed,
+as a boy, a scamper out of Chatham into some strange meadows, as he
+would have enjoyed, when a grown man, a steam in a police boat out into
+the fens to the far east of London. But he was the Cockney venturing
+far; he was not the European coming home. He is still the splendid
+Cockney Orlando of whom I spoke above; he cannot but suppose that any
+strange men, being happy in some pastoral way, are mysterious foreign
+scoundrels. Dickens's real speech to the lazy and laughing civilisation
+of Southern Europe would really have run in the Shakespearian words:
+
+                    but whoe'er you be
+    Who in this desert inaccessible,
+    Under the shade of melancholy boughs
+    Lose and neglect the creeping hours of time.
+    If ever you have looked on better things,
+    If ever been where bells have knolled to church.
+
+If, in short, you have ever had the advantage of being born within the
+sound of Bow bells. Dickens could not really conceive that there was any
+other city but his own.
+
+It is necessary thus to insist that Dickens never understood the
+Continent, because only thus can we appreciate the really remarkable
+thing he did in _A Tale of Two Cities_. It is necessary to feel, first
+of all, the fact that to him London was the centre of the universe. He
+did not understand at all the real sense in which Paris is the capital
+of Europe. He had never realised that all roads lead to Rome. He had
+never felt (as an Englishman can feel) that he was an Athenian before he
+was a Londoner. Yet with everything against him he did this astonishing
+thing. He wrote a book about two cities, one of which he understood; the
+other he did not understand. And his description of the city he did not
+know is almost better than his description of the city he did know. This
+is the entrance of the unquestionable thing about Dickens; the thing
+called genius; the thing which every one has to talk about directly and
+distinctly because no one knows what it is. For a plain word (as for
+instance the word fool) always covers an infinite mystery.
+
+_A Tale of Two Cities_ is one of the more tragic tints of the later life
+of Dickens. It might be said that he grew sadder as he grew older; but
+this would be false, for two reasons. First, a man never or hardly ever
+does grow sad as he grows old; on the contrary, the most melancholy
+young lovers can be found forty years afterwards chuckling over their
+port wine. And second, Dickens never did grow old, even in a physical
+sense. What weariness did appear in him appeared in the prime of life;
+it was due not to age but to overwork, and his exaggerative way of doing
+everything. To call Dickens a victim of elderly disenchantment would be
+as absurd as to say the same of Keats. Such fatigue as there was, was
+due not to the slowing down of his blood, but rather to its unremitting
+rapidity. He was not wearied by his age; rather he was wearied by his
+youth. And though _A Tale of Two Cities_ is full of sadness, it is full
+also of enthusiasm; that pathos is a young pathos rather than an old
+one. Yet there is one circumstance which does render important the fact
+that _A Tale of Two Cities_ is one of the later works of Dickens. This
+fact is the fact of his dependence upon another of the great writers of
+the Victorian era. And it is in connection with this that we can best
+see the truth of which I have been speaking; the truth that his actual
+ignorance of France went with amazing intuitive perception of the truth
+about it. It is here that he has most clearly the plain mark of the man
+of genius; that he can understand what he does not understand.
+
+Dickens was inspired to the study of the French Revolution and to the
+writing of a romance about it by the example and influence of Carlyle.
+Thomas Carlyle undoubtedly rediscovered for Englishmen the revolution
+that was at the back of all their policies and reforms. It is an
+entertaining side joke that the French Revolution should have been
+discovered for Britons by the only British writer who did not really
+believe in it. Nevertheless, the most authoritative and the most recent
+critics on that great renaissance agree in considering Carlyle's work
+one of the most searching and detailed power. Carlyle had read a great
+deal about the French Revolution. Dickens had read nothing at all,
+except Carlyle. Carlyle was a man who collected his ideas by the careful
+collation of documents and the verification of references. Dickens was a
+man who collected his ideas from loose hints in the streets, and those
+always the same streets; as I have said, he was the citizen of one city.
+Carlyle was in his way learned; Dickens was in every way ignorant.
+Dickens was an Englishman cut off from France; Carlyle was a Scotsman,
+historically connected with France. And yet, when all this is said and
+certified, Dickens is more right than Carlyle. Dickens's French
+Revolution is probably more like the real French Revolution than
+Carlyle's. It is difficult, if not impossible, to state the grounds of
+this strong conviction. One can only talk of it by employing that
+excellent method which Cardinal Newman employed when he spoke of the
+"notes" of Catholicism. There were certain "notes" of the Revolution.
+One note of the Revolution was the thing which silly people call
+optimism, and sensible people call high spirits. Carlyle could never
+quite get it, because with all his spiritual energy he had no high
+spirits. That is why he preferred prose to poetry. He could understand
+rhetoric; for rhetoric means singing with an object. But he could not
+understand lyrics; for the lyric means singing without an object; as
+every one does when he is happy. Now for all its blood and its black
+guillotines, the French Revolution was full of mere high spirits. Nay,
+it was full of happiness. This actual lilt and levity Carlyle never
+really found in the Revolution, because he could not find it in himself.
+Dickens knew less of the Revolution, but he had more of it. When Dickens
+attacked abuses, he battered them down with exactly that sort of cheery
+and quite one-sided satisfaction with which the French mob battered down
+the Bastille. Dickens utterly and innocently believed in certain things;
+he would, I think, have drawn the sword for them. Carlyle half believed
+in half a hundred things; he was at once more of a mystic and more of a
+sceptic. Carlyle was the perfect type of the grumbling servant; the old
+grumbling servant of the aristocratic comedies. He followed the
+aristocracy, but he growled as he followed. He was obedient without
+being servile, just as Caleb Balderstone was obedient without being
+servile. But Dickens was the type of the man who might really have
+rebelled instead of grumbling. He might have gone out into the street
+and fought, like the man who took the Bastille. It is somewhat
+nationally significant that when we talk of the man in the street it
+means a figure silent, slouching, and even feeble. When the French speak
+of the man in the street, it means danger in the street.
+
+No one can fail to notice this deep difference between Dickens and the
+Carlyle whom he avowedly copied. Splendid and symbolic as are Carlyle's
+scenes of the French Revolution, we have in reading them a curious sense
+that everything is happening at night. In Dickens even massacre happens
+by daylight. Carlyle always assumes that because things were tragedies
+therefore the men who did them felt tragic. Dickens knows that the man
+who works the worst tragedies is the man who feels comic; as for
+example, Mr. Quilp. The French Revolution was a much simpler world than
+Carlyle could understand; for Carlyle was subtle and not simple. Dickens
+could understand it, for he was simple and not subtle. He understood
+that plain rage against plain political injustice; he understood again
+that obvious vindictiveness and that obvious brutality which followed.
+"Cruelty and the abuse of absolute power," he told an American
+slave-owner, "are two of the bad passions of human nature." Carlyle was
+quite incapable of rising to the height of that uplifted common-sense.
+He must always find something mystical about the cruelty of the French
+Revolution. The effect was equally bad whether he found it mystically
+bad and called the thing anarchy, or whether he found it mystically good
+and called it the rule of the strong. In both cases he could not
+understand the common-sense justice or the common-sense vengeance of
+Dickens and the French Revolution.
+
+Yet Dickens has in this book given a perfect and final touch to this
+whole conception of mere rebellion and mere human nature. Carlyle had
+written the story of the French Revolution and had made the story a mere
+tragedy. Dickens writes the story about the French Revolution, and does
+not make the Revolution itself the tragedy at all. Dickens knows that an
+outbreak is seldom a tragedy; generally it is the avoidance of a
+tragedy. All the real tragedies are silent. Men fight each other with
+furious cries, because men fight each other with chivalry and an
+unchangeable sense of brotherhood. But trees fight each other in utter
+stillness; because they fight each other cruelly and without quarter. In
+this book, as in history, the guillotine is not the calamity, but rather
+the solution of the calamity. The sin of Sydney Carton is a sin of
+habit, not of revolution. His gloom is the gloom of London, not the
+gloom of Paris.
+
+  [Illustration: Charles Dickens, Circa 1860
+  Photograph by J. & C. Watkins.]
+
+
+
+
+GREAT EXPECTATIONS
+
+
+_Great Expectations_, which was written in the afternoon of Dickens's
+life and fame, has a quality of serene irony and even sadness, which
+puts it quite alone among his other works. At no time could Dickens
+possibly be called cynical, he had too much vitality; but relatively to
+the other books this book is cynical; but it has the soft and gentle
+cynicism of old age, not the hard cynicism of youth. To be a young cynic
+is to be a young brute; but Dickens, who had been so perfectly romantic
+and sentimental in his youth, could afford to admit this touch of doubt
+into the mixed experience of his middle age. At no time could any books
+by Dickens have been called Thackerayan. Both of the two men were too
+great for that. But relatively to the other Dickensian productions this
+book may be called Thackerayan. It is a study in human weakness and the
+slow human surrender. It describes how easily a free lad of fresh and
+decent instincts can be made to care more for rank and pride and the
+degrees of our stratified society than for old affection and for honour.
+It is an extra chapter to _The Book of Snobs_.
+
+The best way of stating the change which this book marks in Dickens can
+be put in one phrase. In this book for the first time the hero
+disappears. The hero had descended to Dickens by a long line which
+begins with the gods, nay, perhaps if one may say so, which begins with
+God. First comes Deity and then the image of Deity; first comes the god
+and then the demi-god, the Hercules who labours and conquers before he
+receives his heavenly crown. That idea, with continual mystery and
+modification, has continued behind all romantic tales; the demi-god
+became the hero of paganism; the hero of paganism became the
+knight-errant of Christianity; the knight-errant who wandered and was
+foiled before he triumphed became the hero of the later prose romance,
+the romance in which the hero had to fight a duel with the villain but
+always survived, in which the hero drove desperate horses through the
+night in order to rescue the heroine, but always rescued her.
+
+This heroic modern hero, this demi-god in a top-hat, may be said to
+reach his supreme moment and typical example about the time when Dickens
+was writing that thundering and thrilling and highly unlikely scene in
+_Nicholas Nickleby_, the scene where Nicholas hopelessly denounces the
+atrocious Gride in his hour of grinning triumph, and a thud upon the
+floor above tells them that the heroine's tyrannical father has died
+just in time to set her free. That is the apotheosis of the pure heroic
+as Dickens found it, and as Dickens in some sense continued it. It may
+be that it does not appear with quite so much unmistakable youth,
+beauty, valour, and virtue as it does in Nicholas Nickleby. Walter Gay
+is a simpler and more careless hero, but when he is doing any of the
+business of the story he is purely heroic. Kit Nubbles is a humbler
+hero, but he is a hero; when he is good he is very good. Even David
+Copperfield, who confesses to boyish tremors and boyish evasions in his
+account of his boyhood, acts the strict stiff part of the chivalrous
+gentleman in all the active and determining scenes of the tale. But
+_Great Expectations_ may be called, like _Vanity Fair_, a novel without
+a hero. Almost all Thackeray's novels except Esmond are novels without a
+hero, but only one of Dickens's novels can be so described. I do not
+mean that it is a novel without a _jeune premier_, a young man to make
+love; _Pickwick_ is that and _Oliver Twist_, and, perhaps, _The Old
+Curiosity Shop_. I mean that it is a novel without a hero in the same
+far deeper and more deadly sense in which _Pendennis_ is also a novel
+without a hero. I mean that it is a novel which aims chiefly at showing
+that the hero is unheroic.
+
+All such phrases as these must appear of course to overstate the case.
+Pip is a much more delightful person than Nicholas Nickleby. Or to take
+a stronger case for the purpose of our argument, Pip is a much more
+delightful person than Sydney Carton. Still the fact remains. Most of
+Nicholas Nickleby's personal actions are meant to show that he is
+heroic. Most of Pip's actions are meant to show that he is not heroic.
+The study of Sydney Carton is meant to indicate that with all his vices
+Sydney Carton was a hero. The study of Pip is meant to indicate that
+with all his virtues Pip was a snob. The motive of the literary
+explanation is different. Pip and Pendennis are meant to show how
+circumstances can corrupt men. Sam Weller and Hercules are meant to show
+how heroes can subdue circumstances.
+
+This is the preliminary view of the book which is necessary if we are
+to regard it as a real and separate fact in the life of Dickens. Dickens
+had many moods because he was an artist; but he had one great mood,
+because he was a great artist. Any real difference therefore from the
+general drift, or rather (I apologise to Dickens) the general drive of
+his creation is very important. This is the one place in his work in
+which he does, I will not say feel like Thackeray, far less think like
+Thackeray, less still write like Thackeray, but this is the one of his
+works in which he understands Thackeray. He puts himself in some sense
+in the same place; he considers mankind at somewhat the same angle as
+mankind is considered in one of the sociable and sarcastic novels of
+Thackeray. When he deals with Pip he sets out not to show his strength
+like the strength of Hercules, but to show his weakness like the
+weakness of Pendennis. When he sets out to describe Pip's great
+expectation he does not set out, as in a fairytale, with the idea that
+these great expectations will be fulfilled; he sets out from the first
+with the idea that these great expectations will be disappointing. We
+might very well, as I have remarked elsewhere, apply to all Dickens's
+books the title _Great Expectations_. All his books are full of an airy
+and yet ardent expectation of everything; of the next person who shall
+happen to speak, of the next chimney that shall happen to smoke, of the
+next event, of the next ecstasy; of the next fulfilment of any eager
+human fancy. All his books might be called _Great Expectations_. But the
+only book to which he gave the name of _Great Expectations_ was the only
+book in which the expectation was never realised. It was so with the
+whole of that splendid and unconscious generation to which he belonged.
+The whole glory of that old English middle class was that it was
+unconscious; its excellence was entirely in that, that it was the
+culture of the nation, and that it did not know it. If Dickens had ever
+known that he was optimistic, he would have ceased to be happy.
+
+It is necessary to make this first point clear: that in _Great
+Expectations_ Dickens was really trying to be a quiet, a detached, and
+even a cynical observer of human life. Dickens was trying to be
+Thackeray. And the final and startling triumph of Dickens is this: that
+even to this moderate and modern story, he gives an incomparable energy
+which is not moderate and which is not modern. He is trying to be
+reasonable; but in spite of himself he is inspired. He is trying to be
+detailed, but in spite of himself he is gigantic. Compared to the rest
+of Dickens this is Thackeray; but compared to the whole of Thackeray we
+can only say in supreme praise of it that it is Dickens.
+
+Take, for example, the one question of snobbishness. Dickens has
+achieved admirably the description of the doubts and vanities of the
+wretched Pip as he walks down the street in his new gentlemanly clothes,
+the clothes of which he is so proud and so ashamed. Nothing could be so
+exquisitely human, nothing especially could be so exquisitely masculine
+as that combination of self-love and self-assertion and even insolence
+with a naked and helpless sensibility to the slightest breath of
+ridicule. Pip thinks himself better than every one else, and yet anybody
+can snub him; that is the everlasting male, and perhaps the everlasting
+gentleman. Dickens has described perfectly this quivering and
+defenceless dignity. Dickens has described perfectly how ill-armed it is
+against the coarse humour of real humanity--the real humanity which
+Dickens loved, but which idealists and philanthropists do not love, the
+humanity of cabmen and costermongers and men singing in a third-class
+carriage; the humanity of Trabb's boy. In describing Pip's weakness
+Dickens is as true and as delicate as Thackeray. But Thackeray might
+have been easily as true and as delicate as Dickens. This quick and
+quiet eye for the tremors of mankind is a thing which Dickens possessed,
+but which others possessed also. George Eliot or Thackeray could have
+described the weakness of Pip. Exactly what George Eliot and Thackeray
+could not have described was the vigour of Trabb's boy. There would have
+been admirable humour and observation in their accounts of that
+intolerable urchin. Thackeray would have given us little light touches
+of Trabb's boy, absolutely true to the quality and colour of the humour,
+just as in his novels of the eighteenth century, the glimpses of Steele
+or Bolingbroke or Doctor Johnson are exactly and perfectly true to the
+colour and quality of their humour. George Eliot in her earlier books
+would have given us shrewd authentic scraps of the real dialect of
+Trabb's boy, just as she gave us shrewd and authentic scraps of the real
+talk in a Midland country town. In her later books she would have given
+us highly rationalistic explanations of Trabb's boy; which we should not
+have read. But exactly what they could never have given, and exactly
+what Dickens does give, is the _bounce_ of Trabb's boy. It is the real
+unconquerable rush and energy in a character which was the supreme and
+quite indescribable greatness of Dickens. He conquered by rushes; he
+attacked in masses; he carried things at the spear point in a charge of
+spears; he was the Rupert of Fiction. The thing about any figure of
+Dickens, about Sam Weller or Dick Swiveller, or Micawber, or Bagstock,
+or Trabb's boy,--the thing about each one of these persons is that he
+cannot be exhausted. A Dickens character hits you first on the nose and
+then in the waistcoat, and then in the eye and then in the waistcoat
+again, with the blinding rapidity of some battering engine. The scene in
+which Trabb's boy continually overtakes Pip in order to reel and stagger
+as at a first encounter is a thing quite within the real competence of
+such a character; it might have been suggested by Thackeray, or George
+Eliot, or any realist. But the point with Dickens is that there is a
+rush in the boy's rushings; the writer and the reader rush with him.
+They start with him, they stare with him, they stagger with him, they
+share an inexpressible vitality in the air which emanates from this
+violent and capering satirist. Trabb's boy is among other things a boy;
+he has a physical rapture in hurling himself like a boomerang and in
+bouncing to the sky like a ball. It is just exactly in describing this
+quality that Dickens is Dickens and that no one else comes near him. No
+one feels in his bones that Felix Holt was strong as he feels in his
+bones that little Quilp was strong. No one can feel that even Rawdon
+Crawley's splendid smack across the face of Lord Steyne is quite so
+living and life-giving as the "kick after kick" which old Mr. Weller
+dealt the dancing and quivering Stiggins as he drove him towards the
+trough. This quality, whether expressed intellectually or physically,
+is the profoundly popular and eternal quality in Dickens; it is the
+thing that no one else could do. This quality is the quality which has
+always given its continuous power and poetry to the common people
+everywhere. It is life; it is the joy of life felt by those who have
+nothing else but life. It is the thing that all aristocrats have always
+hated and dreaded in the people. And it is the thing which poor Pip
+really hates and dreads in Trabb's boy.
+
+A great man of letters or any great artist is symbolic without knowing
+it. The things he describes are types because they are truths.
+Shakespeare may, or may not, have ever put it to himself that Richard
+the Second was a philosophical symbol; but all good criticism must
+necessarily see him so. It may be a reasonable question whether the
+artist should be allegorical. There can be no doubt among sane men that
+the critic should be allegorical. Spenser may have lost by being less
+realistic than Fielding. But any good criticism of _Tom Jones_ must be
+as mystical as the _Faery Queen_. Hence it is unavoidable in speaking of
+a fine book like _Great Expectations_ that we should give even to its
+unpretentious and realistic figures a certain massive mysticism. Pip is
+Pip, but he is also the well-meaning snob. And this is even more true of
+those two great figures in the tale which stand for the English
+democracy. For, indeed, the first and last word upon the English
+democracy is said in Joe Gargery and Trabb's boy. The actual English
+populace, as distinct from the French populace or the Scotch or Irish
+populace, may be said to lie between those two types. The first is the
+poor man who does not assert himself at all, and the second is the poor
+man who asserts himself entirely with the weapon of sarcasm. The only
+way in which the English now ever rise in revolution is under the symbol
+and leadership of Trabb's boy. What pikes and shillelahs were to the
+Irish populace, what guns and barricades were to the French populace,
+that chaff is to the English populace. It is their weapon, the use of
+which they really understand. It is the one way in which they can make a
+rich man feel uncomfortable, and they use it very justifiably for all it
+is worth. If they do not cut off the heads of tyrants at least they
+sometimes do their best to make the tyrants lose their heads. The gutter
+boys of the great towns carry the art of personal criticism to so rich
+and delicate a degree that some well-dressed persons when they walk past
+a file of them feel as if they were walking past a row of omniscient
+critics or judges with a power of life and death. Here and there only is
+some ordinary human custom, some natural human pleasure suppressed in
+deference to the fastidiousness of the rich. But all the rich tremble
+before the fastidiousness of the poor.
+
+Of the other type of democracy it is far more difficult to speak. It is
+always hard to speak of good things or good people, for in satisfying
+the soul they take away a certain spur to speech. Dickens was often
+called a sentimentalist. In one sense he sometimes was a sentimentalist.
+But if sentimentalism be held to mean something artificial or
+theatrical, then in the core and reality of his character Dickens was
+the very reverse of a sentimentalist. He seriously and definitely loved
+goodness. To see sincerity and charity satisfied him like a meal. What
+some critics call his love of sweet stuff is really his love of plain
+beef and bread. Sometimes one is tempted to wish that in the long
+Dickens dinner the sweet courses could be left out; but this does not
+make the whole banquet other than a banquet singularly solid and simple.
+The critics complain of the sweet things, but not because they are so
+strong as to like simple things. They complain of the sweet things
+because they are so sophisticated as to like sour things; their tongues
+are tainted with the bitterness of absinthe. Yet because of the very
+simplicity of Dickens's moral tastes it is impossible to speak
+adequately of them; and Joe Gargery must stand as he stands in the book,
+a thing too obvious to be understood. But this may be said of him in one
+of his minor aspects, that he stands for a certain long-suffering in the
+English poor, a certain weary patience and politeness which almost
+breaks the heart. One cannot help wondering whether that great mass of
+silent virtue will ever achieve anything on this earth.
+
+
+
+
+OUR MUTUAL FRIEND
+
+
+_Our Mutual Friend_ marks a happy return to the earlier manner of
+Dickens at the end of Dickens's life. One might call it a sort of Indian
+summer of his farce. Those who most truly love Dickens love the earlier
+Dickens; and any return to his farce must be welcomed, like a young man
+come back from the dead. In this book indeed he does not merely return
+to his farce; he returns in a manner to his vulgarity. It is the old
+democratic and even uneducated Dickens who is writing here. The very
+title is illiterate. Any priggish pupil teacher could tell Dickens that
+there is no such phrase in English as "our mutual friend." Any one could
+tell Dickens that "our mutual friend" means "our reciprocal friend," and
+that "our reciprocal friend" means nothing. If he had only had all the
+solemn advantages of academic learning (the absence of which in him was
+lamented by the _Quarterly Review_), he would have known better. He
+would have known that the correct phrase for a man known to two people
+is "our common friend." But if one calls one's friend a common friend,
+even that phrase is open to misunderstanding.
+
+I dwell with a gloomy pleasure on this mistake in the very title of the
+book because I, for one, am not pleased to see Dickens gradually
+absorbed by modern culture and good manners. Dickens, by class and
+genius, belonged to the kind of people who do talk about a "mutual
+friend"; and for that class there is a very great deal to be said. These
+two things can at least be said--that this class does understand the
+meaning of the word "friend" and the meaning of the word "mutual." I
+know that for some long time before he had been slowly and subtly sucked
+into the whirlpool of the fashionable views of later England. I know
+that in _Bleak House_ he treats the aristocracy far more tenderly than
+he treats them in _David Copperfield_. I know that in _A Tale of Two
+Cities_, having come under the influence of Carlyle, he treats
+revolution as strange and weird, whereas under the influence of Cobbett
+he would have treated it as obvious and reasonable. I know that in _The
+Mystery of Edwin Drood_ he not only praised the Minor Canon of
+Cloisterham at the expense of the dissenting demagogue, Honeythunder; I
+know that he even took the last and most disastrous step in the modern
+English reaction. While blaming the old Cloisterham monks (who were
+democratic), he praised the old-world peace that they had left behind
+them--an old-world peace which is simply one of the last amusements of
+aristocracy. The modern rich feel quite at home with the dead monks.
+They would have felt anything but comfortable with the live ones. I
+know, in short, how the simple democracy of Dickens was gradually dimmed
+by the decay and reaction of the middle of the nineteenth century. I
+know that he fell into some of the bad habits of aristocratic
+sentimentalism. I know that he used the word "gentleman" as meaning good
+man. But all this only adds to the unholy joy with which I realise that
+the very title of one of his best books was a vulgarism. It is pleasant
+to contemplate this last unconscious knock in the eye for the gentility
+with which Dickens was half impressed. Dickens is the old self-made man;
+you may take him or leave him. He has its disadvantages and its merits.
+No university man would have written the title; no university man could
+have written the book.
+
+If it were a mere matter of the accident of a name it would not be worth
+while thus to dwell on it, even as a preface. But the title is in this
+respect typical of the tale. The novel called _Our Mutual Friend_ is in
+many ways a real reaction towards the earlier Dickens manner. I have
+remarked that _Little Dorrit_ was a reversion to the form of the first
+books, but not to their spirit; _Our Mutual Friend_ is a reversion to
+the spirit as well as the form. Compare, for instance, the public
+figures that make a background in each book. Mr. Merdle is a commercial
+man having no great connection with the plot; similarly Mr. Podsnap is a
+commercial man having no great connection with the plot. This is
+altogether in the spirit of the earlier books; the whole point of an
+early Dickens novel was to have as many people as possible entirely
+unconnected with the plot. But exactly because both studies are
+irrelevant, the contrast between them can be more clearly perceived.
+Dickens goes out of his way to describe Merdle; and it is a gloomy
+description. But Dickens goes out of his way to describe Podsnap, and it
+is a happy and hilarious description. It recalls the days when he hunted
+great game; when he went out of his way to entrap such adorable monsters
+as Mr. Pecksniff or Mr. Vincent Crummles. With these wild beings we
+never bother about the cause of their coming. Such guests in a story
+may be uninvited, but they are never _de trop_. They earn their night's
+lodging in any tale by being so uproariously amusing; like little Tommy
+Tucker in the legend, they sing for their supper. This is really the
+marked truth about _Our Mutual Friend_, as a stage in the singular
+latter career of Dickens. It is like the leaping up and flaming of a
+slowly dying fire. The best things in the book are in the old best
+manner of the author. They have that great Dickens quality of being
+something which is pure farce and yet which is not superficial; an
+unfathomable farce--a farce that goes down to the roots of the universe.
+The highest compliment that can ever be paid to the humour of Dickens is
+paid when some lady says, with the sudden sincerity of her sex, that it
+is "too silly." The phrase is really a perfectly sound and acute
+criticism. Humour does consist in being too silly, in passing the
+borderland, in breaking through the floor of sense and falling into some
+starry abyss of nonsense far below our ordinary human life. This "too
+silly" quality is really present in _Our Mutual Friend_. It is present
+in _Our Mutual Friend_ just as it is present in _Pickwick_, or _Martin
+Chuzzlewit_; just as it is not present in _Little Dorrit_ or in _Hard
+Times_. Many tests might be employed. One is the pleasure in purely
+physical jokes--jokes about the body. The general dislike which every
+one felt for Mr. Stiggins's nose is of the same kind as the ardent
+desire which Mr. Lammle felt for Mr. Fledgeby's nose. "Give me your
+nose, Sir," said Mr. Lammle. That sentence alone would be enough to show
+that the young Dickens had never died.
+
+The opening of a book goes for a great deal. The opening of _Our Mutual
+Friend_ is much more instinctively energetic and light-hearted than that
+of any of the other novels of his concluding period. Dickens had always
+enough optimism to make his stories end well. He had not, in his later
+years, always enough optimism to make them begin well. Even _Great
+Expectations_, the saddest of his later books, ends well; it ends well
+in spite of himself, who had intended it to end badly. But if we leave
+the evident case of good endings and take the case of good beginnings,
+we see how much _Our Mutual Friend_ stands out from among the other
+novels of the evening or the end of Dickens. The tale of _Little Dorrit_
+begins in a prison. One of the prisoners is a villain, and his villainy
+is as dreary as the prison; that might matter nothing. But the other
+prisoner is vivacious, and even his vivacity is dreary. The first note
+struck is sad. In the tale of _Edwin Drood_ the first scene is in an
+opium den, suffocated with every sort of phantasy and falsehood. Nor is
+it true that these openings are merely accidental; they really cast
+their shadow over the tales. The people of _Little Dorrit_ begin in
+prison; and it is the whole point of the book that people never get out
+of prison. The story of _Edwin Drood_ begins amid the fumes of opium,
+and it never gets out of the fumes of opium. The darkness of that
+strange and horrible smoke is deliberately rolled over the whole story.
+Dickens, in his later years, permitted more and more his story to take
+the cue from its inception. All the more remarkable, therefore, is the
+real jerk and spurt of good spirits with which he opens _Our Mutual
+Friend_. It begins with a good piece of rowdy satire, wildly exaggerated
+and extremely true. It belongs to the same class as the first chapter
+of _Martin Chuzzlewit_, with its preposterous pedigree of the Chuzzlewit
+family, or even the first chapter of _Pickwick_, with its immortal
+imbecilities about the Theory of Tittlebats and Mr. Blotton of Aldgate.
+Doubtless the early satiric chapter in _Our Mutual Friend_ is of a more
+strategic and ingenious kind of satire than can be found in these early
+and explosive parodies. Still, there is a quality common to both, and
+that quality is the whole of Dickens. It is a quality difficult to
+define--hence the whole difficulty of criticising Dickens. Perhaps it
+can be best stated in two separate statements or as two separate
+symptoms. The first is the mere fact that the reader rushes to read it.
+The second is the mere fact that the writer rushed to write it.
+
+This beginning, which is like a burst of the old exuberant Dickens, is,
+of course, the Veneering dinner-party. In its own way it is as good as
+anything that Dickens ever did. There is the old faculty of managing a
+crowd, of making character clash with character, that had made Dickens
+not only the democrat but even the demagogue of fiction. For if it is
+hard to manage a mob, it is hardest of all to manage a swell mob. The
+particular kind of chaos that is created by the hospitality of a rich
+upstart has perhaps never been so accurately and outrageously described.
+Every touch about the thing is true; to this day any one can test it if
+he goes to a dinner of this particular kind. How admirable, for
+instance, is the description of the way in which all the guests ignored
+the host; how the host and hostess peered and gaped for some stray
+attention as if they had been a pair of poor relations. Again, how well,
+as a matter of social colour, the distinctions between the type and
+tone of the guests are made even in the matter of this unguestlike
+insolence. How well Dickens distinguishes the ill-bred indifference of
+Podsnap from the well-bred indifference of Mortimer Lightwood and Eugene
+Wrayburn. How well he distinguishes the bad manners of the merchant from
+the equally typical bad manners of the gentleman. Above all, how well he
+catches the character of the creature who is really the master of all
+these: the impenetrable male servant. Nowhere in literature is the truth
+about servants better told. For that truth is simply this: that the
+secret of aristocracy is hidden even from aristocrats. Servants,
+butlers, footmen, are the high priests who have the real dispensation;
+and even gentlemen are afraid of them. Dickens was never more right than
+when he made the new people, the Veneerings, employ a butler who
+despised not only them but all their guests and acquaintances. The
+admirable person called the Analytical Chemist shows his perfection
+particularly in the fact that he regards all the sham gentlemen and all
+the real gentlemen with the same gloomy and incurable contempt. He
+offers wine to the offensive Podsnap or the shrieking Tippins with a
+melancholy sincerity and silence; but he offers his letter to the
+aristocratic and unconscious Mortimer with the same sincerity and with
+the same silence. It is a great pity that the Analytical Chemist only
+occurs in two or three scenes of this excellent story. As far as I know,
+he never really says a word from one end of the book to the other; but
+he is one of the best characters in Dickens.
+
+Round the Veneering dinner-table are collected not indeed the best
+characters in Dickens, but certainly the best characters in _Our Mutual
+Friend_. Certainly one exception must be made. Fledgeby is unaccountably
+absent. There was really no reason why he should not have been present
+at a dinner-party given by the Veneerings and including the Lammles. His
+money was at least more genuine than theirs. If he had been present the
+party would really have included all that is important in _Our Mutual
+Friend_. For indeed, outside Mr. Fledgeby and the people at the
+dinner-party, there is something a little heavy and careless about the
+story. Mr. Silas Wegg is really funny; and he serves the purpose of a
+necessary villain in the plot. But his humour and his villainy seem to
+have no particular connection with each other; when he is not scheming
+he seems the last man likely to scheme. He is rather like one of
+Dickens's agreeable Bohemians, a pleasant companion, a quoter of fine
+verses. His villainy seems an artificial thing attached to him, like his
+wooden leg. For while his villainy is supposed to be of a dull, mean,
+and bitter sort (quite unlike, for instance, the uproarious villainy of
+Quilp), his humour is of the sincere, flowing and lyric character, like
+that of Dick Swiveller or Mr. Micawber. He tells Mr. Boffin that he will
+drop into poetry in a friendly way. He does drop into it in a friendly
+way; in much too really a friendly way to make him convincing as a mere
+calculating knave. He and Mr. Venus are such natural and genuine
+companions that one does not see why if Venus repents Wegg should not
+repent too. In short, Wegg is a convenience for a plot and not a very
+good plot at that. But if he is one of the blots on the business, he is
+not the principal one. If the real degradation of Wegg is not very
+convincing, it is at least immeasurably more convincing than the
+pretended degradation of Boffin. The passage in which Boffin appears as
+a sort of miser, and then afterwards explains that he only assumed the
+character for reasons of his own, has something about it highly jerky
+and unsatisfactory. The truth of the whole matter I think, almost
+certainly, is that Dickens did not originally mean Boffin's lapse to be
+fictitious. He originally meant Boffin really to be corrupted by wealth,
+slowly to degenerate and as slowly to repent. But the story went too
+quickly for this long, double, and difficult process; therefore Dickens
+at the last moment made a sudden recovery possible by representing that
+the whole business had been a trick. Consequently, this episode is not
+an error merely in the sense that we may find many errors in a great
+writer like Dickens; it is a mistake patched up with another mistake. It
+is a case of that ossification which occurs round the healing of an
+actual fracture; the story had broken down and been mended.
+
+If Dickens had fulfilled what was probably his original design, and
+described the slow freezing of Boffin's soul in prosperity, I do not say
+that he would have done the thing well. He was not good at describing
+change in anybody, especially not good at describing a change for the
+worse. The tendency of all his characters is upwards, like bubbles,
+never downwards, like stones. But at least it would probably have been
+more credible than the story as it stands; for the story as it stands is
+actually less credible than any conceivable kind of moral ruin for
+Boffin. Such a character as his--rough, simple and lumberingly
+unconscious--might be more easily conceived as really sinking in
+self-respect and honour than as keeping up, month after month, so
+strained and inhuman a theatrical performance. To a good man (of that
+particular type) it would be easier to be bad than to pretend to be bad.
+It might have taken years to turn Noddy Boffin into a miser; but it
+would have taken centuries to turn him into an actor. This unreality in
+the later Boffin scenes makes the end of the story of John Harmon
+somewhat more unimpressive perhaps than it might otherwise have been.
+Upon no hypothesis, however, can he be made one of the more impressive
+figures of Dickens. It is true that it is an unfair criticism to object,
+as some have done, that Dickens does not succeed in disguising the
+identity of John Harmon with John Rokesmith. Dickens never intended to
+disguise it; the whole story would be mainly unintelligible and largely
+uninteresting if it had been successfully disguised. But though John
+Harmon or Rokesmith was never intended to be merely a man of mystery, it
+is not quite so easy to say what he was intended to be. Bella is a
+possible and pretty sketch. Mrs. Wilfer, her mother, is an entirely
+impossible and entirely delightful one. Miss Podsnap is not only
+excellent, she is to a healthy taste positively attractive; there is a
+real suggestion in her of the fact that humility is akin to truth, even
+when humility takes its more comic form of shyness. There is not in all
+literature a more human _cri de coeur_ than that with which Georgiana
+Podsnap receives the information that a young man has professed himself
+to be attracted by her--"Oh what a Fool he must be!"
+
+Two other figures require praise, though they are in the more tragic
+manner which Dickens touched from time to time in his later period.
+Bradley Headstone is really a successful villain; so successful that he
+fully captures our sympathies. Also there is something original in the
+very conception. It was a new notion to add to the villains of fiction,
+whose thoughts go quickly, this villain whose thoughts go slow but sure;
+and it was a new notion to combine a deadly criminality not with high
+life or the slums (the usual haunts for villains) but with the laborious
+respectability of the lower, middle classes. The other good conception
+is the boy, Bradley Headstone's pupil, with his dull, inexhaustible
+egoism, his pert, unconscious cruelty, and the strict decorum and
+incredible baseness of his views of life. It is singular that Dickens,
+who was not only a radical and a social reformer, but one who would have
+been particularly concerned to maintain the principle of modern popular
+education, should nevertheless have seen so clearly this potential evil
+in the mere educationalism of our time--the fact that merely educating
+the democracy may easily mean setting to work to despoil it of all the
+democratic virtues. It is better to be Lizzie Hexam and not know how to
+read and write than to be Charlie Hexam and not know how to appreciate
+Lizzie Hexam. It is not only necessary that the democracy should be
+taught; it is also necessary that the democracy should be taught
+democracy. Otherwise it will certainly fall a victim to that
+snobbishness and system of worldly standards which is the most natural
+and easy of all the forms of human corruption. This is one of the many
+dangers which Dickens saw before it existed. Dickens was really a
+prophet; far more of a prophet than Carlyle.
+
+  [Illustration: Charles Dickens, 1868
+  From a photograph by Gurney.]
+
+
+
+
+EDWIN DROOD
+
+
+_Pickwick_ was a work partly designed by others, but ultimately filled
+up by Dickens. _Edwin Drood_, the last book, was a book designed by
+Dickens, but ultimately filled up by others. The _Pickwick Papers_
+showed how much Dickens could make out of other people's suggestions;
+_The Mystery of Edwin Drood_ shows how very little other people can make
+out of Dickens's suggestions.
+
+Dickens was meant by Heaven to be the great melodramatist; so that even
+his literary end was melodramatic. Something more seems hinted at in the
+cutting short of _Edwin Drood_ by Dickens than the mere cutting short of
+a good novel by a great man. It seems rather like the last taunt of some
+elf, leaving the world, that it should be this story which is not ended,
+this story which is only a story. The only one of Dickens's novels which
+he did not finish was the only one that really needed finishing. He
+never had but one thoroughly good plot to tell; and that he has only
+told in heaven. This is what separates the case in question from any
+parallel cases of novelists cut off in the act of creation. That great
+novelist, for instance, with whom Dickens is constantly compared, died
+also in the middle of _Denis Duval_. But any one can see in _Denis
+Duval_ the qualities of the later work of Thackeray; the increasing
+discursiveness, the increasing retrospective poetry, which had been in
+part the charm and in part the failure of _Philip_ and _The Virginians_.
+But to Dickens it was permitted to die at a dramatic moment and to leave
+a dramatic mystery. Any Thackerayan could have completed the plot of
+_Denis Duval_; except indeed that a really sympathetic Thackerayan might
+have had some doubt as to whether there was any plot to complete. But
+Dickens, having had far too little plot in his stories previously, had
+far too much plot in the story he never told. Dickens dies in the act of
+telling, not his tenth novel, but his first news of murder. He drops
+down dead as he is in the act of denouncing the assassin. It is
+permitted to Dickens, in short, to come to a literary end as strange as
+his literary beginning. He began by completing the old romance of
+travel. He ended by inventing the new detective story.
+
+It is as a detective story first and last that we have to consider _The
+Mystery of Edwin Drood_. This does not mean, of course, that the details
+are not often admirable in their swift and penetrating humour; to say
+that of the book would be to say that Dickens did not write it. Nothing
+could be truer, for instance, than the manner in which the dazed and
+drunken dignity of Durdles illustrates a certain bitterness at the
+bottom of the bewilderment of the poor. Nothing could be better than the
+way in which the haughty and allusive conversation between Miss
+Twinkleton and the landlady illustrates the maddening preference of some
+females for skating upon thin social ice. There is an even better
+example than these of the original humorous insight of Dickens; and one
+not very often remarked, because of its brevity and its unimportance in
+the narrative. But Dickens never did anything better than the short
+account of Mr. Grewgious's dinner being brought from the tavern by two
+waiters: "a stationary waiter," and "a flying waiter." The "flying
+waiter" brought the food and the "stationary waiter" quarrelled with
+him; the "flying waiter" brought glasses and the "stationary waiter"
+looked through them. Finally, it will be remembered the "stationary
+waiter" left the room, casting a glance which indicated "let it be
+understood that all emoluments are mine, and that Nil is the reward of
+this slave." Still, Dickens wrote the book as a detective story; he
+wrote it as _The Mystery of Edwin Drood_. And alone, perhaps, among
+detective-story writers, he never lived to destroy his mystery. Here
+alone then among the Dickens novels it is necessary to speak of the plot
+and of the plot alone. And when we speak of the plot it becomes
+immediately necessary to speak of the two or three standing explanations
+which celebrated critics have given of the plot.
+
+The story, so far as it was written by Dickens, can be read here. It
+describes, as will be seen, the disappearance of the young architect
+Edwin Drood after a night of festivity which was supposed to celebrate
+his reconciliation with a temporary enemy, Neville Landless, and was
+held at the house of his uncle John Jasper. Dickens continued the tale
+long enough to explain or explode the first and most obvious of his
+riddles. Long before the existing part terminates it has become evident
+that Drood has been put away, not by his obvious opponent, Landless, but
+by his uncle who professes for him an almost painful affection. The fact
+that we all know this, however, ought not in fairness to blind us to
+the fact that, considered as the first fraud in a detective story, it
+has been, with great skill, at once suggested and concealed. Nothing,
+for instance, could be cleverer as a piece of artistic mystery than the
+fact that Jasper, the uncle, always kept his eyes fixed on Drood's face
+with a dark and watchful tenderness; the thing is so told that at first
+we really take it as only indicating something morbid in the affection;
+it is only afterwards that the frightful fancy breaks upon us that it is
+not morbid affection but morbid antagonism. This first mystery (which is
+no longer a mystery) of Jasper's guilt, is only worth remarking because
+it shows that Dickens meant and felt himself able to mask all his
+batteries with real artistic strategy and artistic caution. The manner
+of the unmasking of Jasper marks the manner and tone in which the whole
+tale was to be told. Here we have not got to do with Dickens simply
+giving himself away, as he gave himself away in _Pickwick_ or _The
+Christmas Carol_. Not that one complains of his giving himself away;
+there was no better gift.
+
+What was the mystery of Edwin Drood from Dickens's point of view we
+shall never know, except perhaps from Dickens in heaven, and then he
+will very likely have forgotten. But the mystery of Edwin Drood from our
+point of view, from that of his critics, and those who have with some
+courage (after his death) attempted to be his collaborators, is simply
+this. There is no doubt that Jasper either murdered Drood or supposed
+that he had murdered him. This certainty we have from the fact that it
+is the whole point of a scene between Jasper and Drood's lawyer
+Grewgious in which Jasper is struck down with remorse when he realises
+that Drood has been killed (from his point of view) needlessly and
+without profit. The only question is whether Jasper's remorse was as
+needless as his murder. In other words the only question is whether,
+while he certainly thought he had murdered Drood, he had really done it.
+It need hardly be said that such a doubt would not have been raised for
+nothing; gentlemen like Jasper do not as a rule waste good remorse
+except upon successful crime. The origin of the doubt about the real
+death of Drood is this. Towards the latter end of the existing chapters
+there appears very abruptly, and with a quite ostentatious air of
+mystery, a character called Datchery. He appears for the purpose of
+spying upon Jasper and getting up some case against him; at any rate, if
+he has not this purpose in the story he has no other earthly purpose in
+it. He is an old gentleman of juvenile energy, with a habit of carrying
+his hat in his hand even in the open air; which some have interpreted as
+meaning that he feels the unaccustomed weight of a wig. Now there are
+one or two people in the story who this person might possibly be.
+Notably there is one person in the story who seems as if he were meant
+to be something, but who hitherto has certainly been nothing; I mean
+Bazzard, Mr. Grewgious's clerk, a sulky fellow interested in
+theatricals, of whom an unnecessary fuss is made. There is also Mr.
+Grewgious himself, and there is also another suggestion, so much more
+startling that I shall have to deal with it later.
+
+For the moment, however, the point is this: That ingenious writer, Mr.
+Proctor, started the highly plausible theory that this Datchery was
+Drood himself, who had not really been killed. He adduced a most complex
+and complete scheme covering nearly all the details; but the strongest
+argument he had was rather one of general artistic effect. This argument
+has been quite perfectly summed up by Mr. Andrew Lang in one sentence:
+"If Edwin Drood is dead, there is not much mystery about him." This is
+quite true; Dickens, when writing in so deliberate, nay, dark and
+conspiratorial a manner, would surely have kept the death of Drood and
+the guilt of Jasper hidden a little longer if the only real mystery had
+been the guilt of Jasper and the death of Drood. It certainly seems
+artistically more likely that there was a further mystery of Edwin
+Drood; not the mystery that he was murdered, but the mystery that he was
+not murdered. It is true indeed that Mr. Cumming Walters has a theory of
+Datchery (to which I have already darkly alluded) a theory which is wild
+enough to be the centre not only of any novel but of any harlequinade.
+But the point is that even Mr. Cumming Walters's theory, though it makes
+the mystery more extraordinary, does not make it any more of a mystery
+of Edwin Drood. It should not have been called _The Mystery of Drood_,
+but _The Mystery of Datchery_. This is the strongest case for Proctor;
+if the story tells of Drood coming back as Datchery, the story does at
+any rate fulfil the title upon its title-page.
+
+The principal objection to Proctor's theory is that there seems no
+adequate reason why Jasper should not have murdered his nephew if he
+wanted to. And there seems even less reason why Drood, if unsuccessfully
+murdered, should not have raised the alarm. Happy young architects,
+when nearly strangled by elderly organists, do not generally stroll away
+and come back some time afterwards in a wig and with a false name.
+Superficially it would seem almost as odd to find the murderer
+investigating the origin of the murder, as to find the corpse
+investigating it. To this problem two of the ablest literary critics of
+our time, Mr. Andrew Lang and Mr. William Archer (both of them persuaded
+generally of the Proctor theory) have especially addressed themselves.
+Both have come to the same substantial conclusion; and I suspect that
+they are right. They hold that Jasper (whose mania for opium is much
+insisted on in the tale) had some sort of fit, or trance, or other
+physical seizure as he was committing the crime so that he left it
+unfinished; and they also hold that he had drugged Drood, so that Drood,
+when he recovered from the attack, was doubtful about who had been his
+assailant. This might really explain, if a little fancifully, his coming
+back to the town in the character of a detective. He might think it due
+to his uncle (whom he last remembered in a kind of murderous vision) to
+make an independent investigation as to whether he was really guilty or
+not. He might say, as Hamlet said of a vision equally terrifying, "I'll
+have grounds more relative than this." In fairness it must be said that
+there is something vaguely shaky about this theory; chiefly, I think, in
+this respect; that there is a sort of farcical cheerfulness about
+Datchery which does not seem altogether appropriate to a lad who ought
+to be in an agony of doubt as to whether his best friend was or was not
+his assassin. Still there are many such incongruities in Dickens; and
+the explanation of Mr. Archer and Mr. Lang is an explanation. I do not
+believe that any explanation as good can be given to account for the
+tale being called _The Mystery of Edwin Drood_, if the tale practically
+starts with his corpse.
+
+If Drood is really dead one cannot help feeling the story ought to end
+where it does end, not by accident but by design. The murder is
+explained. Jasper is ready to be hanged, and every one else in a decent
+novel ought to be ready to be married. If there was to be much more of
+anything, it must have been of anticlimax. Nevertheless there are
+degrees of anticlimax. Some of the more obvious explanations of Datchery
+are quite reasonable, but they are distinctly tame. For instance,
+Datchery may be Bazzard; but it is not very exciting if he is; for we
+know nothing about Bazzard and care less. Again, he might be Grewgious;
+but there is something pointless about one grotesque character dressing
+up as another grotesque character actually less amusing than himself.
+Now, Mr. Cumming Walters has at least had the distinction of inventing a
+theory which makes the story at least an interesting story, even if it
+is not exactly the story that is promised on the cover of the book. The
+obvious enemy of Drood, on whom suspicion first falls, the swarthy and
+sulky Landless, has a sister even swarthier and, except for her queenly
+dignity, even sulkier than he. This barbaric princess is evidently meant
+to be (in a sombre way) in love with Crisparkle, the clergyman and
+muscular Christian who represents the breezy element in the emotions of
+the tale. Mr. Cumming Walters seriously maintains that it is this
+barbaric princess who puts on a wig and dresses up as Mr. Datchery. He
+urges his case with much ingenuity of detail. Helena Landless certainly
+had a motive; to save her brother, who was accused falsely, by accusing
+Jasper justly. She certainly had some of the faculties; it is
+elaborately stated in the earlier part of her story that she was
+accustomed as a child to dress up in male costume and run into the
+wildest adventures. There may be something in Mr. Cumming Walters's
+argument that the very flippancy of Datchery is the self-conscious
+flippancy of a strong woman in such an odd situation; certainly there is
+the same flippancy in Portia and in Rosalind. Nevertheless, I think,
+there is one final objection to the theory; and that is simply this,
+that it is comic. It is generally wrong to represent a great master of
+the grotesque as being grotesque exactly where he does not intend to be.
+And I am persuaded that if Dickens had really meant Helena to turn into
+Datchery, he would have made her from the first in some way more light,
+eccentric, and laughable; he would have made her at least as light and
+laughable as Rosa. As it is, there is something strangely stiff and
+incredible about the idea of a lady so dark and dignified dressing up as
+a swaggering old gentleman in a blue coat and grey trousers. We might
+almost as easily imagine Edith Dombey dressing up as Major Bagstock. We
+might almost as easily imagine Rebecca in _Ivanhoe_ dressing up as Isaac
+of York.
+
+Of course such a question can never really be settled precisely, because
+it is the question not merely of a mystery but of a puzzle. For here the
+detective novel differs from every other kind of novel. The ordinary
+novelist desires to keep his readers to the point; the detective
+novelist actually desires to keep his readers off the point. In the
+first case, every touch must help to tell the reader what he means; in
+the second case, most of the touches must conceal or even contradict
+what he means. You are supposed to see and appreciate the smallest
+gestures of a good actor; but you do not see all the gestures of a
+conjuror, if he is a good conjuror. Hence, into the critical estimate of
+such works as this, there is introduced a problem, an extra perplexity,
+which does not exist in other cases. I mean the problem of the things
+commonly called blinds. Some of the points which we pick out as
+suggestive may have been put in as deceptive. Thus the whole conflict
+between a critic with one theory, like Mr. Lang, and a critic with
+another theory, like Mr. Cumming Walters, becomes eternal and a trifle
+farcical. Mr. Walters says that all Mr. Lang's clues were blinds; Mr.
+Lang says that all Mr. Walters's clues were blinds. Mr. Walters can say
+that some passages seemed to show that Helena was Datchery; Mr. Lang can
+reply that those passages were only meant to deceive simple people like
+Mr. Walters into supposing that she was Datchery. Similarly Mr. Lang can
+say that the return of Drood is foreshadowed; and Mr. Walters can reply
+that it was foreshadowed because it was never meant to come off. There
+seems no end to this insane process; anything that Dickens wrote may or
+may not mean the opposite of what it says. Upon this principle I should
+be very ready for one to declare that all the suggested Datcherys were
+really blinds; merely because they can naturally be suggested. I would
+undertake to maintain that Mr. Datchery is really Miss Twinkleton, who
+has a mercenary interest in keeping Rosa Budd at her school. This
+suggestion does not seem to me to be really much more humorous than Mr.
+Cumming Walters's theory. Yet either may certainly be true. Dickens is
+dead, and a number of splendid scenes and startling adventures have died
+with him. Even if we get the right solution we shall not know that it is
+right. The tale might have been, and yet it has not been.
+
+And I think there is no thought so much calculated to make one doubt
+death itself, to feel that sublime doubt which has created all
+religion--the doubt that found death incredible. Edwin Drood may or may
+not have really died; but surely Dickens did not really die. Surely our
+real detective liveth and shall appear in the latter days of the earth.
+For a finished tale may give a man immortality in the light and literary
+sense; but an unfinished tale suggests another immortality, more
+essential and more strange.
+
+
+
+
+MASTER HUMPHREY'S CLOCK
+
+
+It is quite indispensable to include a criticism of _Master Humphrey's
+Clock_ in any survey of Dickens, although it is not one of the books of
+which his admirers would chiefly boast; although perhaps it is almost
+the only one of which he would not have boasted himself. As a triumph of
+Dickens, at least, it is not of great importance. But as a sample of
+Dickens it happens to be of quite remarkable importance. The very fact
+that it is for the most part somewhat more level and even monotonous
+than most of his creations, makes us realise, as it were, against what
+level and monotony those creations commonly stand out. This book is the
+background of his mind. It is the basis and minimum of him which was
+always there. Alone, of all written things, this shows how he felt when
+he was not writing. Dickens might have written it in his sleep. That is
+to say, it is written by a sluggish Dickens, a half automatic Dickens, a
+dreaming and drifting Dickens; but still by the enduring Dickens.
+
+But this truth can only be made evident by beginning nearer to the root
+of the matter. _Nicholas Nickleby_ had just completed, or, to speak more
+strictly, confirmed, the popularity of the young author; wonderful as
+_Pickwick_ was it might have been a nine days' wonder; _Oliver Twist_
+had been powerful but painful; it was _Nicholas Nickleby_ that proved
+the man to be a great productive force of which one could ask more, of
+which one could ask all things. His publishers, Chapman and Hall, seem
+to have taken at about this point that step which sooner or later most
+publishers do take with regard to a half successful man who is becoming
+wholly successful. Instead of asking him for something, they asked him
+for anything. They made him, so to speak, the editor of his own works.
+And indeed it is literally as the editor of his own works that he next
+appears; for the next thing to which he proposes to put his name is not
+a novel, but for all practical purposes a magazine. Yet although it is a
+magazine, it is a magazine entirely written by himself; the publishers,
+in point of fact, wanted to create a kind of Dickens Miscellany, in a
+much more literal sense than that in which we speak of a Bentley
+Miscellany. Dickens was in no way disposed to dislike such a job; for
+the more miscellaneous he was the more he enjoyed himself. And indeed
+this early experiment of his bears a great deal of resemblance to those
+later experiences in which he was the editor of two popular periodicals.
+The editor of _Master Humphrey's Clock_ was a kind of type or precursor
+of the editor of _Household Words_ and _All the Year Round_. There was
+the same sense of absolute ease in an atmosphere of infinite gossip.
+There was the same great advantage gained by a man of genius who wrote
+best scrappily and by episodes. The omnipotence of the editor helped the
+eccentricities of the author. He could excuse himself for all his own
+shortcomings. He could begin a novel, get tired of it, and turn it into
+a short story. He could begin a short story, get fond of it, and turn
+it into a novel. Thus in the days of _Household Words_ he could begin a
+big scheme of stories, such as _Somebody's Luggage_, or _Seven Poor
+Travellers_, and after writing a tale or two toss the rest to his
+colleagues. Thus, on the other hand, in the time of _Master Humphrey's
+Clock_, he could begin one small adventure of Master Humphrey and find
+himself unable to stop it. It is quite clear I think (though only from
+moral evidence, which some call reading between the lines) that he
+originally meant to tell many separate tales of Master Humphrey's
+wanderings in London, only one of which, and that a short one, was to
+have been concerned with a little girl going home. Fortunately for us
+that little girl had a grandfather, and that grandfather had a curiosity
+shop and also a nephew, and that nephew had an entirely irrelevant
+friend whom men and angels called Richard Swiveller. Once having come
+into the society of Swiveller it is not unnatural that Dickens stayed
+there for a whole book. The essential point for us here, however, is
+that _Master Humphrey's Clock_ was stopped by the size and energy of the
+thing that had come of it. It died in childbirth.
+
+There is, however, another circumstance which, even in ordinary public
+opinion, makes this miscellany important, besides the great novel that
+came out of it. I mean that the ordinary reader can remember one great
+thing about _Master Humphrey's Clock_, besides the fact that it was the
+frame-work of _The Old Curiosity Shop_. He remembers that Mr. Pickwick
+and the Wellers rise again from the dead. Dickens makes Samuel Pickwick
+become a member of Master Humphrey's Clock Society; and he institutes a
+parallel society in the kitchen under the name of Mr. Weller's Watch.
+
+Before we consider the question of whether Dickens was wise when he did
+this, it is worth remarking how really odd it is that this is the only
+place where he did it. Dickens, one would have thought, was the one man
+who might naturally have introduced old characters into new stories.
+Dickens, as a matter of fact, was almost the one man who never did it.
+It would have seemed natural in him for a double reason; first, that his
+characters were very valuable to him, and second that they were not very
+valuable to his particular stories. They were dear to him, and they are
+dear to us; but they really might as well have turned up (within reason)
+in one environment as well as in another. We, I am sure, should be
+delighted to meet Mr. Mantalini in the story of _Dombey and Son_. And he
+certainly would not be much missed from the plot of Nicholas Nickleby.
+"I am an affectionate father," said Dickens, "to all the children of my
+fancy; but like many other parents I have in my heart of hearts a
+favourite child; and his name is David Copperfield." Yet although his
+heart must often have yearned backwards to the children of his fancy
+whose tale was already told, yet he never touched one of them again even
+with the point of his pen. The characters in _David Copperfield_, as in
+all the others, were dead for him after he had done the book; if he
+loved them as children, it was as dead and sanctified children. It is a
+curious test of the strength and even reticence that underlay the
+seeming exuberance of Dickens, that he never did yield at all to
+exactly that indiscretion or act of sentimentalism which would seem most
+natural to his emotions and his art. Or rather he never did yield to it
+except here in this one case; the case of _Master Humphrey's Clock_.
+
+And it must be remembered that nearly everybody else did yield to it.
+Especially did those writers who are commonly counted Dickens's
+superiors in art and exactitude and closeness to connected reality.
+Thackeray wallowed in it; Anthony Trollope lived on it. Those modern
+artists who pride themselves most on the separation and unity of a work
+of art have indulged in it often; thus, for instance, Stevenson gave a
+glimpse of Alan Breck in _The Master of Ballantrae_, and meant to give a
+glimpse of the Master of Ballantrae in another unwritten tale called
+_The Rising Sun_. The habit of revising old characters is so strong in
+Thackeray that _Vanity Fair_, _Pendennis_, _The Newcomes_, and _Philip_
+are in one sense all one novel. Certainly the reader sometimes forgets
+which one of them he is reading. Afterwards he cannot remember whether
+the best description of Lord Steyne's red whiskers or Mr. Wagg's rude
+jokes occurred in _Vanity Fair_, or _Pendennis_; he cannot remember
+whether his favourite dialogue between Mr. and Mrs. Pendennis occurred
+in _The Newcomes_, or in _Philip_. Whenever two Thackeray characters in
+two Thackeray novels could by any possibility have been contemporary,
+Thackeray delights to connect them. He makes Major Pendennis nod to Dr.
+Firmin, and Colonel Newcome ask Major Dobbin to dinner. Whenever two
+characters could not possibly have been contemporary he goes out of his
+way to make one the remote ancestor of the other. Thus he created the
+great house of Warrington solely to connect a "blue-bearded" Bohemian
+journalist with the blood of Henry Esmond. It is quite impossible to
+conceive Dickens keeping up this elaborate connection between all his
+characters and all his books, especially across the ages. It would give
+us a kind of shock if we learnt from Dickens that Major Bagstock was the
+nephew of Mr. Chester. Still less can we imagine Dickens carrying on an
+almost systematic family chronicle as was in some sense done by
+Trollope. There must be some reason for such a paradox; for in itself it
+is a very curious one. The writers who wrote carefully were always
+putting, as it were, after-words and appendices to their already
+finished portraits; the man who did splendid and flamboyant but faulty
+portraits never attempted to touch them up. Or rather (we may say again)
+he attempted it once, and then he failed.
+
+The reason lay, I think, in the very genius of Dickens's creation. The
+child he bore of his soul quitted him when his term was passed like a
+veritable child born of the body. It was independent of him, as a child
+is of its parents. It had become dead to him even in becoming alive.
+When Thackeray studied Pendennis or Lord Steyne he was studying
+something outside himself, and therefore something that might come
+nearer and nearer. But when Dickens brought forth Sam Weller or Pickwick
+he was creating something that had once been inside himself and
+therefore when once created could only go further and further away. It
+may seem a strange thing to say of such laughable characters and of so
+lively an author, yet I say it quite seriously; I think it possible that
+there arose between Dickens and his characters that strange and almost
+supernatural shyness that arises often between parents and children;
+because they are too close to each other to be open with each other. Too
+much hot and high emotion had gone to the creation of one of his great
+figures for it to be possible for him without embarrassment ever to
+speak with it again. This is the thing which some fools call fickleness;
+but which is not the death of feeling, but rather its dreadful
+perpetuation; this shyness is the final seal of strong sentiment; this
+coldness is an eternal constancy.
+
+This one case where Dickens broke through his rule was not such a
+success as to tempt him in any case to try the thing again.
+
+There is weakness in the strict sense of the word in this particular
+reappearance of Samuel Pickwick and Samuel Weller. In the original
+_Pickwick Papers_ Dickens had with quite remarkable delicacy and
+vividness contrived to suggest a certain fundamental sturdiness and
+spirit in that corpulent and complacent old gentleman. Mr. Pickwick was
+a mild man, a respectable man, a placid man; but he was very decidedly a
+man. He could denounce his enemies and fight for his nightcap. He was
+fat; but he had a backbone. In _Master Humphrey's Clock_ the backbone
+seems somehow to be broken; his good nature seems limp instead of alert.
+He gushes out of his good heart; instead of taking a good heart for
+granted as a part of any decent gentleman's furniture as did the older
+and stronger Pickwick. The truth is, I think, that Mr. Pickwick in
+complete repose loses some part of the whole point of his existence. The
+quality which makes the _Pickwick Papers_ one of the greatest of human
+fairy tales is a quality which all the great fairy tales possess, and
+which marks them out from most modern writing. A modern novelist
+generally endeavours to make his story interesting, by making his hero
+odd. The most typical modern books are those in which the central figure
+is himself or herself an exception, a cripple, a courtesan, a lunatic, a
+swindler, or a person of the most perverse temperament. Such stories,
+for instance, are _Sir Richard Calmady_, _Dodo_, _Quisante_, _La Bête
+Humaine_, even the _Egoist_. But in a fairy tale the boy sees all the
+wonders of fairyland because he is an ordinary boy. In the same way Mr.
+Samuel Pickwick sees an extraordinary England because he is an ordinary
+old gentleman. He does not see things through the rosy spectacles of the
+modern optimist or the green-smoked spectacles of the pessimist; he sees
+it through the crystal glasses of his own innocence. One must see the
+world clearly even in order to see its wildest poetry. One must see it
+sanely even in order to see that it is insane.
+
+Mr. Pickwick, then, relieved against a background of heavy kindliness
+and quiet club life does not seem to be quite the same heroic figure as
+Mr. Pickwick relieved against a background of the fighting police
+constables at Ipswich or the roaring mobs of Eatanswill. Of the
+degeneration of the Wellers, though it has been commonly assumed by
+critics, I am not so sure. Some of the things said in the humorous
+assembly round Mr. Weller's Watch are really human and laughable and
+altogether in the old manner. Especially, I think, the vague and awful
+allusiveness of old Mr. Weller when he reminds his little grandson of
+his delinquencies under the trope or figure of their being those of
+another little boy, is really in the style both of the irony and the
+domesticity of the poorer classes. Sam also says one or two things
+really worthy of himself. We feel almost as if Sam were a living man,
+and could not appear for an instant without being amusing.
+
+The other elements in the make-up of _Master Humphrey's Clock_ come
+under the same paradox which I have applied to the whole work. Though
+not very important in literature they are somehow quite important in
+criticism. They show us better than anything else the whole unconscious
+trend of Dickens, the stuff of which his very dreams were made. If he
+had made up tales to amuse himself when half-awake (as I have no doubt
+he did) they would be just such tales as these. They would have been
+ghostly legends of the nooks and holes of London, echoes of old love and
+laughter from the taverns or the Inns of Court. In a sense also one may
+say that these tales are the great might-have-beens of Dickens. They are
+chiefly designs which he fills up here slightly and unsatisfactorily,
+but which he might have filled up with his own brightest and most
+incredible colours. Nothing, for instance, could have been nearer to the
+heart of Dickens than his great Gargantuan conception of Gog and Magog
+telling London legends to each other all through the night. Those two
+giants might have stood on either side of some new great city of his
+invention, swarming with fanciful figures and noisy with new events.
+But as it is, the two giants stand alone in a wilderness, guarding
+either side of a gate that leads nowhere.
+
+
+
+
+REPRINTED PIECES
+
+
+Those abuses which are supposed to belong specially to religion belong
+to all human institutions. They are not the sins of supernaturalism, but
+the sins of nature. In this respect it is interesting to observe that
+all the evils which our Rationalist or Protestant tradition associates
+with the idolatrous veneration of sacred figures arises in the merely
+human atmosphere of literature and history. Every extravagance of
+hagiology can be found in hero-worship. Every folly alleged in the
+worship of saints can be found in the worship of poets. There are those
+who are honourably and intensely opposed to the atmosphere of religious
+symbolism or religious archæology. There are people who have a vague
+idea that the worship of saints is worse than the imitation of sinners.
+There are some, like a lady I once knew, who think that hagiology is the
+scientific study of hags. But these slightly prejudiced persons
+generally have idolatries and superstitions of their own, particularly
+idolatries and superstitions in connection with celebrated people. Mr.
+Stead preserves a pistol belonging to Oliver Cromwell in the office of
+the _Review of Reviews_; and I am sure he worships it in his rare
+moments of solitude and leisure. A man, who could not be induced to
+believe in God by all the arguments of all the philosophers, professed
+himself ready to believe if he could see it stated on a postcard in the
+handwriting of Mr. Gladstone. Persons not otherwise noted for their
+religious exercise have been known to procure and preserve portions of
+the hair of Paderewski. Nay, by this time blasphemy itself is a sacred
+tradition, and almost as much respect would be paid to the alleged
+relics of an atheist as to the alleged relics of a god. If any one has a
+fork that belonged to Voltaire, he could probably exchange it in the
+open market for a knife that belonged to St. Theresa.
+
+Of all the instances of this there is none stranger than the case of
+Dickens. It should be pondered very carefully by those who reproach
+Christianity with having been easily corrupted into a system of
+superstitions. If ever there was a message full of what modern people
+call true Christianity, the direct appeal to the common heart, a faith
+that was simple, a hope that was infinite, and a charity that was
+omnivorous, if ever there came among men what they call the Christianity
+of Christ, it was in the message of Dickens. Christianity has been in
+the world nearly two thousand years, and it has not yet quite lost, its
+enemies being judges, its first fire and charity; but friends and
+enemies would agree that it was from the very first more detailed and
+doctrinal than the spirit of Dickens. The spirit of Dickens has been in
+the world about sixty years; and already it is a superstition. Already
+it is loaded with relics. Already it is stiff with antiquity.
+
+Everything that can be said about the perversion of Christianity can be
+said about the perversion of Dickens. It is said that Christ's words
+are repeated by the very High Priests and Scribes whom He meant to
+denounce. It is just as true that the jokes in _Pickwick_ are quoted
+with delight by the very bigwigs of bench and bar whom Dickens wished to
+make absurd and impossible. It is said that texts from Scripture are
+constantly taken in vain by Judas and Herod, by Caiaphas and Annas. It
+is just as true that texts from Dickens are rapturously quoted on all
+our platforms by Podsnap and Honeythunder, by Pardiggle and Veneering,
+by Tigg when he is forming a company, or Pott when he is founding a
+newspaper. People joke about Bumble in defence of Bumbledom; people
+allude playfully to Mrs. Jellyby while agitating for Borrioboola Gha.
+The very things which Dickens tried to destroy are preserved as relics
+of him. The very houses he wished to pull down are propped up as
+monuments of Dickens. We wish to preserve everything of him, except his
+perilous public spirit.
+
+This antiquarian attitude towards Dickens has many manifestations, some
+of them somewhat ridiculous. I give one startling instance out of a
+hundred of the irony remarked upon above. In his first important book,
+Dickens lashed the loathsome corruption of our oligarchical politics,
+their blaring servility and dirty diplomacy of bribes, under the name of
+an imaginary town called Eatanswill. If Eatanswill, wherever it was, had
+been burned to the ground by its indignant neighbours the day after the
+exposure, it would have been not inappropriate. If it had been entirely
+deserted by its inhabitants, if they had fled to hide themselves in
+holes and caverns, one could have understood it. If it had been struck
+by a thunderbolt out of heaven or outlawed by the whole human race, all
+that would seem quite natural. What has really happened is this: that
+two respectable towns in Suffolk are still disputing for the honour of
+having been the original Eatanswill; as if two innocent hamlets each
+claimed to be Gomorrah. I make no comment; the thing is beyond speech.
+
+But this strange sentimental and relic-hunting worship of Dickens has
+many more innocent manifestations. One of them is that which takes
+advantage of the fact that Dickens happened to be a journalist by trade.
+It occupies itself therefore with hunting through papers and magazines
+for unsigned articles which may possibly be proved to be his. Only a
+little time ago one of these enthusiasts ran up to me, rubbing his
+hands, and told me that he was sure he had found two and a half short
+paragraphs in _All the Year Round_ which were certainly written by
+Dickens, whom he called (I regret to say) the Master. Something of this
+archæological weakness must cling to all mere reprints of his minor
+work. He was a great novelist; but he was also, among other things, a
+good journalist and a good man. It is often necessary for a good
+journalist to write bad literature. It is sometimes the first duty of a
+good man to write it. Pot-boilers to my feeling are sacred things; but
+they may well be secret as well as sacred, like the holy pot which it is
+their purpose to boil. In the collection called _Reprinted Pieces_ there
+are some, I think, which demand or deserve this apology. There are many
+which fall below the level of his recognised books of fragments, such as
+_The Sketches by Boz_, and _The Uncommercial Traveller_. Two or three
+elements in the compilation, however, make it quite essential to any
+solid appreciation of the author.
+
+Of these the first in importance is that which comes last in order. I
+mean the three remarkable pamphlets upon the English Sunday, called
+_Sunday under Three Heads_. Here, at least, we find the eternal Dickens,
+though not the eternal Dickens of fiction. His other political and
+sociological suggestions in this volume are so far unimportant that they
+are incidental, and even personal. Any man might have formed Dickens's
+opinion about flogging for garrotters, and altered it afterwards. Any
+one might have come to Dickens's conclusion about model prisons, or to
+any other conclusion equally reasonable and unimportant. These things
+have no colour of the great man's character. But on the subject of the
+English Sunday he does stand for his own philosophy. He stands for a
+particular view, remote at present both from Liberals and Conservatives.
+He was, in a conscious sense, the first of its spokesmen. He was in
+every sense the last.
+
+In his appeal for the pleasures of the people, Dickens has remained
+alone. The pleasures of the people have now no defender, Radical or
+Tory. The Tories despise the people. The Radicals despise the pleasures.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+  +--------------------------------------------------------------+
+  | Transcriber's Notes and Errata                               |
+  |                                                              |
+  | The Illustrations have been moved to between chapters.       |
+  |                                                              |
+  | The following typographical errors have been corrected:      |
+  |                                                              |
+  |   |Error              |Correction     |                      |
+  |   |a dupe and who was |a dupe who was |                      |
+  |   |pyschology         |psychology     |                      |
+  |   |Similiarly         |Smilarly       |                      |
+  |                                                              |
+  | The following words were found in both hyphenated and        |
+  | un-hyphenated forms in the text. The numbers in parentheses  |
+  | show the number of times each form occurred.                 |
+  |                                                              |
+  |   |framework (3)  |frame-work (1)  |                         |
+  |   |cocksure (2)   |cock-sure (2)   |                         |
+  |   |Ironmaster (1) |Iron-master (2) |                         |
+  |   |footprints (1) |foot-prints (1) |                         |
+  |   |goodwill (1)   |good-will (1)   |                         |
+  |                                                              |
+  +--------------------------------------------------------------+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Appreciations and Criticisms of the
+Works of Charles Dickens, by G. K. Chesterton
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works
+of Charles Dickens, by G. K. Chesterton
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens
+
+Author: G. K. Chesterton
+
+Release Date: August 20, 2007 [EBook #22362]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DICKENS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Sigal Alon, LN Yaddanapudi and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 365px;"><a name="CD1840" id="CD1840"></a>
+<img src="images/dickens1840.jpg" width="365" height="600" alt="" title="" />
+<span class="caption">Charles Dickens, Circa 1840<br />
+From an oil painting by R. J. Lane.</span></div>
+
+<h1 class='sc'>APPRECIATIONS AND CRITICISMS of the works of CHARLES DICKENS<br />
+
+<span class='sf30'>BY</span><br />
+
+<span class='sf50'>G. K. CHESTERTON</span></h1>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 93px;">
+<img src="images/illus-logo.png" width="93" height="150" alt="" title="" /></div>
+
+<p class='c noin'><span class='sf75'>1911</span><br />
+<span class='sc'>London: J. M. DENT &amp; SONS, Ltd.<br />
+New York: E. P. DUTTON &amp; CO.</span></p>
+
+<p class='c i noin'>All rights reserved</p>
+
+<hr /><p class='pagenum'><a name="Page_iii" id="Page_iii">[iii]</a></p>
+<h2><a name="CONTENTS" id="CONTENTS"></a>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<ul class='off'><li>CHAPTER <span class="ralign">PAGE</span></li></ul>
+
+<ol style='list-style-type:upper-roman'>
+<li><span class="sc"><a href="#INTRODUCTION">Introduction</a></span> <span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_vii">vii</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="sc"><a href="#SKETCHES">Sketches by Boz</a></span> <span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_1">1</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="sc"><a href="#PICKWICK">Pickwick Papers</a></span> <span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_13">13</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="sc"><a href="#NICHOLAS">Nicholas Nickleby</a></span> <span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_26">26</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="sc"><a href="#OLIVER">Oliver Twist</a></span> <span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_38">38</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="sc"><a href="#CURIOSITY">Old Curiosity Shop</a></span> <span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_50">50</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="sc"><a href="#BARNABY">Barnaby Rudge</a></span> <span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_65">65</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="sc"><a href="#AMERICAN">American Notes</a></span> <span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_76">76</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="sc"><a href="#ITALY">Pictures from Italy</a></span> <span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_87">87</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="sc"><a href="#CHUZZLEWIT">Martin Chuzzlewit</a></span> <span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_90">90</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="sc"><a href="#CHRISTMAS_BOOKS">Christmas Books</a></span> <span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_103">103</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="sc"><a href="#DOMBEY">Dombey and Son</a></span> <span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_114">114</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="sc"><a href="#COPPERFIELD">David Copperfield</a></span> <span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_129">129</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="sc"><a href="#CHRISTMAS_STORIES">Christmas Stories</a></span> <span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_140">140</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="sc"><a href="#BLEAK">Bleak House</a></span> <span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_148">148</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="sc"><a href="#HISTORY">Child&rsquo;s History of England</a></span> <span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_160">160</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="sc"><a href="#HARD_TIMES">Hard Times</a></span> <span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_169">169</a></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_iv" id="Page_iv">[iv]</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="sc"><a href="#DORRIT">Little Dorrit</a></span> <span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_178">178</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="sc"><a href="#TWO_CITIES">A Tale of Two Cities</a></span> <span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_188">188</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="sc"><a href="#EXPECTATIONS">Great Expectations</a></span> <span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_197">197</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="sc"><a href="#MUTUAL">Our Mutual Friend</a></span> <span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_207">207</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="sc"><a href="#DROOD">Edwin Drood</a></span> <span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_218">218</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="sc"><a href="#HUMPHREY">Master Humphrey&rsquo;s Clock</a></span> <span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_229">229</a></span></li>
+<li><span class="sc"><a href="#REPRINTED">Reprinted Pieces</a></span> <span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_239">239</a></span></li></ol>
+
+<hr /><p class='pagenum'><a name="Page_v" id="Page_v">[v]</a></p>
+<h2><a name="ILLUSTRATIONS" id="ILLUSTRATIONS"></a>ILLUSTRATIONS</h2>
+
+<ul class='off'><li><span class="ralign sf50">PAGE</span><br /></li>
+
+<li><span class="sc"><a href="#CD1840">Charles Dickens, Circa 1840</a></span> <span class="ralign"><i>Frontispiece</i></span>
+<ul class='off'><li>From an oil painting by R. J. Lane.</li></ul></li>
+
+<li><span class="sc"><a href="#CD1842">Charles Dickens, 1842</a></span> <span class="ralign">76</span>
+<ul class='off'><li>From a bust by H. Dexter, executed during Dickens&rsquo;s first
+visit to America.</li></ul></li>
+
+<li><span class="sc"><a href="#CD1844">Charles Dickens, 1844</a></span> <span class="ralign">90</span>
+<ul class='off'><li>From a miniature by Margaret Gillies.</li></ul></li>
+
+<li><span class="sc"><a href="#CD1849">Charles Dickens, 1849</a></span> <span class="ralign">130</span>
+<ul class='off'><li>From a daguerreotype by Mayall.</li></ul></li>
+
+<li><span class="sc"><a href="#CD1858">Charles Dickens, 1858</a></span> <span class="ralign">184</span>
+<ul class='off'><li>From a black and white drawing by Baughiet.</li></ul></li>
+
+<li><span class="sc"><a href="#CD1859">Charles Dickens, 1859</a></span> <span class="ralign">188</span>
+<ul class='off'><li>From an oil painting by W. P. Frith, R.A.</li></ul></li>
+
+<li><span class="sc"><a href="#CD1860">Charles Dickens, Circa 1860</a></span> <span class="ralign">198</span>
+<ul class='off'><li>Photograph by J. &amp; C. Watkins.</li></ul></li>
+
+<li><span class="sc"><a href="#CD1868">Charles Dickens, 1868</a></span> <span class="ralign">218</span>
+<ul class='off'><li>From a photograph by Gurney.</li></ul></li></ul>
+
+<hr /><p class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">[vii]</a></p>
+<h2><a name="INTRODUCTION" id="INTRODUCTION"></a>INTRODUCTION</h2>
+
+<p>These papers were originally published as prefaces to the separate books
+of Dickens in one of the most extensive of those cheap libraries of the
+classics which are one of the real improvements of recent times. Thus
+they were harmless, being diluted by, or rather drowned in Dickens. My
+scrap of theory was a mere dry biscuit to be taken with the grand tawny
+port of great English comedy; and by most people it was not taken at
+all&mdash;like the biscuit. Nevertheless the essays were not in intention so
+aimless as they appear in fact. I had a general notion of what needed
+saying about Dickens to the new generation, though probably I did not
+say it. I will make another attempt to do so in this prologue, and,
+possibly fail again.</p>
+
+<p>There was a painful moment (somewhere about the eighties) when we
+watched anxiously to see whether Dickens was fading from the modern
+world. We have watched a little longer, and with great relief we begin
+to realise that it is the modern world that is fading. All that universe
+of ranks and respectabilities in comparison with which Dickens was
+called a caricaturist, all that Victorian universe in which he seemed
+vulgar&mdash;all that is itself breaking up like a cloudland. And only the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_viii" id="Page_viii">[viii]</a></span>
+caricatures of Dickens remain like things carved in stone. This, of
+course, is an old story in the case of a man reproached with any excess
+of the poetic. Again and again when the man of visions was pinned by the
+sly dog who knows the world,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">&ldquo;The man recovered of the bite,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The dog it was that died.&rdquo;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>To call Thackeray a cynic, which means a sly dog, was indeed absurd; but
+it is fair to say that in comparison with Dickens he felt himself a man
+of the world. Nevertheless, that world of which he was a man is coming
+to an end before our eyes; its aristocracy has grown corrupt, its middle
+class insecure, and things that he never thought of are walking about
+the drawing-rooms of both. Thackeray has described for ever the
+Anglo-Indian Colonel; but what on earth would he have done with an
+Australian Colonel? What can it matter whether Dickens&rsquo;s clerks
+talked cockney now that half the duchesses talk American? What would
+Thackeray have made of an age in which a man in the position of Lord Kew
+may actually be the born brother of Mr. Moss of Wardour Street? Nor does
+this apply merely to Thackeray, but to all those Victorians who prided
+themselves on the realism or sobriety of their descriptions; it applies
+to Anthony Trollope and, as much as any one, to George Eliot. For we
+have not only survived that present which Thackeray described: we have
+even survived that future to which George Eliot looked forward. It is no
+longer adequate to say that Dickens did not understand that old world of
+gentility, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_ix" id="Page_ix">[ix]</a></span>
+of parliamentary politeness and the balance of the
+constitution. That world is rapidly ceasing to understand itself. It is
+vain to repeat the complaint of the old Quarterly Reviewers, that
+Dickens had not enjoyed a university education. What would the old
+Quarterly Reviewers themselves have thought of the Rhodes Scholarships?
+It is useless to repeat the old tag that Dickens could not describe a
+gentleman. A gentleman in our time has become something quite
+indescribable.</p>
+
+<p>Now the interesting fact is this: That Dickens, whom so many considered
+to be at the best a vulgar enthusiast, saw the coming change in our
+society much more soberly and scientifically than did his better
+educated and more pretentious contemporaries. I give but one example out
+of many. Thackeray was a good Victorian radical, who seems to have gone
+to his grave quite contented with the early Victorian radical
+theory&mdash;the theory which Macaulay preached with unparalleled luminosity
+and completeness; the theory that true progress goes on so steadily
+through human history, that while reaction is indefensible, revolution
+is unnecessary. Thackeray seems to have been quite content to think that
+the world would grow more and more liberal in the limited sense; that
+Free Trade would get freer; that ballot boxes would grow more and more
+secret; that at last (as some satirist of Liberalism puts it) every man
+would have two votes instead of one. There is no trace in Thackeray of
+the slightest consciousness that progress could ever change its
+direction. There is in Dickens. The whole of <i>Hard Times</i> is the
+expression of just such a realisation. It is not true to say that
+Dickens was a Socialist, but it is not absurd <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_x" id="Page_x">[x]</a></span>
+to say so. And it would be simply absurd to say it of any of the great
+Individualist novelists of the Victorian time. Dickens saw far enough
+ahead to know that the time was coming when the people would be
+imploring the State to save them from mere freedom, as from some
+frightful foreign oppressor. He felt the society changing; and Thackeray
+never did.</p>
+
+<p>As talking about Socialism and Individualism is one of the greatest
+bores ever endured among men, I will take another instance to illustrate
+my meaning, even though the instance be a queer and even a delicate one.
+Even if the reader does not agree with my deduction, I ask his attention
+to the fact itself, which I think a curiosity of literature. In the last
+important work of Dickens, that excellent book <i>Our Mutual Friend</i>,
+there is an odd thing about which I cannot make up my mind; I do not
+know whether it is unconscious observation or fiendish irony. But it is
+this. In <i>Our Mutual Friend</i> is an old patriarch named Aaron, who is a
+saintly Jew made to do the dirty work of an abominable Christian usurer.
+In an artistic sense I think the patriarch Aaron as much of a humbug as
+the patriarch Casby. In a moral sense there is no doubt at all that
+Dickens introduced the Jew with a philanthropic idea of doing justice to
+Judaism, which he was told he had affronted by the great gargoyle of
+Fagin. If this was his motive, it was morally a most worthy one. But it
+is certainly unfortunate for the Hebrew cause that the bad Jew should be
+so very much more convincing than the good one. Old Aaron is not an
+exaggeration of Jewish virtues; he is simply not Jewish, because he is
+not human. There is nothing about him <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xi" id="Page_xi">[xi]</a></span>
+that in any way suggests the nobler sort of Jew, such a man as Spinoza
+or Mr. Zangwill. He is simply a public apology, and like most public
+apologies, he is very stiff and not very convincing.</p>
+
+<p>So far so good. Now we come to the funny part. To describe the high
+visionary and mystic Jew like Spinoza or Zangwill is a great and
+delicate task in which even Dickens might have failed. But most of us
+know something of the make and manners of the low Jew, who is generally
+the successful one. Most of us know the Jew who calls himself De
+Valancourt. Now to any one who knows a low Jew by sight or hearing, the
+story called <i>Our Mutual Friend</i> is literally full of Jews. Like all
+Dickens&rsquo;s best characters they are vivid; we know them. And we
+know them to be Hebrew. Mr. Veneering, the Man from Nowhere, dark,
+sphinx-like, smiling, with black curling hair, and a taste in florid
+vulgar furniture&mdash;of what stock was he? Mr. Lammle, with &ldquo;too much
+nose in his face, too much ginger in his whiskers, too much sparkle in
+his studs and manners&rdquo;&mdash;of what blood was he? Mr. Lammle&rsquo;s
+friends, coarse and thick-lipped, with fingers so covered with rings
+that they could hardly hold their gold pencils&mdash;do they remind us of
+anybody? Mr. Fledgeby, with his little ugly eyes and social flashiness
+and craven bodily servility&mdash;might not some fanatic like M. Drumont make
+interesting conjectures about him? The particular types that people hate
+in Jewry, the types that are the shame of all good Jews, absolutely run
+riot in this book, which is supposed to contain an apology to them. It
+looks at first sight as if Dickens&rsquo;s apology were one hideous
+sneer. It looks as if he put <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xii" id="Page_xii">[xii]</a></span>
+in one good Jew whom nobody could believe in, and then balanced him
+with ten bad Jews whom nobody could fail to recognise. It seems as if he
+had avenged himself for the doubt about Fagin by introducing five or six
+Fagins&mdash;triumphant Fagins, fashionable Fagins, Fagins who had
+changed their names. The impeccable old Aaron stands up in the middle of
+this ironic carnival with a peculiar solemnity and silliness. He looks
+like one particularly stupid Englishman pretending to be a Jew, amidst
+all that crowd of clever Jews who are pretending to be Englishmen.</p>
+
+<p>But this notion of a sneer is not admissible. Dickens was far too frank
+and generous a writer to employ such an elaborate plot of silence. His
+satire was always intended to attack, never to entrap; moreover, he was
+far too vain a man not to wish the crowd to see all his jokes. Vanity is
+more divine than pride, because it is more democratic than pride. Third,
+and most important, Dickens was a good Liberal, and would have been
+horrified at the notion of making so venomous a vendetta against one
+race or creed. Nevertheless the fact is there, as I say, if only as a
+curiosity of literature. I defy any man to read through <i>Our Mutual
+Friend</i> after hearing this suggestion, and to get out of his head the
+conviction that Lammle is the wrong kind of Jew. The explanation lies, I
+think, in this, that Dickens was so wonderfully sensitive to that change
+that has come over our society, that he noticed the type of the oriental
+and cosmopolitan financier without even knowing that it was oriental or
+cosmopolitan. He had, in fact, fallen a victim to a very simple fallacy
+affecting this problem. Somebody said, with great wit and truth, that
+treason <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xiii" id="Page_xiii">[xiii]</a></span>
+cannot prosper, because when it prospers it cannot be called treason.
+The same argument soothed all possible Anti-Semitism in men like
+Dickens. Jews cannot be sneaks and snobs, because when they are sneaks
+and snobs they do not admit that they are Jews.</p>
+
+<p>I have taken this case of the growth of the cosmopolitan financier,
+because it is not so stale in discussion as its parallel, the growth of
+Socialism. But as regards Dickens, the same criticism applies to both.
+Dickens knew that Socialism was coming, though he did not know its name.
+Similarly, Dickens knew that the South African millionaire was coming,
+though he did not know the millionaire&rsquo;s name. Nobody does. His
+was not a type of mind to disentangle either the abstract truths
+touching the Socialist, nor the highly personal truth about the
+millionaire. He was a man of impressions; he has never been equalled in
+the art of conveying what a man looks like at first sight&mdash;and he simply
+felt the two things as atmospheric facts. He felt that the mercantile
+power was oppressive, past all bearing by Christian men; and he felt
+that this power was no longer wholly in the hands even of heavy English
+merchants like Podsnap. It was largely in the hands of a feverish and
+unfamiliar type, like Lammle and Veneering. The fact that he felt these
+things is almost more impressive because he did not understand them.</p>
+
+<p>Now for this reason Dickens must definitely be considered in the light
+of the changes which his soul foresaw. Thackeray has become classical;
+but Dickens has done more: he has remained modern. The grand
+retrospective spirit of Thackeray is by its nature
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xiv" id="Page_xiv">[xiv]</a></span>
+attached to places and times; he belongs to Queen Victoria as much as
+Addison belongs to Queen Anne, and it is not only Queen Anne who is
+dead. But Dickens, in a dark prophetic kind of way, belongs to the
+developments. He belongs to the times since his death when Hard Times
+grew harder, and when Veneering became not only a Member of Parliament,
+but a Cabinet Minister; the times when the very soul and spirit of
+Fledgeby carried war into Africa. Dickens can be criticised as a
+contemporary of Bernard Shaw or Anatole France or C. F. G. Masterman. In
+talking of him one need no longer talk merely of the Manchester School
+or Puseyism or the Charge of the Light Brigade; his name comes to the
+tongue when we are talking of Christian Socialists or Mr. Roosevelt or
+County Council Steam Boats or Guilds of Play. He can be considered under
+new lights, some larger and some meaner than his own; and it is a very
+rough effort so to consider him which is the excuse of these pages. Of
+the essays in this book I desire to say as little as possible; I will
+discuss any other subject in preference with a readiness which reaches
+to avidity. But I may very curtly apply the explanation used above to
+the cases of two or three of them. Thus in the article on <i>David
+Copperfield</i> I have done far less than justice to that fine book
+considered in its relation to eternal literature; but I have dwelt at
+some length upon a particular element in it which has grown enormous in
+England after Dickens&rsquo;s death. Thus again, in introducing the
+<i>Sketches by Boz</i> I have felt chiefly that I am introducing them to a
+new generation insufficiently in sympathy with such palpable and
+unsophisticated fun. A Board School education,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xv" id="Page_xv">[xv]</a></span>
+evolved since Dickens&rsquo;s day, has given to our people a queer and
+inadequate sort of refinement, one which prevents them from enjoying the
+raw jests of the <i>Sketches by Boz</i>, but leaves them easily open to that
+slight but poisonous sentimentalism which I note amid all the merits of
+David Copperfield. In the same way I shall speak of <i>Little Dorrit</i>,
+with reference to a school of pessimistic fiction which did not exist
+when it was written, of <i>Hard Times</i> in the light of the most modern
+crises of economics, and of <i>The Child&rsquo;s History of England</i> in
+the light of the most matured authority of history. In short, these
+criticisms are an intrinsically ephemeral comment from one generation
+upon work that will delight many more. Dickens was a very great man, and
+there are many ways of testing and stating the fact. But one permissible
+way is to say this, that he was an ignorant man, ill-read in the past,
+and often confused about the present. Yet he remains great and true, and
+even essentially reliable, if we suppose him to have known not only all
+that went before his lifetime, but also all that was to come after.</p>
+
+<p>From this vanishing of the Victorian compromise (I might say the
+Victorian illusion) there begins to emerge a menacing and even monstrous
+thing&mdash;we may begin again to behold the English people. If that strange
+dawn ever comes, it will be the final vindication of Dickens. It will be
+proved that he is hardly even a caricaturist; that he is something very
+like a realist. Those comic monstrosities which the critics found
+incredible will be found to be the immense majority of the citizens of
+this country. We shall find that Sweedlepipe cuts our hair and
+Pumblechook sells <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xvi" id="Page_xvi">[xvi]</a></span>
+our cereals; that Sam Weller blacks our boots and
+Tony Weller drives our omnibus. For the exaggerated notion of the
+exaggerations of Dickens (as was admirably pointed out by my old friend
+and enemy Mr. Blatchford in a <i>Clarion</i> review) is very largely due to
+our mixing with only one social class, whose conventions are very
+strict, and to whose affectations we are accustomed. In cabmen, in
+cobblers, in charwomen, individuality is often pushed to the edge of
+insanity. But as long as the Thackerayan platform of gentility stood
+firm all this was, comparatively speaking, concealed. For the English,
+of all nations, have the most uniform upper class and the most varied
+democracy. In France it is the peasants who are solid to uniformity; it
+is the marquises who are a little mad. But in England, while good form
+restrains and levels the universities and the army, the poor people are
+the most motley and amusing creatures in the world, full of humorous
+affections and prejudices and twists of irony. Frenchmen tend to be
+alike, because they are all soldiers; Prussians because they are all
+something else, probably policemen; even Americans are all something,
+though it is not easy to say what it is; it goes with hawk-like eyes and
+an irrational eagerness. Perhaps it is savages. But two English cabmen
+will be as grotesquely different as Mr. Weller and Mr. Wegg. Nor is it
+true to say that I see this variety because it is in my own people. For
+I do not see the same degree of variety in my own class or in the class
+above it; there is more superficial resemblance between two Kensington
+doctors or two Highland dukes. No; the democracy is really composed of
+Dickens characters, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xvii" id="Page_xvii">[xvii]</a></span>
+for the simple reason that Dickens was himself one of the democracy.</p>
+
+<p>There remains one thing to be added to this attempt to exhibit Dickens
+in the growing and changing lights of our time. God forbid that any one
+(especially any Dickensian) should dilute or discourage the great
+efforts towards social improvement. But I wish that social reformers
+would more often remember that they are imposing their rules not on dots
+and numbers, but on Bob Sawyer and Tim Linkinwater, on Mrs. Lirriper and
+Dr. Marigold. I wish Mr. Sidney Webb would shut his eyes until he <i>sees</i>
+Sam Weller.</p>
+
+<p>A great many circumstances have led to the neglect in literature of
+these exuberant types which do actually exist in the ruder classes of
+society. Perhaps the principal cause is that since Dickens&rsquo;s time
+the study of the poor has ceased to be an art and become a sort of sham
+science. Dickens took the poor individually: all modern writing tends to
+take them collectively. It is said that the modern realist produces a
+photograph rather than a picture. But this is an inadequate objection.
+The real trouble with the realist is not that he produces a photograph,
+but that he produces a composite photograph. It is like all composite
+photographs, blurred; like all composite photographs, hideous; and like
+all composite photographs, unlike anything or anybody. The new
+sociological novels, which attempt to describe the abstract type of the
+working-classes, sin in practice against the first canon of literature,
+true when all others are subject to exception. Literature must always be
+a pointing out of what is interesting in life; but these books are
+duller than the life they <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xviii" id="Page_xviii">[xviii]</a></span>
+represent. Even supposing that Dickens did exaggerate the degree to
+which one man differs from another&mdash;that was at least an
+exaggeration upon the side of literature; it was better than a mere
+attempt to reduce what is actually vivid and unmistakable to what is in
+comparison colourless or unnoticeable. Even the creditable and necessary
+efforts of our time in certain matters of social reform have discouraged
+the old distinctive Dickens treatment. People are so anxious to do
+something for the poor man that they have a sort of subconscious desire
+to think that there is only one kind of man to do it for. Thus while the
+old accounts were sometimes too steep and crazy, the new became too
+sweeping and flat. People write about the problem of drink, for
+instance, as if it were one problem. Dickens could have told them that
+there is the abyss between heaven and hell between the incongruous
+excesses of Mr. Pickwick and the fatalistic soaking of Mr. Wickfield. He
+could have shown that there was nothing in common between the brandy and
+water of Bob Sawyer and the rum and water of Mr. Stiggins. People talk
+of imprudent marriages among the poor, as if it were all one question.
+Dickens could have told them that it is one thing to marry without much
+money, like Stephen Blackpool, and quite another to marry without the
+smallest intention of ever trying to get any, like Harold Skimpole.
+People talk about husbands in the working-classes being kind or brutal
+to their wives, as if that was the one permanent problem and no other
+possibility need be considered. Dickens could have told them that there
+was the case (the by no means uncommon case) of the husband of Mrs.
+Gargery as well as of the wife <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xix" id="Page_xix">[xix]</a></span>
+of Mr. Quilp. In short, Dickens saw the problem of the poor not as a
+dead and definite business, but as a living and very complex one. In
+some ways he would be called much more conservative than the modern
+sociologists, in some ways much more revolutionary.</p>
+
+<h3>LITTLE DORRIT</h3>
+
+<p>In the time of the decline and death of Dickens, and even more strongly
+after it, there arose a school of criticism which substantially
+maintained that a man wrote better when he was ill. It was some such
+sentiment as this that made Mr. George Gissing, that able writer, come
+near to contending that <i>Little Dorrit</i> is Dickens&rsquo;s best book. It
+was the principle of his philosophy to maintain (I know not why) that a
+man was more likely to perceive the truth when in low spirits than when
+in high spirits.</p>
+
+<h3>REPRINTED PIECES</h3>
+
+<p>The three articles on Sunday of which I speak are almost the last
+expression of an articulate sort in English literature of the ancient
+and existing morality of the English people. It is always asserted that
+Puritanism came in with the seventeenth century and thoroughly soaked
+and absorbed the English. We are now, it is constantly said, an
+incurably Puritanic people. Personally, I have my doubts about this. I
+shall not refuse to admit to the Puritans that they conquered and
+crushed the English people; but I do not think that they ever
+transformed it. My doubt <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xx" id="Page_xx">[xx]</a></span>
+is chiefly derived from three historical facts. First, that England was
+never so richly and recognisably English as in the Shakespearian age
+before the Puritan had appeared. Second, that ever since he did appear
+there has been a long unbroken line of brilliant and typical Englishmen
+who belonged to the Shakespearian and not the Puritanic tradition;
+Dryden, Johnson, Wilkes, Fox, Nelson, were hardly Puritans. And third,
+that the real rise of a new, cold, and illiberal morality in these
+matters seems to me to have occurred in the time of Queen Victoria, and
+not of Queen Elizabeth. All things considered, it is likely that future
+historians will say that the Puritans first really triumphed in the
+twentieth century, and that Dickens was the last cry of Merry England.</p>
+
+<p>And about these additional, miscellaneous, and even inferior works of
+Dickens there is, moreover, another use and fascination which all
+Dickensians will understand; which, after a manner, is not for the
+profane. All who love Dickens have a strange sense that he is really
+inexhaustible. It is this fantastic infinity that divides him even from
+the strongest and healthiest romantic artists of a later day&mdash;from
+Stevenson, for example. I have read <i>Treasure Island</i> twenty times;
+nevertheless I know it. But I do not really feel as if I knew all
+<i>Pickwick</i>; I have not so much read it twenty times as read in it a
+million times; and it almost seemed as if I always read something new.
+We of the true faith look at each other and understand; yes, our master
+was a magician. I believe the books are alive; I believe that leaves
+still grow in them, as leaves grow on the trees. I believe that this
+fairy library flourishes <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xxi" id="Page_xxi">[xxi]</a></span>
+and increases like a fairy forest: but the world is listening to us,
+and we will put our hand upon our mouth.</p>
+
+<h3>OUR MUTUAL FRIEND</h3>
+
+<p>One thing at least seems certain. Dickens may or may not have been
+socialist in his tendencies; one might quote on the affirmative side his
+satire against Mr. Podsnap, who thought Centralisation
+&ldquo;un-English&rdquo;; one might quote in reply the fact that he
+satirised quite as unmercifully state and municipal officials of the
+most modern type. But there is one condition of affairs which Dickens
+would certainly have detested and denounced, and that is the condition
+in which we actually stand to-day. At this moment it is vain to discuss
+whether socialism will be a selling of men&rsquo;s liberty for bread.
+The men have already sold the liberty; only they have not yet got the
+bread. A most incessant and exacting interference with the poor is
+already in operation; they are already ruled like slaves, only they are
+not fed like slaves. The children are forcibly provided with a school;
+only they are not provided with a house. Officials give the most
+detailed domestic directions about the fireguard; only they do not give
+the fireguard. Officials bring round the most stringent directions about
+the milk; only they do not bring round the milk. The situation is
+perhaps the most humorous in the whole history of oppression. We force
+the nigger to dig; but as a concession to him we do not give him a
+spade. We compel Sambo to cook; but we consult his dignity so far as to
+refuse him a fire.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xxii" id="Page_xxii">[xxii]</a></span>
+This state of things at least cannot conceivably endure. We must either
+give the workers more property and liberty, or we must feed them
+properly as we work them properly. If we insist on sending the menu into
+them, they will naturally send the bill into us. This may possibly
+result (it is not my purpose here to prove that it will) in the drilling
+of the English people into hordes of humanely herded serfs; and this
+again may mean the fading from our consciousness of all those elves and
+giants, monsters and fantastics whom we are faintly beginning to feel
+and remember in the land. If this be so, the work of Dickens may be
+considered as a great vision&mdash;a vision, as Swinburne said, between a
+sleep and a sleep. It can be said that between the grey past of
+territorial depression and the grey future of economic routine the
+strange clouds lifted, and we beheld the land of the living.</p>
+
+<p>Lastly, Dickens is even astonishingly right about Eugene Wrayburne. So
+far from reproaching him with not understanding a gentleman, the critic
+will be astonished at the accuracy with which he has really observed the
+worth and the weakness of the aristocrat. He is quite right when he
+suggests that such a man has intelligence enough to despise the
+invitations which he has not the energy to refuse. He is quite right
+when he makes Eugene (like Mr. Balfour) constantly right in argument
+even when he is obviously wrong in fact. Dickens is quite right when he
+describes Eugene as capable of cultivating a sort of secondary and false
+industry about anything that is not profitable; or pursuing with passion
+anything that is not his business. He is quite right in making Eugene
+honestly appreciative <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xxiii" id="Page_xxiii">[xxiii]</a></span>
+of essential goodness&mdash;in other people. He is quite right in
+making him really good at the graceful combination of satire and
+sentiment, both perfectly sincere. He is also right in indicating that
+the only cure for this intellectual condition is a violent blow on the
+head.</p>
+
+<h3>DAVID COPPERFIELD</h3>
+
+<p>The real achievement of the earlier part of <i>David Copperfield</i> lies in
+a certain impression of the little Copperfield living in a land of
+giants. It is at once Gargantuan in its fancy and grossly vivid in its
+facts; like Gulliver in the land of Brobdingnag when he describes
+mountainous hands and faces filling the sky, bristles as big as hedges,
+or moles as big as molehills. To him parents and guardians are not
+Olympians (as in Mr. Kenneth Grahame&rsquo;s clever book), mysterious
+and dignified, dwelling upon a cloudy hill. Rather they are all the more
+visible for being large. They come all the closer because they are
+colossal. Their queer features and weaknesses stand out large in a sort
+of gigantic domesticity, like the hairs and freckles of a
+Brobdingnagian. We feel the sombre Murdstone coming upon the house like
+a tall storm striding through the sky. We watch every pucker of
+Peggotty&rsquo;s peasant face in its moods of flinty prejudice or
+whimsical hesitation. We look up and feel that Aunt Betsey in her garden
+gloves was really terrible&mdash;especially her garden gloves. But one cannot
+avoid the impression that as the boy grows larger these figures grow
+smaller, and are not perhaps so completely satisfactory.</p>
+
+<p class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xxiv" id="Page_xxiv">[xxiv]</a></p>
+
+<h3>CHRISTMAS BOOKS</h3>
+
+<p>And there is doubtless a certain poetic unity and irony in gathering
+together three or four of the crudest and most cocksure of the modern
+theorists, with their shrill voices and metallic virtues, under the
+fulness and the sonorous sanity of Christian bells. But the figures
+satirised in <i>The Chimes</i> cross each other&rsquo;s path and spoil each
+other in some degree. The main purpose of the book was a protest against
+that impudent and hard-hearted utilitarianism which arranges the people
+only in rows of men or even in rows of figures. It is a flaming
+denunciation of that strange mathematical morality which was twisted
+often unfairly out of Bentham and Mill: a morality by which each citizen
+must regard himself as a fraction, and a very vulgar fraction. Though
+the particular form of this insolent patronage has changed, this revolt
+and rebuke is still of value, and may be wholesome for those who are
+teaching the poor to be provident. Doubtless it is a good idea to be
+provident, in the sense that Providence is provident, but that should
+mean being kind, and certainly not merely being cold.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Cricket on the Hearth</i>, though popular, I think, with many sections
+of the great army of Dickensians, cannot be spoken of in any such
+abstract or serious terms. It is a brief domestic glimpse; it is an
+interior. It must be remembered that Dickens was fond of interiors as
+such; he was like a romantic tramp who should go from window to window
+looking in at the parlours. He had that solid, indescribable delight in
+the mere solidity and neatness of funny little humanity in its funny
+little <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xxv" id="Page_xxv">[xxv]</a></span>
+houses, like doll&rsquo;s houses. To him every house was a box, a
+Christmas box, in which a dancing human doll was tied up in bricks and
+slates instead of string and brown paper. He went from one gleaming
+window to another, looking in at the lamp-lit parlours. Thus he stood
+for a little while looking in at this cosy if commonplace interior of
+the carrier and his wife; but he did not stand there very long. He was
+on his way to quainter towns and villages. Already the plants were
+sprouting upon the balcony of Miss Tox; and the great wind was rising
+that flung Mr. Pecksniff against his own front door.</p>
+
+<h3>TALE OF TWO CITIES</h3>
+
+<p>It was well for him, at any rate, that the people rose in France. It was
+well for him, at any rate, that the guillotine was set up in the Place
+de la Concorde. Unconsciously, but not accidentally, Dickens was here
+working out the whole true comparison between swift revolutionism in
+Paris and slow evolutionism in London. Sidney Carton is one of those
+sublime ascetics whose head offends them, and who cut it off. For him at
+least it was better that the blood should flow in Paris than that the
+wine should flow any longer in London. And if I say that even now the
+guillotine might be the best cure for many a London lawyer, I ask you to
+believe that I am not merely flippant. But you will not believe it.</p>
+
+<h3>BARNABY RUDGE</h3>
+
+<p>It may be said that there is no comparison between
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xxvi" id="Page_xxvi">[xxvi]</a></span>
+that explosive opening of the intellect in Paris and an antiquated
+madman leading a knot of provincial Protestants. The Man of the Hill,
+says Victor Hugo somewhere, fights for an idea; the Man of the Forest
+for a prejudice. Nevertheless it remains true that the enemies of the
+red cap long attempted to represent it as a sham decoration in the style
+of Sim Tappertit. Long after the revolutionists had shown more than the
+qualities of men, it was common among lords and lacqueys to attribute to
+them the stagey and piratical pretentiousness of urchins. The kings
+called Napoleon&rsquo;s pistol a toy pistol even while it was holding up
+their coach and mastering their money or their lives; they called his
+sword a stage sword even while they ran away from it. Something of the
+same senile inconsistency can be found in an English and American habit
+common until recently: that of painting the South Americans at once as
+ruffians wading in carnage, and also as poltroons playing at war. They
+blame them first for the cruelty of having a fight; and then for the
+weakness of having a sham fight. Such, however, since the French
+Revolution and before it, has been the fatuous attitude of certain
+Anglo-Saxons towards the whole revolutionary tradition. Sim Tappertit
+was a sort of answer to everything; and the young men were mocked as
+&rsquo;prentices long after they were masters. The rising fortune of the
+South American republics to-day is symbolical and even menacing of many
+things; and it may be that the romance of riot will not be so much
+extinguished as extended; and nearer home we may have boys being boys
+again, and in London the cry of &ldquo;clubs.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xxvii" id="Page_xxvii">[xxvii]</a></p>
+
+<h3>THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER</h3>
+
+<p><i>The Uncommercial Traveller</i> is a collection of Dickens&rsquo;s memories
+rather than of his literary purposes; but it is due to him to say that
+memory is often more startling in him than prophecy in anybody else.
+They have the character which belongs to all his vivid incidental
+writing: that they attach themselves always to some text which is a fact
+rather than an idea. He was one of those sons of Eve who are fonder of
+the Tree of Life than of the Tree of Knowledge&mdash;even of the knowledge of
+good and of evil. He was in this profoundest sense a realist. Critics
+have talked of an artist with his eye on the object. Dickens as an
+essayist always had his eye on an object before he had the faintest
+notion of a subject. All these works of his can best be considered as
+letters; they are notes of personal travel, scribbles in a diary about
+this or that that really happened. But Dickens was one of the few men
+who have the two talents that are the whole of literature&mdash;and have them
+both together. First, he could make a thing happen over again; and
+second, he could make it happen better. He can be called exaggerative;
+but mere exaggeration conveys nothing of his typical talent. Mere
+whirlwinds of words, mere melodramas of earth and heaven do not affect
+us as Dickens affects us, because they are exaggerations of nothing. If
+asked for an exaggeration of something, their inventors would be
+entirely dumb. They would not know how to exaggerate a broom-stick; for
+the life of them they could not exaggerate a tenpenny nail. Dickens
+always began with the nail or the broom-stick. He always
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xxviii" id="Page_xxviii">[xxviii]</a></span>
+began with a fact even when he was most fanciful; and even when he drew
+the long bow he was careful to hit the white.</p>
+
+<p>This riotous realism of Dickens has its disadvantage&mdash;a disadvantage
+that comes out more clearly in these casual sketches than in his
+constructed romances. One grave defect in his greatness is that he was
+altogether too indifferent to theories. On large matters he went right
+by the very largeness of his mind; but in small matters he suffered from
+the lack of any logical test and ready reckoner. Hence his comment upon
+the details of civilisation or reform are sometimes apt to be jerky and
+jarring, and even grossly inconsistent. So long as a thing was heroic
+enough to admire, Dickens admired it; whenever it was absurd enough to
+laugh at he laughed at it: so far he was on sure ground. But about all
+the small human projects that lie between the extremes of the sublime
+and the ridiculous, his criticism was apt to have an accidental quality.
+As Matthew Arnold said of the remarks of the Young Man from the Country
+about the perambulator, they are felt not to be at the heart of the
+situation. On a great many occasions the Uncommercial Traveller seems,
+like other hasty travellers, to be criticising elements and institutions
+which he has quite inadequately understood; and once or twice the
+Uncommercial Traveller might almost as well be a Commercial Traveller
+for all he knows of the countryside.</p>
+
+<p>An instance of what I mean may be found in the amusing article about the
+nightmares of the nursery. Superficially read it might almost be taken
+to mean that Dickens disapproved of ghost stories&mdash;disapproved
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xxix" id="Page_xxix">[xxix]</a></span>
+of that old and genial horror which nurses can hardly supply fast
+enough for the children who want it. Dickens, one would have thought,
+should have been the last man in the world to object to horrible
+stories, having himself written some of the most horrible that exist in
+the world. The author of the Madman&rsquo;s Manuscript, of the disease
+of Monk and the death of Krook, cannot be considered fastidious in the
+matter of revolting realism or of revolting mysticism. If artistic
+horror is to be kept from the young, it is at least as necessary to keep
+little boys from reading <i>Pickwick</i> or <i>Bleak House</i> as to refrain from
+telling them the story of Captain Murderer or the terrible tale of
+Chips. If there was something appalling in the rhyme of Chips and pips
+and ships, it was nothing compared to that infernal refrain of
+&ldquo;Mudstains, bloodstains&rdquo; which Dickens himself, in one of
+his highest moments of hellish art, put into <i>Oliver Twist</i>.</p>
+
+<p>I take this one instance of the excellent article called
+&ldquo;Nurse&rsquo;s Stories&rdquo; because it is quite typical of all
+the rest. Dickens (accused of superficiality by those who cannot grasp
+that there is foam upon deep seas) was really deep about human beings;
+that is, he was original and creative about them. But about ideas he did
+tend to be a little superficial. He judged them by whether they hit him,
+and not by what they were trying to hit. Thus in this book the great
+wizard of the Christmas ghosts seems almost the enemy of ghost stories;
+thus the almost melodramatic moralist who created Ralph Nickleby and
+Jonas Chuzzlewit cannot see the point in original sin; thus the great
+denouncer of official oppression in England may be
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xxx" id="Page_xxx">[xxx]</a></span>
+found far too
+indulgent to the basest aspects of the modern police. His theories were
+less important than his creations, because he was a man of genius. But
+he himself thought his theories the more important, because he was a
+man.</p>
+
+<hr /><p class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[1]</a></p>
+<h2><a name="SKETCHES" id="SKETCHES"></a>SKETCHES BY BOZ</h2>
+
+<p>The greatest mystery about almost any great writer is why he was ever
+allowed to write at all. The first efforts of eminent men are always
+imitations; and very often they are bad imitations. The only question is
+whether the publisher had (as his name would seem to imply) some
+subconscious connection or sympathy with the public, and thus felt
+instinctively the presence of something that might ultimately tell; or
+whether the choice was merely a matter of chance and one Dickens was
+chosen and another Dickens left. The fact is almost unquestionable: most
+authors made their reputation by bad books and afterwards supported it
+by good ones. This is in some degree true even in the case of Dickens.
+The public continued to call him &ldquo;Boz&rdquo; long after the public
+had forgotten the <i>Sketches by Boz</i>. Numberless writers of the time
+speak of &ldquo;Boz&rdquo; as having written <i>Martin Chuzzlewit</i> and
+&ldquo;Boz&rdquo; as having written <i>David Copperfield</i>. Yet if they had
+gone back to the original book signed &ldquo;Boz&rdquo; they might even
+have felt that it was vulgar and flippant. This is indeed the chief
+tragedy of publishers: that they may easily refuse at the same moment
+the wrong manuscript and the right man. It is easy to see of Dickens now
+that he was the right man; but a man might have been very well excused
+if he had not realised <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[2]</a></span>
+that the <i>Sketches</i> was the right book. Dickens, I say, is a case for
+this primary query: whether there was in the first work any clear sign
+of his higher creative spirit. But Dickens is much less a case for this
+query than almost all the other great men of his period. The very
+earliest works of Thackeray are much more unimpressive than those of
+Dickens. Nay, they are much more vulgar than those of Dickens. And worst
+of all, they are much more numerous than those of Dickens. Thackeray
+came much nearer to being the ordinary literary failure than Dickens
+ever came. Read some of the earliest criticisms of Mr. Yellowplush or
+Michael Angelo Titmarsh and you will realise that at the very beginning
+there was more potential clumsiness and silliness in Thackeray than
+there ever was in Dickens. Nevertheless there was some potential
+clumsiness and silliness in Dickens; and what there is of it appears
+here and there in the admirable <i>Sketches by Boz</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps we may put the matter this way: this is the only one of
+Dickens&rsquo;s works of which it is ordinarily necessary to know the
+date. To a close and delicate comprehension it is indeed very important
+that <i>Nicholas Nickleby</i> was written at the beginning of Dickens&rsquo;s
+life, and <i>Our Mutual Friend</i> towards the end of it. Nevertheless
+anybody could understand or enjoy these books, whenever they were
+written. If <i>Our Mutual Friend</i> was written in the Latin of the Dark
+Ages we should still want it translated. If we thought that <i>Nicholas
+Nickleby</i> would not be written until thirty years hence we should all
+wait for it eagerly. The general impression produced by Dickens&rsquo;s
+work is the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[3]</a></span>
+same as that produced by miraculous visions; it is the destruction of
+time. Thomas Aquinas said that there was no time in the sight of God;
+however this may be, there was no time in the sight of Dickens. As a
+general rule Dickens can be read in any order; not only in any order of
+books, but even in any order of chapters. In an average Dickens book
+every part is so amusing and alive that you can read the parts
+backwards; you can read the quarrel first and then the cause of the
+quarrel; you can fall in love with a woman in the tenth chapter and then
+turn back to the first chapter to find out who she is. This is not
+chaos; it is eternity. It means merely that Dickens instinctively felt
+all his figures to be immortal souls who existed whether he wrote of
+them or not, and whether the reader read of them or not. There is a
+peculiar quality as of celestial pre-existence about the Dickens
+characters. Not only did they exist before we heard of them, they
+existed also before Dickens heard of them. As a rule this unchangeable
+air in Dickens deprives any discussion about date of its point. But as I
+have said, this is the one Dickens work of which the date <i>is</i>
+essential. It is really an important part of the criticism of this book
+to say that it is his first book. Certain elements of clumsiness, of
+obviousness, of evident blunder, actually require the chronological
+explanation. It is biographically important that this is his first book,
+almost exactly in the same way that it is biographically important that
+<i>The Mystery of Edwin Drood</i> was his last book. Change or no change,
+<i>Edwin Drood</i> has this plain point of a last story about it: that it is
+not finished. But if the last book is unfinished, the first book is more
+unfinished still.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[4]</a></span>
+The <i>Sketches</i> divide themselves, of course, into two broad classes. One
+half consists of sketches that are truly and in the strict sense
+sketches. That is, they are things that have no story and in their
+outline none of the character of creation; they are merely facts from
+the street or the tavern or the town hall, noted down as they occurred
+by an intelligence of quite exceptional vivacity. The second class
+consists of purely creative things: farces, romances, stories in any
+case with a non-natural perfection, or a poetical justice, to round them
+off. One class is admirably represented, for instance, by the sketch
+describing the Charity Dinner, the other by such a story as that of
+<i>Horatio Sparkins</i>. These things were almost certainly written by
+Dickens at very various periods of his youth; and early as the harvest
+is, no doubt it is a harvest and had ripened during a reasonably long
+time. Nevertheless it is with these two types of narrative that the
+young Charles Dickens first enters English literature; he enters it with
+a number of journalistic notes of such things as he has seen happen in
+streets or offices, and with a number of short stories which err on the
+side of the extravagant and even the superficial. Journalism had not
+then, indeed, sunk to the low level which it has since reached. His
+sketches of dirty London would not have been dirty enough for the modern
+Imperialist press. Still these first efforts of his are journalism, and
+sometimes vulgar journalism. It was as a journalist that he attacked the
+world, as a journalist that he conquered it.</p>
+
+<p>The biographical circumstances will not, of course, be forgotten. The
+life of Dickens had been a curious one. Brought up in a family just poor
+enough to be painfully <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[5]</a></span>
+conscious of its prosperity and its respectability, he had been
+suddenly flung by a financial calamity into a social condition far below
+his own. For men on that exact edge of the educated class such a
+transition is really tragic. A duke may become a navvy for a joke, but a
+clerk cannot become a navvy for a joke. Dickens&rsquo;s parents went to
+a debtors&rsquo; prison; Dickens himself went to a far more unpleasant
+place. The debtors&rsquo; prison had about it at least that element of
+amiable compromise and kindly decay which belonged (and belongs still)
+to all the official institutions of England. But Dickens was doomed to
+see the very blackest aspect of nineteenth-century England, something
+far blacker than any mere bad government. He went not to a prison but to
+a factory. In the musty traditionalism of the Marshalsea old John
+Dickens could easily remain optimistic. In the ferocious efficiency of
+the modern factory young Charles Dickens narrowly escaped being a
+pessimist. He did escape this danger; finally he even escaped the
+factory itself. His next step in life was, if possible, even more
+eccentric. He was sent to school; he was sent off like an innocent
+little boy in Eton collars to learn the rudiments of Latin grammar,
+without any reference to the fact that he had already taken his part in
+the horrible competition and actuality of the age of manufactures. It
+was like giving a sacked bank manager a satchel and sending him to a
+dame&rsquo;s school. Nor was the third stage of this career unconnected
+with the oddity of the others. On leaving the school he was made a clerk
+in a lawyer&rsquo;s office, as if henceforward this child of ridiculous
+changes was to settle down into a silent assistant for a quiet
+solicitor. It was exactly <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[6]</a></span>
+at this moment that his fundamental rebellion began to seethe; it
+seethed more against the quiet finality of his legal occupation than it
+had seethed against the squalor and slavery of his days of poverty.
+There must have been in his mind, I think, a dim feeling: &ldquo;Did all
+my dark crises mean only this; was I crucified only that I might become
+a solicitor&rsquo;s clerk?&rdquo; Whatever be the truth about this
+conjecture there can be no question about the facts themselves. It was
+about this time that he began to burst and bubble over, to insist upon
+his own intellect, to claim a career. It was about this time that he put
+together a loose pile of papers, satires on institutions, pictures of
+private persons, fairy tales of the vulgarity of his world, odds and
+ends such as come out of the facility and the fierce vanity of youth. It
+was about this time at any rate that he decided to publish them, and
+gave them the name of <i>Sketches by Boz</i>.</p>
+
+<p>They must, I think, be read in the light of this youthful explosion. In
+some psychological sense he had really been wronged. But he had only
+become conscious of his wrongs as his wrongs had been gradually righted.
+Similarly, it has often been found that a man who can patiently endure
+penal servitude through a judicial blunder will nevertheless, when once
+his cause is well asserted, quarrel about the amount of compensation or
+complain of small slights in his professional existence. These are the
+marks of the first literary action of Dickens. It has in it all the
+peculiar hardness of youth; a hardness which in those who have in any
+way been unfairly treated reaches even to impudence. It is a terrible
+thing for any man to find out that his elders <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[7]</a></span>
+are wrong. And this almost unkindly courage of youth must partly be
+held responsible for the smartness of Dickens, that almost offensive
+smartness which in these earlier books of his sometimes irritates us
+like the showy gibes in the tall talk of a school-boy. These first pages
+bear witness both to the energy of his genius and also to its
+unenlightenment; he seems more ignorant and more cocksure than so great
+a man should be. Dickens was never stupid, but he was sometimes silly;
+and he is occasionally silly here.</p>
+
+<p>All this must be said to prepare the more fastidious modern for these
+papers, if he has never read them before. But when all this has been
+said there remains in them exactly what always remains in Dickens when
+you have taken away everything that can be taken away by the most
+fastidious modern who ever dissected his grandmother. There remains that
+<i>primum mobile</i> of which all the mystics have spoken: energy, the power
+to create. I will not call it &ldquo;the will to live,&rdquo; for that
+is a priggish phrase of German professors. Even German professors, I
+suppose, have the will to live. But Dickens had exactly what German
+professors have not: he had the power to live. And indeed it is most
+valuable to have these early specimens of the Dickens work if only
+because they are specimens of his spirit apart from his matured
+intelligence. It is well to be able to realise that contact with the
+Dickens world is almost like a physical contact; it is like stepping
+suddenly into the hot smells of a greenhouse, or into the bleak smell of
+the sea. We know that we are there. Let any one read, for instance, one
+of the foolish but amusing farces in Dickens&rsquo;s first volume. Let
+him <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[8]</a></span>
+read, for instance, such a story as that of <i>Horatio Sparkins</i> or that
+of <i>The Tuggses at Ramsgate</i>. He will not find very much of that verbal
+felicity or fantastic irony that Dickens afterwards developed; the
+incidents are upon the plain lines of the stock comedy of the day:
+sharpers who entrap simpletons, spinsters who angle for husbands, youths
+who try to look Byronic and only look foolish. Yet there is something in
+these stories which there is not in the ordinary stock comedies of that
+day: an indefinable flavour of emphasis and richness, a hint as of
+infinity of fun. Doubtless, for instance, a million comic writers of
+that epoch had made game of the dark, romantic young man who pretended
+to abysses of philosophy and despair. And it is not easy to say exactly
+why we feel that the few metaphysical remarks of Mr. Horatio Sparkins
+are in some way really much funnier than any of those old stock jokes.
+It is in a certain quality of deep enjoyment in the writer as well as
+the reader; as if the few words written had been dipped in dark nonsense
+and were, as it were, reeking with derision. &ldquo;Because if Effect be
+the result of Cause and Cause be the Precursor of Effect,&rdquo; said
+Mr. Horatio Sparkins, &ldquo;I apprehend that you are wrong.&rdquo;
+Nobody can get at the real secret of sentences like that; sentences
+which were afterwards strewed with reckless liberality over the
+conversation of Dick Swiveller or Mr. Mantalini, Sim Tappertit or Mr.
+Pecksniff. Though the joke seems most superficial one has only to read
+it a certain number of times to see that it is most subtle. The joke
+does not lie in Mr. Sparkins merely using long words, any more than the
+joke lies merely in Mr. Swiveller drinking, or in Mr. Mantalini
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[9]</a></span>
+deceiving his wife. It is something in the arrangement of the words;
+something in a last inspired turn of absurdity given to a sentence. In
+spite of everything Horatio Sparkins is funny. We cannot tell why he is
+funny. When we know why he is funny we shall know why Dickens is great.</p>
+
+<p>Standing as we do here upon the threshold, as it were, of the work of
+Dickens, it may be well perhaps to state this truth as being, after all,
+the most important one. This first work had, as I have said, the faults
+of first work and the special faults that arose from its author&rsquo;s
+accidental history; he was deprived of education, and therefore it was
+in some ways uneducated; he was confronted with the folly and failure of
+his natural superiors and guardians, and therefore it was in some ways
+pert and insolent. Nevertheless the main fact about the work is worth
+stating here for any reader who should follow the chronological order
+and read the <i>Sketches by Boz</i> before embarking on the stormy and
+splendid sea of <i>Pickwick</i>. For the sea of <i>Pickwick</i>, though splendid,
+does make some people seasick. The great point to be emphasised at such
+an initiation is this: that people, especially refined people, are not
+to judge of Dickens by what they would call the coarseness or
+commonplaceness of his subject. It is quite true that his jokes are
+often on the same <i>subjects</i> as the jokes in a halfpenny comic paper.
+Only they happen to be good jokes. He does make jokes about drunkenness,
+jokes about mothers-in-law, jokes about henpecked husbands, jokes (which
+is much more really unpardonable) about spinsters, jokes about physical
+cowardice, jokes about fatness, jokes about sitting down on one&rsquo;s
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[10]</a></span>
+hat. He does make fun of all these things; and the reason is not very
+far to seek. He makes fun of all these things because all these things,
+or nearly all of them, are really very funny. But a large number of
+those who might otherwise read and enjoy Dickens are undoubtedly
+&ldquo;put off&rdquo; (as the phrase goes) by the fact that he seems to
+be echoing a poor kind of claptrap in his choice of incidents and
+images. Partly, of course, he suffers from the very fact of his success;
+his play with these topics was so good that every one else has played
+with them increasingly since; he may indeed have copied the old jokes,
+but he certainly renewed them. For instance, &ldquo;Ally Sloper&rdquo;
+was certainly copied from Wilkins Micawber. To this day you may see (in
+the front page of that fine periodical) the bald head and the high shirt
+collar that betray the high original from which &ldquo;Ally
+Sloper&rdquo; is derived. But exactly because &ldquo;Sloper&rdquo; was
+stolen from Micawber, for that very reason the new generation feels as
+if Micawber were stolen from &ldquo;Sloper.&rdquo; Many modern readers
+feel as if Dickens were copying the comic papers, whereas in truth the
+comic papers are still copying Dickens.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens showed himself to be an original man by always accepting old and
+established topics. There is no clearer sign of the absence of
+originality among modern poets than their disposition to find new
+themes. Really original poets write poems about the spring. They are
+always fresh, just as the spring is always fresh. Men wholly without
+originality write poems about torture, or new religions, of some
+perversion of obscenity, hoping that the mere sting of the subject may
+speak for them. But we do not sufficiently realise <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[11]</a></span>
+that what is true of the classic ode is also true of the classic joke.
+A true poet writes about the spring being beautiful because (after a
+thousand springs) the spring really is beautiful. In the same way the
+true humourist writes about a man sitting down on his hat, because the
+act of sitting down on one&rsquo;s hat (however often and however
+admirably performed) really is extremely funny. We must not dismiss a
+new poet because his poem is called <i>To a Skylark</i>; nor must we dismiss
+a humourist because his new farce is called <i>My Mother-in-law</i>. He may
+really have splendid and inspiring things to say upon an eternal
+problem. The whole question is whether he has.</p>
+
+<p>Now this is exactly where Dickens, and the possible mistake about
+Dickens, both come in. Numbers of sensitive ladies, numbers of simple
+&aelig;sthetes, have had a vague shrinking from that element in Dickens which
+begins vaguely in <i>The Tuggses at Ramsgate</i> and culminates in
+<i>Pickwick</i>. They have a vague shrinking from the mere subject matter;
+from the mere fact that so much of the fun is about drinking or
+fighting, or falling down, or eloping with old ladies. It is to these
+that the first appeal must be made upon the threshold of Dickens
+criticism. Let them really read the thing and really see whether the
+humour is the gross and half-witted jeering which they imagine it to be.
+It is exactly here that the whole genius of Dickens is concerned. His
+subjects are indeed stock subjects; like the skylark of Shelley, or the
+autumn of Keats. But all the more because they are stock subjects the
+reader realises what a magician is at work. The notion of a clumsy
+fellow who falls off his horse is indeed a stock <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[12]</a></span>
+and stale subject. But Mr. Winkle is not a stock and stale subject. Nor
+is his horse a stock and stale subject; it is as immortal as the horses
+of Achilles. The notion of a fat old gentleman proud of his legs might
+easily be vulgar. But Mr. Pickwick proud of his legs is not vulgar;
+somehow we feel that they were legs to be proud of. And it is exactly
+this that we must look for in these <i>Sketches</i>. We must not leap to any
+cheap fancy that they are low farces. Rather we must see that they are
+not low farces; and see that nobody but Dickens could have prevented
+them from being so.</p>
+
+<hr /><p class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[13]</a></p>
+<h2><a name="PICKWICK" id="PICKWICK"></a>PICKWICK PAPERS</h2>
+
+<p>There are those who deny with enthusiasm the existence of a God and are
+happy in a hobby which they call the Mistakes of Moses. I have not
+studied their labours in detail, but it seems that the chief mistake of
+Moses was that he neglected to write the Pentateuch. The lesser errors,
+apparently, were not made by Moses, but by another person equally
+unknown. These controversialists cover the very widest field, and their
+attacks upon Scripture are varied to the point of wildness. They range
+from the proposition that the unexpurgated Bible is almost as unfit for
+an American girls&rsquo; school as is an unexpurgated Shakespeare; they
+descend to the proposition that kissing the Book is almost as
+hygienically dangerous as kissing the babies of the poor. A superficial
+critic might well imagine that there was not one single sentence left of
+the Hebrew or Christian Scriptures which this school had not marked with
+some ingenious and uneducated comment. But there is one passage at least
+upon which they have never pounced, at least to my knowledge; and in
+pointing it out to them I feel that I am, or ought to be, providing
+material for quite a multitude of Hyde Park orations. I mean that
+singular arrangement in the mystical account <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[14]</a></span>
+of the Creation by which light is created first and all the luminous
+bodies afterwards. One could not imagine a process more open to the
+elephantine logic of the Bible-smasher than this: that the sun should be
+created after the sunlight. The conception that lies at the back of the
+phrase is indeed profoundly antagonistic to much of the modern point of
+view. To many modern people it would sound like saying that foliage
+existed before the first leaf; it would sound like saying that childhood
+existed before a baby was born. The idea is, as I have said, alien to
+most modern thought, and like many other ideas which are alien to most
+modern thought, it is a very subtle and a very sound idea. Whatever be
+the meaning of the passage in the actual primeval poem, there is a very
+real metaphysical meaning in the idea that light existed before the sun
+and stars. It is not barbaric; it is rather Platonic. The idea existed
+before any of the machinery which made manifest the idea. Justice
+existed when there was no need of judges, and mercy existed before any
+man was oppressed.</p>
+
+<p>However this may be in the matter of religion and philosophy, it can be
+said with little exaggeration that this truth is the very key of
+literature. The whole difference between construction and creation is
+exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is
+constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists, as the
+mother can love the unborn child. In creative art the essence of a book
+exists before the book or before even the details or main features of
+the book; the author enjoys it and lives in it with a kind of prophetic
+rapture. He wishes to write a comic <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[15]</a></span>
+story before he has thought of a single comic incident. He desires to
+write a sad story before he has thought of anything sad. He knows the
+atmosphere before he knows anything. There is a low priggish maxim
+sometimes uttered by men so frivolous as to take humour
+seriously&mdash;a maxim that a man should not laugh at his own jokes.
+But the great artist not only laughs at his own jokes; he laughs at his
+own jokes before he has made them. In the case of a man really humorous
+we can see humour in his eye before he has thought of any amusing words
+at all. So the creative writer laughs at his comedy before he creates
+it, and he has tears for his tragedy before he knows what it is. When
+the symbols and the fulfilling facts do come to him, they come generally
+in a manner very fragmentary and inverted, mostly in irrational glimpses
+of crisis or consummation. The last page comes before the first; before
+his romance has begun, he knows that it has ended well. He sees the
+wedding before the wooing; he sees the death before the duel. But most
+of all he sees the colour and character of the whole story prior to any
+possible events in it. This is the real argument for art and style, only
+that the artists and the stylists have not the sense to use it. In one
+very real sense style is far more important than either character or
+narrative. For a man knows what style of book he wants to write when he
+knows nothing else about it.</p>
+
+<p><i>Pickwick</i> is in Dickens&rsquo;s career the mere mass of light before
+the creation of sun or moon. It is the splendid, shapeless substance of
+which all his stars were ultimately made. You might split up <i>Pickwick</i>
+into innumerable novels as you could split up that primeval <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[16]</a></span>
+light into innumerable solar systems. The <i>Pickwick Papers</i> constitute
+first and foremost a kind of wild promise, a pre-natal vision of all the
+children of Dickens. He had not yet settled down into the plain,
+professional habit of picking out a plot and characters, of attending to
+one thing at a time, of writing a separate, sensible novel and sending
+it off to his publishers. He is still in the youthful whirl of the kind
+of world that he would like to create. He has not yet really settled
+what story he will write, but only what sort of story he will write. He
+tries to tell ten stories at once; he pours into the pot all the chaotic
+fancies and crude experiences of his boyhood; he sticks in irrelevant
+short stories shamelessly, as into a scrap-book; he adopts designs and
+abandons them, begins episodes and leaves them unfinished; but from the
+first page to the last there is a nameless and elemental
+ecstasy&mdash;that of the man who is doing the kind of thing that he can
+do. Dickens, like every other honest and effective writer, came at last
+to some degree of care and self-restraint. He learned how to make his
+<i>dramatis person&aelig;</i> assist his drama; he learned how to write
+stories which were full of rambling and perversity, but which were
+stories. But before he wrote a single real story, he had a kind of
+vision. It was a vision of the Dickens world&mdash;a maze of white
+roads, a map full of fantastic towns, thundering coaches, clamorous
+market-places, uproarious inns, strange and swaggering figures. That
+vision was <i>Pickwick</i>.</p>
+
+<p>It must be remembered that this is true even in connection with the
+man&rsquo;s contemporaneous biography. Apart from anything else about
+it, <i>Pickwick</i> was his <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[17]</a></span>
+first great chance. It was a big commission given in some sense to an
+untried man, that he might show what he could do. It was in a strict
+sense a sample. And just as a sample of leather can be only a piece of
+leather, or a sample of coal a lump of coal, so this book may most
+properly be regarded as simply a lump of Dickens. He was anxious to show
+all that was in him. He was more concerned to prove that he could write
+well than to prove that he could write this particular book well. And he
+did prove this, at any rate. No one ever sent such a sample as the
+sample of Dickens. His roll of leather blocked up the street; his lump
+of coal set the Thames on fire.</p>
+
+<p>The book originated in the suggestion of a publisher; as many more good
+books have done than the arrogance of the man of letters is commonly
+inclined to admit. Very much is said in our time about Apollo and
+Admetus, and the impossibility of asking genius to work within
+prescribed limits or assist an alien design. But after all, as a matter
+of fact, some of the greatest geniuses have done it, from Shakespeare
+botching up bad comedies and dramatising bad novels down to Dickens
+writing a masterpiece as the mere framework for a Mr. Seymour&rsquo;s
+sketches. Nor is the true explanation irrelevant to the spirit and power
+of Dickens. Very delicate, slender, and <i>bizarre</i> talents are indeed
+incapable of being used for an outside purpose, whether of public good
+or of private gain. But about very great and rich talent there goes a
+certain disdainful generosity which can turn its hand to anything. Minor
+poets cannot write to order; but very great poets can write to order.
+The larger the man&rsquo;s mind, the wider <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[18]</a></span>
+his scope of vision, the more likely it will be that anything suggested
+to him will seem significant and promising; the more he has a grasp of
+everything the more ready he will be to write anything. It is very hard
+(if that is the question) to throw a brick at a man and ask him to write
+an epic; but the more he is a great man the more able he will be to
+write about the brick. It is very unjust (if that is all) to point to a
+hoarding of Colman&rsquo;s mustard and demand a flood of philosophical
+eloquence; but the greater the man is the more likely he will be to give
+it to you. So it was proved, not for the first time, in this great
+experiment of the early employment of Dickens. Messrs. Chapman and Hall
+came to him with a scheme for a string of sporting stories to serve as
+the context, and one might almost say the excuse, for a string of
+sketches by Seymour, the sporting artist. Dickens made some
+modifications in the plan, but he adopted its main feature; and its main
+feature was Mr. Winkle. To think of what Mr. Winkle might have been in
+the hands of a dull <i>farceur</i>, and then to think of what he is, is to
+experience the feeling that Dickens made a man out of rags and refuse.
+Dickens was to work splendidly and successfully in many fields, and to
+send forth many brilliant books and brave figures. He was destined to
+have the applause of continents like a statesman, and to dictate to his
+publishers like a despot; but perhaps he never worked again so supremely
+well as here, where he worked in chains. It may well be questioned
+whether his one hack book is not his masterpiece.</p>
+
+<p>Of course it is true that as he went on his independence increased, and
+he kicked quite free of the influences <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[19]</a></span>
+that had suggested his story. So Shakespeare declared his independence
+of the original chronicle of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, eliminating
+altogether (with some wisdom) another uncle called Wiglerus. At the
+start the Nimrod Club of Chapman and Hall may have even had equal
+chances with the Pickwick Club of young Mr. Dickens; but the Pickwick
+Club became something much better than any publisher had dared to dream
+of. Some of the old links were indeed severed by accident or extraneous
+trouble; Seymour, for whose sake the whole had perhaps been planned,
+blew his brains out before he had drawn ten pictures. But such things
+were trifles compared to <i>Pickwick</i> itself. It mattered little now
+whether Seymour blew his brains out, so long as Charles Dickens blew his
+brains in. The work became systematically and progressively more
+powerful and masterly. Many critics have commented on the somewhat
+discordant and inartistic change between the earlier part of <i>Pickwick</i>
+and the later; they have pointed out, not without good sense, that the
+character of Mr. Pickwick changes from that of a silly buffoon to that
+of a solid merchant. But the case, if these critics had noticed it, is
+much stronger in the minor characters of the great company. Mr. Winkle,
+who has been an idiot (even, perhaps, as Mr. Pickwick says, &ldquo;an
+impostor&rdquo;), suddenly becomes a romantic and even reckless lover,
+scaling a forbidden wall and planning a bold elopement. Mr. Snodgrass,
+who has behaved in a ridiculous manner in all serious positions,
+suddenly finds himself in a ridiculous position&mdash;that of a
+gentleman surprised in a secret love affair&mdash;and behaves in a
+manner perfectly manly, serious, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[20]</a></span>
+and honourable. Mr. Tupman alone has no serious emotional development,
+and for this reason it is, presumably, that we hear less and less of Mr.
+Tupman towards the end of the book. Dickens has by this time got into a
+thoroughly serious mood&mdash;a mood expressed indeed by extravagant
+incidents, but none the less serious for that; and into this Winkle and
+Snodgrass, in the character of romantic lovers, could be made to fit.
+Mr. Tupman had to be left out of the love affairs; therefore Mr. Tupman
+is left out of the book.</p>
+
+<p>Much of the change was due to the entrance of the greatest character in
+the story. It may seem strange at the first glance to say that Sam
+Weller helped to make the story serious. Nevertheless, this is strictly
+true. The introduction of Sam Weller had, to begin with, some merely
+accidental and superficial effects. When Samuel Weller had appeared,
+Samuel Pickwick was no longer the chief farcical character. Weller
+became the joker and Pickwick in some sense the butt of his jokes. Thus
+it was obvious that the more simple, solemn, and really respectable this
+butt could be made the better. Mr. Pickwick had been the figure capering
+before the footlights. But with the advent of Sam, Mr. Pickwick had
+become a sort of black background and had to behave as such. But this
+explanation, though true as far as it goes, is a mean and unsatisfactory
+one, leaving the great elements unexplained. For a much deeper and more
+righteous reason Sam Weller introduces the more serious tone of
+Pickwick. He introduces it because he introduces something which it was
+the chief business of Dickens to preach throughout his life&mdash;something
+which he never preached so well as when he preached
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[21]</a></span>
+it unconsciously. Sam Weller introduces the English people.</p>
+
+<p>Sam Weller is the great symbol in English literature of the populace
+peculiar to England. His incessant stream of sane nonsense is a
+wonderful achievement of Dickens: but it is no great falsification of
+the incessant stream of sane nonsense as it really exists among the
+English poor. The English poor live in an atmosphere of humour; they
+think in humour. Irony is the very air that they breathe. A joke comes
+suddenly from time to time into the head of a politician or a gentleman,
+and then as a rule he makes the most of it; but when a serious word
+comes into the mind of a coster it is almost as startling as a joke. The
+word &ldquo;chaff&rdquo; was, I suppose, originally applied to badinage
+to express its barren and unsustaining character; but to the English
+poor chaff is as sustaining as grain. The phrase that leaps to their
+lips is the ironical phrase. I remember once being driven in a hansom
+cab down a street that turned out to be a <i>cul de sac</i>, and brought us
+bang up against a wall. The driver and I simultaneously said something.
+But I said: &ldquo;This&rsquo;ll never do!&rdquo; and he said:
+&ldquo;This is all right!&rdquo; Even in the act of pulling back his
+horse&rsquo;s nose from a brick wall, that confirmed satirist thought in
+terms of his highly-trained and traditional satire; while I, belonging
+to a duller and simpler class, expressed my feelings in words as
+innocent and literal as those of a rustic or a child.</p>
+
+<p>This eternal output of divine derision has never been so truly typified
+as by the character of Sam; he is a grotesque fountain which gushes the
+living waters <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[22]</a></span>
+for ever. Dickens is accused of exaggeration and he is often guilty of
+exaggeration; but here he does not exaggerate: he merely symbolises and
+sublimates like any other great artist. Sam Weller does not exaggerate
+the wit of the London street arab one atom more than Colonel Newcome,
+let us say, exaggerates the stateliness of an ordinary soldier and
+gentleman, or than Mr. Collins exaggerates the fatuity of a certain kind
+of country clergyman. And this breath from the boisterous brotherhood of
+the poor lent a special seriousness and smell of reality to the whole
+story. The unconscious follies of Winkle and Tupman are blown away like
+leaves before the solid and conscious folly of Sam Weller. Moreover, the
+relations between Pickwick and his servant Sam are in some ways new and
+valuable in literature. Many comic writers had described the clever
+rascal and his ridiculous dupe; but here, in a fresh and very human
+atmosphere, we have a clever servant who was not a rascal and
+<ins class="corr" title="Transcriber's Note: The original showed 'a dupe and who was'.">a dupe who was</ins>
+not ridiculous. Sam Weller stands in some ways for a cheerful knowledge
+of the world; Mr. Pickwick stands for a still more cheerful ignorance of
+the world. And Dickens responded to a profound human sentiment (the
+sentiment that has made saints and the sanctity of children) when he
+made the gentler and less-travelled type&mdash;the type which moderates
+and controls. Knowledge and innocence are both excellent things, and
+they are both very funny. But it is right that knowledge should be the
+servant and innocence the master.</p>
+
+<p>The sincerity of this study of Sam Weller has produced one particular
+effect in the book which I wonder <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[23]</a></span>
+that critics of Dickens have never noticed or discussed. Because it has
+no Dickens &ldquo;pathos,&rdquo; certain parts of it are truly pathetic.
+Dickens, realising rightly that the whole tone of the book was fun, felt
+that he ought to keep out of it any great experiments in sadness and
+keep within limits those that he put in. He used this restraint in order
+not to spoil the humour; but (if he had known himself better) he might
+well have used it in order not to spoil the pathos. This is the one book
+in which Dickens was, as it were, forced to trample down his tender
+feelings; and for that very reason it is the one book where all the
+tenderness there is is quite unquestionably true. An admirable example
+of what I mean may be found in the scene in which Sam Weller goes down
+to see his bereaved father after the death of his step-mother. The most
+loyal admirer of Dickens can hardly prevent himself from giving a slight
+shudder when he thinks of what Dickens might have made of that scene in
+some of his more expansive and maudlin moments. For all I know old Mrs.
+Weller might have asked what the wild waves were saying; and for all I
+know old Mr. Weller might have told her. As it is, Dickens, being forced
+to keep the tale taut and humorous, gives a picture of humble respect
+and decency which is manly, dignified, and really sad. There is no
+attempt made by these simple and honest men, the father and son, to
+pretend that the dead woman was anything greatly other than she was;
+their respect is for death, and for the human weakness and mystery which
+it must finally cover. Old Tony Weller does not tell his shrewish wife
+that she is already a white-winged <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[24]</a></span>
+angel; he speaks to her with an admirable good nature and good sense:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;&lsquo;Susan,&rsquo; I says, &lsquo;you&rsquo;ve been a wery
+good vife to me altogether: keep a good heart, my dear, and
+you&rsquo;ll live to see me punch that &rsquo;ere Stiggins&rsquo;s
+&rsquo;ead yet.&rsquo; She smiled at this, Samivel ... but she died
+arter all.&rdquo;</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>That is perhaps the first and the last time that Dickens ever touched
+the extreme dignity of pathos. He is restraining his compassion, and
+afterwards he let it go. Now laughter is a thing that can be let go;
+laughter has in it a quality of liberty. But sorrow has in it by its
+very nature a quality of confinement; pathos by its very nature fights
+with itself. Humour is expansive; it bursts outwards; the fact is
+attested by the common expression, &ldquo;holding one&rsquo;s
+sides.&rdquo; But sorrow is not expansive; and it was afterwards the
+mistake of Dickens that he tried to make it expansive. It is the one
+great weakness of Dickens as a great writer, that he did try to make
+that sudden sadness, that abrupt pity, which we call pathos, a thing
+quite obvious, infectious, public, as if it were journalism or the
+measles. It is pleasant to think that in this supreme masterpiece, done
+in the dawn of his career, there is not even this faint fleck upon the
+sun of his just splendour. Pickwick will always be remembered as the
+great example of everything that made Dickens great; of the solemn
+conviviality of great friendships, of the erratic adventures of old
+English roads, of the hospitality of old English inns, of the great
+fundamental kindliness and honour of old English manners. First of all,
+however, it will always be remembered for its laughter, or, if you will,
+for its folly. A good joke is the one ultimate and sacred thing which
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[25]</a></span>
+cannot be criticised. Our relations with a good joke are direct and
+even divine relations. We speak of &ldquo;seeing&rdquo; a joke just as
+we speak of &ldquo;seeing&rdquo; a ghost or a vision. If we have seen
+it, it is futile to argue with us; and we have seen the vision of
+<i>Pickwick</i>. <i>Pickwick</i> may be the top of Dickens&rsquo;s humour; I think
+upon the whole it is. But the broad humour of <i>Pickwick</i> he broadened
+over many wonderful kingdoms; the narrow pathos of <i>Pickwick</i> he never
+found again.</p>
+
+<hr /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[26]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="NICHOLAS" id="NICHOLAS"></a>NICHOLAS NICKLEBY</h2>
+
+<p>Romance is perhaps the highest point of human expression, except indeed
+religion, to which it is closely allied. Romance resembles religion
+especially in this, that it is not only a simplification but a
+shortening of existence. Both romance and religion see everything as it
+were foreshortened; they see everything in an abrupt and fantastic
+perspective, coming to an apex. It is the whole essence of perspective
+that it comes to a point. Similarly, religion comes to a point&mdash;to the
+point. Thus religion is always insisting on the shortness of human life.
+But it does not insist on the shortness of human life as the pessimists
+insist on it. Pessimism insists on the shortness of human life in order
+to show that life is valueless. Religion insists on the shortness of
+human life in order to show that life is frightfully valuable&mdash;is almost
+horribly valuable. Pessimism says that life is so short that it gives
+nobody a chance; religion says that life is so short that it gives
+everybody his final chance. In the first case the word brevity means
+futility; in the second case, opportunity. But the case is even stronger
+than this. Religion shortens everything. Religion shortens even
+eternity. Where science, submitting to the false standard of time, sees
+evolution, which is slow, religion sees creation, which is sudden.
+Philosophically speaking, the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[27]</a></span>
+process is neither slow nor quick since we have nothing to compare it
+with. Religion prefers to think of it as quick. For religion the flowers
+shoot up suddenly like rockets. For religion the mountains are lifted up
+suddenly like waves. Those who quote that fine passage which says that
+in God&rsquo;s sight a thousand years are as yesterday that is passed as
+a watch in the night, do not realise the full force of the meaning. To
+God a thousand years are not only a watch but an exciting watch. For God
+time goes at a gallop, as it does to a man reading a good tale.</p>
+
+<p>All this is, in a humble manner, true for romance. Romance is a
+shortening and sharpening of the human difficulty. Where you and I have
+to vote against a man, or write (rather feebly) against a man, or sign
+illegible petitions against a man, romance does for him what we should
+really like to see done. It knocks him down; it shortens the slow
+process of historical justice. All romances consist of three characters.
+Other characters may be introduced; but those other characters are
+certainly mere scenery as far as the romance is concerned. They are
+bushes that wave rather excitedly; they are posts that stand up with a
+certain pride; they are correctly painted rocks that frown very
+correctly; but they are all landscape&mdash;they are all a background. In
+every pure romance there are three living and moving characters. For the
+sake of argument they may be called St. George and the Dragon and the
+Princess. In every romance there must be the twin elements of loving and
+fighting. In every romance there must be the three characters: there
+must be the Princess, who is a thing to be loved; there must
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[28]</a></span>
+be the Dragon, who is a thing to be fought; and there must be St.
+George, who is a thing that both loves and fights. There have been many
+symptoms of cynicism and decay in our modern civilisation. But of all
+the signs of modern feebleness, of lack of grasp on morals as they
+actually must be, there has been none quite so silly or so dangerous as
+this: that the philosophers of to-day have started to divide loving from
+fighting and to put them into opposite camps. There could be no worse
+sign than that a man, even Nietzsche, can be found to say that we should
+go in for fighting instead of loving. There can be no worse sign than
+that a man, even Tolstoi, can be found to tell us that we should go in
+for loving instead of fighting. The two things imply each other; they
+implied each other in the old romance and in the old religion, which
+were the two permanent things of humanity. You cannot love a thing
+without wanting to fight for it. You cannot fight without something to
+fight for. To love a thing without wishing to fight for it is not love
+at all; it is lust. It may be an airy, philosophical, and disinterested
+lust; it may be, so to speak, a virgin lust; but it is lust, because it
+is wholly self-indulgent and invites no attack. On the other hand,
+fighting for a thing without loving it is not even fighting; it can only
+be called a kind of horse-play that is occasionally fatal. Wherever
+human nature is human and unspoilt by any special sophistry, there
+exists this natural kinship between war and wooing, and that natural
+kinship is called romance. It comes upon a man especially in the great
+hour of youth; and every man who has ever been young at all has felt, if
+only for a moment, this ultimate and poetic paradox. He
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[29]</a></span>
+knows that loving the world is the same thing as fighting the world. It
+was at the very moment when he offered to like everybody he also offered
+to hit everybody. To almost every man that can be called a man this
+especial moment of the romantic culmination has come. In the first
+resort the man wished to live a romance. In the second resort, in the
+last and worst resort, he was content to write one.</p>
+
+<p>Now there is a certain moment when this element enters independently
+into the life of Dickens. There is a particular time when we can see him
+suddenly realise that he wants to write a romance and nothing else. In
+reading his letters, in appreciating his character, this point emerges
+clearly enough. He was full of the afterglow of his marriage; he was
+still young and psychologically ignorant; above all, he was now, really
+for the first time, sure that he was going to be at least some kind of
+success. There is, I repeat, a certain point at which one feels that
+Dickens will either begin to write romances or go off on something
+different altogether. This crucial point in his life is marked by
+<i>Nicholas Nickleby</i>.</p>
+
+<p>It must be remembered that before this issue of <i>Nicholas Nickleby</i> his
+work, successful as it was, had not been such as to dedicate him
+seriously or irrevocably to the writing of novels. He had already
+written three books; and at least two of them are classed among the
+novels under his name. But if we look at the actual origin and formation
+of these books we see that they came from another source and were really
+designed upon another plan. The three books were, of course, the
+<i>Sketches by Boz</i>, <i>the Pickwick Papers</i>, and <i>Oliver Twist</i>.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[30]</a></span>
+It is, I suppose, sufficiently well understood that the <i>Sketches by
+Boz</i> are, as their name implies, only sketches. But surely it is quite
+equally clear that the <i>Pickwick Papers</i> are, as their name implies,
+merely papers. Nor is the case at all different in spirit and essence
+when we come to <i>Oliver Twist</i>. There is indeed a sort of romance in
+<i>Oliver Twist</i>, but it is such an uncommonly bad one that it can hardly
+be regarded as greatly interrupting the previous process; and if the
+reader chooses to pay very little attention to it, he cannot pay less
+attention to it than the author did. But in fact the case lies far
+deeper. <i>Oliver Twist</i> is so much apart from the ordinary track of
+Dickens, it is so gloomy, it is so much all in one atmosphere, that it
+can best be considered as an exception or a solitary excursus in his
+work. Perhaps it can best be considered as the extension of one of his
+old sketches, of some sketch that happened to be about a visit to a
+workhouse or a gaol. In the <i>Sketches by Boz</i> he might well have visited
+a workhouse where he saw Bumble; in the <i>Sketches by Boz</i> he might well
+have visited a prison where he saw Fagin. We are still in the realm of
+sketches and sketchiness. <i>The Pickwick Papers</i> may be called an
+extension of one of his bright sketches. <i>Oliver Twist</i> may be called an
+extension of one of his gloomy ones.</p>
+
+<p>Had he continued along this line all his books might very well have been
+note-books. It would be very easy to split up all his subsequent books
+into scraps and episodes, such as those which make up the <i>Sketches by
+Boz</i>. It would be easy enough for Dickens, instead of publishing
+<i>Nicholas Nickleby</i>, to have published a book of sketches, one of which
+was called &ldquo;A Yorkshire<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[31]</a></span>
+School,&rdquo; another called &ldquo;A Provincial Theatre,&rdquo; and
+another called &ldquo;Sir Mulberry Hawk or High Life Revealed,&rdquo;
+another called &ldquo;Mrs. Nickleby or a Lady&rsquo;s Monologue.&rdquo;
+It would have been very easy to have thrown over the rather chaotic plan
+of the <i>Old Curiosity Shop</i>. He might have merely written short stories
+called &ldquo;The Glorious Apollos,&rdquo; &ldquo;Mrs. Quilp&rsquo;s
+Tea-Party,&rdquo; &ldquo;Mrs. Jarley&rsquo;s Waxwork,&rdquo; &ldquo;The
+Little Servant,&rdquo; and &ldquo;The Death of a Dwarf.&rdquo; <i>Martin
+Chuzzlewit</i> might have been twenty stories instead of one story. <i>Dombey
+and Son</i> might have been twenty stories instead of one story. We might
+have lost all Dickens&rsquo;s novels; we might have lost altogether
+Dickens the novelist. We might have lost that steady love of a seminal
+and growing romance which grew on him steadily as the years advanced,
+and which gave us towards the end some of his greatest triumphs. All his
+books might have been <i>Sketches by Boz</i>. But he did turn away from this,
+and the turning-point is <i>Nicholas Nickleby</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Everything has a supreme moment and is crucial; that is where our
+friends the evolutionists go wrong. I suppose that there is an instant
+of midsummer as there is an instant of midnight. If in the same way
+there is a supreme point of spring, <i>Nicholas Nickleby</i> is the supreme
+point of Dickens&rsquo;s spring. I do not mean that it is the best book
+that he wrote in his youth. <i>Pickwick</i> is a better book. I do not mean
+that it contains more striking characters than any of the other books in
+his youth. The <i>Old Curiosity Shop</i> contains at least two more striking
+characters. But I mean that this book coincided with his resolution to
+be a great novelist and his final belief that he could be one.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[32]</a></span>
+Henceforward his books are novels, very commonly bad novels. Previously
+they have not really been novels at all. There are many indications of
+the change I mean. Here is one, for instance, which is more or less
+final. <i>Nicholas Nickleby</i> is Dickens&rsquo;s first romantic novel
+because it is his first novel with a proper and dignified romantic hero;
+which means, of course, a somewhat chivalrous young donkey. The hero of
+<i>Pickwick</i> is an old man. The hero of <i>Oliver Twist</i> is a child. Even
+after <i>Nicholas Nickleby</i> this non-romantic custom continued. The <i>Old
+Curiosity Shop</i> has no hero in particular. The hero of <i>Barnaby Rudge</i>
+is a lunatic. But Nicholas Nickleby is a proper, formal, and ceremonial
+hero. He has no psychology; he has not even any particular character;
+but he is made deliberately a hero&mdash;young, poor, brave, unimpeachable,
+and ultimately triumphant. He is, in short, the hero. Mr. Vincent
+Crummles had a colossal intellect; and I always have a fancy that under
+all his pomposity he saw things more keenly than he allowed others to
+see. The moment he saw Nicholas Nickleby, almost in rags and limping
+along the high road, he engaged him (you will remember) as first walking
+gentleman. He was right. Nobody could possibly be more of a first
+walking gentleman than Nicholas Nickleby was. He was the first walking
+gentleman before he went on to the boards of Mr. Vincent
+Crummles&rsquo;s theatre, and he remained the first walking gentleman
+after he had come off.</p>
+
+<p>Now this romantic method involves a certain element of climax which to
+us appears crudity. Nicholas Nickleby, for instance, wanders through the
+world; he <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[33]</a></span>
+takes a situation as assistant to a Yorkshire schoolmaster; he sees an
+act of tyranny of which he strongly disapproves; he cries out
+&ldquo;Stop!&rdquo; in a voice that makes the rafters ring; he thrashes
+the schoolmaster within an inch of his life; he throws the schoolmaster
+away like an old cigar, and he goes away. The modern intellect is
+positively prostrated and flattened by this rapid and romantic way of
+righting wrongs. If a modern philanthropist came to Dotheboys Hall I
+fear he would not employ the simple, sacred, and truly Christian
+solution of beating Mr. Squeers with a stick. I fancy he would petition
+the Government to appoint a Royal Commission to inquire into Mr.
+Squeers. I think he would every now and then write letters to newspapers
+reminding people that, in spite of all appearances to the contrary,
+there was a Royal Commission to inquire into Mr. Squeers. I agree that
+he might even go the length of calling a crowded meeting in St.
+James&rsquo;s Hall on the subject of the best policy with regard to Mr.
+Squeers. At this meeting some very heated and daring speakers might even
+go the length of alluding sternly to Mr. Squeers. Occasionally even
+hoarse voices from the back of the hall might ask (in vain) what was
+going to be done with Mr. Squeers. The Royal Commission would report
+about three years afterwards and would say that many things had happened
+which were certainly most regrettable; that Mr. Squeers was the victim
+of a bad system; that Mrs. Squeers was also the victim of a bad system;
+but that the man who sold Squeers his cane had really acted with great
+indiscretion and ought to be spoken to kindly. Something like this would
+be what, after four <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[34]</a></span>
+years, the Royal Commission would have said; but it would not matter in
+the least what the Royal Commission had said, for by that time the
+philanthropists would be off on a new tack and the world would have
+forgotten all about Dotheboys Hall and everything connected with it. By
+that time the philanthropists would be petitioning Parliament for
+another Royal Commission; perhaps a Royal Commission to inquire into
+whether Mr. Mantalini was extravagant with his wife&rsquo;s money;
+perhaps a commission to inquire into whether Mr. Vincent Crummles kept
+the Infant Phenomenon short by means of gin.</p>
+
+<p>If we wish to understand the spirit and the period of <i>Nicholas
+Nickleby</i> we must endeavour to comprehend and to appreciate the old more
+decisive remedies, or, if we prefer to put it so, the old more desperate
+remedies. Our fathers had a plain sort of pity; if you will, a gross and
+coarse pity. They had their own sort of sentimentalism. They were quite
+willing to weep over Smike. But it certainly never occurred to them to
+weep over Squeers. Even those who opposed the French war opposed it
+exactly in the same way as their enemies opposed the French soldiers.
+They fought with fighting. Charles Fox was full of horror at the
+bitterness and the useless bloodshed; but if any one had insulted him
+over the matter, he would have gone out and shot him in a duel as coolly
+as any of his contemporaries. All their interference was heroic
+interference. All their legislation was heroic legislation. All their
+remedies were heroic remedies. No doubt they were often narrow and often
+visionary. No doubt they often looked at a political formula when they
+should have <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[35]</a></span>
+looked at an elemental fact. No doubt they were pedantic in some of
+their principles and clumsy in some of their solutions. No doubt, in
+short, they were all very wrong; and no doubt we are the people, and
+wisdom shall die with us. But when they saw something which in their
+eyes, such as they were, really violated their morality, such as it was,
+then they did not cry &ldquo;Investigate!&rdquo; They did not cry
+&ldquo;Educate!&rdquo; They did not cry &ldquo;Improve!&rdquo; They did
+not cry &ldquo;Evolve!&rdquo; Like Nicholas Nickleby they cried
+&ldquo;Stop!&rdquo; And it did stop.</p>
+
+<p>This is the first mark of the purely romantic method: the swiftness and
+simplicity with which St. George kills the dragon. The second mark of it
+is exhibited here as one of the weaknesses of <i>Nicholas Nickleby</i>. I
+mean the tendency in the purely romantic story to regard the heroine
+merely as something to be won; to regard the princess solely as
+something to be saved from the dragon. The father of Madeline Bray is
+really a very respectable dragon. His selfishness is suggested with much
+more psychological tact and truth than that of any other of the villains
+that Dickens described about this time. But his daughter is merely the
+young woman with whom Nicholas is in love. We do not care a rap about
+Madeline Bray. Personally I should have preferred Cecilia Bobster. Here
+is one real point where the Victorian romance falls below the
+Elizabethan romantic drama. Shakespeare always made his heroines heroic
+as well as his heroes.</p>
+
+<p>In Dickens&rsquo;s actual literary career it is this romantic quality in
+<i>Nicholas Nickleby</i> that is most important. It is his first definite
+attempt to write a young and chivalrous <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[36]</a></span>
+novel. In this sense the comic characters and the comic scenes are
+secondary; and indeed the comic characters and the comic scenes,
+admirable as they are, could never be considered as in themselves
+superior to such characters and such scenes in many of the other books.
+But in themselves how unforgettable they are. Mr. Crummles and the whole
+of his theatrical business is an admirable case of that first and most
+splendid quality in Dickens&mdash;I mean the art of making something
+which in life we call pompous and dull, becoming in literature pompous
+and delightful. I have remarked before that nearly every one of the
+amusing characters of Dickens is in reality a great fool. But I might go
+further. Almost every one of his amusing characters is in reality a
+great bore. The very people that we fly to in Dickens are the very
+people that we fly from in life. And there is more in Crummles than the
+mere entertainment of his solemnity and his tedium. The enormous
+seriousness with which he takes his art is always an exact touch in
+regard to the unsuccessful artist. If an artist is successful,
+everything then depends upon a dilemma of his moral character. If he is
+a mean artist success will make him a society man. If he is a
+magnanimous artist, success will make him an ordinary man. But only as
+long as he is unsuccessful will he be an unfathomable and serious
+artist, like Mr. Crummles. Dickens was always particularly good at
+expressing thus the treasures that belong to those who do not succeed in
+this world. There are vast prospects and splendid songs in the point of
+view of the typically unsuccessful man; if all the used-up actors and
+spoilt journalists and broken clerks could give a chorus, it
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[37]</a></span>
+would be a wonderful chorus in praise of the world. But these
+unsuccessful men commonly cannot even speak. Dickens is the voice of
+them, and a very ringing voice; because he was perhaps the only one of
+these unsuccessful men that was ever successful.</p>
+
+<hr /><p class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[38]</a></p>
+<h2><a name="OLIVER" id="OLIVER"></a>OLIVER TWIST</h2>
+
+<p>In considering Dickens, as we almost always must consider him, as a man
+of rich originality, we may possibly miss the forces from which he drew
+even his original energy. It is not well for man to be alone. We, in the
+modern world, are ready enough to admit that when it is applied to some
+problem of monasticism or of an ecstatic life. But we will not admit
+that our modern artistic claim to absolute originality is really a claim
+to absolute unsociability; a claim to absolute loneliness. The anarchist
+is at least as solitary as the ascetic. And the men of very vivid vigour
+in literature, the men such as Dickens, have generally displayed a large
+sociability towards the society of letters, always expressed in the
+happy pursuit of pre-existent themes, sometimes expressed, as in the
+case of Moli&egrave;re or Sterne, in downright plagiarism. For even theft is a
+confession of our dependence on society. In Dickens, however, this
+element of the original foundations on which he worked is quite
+especially difficult to determine. This is partly due to the fact that
+for the present reading public he is practically the only one of his
+long line that is read at all. He sums up Smollett and Goldsmith, but he
+also destroys them. This one giant, being closest to us, cuts off from
+our view even the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[39]</a></span>
+giants that begat him. But much more is this difficulty due to the fact
+that Dickens mixed up with the old material, materials so subtly modern,
+so made of the French Revolution, that the whole is transformed. If we
+want the best example of this, the best example is <i>Oliver Twist</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Relatively to the other works of Dickens <i>Oliver Twist</i> is not of great
+value, but it is of great importance. Some parts of it are so crude and
+of so clumsy a melodrama, that one is almost tempted to say that Dickens
+would have been greater without it. But even if he had been greater
+without it he would still have been incomplete without it. With the
+exception of some gorgeous passages, both of humour and horror, the
+interest of the book lies not so much in its revelation of
+Dickens&rsquo;s literary genius as in its revelation of those moral,
+personal, and political instincts which were the make-up of his
+character and the permanent support of that literary genius. It is by
+far the most depressing of all his books; it is in some ways the most
+irritating; yet its ugliness gives the last touch of honesty to all that
+spontaneous and splendid output. Without this one discordant note all
+his merriment might have seemed like levity.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens had just appeared upon the stage and set the whole world
+laughing with his first great story <i>Pickwick</i>. <i>Oliver Twist</i> was his
+encore. It was the second opportunity given to him by those who had
+rolled about with laughter over Tupman and Jingle, Weller and Dowler.
+Under such circumstances a stagey reciter will sometimes take care to
+give a pathetic piece after his humorous one; and with all his many
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[40]</a></span>
+moral merits, there was much that was stagey about Dickens. But this
+explanation alone is altogether inadequate and unworthy. There was in
+Dickens this other kind of energy, horrible, uncanny, barbaric, capable
+in another age of coarseness, greedy for the emblems of established
+ugliness, the coffin, the gibbet, the bones, the bloody knife. Dickens
+liked these things and he was all the more of a man for liking them;
+especially he was all the more of a boy. We can all recall with pleasure
+the fact that Miss Petowker (afterwards Mrs. Lillyvick) was in the habit
+of reciting a poem called &ldquo;The Blood Drinker&rsquo;s
+Burial.&rdquo; I cannot express my regret that the words of this poem
+are not given; for Dickens would have been quite as capable of writing
+&ldquo;The Blood Drinker&rsquo;s Burial&rdquo; as Miss Petowker was of
+reciting it. This strain existed in Dickens alongside of his happy
+laughter; both were allied to the same robust romance. Here as elsewhere
+Dickens is close to all the permanent human things. He is close to
+religion, which has never allowed the thousand devils on its churches to
+stop the dancing of its bells. He is allied to the people, to the real
+poor, who love nothing so much as to take a cheerful glass and to talk
+about funerals. The extremes of his gloom and gaiety are the mark of
+religion and democracy; they mark him off from the moderate happiness of
+philosophers, and from that stoicism which is the virtue and the creed
+of aristocrats. There is nothing odd in the fact that the same man who
+conceived the humane hospitalities of Pickwick should also have imagined
+the inhuman laughter of Fagin&rsquo;s den. They are both genuine and
+they are both exaggerated. And the whole human <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[41]</a></span>
+tradition has tied up together in a strange knot these strands of
+festivity and fear. It is over the cups of Christmas Eve that men have
+always competed in telling ghost stories.</p>
+
+<p>This first element was present in Dickens, and it is very powerfully
+present in <i>Oliver Twist</i>. It had not been present with sufficient
+consistency or continuity in <i>Pickwick</i> to make it remain on the
+reader&rsquo;s memory at all, for the tale of &ldquo;Gabriel
+Grubb&rdquo; is grotesque rather than horrible, and the two gloomy
+stories of the &ldquo;Madman&rdquo; and the &ldquo;Queer Client&rdquo;
+are so utterly irrelevant to the tale, that even if the reader remember
+them he probably does not remember that they occur in <i>Pickwick</i>.
+Critics have complained of Shakespeare and others for putting comic
+episodes into a tragedy. It required a man with the courage and
+coarseness of Dickens actually to put tragic episodes into a farce. But
+they are not caught up into the story at all. In <i>Oliver Twist</i>,
+however, the thing broke out with an almost brutal inspiration, and
+those who had fallen in love with Dickens for his generous buffoonery
+may very likely have been startled at receiving such very different fare
+at the next helping. When you have bought a man&rsquo;s book because you
+like his writing about Mr. Wardle&rsquo;s punch-bowl and Mr.
+Winkle&rsquo;s skates, it may very well be surprising to open it and
+read about the sickening thuds that beat out the life of Nancy, or that
+mysterious villain whose face was blasted with disease.</p>
+
+<p>As a nightmare, the work is really admirable. Characters which are not
+very clearly conceived as regards their own psychology are yet, at
+certain moments, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[42]</a></span>
+managed so as to shake to its foundations our own psychology. Bill
+Sikes is not exactly a real man, but for all that he is a real murderer.
+Nancy is not really impressive as a living woman; but (as the phrase
+goes) she makes a lovely corpse. Something quite childish and eternal in
+us, something which is shocked with the mere simplicity of death,
+quivers when we read of those repeated blows or see Sikes cursing the
+tell-tale cur who will follow his bloody foot-prints. And this strange,
+sublime, vulgar melodrama, which is melodrama and yet is painfully real,
+reaches its hideous height in that fine scene of the death of Sikes, the
+besieged house, the boy screaming within, the crowd screaming without,
+the murderer turned almost a maniac and dragging his victim uselessly up
+and down the room, the escape over the roof, the rope swiftly running
+taut, and death sudden, startling and symbolic; a man hanged. There is
+in this and similar scenes something of the quality of Hogarth and many
+other English moralists of the early eighteenth century. It is not easy
+to define this Hogarthian quality in words, beyond saying that it is a
+sort of alphabetical realism, like the cruel candour of children. But it
+has about it these two special principles which separate it from all
+that we call realism in our time. First, that with us a moral story
+means a story about moral people; with them a moral story meant more
+often a story about immoral people. Second, that with us realism is
+always associated with some subtle view of morals; with them realism was
+always associated with some simple view of morals. The end of Bill Sikes
+exactly in the way that the law would have killed him&mdash;this is a
+Hogarthian incident; it <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[43]</a></span>
+carries on that tradition of startling and shocking platitude.</p>
+
+<p>All this element in the book was a sincere thing in the author, but none
+the less it came from old soils, from the graveyard and the gallows, and
+the lane where the ghost walked. Dickens was always attracted to such
+things, and (as Forster says with inimitable simplicity) &ldquo;but for
+his strong sense might have fallen into the follies of
+spiritualism.&rdquo; As a matter of fact, like most of the men of strong
+sense in his tradition, Dickens was left with a half belief in spirits
+which became in practice a belief in bad spirits. The great disadvantage
+of those who have too much strong sense to believe in supernaturalism is
+that they keep last the low and little forms of the supernatural, such
+as omens, curses, spectres, and retributions, but find a high and happy
+supernaturalism quite incredible. Thus the Puritans denied the
+sacraments, but went on burning witches. This shadow does rest, to some
+extent, upon the rational English writers like Dickens; supernaturalism
+was dying, but its ugliest roots died last. Dickens would have found it
+easier to believe in a ghost than in a vision of the Virgin with angels.
+There, for good or evil, however, was the root of the old <i>diablerie</i> in
+Dickens, and there it is in <i>Oliver Twist</i>. But this was only the first
+of the new Dickens elements, which must have surprised those Dickensians
+who eagerly bought his second book. The second of the new Dickens
+elements is equally indisputable and separate. It swelled afterwards to
+enormous proportions in Dickens&rsquo;s work; but it really has its rise
+here. Again, as in the case of the element of <i>diablerie</i>, it would be
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[44]</a></span>
+possible to make technical exceptions in favour of <i>Pickwick</i>. Just as
+there were quite inappropriate scraps of the gruesome element in
+<i>Pickwick</i>, so there are quite inappropriate allusions to this other
+topic in <i>Pickwick</i>. But nobody by merely reading <i>Pickwick</i> would even
+remember this topic; no one by merely reading <i>Pickwick</i> would know what
+this topic is; this third great subject of Dickens; this second great
+subject of the Dickens of <i>Oliver Twist</i>.</p>
+
+<p>This subject is social oppression. It is surely fair to say that no one
+could have gathered from <i>Pickwick</i> how this question boiled in the
+blood of the author of <i>Pickwick</i>. There are, indeed, passages,
+particularly in connection with Mr. Pickwick in the debtor&rsquo;s
+prison, which prove to us, looking back on a whole public career, that
+Dickens had been from the beginning bitter and inquisitive about the
+problem of our civilisation. No one could have imagined at the time that
+this bitterness ran in an unbroken river under all the surges of that
+superb gaiety and exuberance. With <i>Oliver Twist</i> this sterner side of
+Dickens was suddenly revealed. For the very first pages of <i>Oliver
+Twist</i> are stern even when they are funny. They amuse, but they cannot
+be enjoyed, as can the passages about the follies of Mr. Snodgrass or
+the humiliations of Mr. Winkle. The difference between the old easy
+humour and this new harsh humour is a difference not of degree but of
+kind. Dickens makes game of Mr. Bumble because he wants to kill Mr.
+Bumble; he made game of Mr. Winkle because he wanted him to live for
+ever. Dickens has taken the sword in hand; against what is he declaring
+war?</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[45]</a></span>
+It is just here that the greatness of Dickens comes in; it is just here
+that the difference lies between the pedant and the poet. Dickens enters
+the social and political war, and the first stroke he deals is not only
+significant but even startling. Fully to see this we must appreciate the
+national situation. It was an age of reform, and even of radical reform;
+the world was full of radicals and reformers; but only too many of them
+took the line of attacking everything and anything that was opposed to
+some particular theory among the many political theories that possessed
+the end of the eighteenth century. Some had so much perfected the
+perfect theory of republicanism that they almost lay awake at night
+because Queen Victoria had a crown on her head. Others were so certain
+that mankind had hitherto been merely strangled in the bonds of the
+State that they saw truth only in the destruction of tariffs or of
+by-laws. The greater part of that generation held that clearness,
+economy, and a hard common-sense, would soon destroy the errors that had
+been erected by the superstitions and sentimentalities of the past. In
+pursuance of this idea many of the new men of the new century, quite
+confident that they were invigorating the new age, sought to destroy the
+old sentimental clericalism, the old sentimental feudalism, the
+old-world belief in priests, the old-world belief in patrons, and among
+other things the old-world belief in beggars. They sought among other
+things to clear away the old visionary kindliness on the subject of
+vagrants. Hence those reformers enacted not only a new reform bill but
+also a new poor law. In creating many other modern things they created
+the modern <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[46]</a></span>
+workhouse, and when Dickens came out to fight it was the first thing
+that he broke with his battle-axe.</p>
+
+<p>This is where Dickens&rsquo;s social revolt is of more value than mere
+politics and avoids the vulgarity of the novel with a purpose. His
+revolt is not a revolt of the commercialist against the feudalist, of
+the Nonconformist against the Churchman, of the Free-trader against the
+Protectionist, of the Liberal against the Tory. If he were among us now
+his revolt would not be the revolt of the Socialist against the
+Individualist, or of the Anarchist against the Socialist. His revolt was
+simply and solely the eternal revolt; it was the revolt of the weak
+against the strong. He did not dislike this or that argument for
+oppression; he disliked oppression. He disliked a certain look on the
+face of a man when he looks down on another man. And that look on the
+face is, indeed, the only thing in the world that we have really to
+fight between here and the fires of Hell. That which pedants of that
+time and this time would have called the sentimentalism of Dickens was
+really simply the detached sanity of Dickens. He cared nothing for the
+fugitive explanations of the Constitutional Conservatives; he cared
+nothing for the fugitive explanations of the Manchester School. He would
+have cared quite as little for the fugitive explanations of the Fabian
+Society or of the modern scientific Socialist. He saw that under many
+forms there was one fact, the tyranny of man over man; and he struck at
+it when he saw it, whether it was old or new. When he found that footmen
+and rustics were too much afraid of Sir Leicester Dedlock, he attacked
+Sir Leicester Dedlock; he did not care whether Sir Leicester Dedlock
+said he was <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[47]</a></span>
+attacking England or whether Mr. Rouncewell, the Ironmaster, said he
+was attacking an effete oligarchy. In that case he pleased Mr.
+Rouncewell, the Iron-master, and displeased Sir Leicester Dedlock, the
+Aristocrat. But when he found that Mr. Rouncewell&rsquo;s workmen were
+much too frightened of Mr. Rouncewell, then he displeased Mr. Rouncewell
+in turn; he displeased Mr. Rouncewell very much by calling him Mr.
+Bounderby. When he imagined himself to be fighting old laws he gave a
+sort of vague and general approval to new laws. But when he came to the
+new laws they had a bad time. When Dickens found that after a hundred
+economic arguments and granting a hundred economic considerations, the
+fact remained that paupers in modern workhouses were much too afraid of
+the beadle, just as vassals in ancient castles were much too afraid of
+the Dedlocks, then he struck suddenly and at once. This is what makes
+the opening chapters of <i>Oliver Twist</i> so curious and important. The
+very fact of Dickens&rsquo;s distance from, and independence of, the
+elaborate financial arguments of his time, makes more definite and
+dazzling his sudden assertion that he sees the old human tyranny in
+front of him as plain as the sun at noon-day. Dickens attacks the modern
+workhouse with a sort of inspired simplicity as of a boy in a fairy tale
+who had wandered about, sword in hand, looking for ogres and who had
+found an indisputable ogre. All the other people of his time are
+attacking things because they are bad economics or because they are bad
+politics, or because they are bad science; he alone is attacking things
+because they are bad. All the others are Radicals with a large R; he
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[48]</a></span>
+alone is radical with a small one. He encounters evil with that
+beautiful surprise which, as it is the beginning of all real pleasure,
+is also the beginning of all righteous indignation. He enters the
+workhouse just as Oliver Twist enters it, as a little child.</p>
+
+<p>This is the real power and pathos of that celebrated passage in the book
+which has passed into a proverb; but which has not lost its terrible
+humour even in being hackneyed. I mean, of course, the everlasting
+quotation about Oliver Twist asking for more. The real poignancy that
+there is in this idea is a very good study in that strong school of
+social criticism which Dickens represented. A modern realist describing
+the dreary workhouse would have made all the children utterly crushed,
+not daring to speak at all, not expecting anything, not hoping anything,
+past all possibility of affording even an ironical contrast or a protest
+of despair. A modern, in short, would have made all the boys in the
+workhouse pathetic by making them all pessimists. But Oliver Twist is
+not pathetic because he is a pessimist. Oliver Twist is pathetic because
+he is an optimist. The whole tragedy of that incident is in the fact
+that he does expect the universe to be kind to him, that he does believe
+that he is living in a just world. He comes before the Guardians as the
+ragged peasants of the French Revolution came before the Kings and
+Parliaments of Europe. That is to say, he comes, indeed, with gloomy
+experiences, but he comes with a happy philosophy. He knows that there
+are wrongs of man to be reviled; but he believes also that there are
+rights of man to be demanded. It has often been remarked as a singular
+fact that the French <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[49]</a></span>
+poor, who stand in historic tradition as typical of all the desperate
+men who have dragged down tyranny, were, as a matter of fact, by no
+means worse off than the poor of many other European countries before
+the Revolution. The truth is that the French were tragic because they
+were better off. The others had known the sorrowful experiences; but
+they alone had known the splendid expectation and the original claims.
+It was just here that Dickens was so true a child of them and of that
+happy theory so bitterly applied. They were the one oppressed people
+that simply asked for justice; they were the one Parish Boy who
+innocently asked for more.</p>
+
+<hr /><p class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[50]</a></p>
+<h2><a name="CURIOSITY" id="CURIOSITY"></a>OLD CURIOSITY SHOP</h2>
+
+<p>Nothing is important except the fate of the soul; and literature is only
+redeemed from an utter triviality, surpassing that of naughts and
+crosses, by the fact that it describes not the world around us or the
+things on the retina of the eye or the enormous irrelevancy of
+encyclop&aelig;dias, but some condition to which the human spirit can come.
+All good writers express the state of their souls, even (as occurs in
+some cases of very good writers) if it is a state of damnation. The
+first thing that has to be realised about Dickens is this ultimate
+spiritual condition of the man, which lay behind all his creations. This
+Dickens state of mind is difficult to pick out in words as are all
+elementary states of mind; they cannot be described, not because they
+are too subtle for words, but because they are too simple for words.
+Perhaps the nearest approach to a statement of it would be this: that
+Dickens expresses an eager anticipation of everything that will happen
+in the motley affairs of men; he looks at the quiet crowd waiting for it
+to be picturesque and to play the fool; he expects everything; he is
+torn with a happy hunger. Thackeray is always looking back to yesterday;
+Dickens is always looking forward to to-morrow. Both are profoundly
+humorous, for there is a humour of the morning and a humour of the
+evening; but the first <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[51]</a></span>
+guesses at what it will get, at all the grotesqueness and variety which
+a day may bring forth; the second looks back on what the day has been
+and sees even its solemnities as slightly ironical. Nothing can be too
+extravagant for the laughter that looks forward; and nothing can be too
+dignified for the laughter that looks back. It is an idle but obvious
+thing, which many must have noticed, that we often find in the title of
+one of an author&rsquo;s books what might very well stand for a general
+description of all of them. Thus all Spenser&rsquo;s works might be
+called <i>A Hymn to Heavenly Beauty</i>; or all Mr. Bernard Shaw&rsquo;s
+bound books might be called <i>You Never Can Tell</i>. In the same way the
+whole substance and spirit of Thackeray might be gathered under the
+general title <i>Vanity Fair</i>. In the same way too the whole substance and
+spirit of Dickens might be gathered under the general title <i>Great
+Expectations</i>.</p>
+
+<p>In a recent criticism on this position I saw it remarked that all this
+is reading into Dickens something that he did not mean; and I have been
+told that it would have greatly surprised Dickens to be informed that he
+&ldquo;went down the broad road of the Revolution.&rdquo; Of course it
+would. Criticism does not exist to say about authors the things that
+they knew themselves. It exists to say the things about them which they
+did not know themselves. If a critic says that the <i>Iliad</i> has a pagan
+rather than a Christian pity, or that it is full of pictures made by one
+epithet, of course he does not mean that Homer could have said that. If
+Homer could have said that the critic would leave Homer to say it. The
+function of criticism, if it has a legitimate function at all, can only
+be one function&mdash;that <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[52]</a></span>
+of dealing with the subconscious part of the author&rsquo;s mind which
+only the critic can express, and not with the conscious part of the
+author&rsquo;s mind, which the author himself can express. Either
+criticism is no good at all (a very defensible position) or else
+criticism means saying about an author the very things that would have
+made him jump out of his boots.</p>
+
+<p>Doubtless the name in this case <i>Great Expectations</i> is an empty
+coincidence; and indeed it is not in the books of the later Dickens
+period (the period of <i>Great Expectations</i>) that we should look for the
+best examples of this sanguine and expectant spirit which is the
+essential of the man&rsquo;s genius. There are plenty of good examples
+of it especially in the earlier works. But even in the earlier works
+there is no example of it more striking or more satisfactory than <i>The
+Old Curiosity Shop</i>. It is particularly noticeable in the fact that its
+opening and original framework express the idea of a random experience,
+a thing come across in the street; a single face in the crowd, followed
+until it tells its story. Though the thing ends in a novel it begins in
+a sketch; it begins as one of the <i>Sketches by Boz</i>. There is something
+unconsciously artistic in the very clumsiness of this opening. Master
+Humphrey starts to keep a scrap-book of all his adventures, and he finds
+that he can fill the whole scrap-book with the sequels and developments
+of one adventure; he goes out to notice everybody and he finds himself
+busily and variedly occupied only in watching somebody. In this there is
+a very profound truth about the true excitement and inexhaustible poetry
+of life. The truth is not so much that eternity is full of souls as that
+one soul can <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[53]</a></span>
+fill eternity. In strict art there is something quite lame and
+lumbering about the way in which the benevolent old story-teller starts
+to tell many stories and then drops away altogether, while one of his
+stories takes his place. But in a larger art, his collision with Little
+Nell and his complete eclipse by her personality and narrative have a
+real significance. They suggest the random richness of such meetings,
+and their uncalculated results. It makes the whole book a sort of
+splendid accident.</p>
+
+<p>It is not true, as is commonly said, that the Dickens pathos as pathos
+is bad. It is not true, as is still more commonly said, that the whole
+business about Little Nell is bad. The case is more complex than that.
+Yet complex as it is it admits of one sufficiently clear distinction.
+Those who have written about the death of Little Nell, have generally
+noticed the crudities of the character itself; the little girl&rsquo;s
+unnatural and staring innocence, her constrained and awkward piety. But
+they have nearly all of them entirely failed to notice that there is in
+the death of Little Nell one quite definite and really artistic idea. It
+is not an artistic idea that a little child should die rhetorically on
+the stage like Paul Dombey; and Little Nell does not die rhetorically
+upon the stage like Paul Dombey. But it is an artistic idea that all the
+good powers and personalities in the story should set out in pursuit of
+one insignificant child, to repair an injustice to her, should track her
+from town to town over England with all the resources of wealth,
+intelligence, and travel, and should all&mdash;arrive too late. All the good
+fairies and all the kind magicians, all the just kings and all the
+gallant <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[54]</a></span>
+princes, with chariots and flying dragons and armies and navies go
+after one little child who had strayed into a wood, and find her dead.
+That is the conception which Dickens&rsquo;s artistic instinct was
+really aiming at when he finally condemned Little Nell to death, after
+keeping her, so to speak, so long with the rope round her neck. The
+death of Little Nell is open certainly to the particular denial which
+its enemies make about it. The death of Little Nell is not pathetic. It
+is perhaps tragic; it is in reality ironic. Here is a very good case of
+the injustice to Dickens on his purely literary side. It is not that I
+say that Dickens achieved what he designed; it is that the critics will
+not see what the design was. They go on talking of the death of Little
+Nell as if it were a mere example of maudlin description like the death
+of Little Paul. As a fact it is not described at all; so it cannot be
+objectionable. It is not the death of Little Nell, but the life of
+Little Nell, that I object to.</p>
+
+<p>In this, in the actual picture of her personality, if you can call it a
+personality, Dickens did fall into some of his facile vices. The real
+objection to much of his pathos belongs really to another part of his
+character. It is connected with his vanity, his voracity for all kinds
+of praise, his restive experimentalism and even perhaps his envy. He
+strained himself to achieve pathos. His humour was inspiration; but his
+pathos was ambition. His laughter was lonely; he would have laughed on a
+desert island. But his grief was gregarious. He liked to move great
+masses of men, to melt them into tenderness, to play on the people as a
+great pianist plays on them; to make them mad or sad. His pathos
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[55]</a></span>
+was to him a way of showing his power; and for that reason it was
+really powerless. He could not help making people laugh; but he tried to
+make them cry. We come in this novel, as we often do come in his novels,
+upon hard lumps of unreality, upon a phrase that suddenly sickens. That
+is always due to his conscious despotism over the delicate feelings;
+that is always due to his love of fame as distinct from his love of fun.
+But it is not true that all Dickens&rsquo;s pathos is like this; it is
+not even true that all the passages about Little Nell are like this;
+there are two strands almost everywhere and they can be differentiated
+as the sincere and the deliberate. There is a great difference between
+Dickens thinking about the tears of his characters and Dickens thinking
+about the tears of his audience.</p>
+
+<p>When all this is allowed, however, and the exaggerated contempt for the
+Dickens pathos is properly corrected, the broad fact remains: that to
+pass from the solemn characters in this book to the comic characters in
+this book, is to be like some Ulysses who should pass suddenly from the
+land of shadows to the mountain of the gods. Little Nell has her own
+position in careful and reasonable criticism: even that wobbling old
+ass, her grandfather, has his position in it; perhaps even the
+dissipated Fred (whom long acquaintance with Mr. Dick Swiveller has not
+made any less dismal in his dissipation) has a place in it also. But
+when we come to Swiveller and Sampson Brass and Quilp and Mrs. Jarley,
+then Fred and Nell and the grandfather simply do not exist. There are no
+such people in the story. The real hero and heroine of <i>The Old
+Curiosity Shop</i> are of course Dick Swiveller and the Marchioness.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[56]</a></span>
+It is significant in a sense that these two sane, strong, living, and
+lovable human beings are the only two, or almost the only two, people in
+the story who do not run after Little Nell. They have something better
+to do than to go on that shadowy chase after that cheerless phantom.
+They have to build up between them a true romance; perhaps the one true
+romance in the whole of Dickens. Dick Swiveller really has all the
+half-heroic characteristics which make a man respected by a woman and
+which are the male contribution to virtue. He is brave, magnanimous,
+sincere about himself, amusing, absurdly hopeful; above all, he is both
+strong and weak. On the other hand the Marchioness really has all the
+characteristics, the entirely heroic characteristics which make a woman
+respected by a man. She is female: that is, she is at once incurably
+candid and incurably loyal, she is full of terrible common-sense, she
+expects little pleasure for herself and yet she can enjoy bursts of it;
+above all, she is physically timid and yet she can face anything. All
+this solid rocky romanticism is really implied in the speech and action
+of these two characters and can be felt behind them all the time.
+Because they are the two most absurd people in the book they are also
+the most vivid, human, and imaginable. There are two really fine love
+affairs in Dickens; and I almost think only two. One is the happy
+courtship of Swiveller and the Marchioness; the other is the tragic
+courtship of Toots and Florence Dombey. When Dick Swiveller wakes up in
+bed and sees the Marchioness playing cribbage he thinks that he and she
+are a prince and princess in a fairy tale. He thinks right.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[57]</a></span>
+I speak thus seriously of such characters with a deliberate purpose; for
+the frivolous characters of Dickens are taken much too frivolously. It
+has been quite insufficiently pointed out that all the serious moral
+ideas that Dickens did contrive to express he expressed altogether
+through this fantastic medium, in such figures as Swiveller and the
+little servant. The warmest upholder of Dickens would not go to the
+solemn or sentimental passages for anything fresh or suggestive in faith
+or philosophy. No one would pretend that the death of little Dombey
+(with its &ldquo;What are the wild waves saying?&rdquo;) told us
+anything new or real about death. A good Christian dying, one would
+imagine, not only would not know what the wild waves were saying, but
+would not care. No one would pretend that the repentance of old Paul
+Dombey throws any light on the
+<ins class="corr" title="Transcriber's Note: The original showed 'pyschology'.">psychology</ins>
+or philosophy of repentance. No doubt old Dombey, white-haired and
+amiable, was a great improvement on old Dombey brown-haired and
+unpleasant. But in his case the softening of the heart seems to bear too
+close a resemblance to softening of the brain. Whether these serious
+passages are as bad as the critical people or as good as the sentimental
+people find them, at least they do not convey anything in the way of an
+illuminating glimpse or a bold suggestion about men&rsquo;s moral
+nature. The serious figures do not tell one anything about the human
+soul. The comic figures do. Take anything almost at random out of these
+admirable speeches of Dick Swiveller. Notice, for instance, how
+exquisitely Dickens has caught a certain very deep and delicate quality
+at the bottom of this idle kind of man. I <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[58]</a></span>
+mean that odd impersonal sort of intellectual justice, by which the
+frivolous fellow sees things as they are and even himself as he is; and
+is above irritation. Mr. Swiveller, you remember, asks the Marchioness
+whether the Brass family ever talk about him; she nods her head with
+vivacity. &ldquo;&lsquo;Complimentary?&rsquo; inquired Mr. Swiveller.
+The motion of the little servant&rsquo;s head altered.... &lsquo;But she
+says,&rsquo; continued the little servant, &lsquo;that you ain&rsquo;t
+to be trusted.&rsquo; &lsquo;Well, do you know, Marchioness,&rsquo; said
+Mr. Swiveller thoughtfully, &lsquo;many people, not exactly professional
+people, but tradesmen, have had the same idea. The excellent citizen
+from whom I ordered this beer inclines strongly to that
+opinion.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>This philosophical freedom from all resentment, this strange love of
+truth which seems actually to come through carelessness, is a very real
+piece of spiritual observation. Even among liars there are two classes,
+one immeasurably better than another. The honest liar is the man who
+tells the truth about his old lies; who says on Wednesday, &ldquo;I told
+a magnificent lie on Monday.&rdquo; He keeps the truth in circulation;
+no one version of things stagnates in him and becomes an evil secret. He
+does not have to live with old lies; a horrible domesticity. Mr.
+Swiveller may mislead the waiter about whether he has the money to pay;
+but he does not mislead his friend, and he does not mislead himself on
+the point. He is quite as well aware as any one can be of the
+accumulating falsity of the position of a gentleman who by his various
+debts has closed up all the streets into the Strand except one, and who
+is going to close that to-night with a pair of gloves.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[59]</a></span>
+He shuts up the street with a pair of gloves, but he does not shut up
+his mind with a secret. The traffic of truth is still kept open through
+his soul.</p>
+
+<p>It is exactly in these absurd characters, then, that we can find a mass
+of psychological and ethical suggestion. This cannot be found in the
+serious characters except indeed in some of the later experiments: there
+is a little of such psychological and ethical suggestion in figures like
+Gridley, like Jasper, like Bradley Headstone. But in these earlier books
+at least, such as <i>The Old Curiosity Shop</i>, the grave or moral figures
+throw no light upon morals. I should maintain this generalisation even
+in the presence of that apparent exception <i>The Christmas Carol</i> with
+its trio of didactic ghosts. Charity is certainly splendid, at once a
+luxury and a necessity; but Dickens is not most effective when he is
+preaching charity seriously; he is most effective when he is preaching
+it uproariously; when he is preaching it by means of massive
+personalities and vivid scenes. One might say that he is best not when
+he is preaching his human love, but when he is practising it. In his
+grave pages he tells us to love men; but in his wild pages he creates
+men whom we can love. By his solemnity he commands us to love our
+neighbours. By his caricature he makes us love them.</p>
+
+<p>There is an odd literary question which I wonder is not put more often
+in literature. How far can an author tell a truth without seeing it
+himself? Perhaps an actual example will express my meaning. I was once
+talking to a highly intelligent lady about Thackeray&rsquo;s <i>Newcomes</i>.
+We were speaking of the character of Mrs. Mackenzie, the Campaigner, and
+in the middle <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[60]</a></span>
+of the conversation the lady leaned across to me and said in a low,
+hoarse, but emphatic voice, &ldquo;She drank. Thackeray didn&rsquo;t
+know it; but she drank.&rdquo; And it is really astonishing what a shaft
+of white light this sheds on the Campaigner, on her terrible
+temperament, on her agonised abusiveness and her almost more agonised
+urbanity, on her clamour which is nevertheless not open or explicable,
+on her temper which is not so much bad temper as insatiable,
+bloodthirsty, man-eating temper. How far can a writer thus indicate by
+accident a truth of which he is himself ignorant? If truth is a plan or
+pattern of things that really are, or in other words, if truth truly
+exists outside ourselves, or in other words, if truth exists at all, it
+must be often possible for a writer to uncover a corner of it which he
+happens not to understand, but which his reader does happen to
+understand. The author sees only two lines; the reader sees where they
+meet and what is the angle. The author sees only an arc or fragment of a
+curve; the reader sees the size of the circle. The last thing to say
+about Dickens, and especially about books like <i>The Old Curiosity Shop</i>,
+is that they are full of these unconscious truths. The careless reader
+may miss them. The careless author almost certainly did miss them. But
+from them can be gathered an impression of real truth to life which is
+for the grave critics of Dickens an almost unknown benefit, buried
+treasure. Here for instance is one of them out of <i>The Old Curiosity
+Shop</i>. I mean the passage in which (by a blazing stroke of genius) the
+dashing Mr. Chuckster, one of the Glorious Apollos of whom Mr. Swiveller
+was the Perpetual Grand, is made to entertain a hatred bordering upon
+frenzy <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[61]</a></span>
+for the stolid, patient, respectful, and laborious Kit. Now in the
+formal plan of the story Mr. Chuckster is a fool, and Kit is almost a
+hero; at least he is a noble boy. Yet unconsciously Dickens made the
+idiot Chuckster say something profoundly suggestive on the subject. In
+speaking of Kit Mr. Chuckster makes use of these two remarkable phrases;
+that Kit is &ldquo;meek&rdquo; and that he is &ldquo;a snob.&rdquo; Now
+Kit is really a very fresh and manly picture of a boy, firm, sane,
+chivalrous, reasonable, full of those three great Roman virtues which
+Mr. Belloc has so often celebrated, <i>virtus</i> and <i>verecundia</i> and
+<i>pietas</i>. He is a sympathetic but still a straightforward study of the
+best type of that most respectable of all human classes, the respectable
+poor. All this is true; all that Dickens utters in praise of Kit is
+true; nevertheless the awful words of Chuckster remain written on the
+eternal skies. Kit is meek and Kit is a snob. His natural dignity does
+include and is partly marred by that instinctive subservience to the
+employing class which has been the comfortable weakness of the whole
+English democracy, which has prevented their making any revolution for
+the last two hundred years. Kit would not serve any wicked man for
+money, but he would serve any moderately good man and the money would
+give a certain dignity and decisiveness to the goodness. All this is the
+English popular evil which goes along with the English popular virtues
+of geniality, of homeliness, tolerance and strong humour, hope and an
+enormous appetite for a hand-to-mouth happiness. The scene in which Kit
+takes his family to the theatre is a monument of the massive qualities
+of old English enjoyment. If what we want is Merry England, our
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[62]</a></span>
+antiquarians ought not to revive the Maypole or the Morris Dancers;
+they ought to revive Astley&rsquo;s and Sadler&rsquo;s Wells and the old
+solemn Circus and the old stupid Pantomime, and all the sawdust and all
+the oranges. Of all this strength and joy in the poor, Kit is a splendid
+and final symbol. But amid all his masculine and English virtue, he has
+this weak touch of meekness, or acceptance of the powers that be. It is
+a sound touch; it is a real truth about Kit. But Dickens did not know
+it. Mr. Chuckster did.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens&rsquo;s stories taken as a whole have more artistic unity than
+appears at the first glance. It is the immediate impulse of a modern
+critic to dismiss them as mere disorderly scrap-books with very
+brilliant scraps. But this is not quite so true as it looks. In one of
+Dickens&rsquo;s novels there is generally no particular unity of
+construction; but there is often a considerable unity of sentiment and
+atmosphere. Things are irrelevant, but not somehow inappropriate. The
+whole book is written carelessly; but the whole book is generally
+written in one mood. To take a rude parallel from the other arts, we may
+say that there is not much unity of form, but there is much unity of
+colour. In most of the novels this can be seen. <i>Nicholas Nickleby</i>, as
+I have remarked, is full of a certain freshness, a certain light and
+open-air curiosity, which irradiates from the image of the young man
+swinging along the Yorkshire roads in the sun. Hence the comic
+characters with whom he falls in are comic characters in the same key;
+they are a band of strolling players, charlatans and poseurs, but too
+humane to be called humbugs. In the same way, the central story of
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[63]</a></span>
+<i>Oliver Twist</i> is sombre; and hence even its comic character is almost
+sombre; at least he is too ugly to be merely amusing. Mr. Bumble is in
+some ways a terrible grotesque; his apoplectic visage recalls the
+&ldquo;fire-red Cherubimme&rsquo;s face,&rdquo; which added such horror
+to the height and stature of Chaucer&rsquo;s Sompnour. In both these
+cases even the riotous and absurd characters are a little touched with
+the tint of the whole story. But this neglected merit of Dickens can
+certainly be seen best in <i>The Old Curiosity Shop</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The curiosity shop itself was a lumber of grotesque and sinister things,
+outlandish weapons, twisted and diabolic decorations. The comic
+characters in the book are all like images bought in an old curiosity
+shop. Quilp might be a gargoyle. He might be some sort of devilish
+door-knocker, dropped down and crawling about the pavement. The same
+applies to the sinister and really terrifying stiffness of Sally Brass.
+She is like some old staring figure cut out of wood. Sampson Brass, her
+brother, again is a grotesque in the same rather inhuman manner; he is
+especially himself when he comes in with the green shade over his eye.
+About all this group of bad figures in <i>The Old Curiosity Shop</i> there is
+a sort of <i>diablerie</i>. There is also within this atmosphere an
+extraordinary energy of irony and laughter. The scene in which Sampson
+Brass draws up the description of Quilp, supposing him to be dead,
+reaches a point of fiendish fun. &ldquo;We will not say very bandy, Mrs.
+Jiniwin,&rdquo; he says of his friend&rsquo;s legs, &ldquo;we will
+confine ourselves to bandy. He is gone, my friends, where his legs would
+never be called in question.&rdquo; They go on to the discussion of his
+nose, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[64]</a></span>
+Mrs. Jiniwin inclines to the view that it is flat. &ldquo;Aquiline, you
+hag! Aquiline,&rdquo; cries Mr. Quilp, pushing in his head and striking
+his nose with his fist. There is nothing better in the whole brutal
+exuberance of the character than that gesture with which Quilp punches
+his own face with his own fist. It is indeed a perfect symbol; for Quilp
+is always fighting himself for want of anybody else. He is energy, and
+energy by itself is always suicidal; he is that primordial energy which
+tears and which destroys itself.</p>
+
+<hr /><p class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[65]</a></p>
+<h2><a name="BARNABY" id="BARNABY"></a>BARNABY RUDGE</h2>
+
+<p><i>Barnaby Rudge</i> was written by Dickens in the spring and first flowing
+tide of his popularity; it came immediately after <i>The Old Curiosity
+Shop</i>, and only a short time after <i>Pickwick</i>. Dickens was one of those
+rare but often very sincere men in whom the high moment of success
+almost coincides with the high moment of youth. The calls upon him at
+this time were insistent and overwhelming; this necessarily happens at a
+certain stage of a successful writer&rsquo;s career. He was just
+successful enough to invite offers and not successful enough to reject
+them. At the beginning of his career he could throw himself into
+<i>Pickwick</i> because there was nothing else to throw himself into. At the
+end of his life he could throw himself into <i>A Tale of Two Cities</i>,
+because he refused to throw himself into anything else. But there was an
+intervening period, early in his life, when there was almost too much
+work for his imagination, and yet not quite enough work for his
+housekeeping. To this period <i>Barnaby Rudge</i> belongs. And it is a
+curious tribute to the quite curious greatness of Dickens that in this
+period of youthful strain we do not feel the strain but feel only the
+youth. His own amazing wish to write equalled or outstripped even his
+readers&rsquo; amazing wish to read. Working too hard did not cure him
+of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[66]</a></span>
+his abstract love of work. Unreasonable publishers asked him to write
+ten novels at once; but he wanted to write twenty novels at once. All
+this period is strangely full of his own sense at once of fertility and
+of futility; he did work which no one else could have done, and yet he
+could not be certain as yet that he was anybody.</p>
+
+<p><i>Barnaby Rudge</i> marks this epoch because it marks the fact that he is
+still confused about what kind of person he is going to be. He has
+already struck the note of the normal romance in <i>Nicholas Nickleby</i>; he
+has already created some of his highest comic characters in <i>Pickwick</i>
+and <i>The Old Curiosity Shop</i>, but here he betrays the fact that it is
+still a question what ultimate guide he shall follow. <i>Barnaby Rudge</i> is
+a romantic, historical novel. Its design reminds us of Scott; some parts
+of its fulfilment remind us, alas! of Harrison Ainsworth. It is a very
+fine romantic historical novel; Scott would have been proud of it. But
+it is still so far different from the general work of Dickens that it is
+permissible to wonder how far Dickens was proud of it. The book,
+effective as it is, is almost entirely devoted to dealings with a
+certain artistic element, which (in its mere isolation) Dickens did not
+commonly affect; an element which many men of infinitely less genius
+have often seemed to affect more successfully; I mean the element of the
+picturesque.</p>
+
+<p>It is the custom in many quarters to speak somewhat sneeringly of that
+element which is broadly called the picturesque. It is always felt to be
+an inferior, a vulgar, and even an artificial form of art. Yet two
+things may be remarked about it. The first is that,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[67]</a></span>
+with few exceptions, the greatest literary artists have been not only
+particularly clever at the picturesque, but particularly fond of it.
+Shakespeare, for instance, delighted in certain merely pictorial
+contrasts which are quite distinct from, even when they are akin to, the
+spiritual view involved. For instance, there is admirable satire in the
+idea of Touchstone teaching worldly wisdom and worldly honour to the
+woodland yokels. There is excellent philosophy in the idea of the fool
+being the representative of civilisation in the forest. But quite apart
+from this deeper meaning in the incident, the mere figure of the jester,
+in his bright motley and his cap and bells, against the green background
+of the forest and the rude forms of the shepherds, is a strong example
+of the purely picturesque. There is excellent tragic irony in the
+confrontation of the melancholy philosopher among the tombs with the
+cheerful digger of the graves. It sums up the essential point, that dead
+bodies can be comic; it is only dead souls that can be tragic. But quite
+apart from such irony, the mere picture of the grotesque gravedigger,
+the black-clad prince, and the skull is a picture in the strongest sense
+picturesque. Caliban and the two shipwrecked drunkards are an admirable
+symbol; but they are also an admirable scene. Bottom, with the
+ass&rsquo;s head, sitting in a ring of elves, is excellent moving
+comedy, but also excellent still life. Falstaff with his huge body,
+Bardolph with his burning nose, are masterpieces of the pen; but they
+would be fine sketches even for the pencil. King Lear, in the storm, is
+a landscape as well as a character study. There is something decorative
+even about the insistence on the swarthiness <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[68]</a></span>
+of Othello, or the deformity of Richard III. Shakespeare&rsquo;s work
+is much more than picturesque; but it is picturesque. And the same which
+is said here of him by way of example is largely true of the highest
+class of literature. Dante&rsquo;s <i>Divine Comedy</i> is supremely
+important as a philosophy; but it is important merely as a panorama.
+Spenser&rsquo;s <i>Faery Queen</i> pleases us as an allegory; but it would
+please us even as a wall-paper. Stronger still is the case of Chaucer
+who loved the pure picturesque, which always includes something of what
+we commonly call the ugly. The huge stature and startling scarlet face
+of the Sompnour is in just the same spirit as Shakespeare&rsquo;s skulls
+and motley; the same spirit gave Chaucer&rsquo;s miller bagpipes, and
+clad his doctor in crimson. It is the spirit which, while making many
+other things, loves to make a picture.</p>
+
+<p>Now the second thing to be remarked in apology for the picturesque is,
+that the very thing which makes it seem trivial ought really to make it
+seem important; I mean the fact that it consists necessarily of
+contrasts. It brings together types that stand out from their
+background, but are abruptly different from each other, like the clown
+among the fairies or the fool in the forest. And his audacious
+reconciliation is a mark not of frivolity but of extreme seriousness. A
+man who deals in harmonies, who only matches stars with angels or lambs
+with spring flowers, he indeed may be frivolous; for he is taking one
+mood at a time, and perhaps forgetting each mood as it passes. But a man
+who ventures to combine an angel and an octopus must have some serious
+view of the universe. The man who <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[69]</a></span>
+should write a dialogue between two early Christians might be a mere
+writer of dialogues. But a man who should write a dialogue between an
+early Christian and the Missing Link would have to be a philosopher. The
+more widely different the types talked of, the more serious and
+universal must be the philosophy which talks of them. The mark of the
+light and thoughtless writer is the harmony of his subject matter; the
+mark of the thoughtful writer is its apparent diversity. The most
+flippant lyric poet might write a pretty poem about lambs; but it
+requires something bolder and graver than a poet, it requires an
+ecstatic prophet, to talk about the lion lying down with the lamb.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens, at any rate, strongly supports this conception: that great
+literary men as such do not despise the purely pictorial. No man&rsquo;s
+works have so much the quality of illustrating themselves. Few
+men&rsquo;s works have been more thoroughly and eagerly illustrated; few
+men&rsquo;s works can it have been better fun to illustrate. As a rule
+this fascinating quality in the mere fantastic figures of the tale was
+inseparable from their farcical quality in the tale. Stiggins&rsquo;s
+red nose is distinctly connected with the fact that he is a member of
+the Ebenezer Temperance Association; Quilp is little, because a little
+of him goes a long way. Mr. Carker smiles and smiles and is a villain;
+Mr. Chadband is fat because in his case to be fat is to be hated. The
+story is immeasurably more important than the picture; it is not mere
+indulgence in the picturesque. Generally it is an intellectual love of
+the comic; not a pure love of the grotesque.</p>
+
+<p>But in one book Dickens suddenly confesses that he
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[70]</a></span>
+likes the grotesque even without the comic. In one case he makes clear
+that he enjoys pure pictures with a pure love of the picturesque. That
+place is <i>Barnaby Rudge</i>. There had indeed been hints of it in many
+episodes in his books; notably, for example, in that fine scene of the
+death of Quilp&mdash;a scene in which the dwarf remains fantastic long
+after he has ceased to be in any way funny. Still, the dwarf was meant
+to be funny. Humour of a horrible kind, but still humour, is the purpose
+of Quilp&rsquo;s existence and position in the book. Laughter is the
+object of all his oddities. But laughter is not the object of Barnaby
+Rudge&rsquo;s oddities. His idiot costume and his ugly raven are used
+for the purpose of the pure grotesque; solely to make a certain kind of
+Gothic sketch.</p>
+
+<p>It is commonly this love of pictures that drives men back upon the
+historical novel. But it is very typical of Dickens&rsquo;s living
+interest in his own time, that though he wrote two historical novels
+they were neither of them of very ancient history. They were both,
+indeed, of very recent history; only they were those parts of recent
+history which were specially picturesque. I do not think that this was
+due to any mere consciousness on his part that he knew no history.
+Undoubtedly he knew no history; and he may or may not have been
+conscious of the fact. But the consciousness did not prevent him from
+writing a <i>History of England</i>. Nor did it prevent him from interlarding
+all or any of his works with tales of the pictorial past, such as the
+tale of the broken swords in <i>Master Humphrey&rsquo;s Clock</i>, or the
+indefensibly delightful nightmare of the lady in the stage-coach, which
+helps to soften the amiable end <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[71]</a></span>
+of Pickwick. Neither, worst of all, did it prevent him from dogmatising
+anywhere and everywhere about the past, of which he knew nothing; it did
+not prevent him from telling the bells to tell Trotty Veck that the
+Middle Ages were a failure, nor from solemnly declaring that the best
+thing that the medi&aelig;val monks ever did was to create the mean and
+snobbish quietude of a modern cathedral city. No, it was not historical
+reverence that held him back from dealing with the remote past; but
+rather something much better&mdash;a living interest in the living
+century in which he was born. He would have thought himself quite
+intellectually capable of writing a novel about the Council of Trent or
+the First Crusade. He would have thought himself quite equal to
+analysing the psychology of Abelard or giving a bright, satiric sketch
+of St. Augustine. It must frankly be confessed that it was not a sense
+of his own unworthiness that held him back; I fear it was rather a sense
+of St. Augustine&rsquo;s unworthiness. He could not see the point of any
+history before the first slow swell of the French Revolution. He could
+understand the revolutions of the eighteenth century; all the other
+revolutions of history (so many and so splendid) were unmeaning to him.
+But the revolutions of the eighteenth century he did understand; and to
+them therefore he went back, as all historical novelists go back, in
+search of the picturesque. And from this fact an important result
+follows.</p>
+
+<p>The result that follows is this: that his only two historical novels are
+both tales of revolutions&mdash;of eighteenth-century revolutions. These two
+eighteenth-century revolutions may seem to differ, and perhaps
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[72]</a></span>
+do differ in everything except in being revolutions and of the
+eighteenth century. The French Revolution, which is the theme of <i>A Tale
+of Two Cities</i>, was a revolt in favour of all that is now called
+enlightenment and liberation. The great Gordon Riot, which is the theme
+of <i>Barnaby Rudge</i>, was a revolt in favour of something which would now
+be called mere ignorant and obscurantist Protestantism. Nevertheless
+both belonged more typically to the age out of which Dickens
+came&mdash;the great sceptical and yet creative eighteenth century of
+Europe. Whether the mob rose on the right side or the wrong they both
+belonged to the time in which a mob could rise, in which a mob could
+conquer. No growth of intellectual science or of moral cowardice had
+made it impossible to fight in the streets, whether for the republic or
+for the Bible. If we wish to know what was the real link, existing
+actually in ultimate truth, existing unconsciously in Dickens&rsquo;s
+mind, which connected the Gordon Riots with the French Revolution, the
+link may be defined though not with any great adequacy. The nearest and
+truest way of stating it is that neither of the two could possibly
+happen in Fleet Street to-morrow evening.</p>
+
+<p>Another point of resemblance between the two books might be found in the
+fact that they both contain the sketch of the same kind of
+eighteenth-century aristocrat, if indeed that kind of aristocrat really
+existed in the eighteenth century. The diabolical dandy with the rapier
+and the sneer is at any rate a necessity of all normal plays and
+romances; hence Mr. Chester has a right to exist in this romance, and
+Foulon a right to exist in a page of history almost as cloudy and
+disputable <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[73]</a></span>
+as a romance. What Dickens and other romancers do probably omit from
+the picture of the eighteenth-century oligarch is probably his
+liberality. It must never be forgotten that even when he was a despot in
+practice he was generally a liberal in theory. Dickens and romancers
+make the pre-revolution tyrant a sincere believer in tyranny; generally
+he was not. He was a sceptic about everything, even about his own
+position. The romantic Foulon says of the people, &ldquo;Let them eat
+grass,&rdquo; with bitter and deliberate contempt. The real Foulon (if
+he ever said it at all) probably said it as a sort of dreary joke
+because he couldn&rsquo;t think of any other way out of the problem.
+<ins class="corr" title="Transcriber's Note: The original showed 'Similiarly'.">Similarly</ins>
+Mr. Chester, a cynic as he is, believes seriously in the beauty of being
+a gentleman; a real man of that type probably disbelieved in that as in
+everything else. Dickens was too bracing, one may say too bouncing
+himself to understand the psychology of fatigue in a protected and
+leisured class. He could understand a tyrant like Quilp, a tyrant who is
+on his throne because he has climbed up into it, like a monkey. He could
+not understand a tyrant who is on his throne because he is too weary to
+get out of it. The old aristocrats were in a dead way quite
+good-natured. They were even humanitarians; which perhaps accounts for
+the extent to which they roused against themselves the healthy hatred of
+humanity. But they were tired humanitarians; tired with doing nothing.
+Figures like that of Mr. Chester, therefore, fail somewhat to give the
+true sense of something hopeless and helpless which led men to despair
+of the upper class. He has a boyish pleasure in play-acting; he has an
+interest in life; being <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[74]</a></span>
+a villain is his hobby. But the true man of that type had found all
+hobbies fail him. He had wearied of himself as he had wearied of a
+hundred women. He was graceful and could not even admire himself in the
+glass. He was witty and could not even laugh at his own jokes. Dickens
+could never understand tedium.</p>
+
+<p>There is no mark more strange and perhaps sinister of the interesting
+and not very sane condition of our modern literature, than the fact that
+tedium has been admirably described in it. Our best modern writers are
+never so exciting as they are about dulness. Mr. Rudyard Kipling is
+never so powerful as when he is painting yawning deserts, aching
+silences, sleepless nights, or infernal isolation. The excitement in one
+of the stories of Mr. Henry James becomes tense, thrilling, and almost
+intolerable in all the half hours during which nothing whatever is said
+or done. We are entering again into the mind, into the real mind of
+Foulon and Mr. Chester. We begin to understand the deep despair of those
+tyrants whom our fathers pulled down. But Dickens could never have
+understood that despair; it was not in his soul. And it is an
+interesting coincidence that here, in this book of <i>Barnaby Rudge</i>,
+there is a character meant to be wholly grotesque, who, nevertheless,
+expresses much of that element in Dickens which prevented him from being
+a true interpreter of the tired and sceptical aristocrat.</p>
+
+<p>Sim Tappertit is a fool, but a perfectly honourable fool. It requires
+some sincerity to pose. Posing means that one has not dried up in
+oneself all the youthful and innocent vanities with the slow paralysis
+of mere pride. Posing means that one is still fresh <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[75]</a></span>
+enough to enjoy the good opinion of one&rsquo;s fellows. On the other
+hand, the true cynic has not enough truth in him to attempt affectation;
+he has never even seen the truth, far less tried to imitate it. Now we
+might very well take the type of Mr. Chester on the one hand, and of Sim
+Tappertit on the other, as marking the issue, the conflict, and the
+victory which really ushered in the nineteenth century. Dickens was very
+like Sim Tappertit. The Liberal Revolution was very like a Sim Tappertit
+revolution. It was vulgar, it was overdone, it was absurd, but it was
+alive. Dickens was vulgar, was absurd, overdid everything, but he was
+alive. The aristocrats were perfectly correct, but quite dead; dead long
+before they were guillotined. The classics and critics who lamented that
+Dickens was no gentleman were quite right, but quite dead. The
+revolution thought itself rational; but so did Sim Tappertit. It was
+really a huge revolt of romanticism against a reason which had grown
+sick even of itself. Sim Tappertit rose against Mr. Chester; and, thank
+God! he put his foot upon his neck.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 399px;"><a name="CD1842" id="CD1842"></a>
+<img src="images/dickens1842.jpg" width="399" height="600" alt="" title="" />
+<span class="caption">Charles Dickens, 1842<br />
+From a bust by H. Dexter, executed during Dickens&rsquo;s first visit to America.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[76]</a></p>
+<h2><a name="AMERICAN" id="AMERICAN"></a>AMERICAN NOTES</h2>
+
+<p><i>American Notes</i> was written soon after Dickens had returned from his
+first visit to America. That visit had, of course, been a great epoch in
+his life; but how much of an epoch men did not truly realise until, some
+time after, in the middle of a quiet story about Salisbury and a
+ridiculous architect, his feelings flamed out and flared up to the stars
+in <i>Martin Chuzzlewit</i>. The <i>American Notes</i> are, however, interesting,
+because in them he betrays his feelings when he does not know that he is
+betraying them. Dickens&rsquo;s first visit to America was, from his own
+point of view, and at the beginning, a happy and festive experiment. It
+is very characteristic of him that he went among the Americans, enjoyed
+them, even admired them, and then had a quarrel with them. Nothing was
+ever so unmistakable as his good-will, except his ill-will; and they
+were never far apart. And this was not, as some bloodless moderns have
+sneeringly insinuated, a mere repetition of the proximity between the
+benevolent stage and the quarrelsome stage of drink. It was a piece of
+pure optimism; he believed so readily that men were going to be good to
+him that an injury to him was something more than an injury: it was a
+shock. What was the exact nature of the American shock must, however, be
+more carefully stated.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[77]</a></span>
+The famous quarrel between Dickens and America, which finds its most
+elaborate expression in <i>American Notes</i>, though its most brilliant
+expression in <i>Martin Chuzzlewit</i>, is an incident about which a great
+deal remains to be said. But the thing which most specially remains to
+be said is this. This old Anglo-American quarrel was much more
+fundamentally friendly than most Anglo-American alliances. In
+Dickens&rsquo;s day each nation understood the other enough to argue. In
+our time neither nation understands itself even enough to quarrel. There
+was an English tradition, from Fox and eighteenth-century England; there
+was an American tradition from Franklin and eighteenth-century America;
+and they were still close enough together to discuss their differences
+with acrimony, perhaps, but with certain fundamental understandings. The
+eighteenth-century belief in a liberal civilisation was still a dogma;
+for dogma is the only thing that makes argument or reasoning possible.
+America, under all its swagger, did still really believe that Europe was
+its fountain and its mother, because Europe was more fully civilised.
+Dickens, under all his disgust, did still believe that America was in
+advance of Europe, because it was more democratic. It was an age, in
+short, in which the word &ldquo;progress&rdquo; could still be used
+reasonably; because the whole world looked to one way of escape and
+there was only one kind of progress under discussion. Now, of course,
+&ldquo;progress&rdquo; is a useless word; for progress takes for granted
+an already defined direction; and it is exactly about the direction that
+we disagree. Do not let us therefore be misled into any mistaken
+optimism or special self-congratulation<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[78]</a></span>
+upon what many people would call the improved relations between England
+and America. The relations are improved because America has finally
+become a foreign country. And with foreign countries all sane men take
+care to exchange a certain consideration and courtesy. But even as late
+as the time of Dickens&rsquo;s first visit to the United States, we
+English still felt America as a colony; an insolent, offensive, and even
+unintelligible colony sometimes, but still a colony; a part of our
+civilisation, a limb of our life. And America itself, as I have said,
+under all its bounce and independence, really regarded us as a mother
+country. This being the case it was possible for us to quarrel, like
+kinsmen. Now we only bow and smile, like strangers.</p>
+
+<p>This tone, as a sort of family responsibility, can be felt quite
+specially all through the satires or suggestions of these <i>American
+Notes</i>. Dickens is cross with America because he is worried about
+America; as if he were its father. He explores its industrial, legal,
+and educational arrangements like a mother looking at the housekeeping
+of a married son; he makes suggestions with a certain acidity; he takes
+a strange pleasure in being pessimistic. He advises them to take note of
+how much better certain things are done in England. All this is very
+different from Dickens&rsquo;s characteristic way of dealing with a
+foreign country. In countries really foreign, such as France,
+Switzerland, and Italy, he had two attitudes, neither of them in the
+least worried or paternal. When he found a thing in Europe which he did
+not understand, such as the Roman Catholic Church, he simply called it
+an old-world superstition, and sat looking at it like a moonlit
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[79]</a></span>
+ruin. When he found something that he did understand, such as luncheon
+baskets, he burst into carols of praise over the superior sense in our
+civilisation and good management to Continental methods. An example of
+the first attitude may be found in one of his letters, in which he
+describes the backwardness and idleness of Catholics who would not build
+a Birmingham in Italy. He seems quite unconscious of the obvious truth,
+that the backwardness of Catholics was simply the refusal of Bob
+Cratchit to enter the house of Gradgrind. An example of the second
+attitude can be found in the purple patches of fun in <i>Mugby Junction</i>;
+in which the English waitress denounces the profligate French habit of
+providing new bread and clean food for people travelling by rail. The
+point is, however, that in neither case has he the air of one suggesting
+improvements or sharing a problem with the people engaged on it. He does
+not go carefully with a notebook through Jesuit schools nor offer
+friendly suggestions to the governors of Parisian prisons. Or if he
+does, it is in a different spirit; it is in the spirit of an ordinary
+tourist being shown over the Coliseum or the Pyramids. But he visited
+America in the spirit of a Government inspector dealing with something
+it was his duty to inspect. This is never felt either in his praise or
+blame of Continental countries. When he did not leave a foreign country
+to decay like a dead dog, he merely watched it at play like a kitten.
+France he mistook for a kitten. Italy he mistook for a dead dog.</p>
+
+<p>But with America he could feel&mdash;and fear. There he could hate, because
+he could love. There he could feel <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[80]</a></span>
+not the past alone nor the present, but the future also; and, like all
+brave men, when he saw the future he was a little afraid of it. For of
+all tests by which the good citizen and strong reformer can be
+distinguished from the vague faddist or the inhuman sceptic, I know no
+better test than this&mdash;that the unreal reformer sees in front of
+him one certain future, the future of his fad; while the real reformer
+sees before him ten or twenty futures among which his country must
+choose, and may, in some dreadful hour, choose the wrong one. The true
+patriot is always doubtful of victory; because he knows that he is
+dealing with a living thing; a thing with free will. To be certain of
+free will is to be uncertain of success.</p>
+
+<p>The subject matter of the real difference of opinion between Dickens and
+the public of America can only be understood if it is thus treated as a
+dispute between brothers about the destiny of a common heritage. The
+point at issue might be stated like this. Dickens, on his side, did not
+in his heart doubt for a moment that England would eventually follow
+America along the road towards real political equality and purely
+republican institutions. He lived, it must be remembered, before the
+revival of aristocracy, which has since overwhelmed us&mdash;the revival of
+aristocracy worked through popular science and commercial dictatorship,
+and which has nowhere been more manifest than in America itself. He knew
+nothing of this; in his heart he conceded to the Yankees that not only
+was their revolution right but would ultimately be completed everywhere.
+But on the other hand, his whole point against the American experiment
+was this&mdash;that if it ignored certain ancient<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[81]</a></span>
+English contributions it would go to pieces for lack of them. Of these
+the first was good manners and the second individual
+liberty&mdash;liberty, that is, to speak and write against the trend of
+the majority. In these things he was much more serious and much more
+sensible than it is the fashion to think he was; he was indeed one of
+the most serious and sensible critics England ever had of current and
+present problems, though his criticism is useless to the point of
+nonentity about all things remote from him in style of civilisation or
+in time. His point about good manners is really important. All his
+grumblings through this book of <i>American Notes</i>, all his shrieking
+satire in <i>Martin Chuzzlewit</i> are expressions of a grave and reasonable
+fear he had touching the future of democracy. And remember again what
+has been already remarked&mdash;instinctively he paid America the
+compliment of looking at her as the future of democracy.</p>
+
+<p>The mistake which he attacked still exists. I cannot imagine why it is
+that social equality is somehow supposed to mean social familiarity. Why
+should equality mean that all men are equally rude? Should it not rather
+mean that all men are equally polite? Might it not quite reasonably mean
+that all men should be equally ceremonious and stately and pontifical?
+What is there specially Equalitarian, for instance, in calling your
+political friends and even your political enemies by their Christian
+names in public? There is something very futile in the way in which
+certain Socialist leaders call each other Tom, Dick, and Harry;
+especially when Tom is accusing Harry of having basely imposed upon the
+well-known imbecility of Dick. There is <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[82]</a></span>
+something quite undemocratic in all men calling each other by the
+special and affectionate term &ldquo;comrade&rdquo;; especially when
+they say it with a sneer and smart inquiry about the funds. Democracy
+would be quite satisfied if every man called every other man
+&ldquo;sir.&rdquo; Democracy would have no conceivable reason to
+complain if every man called every other man &ldquo;your
+excellency&rdquo; or &ldquo;your holiness&rdquo; or &ldquo;brother of
+the sun and moon.&rdquo; The only democratic essential is that it should
+be a term of dignity and that it should be given to all. To abolish all
+terms of dignity is no more specially democratic than the Roman
+emperor&rsquo;s wish to cut off everybody&rsquo;s head at once was
+specially democratic. That involved equality certainly, but it was
+lacking in respect.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens saw America as markedly the seat of this danger. He saw that
+there was a perilous possibility that republican ideals might be allied
+to a social anarchy good neither for them nor for any other ideals.
+Republican simplicity, which is difficult, might be quickly turned into
+Bohemian brutality, which is easy. Cincinnatus, instead of putting his
+hand to the plough, might put his feet on the tablecloth, and an
+impression prevail that it was all a part of the same rugged equality
+and freedom. Insolence might become a tradition. Bad manners might have
+all the sanctity of good manners. &ldquo;There you are!&rdquo; cries
+Martin Chuzzlewit indignantly, when the American has befouled the
+butter. &ldquo;A man deliberately makes a hog of himself and <i>that</i> is
+an Institution.&rdquo; But the thread of thought which we must always
+keep in hand in this matter is that he would not thus have worried about
+the degradation <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[83]</a></span>
+of republican simplicity into general rudeness if he had not from first
+to last instinctively felt that America held human democracy in her
+hand, to exalt it or to let it fall. In one of his gloomier moments he
+wrote down his fear that the greatest blow ever struck at liberty would
+be struck by America in the failure of her mission upon the earth.</p>
+
+<p>This brings us to the other ground of his alarm&mdash;the matter of liberty
+of speech. Here also he was much more reasonable and philosophic than
+has commonly been realised. The truth is that the lurid individualism of
+Carlyle has, with its violent colours, &ldquo;killed&rdquo; the tones of
+most criticism of his time; and just as we can often see a scheme of
+decoration better if we cover some flaming picture, so you can judge
+nineteenth-century England much better if you leave Carlyle out. He is
+important to moderns because he led that return to Toryism which has
+been the chief feature of modernity, but his judgments were often not
+only spiritually false, but really quite superficial. Dickens understood
+the danger of democracy far better than Carlyle; just as he understood
+the merits of democracy far better than Carlyle. And of this fact we can
+produce one plain evidence in the matter of which we speak. Carlyle, in
+his general dislike of the revolutionary movement, lumped liberty and
+democracy together and said that the chief objection to democracy was
+that it involved the excess and misuse of liberty; he called democracy
+&ldquo;anarchy or no-rule.&rdquo; Dickens, with far more philosophical
+insight and spiritual delicacy, saw that the real danger of democracy is
+that it tends to the very opposite of anarchy; even to the very opposite
+of liberty.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[84]</a></span>
+He lamented in America the freedom of manners. But he lamented even
+more the absence of freedom of opinion. &ldquo;I believe there is no
+country on the face of the earth,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;where there is
+less freedom of opinion on any subject in reference to which there is a
+broad difference of opinion than in this. There! I write the words with
+reluctance, disappointment, and sorrow; but I believe it from the bottom
+of my soul. The notion that I, a man alone by myself in America, should
+venture to suggest to the Americans that there was one point on which
+they were neither just to their own countrymen nor to us, actually
+struck the boldest dumb! Washington Irving, Prescott, Hoffman, Bryant,
+Halleck, Dana, Washington Allston&mdash;every man who writes in this
+country is devoted to the question, and not one of them <i>dares</i> to raise
+his voice and complain of the atrocious state of the law. The wonder is
+that a breathing man can be found with temerity enough to suggest to the
+Americans the possibility of their having done wrong. I wish you could
+have seen the faces that I saw down both sides of the table at Hartford
+when I began to talk about Scott. I wish you could have heard how I gave
+it out. My blood so boiled when I thought of the monstrous injustice
+that I felt as if I were twelve feet high when I thrust it down their
+throats.&rdquo; Dickens knew no history, but he had all history behind
+him in feeling that a pure democracy does tend, when it goes wrong, to
+be too traditional and absolute. The truth is indeed a singular example
+of the unfair attack upon democracy in our own time. Everybody can
+repeat the platitude that the mob can be the greatest of all tyrants.
+But <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[85]</a></span>
+few realise or remember the corresponding truth which goes along with
+it&mdash;that the mob is the only permanent and unassailable high
+priest. Democracy drives its traditions too hard; but democracy is the
+only thing that keeps any traditions. An aristocracy must always be
+going after some new thing. The severity of democracy is far more of a
+virtue than its liberty. The decorum of a democracy is far more of a
+danger than its lawlessness. Dickens discovered this in his great
+quarrels about the copyright, when a whole nation acted on a small point
+of opinion as if it were going to lynch him. But, fortunately for the
+purpose of this argument, there is no need to go back to the forties for
+such a case. Another great literary man has of late visited America; and
+it is possible that Maxim Gorky may be in a position to state how far
+democracy is likely to err on the side of mere liberty and laxity. He
+may have found, like Dickens, some freedom of manners; he did not find
+much freedom of morals.</p>
+
+<p>Along with such American criticism should really go his very
+characteristic summary of the question of the Red Indian. It marks the
+combination between the mental narrowness and the moral justice of the
+old Liberal. Dickens can see nothing in the Red Indian except that he is
+barbaric, retrograde, bellicose, uncleanly, and superstitious&mdash;in short,
+that he is not a member of the special civilisation of Birmingham or
+Brighton. It is curious to note the contrast between the cheery, nay
+Cockney, contempt with which Dickens speaks of the American Indian and
+that chivalrous and pathetic essay in which Washington Irving celebrates
+the virtues of the vanishing race. Between Washington<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[86]</a></span>
+Irving and his friend Charles Dickens there was always indeed this
+ironical comedy of inversion. It is amusing that the Englishman should
+have been the pushing and even pert modernist, and the American the
+stately antiquarian and lover of lost causes. But while a man of more
+mellow sympathies may well dislike Dickens&rsquo;s dislike of savages,
+and even disdain his disdain, he ought to sharply remind himself of the
+admirable ethical fairness and equity which meet with that restricted
+outlook. In the very act of describing Red Indians as devils who, like
+so much dirt, it would pay us to sweep away, he pauses to deny
+emphatically that we have any right to sweep them away. We have no right
+to wrong the man, he means to say, even if he himself be a kind of
+wrong. Here we strike the ringing iron of the old conscience and sense
+of honour which marked the best men of his party and of his epoch. This
+rigid and even reluctant justice towers, at any rate, far above modern
+views of savages, above the sentimentalism of the mere humanitarian and
+the far weaker sentimentalism that pleads for brutality and a race war.
+Dickens was at least more of a man than the brutalitarian who claims to
+wrong people because they are nasty, or the humanitarian who cannot be
+just to them without pretending that they are nice.</p>
+
+<hr /><p class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[87]</a></p>
+<h2><a name="ITALY" id="ITALY"></a>PICTURES FROM ITALY</h2>
+
+<p>The <i>Pictures from Italy</i> are excellent in themselves and excellent as a
+foil to the <i>American Notes</i>. Here we have none of that air of giving a
+decision like a judge or sending in a report like an inspector; here we
+have only glimpses, light and even fantastic glimpses, of a world that
+is really alien to Dickens. It is so alien that he can almost entirely
+enjoy it. For no man can entirely enjoy that which he loves; contentment
+is always unpatriotic. The difference can indeed be put with approximate
+perfection in one phrase. In Italy he was on a holiday; in America he
+was on a tour. But indeed Dickens himself has quite sufficiently
+conveyed the difference in the two phrases that he did actually use for
+the titles of the two books. Dickens often told unconscious truths,
+especially in small matters. The <i>American Notes</i> really are notes, like
+the notes of a student or a professional witness. The <i>Pictures from
+Italy</i> are only pictures from Italy, like the miscellaneous pictures
+that all tourists bring from Italy.</p>
+
+<p>To take another and perhaps closer figure of speech, almost all
+Dickens&rsquo;s works such as these may best be regarded as private
+letters addressed to the public. His private correspondence was quite as
+brilliant as his public works; and many of his public works are almost
+as formless and casual as his private correspondence.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[88]</a></span>
+If he had been struck insensible for a year, I really think that his
+friends and family could have brought out one of his best books by
+themselves if they had happened to keep his letters. The homogeneity of
+his public and private work was indeed strange in many ways. On the one
+hand, there was little that was pompously and unmistakably public in the
+publications; on the other hand, there was very little that was private
+in the private letters. His hilarity had almost a kind of hardness about
+it; no man&rsquo;s letters, I should think, ever needed less expurgation
+on the ground of weakness or undue confession. The main part, and
+certainly the best part, of such a book as <i>Pictures from Italy</i> can
+certainly be criticised best as part of that perpetual torrent of
+entertaining autobiography which he flung at his children as if they
+were his readers and his readers as if they were his children. There are
+some brilliant patches of sense and nonsense in this book; but there is
+always something accidental in them; as if they might have occurred
+somewhere else. Perhaps the most attractive of them is the incomparable
+description of the Italian Marionette Theatre in which they acted a play
+about the death of Napoleon in St. Helena. The description is better
+than that of Codlin and Short&rsquo;s Punch and Judy, and almost as good
+as that of Mrs. Jarley&rsquo;s Wax Works. Indeed the humour is similar;
+for Punch is supposed to be funny, but Napoleon (as Mrs. Jarley said
+when asked if her show was funnier than Punch) was not funny at all. The
+idea of a really tragic scene being enacted between tiny wooden dolls
+with large heads is delightfully dealt with by Dickens. We can almost
+imagine <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[89]</a></span>
+the scene in which the wooden Napoleon haughtily rebukes his wooden
+jailor for calling him General Bonaparte&mdash;&ldquo;Sir Hudson Low,
+call me not thus; I am Napoleon, Emperor of the French.&rdquo; There is
+also something singularly gratifying about the scene of Napoleon&rsquo;s
+death, in which he lay in bed with his little wooden hands outside the
+counterpane and the doctor (who was hung on wires too short)
+&ldquo;delivered medical opinions in the air.&rdquo; It may seem
+flippant to dwell on such flippancies in connection with a book which
+contains many romantic descriptions and many moral generalisations which
+Dickens probably valued highly. But it is not for such things that he is
+valued. In all his writings, from his most reasoned and sustained novel
+to his maddest private note, it is always this obstreperous instinct for
+farce which stands out as his in the highest sense. His wisdom is at the
+best talent, his foolishness is genius. Just that exuberant levity which
+we associate with a moment we associate in his case with immortality. It
+is said of certain old masonry that the mortar was so hard that it has
+survived the stones. So if Dickens could revisit the thing he built, he
+would be surprised to see all the work he thought solid and responsible
+wasted almost utterly away, but the shortest frivolities and the most
+momentary jokes remaining like colossal rocks for ever.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 372px;"><a name="CD1844" id="CD1844"></a>
+<img src="images/dickens1844.jpg" width="372" height="600" alt="" title="" />
+<span class="caption">Charles Dickens, 1844 From a miniature by Margaret
+Gillies.</span></div>
+
+<p class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[90]</a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHUZZLEWIT" id="CHUZZLEWIT"></a>MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT</h2>
+
+<p>There is a certain quality or element which broods over the whole of
+<i>Martin Chuzzlewit</i> to which it is difficult for either friends or foes
+to put a name. I think the reader who enjoys Dickens&rsquo;s other books
+has an impression that it is a kind of melancholy. There are grotesque
+figures of the most gorgeous kind; there are scenes that are farcical
+even by the standard of the farcical license of Dickens; there is humour
+both of the heaviest and of the lightest kind; there are two great comic
+personalities who run like a rich vein through the whole story,
+Pecksniff and Mrs. Gamp; there is one blinding patch of brilliancy, the
+satire on American cant; there is Todgers&rsquo;s boarding-house; there
+is Bailey; there is Mr. Mould, the incomparable undertaker. But yet in
+spite of everything, in spite even of the undertaker, the book is sad.
+No one I think ever went to it in that mixed mood of a tired tenderness
+and a readiness to believe and laugh in which most of Dickens&rsquo;s
+novels are most enjoyed. We go for a particular novel to Dickens as we
+go for a particular inn. We go to the sign of the Pickwick Papers. We go
+to the sign of the Rudge and Raven. We go to the sign of the Old
+Curiosities. We go to the sign of the Two Cities. We go to each or all
+of them according to what kind of hospitality and what kind of happiness
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[91]</a></span>
+we require. But it is always some kind of hospitality and some kind
+of happiness that we require. And as in the case of inns we also
+remember that while there was shelter in all and food in all and some
+kind of fire and some kind of wine in all, yet one has left upon us an
+indescribable and unaccountable memory of mortality and decay, of
+dreariness in the rooms and even of tastelessness in the banquet. So any
+one who has enjoyed the stories of Dickens as they should be enjoyed has
+a nameless feeling that this one story is sad and almost sodden. Dickens
+himself had this feeling, though his breezy vanity forbade him to
+express it in so many words. In spite of Pecksniff, in spite of Mrs.
+Gamp, in spite of the yet greater Bailey, the story went lumberingly and
+even lifelessly; he found the sales falling off; he fancied his
+popularity waning, and by a sudden impulse most inartistic and yet most
+artistic, he dragged in the episode of Martin&rsquo;s visit to America,
+which is the blazing jewel and the sudden redemption of the book. He
+wrote it at an uneasy and unhappy period of his life; when he had ceased
+wandering in America, but could not cease wandering altogether; when he
+had lost his original routine of work which was violent but regular, and
+had not yet settled down to the full enjoyment of his success and his
+later years. He poured into this book genius that might make the
+mountains laugh, invention that juggled with the stars. But the book was
+sad; and he knew it.</p>
+
+<p>The just reason for this is really interesting. Yet it is one that is
+not easy to state without guarding one&rsquo;s self on the one side or
+the other against great misunderstandings; and these stipulations or
+preliminary <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[92]</a></span>
+allowances must in such a case as this of necessity be made first.
+Dickens was among other things a satirist, a pure satirist. I have never
+been able to understand why this title is always specially and sacredly
+reserved for Thackeray. Thackeray was a novelist; in the strict and
+narrow sense at any rate, Thackeray was a far greater novelist than
+Dickens. But Dickens certainly was the satirist. The essence of satire
+is that it perceives some absurdity inherent in the logic of some
+position, and that it draws that absurdity out and isolates it, so that
+all can see it. Thus for instance when Dickens says, &ldquo;Lord Coodle
+would go out; Sir Thomas Doodle wouldn&rsquo;t come in; and there being
+no people to speak of in England except Coodle and Doodle the country
+has been without a Government&rdquo;; when Dickens says this he suddenly
+pounces on and plucks out the one inherent absurdity in the English
+party system which is hidden behind all its paraphernalia of Parliaments
+and Statutes, elections and ballot papers. When all the dignity and all
+the patriotism and all the public interest of the English constitutional
+party conflict have been fully allowed for, there does remain the bold,
+bleak question which Dickens in substance asks, &ldquo;Suppose I want
+somebody else who is neither Coodle nor Doodle.&rdquo; This is the great
+quality called satire; it is a kind of taunting reasonableness; and it
+is inseparable from a certain insane logic which is often called
+exaggeration. Dickens was more of a satirist than Thackeray for this
+simple reason: that Thackeray carried a man&rsquo;s principles as far as
+that man carried them; Dickens carried a man&rsquo;s principles as far
+as a man&rsquo;s principles would go. Dickens in short (as
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[93]</a></span>
+people put it) exaggerated the man and his principles; that is to say
+he emphasised them. Dickens drew a man&rsquo;s absurdity out of him;
+Thackeray left a man&rsquo;s absurdity in him. Of this last fact we can
+take any example we like; take for instance the comparison between the
+city man as treated by Thackeray in the most satiric of his novels, with
+the city man as treated by Dickens in one of the mildest and maturest of
+his. Compare the character of old Mr. Osborne in <i>Vanity Fair</i> with the
+character of Mr. Podsnap in <i>Our Mutual Friend</i>. In the case of Mr.
+Osborne there is nothing except the solid blocking in of a brutal dull
+convincing character. <i>Vanity Fair</i> is not a satire on the City except
+in so far as it happens to be true. <i>Vanity Fair</i> is not a satire on the
+City, in short, except in so far as the City is a satire on the City.
+But Mr. Podsnap is a pure satire; he is an extracting out of the City
+man of those purely intellectual qualities which happen to make that
+kind of City man a particularly exasperating fool. One might almost say
+that Mr. Podsnap is all Mr. Osborne&rsquo;s opinions separated from Mr.
+Osborne and turned into a character. In short the satirist is more
+purely philosophical than the novelist. The novelist may be only an
+observer; the satirist must be a thinker. He must be a thinker, he must
+be a philosophical thinker for this simple reason; that he exercises his
+philosophical thought in deciding what part of his subject he is to
+satirise. You may have the dullest possible intelligence and be a
+portrait painter; but a man must have a serious intellect in order to be
+a caricaturist. He has to select what thing he will caricature. True
+satire is always of this intellectual <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[94]</a></span>
+kind; true satire is always, so to speak, a variation or fantasia upon
+the air of pure logic. The satirist is the man who carries men&rsquo;s
+enthusiasm further than they carry it themselves. He outstrips the most
+extravagant fanatic. He is years ahead of the most audacious prophet. He
+sees where men&rsquo;s detached intellect will eventually lead them, and
+he tells them the name of the place&mdash;which is generally hell.</p>
+
+<p>Now of this detached and rational use of satire there is one great
+example in this book. Even <i>Gulliver&rsquo;s Travels</i> is hardly more
+reasonable than Martin Chuzzlewit&rsquo;s travels in the incredible land
+of the Americans. Before considering the humour of this description in
+its more exhaustive and liberal aspects, it may be first remarked that
+in this American part of <i>Martin Chuzzlewit</i>, Dickens quite specially
+sharpens up his own more controversial and political intelligence. There
+are more things here than anywhere else in Dickens that partake of the
+nature of pamphleteering, of positive challenge, of sudden repartee, of
+pugnacious and exasperating query, in a word of everything that belongs
+to the pure art of controversy as distinct not only from the pure art of
+fiction but even also from the pure art of satire. I am inclined to
+think (to put the matter not only shortly but clumsily) that Dickens was
+never in all his life so strictly clever as he is in the American part
+of <i>Martin Chuzzlewit</i>. There are places where he was more inspired,
+almost in the sense of being intoxicated, as, for instance, in the
+Micawber feasts of <i>David Copperfield</i>; there are places where he wrote
+more carefully and cunningly, as, for instance, in the mystery of <i>The
+Mystery of Edwin Drood</i>; there are places where <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[95]</a></span>
+he wrote very much more humanly, more close to the ground and to
+growing things, as in the whole of that admirable book <i>Great
+Expectations</i>. But I do not think that his mere abstract acuteness and
+rapidity of thought were ever exercised with such startling exactitude
+as they are in this place in <i>Martin Chuzzlewit</i>. It is to be noted, for
+instance, that his American experience had actually worked him up to a
+heat and habit of argument. A slave-owner in the Southern States tells
+Dickens that slave-owners do not ill-treat their slaves, that it is not
+to the interest of slave-owners to ill-treat their slaves. Dickens
+flashes back that it is not to the interest of a man to get drunk, but
+he does get drunk. This pugnacious atmosphere of parry and riposte must
+first of all be allowed for and understood in all the satiric excursus
+of Martin in America. Dickens is arguing all the time; and, to do him
+justice, arguing very well. These chapters are full not merely of
+exuberant satire on America in the sense that Dotheboys Hall or Mr.
+Bumble&rsquo;s Workhouse are exuberant satires on England. They are full
+also of sharp argument with America as if the man who wrote expected
+retort and was prepared with rejoinder. The rest of the book, like the
+rest of Dickens&rsquo;s books, possesses humour. This part of the book,
+like hardly any of Dickens&rsquo;s books, possesses wit. The republican
+gentleman who receives Martin on landing is horrified on hearing an
+English servant speak of the employer as &ldquo;the master.&rdquo;
+&ldquo;There are no masters in America,&rdquo; says the gentleman.
+&ldquo;All owners are they?&rdquo; says Martin. This sort of verbal
+promptitude is out of the ordinary scope of Dickens; but we find it
+frequently <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[96]</a></span>
+in this particular part of <i>Martin Chuzzlewit</i>. Martin himself is
+constantly breaking out into a controversial lucidity, which is
+elsewhere not at all a part of his character. When they talk to him
+about the institutions of America he asks sarcastically whether bowie
+knives and swordsticks and revolvers are the institutions of America.
+All this (if I may summarise) is expressive of one main fact. Being a
+satirist means being a philosopher. Dickens was not always very
+philosophical; but he had this permanent quality of the philosopher
+about him, that he always remembered people by their opinions. Elijah
+Pogram was to him the man who said that &ldquo;his boastful answer to
+the tyrant and the despot was that his bright home was the land of the
+settin&rsquo; sun.&rdquo; Mr. Scadder and Mr. Jefferson Brick were to
+him the men who said (in cooperation) that &ldquo;the libation of
+freedom must sometimes be quaffed in blood.&rdquo; And in these chapters
+more than anywhere else he falls into the extreme habit of satire, that
+of treating people as if there were nothing about them except their
+opinions. It is therefore difficult to accept these pages as pages in a
+novel, splendid as they are considered as pages in a parody. I do not
+dispute that men have said and do say that &ldquo;the libation of
+freedom must sometimes be quaffed in blood,&rdquo; that &ldquo;their
+bright homes are the land of the settin&rsquo; sun,&rdquo; that
+&ldquo;they taunt that lion,&rdquo; that &ldquo;alone they dare
+him,&rdquo; or &ldquo;that softly sleeps the calm ideal in the
+whispering chambers of imagination.&rdquo; I have read too much American
+journalism to deny that any of these sentences and any of these opinions
+may at some time or other have been uttered. I do not deny
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[97]</a></span>
+that there are such opinions. But I do deny that there are such people.
+Elijah Pogram had some other business in life besides defending
+defaulting postmasters; he must have been a son or a father or a husband
+or at least (admirable thought) a lover. Mr. Chollop had some moments in
+his existence when he was not threatening his fellow-creatures with his
+sword-stick and his revolver. Of all this human side of such American
+types Dickens does not really give any hint at all. He does not suggest
+that the bully Chollop had even such coarse good-humour as bullies
+almost always have. He does not suggest that the humbug Elijah Pogram
+had even as much greasy amiability as humbugs almost invariably have. He
+is not studying them as human beings, even as bad human beings; he is
+studying them as conceptions, as points of view, as symbols of a state
+of mind with which he is in violent disagreement. To put it roughly, he
+is not describing characters, he is satirising fads. To put it more
+exactly, he is not describing characters; he is persecuting heresies.
+There is one thing really to be said against his American satire; it is
+a serious thing to be said: it is an argument, and it is true. This can
+be said of Martin&rsquo;s wanderings in America, that from the time he
+lands in America to the time he sets sail from it he never meets a
+living man. He has travelled in the land of Laputa. All the people he
+has met have been absurd opinions walking about. The whole art of
+Dickens in such passages as these consisted in one thing. It consisted
+in finding an opinion that had not a leg to stand on, and then giving it
+two legs to stand on.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[98]</a></span>
+So much may be allowed; it may be admitted that Dickens is in this sense
+the great satirist, in that he can imagine absurd opinions walking by
+themselves about the street. It may be admitted that Thackeray would not
+have allowed an absurd opinion to walk about the street without at least
+tying a man on to it for the sake of safety. But while this first truth
+may be evident, the second truth which is the complement of it may
+easily be forgotten. On the one hand there was no man who could so much
+enjoy mere intellectual satire apart from humanity as Dickens. On the
+other hand there was no man who, with another and more turbulent part of
+his nature, demanded humanity, and demanded its supremacy over
+intellect, more than Dickens. To put it shortly: there never was a man
+so much fitted for saying that everything was wrong; and there never was
+a man who was so desirous of saying that everything was right. Thus,
+when he met men with whom he violently disagreed, he described them as
+devils or lunatics; he could not bear to describe them as men. If they
+could not think with him on essentials he could not stand the idea that
+they were human souls; he cast them out; he forgot them; and if he could
+not forget them he caricatured them. He was too emotional to regard them
+as anything but enemies, if they were not friends. He was too humane not
+to hate them. Charles Lamb said with his inimitable sleek pungency that
+he could read all the books there were; he excluded books that obviously
+were not books, as cookery books, chessboards bound so as to look like
+books, and all the works of modern historians and philosophers. One
+might say in much the same <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[99]</a></span>
+style that Dickens loved all the men in the world; that is he loved all
+the men whom he was able to recognise as men; the rest he turned into
+griffins and chimeras without any serious semblance to humanity. Even in
+his books he never hates a human being. If he wishes to hate him he
+adopts the simple expedient of making him an inhuman being. Now of these
+two strands almost the whole of Dickens is made up; they are not only
+different strands, they are even antagonistic strands. I mean that the
+whole of Dickens is made up of the strand of satire and the strand of
+sentimentalism; and the strand of satire is quite unnecessarily
+merciless and hostile, and the strand of sentimentalism is quite
+unnecessarily humanitarian and even maudlin. On the proper interweaving
+of these two things depends the great part of Dickens&rsquo;s success in
+a novel. And by the consideration of them we can probably best arrive at
+the solution of the particular emotional enigma of the novel called
+<i>Martin Chuzzlewit</i>.</p>
+
+<p><i>Martin Chuzzlewit</i> is, I think, vaguely unsatisfactory to the reader,
+vaguely sad and heavy even to the reader who loves Dickens, because in
+<i>Martin Chuzzlewit</i> more than anywhere else in Dickens&rsquo;s works,
+more even than in <i>Oliver Twist</i>, there is a predominance of the harsh
+and hostile sort of humour over the hilarious and the humane. It is
+absurd to lay down any such little rules for the testing of literature.
+But this may be broadly said and yet with confidence: that Dickens is
+always at his best when he is laughing at the people whom he really
+admires. He is at his most humorous in writing of Mr. Pickwick, who
+represents passive virtue. He is at his most humorous in writing of Mr.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[100]</a></span>
+Sam Weller, who represents active virtue. He is never so funny as when
+he is speaking of people in whom fun itself is a virtue, like the poor
+people in the Fleet or the Marshalsea. And in the stories that had
+immediately preceded <i>Martin Chuzzlewit</i> he had consistently concerned
+himself in the majority of cases with the study of such genial and
+honourable eccentrics; if they are lunatics they are amiable lunatics.
+In the last important novel before <i>Martin Chuzzlewit</i>, <i>Barnaby Rudge</i>,
+the hero himself is an amiable lunatic. In the novel before that, <i>The
+Old Curiosity Shop</i>, the two comic figures, Dick Swiveller and the
+Marchioness, are not only the most really entertaining, but also the
+most really sympathetic characters in the book. Before that came <i>Oliver
+Twist</i> (which is, I have said, an exception), and before that
+<i>Pickwick</i>, where the hero is, as Mr. Weller says, &ldquo;an angel in
+gaiters.&rdquo; Hitherto, then, on the whole, the central Dickens
+character had been the man who gave to the poor many things, gold and
+wine and feasting and good advice; but among other things gave them a
+good laugh at himself. The jolly old English merchant of the Pickwick
+type was popular on both counts. People liked to see him throw his money
+in the gutter. They also liked to see him throw himself there
+occasionally. In both acts they recognised a common quality of virtue.</p>
+
+<p>Now I think it is certainly the disadvantage of <i>Martin Chuzzlewit</i> that
+none of its absurd characters are thus sympathetic. There are in the
+book two celebrated characters who are both especially exuberant and
+amusing even for Dickens, and who are both especially heartless and
+abominable even for Dickens&mdash;I <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[101]</a></span>
+mean of course Mr. Pecksniff on the one hand and Mrs. Gamp on the
+other. The humour of both of them is gigantesque. Nobody will ever
+forget the first time he read the words &ldquo;Now I should be very glad
+to see Mrs. Todgers&rsquo;s idea of a wooden leg.&rdquo; It is like
+remembering first love: there is still some sort of ancient sweetness
+and sting. I am afraid that, in spite of many criticisms to the
+contrary, I am still unable to take Mr. Pecksniff&rsquo;s hypocrisy
+seriously. He does not seem to me so much a hypocrite as a rhetorician;
+he reminds me of Serjeant Buzfuz. A very capable critic, Mr. Noyes, said
+that I was wrong when I suggested in another place that Dickens must
+have loved Pecksniff. Mr. Noyes thinks it clear that Dickens hated
+Pecksniff. I cannot believe it. Hatred does indeed linger round its
+object as much as love; but not in that way. Dickens is always making
+Pecksniff say things which have a wild poetical truth about them. Hatred
+allows no such outbursts of original innocence. But however that may be
+the broad fact remains&mdash;Dickens may or may not have loved Pecksniff
+comically, but he did not love him seriously; he did not respect him as
+he certainly respected Sam Weller. The same of course is true of Mrs.
+Gamp. To any one who appreciates her unctuous and sumptuous conversation
+it is difficult indeed not to feel that it would be almost better to be
+killed by Mrs. Gamp than to be saved by a better nurse. But the fact
+remains. In this book Dickens has not allowed us to love the most absurd
+people seriously, and absurd people ought to be loved seriously.
+Pecksniff has to be amusing all the time; the instant he ceases to be
+laughable he becomes <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[102]</a></span>
+detestable. Pickwick can take his ease at his inn; he can be leisurely,
+he can be spacious; he can fall into moods of gravity and even of
+dulness; he is not bound to be always funny or to forfeit the
+reader&rsquo;s concern, for he is a good man, and therefore even his
+dulness is beautiful, just as is the dulness of the animal. We can leave
+Pickwick a little while by the fire to think; for the thoughts of
+Pickwick, even if they were to go slowly, would be full of all the
+things that all men care for&mdash;old friends and old inns and memory
+and the goodness of God. But we dare not leave Pecksniff alone for a
+moment. We dare not leave him thinking by the fire, for the thoughts of
+Pecksniff would be too frightful.</p>
+
+<hr /><p class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[103]</a></p>
+<h2><a name="CHRISTMAS_BOOKS" id="CHRISTMAS_BOOKS"></a>CHRISTMAS BOOKS</h2>
+
+<p>The mystery of Christmas is in a manner identical with the mystery of
+Dickens. If ever we adequately explain the one we may adequately explain
+the other. And indeed, in the treatment of the two, the chronological or
+historical order must in some degree be remembered. Before we come to
+the question of what Dickens did for Christmas we must consider the
+question of what Christmas did for Dickens. How did it happen that this
+bustling, nineteenth-century man, full of the almost cock-sure
+common-sense of the utilitarian and liberal epoch, came to associate his
+name chiefly in literary history with the perpetuation of a half pagan
+and half Catholic festival which he would certainly have called an
+antiquity and might easily have called a superstition? Christmas has
+indeed been celebrated before in English literature; but it had, in the
+most noticeable cases, been celebrated in connection with that kind of
+feudalism with which Dickens would have severed his connection with an
+ignorant and even excessive scorn. Sir Roger de Coverley kept Christmas;
+but it was a feudal Christmas. Sir Walter Scott sang in praise of
+Christmas; but it was a feudal Christmas. And Dickens was not only
+indifferent to the dignity of the old country gentleman or to the genial
+arch&aelig;ology of Scott; <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[104]</a></span>
+he was even harshly and insolently hostile to it. If Dickens had lived
+in the neighbourhood of Sir Roger de Coverley he would undoubtedly, like
+Tom Touchy, have been always &ldquo;having the law of him.&rdquo; If
+Dickens had stumbled in among the old armour and quaint folios of
+Scott&rsquo;s study he would certainly have read his brother novelist a
+lesson in no measured terms about the futility of thus fumbling in the
+dust-bins of old oppression and error. So far from Dickens being one of
+those who like a thing because it is old, he was one of those cruder
+kind of reformers, in theory at least, who actually dislike a thing
+because it is old. He was not merely the more righteous kind of Radical
+who tries to uproot abuses; he was partly also that more suicidal kind
+of Radical who tries to uproot himself. In theory at any rate, he had no
+adequate conception of the importance of human tradition; in his time it
+had been twisted and falsified into the form of an opposition to
+democracy. In truth, of course, tradition is the most democratic of all
+things, for tradition is merely a democracy of the dead as well as the
+living. But Dickens and his special group or generation had no grasp of
+this permanent position; they had been called to a special war for the
+righting of special wrongs. In so far as such an institution as
+Christmas was old, Dickens would even have tended to despise it. He
+could never have put the matter to himself in the correct way&mdash;that
+while there are some things whose antiquity does prove that they are
+dying, there are some other things whose antiquity only proves that they
+cannot die. If some Radical contemporary and friend of Dickens had
+happened to say to him that in defending <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[105]</a></span>
+the mince-pies and the mummeries of Christmas he was defending a piece
+of barbaric and brutal ritualism, doomed to disappear in the light of
+reason along with the Boy-Bishop and the Lord of Misrule, I am not sure
+that Dickens (though he was one of the readiest and most rapid masters
+of reply in history) would have found it very easy upon his own
+principles to answer. It was by a great ancestral instinct that he
+defended Christmas; by that sacred sub-consciousness which is called
+tradition, which some have called a dead thing, but which is really a
+thing far more living than the intellect. There is a dark kinship and
+brotherhood of all mankind which is much too deep to be called heredity
+or to be in any way explained in scientific formul&aelig;; blood is
+thicker than water and is especially very much thicker than water on the
+brain. But this unconscious and even automatic quality in
+Dickens&rsquo;s defence of the Christmas feast, this fact that his
+defence might almost be called animal rather than mental, though in
+proper language it should be called merely virile; all this brings us
+back to the fact that we must begin with the atmosphere of the subject
+itself. We must not ask Dickens what Christmas is, for with all his heat
+and eloquence he does not know. Rather we must ask Christmas what
+Dickens is&mdash;ask how this strange child of Christmas came to be born
+out of due time.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens devoted his genius in a somewhat special sense to the
+description of happiness. No other literary man of his eminence has made
+this central human aim so specially his subject matter. Happiness is a
+mystery&mdash;generally a momentary mystery&mdash;which seldom stops long enough
+to submit itself to artistic observation, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[106]</a></span>
+and which, even when it is habitual, has something about it which
+renders artistic description almost impossible. There are twenty tiny
+minor poets who can describe fairly impressively an eternity of agony;
+there are very few even of the eternal poets who can describe ten
+minutes of satisfaction. Nevertheless, mankind being half divine is
+always in love with the impossible, and numberless attempts have been
+made from the beginning of human literature to describe a real state of
+felicity. Upon the whole, I think, the most successful have been the
+most frankly physical and symbolic; the flowers of Eden or the jewels of
+the New Jerusalem. Many writers, for instance, have called the gold and
+chrysolite of the Holy City a vulgar lump of jewellery. But when these
+critics themselves attempt to describe their conceptions of future
+happiness, it is always some priggish nonsense about
+&ldquo;planes,&rdquo; about &ldquo;cycles of fulfilment,&rdquo; or
+&ldquo;spirals of spiritual evolution.&rdquo; Now a cycle is just as
+much a physical metaphor as a flower of Eden; a spiral is just as much a
+physical metaphor as a precious stone. But, after all, a garden is a
+beautiful thing; whereas this is by no means necessarily true of a
+cycle, as can be seen in the case of a bicycle. A jewel, after all, is a
+beautiful thing; but this is not necessarily so of a spiral, as can be
+seen in the case of a corkscrew. Nothing is gained by dropping the old
+material metaphors, which did hint at heavenly beauty, and adopting
+other material metaphors which do not even give a hint of earthly
+beauty. This modern or spiral method of describing indescribable
+happiness may, I think, be dismissed. Then there has been another method
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[107]</a></span>
+which has been adopted by many men of a very real poetical genius. It
+was the method of the old pastoral poets like Theocritus. It was in
+another way that adopted by the elegance and piety of Spenser. It was
+certainly expressed in the pictures of Watteau; and it had a very
+sympathetic and even manly expression in modern England in the
+decorative poetry of William Morris. These men of genius, from
+Theocritus to Morris, occupied themselves in endeavouring to describe
+happiness as a state of certain human beings, the atmosphere of a
+commonwealth, the enduring climate of certain cities or islands. They
+poured forth treasures of the truest kind of imagination upon describing
+the happy lives and landscapes of Utopia or Atlantis or the Earthly
+Paradise. They traced with the most tender accuracy the tracery of its
+fruit-trees or the glimmering garments of its women; they used every
+ingenuity of colour or intricate shape to suggest its infinite delight.
+And what they succeeded in suggesting was always its infinite
+melancholy. William Morris described the Earthly Paradise in such a way
+that the only strong emotional note left on the mind was the feeling of
+how homeless his travellers felt in that alien Elysium; and the reader
+sympathised with them, feeling that he would prefer not only Elizabethan
+England but even twentieth-century Camberwell to such a land of shining
+shadows. Thus literature has almost always failed in endeavouring to
+describe happiness as a state. Human tradition, human custom and
+folk-lore (though far more true and reliable than literature as a rule)
+have not often succeeded in giving quite the correct symbols for a real
+atmosphere of <i>camaraderie</i><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[108]</a></span>
+and joy. But here and there the note has been struck with the sudden
+vibration of the <i>vox humana</i>. In human tradition it has been struck
+chiefly in the old celebrations of Christmas. In literature it has been
+struck chiefly in Dickens&rsquo;s Christmas tales.</p>
+
+<p>In the historic celebration of Christmas as it remains from Catholic
+times in certain northern countries (and it is to be remembered that in
+Catholic times the northern countries were, if possible, more Catholic
+than anybody else), there are three qualities which explain, I think,
+its hold upon the human sense of happiness, especially in such men as
+Dickens. There are three notes of Christmas, so to speak, which are also
+notes of happiness, and which the pagans and the Utopians forget. If we
+state what they are in the case of Christmas, it will be quite
+sufficiently obvious how important they are in the case of Dickens.</p>
+
+<p>The first quality is what may be called the dramatic quality. The
+happiness is not a state; it is a crisis. All the old customs
+surrounding the celebration of the birth of Christ are made by human
+instinct so as to insist and re-insist upon this crucial quality.
+Everything is so arranged that the whole household may feel, if
+possible, as a household does when a child is actually being born in it.
+The thing is a vigil and a vigil with a definite limit. People sit up at
+night until they hear the bells ring. Or they try to sleep at night in
+order to see their presents the next morning. Everywhere there is a
+limitation, a restraint; at one moment the door is shut, at the moment
+after it is opened. The hour has come or it has not come; the parcels
+are undone or they are not undone; there is no evolution of
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[109]</a></span>
+Christmas presents. This sharp and theatrical quality in pleasure,
+which human instinct and the mother wit of the world has wisely put into
+the popular celebrations of Christmas, is also a quality which is
+essential in such romantic literature as Dickens wrote. In romantic
+literature the hero and heroine must indeed be happy, but they must also
+be unexpectedly happy. This is the first connecting link between
+literature and the old religious feast; this is the first connecting
+link between Dickens and Christmas.</p>
+
+<p>The second element to be found in all such festivity and all such
+romance is the element which is represented as well as it could be
+represented by the mere fact that Christmas occurs in the winter. It is
+the element not merely of contrast, but actually of antagonism. It
+preserves everything that was best in the merely primitive or pagan view
+of such ceremonies or such banquets. If we are carousing, at least we
+are warriors carousing. We hang above us, as it were, the shields and
+battle-axes with which we must do battle with the giants of the snow and
+hail. All comfort must be based on discomfort. Man chooses when he
+wishes to be most joyful the very moment when the whole material
+universe is most sad. It is this contradiction and mystical defiance
+which gives a quality of manliness and reality to the old winter feasts
+which is not characteristic of the sunny felicities of the Earthly
+Paradise. And this curious element has been carried out even in all the
+trivial jokes and tasks that have always surrounded such occasions as
+these. The object of the jovial customs was not to make everything
+artificially easy: on the contrary, it was rather to make everything
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[110]</a></span>
+artificially difficult. Idealism is not only expressed by shooting an
+arrow at the stars; the fundamental principle of idealism is also
+expressed by putting a leg of mutton at the top of a greasy pole. There
+is in all such observances a quality which can be called only the
+quality of divine obstruction. For instance, in the game of snapdragon
+(that admirable occupation) the conception is that raisins taste much
+nicer if they are brands saved from the burning. About all Christmas
+things there is something a little nobler, if only nobler in form and
+theory, than mere comfort; even holly is prickly. It is not hard to see
+the connection of this kind of historic instinct with a romantic writer
+like Dickens. The healthy novelist must always play snapdragon with his
+principal characters; he must always be snatching the hero and heroine
+like raisins out of the fire.</p>
+
+<p>The third great Christmas element is the element of the grotesque. The
+grotesque is the natural expression of joy; and all the Utopias and new
+Edens of the poets fail to give a real impression of enjoyment, very
+largely because they leave out the grotesque. A man in most modern
+Utopias cannot really be happy; he is too dignified. A man in
+Morris&rsquo;s Earthly Paradise cannot really be enjoying himself; he is
+too decorative. When real human beings have real delights they tend to
+express them entirely in grotesques&mdash;I might almost say entirely in
+goblins. On Christmas Eve one may talk about ghosts so long as they are
+turnip ghosts. But one would not be allowed (I hope, in any decent
+family) to talk on Christmas Eve about astral bodies. The boar&rsquo;s
+head of old Yule-time was as grotesque as <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[111]</a></span>
+the donkey&rsquo;s head of Bottom the Weaver. But there is only one set
+of goblins quite wild enough to express the wild goodwill of Christmas.
+Those goblins are the characters of Dickens.</p>
+
+<p>Arcadian poets and Arcadian painters have striven to express happiness
+by means of beautiful figures. Dickens understood that happiness is best
+expressed by ugly figures. In beauty, perhaps, there is something allied
+to sadness; certainly there is something akin to joy in the grotesque,
+nay, in the uncouth. There is something mysteriously associated with
+happiness not only in the corpulence of Falstaff and the corpulence of
+Tony Weller, but even in the red nose of Bardolph or the red nose of Mr.
+Stiggins. A thing of beauty is an inspiration for ever&mdash;a matter of
+meditation for ever. It is rather a thing of ugliness that is strictly a
+joy for ever.</p>
+
+<p>All Dickens&rsquo;s books are Christmas books. But this is still truest
+of his two or three famous Yuletide tales&mdash;The <i>Christmas Carol</i> and
+<i>The Chimes</i> and <i>The Cricket on the Hearth</i>. Of these <i>The Christmas
+Carol</i> is beyond comparison the best as well as the most popular.
+Indeed, Dickens is in so profound and spiritual a sense a popular author
+that in his case, unlike most others, it can generally be said that the
+best work is the most popular. It is for <i>Pickwick</i> that he is best
+known; and upon the whole it is for Pickwick that he is best worth
+knowing. In any case this superiority of <i>The Christmas Carol</i> makes it
+convenient for us to take it as an example of the generalisations
+already made. If we study the very real atmosphere of rejoicing and of
+riotous charity in <i>The Christmas Carol</i> we shall find
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[112]</a></span>
+that all the three marks I have mentioned are unmistakably visible.
+<i>The Christmas Carol</i> is a happy story first, because it describes an
+abrupt and dramatic change. It is not only the story of a conversion,
+but of a sudden conversion; as sudden as the conversion of a man at a
+Salvation Army meeting. Popular religion is quite right in insisting on
+the fact of a crisis in most things. It is true that the man at the
+Salvation Army meeting would probably be converted from the punch bowl;
+whereas Scrooge was converted to it. That only means that Scrooge and
+Dickens represented a higher and more historic Christianity.</p>
+
+<p>Again, <i>The Christmas Carol</i> owes much of its hilarity to our second
+source&mdash;the fact of its being a tale of winter and of a very wintry
+winter. There is much about comfort in the story; yet the comfort is
+never enervating: it is saved from that by a tingle of something bitter
+and bracing in the weather. Lastly, the story exemplifies throughout the
+power of the third principle&mdash;the kinship between gaiety and the
+grotesque. Everybody is happy because nobody is dignified. We have a
+feeling somehow that Scrooge looked even uglier when he was kind than he
+had looked when he was cruel. The turkey that Scrooge bought was so fat,
+says Dickens, that it could never have stood upright. That top-heavy and
+monstrous bird is a good symbol of the top-heavy happiness of the
+stories.</p>
+
+<p>It is less profitable to criticise the other two tales in detail because
+they represent variations on the theme in two directions; and variations
+that were not, upon the whole, improvements. <i>The Chimes</i> is a monument
+of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[113]</a></span>
+Dickens&rsquo;s honourable quality of pugnacity. He could not admire
+anything, even peace, without wanting to be warlike about it. That was
+all as it should be.</p>
+
+<hr /><p class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[114]</a></p>
+<h2><a name="DOMBEY" id="DOMBEY"></a>DOMBEY AND SON</h2>
+
+<p>In Dickens&rsquo;s literary life <i>Dombey and Son</i> represents a break so
+important as to necessitate our casting back to a summary and a
+generalisation. In order fully to understand what this break is, we must
+say something of the previous character of Dickens&rsquo;s novels, and
+even something of the general character of novels in themselves. How
+essential this is we shall see shortly.</p>
+
+<p>It must first be remembered that the novel is the most typical of modern
+forms. It is typical of modern forms especially in this, that it is
+essentially formless. All the ancient modes or structures of literature
+were definite and severe. Any one composing them had to abide by their
+rules; they were what their name implied. Thus a tragedy might be a bad
+tragedy, but it was always a tragedy. Thus an epic might be a bad epic,
+but it was always an epic. Now in the sense in which there is such a
+thing as an epic, in that sense there is no such thing as a novel. We
+call any long fictitious narrative in prose a novel, just as we call any
+short piece of prose without any narrative an essay. Both these forms
+are really quite formless, and both of them are really quite new. The
+difference between a good epic by Mr. John Milton and a bad epic by Mr.
+John Smith was simply the difference between the same thing done
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[115]</a></span>
+well and the same thing done badly. But it was not (for instance) like
+the difference between <i>Clarissa Harlowe</i> and <i>The Time Machine</i>. If we
+class Richardson&rsquo;s book with Mr. Wells&rsquo;s book it is really
+only for convenience; if we say that they are both novels we shall
+certainly be puzzled in that case to say what on earth a novel is. But
+the note of our age, both for good and evil, is a highly poetical and
+largely illogical faith in liberty. Liberty is not a negation or a piece
+of nonsense, as the cheap reactionaries say; it is a belief in variety
+and growth. But it is a purely poetic and even a merely romantic belief.
+The nineteenth century was an age of romance as certainly as the Middle
+Ages was an age of reason. Medi&aelig;vals liked to have everything
+defined and defensible; the modern world prefers to run some risks for
+the sake of spontaneity and diversity. Consequently the modern world is
+full of a phenomenon peculiar to itself&mdash;I mean the spectacle of
+small or originally small things swollen to enormous size and power. The
+modern world is like a world in which toadstools should be as big as
+trees, and insects should walk about in the sun as large as elephants.
+Thus, for instance, the shopkeeper, almost an unimportant figure in
+carefully ordered states, has in our time become the millionaire, and
+has more power than ten kings. Thus again a practical knowledge of
+nature, of the habits of animals or the properties of fire and water,
+was in the old ordered state either an almost servile labour or a sort
+of joke; it was left to old women and gamekeepers and boys who went
+birds&rsquo;-nesting. In our time this commonplace daily knowledge has
+swollen into the enormous miracle of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[116]</a></span>
+physical size, weighing the stars and talking under the sea. In short,
+our age is a sort of splendid jungle in which some of the most towering
+weeds and blossoms have come from the smallest seed.</p>
+
+<p>And this is, generally speaking, the explanation of the novel. The novel
+is not so much the filling up of an artistic plan, however new or
+fantastic. It is a thing that has grown from some germ of suggestion,
+and has often turned out much larger than the author intended. And this,
+lastly, is the final result of these facts, that the critic can
+generally trace in a novel what was the original artistic type or shape
+of thought from which the whole matter started, and he will generally
+find that this is different in every case. In one novel he will find
+that the first impulse is a character. In another novel he will find
+that the first impulse is a landscape, the atmosphere of some special
+countryside. In another novel he will find that the first impulse is the
+last chapter. Or it may be a thrust with sword or dagger, it may be a
+theology, it may be a song. Somewhere embedded in every ordinary book
+are the five or six words for which really all the rest will be written.
+Some of our enterprising editors who set their readers to hunt for
+banknotes and missing ladies might start a competition for finding those
+words in every novel. But whether or no this is possible, there is no
+doubt that the principle in question is of great importance in the case
+of Dickens, and especially in the case of <i>Dombey and Son</i>.</p>
+
+<p>In all the Dickens novels can be seen, so to speak, the original thing
+that they were before they were novels. The same may be observed, for
+the matter of that, in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[117]</a></span>
+the great novels of most of the great modern novelists. For example,
+Sir Walter Scott wrote poetical romances before he wrote prose romances.
+Hence it follows that, with all their much greater merit, his novels may
+still be described as poetical romances in prose. While adding a new and
+powerful element of popular humours and observation, Scott still retains
+a certain purely poetical right&mdash;a right to make his heroes and
+outlaws and great kings speak at the great moments with a rhetoric so
+rhythmical that it partakes of the nature of song, the same quite
+metrical rhetoric which is used in the metrical speeches of Marmion or
+Roderick Dhu. In the same way, although <i>Don Quixote</i> is a modern novel
+in its irony and subtlety, we can see that it comes from the old long
+romances of chivalry. In the same way, although <i>Clarissa</i> is a modern
+novel in its intimacy and actuality, we can see that it comes from the
+old polite letter-writing and polite essays of the period of the
+<i>Spectator</i>. Any one can see that Scott formed in <i>The Lay of the Last
+Minstrel</i> the style that he applied again and again afterwards, like the
+reappearances of a star taking leave of the stage. All his other
+romances were positively last appearances of the positively last
+Minstrel. Any one can see that Thackeray formed in fragmentary satires
+like <i>The Book of Snobs</i> or <i>The Yellowplush Papers</i> the style, the
+rather fragmentary style, in which he was to write <i>Vanity Fair</i>. In
+most modern cases, in short (until very lately, at any rate), the novel
+is an enormous outgrowth from something that was not a novel. And in
+Dickens this is very important. All his novels are outgrowths of the
+original notion of taking notes, splendid and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[118]</a></span>
+inspired notes, of what happens in the street. Those in the modern
+world who cannot reconcile themselves to his method&mdash;those who feel
+that there is about his books something intolerably clumsy or
+superficial&mdash;have either no natural taste for strong literature at
+all, or else have fallen into their error by too persistently regarding
+Dickens as a modern novelist and expecting all his books to be modern
+novels. Dickens did not know at what exact point he really turned into a
+novelist. Nor do we. Dickens did not know, in his deepest soul, whether
+he ever really did turn into a novelist. Nor do we. The novel being a
+modern product is one of the few things to which we really can apply
+that disgusting method of thought&mdash;the method of evolution. But
+even in evolution there are great gaps, there are great breaks, there
+are great crises. I have said that the first of these breaks in Dickens
+may be placed at the point when he wrote <i>Nicholas Nickleby</i>. This was
+his first serious decision to be a novelist in any sense at all, to be
+anything except a maker of momentary farces. The second break, and that
+a far more important break, is in <i>Dombey and Son</i>. This marks his final
+resolution to be a novelist and nothing else, to be a serious
+constructor of fiction in the serious sense. Before <i>Dombey and Son</i>
+even his pathos had been really frivolous. After <i>Dombey and Son</i> even
+his absurdity was intentional and grave.</p>
+
+<p>In case this transition is not understood, one or two tests may be taken
+at random. The episodes in <i>Dombey and Son</i>, the episodes in <i>David
+Copperfield</i>, which came after it, are no longer episodes merely stuck
+into the middle of the story without any connection <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[119]</a></span>
+with it, like most of the episodes in <i>Nicholas Nickleby</i>, or most of
+the episodes even in <i>Martin Chuzzlewit</i>. Take, for instance, by way of
+a mere coincidence, the fact that three schools for boys are described
+successively in <i>Nicholas Nickleby</i>, in <i>Dombey and Son</i>, and in <i>David
+Copperfield</i>. But the difference is enormous. Dotheboys Hall does not
+exist to tell us anything about Nicholas Nickleby. Rather Nicholas
+Nickleby exists entirely in order to tell us about Dotheboys Hall. It
+does not in any way affect his history or psychology; he enters Mr.
+Squeers&rsquo;s school and leaves Mr. Squeers&rsquo;s school with the
+same character, or rather absence of character. It is a mere episode,
+existing for itself. But when little Paul Dombey goes to an
+old-fashioned but kindly school, it is in a very different sense and for
+a very different reason from that for which Nicholas Nickleby goes to an
+old-fashioned and cruel school. The sending of little Paul to Dr.
+Blimber&rsquo;s is a real part of the history of little Paul, such as it
+is. Dickens deliberately invents all that elderly pedantry in order to
+show up Paul&rsquo;s childishness. Dickens deliberately invents all that
+rather heavy kindness in order to show up Paul&rsquo;s predestination
+and tragedy. Dotheboys Hall is not meant to show up anything except
+Dotheboys Hall. But although Dickens doubtless enjoyed Dr. Blimber quite
+as much as Mr. Squeers, it remains true that Dr. Blimber is really a
+very good foil to Paul; whereas Squeers is not a foil to Nicholas;
+Nicholas is merely a lame excuse for Squeers. The change can be seen
+continued in the school, or rather the two schools, to which David
+Copperfield goes. The whole idea of David Copperfield&rsquo;s life
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[120]</a></span>
+is that he had the dregs of life before the wine of it. He knew the
+worst of the world before he knew the best of it. His childhood at Dr.
+Strong&rsquo;s is a second childhood. Now for this purpose the two
+schools are perfectly well adapted. Mr. Creakle&rsquo;s school is not
+only, like Mr. Squeers&rsquo;s school, a bad school, it is a bad
+influence upon David Copperfield. Dr. Strong&rsquo;s school is not only
+a good school, it is a good influence upon David Copperfield. I have
+taken this case of the schools as a case casual but concrete. The same,
+however, can be seen in any of the groups or incidents of the novels on
+both sides of the boundary. Mr. Crummles&rsquo;s theatrical company is
+only a society that Nicholas happens to fall into. America is only a
+place to which Martin Chuzzlewit happens to go. These things are
+isolated sketches, and nothing else. Even Todgers&rsquo;s boarding-house
+is only a place where Mr. Pecksniff can be delightfully hypocritical. It
+is not a place which throws any new light on Mr. Pecksniff&rsquo;s
+hypocrisy. But the case is different with that more subtle hypocrite in
+<i>Dombey and Son</i>&mdash;I mean Major Bagstock. Dickens does mean it as a
+deliberate light on Mr. Dombey&rsquo;s character that he basks with a
+fatuous calm in the blazing sun of Major Bagstock&rsquo;s tropical and
+offensive flattery. Here, then, is the essence of the change. He not
+only wishes to write a novel; this he did as early as <i>Nicholas
+Nickleby</i>. He wishes to have as little as possible in the novel that
+does not really assist it as a novel. Previously he had asked with the
+assistance of what incidents could his hero wander farther and farther
+from the pathway. Now he has really begun to ask with the assistance of
+what <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[121]</a></span>
+incidents his hero can get nearer and nearer to the goal.</p>
+
+<p>The change made Dickens a greater novelist. I am not sure that it made
+him a greater man. One good character by Dickens requires all eternity
+to stretch its legs in; and the characters in his later books are always
+being tripped up by some tiresome nonsense about the story. For
+instance, in <i>Dombey and Son</i>, Mrs. Skewton is really very funny. But
+nobody with a love of the real smell of Dickens would compare her for a
+moment, for instance, with Mrs. Nickleby. And the reason of Mrs.
+Skewton&rsquo;s inferiority is simply this, that she has something to do
+in the plot; she has to entrap or assist to entrap Mr. Dombey into
+marrying Edith. Mrs. Nickleby, on the other hand, has nothing at all to
+do in the story, except to get in everybody&rsquo;s way. The consequence
+is that we complain not of her for getting in everyone&rsquo;s way, but
+of everyone for getting in hers. What are suns and stars, what are times
+and seasons, what is the mere universe, that it should presume to
+interrupt Mrs. Nickleby? Mrs. Skewton (though supposed, of course, to be
+a much viler sort of woman) has something of the same quality of
+splendid and startling irrelevancy. In her also there is the same
+feeling of wild threads hung from world to world like the webs of
+gigantic spiders; of things connected that seem to have no connection
+save by this one adventurous filament of frail and daring folly. Nothing
+could be better than Mrs. Skewton when she finds herself, after
+convolutions of speech, somehow on the subject of Henry VIII., and
+pauses to mention with approval &ldquo;his dear little peepy eyes and
+his benevolent chin.&rdquo;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[122]</a></span>
+Nothing could be better than her attempt at Mahomedan resignation when
+she feels almost inclined to say &ldquo;that there is no
+What&rsquo;s-his-name but Thingummy, and What-you-may-call-it is his
+prophet!&rdquo; But she has not so much time as Mrs. Nickleby to say
+these good things; also she has not sufficient human virtue to say them
+constantly. She is always intent upon her worldly plans, among other
+things upon the worldly plan of assisting Charles Dickens to get a story
+finished. She is always &ldquo;advancing her shrivelled ear&rdquo; to
+listen to what Dombey is saying to Edith. Worldliness is the most solemn
+thing in the world; it is far more solemn than other-worldliness. Mrs.
+Nickleby can afford to ramble as a child does in a field, or as a child
+does to laugh at nothing, for she is like a child, innocent. It is only
+the good who can afford to be frivolous.</p>
+
+<p>Broadly speaking, what is said here of Mrs. Skewton applies to the great
+part of <i>Dombey and Son</i>, even to the comic part of it. It shows an
+advance in art and unity; it does not show an advance in genius and
+creation. In some cases, in fact, I cannot help feeling that it shows a
+falling off. It may be a personal idiosyncrasy, but there is only one
+comic character really prominent in Dickens, upon whom Dickens has
+really lavished the wealth of his invention, and who does not amuse me
+at all, and that character is Captain Cuttle. But three great exceptions
+must be made to any such disparagement of <i>Dombey and Son</i>. They are all
+three of that royal order in Dickens&rsquo;s creation which can no more
+be described or criticised than strong wine. The first is Major
+Bagstock, the second is Cousin Feenix, the third is Toots. In Bagstock
+Dickens has blasted <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[123]</a></span>
+for ever that type which pretends to be sincere by the simple operation
+of being explosively obvious. He tells about a quarter of the truth, and
+then poses as truthful because a quarter of the truth is much simpler
+than the whole of it. He is the kind of man who goes about with posers
+for Bishops or for Socialists, with plain questions to which he wants a
+plain answer. His questions are plain only in the same sense that he
+himself is plain&mdash;in the sense of being uncommonly ugly. He is the
+man who always bursts with satisfaction because he can call a spade a
+spade, as if there were any kind of logical or philosophical use in
+merely saying the same word twice over. He is the man who wants things
+down in black and white, as if black and white were the only two
+colours; as if blue and green and red and gold were not facts of the
+universe. He is too selfish to tell the truth and too impatient even to
+hear it. He cannot endure the truth, because it is subtle. This man is
+almost always like Bagstock&mdash;a sycophant and a toad-eater. A man is
+not any the less a toad-eater because he eats his toads with a huge
+appetite and gobbles them up, as Bagstock did his breakfast, with the
+eyes starting out of his purple face. He flatters brutally. He cringes
+with a swagger. And men of the world like Dombey are always taken in by
+him, because men of the world are probably the simplest of all the
+children of Adam.</p>
+
+<p>Cousin Feenix again is an exquisite suggestion, with his rickety
+chivalry and rambling compliments. It was about the period of <i>Dombey
+and Son</i> that Dickens began to be taken up by good society. (One can use
+only vulgar terms for an essentially vulgar process.)<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[124]</a></span>
+And his sketches of the man of good family in the books of this period
+show that he had had glimpses of what that singular world is like. The
+aristocrats in his earliest books are simply dragons and griffins for
+his heroes to fight with&mdash;monsters like Sir Mulberry Hawk or Lord
+Verisopht. They are merely created upon the old principle, that your
+scoundrel must be polite and powerful&mdash;a very sound principle. The
+villain must be not only a villain, but a tyrant. The giant must be
+larger than Jack. But in the books of the Dombey period we have many
+shrewd glimpses of the queer realities of English aristocracy. Of these
+Cousin Feenix is one of the best. Cousin Feenix is a much better sketch
+of the essentially decent and chivalrous aristocrat than Sir Leicester
+Dedlock. Both of the men are, if you will, fools, as both are honourable
+gentlemen. But if one may attempt a classification among fools, Sir
+Leicester Dedlock is a stupid fool, while Cousin Feenix is a silly
+fool&mdash;which is much better. The difference is that the silly fool
+has a folly which is always on the borderland of wit, and even of
+wisdom; his wandering wits come often upon undiscovered truths. The
+stupid fool is as consistent and as homogeneous as wood; he is as
+invincible as the ancestral darkness. Cousin Feenix is a good sketch of
+the sort of well-bred old ass who is so fundamentally genuine that he is
+always saying very true things by accident. His whole tone also, though
+exaggerated like everything in Dickens, is very true to the bewildered
+good nature which marks English aristocratic life. The statement that
+Dickens could not describe a gentleman is, like most popular
+animadversions against<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[125]</a></span>
+Dickens, so very thin and one-sided a truth as to be for serious
+purposes a falsehood. When people say that Dickens could not describe a
+gentleman, what they mean is this, and so far what they mean is true.
+They mean that Dickens could not describe a gentleman as gentlemen feel
+a gentleman. They mean that he could not take that atmosphere easily,
+accept it as the normal atmosphere, or describe that world from the
+inside. This is true. In Dickens&rsquo;s time there was such a thing as
+the English people, and Dickens belonged to it. Because there is no such
+thing as an English people now, almost all literary men drift towards
+what is called Society; almost all literary men either are gentlemen or
+pretend to be. Hence, as I say, when we talk of describing a gentleman,
+we always mean describing a gentleman from the point of view of one who
+either belongs to, or is interested in perpetuating, that type. Dickens
+did not describe gentlemen in the way that gentlemen describe gentlemen.
+He described them in the way in which he described waiters, or railway
+guards, or men drawing with chalk on the pavement. He described them, in
+short (and this we may freely concede), from the outside, as he
+described any other oddity or special trade. But when it comes to saying
+that he did not describe them well, then that is quite another matter,
+and that I should emphatically deny. The things that are really odd
+about the English upper class he saw with startling promptitude and
+penetration, and if the English upper class does not see these odd
+things in itself, it is not because they are not there, but because we
+are all blind to our own oddities; it is for the same reason that tramps
+do not feel dirty, or <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[126]</a></span>
+that niggers do not feel black. I have often heard a dear old English
+oligarch say that Dickens could not describe a gentleman, while every
+note of his own voice and turn of his own hand recalled Sir Leicester
+Dedlock. I have often been told by some old buck that Dickens could not
+describe a gentleman, and been told so in the shaky voice and with all
+the vague allusiveness of Cousin Feenix.</p>
+
+<p>Cousin Feenix has really many of the main points of the class that
+governs England. Take, for an instance, his hazy notion that he is in a
+world where everybody knows everybody; whenever he mentions a man, it is
+a man &ldquo;with whom my friend Dombey is no doubt acquainted.&rdquo;
+That pierces to the very helpless soul of aristocracy. Take again the
+stupendous gravity with which he leads up to a joke. That is the very
+soul of the House of Commons and the Cabinet, of the high-class English
+politics, where a joke is always enjoyed solemnly. Take his insistence
+upon the technique of Parliament, his regrets for the time when the
+rules of debate were perhaps better observed than they are now. Take
+that wonderful mixture in him (which is the real human virtue of our
+aristocracy) of a fair amount of personal modesty with an innocent
+assumption of rank. Of a man who saw all these genteel foibles so
+clearly it is absurd merely to say without further explanation that he
+could not describe a gentleman. Let us confine ourselves to saying that
+he did not describe a gentleman as gentlemen like to be described.</p>
+
+<p>Lastly, there is the admirable study of Toots, who may be considered as
+being in some ways the masterpiece <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[127]</a></span>
+of Dickens. Nowhere else did Dickens express with such astonishing
+insight and truth his main contention, which is that to be good and
+idiotic is not a poor fate, but, on the contrary, an experience of
+primeval innocence, which wonders at all things. Dickens did not know,
+anymore than any great man ever knows, what was the particular thing
+that he had to preach. He did not know it; he only preached it. But the
+particular thing that he had to preach was this: That humility is the
+only possible basis of enjoyment; that if one has no other way of being
+humble except being poor, then it is better to be poor, and to enjoy;
+that if one has no other way of being humble except being imbecile, then
+it is better to be imbecile, and to enjoy. That is the deep unconscious
+truth in the character of Toots&mdash;that all his externals are flashy
+and false; all his internals unconscious, obscure, and true. He wears
+loud clothes, and he is silent inside them. His shirts and waistcoats
+are covered with bright spots of pink and purple, while his soul is
+always covered with the sacred shame. He always gets all the outside
+things of life wrong, and all the inside things right. He always admires
+the right Christian people, and gives them the wrong Christian names.
+Dimly connecting Captain Cuttle with the shop of Mr. Solomon Gills, he
+always addresses the astonished mariner as &ldquo;Captain Gills.&rdquo;
+He turns Mr. Walter Gay, by a most improving transformation, into
+&ldquo;Lieutenant Walters.&rdquo; But he always knows which people upon
+his own principles to admire. He forgets who they are, but he remembers
+what they are. With the clear eyes of humility he perceives the whole
+world as it is.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[128]</a></span>
+He respects the Game Chicken for being strong, as even the Game Chicken
+ought to be respected for being strong. He respects Florence for being
+good, as even Florence ought to be respected for being good. And he has
+no doubt about which he admires most; he prefers goodness to strength,
+as do all masculine men. It is through the eyes of such characters as
+Toots that Dickens really sees the whole of his tales. For even if one
+calls him a half-wit, it still makes a difference that he keeps the
+right half of his wits. When we think of the unclean and craven spirit
+in which Toots might be treated in a psychological novel of to-day; how
+he might walk with a mooncalf face, and a brain of bestial darkness, the
+soul rises in real homage to Dickens for showing how much simple
+gratitude and happiness can remain in the lopped roots of the most
+simplified intelligence. If scientists must treat a man as a dog, it
+need not be always as a mad dog. They might grant him, like Toots, a
+little of the dog&rsquo;s loyalty and the dog&rsquo;s reward.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 401px;"><a name="CD1849" id="CD1849"></a>
+<img src="images/dickens1849.jpg" width="401" height="600" alt="" title="" />
+<span class="caption">Charles Dickens, 1849<br />
+From a daguerreotype by Mayall.</span></div>
+
+<p class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[129]</a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="COPPERFIELD" id="COPPERFIELD"></a>DAVID COPPERFIELD</h2>
+
+<p>In this book Dickens is really trying to write a new kind of book, and
+the enterprise is almost as chivalrous as a cavalry charge. He is making
+a romantic attempt to be realistic. That is almost the definition of
+<i>David Copperfield</i>. In his last book, <i>Dombey and Son</i>, we see a
+certain maturity and even a certain mild exhaustion in his earlier
+farcical method. He never failed to have fine things in any of his
+books, and Toots is a very fine thing. Still, I could never find Captain
+Cuttle and Mr. Sol Gills very funny, and the whole Wooden Midshipman
+seems to me very wooden. In <i>David Copperfield</i> he suddenly unseals a
+new torrent of truth, the truth out of his own life. The impulse of the
+thing is autobiography; he is trying to tell all the absurd things that
+have happened to himself, and not the least absurd thing is himself. Yet
+though it is Dickens&rsquo;s ablest and clearest book, there is in it a
+falling away of a somewhat singular kind.</p>
+
+<p>Generally speaking there was astonishingly little of fatigue in
+Dickens&rsquo;s books. He sometimes wrote bad work; he sometimes wrote
+even unimportant work; but he wrote hardly a line which is not full of
+his own fierce vitality and fancy. If he is dull it is hardly ever
+because he cannot think of anything; it is because, by some silly
+excitement or momentary lapse of judgment, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[130]</a></span>
+he has thought of something that was not worth thinking of. If his joke
+is feeble, it is as an impromptu joke at an uproarious dinner-table may
+be feeble; it is no indication of any lack of vitality. The joke is
+feeble, but it is not a sign of feebleness. Broadly speaking, this is
+true of Dickens. If his writing is not amusing us, at least it is
+amusing him. Even when he is tiring he is not tired.</p>
+
+<p>But in the case of <i>David Copperfield</i> there is a real reason for noting
+an air of fatigue. For although this is the best of all Dickens&rsquo;s
+books, it constantly disappoints the critical and intelligent reader.
+The reason is that Dickens began it under his sudden emotional impulse
+of telling the whole truth about himself and gradually allowed the whole
+truth to be more and more diluted, until towards the end of the book we
+are back in the old pedantic and decorative art of Dickens, an art which
+we justly admired in its own place and on its own terms, but which we
+resent when we feel it gradually returning through a tale pitched
+originally in a more practical and piercing key. Here, I say, is the one
+real example of the fatigue of Dickens. He begins his story in a new
+style and then slips back into an old one. The earlier part is in his
+later manner. The later part is in his earlier manner.</p>
+
+<p>There are many marks of something weak and shadowy in the end of <i>David
+Copperfield</i>. Here, for instance, is one of them which is not without
+its bearing on many tendencies of modern England. Why did Dickens at the
+end of this book give way to that typically English optimism about
+emigration? He seems to think that he can cure the souls of a whole
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[131]</a></span>
+cartload, or rather boatload, of his characters by sending them all
+to the Colonies. Peggotty is a desolate and insulted parent whose house
+has been desecrated and his pride laid low; therefore let him go to
+Australia. Emily is a woman whose heart is broken and whose honour is
+blasted; but she will be quite happy if she goes to Australia. Mr.
+Micawber is a man whose soul cannot be made to understand the tyranny of
+time or the limits of human hope; but he will understand all these
+things if he goes to Australia. For it must be noted that Dickens does
+not use this emigration merely as a mode of exit. He does not send these
+characters away on a ship merely as a symbol suggesting that they pass
+wholly out of his hearer&rsquo;s life. He does definitely suggest that
+Australia is a sort of island Valley of Avalon, where the soul may heal
+it of its grievous wound. It is seriously suggested that Peggotty finds
+peace in Australia. It is really indicated that Emily regains her
+dignity in Australia. It is positively explained of Mr. Micawber not
+that he was happy in Australia (for he would be that anywhere), but that
+he was definitely prosperous and practically successful in Australia;
+and that he would certainly be nowhere. Colonising is not talked of
+merely as a coarse, economic expedient for going to a new market. It is
+really offered as something that will cure the hopeless tragedy of
+Peggotty; as something that will cure the still more hopeless comedy of
+Micawber.</p>
+
+<p>I will not dwell here on the subsequent adventures of this very
+sentimental and extremely English illusion. It would be an exaggeration
+to say that Dickens in this matter is something of a forerunner of much
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[132]</a></span>
+modern imperialism. His political views were such that he would have
+regarded modern imperialism with horror and contempt. Nevertheless there
+is here something of that hazy sentimentalism which makes some
+Imperialists prefer to talk of the fringe of the empire of which they
+know nothing, rather than of the heart of the empire which they know is
+diseased. It is said that in the twilight and decline of Rome, close to
+the dark ages, the people in Gaul believed that Britain was a land of
+ghosts (perhaps it was foggy), and that the dead were ferried across to
+it from the northern coast of France. If (as is not entirely impossible)
+our own century appears to future ages as a time of temporary decay and
+twilight, it may be said that there was attached to England a blessed
+island called Australia to which the souls of the socially dead were
+ferried across to remain in bliss for ever.</p>
+
+<p>This element which is represented by the colonial optimism at the end of
+<i>David Copperfield</i> is a moral element. The truth is that there is
+something a little mean about this sort of optimism. I do not like the
+notion of David Copperfield sitting down comfortably to his tea-table
+with Agnes, having got rid of all the inconvenient or distressing
+characters of the story by sending them to the other side of the world.
+The whole thing has too much about it of the selfishness of a family
+which sends a scapegrace to the Colonies to starve with its blessing.
+There is too much in the whole thing of that element which was satirised
+by an ironic interpretation of the epitaph &ldquo;Peace, perfect peace,
+with loved ones far away.&rdquo; We should have thought more of David
+Copperfield (and also of Charles<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[133]</a></span>
+Dickens) if he had endeavoured for the rest of his life, by
+conversation and comfort, to bind up the wounds of his old friends from
+the seaside. We should have thought more of David Copperfield (and also
+of Charles Dickens) if he had faced the possibility of going on till his
+dying day lending money to Mr. Wilkins Micawber. We should have thought
+more of David Copperfield (and also of Charles Dickens) if he had not
+looked upon the marriage with Dora merely as a flirtation, an episode
+which he survived and ought to survive. And yet the truth is that there
+is nowhere in fiction where we feel so keenly the primary human instinct
+and principle that a marriage is a marriage and irrevocable, that such
+things do leave a wound and also a bond as in this case of David&rsquo;s
+short connection with his silly little wife. When all is said and done,
+when Dickens has done his best and his worst, when he has
+sentimentalised for pages and tried to tie up everything in the pink
+tape of optimism, the fact, in the psychology of the reader, still
+remains. The reader does still feel that David&rsquo;s marriage to Dora
+was a real marriage; and that his marriage to Agnes was nothing, a
+middle-aged compromise, a taking of the second best, a sort of
+spiritualised and sublimated marriage of convenience. For all the
+readers of Dickens Dora is thoroughly avenged. The modern world (intent
+on anarchy in everything, even in Government) refuses to perceive the
+permanent element of tragic constancy which inheres in all passion, and
+which is the origin of marriage. Marriage rests upon the fact that you
+cannot have your cake and eat it; that you cannot lose your heart and
+have it. But, as I have said, there is perhaps no place
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[134]</a></span>
+in literature where we feel more vividly the sense of this monogamous
+instinct in man than in David Copperfield. A man is monogamous even if
+he is only monogamous for a month; love is eternal even if it is only
+eternal for a month. It always leaves behind it the sense of something
+broken and betrayed.</p>
+
+<p>But I have mentioned Dora in this connection only because she
+illustrates the same fact which Micawber illustrates; the fact that
+there is at the end of this book too much tendency to bless people and
+get rid of them. Micawber is a nuisance. Dickens the despot condemns him
+to exile. Dora is a nuisance. Dickens the despot condemns her to death.
+But it is the whole business of Dickens in the world to express the fact
+that such people are the spice and interest of life. It is the whole
+point of Dickens that there is nobody more worth living with than a
+strong, splendid, entertaining, immortal nuisance. Micawber interrupts
+practical life; but what is practical life that it should venture to
+interrupt Micawber? Dora confuses the housekeeping; but we are not angry
+with Dora because she confuses the housekeeping. We are angry with the
+housekeeping because it confuses Dora. I repeat, and it cannot be too
+much repeated that the whole lesson of Dickens is here. It is better to
+know Micawber than not to know the minor worries that arise out of
+knowing Micawber. It is better to have a bad debt and a good friend. In
+the same way it is better to marry a human and healthy personality which
+happens to attract you than to marry a mere housewife; for a mere
+housewife is a mere housekeeper. All this was what Dickens stood for;
+that the very people who are most <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[135]</a></span>
+irritating in small business circumstances are often the people who are
+most delightful in long stretches of experience of life. It is just the
+man who is maddening when he is ordering a cutlet or arranging an
+appointment who is probably the man in whose company it is worth while
+to journey steadily towards the grave. Distribute the dignified people
+and the capable people and the highly business-like people among all the
+situations which their ambition or their innate corruption may demand;
+but keep close to your heart, keep deep in your inner councils the
+absurd people. Let the clever people pretend to govern you, let the
+unimpeachable people pretend to advise you, but let the fools alone
+influence you; let the laughable people whose faults you see and
+understand be the only people who are really inside your life, who
+really come near you or accompany you on your lonely march towards the
+last impossibility. That is the whole meaning of Dickens; that we should
+keep the absurd people for our friends. And here at the end of <i>David
+Copperfield</i> he seems in some dim way to deny it. He seems to want to
+get rid of the preposterous people simply because they will always
+continue to be preposterous. I have a horrible feeling that David
+Copperfield will send even his aunt to Australia if she worries him too
+much about donkeys.</p>
+
+<p>I repeat, then, that this wrong ending of <i>David Copperfield</i> is one of
+the very few examples in Dickens of a real symptom of fatigue. Having
+created splendid beings for whom alone life might be worth living, he
+cannot endure the thought of his hero living with them. Having given his
+hero superb and terrible <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[136]</a></span>
+friends, he is afraid of the awful and tempestuous vista of their
+friendship. He slips back into a more superficial kind of story and ends
+it in a more superficial way. He is afraid of the things he has made; of
+that terrible figure Micawber; of that yet more terrible figure Dora. He
+cannot make up his mind to see his hero perpetually entangled in the
+splendid tortures and sacred surprises that come from living with really
+individual and unmanageable people. He cannot endure the idea that his
+fairy prince will not have henceforward a perfectly peaceful time. But
+the wise old fairy tales (which are the wisest things in the world, at
+any rate the wisest things of worldly origin), the wise old fairy tales
+never were so silly as to say that the prince and the princess lived
+peacefully ever afterwards. The fairy tales said that the prince and
+princess lived happily ever afterwards: and so they did. They lived
+happily, although it is very likely that from time to time they threw
+the furniture at each other. Most marriages, I think, are happy
+marriages; but there is no such thing as a contented marriage. The whole
+pleasure of marriage is that it is a perpetual crisis. David Copperfield
+and Dora quarrelled over the cold mutton; and if they had gone on
+quarrelling to the end of their lives, they would have gone on loving
+each other to the end of their lives; it would have been a human
+marriage. But David Copperfield and Agnes would agree about the cold
+mutton. And that cold mutton would be very cold.</p>
+
+<p>I have here endeavoured to suggest some of the main merits of Dickens
+within the framework of one of his faults. I have said that <i>David
+Copperfield</i> represents a rather sad transition from his strongest
+method to his <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[137]</a></span>
+weakest. Nobody would ever complain of Charles Dickens going on writing
+his own kind of novels, his old kind of novels. If there be anywhere a
+man who loves good books, that man wishes that there were four <i>Oliver
+Twists</i> and at least forty-four <i>Pickwicks</i>. If there be any one who
+loves laughter and creation, he would be glad to read a hundred of
+<i>Nicholas Nickleby</i> and two hundred of <i>The Old Curiosity Shop</i>. But
+while any one would have welcomed one of Dickens&rsquo;s own ordered and
+conventional novels, it was not in this spirit that they welcomed <i>David
+Copperfield</i>.</p>
+
+<p><i>David Copperfield</i> begins as if it were going to be a new kind of
+Dickens novel; then it gradually turns into an old kind of Dickens
+novel. It is here that many readers of this splendid book have been
+subtly and secretly irritated. Nicholas Nickleby is all very well; we
+accept him as something which is required to tie the whole affair
+together. Nicholas is a sort of string or clothes-line on which are hung
+the limp figure of Smike, the jumping-jack of Mr. Squeers and the twin
+dolls named Cheeryble. If we do not accept Nicholas Nickleby as the hero
+of the story, at least we accept him as the title of the story. But in
+<i>David Copperfield</i> Dickens begins something which looks for the moment
+fresh and startling. In the earlier chapters (the amazing earlier
+chapters of this book) he does seem to be going to tell the living truth
+about a living boy and man. It is melancholy to see that sudden fire
+fading. It is sad to see David Copperfield gradually turning into
+Nicholas Nickleby. Nicholas Nickleby does not exist at all; he is a
+quite colourless primary condition of the story. We look through
+Nicholas Nickleby at the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[138]</a></span>
+story just as we look through a plain pane of glass at the street. But
+David Copperfield does begin by existing; it is only gradually that he
+gives up that exhausting habit.</p>
+
+<p>Any fair critical account of Dickens must always make him out much
+smaller than he is. For any fair criticism of Dickens must take account
+of his evident errors, as I have taken account of one of the most
+evident of them during the last two or three pages. It would not even be
+loyal to conceal them. But no honest criticism, no criticism, though it
+spoke with the tongues of men and angels, could ever really talk about
+Dickens. In all this that I have said I have not been talking about
+Dickens at all. I say it with equanimity; I say it even with arrogance.
+I have been talking about the gaps of Dickens. I have been talking about
+the omissions of Dickens. I have been talking about the slumber of
+Dickens and the forgetfulness and unconsciousness of Dickens. In one
+word, I have been talking not about Dickens, but about the absence of
+Dickens. But when we come to him and his work itself, what is there to
+be said? What is there to be said about earthquake and the dawn? He has
+created, especially in this book of <i>David Copperfield</i>, he has created,
+creatures who cling to us and tyrannise over us, creatures whom we would
+not forget if we could, creatures whom we could not forget if we would,
+creatures who are more actual than the man who made them.</p>
+
+<p>This is the excuse for all that indeterminate and rambling and sometimes
+sentimental criticism of which Dickens, more than any one else, is the
+victim, of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[139]</a></span>
+which I fear that I for one have made him the victim in this place.
+When I was a boy I could not understand why the Dickensians worried so
+wearily about Dickens, about where he went to school and where he ate
+his dinners, about how he wore his trousers and when he cut his hair. I
+used to wonder why they did not write something that I could read about
+a man like Micawber. But I have come to the conclusion that this almost
+hysterical worship of the man, combined with a comparatively feeble
+criticism on his works, is just and natural. Dickens was a man like
+ourselves; we can see where he went wrong, and study him without being
+stunned or getting the sunstroke. But Micawber is not a man; Micawber is
+the superman. We can only walk round and round him wondering what we
+shall say. All the critics of Dickens, when all is said and done, have
+only walked round and round Micawber wondering what they should say. I
+am myself at this moment walking round and round Micawber wondering what
+I shall say. And I have not found out yet.</p>
+
+<hr /><p class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[140]</a></p>
+<h2><a name="CHRISTMAS_STORIES" id="CHRISTMAS_STORIES"></a>CHRISTMAS STORIES</h2>
+
+<p>The power of Dickens is shown even in the scraps of Dickens, just as the
+virtue of a saint is said to be shown in fragments of his property or
+rags from his robe. It is with such fragments that we are chiefly
+concerned in the <i>Christmas Stories</i>. Many of them are fragments in the
+literal sense; Dickens began them and then allowed some one else to
+carry them on; they are almost rejected notes. In all the other cases we
+have been considering the books that he wrote; here we have rather to
+consider the books that he might have written. And here we find the
+final evidence and the unconscious stamp of greatness, as we might find
+it in some broken bust or some rejected moulding in the studio of
+Michael Angelo.</p>
+
+<p>These sketches or parts of sketches all belong to that period in his
+later life when he had undertaken the duties of an editor, the very
+heavy duties of a very popular editor. He was not by any means naturally
+fitted for that position. He was the best man in the world for founding
+papers; but many people wished that he could have been buried under the
+foundations, like the first builder in some pagan and prehistoric pile.
+He called the <i>Daily News</i> into existence, but when once it existed, it
+objected to him strongly. It is not easy, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[141]</a></span>
+and perhaps it is not important, to state truly the cause of this
+incapacity. It was not in the least what is called the ordinary fault or
+weakness of the artist. It was not that he was careless; rather it was
+that he was too conscientious. It was not that he had the
+irresponsibility of genius; rather it was that he had the irritating
+responsibility of genius; he wanted everybody to see things as he saw
+them. But in spite of all this he certainly ran two great popular
+periodicals&mdash;<i>Household Words</i> and <i>All the Year Round</i>&mdash;with
+enormous popular success. And he certainly so far succeeded in throwing
+himself into the communism of journalism, into the nameless brotherhood
+of a big paper, that many earnest Dickensians are still engaged in
+picking out pieces of Dickens from the anonymous pages of <i>Household
+Words</i> and <i>All the Year Round</i>, and those parts which have been already
+beyond question picked out and proved are often fragmentary. The genuine
+writing of Dickens breaks off at a certain point, and the writing of
+some one else begins. But when the writing of Dickens breaks off, I
+fancy that we know it.</p>
+
+<p>The singular thing is that some of the best work that Dickens ever did,
+better than the work in his best novels, can be found in these slight
+and composite scraps of journalism. For instance, the solemn and
+self-satisfied account of the duty and dignity of a waiter given in the
+opening chapter of <i>Somebody&rsquo;s Luggage</i> is quite as full and fine
+as anything done anywhere by its author in the same vein of sumptuous
+satire. It is as good as the account which Mr. Bumble gives of out-door
+relief, which, &ldquo;properly understood, is the parochial safeguard.
+The great thing is to give <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[142]</a></span>
+the paupers what they don&rsquo;t want, and then they never come
+again.&rdquo; It is as good as Mr. Podsnap&rsquo;s description of the
+British Constitution, which was bestowed on him by Providence. None of
+these celebrated passages is more obviously Dickens at his best than
+this, the admirable description of &ldquo;the true principles of
+waitering,&rdquo; or the account of how the waiter&rsquo;s father came
+back to his mother in broad daylight, &ldquo;in itself an act of madness
+on the part of a waiter,&rdquo; and how he expired repeating continually
+&ldquo;two and six is three and four is nine.&rdquo; That waiter&rsquo;s
+explanatory soliloquy might easily have opened an excellent novel, as
+<i>Martin Chuzzlewit</i> is opened by the clever nonsense about the genealogy
+of the Chuzzlewits, or as <i>Bleak House</i> is opened by a satiric account
+of the damp, dim life of a law court. Yet Dickens practically abandoned
+the scheme of <i>Somebody&rsquo;s Luggage</i>; he only wrote two sketches out
+of those obviously intended. He may almost be said to have only written
+a brilliant introduction to another man&rsquo;s book.</p>
+
+<p>Yet it is exactly in such broken outbreaks that his greatness appears.
+If a man has flung away bad ideas he has shown his sense, but if he has
+flung away good ideas he has shown his genius. He has proved that he
+actually has that over-pressure of pure creativeness which we see in
+nature itself, &ldquo;that of a hundred seeds, she often brings but one
+to bear.&rdquo; Dickens had to be Malthusian about his spiritual
+children. Critics have called Keats and others who died young &ldquo;the
+great Might-have-beens of literary history.&rdquo; Dickens certainly was
+not merely a great Might-have-been. Dickens, to say the least of him,
+was a great Was.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[143]</a></span>
+Yet this fails fully to express the richness of his talent; for the
+truth is that he was a great Was and also a great Might-have-been. He
+said what he had to say, and yet not all he had to say. Wild pictures,
+possible stories, tantalising and attractive trains of thought,
+perspectives of adventure, crowded so continually upon his mind that at
+the end there was a vast mass of them left over, ideas that he literally
+had not the opportunity to develop, tales that he literally had not the
+time to tell. This is shown clearly in his private notes and letters,
+which are full of schemes singularly striking and suggestive, schemes
+which he never carried out. It is indicated even more clearly by these
+<i>Christmas Stories</i>, collected out of the chaotic opulence of <i>Household
+Words</i> and <i>All the Year Round</i>. He wrote short stories actually because
+he had not time to write long stories. He often put into the short story
+a deep and branching idea which would have done very well for a long
+story; many of his long stories, so to speak, broke off short. This is
+where he differs from most who are called the Might-have-beens of
+literature. Marlowe and Chatterton failed because of their weakness.
+Dickens failed because of his force.</p>
+
+<p>Examine for example this case of the waiter in <i>Somebody&rsquo;s
+Luggage</i>. Dickens obviously knew enough about that waiter to have made
+him a running spring of joy throughout a whole novel; as the beadle is
+in <i>Oliver Twist</i>, or the undertaker in <i>Martin Chuzzlewit</i>. Every touch
+of him tingles with truth, from the vague gallantry with which he asks,
+&ldquo;Would&rsquo;st thou know, fair reader (if of the adorable female
+sex)&rdquo; to the official severity with which he takes the chambermaid
+down,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[144]</a></span>
+&ldquo;as many pegs as is desirable for the future comfort of all
+parties.&rdquo; If Dickens had developed this character at full length
+in a book he would have preserved for ever in literature a type of great
+humour and great value, and a type which may only too soon be
+disappearing from English history. He would have eternalised the English
+waiter. He still exists in some sound old taverns and decent country
+inns, but there is no one left really capable of singing his praises. I
+know that Mr. Bernard Shaw has done something of the sort in the
+delightfully whimsical account of William in <i>You Never Can Tell</i>. But
+nothing will persuade me that Mr. Bernard Shaw can really understand the
+English waiter. He can never have ordered wine from him for instance.
+And though the English waiter is by the nature of things solemn about
+everything, he can never reach the true height and ecstasy of his
+solemnity except about wine. What the real English waiter would do or
+say if Mr. Shaw asked him for a vegetarian meal I cannot dare to
+predict. I rather think that for the first time in his life he would
+laugh&mdash;a horrible sight.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens&rsquo;s waiter is described by one who is not merely witty,
+truthful, and observant, like Mr. Bernard Shaw, but one who really knew
+the atmosphere of inns, one who knew and even liked the smell of beef,
+and beer, and brandy. Hence there is a richness in Dickens&rsquo;s
+portrait which does not exist in Mr. Shaw&rsquo;s. Mr. Shaw&rsquo;s
+waiter is merely a man of tact; Dickens&rsquo;s is a man of principle.
+Mr. Shaw&rsquo;s waiter is an opportunist, just as Mr. Shaw is an
+opportunist in politics. Dickens&rsquo;s waiter is ready to stand up
+seriously for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[145]</a></span>
+&ldquo;the true principles of waitering,&rdquo; just as Dickens was
+ready to stand up for the true principles of Liberalism. Mr.
+Shaw&rsquo;s waiter is agnostic; his motto is &ldquo;You never can
+tell.&rdquo; Dickens&rsquo;s waiter is a dogmatist; his motto is
+&ldquo;You can tell; I will tell you.&rdquo; And the true old-fashioned
+English waiter had really this grave and even moral attitude; he was the
+servant of the customers as a priest is the servant of the faithful, but
+scarcely in any less dignified sense. Surely it is not mere patriotic
+partiality that makes one lament the disappearance of this careful and
+honourable figure crowded out by meaner men at meaner wages, by the
+German waiter who has learnt five languages in the course of running
+away from his own, or the Italian waiter who regards those he serves
+with a darkling contempt which must certainly be that either of a
+dynamiter or an exiled prince. The human and hospitable English waiter
+is vanishing. And Dickens might perhaps have saved him, as he saved
+Christmas.</p>
+
+<p>I have taken this case of the waiter in Dickens and his equally
+important counterpart in England as an example of the sincere and genial
+sketches scattered about these short stories. But there are many others,
+and one at least demands special mention; I mean Mrs. Lirriper, the
+London landlady. Not only did Dickens never do anything better in a
+literary sense, but he never performed more perfectly his main moral
+function, that of insisting through laughter and flippancy upon the
+virtue of Christian charity. There has been much broad farce against the
+lodging-house keeper: he alone could have written broad farce in her
+favour. It is fashionable to represent the landlady as a tyrant;
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[146]</a></span>
+it is too much forgotten that if she is one of the oppressors she is at
+least as much one of the oppressed. If she is bad-tempered it is often
+for the same reasons that make all women bad-tempered (I suppose the
+exasperating qualities of the other sex); if she is grasping it is often
+because when a husband makes generosity a vice it is often necessary
+that a wife should make avarice a virtue. All this Dickens suggested
+very soundly and in a few strokes in the more remote character of Miss
+Wozenham. But in Mrs. Lirriper he went further and did not fare worse.
+In Mrs. Lirriper he suggested quite truly how huge a mass of real good
+humour, of grand unconscious patience, of unfailing courtesy and
+constant and difficult benevolence is concealed behind many a
+lodging-house door and compact in the red-faced person of many a
+preposterous landlady. Any one could easily excuse the ill-humour of the
+poor. But great masses of the poor have not even any ill-humour to be
+excused. Their cheeriness is startling enough to be the foundation of a
+miracle play; and certainly is startling enough to be the foundation of
+a romance. Yet I do not know of any romance in which it is expressed
+except this one.</p>
+
+<p>Of the landlady as of the waiter it may be said that Dickens left in a
+slight sketch what he might have developed through a long and strong
+novel. For Dickens had hold of one great truth, the neglect of which
+has, as it were, truncated and made meagre the work of many brilliant
+modern novelists. Modern novelists try to make long novels out of subtle
+characters. But a subtle character soon comes to an end, because it
+works in and in to its own centre and dies there. But a
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[147]</a></span>
+simple character goes on for ever in a fresh interest and energy,
+because it works out and out into the infinite universe. Mr. George
+Moore in France is not by any means so interesting as Mrs. Lirriper in
+France; for she is trying to find France and he is only trying to find
+George Moore. Mrs. Lirriper is the female equivalent of Mr. Pickwick.
+Unlike Mrs. Bardell (another and lesser landlady) she was fully worthy
+to be Mrs. Pickwick. For in both cases the essential truth is the same;
+that original innocence which alone deserves adventures and because it
+alone can appreciate them. We have had Mr. Pickwick in England and we
+can imagine him in France. We have had Mrs. Lirriper in France and we
+can imagine her in Mesopotamia or in heaven. The subtle character in the
+modern novels we cannot really imagine anywhere except in the suburbs or
+in Limbo.</p>
+
+<hr /><p class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[148]</a></p>
+<h2><a name="BLEAK" id="BLEAK"></a>BLEAK HOUSE</h2>
+
+<p><i>Bleak House</i> is not certainly Dickens&rsquo;s best book; but perhaps it
+is his best novel. Such a distinction is not a mere verbal trick; it has
+to be remembered rather constantly in connection with his work. This
+particular story represents the highest point of his intellectual
+maturity. Maturity does not necessarily mean perfection. It is idle to
+say that a mature potato is perfect; some people like new potatoes. A
+mature potato is not perfect, but it is a mature potato; the mind of an
+intelligent epicure may find it less adapted to his particular purpose;
+but the mind of an intelligent potato would at once admit it as being,
+beyond all doubt, a genuine, fully developed specimen of his own
+particular species. The same is in some degree true even of literature.
+We can say more or less when a human being has come to his full mental
+growth, even if we go so far as to wish that he had never come to it.
+Children are very much nicer than grown-up people; but there is such a
+thing as growing up. When Dickens wrote <i>Bleak House</i> he had grown up.</p>
+
+<p>Like Napoleon, he had made his army on the march. He had walked in front
+of his mob of aggressive characters as Napoleon did in front of the
+half-baked battalions of the Revolution. And, like Napoleon, he won
+battle after battle before he knew his own plan <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[149]</a></span>
+of campaign; like Napoleon, he put the enemies&rsquo; forces to rout
+before he had put his own force into order. Like Napoleon, he had a
+victorious army almost before he had an army. After his decisive
+victories Napoleon began to put his house in order; after his decisive
+victories Dickens also began to put his house in order. The house, when
+he had put it in order, was <i>Bleak House</i>.</p>
+
+<p>There was one thing common to nearly all the other Dickens tales, with
+the possible exception of <i>Dombey and Son</i>. They were all rambling
+tales; and they all had a perfect right to be. They were all rambling
+tales for the very simple reason that they were all about rambling
+people. They were novels of adventure; they were even diaries of travel.
+Since the hero strayed from place to place, it did not seem unreasonable
+that the story should stray from subject to subject. This is true of the
+bulk of the novels up to and including <i>David Copperfield</i>, up to the
+very brink or threshold of <i>Bleak House</i>. Mr. Pickwick wanders about on
+the white English roads, always looking for antiquities and always
+finding novelties. Poor Oliver Twist wanders along the same white roads
+to seek his fortune and to find his misfortune. Nicholas Nickleby goes
+walking across England because he is young and hopeful; Little
+Nell&rsquo;s grandfather does the same thing because he is old and
+silly. There is not much in common between Samuel Pickwick and Oliver
+Twist; there is not much in common between Oliver Twist and Nicholas
+Nickleby; there is not much in common (let us hope) between Little
+Nell&rsquo;s grandfather and any other human being. But they all have
+this in common, that they may actually all have trodden in each
+other&rsquo;s footprints.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[150]</a></span>
+They were all wanderers on the face of the same fair English land.
+<i>Martin Chuzzlewit</i> was only made popular by the travels of the hero in
+America. When we come to <i>Dombey and Son</i> we find, as I have said, an
+exception; but even here it is odd to note the fact that it was an
+exception almost by accident. In Dickens&rsquo;s original scheme of the
+story, much greater prominence was to have been given to the travels and
+trials of Walter Gay; in fact, the young man was to have had a
+deterioration of character which could only have been adequately
+detailed in him in his character of a vagabond and a wastrel. The most
+important point, however, is that when we come to <i>David Copperfield</i>,
+in some sense the summit of his serious literature, we find the thing
+still there. The hero still wanders from place to place, his genius is
+still gipsy. The adventures in the book are less violent and less
+improbable than those which wait for Pickwick and Nicholas Nickleby; but
+they are still adventures and not merely events; they are still things
+met on a road. The facts of the story fall away from David as such facts
+do fall away from a traveller walking fast. We are more likely perhaps,
+to pass by Mr. Creakle&rsquo;s school than to pass by Mrs.
+Jarley&rsquo;s wax-works. The only point is that we should pass by both
+of them. Up to this point in Dickens&rsquo;s development, his novel,
+however true, is still picaresque; his hero never really rests anywhere
+in the story. No one seems really to know where Mr. Pickwick lived. Here
+he has no abiding city.</p>
+
+<p>When we come to <i>Bleak House</i>, we come to a change in artistic
+structure. The thing is no longer a string of incidents; it is a cycle
+of incidents. It returns upon <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[151]</a></span>
+itself; it has recurrent melody and poetic justice; it has artistic
+constancy and artistic revenge. It preserves the unities; even to some
+extent it preserves the unities of time and place. The story circles
+round two or three symbolic places; it does not go straggling
+irregularly all over England like one of Mr. Pickwick&rsquo;s coaches.
+People go from one place to another place; but not from one place to
+another place on the road to everywhere else. Mr. Jarndyce goes from
+Bleak House to visit Mr. Boythorn; but he comes back to Bleak House.
+Miss Clare and Miss Summerson go from Bleak House to visit Mr. and Mrs.
+Bayham Badger; but they come back to Bleak House. The whole story strays
+from Bleak House and plunges into the foul fogs of Chancery and the
+autumn mists of Chesney Wold; but the whole story comes back to Bleak
+House. The domestic title is appropriate; it is a permanent address.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens&rsquo;s openings are almost always good; but the opening of
+<i>Bleak House</i> is good in a quite new and striking sense. Nothing could
+be better, for instance, than the first foolish chapter about the
+genealogy of the Chuzzlewits; but it has nothing to do with the
+Chuzzlewits. Nothing could be better than the first chapter of <i>David
+Copperfield</i>; the breezy entrance and banging exit of Miss Betsy
+Trotwood. But if there is ultimately any crisis or serious
+subject-matter of <i>David Copperfield</i>, it is the marred marriage with
+Dora, the final return to Agnes; and all this is in no way involved in
+the highly-amusing fact that his aunt expected him to be a girl. We may
+repeat that the matter is picaresque. The story begins in one place and
+ends in another place, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[152]</a></span>
+and there is no real connection between the beginning and the end
+except a biographical connection.</p>
+
+<p>A picaresque novel is only a very eventful biography; but the opening of
+<i>Bleak House</i> is quite another business altogether. It is admirable in
+quite another way. The description of the fog in the first chapter of
+<i>Bleak House</i> is good in itself; but it is not merely good in itself,
+like the description of the wind in the opening of <i>Martin Chuzzlewit</i>;
+it is also good in the sense that Maeterlinck is good; it is what the
+modern people call an atmosphere. Dickens begins in the Chancery fog
+because he means to end in the Chancery fog. He did not begin in the
+Chuzzlewit wind because he meant to end in it; he began in it because it
+was a good beginning. This is perhaps the best short way of stating the
+peculiarity of the position of <i>Bleak House</i>. In this <i>Bleak House</i>
+beginning we have the feeling that it is not only a beginning; we have
+the feeling that the author sees the conclusion and the whole. The
+beginning is alpha and omega: the beginning and the end. He means that
+all the characters and all the events shall be read through the smoky
+colours of that sinister and unnatural vapour.</p>
+
+<p>The same is true throughout the whole tale; the whole tale is symbolic
+and crowded with symbols. Miss Flite is a funny character, like Miss La
+Creevy, but Miss La Creevy means only Miss La Creevy. Miss Flite means
+Chancery. The rag-and-bone man, Krook, is a powerful grotesque; so is
+Quilp; but in the story Quilp only means Quilp; Krook means Chancery.
+Rick Carstone is a kind and tragic figure, like Sidney Carton; but
+Sidney Carton only means the tragedy of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[153]</a></span>
+human nature; Rick Carstone means the tragedy of Chancery. Little Jo
+dies pathetically like Little Paul; but for the death of Little Paul we
+can only blame Dickens; for the death of Little Jo we blame Chancery.
+Thus the artistic unity of the book, compared to all the author&rsquo;s
+earlier novels, is satisfying, almost suffocating. There is the <i>motif</i>,
+and again the <i>motif</i>. Almost everything is calculated to assert and
+re-assert the savage morality of Dickens&rsquo;s protest against a
+particular social evil. The whole theme is that which another Englishman
+as jovial as Dickens defined shortly and finally as the law&rsquo;s
+delay. The fog of the first chapter never lifts.</p>
+
+<p>In this twilight he traced wonderful shapes. Those people who fancy that
+Dickens was a mere clown; that he could not describe anything delicate
+or deadly in the human character,&mdash;those who fancy this are mostly
+people whose position is explicable in many easy ways. The vast majority
+of the fastidious critics have, in the quite strict and solid sense of
+the words, never read Dickens at all; hence their opposition is due to
+and inspired by a hearty innocence which will certainly make them
+enthusiastic Dickensians if they ever, by some accident, happen to read
+him. In other cases it is due to a certain habit of reading books under
+the eye of a conventional critic, admiring what we expect to admire,
+regretting what we are told to regret, waiting for Mr. Bumble to admire
+him, waiting for Little Nell to despise her. Yet again, of course, it is
+sometimes due to that basest of all artistic indulgences (certainly far
+baser than the pleasure of absinthe or the pleasure of opium), the
+pleasure of appreciating <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[154]</a></span>
+works of art which ordinary men cannot appreciate. Surely the vilest
+point of human vanity is exactly that; to ask to be admired for admiring
+what your admirers do not admire. But whatever be the reason, whether
+rude or subtle, which has prevented any particular man from personally
+admiring Dickens, there is in connection with a book like <i>Bleak House</i>
+something that may be called a solid and impressive challenge. Let
+anyone who thinks that Dickens could not describe the semi-tones and the
+abrupt instincts of real human nature simply take the trouble to read
+the stretch of chapters which detail the way in which Carstone&rsquo;s
+mind grew gradually morbid about his chances in Chancery. Let him note
+the manner in which the mere masculinity of Carstone is caught; how as
+he grows more mad he grows more logical, nay, more rational. Good women
+who love him come to him, and point out the fact that Jarndyce is a good
+man, a fact to them solid like an object of the senses. In answer he
+asks them to understand his position. He does not say this; he does not
+say that. He only urges that Jarndyce may have become cynical in the
+affair in the same sense that he himself may have become cynical in the
+affair. He is always a man; that is to say, he is always unanswerable,
+always wrong. The passionate certainty of the woman beats itself like
+battering waves against the thin smooth wall of his insane consistency.
+I repeat: let any one who thinks that Dickens was a gross and indelicate
+artist read that part of the book. If Dickens had been the clumsy
+journalist that such people represent, he never could have written such
+an episode at all. A clumsy journalist would have made
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[155]</a></span>
+Rick Carstone in his mad career cast off Esther and Ada and the others.
+The great artist knew better. He knew that even if all the good in a man
+is dying, the last sense that dies is the sense that knows a good woman
+from a bad; it is like the scent of a noble hound.</p>
+
+<p>The clumsy journalist would have made Rick Carstone turn on John
+Jarndyce with an explosion of hatred, as of one who had made an
+exposure&mdash;who had found out what low people call &ldquo;a false
+friend&rdquo; in what they call &ldquo;his true colours.&rdquo; The
+great artist knew better; he knew that a good man going wrong tries to
+salve his soul to the last with the sense of generosity and intellectual
+justice. He will try to love his enemy if only out of mere love of
+himself. As the wolf dies fighting, the good man gone wrong dies
+arguing. This is what constitutes the true and real tragedy of Richard
+Carstone. It is strictly the one and only great tragedy that Dickens
+wrote. It is like the tragedy of Hamlet. The others are not tragedies
+because they deal almost with dead men. The tragedy of old Dorrit is
+merely the sad spectacle of a dotard dragged about Europe in his last
+childhood. The tragedy of Steerforth is only that of one who dies
+suddenly; the tragedy of old Dombey only that of one who was dead all
+the time. But Rick is a real tragedy, for he is still alive when the
+quicksand sucks him down.</p>
+
+<p>It is impossible to avoid putting in the first place this pall of smoke
+which Dickens has deliberately spread over the story. It is quite true
+that the country underneath is clear enough to contain any number of
+unconscious comedians or of merry monsters such as <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[156]</a></span>
+he was in the custom of introducing into the carnival of his tales. But
+he meant us to take the smoky atmosphere seriously. Charles Dickens, who
+was, like all men who are really funny about funny things, horribly
+serious about serious things, certainly meant us to read this story in
+terms of his protest and his insurrection against the emptiness and
+arrogance of law, against the folly and the pride of judges. Everything
+else that there is in this story entered into it through the unconscious
+or accidental energy of his genius, which broke in at every gap. But it
+was the tragedy of Richard Carstone that he meant, not the comedy of
+Harold Skimpole. He could not help being amusing; but he meant to be
+depressing.</p>
+
+<p>Another case might be taken as testing the greater seriousness of this
+tale. The passages about Mrs. Jellyby and her philanthropic schemes show
+Dickens at his best in his old and more familiar satiric manner. But in
+the midst of the Jellyby pandemonium, which is in itself described with
+the same <i>abandon</i> and irrelevance as the boarding-house of Mrs. Todgers
+or the travelling theatre of Mr. Crummles, the elder Dickens introduced
+another piece of pure truth and even tenderness. I mean the account of
+Caddy Jellyby. If Carstone is a truly masculine study of how a man goes
+wrong, Caddy is a perfectly feminine study of how a girl goes right.
+Nowhere else perhaps in fiction, and certainly nowhere else in Dickens,
+is the mere female paradox so well epitomised, the unjust use of words
+covering so much capacity for a justice of ultimate estimate; the
+seeming irresponsibility in language concealing such a fixed and
+pitiless sense of responsibility <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[157]</a></span>
+about things; the air of being always at daggers-drawn with her own
+kindred, yet the confession of incurable kinship implied in pride and
+shame; and, above all, that thirst for order and beauty as for something
+physical; that strange female power of hating ugliness and waste as good
+men can only hate sin and bad men virtue. Every touch in her is true,
+from her first bewildering outbursts of hating people because she likes
+them, down to the sudden quietude and good sense which announces that
+she has slipped into her natural place as a woman. Miss Clare is a
+figure-head, Miss Summerson in some ways a failure; but Miss Caddy
+Jellyby is by far the greatest, the most human, and the most really
+dignified of all the heroines of Dickens.</p>
+
+<p>With one or two exceptions, all the effects in this story are of this
+somewhat quieter kind, though none of them are so subtly successful as
+Rick Carstone and Caddy. Harold Skimpole begins as a sketch drawn with a
+pencil almost as airy and fanciful as his own. The humour of the earlier
+scenes is delightful&mdash;the scenes in which Skimpole looks on at other
+people paying his debts with the air of a kindly outsider, and suggests
+in formless legal phraseology that they might &ldquo;sign
+something&rdquo; or &ldquo;make over something,&rdquo; or the scene in
+which he tries to explain the advantages of accepting everything to the
+apoplectic Mr. Boythorn. But it was one of the defects of Dickens as a
+novelist that his characters always became coarser and clumsier as they
+passed through the practical events of a story, and this would
+necessarily be so with Skimpole, whose position was conceivable even to
+himself only on the assumption that he was a mere spectator of life.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[158]</a></span>
+Poor Skimpole only asked to be kept out of the business of this world,
+and Dickens ought to have kept him out of the business of <i>Bleak House</i>.
+By the end of the tale he has brought Skimpole to doing acts of mere low
+villainy. This altogether spoils the ironical daintiness of the original
+notion. Skimpole was meant to end with a note of interrogation. As it
+is, he ends with a big, black, unmistakable blot. Speaking purely
+artistically, we may say that this is as great a collapse or
+vulgarisation as if Richard Carstone had turned into a common blackguard
+and wife-beater, or Caddy Jellyby into a comic and illiterate landlady.
+Upon the whole it may, I think, be said that the character of Skimpole
+is rather a piece of brilliant moralising than of pure observation or
+creation. Dickens had a singularly just mind. He was wild in his
+caricatures, but very sane in his impressions. Many of his books were
+devoted, and this book is partly devoted, to a denunciation of
+aristocracy&mdash;of the idle class that lives easily upon the toil of
+nations. But he was fairer than many modern revolutionists, and he
+insisted on satirising also those who prey on society not in the name of
+rank or law, but in the name of intellect and beauty. Sir Leicester
+Dedlock and Mr. Harold Skimpole are alike in accepting with a royal
+unconsciousness the anomaly and evil of their position. But the idleness
+and insolence of the aristocrat is human and humble compared to the
+idleness and insolence of the artist.</p>
+
+<p>With the exception of a few fine freaks, such as Turveydrop and
+Chadband, all the figures in this book are touched more delicately, even
+more faintly, than is common with Dickens. But if the figures are
+touched <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[159]</a></span>
+more faintly, it is partly because they are figures in a fog&mdash;the
+fog of Chancery. Dickens meant that twilight to be oppressive; for it
+was the symbol of oppression. Deliberately he did not dispel the
+darkness at the end of this book, as he does dispel it at the end of
+most of his books. Pickwick gets out of the Fleet Prison; Carstone never
+gets out of Chancery but by death. This tyranny, Dickens said, shall not
+be lifted by the light subterfuge of a fiction. This tyranny shall never
+be lifted till all Englishmen lift it together.</p>
+
+<hr /><p class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[160]</a></p>
+<h2><a name="HISTORY" id="HISTORY"></a>CHILD&rsquo;S HISTORY OF ENGLAND</h2>
+
+<p>There are works of great authors manifestly inferior to their typical
+work which are yet necessary to their fame and their figure in the
+world. It is not difficult to recall examples of them. No one, for
+instance, would talk of Scott&rsquo;s <i>Tales of a Grandfather</i> as
+indicating the power that produced <i>Kenilworth</i> and <i>Guy Mannering</i>.
+Nevertheless, without this chance minor compilation we should not really
+have the key of Scott. Without this one insignificant book we should not
+see his significance. For the truth was that Scott loved history more
+than romance, because he was so constituted as to find it more romantic
+than romance. He preferred the deeds of Wallace and Douglas to those of
+Marmion and Ivanhoe. Therefore his garrulous gossip of old times, his
+rambles in dead centuries, give us the real material and impulse of all
+his work; they represent the quarry in which he dug and the food on
+which he fed. Almost alone among novelists Scott actually preferred
+those parts of his historical novels which he had not invented himself.
+He exults when he can boast in an eager note that he has stolen some
+saying from history. Thus <i>The Tales of a Grandfather</i>, though small, is
+in some sense the frame of all the Waverley novels. We realise that all
+Scott&rsquo;s novels are tales of a grandfather.</p>
+
+<p>What has been said here about Scott might be said
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[161]</a></span>
+in a less degree about Thackeray&rsquo;s <i>Four Georges</i>. Though
+standing higher among his works than <i>The Tales of a Grandfather</i> among
+Scott&rsquo;s they are not his works of genius; yet they seem in some
+way to surround, supplement, and explain such works. Without the <i>Four
+Georges</i> we should know less of the link that bound Thackeray to the
+beginning and to the end of the eighteenth century; thence we should
+have known less of Colonel Esmond and also less of Lord Steyne. To these
+two examples I have given of the slight historical experiments of two
+novelists a third has to be added. The third great master of English
+fiction whose glory fills the nineteenth century also produced a small
+experiment in the popularisation of history. It is separated from the
+other two partly by a great difference of merit but partly also by an
+utter difference of tone and outlook. We seem to hear it suddenly as in
+the first words spoken by a new voice, a voice gay, colloquial, and
+impatient. Scott and Thackeray were tenderly attached to the past;
+Dickens (in his consciousness at any rate) was impatient with
+everything, but especially impatient with the past.</p>
+
+<p>A collection of the works of Dickens would be incomplete in an essential
+as well as a literal sense without his <i>Child&rsquo;s History of
+England</i>. It may not be important as a contribution to history, but it
+is important as a contribution to biography; as a contribution to the
+character and the career of the man who wrote it, a typical man of his
+time. That he had made no personal historical researches, that he had no
+special historical learning, that he had not had, in truth, even
+anything that could be called a good education, all <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[162]</a></span>
+this only accentuates not the merit but at least the importance of the
+book. For here we may read in plain popular language, written by a man
+whose genius for popular exposition has never been surpassed among men,
+a brief account of the origin and meaning of England as it seemed to the
+average Englishman of that age. When subtler views of our history, some
+more false and some more true than his, have become popular, or at least
+well known, when in the near future Carlylean or Catholic or Marxian
+views of history have spread themselves among the reading public, this
+book will always remain as a bright and brisk summary of the cock-sure,
+healthy-minded, essentially manly and essentially ungentlemanly view of
+history which characterised the Radicals of that particular Radical era.
+The history tells us nothing about the periods that it talks about; but
+it tells us a great deal about the period that it does not talk about;
+the period in which it was written. It is in no sense a history of
+England from the Roman invasion; but it is certainly one of the
+documents which will contribute to a history of England in the
+nineteenth century.</p>
+
+<p>Of the actual nature of its philosophical and technical limitations it
+is, I suppose, unnecessary to speak. They all resolve themselves into
+one fault common in the modern world, and certainly characteristic of
+historians much more learned and pretentious than Dickens. That fault
+consists simply in ignoring or underrating the variety of strange evils
+and unique dangers in the world. The Radicals of the nineteenth century
+were engaged, and most righteously engaged, in dealing with one
+particular problem of human <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[163]</a></span>
+civilisation; they were shifting and apportioning more equally a load
+of custom that had really become unmeaning, often accidental, and nearly
+always unfair. Thus, for instance, a fierce and fighting penal code,
+which had been perfectly natural when the robbers were as strong as the
+Government, had become in more ordered times nothing but a base and
+bloody habit. Thus again Church powers and dues, which had been human
+when every man felt the Church as the best part of himself, were mere
+mean privileges when the nation was full of sects and full of
+freethinkers. This clearing away of external symbols that no longer
+symbolised anything was an honourable and needful work; but it was so
+difficult that to the men engaged in it it blocked up the perspective
+and filled the sky, so that they slid into a very natural mental mistake
+which coloured all their views of history. They supposed that this
+particular problem on which they were engaged was the one problem upon
+which all mankind had always been engaged. They got it into their heads
+that breaking away from a dead past was the perpetual process of
+humanity. The truth is obviously that humanity has found itself in many
+difficulties very different from that. Sometimes the best business of an
+age is to resist some alien invasion; sometimes to preach practical
+self-control in a world too self-indulgent and diffused; sometimes to
+prevent the growth in the State of great new private enterprises that
+would poison or oppress it. Above all it may sometimes happen that the
+highest task of a thinking citizen may be to do the exact opposite of
+the work which the Radicals had to do. It may be his <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[164]</a></span>
+highest duty to cling on to every scrap of the past that he can find,
+if he feels that the ground is giving way beneath him and sinking into
+mere savagery and forgetfulness of all human culture. This was exactly
+the position of all thinking men in what we call the dark ages, say from
+the sixth to the tenth century. The cheap progressive view of history
+can never make head or tail of that epoch; it was an epoch upside down.
+We think of the old things as barbaric and the new things as
+enlightened. In that age all the enlightened things were old; all the
+barbaric and brutally ignorant things were new and up to date.
+Republicanism was a fading legend; despotism was a new and successful
+experiment. Christianity was not only better than the clans that
+rebelled against it; Christianity was more rationalistic than they were.
+When men looked back they saw progress and reason; when they looked
+forward they saw shapeless tradition and tribal terror. Touching such an
+age it is obvious that all our modern terms describing reform or
+conservation are foolish and beside the mark. The Conservative was then
+the only possible reformer. If a man did not strengthen the remains of
+Roman order and the root of Roman Christianity, he was simply helping
+the world to roll downhill into ruin and idiotcy. Remember all these
+evident historical truths and then turn to the account given by Charles
+Dickens of that great man, St. Dunstan. It is not that the pert cockney
+tone of the abuse is irritating to the nerves: it is that he has got the
+whole hang of the thing wrong. His head is full of the
+nineteenth-century situation; that a priest imposing discipline is a
+person somehow blocking the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[165]</a></span>
+way to equality and light. Whereas the point about such a man as
+Dunstan was that nobody in the place except he cared a button about
+equality or light: and that he was defending what was left of them
+against the young and growing power of darkness and division and caste.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless the case against such books as this is commonly stated
+wrong. The fault of Dickens is not (as is often said) that he
+&ldquo;applies the same moral standard to all ages.&rdquo; Every sane
+man must do that: a moral standard must remain the same or it is not a
+moral standard. If we call St. Anthony of Padua a good man, we must mean
+what we mean when we call Huxley a good man, or else there is no sense
+in using the word &ldquo;good.&rdquo; The fault of the Dickens school of
+popular history lies, not in the application of a plain rule of right
+and wrong to all circumstances, but in ignorance of the circumstances to
+which it was applied. It is not that they wrongly enforce the fixed
+principle that life should be saved; it is that they take a fire-engine
+to a shipwreck and a lifeboat to a house on fire. The business of a good
+man in Dickens&rsquo;s time was to bring justice up to date. The
+business of a good man in Dunstan&rsquo;s time was to toil to ensure the
+survival of any justice at all.</p>
+
+<p>And Dickens, through being a living and fighting man of his own time,
+kept the health of his own heart, and so saw many truths with a single
+eye: truths that were spoilt for subtler eyes. He was much more really
+right than Carlyle; immeasurably more right than Froude. He was more
+right precisely because he applied plain human morals to all facts as he
+saw them.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[166]</a></span>
+Carlyle really had a vague idea that in coarse and cruel times it was
+right to be coarse and cruel; that tyranny was excusable in the twelfth
+century: as if the twelfth century did not denounce tyrants as much or
+more than any other. Carlyle, in fact, fancied that Rufus was the right
+sort of man; a view which was not only not shared by Anselm, but was
+probably not shared by Rufus. In this connection, or rather in
+connection with the other case of Froude, it is worth while to take
+another figure from Dickens&rsquo;s history, which illustrates the other
+and better side of the facile and popular method. Sheer ignorance of the
+environment made him wrong about Dunstan. But sheer instinct and good
+moral tradition made him right, for instance, about Henry VIII.; right
+where Froude is wildly wrong. Dickens&rsquo;s imagination could not
+re-picture an age where learning and liberty were dying rather than
+being born: but Henry VIII. lived in a time of expanding knowledge and
+unrest; a time therefore somewhat like the Victorian. And Dickens in his
+childish but robust way does perceive the main point about him: that he
+was a wicked man. He misses all the fine shades, of course; he makes him
+every kind of wicked man at once. He leaves out the serious interests of
+the man: his strange but real concern for theology; his love of certain
+legal and moral forms; his half-unconscious patriotism. But he sees the
+solid bulk of definite badness simply because it was there; and Froude
+cannot see it at all; because Froude followed Carlyle and played tricks
+with the eternal conscience. Henry VIII. <i>was</i> &ldquo;a blot of blood
+and grease upon the history of England.&rdquo; For he was the embodiment
+of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[167]</a></span>
+Devil in the Renascence, that wild worship of mere pleasure and scorn,
+which with its pictures and its palaces has enriched and ruined the
+world.</p>
+
+<p>The time will soon come when the mere common-sense of Dickens, like the
+mere common-sense of Macaulay (though his was poisoned by learning and
+Whig politics), will appear to give a plainer and therefore truer
+picture of the mass of history than the mystical perversity of a man of
+genius writing only out of his own temperament, like Carlyle or Taine.
+If a man has a new theory of ethics there is one thing he must not be
+allowed to do. Let him give laws on Sinai, let him dictate a Bible, let
+him fill the world with cathedrals if he can. But he must not be allowed
+to write a history of England; or a history of any country. All history
+was conducted on ordinary morality: with his extraordinary morality he
+is certain to read it all askew. Thus Carlyle tries to write of the
+Middle Ages with a bias against humility and mercy; that is, with a bias
+against the whole theoretic morality of the Middle Ages. The result is
+that he turns into a mere turmoil of arrogant German savages what was
+really the most complete and logical, if not the highest, of human
+civilisations. Historically speaking, it is better to be Dickens than to
+be this; better to be ignorant, provincial, slap-dash, seeing only the
+passing moment, but in that moment, to be true to eternal things.</p>
+
+<p>It must be remembered, of course, that Dickens deliberately offers this
+only as a &ldquo;child&rsquo;s&rdquo; history of England. That is, he
+only professes to be able to teach history as any father of a little boy
+of five professes to be able to teach him history. And although
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[168]</a></span>
+the history of England would certainly be taught very differently (as
+regards the actual criticism of events and men) in a family with a wider
+culture or with another religion, the general method would be the same.
+For the general method is quite right. This black-and-white history of
+heroes and villains; this history full of pugnacious ethics and of
+nothing else, is the right kind of history for children. I have often
+wondered how the scientific Marxians and the believers in &ldquo;the
+materialist view of history&rdquo; will ever manage to teach their
+dreary economic generalisations to children: but I suppose they will
+have no children. Dickens&rsquo;s history will always be popular with
+the young; almost as popular as Dickens&rsquo;s novels, and for the same
+reason: because it is full of moralising. Science and art without
+morality are not dangerous in the sense commonly supposed. They are not
+dangerous like a fire, but dangerous like a fog. A fire is dangerous in
+its brightness; a fog in its dulness; and thought without morals is
+merely dull, like a fog. The fog seems to be creeping up the street;
+putting out lamp after lamp. But this cockney lamp-post which the
+children love is still crowned with its flame; and when the fathers have
+forgotten ethics, their babies will turn and teach them.</p>
+
+<hr /><p class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[169]</a></p>
+<h2><a name="HARD_TIMES" id="HARD_TIMES"></a>HARD TIMES</h2>
+
+<p>I have heard that in some debating clubs there is a rule that the
+members may discuss anything except religion and politics. I cannot
+imagine what they do discuss; but it is quite evident that they have
+ruled out the only two subjects which are either important or amusing.
+The thing is a part of a certain modern tendency to avoid things because
+they lead to warmth; whereas, obviously, we ought, even in a social
+sense, to seek those things specially. The warmth of the discussion is
+as much a part of hospitality as the warmth of the fire. And it is
+singularly suggestive that in English literature the two things have
+died together. The very people who would blame Dickens for his
+sentimental hospitality are the very people who would also blame him for
+his narrow political conviction. The very people who would mock him for
+his narrow radicalism are those who would mock him for his broad
+fireside. Real conviction and real charity are much nearer than people
+suppose. Dickens was capable of loving all men; but he refused to love
+all opinions. The modern humanitarian can love all opinions, but he
+cannot love all men; he seems, sometimes, in the ecstasy of his
+humanitarianism, even to hate them all. He can love all opinions,
+including the opinion that men are unlovable.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[170]</a></span>
+In feeling Dickens as a lover we must never forget him as a fighter, and
+a fighter for a creed; but indeed there is no other kind of fighter. The
+geniality which he spread over all his creations was geniality spread
+from one centre, from one flaming peak. He was willing to excuse Mr.
+Micawber for being extravagant; but Dickens and Dickens&rsquo;s doctrine
+were strictly to decide how far he was to be excused. He was willing to
+like Mr. Twemlow in spite of his snobbishness, but Dickens and
+Dickens&rsquo;s doctrine were alone to be judges of how far he was
+snobbish. There was never a more didactic writer: hence there was never
+one more amusing. He had no mean modern notion of keeping the moral
+doubtful. He would have regarded this as a mere piece of slovenliness,
+like leaving the last page illegible.</p>
+
+<p>Everywhere in Dickens&rsquo;s work these angles of his absolute opinion
+stood up out of the confusion of his general kindness, just as sharp and
+splintered peaks stand up out of the soft confusion of the forests.
+Dickens is always generous, he is generally kind-hearted, he is often
+sentimental, he is sometimes intolerably maudlin; but you never know
+when you will not come upon one of the convictions of Dickens; and when
+you do come upon it you do know it. It is as hard and as high as any
+precipice or peak of the mountains. The highest and hardest of these
+peaks is <i>Hard Times</i>.</p>
+
+<p>It is here more than anywhere else that the sternness of Dickens emerges
+as separate from his softness; it is here, most obviously, so to speak,
+that his bones stick out. There are indeed many other books of his which
+are written better and written in a sadder tone. <i>Great Expectations</i> is
+melancholy in a sense; but it is doubtful <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[171]</a></span>
+of everything, even of its own melancholy. <i>The Tale of Two Cities</i> is
+a great tragedy, but it is still a sentimental tragedy. It is a great
+drama, but it is still a melodrama. But this tale of <i>Hard Times</i> is in
+some way harsher than all these. For it is the expression of a righteous
+indignation which cannot condescend to humour and which cannot even
+condescend to pathos. Twenty times we have taken Dickens&rsquo;s hand
+and it has been sometimes hot with revelry and sometimes weak with
+weariness; but this time we start a little, for it is inhumanly cold;
+and then we realise that we have touched his gauntlet of steel.</p>
+
+<p>One cannot express the real value of this book without being irrelevant.
+It is true that one cannot express the real value of anything without
+being irrelevant. If we take a thing frivolously we can take it
+separately, but the moment we take a thing seriously, if it were only an
+old umbrella, it is obvious that that umbrella opens above us into the
+immensity of the whole universe. But there are rather particular reasons
+why the value of the book called <i>Hard Times</i> should be referred back to
+great historic and theoretic matters with which it may appear
+superficially to have little or nothing to do. The chief reason can
+perhaps be stated thus&mdash;that English politics had for more than a
+hundred years been getting into more and more of a hopeless tangle (a
+tangle which, of course, has since become even worse) and that Dickens
+did in some extraordinary way see what was wrong, even if he did not see
+what was right.</p>
+
+<p>The Liberalism which Dickens and nearly all of his contemporaries
+professed had begun in the American and the French Revolutions. Almost
+all modern<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[172]</a></span>
+English criticism upon those revolutions has been vitiated by the
+assumption that those revolutions burst upon a world which was
+unprepared for their ideas&mdash;a world ignorant of the possibility of
+such ideas. Somewhat the same mistake is made by those who suggest that
+Christianity was adopted by a world incapable of criticising it; whereas
+obviously it was adopted by a world that was tired of criticising
+everything. The vital mistake that is made about the French Revolution
+is merely this&mdash;that everyone talks about it as the introduction of
+a new idea. It was not the introduction of a new idea; there are no new
+ideas. Or if there are new ideas, they would not cause the least
+irritation if they were introduced into political society; because the
+world having never got used to them there would be no mass of men ready
+to fight for them at a moment&rsquo;s notice. That which was irritating
+about the French Revolution was this&mdash;that it was not the
+introduction of a new ideal, but the practical fulfilment of an old one.
+From the time of the first fairy tales men had always believed ideally
+in equality; they had always thought that something ought to be done, if
+anything could be done, to redress the balance between Cinderella and
+the ugly sisters. The irritating thing about the French was not that
+they said this ought to be done; everybody said that. The irritating
+thing about the French was that they did it. They proposed to carry out
+into a positive scheme what had been the vision of humanity; and
+humanity was naturally annoyed. The kings of Europe did not make war
+upon the Revolution because it was a blasphemy, but because it was a
+copy-book maxim which had been just too accurately copied. It
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[173]</a></span>
+was a platitude which they had always held in theory unexpectedly put
+into practice. The tyrants did not hate democracy because it was a
+paradox; they hated it because it was a truism which seemed in some
+danger of coming true.</p>
+
+<p>Now it happens to be hugely important to have this right view of the
+Revolution in considering its political effects upon England. For the
+English, being a deeply and indeed excessively romantic people, could
+never be quite content with this quality of cold and bald obviousness
+about the republican formula. The republican formula was merely
+this&mdash;that the State must consist of its citizens ruling equally,
+however unequally they may do anything else. In their capacity of
+members of the State they are all equally interested in its
+preservation. But the English soon began to be romantically restless
+about this eternal truism; they were perpetually trying to turn it into
+something else, into something more picturesque&mdash;progress perhaps, or
+anarchy. At last they turned it into the highly exciting and highly
+unsound system of politics, which was known as the Manchester School,
+and which was expressed with a sort of logical flightiness, more
+excusable in literature, by Mr. Herbert Spencer. Of course Danton or
+Washington or any of the original republicans would have thought these
+people were mad. They would never have admitted for a moment that the
+State must not interfere with commerce or competition; they would merely
+have insisted that if the State did interfere, it must really be the
+State&mdash;that is, the whole people. But the distance between the common
+sense of Danton and the mere ecstasy of Herbert Spencer marks
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[174]</a></span>
+the English way of colouring and altering the revolutionary idea. The
+English people as a body went blind, as the saying is, for interpreting
+democracy entirely in terms of liberty. They said in substance that if
+they had more and more liberty it did not matter whether they had any
+equality or any fraternity. But this was violating the sacred trinity of
+true politics; they confounded the persons and they divided the
+substance.</p>
+
+<p>Now the really odd thing about England in the nineteenth century is
+this&mdash;that there was one Englishman who happened to keep his head. The
+men who lost their heads lost highly scientific and philosophical heads;
+they were great cosmic systematisers like Spencer, great social
+philosophers like Bentham, great practical politicians like Bright,
+great political economists like Mill. The man who kept his head kept a
+head full of fantastic nonsense; he was a writer of rowdy farces, a
+demagogue of fiction, a man without education in any serious sense
+whatever, a man whose whole business was to turn ordinary cockneys into
+extraordinary caricatures. Yet when all these other children of the
+revolution went wrong he, by a mystical something in his bones, went
+right. He knew nothing of the Revolution; yet he struck the note of it.
+He returned to the original sentimental commonplace upon which it is
+forever founded, as the Church is founded on a rock. In an England gone
+mad about a minor theory he reasserted the original idea&mdash;the idea that
+no one in the State must be too weak to influence the State.</p>
+
+<p>This man was Dickens. He did this work much more genuinely than it was
+done by Carlyle or Ruskin; <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[175]</a></span>
+for they were simply Tories making out a romantic case for the return
+of Toryism. But Dickens was a real Liberal demanding the return of real
+Liberalism. Dickens was there to remind people that England had rubbed
+out two words of the revolutionary motto, had left only Liberty and
+destroyed Equality and Fraternity. In this book, <i>Hard Times</i>, he
+specially champions equality. In all his books he champions fraternity.</p>
+
+<p>The atmosphere of this book and what it stands for can be very
+adequately conveyed in the note on the book by Lord Macaulay, who may
+stand as a very good example of the spirit of England in those years of
+eager emancipation and expanding wealth&mdash;the years in which Liberalism
+was turned from an omnipotent truth to a weak scientific system.
+Macaulay&rsquo;s private comment on <i>Hard Times</i> runs, &ldquo;One or two
+passages of exquisite pathos and the rest sullen Socialism.&rdquo; That
+is not an unfair and certainly not a specially hostile criticism, but it
+exactly shows how the book struck those people who were mad on political
+liberty and dead about everything else. Macaulay mistook for a new
+formula called Socialism what was, in truth, only the old formula called
+political democracy. He and his Whigs had so thoroughly mauled and
+modified the original idea of Rousseau or Jefferson that when they saw
+it again they positively thought that it was something quite new and
+eccentric. But the truth was that Dickens was not a Socialist, but an
+unspoilt Liberal; he was not sullen; nay, rather, he had remained
+strangely hopeful. They called him a sullen Socialist only to disguise
+their astonishment at finding still loose about the London streets a
+happy republican.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[176]</a></span>
+Dickens is the one living link between the old kindness and the new,
+between the good will of the past and the good works of the future. He
+links May Day with Bank Holiday, and he does it almost alone. All the
+men around him, great and good as they were, were in comparison
+puritanical, and never so puritanical as when they were also atheistic.
+He is a sort of solitary pipe down which pours to the twentieth century
+the original river of Merry England. And although this <i>Hard Times</i> is,
+as its name implies, the hardest of his works, although there is less in
+it perhaps than in any of the others of the <i>abandon</i> and the buffoonery
+of Dickens, this only emphasises the more clearly the fact that he stood
+almost alone for a more humane and hilarious view of democracy. None of
+his great and much more highly-educated contemporaries could help him in
+this. Carlyle was as gloomy on the one side as Herbert Spencer on the
+other. He protested against the commercial oppression simply and solely
+because it was not only an oppression but a depression. And this protest
+of his was made specially in the case of the book before us. It may be
+bitter, but it was a protest against bitterness. It may be dark, but it
+is the darkness of the subject and not of the author. He is by his own
+account dealing with hard times, but not with a hard eternity, not with
+a hard philosophy of the universe. Nevertheless, this is the one place
+in his work where he does not make us remember human happiness by
+example as well as by precept. This is, as I have said, not the saddest,
+but certainly the harshest of his stories. It is perhaps the only place
+where Dickens, in defending happiness, for a moment forgets to be
+happy.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[177]</a></span>
+He describes Bounderby and Gradgrind with a degree of grimness and
+sombre hatred very different from the half affectionate derision which
+he directed against the old tyrants or humbugs of the earlier nineteenth
+century&mdash;the pompous Dedlock or the fatuous Nupkins, the grotesque
+Bumble or the inane Tigg. In those old books his very abuse was
+benignant; in <i>Hard Times</i> even his sympathy is hard. And the reason is
+again to be found in the political facts of the century. Dickens could
+be half genial with the older generation of oppressors because it was a
+dying generation. It was evident, or at least it seemed evident then,
+that Nupkins could not go on much longer making up the law of England to
+suit himself; that Sir Leicester Dedlock could not go on much longer
+being kind to his tenants as if they were dogs and cats. And some of
+these evils the nineteenth century did really eliminate or improve. For
+the first half of the century Dickens and all his friends were justified
+in feeling that the chains were falling from mankind. At any rate, the
+chains did fall from Mr. Rouncewell the Iron-master. And when they fell
+from him he picked them up and put them upon the poor.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 462px;"><a name="CD1858" id="CD1858"></a>
+<img src="images/dickens1858.jpg" width="462" height="600" alt="" title="" />
+<span class="caption">Charles Dickens, 1858<br />
+From a black and white drawing by Baughiet.</span></div>
+
+<p class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[178]</a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="DORRIT" id="DORRIT"></a>LITTLE DORRIT</h2>
+
+<p><i>Little Dorrit</i> stands in Dickens&rsquo;s life chiefly as a signal of
+how far he went down the road of realism, of sadness, and of what is
+called modernity. True, it was by no means the best of the books of his
+later period; some even think it the worst. <i>Great Expectations</i> is
+certainly the best of the later novels; some even think it the best of
+all the novels. Nor is it the novel most concerned with strictly recent
+problems; that title must be given to <i>Hard Times</i>. Nor again is it the
+most finely finished or well constructed of the later books; that claim
+can be probably made for <i>Edwin Drood</i>. By a queer verbal paradox the
+most carefully finished of his later tales is the tale that is not
+finished at all. In form, indeed, the book bears a superficial
+resemblance to those earlier works by which the young Dickens had set
+the whole world laughing long ago. Much of the story refers to a remote
+time early in the nineteenth century; much of it was actually recalled
+and copied from the life of Dickens&rsquo;s father in the old Marshalsea
+prison. Also the narrative has something of the form, or rather absence
+of form, which belonged to <i>Nicholas Nickleby</i> or <i>Martin Chuzzlewit</i>.
+It has something of the old air of being a string of disconnected
+adventures, like a boy&rsquo;s book about bears and Indians. The Dorrits
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[179]</a></span>
+go wandering for no particular reason on the Continent of Europe, just
+as young Martin Chuzzlewit went wandering for no particular reason on
+the continent of America. The story of <i>Little Dorrit</i> stops and lingers
+at the doors of the Circumlocution Office much in the same way that the
+story of Samuel Pickwick stops and lingers in the political excitement
+of Eatanswill. The villain, Blandois, is a very stagey villain indeed;
+quite as stagey as Ralph Nickleby or the mysterious Monk. The secret of
+the dark house of Clennam is a very silly secret; quite as silly as the
+secret of Ralph Nickleby or the secret of Monk. Yet all these external
+similarities between <i>Little Dorrit</i> and the earliest books, all this
+loose, melodramatic quality, only serves to make more obvious and
+startling the fact that some change has come over the soul of Dickens.
+<i>Hard Times</i> is harsh; but then <i>Hard Times</i> is a social pamphlet;
+perhaps it is only harsh as a social pamphlet must be harsh. <i>Bleak
+House</i> is a little sombre; but then <i>Bleak House</i> is almost a detective
+story; perhaps it is only sombre in the sense that a detective story
+must be sombre. <i>A Tale of Two Cities</i> is a tragedy; but then <i>A Tale of
+Two Cities</i> is a tale of the French Revolution; perhaps it is only a
+tragedy because the French Revolution was a tragedy. <i>The Mystery of
+Edwin Drood</i> is dark; but then the mystery of anybody must be dark. In
+all these other cases of the later books an artistic reason can be
+given&mdash;a reason of theme or of construction for the slight sadness
+that seems to cling to them. But exactly because <i>Little Dorrit</i> is a
+mere Dickens novel, it shows that something must somehow have happened
+to Dickens himself. Even in resuming <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[180]</a></span>
+his old liberty, he cannot resume his old hilarity. He can re-create
+the anarchy, but not the revelry.</p>
+
+<p>It so happens that this strange difference between the new and the old
+mode of Dickens can be symbolised and stated in one separate and simple
+contrast. Dickens&rsquo;s father had been a prisoner in a debtors&rsquo;
+prison, and Dickens&rsquo;s works contain two pictures partly suggested
+by the personality of that prisoner. Mr. Micawber is one picture of him.
+Mr. Dorrit is another. This truth is almost incredible, but it is the
+truth. The joyful Micawber, whose very despair was exultant, and the
+desolate Dorrit, whose very pride was pitiful, were the same man. The
+valiant Micawber and the nervous, shaking Dorrit were the same man. The
+defiant Micawber and the snobbish, essentially obsequious Dorrit were
+the same man. I do not mean of course that either of the pictures was an
+exact copy of anybody. The whole Dickens genius consisted of taking
+hints and turning them into human beings. As he took twenty real persons
+and turned them into one fictitious person, so he took one real person
+and turned him into twenty fictitious persons. This quality would
+suggest one character, that quality would suggest another. But in this
+case, at any rate, he did take one real person and turn him into two.
+And what is more, he turned him into two persons who seem to be quite
+opposite persons. To ordinary readers of Dickens, to say that Micawber
+and Dorrit had in any sense the same original, will appear unexpected
+and wild. No conceivable connection between the two would ever have
+occurred to anybody who had read Dickens with simple and superficial
+enjoyment, as all good literature ought to be read.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[181]</a></span>
+It will seem to them just as silly as saying that the Fat Boy and Mr.
+Alfred Jingle were both copied from the same character. It will seem as
+insane as saying that the character of Smike and the character of Major
+Bagstock were both copied from Dickens&rsquo;s father. Yet it is an
+unquestionable historical fact that Micawber and Dorrit were both copied
+from Dickens&rsquo;s father, in the only sense that any figures in good
+literature are ever copied from anything or anybody. Dickens did get the
+main idea of Micawber from his father; and that idea is that a poor man
+is not conquered by the world. And Dickens did get the main idea of
+Dorrit from his father; and that idea is that a poor man may be
+conquered by the world. I shall take the opportunity of discussing, in a
+moment, which of these ideas is true. Doubtless old John Dickens
+included both the gay and the sad moral; most men do. My only purpose
+here is to point out that Dickens drew the gay moral in 1849, and the
+sad moral in 1857.</p>
+
+<p>There must have been some real sadness at this time creeping like a
+cloud over Dickens himself. It is nothing that a man dwells on the
+darkness of dark things; all healthy men do that. It is when he dwells
+on the darkness of bright things that we have reason to fear some
+disease of the emotions. There must really have been some depression
+when a man can only see the sad side of flowers or the sad side of
+holidays or the sad side of wine. And there must be some depression of
+an uncommonly dark and genuine character when a man has reached such a
+point that he can see only the sad side of Mr. Wilkins Micawber.</p>
+
+<p>Yet this is in reality what had happened to Dickens <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[182]</a></span>
+about this time. Staring at Wilkins Micawber he could see only the
+weakness and the tragedy that was made possible by his indifference, his
+indulgence, and his bravado. He had already indeed been slightly moved
+towards this study of the feebleness and ruin of the old epicurean type
+with which he had once sympathised, the type of Bob Sawyer or Dick
+Swiveller. He had already attacked the evil of it in <i>Bleak House</i> in
+the character of Harold Skimpole, with its essentially cowardly
+carelessness and its highly selfish communism. Nevertheless, as I have
+said before, it must have been no small degree of actual melancholia
+which led Dickens to look for a lesson of disaster and slavery in the
+very same career from which he had once taught lessons of continual
+recuperation and a kind of fantastic freedom. There must have been at
+this time some melancholy behind the writings. There must have existed
+on this earth at the time that portent and paradox&mdash;a somewhat
+depressed Dickens.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps it was a reminiscence of that metaphorical proverb which tells
+us that &ldquo;truth lies at the bottom of a well.&rdquo; Perhaps these
+people thought that the only way to find truth in the well was to drown
+oneself. But on whatever thin theoretic basis, the type and period of
+George Gissing did certainly consider that Dickens, so far as he went,
+was all the worse for the optimism of the story of Micawber; hence it is
+not unnatural that they should think him all the better for the
+comparative pessimism of the story of <i>Little Dorrit</i>. The very things
+in the tale that would naturally displease the ordinary admirers of
+Dickens, are the things which would naturally please a man like George
+Gissing. There are <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[183]</a></span>
+many of these things, but one of them emerges pre-eminent and
+unmistakable. This is the fact that when all is said and done the main
+business of the story of <i>Little Dorrit</i> is to describe the victory of
+circumstances over a soul. The circumstances are the financial ruin and
+long imprisonment of Edward Dorrit; the soul is Edward Dorrit himself.
+Let it be granted that the circumstances are exceptional and oppressive,
+are denounced as exceptional and oppressive, are finally exploded and
+overthrown; still, they are circumstances. Let it be granted that the
+soul is that of a man perhaps weak in any case and retaining many merits
+to the last, still it is a soul. Let it be granted, above all, that the
+admission that such spiritual tragedies do occur does not decrease by so
+much as an iota our faith in the validity of any spiritual struggle. For
+example, Stevenson has made a study of the breakdown of a good
+man&rsquo;s character under a burden for which he is not to blame, in
+the tragedy of Henry Durie in <i>The Master of Ballantrae</i>. Yet he has
+added, in the mouth of Mackellar, the exact common sense and good
+theology of the matter, saying &ldquo;It matters not a jot; for he that
+is to pass judgment upon the records of our life is the same that formed
+us in frailty.&rdquo; Let us concede then all this, and the fact remains
+that the study of the slow demoralisation of a man through mere
+misfortune was not a study congenial to Dickens, not in accordance with
+his original inspiration, not connected in any manner with the special
+thing that he had to say. In a word, the thing is not quite a part of
+himself; and he was not quite himself when he did it.</p>
+
+<p>He was still quite a young man; his depression did not
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[184]</a></span>
+come from age. In fact, as far as I know, mere depression never does
+come from mere age. Age can pass into a beautiful reverie. Age can pass
+into a sort of beautiful idiocy. But I do not think that the actual
+decline and close of our ordinary vitality brings with it any particular
+heaviness of the spirits. The spirits of the old do not as a rule seem
+to become more and more ponderous until they sink into the earth. Rather
+the spirits of the old seem to grow lighter and lighter until they float
+away like thistledown. Wherever there is the definite phenomenon called
+depression, it commonly means that something else has been closer to us
+than so normal a thing as death. There has been disease, bodily or
+mental, or there has been sin, or there has been some struggle or
+effort, breaking past the ordinary boundaries of human custom. In the
+case of Dickens there had been two things that are not of the routine of
+a wholesome human life; there had been the quarrel with his wife, and
+there had been the strain of incessant and exaggerated intellectual
+labour. He had not an easy time; and on top of that (or perhaps rather
+at the bottom of it) he had not an easy nature. Not only did his life
+necessitate work, but his character necessitated worry about work; and
+that combination is always one which is very dangerous to the
+temperament which is exposed to it. The only people who ought to be
+allowed to work are the people who are able to shirk. The only people
+who ought to be allowed to worry are the people who have nothing to
+worry about. When the two are combined, as they were in Dickens, you are
+very likely to have at least one collapse. <i>Little Dorrit</i> is a very
+interesting, sincere, and fascinating <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[185]</a></span>
+book. But for all that, I fancy it is the one collapse.</p>
+
+<p>The complete proof of this depression may be difficult to advance;
+because it will be urged, and entirely with reason, that the actual
+examples of it are artistic and appropriate. Dickens, the Gissing school
+will say, was here pointing out certain sad truths of psychology; can
+any one say that he ought not to point them out? That may be; in any
+case, to explain depression is not to remove it. But the instances of
+this more sombre quality of which I have spoken are not very hard to
+find. The thing can easily be seen by comparing a book like <i>Little
+Dorrit</i> with a book like <i>David Copperfield</i>. David Copperfield and
+Arthur Clennam have both been brought up in unhappy homes, under bitter
+guardians and a black, disheartening religion. It is the whole point of
+David Copperfield that he has broken out of a Calvinistic tyranny which
+he cannot forgive. But it is the whole point of Arthur Clennam that he
+has not broken out of the Calvinistic tyranny, but is still under its
+shadow. Copperfield has come from a gloomy childhood; Clennam, though
+forty years old, is still in a gloomy childhood. When David meets the
+Murdstones again it is to defy them with the health and hilarious anger
+that go with his happy delirium about Dora. But when Clennam re-enters
+his sepulchral house there is a weight upon his soul which makes it
+impossible for him to answer, with any spirit, the morbidities of his
+mother, or even the grotesque interferences of Mr. Flintwinch. This is
+only another example of the same quality which makes the Dickens of
+<i>Little Dorrit</i> insist on the degradation of the debtor, while the
+Dickens of <i>David Copperfield</i> insisted on his <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[186]</a></span>
+splendid irresponsibility, his essential emancipation. Imprisonments
+passed over Micawber like summer clouds. But the imprisonment in <i>Little
+Dorrit</i> is like a complete natural climate and environment; it has
+positively modified the shapes and functions of the animals that dwell
+in it. A horrible thing has happened to Dickens; he has almost become an
+Evolutionist. Worse still, in studying the Calvinism of Mrs.
+Clennam&rsquo;s house, he has almost become a Calvinist. He half
+believes (as do some of the modern scientists) that there is really such
+a thing as &ldquo;a child of wrath,&rdquo; that a man on whom such an
+early shadow had fallen could never shake it off. For ancient Calvinism
+and modern Evolutionism are essentially the same things. They are both
+ingenious logical blasphemies against the dignity and liberty of the
+human soul.</p>
+
+<p>The workmanship of the book in detail is often extremely good. The one
+passage in the older and heartier Dickens manner (I mean the description
+of the Circumlocution Office) is beyond praise. It is a complete picture
+of the way England is actually governed at this moment. The very core of
+our politics is expressed in the light and easy young Barnacle who told
+Clennam with a kindly frankness that he, Clennam, would &ldquo;never go
+on with it.&rdquo; Dickens hit the mark so that the bell rang when he
+made all the lower officials, who were cads, tell Clennam coldly that
+his claim was absurd, until the last official, who is a gentleman, tells
+him genially that the whole business is absurd. Even here, perhaps,
+there is something more than the old exuberant derision of Dickens;
+there is a touch of experience that verges on scepticism.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[187]</a></span>
+Everywhere else, certainly, there is the note which I have called
+Calvinistic; especially in the predestined passion of Tattycoram or the
+incurable cruelty of Miss Wade. Even Little Dorrit herself had, we are
+told, one stain from her prison experience; and it is spoken of like a
+bodily stain; like something that cannot be washed away.</p>
+
+<p>There is no denying that this is Dickens&rsquo;s dark moment. It adds
+enormously to the value of his general view of life that such a dark
+moment came. He did what all the heroes and all the really happy men
+have done; he descended into Hell. Nor is it irreverent to continue the
+quotation from the Creed, for in the next book he was to write he was to
+break out of all these dreams of fate and failure, and with his highest
+voice to speak of the triumph of the weak of this world. His next book
+was to leave us saying, as Sydney Carton mounted the scaffold, words
+which, splendid in themselves, have never been so splendidly
+quoted&mdash;&ldquo;I am the Resurrection and the Life; whoso believeth in Me
+though he be dead yet he shall live.&rdquo; In Sydney Carton at least,
+Dickens shows none of that dreary submission to the environment of the
+irrevocable that had for an instant lain on him like a cloud. On this
+occasion he sees with the old heroic clearness that to be a failure may
+be one step to being a saint. On the third day he rose again from the
+dead.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 445px;"><a name="CD1859" id="CD1859"></a>
+<img src="images/dickens1859.jpg" width="445" height="600" alt="" title="" />
+<span class="caption">Charles Dickens, 1859 From an oil painting by W. P.
+Frith, R.A.</span></div>
+
+<p class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[188]</a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="TWO_CITIES" id="TWO_CITIES"></a>A TALE OF TWO CITIES</h2>
+
+<p>As an example of Dickens&rsquo;s literary work, <i>A Tale of Two Cities</i>
+is not wrongly named. It is his most typical contact with the civic
+ideals of Europe. All his other tales have been tales of one city. He
+was in spirit a Cockney; though that title has been quite unreasonably
+twisted to mean a cad. By the old sound and proverbial test a Cockney
+was a man born within the sound of Bow bells. That is, he was a man born
+within the immediate appeal of high civilisation and of eternal
+religion. Shakespeare, in the heart of his fantastic forest, turns with
+a splendid suddenness to the Cockney ideal as being the true one after
+all. For a jest, for a reaction, for an idle summer love or still idler
+summer hatred, it is well to wander away into the bewildering forest of
+Arden. It is well that those who are sick with love or sick with the
+absence of love, those who weary of the folly of courts or weary yet
+more of their wisdom, it is natural that these should trail away into
+the twinkling twilight of the woods. Yet it is here that Shakespeare
+makes one of his most arresting and startling assertions of the truth.
+Here is one of those rare and tremendous moments of which one may say
+that there is a stage direction, &ldquo;Enter Shakespeare.&rdquo; He has
+admitted that for men weary of courts, for men sick of cities, the wood
+is the wisest place, and he has <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[189]</a></span>
+praised it with his purest lyric ecstasy. But when a man enters
+suddenly upon that celestial picnic, a man who is not sick of cities,
+but sick of hunger, a man who is not weary of courts, but weary of
+walking, then Shakespeare lets through his own voice with a shattering
+sincerity and cries the praise of practical human civilisation:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">If ever you have looked on better days,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">If ever you have sat at good men&rsquo;s feasts,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">If ever been where bells have knolled to church,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">If ever from your eyelids wiped a tear<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Or know what &rsquo;tis to pity and be pitied.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>There is nothing finer even in Shakespeare than that conception of the
+circle of rich men all pretending to rough it in the country, and the
+one really hungry man entering, sword in hand, and praising the city.
+&ldquo;If ever been where bells have knolled to church&rdquo;; if you
+have ever been within sound of Bow bells; if you have ever been happy
+and haughty enough to call yourself a Cockney.</p>
+
+<p>We must remember this distinction always in the case of Dickens. Dickens
+is the great Cockney, at once tragic and comic, who enters abruptly upon
+the Arcadian banquet of the &aelig;sthetics and says, &ldquo;Forbear and eat
+no more,&rdquo; and tells them that they shall not eat &ldquo;until
+necessity be served.&rdquo; If there was one thing he would have
+favoured instinctively it would have been the spreading of the town as
+meaning the spreading of civilisation. And we should (I hope) all favour
+the spreading of the town if it did mean the spreading of civilisation.
+The objection to the spreading <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[190]</a></span>
+of the modern Manchester or Birmingham suburb is simply that such a
+suburb is much more barbaric than any village in Europe could ever
+conceivably be. And again, if there is anything that Dickens would have
+definitely hated it is that general treatment of nature as a dramatic
+spectacle, a piece of scene-painting which has become the common mark of
+the culture of our wealthier classes. Despite many fine pictures of
+natural scenery, especially along the English roadsides, he was upon the
+whole emphatically on the side of the town. He was on the side of bricks
+and mortar. He was a citizen; and, after all, a citizen means a man of
+the city. His strength was, after all, in the fact that he was a man of
+the city. But, after all, his weakness, his calamitous weakness, was
+that he was a man of one city.</p>
+
+<p>For all practical purposes he had never been outside such places as
+Chatham and London. He did indeed travel on the Continent; but surely no
+man&rsquo;s travel was ever so superficial as his. He was more
+superficial than the smallest and commonest tourist. He went about
+Europe on stilts; he never touched the ground. There is one good test
+and one only of whether a man has travelled to any profit in Europe. An
+Englishman is, as such, a European, and as he approaches the central
+splendours of Europe he ought to feel that he is coming home. If he does
+not feel at home he had much better have stopped at home. England is a
+real home; London is a real home; and all the essential feelings of
+adventure or the picturesque can easily be gained by going out at night
+upon the flats of Essex or the cloven hills of Surrey. Your visit to
+Europe is useless unless <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[191]</a></span>
+it gives you the sense of an exile returning. Your first sight of Rome
+is futile unless you feel that you have seen it before. Thus useless and
+thus futile were the foreign experiments and the continental raids of
+Dickens. He enjoyed them as he would have enjoyed, as a boy, a scamper
+out of Chatham into some strange meadows, as he would have enjoyed, when
+a grown man, a steam in a police boat out into the fens to the far east
+of London. But he was the Cockney venturing far; he was not the European
+coming home. He is still the splendid Cockney Orlando of whom I spoke
+above; he cannot but suppose that any strange men, being happy in some
+pastoral way, are mysterious foreign scoundrels. Dickens&rsquo;s real
+speech to the lazy and laughing civilisation of Southern Europe would
+really have run in the Shakespearian words:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">but whoe&rsquo;er you be<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Who in this desert inaccessible,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Under the shade of melancholy boughs<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Lose and neglect the creeping hours of time.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">If ever you have looked on better things,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">If ever been where bells have knolled to church.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>If, in short, you have ever had the advantage of being born within the
+sound of Bow bells. Dickens could not really conceive that there was any
+other city but his own.</p>
+
+<p>It is necessary thus to insist that Dickens never understood the
+Continent, because only thus can we appreciate the really remarkable
+thing he did in <i>A Tale of Two Cities</i>. It is necessary to feel, first
+of all, the fact that to him London was the centre of the universe.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[192]</a></span>
+He did not understand at all the real sense in which Paris is the
+capital of Europe. He had never realised that all roads lead to Rome. He
+had never felt (as an Englishman can feel) that he was an Athenian
+before he was a Londoner. Yet with everything against him he did this
+astonishing thing. He wrote a book about two cities, one of which he
+understood; the other he did not understand. And his description of the
+city he did not know is almost better than his description of the city
+he did know. This is the entrance of the unquestionable thing about
+Dickens; the thing called genius; the thing which every one has to talk
+about directly and distinctly because no one knows what it is. For a
+plain word (as for instance the word fool) always covers an infinite
+mystery.</p>
+
+<p><i>A Tale of Two Cities</i> is one of the more tragic tints of the later life
+of Dickens. It might be said that he grew sadder as he grew older; but
+this would be false, for two reasons. First, a man never or hardly ever
+does grow sad as he grows old; on the contrary, the most melancholy
+young lovers can be found forty years afterwards chuckling over their
+port wine. And second, Dickens never did grow old, even in a physical
+sense. What weariness did appear in him appeared in the prime of life;
+it was due not to age but to overwork, and his exaggerative way of doing
+everything. To call Dickens a victim of elderly disenchantment would be
+as absurd as to say the same of Keats. Such fatigue as there was, was
+due not to the slowing down of his blood, but rather to its unremitting
+rapidity. He was not wearied by his age; rather he was wearied by his
+youth. And though <i>A Tale of Two Cities</i> is full
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[193]</a></span>
+of sadness, it is full also of enthusiasm; that pathos is a young
+pathos rather than an old one. Yet there is one circumstance which does
+render important the fact that <i>A Tale of Two Cities</i> is one of the
+later works of Dickens. This fact is the fact of his dependence upon
+another of the great writers of the Victorian era. And it is in
+connection with this that we can best see the truth of which I have been
+speaking; the truth that his actual ignorance of France went with
+amazing intuitive perception of the truth about it. It is here that he
+has most clearly the plain mark of the man of genius; that he can
+understand what he does not understand.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens was inspired to the study of the French Revolution and to the
+writing of a romance about it by the example and influence of Carlyle.
+Thomas Carlyle undoubtedly rediscovered for Englishmen the revolution
+that was at the back of all their policies and reforms. It is an
+entertaining side joke that the French Revolution should have been
+discovered for Britons by the only British writer who did not really
+believe in it. Nevertheless, the most authoritative and the most recent
+critics on that great renaissance agree in considering Carlyle&rsquo;s
+work one of the most searching and detailed power. Carlyle had read a
+great deal about the French Revolution. Dickens had read nothing at all,
+except Carlyle. Carlyle was a man who collected his ideas by the careful
+collation of documents and the verification of references. Dickens was a
+man who collected his ideas from loose hints in the streets, and those
+always the same streets; as I have said, he was the citizen of one city.
+Carlyle was in his <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[194]</a></span>
+way learned; Dickens was in every way ignorant. Dickens was an
+Englishman cut off from France; Carlyle was a Scotsman, historically
+connected with France. And yet, when all this is said and certified,
+Dickens is more right than Carlyle. Dickens&rsquo;s French Revolution is
+probably more like the real French Revolution than Carlyle&rsquo;s. It
+is difficult, if not impossible, to state the grounds of this strong
+conviction. One can only talk of it by employing that excellent method
+which Cardinal Newman employed when he spoke of the &ldquo;notes&rdquo;
+of Catholicism. There were certain &ldquo;notes&rdquo; of the
+Revolution. One note of the Revolution was the thing which silly people
+call optimism, and sensible people call high spirits. Carlyle could
+never quite get it, because with all his spiritual energy he had no high
+spirits. That is why he preferred prose to poetry. He could understand
+rhetoric; for rhetoric means singing with an object. But he could not
+understand lyrics; for the lyric means singing without an object; as
+every one does when he is happy. Now for all its blood and its black
+guillotines, the French Revolution was full of mere high spirits. Nay,
+it was full of happiness. This actual lilt and levity Carlyle never
+really found in the Revolution, because he could not find it in himself.
+Dickens knew less of the Revolution, but he had more of it. When Dickens
+attacked abuses, he battered them down with exactly that sort of cheery
+and quite one-sided satisfaction with which the French mob battered down
+the Bastille. Dickens utterly and innocently believed in certain things;
+he would, I think, have drawn the sword for them. Carlyle half believed
+in half a hundred things; he was at <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[195]</a></span>
+once more of a mystic and more of a sceptic. Carlyle was the perfect
+type of the grumbling servant; the old grumbling servant of the
+aristocratic comedies. He followed the aristocracy, but he growled as he
+followed. He was obedient without being servile, just as Caleb
+Balderstone was obedient without being servile. But Dickens was the type
+of the man who might really have rebelled instead of grumbling. He might
+have gone out into the street and fought, like the man who took the
+Bastille. It is somewhat nationally significant that when we talk of the
+man in the street it means a figure silent, slouching, and even feeble.
+When the French speak of the man in the street, it means danger in the
+street.</p>
+
+<p>No one can fail to notice this deep difference between Dickens and the
+Carlyle whom he avowedly copied. Splendid and symbolic as are
+Carlyle&rsquo;s scenes of the French Revolution, we have in reading them
+a curious sense that everything is happening at night. In Dickens even
+massacre happens by daylight. Carlyle always assumes that because things
+were tragedies therefore the men who did them felt tragic. Dickens knows
+that the man who works the worst tragedies is the man who feels comic;
+as for example, Mr. Quilp. The French Revolution was a much simpler
+world than Carlyle could understand; for Carlyle was subtle and not
+simple. Dickens could understand it, for he was simple and not subtle.
+He understood that plain rage against plain political injustice; he
+understood again that obvious vindictiveness and that obvious brutality
+which followed. &ldquo;Cruelty and the abuse of absolute power,&rdquo;
+he told an American slave-owner, &ldquo;are two of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[196]</a></span>
+the bad passions of human nature.&rdquo; Carlyle was quite incapable of
+rising to the height of that uplifted common-sense. He must always find
+something mystical about the cruelty of the French Revolution. The
+effect was equally bad whether he found it mystically bad and called the
+thing anarchy, or whether he found it mystically good and called it the
+rule of the strong. In both cases he could not understand the
+common-sense justice or the common-sense vengeance of Dickens and the
+French Revolution.</p>
+
+<p>Yet Dickens has in this book given a perfect and final touch to this
+whole conception of mere rebellion and mere human nature. Carlyle had
+written the story of the French Revolution and had made the story a mere
+tragedy. Dickens writes the story about the French Revolution, and does
+not make the Revolution itself the tragedy at all. Dickens knows that an
+outbreak is seldom a tragedy; generally it is the avoidance of a
+tragedy. All the real tragedies are silent. Men fight each other with
+furious cries, because men fight each other with chivalry and an
+unchangeable sense of brotherhood. But trees fight each other in utter
+stillness; because they fight each other cruelly and without quarter. In
+this book, as in history, the guillotine is not the calamity, but rather
+the solution of the calamity. The sin of Sydney Carton is a sin of
+habit, not of revolution. His gloom is the gloom of London, not the
+gloom of Paris.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 382px;"><a name="CD1860" id="CD1860"></a>
+<img src="images/dickens1860.jpg" width="382" height="600" alt="" title="" />
+<span class="caption">Charles Dickens, Circa 1860<br />
+Photograph by J. &amp; C. Watkins.</span></div>
+
+<p class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[197]</a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="EXPECTATIONS" id="EXPECTATIONS"></a>GREAT EXPECTATIONS</h2>
+
+<p><i>Great Expectations</i>, which was written in the afternoon of
+Dickens&rsquo;s life and fame, has a quality of serene irony and even
+sadness, which puts it quite alone among his other works. At no time
+could Dickens possibly be called cynical, he had too much vitality; but
+relatively to the other books this book is cynical; but it has the soft
+and gentle cynicism of old age, not the hard cynicism of youth. To be a
+young cynic is to be a young brute; but Dickens, who had been so
+perfectly romantic and sentimental in his youth, could afford to admit
+this touch of doubt into the mixed experience of his middle age. At no
+time could any books by Dickens have been called Thackerayan. Both of
+the two men were too great for that. But relatively to the other
+Dickensian productions this book may be called Thackerayan. It is a
+study in human weakness and the slow human surrender. It describes how
+easily a free lad of fresh and decent instincts can be made to care more
+for rank and pride and the degrees of our stratified society than for
+old affection and for honour. It is an extra chapter to <i>The Book of
+Snobs</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The best way of stating the change which this book marks in Dickens can
+be put in one phrase. In this book for the first time the hero
+disappears. The hero had descended to Dickens by a long line which
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[198]</a></span>
+begins with the gods, nay, perhaps if one may say so, which begins with
+God. First comes Deity and then the image of Deity; first comes the god
+and then the demi-god, the Hercules who labours and conquers before he
+receives his heavenly crown. That idea, with continual mystery and
+modification, has continued behind all romantic tales; the demi-god
+became the hero of paganism; the hero of paganism became the
+knight-errant of Christianity; the knight-errant who wandered and was
+foiled before he triumphed became the hero of the later prose romance,
+the romance in which the hero had to fight a duel with the villain but
+always survived, in which the hero drove desperate horses through the
+night in order to rescue the heroine, but always rescued her.</p>
+
+<p>This heroic modern hero, this demi-god in a top-hat, may be said to
+reach his supreme moment and typical example about the time when Dickens
+was writing that thundering and thrilling and highly unlikely scene in
+<i>Nicholas Nickleby</i>, the scene where Nicholas hopelessly denounces the
+atrocious Gride in his hour of grinning triumph, and a thud upon the
+floor above tells them that the heroine&rsquo;s tyrannical father has
+died just in time to set her free. That is the apotheosis of the pure
+heroic as Dickens found it, and as Dickens in some sense continued it.
+It may be that it does not appear with quite so much unmistakable youth,
+beauty, valour, and virtue as it does in Nicholas Nickleby. Walter Gay
+is a simpler and more careless hero, but when he is doing any of the
+business of the story he is purely heroic. Kit Nubbles is a humbler
+hero, but he is a hero; when he is good he is very good. Even
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[199]</a></span>
+David Copperfield, who confesses to boyish tremors and boyish
+evasions in his account of his boyhood, acts the strict stiff part of
+the chivalrous gentleman in all the active and determining scenes of the
+tale. But <i>Great Expectations</i> may be called, like <i>Vanity Fair</i>, a
+novel without a hero. Almost all Thackeray&rsquo;s novels except Esmond
+are novels without a hero, but only one of Dickens&rsquo;s novels can be
+so described. I do not mean that it is a novel without a <i>jeune
+premier</i>, a young man to make love; <i>Pickwick</i> is that and <i>Oliver
+Twist</i>, and, perhaps, <i>The Old Curiosity Shop</i>. I mean that it is a
+novel without a hero in the same far deeper and more deadly sense in
+which <i>Pendennis</i> is also a novel without a hero. I mean that it is a
+novel which aims chiefly at showing that the hero is unheroic.</p>
+
+<p>All such phrases as these must appear of course to overstate the case.
+Pip is a much more delightful person than Nicholas Nickleby. Or to take
+a stronger case for the purpose of our argument, Pip is a much more
+delightful person than Sydney Carton. Still the fact remains. Most of
+Nicholas Nickleby&rsquo;s personal actions are meant to show that he is
+heroic. Most of Pip&rsquo;s actions are meant to show that he is not
+heroic. The study of Sydney Carton is meant to indicate that with all
+his vices Sydney Carton was a hero. The study of Pip is meant to
+indicate that with all his virtues Pip was a snob. The motive of the
+literary explanation is different. Pip and Pendennis are meant to show
+how circumstances can corrupt men. Sam Weller and Hercules are meant to
+show how heroes can subdue circumstances.</p>
+
+<p>This is the preliminary view of the book which is
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[200]</a></span>
+necessary if we are to regard it as a real and separate fact in the
+life of Dickens. Dickens had many moods because he was an artist; but he
+had one great mood, because he was a great artist. Any real difference
+therefore from the general drift, or rather (I apologise to Dickens) the
+general drive of his creation is very important. This is the one place
+in his work in which he does, I will not say feel like Thackeray, far
+less think like Thackeray, less still write like Thackeray, but this is
+the one of his works in which he understands Thackeray. He puts himself
+in some sense in the same place; he considers mankind at somewhat the
+same angle as mankind is considered in one of the sociable and sarcastic
+novels of Thackeray. When he deals with Pip he sets out not to show his
+strength like the strength of Hercules, but to show his weakness like
+the weakness of Pendennis. When he sets out to describe Pip&rsquo;s
+great expectation he does not set out, as in a fairytale, with the idea
+that these great expectations will be fulfilled; he sets out from the
+first with the idea that these great expectations will be disappointing.
+We might very well, as I have remarked elsewhere, apply to all
+Dickens&rsquo;s books the title <i>Great Expectations</i>. All his books are
+full of an airy and yet ardent expectation of everything; of the next
+person who shall happen to speak, of the next chimney that shall happen
+to smoke, of the next event, of the next ecstasy; of the next fulfilment
+of any eager human fancy. All his books might be called <i>Great
+Expectations</i>. But the only book to which he gave the name of <i>Great
+Expectations</i> was the only book in which the expectation was never
+realised. It was so with the whole of that splendid and
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[201]</a></span>
+unconscious generation to which he belonged. The whole glory of that
+old English middle class was that it was unconscious; its excellence was
+entirely in that, that it was the culture of the nation, and that it did
+not know it. If Dickens had ever known that he was optimistic, he would
+have ceased to be happy.</p>
+
+<p>It is necessary to make this first point clear: that in <i>Great
+Expectations</i> Dickens was really trying to be a quiet, a detached, and
+even a cynical observer of human life. Dickens was trying to be
+Thackeray. And the final and startling triumph of Dickens is this: that
+even to this moderate and modern story, he gives an incomparable energy
+which is not moderate and which is not modern. He is trying to be
+reasonable; but in spite of himself he is inspired. He is trying to be
+detailed, but in spite of himself he is gigantic. Compared to the rest
+of Dickens this is Thackeray; but compared to the whole of Thackeray we
+can only say in supreme praise of it that it is Dickens.</p>
+
+<p>Take, for example, the one question of snobbishness. Dickens has
+achieved admirably the description of the doubts and vanities of the
+wretched Pip as he walks down the street in his new gentlemanly clothes,
+the clothes of which he is so proud and so ashamed. Nothing could be so
+exquisitely human, nothing especially could be so exquisitely masculine
+as that combination of self-love and self-assertion and even insolence
+with a naked and helpless sensibility to the slightest breath of
+ridicule. Pip thinks himself better than every one else, and yet anybody
+can snub him; that is the everlasting male, and perhaps the everlasting
+gentleman. Dickens has described perfectly this <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[202]</a></span>
+quivering and defenceless dignity. Dickens has described perfectly how
+ill-armed it is against the coarse humour of real humanity&mdash;the
+real humanity which Dickens loved, but which idealists and
+philanthropists do not love, the humanity of cabmen and costermongers
+and men singing in a third-class carriage; the humanity of Trabb&rsquo;s
+boy. In describing Pip&rsquo;s weakness Dickens is as true and as
+delicate as Thackeray. But Thackeray might have been easily as true and
+as delicate as Dickens. This quick and quiet eye for the tremors of
+mankind is a thing which Dickens possessed, but which others possessed
+also. George Eliot or Thackeray could have described the weakness of
+Pip. Exactly what George Eliot and Thackeray could not have described
+was the vigour of Trabb&rsquo;s boy. There would have been admirable
+humour and observation in their accounts of that intolerable urchin.
+Thackeray would have given us little light touches of Trabb&rsquo;s boy,
+absolutely true to the quality and colour of the humour, just as in his
+novels of the eighteenth century, the glimpses of Steele or Bolingbroke
+or Doctor Johnson are exactly and perfectly true to the colour and
+quality of their humour. George Eliot in her earlier books would have
+given us shrewd authentic scraps of the real dialect of Trabb&rsquo;s
+boy, just as she gave us shrewd and authentic scraps of the real talk in
+a Midland country town. In her later books she would have given us
+highly rationalistic explanations of Trabb&rsquo;s boy; which we should
+not have read. But exactly what they could never have given, and exactly
+what Dickens does give, is the <i>bounce</i> of Trabb&rsquo;s boy. It is the
+real unconquerable rush and energy in a character which was the supreme
+and quite <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[203]</a></span>
+indescribable greatness of Dickens. He conquered by rushes; he attacked
+in masses; he carried things at the spear point in a charge of spears;
+he was the Rupert of Fiction. The thing about any figure of Dickens,
+about Sam Weller or Dick Swiveller, or Micawber, or Bagstock, or
+Trabb&rsquo;s boy,&mdash;the thing about each one of these persons is
+that he cannot be exhausted. A Dickens character hits you first on the
+nose and then in the waistcoat, and then in the eye and then in the
+waistcoat again, with the blinding rapidity of some battering engine.
+The scene in which Trabb&rsquo;s boy continually overtakes Pip in order
+to reel and stagger as at a first encounter is a thing quite within the
+real competence of such a character; it might have been suggested by
+Thackeray, or George Eliot, or any realist. But the point with Dickens
+is that there is a rush in the boy&rsquo;s rushings; the writer and the
+reader rush with him. They start with him, they stare with him, they
+stagger with him, they share an inexpressible vitality in the air which
+emanates from this violent and capering satirist. Trabb&rsquo;s boy is
+among other things a boy; he has a physical rapture in hurling himself
+like a boomerang and in bouncing to the sky like a ball. It is just
+exactly in describing this quality that Dickens is Dickens and that no
+one else comes near him. No one feels in his bones that Felix Holt was
+strong as he feels in his bones that little Quilp was strong. No one can
+feel that even Rawdon Crawley&rsquo;s splendid smack across the face of
+Lord Steyne is quite so living and life-giving as the &ldquo;kick after
+kick&rdquo; which old Mr. Weller dealt the dancing and quivering
+Stiggins as he drove him towards the trough. This quality, whether
+expressed intellectually <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[204]</a></span>
+or physically, is the profoundly popular and eternal quality in
+Dickens; it is the thing that no one else could do. This quality is the
+quality which has always given its continuous power and poetry to the
+common people everywhere. It is life; it is the joy of life felt by
+those who have nothing else but life. It is the thing that all
+aristocrats have always hated and dreaded in the people. And it is the
+thing which poor Pip really hates and dreads in Trabb&rsquo;s boy.</p>
+
+<p>A great man of letters or any great artist is symbolic without knowing
+it. The things he describes are types because they are truths.
+Shakespeare may, or may not, have ever put it to himself that Richard
+the Second was a philosophical symbol; but all good criticism must
+necessarily see him so. It may be a reasonable question whether the
+artist should be allegorical. There can be no doubt among sane men that
+the critic should be allegorical. Spenser may have lost by being less
+realistic than Fielding. But any good criticism of <i>Tom Jones</i> must be
+as mystical as the <i>Faery Queen</i>. Hence it is unavoidable in speaking of
+a fine book like <i>Great Expectations</i> that we should give even to its
+unpretentious and realistic figures a certain massive mysticism. Pip is
+Pip, but he is also the well-meaning snob. And this is even more true of
+those two great figures in the tale which stand for the English
+democracy. For, indeed, the first and last word upon the English
+democracy is said in Joe Gargery and Trabb&rsquo;s boy. The actual
+English populace, as distinct from the French populace or the Scotch or
+Irish populace, may be said to lie between those two types. The first is
+the poor man who does not assert <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[205]</a></span>
+himself at all, and the second is the poor man who asserts himself
+entirely with the weapon of sarcasm. The only way in which the English
+now ever rise in revolution is under the symbol and leadership of
+Trabb&rsquo;s boy. What pikes and shillelahs were to the Irish populace,
+what guns and barricades were to the French populace, that chaff is to
+the English populace. It is their weapon, the use of which they really
+understand. It is the one way in which they can make a rich man feel
+uncomfortable, and they use it very justifiably for all it is worth. If
+they do not cut off the heads of tyrants at least they sometimes do
+their best to make the tyrants lose their heads. The gutter boys of the
+great towns carry the art of personal criticism to so rich and delicate
+a degree that some well-dressed persons when they walk past a file of
+them feel as if they were walking past a row of omniscient critics or
+judges with a power of life and death. Here and there only is some
+ordinary human custom, some natural human pleasure suppressed in
+deference to the fastidiousness of the rich. But all the rich tremble
+before the fastidiousness of the poor.</p>
+
+<p>Of the other type of democracy it is far more difficult to speak. It is
+always hard to speak of good things or good people, for in satisfying
+the soul they take away a certain spur to speech. Dickens was often
+called a sentimentalist. In one sense he sometimes was a sentimentalist.
+But if sentimentalism be held to mean something artificial or
+theatrical, then in the core and reality of his character Dickens was
+the very reverse of a sentimentalist. He seriously and definitely loved
+goodness. To see sincerity and charity satisfied <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[206]</a></span>
+him like a meal. What some critics call his love of sweet stuff is
+really his love of plain beef and bread. Sometimes one is tempted to
+wish that in the long Dickens dinner the sweet courses could be left
+out; but this does not make the whole banquet other than a banquet
+singularly solid and simple. The critics complain of the sweet things,
+but not because they are so strong as to like simple things. They
+complain of the sweet things because they are so sophisticated as to
+like sour things; their tongues are tainted with the bitterness of
+absinthe. Yet because of the very simplicity of Dickens&rsquo;s moral
+tastes it is impossible to speak adequately of them; and Joe Gargery
+must stand as he stands in the book, a thing too obvious to be
+understood. But this may be said of him in one of his minor aspects,
+that he stands for a certain long-suffering in the English poor, a
+certain weary patience and politeness which almost breaks the heart. One
+cannot help wondering whether that great mass of silent virtue will ever
+achieve anything on this earth.</p>
+
+<hr /><p class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[207]</a></p>
+<h2><a name="MUTUAL" id="MUTUAL"></a>OUR MUTUAL FRIEND</h2>
+
+<p><i>Our Mutual Friend</i> marks a happy return to the earlier manner of
+Dickens at the end of Dickens&rsquo;s life. One might call it a sort of
+Indian summer of his farce. Those who most truly love Dickens love the
+earlier Dickens; and any return to his farce must be welcomed, like a
+young man come back from the dead. In this book indeed he does not
+merely return to his farce; he returns in a manner to his vulgarity. It
+is the old democratic and even uneducated Dickens who is writing here.
+The very title is illiterate. Any priggish pupil teacher could tell
+Dickens that there is no such phrase in English as &ldquo;our mutual
+friend.&rdquo; Any one could tell Dickens that &ldquo;our mutual
+friend&rdquo; means &ldquo;our reciprocal friend,&rdquo; and that
+&ldquo;our reciprocal friend&rdquo; means nothing. If he had only had
+all the solemn advantages of academic learning (the absence of which in
+him was lamented by the <i>Quarterly Review</i>), he would have known better.
+He would have known that the correct phrase for a man known to two
+people is &ldquo;our common friend.&rdquo; But if one calls one&rsquo;s
+friend a common friend, even that phrase is open to misunderstanding.</p>
+
+<p>I dwell with a gloomy pleasure on this mistake in the very title of the
+book because I, for one, am not pleased to see Dickens gradually
+absorbed by modern culture and good manners. Dickens, by class and
+genius, belonged to the kind of people who do talk about a
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[208]</a></span>
+&ldquo;mutual friend&rdquo;; and for that class there is a very great
+deal to be said. These two things can at least be said&mdash;that this class
+does understand the meaning of the word &ldquo;friend&rdquo; and the
+meaning of the word &ldquo;mutual.&rdquo; I know that for some long time
+before he had been slowly and subtly sucked into the whirlpool of the
+fashionable views of later England. I know that in <i>Bleak House</i> he
+treats the aristocracy far more tenderly than he treats them in <i>David
+Copperfield</i>. I know that in <i>A Tale of Two Cities</i>, having come under
+the influence of Carlyle, he treats revolution as strange and weird,
+whereas under the influence of Cobbett he would have treated it as
+obvious and reasonable. I know that in <i>The Mystery of Edwin Drood</i> he
+not only praised the Minor Canon of Cloisterham at the expense of the
+dissenting demagogue, Honeythunder; I know that he even took the last
+and most disastrous step in the modern English reaction. While blaming
+the old Cloisterham monks (who were democratic), he praised the
+old-world peace that they had left behind them&mdash;an old-world peace which
+is simply one of the last amusements of aristocracy. The modern rich
+feel quite at home with the dead monks. They would have felt anything
+but comfortable with the live ones. I know, in short, how the simple
+democracy of Dickens was gradually dimmed by the decay and reaction of
+the middle of the nineteenth century. I know that he fell into some of
+the bad habits of aristocratic sentimentalism. I know that he used the
+word &ldquo;gentleman&rdquo; as meaning good man. But all this only adds
+to the unholy joy with which I realise that the very title of one of his
+best books was a vulgarism. It <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[209]</a></span>
+is pleasant to contemplate this last unconscious knock in the eye for
+the gentility with which Dickens was half impressed. Dickens is the old
+self-made man; you may take him or leave him. He has its disadvantages
+and its merits. No university man would have written the title; no
+university man could have written the book.</p>
+
+<p>If it were a mere matter of the accident of a name it would not be worth
+while thus to dwell on it, even as a preface. But the title is in this
+respect typical of the tale. The novel called <i>Our Mutual Friend</i> is in
+many ways a real reaction towards the earlier Dickens manner. I have
+remarked that <i>Little Dorrit</i> was a reversion to the form of the first
+books, but not to their spirit; <i>Our Mutual Friend</i> is a reversion to
+the spirit as well as the form. Compare, for instance, the public
+figures that make a background in each book. Mr. Merdle is a commercial
+man having no great connection with the plot; similarly Mr. Podsnap is a
+commercial man having no great connection with the plot. This is
+altogether in the spirit of the earlier books; the whole point of an
+early Dickens novel was to have as many people as possible entirely
+unconnected with the plot. But exactly because both studies are
+irrelevant, the contrast between them can be more clearly perceived.
+Dickens goes out of his way to describe Merdle; and it is a gloomy
+description. But Dickens goes out of his way to describe Podsnap, and it
+is a happy and hilarious description. It recalls the days when he hunted
+great game; when he went out of his way to entrap such adorable monsters
+as Mr. Pecksniff or Mr. Vincent Crummles. With these wild beings we
+never bother about the cause of their coming. Such guests in a
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[210]</a></span>\
+story may be uninvited, but they are never <i>de trop</i>. They earn their
+night&rsquo;s lodging in any tale by being so uproariously amusing; like
+little Tommy Tucker in the legend, they sing for their supper. This is
+really the marked truth about <i>Our Mutual Friend</i>, as a stage in the
+singular latter career of Dickens. It is like the leaping up and flaming
+of a slowly dying fire. The best things in the book are in the old best
+manner of the author. They have that great Dickens quality of being
+something which is pure farce and yet which is not superficial; an
+unfathomable farce&mdash;a farce that goes down to the roots of the
+universe. The highest compliment that can ever be paid to the humour of
+Dickens is paid when some lady says, with the sudden sincerity of her
+sex, that it is &ldquo;too silly.&rdquo; The phrase is really a
+perfectly sound and acute criticism. Humour does consist in being too
+silly, in passing the borderland, in breaking through the floor of sense
+and falling into some starry abyss of nonsense far below our ordinary
+human life. This &ldquo;too silly&rdquo; quality is really present in
+<i>Our Mutual Friend</i>. It is present in <i>Our Mutual Friend</i> just as it is
+present in <i>Pickwick</i>, or <i>Martin Chuzzlewit</i>; just as it is not present
+in <i>Little Dorrit</i> or in <i>Hard Times</i>. Many tests might be employed. One
+is the pleasure in purely physical jokes&mdash;jokes about the body. The
+general dislike which every one felt for Mr. Stiggins&rsquo;s nose is of
+the same kind as the ardent desire which Mr. Lammle felt for Mr.
+Fledgeby&rsquo;s nose. &ldquo;Give me your nose, Sir,&rdquo; said Mr.
+Lammle. That sentence alone would be enough to show that the young
+Dickens had never died.</p>
+
+<p>The opening of a book goes for a great deal. The <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[211]</a></span>
+opening of <i>Our Mutual Friend</i> is much more instinctively energetic and
+light-hearted than that of any of the other novels of his concluding
+period. Dickens had always enough optimism to make his stories end well.
+He had not, in his later years, always enough optimism to make them
+begin well. Even <i>Great Expectations</i>, the saddest of his later books,
+ends well; it ends well in spite of himself, who had intended it to end
+badly. But if we leave the evident case of good endings and take the
+case of good beginnings, we see how much <i>Our Mutual Friend</i> stands out
+from among the other novels of the evening or the end of Dickens. The
+tale of <i>Little Dorrit</i> begins in a prison. One of the prisoners is a
+villain, and his villainy is as dreary as the prison; that might matter
+nothing. But the other prisoner is vivacious, and even his vivacity is
+dreary. The first note struck is sad. In the tale of <i>Edwin Drood</i> the
+first scene is in an opium den, suffocated with every sort of phantasy
+and falsehood. Nor is it true that these openings are merely accidental;
+they really cast their shadow over the tales. The people of <i>Little
+Dorrit</i> begin in prison; and it is the whole point of the book that
+people never get out of prison. The story of <i>Edwin Drood</i> begins amid
+the fumes of opium, and it never gets out of the fumes of opium. The
+darkness of that strange and horrible smoke is deliberately rolled over
+the whole story. Dickens, in his later years, permitted more and more
+his story to take the cue from its inception. All the more remarkable,
+therefore, is the real jerk and spurt of good spirits with which he
+opens <i>Our Mutual Friend</i>. It begins with a good piece of rowdy satire,
+wildly exaggerated and extremely true.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[212]</a></span>
+It belongs to the same class as the first chapter of <i>Martin
+Chuzzlewit</i>, with its preposterous pedigree of the Chuzzlewit family, or
+even the first chapter of <i>Pickwick</i>, with its immortal imbecilities
+about the Theory of Tittlebats and Mr. Blotton of Aldgate. Doubtless the
+early satiric chapter in <i>Our Mutual Friend</i> is of a more strategic and
+ingenious kind of satire than can be found in these early and explosive
+parodies. Still, there is a quality common to both, and that quality is
+the whole of Dickens. It is a quality difficult to define&mdash;hence
+the whole difficulty of criticising Dickens. Perhaps it can be best
+stated in two separate statements or as two separate symptoms. The first
+is the mere fact that the reader rushes to read it. The second is the
+mere fact that the writer rushed to write it.</p>
+
+<p>This beginning, which is like a burst of the old exuberant Dickens, is,
+of course, the Veneering dinner-party. In its own way it is as good as
+anything that Dickens ever did. There is the old faculty of managing a
+crowd, of making character clash with character, that had made Dickens
+not only the democrat but even the demagogue of fiction. For if it is
+hard to manage a mob, it is hardest of all to manage a swell mob. The
+particular kind of chaos that is created by the hospitality of a rich
+upstart has perhaps never been so accurately and outrageously described.
+Every touch about the thing is true; to this day any one can test it if
+he goes to a dinner of this particular kind. How admirable, for
+instance, is the description of the way in which all the guests ignored
+the host; how the host and hostess peered and gaped for some stray
+attention as if they had been a pair of poor relations. Again, how well,
+as a matter <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[213]</a></span>
+of social colour, the distinctions between the type and tone of the
+guests are made even in the matter of this unguestlike insolence. How
+well Dickens distinguishes the ill-bred indifference of Podsnap from the
+well-bred indifference of Mortimer Lightwood and Eugene Wrayburn. How
+well he distinguishes the bad manners of the merchant from the equally
+typical bad manners of the gentleman. Above all, how well he catches the
+character of the creature who is really the master of all these: the
+impenetrable male servant. Nowhere in literature is the truth about
+servants better told. For that truth is simply this: that the secret of
+aristocracy is hidden even from aristocrats. Servants, butlers, footmen,
+are the high priests who have the real dispensation; and even gentlemen
+are afraid of them. Dickens was never more right than when he made the
+new people, the Veneerings, employ a butler who despised not only them
+but all their guests and acquaintances. The admirable person called the
+Analytical Chemist shows his perfection particularly in the fact that he
+regards all the sham gentlemen and all the real gentlemen with the same
+gloomy and incurable contempt. He offers wine to the offensive Podsnap
+or the shrieking Tippins with a melancholy sincerity and silence; but he
+offers his letter to the aristocratic and unconscious Mortimer with the
+same sincerity and with the same silence. It is a great pity that the
+Analytical Chemist only occurs in two or three scenes of this excellent
+story. As far as I know, he never really says a word from one end of the
+book to the other; but he is one of the best characters in Dickens.</p>
+
+<p>Round the Veneering dinner-table are collected not
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[214]</a></span>
+indeed the best characters in Dickens, but certainly the best
+characters in <i>Our Mutual Friend</i>. Certainly one exception must be made.
+Fledgeby is unaccountably absent. There was really no reason why he
+should not have been present at a dinner-party given by the Veneerings
+and including the Lammles. His money was at least more genuine than
+theirs. If he had been present the party would really have included all
+that is important in <i>Our Mutual Friend</i>. For indeed, outside Mr.
+Fledgeby and the people at the dinner-party, there is something a little
+heavy and careless about the story. Mr. Silas Wegg is really funny; and
+he serves the purpose of a necessary villain in the plot. But his humour
+and his villainy seem to have no particular connection with each other;
+when he is not scheming he seems the last man likely to scheme. He is
+rather like one of Dickens&rsquo;s agreeable Bohemians, a pleasant
+companion, a quoter of fine verses. His villainy seems an artificial
+thing attached to him, like his wooden leg. For while his villainy is
+supposed to be of a dull, mean, and bitter sort (quite unlike, for
+instance, the uproarious villainy of Quilp), his humour is of the
+sincere, flowing and lyric character, like that of Dick Swiveller or Mr.
+Micawber. He tells Mr. Boffin that he will drop into poetry in a
+friendly way. He does drop into it in a friendly way; in much too really
+a friendly way to make him convincing as a mere calculating knave. He
+and Mr. Venus are such natural and genuine companions that one does not
+see why if Venus repents Wegg should not repent too. In short, Wegg is a
+convenience for a plot and not a very good plot at that. But if he is
+one of the blots on the business, he is not the principal
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[215]</a></span>
+one. If the real degradation of Wegg is not very convincing, it is at
+least immeasurably more convincing than the pretended degradation of
+Boffin. The passage in which Boffin appears as a sort of miser, and then
+afterwards explains that he only assumed the character for reasons of
+his own, has something about it highly jerky and unsatisfactory. The
+truth of the whole matter I think, almost certainly, is that Dickens did
+not originally mean Boffin&rsquo;s lapse to be fictitious. He originally
+meant Boffin really to be corrupted by wealth, slowly to degenerate and
+as slowly to repent. But the story went too quickly for this long,
+double, and difficult process; therefore Dickens at the last moment made
+a sudden recovery possible by representing that the whole business had
+been a trick. Consequently, this episode is not an error merely in the
+sense that we may find many errors in a great writer like Dickens; it is
+a mistake patched up with another mistake. It is a case of that
+ossification which occurs round the healing of an actual fracture; the
+story had broken down and been mended.</p>
+
+<p>If Dickens had fulfilled what was probably his original design, and
+described the slow freezing of Boffin&rsquo;s soul in prosperity, I do
+not say that he would have done the thing well. He was not good at
+describing change in anybody, especially not good at describing a change
+for the worse. The tendency of all his characters is upwards, like
+bubbles, never downwards, like stones. But at least it would probably
+have been more credible than the story as it stands; for the story as it
+stands is actually less credible than any conceivable kind of moral ruin
+for Boffin. Such a character as his&mdash;rough, simple and lumberingly
+unconscious&mdash;might be more <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[216]</a></span>
+easily conceived as really sinking in self-respect and honour than as
+keeping up, month after month, so strained and inhuman a theatrical
+performance. To a good man (of that particular type) it would be easier
+to be bad than to pretend to be bad. It might have taken years to turn
+Noddy Boffin into a miser; but it would have taken centuries to turn him
+into an actor. This unreality in the later Boffin scenes makes the end
+of the story of John Harmon somewhat more unimpressive perhaps than it
+might otherwise have been. Upon no hypothesis, however, can he be made
+one of the more impressive figures of Dickens. It is true that it is an
+unfair criticism to object, as some have done, that Dickens does not
+succeed in disguising the identity of John Harmon with John Rokesmith.
+Dickens never intended to disguise it; the whole story would be mainly
+unintelligible and largely uninteresting if it had been successfully
+disguised. But though John Harmon or Rokesmith was never intended to be
+merely a man of mystery, it is not quite so easy to say what he was
+intended to be. Bella is a possible and pretty sketch. Mrs. Wilfer, her
+mother, is an entirely impossible and entirely delightful one. Miss
+Podsnap is not only excellent, she is to a healthy taste positively
+attractive; there is a real suggestion in her of the fact that humility
+is akin to truth, even when humility takes its more comic form of
+shyness. There is not in all literature a more human <i>cri de c&oelig;ur</i> than
+that with which Georgiana Podsnap receives the information that a young
+man has professed himself to be attracted by her&mdash;&ldquo;Oh what a
+Fool he must be!&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Two other figures require praise, though they are in
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[217]</a></span>
+the more tragic manner which Dickens touched from time to time in his
+later period. Bradley Headstone is really a successful villain; so
+successful that he fully captures our sympathies. Also there is
+something original in the very conception. It was a new notion to add to
+the villains of fiction, whose thoughts go quickly, this villain whose
+thoughts go slow but sure; and it was a new notion to combine a deadly
+criminality not with high life or the slums (the usual haunts for
+villains) but with the laborious respectability of the lower, middle
+classes. The other good conception is the boy, Bradley Headstone&rsquo;s
+pupil, with his dull, inexhaustible egoism, his pert, unconscious
+cruelty, and the strict decorum and incredible baseness of his views of
+life. It is singular that Dickens, who was not only a radical and a
+social reformer, but one who would have been particularly concerned to
+maintain the principle of modern popular education, should nevertheless
+have seen so clearly this potential evil in the mere educationalism of
+our time&mdash;the fact that merely educating the democracy may easily
+mean setting to work to despoil it of all the democratic virtues. It is
+better to be Lizzie Hexam and not know how to read and write than to be
+Charlie Hexam and not know how to appreciate Lizzie Hexam. It is not
+only necessary that the democracy should be taught; it is also necessary
+that the democracy should be taught democracy. Otherwise it will
+certainly fall a victim to that snobbishness and system of worldly
+standards which is the most natural and easy of all the forms of human
+corruption. This is one of the many dangers which Dickens saw before it
+existed. Dickens was really a prophet; far more of a prophet than
+Carlyle.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 486px;"><a name="CD1868" id="CD1868"></a>
+<img src="images/dickens1868.jpg" width="486" height="600" alt="" title="" />
+<span class="caption">Charles Dickens, 1868<br />
+From a photograph by Gurney.</span></div>
+
+<p class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[218]</a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="DROOD" id="DROOD"></a>EDWIN DROOD</h2>
+
+<p><i>Pickwick</i> was a work partly designed by others, but ultimately filled
+up by Dickens. <i>Edwin Drood</i>, the last book, was a book designed by
+Dickens, but ultimately filled up by others. The <i>Pickwick Papers</i>
+showed how much Dickens could make out of other people&rsquo;s
+suggestions; <i>The Mystery of Edwin Drood</i> shows how very little other
+people can make out of Dickens&rsquo;s suggestions.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens was meant by Heaven to be the great melodramatist; so that even
+his literary end was melodramatic. Something more seems hinted at in the
+cutting short of <i>Edwin Drood</i> by Dickens than the mere cutting short of
+a good novel by a great man. It seems rather like the last taunt of some
+elf, leaving the world, that it should be this story which is not ended,
+this story which is only a story. The only one of Dickens&rsquo;s novels
+which he did not finish was the only one that really needed finishing.
+He never had but one thoroughly good plot to tell; and that he has only
+told in heaven. This is what separates the case in question from any
+parallel cases of novelists cut off in the act of creation. That great
+novelist, for instance, with whom Dickens is constantly compared, died
+also in the middle of <i>Denis Duval</i>. But any one can see in <i>Denis
+Duval</i> the qualities of the later work of Thackeray; the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[219]</a></span>
+increasing discursiveness, the increasing retrospective poetry, which
+had been in part the charm and in part the failure of <i>Philip</i> and <i>The
+Virginians</i>. But to Dickens it was permitted to die at a dramatic moment
+and to leave a dramatic mystery. Any Thackerayan could have completed
+the plot of <i>Denis Duval</i>; except indeed that a really sympathetic
+Thackerayan might have had some doubt as to whether there was any plot
+to complete. But Dickens, having had far too little plot in his stories
+previously, had far too much plot in the story he never told. Dickens
+dies in the act of telling, not his tenth novel, but his first news of
+murder. He drops down dead as he is in the act of denouncing the
+assassin. It is permitted to Dickens, in short, to come to a literary
+end as strange as his literary beginning. He began by completing the old
+romance of travel. He ended by inventing the new detective story.</p>
+
+<p>It is as a detective story first and last that we have to consider <i>The
+Mystery of Edwin Drood</i>. This does not mean, of course, that the details
+are not often admirable in their swift and penetrating humour; to say
+that of the book would be to say that Dickens did not write it. Nothing
+could be truer, for instance, than the manner in which the dazed and
+drunken dignity of Durdles illustrates a certain bitterness at the
+bottom of the bewilderment of the poor. Nothing could be better than the
+way in which the haughty and allusive conversation between Miss
+Twinkleton and the landlady illustrates the maddening preference of some
+females for skating upon thin social ice. There is an even better
+example than these of the original humorous insight of Dickens; and one
+not very often remarked, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[220]</a></span>
+because of its brevity and its unimportance in the narrative. But
+Dickens never did anything better than the short account of Mr.
+Grewgious&rsquo;s dinner being brought from the tavern by two waiters:
+&ldquo;a stationary waiter,&rdquo; and &ldquo;a flying waiter.&rdquo;
+The &ldquo;flying waiter&rdquo; brought the food and the
+&ldquo;stationary waiter&rdquo; quarrelled with him; the &ldquo;flying
+waiter&rdquo; brought glasses and the &ldquo;stationary waiter&rdquo;
+looked through them. Finally, it will be remembered the
+&ldquo;stationary waiter&rdquo; left the room, casting a glance which
+indicated &ldquo;let it be understood that all emoluments are mine, and
+that Nil is the reward of this slave.&rdquo; Still, Dickens wrote the
+book as a detective story; he wrote it as <i>The Mystery of Edwin Drood</i>.
+And alone, perhaps, among detective-story writers, he never lived to
+destroy his mystery. Here alone then among the Dickens novels it is
+necessary to speak of the plot and of the plot alone. And when we speak
+of the plot it becomes immediately necessary to speak of the two or
+three standing explanations which celebrated critics have given of the
+plot.</p>
+
+<p>The story, so far as it was written by Dickens, can be read here. It
+describes, as will be seen, the disappearance of the young architect
+Edwin Drood after a night of festivity which was supposed to celebrate
+his reconciliation with a temporary enemy, Neville Landless, and was
+held at the house of his uncle John Jasper. Dickens continued the tale
+long enough to explain or explode the first and most obvious of his
+riddles. Long before the existing part terminates it has become evident
+that Drood has been put away, not by his obvious opponent, Landless, but
+by his uncle who professes for him an almost painful affection. The fact
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[221]</a></span>
+that we all know this, however, ought not in fairness to blind us to
+the fact that, considered as the first fraud in a detective story, it
+has been, with great skill, at once suggested and concealed. Nothing,
+for instance, could be cleverer as a piece of artistic mystery than the
+fact that Jasper, the uncle, always kept his eyes fixed on Drood&rsquo;s
+face with a dark and watchful tenderness; the thing is so told that at
+first we really take it as only indicating something morbid in the
+affection; it is only afterwards that the frightful fancy breaks upon us
+that it is not morbid affection but morbid antagonism. This first
+mystery (which is no longer a mystery) of Jasper&rsquo;s guilt, is only
+worth remarking because it shows that Dickens meant and felt himself
+able to mask all his batteries with real artistic strategy and artistic
+caution. The manner of the unmasking of Jasper marks the manner and tone
+in which the whole tale was to be told. Here we have not got to do with
+Dickens simply giving himself away, as he gave himself away in
+<i>Pickwick</i> or <i>The Christmas Carol</i>. Not that one complains of his
+giving himself away; there was no better gift.</p>
+
+<p>What was the mystery of Edwin Drood from Dickens&rsquo;s point of view
+we shall never know, except perhaps from Dickens in heaven, and then he
+will very likely have forgotten. But the mystery of Edwin Drood from our
+point of view, from that of his critics, and those who have with some
+courage (after his death) attempted to be his collaborators, is simply
+this. There is no doubt that Jasper either murdered Drood or supposed
+that he had murdered him. This certainty we have from the fact that it
+is the whole point of a scene between Jasper and Drood&rsquo;s lawyer
+Grewgious <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[222]</a></span>
+in which Jasper is struck down with remorse when he realises that Drood
+has been killed (from his point of view) needlessly and without profit.
+The only question is whether Jasper&rsquo;s remorse was as needless as
+his murder. In other words the only question is whether, while he
+certainly thought he had murdered Drood, he had really done it. It need
+hardly be said that such a doubt would not have been raised for nothing;
+gentlemen like Jasper do not as a rule waste good remorse except upon
+successful crime. The origin of the doubt about the real death of Drood
+is this. Towards the latter end of the existing chapters there appears
+very abruptly, and with a quite ostentatious air of mystery, a character
+called Datchery. He appears for the purpose of spying upon Jasper and
+getting up some case against him; at any rate, if he has not this
+purpose in the story he has no other earthly purpose in it. He is an old
+gentleman of juvenile energy, with a habit of carrying his hat in his
+hand even in the open air; which some have interpreted as meaning that
+he feels the unaccustomed weight of a wig. Now there are one or two
+people in the story who this person might possibly be. Notably there is
+one person in the story who seems as if he were meant to be something,
+but who hitherto has certainly been nothing; I mean Bazzard, Mr.
+Grewgious&rsquo;s clerk, a sulky fellow interested in theatricals, of
+whom an unnecessary fuss is made. There is also Mr. Grewgious himself,
+and there is also another suggestion, so much more startling that I
+shall have to deal with it later.</p>
+
+<p>For the moment, however, the point is this: That ingenious writer, Mr.
+Proctor, started the highly <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[223]</a></span>
+plausible theory that this Datchery was Drood himself, who had not
+really been killed. He adduced a most complex and complete scheme
+covering nearly all the details; but the strongest argument he had was
+rather one of general artistic effect. This argument has been quite
+perfectly summed up by Mr. Andrew Lang in one sentence: &ldquo;If Edwin
+Drood is dead, there is not much mystery about him.&rdquo; This is quite
+true; Dickens, when writing in so deliberate, nay, dark and
+conspiratorial a manner, would surely have kept the death of Drood and
+the guilt of Jasper hidden a little longer if the only real mystery had
+been the guilt of Jasper and the death of Drood. It certainly seems
+artistically more likely that there was a further mystery of Edwin
+Drood; not the mystery that he was murdered, but the mystery that he was
+not murdered. It is true indeed that Mr. Cumming Walters has a theory of
+Datchery (to which I have already darkly alluded) a theory which is wild
+enough to be the centre not only of any novel but of any harlequinade.
+But the point is that even Mr. Cumming Walters&rsquo;s theory, though it
+makes the mystery more extraordinary, does not make it any more of a
+mystery of Edwin Drood. It should not have been called <i>The Mystery of
+Drood</i>, but <i>The Mystery of Datchery</i>. This is the strongest case for
+Proctor; if the story tells of Drood coming back as Datchery, the story
+does at any rate fulfil the title upon its title-page.</p>
+
+<p>The principal objection to Proctor&rsquo;s theory is that there seems no
+adequate reason why Jasper should not have murdered his nephew if he
+wanted to. And there seems even less reason why Drood, if unsuccessfully
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[224]</a></span>
+murdered, should not have raised the alarm. Happy young architects,
+when nearly strangled by elderly organists, do not generally stroll away
+and come back some time afterwards in a wig and with a false name.
+Superficially it would seem almost as odd to find the murderer
+investigating the origin of the murder, as to find the corpse
+investigating it. To this problem two of the ablest literary critics of
+our time, Mr. Andrew Lang and Mr. William Archer (both of them persuaded
+generally of the Proctor theory) have especially addressed themselves.
+Both have come to the same substantial conclusion; and I suspect that
+they are right. They hold that Jasper (whose mania for opium is much
+insisted on in the tale) had some sort of fit, or trance, or other
+physical seizure as he was committing the crime so that he left it
+unfinished; and they also hold that he had drugged Drood, so that Drood,
+when he recovered from the attack, was doubtful about who had been his
+assailant. This might really explain, if a little fancifully, his coming
+back to the town in the character of a detective. He might think it due
+to his uncle (whom he last remembered in a kind of murderous vision) to
+make an independent investigation as to whether he was really guilty or
+not. He might say, as Hamlet said of a vision equally terrifying,
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll have grounds more relative than this.&rdquo; In
+fairness it must be said that there is something vaguely shaky about
+this theory; chiefly, I think, in this respect; that there is a sort of
+farcical cheerfulness about Datchery which does not seem altogether
+appropriate to a lad who ought to be in an agony of doubt as to whether
+his best friend was or was not his assassin. Still there are many such
+incongruities <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[225]</a></span>
+in Dickens; and the explanation of Mr. Archer and Mr. Lang is an
+explanation. I do not believe that any explanation as good can be given
+to account for the tale being called <i>The Mystery of Edwin Drood</i>, if
+the tale practically starts with his corpse.</p>
+
+<p>If Drood is really dead one cannot help feeling the story ought to end
+where it does end, not by accident but by design. The murder is
+explained. Jasper is ready to be hanged, and every one else in a decent
+novel ought to be ready to be married. If there was to be much more of
+anything, it must have been of anticlimax. Nevertheless there are
+degrees of anticlimax. Some of the more obvious explanations of Datchery
+are quite reasonable, but they are distinctly tame. For instance,
+Datchery may be Bazzard; but it is not very exciting if he is; for we
+know nothing about Bazzard and care less. Again, he might be Grewgious;
+but there is something pointless about one grotesque character dressing
+up as another grotesque character actually less amusing than himself.
+Now, Mr. Cumming Walters has at least had the distinction of inventing a
+theory which makes the story at least an interesting story, even if it
+is not exactly the story that is promised on the cover of the book. The
+obvious enemy of Drood, on whom suspicion first falls, the swarthy and
+sulky Landless, has a sister even swarthier and, except for her queenly
+dignity, even sulkier than he. This barbaric princess is evidently meant
+to be (in a sombre way) in love with Crisparkle, the clergyman and
+muscular Christian who represents the breezy element in the emotions of
+the tale. Mr. Cumming Walters seriously maintains that it is this
+barbaric princess <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[226]</a></span>
+who puts on a wig and dresses up as Mr. Datchery. He urges his case
+with much ingenuity of detail. Helena Landless certainly had a motive;
+to save her brother, who was accused falsely, by accusing Jasper justly.
+She certainly had some of the faculties; it is elaborately stated in the
+earlier part of her story that she was accustomed as a child to dress up
+in male costume and run into the wildest adventures. There may be
+something in Mr. Cumming Walters&rsquo;s argument that the very
+flippancy of Datchery is the self-conscious flippancy of a strong woman
+in such an odd situation; certainly there is the same flippancy in
+Portia and in Rosalind. Nevertheless, I think, there is one final
+objection to the theory; and that is simply this, that it is comic. It
+is generally wrong to represent a great master of the grotesque as being
+grotesque exactly where he does not intend to be. And I am persuaded
+that if Dickens had really meant Helena to turn into Datchery, he would
+have made her from the first in some way more light, eccentric, and
+laughable; he would have made her at least as light and laughable as
+Rosa. As it is, there is something strangely stiff and incredible about
+the idea of a lady so dark and dignified dressing up as a swaggering old
+gentleman in a blue coat and grey trousers. We might almost as easily
+imagine Edith Dombey dressing up as Major Bagstock. We might almost as
+easily imagine Rebecca in <i>Ivanhoe</i> dressing up as Isaac of York.</p>
+
+<p>Of course such a question can never really be settled precisely, because
+it is the question not merely of a mystery but of a puzzle. For here the
+detective novel differs from every other kind of novel. The ordinary
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[227]</a></span>
+novelist desires to keep his readers to the point; the detective
+novelist actually desires to keep his readers off the point. In the
+first case, every touch must help to tell the reader what he means; in
+the second case, most of the touches must conceal or even contradict
+what he means. You are supposed to see and appreciate the smallest
+gestures of a good actor; but you do not see all the gestures of a
+conjuror, if he is a good conjuror. Hence, into the critical estimate of
+such works as this, there is introduced a problem, an extra perplexity,
+which does not exist in other cases. I mean the problem of the things
+commonly called blinds. Some of the points which we pick out as
+suggestive may have been put in as deceptive. Thus the whole conflict
+between a critic with one theory, like Mr. Lang, and a critic with
+another theory, like Mr. Cumming Walters, becomes eternal and a trifle
+farcical. Mr. Walters says that all Mr. Lang&rsquo;s clues were blinds;
+Mr. Lang says that all Mr. Walters&rsquo;s clues were blinds. Mr.
+Walters can say that some passages seemed to show that Helena was
+Datchery; Mr. Lang can reply that those passages were only meant to
+deceive simple people like Mr. Walters into supposing that she was
+Datchery. Similarly Mr. Lang can say that the return of Drood is
+foreshadowed; and Mr. Walters can reply that it was foreshadowed because
+it was never meant to come off. There seems no end to this insane
+process; anything that Dickens wrote may or may not mean the opposite of
+what it says. Upon this principle I should be very ready for one to
+declare that all the suggested Datcherys were really blinds; merely
+because they can naturally be suggested. I would undertake to maintain
+that Mr.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[228]</a></span>
+Datchery is really Miss Twinkleton, who has a mercenary interest in
+keeping Rosa Budd at her school. This suggestion does not seem to me to
+be really much more humorous than Mr. Cumming Walters&rsquo;s theory.
+Yet either may certainly be true. Dickens is dead, and a number of
+splendid scenes and startling adventures have died with him. Even if we
+get the right solution we shall not know that it is right. The tale
+might have been, and yet it has not been.</p>
+
+<p>And I think there is no thought so much calculated to make one doubt
+death itself, to feel that sublime doubt which has created all
+religion&mdash;the doubt that found death incredible. Edwin Drood may or may
+not have really died; but surely Dickens did not really die. Surely our
+real detective liveth and shall appear in the latter days of the earth.
+For a finished tale may give a man immortality in the light and literary
+sense; but an unfinished tale suggests another immortality, more
+essential and more strange.</p>
+
+<hr /><p class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[229]</a></p>
+<h2><a name="HUMPHREY" id="HUMPHREY"></a>MASTER HUMPHREY&rsquo;S CLOCK</h2>
+
+<p>It is quite indispensable to include a criticism of <i>Master
+Humphrey&rsquo;s Clock</i> in any survey of Dickens, although it is not one
+of the books of which his admirers would chiefly boast; although perhaps
+it is almost the only one of which he would not have boasted himself. As
+a triumph of Dickens, at least, it is not of great importance. But as a
+sample of Dickens it happens to be of quite remarkable importance. The
+very fact that it is for the most part somewhat more level and even
+monotonous than most of his creations, makes us realise, as it were,
+against what level and monotony those creations commonly stand out. This
+book is the background of his mind. It is the basis and minimum of him
+which was always there. Alone, of all written things, this shows how he
+felt when he was not writing. Dickens might have written it in his
+sleep. That is to say, it is written by a sluggish Dickens, a half
+automatic Dickens, a dreaming and drifting Dickens; but still by the
+enduring Dickens.</p>
+
+<p>But this truth can only be made evident by beginning nearer to the root
+of the matter. <i>Nicholas Nickleby</i> had just completed, or, to speak more
+strictly, confirmed, the popularity of the young author; wonderful as
+<i>Pickwick</i> was it might have been a nine days&rsquo; wonder; <i>Oliver
+Twist</i> had been powerful but painful; it was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[230]</a></span>
+<i>Nicholas Nickleby</i> that proved the man to be a great productive force
+of which one could ask more, of which one could ask all things. His
+publishers, Chapman and Hall, seem to have taken at about this point
+that step which sooner or later most publishers do take with regard to a
+half successful man who is becoming wholly successful. Instead of asking
+him for something, they asked him for anything. They made him, so to
+speak, the editor of his own works. And indeed it is literally as the
+editor of his own works that he next appears; for the next thing to
+which he proposes to put his name is not a novel, but for all practical
+purposes a magazine. Yet although it is a magazine, it is a magazine
+entirely written by himself; the publishers, in point of fact, wanted to
+create a kind of Dickens Miscellany, in a much more literal sense than
+that in which we speak of a Bentley Miscellany. Dickens was in no way
+disposed to dislike such a job; for the more miscellaneous he was the
+more he enjoyed himself. And indeed this early experiment of his bears a
+great deal of resemblance to those later experiences in which he was the
+editor of two popular periodicals. The editor of <i>Master
+Humphrey&rsquo;s Clock</i> was a kind of type or precursor of the editor of
+<i>Household Words</i> and <i>All the Year Round</i>. There was the same sense of
+absolute ease in an atmosphere of infinite gossip. There was the same
+great advantage gained by a man of genius who wrote best scrappily and
+by episodes. The omnipotence of the editor helped the eccentricities of
+the author. He could excuse himself for all his own shortcomings. He
+could begin a novel, get tired of it, and turn it into a short story. He
+could begin a short <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[231]</a></span>
+story, get fond of it, and turn it into a novel. Thus in the days of
+<i>Household Words</i> he could begin a big scheme of stories, such as
+<i>Somebody&rsquo;s Luggage</i>, or <i>Seven Poor Travellers</i>, and after
+writing a tale or two toss the rest to his colleagues. Thus, on the
+other hand, in the time of <i>Master Humphrey&rsquo;s Clock</i>, he could
+begin one small adventure of Master Humphrey and find himself unable to
+stop it. It is quite clear I think (though only from moral evidence,
+which some call reading between the lines) that he originally meant to
+tell many separate tales of Master Humphrey&rsquo;s wanderings in
+London, only one of which, and that a short one, was to have been
+concerned with a little girl going home. Fortunately for us that little
+girl had a grandfather, and that grandfather had a curiosity shop and
+also a nephew, and that nephew had an entirely irrelevant friend whom
+men and angels called Richard Swiveller. Once having come into the
+society of Swiveller it is not unnatural that Dickens stayed there for a
+whole book. The essential point for us here, however, is that <i>Master
+Humphrey&rsquo;s Clock</i> was stopped by the size and energy of the thing
+that had come of it. It died in childbirth.</p>
+
+<p>There is, however, another circumstance which, even in ordinary public
+opinion, makes this miscellany important, besides the great novel that
+came out of it. I mean that the ordinary reader can remember one great
+thing about <i>Master Humphrey&rsquo;s Clock</i>, besides the fact that it
+was the frame-work of <i>The Old Curiosity Shop</i>. He remembers that Mr.
+Pickwick and the Wellers rise again from the dead. Dickens makes Samuel
+Pickwick become a member of Master Humphrey&rsquo;s<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[232]</a></span>
+Clock Society; and he institutes a parallel society in the kitchen
+under the name of Mr. Weller&rsquo;s Watch.</p>
+
+<p>Before we consider the question of whether Dickens was wise when he did
+this, it is worth remarking how really odd it is that this is the only
+place where he did it. Dickens, one would have thought, was the one man
+who might naturally have introduced old characters into new stories.
+Dickens, as a matter of fact, was almost the one man who never did it.
+It would have seemed natural in him for a double reason; first, that his
+characters were very valuable to him, and second that they were not very
+valuable to his particular stories. They were dear to him, and they are
+dear to us; but they really might as well have turned up (within reason)
+in one environment as well as in another. We, I am sure, should be
+delighted to meet Mr. Mantalini in the story of <i>Dombey and Son</i>. And he
+certainly would not be much missed from the plot of Nicholas Nickleby.
+&ldquo;I am an affectionate father,&rdquo; said Dickens, &ldquo;to all
+the children of my fancy; but like many other parents I have in my heart
+of hearts a favourite child; and his name is David Copperfield.&rdquo;
+Yet although his heart must often have yearned backwards to the children
+of his fancy whose tale was already told, yet he never touched one of
+them again even with the point of his pen. The characters in <i>David
+Copperfield</i>, as in all the others, were dead for him after he had done
+the book; if he loved them as children, it was as dead and sanctified
+children. It is a curious test of the strength and even reticence that
+underlay the seeming exuberance of Dickens, that he <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[233]</a></span>
+never did yield at all to exactly that indiscretion or act of
+sentimentalism which would seem most natural to his emotions and his
+art. Or rather he never did yield to it except here in this one case;
+the case of <i>Master Humphrey&rsquo;s Clock</i>.</p>
+
+<p>And it must be remembered that nearly everybody else did yield to it.
+Especially did those writers who are commonly counted Dickens&rsquo;s
+superiors in art and exactitude and closeness to connected reality.
+Thackeray wallowed in it; Anthony Trollope lived on it. Those modern
+artists who pride themselves most on the separation and unity of a work
+of art have indulged in it often; thus, for instance, Stevenson gave a
+glimpse of Alan Breck in <i>The Master of Ballantrae</i>, and meant to give a
+glimpse of the Master of Ballantrae in another unwritten tale called
+<i>The Rising Sun</i>. The habit of revising old characters is so strong in
+Thackeray that <i>Vanity Fair</i>, <i>Pendennis</i>, <i>The Newcomes</i>, and <i>Philip</i>
+are in one sense all one novel. Certainly the reader sometimes forgets
+which one of them he is reading. Afterwards he cannot remember whether
+the best description of Lord Steyne&rsquo;s red whiskers or Mr.
+Wagg&rsquo;s rude jokes occurred in <i>Vanity Fair</i>, or <i>Pendennis</i>; he
+cannot remember whether his favourite dialogue between Mr. and Mrs.
+Pendennis occurred in <i>The Newcomes</i>, or in <i>Philip</i>. Whenever two
+Thackeray characters in two Thackeray novels could by any possibility
+have been contemporary, Thackeray delights to connect them. He makes
+Major Pendennis nod to Dr. Firmin, and Colonel Newcome ask Major Dobbin
+to dinner. Whenever two characters could not possibly have been
+contemporary he goes out of his <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[234]</a></span>
+way to make one the remote ancestor of the other. Thus he created the
+great house of Warrington solely to connect a &ldquo;blue-bearded&rdquo;
+Bohemian journalist with the blood of Henry Esmond. It is quite
+impossible to conceive Dickens keeping up this elaborate connection
+between all his characters and all his books, especially across the
+ages. It would give us a kind of shock if we learnt from Dickens that
+Major Bagstock was the nephew of Mr. Chester. Still less can we imagine
+Dickens carrying on an almost systematic family chronicle as was in some
+sense done by Trollope. There must be some reason for such a paradox;
+for in itself it is a very curious one. The writers who wrote carefully
+were always putting, as it were, after-words and appendices to their
+already finished portraits; the man who did splendid and flamboyant but
+faulty portraits never attempted to touch them up. Or rather (we may say
+again) he attempted it once, and then he failed.</p>
+
+<p>The reason lay, I think, in the very genius of Dickens&rsquo;s creation.
+The child he bore of his soul quitted him when his term was passed like
+a veritable child born of the body. It was independent of him, as a
+child is of its parents. It had become dead to him even in becoming
+alive. When Thackeray studied Pendennis or Lord Steyne he was studying
+something outside himself, and therefore something that might come
+nearer and nearer. But when Dickens brought forth Sam Weller or Pickwick
+he was creating something that had once been inside himself and
+therefore when once created could only go further and further away. It
+may seem a strange thing to say of such <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[235]</a></span>
+laughable characters and of so lively an author, yet I say it quite
+seriously; I think it possible that there arose between Dickens and his
+characters that strange and almost supernatural shyness that arises
+often between parents and children; because they are too close to each
+other to be open with each other. Too much hot and high emotion had gone
+to the creation of one of his great figures for it to be possible for
+him without embarrassment ever to speak with it again. This is the thing
+which some fools call fickleness; but which is not the death of feeling,
+but rather its dreadful perpetuation; this shyness is the final seal of
+strong sentiment; this coldness is an eternal constancy.</p>
+
+<p>This one case where Dickens broke through his rule was not such a
+success as to tempt him in any case to try the thing again.</p>
+
+<p>There is weakness in the strict sense of the word in this particular
+reappearance of Samuel Pickwick and Samuel Weller. In the original
+<i>Pickwick Papers</i> Dickens had with quite remarkable delicacy and
+vividness contrived to suggest a certain fundamental sturdiness and
+spirit in that corpulent and complacent old gentleman. Mr. Pickwick was
+a mild man, a respectable man, a placid man; but he was very decidedly a
+man. He could denounce his enemies and fight for his nightcap. He was
+fat; but he had a backbone. In <i>Master Humphrey&rsquo;s Clock</i> the
+backbone seems somehow to be broken; his good nature seems limp instead
+of alert. He gushes out of his good heart; instead of taking a good
+heart for granted as a part of any decent gentleman&rsquo;s furniture as
+did the older and stronger Pickwick. The truth is, I think, that Mr.
+Pickwick <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[236]</a></span>
+in complete repose loses some part of the whole point of his existence.
+The quality which makes the <i>Pickwick Papers</i> one of the greatest of
+human fairy tales is a quality which all the great fairy tales possess,
+and which marks them out from most modern writing. A modern novelist
+generally endeavours to make his story interesting, by making his hero
+odd. The most typical modern books are those in which the central figure
+is himself or herself an exception, a cripple, a courtesan, a lunatic, a
+swindler, or a person of the most perverse temperament. Such stories,
+for instance, are <i>Sir Richard Calmady</i>, <i>Dodo</i>, <i>Quisante</i>, <i>La
+B&ecirc;te Humaine</i>, even the <i>Egoist</i>. But in a fairy tale the boy sees
+all the wonders of fairyland because he is an ordinary boy. In the same
+way Mr. Samuel Pickwick sees an extraordinary England because he is an
+ordinary old gentleman. He does not see things through the rosy
+spectacles of the modern optimist or the green-smoked spectacles of the
+pessimist; he sees it through the crystal glasses of his own innocence.
+One must see the world clearly even in order to see its wildest poetry.
+One must see it sanely even in order to see that it is insane.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Pickwick, then, relieved against a background of heavy kindliness
+and quiet club life does not seem to be quite the same heroic figure as
+Mr. Pickwick relieved against a background of the fighting police
+constables at Ipswich or the roaring mobs of Eatanswill. Of the
+degeneration of the Wellers, though it has been commonly assumed by
+critics, I am not so sure. Some of the things said in the humorous
+assembly round Mr. Weller&rsquo;s Watch are really human and laughable
+and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[237]</a></span>
+altogether in the old manner. Especially, I think, the vague and awful
+allusiveness of old Mr. Weller when he reminds his little grandson of
+his delinquencies under the trope or figure of their being those of
+another little boy, is really in the style both of the irony and the
+domesticity of the poorer classes. Sam also says one or two things
+really worthy of himself. We feel almost as if Sam were a living man,
+and could not appear for an instant without being amusing.</p>
+
+<p>The other elements in the make-up of <i>Master Humphrey&rsquo;s Clock</i>
+come under the same paradox which I have applied to the whole work.
+Though not very important in literature they are somehow quite important
+in criticism. They show us better than anything else the whole
+unconscious trend of Dickens, the stuff of which his very dreams were
+made. If he had made up tales to amuse himself when half-awake (as I
+have no doubt he did) they would be just such tales as these. They would
+have been ghostly legends of the nooks and holes of London, echoes of
+old love and laughter from the taverns or the Inns of Court. In a sense
+also one may say that these tales are the great might-have-beens of
+Dickens. They are chiefly designs which he fills up here slightly and
+unsatisfactorily, but which he might have filled up with his own
+brightest and most incredible colours. Nothing, for instance, could have
+been nearer to the heart of Dickens than his great Gargantuan conception
+of Gog and Magog telling London legends to each other all through the
+night. Those two giants might have stood on either side of some new
+great city of his invention, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[238]</a></span>
+swarming with fanciful figures and noisy with new events. But as it is,
+the two giants stand alone in a wilderness, guarding either side of a
+gate that leads nowhere.</p>
+
+<hr /><p class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[239]</a></p>
+<h2><a name="REPRINTED" id="REPRINTED"></a>REPRINTED PIECES</h2>
+
+<p>Those abuses which are supposed to belong specially to religion belong
+to all human institutions. They are not the sins of supernaturalism, but
+the sins of nature. In this respect it is interesting to observe that
+all the evils which our Rationalist or Protestant tradition associates
+with the idolatrous veneration of sacred figures arises in the merely
+human atmosphere of literature and history. Every extravagance of
+hagiology can be found in hero-worship. Every folly alleged in the
+worship of saints can be found in the worship of poets. There are those
+who are honourably and intensely opposed to the atmosphere of religious
+symbolism or religious arch&aelig;ology. There are people who have a vague
+idea that the worship of saints is worse than the imitation of sinners.
+There are some, like a lady I once knew, who think that hagiology is the
+scientific study of hags. But these slightly prejudiced persons
+generally have idolatries and superstitions of their own, particularly
+idolatries and superstitions in connection with celebrated people. Mr.
+Stead preserves a pistol belonging to Oliver Cromwell in the office of
+the <i>Review of Reviews</i>; and I am sure he worships it in his rare
+moments of solitude and leisure. A man, who could not be induced to
+believe in God <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[240]</a></span>
+by all the arguments of all the philosophers, professed himself ready
+to believe if he could see it stated on a postcard in the handwriting of
+Mr. Gladstone. Persons not otherwise noted for their religious exercise
+have been known to procure and preserve portions of the hair of
+Paderewski. Nay, by this time blasphemy itself is a sacred tradition,
+and almost as much respect would be paid to the alleged relics of an
+atheist as to the alleged relics of a god. If any one has a fork that
+belonged to Voltaire, he could probably exchange it in the open market
+for a knife that belonged to St. Theresa.</p>
+
+<p>Of all the instances of this there is none stranger than the case of
+Dickens. It should be pondered very carefully by those who reproach
+Christianity with having been easily corrupted into a system of
+superstitions. If ever there was a message full of what modern people
+call true Christianity, the direct appeal to the common heart, a faith
+that was simple, a hope that was infinite, and a charity that was
+omnivorous, if ever there came among men what they call the Christianity
+of Christ, it was in the message of Dickens. Christianity has been in
+the world nearly two thousand years, and it has not yet quite lost, its
+enemies being judges, its first fire and charity; but friends and
+enemies would agree that it was from the very first more detailed and
+doctrinal than the spirit of Dickens. The spirit of Dickens has been in
+the world about sixty years; and already it is a superstition. Already
+it is loaded with relics. Already it is stiff with antiquity.</p>
+
+<p>Everything that can be said about the perversion of Christianity can be
+said about the perversion of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[241]</a></span>
+Dickens. It is said that Christ&rsquo;s words are repeated by the very
+High Priests and Scribes whom He meant to denounce. It is just as true
+that the jokes in <i>Pickwick</i> are quoted with delight by the very bigwigs
+of bench and bar whom Dickens wished to make absurd and impossible. It
+is said that texts from Scripture are constantly taken in vain by Judas
+and Herod, by Caiaphas and Annas. It is just as true that texts from
+Dickens are rapturously quoted on all our platforms by Podsnap and
+Honeythunder, by Pardiggle and Veneering, by Tigg when he is forming a
+company, or Pott when he is founding a newspaper. People joke about
+Bumble in defence of Bumbledom; people allude playfully to Mrs. Jellyby
+while agitating for Borrioboola Gha. The very things which Dickens tried
+to destroy are preserved as relics of him. The very houses he wished to
+pull down are propped up as monuments of Dickens. We wish to preserve
+everything of him, except his perilous public spirit.</p>
+
+<p>This antiquarian attitude towards Dickens has many manifestations, some
+of them somewhat ridiculous. I give one startling instance out of a
+hundred of the irony remarked upon above. In his first important book,
+Dickens lashed the loathsome corruption of our oligarchical politics,
+their blaring servility and dirty diplomacy of bribes, under the name of
+an imaginary town called Eatanswill. If Eatanswill, wherever it was, had
+been burned to the ground by its indignant neighbours the day after the
+exposure, it would have been not inappropriate. If it had been entirely
+deserted by its inhabitants, if they had fled to hide themselves in
+holes and caverns, one could have understood <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[242]</a></span>
+it. If it had been struck by a thunderbolt out of heaven or outlawed by
+the whole human race, all that would seem quite natural. What has really
+happened is this: that two respectable towns in Suffolk are still
+disputing for the honour of having been the original Eatanswill; as if
+two innocent hamlets each claimed to be Gomorrah. I make no comment; the
+thing is beyond speech.</p>
+
+<p>But this strange sentimental and relic-hunting worship of Dickens has
+many more innocent manifestations. One of them is that which takes
+advantage of the fact that Dickens happened to be a journalist by trade.
+It occupies itself therefore with hunting through papers and magazines
+for unsigned articles which may possibly be proved to be his. Only a
+little time ago one of these enthusiasts ran up to me, rubbing his
+hands, and told me that he was sure he had found two and a half short
+paragraphs in <i>All the Year Round</i> which were certainly written by
+Dickens, whom he called (I regret to say) the Master. Something of this
+arch&aelig;ological weakness must cling to all mere reprints of his minor
+work. He was a great novelist; but he was also, among other things, a
+good journalist and a good man. It is often necessary for a good
+journalist to write bad literature. It is sometimes the first duty of a
+good man to write it. Pot-boilers to my feeling are sacred things; but
+they may well be secret as well as sacred, like the holy pot which it is
+their purpose to boil. In the collection called <i>Reprinted Pieces</i> there
+are some, I think, which demand or deserve this apology. There are many
+which fall below the level of his recognised books of fragments, such as
+<i>The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[243]</a></span>
+Sketches by Boz</i>, and <i>The Uncommercial Traveller</i>. Two or three
+elements in the compilation, however, make it quite essential to any
+solid appreciation of the author.</p>
+
+<p>Of these the first in importance is that which comes last in order. I
+mean the three remarkable pamphlets upon the English Sunday, called
+<i>Sunday under Three Heads</i>. Here, at least, we find the eternal Dickens,
+though not the eternal Dickens of fiction. His other political and
+sociological suggestions in this volume are so far unimportant that they
+are incidental, and even personal. Any man might have formed
+Dickens&rsquo;s opinion about flogging for garrotters, and altered it
+afterwards. Any one might have come to Dickens&rsquo;s conclusion about
+model prisons, or to any other conclusion equally reasonable and
+unimportant. These things have no colour of the great man&rsquo;s
+character. But on the subject of the English Sunday he does stand for
+his own philosophy. He stands for a particular view, remote at present
+both from Liberals and Conservatives. He was, in a conscious sense, the
+first of its spokesmen. He was in every sense the last.</p>
+
+<p>In his appeal for the pleasures of the people, Dickens has remained
+alone. The pleasures of the people have now no defender, Radical or
+Tory. The Tories despise the people. The Radicals despise the pleasures.</p>
+
+<p class="c noin" style="font-size:120%;">THE END</p>
+
+<hr /><div class='blurb'>
+<h3>Transcriber&rsquo;s Notes &amp; Errata</h3>
+
+<p>Some illustrations have been moved to between chapters. Therefore, the
+entries in the List of Illustrations have been linked directly to the
+images and not to the page numbers.</p>
+
+<p>The following typographical errors have been corrected:</p>
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="1" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tr class='b'><td align='left'>Page</td><td align='left'>Error</td><td align='left'>Correction</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>22</td><td align='left'>a dupe and who was</td><td align='left'>a dupe who was</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>57</td><td align='left'>pyschology</td><td align='left'>psychology</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>164</td><td align='left'>Similiarly</td><td align='left'>Similarly</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+<p>The following words were found in both hyphenated and
+un-hyphenated forms in the text. The numbers in parentheses
+show the number of times each form occurred.</p>
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="1" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tr><td align='left'>framework (3)</td><td align='left'>frame-work (1)</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>cocksure (2)</td><td align='left'>cock-sure (2)</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Ironmaster (1)</td><td align='left'>Iron-master (2)</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>footprints (1)</td><td align='left'>foot-prints (1)</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>goodwill (1)</td><td align='left'>good-will (1)</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+</div><hr class='full' />
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Appreciations and Criticisms of the
+Works of Charles Dickens, by G. K. Chesterton
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+</body>
+</html>
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works
+of Charles Dickens, by G. K. Chesterton
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens
+
+Author: G. K. Chesterton
+
+Release Date: August 20, 2007 [EBook #22362]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DICKENS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Sigal Alon, LN Yaddanapudi and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+  [Illustration: Charles Dickens, Circa 1840
+  From an oil painting by R. J. Lane.]
+
+APPRECIATIONS AND CRITICISMS OF THE WORKS OF CHARLES DICKENS
+
+BY
+
+G. K. CHESTERTON
+
+[Illustration]
+
+1911
+
+LONDON: J. M. DENT & SONS, LTD.
+NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO.
+
+_All rights reserved_
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+  CHAPTER                             PAGE
+
+     I. INTRODUCTION                   vii
+    II. SKETCHES BY BOZ                  1
+   III. PICKWICK PAPERS                 13
+    IV. NICHOLAS NICKLEBY               26
+     V. OLIVER TWIST                    38
+    VI. OLD CURIOSITY SHOP              50
+   VII. BARNABY RUDGE                   65
+  VIII. AMERICAN NOTES                  76
+    IX. PICTURES FROM ITALY             87
+     X. MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT               90
+    XI. CHRISTMAS BOOKS                103
+   XII. DOMBEY AND SON                 114
+  XIII. DAVID COPPERFIELD              129
+   XIV. CHRISTMAS STORIES              140
+    XV. BLEAK HOUSE                    148
+   XVI. CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND     160
+   XVII. HARD TIMES                    169
+  XVIII. LITTLE DORRIT                 178
+    XIX. A TALE OF TWO CITIES          188
+     XX. GREAT EXPECTATIONS            197
+    XXI. OUR MUTUAL FRIEND             207
+   XXII. EDWIN DROOD                   218
+  XXIII. MASTER HUMPHREY'S CLOCK       229
+   XXIV. REPRINTED PIECES              239
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+                                                                    PAGE
+
+  CHARLES DICKENS, CIRCA 1840                             _Frontispiece_
+    From an oil painting by R. J. Lane.
+
+  CHARLES DICKENS, 1842                                               76
+    From a bust by H. Dexter, executed during Dickens's
+    first visit to America.
+
+  CHARLES DICKENS, 1844                                               90
+    From a miniature by Margaret Gillies.
+
+  CHARLES DICKENS, 1849                                              130
+    From a daguerreotype by Mayall.
+
+  CHARLES DICKENS, 1858                                              184
+    From a black and white drawing by Baughiet.
+
+  CHARLES DICKENS, 1859                                              188
+    From an oil painting by W. P. Frith, R.A.
+
+  CHARLES DICKENS, CIRCA 1860                                        198
+    Photograph by J. & C. Watkins.
+
+  CHARLES DICKENS, 1868                                              218
+    From a photograph by Gurney.
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+These papers were originally published as prefaces to the separate books
+of Dickens in one of the most extensive of those cheap libraries of the
+classics which are one of the real improvements of recent times. Thus
+they were harmless, being diluted by, or rather drowned in Dickens. My
+scrap of theory was a mere dry biscuit to be taken with the grand tawny
+port of great English comedy; and by most people it was not taken at
+all--like the biscuit. Nevertheless the essays were not in intention so
+aimless as they appear in fact. I had a general notion of what needed
+saying about Dickens to the new generation, though probably I did not
+say it. I will make another attempt to do so in this prologue, and,
+possibly fail again.
+
+There was a painful moment (somewhere about the eighties) when we
+watched anxiously to see whether Dickens was fading from the modern
+world. We have watched a little longer, and with great relief we begin
+to realise that it is the modern world that is fading. All that universe
+of ranks and respectabilities in comparison with which Dickens was
+called a caricaturist, all that Victorian universe in which he seemed
+vulgar--all that is itself breaking up like a cloudland. And only the
+caricatures of Dickens remain like things carved in stone. This, of
+course, is an old story in the case of a man reproached with any excess
+of the poetic. Again and again when the man of visions was pinned by the
+sly dog who knows the world,
+
+    "The man recovered of the bite,
+    The dog it was that died."
+
+To call Thackeray a cynic, which means a sly dog, was indeed absurd; but
+it is fair to say that in comparison with Dickens he felt himself a man
+of the world. Nevertheless, that world of which he was a man is coming
+to an end before our eyes; its aristocracy has grown corrupt, its middle
+class insecure, and things that he never thought of are walking about
+the drawing-rooms of both. Thackeray has described for ever the
+Anglo-Indian Colonel; but what on earth would he have done with an
+Australian Colonel? What can it matter whether Dickens's clerks talked
+cockney now that half the duchesses talk American? What would Thackeray
+have made of an age in which a man in the position of Lord Kew may
+actually be the born brother of Mr. Moss of Wardour Street? Nor does
+this apply merely to Thackeray, but to all those Victorians who prided
+themselves on the realism or sobriety of their descriptions; it applies
+to Anthony Trollope and, as much as any one, to George Eliot. For we
+have not only survived that present which Thackeray described: we have
+even survived that future to which George Eliot looked forward. It is no
+longer adequate to say that Dickens did not understand that old world of
+gentility, of parliamentary politeness and the balance of the
+constitution. That world is rapidly ceasing to understand itself. It is
+vain to repeat the complaint of the old Quarterly Reviewers, that
+Dickens had not enjoyed a university education. What would the old
+Quarterly Reviewers themselves have thought of the Rhodes Scholarships?
+It is useless to repeat the old tag that Dickens could not describe a
+gentleman. A gentleman in our time has become something quite
+indescribable.
+
+Now the interesting fact is this: That Dickens, whom so many considered
+to be at the best a vulgar enthusiast, saw the coming change in our
+society much more soberly and scientifically than did his better
+educated and more pretentious contemporaries. I give but one example out
+of many. Thackeray was a good Victorian radical, who seems to have gone
+to his grave quite contented with the early Victorian radical
+theory--the theory which Macaulay preached with unparalleled luminosity
+and completeness; the theory that true progress goes on so steadily
+through human history, that while reaction is indefensible, revolution
+is unnecessary. Thackeray seems to have been quite content to think that
+the world would grow more and more liberal in the limited sense; that
+Free Trade would get freer; that ballot boxes would grow more and more
+secret; that at last (as some satirist of Liberalism puts it) every man
+would have two votes instead of one. There is no trace in Thackeray of
+the slightest consciousness that progress could ever change its
+direction. There is in Dickens. The whole of _Hard Times_ is the
+expression of just such a realisation. It is not true to say that
+Dickens was a Socialist, but it is not absurd to say so. And it would
+be simply absurd to say it of any of the great Individualist novelists
+of the Victorian time. Dickens saw far enough ahead to know that the
+time was coming when the people would be imploring the State to save
+them from mere freedom, as from some frightful foreign oppressor. He
+felt the society changing; and Thackeray never did.
+
+As talking about Socialism and Individualism is one of the greatest
+bores ever endured among men, I will take another instance to illustrate
+my meaning, even though the instance be a queer and even a delicate one.
+Even if the reader does not agree with my deduction, I ask his attention
+to the fact itself, which I think a curiosity of literature. In the last
+important work of Dickens, that excellent book _Our Mutual Friend_,
+there is an odd thing about which I cannot make up my mind; I do not
+know whether it is unconscious observation or fiendish irony. But it is
+this. In _Our Mutual Friend_ is an old patriarch named Aaron, who is a
+saintly Jew made to do the dirty work of an abominable Christian usurer.
+In an artistic sense I think the patriarch Aaron as much of a humbug as
+the patriarch Casby. In a moral sense there is no doubt at all that
+Dickens introduced the Jew with a philanthropic idea of doing justice to
+Judaism, which he was told he had affronted by the great gargoyle of
+Fagin. If this was his motive, it was morally a most worthy one. But it
+is certainly unfortunate for the Hebrew cause that the bad Jew should be
+so very much more convincing than the good one. Old Aaron is not an
+exaggeration of Jewish virtues; he is simply not Jewish, because he is
+not human. There is nothing about him that in any way suggests the
+nobler sort of Jew, such a man as Spinoza or Mr. Zangwill. He is simply
+a public apology, and like most public apologies, he is very stiff and
+not very convincing.
+
+So far so good. Now we come to the funny part. To describe the high
+visionary and mystic Jew like Spinoza or Zangwill is a great and
+delicate task in which even Dickens might have failed. But most of us
+know something of the make and manners of the low Jew, who is generally
+the successful one. Most of us know the Jew who calls himself De
+Valancourt. Now to any one who knows a low Jew by sight or hearing, the
+story called _Our Mutual Friend_ is literally full of Jews. Like all
+Dickens's best characters they are vivid; we know them. And we know them
+to be Hebrew. Mr. Veneering, the Man from Nowhere, dark, sphinx-like,
+smiling, with black curling hair, and a taste in florid vulgar
+furniture--of what stock was he? Mr. Lammle, with "too much nose in his
+face, too much ginger in his whiskers, too much sparkle in his studs and
+manners"--of what blood was he? Mr. Lammle's friends, coarse and
+thick-lipped, with fingers so covered with rings that they could hardly
+hold their gold pencils--do they remind us of anybody? Mr. Fledgeby,
+with his little ugly eyes and social flashiness and craven bodily
+servility--might not some fanatic like M. Drumont make interesting
+conjectures about him? The particular types that people hate in Jewry,
+the types that are the shame of all good Jews, absolutely run riot in
+this book, which is supposed to contain an apology to them. It looks at
+first sight as if Dickens's apology were one hideous sneer. It looks as
+if he put in one good Jew whom nobody could believe in, and then
+balanced him with ten bad Jews whom nobody could fail to recognise. It
+seems as if he had avenged himself for the doubt about Fagin by
+introducing five or six Fagins--triumphant Fagins, fashionable Fagins,
+Fagins who had changed their names. The impeccable old Aaron stands up
+in the middle of this ironic carnival with a peculiar solemnity and
+silliness. He looks like one particularly stupid Englishman pretending
+to be a Jew, amidst all that crowd of clever Jews who are pretending to
+be Englishmen.
+
+But this notion of a sneer is not admissible. Dickens was far too frank
+and generous a writer to employ such an elaborate plot of silence. His
+satire was always intended to attack, never to entrap; moreover, he was
+far too vain a man not to wish the crowd to see all his jokes. Vanity is
+more divine than pride, because it is more democratic than pride. Third,
+and most important, Dickens was a good Liberal, and would have been
+horrified at the notion of making so venomous a vendetta against one
+race or creed. Nevertheless the fact is there, as I say, if only as a
+curiosity of literature. I defy any man to read through _Our Mutual
+Friend_ after hearing this suggestion, and to get out of his head the
+conviction that Lammle is the wrong kind of Jew. The explanation lies, I
+think, in this, that Dickens was so wonderfully sensitive to that change
+that has come over our society, that he noticed the type of the oriental
+and cosmopolitan financier without even knowing that it was oriental or
+cosmopolitan. He had, in fact, fallen a victim to a very simple fallacy
+affecting this problem. Somebody said, with great wit and truth, that
+treason cannot prosper, because when it prospers it cannot be called
+treason. The same argument soothed all possible Anti-Semitism in men
+like Dickens. Jews cannot be sneaks and snobs, because when they are
+sneaks and snobs they do not admit that they are Jews.
+
+I have taken this case of the growth of the cosmopolitan financier,
+because it is not so stale in discussion as its parallel, the growth of
+Socialism. But as regards Dickens, the same criticism applies to both.
+Dickens knew that Socialism was coming, though he did not know its name.
+Similarly, Dickens knew that the South African millionaire was coming,
+though he did not know the millionaire's name. Nobody does. His was not
+a type of mind to disentangle either the abstract truths touching the
+Socialist, nor the highly personal truth about the millionaire. He was a
+man of impressions; he has never been equalled in the art of conveying
+what a man looks like at first sight--and he simply felt the two things
+as atmospheric facts. He felt that the mercantile power was oppressive,
+past all bearing by Christian men; and he felt that this power was no
+longer wholly in the hands even of heavy English merchants like Podsnap.
+It was largely in the hands of a feverish and unfamiliar type, like
+Lammle and Veneering. The fact that he felt these things is almost more
+impressive because he did not understand them.
+
+Now for this reason Dickens must definitely be considered in the light
+of the changes which his soul foresaw. Thackeray has become classical;
+but Dickens has done more: he has remained modern. The grand
+retrospective spirit of Thackeray is by its nature attached to places
+and times; he belongs to Queen Victoria as much as Addison belongs to
+Queen Anne, and it is not only Queen Anne who is dead. But Dickens, in a
+dark prophetic kind of way, belongs to the developments. He belongs to
+the times since his death when Hard Times grew harder, and when
+Veneering became not only a Member of Parliament, but a Cabinet
+Minister; the times when the very soul and spirit of Fledgeby carried
+war into Africa. Dickens can be criticised as a contemporary of Bernard
+Shaw or Anatole France or C. F. G. Masterman. In talking of him one need
+no longer talk merely of the Manchester School or Puseyism or the Charge
+of the Light Brigade; his name comes to the tongue when we are talking
+of Christian Socialists or Mr. Roosevelt or County Council Steam Boats
+or Guilds of Play. He can be considered under new lights, some larger
+and some meaner than his own; and it is a very rough effort so to
+consider him which is the excuse of these pages. Of the essays in this
+book I desire to say as little as possible; I will discuss any other
+subject in preference with a readiness which reaches to avidity. But I
+may very curtly apply the explanation used above to the cases of two or
+three of them. Thus in the article on _David Copperfield_ I have done
+far less than justice to that fine book considered in its relation to
+eternal literature; but I have dwelt at some length upon a particular
+element in it which has grown enormous in England after Dickens's death.
+Thus again, in introducing the _Sketches by Boz_ I have felt chiefly
+that I am introducing them to a new generation insufficiently in
+sympathy with such palpable and unsophisticated fun. A Board School
+education, evolved since Dickens's day, has given to our people a queer
+and inadequate sort of refinement, one which prevents them from enjoying
+the raw jests of the _Sketches by Boz_, but leaves them easily open to
+that slight but poisonous sentimentalism which I note amid all the
+merits of David Copperfield. In the same way I shall speak of _Little
+Dorrit_, with reference to a school of pessimistic fiction which did not
+exist when it was written, of _Hard Times_ in the light of the most
+modern crises of economics, and of _The Child's History of England_ in
+the light of the most matured authority of history. In short, these
+criticisms are an intrinsically ephemeral comment from one generation
+upon work that will delight many more. Dickens was a very great man, and
+there are many ways of testing and stating the fact. But one permissible
+way is to say this, that he was an ignorant man, ill-read in the past,
+and often confused about the present. Yet he remains great and true, and
+even essentially reliable, if we suppose him to have known not only all
+that went before his lifetime, but also all that was to come after.
+
+From this vanishing of the Victorian compromise (I might say the
+Victorian illusion) there begins to emerge a menacing and even monstrous
+thing--we may begin again to behold the English people. If that strange
+dawn ever comes, it will be the final vindication of Dickens. It will be
+proved that he is hardly even a caricaturist; that he is something very
+like a realist. Those comic monstrosities which the critics found
+incredible will be found to be the immense majority of the citizens of
+this country. We shall find that Sweedlepipe cuts our hair and
+Pumblechook sells our cereals; that Sam Weller blacks our boots and
+Tony Weller drives our omnibus. For the exaggerated notion of the
+exaggerations of Dickens (as was admirably pointed out by my old friend
+and enemy Mr. Blatchford in a _Clarion_ review) is very largely due to
+our mixing with only one social class, whose conventions are very
+strict, and to whose affectations we are accustomed. In cabmen, in
+cobblers, in charwomen, individuality is often pushed to the edge of
+insanity. But as long as the Thackerayan platform of gentility stood
+firm all this was, comparatively speaking, concealed. For the English,
+of all nations, have the most uniform upper class and the most varied
+democracy. In France it is the peasants who are solid to uniformity; it
+is the marquises who are a little mad. But in England, while good form
+restrains and levels the universities and the army, the poor people are
+the most motley and amusing creatures in the world, full of humorous
+affections and prejudices and twists of irony. Frenchmen tend to be
+alike, because they are all soldiers; Prussians because they are all
+something else, probably policemen; even Americans are all something,
+though it is not easy to say what it is; it goes with hawk-like eyes and
+an irrational eagerness. Perhaps it is savages. But two English cabmen
+will be as grotesquely different as Mr. Weller and Mr. Wegg. Nor is it
+true to say that I see this variety because it is in my own people. For
+I do not see the same degree of variety in my own class or in the class
+above it; there is more superficial resemblance between two Kensington
+doctors or two Highland dukes. No; the democracy is really composed of
+Dickens characters, for the simple reason that Dickens was himself one
+of the democracy.
+
+There remains one thing to be added to this attempt to exhibit Dickens
+in the growing and changing lights of our time. God forbid that any one
+(especially any Dickensian) should dilute or discourage the great
+efforts towards social improvement. But I wish that social reformers
+would more often remember that they are imposing their rules not on dots
+and numbers, but on Bob Sawyer and Tim Linkinwater, on Mrs. Lirriper and
+Dr. Marigold. I wish Mr. Sidney Webb would shut his eyes until he _sees_
+Sam Weller.
+
+A great many circumstances have led to the neglect in literature of
+these exuberant types which do actually exist in the ruder classes of
+society. Perhaps the principal cause is that since Dickens's time the
+study of the poor has ceased to be an art and become a sort of sham
+science. Dickens took the poor individually: all modern writing tends to
+take them collectively. It is said that the modern realist produces a
+photograph rather than a picture. But this is an inadequate objection.
+The real trouble with the realist is not that he produces a photograph,
+but that he produces a composite photograph. It is like all composite
+photographs, blurred; like all composite photographs, hideous; and like
+all composite photographs, unlike anything or anybody. The new
+sociological novels, which attempt to describe the abstract type of the
+working-classes, sin in practice against the first canon of literature,
+true when all others are subject to exception. Literature must always be
+a pointing out of what is interesting in life; but these books are
+duller than the life they represent. Even supposing that Dickens did
+exaggerate the degree to which one man differs from another--that was at
+least an exaggeration upon the side of literature; it was better than a
+mere attempt to reduce what is actually vivid and unmistakable to what
+is in comparison colourless or unnoticeable. Even the creditable and
+necessary efforts of our time in certain matters of social reform have
+discouraged the old distinctive Dickens treatment. People are so anxious
+to do something for the poor man that they have a sort of subconscious
+desire to think that there is only one kind of man to do it for. Thus
+while the old accounts were sometimes too steep and crazy, the new
+became too sweeping and flat. People write about the problem of drink,
+for instance, as if it were one problem. Dickens could have told them
+that there is the abyss between heaven and hell between the incongruous
+excesses of Mr. Pickwick and the fatalistic soaking of Mr. Wickfield. He
+could have shown that there was nothing in common between the brandy and
+water of Bob Sawyer and the rum and water of Mr. Stiggins. People talk
+of imprudent marriages among the poor, as if it were all one question.
+Dickens could have told them that it is one thing to marry without much
+money, like Stephen Blackpool, and quite another to marry without the
+smallest intention of ever trying to get any, like Harold Skimpole.
+People talk about husbands in the working-classes being kind or brutal
+to their wives, as if that was the one permanent problem and no other
+possibility need be considered. Dickens could have told them that there
+was the case (the by no means uncommon case) of the husband of Mrs.
+Gargery as well as of the wife of Mr. Quilp. In short, Dickens saw the
+problem of the poor not as a dead and definite business, but as a living
+and very complex one. In some ways he would be called much more
+conservative than the modern sociologists, in some ways much more
+revolutionary.
+
+
+LITTLE DORRIT
+
+In the time of the decline and death of Dickens, and even more strongly
+after it, there arose a school of criticism which substantially
+maintained that a man wrote better when he was ill. It was some such
+sentiment as this that made Mr. George Gissing, that able writer, come
+near to contending that _Little Dorrit_ is Dickens's best book. It was
+the principle of his philosophy to maintain (I know not why) that a man
+was more likely to perceive the truth when in low spirits than when in
+high spirits.
+
+
+REPRINTED PIECES
+
+The three articles on Sunday of which I speak are almost the last
+expression of an articulate sort in English literature of the ancient
+and existing morality of the English people. It is always asserted that
+Puritanism came in with the seventeenth century and thoroughly soaked
+and absorbed the English. We are now, it is constantly said, an
+incurably Puritanic people. Personally, I have my doubts about this. I
+shall not refuse to admit to the Puritans that they conquered and
+crushed the English people; but I do not think that they ever
+transformed it. My doubt is chiefly derived from three historical
+facts. First, that England was never so richly and recognisably English
+as in the Shakespearian age before the Puritan had appeared. Second,
+that ever since he did appear there has been a long unbroken line of
+brilliant and typical Englishmen who belonged to the Shakespearian and
+not the Puritanic tradition; Dryden, Johnson, Wilkes, Fox, Nelson, were
+hardly Puritans. And third, that the real rise of a new, cold, and
+illiberal morality in these matters seems to me to have occurred in the
+time of Queen Victoria, and not of Queen Elizabeth. All things
+considered, it is likely that future historians will say that the
+Puritans first really triumphed in the twentieth century, and that
+Dickens was the last cry of Merry England.
+
+And about these additional, miscellaneous, and even inferior works of
+Dickens there is, moreover, another use and fascination which all
+Dickensians will understand; which, after a manner, is not for the
+profane. All who love Dickens have a strange sense that he is really
+inexhaustible. It is this fantastic infinity that divides him even from
+the strongest and healthiest romantic artists of a later day--from
+Stevenson, for example. I have read _Treasure Island_ twenty times;
+nevertheless I know it. But I do not really feel as if I knew all
+_Pickwick_; I have not so much read it twenty times as read in it a
+million times; and it almost seemed as if I always read something new.
+We of the true faith look at each other and understand; yes, our master
+was a magician. I believe the books are alive; I believe that leaves
+still grow in them, as leaves grow on the trees. I believe that this
+fairy library flourishes and increases like a fairy forest: but the
+world is listening to us, and we will put our hand upon our mouth.
+
+
+OUR MUTUAL FRIEND
+
+One thing at least seems certain. Dickens may or may not have been
+socialist in his tendencies; one might quote on the affirmative side his
+satire against Mr. Podsnap, who thought Centralisation "un-English"; one
+might quote in reply the fact that he satirised quite as unmercifully
+state and municipal officials of the most modern type. But there is one
+condition of affairs which Dickens would certainly have detested and
+denounced, and that is the condition in which we actually stand to-day.
+At this moment it is vain to discuss whether socialism will be a selling
+of men's liberty for bread. The men have already sold the liberty; only
+they have not yet got the bread. A most incessant and exacting
+interference with the poor is already in operation; they are already
+ruled like slaves, only they are not fed like slaves. The children are
+forcibly provided with a school; only they are not provided with a
+house. Officials give the most detailed domestic directions about the
+fireguard; only they do not give the fireguard. Officials bring round
+the most stringent directions about the milk; only they do not bring
+round the milk. The situation is perhaps the most humorous in the whole
+history of oppression. We force the nigger to dig; but as a concession
+to him we do not give him a spade. We compel Sambo to cook; but we
+consult his dignity so far as to refuse him a fire.
+
+This state of things at least cannot conceivably endure. We must either
+give the workers more property and liberty, or we must feed them
+properly as we work them properly. If we insist on sending the menu into
+them, they will naturally send the bill into us. This may possibly
+result (it is not my purpose here to prove that it will) in the drilling
+of the English people into hordes of humanely herded serfs; and this
+again may mean the fading from our consciousness of all those elves and
+giants, monsters and fantastics whom we are faintly beginning to feel
+and remember in the land. If this be so, the work of Dickens may be
+considered as a great vision--a vision, as Swinburne said, between a
+sleep and a sleep. It can be said that between the grey past of
+territorial depression and the grey future of economic routine the
+strange clouds lifted, and we beheld the land of the living.
+
+Lastly, Dickens is even astonishingly right about Eugene Wrayburne. So
+far from reproaching him with not understanding a gentleman, the critic
+will be astonished at the accuracy with which he has really observed the
+worth and the weakness of the aristocrat. He is quite right when he
+suggests that such a man has intelligence enough to despise the
+invitations which he has not the energy to refuse. He is quite right
+when he makes Eugene (like Mr. Balfour) constantly right in argument
+even when he is obviously wrong in fact. Dickens is quite right when he
+describes Eugene as capable of cultivating a sort of secondary and false
+industry about anything that is not profitable; or pursuing with passion
+anything that is not his business. He is quite right in making Eugene
+honestly appreciative of essential goodness--in other people. He is
+quite right in making him really good at the graceful combination of
+satire and sentiment, both perfectly sincere. He is also right in
+indicating that the only cure for this intellectual condition is a
+violent blow on the head.
+
+
+DAVID COPPERFIELD
+
+The real achievement of the earlier part of _David Copperfield_ lies in
+a certain impression of the little Copperfield living in a land of
+giants. It is at once Gargantuan in its fancy and grossly vivid in its
+facts; like Gulliver in the land of Brobdingnag when he describes
+mountainous hands and faces filling the sky, bristles as big as hedges,
+or moles as big as molehills. To him parents and guardians are not
+Olympians (as in Mr. Kenneth Grahame's clever book), mysterious and
+dignified, dwelling upon a cloudy hill. Rather they are all the more
+visible for being large. They come all the closer because they are
+colossal. Their queer features and weaknesses stand out large in a sort
+of gigantic domesticity, like the hairs and freckles of a
+Brobdingnagian. We feel the sombre Murdstone coming upon the house like
+a tall storm striding through the sky. We watch every pucker of
+Peggotty's peasant face in its moods of flinty prejudice or whimsical
+hesitation. We look up and feel that Aunt Betsey in her garden gloves
+was really terrible--especially her garden gloves. But one cannot avoid
+the impression that as the boy grows larger these figures grow smaller,
+and are not perhaps so completely satisfactory.
+
+
+CHRISTMAS BOOKS
+
+And there is doubtless a certain poetic unity and irony in gathering
+together three or four of the crudest and most cocksure of the modern
+theorists, with their shrill voices and metallic virtues, under the
+fulness and the sonorous sanity of Christian bells. But the figures
+satirised in _The Chimes_ cross each other's path and spoil each other
+in some degree. The main purpose of the book was a protest against that
+impudent and hard-hearted utilitarianism which arranges the people only
+in rows of men or even in rows of figures. It is a flaming denunciation
+of that strange mathematical morality which was twisted often unfairly
+out of Bentham and Mill: a morality by which each citizen must regard
+himself as a fraction, and a very vulgar fraction. Though the particular
+form of this insolent patronage has changed, this revolt and rebuke is
+still of value, and may be wholesome for those who are teaching the poor
+to be provident. Doubtless it is a good idea to be provident, in the
+sense that Providence is provident, but that should mean being kind, and
+certainly not merely being cold.
+
+_The Cricket on the Hearth_, though popular, I think, with many sections
+of the great army of Dickensians, cannot be spoken of in any such
+abstract or serious terms. It is a brief domestic glimpse; it is an
+interior. It must be remembered that Dickens was fond of interiors as
+such; he was like a romantic tramp who should go from window to window
+looking in at the parlours. He had that solid, indescribable delight in
+the mere solidity and neatness of funny little humanity in its funny
+little houses, like doll's houses. To him every house was a box, a
+Christmas box, in which a dancing human doll was tied up in bricks and
+slates instead of string and brown paper. He went from one gleaming
+window to another, looking in at the lamp-lit parlours. Thus he stood
+for a little while looking in at this cosy if commonplace interior of
+the carrier and his wife; but he did not stand there very long. He was
+on his way to quainter towns and villages. Already the plants were
+sprouting upon the balcony of Miss Tox; and the great wind was rising
+that flung Mr. Pecksniff against his own front door.
+
+
+TALE OF TWO CITIES
+
+It was well for him, at any rate, that the people rose in France. It was
+well for him, at any rate, that the guillotine was set up in the Place
+de la Concorde. Unconsciously, but not accidentally, Dickens was here
+working out the whole true comparison between swift revolutionism in
+Paris and slow evolutionism in London. Sidney Carton is one of those
+sublime ascetics whose head offends them, and who cut it off. For him at
+least it was better that the blood should flow in Paris than that the
+wine should flow any longer in London. And if I say that even now the
+guillotine might be the best cure for many a London lawyer, I ask you to
+believe that I am not merely flippant. But you will not believe it.
+
+
+BARNABY RUDGE
+
+It may be said that there is no comparison between that explosive
+opening of the intellect in Paris and an antiquated madman leading a
+knot of provincial Protestants. The Man of the Hill, says Victor Hugo
+somewhere, fights for an idea; the Man of the Forest for a prejudice.
+Nevertheless it remains true that the enemies of the red cap long
+attempted to represent it as a sham decoration in the style of Sim
+Tappertit. Long after the revolutionists had shown more than the
+qualities of men, it was common among lords and lacqueys to attribute to
+them the stagey and piratical pretentiousness of urchins. The kings
+called Napoleon's pistol a toy pistol even while it was holding up their
+coach and mastering their money or their lives; they called his sword a
+stage sword even while they ran away from it. Something of the same
+senile inconsistency can be found in an English and American habit
+common until recently: that of painting the South Americans at once as
+ruffians wading in carnage, and also as poltroons playing at war. They
+blame them first for the cruelty of having a fight; and then for the
+weakness of having a sham fight. Such, however, since the French
+Revolution and before it, has been the fatuous attitude of certain
+Anglo-Saxons towards the whole revolutionary tradition. Sim Tappertit
+was a sort of answer to everything; and the young men were mocked as
+'prentices long after they were masters. The rising fortune of the South
+American republics to-day is symbolical and even menacing of many
+things; and it may be that the romance of riot will not be so much
+extinguished as extended; and nearer home we may have boys being boys
+again, and in London the cry of "clubs."
+
+
+THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER
+
+_The Uncommercial Traveller_ is a collection of Dickens's memories
+rather than of his literary purposes; but it is due to him to say that
+memory is often more startling in him than prophecy in anybody else.
+They have the character which belongs to all his vivid incidental
+writing: that they attach themselves always to some text which is a fact
+rather than an idea. He was one of those sons of Eve who are fonder of
+the Tree of Life than of the Tree of Knowledge--even of the knowledge of
+good and of evil. He was in this profoundest sense a realist. Critics
+have talked of an artist with his eye on the object. Dickens as an
+essayist always had his eye on an object before he had the faintest
+notion of a subject. All these works of his can best be considered as
+letters; they are notes of personal travel, scribbles in a diary about
+this or that that really happened. But Dickens was one of the few men
+who have the two talents that are the whole of literature--and have them
+both together. First, he could make a thing happen over again; and
+second, he could make it happen better. He can be called exaggerative;
+but mere exaggeration conveys nothing of his typical talent. Mere
+whirlwinds of words, mere melodramas of earth and heaven do not affect
+us as Dickens affects us, because they are exaggerations of nothing. If
+asked for an exaggeration of something, their inventors would be
+entirely dumb. They would not know how to exaggerate a broom-stick; for
+the life of them they could not exaggerate a tenpenny nail. Dickens
+always began with the nail or the broom-stick. He always began with a
+fact even when he was most fanciful; and even when he drew the long bow
+he was careful to hit the white.
+
+This riotous realism of Dickens has its disadvantage--a disadvantage
+that comes out more clearly in these casual sketches than in his
+constructed romances. One grave defect in his greatness is that he was
+altogether too indifferent to theories. On large matters he went right
+by the very largeness of his mind; but in small matters he suffered from
+the lack of any logical test and ready reckoner. Hence his comment upon
+the details of civilisation or reform are sometimes apt to be jerky and
+jarring, and even grossly inconsistent. So long as a thing was heroic
+enough to admire, Dickens admired it; whenever it was absurd enough to
+laugh at he laughed at it: so far he was on sure ground. But about all
+the small human projects that lie between the extremes of the sublime
+and the ridiculous, his criticism was apt to have an accidental quality.
+As Matthew Arnold said of the remarks of the Young Man from the Country
+about the perambulator, they are felt not to be at the heart of the
+situation. On a great many occasions the Uncommercial Traveller seems,
+like other hasty travellers, to be criticising elements and institutions
+which he has quite inadequately understood; and once or twice the
+Uncommercial Traveller might almost as well be a Commercial Traveller
+for all he knows of the countryside.
+
+An instance of what I mean may be found in the amusing article about the
+nightmares of the nursery. Superficially read it might almost be taken
+to mean that Dickens disapproved of ghost stories--disapproved of that
+old and genial horror which nurses can hardly supply fast enough for the
+children who want it. Dickens, one would have thought, should have been
+the last man in the world to object to horrible stories, having himself
+written some of the most horrible that exist in the world. The author of
+the Madman's Manuscript, of the disease of Monk and the death of Krook,
+cannot be considered fastidious in the matter of revolting realism or of
+revolting mysticism. If artistic horror is to be kept from the young, it
+is at least as necessary to keep little boys from reading _Pickwick_ or
+_Bleak House_ as to refrain from telling them the story of Captain
+Murderer or the terrible tale of Chips. If there was something appalling
+in the rhyme of Chips and pips and ships, it was nothing compared to
+that infernal refrain of "Mudstains, bloodstains" which Dickens himself,
+in one of his highest moments of hellish art, put into _Oliver Twist_.
+
+I take this one instance of the excellent article called "Nurse's
+Stories" because it is quite typical of all the rest. Dickens (accused
+of superficiality by those who cannot grasp that there is foam upon deep
+seas) was really deep about human beings; that is, he was original and
+creative about them. But about ideas he did tend to be a little
+superficial. He judged them by whether they hit him, and not by what
+they were trying to hit. Thus in this book the great wizard of the
+Christmas ghosts seems almost the enemy of ghost stories; thus the
+almost melodramatic moralist who created Ralph Nickleby and Jonas
+Chuzzlewit cannot see the point in original sin; thus the great
+denouncer of official oppression in England may be found far too
+indulgent to the basest aspects of the modern police. His theories were
+less important than his creations, because he was a man of genius. But
+he himself thought his theories the more important, because he was a
+man.
+
+
+
+
+SKETCHES BY BOZ
+
+
+The greatest mystery about almost any great writer is why he was ever
+allowed to write at all. The first efforts of eminent men are always
+imitations; and very often they are bad imitations. The only question is
+whether the publisher had (as his name would seem to imply) some
+subconscious connection or sympathy with the public, and thus felt
+instinctively the presence of something that might ultimately tell; or
+whether the choice was merely a matter of chance and one Dickens was
+chosen and another Dickens left. The fact is almost unquestionable: most
+authors made their reputation by bad books and afterwards supported it
+by good ones. This is in some degree true even in the case of Dickens.
+The public continued to call him "Boz" long after the public had
+forgotten the _Sketches by Boz_. Numberless writers of the time speak of
+"Boz" as having written _Martin Chuzzlewit_ and "Boz" as having written
+_David Copperfield_. Yet if they had gone back to the original book
+signed "Boz" they might even have felt that it was vulgar and flippant.
+This is indeed the chief tragedy of publishers: that they may easily
+refuse at the same moment the wrong manuscript and the right man. It is
+easy to see of Dickens now that he was the right man; but a man might
+have been very well excused if he had not realised that the _Sketches_
+was the right book. Dickens, I say, is a case for this primary query:
+whether there was in the first work any clear sign of his higher
+creative spirit. But Dickens is much less a case for this query than
+almost all the other great men of his period. The very earliest works of
+Thackeray are much more unimpressive than those of Dickens. Nay, they
+are much more vulgar than those of Dickens. And worst of all, they are
+much more numerous than those of Dickens. Thackeray came much nearer to
+being the ordinary literary failure than Dickens ever came. Read some of
+the earliest criticisms of Mr. Yellowplush or Michael Angelo Titmarsh
+and you will realise that at the very beginning there was more potential
+clumsiness and silliness in Thackeray than there ever was in Dickens.
+Nevertheless there was some potential clumsiness and silliness in
+Dickens; and what there is of it appears here and there in the admirable
+_Sketches by Boz_.
+
+Perhaps we may put the matter this way: this is the only one of
+Dickens's works of which it is ordinarily necessary to know the date. To
+a close and delicate comprehension it is indeed very important that
+_Nicholas Nickleby_ was written at the beginning of Dickens's life, and
+_Our Mutual Friend_ towards the end of it. Nevertheless anybody could
+understand or enjoy these books, whenever they were written. If _Our
+Mutual Friend_ was written in the Latin of the Dark Ages we should still
+want it translated. If we thought that _Nicholas Nickleby_ would not be
+written until thirty years hence we should all wait for it eagerly. The
+general impression produced by Dickens's work is the same as that
+produced by miraculous visions; it is the destruction of time. Thomas
+Aquinas said that there was no time in the sight of God; however this
+may be, there was no time in the sight of Dickens. As a general rule
+Dickens can be read in any order; not only in any order of books, but
+even in any order of chapters. In an average Dickens book every part is
+so amusing and alive that you can read the parts backwards; you can read
+the quarrel first and then the cause of the quarrel; you can fall in
+love with a woman in the tenth chapter and then turn back to the first
+chapter to find out who she is. This is not chaos; it is eternity. It
+means merely that Dickens instinctively felt all his figures to be
+immortal souls who existed whether he wrote of them or not, and whether
+the reader read of them or not. There is a peculiar quality as of
+celestial pre-existence about the Dickens characters. Not only did they
+exist before we heard of them, they existed also before Dickens heard of
+them. As a rule this unchangeable air in Dickens deprives any discussion
+about date of its point. But as I have said, this is the one Dickens
+work of which the date _is_ essential. It is really an important part of
+the criticism of this book to say that it is his first book. Certain
+elements of clumsiness, of obviousness, of evident blunder, actually
+require the chronological explanation. It is biographically important
+that this is his first book, almost exactly in the same way that it is
+biographically important that _The Mystery of Edwin Drood_ was his last
+book. Change or no change, _Edwin Drood_ has this plain point of a last
+story about it: that it is not finished. But if the last book is
+unfinished, the first book is more unfinished still.
+
+The _Sketches_ divide themselves, of course, into two broad classes. One
+half consists of sketches that are truly and in the strict sense
+sketches. That is, they are things that have no story and in their
+outline none of the character of creation; they are merely facts from
+the street or the tavern or the town hall, noted down as they occurred
+by an intelligence of quite exceptional vivacity. The second class
+consists of purely creative things: farces, romances, stories in any
+case with a non-natural perfection, or a poetical justice, to round them
+off. One class is admirably represented, for instance, by the sketch
+describing the Charity Dinner, the other by such a story as that of
+_Horatio Sparkins_. These things were almost certainly written by
+Dickens at very various periods of his youth; and early as the harvest
+is, no doubt it is a harvest and had ripened during a reasonably long
+time. Nevertheless it is with these two types of narrative that the
+young Charles Dickens first enters English literature; he enters it with
+a number of journalistic notes of such things as he has seen happen in
+streets or offices, and with a number of short stories which err on the
+side of the extravagant and even the superficial. Journalism had not
+then, indeed, sunk to the low level which it has since reached. His
+sketches of dirty London would not have been dirty enough for the modern
+Imperialist press. Still these first efforts of his are journalism, and
+sometimes vulgar journalism. It was as a journalist that he attacked the
+world, as a journalist that he conquered it.
+
+The biographical circumstances will not, of course, be forgotten. The
+life of Dickens had been a curious one. Brought up in a family just poor
+enough to be painfully conscious of its prosperity and its
+respectability, he had been suddenly flung by a financial calamity into
+a social condition far below his own. For men on that exact edge of the
+educated class such a transition is really tragic. A duke may become a
+navvy for a joke, but a clerk cannot become a navvy for a joke.
+Dickens's parents went to a debtors' prison; Dickens himself went to a
+far more unpleasant place. The debtors' prison had about it at least
+that element of amiable compromise and kindly decay which belonged (and
+belongs still) to all the official institutions of England. But Dickens
+was doomed to see the very blackest aspect of nineteenth-century
+England, something far blacker than any mere bad government. He went not
+to a prison but to a factory. In the musty traditionalism of the
+Marshalsea old John Dickens could easily remain optimistic. In the
+ferocious efficiency of the modern factory young Charles Dickens
+narrowly escaped being a pessimist. He did escape this danger; finally
+he even escaped the factory itself. His next step in life was, if
+possible, even more eccentric. He was sent to school; he was sent off
+like an innocent little boy in Eton collars to learn the rudiments of
+Latin grammar, without any reference to the fact that he had already
+taken his part in the horrible competition and actuality of the age of
+manufactures. It was like giving a sacked bank manager a satchel and
+sending him to a dame's school. Nor was the third stage of this career
+unconnected with the oddity of the others. On leaving the school he was
+made a clerk in a lawyer's office, as if henceforward this child of
+ridiculous changes was to settle down into a silent assistant for a
+quiet solicitor. It was exactly at this moment that his fundamental
+rebellion began to seethe; it seethed more against the quiet finality of
+his legal occupation than it had seethed against the squalor and slavery
+of his days of poverty. There must have been in his mind, I think, a dim
+feeling: "Did all my dark crises mean only this; was I crucified only
+that I might become a solicitor's clerk?" Whatever be the truth about
+this conjecture there can be no question about the facts themselves. It
+was about this time that he began to burst and bubble over, to insist
+upon his own intellect, to claim a career. It was about this time that
+he put together a loose pile of papers, satires on institutions,
+pictures of private persons, fairy tales of the vulgarity of his world,
+odds and ends such as come out of the facility and the fierce vanity of
+youth. It was about this time at any rate that he decided to publish
+them, and gave them the name of _Sketches by Boz_.
+
+They must, I think, be read in the light of this youthful explosion. In
+some psychological sense he had really been wronged. But he had only
+become conscious of his wrongs as his wrongs had been gradually righted.
+Similarly, it has often been found that a man who can patiently endure
+penal servitude through a judicial blunder will nevertheless, when once
+his cause is well asserted, quarrel about the amount of compensation or
+complain of small slights in his professional existence. These are the
+marks of the first literary action of Dickens. It has in it all the
+peculiar hardness of youth; a hardness which in those who have in any
+way been unfairly treated reaches even to impudence. It is a terrible
+thing for any man to find out that his elders are wrong. And this
+almost unkindly courage of youth must partly be held responsible for the
+smartness of Dickens, that almost offensive smartness which in these
+earlier books of his sometimes irritates us like the showy gibes in the
+tall talk of a school-boy. These first pages bear witness both to the
+energy of his genius and also to its unenlightenment; he seems more
+ignorant and more cocksure than so great a man should be. Dickens was
+never stupid, but he was sometimes silly; and he is occasionally silly
+here.
+
+All this must be said to prepare the more fastidious modern for these
+papers, if he has never read them before. But when all this has been
+said there remains in them exactly what always remains in Dickens when
+you have taken away everything that can be taken away by the most
+fastidious modern who ever dissected his grandmother. There remains that
+_primum mobile_ of which all the mystics have spoken: energy, the power
+to create. I will not call it "the will to live," for that is a priggish
+phrase of German professors. Even German professors, I suppose, have the
+will to live. But Dickens had exactly what German professors have not:
+he had the power to live. And indeed it is most valuable to have these
+early specimens of the Dickens work if only because they are specimens
+of his spirit apart from his matured intelligence. It is well to be able
+to realise that contact with the Dickens world is almost like a physical
+contact; it is like stepping suddenly into the hot smells of a
+greenhouse, or into the bleak smell of the sea. We know that we are
+there. Let any one read, for instance, one of the foolish but amusing
+farces in Dickens's first volume. Let him read, for instance, such a
+story as that of _Horatio Sparkins_ or that of _The Tuggses at
+Ramsgate_. He will not find very much of that verbal felicity or
+fantastic irony that Dickens afterwards developed; the incidents are
+upon the plain lines of the stock comedy of the day: sharpers who entrap
+simpletons, spinsters who angle for husbands, youths who try to look
+Byronic and only look foolish. Yet there is something in these stories
+which there is not in the ordinary stock comedies of that day: an
+indefinable flavour of emphasis and richness, a hint as of infinity of
+fun. Doubtless, for instance, a million comic writers of that epoch had
+made game of the dark, romantic young man who pretended to abysses of
+philosophy and despair. And it is not easy to say exactly why we feel
+that the few metaphysical remarks of Mr. Horatio Sparkins are in some
+way really much funnier than any of those old stock jokes. It is in a
+certain quality of deep enjoyment in the writer as well as the reader;
+as if the few words written had been dipped in dark nonsense and were,
+as it were, reeking with derision. "Because if Effect be the result of
+Cause and Cause be the Precursor of Effect," said Mr. Horatio Sparkins,
+"I apprehend that you are wrong." Nobody can get at the real secret of
+sentences like that; sentences which were afterwards strewed with
+reckless liberality over the conversation of Dick Swiveller or Mr.
+Mantalini, Sim Tappertit or Mr. Pecksniff. Though the joke seems most
+superficial one has only to read it a certain number of times to see
+that it is most subtle. The joke does not lie in Mr. Sparkins merely
+using long words, any more than the joke lies merely in Mr. Swiveller
+drinking, or in Mr. Mantalini deceiving his wife. It is something in
+the arrangement of the words; something in a last inspired turn of
+absurdity given to a sentence. In spite of everything Horatio Sparkins
+is funny. We cannot tell why he is funny. When we know why he is funny
+we shall know why Dickens is great.
+
+Standing as we do here upon the threshold, as it were, of the work of
+Dickens, it may be well perhaps to state this truth as being, after all,
+the most important one. This first work had, as I have said, the faults
+of first work and the special faults that arose from its author's
+accidental history; he was deprived of education, and therefore it was
+in some ways uneducated; he was confronted with the folly and failure of
+his natural superiors and guardians, and therefore it was in some ways
+pert and insolent. Nevertheless the main fact about the work is worth
+stating here for any reader who should follow the chronological order
+and read the _Sketches by Boz_ before embarking on the stormy and
+splendid sea of _Pickwick_. For the sea of _Pickwick_, though splendid,
+does make some people seasick. The great point to be emphasised at such
+an initiation is this: that people, especially refined people, are not
+to judge of Dickens by what they would call the coarseness or
+commonplaceness of his subject. It is quite true that his jokes are
+often on the same _subjects_ as the jokes in a halfpenny comic paper.
+Only they happen to be good jokes. He does make jokes about drunkenness,
+jokes about mothers-in-law, jokes about henpecked husbands, jokes (which
+is much more really unpardonable) about spinsters, jokes about physical
+cowardice, jokes about fatness, jokes about sitting down on one's hat.
+He does make fun of all these things; and the reason is not very far to
+seek. He makes fun of all these things because all these things, or
+nearly all of them, are really very funny. But a large number of those
+who might otherwise read and enjoy Dickens are undoubtedly "put off" (as
+the phrase goes) by the fact that he seems to be echoing a poor kind of
+claptrap in his choice of incidents and images. Partly, of course, he
+suffers from the very fact of his success; his play with these topics
+was so good that every one else has played with them increasingly since;
+he may indeed have copied the old jokes, but he certainly renewed them.
+For instance, "Ally Sloper" was certainly copied from Wilkins Micawber.
+To this day you may see (in the front page of that fine periodical) the
+bald head and the high shirt collar that betray the high original from
+which "Ally Sloper" is derived. But exactly because "Sloper" was stolen
+from Micawber, for that very reason the new generation feels as if
+Micawber were stolen from "Sloper." Many modern readers feel as if
+Dickens were copying the comic papers, whereas in truth the comic papers
+are still copying Dickens.
+
+Dickens showed himself to be an original man by always accepting old and
+established topics. There is no clearer sign of the absence of
+originality among modern poets than their disposition to find new
+themes. Really original poets write poems about the spring. They are
+always fresh, just as the spring is always fresh. Men wholly without
+originality write poems about torture, or new religions, of some
+perversion of obscenity, hoping that the mere sting of the subject may
+speak for them. But we do not sufficiently realise that what is true of
+the classic ode is also true of the classic joke. A true poet writes
+about the spring being beautiful because (after a thousand springs) the
+spring really is beautiful. In the same way the true humourist writes
+about a man sitting down on his hat, because the act of sitting down on
+one's hat (however often and however admirably performed) really is
+extremely funny. We must not dismiss a new poet because his poem is
+called _To a Skylark_; nor must we dismiss a humourist because his new
+farce is called _My Mother-in-law_. He may really have splendid and
+inspiring things to say upon an eternal problem. The whole question is
+whether he has.
+
+Now this is exactly where Dickens, and the possible mistake about
+Dickens, both come in. Numbers of sensitive ladies, numbers of simple
+aesthetes, have had a vague shrinking from that element in Dickens which
+begins vaguely in _The Tuggses at Ramsgate_ and culminates in
+_Pickwick_. They have a vague shrinking from the mere subject matter;
+from the mere fact that so much of the fun is about drinking or
+fighting, or falling down, or eloping with old ladies. It is to these
+that the first appeal must be made upon the threshold of Dickens
+criticism. Let them really read the thing and really see whether the
+humour is the gross and half-witted jeering which they imagine it to be.
+It is exactly here that the whole genius of Dickens is concerned. His
+subjects are indeed stock subjects; like the skylark of Shelley, or the
+autumn of Keats. But all the more because they are stock subjects the
+reader realises what a magician is at work. The notion of a clumsy
+fellow who falls off his horse is indeed a stock and stale subject. But
+Mr. Winkle is not a stock and stale subject. Nor is his horse a stock
+and stale subject; it is as immortal as the horses of Achilles. The
+notion of a fat old gentleman proud of his legs might easily be vulgar.
+But Mr. Pickwick proud of his legs is not vulgar; somehow we feel that
+they were legs to be proud of. And it is exactly this that we must look
+for in these _Sketches_. We must not leap to any cheap fancy that they
+are low farces. Rather we must see that they are not low farces; and see
+that nobody but Dickens could have prevented them from being so.
+
+
+
+
+PICKWICK PAPERS
+
+
+There are those who deny with enthusiasm the existence of a God and are
+happy in a hobby which they call the Mistakes of Moses. I have not
+studied their labours in detail, but it seems that the chief mistake of
+Moses was that he neglected to write the Pentateuch. The lesser errors,
+apparently, were not made by Moses, but by another person equally
+unknown. These controversialists cover the very widest field, and their
+attacks upon Scripture are varied to the point of wildness. They range
+from the proposition that the unexpurgated Bible is almost as unfit for
+an American girls' school as is an unexpurgated Shakespeare; they
+descend to the proposition that kissing the Book is almost as
+hygienically dangerous as kissing the babies of the poor. A superficial
+critic might well imagine that there was not one single sentence left of
+the Hebrew or Christian Scriptures which this school had not marked with
+some ingenious and uneducated comment. But there is one passage at least
+upon which they have never pounced, at least to my knowledge; and in
+pointing it out to them I feel that I am, or ought to be, providing
+material for quite a multitude of Hyde Park orations. I mean that
+singular arrangement in the mystical account of the Creation by which
+light is created first and all the luminous bodies afterwards. One could
+not imagine a process more open to the elephantine logic of the
+Bible-smasher than this: that the sun should be created after the
+sunlight. The conception that lies at the back of the phrase is indeed
+profoundly antagonistic to much of the modern point of view. To many
+modern people it would sound like saying that foliage existed before the
+first leaf; it would sound like saying that childhood existed before a
+baby was born. The idea is, as I have said, alien to most modern
+thought, and like many other ideas which are alien to most modern
+thought, it is a very subtle and a very sound idea. Whatever be the
+meaning of the passage in the actual primeval poem, there is a very real
+metaphysical meaning in the idea that light existed before the sun and
+stars. It is not barbaric; it is rather Platonic. The idea existed
+before any of the machinery which made manifest the idea. Justice
+existed when there was no need of judges, and mercy existed before any
+man was oppressed.
+
+However this may be in the matter of religion and philosophy, it can be
+said with little exaggeration that this truth is the very key of
+literature. The whole difference between construction and creation is
+exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is
+constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists, as the
+mother can love the unborn child. In creative art the essence of a book
+exists before the book or before even the details or main features of
+the book; the author enjoys it and lives in it with a kind of prophetic
+rapture. He wishes to write a comic story before he has thought of a
+single comic incident. He desires to write a sad story before he has
+thought of anything sad. He knows the atmosphere before he knows
+anything. There is a low priggish maxim sometimes uttered by men so
+frivolous as to take humour seriously--a maxim that a man should not
+laugh at his own jokes. But the great artist not only laughs at his own
+jokes; he laughs at his own jokes before he has made them. In the case
+of a man really humorous we can see humour in his eye before he has
+thought of any amusing words at all. So the creative writer laughs at
+his comedy before he creates it, and he has tears for his tragedy before
+he knows what it is. When the symbols and the fulfilling facts do come
+to him, they come generally in a manner very fragmentary and inverted,
+mostly in irrational glimpses of crisis or consummation. The last page
+comes before the first; before his romance has begun, he knows that it
+has ended well. He sees the wedding before the wooing; he sees the death
+before the duel. But most of all he sees the colour and character of the
+whole story prior to any possible events in it. This is the real
+argument for art and style, only that the artists and the stylists have
+not the sense to use it. In one very real sense style is far more
+important than either character or narrative. For a man knows what style
+of book he wants to write when he knows nothing else about it.
+
+_Pickwick_ is in Dickens's career the mere mass of light before the
+creation of sun or moon. It is the splendid, shapeless substance of
+which all his stars were ultimately made. You might split up _Pickwick_
+into innumerable novels as you could split up that primeval light into
+innumerable solar systems. The _Pickwick Papers_ constitute first and
+foremost a kind of wild promise, a pre-natal vision of all the children
+of Dickens. He had not yet settled down into the plain, professional
+habit of picking out a plot and characters, of attending to one thing at
+a time, of writing a separate, sensible novel and sending it off to his
+publishers. He is still in the youthful whirl of the kind of world that
+he would like to create. He has not yet really settled what story he
+will write, but only what sort of story he will write. He tries to tell
+ten stories at once; he pours into the pot all the chaotic fancies and
+crude experiences of his boyhood; he sticks in irrelevant short stories
+shamelessly, as into a scrap-book; he adopts designs and abandons them,
+begins episodes and leaves them unfinished; but from the first page to
+the last there is a nameless and elemental ecstasy--that of the man who
+is doing the kind of thing that he can do. Dickens, like every other
+honest and effective writer, came at last to some degree of care and
+self-restraint. He learned how to make his _dramatis personae_ assist his
+drama; he learned how to write stories which were full of rambling and
+perversity, but which were stories. But before he wrote a single real
+story, he had a kind of vision. It was a vision of the Dickens world--a
+maze of white roads, a map full of fantastic towns, thundering coaches,
+clamorous market-places, uproarious inns, strange and swaggering
+figures. That vision was _Pickwick_.
+
+It must be remembered that this is true even in connection with the
+man's contemporaneous biography. Apart from anything else about it,
+_Pickwick_ was his first great chance. It was a big commission given in
+some sense to an untried man, that he might show what he could do. It
+was in a strict sense a sample. And just as a sample of leather can be
+only a piece of leather, or a sample of coal a lump of coal, so this
+book may most properly be regarded as simply a lump of Dickens. He was
+anxious to show all that was in him. He was more concerned to prove that
+he could write well than to prove that he could write this particular
+book well. And he did prove this, at any rate. No one ever sent such a
+sample as the sample of Dickens. His roll of leather blocked up the
+street; his lump of coal set the Thames on fire.
+
+The book originated in the suggestion of a publisher; as many more good
+books have done than the arrogance of the man of letters is commonly
+inclined to admit. Very much is said in our time about Apollo and
+Admetus, and the impossibility of asking genius to work within
+prescribed limits or assist an alien design. But after all, as a matter
+of fact, some of the greatest geniuses have done it, from Shakespeare
+botching up bad comedies and dramatising bad novels down to Dickens
+writing a masterpiece as the mere framework for a Mr. Seymour's
+sketches. Nor is the true explanation irrelevant to the spirit and power
+of Dickens. Very delicate, slender, and _bizarre_ talents are indeed
+incapable of being used for an outside purpose, whether of public good
+or of private gain. But about very great and rich talent there goes a
+certain disdainful generosity which can turn its hand to anything. Minor
+poets cannot write to order; but very great poets can write to order.
+The larger the man's mind, the wider his scope of vision, the more
+likely it will be that anything suggested to him will seem significant
+and promising; the more he has a grasp of everything the more ready he
+will be to write anything. It is very hard (if that is the question) to
+throw a brick at a man and ask him to write an epic; but the more he is
+a great man the more able he will be to write about the brick. It is
+very unjust (if that is all) to point to a hoarding of Colman's mustard
+and demand a flood of philosophical eloquence; but the greater the man
+is the more likely he will be to give it to you. So it was proved, not
+for the first time, in this great experiment of the early employment of
+Dickens. Messrs. Chapman and Hall came to him with a scheme for a string
+of sporting stories to serve as the context, and one might almost say
+the excuse, for a string of sketches by Seymour, the sporting artist.
+Dickens made some modifications in the plan, but he adopted its main
+feature; and its main feature was Mr. Winkle. To think of what Mr.
+Winkle might have been in the hands of a dull _farceur_, and then to
+think of what he is, is to experience the feeling that Dickens made a
+man out of rags and refuse. Dickens was to work splendidly and
+successfully in many fields, and to send forth many brilliant books and
+brave figures. He was destined to have the applause of continents like a
+statesman, and to dictate to his publishers like a despot; but perhaps
+he never worked again so supremely well as here, where he worked in
+chains. It may well be questioned whether his one hack book is not his
+masterpiece.
+
+Of course it is true that as he went on his independence increased, and
+he kicked quite free of the influences that had suggested his story. So
+Shakespeare declared his independence of the original chronicle of
+Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, eliminating altogether (with some wisdom)
+another uncle called Wiglerus. At the start the Nimrod Club of Chapman
+and Hall may have even had equal chances with the Pickwick Club of young
+Mr. Dickens; but the Pickwick Club became something much better than any
+publisher had dared to dream of. Some of the old links were indeed
+severed by accident or extraneous trouble; Seymour, for whose sake the
+whole had perhaps been planned, blew his brains out before he had drawn
+ten pictures. But such things were trifles compared to _Pickwick_
+itself. It mattered little now whether Seymour blew his brains out, so
+long as Charles Dickens blew his brains in. The work became
+systematically and progressively more powerful and masterly. Many
+critics have commented on the somewhat discordant and inartistic change
+between the earlier part of _Pickwick_ and the later; they have pointed
+out, not without good sense, that the character of Mr. Pickwick changes
+from that of a silly buffoon to that of a solid merchant. But the case,
+if these critics had noticed it, is much stronger in the minor
+characters of the great company. Mr. Winkle, who has been an idiot
+(even, perhaps, as Mr. Pickwick says, "an impostor"), suddenly becomes a
+romantic and even reckless lover, scaling a forbidden wall and planning
+a bold elopement. Mr. Snodgrass, who has behaved in a ridiculous manner
+in all serious positions, suddenly finds himself in a ridiculous
+position--that of a gentleman surprised in a secret love affair--and
+behaves in a manner perfectly manly, serious, and honourable. Mr.
+Tupman alone has no serious emotional development, and for this reason
+it is, presumably, that we hear less and less of Mr. Tupman towards the
+end of the book. Dickens has by this time got into a thoroughly serious
+mood--a mood expressed indeed by extravagant incidents, but none the
+less serious for that; and into this Winkle and Snodgrass, in the
+character of romantic lovers, could be made to fit. Mr. Tupman had to be
+left out of the love affairs; therefore Mr. Tupman is left out of the
+book.
+
+Much of the change was due to the entrance of the greatest character in
+the story. It may seem strange at the first glance to say that Sam
+Weller helped to make the story serious. Nevertheless, this is strictly
+true. The introduction of Sam Weller had, to begin with, some merely
+accidental and superficial effects. When Samuel Weller had appeared,
+Samuel Pickwick was no longer the chief farcical character. Weller
+became the joker and Pickwick in some sense the butt of his jokes. Thus
+it was obvious that the more simple, solemn, and really respectable this
+butt could be made the better. Mr. Pickwick had been the figure capering
+before the footlights. But with the advent of Sam, Mr. Pickwick had
+become a sort of black background and had to behave as such. But this
+explanation, though true as far as it goes, is a mean and unsatisfactory
+one, leaving the great elements unexplained. For a much deeper and more
+righteous reason Sam Weller introduces the more serious tone of
+Pickwick. He introduces it because he introduces something which it was
+the chief business of Dickens to preach throughout his life--something
+which he never preached so well as when he preached it unconsciously.
+Sam Weller introduces the English people.
+
+Sam Weller is the great symbol in English literature of the populace
+peculiar to England. His incessant stream of sane nonsense is a
+wonderful achievement of Dickens: but it is no great falsification of
+the incessant stream of sane nonsense as it really exists among the
+English poor. The English poor live in an atmosphere of humour; they
+think in humour. Irony is the very air that they breathe. A joke comes
+suddenly from time to time into the head of a politician or a gentleman,
+and then as a rule he makes the most of it; but when a serious word
+comes into the mind of a coster it is almost as startling as a joke. The
+word "chaff" was, I suppose, originally applied to badinage to express
+its barren and unsustaining character; but to the English poor chaff is
+as sustaining as grain. The phrase that leaps to their lips is the
+ironical phrase. I remember once being driven in a hansom cab down a
+street that turned out to be a _cul de sac_, and brought us bang up
+against a wall. The driver and I simultaneously said something. But I
+said: "This'll never do!" and he said: "This is all right!" Even in the
+act of pulling back his horse's nose from a brick wall, that confirmed
+satirist thought in terms of his highly-trained and traditional satire;
+while I, belonging to a duller and simpler class, expressed my feelings
+in words as innocent and literal as those of a rustic or a child.
+
+This eternal output of divine derision has never been so truly typified
+as by the character of Sam; he is a grotesque fountain which gushes the
+living waters for ever. Dickens is accused of exaggeration and he is
+often guilty of exaggeration; but here he does not exaggerate: he merely
+symbolises and sublimates like any other great artist. Sam Weller does
+not exaggerate the wit of the London street arab one atom more than
+Colonel Newcome, let us say, exaggerates the stateliness of an ordinary
+soldier and gentleman, or than Mr. Collins exaggerates the fatuity of a
+certain kind of country clergyman. And this breath from the boisterous
+brotherhood of the poor lent a special seriousness and smell of reality
+to the whole story. The unconscious follies of Winkle and Tupman are
+blown away like leaves before the solid and conscious folly of Sam
+Weller. Moreover, the relations between Pickwick and his servant Sam are
+in some ways new and valuable in literature. Many comic writers had
+described the clever rascal and his ridiculous dupe; but here, in a
+fresh and very human atmosphere, we have a clever servant who was not a
+rascal and a dupe who was not ridiculous. Sam Weller stands in some ways
+for a cheerful knowledge of the world; Mr. Pickwick stands for a still
+more cheerful ignorance of the world. And Dickens responded to a
+profound human sentiment (the sentiment that has made saints and the
+sanctity of children) when he made the gentler and less-travelled
+type--the type which moderates and controls. Knowledge and innocence are
+both excellent things, and they are both very funny. But it is right
+that knowledge should be the servant and innocence the master.
+
+The sincerity of this study of Sam Weller has produced one particular
+effect in the book which I wonder that critics of Dickens have never
+noticed or discussed. Because it has no Dickens "pathos," certain parts
+of it are truly pathetic. Dickens, realising rightly that the whole tone
+of the book was fun, felt that he ought to keep out of it any great
+experiments in sadness and keep within limits those that he put in. He
+used this restraint in order not to spoil the humour; but (if he had
+known himself better) he might well have used it in order not to spoil
+the pathos. This is the one book in which Dickens was, as it were,
+forced to trample down his tender feelings; and for that very reason it
+is the one book where all the tenderness there is is quite
+unquestionably true. An admirable example of what I mean may be found in
+the scene in which Sam Weller goes down to see his bereaved father after
+the death of his step-mother. The most loyal admirer of Dickens can
+hardly prevent himself from giving a slight shudder when he thinks of
+what Dickens might have made of that scene in some of his more expansive
+and maudlin moments. For all I know old Mrs. Weller might have asked
+what the wild waves were saying; and for all I know old Mr. Weller might
+have told her. As it is, Dickens, being forced to keep the tale taut and
+humorous, gives a picture of humble respect and decency which is manly,
+dignified, and really sad. There is no attempt made by these simple and
+honest men, the father and son, to pretend that the dead woman was
+anything greatly other than she was; their respect is for death, and for
+the human weakness and mystery which it must finally cover. Old Tony
+Weller does not tell his shrewish wife that she is already a
+white-winged angel; he speaks to her with an admirable good nature and
+good sense:
+
+     "'Susan,' I says, 'you've been a wery good vife to me altogether:
+     keep a good heart, my dear, and you'll live to see me punch that
+     'ere Stiggins's 'ead yet.' She smiled at this, Samivel ... but she
+     died arter all."
+
+That is perhaps the first and the last time that Dickens ever touched
+the extreme dignity of pathos. He is restraining his compassion, and
+afterwards he let it go. Now laughter is a thing that can be let go;
+laughter has in it a quality of liberty. But sorrow has in it by its
+very nature a quality of confinement; pathos by its very nature fights
+with itself. Humour is expansive; it bursts outwards; the fact is
+attested by the common expression, "holding one's sides." But sorrow is
+not expansive; and it was afterwards the mistake of Dickens that he
+tried to make it expansive. It is the one great weakness of Dickens as a
+great writer, that he did try to make that sudden sadness, that abrupt
+pity, which we call pathos, a thing quite obvious, infectious, public,
+as if it were journalism or the measles. It is pleasant to think that in
+this supreme masterpiece, done in the dawn of his career, there is not
+even this faint fleck upon the sun of his just splendour. Pickwick will
+always be remembered as the great example of everything that made
+Dickens great; of the solemn conviviality of great friendships, of the
+erratic adventures of old English roads, of the hospitality of old
+English inns, of the great fundamental kindliness and honour of old
+English manners. First of all, however, it will always be remembered for
+its laughter, or, if you will, for its folly. A good joke is the one
+ultimate and sacred thing which cannot be criticised. Our relations
+with a good joke are direct and even divine relations. We speak of
+"seeing" a joke just as we speak of "seeing" a ghost or a vision. If we
+have seen it, it is futile to argue with us; and we have seen the vision
+of _Pickwick_. _Pickwick_ may be the top of Dickens's humour; I think
+upon the whole it is. But the broad humour of _Pickwick_ he broadened
+over many wonderful kingdoms; the narrow pathos of _Pickwick_ he never
+found again.
+
+
+
+
+NICHOLAS NICKLEBY
+
+
+Romance is perhaps the highest point of human expression, except indeed
+religion, to which it is closely allied. Romance resembles religion
+especially in this, that it is not only a simplification but a
+shortening of existence. Both romance and religion see everything as it
+were foreshortened; they see everything in an abrupt and fantastic
+perspective, coming to an apex. It is the whole essence of perspective
+that it comes to a point. Similarly, religion comes to a point--to the
+point. Thus religion is always insisting on the shortness of human life.
+But it does not insist on the shortness of human life as the pessimists
+insist on it. Pessimism insists on the shortness of human life in order
+to show that life is valueless. Religion insists on the shortness of
+human life in order to show that life is frightfully valuable--is almost
+horribly valuable. Pessimism says that life is so short that it gives
+nobody a chance; religion says that life is so short that it gives
+everybody his final chance. In the first case the word brevity means
+futility; in the second case, opportunity. But the case is even stronger
+than this. Religion shortens everything. Religion shortens even
+eternity. Where science, submitting to the false standard of time, sees
+evolution, which is slow, religion sees creation, which is sudden.
+Philosophically speaking, the process is neither slow nor quick since
+we have nothing to compare it with. Religion prefers to think of it as
+quick. For religion the flowers shoot up suddenly like rockets. For
+religion the mountains are lifted up suddenly like waves. Those who
+quote that fine passage which says that in God's sight a thousand years
+are as yesterday that is passed as a watch in the night, do not realise
+the full force of the meaning. To God a thousand years are not only a
+watch but an exciting watch. For God time goes at a gallop, as it does
+to a man reading a good tale.
+
+All this is, in a humble manner, true for romance. Romance is a
+shortening and sharpening of the human difficulty. Where you and I have
+to vote against a man, or write (rather feebly) against a man, or sign
+illegible petitions against a man, romance does for him what we should
+really like to see done. It knocks him down; it shortens the slow
+process of historical justice. All romances consist of three characters.
+Other characters may be introduced; but those other characters are
+certainly mere scenery as far as the romance is concerned. They are
+bushes that wave rather excitedly; they are posts that stand up with a
+certain pride; they are correctly painted rocks that frown very
+correctly; but they are all landscape--they are all a background. In
+every pure romance there are three living and moving characters. For the
+sake of argument they may be called St. George and the Dragon and the
+Princess. In every romance there must be the twin elements of loving and
+fighting. In every romance there must be the three characters: there
+must be the Princess, who is a thing to be loved; there must be the
+Dragon, who is a thing to be fought; and there must be St. George, who
+is a thing that both loves and fights. There have been many symptoms of
+cynicism and decay in our modern civilisation. But of all the signs of
+modern feebleness, of lack of grasp on morals as they actually must be,
+there has been none quite so silly or so dangerous as this: that the
+philosophers of to-day have started to divide loving from fighting and
+to put them into opposite camps. There could be no worse sign than that
+a man, even Nietzsche, can be found to say that we should go in for
+fighting instead of loving. There can be no worse sign than that a man,
+even Tolstoi, can be found to tell us that we should go in for loving
+instead of fighting. The two things imply each other; they implied each
+other in the old romance and in the old religion, which were the two
+permanent things of humanity. You cannot love a thing without wanting to
+fight for it. You cannot fight without something to fight for. To love a
+thing without wishing to fight for it is not love at all; it is lust. It
+may be an airy, philosophical, and disinterested lust; it may be, so to
+speak, a virgin lust; but it is lust, because it is wholly
+self-indulgent and invites no attack. On the other hand, fighting for a
+thing without loving it is not even fighting; it can only be called a
+kind of horse-play that is occasionally fatal. Wherever human nature is
+human and unspoilt by any special sophistry, there exists this natural
+kinship between war and wooing, and that natural kinship is called
+romance. It comes upon a man especially in the great hour of youth; and
+every man who has ever been young at all has felt, if only for a moment,
+this ultimate and poetic paradox. He knows that loving the world is the
+same thing as fighting the world. It was at the very moment when he
+offered to like everybody he also offered to hit everybody. To almost
+every man that can be called a man this especial moment of the romantic
+culmination has come. In the first resort the man wished to live a
+romance. In the second resort, in the last and worst resort, he was
+content to write one.
+
+Now there is a certain moment when this element enters independently
+into the life of Dickens. There is a particular time when we can see him
+suddenly realise that he wants to write a romance and nothing else. In
+reading his letters, in appreciating his character, this point emerges
+clearly enough. He was full of the afterglow of his marriage; he was
+still young and psychologically ignorant; above all, he was now, really
+for the first time, sure that he was going to be at least some kind of
+success. There is, I repeat, a certain point at which one feels that
+Dickens will either begin to write romances or go off on something
+different altogether. This crucial point in his life is marked by
+_Nicholas Nickleby_.
+
+It must be remembered that before this issue of _Nicholas Nickleby_ his
+work, successful as it was, had not been such as to dedicate him
+seriously or irrevocably to the writing of novels. He had already
+written three books; and at least two of them are classed among the
+novels under his name. But if we look at the actual origin and formation
+of these books we see that they came from another source and were really
+designed upon another plan. The three books were, of course, the
+_Sketches by Boz_, _the Pickwick Papers_, and _Oliver Twist_. It is, I
+suppose, sufficiently well understood that the _Sketches by Boz_ are, as
+their name implies, only sketches. But surely it is quite equally clear
+that the _Pickwick Papers_ are, as their name implies, merely papers.
+Nor is the case at all different in spirit and essence when we come to
+_Oliver Twist_. There is indeed a sort of romance in _Oliver Twist_, but
+it is such an uncommonly bad one that it can hardly be regarded as
+greatly interrupting the previous process; and if the reader chooses to
+pay very little attention to it, he cannot pay less attention to it than
+the author did. But in fact the case lies far deeper. _Oliver Twist_ is
+so much apart from the ordinary track of Dickens, it is so gloomy, it is
+so much all in one atmosphere, that it can best be considered as an
+exception or a solitary excursus in his work. Perhaps it can best be
+considered as the extension of one of his old sketches, of some sketch
+that happened to be about a visit to a workhouse or a gaol. In the
+_Sketches by Boz_ he might well have visited a workhouse where he saw
+Bumble; in the _Sketches by Boz_ he might well have visited a prison
+where he saw Fagin. We are still in the realm of sketches and
+sketchiness. _The Pickwick Papers_ may be called an extension of one of
+his bright sketches. _Oliver Twist_ may be called an extension of one of
+his gloomy ones.
+
+Had he continued along this line all his books might very well have been
+note-books. It would be very easy to split up all his subsequent books
+into scraps and episodes, such as those which make up the _Sketches by
+Boz_. It would be easy enough for Dickens, instead of publishing
+_Nicholas Nickleby_, to have published a book of sketches, one of which
+was called "A Yorkshire School," another called "A Provincial Theatre,"
+and another called "Sir Mulberry Hawk or High Life Revealed," another
+called "Mrs. Nickleby or a Lady's Monologue." It would have been very
+easy to have thrown over the rather chaotic plan of the _Old Curiosity
+Shop_. He might have merely written short stories called "The Glorious
+Apollos," "Mrs. Quilp's Tea-Party," "Mrs. Jarley's Waxwork," "The Little
+Servant," and "The Death of a Dwarf." _Martin Chuzzlewit_ might have
+been twenty stories instead of one story. _Dombey and Son_ might have
+been twenty stories instead of one story. We might have lost all
+Dickens's novels; we might have lost altogether Dickens the novelist. We
+might have lost that steady love of a seminal and growing romance which
+grew on him steadily as the years advanced, and which gave us towards
+the end some of his greatest triumphs. All his books might have been
+_Sketches by Boz_. But he did turn away from this, and the turning-point
+is _Nicholas Nickleby_.
+
+Everything has a supreme moment and is crucial; that is where our
+friends the evolutionists go wrong. I suppose that there is an instant
+of midsummer as there is an instant of midnight. If in the same way
+there is a supreme point of spring, _Nicholas Nickleby_ is the supreme
+point of Dickens's spring. I do not mean that it is the best book that
+he wrote in his youth. _Pickwick_ is a better book. I do not mean that
+it contains more striking characters than any of the other books in his
+youth. The _Old Curiosity Shop_ contains at least two more striking
+characters. But I mean that this book coincided with his resolution to
+be a great novelist and his final belief that he could be one.
+Henceforward his books are novels, very commonly bad novels. Previously
+they have not really been novels at all. There are many indications of
+the change I mean. Here is one, for instance, which is more or less
+final. _Nicholas Nickleby_ is Dickens's first romantic novel because it
+is his first novel with a proper and dignified romantic hero; which
+means, of course, a somewhat chivalrous young donkey. The hero of
+_Pickwick_ is an old man. The hero of _Oliver Twist_ is a child. Even
+after _Nicholas Nickleby_ this non-romantic custom continued. The _Old
+Curiosity Shop_ has no hero in particular. The hero of _Barnaby Rudge_
+is a lunatic. But Nicholas Nickleby is a proper, formal, and ceremonial
+hero. He has no psychology; he has not even any particular character;
+but he is made deliberately a hero--young, poor, brave, unimpeachable,
+and ultimately triumphant. He is, in short, the hero. Mr. Vincent
+Crummles had a colossal intellect; and I always have a fancy that under
+all his pomposity he saw things more keenly than he allowed others to
+see. The moment he saw Nicholas Nickleby, almost in rags and limping
+along the high road, he engaged him (you will remember) as first walking
+gentleman. He was right. Nobody could possibly be more of a first
+walking gentleman than Nicholas Nickleby was. He was the first walking
+gentleman before he went on to the boards of Mr. Vincent Crummles's
+theatre, and he remained the first walking gentleman after he had come
+off.
+
+Now this romantic method involves a certain element of climax which to
+us appears crudity. Nicholas Nickleby, for instance, wanders through the
+world; he takes a situation as assistant to a Yorkshire schoolmaster;
+he sees an act of tyranny of which he strongly disapproves; he cries out
+"Stop!" in a voice that makes the rafters ring; he thrashes the
+schoolmaster within an inch of his life; he throws the schoolmaster away
+like an old cigar, and he goes away. The modern intellect is positively
+prostrated and flattened by this rapid and romantic way of righting
+wrongs. If a modern philanthropist came to Dotheboys Hall I fear he
+would not employ the simple, sacred, and truly Christian solution of
+beating Mr. Squeers with a stick. I fancy he would petition the
+Government to appoint a Royal Commission to inquire into Mr. Squeers. I
+think he would every now and then write letters to newspapers reminding
+people that, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, there was a
+Royal Commission to inquire into Mr. Squeers. I agree that he might even
+go the length of calling a crowded meeting in St. James's Hall on the
+subject of the best policy with regard to Mr. Squeers. At this meeting
+some very heated and daring speakers might even go the length of
+alluding sternly to Mr. Squeers. Occasionally even hoarse voices from
+the back of the hall might ask (in vain) what was going to be done with
+Mr. Squeers. The Royal Commission would report about three years
+afterwards and would say that many things had happened which were
+certainly most regrettable; that Mr. Squeers was the victim of a bad
+system; that Mrs. Squeers was also the victim of a bad system; but that
+the man who sold Squeers his cane had really acted with great
+indiscretion and ought to be spoken to kindly. Something like this would
+be what, after four years, the Royal Commission would have said; but it
+would not matter in the least what the Royal Commission had said, for by
+that time the philanthropists would be off on a new tack and the world
+would have forgotten all about Dotheboys Hall and everything connected
+with it. By that time the philanthropists would be petitioning
+Parliament for another Royal Commission; perhaps a Royal Commission to
+inquire into whether Mr. Mantalini was extravagant with his wife's
+money; perhaps a commission to inquire into whether Mr. Vincent Crummles
+kept the Infant Phenomenon short by means of gin.
+
+If we wish to understand the spirit and the period of _Nicholas
+Nickleby_ we must endeavour to comprehend and to appreciate the old more
+decisive remedies, or, if we prefer to put it so, the old more desperate
+remedies. Our fathers had a plain sort of pity; if you will, a gross and
+coarse pity. They had their own sort of sentimentalism. They were quite
+willing to weep over Smike. But it certainly never occurred to them to
+weep over Squeers. Even those who opposed the French war opposed it
+exactly in the same way as their enemies opposed the French soldiers.
+They fought with fighting. Charles Fox was full of horror at the
+bitterness and the useless bloodshed; but if any one had insulted him
+over the matter, he would have gone out and shot him in a duel as coolly
+as any of his contemporaries. All their interference was heroic
+interference. All their legislation was heroic legislation. All their
+remedies were heroic remedies. No doubt they were often narrow and often
+visionary. No doubt they often looked at a political formula when they
+should have looked at an elemental fact. No doubt they were pedantic in
+some of their principles and clumsy in some of their solutions. No
+doubt, in short, they were all very wrong; and no doubt we are the
+people, and wisdom shall die with us. But when they saw something which
+in their eyes, such as they were, really violated their morality, such
+as it was, then they did not cry "Investigate!" They did not cry
+"Educate!" They did not cry "Improve!" They did not cry "Evolve!" Like
+Nicholas Nickleby they cried "Stop!" And it did stop.
+
+This is the first mark of the purely romantic method: the swiftness and
+simplicity with which St. George kills the dragon. The second mark of it
+is exhibited here as one of the weaknesses of _Nicholas Nickleby_. I
+mean the tendency in the purely romantic story to regard the heroine
+merely as something to be won; to regard the princess solely as
+something to be saved from the dragon. The father of Madeline Bray is
+really a very respectable dragon. His selfishness is suggested with much
+more psychological tact and truth than that of any other of the villains
+that Dickens described about this time. But his daughter is merely the
+young woman with whom Nicholas is in love. We do not care a rap about
+Madeline Bray. Personally I should have preferred Cecilia Bobster. Here
+is one real point where the Victorian romance falls below the
+Elizabethan romantic drama. Shakespeare always made his heroines heroic
+as well as his heroes.
+
+In Dickens's actual literary career it is this romantic quality in
+_Nicholas Nickleby_ that is most important. It is his first definite
+attempt to write a young and chivalrous novel. In this sense the comic
+characters and the comic scenes are secondary; and indeed the comic
+characters and the comic scenes, admirable as they are, could never be
+considered as in themselves superior to such characters and such scenes
+in many of the other books. But in themselves how unforgettable they
+are. Mr. Crummles and the whole of his theatrical business is an
+admirable case of that first and most splendid quality in Dickens--I
+mean the art of making something which in life we call pompous and dull,
+becoming in literature pompous and delightful. I have remarked before
+that nearly every one of the amusing characters of Dickens is in reality
+a great fool. But I might go further. Almost every one of his amusing
+characters is in reality a great bore. The very people that we fly to in
+Dickens are the very people that we fly from in life. And there is more
+in Crummles than the mere entertainment of his solemnity and his tedium.
+The enormous seriousness with which he takes his art is always an exact
+touch in regard to the unsuccessful artist. If an artist is successful,
+everything then depends upon a dilemma of his moral character. If he is
+a mean artist success will make him a society man. If he is a
+magnanimous artist, success will make him an ordinary man. But only as
+long as he is unsuccessful will he be an unfathomable and serious
+artist, like Mr. Crummles. Dickens was always particularly good at
+expressing thus the treasures that belong to those who do not succeed in
+this world. There are vast prospects and splendid songs in the point of
+view of the typically unsuccessful man; if all the used-up actors and
+spoilt journalists and broken clerks could give a chorus, it would be a
+wonderful chorus in praise of the world. But these unsuccessful men
+commonly cannot even speak. Dickens is the voice of them, and a very
+ringing voice; because he was perhaps the only one of these unsuccessful
+men that was ever successful.
+
+
+
+
+OLIVER TWIST
+
+
+In considering Dickens, as we almost always must consider him, as a man
+of rich originality, we may possibly miss the forces from which he drew
+even his original energy. It is not well for man to be alone. We, in the
+modern world, are ready enough to admit that when it is applied to some
+problem of monasticism or of an ecstatic life. But we will not admit
+that our modern artistic claim to absolute originality is really a claim
+to absolute unsociability; a claim to absolute loneliness. The anarchist
+is at least as solitary as the ascetic. And the men of very vivid vigour
+in literature, the men such as Dickens, have generally displayed a large
+sociability towards the society of letters, always expressed in the
+happy pursuit of pre-existent themes, sometimes expressed, as in the
+case of Moliere or Sterne, in downright plagiarism. For even theft is a
+confession of our dependence on society. In Dickens, however, this
+element of the original foundations on which he worked is quite
+especially difficult to determine. This is partly due to the fact that
+for the present reading public he is practically the only one of his
+long line that is read at all. He sums up Smollett and Goldsmith, but he
+also destroys them. This one giant, being closest to us, cuts off from
+our view even the giants that begat him. But much more is this
+difficulty due to the fact that Dickens mixed up with the old material,
+materials so subtly modern, so made of the French Revolution, that the
+whole is transformed. If we want the best example of this, the best
+example is _Oliver Twist_.
+
+Relatively to the other works of Dickens _Oliver Twist_ is not of great
+value, but it is of great importance. Some parts of it are so crude and
+of so clumsy a melodrama, that one is almost tempted to say that Dickens
+would have been greater without it. But even if he had been greater
+without it he would still have been incomplete without it. With the
+exception of some gorgeous passages, both of humour and horror, the
+interest of the book lies not so much in its revelation of Dickens's
+literary genius as in its revelation of those moral, personal, and
+political instincts which were the make-up of his character and the
+permanent support of that literary genius. It is by far the most
+depressing of all his books; it is in some ways the most irritating; yet
+its ugliness gives the last touch of honesty to all that spontaneous and
+splendid output. Without this one discordant note all his merriment
+might have seemed like levity.
+
+Dickens had just appeared upon the stage and set the whole world
+laughing with his first great story _Pickwick_. _Oliver Twist_ was his
+encore. It was the second opportunity given to him by those who had
+rolled about with laughter over Tupman and Jingle, Weller and Dowler.
+Under such circumstances a stagey reciter will sometimes take care to
+give a pathetic piece after his humorous one; and with all his many
+moral merits, there was much that was stagey about Dickens. But this
+explanation alone is altogether inadequate and unworthy. There was in
+Dickens this other kind of energy, horrible, uncanny, barbaric, capable
+in another age of coarseness, greedy for the emblems of established
+ugliness, the coffin, the gibbet, the bones, the bloody knife. Dickens
+liked these things and he was all the more of a man for liking them;
+especially he was all the more of a boy. We can all recall with pleasure
+the fact that Miss Petowker (afterwards Mrs. Lillyvick) was in the habit
+of reciting a poem called "The Blood Drinker's Burial." I cannot express
+my regret that the words of this poem are not given; for Dickens would
+have been quite as capable of writing "The Blood Drinker's Burial" as
+Miss Petowker was of reciting it. This strain existed in Dickens
+alongside of his happy laughter; both were allied to the same robust
+romance. Here as elsewhere Dickens is close to all the permanent human
+things. He is close to religion, which has never allowed the thousand
+devils on its churches to stop the dancing of its bells. He is allied to
+the people, to the real poor, who love nothing so much as to take a
+cheerful glass and to talk about funerals. The extremes of his gloom and
+gaiety are the mark of religion and democracy; they mark him off from
+the moderate happiness of philosophers, and from that stoicism which is
+the virtue and the creed of aristocrats. There is nothing odd in the
+fact that the same man who conceived the humane hospitalities of
+Pickwick should also have imagined the inhuman laughter of Fagin's den.
+They are both genuine and they are both exaggerated. And the whole human
+tradition has tied up together in a strange knot these strands of
+festivity and fear. It is over the cups of Christmas Eve that men have
+always competed in telling ghost stories.
+
+This first element was present in Dickens, and it is very powerfully
+present in _Oliver Twist_. It had not been present with sufficient
+consistency or continuity in _Pickwick_ to make it remain on the
+reader's memory at all, for the tale of "Gabriel Grubb" is grotesque
+rather than horrible, and the two gloomy stories of the "Madman" and the
+"Queer Client" are so utterly irrelevant to the tale, that even if the
+reader remember them he probably does not remember that they occur in
+_Pickwick_. Critics have complained of Shakespeare and others for
+putting comic episodes into a tragedy. It required a man with the
+courage and coarseness of Dickens actually to put tragic episodes into a
+farce. But they are not caught up into the story at all. In _Oliver
+Twist_, however, the thing broke out with an almost brutal inspiration,
+and those who had fallen in love with Dickens for his generous
+buffoonery may very likely have been startled at receiving such very
+different fare at the next helping. When you have bought a man's book
+because you like his writing about Mr. Wardle's punch-bowl and Mr.
+Winkle's skates, it may very well be surprising to open it and read
+about the sickening thuds that beat out the life of Nancy, or that
+mysterious villain whose face was blasted with disease.
+
+As a nightmare, the work is really admirable. Characters which are not
+very clearly conceived as regards their own psychology are yet, at
+certain moments, managed so as to shake to its foundations our own
+psychology. Bill Sikes is not exactly a real man, but for all that he is
+a real murderer. Nancy is not really impressive as a living woman; but
+(as the phrase goes) she makes a lovely corpse. Something quite childish
+and eternal in us, something which is shocked with the mere simplicity
+of death, quivers when we read of those repeated blows or see Sikes
+cursing the tell-tale cur who will follow his bloody foot-prints. And
+this strange, sublime, vulgar melodrama, which is melodrama and yet is
+painfully real, reaches its hideous height in that fine scene of the
+death of Sikes, the besieged house, the boy screaming within, the crowd
+screaming without, the murderer turned almost a maniac and dragging his
+victim uselessly up and down the room, the escape over the roof, the
+rope swiftly running taut, and death sudden, startling and symbolic; a
+man hanged. There is in this and similar scenes something of the quality
+of Hogarth and many other English moralists of the early eighteenth
+century. It is not easy to define this Hogarthian quality in words,
+beyond saying that it is a sort of alphabetical realism, like the cruel
+candour of children. But it has about it these two special principles
+which separate it from all that we call realism in our time. First, that
+with us a moral story means a story about moral people; with them a
+moral story meant more often a story about immoral people. Second, that
+with us realism is always associated with some subtle view of morals;
+with them realism was always associated with some simple view of morals.
+The end of Bill Sikes exactly in the way that the law would have killed
+him--this is a Hogarthian incident; it carries on that tradition of
+startling and shocking platitude.
+
+All this element in the book was a sincere thing in the author, but none
+the less it came from old soils, from the graveyard and the gallows, and
+the lane where the ghost walked. Dickens was always attracted to such
+things, and (as Forster says with inimitable simplicity) "but for his
+strong sense might have fallen into the follies of spiritualism." As a
+matter of fact, like most of the men of strong sense in his tradition,
+Dickens was left with a half belief in spirits which became in practice
+a belief in bad spirits. The great disadvantage of those who have too
+much strong sense to believe in supernaturalism is that they keep last
+the low and little forms of the supernatural, such as omens, curses,
+spectres, and retributions, but find a high and happy supernaturalism
+quite incredible. Thus the Puritans denied the sacraments, but went on
+burning witches. This shadow does rest, to some extent, upon the
+rational English writers like Dickens; supernaturalism was dying, but
+its ugliest roots died last. Dickens would have found it easier to
+believe in a ghost than in a vision of the Virgin with angels. There,
+for good or evil, however, was the root of the old _diablerie_ in
+Dickens, and there it is in _Oliver Twist_. But this was only the first
+of the new Dickens elements, which must have surprised those Dickensians
+who eagerly bought his second book. The second of the new Dickens
+elements is equally indisputable and separate. It swelled afterwards to
+enormous proportions in Dickens's work; but it really has its rise here.
+Again, as in the case of the element of _diablerie_, it would be
+possible to make technical exceptions in favour of _Pickwick_. Just as
+there were quite inappropriate scraps of the gruesome element in
+_Pickwick_, so there are quite inappropriate allusions to this other
+topic in _Pickwick_. But nobody by merely reading _Pickwick_ would even
+remember this topic; no one by merely reading _Pickwick_ would know what
+this topic is; this third great subject of Dickens; this second great
+subject of the Dickens of _Oliver Twist_.
+
+This subject is social oppression. It is surely fair to say that no one
+could have gathered from _Pickwick_ how this question boiled in the
+blood of the author of _Pickwick_. There are, indeed, passages,
+particularly in connection with Mr. Pickwick in the debtor's prison,
+which prove to us, looking back on a whole public career, that Dickens
+had been from the beginning bitter and inquisitive about the problem of
+our civilisation. No one could have imagined at the time that this
+bitterness ran in an unbroken river under all the surges of that superb
+gaiety and exuberance. With _Oliver Twist_ this sterner side of Dickens
+was suddenly revealed. For the very first pages of _Oliver Twist_ are
+stern even when they are funny. They amuse, but they cannot be enjoyed,
+as can the passages about the follies of Mr. Snodgrass or the
+humiliations of Mr. Winkle. The difference between the old easy humour
+and this new harsh humour is a difference not of degree but of kind.
+Dickens makes game of Mr. Bumble because he wants to kill Mr. Bumble; he
+made game of Mr. Winkle because he wanted him to live for ever. Dickens
+has taken the sword in hand; against what is he declaring war?
+
+It is just here that the greatness of Dickens comes in; it is just here
+that the difference lies between the pedant and the poet. Dickens enters
+the social and political war, and the first stroke he deals is not only
+significant but even startling. Fully to see this we must appreciate the
+national situation. It was an age of reform, and even of radical reform;
+the world was full of radicals and reformers; but only too many of them
+took the line of attacking everything and anything that was opposed to
+some particular theory among the many political theories that possessed
+the end of the eighteenth century. Some had so much perfected the
+perfect theory of republicanism that they almost lay awake at night
+because Queen Victoria had a crown on her head. Others were so certain
+that mankind had hitherto been merely strangled in the bonds of the
+State that they saw truth only in the destruction of tariffs or of
+by-laws. The greater part of that generation held that clearness,
+economy, and a hard common-sense, would soon destroy the errors that had
+been erected by the superstitions and sentimentalities of the past. In
+pursuance of this idea many of the new men of the new century, quite
+confident that they were invigorating the new age, sought to destroy the
+old sentimental clericalism, the old sentimental feudalism, the
+old-world belief in priests, the old-world belief in patrons, and among
+other things the old-world belief in beggars. They sought among other
+things to clear away the old visionary kindliness on the subject of
+vagrants. Hence those reformers enacted not only a new reform bill but
+also a new poor law. In creating many other modern things they created
+the modern workhouse, and when Dickens came out to fight it was the
+first thing that he broke with his battle-axe.
+
+This is where Dickens's social revolt is of more value than mere
+politics and avoids the vulgarity of the novel with a purpose. His
+revolt is not a revolt of the commercialist against the feudalist, of
+the Nonconformist against the Churchman, of the Free-trader against the
+Protectionist, of the Liberal against the Tory. If he were among us now
+his revolt would not be the revolt of the Socialist against the
+Individualist, or of the Anarchist against the Socialist. His revolt was
+simply and solely the eternal revolt; it was the revolt of the weak
+against the strong. He did not dislike this or that argument for
+oppression; he disliked oppression. He disliked a certain look on the
+face of a man when he looks down on another man. And that look on the
+face is, indeed, the only thing in the world that we have really to
+fight between here and the fires of Hell. That which pedants of that
+time and this time would have called the sentimentalism of Dickens was
+really simply the detached sanity of Dickens. He cared nothing for the
+fugitive explanations of the Constitutional Conservatives; he cared
+nothing for the fugitive explanations of the Manchester School. He would
+have cared quite as little for the fugitive explanations of the Fabian
+Society or of the modern scientific Socialist. He saw that under many
+forms there was one fact, the tyranny of man over man; and he struck at
+it when he saw it, whether it was old or new. When he found that footmen
+and rustics were too much afraid of Sir Leicester Dedlock, he attacked
+Sir Leicester Dedlock; he did not care whether Sir Leicester Dedlock
+said he was attacking England or whether Mr. Rouncewell, the
+Ironmaster, said he was attacking an effete oligarchy. In that case he
+pleased Mr. Rouncewell, the Iron-master, and displeased Sir Leicester
+Dedlock, the Aristocrat. But when he found that Mr. Rouncewell's workmen
+were much too frightened of Mr. Rouncewell, then he displeased Mr.
+Rouncewell in turn; he displeased Mr. Rouncewell very much by calling
+him Mr. Bounderby. When he imagined himself to be fighting old laws he
+gave a sort of vague and general approval to new laws. But when he came
+to the new laws they had a bad time. When Dickens found that after a
+hundred economic arguments and granting a hundred economic
+considerations, the fact remained that paupers in modern workhouses were
+much too afraid of the beadle, just as vassals in ancient castles were
+much too afraid of the Dedlocks, then he struck suddenly and at once.
+This is what makes the opening chapters of _Oliver Twist_ so curious and
+important. The very fact of Dickens's distance from, and independence
+of, the elaborate financial arguments of his time, makes more definite
+and dazzling his sudden assertion that he sees the old human tyranny in
+front of him as plain as the sun at noon-day. Dickens attacks the modern
+workhouse with a sort of inspired simplicity as of a boy in a fairy tale
+who had wandered about, sword in hand, looking for ogres and who had
+found an indisputable ogre. All the other people of his time are
+attacking things because they are bad economics or because they are bad
+politics, or because they are bad science; he alone is attacking things
+because they are bad. All the others are Radicals with a large R; he
+alone is radical with a small one. He encounters evil with that
+beautiful surprise which, as it is the beginning of all real pleasure,
+is also the beginning of all righteous indignation. He enters the
+workhouse just as Oliver Twist enters it, as a little child.
+
+This is the real power and pathos of that celebrated passage in the book
+which has passed into a proverb; but which has not lost its terrible
+humour even in being hackneyed. I mean, of course, the everlasting
+quotation about Oliver Twist asking for more. The real poignancy that
+there is in this idea is a very good study in that strong school of
+social criticism which Dickens represented. A modern realist describing
+the dreary workhouse would have made all the children utterly crushed,
+not daring to speak at all, not expecting anything, not hoping anything,
+past all possibility of affording even an ironical contrast or a protest
+of despair. A modern, in short, would have made all the boys in the
+workhouse pathetic by making them all pessimists. But Oliver Twist is
+not pathetic because he is a pessimist. Oliver Twist is pathetic because
+he is an optimist. The whole tragedy of that incident is in the fact
+that he does expect the universe to be kind to him, that he does believe
+that he is living in a just world. He comes before the Guardians as the
+ragged peasants of the French Revolution came before the Kings and
+Parliaments of Europe. That is to say, he comes, indeed, with gloomy
+experiences, but he comes with a happy philosophy. He knows that there
+are wrongs of man to be reviled; but he believes also that there are
+rights of man to be demanded. It has often been remarked as a singular
+fact that the French poor, who stand in historic tradition as typical
+of all the desperate men who have dragged down tyranny, were, as a
+matter of fact, by no means worse off than the poor of many other
+European countries before the Revolution. The truth is that the French
+were tragic because they were better off. The others had known the
+sorrowful experiences; but they alone had known the splendid expectation
+and the original claims. It was just here that Dickens was so true a
+child of them and of that happy theory so bitterly applied. They were
+the one oppressed people that simply asked for justice; they were the
+one Parish Boy who innocently asked for more.
+
+
+
+
+OLD CURIOSITY SHOP
+
+
+Nothing is important except the fate of the soul; and literature is only
+redeemed from an utter triviality, surpassing that of naughts and
+crosses, by the fact that it describes not the world around us or the
+things on the retina of the eye or the enormous irrelevancy of
+encyclopaedias, but some condition to which the human spirit can come.
+All good writers express the state of their souls, even (as occurs in
+some cases of very good writers) if it is a state of damnation. The
+first thing that has to be realised about Dickens is this ultimate
+spiritual condition of the man, which lay behind all his creations. This
+Dickens state of mind is difficult to pick out in words as are all
+elementary states of mind; they cannot be described, not because they
+are too subtle for words, but because they are too simple for words.
+Perhaps the nearest approach to a statement of it would be this: that
+Dickens expresses an eager anticipation of everything that will happen
+in the motley affairs of men; he looks at the quiet crowd waiting for it
+to be picturesque and to play the fool; he expects everything; he is
+torn with a happy hunger. Thackeray is always looking back to yesterday;
+Dickens is always looking forward to to-morrow. Both are profoundly
+humorous, for there is a humour of the morning and a humour of the
+evening; but the first guesses at what it will get, at all the
+grotesqueness and variety which a day may bring forth; the second looks
+back on what the day has been and sees even its solemnities as slightly
+ironical. Nothing can be too extravagant for the laughter that looks
+forward; and nothing can be too dignified for the laughter that looks
+back. It is an idle but obvious thing, which many must have noticed,
+that we often find in the title of one of an author's books what might
+very well stand for a general description of all of them. Thus all
+Spenser's works might be called _A Hymn to Heavenly Beauty_; or all Mr.
+Bernard Shaw's bound books might be called _You Never Can Tell_. In the
+same way the whole substance and spirit of Thackeray might be gathered
+under the general title _Vanity Fair_. In the same way too the whole
+substance and spirit of Dickens might be gathered under the general
+title _Great Expectations_.
+
+In a recent criticism on this position I saw it remarked that all this
+is reading into Dickens something that he did not mean; and I have been
+told that it would have greatly surprised Dickens to be informed that he
+"went down the broad road of the Revolution." Of course it would.
+Criticism does not exist to say about authors the things that they knew
+themselves. It exists to say the things about them which they did not
+know themselves. If a critic says that the _Iliad_ has a pagan rather
+than a Christian pity, or that it is full of pictures made by one
+epithet, of course he does not mean that Homer could have said that. If
+Homer could have said that the critic would leave Homer to say it. The
+function of criticism, if it has a legitimate function at all, can only
+be one function--that of dealing with the subconscious part of the
+author's mind which only the critic can express, and not with the
+conscious part of the author's mind, which the author himself can
+express. Either criticism is no good at all (a very defensible position)
+or else criticism means saying about an author the very things that
+would have made him jump out of his boots.
+
+Doubtless the name in this case _Great Expectations_ is an empty
+coincidence; and indeed it is not in the books of the later Dickens
+period (the period of _Great Expectations_) that we should look for the
+best examples of this sanguine and expectant spirit which is the
+essential of the man's genius. There are plenty of good examples of it
+especially in the earlier works. But even in the earlier works there is
+no example of it more striking or more satisfactory than _The Old
+Curiosity Shop_. It is particularly noticeable in the fact that its
+opening and original framework express the idea of a random experience,
+a thing come across in the street; a single face in the crowd, followed
+until it tells its story. Though the thing ends in a novel it begins in
+a sketch; it begins as one of the _Sketches by Boz_. There is something
+unconsciously artistic in the very clumsiness of this opening. Master
+Humphrey starts to keep a scrap-book of all his adventures, and he finds
+that he can fill the whole scrap-book with the sequels and developments
+of one adventure; he goes out to notice everybody and he finds himself
+busily and variedly occupied only in watching somebody. In this there is
+a very profound truth about the true excitement and inexhaustible poetry
+of life. The truth is not so much that eternity is full of souls as that
+one soul can fill eternity. In strict art there is something quite lame
+and lumbering about the way in which the benevolent old story-teller
+starts to tell many stories and then drops away altogether, while one of
+his stories takes his place. But in a larger art, his collision with
+Little Nell and his complete eclipse by her personality and narrative
+have a real significance. They suggest the random richness of such
+meetings, and their uncalculated results. It makes the whole book a sort
+of splendid accident.
+
+It is not true, as is commonly said, that the Dickens pathos as pathos
+is bad. It is not true, as is still more commonly said, that the whole
+business about Little Nell is bad. The case is more complex than that.
+Yet complex as it is it admits of one sufficiently clear distinction.
+Those who have written about the death of Little Nell, have generally
+noticed the crudities of the character itself; the little girl's
+unnatural and staring innocence, her constrained and awkward piety. But
+they have nearly all of them entirely failed to notice that there is in
+the death of Little Nell one quite definite and really artistic idea. It
+is not an artistic idea that a little child should die rhetorically on
+the stage like Paul Dombey; and Little Nell does not die rhetorically
+upon the stage like Paul Dombey. But it is an artistic idea that all the
+good powers and personalities in the story should set out in pursuit of
+one insignificant child, to repair an injustice to her, should track her
+from town to town over England with all the resources of wealth,
+intelligence, and travel, and should all--arrive too late. All the good
+fairies and all the kind magicians, all the just kings and all the
+gallant princes, with chariots and flying dragons and armies and navies
+go after one little child who had strayed into a wood, and find her
+dead. That is the conception which Dickens's artistic instinct was
+really aiming at when he finally condemned Little Nell to death, after
+keeping her, so to speak, so long with the rope round her neck. The
+death of Little Nell is open certainly to the particular denial which
+its enemies make about it. The death of Little Nell is not pathetic. It
+is perhaps tragic; it is in reality ironic. Here is a very good case of
+the injustice to Dickens on his purely literary side. It is not that I
+say that Dickens achieved what he designed; it is that the critics will
+not see what the design was. They go on talking of the death of Little
+Nell as if it were a mere example of maudlin description like the death
+of Little Paul. As a fact it is not described at all; so it cannot be
+objectionable. It is not the death of Little Nell, but the life of
+Little Nell, that I object to.
+
+In this, in the actual picture of her personality, if you can call it a
+personality, Dickens did fall into some of his facile vices. The real
+objection to much of his pathos belongs really to another part of his
+character. It is connected with his vanity, his voracity for all kinds
+of praise, his restive experimentalism and even perhaps his envy. He
+strained himself to achieve pathos. His humour was inspiration; but his
+pathos was ambition. His laughter was lonely; he would have laughed on a
+desert island. But his grief was gregarious. He liked to move great
+masses of men, to melt them into tenderness, to play on the people as a
+great pianist plays on them; to make them mad or sad. His pathos was to
+him a way of showing his power; and for that reason it was really
+powerless. He could not help making people laugh; but he tried to make
+them cry. We come in this novel, as we often do come in his novels, upon
+hard lumps of unreality, upon a phrase that suddenly sickens. That is
+always due to his conscious despotism over the delicate feelings; that
+is always due to his love of fame as distinct from his love of fun. But
+it is not true that all Dickens's pathos is like this; it is not even
+true that all the passages about Little Nell are like this; there are
+two strands almost everywhere and they can be differentiated as the
+sincere and the deliberate. There is a great difference between Dickens
+thinking about the tears of his characters and Dickens thinking about
+the tears of his audience.
+
+When all this is allowed, however, and the exaggerated contempt for the
+Dickens pathos is properly corrected, the broad fact remains: that to
+pass from the solemn characters in this book to the comic characters in
+this book, is to be like some Ulysses who should pass suddenly from the
+land of shadows to the mountain of the gods. Little Nell has her own
+position in careful and reasonable criticism: even that wobbling old
+ass, her grandfather, has his position in it; perhaps even the
+dissipated Fred (whom long acquaintance with Mr. Dick Swiveller has not
+made any less dismal in his dissipation) has a place in it also. But
+when we come to Swiveller and Sampson Brass and Quilp and Mrs. Jarley,
+then Fred and Nell and the grandfather simply do not exist. There are no
+such people in the story. The real hero and heroine of _The Old
+Curiosity Shop_ are of course Dick Swiveller and the Marchioness. It is
+significant in a sense that these two sane, strong, living, and lovable
+human beings are the only two, or almost the only two, people in the
+story who do not run after Little Nell. They have something better to do
+than to go on that shadowy chase after that cheerless phantom. They have
+to build up between them a true romance; perhaps the one true romance in
+the whole of Dickens. Dick Swiveller really has all the half-heroic
+characteristics which make a man respected by a woman and which are the
+male contribution to virtue. He is brave, magnanimous, sincere about
+himself, amusing, absurdly hopeful; above all, he is both strong and
+weak. On the other hand the Marchioness really has all the
+characteristics, the entirely heroic characteristics which make a woman
+respected by a man. She is female: that is, she is at once incurably
+candid and incurably loyal, she is full of terrible common-sense, she
+expects little pleasure for herself and yet she can enjoy bursts of it;
+above all, she is physically timid and yet she can face anything. All
+this solid rocky romanticism is really implied in the speech and action
+of these two characters and can be felt behind them all the time.
+Because they are the two most absurd people in the book they are also
+the most vivid, human, and imaginable. There are two really fine love
+affairs in Dickens; and I almost think only two. One is the happy
+courtship of Swiveller and the Marchioness; the other is the tragic
+courtship of Toots and Florence Dombey. When Dick Swiveller wakes up in
+bed and sees the Marchioness playing cribbage he thinks that he and she
+are a prince and princess in a fairy tale. He thinks right.
+
+I speak thus seriously of such characters with a deliberate purpose; for
+the frivolous characters of Dickens are taken much too frivolously. It
+has been quite insufficiently pointed out that all the serious moral
+ideas that Dickens did contrive to express he expressed altogether
+through this fantastic medium, in such figures as Swiveller and the
+little servant. The warmest upholder of Dickens would not go to the
+solemn or sentimental passages for anything fresh or suggestive in faith
+or philosophy. No one would pretend that the death of little Dombey
+(with its "What are the wild waves saying?") told us anything new or
+real about death. A good Christian dying, one would imagine, not only
+would not know what the wild waves were saying, but would not care. No
+one would pretend that the repentance of old Paul Dombey throws any
+light on the psychology or philosophy of repentance. No doubt old
+Dombey, white-haired and amiable, was a great improvement on old Dombey
+brown-haired and unpleasant. But in his case the softening of the heart
+seems to bear too close a resemblance to softening of the brain. Whether
+these serious passages are as bad as the critical people or as good as
+the sentimental people find them, at least they do not convey anything
+in the way of an illuminating glimpse or a bold suggestion about men's
+moral nature. The serious figures do not tell one anything about the
+human soul. The comic figures do. Take anything almost at random out of
+these admirable speeches of Dick Swiveller. Notice, for instance, how
+exquisitely Dickens has caught a certain very deep and delicate quality
+at the bottom of this idle kind of man. I mean that odd impersonal sort
+of intellectual justice, by which the frivolous fellow sees things as
+they are and even himself as he is; and is above irritation. Mr.
+Swiveller, you remember, asks the Marchioness whether the Brass family
+ever talk about him; she nods her head with vivacity. "'Complimentary?'
+inquired Mr. Swiveller. The motion of the little servant's head
+altered.... 'But she says,' continued the little servant, 'that you
+ain't to be trusted.' 'Well, do you know, Marchioness,' said Mr.
+Swiveller thoughtfully, 'many people, not exactly professional people,
+but tradesmen, have had the same idea. The excellent citizen from whom I
+ordered this beer inclines strongly to that opinion.'"
+
+This philosophical freedom from all resentment, this strange love of
+truth which seems actually to come through carelessness, is a very real
+piece of spiritual observation. Even among liars there are two classes,
+one immeasurably better than another. The honest liar is the man who
+tells the truth about his old lies; who says on Wednesday, "I told a
+magnificent lie on Monday." He keeps the truth in circulation; no one
+version of things stagnates in him and becomes an evil secret. He does
+not have to live with old lies; a horrible domesticity. Mr. Swiveller
+may mislead the waiter about whether he has the money to pay; but he
+does not mislead his friend, and he does not mislead himself on the
+point. He is quite as well aware as any one can be of the accumulating
+falsity of the position of a gentleman who by his various debts has
+closed up all the streets into the Strand except one, and who is going
+to close that to-night with a pair of gloves. He shuts up the street
+with a pair of gloves, but he does not shut up his mind with a secret.
+The traffic of truth is still kept open through his soul.
+
+It is exactly in these absurd characters, then, that we can find a mass
+of psychological and ethical suggestion. This cannot be found in the
+serious characters except indeed in some of the later experiments: there
+is a little of such psychological and ethical suggestion in figures like
+Gridley, like Jasper, like Bradley Headstone. But in these earlier books
+at least, such as _The Old Curiosity Shop_, the grave or moral figures
+throw no light upon morals. I should maintain this generalisation even
+in the presence of that apparent exception _The Christmas Carol_ with
+its trio of didactic ghosts. Charity is certainly splendid, at once a
+luxury and a necessity; but Dickens is not most effective when he is
+preaching charity seriously; he is most effective when he is preaching
+it uproariously; when he is preaching it by means of massive
+personalities and vivid scenes. One might say that he is best not when
+he is preaching his human love, but when he is practising it. In his
+grave pages he tells us to love men; but in his wild pages he creates
+men whom we can love. By his solemnity he commands us to love our
+neighbours. By his caricature he makes us love them.
+
+There is an odd literary question which I wonder is not put more often
+in literature. How far can an author tell a truth without seeing it
+himself? Perhaps an actual example will express my meaning. I was once
+talking to a highly intelligent lady about Thackeray's _Newcomes_. We
+were speaking of the character of Mrs. Mackenzie, the Campaigner, and in
+the middle of the conversation the lady leaned across to me and said in
+a low, hoarse, but emphatic voice, "She drank. Thackeray didn't know it;
+but she drank." And it is really astonishing what a shaft of white light
+this sheds on the Campaigner, on her terrible temperament, on her
+agonised abusiveness and her almost more agonised urbanity, on her
+clamour which is nevertheless not open or explicable, on her temper
+which is not so much bad temper as insatiable, bloodthirsty, man-eating
+temper. How far can a writer thus indicate by accident a truth of which
+he is himself ignorant? If truth is a plan or pattern of things that
+really are, or in other words, if truth truly exists outside ourselves,
+or in other words, if truth exists at all, it must be often possible for
+a writer to uncover a corner of it which he happens not to understand,
+but which his reader does happen to understand. The author sees only two
+lines; the reader sees where they meet and what is the angle. The author
+sees only an arc or fragment of a curve; the reader sees the size of the
+circle. The last thing to say about Dickens, and especially about books
+like _The Old Curiosity Shop_, is that they are full of these
+unconscious truths. The careless reader may miss them. The careless
+author almost certainly did miss them. But from them can be gathered an
+impression of real truth to life which is for the grave critics of
+Dickens an almost unknown benefit, buried treasure. Here for instance is
+one of them out of _The Old Curiosity Shop_. I mean the passage in which
+(by a blazing stroke of genius) the dashing Mr. Chuckster, one of the
+Glorious Apollos of whom Mr. Swiveller was the Perpetual Grand, is made
+to entertain a hatred bordering upon frenzy for the stolid, patient,
+respectful, and laborious Kit. Now in the formal plan of the story Mr.
+Chuckster is a fool, and Kit is almost a hero; at least he is a noble
+boy. Yet unconsciously Dickens made the idiot Chuckster say something
+profoundly suggestive on the subject. In speaking of Kit Mr. Chuckster
+makes use of these two remarkable phrases; that Kit is "meek" and that
+he is "a snob." Now Kit is really a very fresh and manly picture of a
+boy, firm, sane, chivalrous, reasonable, full of those three great Roman
+virtues which Mr. Belloc has so often celebrated, _virtus_ and
+_verecundia_ and _pietas_. He is a sympathetic but still a
+straightforward study of the best type of that most respectable of all
+human classes, the respectable poor. All this is true; all that Dickens
+utters in praise of Kit is true; nevertheless the awful words of
+Chuckster remain written on the eternal skies. Kit is meek and Kit is a
+snob. His natural dignity does include and is partly marred by that
+instinctive subservience to the employing class which has been the
+comfortable weakness of the whole English democracy, which has prevented
+their making any revolution for the last two hundred years. Kit would
+not serve any wicked man for money, but he would serve any moderately
+good man and the money would give a certain dignity and decisiveness to
+the goodness. All this is the English popular evil which goes along with
+the English popular virtues of geniality, of homeliness, tolerance and
+strong humour, hope and an enormous appetite for a hand-to-mouth
+happiness. The scene in which Kit takes his family to the theatre is a
+monument of the massive qualities of old English enjoyment. If what we
+want is Merry England, our antiquarians ought not to revive the Maypole
+or the Morris Dancers; they ought to revive Astley's and Sadler's Wells
+and the old solemn Circus and the old stupid Pantomime, and all the
+sawdust and all the oranges. Of all this strength and joy in the poor,
+Kit is a splendid and final symbol. But amid all his masculine and
+English virtue, he has this weak touch of meekness, or acceptance of the
+powers that be. It is a sound touch; it is a real truth about Kit. But
+Dickens did not know it. Mr. Chuckster did.
+
+Dickens's stories taken as a whole have more artistic unity than appears
+at the first glance. It is the immediate impulse of a modern critic to
+dismiss them as mere disorderly scrap-books with very brilliant scraps.
+But this is not quite so true as it looks. In one of Dickens's novels
+there is generally no particular unity of construction; but there is
+often a considerable unity of sentiment and atmosphere. Things are
+irrelevant, but not somehow inappropriate. The whole book is written
+carelessly; but the whole book is generally written in one mood. To take
+a rude parallel from the other arts, we may say that there is not much
+unity of form, but there is much unity of colour. In most of the novels
+this can be seen. _Nicholas Nickleby_, as I have remarked, is full of a
+certain freshness, a certain light and open-air curiosity, which
+irradiates from the image of the young man swinging along the Yorkshire
+roads in the sun. Hence the comic characters with whom he falls in are
+comic characters in the same key; they are a band of strolling players,
+charlatans and poseurs, but too humane to be called humbugs. In the same
+way, the central story of _Oliver Twist_ is sombre; and hence even its
+comic character is almost sombre; at least he is too ugly to be merely
+amusing. Mr. Bumble is in some ways a terrible grotesque; his apoplectic
+visage recalls the "fire-red Cherubimme's face," which added such horror
+to the height and stature of Chaucer's Sompnour. In both these cases
+even the riotous and absurd characters are a little touched with the
+tint of the whole story. But this neglected merit of Dickens can
+certainly be seen best in _The Old Curiosity Shop_.
+
+The curiosity shop itself was a lumber of grotesque and sinister things,
+outlandish weapons, twisted and diabolic decorations. The comic
+characters in the book are all like images bought in an old curiosity
+shop. Quilp might be a gargoyle. He might be some sort of devilish
+door-knocker, dropped down and crawling about the pavement. The same
+applies to the sinister and really terrifying stiffness of Sally Brass.
+She is like some old staring figure cut out of wood. Sampson Brass, her
+brother, again is a grotesque in the same rather inhuman manner; he is
+especially himself when he comes in with the green shade over his eye.
+About all this group of bad figures in _The Old Curiosity Shop_ there is
+a sort of _diablerie_. There is also within this atmosphere an
+extraordinary energy of irony and laughter. The scene in which Sampson
+Brass draws up the description of Quilp, supposing him to be dead,
+reaches a point of fiendish fun. "We will not say very bandy, Mrs.
+Jiniwin," he says of his friend's legs, "we will confine ourselves to
+bandy. He is gone, my friends, where his legs would never be called in
+question." They go on to the discussion of his nose, and Mrs. Jiniwin
+inclines to the view that it is flat. "Aquiline, you hag! Aquiline,"
+cries Mr. Quilp, pushing in his head and striking his nose with his
+fist. There is nothing better in the whole brutal exuberance of the
+character than that gesture with which Quilp punches his own face with
+his own fist. It is indeed a perfect symbol; for Quilp is always
+fighting himself for want of anybody else. He is energy, and energy by
+itself is always suicidal; he is that primordial energy which tears and
+which destroys itself.
+
+
+
+
+BARNABY RUDGE
+
+
+_Barnaby Rudge_ was written by Dickens in the spring and first flowing
+tide of his popularity; it came immediately after _The Old Curiosity
+Shop_, and only a short time after _Pickwick_. Dickens was one of those
+rare but often very sincere men in whom the high moment of success
+almost coincides with the high moment of youth. The calls upon him at
+this time were insistent and overwhelming; this necessarily happens at a
+certain stage of a successful writer's career. He was just successful
+enough to invite offers and not successful enough to reject them. At the
+beginning of his career he could throw himself into _Pickwick_ because
+there was nothing else to throw himself into. At the end of his life he
+could throw himself into _A Tale of Two Cities_, because he refused to
+throw himself into anything else. But there was an intervening period,
+early in his life, when there was almost too much work for his
+imagination, and yet not quite enough work for his housekeeping. To this
+period _Barnaby Rudge_ belongs. And it is a curious tribute to the quite
+curious greatness of Dickens that in this period of youthful strain we
+do not feel the strain but feel only the youth. His own amazing wish to
+write equalled or outstripped even his readers' amazing wish to read.
+Working too hard did not cure him of his abstract love of work.
+Unreasonable publishers asked him to write ten novels at once; but he
+wanted to write twenty novels at once. All this period is strangely full
+of his own sense at once of fertility and of futility; he did work which
+no one else could have done, and yet he could not be certain as yet that
+he was anybody.
+
+_Barnaby Rudge_ marks this epoch because it marks the fact that he is
+still confused about what kind of person he is going to be. He has
+already struck the note of the normal romance in _Nicholas Nickleby_; he
+has already created some of his highest comic characters in _Pickwick_
+and _The Old Curiosity Shop_, but here he betrays the fact that it is
+still a question what ultimate guide he shall follow. _Barnaby Rudge_ is
+a romantic, historical novel. Its design reminds us of Scott; some parts
+of its fulfilment remind us, alas! of Harrison Ainsworth. It is a very
+fine romantic historical novel; Scott would have been proud of it. But
+it is still so far different from the general work of Dickens that it is
+permissible to wonder how far Dickens was proud of it. The book,
+effective as it is, is almost entirely devoted to dealings with a
+certain artistic element, which (in its mere isolation) Dickens did not
+commonly affect; an element which many men of infinitely less genius
+have often seemed to affect more successfully; I mean the element of the
+picturesque.
+
+It is the custom in many quarters to speak somewhat sneeringly of that
+element which is broadly called the picturesque. It is always felt to be
+an inferior, a vulgar, and even an artificial form of art. Yet two
+things may be remarked about it. The first is that, with few
+exceptions, the greatest literary artists have been not only
+particularly clever at the picturesque, but particularly fond of it.
+Shakespeare, for instance, delighted in certain merely pictorial
+contrasts which are quite distinct from, even when they are akin to, the
+spiritual view involved. For instance, there is admirable satire in the
+idea of Touchstone teaching worldly wisdom and worldly honour to the
+woodland yokels. There is excellent philosophy in the idea of the fool
+being the representative of civilisation in the forest. But quite apart
+from this deeper meaning in the incident, the mere figure of the jester,
+in his bright motley and his cap and bells, against the green background
+of the forest and the rude forms of the shepherds, is a strong example
+of the purely picturesque. There is excellent tragic irony in the
+confrontation of the melancholy philosopher among the tombs with the
+cheerful digger of the graves. It sums up the essential point, that dead
+bodies can be comic; it is only dead souls that can be tragic. But quite
+apart from such irony, the mere picture of the grotesque gravedigger,
+the black-clad prince, and the skull is a picture in the strongest sense
+picturesque. Caliban and the two shipwrecked drunkards are an admirable
+symbol; but they are also an admirable scene. Bottom, with the ass's
+head, sitting in a ring of elves, is excellent moving comedy, but also
+excellent still life. Falstaff with his huge body, Bardolph with his
+burning nose, are masterpieces of the pen; but they would be fine
+sketches even for the pencil. King Lear, in the storm, is a landscape as
+well as a character study. There is something decorative even about the
+insistence on the swarthiness of Othello, or the deformity of Richard
+III. Shakespeare's work is much more than picturesque; but it is
+picturesque. And the same which is said here of him by way of example is
+largely true of the highest class of literature. Dante's _Divine Comedy_
+is supremely important as a philosophy; but it is important merely as a
+panorama. Spenser's _Faery Queen_ pleases us as an allegory; but it
+would please us even as a wall-paper. Stronger still is the case of
+Chaucer who loved the pure picturesque, which always includes something
+of what we commonly call the ugly. The huge stature and startling
+scarlet face of the Sompnour is in just the same spirit as Shakespeare's
+skulls and motley; the same spirit gave Chaucer's miller bagpipes, and
+clad his doctor in crimson. It is the spirit which, while making many
+other things, loves to make a picture.
+
+Now the second thing to be remarked in apology for the picturesque is,
+that the very thing which makes it seem trivial ought really to make it
+seem important; I mean the fact that it consists necessarily of
+contrasts. It brings together types that stand out from their
+background, but are abruptly different from each other, like the clown
+among the fairies or the fool in the forest. And his audacious
+reconciliation is a mark not of frivolity but of extreme seriousness. A
+man who deals in harmonies, who only matches stars with angels or lambs
+with spring flowers, he indeed may be frivolous; for he is taking one
+mood at a time, and perhaps forgetting each mood as it passes. But a man
+who ventures to combine an angel and an octopus must have some serious
+view of the universe. The man who should write a dialogue between two
+early Christians might be a mere writer of dialogues. But a man who
+should write a dialogue between an early Christian and the Missing Link
+would have to be a philosopher. The more widely different the types
+talked of, the more serious and universal must be the philosophy which
+talks of them. The mark of the light and thoughtless writer is the
+harmony of his subject matter; the mark of the thoughtful writer is its
+apparent diversity. The most flippant lyric poet might write a pretty
+poem about lambs; but it requires something bolder and graver than a
+poet, it requires an ecstatic prophet, to talk about the lion lying down
+with the lamb.
+
+Dickens, at any rate, strongly supports this conception: that great
+literary men as such do not despise the purely pictorial. No man's works
+have so much the quality of illustrating themselves. Few men's works
+have been more thoroughly and eagerly illustrated; few men's works can
+it have been better fun to illustrate. As a rule this fascinating
+quality in the mere fantastic figures of the tale was inseparable from
+their farcical quality in the tale. Stiggins's red nose is distinctly
+connected with the fact that he is a member of the Ebenezer Temperance
+Association; Quilp is little, because a little of him goes a long way.
+Mr. Carker smiles and smiles and is a villain; Mr. Chadband is fat
+because in his case to be fat is to be hated. The story is immeasurably
+more important than the picture; it is not mere indulgence in the
+picturesque. Generally it is an intellectual love of the comic; not a
+pure love of the grotesque.
+
+But in one book Dickens suddenly confesses that he likes the grotesque
+even without the comic. In one case he makes clear that he enjoys pure
+pictures with a pure love of the picturesque. That place is _Barnaby
+Rudge_. There had indeed been hints of it in many episodes in his books;
+notably, for example, in that fine scene of the death of Quilp--a scene
+in which the dwarf remains fantastic long after he has ceased to be in
+any way funny. Still, the dwarf was meant to be funny. Humour of a
+horrible kind, but still humour, is the purpose of Quilp's existence and
+position in the book. Laughter is the object of all his oddities. But
+laughter is not the object of Barnaby Rudge's oddities. His idiot
+costume and his ugly raven are used for the purpose of the pure
+grotesque; solely to make a certain kind of Gothic sketch.
+
+It is commonly this love of pictures that drives men back upon the
+historical novel. But it is very typical of Dickens's living interest in
+his own time, that though he wrote two historical novels they were
+neither of them of very ancient history. They were both, indeed, of very
+recent history; only they were those parts of recent history which were
+specially picturesque. I do not think that this was due to any mere
+consciousness on his part that he knew no history. Undoubtedly he knew
+no history; and he may or may not have been conscious of the fact. But
+the consciousness did not prevent him from writing a _History of
+England_. Nor did it prevent him from interlarding all or any of his
+works with tales of the pictorial past, such as the tale of the broken
+swords in _Master Humphrey's Clock_, or the indefensibly delightful
+nightmare of the lady in the stage-coach, which helps to soften the
+amiable end of Pickwick. Neither, worst of all, did it prevent him from
+dogmatising anywhere and everywhere about the past, of which he knew
+nothing; it did not prevent him from telling the bells to tell Trotty
+Veck that the Middle Ages were a failure, nor from solemnly declaring
+that the best thing that the mediaeval monks ever did was to create the
+mean and snobbish quietude of a modern cathedral city. No, it was not
+historical reverence that held him back from dealing with the remote
+past; but rather something much better--a living interest in the living
+century in which he was born. He would have thought himself quite
+intellectually capable of writing a novel about the Council of Trent or
+the First Crusade. He would have thought himself quite equal to
+analysing the psychology of Abelard or giving a bright, satiric sketch
+of St. Augustine. It must frankly be confessed that it was not a sense
+of his own unworthiness that held him back; I fear it was rather a sense
+of St. Augustine's unworthiness. He could not see the point of any
+history before the first slow swell of the French Revolution. He could
+understand the revolutions of the eighteenth century; all the other
+revolutions of history (so many and so splendid) were unmeaning to him.
+But the revolutions of the eighteenth century he did understand; and to
+them therefore he went back, as all historical novelists go back, in
+search of the picturesque. And from this fact an important result
+follows.
+
+The result that follows is this: that his only two historical novels are
+both tales of revolutions--of eighteenth-century revolutions. These two
+eighteenth-century revolutions may seem to differ, and perhaps do
+differ in everything except in being revolutions and of the eighteenth
+century. The French Revolution, which is the theme of _A Tale of Two
+Cities_, was a revolt in favour of all that is now called enlightenment
+and liberation. The great Gordon Riot, which is the theme of _Barnaby
+Rudge_, was a revolt in favour of something which would now be called
+mere ignorant and obscurantist Protestantism. Nevertheless both belonged
+more typically to the age out of which Dickens came--the great sceptical
+and yet creative eighteenth century of Europe. Whether the mob rose on
+the right side or the wrong they both belonged to the time in which a
+mob could rise, in which a mob could conquer. No growth of intellectual
+science or of moral cowardice had made it impossible to fight in the
+streets, whether for the republic or for the Bible. If we wish to know
+what was the real link, existing actually in ultimate truth, existing
+unconsciously in Dickens's mind, which connected the Gordon Riots with
+the French Revolution, the link may be defined though not with any great
+adequacy. The nearest and truest way of stating it is that neither of
+the two could possibly happen in Fleet Street to-morrow evening.
+
+Another point of resemblance between the two books might be found in the
+fact that they both contain the sketch of the same kind of
+eighteenth-century aristocrat, if indeed that kind of aristocrat really
+existed in the eighteenth century. The diabolical dandy with the rapier
+and the sneer is at any rate a necessity of all normal plays and
+romances; hence Mr. Chester has a right to exist in this romance, and
+Foulon a right to exist in a page of history almost as cloudy and
+disputable as a romance. What Dickens and other romancers do probably
+omit from the picture of the eighteenth-century oligarch is probably his
+liberality. It must never be forgotten that even when he was a despot in
+practice he was generally a liberal in theory. Dickens and romancers
+make the pre-revolution tyrant a sincere believer in tyranny; generally
+he was not. He was a sceptic about everything, even about his own
+position. The romantic Foulon says of the people, "Let them eat grass,"
+with bitter and deliberate contempt. The real Foulon (if he ever said it
+at all) probably said it as a sort of dreary joke because he couldn't
+think of any other way out of the problem. Similarly Mr. Chester, a
+cynic as he is, believes seriously in the beauty of being a gentleman; a
+real man of that type probably disbelieved in that as in everything
+else. Dickens was too bracing, one may say too bouncing himself to
+understand the psychology of fatigue in a protected and leisured class.
+He could understand a tyrant like Quilp, a tyrant who is on his throne
+because he has climbed up into it, like a monkey. He could not
+understand a tyrant who is on his throne because he is too weary to get
+out of it. The old aristocrats were in a dead way quite good-natured.
+They were even humanitarians; which perhaps accounts for the extent to
+which they roused against themselves the healthy hatred of humanity. But
+they were tired humanitarians; tired with doing nothing. Figures like
+that of Mr. Chester, therefore, fail somewhat to give the true sense of
+something hopeless and helpless which led men to despair of the upper
+class. He has a boyish pleasure in play-acting; he has an interest in
+life; being a villain is his hobby. But the true man of that type had
+found all hobbies fail him. He had wearied of himself as he had wearied
+of a hundred women. He was graceful and could not even admire himself in
+the glass. He was witty and could not even laugh at his own jokes.
+Dickens could never understand tedium.
+
+There is no mark more strange and perhaps sinister of the interesting
+and not very sane condition of our modern literature, than the fact that
+tedium has been admirably described in it. Our best modern writers are
+never so exciting as they are about dulness. Mr. Rudyard Kipling is
+never so powerful as when he is painting yawning deserts, aching
+silences, sleepless nights, or infernal isolation. The excitement in one
+of the stories of Mr. Henry James becomes tense, thrilling, and almost
+intolerable in all the half hours during which nothing whatever is said
+or done. We are entering again into the mind, into the real mind of
+Foulon and Mr. Chester. We begin to understand the deep despair of those
+tyrants whom our fathers pulled down. But Dickens could never have
+understood that despair; it was not in his soul. And it is an
+interesting coincidence that here, in this book of _Barnaby Rudge_,
+there is a character meant to be wholly grotesque, who, nevertheless,
+expresses much of that element in Dickens which prevented him from being
+a true interpreter of the tired and sceptical aristocrat.
+
+Sim Tappertit is a fool, but a perfectly honourable fool. It requires
+some sincerity to pose. Posing means that one has not dried up in
+oneself all the youthful and innocent vanities with the slow paralysis
+of mere pride. Posing means that one is still fresh enough to enjoy the
+good opinion of one's fellows. On the other hand, the true cynic has not
+enough truth in him to attempt affectation; he has never even seen the
+truth, far less tried to imitate it. Now we might very well take the
+type of Mr. Chester on the one hand, and of Sim Tappertit on the other,
+as marking the issue, the conflict, and the victory which really ushered
+in the nineteenth century. Dickens was very like Sim Tappertit. The
+Liberal Revolution was very like a Sim Tappertit revolution. It was
+vulgar, it was overdone, it was absurd, but it was alive. Dickens was
+vulgar, was absurd, overdid everything, but he was alive. The
+aristocrats were perfectly correct, but quite dead; dead long before
+they were guillotined. The classics and critics who lamented that
+Dickens was no gentleman were quite right, but quite dead. The
+revolution thought itself rational; but so did Sim Tappertit. It was
+really a huge revolt of romanticism against a reason which had grown
+sick even of itself. Sim Tappertit rose against Mr. Chester; and, thank
+God! he put his foot upon his neck.
+
+  [Illustration: Charles Dickens, 1842
+  From a bust by H. Dexter, executed during Dickens's first visit to
+  America.]
+
+
+
+
+AMERICAN NOTES
+
+
+_American Notes_ was written soon after Dickens had returned from his
+first visit to America. That visit had, of course, been a great epoch in
+his life; but how much of an epoch men did not truly realise until, some
+time after, in the middle of a quiet story about Salisbury and a
+ridiculous architect, his feelings flamed out and flared up to the stars
+in _Martin Chuzzlewit_. The _American Notes_ are, however, interesting,
+because in them he betrays his feelings when he does not know that he is
+betraying them. Dickens's first visit to America was, from his own point
+of view, and at the beginning, a happy and festive experiment. It is
+very characteristic of him that he went among the Americans, enjoyed
+them, even admired them, and then had a quarrel with them. Nothing was
+ever so unmistakable as his good-will, except his ill-will; and they
+were never far apart. And this was not, as some bloodless moderns have
+sneeringly insinuated, a mere repetition of the proximity between the
+benevolent stage and the quarrelsome stage of drink. It was a piece of
+pure optimism; he believed so readily that men were going to be good to
+him that an injury to him was something more than an injury: it was a
+shock. What was the exact nature of the American shock must, however, be
+more carefully stated.
+
+The famous quarrel between Dickens and America, which finds its most
+elaborate expression in _American Notes_, though its most brilliant
+expression in _Martin Chuzzlewit_, is an incident about which a great
+deal remains to be said. But the thing which most specially remains to
+be said is this. This old Anglo-American quarrel was much more
+fundamentally friendly than most Anglo-American alliances. In Dickens's
+day each nation understood the other enough to argue. In our time
+neither nation understands itself even enough to quarrel. There was an
+English tradition, from Fox and eighteenth-century England; there was an
+American tradition from Franklin and eighteenth-century America; and
+they were still close enough together to discuss their differences with
+acrimony, perhaps, but with certain fundamental understandings. The
+eighteenth-century belief in a liberal civilisation was still a dogma;
+for dogma is the only thing that makes argument or reasoning possible.
+America, under all its swagger, did still really believe that Europe was
+its fountain and its mother, because Europe was more fully civilised.
+Dickens, under all his disgust, did still believe that America was in
+advance of Europe, because it was more democratic. It was an age, in
+short, in which the word "progress" could still be used reasonably;
+because the whole world looked to one way of escape and there was only
+one kind of progress under discussion. Now, of course, "progress" is a
+useless word; for progress takes for granted an already defined
+direction; and it is exactly about the direction that we disagree. Do
+not let us therefore be misled into any mistaken optimism or special
+self-congratulation upon what many people would call the improved
+relations between England and America. The relations are improved
+because America has finally become a foreign country. And with foreign
+countries all sane men take care to exchange a certain consideration and
+courtesy. But even as late as the time of Dickens's first visit to the
+United States, we English still felt America as a colony; an insolent,
+offensive, and even unintelligible colony sometimes, but still a colony;
+a part of our civilisation, a limb of our life. And America itself, as I
+have said, under all its bounce and independence, really regarded us as
+a mother country. This being the case it was possible for us to quarrel,
+like kinsmen. Now we only bow and smile, like strangers.
+
+This tone, as a sort of family responsibility, can be felt quite
+specially all through the satires or suggestions of these _American
+Notes_. Dickens is cross with America because he is worried about
+America; as if he were its father. He explores its industrial, legal,
+and educational arrangements like a mother looking at the housekeeping
+of a married son; he makes suggestions with a certain acidity; he takes
+a strange pleasure in being pessimistic. He advises them to take note of
+how much better certain things are done in England. All this is very
+different from Dickens's characteristic way of dealing with a foreign
+country. In countries really foreign, such as France, Switzerland, and
+Italy, he had two attitudes, neither of them in the least worried or
+paternal. When he found a thing in Europe which he did not understand,
+such as the Roman Catholic Church, he simply called it an old-world
+superstition, and sat looking at it like a moonlit ruin. When he found
+something that he did understand, such as luncheon baskets, he burst
+into carols of praise over the superior sense in our civilisation and
+good management to Continental methods. An example of the first attitude
+may be found in one of his letters, in which he describes the
+backwardness and idleness of Catholics who would not build a Birmingham
+in Italy. He seems quite unconscious of the obvious truth, that the
+backwardness of Catholics was simply the refusal of Bob Cratchit to
+enter the house of Gradgrind. An example of the second attitude can be
+found in the purple patches of fun in _Mugby Junction_; in which the
+English waitress denounces the profligate French habit of providing new
+bread and clean food for people travelling by rail. The point is,
+however, that in neither case has he the air of one suggesting
+improvements or sharing a problem with the people engaged on it. He does
+not go carefully with a notebook through Jesuit schools nor offer
+friendly suggestions to the governors of Parisian prisons. Or if he
+does, it is in a different spirit; it is in the spirit of an ordinary
+tourist being shown over the Coliseum or the Pyramids. But he visited
+America in the spirit of a Government inspector dealing with something
+it was his duty to inspect. This is never felt either in his praise or
+blame of Continental countries. When he did not leave a foreign country
+to decay like a dead dog, he merely watched it at play like a kitten.
+France he mistook for a kitten. Italy he mistook for a dead dog.
+
+But with America he could feel--and fear. There he could hate, because
+he could love. There he could feel not the past alone nor the present,
+but the future also; and, like all brave men, when he saw the future he
+was a little afraid of it. For of all tests by which the good citizen
+and strong reformer can be distinguished from the vague faddist or the
+inhuman sceptic, I know no better test than this--that the unreal
+reformer sees in front of him one certain future, the future of his fad;
+while the real reformer sees before him ten or twenty futures among
+which his country must choose, and may, in some dreadful hour, choose
+the wrong one. The true patriot is always doubtful of victory; because
+he knows that he is dealing with a living thing; a thing with free will.
+To be certain of free will is to be uncertain of success.
+
+The subject matter of the real difference of opinion between Dickens and
+the public of America can only be understood if it is thus treated as a
+dispute between brothers about the destiny of a common heritage. The
+point at issue might be stated like this. Dickens, on his side, did not
+in his heart doubt for a moment that England would eventually follow
+America along the road towards real political equality and purely
+republican institutions. He lived, it must be remembered, before the
+revival of aristocracy, which has since overwhelmed us--the revival of
+aristocracy worked through popular science and commercial dictatorship,
+and which has nowhere been more manifest than in America itself. He knew
+nothing of this; in his heart he conceded to the Yankees that not only
+was their revolution right but would ultimately be completed everywhere.
+But on the other hand, his whole point against the American experiment
+was this--that if it ignored certain ancient English contributions it
+would go to pieces for lack of them. Of these the first was good manners
+and the second individual liberty--liberty, that is, to speak and write
+against the trend of the majority. In these things he was much more
+serious and much more sensible than it is the fashion to think he was;
+he was indeed one of the most serious and sensible critics England ever
+had of current and present problems, though his criticism is useless to
+the point of nonentity about all things remote from him in style of
+civilisation or in time. His point about good manners is really
+important. All his grumblings through this book of _American Notes_, all
+his shrieking satire in _Martin Chuzzlewit_ are expressions of a grave
+and reasonable fear he had touching the future of democracy. And
+remember again what has been already remarked--instinctively he paid
+America the compliment of looking at her as the future of democracy.
+
+The mistake which he attacked still exists. I cannot imagine why it is
+that social equality is somehow supposed to mean social familiarity. Why
+should equality mean that all men are equally rude? Should it not rather
+mean that all men are equally polite? Might it not quite reasonably mean
+that all men should be equally ceremonious and stately and pontifical?
+What is there specially Equalitarian, for instance, in calling your
+political friends and even your political enemies by their Christian
+names in public? There is something very futile in the way in which
+certain Socialist leaders call each other Tom, Dick, and Harry;
+especially when Tom is accusing Harry of having basely imposed upon the
+well-known imbecility of Dick. There is something quite undemocratic in
+all men calling each other by the special and affectionate term
+"comrade"; especially when they say it with a sneer and smart inquiry
+about the funds. Democracy would be quite satisfied if every man called
+every other man "sir." Democracy would have no conceivable reason to
+complain if every man called every other man "your excellency" or "your
+holiness" or "brother of the sun and moon." The only democratic
+essential is that it should be a term of dignity and that it should be
+given to all. To abolish all terms of dignity is no more specially
+democratic than the Roman emperor's wish to cut off everybody's head at
+once was specially democratic. That involved equality certainly, but it
+was lacking in respect.
+
+Dickens saw America as markedly the seat of this danger. He saw that
+there was a perilous possibility that republican ideals might be allied
+to a social anarchy good neither for them nor for any other ideals.
+Republican simplicity, which is difficult, might be quickly turned into
+Bohemian brutality, which is easy. Cincinnatus, instead of putting his
+hand to the plough, might put his feet on the tablecloth, and an
+impression prevail that it was all a part of the same rugged equality
+and freedom. Insolence might become a tradition. Bad manners might have
+all the sanctity of good manners. "There you are!" cries Martin
+Chuzzlewit indignantly, when the American has befouled the butter. "A
+man deliberately makes a hog of himself and _that_ is an Institution."
+But the thread of thought which we must always keep in hand in this
+matter is that he would not thus have worried about the degradation of
+republican simplicity into general rudeness if he had not from first to
+last instinctively felt that America held human democracy in her hand,
+to exalt it or to let it fall. In one of his gloomier moments he wrote
+down his fear that the greatest blow ever struck at liberty would be
+struck by America in the failure of her mission upon the earth.
+
+This brings us to the other ground of his alarm--the matter of liberty
+of speech. Here also he was much more reasonable and philosophic than
+has commonly been realised. The truth is that the lurid individualism of
+Carlyle has, with its violent colours, "killed" the tones of most
+criticism of his time; and just as we can often see a scheme of
+decoration better if we cover some flaming picture, so you can judge
+nineteenth-century England much better if you leave Carlyle out. He is
+important to moderns because he led that return to Toryism which has
+been the chief feature of modernity, but his judgments were often not
+only spiritually false, but really quite superficial. Dickens understood
+the danger of democracy far better than Carlyle; just as he understood
+the merits of democracy far better than Carlyle. And of this fact we can
+produce one plain evidence in the matter of which we speak. Carlyle, in
+his general dislike of the revolutionary movement, lumped liberty and
+democracy together and said that the chief objection to democracy was
+that it involved the excess and misuse of liberty; he called democracy
+"anarchy or no-rule." Dickens, with far more philosophical insight and
+spiritual delicacy, saw that the real danger of democracy is that it
+tends to the very opposite of anarchy; even to the very opposite of
+liberty. He lamented in America the freedom of manners. But he lamented
+even more the absence of freedom of opinion. "I believe there is no
+country on the face of the earth," he says, "where there is less freedom
+of opinion on any subject in reference to which there is a broad
+difference of opinion than in this. There! I write the words with
+reluctance, disappointment, and sorrow; but I believe it from the bottom
+of my soul. The notion that I, a man alone by myself in America, should
+venture to suggest to the Americans that there was one point on which
+they were neither just to their own countrymen nor to us, actually
+struck the boldest dumb! Washington Irving, Prescott, Hoffman, Bryant,
+Halleck, Dana, Washington Allston--every man who writes in this country
+is devoted to the question, and not one of them _dares_ to raise his
+voice and complain of the atrocious state of the law. The wonder is that
+a breathing man can be found with temerity enough to suggest to the
+Americans the possibility of their having done wrong. I wish you could
+have seen the faces that I saw down both sides of the table at Hartford
+when I began to talk about Scott. I wish you could have heard how I gave
+it out. My blood so boiled when I thought of the monstrous injustice
+that I felt as if I were twelve feet high when I thrust it down their
+throats." Dickens knew no history, but he had all history behind him in
+feeling that a pure democracy does tend, when it goes wrong, to be too
+traditional and absolute. The truth is indeed a singular example of the
+unfair attack upon democracy in our own time. Everybody can repeat the
+platitude that the mob can be the greatest of all tyrants. But few
+realise or remember the corresponding truth which goes along with
+it--that the mob is the only permanent and unassailable high priest.
+Democracy drives its traditions too hard; but democracy is the only
+thing that keeps any traditions. An aristocracy must always be going
+after some new thing. The severity of democracy is far more of a virtue
+than its liberty. The decorum of a democracy is far more of a danger
+than its lawlessness. Dickens discovered this in his great quarrels
+about the copyright, when a whole nation acted on a small point of
+opinion as if it were going to lynch him. But, fortunately for the
+purpose of this argument, there is no need to go back to the forties for
+such a case. Another great literary man has of late visited America; and
+it is possible that Maxim Gorky may be in a position to state how far
+democracy is likely to err on the side of mere liberty and laxity. He
+may have found, like Dickens, some freedom of manners; he did not find
+much freedom of morals.
+
+Along with such American criticism should really go his very
+characteristic summary of the question of the Red Indian. It marks the
+combination between the mental narrowness and the moral justice of the
+old Liberal. Dickens can see nothing in the Red Indian except that he is
+barbaric, retrograde, bellicose, uncleanly, and superstitious--in short,
+that he is not a member of the special civilisation of Birmingham or
+Brighton. It is curious to note the contrast between the cheery, nay
+Cockney, contempt with which Dickens speaks of the American Indian and
+that chivalrous and pathetic essay in which Washington Irving celebrates
+the virtues of the vanishing race. Between Washington Irving and his
+friend Charles Dickens there was always indeed this ironical comedy of
+inversion. It is amusing that the Englishman should have been the
+pushing and even pert modernist, and the American the stately
+antiquarian and lover of lost causes. But while a man of more mellow
+sympathies may well dislike Dickens's dislike of savages, and even
+disdain his disdain, he ought to sharply remind himself of the admirable
+ethical fairness and equity which meet with that restricted outlook. In
+the very act of describing Red Indians as devils who, like so much dirt,
+it would pay us to sweep away, he pauses to deny emphatically that we
+have any right to sweep them away. We have no right to wrong the man, he
+means to say, even if he himself be a kind of wrong. Here we strike the
+ringing iron of the old conscience and sense of honour which marked the
+best men of his party and of his epoch. This rigid and even reluctant
+justice towers, at any rate, far above modern views of savages, above
+the sentimentalism of the mere humanitarian and the far weaker
+sentimentalism that pleads for brutality and a race war. Dickens was at
+least more of a man than the brutalitarian who claims to wrong people
+because they are nasty, or the humanitarian who cannot be just to them
+without pretending that they are nice.
+
+
+
+
+PICTURES FROM ITALY
+
+
+The _Pictures from Italy_ are excellent in themselves and excellent as a
+foil to the _American Notes_. Here we have none of that air of giving a
+decision like a judge or sending in a report like an inspector; here we
+have only glimpses, light and even fantastic glimpses, of a world that
+is really alien to Dickens. It is so alien that he can almost entirely
+enjoy it. For no man can entirely enjoy that which he loves; contentment
+is always unpatriotic. The difference can indeed be put with approximate
+perfection in one phrase. In Italy he was on a holiday; in America he
+was on a tour. But indeed Dickens himself has quite sufficiently
+conveyed the difference in the two phrases that he did actually use for
+the titles of the two books. Dickens often told unconscious truths,
+especially in small matters. The _American Notes_ really are notes, like
+the notes of a student or a professional witness. The _Pictures from
+Italy_ are only pictures from Italy, like the miscellaneous pictures
+that all tourists bring from Italy.
+
+To take another and perhaps closer figure of speech, almost all
+Dickens's works such as these may best be regarded as private letters
+addressed to the public. His private correspondence was quite as
+brilliant as his public works; and many of his public works are almost
+as formless and casual as his private correspondence. If he had been
+struck insensible for a year, I really think that his friends and family
+could have brought out one of his best books by themselves if they had
+happened to keep his letters. The homogeneity of his public and private
+work was indeed strange in many ways. On the one hand, there was little
+that was pompously and unmistakably public in the publications; on the
+other hand, there was very little that was private in the private
+letters. His hilarity had almost a kind of hardness about it; no man's
+letters, I should think, ever needed less expurgation on the ground of
+weakness or undue confession. The main part, and certainly the best
+part, of such a book as _Pictures from Italy_ can certainly be
+criticised best as part of that perpetual torrent of entertaining
+autobiography which he flung at his children as if they were his readers
+and his readers as if they were his children. There are some brilliant
+patches of sense and nonsense in this book; but there is always
+something accidental in them; as if they might have occurred somewhere
+else. Perhaps the most attractive of them is the incomparable
+description of the Italian Marionette Theatre in which they acted a play
+about the death of Napoleon in St. Helena. The description is better
+than that of Codlin and Short's Punch and Judy, and almost as good as
+that of Mrs. Jarley's Wax Works. Indeed the humour is similar; for Punch
+is supposed to be funny, but Napoleon (as Mrs. Jarley said when asked if
+her show was funnier than Punch) was not funny at all. The idea of a
+really tragic scene being enacted between tiny wooden dolls with large
+heads is delightfully dealt with by Dickens. We can almost imagine the
+scene in which the wooden Napoleon haughtily rebukes his wooden jailor
+for calling him General Bonaparte--"Sir Hudson Low, call me not thus; I
+am Napoleon, Emperor of the French." There is also something singularly
+gratifying about the scene of Napoleon's death, in which he lay in bed
+with his little wooden hands outside the counterpane and the doctor (who
+was hung on wires too short) "delivered medical opinions in the air." It
+may seem flippant to dwell on such flippancies in connection with a book
+which contains many romantic descriptions and many moral generalisations
+which Dickens probably valued highly. But it is not for such things that
+he is valued. In all his writings, from his most reasoned and sustained
+novel to his maddest private note, it is always this obstreperous
+instinct for farce which stands out as his in the highest sense. His
+wisdom is at the best talent, his foolishness is genius. Just that
+exuberant levity which we associate with a moment we associate in his
+case with immortality. It is said of certain old masonry that the mortar
+was so hard that it has survived the stones. So if Dickens could revisit
+the thing he built, he would be surprised to see all the work he thought
+solid and responsible wasted almost utterly away, but the shortest
+frivolities and the most momentary jokes remaining like colossal rocks
+for ever.
+
+  [Illustration: Charles Dickens, 1844
+  From a miniature by Margaret Gillies.]
+
+
+
+
+MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT
+
+
+There is a certain quality or element which broods over the whole of
+_Martin Chuzzlewit_ to which it is difficult for either friends or foes
+to put a name. I think the reader who enjoys Dickens's other books has
+an impression that it is a kind of melancholy. There are grotesque
+figures of the most gorgeous kind; there are scenes that are farcical
+even by the standard of the farcical license of Dickens; there is humour
+both of the heaviest and of the lightest kind; there are two great comic
+personalities who run like a rich vein through the whole story,
+Pecksniff and Mrs. Gamp; there is one blinding patch of brilliancy, the
+satire on American cant; there is Todgers's boarding-house; there is
+Bailey; there is Mr. Mould, the incomparable undertaker. But yet in
+spite of everything, in spite even of the undertaker, the book is sad.
+No one I think ever went to it in that mixed mood of a tired tenderness
+and a readiness to believe and laugh in which most of Dickens's novels
+are most enjoyed. We go for a particular novel to Dickens as we go for a
+particular inn. We go to the sign of the Pickwick Papers. We go to the
+sign of the Rudge and Raven. We go to the sign of the Old Curiosities.
+We go to the sign of the Two Cities. We go to each or all of them
+according to what kind of hospitality and what kind of happiness we
+require. But it is always some kind of hospitality and some kind of
+happiness that we require. And as in the case of inns we also remember
+that while there was shelter in all and food in all and some kind of
+fire and some kind of wine in all, yet one has left upon us an
+indescribable and unaccountable memory of mortality and decay, of
+dreariness in the rooms and even of tastelessness in the banquet. So any
+one who has enjoyed the stories of Dickens as they should be enjoyed has
+a nameless feeling that this one story is sad and almost sodden. Dickens
+himself had this feeling, though his breezy vanity forbade him to
+express it in so many words. In spite of Pecksniff, in spite of Mrs.
+Gamp, in spite of the yet greater Bailey, the story went lumberingly and
+even lifelessly; he found the sales falling off; he fancied his
+popularity waning, and by a sudden impulse most inartistic and yet most
+artistic, he dragged in the episode of Martin's visit to America, which
+is the blazing jewel and the sudden redemption of the book. He wrote it
+at an uneasy and unhappy period of his life; when he had ceased
+wandering in America, but could not cease wandering altogether; when he
+had lost his original routine of work which was violent but regular, and
+had not yet settled down to the full enjoyment of his success and his
+later years. He poured into this book genius that might make the
+mountains laugh, invention that juggled with the stars. But the book was
+sad; and he knew it.
+
+The just reason for this is really interesting. Yet it is one that is
+not easy to state without guarding one's self on the one side or the
+other against great misunderstandings; and these stipulations or
+preliminary allowances must in such a case as this of necessity be made
+first. Dickens was among other things a satirist, a pure satirist. I
+have never been able to understand why this title is always specially
+and sacredly reserved for Thackeray. Thackeray was a novelist; in the
+strict and narrow sense at any rate, Thackeray was a far greater
+novelist than Dickens. But Dickens certainly was the satirist. The
+essence of satire is that it perceives some absurdity inherent in the
+logic of some position, and that it draws that absurdity out and
+isolates it, so that all can see it. Thus for instance when Dickens
+says, "Lord Coodle would go out; Sir Thomas Doodle wouldn't come in; and
+there being no people to speak of in England except Coodle and Doodle
+the country has been without a Government"; when Dickens says this he
+suddenly pounces on and plucks out the one inherent absurdity in the
+English party system which is hidden behind all its paraphernalia of
+Parliaments and Statutes, elections and ballot papers. When all the
+dignity and all the patriotism and all the public interest of the
+English constitutional party conflict have been fully allowed for, there
+does remain the bold, bleak question which Dickens in substance asks,
+"Suppose I want somebody else who is neither Coodle nor Doodle." This is
+the great quality called satire; it is a kind of taunting
+reasonableness; and it is inseparable from a certain insane logic which
+is often called exaggeration. Dickens was more of a satirist than
+Thackeray for this simple reason: that Thackeray carried a man's
+principles as far as that man carried them; Dickens carried a man's
+principles as far as a man's principles would go. Dickens in short (as
+people put it) exaggerated the man and his principles; that is to say
+he emphasised them. Dickens drew a man's absurdity out of him; Thackeray
+left a man's absurdity in him. Of this last fact we can take any example
+we like; take for instance the comparison between the city man as
+treated by Thackeray in the most satiric of his novels, with the city
+man as treated by Dickens in one of the mildest and maturest of his.
+Compare the character of old Mr. Osborne in _Vanity Fair_ with the
+character of Mr. Podsnap in _Our Mutual Friend_. In the case of Mr.
+Osborne there is nothing except the solid blocking in of a brutal dull
+convincing character. _Vanity Fair_ is not a satire on the City except
+in so far as it happens to be true. _Vanity Fair_ is not a satire on the
+City, in short, except in so far as the City is a satire on the City.
+But Mr. Podsnap is a pure satire; he is an extracting out of the City
+man of those purely intellectual qualities which happen to make that
+kind of City man a particularly exasperating fool. One might almost say
+that Mr. Podsnap is all Mr. Osborne's opinions separated from Mr.
+Osborne and turned into a character. In short the satirist is more
+purely philosophical than the novelist. The novelist may be only an
+observer; the satirist must be a thinker. He must be a thinker, he must
+be a philosophical thinker for this simple reason; that he exercises his
+philosophical thought in deciding what part of his subject he is to
+satirise. You may have the dullest possible intelligence and be a
+portrait painter; but a man must have a serious intellect in order to be
+a caricaturist. He has to select what thing he will caricature. True
+satire is always of this intellectual kind; true satire is always, so
+to speak, a variation or fantasia upon the air of pure logic. The
+satirist is the man who carries men's enthusiasm further than they carry
+it themselves. He outstrips the most extravagant fanatic. He is years
+ahead of the most audacious prophet. He sees where men's detached
+intellect will eventually lead them, and he tells them the name of the
+place--which is generally hell.
+
+Now of this detached and rational use of satire there is one great
+example in this book. Even _Gulliver's Travels_ is hardly more
+reasonable than Martin Chuzzlewit's travels in the incredible land of
+the Americans. Before considering the humour of this description in its
+more exhaustive and liberal aspects, it may be first remarked that in
+this American part of _Martin Chuzzlewit_, Dickens quite specially
+sharpens up his own more controversial and political intelligence. There
+are more things here than anywhere else in Dickens that partake of the
+nature of pamphleteering, of positive challenge, of sudden repartee, of
+pugnacious and exasperating query, in a word of everything that belongs
+to the pure art of controversy as distinct not only from the pure art of
+fiction but even also from the pure art of satire. I am inclined to
+think (to put the matter not only shortly but clumsily) that Dickens was
+never in all his life so strictly clever as he is in the American part
+of _Martin Chuzzlewit_. There are places where he was more inspired,
+almost in the sense of being intoxicated, as, for instance, in the
+Micawber feasts of _David Copperfield_; there are places where he wrote
+more carefully and cunningly, as, for instance, in the mystery of _The
+Mystery of Edwin Drood_; there are places where he wrote very much more
+humanly, more close to the ground and to growing things, as in the whole
+of that admirable book _Great Expectations_. But I do not think that his
+mere abstract acuteness and rapidity of thought were ever exercised with
+such startling exactitude as they are in this place in _Martin
+Chuzzlewit_. It is to be noted, for instance, that his American
+experience had actually worked him up to a heat and habit of argument. A
+slave-owner in the Southern States tells Dickens that slave-owners do
+not ill-treat their slaves, that it is not to the interest of
+slave-owners to ill-treat their slaves. Dickens flashes back that it is
+not to the interest of a man to get drunk, but he does get drunk. This
+pugnacious atmosphere of parry and riposte must first of all be allowed
+for and understood in all the satiric excursus of Martin in America.
+Dickens is arguing all the time; and, to do him justice, arguing very
+well. These chapters are full not merely of exuberant satire on America
+in the sense that Dotheboys Hall or Mr. Bumble's Workhouse are exuberant
+satires on England. They are full also of sharp argument with America as
+if the man who wrote expected retort and was prepared with rejoinder.
+The rest of the book, like the rest of Dickens's books, possesses
+humour. This part of the book, like hardly any of Dickens's books,
+possesses wit. The republican gentleman who receives Martin on landing
+is horrified on hearing an English servant speak of the employer as "the
+master." "There are no masters in America," says the gentleman. "All
+owners are they?" says Martin. This sort of verbal promptitude is out of
+the ordinary scope of Dickens; but we find it frequently in this
+particular part of _Martin Chuzzlewit_. Martin himself is constantly
+breaking out into a controversial lucidity, which is elsewhere not at
+all a part of his character. When they talk to him about the
+institutions of America he asks sarcastically whether bowie knives and
+swordsticks and revolvers are the institutions of America. All this (if
+I may summarise) is expressive of one main fact. Being a satirist means
+being a philosopher. Dickens was not always very philosophical; but he
+had this permanent quality of the philosopher about him, that he always
+remembered people by their opinions. Elijah Pogram was to him the man
+who said that "his boastful answer to the tyrant and the despot was that
+his bright home was the land of the settin' sun." Mr. Scadder and Mr.
+Jefferson Brick were to him the men who said (in cooperation) that "the
+libation of freedom must sometimes be quaffed in blood." And in these
+chapters more than anywhere else he falls into the extreme habit of
+satire, that of treating people as if there were nothing about them
+except their opinions. It is therefore difficult to accept these pages
+as pages in a novel, splendid as they are considered as pages in a
+parody. I do not dispute that men have said and do say that "the
+libation of freedom must sometimes be quaffed in blood," that "their
+bright homes are the land of the settin' sun," that "they taunt that
+lion," that "alone they dare him," or "that softly sleeps the calm ideal
+in the whispering chambers of imagination." I have read too much
+American journalism to deny that any of these sentences and any of these
+opinions may at some time or other have been uttered. I do not deny
+that there are such opinions. But I do deny that there are such people.
+Elijah Pogram had some other business in life besides defending
+defaulting postmasters; he must have been a son or a father or a husband
+or at least (admirable thought) a lover. Mr. Chollop had some moments in
+his existence when he was not threatening his fellow-creatures with his
+sword-stick and his revolver. Of all this human side of such American
+types Dickens does not really give any hint at all. He does not suggest
+that the bully Chollop had even such coarse good-humour as bullies
+almost always have. He does not suggest that the humbug Elijah Pogram
+had even as much greasy amiability as humbugs almost invariably have. He
+is not studying them as human beings, even as bad human beings; he is
+studying them as conceptions, as points of view, as symbols of a state
+of mind with which he is in violent disagreement. To put it roughly, he
+is not describing characters, he is satirising fads. To put it more
+exactly, he is not describing characters; he is persecuting heresies.
+There is one thing really to be said against his American satire; it is
+a serious thing to be said: it is an argument, and it is true. This can
+be said of Martin's wanderings in America, that from the time he lands
+in America to the time he sets sail from it he never meets a living man.
+He has travelled in the land of Laputa. All the people he has met have
+been absurd opinions walking about. The whole art of Dickens in such
+passages as these consisted in one thing. It consisted in finding an
+opinion that had not a leg to stand on, and then giving it two legs to
+stand on.
+
+So much may be allowed; it may be admitted that Dickens is in this sense
+the great satirist, in that he can imagine absurd opinions walking by
+themselves about the street. It may be admitted that Thackeray would not
+have allowed an absurd opinion to walk about the street without at least
+tying a man on to it for the sake of safety. But while this first truth
+may be evident, the second truth which is the complement of it may
+easily be forgotten. On the one hand there was no man who could so much
+enjoy mere intellectual satire apart from humanity as Dickens. On the
+other hand there was no man who, with another and more turbulent part of
+his nature, demanded humanity, and demanded its supremacy over
+intellect, more than Dickens. To put it shortly: there never was a man
+so much fitted for saying that everything was wrong; and there never was
+a man who was so desirous of saying that everything was right. Thus,
+when he met men with whom he violently disagreed, he described them as
+devils or lunatics; he could not bear to describe them as men. If they
+could not think with him on essentials he could not stand the idea that
+they were human souls; he cast them out; he forgot them; and if he could
+not forget them he caricatured them. He was too emotional to regard them
+as anything but enemies, if they were not friends. He was too humane not
+to hate them. Charles Lamb said with his inimitable sleek pungency that
+he could read all the books there were; he excluded books that obviously
+were not books, as cookery books, chessboards bound so as to look like
+books, and all the works of modern historians and philosophers. One
+might say in much the same style that Dickens loved all the men in the
+world; that is he loved all the men whom he was able to recognise as
+men; the rest he turned into griffins and chimeras without any serious
+semblance to humanity. Even in his books he never hates a human being.
+If he wishes to hate him he adopts the simple expedient of making him an
+inhuman being. Now of these two strands almost the whole of Dickens is
+made up; they are not only different strands, they are even antagonistic
+strands. I mean that the whole of Dickens is made up of the strand of
+satire and the strand of sentimentalism; and the strand of satire is
+quite unnecessarily merciless and hostile, and the strand of
+sentimentalism is quite unnecessarily humanitarian and even maudlin. On
+the proper interweaving of these two things depends the great part of
+Dickens's success in a novel. And by the consideration of them we can
+probably best arrive at the solution of the particular emotional enigma
+of the novel called _Martin Chuzzlewit_.
+
+_Martin Chuzzlewit_ is, I think, vaguely unsatisfactory to the reader,
+vaguely sad and heavy even to the reader who loves Dickens, because in
+_Martin Chuzzlewit_ more than anywhere else in Dickens's works, more
+even than in _Oliver Twist_, there is a predominance of the harsh and
+hostile sort of humour over the hilarious and the humane. It is absurd
+to lay down any such little rules for the testing of literature. But
+this may be broadly said and yet with confidence: that Dickens is always
+at his best when he is laughing at the people whom he really admires. He
+is at his most humorous in writing of Mr. Pickwick, who represents
+passive virtue. He is at his most humorous in writing of Mr. Sam
+Weller, who represents active virtue. He is never so funny as when he is
+speaking of people in whom fun itself is a virtue, like the poor people
+in the Fleet or the Marshalsea. And in the stories that had immediately
+preceded _Martin Chuzzlewit_ he had consistently concerned himself in
+the majority of cases with the study of such genial and honourable
+eccentrics; if they are lunatics they are amiable lunatics. In the last
+important novel before _Martin Chuzzlewit_, _Barnaby Rudge_, the hero
+himself is an amiable lunatic. In the novel before that, _The Old
+Curiosity Shop_, the two comic figures, Dick Swiveller and the
+Marchioness, are not only the most really entertaining, but also the
+most really sympathetic characters in the book. Before that came _Oliver
+Twist_ (which is, I have said, an exception), and before that
+_Pickwick_, where the hero is, as Mr. Weller says, "an angel in
+gaiters." Hitherto, then, on the whole, the central Dickens character
+had been the man who gave to the poor many things, gold and wine and
+feasting and good advice; but among other things gave them a good laugh
+at himself. The jolly old English merchant of the Pickwick type was
+popular on both counts. People liked to see him throw his money in the
+gutter. They also liked to see him throw himself there occasionally. In
+both acts they recognised a common quality of virtue.
+
+Now I think it is certainly the disadvantage of _Martin Chuzzlewit_ that
+none of its absurd characters are thus sympathetic. There are in the
+book two celebrated characters who are both especially exuberant and
+amusing even for Dickens, and who are both especially heartless and
+abominable even for Dickens--I mean of course Mr. Pecksniff on the one
+hand and Mrs. Gamp on the other. The humour of both of them is
+gigantesque. Nobody will ever forget the first time he read the words
+"Now I should be very glad to see Mrs. Todgers's idea of a wooden leg."
+It is like remembering first love: there is still some sort of ancient
+sweetness and sting. I am afraid that, in spite of many criticisms to
+the contrary, I am still unable to take Mr. Pecksniff's hypocrisy
+seriously. He does not seem to me so much a hypocrite as a rhetorician;
+he reminds me of Serjeant Buzfuz. A very capable critic, Mr. Noyes, said
+that I was wrong when I suggested in another place that Dickens must
+have loved Pecksniff. Mr. Noyes thinks it clear that Dickens hated
+Pecksniff. I cannot believe it. Hatred does indeed linger round its
+object as much as love; but not in that way. Dickens is always making
+Pecksniff say things which have a wild poetical truth about them. Hatred
+allows no such outbursts of original innocence. But however that may be
+the broad fact remains--Dickens may or may not have loved Pecksniff
+comically, but he did not love him seriously; he did not respect him as
+he certainly respected Sam Weller. The same of course is true of Mrs.
+Gamp. To any one who appreciates her unctuous and sumptuous conversation
+it is difficult indeed not to feel that it would be almost better to be
+killed by Mrs. Gamp than to be saved by a better nurse. But the fact
+remains. In this book Dickens has not allowed us to love the most absurd
+people seriously, and absurd people ought to be loved seriously.
+Pecksniff has to be amusing all the time; the instant he ceases to be
+laughable he becomes detestable. Pickwick can take his ease at his inn;
+he can be leisurely, he can be spacious; he can fall into moods of
+gravity and even of dulness; he is not bound to be always funny or to
+forfeit the reader's concern, for he is a good man, and therefore even
+his dulness is beautiful, just as is the dulness of the animal. We can
+leave Pickwick a little while by the fire to think; for the thoughts of
+Pickwick, even if they were to go slowly, would be full of all the
+things that all men care for--old friends and old inns and memory and
+the goodness of God. But we dare not leave Pecksniff alone for a moment.
+We dare not leave him thinking by the fire, for the thoughts of
+Pecksniff would be too frightful.
+
+
+
+
+CHRISTMAS BOOKS
+
+
+The mystery of Christmas is in a manner identical with the mystery of
+Dickens. If ever we adequately explain the one we may adequately explain
+the other. And indeed, in the treatment of the two, the chronological or
+historical order must in some degree be remembered. Before we come to
+the question of what Dickens did for Christmas we must consider the
+question of what Christmas did for Dickens. How did it happen that this
+bustling, nineteenth-century man, full of the almost cock-sure
+common-sense of the utilitarian and liberal epoch, came to associate his
+name chiefly in literary history with the perpetuation of a half pagan
+and half Catholic festival which he would certainly have called an
+antiquity and might easily have called a superstition? Christmas has
+indeed been celebrated before in English literature; but it had, in the
+most noticeable cases, been celebrated in connection with that kind of
+feudalism with which Dickens would have severed his connection with an
+ignorant and even excessive scorn. Sir Roger de Coverley kept Christmas;
+but it was a feudal Christmas. Sir Walter Scott sang in praise of
+Christmas; but it was a feudal Christmas. And Dickens was not only
+indifferent to the dignity of the old country gentleman or to the genial
+archaeology of Scott; he was even harshly and insolently hostile to it.
+If Dickens had lived in the neighbourhood of Sir Roger de Coverley he
+would undoubtedly, like Tom Touchy, have been always "having the law of
+him." If Dickens had stumbled in among the old armour and quaint folios
+of Scott's study he would certainly have read his brother novelist a
+lesson in no measured terms about the futility of thus fumbling in the
+dust-bins of old oppression and error. So far from Dickens being one of
+those who like a thing because it is old, he was one of those cruder
+kind of reformers, in theory at least, who actually dislike a thing
+because it is old. He was not merely the more righteous kind of Radical
+who tries to uproot abuses; he was partly also that more suicidal kind
+of Radical who tries to uproot himself. In theory at any rate, he had no
+adequate conception of the importance of human tradition; in his time it
+had been twisted and falsified into the form of an opposition to
+democracy. In truth, of course, tradition is the most democratic of all
+things, for tradition is merely a democracy of the dead as well as the
+living. But Dickens and his special group or generation had no grasp of
+this permanent position; they had been called to a special war for the
+righting of special wrongs. In so far as such an institution as
+Christmas was old, Dickens would even have tended to despise it. He
+could never have put the matter to himself in the correct way--that
+while there are some things whose antiquity does prove that they are
+dying, there are some other things whose antiquity only proves that they
+cannot die. If some Radical contemporary and friend of Dickens had
+happened to say to him that in defending the mince-pies and the
+mummeries of Christmas he was defending a piece of barbaric and brutal
+ritualism, doomed to disappear in the light of reason along with the
+Boy-Bishop and the Lord of Misrule, I am not sure that Dickens (though
+he was one of the readiest and most rapid masters of reply in history)
+would have found it very easy upon his own principles to answer. It was
+by a great ancestral instinct that he defended Christmas; by that sacred
+sub-consciousness which is called tradition, which some have called a
+dead thing, but which is really a thing far more living than the
+intellect. There is a dark kinship and brotherhood of all mankind which
+is much too deep to be called heredity or to be in any way explained in
+scientific formulae; blood is thicker than water and is especially very
+much thicker than water on the brain. But this unconscious and even
+automatic quality in Dickens's defence of the Christmas feast, this fact
+that his defence might almost be called animal rather than mental,
+though in proper language it should be called merely virile; all this
+brings us back to the fact that we must begin with the atmosphere of the
+subject itself. We must not ask Dickens what Christmas is, for with all
+his heat and eloquence he does not know. Rather we must ask Christmas
+what Dickens is--ask how this strange child of Christmas came to be born
+out of due time.
+
+Dickens devoted his genius in a somewhat special sense to the
+description of happiness. No other literary man of his eminence has made
+this central human aim so specially his subject matter. Happiness is a
+mystery--generally a momentary mystery--which seldom stops long enough
+to submit itself to artistic observation, and which, even when it is
+habitual, has something about it which renders artistic description
+almost impossible. There are twenty tiny minor poets who can describe
+fairly impressively an eternity of agony; there are very few even of the
+eternal poets who can describe ten minutes of satisfaction.
+Nevertheless, mankind being half divine is always in love with the
+impossible, and numberless attempts have been made from the beginning of
+human literature to describe a real state of felicity. Upon the whole, I
+think, the most successful have been the most frankly physical and
+symbolic; the flowers of Eden or the jewels of the New Jerusalem. Many
+writers, for instance, have called the gold and chrysolite of the Holy
+City a vulgar lump of jewellery. But when these critics themselves
+attempt to describe their conceptions of future happiness, it is always
+some priggish nonsense about "planes," about "cycles of fulfilment," or
+"spirals of spiritual evolution." Now a cycle is just as much a physical
+metaphor as a flower of Eden; a spiral is just as much a physical
+metaphor as a precious stone. But, after all, a garden is a beautiful
+thing; whereas this is by no means necessarily true of a cycle, as can
+be seen in the case of a bicycle. A jewel, after all, is a beautiful
+thing; but this is not necessarily so of a spiral, as can be seen in the
+case of a corkscrew. Nothing is gained by dropping the old material
+metaphors, which did hint at heavenly beauty, and adopting other
+material metaphors which do not even give a hint of earthly beauty. This
+modern or spiral method of describing indescribable happiness may, I
+think, be dismissed. Then there has been another method which has been
+adopted by many men of a very real poetical genius. It was the method of
+the old pastoral poets like Theocritus. It was in another way that
+adopted by the elegance and piety of Spenser. It was certainly expressed
+in the pictures of Watteau; and it had a very sympathetic and even manly
+expression in modern England in the decorative poetry of William Morris.
+These men of genius, from Theocritus to Morris, occupied themselves in
+endeavouring to describe happiness as a state of certain human beings,
+the atmosphere of a commonwealth, the enduring climate of certain cities
+or islands. They poured forth treasures of the truest kind of
+imagination upon describing the happy lives and landscapes of Utopia or
+Atlantis or the Earthly Paradise. They traced with the most tender
+accuracy the tracery of its fruit-trees or the glimmering garments of
+its women; they used every ingenuity of colour or intricate shape to
+suggest its infinite delight. And what they succeeded in suggesting was
+always its infinite melancholy. William Morris described the Earthly
+Paradise in such a way that the only strong emotional note left on the
+mind was the feeling of how homeless his travellers felt in that alien
+Elysium; and the reader sympathised with them, feeling that he would
+prefer not only Elizabethan England but even twentieth-century
+Camberwell to such a land of shining shadows. Thus literature has almost
+always failed in endeavouring to describe happiness as a state. Human
+tradition, human custom and folk-lore (though far more true and reliable
+than literature as a rule) have not often succeeded in giving quite the
+correct symbols for a real atmosphere of _camaraderie_ and joy. But
+here and there the note has been struck with the sudden vibration of the
+_vox humana_. In human tradition it has been struck chiefly in the old
+celebrations of Christmas. In literature it has been struck chiefly in
+Dickens's Christmas tales.
+
+In the historic celebration of Christmas as it remains from Catholic
+times in certain northern countries (and it is to be remembered that in
+Catholic times the northern countries were, if possible, more Catholic
+than anybody else), there are three qualities which explain, I think,
+its hold upon the human sense of happiness, especially in such men as
+Dickens. There are three notes of Christmas, so to speak, which are also
+notes of happiness, and which the pagans and the Utopians forget. If we
+state what they are in the case of Christmas, it will be quite
+sufficiently obvious how important they are in the case of Dickens.
+
+The first quality is what may be called the dramatic quality. The
+happiness is not a state; it is a crisis. All the old customs
+surrounding the celebration of the birth of Christ are made by human
+instinct so as to insist and re-insist upon this crucial quality.
+Everything is so arranged that the whole household may feel, if
+possible, as a household does when a child is actually being born in it.
+The thing is a vigil and a vigil with a definite limit. People sit up at
+night until they hear the bells ring. Or they try to sleep at night in
+order to see their presents the next morning. Everywhere there is a
+limitation, a restraint; at one moment the door is shut, at the moment
+after it is opened. The hour has come or it has not come; the parcels
+are undone or they are not undone; there is no evolution of Christmas
+presents. This sharp and theatrical quality in pleasure, which human
+instinct and the mother wit of the world has wisely put into the popular
+celebrations of Christmas, is also a quality which is essential in such
+romantic literature as Dickens wrote. In romantic literature the hero
+and heroine must indeed be happy, but they must also be unexpectedly
+happy. This is the first connecting link between literature and the old
+religious feast; this is the first connecting link between Dickens and
+Christmas.
+
+The second element to be found in all such festivity and all such
+romance is the element which is represented as well as it could be
+represented by the mere fact that Christmas occurs in the winter. It is
+the element not merely of contrast, but actually of antagonism. It
+preserves everything that was best in the merely primitive or pagan view
+of such ceremonies or such banquets. If we are carousing, at least we
+are warriors carousing. We hang above us, as it were, the shields and
+battle-axes with which we must do battle with the giants of the snow and
+hail. All comfort must be based on discomfort. Man chooses when he
+wishes to be most joyful the very moment when the whole material
+universe is most sad. It is this contradiction and mystical defiance
+which gives a quality of manliness and reality to the old winter feasts
+which is not characteristic of the sunny felicities of the Earthly
+Paradise. And this curious element has been carried out even in all the
+trivial jokes and tasks that have always surrounded such occasions as
+these. The object of the jovial customs was not to make everything
+artificially easy: on the contrary, it was rather to make everything
+artificially difficult. Idealism is not only expressed by shooting an
+arrow at the stars; the fundamental principle of idealism is also
+expressed by putting a leg of mutton at the top of a greasy pole. There
+is in all such observances a quality which can be called only the
+quality of divine obstruction. For instance, in the game of snapdragon
+(that admirable occupation) the conception is that raisins taste much
+nicer if they are brands saved from the burning. About all Christmas
+things there is something a little nobler, if only nobler in form and
+theory, than mere comfort; even holly is prickly. It is not hard to see
+the connection of this kind of historic instinct with a romantic writer
+like Dickens. The healthy novelist must always play snapdragon with his
+principal characters; he must always be snatching the hero and heroine
+like raisins out of the fire.
+
+The third great Christmas element is the element of the grotesque. The
+grotesque is the natural expression of joy; and all the Utopias and new
+Edens of the poets fail to give a real impression of enjoyment, very
+largely because they leave out the grotesque. A man in most modern
+Utopias cannot really be happy; he is too dignified. A man in Morris's
+Earthly Paradise cannot really be enjoying himself; he is too
+decorative. When real human beings have real delights they tend to
+express them entirely in grotesques--I might almost say entirely in
+goblins. On Christmas Eve one may talk about ghosts so long as they are
+turnip ghosts. But one would not be allowed (I hope, in any decent
+family) to talk on Christmas Eve about astral bodies. The boar's head of
+old Yule-time was as grotesque as the donkey's head of Bottom the
+Weaver. But there is only one set of goblins quite wild enough to
+express the wild goodwill of Christmas. Those goblins are the characters
+of Dickens.
+
+Arcadian poets and Arcadian painters have striven to express happiness
+by means of beautiful figures. Dickens understood that happiness is best
+expressed by ugly figures. In beauty, perhaps, there is something allied
+to sadness; certainly there is something akin to joy in the grotesque,
+nay, in the uncouth. There is something mysteriously associated with
+happiness not only in the corpulence of Falstaff and the corpulence of
+Tony Weller, but even in the red nose of Bardolph or the red nose of Mr.
+Stiggins. A thing of beauty is an inspiration for ever--a matter of
+meditation for ever. It is rather a thing of ugliness that is strictly a
+joy for ever.
+
+All Dickens's books are Christmas books. But this is still truest of his
+two or three famous Yuletide tales--The _Christmas Carol_ and _The
+Chimes_ and _The Cricket on the Hearth_. Of these _The Christmas Carol_
+is beyond comparison the best as well as the most popular. Indeed,
+Dickens is in so profound and spiritual a sense a popular author that in
+his case, unlike most others, it can generally be said that the best
+work is the most popular. It is for _Pickwick_ that he is best known;
+and upon the whole it is for Pickwick that he is best worth knowing. In
+any case this superiority of _The Christmas Carol_ makes it convenient
+for us to take it as an example of the generalisations already made. If
+we study the very real atmosphere of rejoicing and of riotous charity in
+_The Christmas Carol_ we shall find that all the three marks I have
+mentioned are unmistakably visible. _The Christmas Carol_ is a happy
+story first, because it describes an abrupt and dramatic change. It is
+not only the story of a conversion, but of a sudden conversion; as
+sudden as the conversion of a man at a Salvation Army meeting. Popular
+religion is quite right in insisting on the fact of a crisis in most
+things. It is true that the man at the Salvation Army meeting would
+probably be converted from the punch bowl; whereas Scrooge was converted
+to it. That only means that Scrooge and Dickens represented a higher and
+more historic Christianity.
+
+Again, _The Christmas Carol_ owes much of its hilarity to our second
+source--the fact of its being a tale of winter and of a very wintry
+winter. There is much about comfort in the story; yet the comfort is
+never enervating: it is saved from that by a tingle of something bitter
+and bracing in the weather. Lastly, the story exemplifies throughout the
+power of the third principle--the kinship between gaiety and the
+grotesque. Everybody is happy because nobody is dignified. We have a
+feeling somehow that Scrooge looked even uglier when he was kind than he
+had looked when he was cruel. The turkey that Scrooge bought was so fat,
+says Dickens, that it could never have stood upright. That top-heavy and
+monstrous bird is a good symbol of the top-heavy happiness of the
+stories.
+
+It is less profitable to criticise the other two tales in detail because
+they represent variations on the theme in two directions; and variations
+that were not, upon the whole, improvements. _The Chimes_ is a monument
+of Dickens's honourable quality of pugnacity. He could not admire
+anything, even peace, without wanting to be warlike about it. That was
+all as it should be.
+
+
+
+
+DOMBEY AND SON
+
+
+In Dickens's literary life _Dombey and Son_ represents a break so
+important as to necessitate our casting back to a summary and a
+generalisation. In order fully to understand what this break is, we must
+say something of the previous character of Dickens's novels, and even
+something of the general character of novels in themselves. How
+essential this is we shall see shortly.
+
+It must first be remembered that the novel is the most typical of modern
+forms. It is typical of modern forms especially in this, that it is
+essentially formless. All the ancient modes or structures of literature
+were definite and severe. Any one composing them had to abide by their
+rules; they were what their name implied. Thus a tragedy might be a bad
+tragedy, but it was always a tragedy. Thus an epic might be a bad epic,
+but it was always an epic. Now in the sense in which there is such a
+thing as an epic, in that sense there is no such thing as a novel. We
+call any long fictitious narrative in prose a novel, just as we call any
+short piece of prose without any narrative an essay. Both these forms
+are really quite formless, and both of them are really quite new. The
+difference between a good epic by Mr. John Milton and a bad epic by Mr.
+John Smith was simply the difference between the same thing done well
+and the same thing done badly. But it was not (for instance) like the
+difference between _Clarissa Harlowe_ and _The Time Machine_. If we
+class Richardson's book with Mr. Wells's book it is really only for
+convenience; if we say that they are both novels we shall certainly be
+puzzled in that case to say what on earth a novel is. But the note of
+our age, both for good and evil, is a highly poetical and largely
+illogical faith in liberty. Liberty is not a negation or a piece of
+nonsense, as the cheap reactionaries say; it is a belief in variety and
+growth. But it is a purely poetic and even a merely romantic belief. The
+nineteenth century was an age of romance as certainly as the Middle Ages
+was an age of reason. Mediaevals liked to have everything defined and
+defensible; the modern world prefers to run some risks for the sake of
+spontaneity and diversity. Consequently the modern world is full of a
+phenomenon peculiar to itself--I mean the spectacle of small or
+originally small things swollen to enormous size and power. The modern
+world is like a world in which toadstools should be as big as trees, and
+insects should walk about in the sun as large as elephants. Thus, for
+instance, the shopkeeper, almost an unimportant figure in carefully
+ordered states, has in our time become the millionaire, and has more
+power than ten kings. Thus again a practical knowledge of nature, of the
+habits of animals or the properties of fire and water, was in the old
+ordered state either an almost servile labour or a sort of joke; it was
+left to old women and gamekeepers and boys who went birds'-nesting. In
+our time this commonplace daily knowledge has swollen into the enormous
+miracle of physical size, weighing the stars and talking under the sea.
+In short, our age is a sort of splendid jungle in which some of the most
+towering weeds and blossoms have come from the smallest seed.
+
+And this is, generally speaking, the explanation of the novel. The novel
+is not so much the filling up of an artistic plan, however new or
+fantastic. It is a thing that has grown from some germ of suggestion,
+and has often turned out much larger than the author intended. And this,
+lastly, is the final result of these facts, that the critic can
+generally trace in a novel what was the original artistic type or shape
+of thought from which the whole matter started, and he will generally
+find that this is different in every case. In one novel he will find
+that the first impulse is a character. In another novel he will find
+that the first impulse is a landscape, the atmosphere of some special
+countryside. In another novel he will find that the first impulse is the
+last chapter. Or it may be a thrust with sword or dagger, it may be a
+theology, it may be a song. Somewhere embedded in every ordinary book
+are the five or six words for which really all the rest will be written.
+Some of our enterprising editors who set their readers to hunt for
+banknotes and missing ladies might start a competition for finding those
+words in every novel. But whether or no this is possible, there is no
+doubt that the principle in question is of great importance in the case
+of Dickens, and especially in the case of _Dombey and Son_.
+
+In all the Dickens novels can be seen, so to speak, the original thing
+that they were before they were novels. The same may be observed, for
+the matter of that, in the great novels of most of the great modern
+novelists. For example, Sir Walter Scott wrote poetical romances before
+he wrote prose romances. Hence it follows that, with all their much
+greater merit, his novels may still be described as poetical romances in
+prose. While adding a new and powerful element of popular humours and
+observation, Scott still retains a certain purely poetical right--a
+right to make his heroes and outlaws and great kings speak at the great
+moments with a rhetoric so rhythmical that it partakes of the nature of
+song, the same quite metrical rhetoric which is used in the metrical
+speeches of Marmion or Roderick Dhu. In the same way, although _Don
+Quixote_ is a modern novel in its irony and subtlety, we can see that it
+comes from the old long romances of chivalry. In the same way, although
+_Clarissa_ is a modern novel in its intimacy and actuality, we can see
+that it comes from the old polite letter-writing and polite essays of
+the period of the _Spectator_. Any one can see that Scott formed in _The
+Lay of the Last Minstrel_ the style that he applied again and again
+afterwards, like the reappearances of a star taking leave of the stage.
+All his other romances were positively last appearances of the
+positively last Minstrel. Any one can see that Thackeray formed in
+fragmentary satires like _The Book of Snobs_ or _The Yellowplush Papers_
+the style, the rather fragmentary style, in which he was to write
+_Vanity Fair_. In most modern cases, in short (until very lately, at any
+rate), the novel is an enormous outgrowth from something that was not a
+novel. And in Dickens this is very important. All his novels are
+outgrowths of the original notion of taking notes, splendid and
+inspired notes, of what happens in the street. Those in the modern
+world who cannot reconcile themselves to his method--those who feel that
+there is about his books something intolerably clumsy or
+superficial--have either no natural taste for strong literature at all,
+or else have fallen into their error by too persistently regarding
+Dickens as a modern novelist and expecting all his books to be modern
+novels. Dickens did not know at what exact point he really turned into a
+novelist. Nor do we. Dickens did not know, in his deepest soul, whether
+he ever really did turn into a novelist. Nor do we. The novel being a
+modern product is one of the few things to which we really can apply
+that disgusting method of thought--the method of evolution. But even in
+evolution there are great gaps, there are great breaks, there are great
+crises. I have said that the first of these breaks in Dickens may be
+placed at the point when he wrote _Nicholas Nickleby_. This was his
+first serious decision to be a novelist in any sense at all, to be
+anything except a maker of momentary farces. The second break, and that
+a far more important break, is in _Dombey and Son_. This marks his final
+resolution to be a novelist and nothing else, to be a serious
+constructor of fiction in the serious sense. Before _Dombey and Son_
+even his pathos had been really frivolous. After _Dombey and Son_ even
+his absurdity was intentional and grave.
+
+In case this transition is not understood, one or two tests may be taken
+at random. The episodes in _Dombey and Son_, the episodes in _David
+Copperfield_, which came after it, are no longer episodes merely stuck
+into the middle of the story without any connection with it, like most
+of the episodes in _Nicholas Nickleby_, or most of the episodes even in
+_Martin Chuzzlewit_. Take, for instance, by way of a mere coincidence,
+the fact that three schools for boys are described successively in
+_Nicholas Nickleby_, in _Dombey and Son_, and in _David Copperfield_.
+But the difference is enormous. Dotheboys Hall does not exist to tell us
+anything about Nicholas Nickleby. Rather Nicholas Nickleby exists
+entirely in order to tell us about Dotheboys Hall. It does not in any
+way affect his history or psychology; he enters Mr. Squeers's school and
+leaves Mr. Squeers's school with the same character, or rather absence
+of character. It is a mere episode, existing for itself. But when little
+Paul Dombey goes to an old-fashioned but kindly school, it is in a very
+different sense and for a very different reason from that for which
+Nicholas Nickleby goes to an old-fashioned and cruel school. The sending
+of little Paul to Dr. Blimber's is a real part of the history of little
+Paul, such as it is. Dickens deliberately invents all that elderly
+pedantry in order to show up Paul's childishness. Dickens deliberately
+invents all that rather heavy kindness in order to show up Paul's
+predestination and tragedy. Dotheboys Hall is not meant to show up
+anything except Dotheboys Hall. But although Dickens doubtless enjoyed
+Dr. Blimber quite as much as Mr. Squeers, it remains true that Dr.
+Blimber is really a very good foil to Paul; whereas Squeers is not a
+foil to Nicholas; Nicholas is merely a lame excuse for Squeers. The
+change can be seen continued in the school, or rather the two schools,
+to which David Copperfield goes. The whole idea of David Copperfield's
+life is that he had the dregs of life before the wine of it. He knew
+the worst of the world before he knew the best of it. His childhood at
+Dr. Strong's is a second childhood. Now for this purpose the two schools
+are perfectly well adapted. Mr. Creakle's school is not only, like Mr.
+Squeers's school, a bad school, it is a bad influence upon David
+Copperfield. Dr. Strong's school is not only a good school, it is a good
+influence upon David Copperfield. I have taken this case of the schools
+as a case casual but concrete. The same, however, can be seen in any of
+the groups or incidents of the novels on both sides of the boundary. Mr.
+Crummles's theatrical company is only a society that Nicholas happens to
+fall into. America is only a place to which Martin Chuzzlewit happens to
+go. These things are isolated sketches, and nothing else. Even Todgers's
+boarding-house is only a place where Mr. Pecksniff can be delightfully
+hypocritical. It is not a place which throws any new light on Mr.
+Pecksniff's hypocrisy. But the case is different with that more subtle
+hypocrite in _Dombey and Son_--I mean Major Bagstock. Dickens does mean
+it as a deliberate light on Mr. Dombey's character that he basks with a
+fatuous calm in the blazing sun of Major Bagstock's tropical and
+offensive flattery. Here, then, is the essence of the change. He not
+only wishes to write a novel; this he did as early as _Nicholas
+Nickleby_. He wishes to have as little as possible in the novel that
+does not really assist it as a novel. Previously he had asked with the
+assistance of what incidents could his hero wander farther and farther
+from the pathway. Now he has really begun to ask with the assistance of
+what incidents his hero can get nearer and nearer to the goal.
+
+The change made Dickens a greater novelist. I am not sure that it made
+him a greater man. One good character by Dickens requires all eternity
+to stretch its legs in; and the characters in his later books are always
+being tripped up by some tiresome nonsense about the story. For
+instance, in _Dombey and Son_, Mrs. Skewton is really very funny. But
+nobody with a love of the real smell of Dickens would compare her for a
+moment, for instance, with Mrs. Nickleby. And the reason of Mrs.
+Skewton's inferiority is simply this, that she has something to do in
+the plot; she has to entrap or assist to entrap Mr. Dombey into marrying
+Edith. Mrs. Nickleby, on the other hand, has nothing at all to do in the
+story, except to get in everybody's way. The consequence is that we
+complain not of her for getting in everyone's way, but of everyone for
+getting in hers. What are suns and stars, what are times and seasons,
+what is the mere universe, that it should presume to interrupt Mrs.
+Nickleby? Mrs. Skewton (though supposed, of course, to be a much viler
+sort of woman) has something of the same quality of splendid and
+startling irrelevancy. In her also there is the same feeling of wild
+threads hung from world to world like the webs of gigantic spiders; of
+things connected that seem to have no connection save by this one
+adventurous filament of frail and daring folly. Nothing could be better
+than Mrs. Skewton when she finds herself, after convolutions of speech,
+somehow on the subject of Henry VIII., and pauses to mention with
+approval "his dear little peepy eyes and his benevolent chin." Nothing
+could be better than her attempt at Mahomedan resignation when she feels
+almost inclined to say "that there is no What's-his-name but Thingummy,
+and What-you-may-call-it is his prophet!" But she has not so much time
+as Mrs. Nickleby to say these good things; also she has not sufficient
+human virtue to say them constantly. She is always intent upon her
+worldly plans, among other things upon the worldly plan of assisting
+Charles Dickens to get a story finished. She is always "advancing her
+shrivelled ear" to listen to what Dombey is saying to Edith. Worldliness
+is the most solemn thing in the world; it is far more solemn than
+other-worldliness. Mrs. Nickleby can afford to ramble as a child does in
+a field, or as a child does to laugh at nothing, for she is like a
+child, innocent. It is only the good who can afford to be frivolous.
+
+Broadly speaking, what is said here of Mrs. Skewton applies to the great
+part of _Dombey and Son_, even to the comic part of it. It shows an
+advance in art and unity; it does not show an advance in genius and
+creation. In some cases, in fact, I cannot help feeling that it shows a
+falling off. It may be a personal idiosyncrasy, but there is only one
+comic character really prominent in Dickens, upon whom Dickens has
+really lavished the wealth of his invention, and who does not amuse me
+at all, and that character is Captain Cuttle. But three great exceptions
+must be made to any such disparagement of _Dombey and Son_. They are all
+three of that royal order in Dickens's creation which can no more be
+described or criticised than strong wine. The first is Major Bagstock,
+the second is Cousin Feenix, the third is Toots. In Bagstock Dickens has
+blasted for ever that type which pretends to be sincere by the simple
+operation of being explosively obvious. He tells about a quarter of the
+truth, and then poses as truthful because a quarter of the truth is much
+simpler than the whole of it. He is the kind of man who goes about with
+posers for Bishops or for Socialists, with plain questions to which he
+wants a plain answer. His questions are plain only in the same sense
+that he himself is plain--in the sense of being uncommonly ugly. He is
+the man who always bursts with satisfaction because he can call a spade
+a spade, as if there were any kind of logical or philosophical use in
+merely saying the same word twice over. He is the man who wants things
+down in black and white, as if black and white were the only two
+colours; as if blue and green and red and gold were not facts of the
+universe. He is too selfish to tell the truth and too impatient even to
+hear it. He cannot endure the truth, because it is subtle. This man is
+almost always like Bagstock--a sycophant and a toad-eater. A man is not
+any the less a toad-eater because he eats his toads with a huge appetite
+and gobbles them up, as Bagstock did his breakfast, with the eyes
+starting out of his purple face. He flatters brutally. He cringes with a
+swagger. And men of the world like Dombey are always taken in by him,
+because men of the world are probably the simplest of all the children
+of Adam.
+
+Cousin Feenix again is an exquisite suggestion, with his rickety
+chivalry and rambling compliments. It was about the period of _Dombey
+and Son_ that Dickens began to be taken up by good society. (One can use
+only vulgar terms for an essentially vulgar process.) And his sketches
+of the man of good family in the books of this period show that he had
+had glimpses of what that singular world is like. The aristocrats in his
+earliest books are simply dragons and griffins for his heroes to fight
+with--monsters like Sir Mulberry Hawk or Lord Verisopht. They are merely
+created upon the old principle, that your scoundrel must be polite and
+powerful--a very sound principle. The villain must be not only a
+villain, but a tyrant. The giant must be larger than Jack. But in the
+books of the Dombey period we have many shrewd glimpses of the queer
+realities of English aristocracy. Of these Cousin Feenix is one of the
+best. Cousin Feenix is a much better sketch of the essentially decent
+and chivalrous aristocrat than Sir Leicester Dedlock. Both of the men
+are, if you will, fools, as both are honourable gentlemen. But if one
+may attempt a classification among fools, Sir Leicester Dedlock is a
+stupid fool, while Cousin Feenix is a silly fool--which is much better.
+The difference is that the silly fool has a folly which is always on the
+borderland of wit, and even of wisdom; his wandering wits come often
+upon undiscovered truths. The stupid fool is as consistent and as
+homogeneous as wood; he is as invincible as the ancestral darkness.
+Cousin Feenix is a good sketch of the sort of well-bred old ass who is
+so fundamentally genuine that he is always saying very true things by
+accident. His whole tone also, though exaggerated like everything in
+Dickens, is very true to the bewildered good nature which marks English
+aristocratic life. The statement that Dickens could not describe a
+gentleman is, like most popular animadversions against Dickens, so very
+thin and one-sided a truth as to be for serious purposes a falsehood.
+When people say that Dickens could not describe a gentleman, what they
+mean is this, and so far what they mean is true. They mean that Dickens
+could not describe a gentleman as gentlemen feel a gentleman. They mean
+that he could not take that atmosphere easily, accept it as the normal
+atmosphere, or describe that world from the inside. This is true. In
+Dickens's time there was such a thing as the English people, and Dickens
+belonged to it. Because there is no such thing as an English people now,
+almost all literary men drift towards what is called Society; almost all
+literary men either are gentlemen or pretend to be. Hence, as I say,
+when we talk of describing a gentleman, we always mean describing a
+gentleman from the point of view of one who either belongs to, or is
+interested in perpetuating, that type. Dickens did not describe
+gentlemen in the way that gentlemen describe gentlemen. He described
+them in the way in which he described waiters, or railway guards, or men
+drawing with chalk on the pavement. He described them, in short (and
+this we may freely concede), from the outside, as he described any other
+oddity or special trade. But when it comes to saying that he did not
+describe them well, then that is quite another matter, and that I should
+emphatically deny. The things that are really odd about the English
+upper class he saw with startling promptitude and penetration, and if
+the English upper class does not see these odd things in itself, it is
+not because they are not there, but because we are all blind to our own
+oddities; it is for the same reason that tramps do not feel dirty, or
+that niggers do not feel black. I have often heard a dear old English
+oligarch say that Dickens could not describe a gentleman, while every
+note of his own voice and turn of his own hand recalled Sir Leicester
+Dedlock. I have often been told by some old buck that Dickens could not
+describe a gentleman, and been told so in the shaky voice and with all
+the vague allusiveness of Cousin Feenix.
+
+Cousin Feenix has really many of the main points of the class that
+governs England. Take, for an instance, his hazy notion that he is in a
+world where everybody knows everybody; whenever he mentions a man, it is
+a man "with whom my friend Dombey is no doubt acquainted." That pierces
+to the very helpless soul of aristocracy. Take again the stupendous
+gravity with which he leads up to a joke. That is the very soul of the
+House of Commons and the Cabinet, of the high-class English politics,
+where a joke is always enjoyed solemnly. Take his insistence upon the
+technique of Parliament, his regrets for the time when the rules of
+debate were perhaps better observed than they are now. Take that
+wonderful mixture in him (which is the real human virtue of our
+aristocracy) of a fair amount of personal modesty with an innocent
+assumption of rank. Of a man who saw all these genteel foibles so
+clearly it is absurd merely to say without further explanation that he
+could not describe a gentleman. Let us confine ourselves to saying that
+he did not describe a gentleman as gentlemen like to be described.
+
+Lastly, there is the admirable study of Toots, who may be considered as
+being in some ways the masterpiece of Dickens. Nowhere else did Dickens
+express with such astonishing insight and truth his main contention,
+which is that to be good and idiotic is not a poor fate, but, on the
+contrary, an experience of primeval innocence, which wonders at all
+things. Dickens did not know, anymore than any great man ever knows,
+what was the particular thing that he had to preach. He did not know it;
+he only preached it. But the particular thing that he had to preach was
+this: That humility is the only possible basis of enjoyment; that if one
+has no other way of being humble except being poor, then it is better to
+be poor, and to enjoy; that if one has no other way of being humble
+except being imbecile, then it is better to be imbecile, and to enjoy.
+That is the deep unconscious truth in the character of Toots--that all
+his externals are flashy and false; all his internals unconscious,
+obscure, and true. He wears loud clothes, and he is silent inside them.
+His shirts and waistcoats are covered with bright spots of pink and
+purple, while his soul is always covered with the sacred shame. He
+always gets all the outside things of life wrong, and all the inside
+things right. He always admires the right Christian people, and gives
+them the wrong Christian names. Dimly connecting Captain Cuttle with the
+shop of Mr. Solomon Gills, he always addresses the astonished mariner as
+"Captain Gills." He turns Mr. Walter Gay, by a most improving
+transformation, into "Lieutenant Walters." But he always knows which
+people upon his own principles to admire. He forgets who they are, but
+he remembers what they are. With the clear eyes of humility he perceives
+the whole world as it is. He respects the Game Chicken for being
+strong, as even the Game Chicken ought to be respected for being strong.
+He respects Florence for being good, as even Florence ought to be
+respected for being good. And he has no doubt about which he admires
+most; he prefers goodness to strength, as do all masculine men. It is
+through the eyes of such characters as Toots that Dickens really sees
+the whole of his tales. For even if one calls him a half-wit, it still
+makes a difference that he keeps the right half of his wits. When we
+think of the unclean and craven spirit in which Toots might be treated
+in a psychological novel of to-day; how he might walk with a mooncalf
+face, and a brain of bestial darkness, the soul rises in real homage to
+Dickens for showing how much simple gratitude and happiness can remain
+in the lopped roots of the most simplified intelligence. If scientists
+must treat a man as a dog, it need not be always as a mad dog. They
+might grant him, like Toots, a little of the dog's loyalty and the dog's
+reward.
+
+  [Illustration: Charles Dickens, 1849
+  From a daguerreotype by Mayall.]
+
+
+
+
+DAVID COPPERFIELD
+
+
+In this book Dickens is really trying to write a new kind of book, and
+the enterprise is almost as chivalrous as a cavalry charge. He is making
+a romantic attempt to be realistic. That is almost the definition of
+_David Copperfield_. In his last book, _Dombey and Son_, we see a
+certain maturity and even a certain mild exhaustion in his earlier
+farcical method. He never failed to have fine things in any of his
+books, and Toots is a very fine thing. Still, I could never find Captain
+Cuttle and Mr. Sol Gills very funny, and the whole Wooden Midshipman
+seems to me very wooden. In _David Copperfield_ he suddenly unseals a
+new torrent of truth, the truth out of his own life. The impulse of the
+thing is autobiography; he is trying to tell all the absurd things that
+have happened to himself, and not the least absurd thing is himself. Yet
+though it is Dickens's ablest and clearest book, there is in it a
+falling away of a somewhat singular kind.
+
+Generally speaking there was astonishingly little of fatigue in
+Dickens's books. He sometimes wrote bad work; he sometimes wrote even
+unimportant work; but he wrote hardly a line which is not full of his
+own fierce vitality and fancy. If he is dull it is hardly ever because
+he cannot think of anything; it is because, by some silly excitement or
+momentary lapse of judgment, he has thought of something that was not
+worth thinking of. If his joke is feeble, it is as an impromptu joke at
+an uproarious dinner-table may be feeble; it is no indication of any
+lack of vitality. The joke is feeble, but it is not a sign of
+feebleness. Broadly speaking, this is true of Dickens. If his writing is
+not amusing us, at least it is amusing him. Even when he is tiring he is
+not tired.
+
+But in the case of _David Copperfield_ there is a real reason for noting
+an air of fatigue. For although this is the best of all Dickens's books,
+it constantly disappoints the critical and intelligent reader. The
+reason is that Dickens began it under his sudden emotional impulse of
+telling the whole truth about himself and gradually allowed the whole
+truth to be more and more diluted, until towards the end of the book we
+are back in the old pedantic and decorative art of Dickens, an art which
+we justly admired in its own place and on its own terms, but which we
+resent when we feel it gradually returning through a tale pitched
+originally in a more practical and piercing key. Here, I say, is the one
+real example of the fatigue of Dickens. He begins his story in a new
+style and then slips back into an old one. The earlier part is in his
+later manner. The later part is in his earlier manner.
+
+There are many marks of something weak and shadowy in the end of _David
+Copperfield_. Here, for instance, is one of them which is not without
+its bearing on many tendencies of modern England. Why did Dickens at the
+end of this book give way to that typically English optimism about
+emigration? He seems to think that he can cure the souls of a whole
+cartload, or rather boatload, of his characters by sending them all
+to the Colonies. Peggotty is a desolate and insulted parent whose house
+has been desecrated and his pride laid low; therefore let him go to
+Australia. Emily is a woman whose heart is broken and whose honour is
+blasted; but she will be quite happy if she goes to Australia. Mr.
+Micawber is a man whose soul cannot be made to understand the tyranny of
+time or the limits of human hope; but he will understand all these
+things if he goes to Australia. For it must be noted that Dickens does
+not use this emigration merely as a mode of exit. He does not send these
+characters away on a ship merely as a symbol suggesting that they pass
+wholly out of his hearer's life. He does definitely suggest that
+Australia is a sort of island Valley of Avalon, where the soul may heal
+it of its grievous wound. It is seriously suggested that Peggotty finds
+peace in Australia. It is really indicated that Emily regains her
+dignity in Australia. It is positively explained of Mr. Micawber not
+that he was happy in Australia (for he would be that anywhere), but that
+he was definitely prosperous and practically successful in Australia;
+and that he would certainly be nowhere. Colonising is not talked of
+merely as a coarse, economic expedient for going to a new market. It is
+really offered as something that will cure the hopeless tragedy of
+Peggotty; as something that will cure the still more hopeless comedy of
+Micawber.
+
+I will not dwell here on the subsequent adventures of this very
+sentimental and extremely English illusion. It would be an exaggeration
+to say that Dickens in this matter is something of a forerunner of much
+modern imperialism. His political views were such that he would have
+regarded modern imperialism with horror and contempt. Nevertheless there
+is here something of that hazy sentimentalism which makes some
+Imperialists prefer to talk of the fringe of the empire of which they
+know nothing, rather than of the heart of the empire which they know is
+diseased. It is said that in the twilight and decline of Rome, close to
+the dark ages, the people in Gaul believed that Britain was a land of
+ghosts (perhaps it was foggy), and that the dead were ferried across to
+it from the northern coast of France. If (as is not entirely impossible)
+our own century appears to future ages as a time of temporary decay and
+twilight, it may be said that there was attached to England a blessed
+island called Australia to which the souls of the socially dead were
+ferried across to remain in bliss for ever.
+
+This element which is represented by the colonial optimism at the end of
+_David Copperfield_ is a moral element. The truth is that there is
+something a little mean about this sort of optimism. I do not like the
+notion of David Copperfield sitting down comfortably to his tea-table
+with Agnes, having got rid of all the inconvenient or distressing
+characters of the story by sending them to the other side of the world.
+The whole thing has too much about it of the selfishness of a family
+which sends a scapegrace to the Colonies to starve with its blessing.
+There is too much in the whole thing of that element which was satirised
+by an ironic interpretation of the epitaph "Peace, perfect peace, with
+loved ones far away." We should have thought more of David Copperfield
+(and also of Charles Dickens) if he had endeavoured for the rest of his
+life, by conversation and comfort, to bind up the wounds of his old
+friends from the seaside. We should have thought more of David
+Copperfield (and also of Charles Dickens) if he had faced the
+possibility of going on till his dying day lending money to Mr. Wilkins
+Micawber. We should have thought more of David Copperfield (and also of
+Charles Dickens) if he had not looked upon the marriage with Dora merely
+as a flirtation, an episode which he survived and ought to survive. And
+yet the truth is that there is nowhere in fiction where we feel so
+keenly the primary human instinct and principle that a marriage is a
+marriage and irrevocable, that such things do leave a wound and also a
+bond as in this case of David's short connection with his silly little
+wife. When all is said and done, when Dickens has done his best and his
+worst, when he has sentimentalised for pages and tried to tie up
+everything in the pink tape of optimism, the fact, in the psychology of
+the reader, still remains. The reader does still feel that David's
+marriage to Dora was a real marriage; and that his marriage to Agnes was
+nothing, a middle-aged compromise, a taking of the second best, a sort
+of spiritualised and sublimated marriage of convenience. For all the
+readers of Dickens Dora is thoroughly avenged. The modern world (intent
+on anarchy in everything, even in Government) refuses to perceive the
+permanent element of tragic constancy which inheres in all passion, and
+which is the origin of marriage. Marriage rests upon the fact that you
+cannot have your cake and eat it; that you cannot lose your heart and
+have it. But, as I have said, there is perhaps no place in literature
+where we feel more vividly the sense of this monogamous instinct in man
+than in David Copperfield. A man is monogamous even if he is only
+monogamous for a month; love is eternal even if it is only eternal for a
+month. It always leaves behind it the sense of something broken and
+betrayed.
+
+But I have mentioned Dora in this connection only because she
+illustrates the same fact which Micawber illustrates; the fact that
+there is at the end of this book too much tendency to bless people and
+get rid of them. Micawber is a nuisance. Dickens the despot condemns him
+to exile. Dora is a nuisance. Dickens the despot condemns her to death.
+But it is the whole business of Dickens in the world to express the fact
+that such people are the spice and interest of life. It is the whole
+point of Dickens that there is nobody more worth living with than a
+strong, splendid, entertaining, immortal nuisance. Micawber interrupts
+practical life; but what is practical life that it should venture to
+interrupt Micawber? Dora confuses the housekeeping; but we are not angry
+with Dora because she confuses the housekeeping. We are angry with the
+housekeeping because it confuses Dora. I repeat, and it cannot be too
+much repeated that the whole lesson of Dickens is here. It is better to
+know Micawber than not to know the minor worries that arise out of
+knowing Micawber. It is better to have a bad debt and a good friend. In
+the same way it is better to marry a human and healthy personality which
+happens to attract you than to marry a mere housewife; for a mere
+housewife is a mere housekeeper. All this was what Dickens stood for;
+that the very people who are most irritating in small business
+circumstances are often the people who are most delightful in long
+stretches of experience of life. It is just the man who is maddening
+when he is ordering a cutlet or arranging an appointment who is probably
+the man in whose company it is worth while to journey steadily towards
+the grave. Distribute the dignified people and the capable people and
+the highly business-like people among all the situations which their
+ambition or their innate corruption may demand; but keep close to your
+heart, keep deep in your inner councils the absurd people. Let the
+clever people pretend to govern you, let the unimpeachable people
+pretend to advise you, but let the fools alone influence you; let the
+laughable people whose faults you see and understand be the only people
+who are really inside your life, who really come near you or accompany
+you on your lonely march towards the last impossibility. That is the
+whole meaning of Dickens; that we should keep the absurd people for our
+friends. And here at the end of _David Copperfield_ he seems in some dim
+way to deny it. He seems to want to get rid of the preposterous people
+simply because they will always continue to be preposterous. I have a
+horrible feeling that David Copperfield will send even his aunt to
+Australia if she worries him too much about donkeys.
+
+I repeat, then, that this wrong ending of _David Copperfield_ is one of
+the very few examples in Dickens of a real symptom of fatigue. Having
+created splendid beings for whom alone life might be worth living, he
+cannot endure the thought of his hero living with them. Having given his
+hero superb and terrible friends, he is afraid of the awful and
+tempestuous vista of their friendship. He slips back into a more
+superficial kind of story and ends it in a more superficial way. He is
+afraid of the things he has made; of that terrible figure Micawber; of
+that yet more terrible figure Dora. He cannot make up his mind to see
+his hero perpetually entangled in the splendid tortures and sacred
+surprises that come from living with really individual and unmanageable
+people. He cannot endure the idea that his fairy prince will not have
+henceforward a perfectly peaceful time. But the wise old fairy tales
+(which are the wisest things in the world, at any rate the wisest things
+of worldly origin), the wise old fairy tales never were so silly as to
+say that the prince and the princess lived peacefully ever afterwards.
+The fairy tales said that the prince and princess lived happily ever
+afterwards: and so they did. They lived happily, although it is very
+likely that from time to time they threw the furniture at each other.
+Most marriages, I think, are happy marriages; but there is no such thing
+as a contented marriage. The whole pleasure of marriage is that it is a
+perpetual crisis. David Copperfield and Dora quarrelled over the cold
+mutton; and if they had gone on quarrelling to the end of their lives,
+they would have gone on loving each other to the end of their lives; it
+would have been a human marriage. But David Copperfield and Agnes would
+agree about the cold mutton. And that cold mutton would be very cold.
+
+I have here endeavoured to suggest some of the main merits of Dickens
+within the framework of one of his faults. I have said that _David
+Copperfield_ represents a rather sad transition from his strongest
+method to his weakest. Nobody would ever complain of Charles Dickens
+going on writing his own kind of novels, his old kind of novels. If
+there be anywhere a man who loves good books, that man wishes that there
+were four _Oliver Twists_ and at least forty-four _Pickwicks_. If there
+be any one who loves laughter and creation, he would be glad to read a
+hundred of _Nicholas Nickleby_ and two hundred of _The Old Curiosity
+Shop_. But while any one would have welcomed one of Dickens's own
+ordered and conventional novels, it was not in this spirit that they
+welcomed _David Copperfield_.
+
+_David Copperfield_ begins as if it were going to be a new kind of
+Dickens novel; then it gradually turns into an old kind of Dickens
+novel. It is here that many readers of this splendid book have been
+subtly and secretly irritated. Nicholas Nickleby is all very well; we
+accept him as something which is required to tie the whole affair
+together. Nicholas is a sort of string or clothes-line on which are hung
+the limp figure of Smike, the jumping-jack of Mr. Squeers and the twin
+dolls named Cheeryble. If we do not accept Nicholas Nickleby as the hero
+of the story, at least we accept him as the title of the story. But in
+_David Copperfield_ Dickens begins something which looks for the moment
+fresh and startling. In the earlier chapters (the amazing earlier
+chapters of this book) he does seem to be going to tell the living truth
+about a living boy and man. It is melancholy to see that sudden fire
+fading. It is sad to see David Copperfield gradually turning into
+Nicholas Nickleby. Nicholas Nickleby does not exist at all; he is a
+quite colourless primary condition of the story. We look through
+Nicholas Nickleby at the story just as we look through a plain pane of
+glass at the street. But David Copperfield does begin by existing; it is
+only gradually that he gives up that exhausting habit.
+
+Any fair critical account of Dickens must always make him out much
+smaller than he is. For any fair criticism of Dickens must take account
+of his evident errors, as I have taken account of one of the most
+evident of them during the last two or three pages. It would not even be
+loyal to conceal them. But no honest criticism, no criticism, though it
+spoke with the tongues of men and angels, could ever really talk about
+Dickens. In all this that I have said I have not been talking about
+Dickens at all. I say it with equanimity; I say it even with arrogance.
+I have been talking about the gaps of Dickens. I have been talking about
+the omissions of Dickens. I have been talking about the slumber of
+Dickens and the forgetfulness and unconsciousness of Dickens. In one
+word, I have been talking not about Dickens, but about the absence of
+Dickens. But when we come to him and his work itself, what is there to
+be said? What is there to be said about earthquake and the dawn? He has
+created, especially in this book of _David Copperfield_, he has created,
+creatures who cling to us and tyrannise over us, creatures whom we would
+not forget if we could, creatures whom we could not forget if we would,
+creatures who are more actual than the man who made them.
+
+This is the excuse for all that indeterminate and rambling and sometimes
+sentimental criticism of which Dickens, more than any one else, is the
+victim, of which I fear that I for one have made him the victim in this
+place. When I was a boy I could not understand why the Dickensians
+worried so wearily about Dickens, about where he went to school and
+where he ate his dinners, about how he wore his trousers and when he cut
+his hair. I used to wonder why they did not write something that I could
+read about a man like Micawber. But I have come to the conclusion that
+this almost hysterical worship of the man, combined with a comparatively
+feeble criticism on his works, is just and natural. Dickens was a man
+like ourselves; we can see where he went wrong, and study him without
+being stunned or getting the sunstroke. But Micawber is not a man;
+Micawber is the superman. We can only walk round and round him wondering
+what we shall say. All the critics of Dickens, when all is said and
+done, have only walked round and round Micawber wondering what they
+should say. I am myself at this moment walking round and round Micawber
+wondering what I shall say. And I have not found out yet.
+
+
+
+
+CHRISTMAS STORIES
+
+
+The power of Dickens is shown even in the scraps of Dickens, just as the
+virtue of a saint is said to be shown in fragments of his property or
+rags from his robe. It is with such fragments that we are chiefly
+concerned in the _Christmas Stories_. Many of them are fragments in the
+literal sense; Dickens began them and then allowed some one else to
+carry them on; they are almost rejected notes. In all the other cases we
+have been considering the books that he wrote; here we have rather to
+consider the books that he might have written. And here we find the
+final evidence and the unconscious stamp of greatness, as we might find
+it in some broken bust or some rejected moulding in the studio of
+Michael Angelo.
+
+These sketches or parts of sketches all belong to that period in his
+later life when he had undertaken the duties of an editor, the very
+heavy duties of a very popular editor. He was not by any means naturally
+fitted for that position. He was the best man in the world for founding
+papers; but many people wished that he could have been buried under the
+foundations, like the first builder in some pagan and prehistoric pile.
+He called the _Daily News_ into existence, but when once it existed, it
+objected to him strongly. It is not easy, and perhaps it is not
+important, to state truly the cause of this incapacity. It was not in
+the least what is called the ordinary fault or weakness of the artist.
+It was not that he was careless; rather it was that he was too
+conscientious. It was not that he had the irresponsibility of genius;
+rather it was that he had the irritating responsibility of genius; he
+wanted everybody to see things as he saw them. But in spite of all this
+he certainly ran two great popular periodicals--_Household Words_ and
+_All the Year Round_--with enormous popular success. And he certainly so
+far succeeded in throwing himself into the communism of journalism, into
+the nameless brotherhood of a big paper, that many earnest Dickensians
+are still engaged in picking out pieces of Dickens from the anonymous
+pages of _Household Words_ and _All the Year Round_, and those parts
+which have been already beyond question picked out and proved are often
+fragmentary. The genuine writing of Dickens breaks off at a certain
+point, and the writing of some one else begins. But when the writing of
+Dickens breaks off, I fancy that we know it.
+
+The singular thing is that some of the best work that Dickens ever did,
+better than the work in his best novels, can be found in these slight
+and composite scraps of journalism. For instance, the solemn and
+self-satisfied account of the duty and dignity of a waiter given in the
+opening chapter of _Somebody's Luggage_ is quite as full and fine as
+anything done anywhere by its author in the same vein of sumptuous
+satire. It is as good as the account which Mr. Bumble gives of out-door
+relief, which, "properly understood, is the parochial safeguard. The
+great thing is to give the paupers what they don't want, and then they
+never come again." It is as good as Mr. Podsnap's description of the
+British Constitution, which was bestowed on him by Providence. None of
+these celebrated passages is more obviously Dickens at his best than
+this, the admirable description of "the true principles of waitering,"
+or the account of how the waiter's father came back to his mother in
+broad daylight, "in itself an act of madness on the part of a waiter,"
+and how he expired repeating continually "two and six is three and four
+is nine." That waiter's explanatory soliloquy might easily have opened
+an excellent novel, as _Martin Chuzzlewit_ is opened by the clever
+nonsense about the genealogy of the Chuzzlewits, or as _Bleak House_ is
+opened by a satiric account of the damp, dim life of a law court. Yet
+Dickens practically abandoned the scheme of _Somebody's Luggage_; he
+only wrote two sketches out of those obviously intended. He may almost
+be said to have only written a brilliant introduction to another man's
+book.
+
+Yet it is exactly in such broken outbreaks that his greatness appears.
+If a man has flung away bad ideas he has shown his sense, but if he has
+flung away good ideas he has shown his genius. He has proved that he
+actually has that over-pressure of pure creativeness which we see in
+nature itself, "that of a hundred seeds, she often brings but one to
+bear." Dickens had to be Malthusian about his spiritual children.
+Critics have called Keats and others who died young "the great
+Might-have-beens of literary history." Dickens certainly was not merely
+a great Might-have-been. Dickens, to say the least of him, was a great
+Was. Yet this fails fully to express the richness of his talent; for
+the truth is that he was a great Was and also a great Might-have-been.
+He said what he had to say, and yet not all he had to say. Wild
+pictures, possible stories, tantalising and attractive trains of
+thought, perspectives of adventure, crowded so continually upon his mind
+that at the end there was a vast mass of them left over, ideas that he
+literally had not the opportunity to develop, tales that he literally
+had not the time to tell. This is shown clearly in his private notes and
+letters, which are full of schemes singularly striking and suggestive,
+schemes which he never carried out. It is indicated even more clearly by
+these _Christmas Stories_, collected out of the chaotic opulence of
+_Household Words_ and _All the Year Round_. He wrote short stories
+actually because he had not time to write long stories. He often put
+into the short story a deep and branching idea which would have done
+very well for a long story; many of his long stories, so to speak, broke
+off short. This is where he differs from most who are called the
+Might-have-beens of literature. Marlowe and Chatterton failed because of
+their weakness. Dickens failed because of his force.
+
+Examine for example this case of the waiter in _Somebody's Luggage_.
+Dickens obviously knew enough about that waiter to have made him a
+running spring of joy throughout a whole novel; as the beadle is in
+_Oliver Twist_, or the undertaker in _Martin Chuzzlewit_. Every touch of
+him tingles with truth, from the vague gallantry with which he asks,
+"Would'st thou know, fair reader (if of the adorable female sex)" to the
+official severity with which he takes the chambermaid down, "as many
+pegs as is desirable for the future comfort of all parties." If Dickens
+had developed this character at full length in a book he would have
+preserved for ever in literature a type of great humour and great value,
+and a type which may only too soon be disappearing from English history.
+He would have eternalised the English waiter. He still exists in some
+sound old taverns and decent country inns, but there is no one left
+really capable of singing his praises. I know that Mr. Bernard Shaw has
+done something of the sort in the delightfully whimsical account of
+William in _You Never Can Tell_. But nothing will persuade me that Mr.
+Bernard Shaw can really understand the English waiter. He can never have
+ordered wine from him for instance. And though the English waiter is by
+the nature of things solemn about everything, he can never reach the
+true height and ecstasy of his solemnity except about wine. What the
+real English waiter would do or say if Mr. Shaw asked him for a
+vegetarian meal I cannot dare to predict. I rather think that for the
+first time in his life he would laugh--a horrible sight.
+
+Dickens's waiter is described by one who is not merely witty, truthful,
+and observant, like Mr. Bernard Shaw, but one who really knew the
+atmosphere of inns, one who knew and even liked the smell of beef, and
+beer, and brandy. Hence there is a richness in Dickens's portrait which
+does not exist in Mr. Shaw's. Mr. Shaw's waiter is merely a man of tact;
+Dickens's is a man of principle. Mr. Shaw's waiter is an opportunist,
+just as Mr. Shaw is an opportunist in politics. Dickens's waiter is
+ready to stand up seriously for "the true principles of waitering,"
+just as Dickens was ready to stand up for the true principles of
+Liberalism. Mr. Shaw's waiter is agnostic; his motto is "You never can
+tell." Dickens's waiter is a dogmatist; his motto is "You can tell; I
+will tell you." And the true old-fashioned English waiter had really
+this grave and even moral attitude; he was the servant of the customers
+as a priest is the servant of the faithful, but scarcely in any less
+dignified sense. Surely it is not mere patriotic partiality that makes
+one lament the disappearance of this careful and honourable figure
+crowded out by meaner men at meaner wages, by the German waiter who has
+learnt five languages in the course of running away from his own, or the
+Italian waiter who regards those he serves with a darkling contempt
+which must certainly be that either of a dynamiter or an exiled prince.
+The human and hospitable English waiter is vanishing. And Dickens might
+perhaps have saved him, as he saved Christmas.
+
+I have taken this case of the waiter in Dickens and his equally
+important counterpart in England as an example of the sincere and genial
+sketches scattered about these short stories. But there are many others,
+and one at least demands special mention; I mean Mrs. Lirriper, the
+London landlady. Not only did Dickens never do anything better in a
+literary sense, but he never performed more perfectly his main moral
+function, that of insisting through laughter and flippancy upon the
+virtue of Christian charity. There has been much broad farce against the
+lodging-house keeper: he alone could have written broad farce in her
+favour. It is fashionable to represent the landlady as a tyrant; it is
+too much forgotten that if she is one of the oppressors she is at least
+as much one of the oppressed. If she is bad-tempered it is often for the
+same reasons that make all women bad-tempered (I suppose the
+exasperating qualities of the other sex); if she is grasping it is often
+because when a husband makes generosity a vice it is often necessary
+that a wife should make avarice a virtue. All this Dickens suggested
+very soundly and in a few strokes in the more remote character of Miss
+Wozenham. But in Mrs. Lirriper he went further and did not fare worse.
+In Mrs. Lirriper he suggested quite truly how huge a mass of real good
+humour, of grand unconscious patience, of unfailing courtesy and
+constant and difficult benevolence is concealed behind many a
+lodging-house door and compact in the red-faced person of many a
+preposterous landlady. Any one could easily excuse the ill-humour of the
+poor. But great masses of the poor have not even any ill-humour to be
+excused. Their cheeriness is startling enough to be the foundation of a
+miracle play; and certainly is startling enough to be the foundation of
+a romance. Yet I do not know of any romance in which it is expressed
+except this one.
+
+Of the landlady as of the waiter it may be said that Dickens left in a
+slight sketch what he might have developed through a long and strong
+novel. For Dickens had hold of one great truth, the neglect of which
+has, as it were, truncated and made meagre the work of many brilliant
+modern novelists. Modern novelists try to make long novels out of subtle
+characters. But a subtle character soon comes to an end, because it
+works in and in to its own centre and dies there. But a simple
+character goes on for ever in a fresh interest and energy, because it
+works out and out into the infinite universe. Mr. George Moore in France
+is not by any means so interesting as Mrs. Lirriper in France; for she
+is trying to find France and he is only trying to find George Moore.
+Mrs. Lirriper is the female equivalent of Mr. Pickwick. Unlike Mrs.
+Bardell (another and lesser landlady) she was fully worthy to be Mrs.
+Pickwick. For in both cases the essential truth is the same; that
+original innocence which alone deserves adventures and because it alone
+can appreciate them. We have had Mr. Pickwick in England and we can
+imagine him in France. We have had Mrs. Lirriper in France and we can
+imagine her in Mesopotamia or in heaven. The subtle character in the
+modern novels we cannot really imagine anywhere except in the suburbs or
+in Limbo.
+
+
+
+
+BLEAK HOUSE
+
+
+_Bleak House_ is not certainly Dickens's best book; but perhaps it is
+his best novel. Such a distinction is not a mere verbal trick; it has to
+be remembered rather constantly in connection with his work. This
+particular story represents the highest point of his intellectual
+maturity. Maturity does not necessarily mean perfection. It is idle to
+say that a mature potato is perfect; some people like new potatoes. A
+mature potato is not perfect, but it is a mature potato; the mind of an
+intelligent epicure may find it less adapted to his particular purpose;
+but the mind of an intelligent potato would at once admit it as being,
+beyond all doubt, a genuine, fully developed specimen of his own
+particular species. The same is in some degree true even of literature.
+We can say more or less when a human being has come to his full mental
+growth, even if we go so far as to wish that he had never come to it.
+Children are very much nicer than grown-up people; but there is such a
+thing as growing up. When Dickens wrote _Bleak House_ he had grown up.
+
+Like Napoleon, he had made his army on the march. He had walked in front
+of his mob of aggressive characters as Napoleon did in front of the
+half-baked battalions of the Revolution. And, like Napoleon, he won
+battle after battle before he knew his own plan of campaign; like
+Napoleon, he put the enemies' forces to rout before he had put his own
+force into order. Like Napoleon, he had a victorious army almost before
+he had an army. After his decisive victories Napoleon began to put his
+house in order; after his decisive victories Dickens also began to put
+his house in order. The house, when he had put it in order, was _Bleak
+House_.
+
+There was one thing common to nearly all the other Dickens tales, with
+the possible exception of _Dombey and Son_. They were all rambling
+tales; and they all had a perfect right to be. They were all rambling
+tales for the very simple reason that they were all about rambling
+people. They were novels of adventure; they were even diaries of travel.
+Since the hero strayed from place to place, it did not seem unreasonable
+that the story should stray from subject to subject. This is true of the
+bulk of the novels up to and including _David Copperfield_, up to the
+very brink or threshold of _Bleak House_. Mr. Pickwick wanders about on
+the white English roads, always looking for antiquities and always
+finding novelties. Poor Oliver Twist wanders along the same white roads
+to seek his fortune and to find his misfortune. Nicholas Nickleby goes
+walking across England because he is young and hopeful; Little Nell's
+grandfather does the same thing because he is old and silly. There is
+not much in common between Samuel Pickwick and Oliver Twist; there is
+not much in common between Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby; there is
+not much in common (let us hope) between Little Nell's grandfather and
+any other human being. But they all have this in common, that they may
+actually all have trodden in each other's footprints. They were all
+wanderers on the face of the same fair English land. _Martin Chuzzlewit_
+was only made popular by the travels of the hero in America. When we
+come to _Dombey and Son_ we find, as I have said, an exception; but even
+here it is odd to note the fact that it was an exception almost by
+accident. In Dickens's original scheme of the story, much greater
+prominence was to have been given to the travels and trials of Walter
+Gay; in fact, the young man was to have had a deterioration of character
+which could only have been adequately detailed in him in his character
+of a vagabond and a wastrel. The most important point, however, is that
+when we come to _David Copperfield_, in some sense the summit of his
+serious literature, we find the thing still there. The hero still
+wanders from place to place, his genius is still gipsy. The adventures
+in the book are less violent and less improbable than those which wait
+for Pickwick and Nicholas Nickleby; but they are still adventures and
+not merely events; they are still things met on a road. The facts of the
+story fall away from David as such facts do fall away from a traveller
+walking fast. We are more likely perhaps, to pass by Mr. Creakle's
+school than to pass by Mrs. Jarley's wax-works. The only point is that
+we should pass by both of them. Up to this point in Dickens's
+development, his novel, however true, is still picaresque; his hero
+never really rests anywhere in the story. No one seems really to know
+where Mr. Pickwick lived. Here he has no abiding city.
+
+When we come to _Bleak House_, we come to a change in artistic
+structure. The thing is no longer a string of incidents; it is a cycle
+of incidents. It returns upon itself; it has recurrent melody and
+poetic justice; it has artistic constancy and artistic revenge. It
+preserves the unities; even to some extent it preserves the unities of
+time and place. The story circles round two or three symbolic places; it
+does not go straggling irregularly all over England like one of Mr.
+Pickwick's coaches. People go from one place to another place; but not
+from one place to another place on the road to everywhere else. Mr.
+Jarndyce goes from Bleak House to visit Mr. Boythorn; but he comes back
+to Bleak House. Miss Clare and Miss Summerson go from Bleak House to
+visit Mr. and Mrs. Bayham Badger; but they come back to Bleak House. The
+whole story strays from Bleak House and plunges into the foul fogs of
+Chancery and the autumn mists of Chesney Wold; but the whole story comes
+back to Bleak House. The domestic title is appropriate; it is a
+permanent address.
+
+Dickens's openings are almost always good; but the opening of _Bleak
+House_ is good in a quite new and striking sense. Nothing could be
+better, for instance, than the first foolish chapter about the genealogy
+of the Chuzzlewits; but it has nothing to do with the Chuzzlewits.
+Nothing could be better than the first chapter of _David Copperfield_;
+the breezy entrance and banging exit of Miss Betsy Trotwood. But if
+there is ultimately any crisis or serious subject-matter of _David
+Copperfield_, it is the marred marriage with Dora, the final return to
+Agnes; and all this is in no way involved in the highly-amusing fact
+that his aunt expected him to be a girl. We may repeat that the matter
+is picaresque. The story begins in one place and ends in another place,
+and there is no real connection between the beginning and the end
+except a biographical connection.
+
+A picaresque novel is only a very eventful biography; but the opening of
+_Bleak House_ is quite another business altogether. It is admirable in
+quite another way. The description of the fog in the first chapter of
+_Bleak House_ is good in itself; but it is not merely good in itself,
+like the description of the wind in the opening of _Martin Chuzzlewit_;
+it is also good in the sense that Maeterlinck is good; it is what the
+modern people call an atmosphere. Dickens begins in the Chancery fog
+because he means to end in the Chancery fog. He did not begin in the
+Chuzzlewit wind because he meant to end in it; he began in it because it
+was a good beginning. This is perhaps the best short way of stating the
+peculiarity of the position of _Bleak House_. In this _Bleak House_
+beginning we have the feeling that it is not only a beginning; we have
+the feeling that the author sees the conclusion and the whole. The
+beginning is alpha and omega: the beginning and the end. He means that
+all the characters and all the events shall be read through the smoky
+colours of that sinister and unnatural vapour.
+
+The same is true throughout the whole tale; the whole tale is symbolic
+and crowded with symbols. Miss Flite is a funny character, like Miss La
+Creevy, but Miss La Creevy means only Miss La Creevy. Miss Flite means
+Chancery. The rag-and-bone man, Krook, is a powerful grotesque; so is
+Quilp; but in the story Quilp only means Quilp; Krook means Chancery.
+Rick Carstone is a kind and tragic figure, like Sidney Carton; but
+Sidney Carton only means the tragedy of human nature; Rick Carstone
+means the tragedy of Chancery. Little Jo dies pathetically like Little
+Paul; but for the death of Little Paul we can only blame Dickens; for
+the death of Little Jo we blame Chancery. Thus the artistic unity of the
+book, compared to all the author's earlier novels, is satisfying, almost
+suffocating. There is the _motif_, and again the _motif_. Almost
+everything is calculated to assert and re-assert the savage morality of
+Dickens's protest against a particular social evil. The whole theme is
+that which another Englishman as jovial as Dickens defined shortly and
+finally as the law's delay. The fog of the first chapter never lifts.
+
+In this twilight he traced wonderful shapes. Those people who fancy that
+Dickens was a mere clown; that he could not describe anything delicate
+or deadly in the human character,--those who fancy this are mostly
+people whose position is explicable in many easy ways. The vast majority
+of the fastidious critics have, in the quite strict and solid sense of
+the words, never read Dickens at all; hence their opposition is due to
+and inspired by a hearty innocence which will certainly make them
+enthusiastic Dickensians if they ever, by some accident, happen to read
+him. In other cases it is due to a certain habit of reading books under
+the eye of a conventional critic, admiring what we expect to admire,
+regretting what we are told to regret, waiting for Mr. Bumble to admire
+him, waiting for Little Nell to despise her. Yet again, of course, it is
+sometimes due to that basest of all artistic indulgences (certainly far
+baser than the pleasure of absinthe or the pleasure of opium), the
+pleasure of appreciating works of art which ordinary men cannot
+appreciate. Surely the vilest point of human vanity is exactly that; to
+ask to be admired for admiring what your admirers do not admire. But
+whatever be the reason, whether rude or subtle, which has prevented any
+particular man from personally admiring Dickens, there is in connection
+with a book like _Bleak House_ something that may be called a solid and
+impressive challenge. Let anyone who thinks that Dickens could not
+describe the semi-tones and the abrupt instincts of real human nature
+simply take the trouble to read the stretch of chapters which detail the
+way in which Carstone's mind grew gradually morbid about his chances in
+Chancery. Let him note the manner in which the mere masculinity of
+Carstone is caught; how as he grows more mad he grows more logical, nay,
+more rational. Good women who love him come to him, and point out the
+fact that Jarndyce is a good man, a fact to them solid like an object of
+the senses. In answer he asks them to understand his position. He does
+not say this; he does not say that. He only urges that Jarndyce may have
+become cynical in the affair in the same sense that he himself may have
+become cynical in the affair. He is always a man; that is to say, he is
+always unanswerable, always wrong. The passionate certainty of the woman
+beats itself like battering waves against the thin smooth wall of his
+insane consistency. I repeat: let any one who thinks that Dickens was a
+gross and indelicate artist read that part of the book. If Dickens had
+been the clumsy journalist that such people represent, he never could
+have written such an episode at all. A clumsy journalist would have
+made Rick Carstone in his mad career cast off Esther and Ada and the
+others. The great artist knew better. He knew that even if all the good
+in a man is dying, the last sense that dies is the sense that knows a
+good woman from a bad; it is like the scent of a noble hound.
+
+The clumsy journalist would have made Rick Carstone turn on John
+Jarndyce with an explosion of hatred, as of one who had made an
+exposure--who had found out what low people call "a false friend" in
+what they call "his true colours." The great artist knew better; he knew
+that a good man going wrong tries to salve his soul to the last with the
+sense of generosity and intellectual justice. He will try to love his
+enemy if only out of mere love of himself. As the wolf dies fighting,
+the good man gone wrong dies arguing. This is what constitutes the true
+and real tragedy of Richard Carstone. It is strictly the one and only
+great tragedy that Dickens wrote. It is like the tragedy of Hamlet. The
+others are not tragedies because they deal almost with dead men. The
+tragedy of old Dorrit is merely the sad spectacle of a dotard dragged
+about Europe in his last childhood. The tragedy of Steerforth is only
+that of one who dies suddenly; the tragedy of old Dombey only that of
+one who was dead all the time. But Rick is a real tragedy, for he is
+still alive when the quicksand sucks him down.
+
+It is impossible to avoid putting in the first place this pall of smoke
+which Dickens has deliberately spread over the story. It is quite true
+that the country underneath is clear enough to contain any number of
+unconscious comedians or of merry monsters such as he was in the custom
+of introducing into the carnival of his tales. But he meant us to take
+the smoky atmosphere seriously. Charles Dickens, who was, like all men
+who are really funny about funny things, horribly serious about serious
+things, certainly meant us to read this story in terms of his protest
+and his insurrection against the emptiness and arrogance of law, against
+the folly and the pride of judges. Everything else that there is in this
+story entered into it through the unconscious or accidental energy of
+his genius, which broke in at every gap. But it was the tragedy of
+Richard Carstone that he meant, not the comedy of Harold Skimpole. He
+could not help being amusing; but he meant to be depressing.
+
+Another case might be taken as testing the greater seriousness of this
+tale. The passages about Mrs. Jellyby and her philanthropic schemes show
+Dickens at his best in his old and more familiar satiric manner. But in
+the midst of the Jellyby pandemonium, which is in itself described with
+the same _abandon_ and irrelevance as the boarding-house of Mrs. Todgers
+or the travelling theatre of Mr. Crummles, the elder Dickens introduced
+another piece of pure truth and even tenderness. I mean the account of
+Caddy Jellyby. If Carstone is a truly masculine study of how a man goes
+wrong, Caddy is a perfectly feminine study of how a girl goes right.
+Nowhere else perhaps in fiction, and certainly nowhere else in Dickens,
+is the mere female paradox so well epitomised, the unjust use of words
+covering so much capacity for a justice of ultimate estimate; the
+seeming irresponsibility in language concealing such a fixed and
+pitiless sense of responsibility about things; the air of being always
+at daggers-drawn with her own kindred, yet the confession of incurable
+kinship implied in pride and shame; and, above all, that thirst for
+order and beauty as for something physical; that strange female power of
+hating ugliness and waste as good men can only hate sin and bad men
+virtue. Every touch in her is true, from her first bewildering outbursts
+of hating people because she likes them, down to the sudden quietude and
+good sense which announces that she has slipped into her natural place
+as a woman. Miss Clare is a figure-head, Miss Summerson in some ways a
+failure; but Miss Caddy Jellyby is by far the greatest, the most human,
+and the most really dignified of all the heroines of Dickens.
+
+With one or two exceptions, all the effects in this story are of this
+somewhat quieter kind, though none of them are so subtly successful as
+Rick Carstone and Caddy. Harold Skimpole begins as a sketch drawn with a
+pencil almost as airy and fanciful as his own. The humour of the earlier
+scenes is delightful--the scenes in which Skimpole looks on at other
+people paying his debts with the air of a kindly outsider, and suggests
+in formless legal phraseology that they might "sign something" or "make
+over something," or the scene in which he tries to explain the
+advantages of accepting everything to the apoplectic Mr. Boythorn. But
+it was one of the defects of Dickens as a novelist that his characters
+always became coarser and clumsier as they passed through the practical
+events of a story, and this would necessarily be so with Skimpole, whose
+position was conceivable even to himself only on the assumption that he
+was a mere spectator of life. Poor Skimpole only asked to be kept out
+of the business of this world, and Dickens ought to have kept him out of
+the business of _Bleak House_. By the end of the tale he has brought
+Skimpole to doing acts of mere low villainy. This altogether spoils the
+ironical daintiness of the original notion. Skimpole was meant to end
+with a note of interrogation. As it is, he ends with a big, black,
+unmistakable blot. Speaking purely artistically, we may say that this is
+as great a collapse or vulgarisation as if Richard Carstone had turned
+into a common blackguard and wife-beater, or Caddy Jellyby into a comic
+and illiterate landlady. Upon the whole it may, I think, be said that
+the character of Skimpole is rather a piece of brilliant moralising than
+of pure observation or creation. Dickens had a singularly just mind. He
+was wild in his caricatures, but very sane in his impressions. Many of
+his books were devoted, and this book is partly devoted, to a
+denunciation of aristocracy--of the idle class that lives easily upon
+the toil of nations. But he was fairer than many modern revolutionists,
+and he insisted on satirising also those who prey on society not in the
+name of rank or law, but in the name of intellect and beauty. Sir
+Leicester Dedlock and Mr. Harold Skimpole are alike in accepting with a
+royal unconsciousness the anomaly and evil of their position. But the
+idleness and insolence of the aristocrat is human and humble compared to
+the idleness and insolence of the artist.
+
+With the exception of a few fine freaks, such as Turveydrop and
+Chadband, all the figures in this book are touched more delicately, even
+more faintly, than is common with Dickens. But if the figures are
+touched more faintly, it is partly because they are figures in a
+fog--the fog of Chancery. Dickens meant that twilight to be oppressive;
+for it was the symbol of oppression. Deliberately he did not dispel the
+darkness at the end of this book, as he does dispel it at the end of
+most of his books. Pickwick gets out of the Fleet Prison; Carstone never
+gets out of Chancery but by death. This tyranny, Dickens said, shall not
+be lifted by the light subterfuge of a fiction. This tyranny shall never
+be lifted till all Englishmen lift it together.
+
+
+
+
+CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND
+
+
+There are works of great authors manifestly inferior to their typical
+work which are yet necessary to their fame and their figure in the
+world. It is not difficult to recall examples of them. No one, for
+instance, would talk of Scott's _Tales of a Grandfather_ as indicating
+the power that produced _Kenilworth_ and _Guy Mannering_. Nevertheless,
+without this chance minor compilation we should not really have the key
+of Scott. Without this one insignificant book we should not see his
+significance. For the truth was that Scott loved history more than
+romance, because he was so constituted as to find it more romantic than
+romance. He preferred the deeds of Wallace and Douglas to those of
+Marmion and Ivanhoe. Therefore his garrulous gossip of old times, his
+rambles in dead centuries, give us the real material and impulse of all
+his work; they represent the quarry in which he dug and the food on
+which he fed. Almost alone among novelists Scott actually preferred
+those parts of his historical novels which he had not invented himself.
+He exults when he can boast in an eager note that he has stolen some
+saying from history. Thus _The Tales of a Grandfather_, though small, is
+in some sense the frame of all the Waverley novels. We realise that all
+Scott's novels are tales of a grandfather.
+
+What has been said here about Scott might be said in a less degree
+about Thackeray's _Four Georges_. Though standing higher among his works
+than _The Tales of a Grandfather_ among Scott's they are not his works
+of genius; yet they seem in some way to surround, supplement, and
+explain such works. Without the _Four Georges_ we should know less of
+the link that bound Thackeray to the beginning and to the end of the
+eighteenth century; thence we should have known less of Colonel Esmond
+and also less of Lord Steyne. To these two examples I have given of the
+slight historical experiments of two novelists a third has to be added.
+The third great master of English fiction whose glory fills the
+nineteenth century also produced a small experiment in the
+popularisation of history. It is separated from the other two partly by
+a great difference of merit but partly also by an utter difference of
+tone and outlook. We seem to hear it suddenly as in the first words
+spoken by a new voice, a voice gay, colloquial, and impatient. Scott and
+Thackeray were tenderly attached to the past; Dickens (in his
+consciousness at any rate) was impatient with everything, but especially
+impatient with the past.
+
+A collection of the works of Dickens would be incomplete in an essential
+as well as a literal sense without his _Child's History of England_. It
+may not be important as a contribution to history, but it is important
+as a contribution to biography; as a contribution to the character and
+the career of the man who wrote it, a typical man of his time. That he
+had made no personal historical researches, that he had no special
+historical learning, that he had not had, in truth, even anything that
+could be called a good education, all this only accentuates not the
+merit but at least the importance of the book. For here we may read in
+plain popular language, written by a man whose genius for popular
+exposition has never been surpassed among men, a brief account of the
+origin and meaning of England as it seemed to the average Englishman of
+that age. When subtler views of our history, some more false and some
+more true than his, have become popular, or at least well known, when in
+the near future Carlylean or Catholic or Marxian views of history have
+spread themselves among the reading public, this book will always remain
+as a bright and brisk summary of the cock-sure, healthy-minded,
+essentially manly and essentially ungentlemanly view of history which
+characterised the Radicals of that particular Radical era. The history
+tells us nothing about the periods that it talks about; but it tells us
+a great deal about the period that it does not talk about; the period in
+which it was written. It is in no sense a history of England from the
+Roman invasion; but it is certainly one of the documents which will
+contribute to a history of England in the nineteenth century.
+
+Of the actual nature of its philosophical and technical limitations it
+is, I suppose, unnecessary to speak. They all resolve themselves into
+one fault common in the modern world, and certainly characteristic of
+historians much more learned and pretentious than Dickens. That fault
+consists simply in ignoring or underrating the variety of strange evils
+and unique dangers in the world. The Radicals of the nineteenth century
+were engaged, and most righteously engaged, in dealing with one
+particular problem of human civilisation; they were shifting and
+apportioning more equally a load of custom that had really become
+unmeaning, often accidental, and nearly always unfair. Thus, for
+instance, a fierce and fighting penal code, which had been perfectly
+natural when the robbers were as strong as the Government, had become in
+more ordered times nothing but a base and bloody habit. Thus again
+Church powers and dues, which had been human when every man felt the
+Church as the best part of himself, were mere mean privileges when the
+nation was full of sects and full of freethinkers. This clearing away of
+external symbols that no longer symbolised anything was an honourable
+and needful work; but it was so difficult that to the men engaged in it
+it blocked up the perspective and filled the sky, so that they slid into
+a very natural mental mistake which coloured all their views of history.
+They supposed that this particular problem on which they were engaged
+was the one problem upon which all mankind had always been engaged. They
+got it into their heads that breaking away from a dead past was the
+perpetual process of humanity. The truth is obviously that humanity has
+found itself in many difficulties very different from that. Sometimes
+the best business of an age is to resist some alien invasion; sometimes
+to preach practical self-control in a world too self-indulgent and
+diffused; sometimes to prevent the growth in the State of great new
+private enterprises that would poison or oppress it. Above all it may
+sometimes happen that the highest task of a thinking citizen may be to
+do the exact opposite of the work which the Radicals had to do. It may
+be his highest duty to cling on to every scrap of the past that he can
+find, if he feels that the ground is giving way beneath him and sinking
+into mere savagery and forgetfulness of all human culture. This was
+exactly the position of all thinking men in what we call the dark ages,
+say from the sixth to the tenth century. The cheap progressive view of
+history can never make head or tail of that epoch; it was an epoch
+upside down. We think of the old things as barbaric and the new things
+as enlightened. In that age all the enlightened things were old; all
+the barbaric and brutally ignorant things were new and up to date.
+Republicanism was a fading legend; despotism was a new and successful
+experiment. Christianity was not only better than the clans that
+rebelled against it; Christianity was more rationalistic than they were.
+When men looked back they saw progress and reason; when they looked
+forward they saw shapeless tradition and tribal terror. Touching such
+an age it is obvious that all our modern terms describing reform or
+conservation are foolish and beside the mark. The Conservative was then
+the only possible reformer. If a man did not strengthen the remains of
+Roman order and the root of Roman Christianity, he was simply helping
+the world to roll downhill into ruin and idiotcy. Remember all these
+evident historical truths and then turn to the account given by
+Charles Dickens of that great man, St. Dunstan. It is not that the
+pert cockney tone of the abuse is irritating to the nerves: it is that
+he has got the whole hang of the thing wrong. His head is full of the
+nineteenth-century situation; that a priest imposing discipline is a
+person somehow blocking the way to equality and light. Whereas the
+point about such a man as Dunstan was that nobody in the place except he
+cared a button about equality or light: and that he was defending what
+was left of them against the young and growing power of darkness and
+division and caste.
+
+Nevertheless the case against such books as this is commonly stated
+wrong. The fault of Dickens is not (as is often said) that he "applies
+the same moral standard to all ages." Every sane man must do that: a
+moral standard must remain the same or it is not a moral standard. If we
+call St. Anthony of Padua a good man, we must mean what we mean when we
+call Huxley a good man, or else there is no sense in using the word
+"good." The fault of the Dickens school of popular history lies, not in
+the application of a plain rule of right and wrong to all circumstances,
+but in ignorance of the circumstances to which it was applied. It is not
+that they wrongly enforce the fixed principle that life should be saved;
+it is that they take a fire-engine to a shipwreck and a lifeboat to a
+house on fire. The business of a good man in Dickens's time was to bring
+justice up to date. The business of a good man in Dunstan's time was to
+toil to ensure the survival of any justice at all.
+
+And Dickens, through being a living and fighting man of his own time,
+kept the health of his own heart, and so saw many truths with a single
+eye: truths that were spoilt for subtler eyes. He was much more really
+right than Carlyle; immeasurably more right than Froude. He was more
+right precisely because he applied plain human morals to all facts as he
+saw them. Carlyle really had a vague idea that in coarse and cruel
+times it was right to be coarse and cruel; that tyranny was excusable in
+the twelfth century: as if the twelfth century did not denounce tyrants
+as much or more than any other. Carlyle, in fact, fancied that Rufus was
+the right sort of man; a view which was not only not shared by Anselm,
+but was probably not shared by Rufus. In this connection, or rather in
+connection with the other case of Froude, it is worth while to take
+another figure from Dickens's history, which illustrates the other and
+better side of the facile and popular method. Sheer ignorance of the
+environment made him wrong about Dunstan. But sheer instinct and good
+moral tradition made him right, for instance, about Henry VIII.; right
+where Froude is wildly wrong. Dickens's imagination could not re-picture
+an age where learning and liberty were dying rather than being born: but
+Henry VIII. lived in a time of expanding knowledge and unrest; a time
+therefore somewhat like the Victorian. And Dickens in his childish but
+robust way does perceive the main point about him: that he was a wicked
+man. He misses all the fine shades, of course; he makes him every kind
+of wicked man at once. He leaves out the serious interests of the man:
+his strange but real concern for theology; his love of certain legal and
+moral forms; his half-unconscious patriotism. But he sees the solid bulk
+of definite badness simply because it was there; and Froude cannot see
+it at all; because Froude followed Carlyle and played tricks with the
+eternal conscience. Henry VIII. _was_ "a blot of blood and grease upon
+the history of England." For he was the embodiment of the Devil in the
+Renascence, that wild worship of mere pleasure and scorn, which with its
+pictures and its palaces has enriched and ruined the world.
+
+The time will soon come when the mere common-sense of Dickens, like the
+mere common-sense of Macaulay (though his was poisoned by learning and
+Whig politics), will appear to give a plainer and therefore truer
+picture of the mass of history than the mystical perversity of a man of
+genius writing only out of his own temperament, like Carlyle or Taine.
+If a man has a new theory of ethics there is one thing he must not be
+allowed to do. Let him give laws on Sinai, let him dictate a Bible, let
+him fill the world with cathedrals if he can. But he must not be allowed
+to write a history of England; or a history of any country. All history
+was conducted on ordinary morality: with his extraordinary morality he
+is certain to read it all askew. Thus Carlyle tries to write of the
+Middle Ages with a bias against humility and mercy; that is, with a bias
+against the whole theoretic morality of the Middle Ages. The result is
+that he turns into a mere turmoil of arrogant German savages what was
+really the most complete and logical, if not the highest, of human
+civilisations. Historically speaking, it is better to be Dickens than to
+be this; better to be ignorant, provincial, slap-dash, seeing only the
+passing moment, but in that moment, to be true to eternal things.
+
+It must be remembered, of course, that Dickens deliberately offers this
+only as a "child's" history of England. That is, he only professes to be
+able to teach history as any father of a little boy of five professes to
+be able to teach him history. And although the history of England would
+certainly be taught very differently (as regards the actual criticism of
+events and men) in a family with a wider culture or with another
+religion, the general method would be the same. For the general method
+is quite right. This black-and-white history of heroes and villains;
+this history full of pugnacious ethics and of nothing else, is the right
+kind of history for children. I have often wondered how the scientific
+Marxians and the believers in "the materialist view of history" will
+ever manage to teach their dreary economic generalisations to children:
+but I suppose they will have no children. Dickens's history will always
+be popular with the young; almost as popular as Dickens's novels, and
+for the same reason: because it is full of moralising. Science and art
+without morality are not dangerous in the sense commonly supposed. They
+are not dangerous like a fire, but dangerous like a fog. A fire is
+dangerous in its brightness; a fog in its dulness; and thought without
+morals is merely dull, like a fog. The fog seems to be creeping up the
+street; putting out lamp after lamp. But this cockney lamp-post which
+the children love is still crowned with its flame; and when the fathers
+have forgotten ethics, their babies will turn and teach them.
+
+
+
+
+HARD TIMES
+
+
+I have heard that in some debating clubs there is a rule that the
+members may discuss anything except religion and politics. I cannot
+imagine what they do discuss; but it is quite evident that they have
+ruled out the only two subjects which are either important or amusing.
+The thing is a part of a certain modern tendency to avoid things because
+they lead to warmth; whereas, obviously, we ought, even in a social
+sense, to seek those things specially. The warmth of the discussion is
+as much a part of hospitality as the warmth of the fire. And it is
+singularly suggestive that in English literature the two things have
+died together. The very people who would blame Dickens for his
+sentimental hospitality are the very people who would also blame him for
+his narrow political conviction. The very people who would mock him for
+his narrow radicalism are those who would mock him for his broad
+fireside. Real conviction and real charity are much nearer than people
+suppose. Dickens was capable of loving all men; but he refused to love
+all opinions. The modern humanitarian can love all opinions, but he
+cannot love all men; he seems, sometimes, in the ecstasy of his
+humanitarianism, even to hate them all. He can love all opinions,
+including the opinion that men are unlovable.
+
+In feeling Dickens as a lover we must never forget him as a fighter, and
+a fighter for a creed; but indeed there is no other kind of fighter. The
+geniality which he spread over all his creations was geniality spread
+from one centre, from one flaming peak. He was willing to excuse Mr.
+Micawber for being extravagant; but Dickens and Dickens's doctrine were
+strictly to decide how far he was to be excused. He was willing to like
+Mr. Twemlow in spite of his snobbishness, but Dickens and Dickens's
+doctrine were alone to be judges of how far he was snobbish. There was
+never a more didactic writer: hence there was never one more amusing. He
+had no mean modern notion of keeping the moral doubtful. He would have
+regarded this as a mere piece of slovenliness, like leaving the last
+page illegible.
+
+Everywhere in Dickens's work these angles of his absolute opinion stood
+up out of the confusion of his general kindness, just as sharp and
+splintered peaks stand up out of the soft confusion of the forests.
+Dickens is always generous, he is generally kind-hearted, he is often
+sentimental, he is sometimes intolerably maudlin; but you never know
+when you will not come upon one of the convictions of Dickens; and when
+you do come upon it you do know it. It is as hard and as high as any
+precipice or peak of the mountains. The highest and hardest of these
+peaks is _Hard Times_.
+
+It is here more than anywhere else that the sternness of Dickens emerges
+as separate from his softness; it is here, most obviously, so to speak,
+that his bones stick out. There are indeed many other books of his which
+are written better and written in a sadder tone. _Great Expectations_ is
+melancholy in a sense; but it is doubtful of everything, even of its
+own melancholy. _The Tale of Two Cities_ is a great tragedy, but it is
+still a sentimental tragedy. It is a great drama, but it is still a
+melodrama. But this tale of _Hard Times_ is in some way harsher than all
+these. For it is the expression of a righteous indignation which cannot
+condescend to humour and which cannot even condescend to pathos. Twenty
+times we have taken Dickens's hand and it has been sometimes hot with
+revelry and sometimes weak with weariness; but this time we start a
+little, for it is inhumanly cold; and then we realise that we have
+touched his gauntlet of steel.
+
+One cannot express the real value of this book without being irrelevant.
+It is true that one cannot express the real value of anything without
+being irrelevant. If we take a thing frivolously we can take it
+separately, but the moment we take a thing seriously, if it were only an
+old umbrella, it is obvious that that umbrella opens above us into the
+immensity of the whole universe. But there are rather particular reasons
+why the value of the book called _Hard Times_ should be referred back to
+great historic and theoretic matters with which it may appear
+superficially to have little or nothing to do. The chief reason can
+perhaps be stated thus--that English politics had for more than a
+hundred years been getting into more and more of a hopeless tangle (a
+tangle which, of course, has since become even worse) and that Dickens
+did in some extraordinary way see what was wrong, even if he did not see
+what was right.
+
+The Liberalism which Dickens and nearly all of his contemporaries
+professed had begun in the American and the French Revolutions. Almost
+all modern English criticism upon those revolutions has been vitiated
+by the assumption that those revolutions burst upon a world which was
+unprepared for their ideas--a world ignorant of the possibility of such
+ideas. Somewhat the same mistake is made by those who suggest that
+Christianity was adopted by a world incapable of criticising it; whereas
+obviously it was adopted by a world that was tired of criticising
+everything. The vital mistake that is made about the French Revolution
+is merely this--that everyone talks about it as the introduction of a
+new idea. It was not the introduction of a new idea; there are no new
+ideas. Or if there are new ideas, they would not cause the least
+irritation if they were introduced into political society; because the
+world having never got used to them there would be no mass of men ready
+to fight for them at a moment's notice. That which was irritating about
+the French Revolution was this--that it was not the introduction of a
+new ideal, but the practical fulfilment of an old one. From the time of
+the first fairy tales men had always believed ideally in equality; they
+had always thought that something ought to be done, if anything could be
+done, to redress the balance between Cinderella and the ugly sisters.
+The irritating thing about the French was not that they said this ought
+to be done; everybody said that. The irritating thing about the French
+was that they did it. They proposed to carry out into a positive scheme
+what had been the vision of humanity; and humanity was naturally
+annoyed. The kings of Europe did not make war upon the Revolution
+because it was a blasphemy, but because it was a copy-book maxim which
+had been just too accurately copied. It was a platitude which they had
+always held in theory unexpectedly put into practice. The tyrants did
+not hate democracy because it was a paradox; they hated it because it
+was a truism which seemed in some danger of coming true.
+
+Now it happens to be hugely important to have this right view of the
+Revolution in considering its political effects upon England. For the
+English, being a deeply and indeed excessively romantic people, could
+never be quite content with this quality of cold and bald obviousness
+about the republican formula. The republican formula was merely
+this--that the State must consist of its citizens ruling equally,
+however unequally they may do anything else. In their capacity of
+members of the State they are all equally interested in its
+preservation. But the English soon began to be romantically restless
+about this eternal truism; they were perpetually trying to turn it into
+something else, into something more picturesque--progress perhaps, or
+anarchy. At last they turned it into the highly exciting and highly
+unsound system of politics, which was known as the Manchester School,
+and which was expressed with a sort of logical flightiness, more
+excusable in literature, by Mr. Herbert Spencer. Of course Danton or
+Washington or any of the original republicans would have thought these
+people were mad. They would never have admitted for a moment that the
+State must not interfere with commerce or competition; they would merely
+have insisted that if the State did interfere, it must really be the
+State--that is, the whole people. But the distance between the common
+sense of Danton and the mere ecstasy of Herbert Spencer marks the
+English way of colouring and altering the revolutionary idea. The
+English people as a body went blind, as the saying is, for interpreting
+democracy entirely in terms of liberty. They said in substance that if
+they had more and more liberty it did not matter whether they had any
+equality or any fraternity. But this was violating the sacred trinity of
+true politics; they confounded the persons and they divided the
+substance.
+
+Now the really odd thing about England in the nineteenth century is
+this--that there was one Englishman who happened to keep his head. The
+men who lost their heads lost highly scientific and philosophical heads;
+they were great cosmic systematisers like Spencer, great social
+philosophers like Bentham, great practical politicians like Bright,
+great political economists like Mill. The man who kept his head kept a
+head full of fantastic nonsense; he was a writer of rowdy farces, a
+demagogue of fiction, a man without education in any serious sense
+whatever, a man whose whole business was to turn ordinary cockneys into
+extraordinary caricatures. Yet when all these other children of the
+revolution went wrong he, by a mystical something in his bones, went
+right. He knew nothing of the Revolution; yet he struck the note of it.
+He returned to the original sentimental commonplace upon which it is
+forever founded, as the Church is founded on a rock. In an England gone
+mad about a minor theory he reasserted the original idea--the idea that
+no one in the State must be too weak to influence the State.
+
+This man was Dickens. He did this work much more genuinely than it was
+done by Carlyle or Ruskin; for they were simply Tories making out a
+romantic case for the return of Toryism. But Dickens was a real Liberal
+demanding the return of real Liberalism. Dickens was there to remind
+people that England had rubbed out two words of the revolutionary motto,
+had left only Liberty and destroyed Equality and Fraternity. In this
+book, _Hard Times_, he specially champions equality. In all his books he
+champions fraternity.
+
+The atmosphere of this book and what it stands for can be very
+adequately conveyed in the note on the book by Lord Macaulay, who may
+stand as a very good example of the spirit of England in those years of
+eager emancipation and expanding wealth--the years in which Liberalism
+was turned from an omnipotent truth to a weak scientific system.
+Macaulay's private comment on _Hard Times_ runs, "One or two passages of
+exquisite pathos and the rest sullen Socialism." That is not an unfair
+and certainly not a specially hostile criticism, but it exactly shows
+how the book struck those people who were mad on political liberty and
+dead about everything else. Macaulay mistook for a new formula called
+Socialism what was, in truth, only the old formula called political
+democracy. He and his Whigs had so thoroughly mauled and modified the
+original idea of Rousseau or Jefferson that when they saw it again they
+positively thought that it was something quite new and eccentric. But
+the truth was that Dickens was not a Socialist, but an unspoilt Liberal;
+he was not sullen; nay, rather, he had remained strangely hopeful. They
+called him a sullen Socialist only to disguise their astonishment at
+finding still loose about the London streets a happy republican.
+
+Dickens is the one living link between the old kindness and the new,
+between the good will of the past and the good works of the future. He
+links May Day with Bank Holiday, and he does it almost alone. All the
+men around him, great and good as they were, were in comparison
+puritanical, and never so puritanical as when they were also atheistic.
+He is a sort of solitary pipe down which pours to the twentieth century
+the original river of Merry England. And although this _Hard Times_ is,
+as its name implies, the hardest of his works, although there is less in
+it perhaps than in any of the others of the _abandon_ and the buffoonery
+of Dickens, this only emphasises the more clearly the fact that he stood
+almost alone for a more humane and hilarious view of democracy. None of
+his great and much more highly-educated contemporaries could help him in
+this. Carlyle was as gloomy on the one side as Herbert Spencer on the
+other. He protested against the commercial oppression simply and solely
+because it was not only an oppression but a depression. And this protest
+of his was made specially in the case of the book before us. It may be
+bitter, but it was a protest against bitterness. It may be dark, but it
+is the darkness of the subject and not of the author. He is by his own
+account dealing with hard times, but not with a hard eternity, not with
+a hard philosophy of the universe. Nevertheless, this is the one place
+in his work where he does not make us remember human happiness by
+example as well as by precept. This is, as I have said, not the saddest,
+but certainly the harshest of his stories. It is perhaps the only place
+where Dickens, in defending happiness, for a moment forgets to be
+happy.
+
+He describes Bounderby and Gradgrind with a degree of grimness and
+sombre hatred very different from the half affectionate derision which
+he directed against the old tyrants or humbugs of the earlier nineteenth
+century--the pompous Dedlock or the fatuous Nupkins, the grotesque
+Bumble or the inane Tigg. In those old books his very abuse was
+benignant; in _Hard Times_ even his sympathy is hard. And the reason is
+again to be found in the political facts of the century. Dickens could
+be half genial with the older generation of oppressors because it was a
+dying generation. It was evident, or at least it seemed evident then,
+that Nupkins could not go on much longer making up the law of England to
+suit himself; that Sir Leicester Dedlock could not go on much longer
+being kind to his tenants as if they were dogs and cats. And some of
+these evils the nineteenth century did really eliminate or improve. For
+the first half of the century Dickens and all his friends were justified
+in feeling that the chains were falling from mankind. At any rate, the
+chains did fall from Mr. Rouncewell the Iron-master. And when they fell
+from him he picked them up and put them upon the poor.
+
+  [Illustration: Charles Dickens, 1858
+  From a black and white drawing by Baughiet.]
+
+
+
+
+LITTLE DORRIT
+
+
+_Little Dorrit_ stands in Dickens's life chiefly as a signal of how far
+he went down the road of realism, of sadness, and of what is called
+modernity. True, it was by no means the best of the books of his later
+period; some even think it the worst. _Great Expectations_ is certainly
+the best of the later novels; some even think it the best of all the
+novels. Nor is it the novel most concerned with strictly recent
+problems; that title must be given to _Hard Times_. Nor again is it the
+most finely finished or well constructed of the later books; that claim
+can be probably made for _Edwin Drood_. By a queer verbal paradox the
+most carefully finished of his later tales is the tale that is not
+finished at all. In form, indeed, the book bears a superficial
+resemblance to those earlier works by which the young Dickens had set
+the whole world laughing long ago. Much of the story refers to a remote
+time early in the nineteenth century; much of it was actually recalled
+and copied from the life of Dickens's father in the old Marshalsea
+prison. Also the narrative has something of the form, or rather absence
+of form, which belonged to _Nicholas Nickleby_ or _Martin Chuzzlewit_.
+It has something of the old air of being a string of disconnected
+adventures, like a boy's book about bears and Indians. The Dorrits go
+wandering for no particular reason on the Continent of Europe, just as
+young Martin Chuzzlewit went wandering for no particular reason on the
+continent of America. The story of _Little Dorrit_ stops and lingers at
+the doors of the Circumlocution Office much in the same way that the
+story of Samuel Pickwick stops and lingers in the political excitement
+of Eatanswill. The villain, Blandois, is a very stagey villain indeed;
+quite as stagey as Ralph Nickleby or the mysterious Monk. The secret of
+the dark house of Clennam is a very silly secret; quite as silly as the
+secret of Ralph Nickleby or the secret of Monk. Yet all these external
+similarities between _Little Dorrit_ and the earliest books, all this
+loose, melodramatic quality, only serves to make more obvious and
+startling the fact that some change has come over the soul of Dickens.
+_Hard Times_ is harsh; but then _Hard Times_ is a social pamphlet;
+perhaps it is only harsh as a social pamphlet must be harsh. _Bleak
+House_ is a little sombre; but then _Bleak House_ is almost a detective
+story; perhaps it is only sombre in the sense that a detective story
+must be sombre. _A Tale of Two Cities_ is a tragedy; but then _A Tale of
+Two Cities_ is a tale of the French Revolution; perhaps it is only a
+tragedy because the French Revolution was a tragedy. _The Mystery of
+Edwin Drood_ is dark; but then the mystery of anybody must be dark. In
+all these other cases of the later books an artistic reason can be
+given--a reason of theme or of construction for the slight sadness that
+seems to cling to them. But exactly because _Little Dorrit_ is a mere
+Dickens novel, it shows that something must somehow have happened to
+Dickens himself. Even in resuming his old liberty, he cannot resume his
+old hilarity. He can re-create the anarchy, but not the revelry.
+
+It so happens that this strange difference between the new and the old
+mode of Dickens can be symbolised and stated in one separate and simple
+contrast. Dickens's father had been a prisoner in a debtors' prison, and
+Dickens's works contain two pictures partly suggested by the personality
+of that prisoner. Mr. Micawber is one picture of him. Mr. Dorrit is
+another. This truth is almost incredible, but it is the truth. The
+joyful Micawber, whose very despair was exultant, and the desolate
+Dorrit, whose very pride was pitiful, were the same man. The valiant
+Micawber and the nervous, shaking Dorrit were the same man. The defiant
+Micawber and the snobbish, essentially obsequious Dorrit were the same
+man. I do not mean of course that either of the pictures was an exact
+copy of anybody. The whole Dickens genius consisted of taking hints and
+turning them into human beings. As he took twenty real persons and
+turned them into one fictitious person, so he took one real person and
+turned him into twenty fictitious persons. This quality would suggest
+one character, that quality would suggest another. But in this case, at
+any rate, he did take one real person and turn him into two. And what is
+more, he turned him into two persons who seem to be quite opposite
+persons. To ordinary readers of Dickens, to say that Micawber and Dorrit
+had in any sense the same original, will appear unexpected and wild. No
+conceivable connection between the two would ever have occurred to
+anybody who had read Dickens with simple and superficial enjoyment, as
+all good literature ought to be read. It will seem to them just as
+silly as saying that the Fat Boy and Mr. Alfred Jingle were both copied
+from the same character. It will seem as insane as saying that the
+character of Smike and the character of Major Bagstock were both copied
+from Dickens's father. Yet it is an unquestionable historical fact that
+Micawber and Dorrit were both copied from Dickens's father, in the only
+sense that any figures in good literature are ever copied from anything
+or anybody. Dickens did get the main idea of Micawber from his father;
+and that idea is that a poor man is not conquered by the world. And
+Dickens did get the main idea of Dorrit from his father; and that idea
+is that a poor man may be conquered by the world. I shall take the
+opportunity of discussing, in a moment, which of these ideas is true.
+Doubtless old John Dickens included both the gay and the sad moral; most
+men do. My only purpose here is to point out that Dickens drew the gay
+moral in 1849, and the sad moral in 1857.
+
+There must have been some real sadness at this time creeping like a
+cloud over Dickens himself. It is nothing that a man dwells on the
+darkness of dark things; all healthy men do that. It is when he dwells
+on the darkness of bright things that we have reason to fear some
+disease of the emotions. There must really have been some depression
+when a man can only see the sad side of flowers or the sad side of
+holidays or the sad side of wine. And there must be some depression of
+an uncommonly dark and genuine character when a man has reached such a
+point that he can see only the sad side of Mr. Wilkins Micawber.
+
+Yet this is in reality what had happened to Dickens about this time.
+Staring at Wilkins Micawber he could see only the weakness and the
+tragedy that was made possible by his indifference, his indulgence, and
+his bravado. He had already indeed been slightly moved towards this
+study of the feebleness and ruin of the old epicurean type with which he
+had once sympathised, the type of Bob Sawyer or Dick Swiveller. He had
+already attacked the evil of it in _Bleak House_ in the character of
+Harold Skimpole, with its essentially cowardly carelessness and its
+highly selfish communism. Nevertheless, as I have said before, it must
+have been no small degree of actual melancholia which led Dickens to
+look for a lesson of disaster and slavery in the very same career from
+which he had once taught lessons of continual recuperation and a kind of
+fantastic freedom. There must have been at this time some melancholy
+behind the writings. There must have existed on this earth at the time
+that portent and paradox--a somewhat depressed Dickens.
+
+Perhaps it was a reminiscence of that metaphorical proverb which tells
+us that "truth lies at the bottom of a well." Perhaps these people
+thought that the only way to find truth in the well was to drown
+oneself. But on whatever thin theoretic basis, the type and period of
+George Gissing did certainly consider that Dickens, so far as he went,
+was all the worse for the optimism of the story of Micawber; hence it is
+not unnatural that they should think him all the better for the
+comparative pessimism of the story of _Little Dorrit_. The very things
+in the tale that would naturally displease the ordinary admirers of
+Dickens, are the things which would naturally please a man like George
+Gissing. There are many of these things, but one of them emerges
+pre-eminent and unmistakable. This is the fact that when all is said and
+done the main business of the story of _Little Dorrit_ is to describe
+the victory of circumstances over a soul. The circumstances are the
+financial ruin and long imprisonment of Edward Dorrit; the soul is
+Edward Dorrit himself. Let it be granted that the circumstances are
+exceptional and oppressive, are denounced as exceptional and oppressive,
+are finally exploded and overthrown; still, they are circumstances. Let
+it be granted that the soul is that of a man perhaps weak in any case
+and retaining many merits to the last, still it is a soul. Let it be
+granted, above all, that the admission that such spiritual tragedies do
+occur does not decrease by so much as an iota our faith in the validity
+of any spiritual struggle. For example, Stevenson has made a study of
+the breakdown of a good man's character under a burden for which he is
+not to blame, in the tragedy of Henry Durie in _The Master of
+Ballantrae_. Yet he has added, in the mouth of Mackellar, the exact
+common sense and good theology of the matter, saying "It matters not a
+jot; for he that is to pass judgment upon the records of our life is the
+same that formed us in frailty." Let us concede then all this, and the
+fact remains that the study of the slow demoralisation of a man through
+mere misfortune was not a study congenial to Dickens, not in accordance
+with his original inspiration, not connected in any manner with the
+special thing that he had to say. In a word, the thing is not quite a
+part of himself; and he was not quite himself when he did it.
+
+He was still quite a young man; his depression did not come from age.
+In fact, as far as I know, mere depression never does come from mere
+age. Age can pass into a beautiful reverie. Age can pass into a sort of
+beautiful idiocy. But I do not think that the actual decline and close
+of our ordinary vitality brings with it any particular heaviness of the
+spirits. The spirits of the old do not as a rule seem to become more and
+more ponderous until they sink into the earth. Rather the spirits of the
+old seem to grow lighter and lighter until they float away like
+thistledown. Wherever there is the definite phenomenon called
+depression, it commonly means that something else has been closer to us
+than so normal a thing as death. There has been disease, bodily or
+mental, or there has been sin, or there has been some struggle or
+effort, breaking past the ordinary boundaries of human custom. In the
+case of Dickens there had been two things that are not of the routine of
+a wholesome human life; there had been the quarrel with his wife, and
+there had been the strain of incessant and exaggerated intellectual
+labour. He had not an easy time; and on top of that (or perhaps rather
+at the bottom of it) he had not an easy nature. Not only did his life
+necessitate work, but his character necessitated worry about work; and
+that combination is always one which is very dangerous to the
+temperament which is exposed to it. The only people who ought to be
+allowed to work are the people who are able to shirk. The only people
+who ought to be allowed to worry are the people who have nothing to
+worry about. When the two are combined, as they were in Dickens, you are
+very likely to have at least one collapse. _Little Dorrit_ is a very
+interesting, sincere, and fascinating book. But for all that, I fancy
+it is the one collapse.
+
+The complete proof of this depression may be difficult to advance;
+because it will be urged, and entirely with reason, that the actual
+examples of it are artistic and appropriate. Dickens, the Gissing school
+will say, was here pointing out certain sad truths of psychology; can
+any one say that he ought not to point them out? That may be; in any
+case, to explain depression is not to remove it. But the instances of
+this more sombre quality of which I have spoken are not very hard to
+find. The thing can easily be seen by comparing a book like _Little
+Dorrit_ with a book like _David Copperfield_. David Copperfield and
+Arthur Clennam have both been brought up in unhappy homes, under bitter
+guardians and a black, disheartening religion. It is the whole point of
+David Copperfield that he has broken out of a Calvinistic tyranny which
+he cannot forgive. But it is the whole point of Arthur Clennam that he
+has not broken out of the Calvinistic tyranny, but is still under its
+shadow. Copperfield has come from a gloomy childhood; Clennam, though
+forty years old, is still in a gloomy childhood. When David meets the
+Murdstones again it is to defy them with the health and hilarious anger
+that go with his happy delirium about Dora. But when Clennam re-enters
+his sepulchral house there is a weight upon his soul which makes it
+impossible for him to answer, with any spirit, the morbidities of his
+mother, or even the grotesque interferences of Mr. Flintwinch. This is
+only another example of the same quality which makes the Dickens of
+_Little Dorrit_ insist on the degradation of the debtor, while the
+Dickens of _David Copperfield_ insisted on his splendid
+irresponsibility, his essential emancipation. Imprisonments passed over
+Micawber like summer clouds. But the imprisonment in _Little Dorrit_ is
+like a complete natural climate and environment; it has positively
+modified the shapes and functions of the animals that dwell in it. A
+horrible thing has happened to Dickens; he has almost become an
+Evolutionist. Worse still, in studying the Calvinism of Mrs. Clennam's
+house, he has almost become a Calvinist. He half believes (as do some of
+the modern scientists) that there is really such a thing as "a child of
+wrath," that a man on whom such an early shadow had fallen could never
+shake it off. For ancient Calvinism and modern Evolutionism are
+essentially the same things. They are both ingenious logical blasphemies
+against the dignity and liberty of the human soul.
+
+The workmanship of the book in detail is often extremely good. The one
+passage in the older and heartier Dickens manner (I mean the description
+of the Circumlocution Office) is beyond praise. It is a complete picture
+of the way England is actually governed at this moment. The very core of
+our politics is expressed in the light and easy young Barnacle who told
+Clennam with a kindly frankness that he, Clennam, would "never go on
+with it." Dickens hit the mark so that the bell rang when he made all
+the lower officials, who were cads, tell Clennam coldly that his claim
+was absurd, until the last official, who is a gentleman, tells him
+genially that the whole business is absurd. Even here, perhaps, there is
+something more than the old exuberant derision of Dickens; there is a
+touch of experience that verges on scepticism. Everywhere else,
+certainly, there is the note which I have called Calvinistic; especially
+in the predestined passion of Tattycoram or the incurable cruelty of
+Miss Wade. Even Little Dorrit herself had, we are told, one stain from
+her prison experience; and it is spoken of like a bodily stain; like
+something that cannot be washed away.
+
+There is no denying that this is Dickens's dark moment. It adds
+enormously to the value of his general view of life that such a dark
+moment came. He did what all the heroes and all the really happy men
+have done; he descended into Hell. Nor is it irreverent to continue the
+quotation from the Creed, for in the next book he was to write he was to
+break out of all these dreams of fate and failure, and with his highest
+voice to speak of the triumph of the weak of this world. His next book
+was to leave us saying, as Sydney Carton mounted the scaffold, words
+which, splendid in themselves, have never been so splendidly quoted--"I
+am the Resurrection and the Life; whoso believeth in Me though he be
+dead yet he shall live." In Sydney Carton at least, Dickens shows none
+of that dreary submission to the environment of the irrevocable that had
+for an instant lain on him like a cloud. On this occasion he sees with
+the old heroic clearness that to be a failure may be one step to being a
+saint. On the third day he rose again from the dead.
+
+  [Illustration: Charles Dickens, 1859
+  From an oil painting by W. P. Frith, R.A.]
+
+
+
+
+A TALE OF TWO CITIES
+
+
+As an example of Dickens's literary work, _A Tale of Two Cities_ is not
+wrongly named. It is his most typical contact with the civic ideals of
+Europe. All his other tales have been tales of one city. He was in
+spirit a Cockney; though that title has been quite unreasonably twisted
+to mean a cad. By the old sound and proverbial test a Cockney was a man
+born within the sound of Bow bells. That is, he was a man born within
+the immediate appeal of high civilisation and of eternal religion.
+Shakespeare, in the heart of his fantastic forest, turns with a splendid
+suddenness to the Cockney ideal as being the true one after all. For a
+jest, for a reaction, for an idle summer love or still idler summer
+hatred, it is well to wander away into the bewildering forest of Arden.
+It is well that those who are sick with love or sick with the absence of
+love, those who weary of the folly of courts or weary yet more of their
+wisdom, it is natural that these should trail away into the twinkling
+twilight of the woods. Yet it is here that Shakespeare makes one of his
+most arresting and startling assertions of the truth. Here is one of
+those rare and tremendous moments of which one may say that there is a
+stage direction, "Enter Shakespeare." He has admitted that for men weary
+of courts, for men sick of cities, the wood is the wisest place, and he
+has praised it with his purest lyric ecstasy. But when a man enters
+suddenly upon that celestial picnic, a man who is not sick of cities,
+but sick of hunger, a man who is not weary of courts, but weary of
+walking, then Shakespeare lets through his own voice with a shattering
+sincerity and cries the praise of practical human civilisation:
+
+    If ever you have looked on better days,
+    If ever you have sat at good men's feasts,
+    If ever been where bells have knolled to church,
+    If ever from your eyelids wiped a tear
+    Or know what 'tis to pity and be pitied.
+
+There is nothing finer even in Shakespeare than that conception of the
+circle of rich men all pretending to rough it in the country, and the
+one really hungry man entering, sword in hand, and praising the city.
+"If ever been where bells have knolled to church"; if you have ever been
+within sound of Bow bells; if you have ever been happy and haughty
+enough to call yourself a Cockney.
+
+We must remember this distinction always in the case of Dickens. Dickens
+is the great Cockney, at once tragic and comic, who enters abruptly upon
+the Arcadian banquet of the aesthetics and says, "Forbear and eat no
+more," and tells them that they shall not eat "until necessity be
+served." If there was one thing he would have favoured instinctively it
+would have been the spreading of the town as meaning the spreading of
+civilisation. And we should (I hope) all favour the spreading of the
+town if it did mean the spreading of civilisation. The objection to the
+spreading of the modern Manchester or Birmingham suburb is simply that
+such a suburb is much more barbaric than any village in Europe could
+ever conceivably be. And again, if there is anything that Dickens would
+have definitely hated it is that general treatment of nature as a
+dramatic spectacle, a piece of scene-painting which has become the
+common mark of the culture of our wealthier classes. Despite many fine
+pictures of natural scenery, especially along the English roadsides, he
+was upon the whole emphatically on the side of the town. He was on the
+side of bricks and mortar. He was a citizen; and, after all, a citizen
+means a man of the city. His strength was, after all, in the fact that
+he was a man of the city. But, after all, his weakness, his calamitous
+weakness, was that he was a man of one city.
+
+For all practical purposes he had never been outside such places as
+Chatham and London. He did indeed travel on the Continent; but surely no
+man's travel was ever so superficial as his. He was more superficial
+than the smallest and commonest tourist. He went about Europe on stilts;
+he never touched the ground. There is one good test and one only of
+whether a man has travelled to any profit in Europe. An Englishman is,
+as such, a European, and as he approaches the central splendours of
+Europe he ought to feel that he is coming home. If he does not feel at
+home he had much better have stopped at home. England is a real home;
+London is a real home; and all the essential feelings of adventure or
+the picturesque can easily be gained by going out at night upon the
+flats of Essex or the cloven hills of Surrey. Your visit to Europe is
+useless unless it gives you the sense of an exile returning. Your first
+sight of Rome is futile unless you feel that you have seen it before.
+Thus useless and thus futile were the foreign experiments and the
+continental raids of Dickens. He enjoyed them as he would have enjoyed,
+as a boy, a scamper out of Chatham into some strange meadows, as he
+would have enjoyed, when a grown man, a steam in a police boat out into
+the fens to the far east of London. But he was the Cockney venturing
+far; he was not the European coming home. He is still the splendid
+Cockney Orlando of whom I spoke above; he cannot but suppose that any
+strange men, being happy in some pastoral way, are mysterious foreign
+scoundrels. Dickens's real speech to the lazy and laughing civilisation
+of Southern Europe would really have run in the Shakespearian words:
+
+                    but whoe'er you be
+    Who in this desert inaccessible,
+    Under the shade of melancholy boughs
+    Lose and neglect the creeping hours of time.
+    If ever you have looked on better things,
+    If ever been where bells have knolled to church.
+
+If, in short, you have ever had the advantage of being born within the
+sound of Bow bells. Dickens could not really conceive that there was any
+other city but his own.
+
+It is necessary thus to insist that Dickens never understood the
+Continent, because only thus can we appreciate the really remarkable
+thing he did in _A Tale of Two Cities_. It is necessary to feel, first
+of all, the fact that to him London was the centre of the universe. He
+did not understand at all the real sense in which Paris is the capital
+of Europe. He had never realised that all roads lead to Rome. He had
+never felt (as an Englishman can feel) that he was an Athenian before he
+was a Londoner. Yet with everything against him he did this astonishing
+thing. He wrote a book about two cities, one of which he understood; the
+other he did not understand. And his description of the city he did not
+know is almost better than his description of the city he did know. This
+is the entrance of the unquestionable thing about Dickens; the thing
+called genius; the thing which every one has to talk about directly and
+distinctly because no one knows what it is. For a plain word (as for
+instance the word fool) always covers an infinite mystery.
+
+_A Tale of Two Cities_ is one of the more tragic tints of the later life
+of Dickens. It might be said that he grew sadder as he grew older; but
+this would be false, for two reasons. First, a man never or hardly ever
+does grow sad as he grows old; on the contrary, the most melancholy
+young lovers can be found forty years afterwards chuckling over their
+port wine. And second, Dickens never did grow old, even in a physical
+sense. What weariness did appear in him appeared in the prime of life;
+it was due not to age but to overwork, and his exaggerative way of doing
+everything. To call Dickens a victim of elderly disenchantment would be
+as absurd as to say the same of Keats. Such fatigue as there was, was
+due not to the slowing down of his blood, but rather to its unremitting
+rapidity. He was not wearied by his age; rather he was wearied by his
+youth. And though _A Tale of Two Cities_ is full of sadness, it is full
+also of enthusiasm; that pathos is a young pathos rather than an old
+one. Yet there is one circumstance which does render important the fact
+that _A Tale of Two Cities_ is one of the later works of Dickens. This
+fact is the fact of his dependence upon another of the great writers of
+the Victorian era. And it is in connection with this that we can best
+see the truth of which I have been speaking; the truth that his actual
+ignorance of France went with amazing intuitive perception of the truth
+about it. It is here that he has most clearly the plain mark of the man
+of genius; that he can understand what he does not understand.
+
+Dickens was inspired to the study of the French Revolution and to the
+writing of a romance about it by the example and influence of Carlyle.
+Thomas Carlyle undoubtedly rediscovered for Englishmen the revolution
+that was at the back of all their policies and reforms. It is an
+entertaining side joke that the French Revolution should have been
+discovered for Britons by the only British writer who did not really
+believe in it. Nevertheless, the most authoritative and the most recent
+critics on that great renaissance agree in considering Carlyle's work
+one of the most searching and detailed power. Carlyle had read a great
+deal about the French Revolution. Dickens had read nothing at all,
+except Carlyle. Carlyle was a man who collected his ideas by the careful
+collation of documents and the verification of references. Dickens was a
+man who collected his ideas from loose hints in the streets, and those
+always the same streets; as I have said, he was the citizen of one city.
+Carlyle was in his way learned; Dickens was in every way ignorant.
+Dickens was an Englishman cut off from France; Carlyle was a Scotsman,
+historically connected with France. And yet, when all this is said and
+certified, Dickens is more right than Carlyle. Dickens's French
+Revolution is probably more like the real French Revolution than
+Carlyle's. It is difficult, if not impossible, to state the grounds of
+this strong conviction. One can only talk of it by employing that
+excellent method which Cardinal Newman employed when he spoke of the
+"notes" of Catholicism. There were certain "notes" of the Revolution.
+One note of the Revolution was the thing which silly people call
+optimism, and sensible people call high spirits. Carlyle could never
+quite get it, because with all his spiritual energy he had no high
+spirits. That is why he preferred prose to poetry. He could understand
+rhetoric; for rhetoric means singing with an object. But he could not
+understand lyrics; for the lyric means singing without an object; as
+every one does when he is happy. Now for all its blood and its black
+guillotines, the French Revolution was full of mere high spirits. Nay,
+it was full of happiness. This actual lilt and levity Carlyle never
+really found in the Revolution, because he could not find it in himself.
+Dickens knew less of the Revolution, but he had more of it. When Dickens
+attacked abuses, he battered them down with exactly that sort of cheery
+and quite one-sided satisfaction with which the French mob battered down
+the Bastille. Dickens utterly and innocently believed in certain things;
+he would, I think, have drawn the sword for them. Carlyle half believed
+in half a hundred things; he was at once more of a mystic and more of a
+sceptic. Carlyle was the perfect type of the grumbling servant; the old
+grumbling servant of the aristocratic comedies. He followed the
+aristocracy, but he growled as he followed. He was obedient without
+being servile, just as Caleb Balderstone was obedient without being
+servile. But Dickens was the type of the man who might really have
+rebelled instead of grumbling. He might have gone out into the street
+and fought, like the man who took the Bastille. It is somewhat
+nationally significant that when we talk of the man in the street it
+means a figure silent, slouching, and even feeble. When the French speak
+of the man in the street, it means danger in the street.
+
+No one can fail to notice this deep difference between Dickens and the
+Carlyle whom he avowedly copied. Splendid and symbolic as are Carlyle's
+scenes of the French Revolution, we have in reading them a curious sense
+that everything is happening at night. In Dickens even massacre happens
+by daylight. Carlyle always assumes that because things were tragedies
+therefore the men who did them felt tragic. Dickens knows that the man
+who works the worst tragedies is the man who feels comic; as for
+example, Mr. Quilp. The French Revolution was a much simpler world than
+Carlyle could understand; for Carlyle was subtle and not simple. Dickens
+could understand it, for he was simple and not subtle. He understood
+that plain rage against plain political injustice; he understood again
+that obvious vindictiveness and that obvious brutality which followed.
+"Cruelty and the abuse of absolute power," he told an American
+slave-owner, "are two of the bad passions of human nature." Carlyle was
+quite incapable of rising to the height of that uplifted common-sense.
+He must always find something mystical about the cruelty of the French
+Revolution. The effect was equally bad whether he found it mystically
+bad and called the thing anarchy, or whether he found it mystically good
+and called it the rule of the strong. In both cases he could not
+understand the common-sense justice or the common-sense vengeance of
+Dickens and the French Revolution.
+
+Yet Dickens has in this book given a perfect and final touch to this
+whole conception of mere rebellion and mere human nature. Carlyle had
+written the story of the French Revolution and had made the story a mere
+tragedy. Dickens writes the story about the French Revolution, and does
+not make the Revolution itself the tragedy at all. Dickens knows that an
+outbreak is seldom a tragedy; generally it is the avoidance of a
+tragedy. All the real tragedies are silent. Men fight each other with
+furious cries, because men fight each other with chivalry and an
+unchangeable sense of brotherhood. But trees fight each other in utter
+stillness; because they fight each other cruelly and without quarter. In
+this book, as in history, the guillotine is not the calamity, but rather
+the solution of the calamity. The sin of Sydney Carton is a sin of
+habit, not of revolution. His gloom is the gloom of London, not the
+gloom of Paris.
+
+  [Illustration: Charles Dickens, Circa 1860
+  Photograph by J. & C. Watkins.]
+
+
+
+
+GREAT EXPECTATIONS
+
+
+_Great Expectations_, which was written in the afternoon of Dickens's
+life and fame, has a quality of serene irony and even sadness, which
+puts it quite alone among his other works. At no time could Dickens
+possibly be called cynical, he had too much vitality; but relatively to
+the other books this book is cynical; but it has the soft and gentle
+cynicism of old age, not the hard cynicism of youth. To be a young cynic
+is to be a young brute; but Dickens, who had been so perfectly romantic
+and sentimental in his youth, could afford to admit this touch of doubt
+into the mixed experience of his middle age. At no time could any books
+by Dickens have been called Thackerayan. Both of the two men were too
+great for that. But relatively to the other Dickensian productions this
+book may be called Thackerayan. It is a study in human weakness and the
+slow human surrender. It describes how easily a free lad of fresh and
+decent instincts can be made to care more for rank and pride and the
+degrees of our stratified society than for old affection and for honour.
+It is an extra chapter to _The Book of Snobs_.
+
+The best way of stating the change which this book marks in Dickens can
+be put in one phrase. In this book for the first time the hero
+disappears. The hero had descended to Dickens by a long line which
+begins with the gods, nay, perhaps if one may say so, which begins with
+God. First comes Deity and then the image of Deity; first comes the god
+and then the demi-god, the Hercules who labours and conquers before he
+receives his heavenly crown. That idea, with continual mystery and
+modification, has continued behind all romantic tales; the demi-god
+became the hero of paganism; the hero of paganism became the
+knight-errant of Christianity; the knight-errant who wandered and was
+foiled before he triumphed became the hero of the later prose romance,
+the romance in which the hero had to fight a duel with the villain but
+always survived, in which the hero drove desperate horses through the
+night in order to rescue the heroine, but always rescued her.
+
+This heroic modern hero, this demi-god in a top-hat, may be said to
+reach his supreme moment and typical example about the time when Dickens
+was writing that thundering and thrilling and highly unlikely scene in
+_Nicholas Nickleby_, the scene where Nicholas hopelessly denounces the
+atrocious Gride in his hour of grinning triumph, and a thud upon the
+floor above tells them that the heroine's tyrannical father has died
+just in time to set her free. That is the apotheosis of the pure heroic
+as Dickens found it, and as Dickens in some sense continued it. It may
+be that it does not appear with quite so much unmistakable youth,
+beauty, valour, and virtue as it does in Nicholas Nickleby. Walter Gay
+is a simpler and more careless hero, but when he is doing any of the
+business of the story he is purely heroic. Kit Nubbles is a humbler
+hero, but he is a hero; when he is good he is very good. Even David
+Copperfield, who confesses to boyish tremors and boyish evasions in his
+account of his boyhood, acts the strict stiff part of the chivalrous
+gentleman in all the active and determining scenes of the tale. But
+_Great Expectations_ may be called, like _Vanity Fair_, a novel without
+a hero. Almost all Thackeray's novels except Esmond are novels without a
+hero, but only one of Dickens's novels can be so described. I do not
+mean that it is a novel without a _jeune premier_, a young man to make
+love; _Pickwick_ is that and _Oliver Twist_, and, perhaps, _The Old
+Curiosity Shop_. I mean that it is a novel without a hero in the same
+far deeper and more deadly sense in which _Pendennis_ is also a novel
+without a hero. I mean that it is a novel which aims chiefly at showing
+that the hero is unheroic.
+
+All such phrases as these must appear of course to overstate the case.
+Pip is a much more delightful person than Nicholas Nickleby. Or to take
+a stronger case for the purpose of our argument, Pip is a much more
+delightful person than Sydney Carton. Still the fact remains. Most of
+Nicholas Nickleby's personal actions are meant to show that he is
+heroic. Most of Pip's actions are meant to show that he is not heroic.
+The study of Sydney Carton is meant to indicate that with all his vices
+Sydney Carton was a hero. The study of Pip is meant to indicate that
+with all his virtues Pip was a snob. The motive of the literary
+explanation is different. Pip and Pendennis are meant to show how
+circumstances can corrupt men. Sam Weller and Hercules are meant to show
+how heroes can subdue circumstances.
+
+This is the preliminary view of the book which is necessary if we are
+to regard it as a real and separate fact in the life of Dickens. Dickens
+had many moods because he was an artist; but he had one great mood,
+because he was a great artist. Any real difference therefore from the
+general drift, or rather (I apologise to Dickens) the general drive of
+his creation is very important. This is the one place in his work in
+which he does, I will not say feel like Thackeray, far less think like
+Thackeray, less still write like Thackeray, but this is the one of his
+works in which he understands Thackeray. He puts himself in some sense
+in the same place; he considers mankind at somewhat the same angle as
+mankind is considered in one of the sociable and sarcastic novels of
+Thackeray. When he deals with Pip he sets out not to show his strength
+like the strength of Hercules, but to show his weakness like the
+weakness of Pendennis. When he sets out to describe Pip's great
+expectation he does not set out, as in a fairytale, with the idea that
+these great expectations will be fulfilled; he sets out from the first
+with the idea that these great expectations will be disappointing. We
+might very well, as I have remarked elsewhere, apply to all Dickens's
+books the title _Great Expectations_. All his books are full of an airy
+and yet ardent expectation of everything; of the next person who shall
+happen to speak, of the next chimney that shall happen to smoke, of the
+next event, of the next ecstasy; of the next fulfilment of any eager
+human fancy. All his books might be called _Great Expectations_. But the
+only book to which he gave the name of _Great Expectations_ was the only
+book in which the expectation was never realised. It was so with the
+whole of that splendid and unconscious generation to which he belonged.
+The whole glory of that old English middle class was that it was
+unconscious; its excellence was entirely in that, that it was the
+culture of the nation, and that it did not know it. If Dickens had ever
+known that he was optimistic, he would have ceased to be happy.
+
+It is necessary to make this first point clear: that in _Great
+Expectations_ Dickens was really trying to be a quiet, a detached, and
+even a cynical observer of human life. Dickens was trying to be
+Thackeray. And the final and startling triumph of Dickens is this: that
+even to this moderate and modern story, he gives an incomparable energy
+which is not moderate and which is not modern. He is trying to be
+reasonable; but in spite of himself he is inspired. He is trying to be
+detailed, but in spite of himself he is gigantic. Compared to the rest
+of Dickens this is Thackeray; but compared to the whole of Thackeray we
+can only say in supreme praise of it that it is Dickens.
+
+Take, for example, the one question of snobbishness. Dickens has
+achieved admirably the description of the doubts and vanities of the
+wretched Pip as he walks down the street in his new gentlemanly clothes,
+the clothes of which he is so proud and so ashamed. Nothing could be so
+exquisitely human, nothing especially could be so exquisitely masculine
+as that combination of self-love and self-assertion and even insolence
+with a naked and helpless sensibility to the slightest breath of
+ridicule. Pip thinks himself better than every one else, and yet anybody
+can snub him; that is the everlasting male, and perhaps the everlasting
+gentleman. Dickens has described perfectly this quivering and
+defenceless dignity. Dickens has described perfectly how ill-armed it is
+against the coarse humour of real humanity--the real humanity which
+Dickens loved, but which idealists and philanthropists do not love, the
+humanity of cabmen and costermongers and men singing in a third-class
+carriage; the humanity of Trabb's boy. In describing Pip's weakness
+Dickens is as true and as delicate as Thackeray. But Thackeray might
+have been easily as true and as delicate as Dickens. This quick and
+quiet eye for the tremors of mankind is a thing which Dickens possessed,
+but which others possessed also. George Eliot or Thackeray could have
+described the weakness of Pip. Exactly what George Eliot and Thackeray
+could not have described was the vigour of Trabb's boy. There would have
+been admirable humour and observation in their accounts of that
+intolerable urchin. Thackeray would have given us little light touches
+of Trabb's boy, absolutely true to the quality and colour of the humour,
+just as in his novels of the eighteenth century, the glimpses of Steele
+or Bolingbroke or Doctor Johnson are exactly and perfectly true to the
+colour and quality of their humour. George Eliot in her earlier books
+would have given us shrewd authentic scraps of the real dialect of
+Trabb's boy, just as she gave us shrewd and authentic scraps of the real
+talk in a Midland country town. In her later books she would have given
+us highly rationalistic explanations of Trabb's boy; which we should not
+have read. But exactly what they could never have given, and exactly
+what Dickens does give, is the _bounce_ of Trabb's boy. It is the real
+unconquerable rush and energy in a character which was the supreme and
+quite indescribable greatness of Dickens. He conquered by rushes; he
+attacked in masses; he carried things at the spear point in a charge of
+spears; he was the Rupert of Fiction. The thing about any figure of
+Dickens, about Sam Weller or Dick Swiveller, or Micawber, or Bagstock,
+or Trabb's boy,--the thing about each one of these persons is that he
+cannot be exhausted. A Dickens character hits you first on the nose and
+then in the waistcoat, and then in the eye and then in the waistcoat
+again, with the blinding rapidity of some battering engine. The scene in
+which Trabb's boy continually overtakes Pip in order to reel and stagger
+as at a first encounter is a thing quite within the real competence of
+such a character; it might have been suggested by Thackeray, or George
+Eliot, or any realist. But the point with Dickens is that there is a
+rush in the boy's rushings; the writer and the reader rush with him.
+They start with him, they stare with him, they stagger with him, they
+share an inexpressible vitality in the air which emanates from this
+violent and capering satirist. Trabb's boy is among other things a boy;
+he has a physical rapture in hurling himself like a boomerang and in
+bouncing to the sky like a ball. It is just exactly in describing this
+quality that Dickens is Dickens and that no one else comes near him. No
+one feels in his bones that Felix Holt was strong as he feels in his
+bones that little Quilp was strong. No one can feel that even Rawdon
+Crawley's splendid smack across the face of Lord Steyne is quite so
+living and life-giving as the "kick after kick" which old Mr. Weller
+dealt the dancing and quivering Stiggins as he drove him towards the
+trough. This quality, whether expressed intellectually or physically,
+is the profoundly popular and eternal quality in Dickens; it is the
+thing that no one else could do. This quality is the quality which has
+always given its continuous power and poetry to the common people
+everywhere. It is life; it is the joy of life felt by those who have
+nothing else but life. It is the thing that all aristocrats have always
+hated and dreaded in the people. And it is the thing which poor Pip
+really hates and dreads in Trabb's boy.
+
+A great man of letters or any great artist is symbolic without knowing
+it. The things he describes are types because they are truths.
+Shakespeare may, or may not, have ever put it to himself that Richard
+the Second was a philosophical symbol; but all good criticism must
+necessarily see him so. It may be a reasonable question whether the
+artist should be allegorical. There can be no doubt among sane men that
+the critic should be allegorical. Spenser may have lost by being less
+realistic than Fielding. But any good criticism of _Tom Jones_ must be
+as mystical as the _Faery Queen_. Hence it is unavoidable in speaking of
+a fine book like _Great Expectations_ that we should give even to its
+unpretentious and realistic figures a certain massive mysticism. Pip is
+Pip, but he is also the well-meaning snob. And this is even more true of
+those two great figures in the tale which stand for the English
+democracy. For, indeed, the first and last word upon the English
+democracy is said in Joe Gargery and Trabb's boy. The actual English
+populace, as distinct from the French populace or the Scotch or Irish
+populace, may be said to lie between those two types. The first is the
+poor man who does not assert himself at all, and the second is the poor
+man who asserts himself entirely with the weapon of sarcasm. The only
+way in which the English now ever rise in revolution is under the symbol
+and leadership of Trabb's boy. What pikes and shillelahs were to the
+Irish populace, what guns and barricades were to the French populace,
+that chaff is to the English populace. It is their weapon, the use of
+which they really understand. It is the one way in which they can make a
+rich man feel uncomfortable, and they use it very justifiably for all it
+is worth. If they do not cut off the heads of tyrants at least they
+sometimes do their best to make the tyrants lose their heads. The gutter
+boys of the great towns carry the art of personal criticism to so rich
+and delicate a degree that some well-dressed persons when they walk past
+a file of them feel as if they were walking past a row of omniscient
+critics or judges with a power of life and death. Here and there only is
+some ordinary human custom, some natural human pleasure suppressed in
+deference to the fastidiousness of the rich. But all the rich tremble
+before the fastidiousness of the poor.
+
+Of the other type of democracy it is far more difficult to speak. It is
+always hard to speak of good things or good people, for in satisfying
+the soul they take away a certain spur to speech. Dickens was often
+called a sentimentalist. In one sense he sometimes was a sentimentalist.
+But if sentimentalism be held to mean something artificial or
+theatrical, then in the core and reality of his character Dickens was
+the very reverse of a sentimentalist. He seriously and definitely loved
+goodness. To see sincerity and charity satisfied him like a meal. What
+some critics call his love of sweet stuff is really his love of plain
+beef and bread. Sometimes one is tempted to wish that in the long
+Dickens dinner the sweet courses could be left out; but this does not
+make the whole banquet other than a banquet singularly solid and simple.
+The critics complain of the sweet things, but not because they are so
+strong as to like simple things. They complain of the sweet things
+because they are so sophisticated as to like sour things; their tongues
+are tainted with the bitterness of absinthe. Yet because of the very
+simplicity of Dickens's moral tastes it is impossible to speak
+adequately of them; and Joe Gargery must stand as he stands in the book,
+a thing too obvious to be understood. But this may be said of him in one
+of his minor aspects, that he stands for a certain long-suffering in the
+English poor, a certain weary patience and politeness which almost
+breaks the heart. One cannot help wondering whether that great mass of
+silent virtue will ever achieve anything on this earth.
+
+
+
+
+OUR MUTUAL FRIEND
+
+
+_Our Mutual Friend_ marks a happy return to the earlier manner of
+Dickens at the end of Dickens's life. One might call it a sort of Indian
+summer of his farce. Those who most truly love Dickens love the earlier
+Dickens; and any return to his farce must be welcomed, like a young man
+come back from the dead. In this book indeed he does not merely return
+to his farce; he returns in a manner to his vulgarity. It is the old
+democratic and even uneducated Dickens who is writing here. The very
+title is illiterate. Any priggish pupil teacher could tell Dickens that
+there is no such phrase in English as "our mutual friend." Any one could
+tell Dickens that "our mutual friend" means "our reciprocal friend," and
+that "our reciprocal friend" means nothing. If he had only had all the
+solemn advantages of academic learning (the absence of which in him was
+lamented by the _Quarterly Review_), he would have known better. He
+would have known that the correct phrase for a man known to two people
+is "our common friend." But if one calls one's friend a common friend,
+even that phrase is open to misunderstanding.
+
+I dwell with a gloomy pleasure on this mistake in the very title of the
+book because I, for one, am not pleased to see Dickens gradually
+absorbed by modern culture and good manners. Dickens, by class and
+genius, belonged to the kind of people who do talk about a "mutual
+friend"; and for that class there is a very great deal to be said. These
+two things can at least be said--that this class does understand the
+meaning of the word "friend" and the meaning of the word "mutual." I
+know that for some long time before he had been slowly and subtly sucked
+into the whirlpool of the fashionable views of later England. I know
+that in _Bleak House_ he treats the aristocracy far more tenderly than
+he treats them in _David Copperfield_. I know that in _A Tale of Two
+Cities_, having come under the influence of Carlyle, he treats
+revolution as strange and weird, whereas under the influence of Cobbett
+he would have treated it as obvious and reasonable. I know that in _The
+Mystery of Edwin Drood_ he not only praised the Minor Canon of
+Cloisterham at the expense of the dissenting demagogue, Honeythunder; I
+know that he even took the last and most disastrous step in the modern
+English reaction. While blaming the old Cloisterham monks (who were
+democratic), he praised the old-world peace that they had left behind
+them--an old-world peace which is simply one of the last amusements of
+aristocracy. The modern rich feel quite at home with the dead monks.
+They would have felt anything but comfortable with the live ones. I
+know, in short, how the simple democracy of Dickens was gradually dimmed
+by the decay and reaction of the middle of the nineteenth century. I
+know that he fell into some of the bad habits of aristocratic
+sentimentalism. I know that he used the word "gentleman" as meaning good
+man. But all this only adds to the unholy joy with which I realise that
+the very title of one of his best books was a vulgarism. It is pleasant
+to contemplate this last unconscious knock in the eye for the gentility
+with which Dickens was half impressed. Dickens is the old self-made man;
+you may take him or leave him. He has its disadvantages and its merits.
+No university man would have written the title; no university man could
+have written the book.
+
+If it were a mere matter of the accident of a name it would not be worth
+while thus to dwell on it, even as a preface. But the title is in this
+respect typical of the tale. The novel called _Our Mutual Friend_ is in
+many ways a real reaction towards the earlier Dickens manner. I have
+remarked that _Little Dorrit_ was a reversion to the form of the first
+books, but not to their spirit; _Our Mutual Friend_ is a reversion to
+the spirit as well as the form. Compare, for instance, the public
+figures that make a background in each book. Mr. Merdle is a commercial
+man having no great connection with the plot; similarly Mr. Podsnap is a
+commercial man having no great connection with the plot. This is
+altogether in the spirit of the earlier books; the whole point of an
+early Dickens novel was to have as many people as possible entirely
+unconnected with the plot. But exactly because both studies are
+irrelevant, the contrast between them can be more clearly perceived.
+Dickens goes out of his way to describe Merdle; and it is a gloomy
+description. But Dickens goes out of his way to describe Podsnap, and it
+is a happy and hilarious description. It recalls the days when he hunted
+great game; when he went out of his way to entrap such adorable monsters
+as Mr. Pecksniff or Mr. Vincent Crummles. With these wild beings we
+never bother about the cause of their coming. Such guests in a story
+may be uninvited, but they are never _de trop_. They earn their night's
+lodging in any tale by being so uproariously amusing; like little Tommy
+Tucker in the legend, they sing for their supper. This is really the
+marked truth about _Our Mutual Friend_, as a stage in the singular
+latter career of Dickens. It is like the leaping up and flaming of a
+slowly dying fire. The best things in the book are in the old best
+manner of the author. They have that great Dickens quality of being
+something which is pure farce and yet which is not superficial; an
+unfathomable farce--a farce that goes down to the roots of the universe.
+The highest compliment that can ever be paid to the humour of Dickens is
+paid when some lady says, with the sudden sincerity of her sex, that it
+is "too silly." The phrase is really a perfectly sound and acute
+criticism. Humour does consist in being too silly, in passing the
+borderland, in breaking through the floor of sense and falling into some
+starry abyss of nonsense far below our ordinary human life. This "too
+silly" quality is really present in _Our Mutual Friend_. It is present
+in _Our Mutual Friend_ just as it is present in _Pickwick_, or _Martin
+Chuzzlewit_; just as it is not present in _Little Dorrit_ or in _Hard
+Times_. Many tests might be employed. One is the pleasure in purely
+physical jokes--jokes about the body. The general dislike which every
+one felt for Mr. Stiggins's nose is of the same kind as the ardent
+desire which Mr. Lammle felt for Mr. Fledgeby's nose. "Give me your
+nose, Sir," said Mr. Lammle. That sentence alone would be enough to show
+that the young Dickens had never died.
+
+The opening of a book goes for a great deal. The opening of _Our Mutual
+Friend_ is much more instinctively energetic and light-hearted than that
+of any of the other novels of his concluding period. Dickens had always
+enough optimism to make his stories end well. He had not, in his later
+years, always enough optimism to make them begin well. Even _Great
+Expectations_, the saddest of his later books, ends well; it ends well
+in spite of himself, who had intended it to end badly. But if we leave
+the evident case of good endings and take the case of good beginnings,
+we see how much _Our Mutual Friend_ stands out from among the other
+novels of the evening or the end of Dickens. The tale of _Little Dorrit_
+begins in a prison. One of the prisoners is a villain, and his villainy
+is as dreary as the prison; that might matter nothing. But the other
+prisoner is vivacious, and even his vivacity is dreary. The first note
+struck is sad. In the tale of _Edwin Drood_ the first scene is in an
+opium den, suffocated with every sort of phantasy and falsehood. Nor is
+it true that these openings are merely accidental; they really cast
+their shadow over the tales. The people of _Little Dorrit_ begin in
+prison; and it is the whole point of the book that people never get out
+of prison. The story of _Edwin Drood_ begins amid the fumes of opium,
+and it never gets out of the fumes of opium. The darkness of that
+strange and horrible smoke is deliberately rolled over the whole story.
+Dickens, in his later years, permitted more and more his story to take
+the cue from its inception. All the more remarkable, therefore, is the
+real jerk and spurt of good spirits with which he opens _Our Mutual
+Friend_. It begins with a good piece of rowdy satire, wildly exaggerated
+and extremely true. It belongs to the same class as the first chapter
+of _Martin Chuzzlewit_, with its preposterous pedigree of the Chuzzlewit
+family, or even the first chapter of _Pickwick_, with its immortal
+imbecilities about the Theory of Tittlebats and Mr. Blotton of Aldgate.
+Doubtless the early satiric chapter in _Our Mutual Friend_ is of a more
+strategic and ingenious kind of satire than can be found in these early
+and explosive parodies. Still, there is a quality common to both, and
+that quality is the whole of Dickens. It is a quality difficult to
+define--hence the whole difficulty of criticising Dickens. Perhaps it
+can be best stated in two separate statements or as two separate
+symptoms. The first is the mere fact that the reader rushes to read it.
+The second is the mere fact that the writer rushed to write it.
+
+This beginning, which is like a burst of the old exuberant Dickens, is,
+of course, the Veneering dinner-party. In its own way it is as good as
+anything that Dickens ever did. There is the old faculty of managing a
+crowd, of making character clash with character, that had made Dickens
+not only the democrat but even the demagogue of fiction. For if it is
+hard to manage a mob, it is hardest of all to manage a swell mob. The
+particular kind of chaos that is created by the hospitality of a rich
+upstart has perhaps never been so accurately and outrageously described.
+Every touch about the thing is true; to this day any one can test it if
+he goes to a dinner of this particular kind. How admirable, for
+instance, is the description of the way in which all the guests ignored
+the host; how the host and hostess peered and gaped for some stray
+attention as if they had been a pair of poor relations. Again, how well,
+as a matter of social colour, the distinctions between the type and
+tone of the guests are made even in the matter of this unguestlike
+insolence. How well Dickens distinguishes the ill-bred indifference of
+Podsnap from the well-bred indifference of Mortimer Lightwood and Eugene
+Wrayburn. How well he distinguishes the bad manners of the merchant from
+the equally typical bad manners of the gentleman. Above all, how well he
+catches the character of the creature who is really the master of all
+these: the impenetrable male servant. Nowhere in literature is the truth
+about servants better told. For that truth is simply this: that the
+secret of aristocracy is hidden even from aristocrats. Servants,
+butlers, footmen, are the high priests who have the real dispensation;
+and even gentlemen are afraid of them. Dickens was never more right than
+when he made the new people, the Veneerings, employ a butler who
+despised not only them but all their guests and acquaintances. The
+admirable person called the Analytical Chemist shows his perfection
+particularly in the fact that he regards all the sham gentlemen and all
+the real gentlemen with the same gloomy and incurable contempt. He
+offers wine to the offensive Podsnap or the shrieking Tippins with a
+melancholy sincerity and silence; but he offers his letter to the
+aristocratic and unconscious Mortimer with the same sincerity and with
+the same silence. It is a great pity that the Analytical Chemist only
+occurs in two or three scenes of this excellent story. As far as I know,
+he never really says a word from one end of the book to the other; but
+he is one of the best characters in Dickens.
+
+Round the Veneering dinner-table are collected not indeed the best
+characters in Dickens, but certainly the best characters in _Our Mutual
+Friend_. Certainly one exception must be made. Fledgeby is unaccountably
+absent. There was really no reason why he should not have been present
+at a dinner-party given by the Veneerings and including the Lammles. His
+money was at least more genuine than theirs. If he had been present the
+party would really have included all that is important in _Our Mutual
+Friend_. For indeed, outside Mr. Fledgeby and the people at the
+dinner-party, there is something a little heavy and careless about the
+story. Mr. Silas Wegg is really funny; and he serves the purpose of a
+necessary villain in the plot. But his humour and his villainy seem to
+have no particular connection with each other; when he is not scheming
+he seems the last man likely to scheme. He is rather like one of
+Dickens's agreeable Bohemians, a pleasant companion, a quoter of fine
+verses. His villainy seems an artificial thing attached to him, like his
+wooden leg. For while his villainy is supposed to be of a dull, mean,
+and bitter sort (quite unlike, for instance, the uproarious villainy of
+Quilp), his humour is of the sincere, flowing and lyric character, like
+that of Dick Swiveller or Mr. Micawber. He tells Mr. Boffin that he will
+drop into poetry in a friendly way. He does drop into it in a friendly
+way; in much too really a friendly way to make him convincing as a mere
+calculating knave. He and Mr. Venus are such natural and genuine
+companions that one does not see why if Venus repents Wegg should not
+repent too. In short, Wegg is a convenience for a plot and not a very
+good plot at that. But if he is one of the blots on the business, he is
+not the principal one. If the real degradation of Wegg is not very
+convincing, it is at least immeasurably more convincing than the
+pretended degradation of Boffin. The passage in which Boffin appears as
+a sort of miser, and then afterwards explains that he only assumed the
+character for reasons of his own, has something about it highly jerky
+and unsatisfactory. The truth of the whole matter I think, almost
+certainly, is that Dickens did not originally mean Boffin's lapse to be
+fictitious. He originally meant Boffin really to be corrupted by wealth,
+slowly to degenerate and as slowly to repent. But the story went too
+quickly for this long, double, and difficult process; therefore Dickens
+at the last moment made a sudden recovery possible by representing that
+the whole business had been a trick. Consequently, this episode is not
+an error merely in the sense that we may find many errors in a great
+writer like Dickens; it is a mistake patched up with another mistake. It
+is a case of that ossification which occurs round the healing of an
+actual fracture; the story had broken down and been mended.
+
+If Dickens had fulfilled what was probably his original design, and
+described the slow freezing of Boffin's soul in prosperity, I do not say
+that he would have done the thing well. He was not good at describing
+change in anybody, especially not good at describing a change for the
+worse. The tendency of all his characters is upwards, like bubbles,
+never downwards, like stones. But at least it would probably have been
+more credible than the story as it stands; for the story as it stands is
+actually less credible than any conceivable kind of moral ruin for
+Boffin. Such a character as his--rough, simple and lumberingly
+unconscious--might be more easily conceived as really sinking in
+self-respect and honour than as keeping up, month after month, so
+strained and inhuman a theatrical performance. To a good man (of that
+particular type) it would be easier to be bad than to pretend to be bad.
+It might have taken years to turn Noddy Boffin into a miser; but it
+would have taken centuries to turn him into an actor. This unreality in
+the later Boffin scenes makes the end of the story of John Harmon
+somewhat more unimpressive perhaps than it might otherwise have been.
+Upon no hypothesis, however, can he be made one of the more impressive
+figures of Dickens. It is true that it is an unfair criticism to object,
+as some have done, that Dickens does not succeed in disguising the
+identity of John Harmon with John Rokesmith. Dickens never intended to
+disguise it; the whole story would be mainly unintelligible and largely
+uninteresting if it had been successfully disguised. But though John
+Harmon or Rokesmith was never intended to be merely a man of mystery, it
+is not quite so easy to say what he was intended to be. Bella is a
+possible and pretty sketch. Mrs. Wilfer, her mother, is an entirely
+impossible and entirely delightful one. Miss Podsnap is not only
+excellent, she is to a healthy taste positively attractive; there is a
+real suggestion in her of the fact that humility is akin to truth, even
+when humility takes its more comic form of shyness. There is not in all
+literature a more human _cri de coeur_ than that with which Georgiana
+Podsnap receives the information that a young man has professed himself
+to be attracted by her--"Oh what a Fool he must be!"
+
+Two other figures require praise, though they are in the more tragic
+manner which Dickens touched from time to time in his later period.
+Bradley Headstone is really a successful villain; so successful that he
+fully captures our sympathies. Also there is something original in the
+very conception. It was a new notion to add to the villains of fiction,
+whose thoughts go quickly, this villain whose thoughts go slow but sure;
+and it was a new notion to combine a deadly criminality not with high
+life or the slums (the usual haunts for villains) but with the laborious
+respectability of the lower, middle classes. The other good conception
+is the boy, Bradley Headstone's pupil, with his dull, inexhaustible
+egoism, his pert, unconscious cruelty, and the strict decorum and
+incredible baseness of his views of life. It is singular that Dickens,
+who was not only a radical and a social reformer, but one who would have
+been particularly concerned to maintain the principle of modern popular
+education, should nevertheless have seen so clearly this potential evil
+in the mere educationalism of our time--the fact that merely educating
+the democracy may easily mean setting to work to despoil it of all the
+democratic virtues. It is better to be Lizzie Hexam and not know how to
+read and write than to be Charlie Hexam and not know how to appreciate
+Lizzie Hexam. It is not only necessary that the democracy should be
+taught; it is also necessary that the democracy should be taught
+democracy. Otherwise it will certainly fall a victim to that
+snobbishness and system of worldly standards which is the most natural
+and easy of all the forms of human corruption. This is one of the many
+dangers which Dickens saw before it existed. Dickens was really a
+prophet; far more of a prophet than Carlyle.
+
+  [Illustration: Charles Dickens, 1868
+  From a photograph by Gurney.]
+
+
+
+
+EDWIN DROOD
+
+
+_Pickwick_ was a work partly designed by others, but ultimately filled
+up by Dickens. _Edwin Drood_, the last book, was a book designed by
+Dickens, but ultimately filled up by others. The _Pickwick Papers_
+showed how much Dickens could make out of other people's suggestions;
+_The Mystery of Edwin Drood_ shows how very little other people can make
+out of Dickens's suggestions.
+
+Dickens was meant by Heaven to be the great melodramatist; so that even
+his literary end was melodramatic. Something more seems hinted at in the
+cutting short of _Edwin Drood_ by Dickens than the mere cutting short of
+a good novel by a great man. It seems rather like the last taunt of some
+elf, leaving the world, that it should be this story which is not ended,
+this story which is only a story. The only one of Dickens's novels which
+he did not finish was the only one that really needed finishing. He
+never had but one thoroughly good plot to tell; and that he has only
+told in heaven. This is what separates the case in question from any
+parallel cases of novelists cut off in the act of creation. That great
+novelist, for instance, with whom Dickens is constantly compared, died
+also in the middle of _Denis Duval_. But any one can see in _Denis
+Duval_ the qualities of the later work of Thackeray; the increasing
+discursiveness, the increasing retrospective poetry, which had been in
+part the charm and in part the failure of _Philip_ and _The Virginians_.
+But to Dickens it was permitted to die at a dramatic moment and to leave
+a dramatic mystery. Any Thackerayan could have completed the plot of
+_Denis Duval_; except indeed that a really sympathetic Thackerayan might
+have had some doubt as to whether there was any plot to complete. But
+Dickens, having had far too little plot in his stories previously, had
+far too much plot in the story he never told. Dickens dies in the act of
+telling, not his tenth novel, but his first news of murder. He drops
+down dead as he is in the act of denouncing the assassin. It is
+permitted to Dickens, in short, to come to a literary end as strange as
+his literary beginning. He began by completing the old romance of
+travel. He ended by inventing the new detective story.
+
+It is as a detective story first and last that we have to consider _The
+Mystery of Edwin Drood_. This does not mean, of course, that the details
+are not often admirable in their swift and penetrating humour; to say
+that of the book would be to say that Dickens did not write it. Nothing
+could be truer, for instance, than the manner in which the dazed and
+drunken dignity of Durdles illustrates a certain bitterness at the
+bottom of the bewilderment of the poor. Nothing could be better than the
+way in which the haughty and allusive conversation between Miss
+Twinkleton and the landlady illustrates the maddening preference of some
+females for skating upon thin social ice. There is an even better
+example than these of the original humorous insight of Dickens; and one
+not very often remarked, because of its brevity and its unimportance in
+the narrative. But Dickens never did anything better than the short
+account of Mr. Grewgious's dinner being brought from the tavern by two
+waiters: "a stationary waiter," and "a flying waiter." The "flying
+waiter" brought the food and the "stationary waiter" quarrelled with
+him; the "flying waiter" brought glasses and the "stationary waiter"
+looked through them. Finally, it will be remembered the "stationary
+waiter" left the room, casting a glance which indicated "let it be
+understood that all emoluments are mine, and that Nil is the reward of
+this slave." Still, Dickens wrote the book as a detective story; he
+wrote it as _The Mystery of Edwin Drood_. And alone, perhaps, among
+detective-story writers, he never lived to destroy his mystery. Here
+alone then among the Dickens novels it is necessary to speak of the plot
+and of the plot alone. And when we speak of the plot it becomes
+immediately necessary to speak of the two or three standing explanations
+which celebrated critics have given of the plot.
+
+The story, so far as it was written by Dickens, can be read here. It
+describes, as will be seen, the disappearance of the young architect
+Edwin Drood after a night of festivity which was supposed to celebrate
+his reconciliation with a temporary enemy, Neville Landless, and was
+held at the house of his uncle John Jasper. Dickens continued the tale
+long enough to explain or explode the first and most obvious of his
+riddles. Long before the existing part terminates it has become evident
+that Drood has been put away, not by his obvious opponent, Landless, but
+by his uncle who professes for him an almost painful affection. The fact
+that we all know this, however, ought not in fairness to blind us to
+the fact that, considered as the first fraud in a detective story, it
+has been, with great skill, at once suggested and concealed. Nothing,
+for instance, could be cleverer as a piece of artistic mystery than the
+fact that Jasper, the uncle, always kept his eyes fixed on Drood's face
+with a dark and watchful tenderness; the thing is so told that at first
+we really take it as only indicating something morbid in the affection;
+it is only afterwards that the frightful fancy breaks upon us that it is
+not morbid affection but morbid antagonism. This first mystery (which is
+no longer a mystery) of Jasper's guilt, is only worth remarking because
+it shows that Dickens meant and felt himself able to mask all his
+batteries with real artistic strategy and artistic caution. The manner
+of the unmasking of Jasper marks the manner and tone in which the whole
+tale was to be told. Here we have not got to do with Dickens simply
+giving himself away, as he gave himself away in _Pickwick_ or _The
+Christmas Carol_. Not that one complains of his giving himself away;
+there was no better gift.
+
+What was the mystery of Edwin Drood from Dickens's point of view we
+shall never know, except perhaps from Dickens in heaven, and then he
+will very likely have forgotten. But the mystery of Edwin Drood from our
+point of view, from that of his critics, and those who have with some
+courage (after his death) attempted to be his collaborators, is simply
+this. There is no doubt that Jasper either murdered Drood or supposed
+that he had murdered him. This certainty we have from the fact that it
+is the whole point of a scene between Jasper and Drood's lawyer
+Grewgious in which Jasper is struck down with remorse when he realises
+that Drood has been killed (from his point of view) needlessly and
+without profit. The only question is whether Jasper's remorse was as
+needless as his murder. In other words the only question is whether,
+while he certainly thought he had murdered Drood, he had really done it.
+It need hardly be said that such a doubt would not have been raised for
+nothing; gentlemen like Jasper do not as a rule waste good remorse
+except upon successful crime. The origin of the doubt about the real
+death of Drood is this. Towards the latter end of the existing chapters
+there appears very abruptly, and with a quite ostentatious air of
+mystery, a character called Datchery. He appears for the purpose of
+spying upon Jasper and getting up some case against him; at any rate, if
+he has not this purpose in the story he has no other earthly purpose in
+it. He is an old gentleman of juvenile energy, with a habit of carrying
+his hat in his hand even in the open air; which some have interpreted as
+meaning that he feels the unaccustomed weight of a wig. Now there are
+one or two people in the story who this person might possibly be.
+Notably there is one person in the story who seems as if he were meant
+to be something, but who hitherto has certainly been nothing; I mean
+Bazzard, Mr. Grewgious's clerk, a sulky fellow interested in
+theatricals, of whom an unnecessary fuss is made. There is also Mr.
+Grewgious himself, and there is also another suggestion, so much more
+startling that I shall have to deal with it later.
+
+For the moment, however, the point is this: That ingenious writer, Mr.
+Proctor, started the highly plausible theory that this Datchery was
+Drood himself, who had not really been killed. He adduced a most complex
+and complete scheme covering nearly all the details; but the strongest
+argument he had was rather one of general artistic effect. This argument
+has been quite perfectly summed up by Mr. Andrew Lang in one sentence:
+"If Edwin Drood is dead, there is not much mystery about him." This is
+quite true; Dickens, when writing in so deliberate, nay, dark and
+conspiratorial a manner, would surely have kept the death of Drood and
+the guilt of Jasper hidden a little longer if the only real mystery had
+been the guilt of Jasper and the death of Drood. It certainly seems
+artistically more likely that there was a further mystery of Edwin
+Drood; not the mystery that he was murdered, but the mystery that he was
+not murdered. It is true indeed that Mr. Cumming Walters has a theory of
+Datchery (to which I have already darkly alluded) a theory which is wild
+enough to be the centre not only of any novel but of any harlequinade.
+But the point is that even Mr. Cumming Walters's theory, though it makes
+the mystery more extraordinary, does not make it any more of a mystery
+of Edwin Drood. It should not have been called _The Mystery of Drood_,
+but _The Mystery of Datchery_. This is the strongest case for Proctor;
+if the story tells of Drood coming back as Datchery, the story does at
+any rate fulfil the title upon its title-page.
+
+The principal objection to Proctor's theory is that there seems no
+adequate reason why Jasper should not have murdered his nephew if he
+wanted to. And there seems even less reason why Drood, if unsuccessfully
+murdered, should not have raised the alarm. Happy young architects,
+when nearly strangled by elderly organists, do not generally stroll away
+and come back some time afterwards in a wig and with a false name.
+Superficially it would seem almost as odd to find the murderer
+investigating the origin of the murder, as to find the corpse
+investigating it. To this problem two of the ablest literary critics of
+our time, Mr. Andrew Lang and Mr. William Archer (both of them persuaded
+generally of the Proctor theory) have especially addressed themselves.
+Both have come to the same substantial conclusion; and I suspect that
+they are right. They hold that Jasper (whose mania for opium is much
+insisted on in the tale) had some sort of fit, or trance, or other
+physical seizure as he was committing the crime so that he left it
+unfinished; and they also hold that he had drugged Drood, so that Drood,
+when he recovered from the attack, was doubtful about who had been his
+assailant. This might really explain, if a little fancifully, his coming
+back to the town in the character of a detective. He might think it due
+to his uncle (whom he last remembered in a kind of murderous vision) to
+make an independent investigation as to whether he was really guilty or
+not. He might say, as Hamlet said of a vision equally terrifying, "I'll
+have grounds more relative than this." In fairness it must be said that
+there is something vaguely shaky about this theory; chiefly, I think, in
+this respect; that there is a sort of farcical cheerfulness about
+Datchery which does not seem altogether appropriate to a lad who ought
+to be in an agony of doubt as to whether his best friend was or was not
+his assassin. Still there are many such incongruities in Dickens; and
+the explanation of Mr. Archer and Mr. Lang is an explanation. I do not
+believe that any explanation as good can be given to account for the
+tale being called _The Mystery of Edwin Drood_, if the tale practically
+starts with his corpse.
+
+If Drood is really dead one cannot help feeling the story ought to end
+where it does end, not by accident but by design. The murder is
+explained. Jasper is ready to be hanged, and every one else in a decent
+novel ought to be ready to be married. If there was to be much more of
+anything, it must have been of anticlimax. Nevertheless there are
+degrees of anticlimax. Some of the more obvious explanations of Datchery
+are quite reasonable, but they are distinctly tame. For instance,
+Datchery may be Bazzard; but it is not very exciting if he is; for we
+know nothing about Bazzard and care less. Again, he might be Grewgious;
+but there is something pointless about one grotesque character dressing
+up as another grotesque character actually less amusing than himself.
+Now, Mr. Cumming Walters has at least had the distinction of inventing a
+theory which makes the story at least an interesting story, even if it
+is not exactly the story that is promised on the cover of the book. The
+obvious enemy of Drood, on whom suspicion first falls, the swarthy and
+sulky Landless, has a sister even swarthier and, except for her queenly
+dignity, even sulkier than he. This barbaric princess is evidently meant
+to be (in a sombre way) in love with Crisparkle, the clergyman and
+muscular Christian who represents the breezy element in the emotions of
+the tale. Mr. Cumming Walters seriously maintains that it is this
+barbaric princess who puts on a wig and dresses up as Mr. Datchery. He
+urges his case with much ingenuity of detail. Helena Landless certainly
+had a motive; to save her brother, who was accused falsely, by accusing
+Jasper justly. She certainly had some of the faculties; it is
+elaborately stated in the earlier part of her story that she was
+accustomed as a child to dress up in male costume and run into the
+wildest adventures. There may be something in Mr. Cumming Walters's
+argument that the very flippancy of Datchery is the self-conscious
+flippancy of a strong woman in such an odd situation; certainly there is
+the same flippancy in Portia and in Rosalind. Nevertheless, I think,
+there is one final objection to the theory; and that is simply this,
+that it is comic. It is generally wrong to represent a great master of
+the grotesque as being grotesque exactly where he does not intend to be.
+And I am persuaded that if Dickens had really meant Helena to turn into
+Datchery, he would have made her from the first in some way more light,
+eccentric, and laughable; he would have made her at least as light and
+laughable as Rosa. As it is, there is something strangely stiff and
+incredible about the idea of a lady so dark and dignified dressing up as
+a swaggering old gentleman in a blue coat and grey trousers. We might
+almost as easily imagine Edith Dombey dressing up as Major Bagstock. We
+might almost as easily imagine Rebecca in _Ivanhoe_ dressing up as Isaac
+of York.
+
+Of course such a question can never really be settled precisely, because
+it is the question not merely of a mystery but of a puzzle. For here the
+detective novel differs from every other kind of novel. The ordinary
+novelist desires to keep his readers to the point; the detective
+novelist actually desires to keep his readers off the point. In the
+first case, every touch must help to tell the reader what he means; in
+the second case, most of the touches must conceal or even contradict
+what he means. You are supposed to see and appreciate the smallest
+gestures of a good actor; but you do not see all the gestures of a
+conjuror, if he is a good conjuror. Hence, into the critical estimate of
+such works as this, there is introduced a problem, an extra perplexity,
+which does not exist in other cases. I mean the problem of the things
+commonly called blinds. Some of the points which we pick out as
+suggestive may have been put in as deceptive. Thus the whole conflict
+between a critic with one theory, like Mr. Lang, and a critic with
+another theory, like Mr. Cumming Walters, becomes eternal and a trifle
+farcical. Mr. Walters says that all Mr. Lang's clues were blinds; Mr.
+Lang says that all Mr. Walters's clues were blinds. Mr. Walters can say
+that some passages seemed to show that Helena was Datchery; Mr. Lang can
+reply that those passages were only meant to deceive simple people like
+Mr. Walters into supposing that she was Datchery. Similarly Mr. Lang can
+say that the return of Drood is foreshadowed; and Mr. Walters can reply
+that it was foreshadowed because it was never meant to come off. There
+seems no end to this insane process; anything that Dickens wrote may or
+may not mean the opposite of what it says. Upon this principle I should
+be very ready for one to declare that all the suggested Datcherys were
+really blinds; merely because they can naturally be suggested. I would
+undertake to maintain that Mr. Datchery is really Miss Twinkleton, who
+has a mercenary interest in keeping Rosa Budd at her school. This
+suggestion does not seem to me to be really much more humorous than Mr.
+Cumming Walters's theory. Yet either may certainly be true. Dickens is
+dead, and a number of splendid scenes and startling adventures have died
+with him. Even if we get the right solution we shall not know that it is
+right. The tale might have been, and yet it has not been.
+
+And I think there is no thought so much calculated to make one doubt
+death itself, to feel that sublime doubt which has created all
+religion--the doubt that found death incredible. Edwin Drood may or may
+not have really died; but surely Dickens did not really die. Surely our
+real detective liveth and shall appear in the latter days of the earth.
+For a finished tale may give a man immortality in the light and literary
+sense; but an unfinished tale suggests another immortality, more
+essential and more strange.
+
+
+
+
+MASTER HUMPHREY'S CLOCK
+
+
+It is quite indispensable to include a criticism of _Master Humphrey's
+Clock_ in any survey of Dickens, although it is not one of the books of
+which his admirers would chiefly boast; although perhaps it is almost
+the only one of which he would not have boasted himself. As a triumph of
+Dickens, at least, it is not of great importance. But as a sample of
+Dickens it happens to be of quite remarkable importance. The very fact
+that it is for the most part somewhat more level and even monotonous
+than most of his creations, makes us realise, as it were, against what
+level and monotony those creations commonly stand out. This book is the
+background of his mind. It is the basis and minimum of him which was
+always there. Alone, of all written things, this shows how he felt when
+he was not writing. Dickens might have written it in his sleep. That is
+to say, it is written by a sluggish Dickens, a half automatic Dickens, a
+dreaming and drifting Dickens; but still by the enduring Dickens.
+
+But this truth can only be made evident by beginning nearer to the root
+of the matter. _Nicholas Nickleby_ had just completed, or, to speak more
+strictly, confirmed, the popularity of the young author; wonderful as
+_Pickwick_ was it might have been a nine days' wonder; _Oliver Twist_
+had been powerful but painful; it was _Nicholas Nickleby_ that proved
+the man to be a great productive force of which one could ask more, of
+which one could ask all things. His publishers, Chapman and Hall, seem
+to have taken at about this point that step which sooner or later most
+publishers do take with regard to a half successful man who is becoming
+wholly successful. Instead of asking him for something, they asked him
+for anything. They made him, so to speak, the editor of his own works.
+And indeed it is literally as the editor of his own works that he next
+appears; for the next thing to which he proposes to put his name is not
+a novel, but for all practical purposes a magazine. Yet although it is a
+magazine, it is a magazine entirely written by himself; the publishers,
+in point of fact, wanted to create a kind of Dickens Miscellany, in a
+much more literal sense than that in which we speak of a Bentley
+Miscellany. Dickens was in no way disposed to dislike such a job; for
+the more miscellaneous he was the more he enjoyed himself. And indeed
+this early experiment of his bears a great deal of resemblance to those
+later experiences in which he was the editor of two popular periodicals.
+The editor of _Master Humphrey's Clock_ was a kind of type or precursor
+of the editor of _Household Words_ and _All the Year Round_. There was
+the same sense of absolute ease in an atmosphere of infinite gossip.
+There was the same great advantage gained by a man of genius who wrote
+best scrappily and by episodes. The omnipotence of the editor helped the
+eccentricities of the author. He could excuse himself for all his own
+shortcomings. He could begin a novel, get tired of it, and turn it into
+a short story. He could begin a short story, get fond of it, and turn
+it into a novel. Thus in the days of _Household Words_ he could begin a
+big scheme of stories, such as _Somebody's Luggage_, or _Seven Poor
+Travellers_, and after writing a tale or two toss the rest to his
+colleagues. Thus, on the other hand, in the time of _Master Humphrey's
+Clock_, he could begin one small adventure of Master Humphrey and find
+himself unable to stop it. It is quite clear I think (though only from
+moral evidence, which some call reading between the lines) that he
+originally meant to tell many separate tales of Master Humphrey's
+wanderings in London, only one of which, and that a short one, was to
+have been concerned with a little girl going home. Fortunately for us
+that little girl had a grandfather, and that grandfather had a curiosity
+shop and also a nephew, and that nephew had an entirely irrelevant
+friend whom men and angels called Richard Swiveller. Once having come
+into the society of Swiveller it is not unnatural that Dickens stayed
+there for a whole book. The essential point for us here, however, is
+that _Master Humphrey's Clock_ was stopped by the size and energy of the
+thing that had come of it. It died in childbirth.
+
+There is, however, another circumstance which, even in ordinary public
+opinion, makes this miscellany important, besides the great novel that
+came out of it. I mean that the ordinary reader can remember one great
+thing about _Master Humphrey's Clock_, besides the fact that it was the
+frame-work of _The Old Curiosity Shop_. He remembers that Mr. Pickwick
+and the Wellers rise again from the dead. Dickens makes Samuel Pickwick
+become a member of Master Humphrey's Clock Society; and he institutes a
+parallel society in the kitchen under the name of Mr. Weller's Watch.
+
+Before we consider the question of whether Dickens was wise when he did
+this, it is worth remarking how really odd it is that this is the only
+place where he did it. Dickens, one would have thought, was the one man
+who might naturally have introduced old characters into new stories.
+Dickens, as a matter of fact, was almost the one man who never did it.
+It would have seemed natural in him for a double reason; first, that his
+characters were very valuable to him, and second that they were not very
+valuable to his particular stories. They were dear to him, and they are
+dear to us; but they really might as well have turned up (within reason)
+in one environment as well as in another. We, I am sure, should be
+delighted to meet Mr. Mantalini in the story of _Dombey and Son_. And he
+certainly would not be much missed from the plot of Nicholas Nickleby.
+"I am an affectionate father," said Dickens, "to all the children of my
+fancy; but like many other parents I have in my heart of hearts a
+favourite child; and his name is David Copperfield." Yet although his
+heart must often have yearned backwards to the children of his fancy
+whose tale was already told, yet he never touched one of them again even
+with the point of his pen. The characters in _David Copperfield_, as in
+all the others, were dead for him after he had done the book; if he
+loved them as children, it was as dead and sanctified children. It is a
+curious test of the strength and even reticence that underlay the
+seeming exuberance of Dickens, that he never did yield at all to
+exactly that indiscretion or act of sentimentalism which would seem most
+natural to his emotions and his art. Or rather he never did yield to it
+except here in this one case; the case of _Master Humphrey's Clock_.
+
+And it must be remembered that nearly everybody else did yield to it.
+Especially did those writers who are commonly counted Dickens's
+superiors in art and exactitude and closeness to connected reality.
+Thackeray wallowed in it; Anthony Trollope lived on it. Those modern
+artists who pride themselves most on the separation and unity of a work
+of art have indulged in it often; thus, for instance, Stevenson gave a
+glimpse of Alan Breck in _The Master of Ballantrae_, and meant to give a
+glimpse of the Master of Ballantrae in another unwritten tale called
+_The Rising Sun_. The habit of revising old characters is so strong in
+Thackeray that _Vanity Fair_, _Pendennis_, _The Newcomes_, and _Philip_
+are in one sense all one novel. Certainly the reader sometimes forgets
+which one of them he is reading. Afterwards he cannot remember whether
+the best description of Lord Steyne's red whiskers or Mr. Wagg's rude
+jokes occurred in _Vanity Fair_, or _Pendennis_; he cannot remember
+whether his favourite dialogue between Mr. and Mrs. Pendennis occurred
+in _The Newcomes_, or in _Philip_. Whenever two Thackeray characters in
+two Thackeray novels could by any possibility have been contemporary,
+Thackeray delights to connect them. He makes Major Pendennis nod to Dr.
+Firmin, and Colonel Newcome ask Major Dobbin to dinner. Whenever two
+characters could not possibly have been contemporary he goes out of his
+way to make one the remote ancestor of the other. Thus he created the
+great house of Warrington solely to connect a "blue-bearded" Bohemian
+journalist with the blood of Henry Esmond. It is quite impossible to
+conceive Dickens keeping up this elaborate connection between all his
+characters and all his books, especially across the ages. It would give
+us a kind of shock if we learnt from Dickens that Major Bagstock was the
+nephew of Mr. Chester. Still less can we imagine Dickens carrying on an
+almost systematic family chronicle as was in some sense done by
+Trollope. There must be some reason for such a paradox; for in itself it
+is a very curious one. The writers who wrote carefully were always
+putting, as it were, after-words and appendices to their already
+finished portraits; the man who did splendid and flamboyant but faulty
+portraits never attempted to touch them up. Or rather (we may say again)
+he attempted it once, and then he failed.
+
+The reason lay, I think, in the very genius of Dickens's creation. The
+child he bore of his soul quitted him when his term was passed like a
+veritable child born of the body. It was independent of him, as a child
+is of its parents. It had become dead to him even in becoming alive.
+When Thackeray studied Pendennis or Lord Steyne he was studying
+something outside himself, and therefore something that might come
+nearer and nearer. But when Dickens brought forth Sam Weller or Pickwick
+he was creating something that had once been inside himself and
+therefore when once created could only go further and further away. It
+may seem a strange thing to say of such laughable characters and of so
+lively an author, yet I say it quite seriously; I think it possible that
+there arose between Dickens and his characters that strange and almost
+supernatural shyness that arises often between parents and children;
+because they are too close to each other to be open with each other. Too
+much hot and high emotion had gone to the creation of one of his great
+figures for it to be possible for him without embarrassment ever to
+speak with it again. This is the thing which some fools call fickleness;
+but which is not the death of feeling, but rather its dreadful
+perpetuation; this shyness is the final seal of strong sentiment; this
+coldness is an eternal constancy.
+
+This one case where Dickens broke through his rule was not such a
+success as to tempt him in any case to try the thing again.
+
+There is weakness in the strict sense of the word in this particular
+reappearance of Samuel Pickwick and Samuel Weller. In the original
+_Pickwick Papers_ Dickens had with quite remarkable delicacy and
+vividness contrived to suggest a certain fundamental sturdiness and
+spirit in that corpulent and complacent old gentleman. Mr. Pickwick was
+a mild man, a respectable man, a placid man; but he was very decidedly a
+man. He could denounce his enemies and fight for his nightcap. He was
+fat; but he had a backbone. In _Master Humphrey's Clock_ the backbone
+seems somehow to be broken; his good nature seems limp instead of alert.
+He gushes out of his good heart; instead of taking a good heart for
+granted as a part of any decent gentleman's furniture as did the older
+and stronger Pickwick. The truth is, I think, that Mr. Pickwick in
+complete repose loses some part of the whole point of his existence. The
+quality which makes the _Pickwick Papers_ one of the greatest of human
+fairy tales is a quality which all the great fairy tales possess, and
+which marks them out from most modern writing. A modern novelist
+generally endeavours to make his story interesting, by making his hero
+odd. The most typical modern books are those in which the central figure
+is himself or herself an exception, a cripple, a courtesan, a lunatic, a
+swindler, or a person of the most perverse temperament. Such stories,
+for instance, are _Sir Richard Calmady_, _Dodo_, _Quisante_, _La Bete
+Humaine_, even the _Egoist_. But in a fairy tale the boy sees all the
+wonders of fairyland because he is an ordinary boy. In the same way Mr.
+Samuel Pickwick sees an extraordinary England because he is an ordinary
+old gentleman. He does not see things through the rosy spectacles of the
+modern optimist or the green-smoked spectacles of the pessimist; he sees
+it through the crystal glasses of his own innocence. One must see the
+world clearly even in order to see its wildest poetry. One must see it
+sanely even in order to see that it is insane.
+
+Mr. Pickwick, then, relieved against a background of heavy kindliness
+and quiet club life does not seem to be quite the same heroic figure as
+Mr. Pickwick relieved against a background of the fighting police
+constables at Ipswich or the roaring mobs of Eatanswill. Of the
+degeneration of the Wellers, though it has been commonly assumed by
+critics, I am not so sure. Some of the things said in the humorous
+assembly round Mr. Weller's Watch are really human and laughable and
+altogether in the old manner. Especially, I think, the vague and awful
+allusiveness of old Mr. Weller when he reminds his little grandson of
+his delinquencies under the trope or figure of their being those of
+another little boy, is really in the style both of the irony and the
+domesticity of the poorer classes. Sam also says one or two things
+really worthy of himself. We feel almost as if Sam were a living man,
+and could not appear for an instant without being amusing.
+
+The other elements in the make-up of _Master Humphrey's Clock_ come
+under the same paradox which I have applied to the whole work. Though
+not very important in literature they are somehow quite important in
+criticism. They show us better than anything else the whole unconscious
+trend of Dickens, the stuff of which his very dreams were made. If he
+had made up tales to amuse himself when half-awake (as I have no doubt
+he did) they would be just such tales as these. They would have been
+ghostly legends of the nooks and holes of London, echoes of old love and
+laughter from the taverns or the Inns of Court. In a sense also one may
+say that these tales are the great might-have-beens of Dickens. They are
+chiefly designs which he fills up here slightly and unsatisfactorily,
+but which he might have filled up with his own brightest and most
+incredible colours. Nothing, for instance, could have been nearer to the
+heart of Dickens than his great Gargantuan conception of Gog and Magog
+telling London legends to each other all through the night. Those two
+giants might have stood on either side of some new great city of his
+invention, swarming with fanciful figures and noisy with new events.
+But as it is, the two giants stand alone in a wilderness, guarding
+either side of a gate that leads nowhere.
+
+
+
+
+REPRINTED PIECES
+
+
+Those abuses which are supposed to belong specially to religion belong
+to all human institutions. They are not the sins of supernaturalism, but
+the sins of nature. In this respect it is interesting to observe that
+all the evils which our Rationalist or Protestant tradition associates
+with the idolatrous veneration of sacred figures arises in the merely
+human atmosphere of literature and history. Every extravagance of
+hagiology can be found in hero-worship. Every folly alleged in the
+worship of saints can be found in the worship of poets. There are those
+who are honourably and intensely opposed to the atmosphere of religious
+symbolism or religious archaeology. There are people who have a vague
+idea that the worship of saints is worse than the imitation of sinners.
+There are some, like a lady I once knew, who think that hagiology is the
+scientific study of hags. But these slightly prejudiced persons
+generally have idolatries and superstitions of their own, particularly
+idolatries and superstitions in connection with celebrated people. Mr.
+Stead preserves a pistol belonging to Oliver Cromwell in the office of
+the _Review of Reviews_; and I am sure he worships it in his rare
+moments of solitude and leisure. A man, who could not be induced to
+believe in God by all the arguments of all the philosophers, professed
+himself ready to believe if he could see it stated on a postcard in the
+handwriting of Mr. Gladstone. Persons not otherwise noted for their
+religious exercise have been known to procure and preserve portions of
+the hair of Paderewski. Nay, by this time blasphemy itself is a sacred
+tradition, and almost as much respect would be paid to the alleged
+relics of an atheist as to the alleged relics of a god. If any one has a
+fork that belonged to Voltaire, he could probably exchange it in the
+open market for a knife that belonged to St. Theresa.
+
+Of all the instances of this there is none stranger than the case of
+Dickens. It should be pondered very carefully by those who reproach
+Christianity with having been easily corrupted into a system of
+superstitions. If ever there was a message full of what modern people
+call true Christianity, the direct appeal to the common heart, a faith
+that was simple, a hope that was infinite, and a charity that was
+omnivorous, if ever there came among men what they call the Christianity
+of Christ, it was in the message of Dickens. Christianity has been in
+the world nearly two thousand years, and it has not yet quite lost, its
+enemies being judges, its first fire and charity; but friends and
+enemies would agree that it was from the very first more detailed and
+doctrinal than the spirit of Dickens. The spirit of Dickens has been in
+the world about sixty years; and already it is a superstition. Already
+it is loaded with relics. Already it is stiff with antiquity.
+
+Everything that can be said about the perversion of Christianity can be
+said about the perversion of Dickens. It is said that Christ's words
+are repeated by the very High Priests and Scribes whom He meant to
+denounce. It is just as true that the jokes in _Pickwick_ are quoted
+with delight by the very bigwigs of bench and bar whom Dickens wished to
+make absurd and impossible. It is said that texts from Scripture are
+constantly taken in vain by Judas and Herod, by Caiaphas and Annas. It
+is just as true that texts from Dickens are rapturously quoted on all
+our platforms by Podsnap and Honeythunder, by Pardiggle and Veneering,
+by Tigg when he is forming a company, or Pott when he is founding a
+newspaper. People joke about Bumble in defence of Bumbledom; people
+allude playfully to Mrs. Jellyby while agitating for Borrioboola Gha.
+The very things which Dickens tried to destroy are preserved as relics
+of him. The very houses he wished to pull down are propped up as
+monuments of Dickens. We wish to preserve everything of him, except his
+perilous public spirit.
+
+This antiquarian attitude towards Dickens has many manifestations, some
+of them somewhat ridiculous. I give one startling instance out of a
+hundred of the irony remarked upon above. In his first important book,
+Dickens lashed the loathsome corruption of our oligarchical politics,
+their blaring servility and dirty diplomacy of bribes, under the name of
+an imaginary town called Eatanswill. If Eatanswill, wherever it was, had
+been burned to the ground by its indignant neighbours the day after the
+exposure, it would have been not inappropriate. If it had been entirely
+deserted by its inhabitants, if they had fled to hide themselves in
+holes and caverns, one could have understood it. If it had been struck
+by a thunderbolt out of heaven or outlawed by the whole human race, all
+that would seem quite natural. What has really happened is this: that
+two respectable towns in Suffolk are still disputing for the honour of
+having been the original Eatanswill; as if two innocent hamlets each
+claimed to be Gomorrah. I make no comment; the thing is beyond speech.
+
+But this strange sentimental and relic-hunting worship of Dickens has
+many more innocent manifestations. One of them is that which takes
+advantage of the fact that Dickens happened to be a journalist by trade.
+It occupies itself therefore with hunting through papers and magazines
+for unsigned articles which may possibly be proved to be his. Only a
+little time ago one of these enthusiasts ran up to me, rubbing his
+hands, and told me that he was sure he had found two and a half short
+paragraphs in _All the Year Round_ which were certainly written by
+Dickens, whom he called (I regret to say) the Master. Something of this
+archaeological weakness must cling to all mere reprints of his minor
+work. He was a great novelist; but he was also, among other things, a
+good journalist and a good man. It is often necessary for a good
+journalist to write bad literature. It is sometimes the first duty of a
+good man to write it. Pot-boilers to my feeling are sacred things; but
+they may well be secret as well as sacred, like the holy pot which it is
+their purpose to boil. In the collection called _Reprinted Pieces_ there
+are some, I think, which demand or deserve this apology. There are many
+which fall below the level of his recognised books of fragments, such as
+_The Sketches by Boz_, and _The Uncommercial Traveller_. Two or three
+elements in the compilation, however, make it quite essential to any
+solid appreciation of the author.
+
+Of these the first in importance is that which comes last in order. I
+mean the three remarkable pamphlets upon the English Sunday, called
+_Sunday under Three Heads_. Here, at least, we find the eternal Dickens,
+though not the eternal Dickens of fiction. His other political and
+sociological suggestions in this volume are so far unimportant that they
+are incidental, and even personal. Any man might have formed Dickens's
+opinion about flogging for garrotters, and altered it afterwards. Any
+one might have come to Dickens's conclusion about model prisons, or to
+any other conclusion equally reasonable and unimportant. These things
+have no colour of the great man's character. But on the subject of the
+English Sunday he does stand for his own philosophy. He stands for a
+particular view, remote at present both from Liberals and Conservatives.
+He was, in a conscious sense, the first of its spokesmen. He was in
+every sense the last.
+
+In his appeal for the pleasures of the people, Dickens has remained
+alone. The pleasures of the people have now no defender, Radical or
+Tory. The Tories despise the people. The Radicals despise the pleasures.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+  +--------------------------------------------------------------+
+  | Transcriber's Notes and Errata                               |
+  |                                                              |
+  | The Illustrations have been moved to between chapters.       |
+  |                                                              |
+  | The following typographical errors have been corrected:      |
+  |                                                              |
+  |   |Error              |Correction     |                      |
+  |   |a dupe and who was |a dupe who was |                      |
+  |   |pyschology         |psychology     |                      |
+  |   |Similiarly         |Smilarly       |                      |
+  |                                                              |
+  | The following words were found in both hyphenated and        |
+  | un-hyphenated forms in the text. The numbers in parentheses  |
+  | show the number of times each form occurred.                 |
+  |                                                              |
+  |   |framework (3)  |frame-work (1)  |                         |
+  |   |cocksure (2)   |cock-sure (2)   |                         |
+  |   |Ironmaster (1) |Iron-master (2) |                         |
+  |   |footprints (1) |foot-prints (1) |                         |
+  |   |goodwill (1)   |good-will (1)   |                         |
+  |                                                              |
+  +--------------------------------------------------------------+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Appreciations and Criticisms of the
+Works of Charles Dickens, by G. K. Chesterton
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