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Charles Dickens: A Critical Study, by G. K. Chesterton—A Project Gutenberg eBook
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<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 68682 ***</div>
<h1><span class="smaller wspace">CHARLES DICKENS</span></h1>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter newpage p4 center wspace">
<p class="xxlarge bold vspace red">
CHARLES DICKENS<br />
<span class="smaller">A CRITICAL STUDY</span></p>
<p class="p4">BY<br />
<span class="larger">G. K. CHESTERTON</span><br />
<span class="smaller">Author of Varied Types, Heretics, Etc.</span></p>
<p class="p4 large">NEW YORK<br />
DODD MEAD & COMPANY<br />
<span class="small">1911</span>
</p>
</div>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter newpage p4 center wspace">
<p class="vspace">
<span class="smcap">Copyright, 1906, by</span><br />
DODD, MEAD & COMPANY<br />
❦<br />
<i>First Edition Published in September, 1906</i>
</p>
</div>
<hr class="newpage x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter newpage p4 center wspace">
<p class="vspace">
<span class="bold">To</span><br />
<span class="larger gesperrt">RHODA BASTABLE</span>
</p>
</div>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<h2 class="nobreak" id="CONTENTS">CONTENTS</h2>
</div>
<table id="toc">
<tr>
<td class="tdc chap" colspan="2">CHAPTER I</td>
</tr>
<tr class="small">
<td> </td>
<td class="tdr">PAGE</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">THE DICKENS PERIOD</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#toclink_1">1</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdc chap" colspan="2">CHAPTER II</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">THE BOYHOOD OF DICKENS</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#toclink_24">24</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdc chap" colspan="2">CHAPTER III</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">THE YOUTH OF DICKENS</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#toclink_43">43</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdc chap" colspan="2">CHAPTER IV</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">“THE PICKWICK PAPERS”</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#toclink_71">71</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdc chap" colspan="2">CHAPTER V</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">THE GREAT POPULARITY</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#toclink_100">100</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdc chap" colspan="2">CHAPTER VI</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">DICKENS AND AMERICA</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#toclink_127">127</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdc chap" colspan="2">CHAPTER VII</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">DICKENS AND CHRISTMAS</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#toclink_155">155</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdc chap" colspan="2">CHAPTER VIII</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">THE TIME OF TRANSITION</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#toclink_181">181</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdc chap" colspan="2">CHAPTER IX</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">LATER LIFE AND WORKS</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#toclink_211">211</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdc chap" colspan="2">CHAPTER X</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">THE GREAT DICKENS CHARACTERS</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#toclink_244">244</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdc chap" colspan="2">CHAPTER XI</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">ON THE ALLEGED OPTIMISM OF DICKENS</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#toclink_266">266</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdc chap" colspan="2">CHAPTER XII</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl">A NOTE ON THE FUTURE OF DICKENS</td>
<td class="tdr"><a href="#toclink_291">291</a></td>
</tr>
</table>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_1">1</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="toclink_1">CHAPTER I<br />
<span class="subhead">THE DICKENS PERIOD</span></h2>
</div>
<p class="in0"><span class="firstword">Much</span> of our modern difficulty, in religion and
other things, arises merely from this, that we
confuse the word “indefinable” with the word
“vague.” If some one speaks of a spiritual fact
as “indefinable” we promptly picture something
misty, a cloud with indeterminate edges. But this
is an error even in common-place logic. The
thing that cannot be defined is the first thing; the
primary fact. It is our arms and legs, our pots
and pans, that are indefinable. The indefinable
is the indisputable. The man next door is indefinable,
because he is too actual to be defined.
And there are some to whom spiritual things have
the same fierce and practical proximity; some to
whom God is too actual to be defined.</p>
<p>But there is a third class of primary terms.
There are popular expressions which every one
uses and no one can explain; which the wise man
will accept and reverence, as he reverences desire
or darkness or any elemental thing. The prigs
of the debating club will demand that he should<span class="pagenum" id="Page_2">2</span>
define his terms. And being a wise man he will
flatly refuse. This first inexplicable term is the
most important term of all. The word that has
no definition is the word that has no substitute. If
a man falls back again and again on some such
word as “vulgar” or “manly” do not suppose
that the word means nothing because he cannot
say what it means. If he could say what the word
means he would say what it means instead of
saying the word. When the Game Chicken (that
fine thinker) kept on saying to Mr. Toots, “It’s
mean. That’s what it is—it’s mean,” he was
using language in the wisest possible way. For
what else could he say? There is no word for
mean except mean. A man must be very mean
himself before he comes to defining meanness.
Precisely because the word is indefinable, the word
is indispensable.</p>
<p>In everyday talk, or in any of our journals, we
may find the loose but important phrase, “Why
have we no great men to-day? Why have we
no great men like Thackeray, or Carlyle, or
Dickens?” Do not let us dismiss this expression,
because it appears loose or arbitrary. “Great”
does mean something, and the test of its actuality
is to be found by noting how instinctively and
decisively we do apply it to some men and not to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_3">3</span>
others; above all how instinctively and decisively
we do apply it to four or five men in the Victorian
era, four or five men of whom Dickens was not
the least. The term is found to fit a definite thing.
Whatever the word “great” means, Dickens was
what it means. Even the fastidious and unhappy
who cannot read his books without a continuous
critical exasperation, would use the word of him
without stopping to think. They feel that Dickens
is a great writer even if he is not a good writer.
He is treated as a classic; that is, as a king who
may now be deserted, but who cannot now be
dethroned. The atmosphere of this word clings
to him; and the curious thing is that we cannot
get it to cling to any of the men of our own
generation. “Great” is the first adjective which
the most supercilious modern critic would apply
to Dickens. And “great” is the last adjective
that the most supercilious modern critic would
apply to himself. We dare not claim to be great
men, even when we claim to be superior to them.</p>
<p>Is there, then, any vital meaning in this idea of
“greatness” or in our laments over its absence in
our own time? Some people say, indeed, that
this sense of mass is but a mirage of distance, and
that men always think dead men great and live
men small. They seem to think that the law of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_4">4</span>
perspective in the mental world is the precise opposite
to the law of perspective in the physical world.
They think that figures grow larger as they walk
away. But this theory cannot be made to correspond
with the facts. We do not lack great men
in our own day because we decline to look for
them in our own day; on the contrary, we are
looking for them all day long. We are not, as a
matter of fact, mere examples of those who stone
the prophets and leave it to their posterity to
build their sepulchres. If the world would only
produce our perfect prophet, solemn, searching,
universal, nothing would give us keener pleasure
than to build his sepulchre. In our eagerness we
might even bury him alive. Nor is it true that
the great men of the Victorian era were not called
great in their own time. By many they were
called great from the first. Charlotte Brontë
held this heroic language about Thackeray. Ruskin
held it about Carlyle. A definite school regarded
Dickens as a great man from the first days
of his fame: Dickens certainly belonged to this
school.</p>
<p>In reply to this question, “Why have we no
great men to-day?” many modern explanations
are offered. Advertisement, cigarette-smoking,
the decay of religion, the decay of agriculture, too<span class="pagenum" id="Page_5">5</span>
much humanitarianism, too little humanitarianism,
the fact that people are educated insufficiently, the
fact that they are educated at all, all these are
reasons given. If I give my own explanation, it
is not for its intrinsic value; it is because my answer
to the question, “Why have we no great
men?” is a short way of stating the deepest and
most catastrophic difference between the age in
which we live and the early nineteenth century;
the age under the shadow of the French Revolution,
the age in which Dickens was born.</p>
<p>The soundest of the Dickens critics, a man of
genius, Mr. George Gissing, opens his criticism by
remarking that the world in which Dickens grew
up was a hard and cruel world. He notes its gross
feeding, its fierce sports, its fighting and foul
humour, and all this he summarizes in the words
hard and cruel. It is curious how different are the
impressions of men. To me this old English
world seems infinitely less hard and cruel than the
world described in Gissing’s own novels. Coarse
external customs are merely relative, and easily
assimilated. A man soon learnt to harden his
hands and harden his head. Faced with the world
of Gissing, he can do little but harden his heart.
But the fundamental difference between the beginning
of the nineteenth century and the end of it<span class="pagenum" id="Page_6">6</span>
is a difference simple but enormous. The first
period was full of evil things, but it was full of
hope. The second period, the <i xml:lang="fr" lang="fr">fin de siècle</i>, was
even full (in some sense) of good things. But
it was occupied in asking what was the good of
good things. Joy itself became joyless; and the
fighting of Cobbett was happier than the feasting
of Walter Pater. The men of Cobbett’s day were
sturdy enough to endure and inflict brutality; but
they were also sturdy enough to alter it. This
“hard and cruel” age was, after all, the age of reform.
The gibbet stood up black above them;
but it was black against the dawn.</p>
<p>This dawn, against which the gibbet and all the
old cruelties stood out so black and clear, was the
developing idea of liberalism, the French Revolution.
It was a clear and a happy philosophy.
And only against such philosophies do evils appear
evident at all. The optimist is a better reformer
than the pessimist; and the man who believes life
to be excellent is the man who alters it most. It
seems a paradox, yet the reason of it is very plain.
The pessimist can be enraged at evil. But only
the optimist can be surprised at it. From the
reformer is required a simplicity of surprise. He
must have the faculty of a violent and virgin
astonishment. It is not enough that he should<span class="pagenum" id="Page_7">7</span>
think injustice distressing; he must think injustice
<em>absurd</em>, an anomaly in existence, a matter less for
tears than for a shattering laughter. On the other
hand, the pessimists at the end of the century
could hardly curse even the blackest thing; for
they could hardly see it against its black and eternal
background. Nothing was bad, because everything
was bad. Life in prison was infamous—like
life anywhere else. The fires of persecution
were vile—like the stars. We perpetually find
this paradox of a contented discontent. Dr. Johnson
takes too sad a view of humanity, but he is
also too satisfied a Conservative. Rousseau takes
too rosy a view of humanity, but he causes a revolution.
Swift is angry, but a Tory. Shelley is
happy, and a rebel. Dickens, the optimist, satirizes
the Fleet, and the Fleet is gone. Gissing,
the pessimist, satirizes Suburbia, and Suburbia remains.</p>
<p>Mr. Gissing’s error, then, about the early Dickens
period we may put thus: in calling it hard
and cruel he omits the wind of hope and humanity
that was blowing through it. It may have been
full of inhuman institutions, but it was full of
humanitarian people. And this humanitarianism
was very much the better (in my view) because it
was a rough and even rowdy humanitarianism.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_8">8</span>
It was free from all the faults that cling to the
name. It was, if you will, a coarse humanitarianism.
It was a shouting, fighting, drinking philanthropy—a
noble thing. But, in any case, this
atmosphere was the atmosphere of the Revolution;
and its main idea was the idea of human equality.
I am not concerned here to defend the egalitarian
idea against the solemn and babyish attacks made
upon it by the rich and learned of to-day. I am
merely concerned to state one of its practical consequences.
One of the actual and certain consequences
of the idea that all men are equal is immediately
to produce very great men. I would say
superior men, only that the hero thinks of himself
as great, but not as superior. This has been
hidden from us of late by a foolish worship of
sinister and exceptional men, men without comradeship,
or any infectious virtue. This type of
Cæsar does exist. There is a great man who
makes every man feel small. But the real great
man is the man who makes every man feel great.</p>
<p>The spirit of the early century produced great
men, because it believed that men were great. It
made strong men by encouraging weak men. Its
education, its public habits, its rhetoric, were all
addressed towards encouraging the greatness in
everybody. And by encouraging the greatness in<span class="pagenum" id="Page_9">9</span>
everybody, it naturally encouraged superlative
greatness in some. Superiority came out of the
high rapture of equality. It is precisely in this
sort of passionate unconsciousness and bewildering
community of thought that men do become more
than themselves. No man by taking thought can
add one cubit to his stature; but a man may add
many cubits to his stature by not taking thought.
The best men of the Revolution were simply common
men at their best. This is why our age can
never understand Napoleon. Because he was
something great and triumphant, we suppose that
he must have been something extraordinary, something
inhuman. Some say he was the Devil; some
say he was the Superhuman. Was he a very, very
bad man? Was he a good man with some greater
moral code? We strive in vain to invent the mysteries
behind that immortal mask of brass. The
modern world with all its subtleness will never
guess his strange secret; for his strange secret was
that he was very like other people.</p>
<p>And almost without exception all the great men
have come out of this atmosphere of equality.
Great men may make despotisms; but democracies
make great men. The other main factory of heroes
besides a revolution is a religion. And a religion
again, is a thing which, by its nature, does not<span class="pagenum" id="Page_10">10</span>
think of men as more or less valuable, but of men
as all intensely and painfully valuable, a democracy
of eternal danger. For religion all men are equal,
as all pennies are equal, because the only value
in any of them is that they bear the image of the
King. This fact has been quite insufficiently
observed in the study of religious heroes. Piety
produces intellectual greatness precisely because
piety in itself is quite indifferent to intellectual
greatness. The strength of Cromwell was that
he cared for religion. But the strength of religion
was that it did not care for Cromwell; did not care
for him, that is, any more than for anybody else.
He and his footman were equally welcomed to
warm places in the hospitality of hell. It has
often been said, very truly, that religion is the
thing that makes the ordinary man feel extraordinary;
it is an equally important truth that religion
is the thing that makes the extraordinary
man feel ordinary.</p>
<p>Carlyle killed the heroes; there have been none
since his time. He killed the heroic (which he
sincerely loved) by forcing upon each man this
question: “Am I strong or weak?” To which
the answer from any honest man whatever (yes,
from Cæsar or Bismarck) would certainly be
“weak.” He asked for candidates for a definite<span class="pagenum" id="Page_11">11</span>
aristocracy, for men who should hold themselves
consciously above their fellows. He advertised
for them, so to speak; he promised them glory;
he promised them omnipotence. They have not
appeared yet. They never will. For the real
heroes of whom he wrote had appeared out of an
ecstacy of the ordinary. I have already instanced
such a case as Cromwell. But there is no need to
go through all the great men of Carlyle. Carlyle
himself was as great as any of them; and if ever
there was a typical child of the French Revolution,
it was he. He began with the wildest hopes from
the Reform Bill, and although he soured afterwards,
he had been made and moulded by those
hopes. He was disappointed with Equality; but
Equality was not disappointed with him. Equality
is justified of all her children.</p>
<p>But we, in the post-Carlylean period, have
become fastidious about great men. Every man
examines himself, every man examines his neighbours,
to see whether they or he quite come up
to the exact line of greatness. The answer is,
naturally, “No.” And many a man calls himself
contentedly “a minor poet” who would then have
been inspired to be a major prophet. We are hard
to please and of little faith. We can hardly believe
that there is such a thing as a great man.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_12">12</span>
They could hardly believe there was such a thing
as a small one. But we are always praying that
our eyes may behold greatness, instead of praying
that our hearts may be filled with it. Thus, for
instance, the Liberal party (to which I belong)
was, in its period of exile, always saying, “O for
a Gladstone!” and such things. We were always
asking that it might be strengthened from above,
instead of ourselves strengthening it from below,
with our hope and our anger and our youth.
Every man was waiting for a leader. Every man
ought to be waiting for a chance to lead. If a
god does come upon the earth, he will descend at
the sight of the brave. Our protestations and litanies
are of no avail; our new moons and our sabbaths
are an abomination. The great man will
come when all of us are feeling great, not when
all of us are feeling small. He will ride in at some
splendid moment when we all feel that we could
do without him.</p>
<p>We are then able to answer in some manner
the question, “Why have we no great men?”
We have no great men chiefly because we are always
looking for them. We are connoisseurs of
greatness, and connoisseurs can never be great;
we are fastidious, that is, we are small. When
Diogenes went about with a lantern looking for<span class="pagenum" id="Page_13">13</span>
an honest man, I am afraid he had very little time
to be honest himself. And when anybody goes
about on his hands and knees looking for a great
man to worship, he is making sure that one man
at any rate shall not be great. Now, the error of
Diogenes is evident. The error of Diogenes lay
in the fact that he omitted to notice that every man
is both an honest man and a dishonest man.
Diogenes looked for his honest man inside every
crypt and cavern; but he never thought of looking
inside the thief. And that is where the Founder
of Christianity found the honest man; He found
him on a gibbet and promised him Paradise. Just
as Christianity looked for the honest man inside
the thief, democracy looked for the wise man
inside the fool. It encouraged the fool to be
wise. We can call this thing sometimes optimism,
sometimes equality; the nearest name for it is encouragement.
It had its exaggerations—failure to
understand original sin, notions that education
would make all men good, the childlike yet pedantic
philosophies of human perfectibility. But the
whole was full of a faith in the infinity of human
souls, which is in itself not only Christian but
orthodox; and this we have lost amid the limitations
of a pessimistic science. Christianity said
that any man could be a saint if he chose; democracy,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_14">14</span>
that any man could be a citizen if he chose.
The note of the last few decades in art and ethics
has been that a man is stamped with an irrevocable
psychology, and is cramped for perpetuity in the
prison of his skull. It was a world that expected
everything of everybody. It was a world that encouraged
anybody to be anything. And in England
and literature its living expression was
Dickens.</p>
<p>We shall consider Dickens in many other capacities,
but let us put this one first. He was the
voice in England of this humane intoxication and
expansion, this encouraging of anybody to be anything.
His best books are a carnival of liberty,
and there is more of the real spirit of the French
Revolution in “Nicholas Nickleby” than in “The
Tale of Two Cities.” His work has the great
glory of the Revolution, the bidding of every man
to be himself; it has also the revolutionary deficiency;
it seems to think that this mere emancipation
is enough. No man <em>encouraged</em> his characters
so much as Dickens. “I am an affectionate
father,” he says, “to every child of my fancy.”
He was not only an affectionate father, he was an
everindulgent father. The children of his fancy
are spoilt children. They shake the house like
heavy and shouting schoolboys; they smash the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_15">15</span>
story to pieces like so much furniture. When we
moderns write stories our characters are better controlled.
But, alas! our characters are rather easier
to control. We are in no danger from the gigantic
gambols of creatures like Mantalini and Micawber.
We are in no danger of giving our readers
too much Weller or Wegg. We have not got it
to give. When we experience the ungovernable
sense of life which goes along with the old Dickens
sense of liberty, we experience the best of the
revolution. We are filled with the first of all
democratic doctrines, that all men are interesting;
Dickens tried to make some of his people appear
dull people, but he could not keep them dull. He
could not make a monotonous man. The bores in
his books are brighter than the wits in other books.</p>
<p>I have put this position first for a defined reason.
It is useless for us to attempt to imagine
Dickens and his life unless we are able at least
to imagine this old atmosphere of a democratic
optimism—a confidence in common men. Dickens
depends upon such a comprehension in a rather
unusual manner, a manner worth explanation, or
at least remark.</p>
<p>The disadvantage under which Dickens has
fallen, both as an artist and a moralist, is very
plain. His misfortune is that neither of the two<span class="pagenum" id="Page_16">16</span>
last movements in literary criticism has done him
any good. He has suffered alike from his enemies,
and from the enemies of his enemies. The facts
to which I refer are familiar. When the world
first awoke from the mere hypnotism of Dickens,
from the direct tyranny of his temperament, there
was, of course, a reaction. At the head of it came
the Realists, with their documents, like Miss Flite.
They declared that scenes and types in Dickens
were wholly impossible (in which they were perfectly
right), and on this rather paradoxical
ground objected to them as literature. They were
not “like life,” and there, they thought, was an
end of the matter. The Realist for a time prevailed.
But Realists did not enjoy their victory
(if they enjoyed anything) very long. A more
symbolic school of criticism soon arose. Men saw
that it was necessary to give a much deeper and
more delicate meaning to the expression “like
life.” Streets are not life, cities and civilizations
are not life, faces even and voices are not life
itself. Life is within, and no man hath seen it
at any time. As for our meals, and our manners,
and our daily dress, these are things exactly like
sonnets; they are random symbols of the soul.
One man tries to express himself in books, another
in boots; both probably fail. Our solid<span class="pagenum" id="Page_17">17</span>
houses and square meals are in the strict sense
fiction. They are things made up to typify our
thoughts. The coat a man wears may be wholly
fictitious; the movement of his hands may be quite
unlike life.</p>
<p>This much the intelligence of men soon perceived.
And by this much Dickens’s fame should
have greatly profited. For Dickens is “like life”
in the truer sense, in the sense that he is akin to
the living principle in us and in the universe; he is
like life, at least in this detail, that he is alive.
His art is like life, because, like life, it cares for
nothing outside itself, and goes on its way rejoicing.
Both produce monsters with a kind of carelessness,
like enormous by-products; life producing
the rhinoceros, and art Mr. Bunsby. Art indeed
copies life in not copying life, for life copies nothing.
Dickens’s art is like life because, like life,
it is irresponsible, because, like life, it is incredible.</p>
<p>Yet the return of this realization has not greatly
profited Dickens, the return of romance has been
almost useless to this great romantic. He has
gained as little from the fall of the Realists as
from their triumph; there has been a revolution,
there has been a counter revolution, there has been
no restoration. And the reason of this brings us
back to that atmosphere of popular optimism of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_18">18</span>
which I spoke. And the shortest way of expressing
the more recent neglect of Dickens is to say
that for our time and taste he exaggerates the
wrong thing.</p>
<p>Exaggeration is the definition of Art. That both
Dickens and the moderns understood Art is, in its
inmost nature, fantastic. Time brings queer revenges,
and while the Realists were yet living, the
art of Dickens was justified by Aubrey Beardsley.
But men like Aubrey Beardsley were allowed to
be fantastic, because the mood which they overstrained
and overstated was a mood which their
period understood. Dickens overstrains and overstates
a mood our period does not understand.
The truth he exaggerates is exactly this old Revolution
sense of infinite opportunity and boisterous
brotherhood. And we resent his undue sense of
it, because we ourselves have not even a due sense
of it. We feel troubled with too much where we
have too little; we wish he would keep it within
bounds. For we are all exact and scientific on the
subjects we do not care about. We all immediately
detect exaggeration in an exposition of Mormonism
or a patriotic speech from Paraguay. We all
require sobriety on the subject of the sea serpent.
But the moment we begin to believe a thing ourselves,
that moment we begin easily to overstate<span class="pagenum" id="Page_19">19</span>
it; and the moment our souls become serious, our
words become a little wild. And certain moderns
are thus placed towards exaggeration. They permit
any writer to emphasize doubts, for instance,
for doubts are their religion, but they permit no
man to emphasize dogmas. If a man be the mildest
Christian, they smell “cant”; but he can be a
raving windmill of pessimism, and they call it
“temperament.” If a moralist paints a wild picture
of immorality, they doubt its truth, they say
that devils are not so black as they are painted.
But if a pessimist paints a wild picture of melancholy,
they accept the whole horrible psychology,
and they never ask if devils are as blue as they are
painted.</p>
<p>It is evident, in short, why even those who admire
exaggeration do not admire Dickens. He
is exaggerating the wrong thing. They know what
it is to feel a sadness so strange and deep that only
impossible characters can express it: they do not
know what it is to feel a joy so vital and violent
that only impossible characters can express
that. They know that the soul can be so
sad as to dream naturally of the blue faces
of the corpses of Baudelaire: they do not know
that the soul can be so cheerful as to dream
naturally of the blue face of Major Bagstock.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_20">20</span>
They know that there is a point of depression at
which one believes in Tintagiles: they do not know
that there is a point of exhilaration at which one
believes in Mr. Wegg. To them the impossibilities
of Dickens seem much more impossible than
they really are, because they are already attuned
to the opposite impossibilities of Maeterlinck. For
every mood there is an appropriate impossibility—a
decent and tactful impossibility—fitted to the
frame of mind. Every train of thought may end
in an ecstasy, and all roads lead to Elfland. But
few now walk far enough along the street of
Dickens to find the place where the cockney villas
grow so comic that they become poetical. People
do not know how far mere good spirits will go.
For instance, we never think (as the old folklore
did) of good spirits reaching to the spiritual
world. We see this in the complete absence from
modern, popular supernaturalism of the old popular
mirth. We hear plenty to-day of the wisdom
of the spiritual world; but we do not hear, as
our fathers did, of the folly of the spiritual
world, of the tricks of the gods, and the jokes of
the patron saints. Our popular tales tell us of a
man who is so wise that he touches the supernatural,
like Dr. Nikola; but they never tell us
(like the popular tales of the past) of a man who<span class="pagenum" id="Page_21">21</span>
was so silly that he touched the supernatural, like
Bottom the Weaver. We do not understand the
dark and transcendental sympathy between fairies
and fools. We understand a devout occultism, an
evil occultism, a tragic occultism, but a farcical
occultism is beyond us. Yet a farcical occultism is
the very essence of “The Midsummer Night’s
Dream.” It is also the right and credible essence
of “The Christmas Carol.” Whether we understand
it depends upon whether we can understand
that exhilaration is not a physical accident, but a
mystical fact; that exhilaration can be infinite, like
sorrow; that a joke can be so big that it breaks
the roof of the stars. By simply going on being
absurd, a thing can become godlike; there is but
one step from the ridiculous to the sublime.</p>
<p>Dickens was great because he was immoderately
possessed with all this; if we are to understand
him at all we must also be moderately possessed
with it. We must understand this old limitless
hilarity and human confidence, at least enough to
be able to endure it when it is pushed a great deal
too far. For Dickens did push it too far; he did
push the hilarity to the point of incredible character-drawing;
he did push the human confidence
to the point of an unconvincing sentimentalism.
You can trace, if you will, the revolutionary joy<span class="pagenum" id="Page_22">22</span>
till it reaches the incredible Sapsea epitaph; you
can trace the revolutionary hope till it reaches the
repentance of Dombey. There is plenty to carp
at in this man if you are inclined to carp; you may
easily find him vulgar if you cannot see that he
is divine; and if you cannot laugh with Dickens,
undoubtedly you can laugh at him.</p>
<p>I believe myself that this braver world of his
will certainly return; for I believe that it is bound
up with realities, like morning and the spring.
But for those who beyond remedy regard it as an
error, I put this appeal before any other observations
on Dickens. First let us sympathize, if only
for an instant, with the hopes of the Dickens
period, with that cheerful trouble of change. If
democracy has disappointed you, do not think of
it as a burst bubble, but at least as a broken heart,
an old love-affair. Do not sneer at the time when
the creed of humanity was on its honeymoon; treat
it with the dreadful reverence that is due to youth.
For you, perhaps, a drearier philosophy has covered
and eclipsed the earth. The fierce poet of
the Middle Ages wrote, “Abandon hope all ye
who enter here” over the gates of the lower world.
The emancipated poets of to-day have written it
over the gates of this world. But if we are to
understand the story which follows, we must erase<span class="pagenum" id="Page_23">23</span>
that apocalyptic writing, if only for an hour. We
must recreate the faith of our fathers, if only as
an artistic atmosphere. If, then, you are a pessimist,
in reading this story, forego for a little the
pleasures of pessimism. Dream for one mad moment
that the grass is green. Unlearn that sinister
learning that you think so clear; deny that deadly
knowledge that you think you know. Surrender
the very flower of your culture; give up the very
jewel of your pride; abandon hopelessness, all ye
who enter here.</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_24">24</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="toclink_24">CHAPTER II<br />
<span class="subhead">THE BOYHOOD OF DICKENS</span></h2>
</div>
<p class="in0"><span class="firstword">Charles Dickens</span> was born at Landport, in
Portsea, on February 7, 1812. His father was
a clerk in the Navy Pay-office, and was temporarily
on duty in the neighbourhood. Very soon
after the birth of Charles Dickens, however, the
family moved for a short period to Norfolk Street,
Bloomsbury, and then for a long period to Chatham,
which thus became the real home, and for all
serious purposes, the native place of Dickens. The
whole story of his life moves like a Canterbury
pilgrimage along the great roads of Kent.</p>
<p>John Dickens, his father, was, as stated, a clerk;
but such mere terms of trade tell us little of the
tone or status of a family. Browning’s father (to
take an instance at random) would also be described
as a clerk and a man of the middle class;
but the Browning family and the Dickens family
have the colour of two different civilizations. The
difference cannot be conveyed merely by saying
that Browning stood many strata above Dickens.
It must also be conveyed that Browning belonged<span class="pagenum" id="Page_25">25</span>
to that section of the middle class which tends (in
the small social sense) to rise; the Dickenses to
that section which tends in the same sense to fall.
If Browning had not been a poet, he would have
been a better clerk than his father, and his son
probably a better and richer clerk than he. But
if they had not been lifted in the air by the enormous
accident of a man of genius, the Dickenses,
I fancy would have appeared in poorer and poorer
places, as inventory clerks, as caretakers, as addressers
of envelopes, until they melted into the
masses of the poor.</p>
<p>Yet at the time of Dickens’s birth and childhood
this weakness in their worldly destiny was in no
way apparent; especially it was not apparent to
the little Charles himself. He was born and grew
up in a paradise of small prosperity. He fell into
the family, so to speak, during one of its comfortable
periods, and he never in those early days
thought of himself as anything but as a comfortable
middle-class child, the son of a comfortable
middle-class man. The father whom he found
provided for him, was one from whom comfort
drew forth his most pleasant and reassuring qualities,
though not perhaps his most interesting and
peculiar. John Dickens seemed, most probably,
a hearty and kindly character, a little florid of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_26">26</span>
speech, a little careless of duty in some details,
notably in the detail of education. His neglect
of his son’s mental training in later and more trying
times was a piece of unconscious selfishness
which remained a little acrimoniously in his son’s
mind through life. But even in this earlier and
easier period what records there are of John Dickens
give out the air of a somewhat idle and irresponsible
fatherhood. He exhibited towards his
son that contradiction in conduct which is always
shown by the too thoughtless parent to the too
thoughtful child. He contrived at once to neglect
his mind, and also to over-stimulate it.</p>
<p>There are many recorded tales and traits of the
author’s infancy, but one small fact seems to me
more than any other to strike the note and give the
key to his whole strange character. His father
found it more amusing to be an audience than to
be an instructor; and instead of giving the child
intellectual pleasure, called upon him, almost before
he was out of petticoats, to provide it. Some
of the earliest glimpses we have of Charles Dickens
show him to us perched on some chair or table
singing comic songs in an atmosphere of perpetual
applause. So, almost as soon as he can toddle, he
steps into the glare of the footlights. He never
stepped out of it until he died. He was a good<span class="pagenum" id="Page_27">27</span>
man, as men go in this bewildering world of ours,
brave, transparent, tender-hearted, scrupulously independent
and honourable; he was not a man
whose weaknesses should be spoken of without
some delicacy and doubt. But there did mingle
with his merits all his life this theatrical quality,
this atmosphere of being shown off—a sort of
hilarious self-consciousness. His literary life was
a triumphal procession; he died drunken with
glory. And behind all this nine years’ wonder that
filled the world, behind his gigantic tours and his
ten thousand editions, the crowded lectures and the
crashing brass, behind all the thing we really see
is the flushed face of a little boy singing music-hall
songs to a circle of aunts and uncles. And this
precocious pleasure explains much, too, in the
moral way. Dickens had all his life the faults of
the little boy who is kept up too late at night.
The boy in such a case exhibits a psychological
paradox; he is a little too irritable because he is a
little too happy. Dickens was always a little too
irritable because he was a little too happy. Like
the over-wrought child in society, he was splendidly
sociable, and yet suddenly quarrelsome. In
all the practical relations of his life he was what
the child is in the last hours of an evening party,
genuinely delighted, genuinely delightful, genuinely<span class="pagenum" id="Page_28">28</span>
affectionate and happy, and yet in some
strange way fundamentally exasperated and dangerously
close to tears.</p>
<p>There was another touch about the boy which
made his case more peculiar, and perhaps his intelligence
more fervid; the touch of ill-health.
It could not be called more than a touch, for he
suffered from no formidable malady and could
always through life endure a great degree of
exertion even if it was only the exertion of walking
violently all night. Still the streak of sickness
was sufficient to take him out of the common unconscious
life of the community of boys; and for
good or evil that withdrawal is always a matter of
deadly importance to the mind. He was thrown
back perpetually upon the pleasures of the intelligence,
and these began to burn in his head like
a pent and painful furnace. In his own unvaryingly
vivid way he has described how he crawled
up into an unconsidered garret, and there found, in
a dusty heap, the undying literature of England.
The books he mentions chiefly are “Humphrey
Clinker” and “Tom Jones.” When he opened
those two books in the garret he caught hold of the
only past with which he is at all connected, the
great comic writers of England of whom he was
destined to be the last.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_29">29</span></p>
<p>It must be remembered (as I have suggested
before) that there was something about the county
in which he lived, and the great roads along which
he travelled that sympathized with and stimulated
his pleasure in this old picaresque literature. The
groups that came along the road, that passed
through his town and out of it, were of the motley
laughable type that tumbled into ditches or beat
down the doors of taverns under the escort of
Smollett and Fielding. In our time the main roads
of Kent have upon them very often a perpetual
procession of tramps and tinkers unknown on the
quiet hills of Sussex; and it may have been so also
in Dickens’s boyhood. In his neighbourhood were
definite memorials of yet older and yet greater
English comedy. From the height of Gad’s-hill at
which he stared unceasingly there looked down
upon him the monstrous ghost of Falstaff, Falstaff
who might well have been the spiritual father of
all Dickens’s adorable knaves, Falstaff the great
mountain of English laughter and English sentimentalism,
the great, healthy, humane English
humbug, not to be matched among the nations.</p>
<p>At this eminence of Gad’s-hill Dickens used to
stare even as a boy with the steady purpose of
some day making it his own. It is characteristic
of the consistency which underlies the superficially<span class="pagenum" id="Page_30">30</span>
erratic career of Dickens that he actually did live
to make it his own. The truth is that he was a
precocious child, precocious not only on the more
poetical but on the more prosaic side of life. He
was ambitious as well as enthusiastic. No one can
ever know what visions they were that crowded
into the head of the clever little brat as he ran
about the streets of Chatham or stood glowering
at Gad’s-hill. But I think that quite mundane
visions had a very considerable share in the matter.
He longed to go to school (a strange wish), to go
to college, to make a name, nor did he merely
aspire to these things; the great number of them
he also expected. He regarded himself as a child
of good position just about to enter on a life of
good luck. He thought his home and family a
very good spring-board or jumping-off place from
which to fling himself to the positions which he
desired to reach. And almost as he was about
to spring the whole structure broke under him,
and he and all that belonged to him disappeared
into a darkness far below.</p>
<p>Everything had been struck down as with the
finality of a thunder-bolt. His lordly father was
a bankrupt, and in the Marshalsea prison. His
mother was in a mean home in the north of London,
wildly proclaiming herself the principal of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_31">31</span>
a girl’s school, a girl’s school to which nobody
would go. And he himself, the conqueror of the
world and the prospective purchaser of Gads-hill,
passed some distracted and bewildering days in
pawning the household necessities to Fagins in foul
shops, and then found himself somehow or other
one of a row of ragged boys in a great dreary
factory, pasting the same kinds of labels on to the
same kinds of blacking bottles from morning till
night.</p>
<p>Although it seemed sudden enough to him, the
disintegration had, as a matter of fact, of course,
been going on for a long time. He had only heard
from his father dark and melodramatic allusions
to a “deed” which, from the way it was mentioned,
might have been a claim to the crown or
a compact with the devil, but which was in truth
an unsuccessful documentary attempt on the part
of John Dickens to come to a composition with
his creditors. And now, in the lurid light of his
sunset, the character of John Dickens began to
take on those purple colours which have made
him under another name absurd and immortal. It
required a tragedy to bring out this man’s comedy.
So long as John Dickens was in easy circumstances,
he seemed only an easy man, a little long
and luxuriant in his phrases, a little careless in<span class="pagenum" id="Page_32">32</span>
his business routine. He seemed only a wordy
man, who lived on bread and beef like his neighbours;
but as bread and beef were successively
taken away from him, it was discovered that he
lived on words. For him to be involved in a
calamity only meant to be cast for the first part
in a tragedy. For him blank ruin was only a
subject for blank verse. Henceforth we feel
scarcely inclined to call him John Dickens at all;
we feel inclined to call him by the name through
which his son celebrated this preposterous and sublime
victory of the human spirit over circumstances.
Dickens, in “David Copperfield,” called
him Wilkins Micawber. In his personal correspondence
he called him the Prodigal Father.</p>
<p>Young Charles had been hurriedly flung into the
factory by the more or less careless good-nature
of James Lamert, a relation of his mother’s; it
was a blacking factory, supposed to be run as a
rival to Warren’s by another and “original”
Warren, both practically conducted by another of
the Lamerts. It was situated near Hungerford
Market. Dickens worked there drearily, like one
stunned with disappointment. To a child excessively
intellectualized, and at this time, I fear,
excessively egotistical, the coarseness of the whole
thing—the work, the rooms, the boys, the language—was<span class="pagenum" id="Page_33">33</span>
a sort of bestial nightmare. Not only
did he scarcely speak of it then, but he scarcely
spoke of it afterwards. Years later, in the fulness
of his fame, he heard from Forster that a man
had spoken of knowing him. On hearing the
name, he somewhat curtly acknowledged it, and
spoke of having seen the man once. Forster, in
his innocence, answered that the man said he had
seen Dickens many times in a factory by Hungerford
Market. Dickens was suddenly struck with
a long and extraordinary silence. Then he invited
Forster, as his best friend, to a particular interview,
and, with every appearance of difficulty and
distress, told him the whole story for the first and
the last time. A long while after that he told the
world some part of the matter in the account of
Murdstone and Grinby’s in “David Copperfield.”
He never spoke of the whole experience except
once or twice, and he never spoke of it otherwise
than as a man might speak of hell.</p>
<p>It need not be suggested, I think, that this
agony in the child was exaggerated by the man.
It is true that he was not incapable of the vice of
exaggeration, if it be a vice. There was about
him much vanity and a certain virulence in his
version of many things. Upon the whole, indeed,
it would hardly be too much to say that he would<span class="pagenum" id="Page_34">34</span>
have exaggerated any sorrow he talked about.
But this was a sorrow with a very strange position
in Dickens’s life; it was a sorrow he did not talk
about. Upon this particular dark spot he kept a
sort of deadly silence for twenty years. An accident
revealed part of the truth to the dearest
of all his friends. He then told the whole truth
to the dearest of all his friends. He never told
anybody else. I do not think that this arose from
any social sense of disgrace; if he had it slightly
at the time, he was far too self-satisfied a man to
have taken it seriously in after life. I really think
that his pain at this time was so real and ugly that
the thought of it filled him with that sort of
impersonal but unbearable shame with which we
are filled, for instance, by the notion of physical
torture, of something that humiliates humanity.
He felt that such agony was something obscene.
Moreover there are two other good reasons for
thinking that his sense of hopelessness was very
genuine. First of all, this starless outlook is common
in the calamities of boyhood. The bitterness
of boyish distresses does not lie in the fact that
they are large; it lies in the fact that we do not
know that they are small. About any early disaster
there is a dreadful finality; a lost child can
suffer like a lost soul.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_35">35</span></p>
<p>It is currently said that hope goes with youth,
and lends to youth its wings of a butterfly; but
I fancy that hope is the last gift given to man, and
the only gift not given to youth. Youth is pre-eminently
the period in which a man can be lyric,
fanatical, poetic; but youth is the period in which
a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode
is the end of the world. But the power of hoping
through everything, the knowledge that the soul
survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes
to the middle-aged; God has kept that good wine
until now. It is from the backs of the elderly
gentlemen that the wings of the butterfly should
burst. There is nothing that so much mystifies
the young as the consistent frivolity of the old.
They have discovered their indestructibility. They
are in their second and clearer childhood, and
there is a meaning in the merriment of their eyes.
They have seen the end of the End of the World.</p>
<p>First, then, the desolate finality of Dickens’s
childish mood makes me think it was a real one.
And there is another thing to be remembered.
Dickens was not a saintly child after the style
of Little Dorrit or Little Nell. He had not,
at this time at any rate, set his heart wholly upon
higher things, even upon things such as personal
tenderness or loyalty. He had been, and was,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_36">36</span>
unless I am very much mistaken, sincerely, stubbornly,
bitterly ambitious. He had, I fancy, a
fairly clear idea previous to the downfall of all
his family’s hopes of what he wanted to do in
the world, and of the mark that he meant to make
there. In no dishonourable sense, but still in a
definite sense he might, in early life, be called
worldly; and the children of this world are in their
generation infinitely more sensitive than the children
of light. A saint after repentance will forgive
himself for a sin; a man about town will never
forgive himself for a <i xml:lang="fr" lang="fr">faux pas</i>. There are ways
of getting absolved for murder; there are no ways
of getting absolved for upsetting the soup. This
thin-skinned quality in all very mundane people
is a thing too little remembered; and it must not
be wholly forgotten in connection with a clever,
restless lad who dreamed of a destiny. That part
of his distress which concerned himself and his
social standing was among the other parts of it
the least noble; but perhaps it was the most painful.
For pride is not only (as the modern world
fails to understand) a sin to be condemned; it is
also (as it understands even less) a weakness to
be very much commiserated. A very vitalizing
touch is given in one of his own reminiscences.
His most unendurable moment did not come in any<span class="pagenum" id="Page_37">37</span>
bullying in the factory or any famine in the streets.
It came when he went to see his sister Fanny
take a prize at the Royal Academy of Music. “I
could not bear to think of myself—beyond the
reach of all such honourable emulation and success.
The tears ran down my face. I felt as if my heart
were rent. I prayed when I went to bed that night
to be lifted out of the humiliation and neglect in
which I was. I never had suffered so much before.
There was no envy in this.” I do not think that
there was, though the poor little wretch could
hardly have been blamed if there had been. There
was only a furious sense of frustration; a spirit
like a wild beast in a cage. It was only a small
matter in the external and obvious sense; it was
only Dickens prevented from being Dickens.</p>
<p>If we put these facts together, that the tragedy
seemed final, and that the tragedy was concerned
with the supersensitive matters of the ego and
the gentleman, I think we can imagine a pretty
genuine case of internal depression. And when
we add to the case of the internal depression the
case of the external oppression, the case of the
material circumstances by which he was surrounded,
we have reached a sort of midnight. All
day he worked on insufficient food at a factory.
It is sufficient to say that it afterwards appeared<span class="pagenum" id="Page_38">38</span>
in his works as Murdstone and Grinby’s. At
night he returned disconsolately to a lodging-house
for such lads, kept by an old lady. It is sufficient
to say that she appeared afterwards as Mrs. Pipchin.
Once a week only he saw anybody for whom
he cared a straw; that was when he went to the
Marshalsea prison, and that gave his juvenile
pride, half manly and half snobbish, bitter annoyance
of another kind. Add to this, finally, that
physically he was always very weak and never
very well. Once he was struck down in the middle
of his work with sudden bodily pain. The boy
who worked next to him, a coarse and heavy lad
named Bob Fagin, who had often attacked Dickens
on the not unreasonable ground of his being
a “gentleman,” suddenly showed that enduring
sanity of compassion which Dickens was destined
to show so often in the characters of the common
and unclean. Fagin made a bed for his sick companion
out of the straw in the workroom, and
filled empty blacking bottles with hot water all
day. When the evening came, and Dickens was
somewhat recovered, Bob Fagin insisted on escorting
the boy home to his father. The situation
was as poignant as a sort of tragic farce.
Fagin in his wooden-headed chivalry would have
died in order to take Dickens to his family; Dickens<span class="pagenum" id="Page_39">39</span>
in his bitter gentility would have died rather
than let Fagin know that his family were in the
Marshalsea. So these two young idiots tramped
the tedious streets, both stubborn, both suffering
for an idea. The advantage certainly was with
Fagin, who was suffering for a Christian compassion,
while Dickens was suffering for a pagan
pride. At last Dickens flung off his friend with
desperate farewell and thanks, and dashed up the
steps of a strange house on the Surrey side. He
knocked and rang as Bob Fagin, his benefactor
and his incubus, disappeared round the corner.
And when the servant came to open the door, he
asked, apparently with gravity, whether Mr. Robert
Fagin lived there. It is a strange touch. The
immortal Dickens woke in him for an instant in
that last wild joke of that weary evening. Next
morning, however, he was again well enough to
make himself ill again, and the wheels of the
great factory went on. They manufactured a
number of bottles of Warren’s Blacking, and in
the course of the process they manufactured also
the greatest optimist of the nineteenth century.</p>
<p>This boy who dropped down groaning at his
work, who was hungry four or five times a week,
whose best feelings and worst feelings were alike
flayed alive, was the man on whom two generations<span class="pagenum" id="Page_40">40</span>
of comfortable critics have visited the complaint
that his view of life was too rosy to be
anything but unreal. Afterwards, and in its
proper place, I shall speak of what is called the
optimism of Dickens, and of whether it was really
too cheerful or too smooth. But this boyhood
of his may be recorded now as a mere fact. If
he was too happy, this was where he learnt it.
If his school of thought was a vulgar optimism,
this is where he went to school. If he learnt to
whitewash the universe, it was in a blacking factory
that he learnt it.</p>
<p>As a fact, there is no shred of evidence to show
that those who have had sad experiences tend to
have a sad philosophy. There are numberless
points upon which Dickens is spiritually at one
with the poor, that is, with the great mass of mankind.
But there is no point in which he is more
perfectly at one with them than in showing that
there is no kind of connection between a man being
unhappy and a man being pessimistic. Sorrow and
pessimism are indeed, in a sense, opposite things,
since sorrow is founded on the value of something,
and pessimism upon the value of nothing. And
in practice we find that those poets or political
leaders who come from the people, and whose experiences
have really been searching and cruel, are<span class="pagenum" id="Page_41">41</span>
the most sanguine people in the world. These
men out of the old agony are always optimists;
they are sometimes offensive optimists. A man
like Robert Burns, whose father (like Dickens’s
father) goes bankrupt, whose whole life is a struggle
against miserable external powers and internal
weaknesses yet more miserable—a man whose life
begins grey and ends black—Burns does not
merely sing about the goodness of life, he positively
rants and cants about it. Rousseau, whom
all his friends and acquaintances treated almost
as badly as he treated them—Rousseau does not
grow merely eloquent, he grows gushing and sentimental,
about the inherent goodness of human
nature. Charles Dickens, who was most miserable
at the receptive age when most people are
most happy, is afterwards happy when all men
weep. Circumstances break men’s bones; it has
never been shown that they break men’s optimism.
These great popular leaders do all kinds of desperate
things under the immediate scourge of
tragedy. They become drunkards; they become
demagogues; they become morpho-maniacs. They
never become pessimists. Most unquestionably
there are ragged and unhappy men whom we could
easily understand being pessimists. But as a matter
of fact they are not pessimists. Most unquestionably<span class="pagenum" id="Page_42">42</span>
there are whole dim hordes of humanity
whom we should promptly pardon if they cursed
God. But they don’t. The pessimists are aristocrats
like Byron; the men who curse God are
aristocrats like Swinburne. But when those who
starve and suffer speak for a moment, they do not
profess merely an optimism, they profess a cheap
optimism; they are too poor to afford a dear one.
They cannot indulge in any detailed or merely
logical defence of life; that would be to delay
the enjoyment of it. These higher optimists, of
whom Dickens was one, do not approve of the
universe; they do not even admire the universe;
they fall in love with it. They embrace life too
closely to criticize or even to see it. Existence to
such men has the wild beauty of a woman, and
those love her with most intensity who love her
with least cause.</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_43">43</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="toclink_43">CHAPTER III<br />
<span class="subhead">THE YOUTH OF DICKENS</span></h2>
</div>
<p class="in0"><span class="firstword">There</span> are popular phrases so picturesque that
even when they are intentionally funny they are
unintentionally poetical. I remember, to take one
instance out of many, hearing a heated Secularist
in Hyde Park apply to some parson or other the
exquisite expression, “a sky-pilot.” Subsequent
inquiry has taught me that the term is intended
to be comic and even contemptuous; but in that
first freshness of it I went home repeating it to
myself like a new poem. Few of the pious legends
have conceived so strange and yet celestial a picture
as this of the pilot in the sky, leaning on his
helm above the empty heavens, and carrying his
cargo of souls higher than the loneliest cloud.
The phrase is like a lyric of Shelley. Or, to take
another instance from another language, the
French have an incomparable idiom for a boy
playing truant: “Il fait l’école buissonnière”—he
goes to the bushy school, or the school among the
bushes. How admirably this accidental expression,
“the bushy school” (not to be lightly confounded<span class="pagenum" id="Page_44">44</span>
with the Art School at Bushey)—how
admirably this “bushy school” expresses half the
modern notions of a more natural education! The
two words express the whole poetry of Wordsworth,
the whole philosophy of Thoreau, and are
quite as good literature as either.</p>
<p>Now, among a million of such scraps of inspired
slang there is one which describes a certain
side of Dickens better than pages of explanation.
The phrase, appropriately enough, occurs at least
once in his works, and that on a fitting occasion.
When Job Trotter is sent by Sam on a wild chase
after Mr. Perker, the solicitor, Mr. Perker’s clerk
condoles with Job upon the lateness of the hour,
and the fact that all habitable places are shut up.
“My friend,” says Mr. Perker’s clerk, “you’ve
got the key of the street.” Mr. Perker’s clerk,
who was a flippant and scornful young man, may
perhaps be pardoned if he used this expression in
a flippant and scornful sense; but let us hope that
Dickens did not. Let us hope that Dickens saw
the strange, yet satisfying, imaginative justice of
the words; for Dickens himself had, in the most
sacred and serious sense of the term, the key of the
street. When we shut out anything, we are shut
out of that thing. When we shut out the street,
we are shut out of the street. Few of us understand<span class="pagenum" id="Page_45">45</span>
the street. Even when we step into it, we
step into it doubtfully, as into a house or room of
strangers. Few of us see through the shining
riddle of the street, the strange folk that belong
to the street only—the street-walker or the street
arab, the nomads who, generation after generation,
have kept their ancient secrets in the full
blaze of the sun. Of the street at night many of
us know even less. The street at night is a great
house locked up. But Dickens had, if ever man
had, the key of the street. His earth was the
stones of the street; his stars were the lamps of
the street; his hero was the man in the street. He
could open the inmost door of his house—the door
that leads into that secret passage which is lined
with houses and roofed with stars.</p>
<p>This silent transformation into a citizen of the
street took place during those dark days of boyhood,
when Dickens was drudging at the factory.
Whenever he had done drudging, he had no other
resource but drifting, and he drifted over half
London. He was a dreamy child, thinking mostly
of his own dreary prospects. Yet he saw and
remembered much of the streets and squares he
passed. Indeed, as a matter of fact, he went the
right way to work unconsciously to do so. He
did not go in for “observation,” a priggish habit;<span class="pagenum" id="Page_46">46</span>
he did not look at Charing Cross to improve his
mind or count the lamp-posts in Holborn to practise
his arithmetic. But unconsciously he made
all these places the scenes of the monstrous drama
in his miserable little soul. He walked in darkness
under the lamps of Holborn, and was crucified
at Charing Cross. So for him ever afterwards
these places had the beauty that only belongs
to battlefields. For our memory never fixes
the facts which we have merely observed. The
only way to remember a place for ever is to live
in the place for an hour; and the only way to live
in the place for an hour is to forget the place for
an hour. The undying scenes we can all see if
we shut our eyes are not the scenes that we have
stared at under the direction of guide-books; the
scenes we see are the scenes at which we did not
look at all—the scenes in which we walked when
we were thinking about something else—about a
sin, or a love affair, or some childish sorrow. We
can see the background now because we did not
see it then. So Dickens did not stamp these places
on his mind; he stamped his mind on these places.
For him ever afterwards these streets were mortally
romantic; they were dipped in the purple
dyes of youth and its tragedy, and rich with irrevocable
sunsets.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_47">47</span></p>
<p>Herein is the whole secret of that eerie realism
with which Dickens could always vitalize some
dark or dull corner of London. There are details
in the Dickens descriptions—a window, or a railing,
or the keyhole of a door—which he endows
with demoniac life. The things seem more actual
than things really are. Indeed, that degree of
realism does not exist in reality: it is the unbearable
realism of a dream. And this kind of realism
can only be gained by walking dreamily in a
place; it cannot be gained by walking observantly.
Dickens himself has given a perfect instance of
how these nightmare minutiæ grew upon him in
his trance of abstraction. He mentions among the
coffee-shops into which he crept in those wretched
days “one in St. Martin’s Lane, of which I only
recollect that it stood near the church, and that
in the door there was an oval glass plate with
‘COFFEE ROOM’ painted on it, addressed
towards the street. If I ever find myself in a very
different kind of coffee-room now, but where there
is such an inscription on glass, and read it backwards
on the wrong side, MOOR EEFFOC (as
I often used to do then in a dismal reverie), a
shock goes through my blood.” That wild word,
“Moor Eeffoc,” is the motto of all effective realism!
it is the masterpiece of the good realistic<span class="pagenum" id="Page_48">48</span>
principle—the principle that the most fantastic
thing of all is often the precise fact. And that
elvish kind of realism Dickens adopted everywhere.
His world was alive with inanimate objects.
The date on the door danced over Mr.
Grewgius, the knocker grinned at Mr. Scrooge,
the Roman on the ceiling pointed down at Mr.
Tulkinghorn, the elderly armchair leered at Tom
Smart—these are all <em>moor eeffocish</em> things. A
man sees them because he does not look at them.</p>
<p>And so the little Dickens Dickensized London.
He prepared the way for all his personages. Into
whatever cranny of our city his characters might
crawl, Dickens had been there before them. However
wild were the events he narrated as outside
him, they could not be wilder than the things that
had gone on within. However queer a character
of Dickens might be, he could hardly be queerer
than Dickens was. The whole secret of his after-writings
is sealed up in those silent years of which
no written word remains. Those years did him
harm perhaps, as his biographer, Forster, has
thoughtfully suggested, by sharpening a certain
fierce individualism in him which once or twice
during his genial life flashed like a half-hidden
knife. He was always generous; but things had
gone too hardly with him for him to be always<span class="pagenum" id="Page_49">49</span>
easy-going. He was always kind-hearted; he was
not always good-humoured. Those years may
also, in their strange mixture of morbidity and
reality, have increased in him his tendency to exaggeration.
But we can scarcely lament this in
a literary sense; exaggeration is almost the definition
of art—and it is entirely the definition of
Dickens’s art. Those years may have given him
many moral and mental wounds, from which he
never recovered. But they gave him the key of
the street.</p>
<p>There is a weird contradiction in the soul of
the born optimist. He can be happy and unhappy
at the same time. With Dickens the practical
depression of his life at this time did nothing to
prevent him from laying up those hilarious memories
of which all his books are made. No doubt
he was genuinely unhappy in the poor place where
his mother kept school. Nevertheless it was there
that he noticed the unfathomable quaintness of the
little servant whom he made into the Marchioness.
No doubt he was comfortless enough at the boarding-house
of Mrs. Roylance; but he perceived
with a dreadful joy that Mrs. Roylance’s name
was Pipchin. There seems to be no incompatibility
between taking in tragedy and giving out
comedy; they are able to run parallel in the same<span class="pagenum" id="Page_50">50</span>
personality. One incident which he described in
his unfinished “autobiography,” and which he
afterwards transferred almost verbatim to David
Copperfield, was peculiarly rich and impressive.
It was the inauguration of a petition to the King
for a bounty, drawn up by a committee of the
prisoners in the Marshalsea, a committee of which
Dickens’s father was the president, no doubt in
virtue of his oratory, and also the scribe, no doubt
in virtue of his genuine love of literary flights.</p>
<p>“As many of the principal officers of this body
as could be got into a small room without filling
it up, supported him in front of the petition; and
my old friend, Captain Porter (who had washed
himself to do honour to so solemn an occasion),
stationed himself close to it, to read it to all who
were unacquainted with its contents. The door
was then thrown open, and they began to come in
in a long file; several waiting on the landing outside,
while one entered, affixed his signature, and
went out. To everybody in succession Captain
Porter said, ‘Would you like to hear it read’?
If he weakly showed the least disposition to hear
it, Captain Porter in a loud, sonorous voice gave
him every word of it. I remember a certain
luscious roll he gave to such words as ‘Majesty—Gracious
Majesty—Your Gracious Majesty’s unfortunate<span class="pagenum" id="Page_51">51</span>
subjects—Your Majesty’s well-known
munificence,’ as if the words were something real
in his mouth and delicious to taste: my poor father
meanwhile listening with a little of an author’s
vanity and contemplating (not severely) the spike
on the opposite wall. Whatever was comical or
pathetic in this scene, I sincerely believe I perceived
in my corner, whether I demonstrated it
or not, quite as well as I should perceive it now.
I made out my own little character and story for
every man who put his name to the sheet of
paper.”</p>
<p>Here we see very plainly that Dickens did not
merely look back in after days and see that these
humours had been delightful. He was delighted
at the same moment that he was desperate. The
two opposite things existed in him simultaneously,
and each in its full strength. His soul was not a
mixed colour like grey and purple, caused by no
component colour being quite itself. His soul was
like a shot silk of black and crimson, a shot silk of
misery and joy.</p>
<p>Seen from the outside, his little pleasures and
extravagances seem more pathetic than his grief.
Once the solemn little figure went into a public-house
in Parliament Street, and addressed the man
behind the bar in the following terms—“What is<span class="pagenum" id="Page_52">52</span>
your very best—the VERY <em>best</em> ale a glass?”
The man replied, “Twopence.” “Then,” said
the infant, “just draw me a glass of that, if you
please, with a good head to it.” “The landlord,”
says Dickens, in telling the story, “looked at me
in return over the bar from head to foot with a
strange smile on his face; instead of drawing the
beer looked round the screen and said something
to his wife, who came out from behind it with her
work in her hand and joined him in surveying me....
They asked me a good many questions as to
what my name was, how old I was, where I lived,
how I was employed, etc., etc. To all of which,
that I might commit nobody, I invented appropriate
answers. They served me with the ale, though
I suspect it was not the strongest on the premises;
and the landlord’s wife, opening the little half-door,
and bending down, gave me a kiss.” Here
he touches that other side of common life which
he was chiefly to champion; he was to show that
there is no ale like the ale of a poor man’s festival,
and no pleasures like the pleasures of the poor.
At other places of refreshment he was yet more
majestic. “I remember,” he says, “tucking my
own bread (which I had brought from home in the
morning) under my arm, wrapt up in a piece of
paper like a book, and going into the best dining-room<span class="pagenum" id="Page_53">53</span>
in Johnson’s Alamode Beef House in Clare
Court, Drury Lane, and magnificently ordering a
small plate of <i xml:lang="fr" lang="fr">à-la-mode</i> beef to eat with it. What
the waiter thought of such a strange little apparition
coming in all alone I don’t know; but I can
see him now staring at me as I ate my dinner, and
bringing up the other waiter to look. I gave him
a halfpenny, and I wish, now, that he hadn’t
taken it.”</p>
<p>For the boy individually the prospect seemed
to be growing drearier and drearier. This phrase
indeed hardly expresses the fact; for, as he felt it,
it was not so much a run of worsening luck as the
closing in of a certain and quiet calamity like the
coming on of twilight and dark. He felt that he
would die and be buried in blacking. Through
all this he does not seem to have said much to his
parents of his distress. They who were in prison
had certainly a much jollier time than he who was
free. But of all the strange ways in which the
human being proves that he is not a rational being,
whatever else he is, no case is so mysterious and
unaccountable as the secrecy of childhood. We
learn of the cruelty of some school or child-factory
from journalists; we learn it from inspectors, we
learn it from doctors, we learn it even from shame-stricken
schoolmasters and repentant sweaters; but<span class="pagenum" id="Page_54">54</span>
we never learn it from the children; we never
learn it from the victims. It would seem as if a
living creature had to be taught, like an art of
culture, the art of crying out when it is hurt. It
would seem as if patience were the natural thing;
it would seem as if impatience were an accomplishment
like whist. However this may be, it is wholly
certain that Dickens might have drudged and died
drudging, and buried the unborn Pickwick, but
for an external accident.</p>
<p>He was, as has been said, in the habit of visiting
his father at the Marshalsea every week. The
talks between the two must have been a comedy,
at once more cruel and more delicate than Dickens
ever described. Meredith might picture the comparison
between the child whose troubles were so
childish, but who felt them like a damned spirit,
and the middle-aged man whose trouble was final
ruin, and who felt it no more than a baby. Once,
it would appear, the boy broke down altogether—perhaps
under the unbearable buoyancy of his oratorical
papa—and implored to be freed from the
factory—implored it, I fear, with a precocious and
almost horrible eloquence. The old optimist was
astounded—too much astounded to do anything in
particular. Whether the incident had really anything
to do with what followed cannot be decided,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_55">55</span>
but ostensibly it had not. Ostensibly the cause of
Charles’s ultimate liberation was a quarrel between
his father and Lamert, the head of the factory.
Dickens the elder (who had at last left the Marshalsea)
could no doubt conduct a quarrel with the
magnificence of Micawber; the result of this talent,
at any rate, was to leave Mr. Lamert in a towering
rage. He had a stormy interview with Charles,
in which he tried to be good-tempered to the boy,
but could hardly master his tongue about the boy’s
father. Finally he told him he must go, and with
every observance the little creature was solemnly
expelled from hell.</p>
<p>His mother, with a touch of strange harshness,
was for patching up the quarrel and sending him
back. Perhaps, with the fierce feminine responsibility,
she felt that the first necessity was to keep
the family out of debt. But old John Dickens put
his foot down here—put his foot down with that
ringing but very rare decision with which (once in
ten years, and often on some trivial matter) the
weakest man will overwhelm the strongest woman.
The boy was miserable; the boy was clever; the
boy should go to school. The boy went to school;
he went to the Wellington House Academy, Mornington
Place. It was an odd experience for any
one to go from the world to a school, instead of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_56">56</span>
going from school to the world. Dickens, we
may say, had his boyhood after his youth. He
had seen life at its coarsest before he began his
training for it, and knew the worst words in the
English language probably before the best. This
odd chronology, it will be remembered, he retained
in his semi-autobiographical account of the adventures
of David Copperfield, who went into the
business of Murdstone and Grinby’s before he
went to the school kept by Dr. Strong. David
Copperfield, also, went to be carefully prepared
for a world that he had seen already. Outside
David Copperfield, the records of Dickens at this
time reduce themselves to a few glimpses provided
by accidental companions of his schooldays,
and little can be deduced from them about his
personality beyond a general impression of sharpness
and, perhaps, of bravado, of bright eyes and
bright speeches. Probably the young creature was
recuperating himself for his misfortunes, was making
the most of his liberty, was flapping the wings
of that wild spirit that had just not been broken.
We hear of things that sound suddenly juvenile
after his maturer troubles, of a secret language
sounding like mere gibberish, and of a small theatre,
with paint and red fire, such as that which
Stevenson loved. It was not an accident that<span class="pagenum" id="Page_57">57</span>
Dickens and Stevenson loved it. It is a stage unsuited
for psychological realism; the cardboard
characters cannot analyze each other with any effect.
But it is a stage almost divinely suited for
making surroundings, for making that situation
and background which belong peculiarly to romance.
A toy theatre, in fact, is the opposite of
private theatricals. In the latter you can do anything
with the people if you do not ask much from
the scenery; in the former you can do anything in
scenery if you do not ask much from the people.
In a toy theatre you could hardly manage a modern
dialogue on marriage, but the Day of Judgment
would be quite easy.</p>
<p>After leaving school, Dickens found employment
as a clerk to Mr. Blackmore, a solicitor, as
one of those inconspicuous under-clerks whom he
afterwards turned to many grotesque uses. Here,
no doubt, he met Lowten and Swiveller, Chuckster
and Wobbler, in so far as such sacred creatures
ever had embodiments on this lower earth. But
it is typical of him that he had no fancy at all to
remain a solicitor’s clerk. The resolution to rise
which had glowed in him even as a dawdling boy,
when he gazed at Gad’s-hill, which had been
darkened but not quite destroyed by his fall into
the factory routine, which had been released again<span class="pagenum" id="Page_58">58</span>
by his return to normal boyhood and the boundaries
of school, was not likely to content itself now
with the copying out of agreements. He set to
work, without any advice or help, to learn to be a
reporter. He worked all day at law, and then
all night at shorthand. It is an art which can only
be effected by time, and he had to effect it by overtime.
But learning the thing under every disadvantage,
without a teacher, without the possibility
of concentration or complete mental force, without
ordinary human sleep, he made himself one of the
most rapid reporters then alive. There is a curious
contrast between the casualness of the mental
training to which his parents and others subjected
him and the savage seriousness of the training to
which he subjected himself. Somebody once asked
old John Dickens where his son Charles was educated.
“Well, really,” said the great creature, in
his spacious way, “he may be said—ah—to have
educated himself.” He might indeed.</p>
<p>This practical intensity of Dickens is worth our
dwelling on, because it illustrates an elementary
antithesis in his character, or what appears as an
antithesis in our modern popular psychology. We
are always talking about strong men against weak
men; but Dickens was not only both a weak man
and a strong man, he was a very weak man and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_59">59</span>
also a very strong man. He was everything that
we currently call a weak man; he was a man hung
on wires; he was a man who might at any moment
cry like a child; he was so sensitive to criticism
that one may say that he lacked a skin; he was so
nervous that he allowed great tragedies in his life
to arise only out of nerves. But in the matter
where all ordinary strong men are miserably weak—in
the matter of concentrated toil and clear purpose
and unconquerable worldly courage—he was
like a straight sword. Mrs. Carlyle, who in her
human epithets often hit the right nail so that it
rang, said of him once, “He has a face made of
steel.” This was probably felt in a flash when she
saw, in some social crowd, the clear, eager face of
Dickens cutting through those near him like a
knife. Any people who had met him from year to
year would each year have found a man weakly
troubled about his worldly decline; and each year
they would have found him higher up in the world.
His was a character very hard for any man of
slow and placable temperament to understand; he
was the character whom anybody can hurt and nobody
can kill.</p>
<p>When he began to report in the House of Commons
he was still only nineteen. His father, who
had been released from his prison a short time<span class="pagenum" id="Page_60">60</span>
before Charles had been released from his, had
also become, among many other things, a reporter.
But old John Dickens could enjoy doing anything
without any particular aspiration after doing it
well. But Charles was of a very different temper.
He was, as I have said, consumed with an enduring
and almost angry thirst to excel. He learnt
shorthand with a dark self-devotion as if it were
a sacred hieroglyph. Of this self-instruction, as
of everything else, he has left humorous and illuminating
phrases. He describes how, after he had
learnt the whole exact alphabet, “there then appeared
a procession of new horrors, called arbitrary
characters—the most despotic characters I
have ever known; who insisted, for instance, that
a thing like the beginning of a cobweb meant
‘expectation,’ and that a pen-and-ink skyrocket
stood for ‘disadvantageous.’” He concludes, “It
was almost heartbreaking.” But it is significant
that somebody else, a colleague of his, concluded,
“There never <em>was</em> such a shorthand writer.”</p>
<p>Dickens succeeded in becoming a shorthand
writer; succeeded in becoming a reporter; succeeded
ultimately in becoming a highly effective
journalist. He was appointed as a reporter of the
speeches in Parliament, first by <i>The True Sun</i>, then
by <i>The Mirror of Parliament</i>, and last by <i>The<span class="pagenum" id="Page_61">61</span>
Morning Chronicle</i>. He reported the speeches
very well, and if we must analyze his internal
opinions, much better than they deserved. For it
must be remembered that this lad went into the
reporter’s gallery full of the triumphant Radicalism
which was then the rising tide of the world.
He was, it must be confessed, very little overpowered
by the dignity of the Mother of Parliaments:
he regarded the House of Commons much as he
regarded the House of Lords, as a sort of venerable
joke. It was, perhaps, while he watched, pale
with weariness from the reporter’s gallery, that
there sank into him a thing that never left him,
his unfathomable contempt for the British Constitution.
Then perhaps he heard from the Government
benches the immortal apologies of the
Circumlocution Office. “Then would the noble
lord or right honourable gentleman, in whose
department it was to defend the Circumlocution
Office, put an orange in his pocket, and make a
regular field-day of the occasion. Then would he
come down to that house with a slap upon the table
and meet the honourable gentleman foot to foot.
Then would he be there to tell that honourable
gentleman that the Circumlocution Office was not
only blameless in this matter, but was commendable
in this matter, was extollable to the skies in<span class="pagenum" id="Page_62">62</span>
this matter. Then would he be there to tell that
honourable gentleman that although the Circumlocution
Office was invariably right, and wholly
right, it never was so right as in this matter. Then
would he be there to tell the honourable gentleman
that it would have been more to his honour,
more to his credit, more to his good taste, more
to his good sense, more to half the dictionary of
common-places if he had left the Circumlocution
Office alone and never approached this matter.
Then would he keep one eye upon a coach or
crammer from the Circumlocution Office below the
bar, and smash the honourable gentleman with the
Circumlocution Office account of this matter. And
although one of two things always happened;
namely, either that the Circumlocution Office had
nothing to say, and said it, or that it had something
to say of which the noble lord or right honourable
gentleman blundered one half and forgot
the other; the Circumlocution Office was always
voted immaculate by an accommodating majority.”
We are now generally told that Dickens has destroyed
these abuses, and that this is no longer a
true picture of public life. Such, at any rate, is
the Circumlocution Office account of this matter.
But Dickens as a good Radical would, I fancy,
much prefer that we should continue his battle<span class="pagenum" id="Page_63">63</span>
than that we should celebrate his triumph; especially
when it has not come. England is still ruled
by the great Barnacle family. Parliament is still
ruled by the great Barnacle trinity—the solemn
old Barnacle, who knew that the Circumlocution
Office was a protection, the sprightly young Barnacle
who knew that it was a fraud, and the bewildered
young Barnacle who knew nothing about
it. From these three types our Cabinets are still
exclusively recruited. People talk of the tyrannies
and anomalies which Dickens denounced as things
of the past like the Star Chamber. They believe
that the days of the old stupid optimism and the
old brutal indifference are gone for ever. In truth,
this very belief is only the continuance of the old
stupid optimism and the old brutal indifference.
We believe in a free England and a pure England,
because we still believe in the Circumlocution
Office account of this matter. Undoubtedly our
serenity is wide-spread. We believe that England
is really reformed, we believe that England is
really democratic, we believe that English politics
are free from corruption. But this general satisfaction
of ours does not show that Dickens has
beaten the Barnacles. It only shows that the
Barnacles have beaten Dickens.</p>
<p>It cannot be too often said, then, that we must<span class="pagenum" id="Page_64">64</span>
read into young Dickens and his works this old
Radical tone towards institutions. That tone was
a sort of happy impatience. And when Dickens
had to listen for hours to the speech of the noble
lord in defence of the Circumlocution Office, when,
that is, he had to listen to what he regarded as the
last vaporings of a vanishing oligarchy, the impatience
rather predominated over the happiness.
His incurably restless nature found more pleasure
in the wandering side of journalism. He went
about wildly in post-chaises to report political
meetings for the <i>Morning Chronicle</i>. “And what
gentlemen they were to serve,” he exclaimed, “in
such things at the old <i>Morning Chronicle</i>. Great
or small it did not matter. I have had to charge
for half a dozen breakdowns in half a dozen times
as many miles. I have had to charge for the damage
of a great-coat from the drippings of a blazing
wax candle, in writing through the smallest
hours of the night in a swift flying carriage and
pair.” And again, “I have often transcribed for
the printer from my shorthand notes important
public speeches in which the strictest accuracy was
required, and a mistake in which would have been
to a young man severely compromising, writing
on the palm of my hand, by the light of a dark
lantern, in a post-chaise and four, galloping<span class="pagenum" id="Page_65">65</span>
through a wild country and through the dead of
the night, at the then surprising rate of fifteen
miles an hour.” The whole of Dickens’s life goes
with the throb of that nocturnal gallop. All its
real wildness shot through with an imaginative
wickedness he afterwards uttered in the drive of
Jonas Chuzzlewit through the storm.</p>
<p>All this time, and indeed from a time of which
no measure can be taken, the creative part of his
mind had been in a stir or even a fever. While
still a small boy he had written for his own amusement
some sketches of queer people he had met;
notably, one of his uncle’s barber, whose principal
hobby was pointing out what Napoleon ought to
have done in the matter of military tactics. He
had a note-book full of such sketches. He had
sketches not only of persons, but of places which
were to him almost more personal than persons.
In the December of 1833 he published one of these
fragments in the <i>Old Monthly Magazine</i>. This
was followed by nine others in the same paper, and
when the paper (which was a romantically Radical
venture, run by a veteran soldier of Bolivar) itself
collapsed, Dickens continued the series in the
<i>Evening Chronicle</i>, an off-shoot of the morning
paper of the same name. These were the pieces
afterwards published and known as the “Sketches<span class="pagenum" id="Page_66">66</span>
by Boz”; and with them Dickens enters literature.
He also enters many other things about this time;
he enters manhood, and among other things marriage.
A friend of his on the <i>Chronicle</i>, George
Hogarth, had several daughters. With all of
them Dickens appears to have been on terms of
great affection. This sketch is wholly literary,
and I do not feel it necessary to do more than
touch upon such incidents as his marriage, just as
I shall do no more than touch upon the tragedy
that ultimately overtook it. But it may be suggested
here that the final misfortunes were in some
degree due to the circumstances attending the original
action. A very young man fighting his way,
and excessively poor, with no memories for years
past that were not monotonous and mean, and with
his strongest and most personal memories quite
ignominious and unendurable, was suddenly
thrown into the society of a whole family of girls.
I think it does not overstate his weakness, and I
think it partly constitutes his excuse, to say that
he fell in love with all of them. As sometimes
happens in the undeveloped youth, an abstract
femininity simply intoxicated him. And again, I
think we shall not be mistakenly accused of harshness
if we put the point in this way; that by a kind
of accident he got hold of the wrong sister. In<span class="pagenum" id="Page_67">67</span>
what came afterwards he was enormously to blame.
But I do not think that his was a case of cold
division from a woman whom he had once seriously
and singly loved. He had been bewildered
in a burning haze, I will not say even of first love,
but of first flirtations. His wife’s sisters stimulated
him before he fell in love with his wife; and
they continued to stimulate him long after he had
quarrelled with her for ever. This view is strikingly
supported by all the details of his attitude
towards all the other members of the sacred house
of Hogarth. One of the sisters remained, of
course, his dearest friend till death. Another who
had died, he worshipped as a saint, and he always
asked to be buried in her grave. He was married
on April 2, 1836. Forster remarks that a few
days before the announcement of their marriage
in the <i>Times</i>, the same paper contained another
announcement that on the 31st would be published
the first number of a work called “The Posthumous
Papers of the Pickwick Club.” It is the
beginning of his career.</p>
<p>The “Sketches,” apart from splendid splashes
of humour here and there, are not manifestations
of the man of genius. We might almost say that
this book is one of the few books by Dickens which
would not, standing alone, have made his fame.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_68">68</span>
And yet standing alone it did make his fame. His
contemporaries could see a new spirit in it, where
we, familiar with the larger fruits of that spirit,
can only see a continuation of the prosaic and almost
wooden wit of the comic books of that day.
But in any case we should hardly look in the man’s
first book for the fulness of his contribution to letters.
Youth is almost everything else, but it is
hardly ever original. We read of young men
bursting on the old world with a new message.
But youth in actual experience is the period of
imitation and even obedience. Subjectively its
emotions may be furious and headlong; but its only
external outcome is a furious imitation and a headlong
obedience. As we grow older we learn the
special thing we have to do. As a man goes on
towards the grave he discovers gradually a philosophy
he can really call fresh, a style he can really
call his own, and as he becomes an older man he
becomes a newer writer. Ibsen, in his youth, wrote
almost classic plays about vikings; it was in his
old age that he began to break windows and throw
fireworks. The only fault, it was said, of Browning’s
first poems was that they had “too much
beauty of imagery, and too little wealth of
thought.” The only fault, that is, of Browning’s
first poems, was that they were not Browning’s.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_69">69</span></p>
<p>In one way, however, the “Sketches by Boz”
do stand out very symbolically in the life of
Dickens. They constitute in a manner the dedication
of him to his especial task; the sympathetic
and yet exaggerated painting of the poorer middle-class.
He was to make men feel that this dull
middle-class was actually a kind of elf-land. But
here, again, the work is rude and undeveloped;
and this is shown in the fact that it is a great deal
more exaggerative than it is sympathetic. We
are not, of course, concerned with the kind of people
who say that they wish that Dickens was more
refined. If those people are ever refined it will
be by fire. But there is in this earliest work, an
element which almost vanished in the later ones,
an element which is typical of the middle-classes
in England, and which is in a more real sense to
be called vulgar. I mean that in these little farces
there is a trace, in the author as well as in the characters,
of that petty sense of social precedence, that
hub-hub of little unheard-of oligarchies, which
is the only serious sin of the bourgeoisie of Britain.
It may seem pragmatical, for example, to instance
such a rowdy farce as the story of Horatio Sparkins,
which tells how a tuft-hunting family entertained
a rhetorical youth thinking he was a lord,
and found he was a draper’s assistant. No doubt<span class="pagenum" id="Page_70">70</span>
they were very snobbish in thinking that a lord
must be eloquent; but we cannot help feeling that
Dickens is almost equally snobbish in feeling it
so very funny that a draper’s assistant should be
eloquent. A free man, one would think, would
despise the family quite as much if Horatio had
been a peer. Here, and here only, there is just
a touch of the vulgarity, of the only vulgarity of
the world out of which Dickens came. For the
only element of lowness that there really is in our
populace is exactly that they are full of superiorities
and very conscious of class. Shades, imperceptible
to the eyes of others, but as hard and
haughty as a Brahmin caste, separate one kind of
charwoman from another kind of charwoman.
Dickens was destined to show with inspired symbolism
all the immense virtues of the democracy.
He was to show them as the most humorous part
of our civilization; which they certainly are. He
was to show them as the most promptly and practically
compassionate part of our civilization;
which they certainly are. The democracy has a
hundred exuberant good qualities; the democracy
has only one outstanding sin—it is not democratic.</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_71">71</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="toclink_71">CHAPTER IV<br />
<span class="subhead">“THE PICKWICK PAPERS”</span></h2>
</div>
<p class="in0"><span class="firstword">Round</span> the birth of “Pickwick” broke one of
those literary quarrels that were too common in
the life of Dickens. Such quarrels indeed generally
arose from some definite mistake or misdemeanour
on the part of somebody else; but they
were also made possible by an indefinite touchiness
and susceptibility in Dickens himself. He was so
sensitive on points of personal authorship and responsibility
that even his sacred sense of humour
deserted him. He turned people into mortal enemies
whom he might have turned very easily into
immortal jokes. It was not that he was lawless:
in a sense it was that he was too legal; but he did
not understand the principle of <i xml:lang="la" lang="la">de minimis non
curat lex</i>. Anybody could draw him; any fool
could make a fool of him. Any obscure madman
who chose to say that he had written the whole of
“Martin Chuzzlewit”; any penny-a-liner who
chose to say that Dickens wore no shirt collar could
call forth the most passionate and public denials
as of a man pleading “not guilty” to witchcraft<span class="pagenum" id="Page_72">72</span>
or high treason. Hence the letters of Dickens are
filled with a certain singular type of quarrels and
complaints, quarrels and complaints in which one
cannot say that he was on the wrong side, but
merely that even in being on the right side he was
in the wrong place. He was not only a generous
man, he was even a just man; to have made against
anybody a charge or claim which was unfair would
have been insupportable to him. His weakness
was that he found the unfair claim or charge, however
small, equally insupportable when brought
against himself. No one can say of him that he
was often wrong; we can only say of him as of
many pugnacious people, that he was too often
right.</p>
<p>The incidents attending the inauguration of the
“Pickwick Papers” are not, perhaps, a perfect
example of this trait, because Dickens was here
a hand-to-mouth journalist, and the blow might
possibly have been more disabling than those struck
at him in his days of triumph. But all through
those days of triumph, and to the day of his
death, Dickens took this old tea-cup tempest
with the most terrible gravity, drew up declarations,
called witnesses, preserved pulverizing documents,
and handed on to his children the forgotten
folly as if it had been a Highland feud. Yet the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_73">73</span>
unjust claim made on him was so much more ridiculous
even than it was unjust, that it seems strange
that he should have remembered it for a month
except for his amusement. The facts are simple
and familiar to most people. The publishers—Chapman
& Hall—wished to produce some kind
of serial with comic illustrations by a popular caricaturist
named Seymour. This artist was chiefly
famous for his rendering of the farcical side of
sport, and to suit this specialty it was very vaguely
suggested to Dickens by the publishers that he
should write about a Nimrod Club, or some such
thing, a club of amateur sportsmen, foredoomed
to perpetual ignominies. Dickens objected in substance
upon two very sensible grounds—first, that
sporting sketches were stale; and second, that he
knew nothing about sport. He changed the idea
to that of a general club for travel and investigation,
the Pickwick Club, and only retained one
fated sportsman, Mr. Winkle, the melancholy remnant
of the Nimrod Club that never was. The
first seven pictures appeared with the signature of
Seymour and the letterpress of Dickens, and in
them Winkle and his woes were fairly, but not
extraordinarily prominent. Before the eighth picture
appeared Seymour had blown his brains out.
After a brief interval of the employment of a man<span class="pagenum" id="Page_74">74</span>
named Buss, Dickens obtained the assistance of
Hoblot K. Brown whom we all call “Phiz,” and
may almost, in a certain sense, be said to have gone
into partnership with him. They were as suited
to each other and to the common creation of a
unique thing as Gilbert and Sullivan. No other
illustrator ever created the true Dickens characters
with the precise and correct quantum of exaggeration.
No other illustrator ever breathed the true
Dickens atmosphere, in which clerks are clerks and
yet at the same time elves.</p>
<p>To the tame mind the above affair does not
seem to offer anything very promising in the way
of a row. But Seymour’s widow managed to
evolve out of it the proposition that somehow or
other her husband had written “Pickwick,” or, at
least, had been responsible for the genius and success
of it. It does not appear that she had anything
at all resembling a reason for this opinion except
the unquestionable fact that the publishers had
started with the idea of employing Seymour. This
was quite true, and Dickens (who over and above
his honesty was far too quarrelsome a man not to
try to keep in the right, and who showed a sort
of fierce carefulness in telling the truth in such
cases) never denied it or attempted to conceal it.
It was quite true, that at the beginning, instead<span class="pagenum" id="Page_75">75</span>
of Seymour being employed to illustrate Dickens,
Dickens may be said to have been employed to
illustrate Seymour. But that Seymour invented
anything in the letter-press large or small, that he
invented either the outline of Mr. Pickwick’s character
or the number of Mr. Pickwick’s cabman,
that he invented either the story, or so much as a
semi-colon in the story was not only never proved,
but was never very lucidly alleged. Dickens fills
his letters with all that there is to be said against
Mrs. Seymour’s idea; it is not very clear whether
there was ever anything definitely said for it.</p>
<p>Upon the mere superficial fact and law of the
affair, Dickens ought to have been superior to this
silly business. But in a much deeper and a much
more real sense he ought to have been superior to
it. It did not really touch him or his greatness at
all, even as an abstract allegation. If Seymour had
started the story, had provided Dickens with his
puppets, Tupman or Jingle, Dickens would have
still have been Dickens and Seymour only Seymour.
As a matter of fact, it happened to be a
contemptible lie, but it would have been an equally
contemptible truth. For the fact is that the greatness
of Dickens and especially the greatness of
Pickwick is not of a kind that could be affected by
somebody else suggesting the first idea. It could<span class="pagenum" id="Page_76">76</span>
not be affected by somebody else writing the first
chapter. If it could be shown that another man
had suggested to Hawthorne (let us say) the
primary conception of the “Scarlet Letter,” Hawthorne
who worked it out would still be an exquisite
workman; but he would be by so much less
a creator. But in a case like Pickwick there is a
simple test. If Seymour gave Dickens the main
idea of Pickwick, what was it? There is no primary
conception of Pickwick for any one to suggest.
Dickens not only did not get the general
plan from Seymour, he did not get it at all. In
Pickwick, and, indeed, in Dickens, generally it is
in the details that the author is creative, it is in
the details that he is vast. The power of the book
lies in the perpetual torrent of ingenious and inventive
treatment; the theme (at least at the beginning)
simply does not exist. The idea of Tupman,
the fat lady-killer, is in itself quite dreary and vulgar;
it is the detailed Tupman, as he is developed,
who is unexpectedly amusing. The idea of Winkle,
the clumsy sportsman, is in itself quite stale;
it is as he goes on repeating himself that he becomes
original. We hear of men whose imagination
can touch with magic the dull facts of our
life, but Dickens’s yet more indomitable fancy
could touch with magic even our dull fiction. Before<span class="pagenum" id="Page_77">77</span>
we are halfway through the book the stock
characters of dead and damned farces astonish us
like splendid strangers.</p>
<p>Seymour’s claim, then, viewed symbolically was
even a compliment. It was true in spirit that
Dickens obtained (or might have obtained) the
start of Pickwick from somebody else, from anybody
else. For he had a more gigantic energy
than the energy of the intense artist, the energy
which is prepared to write something. He had
the energy which is prepared to write anything.
He could have finished any man’s tale. He could
have breathed a mad life into any man’s characters.
If it had been true that Seymour had planned out
Pickwick, if Seymour had fixed the chapters and
named and numbered the characters, his slave
would have shown even in these shackles such a
freedom as would have shaken the world. If
Dickens had been forced to make his incidents out
of a chapter in a child’s reading-book, or the names
in a scrap of newspaper, he would have turned
them in ten pages into creatures of his own. Seymour,
as I say, was in a manner right in spirit.
Dickens would at this time get his materials from
anywhere, in the sense that he cared little what
materials they were. He would not have stolen;
but if he had stolen he would never have imitated.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_78">78</span>
The power which he proceeded at once to exhibit
was the one power in letters which literally cannot
be imitated, the primary inexhaustible creative
energy, the enormous prodigality of genius which
no one but another genius could parody. To claim
to have originated an idea of Dickens is like claiming
to have contributed a glass of water to Niagara.
Wherever this stream or that stream started the colossal
cataract of absurdity went roaring night and
day. The volume of his invention overwhelmed all
doubt of his inventiveness; Dickens was evidently
a great man; unless he was a thousand men.</p>
<p>The actual circumstances of the writing and publishing
of “Pickwick” show that while Seymour’s
specific claim was absurd, Dickens’s indignant exactitude
about every jot and tittle of authorship
was also inappropriate and misleading. “The
Pickwick Papers,” when all is said and done, did
emerge out of a haze of suggestions and proposals
in which more than one person was involved. The
publishers failed to base the story on a Nimrod
Club, but they succeeded in basing it on a club.
Seymour, by virtue of his idiosyncrasy, if he did
not create, brought about the creation of Mr.
Winkle. Seymour sketched Mr. Pickwick as a
tall, thin man. Mr. Chapman (apparently without
any word from Dickens) boldly turned him<span class="pagenum" id="Page_79">79</span>
into a short, fat man. Chapman took the type
from a corpulent old dandy named Foster, who
wore tights and gaiters and lived at Richmond.
In this sense were we affected by this idle aspect of
the thing we might call Chapman the real originator
of “Pickwick.” But as I have suggested,
originating “Pickwick” is not the point. It was
quite easy to originate “Pickwick.” The difficulty
was to write it.</p>
<p>However such things may be, there can be no
question of the result of this chaos. In “The
Pickwick Papers” Dickens sprang suddenly from
a comparatively low level to a very high one. To
the level of “Sketches by Boz” he never afterwards
descended. To the level of “The Pickwick
Papers” it is doubtful if he ever afterwards rose.
“Pickwick,” indeed, is not a good novel; but it is
not a bad novel, for it is not a novel at all. In one
sense, indeed, it is something nobler than a novel,
for no novel with a plot and a proper termination
could emit that sense of everlasting youth—a sense
as of the gods gone wandering in England. This
is not a novel, for all novels have an end; and
“Pickwick,” properly speaking, has no end—he is
equal unto the angels. The point at which, as a
fact, we find the printed matter terminates is not
an end in any artistic sense of the word. Even as<span class="pagenum" id="Page_80">80</span>
a boy I believed there were some more pages that
were torn out of my copy, and I am looking for
them still. The book might have been cut short
anywhere else. It might have been cut short after
Mr. Pickwick was released by Mr. Nupkins, or
after Mr. Pickwick was fished out of the water, or
at a hundred other places. And we should still
have known that this was not really the story’s
end. We should have known that Mr. Pickwick
was still having the same high adventures on the
same high roads. As it happens, the book ends
after Mr. Pickwick has taken a house in the neighbourhood
of Dulwich. But we know he did not
stop there. We know he broke out, that he took
again the road of the high adventures; we know
that if we take it ourselves in any acre of England,
we may come suddenly upon him in a lane.</p>
<p>But this relation of “Pickwick” to the strict
form of fiction demands a further word, which
should indeed be said in any case before the consideration
of any or all of the Dickens tales.
Dickens’s work is not to be reckoned in novels at
all. Dickens’s work is to be reckoned always by
characters, sometimes by groups, oftener by episodes,
but never by novels. You cannot discuss
whether “Nicholas Nickleby” is a good novel, or
whether “Our Mutual Friend” is a bad novel.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_81">81</span>
Strictly, there is no such novel as “Nicholas
Nickleby.” There is no such novel as “Our
Mutual Friend.” They are simply lengths cut
from the flowing and mixed substance called
Dickens—a substance of which any given length
will be certain to contain a given proportion of
brilliant and of bad stuff. You can say, according
to your opinions, “the Crummles part is perfect,”
or “the Boffins are a mistake,” just as a
man watching a river go by him could count here
a floating flower, and there a streak of scum. But
you cannot artistically divide the output into books.
The best of his work can be found in the worst
of his works. “The Tale of Two Cities” is a
good novel; “Little Dorrit” is not a good novel.
But the description of “The Circumlocution
Office” in “Little Dorrit” is quite as good as the
description of “Tellson’s Bank” in “The Tale
of Two Cities.” “The Old Curiosity Shop” is
not so good as “David Copperfield,” but Swiveller
is quite as good as Micawber. Nor is there any
reason why these superb creatures, as a general
rule, should be in one novel any more than another.
There is no reason why Sam Weller, in the
course of his wanderings, should not wander into
“Nicholas Nickleby.” There is no reason why
Major Bagstock, in his brisk way, should not walk<span class="pagenum" id="Page_82">82</span>
straight out of “Dombey and Son” and straight
into “Martin Chuzzlewit.” To this generalization
some modification should be added. “Pickwick”
stands by itself, and has even a sort of
unity in not pretending to unity. “David Copperfield,”
in a less degree, stands by itself, as being
the only book in which Dickens wrote of himself;
and “The Tale of Two Cities” stands by itself
as being the only book in which Dickens slightly
altered himself. But as a whole, this should be
firmly grasped, that the units of Dickens, the primary
elements, are not the stories, but the characters
who affect the stories—or, more often still,
the characters who do not affect the stories.</p>
<p>This is a plain matter; but, unless it be stated
and felt, Dickens may be greatly misunderstood
and greatly underrated. For not only is his whole
machinery directed to facilitating the self-display
of certain characters, but something more deep and
more unmodern still is also true of him. It is also
true that all the <em>moving</em> machinery exists only to
display entirely <em>static</em> character. Things in the
Dickens story shift and change only in order to
give us glimpses of great characters that do not
change at all. If we had a sequel of Pickwick ten
years afterwards, Pickwick would be exactly the
same age. We know he would not have fallen<span class="pagenum" id="Page_83">83</span>
into that strange and beautiful second childhood
which soothed and simplified the end of Colonel
Newcome. Newcome, throughout the book, is in
an atmosphere of time: Pickwick, throughout the
book, is not. This will probably be taken by most
modern people as praise of Thackeray and dispraise
of Dickens. But this only shows how few
modern people understand Dickens. It also shows
how few understand the faiths and the fables of
mankind. The matter can only be roughly stated
in one way. Dickens did not strictly make a literature;
he made a mythology.</p>
<p>For a few years our corner of Western Europe
has had a fancy for this thing we call fiction; that
is, for writing down our own lives or similar lives
in order to look at them. But though we call it
fiction, it differs from older literatures chiefly in
being less fictitious. It imitates not only life, but
the limitations of life; it not only reproduces life,
it reproduces death. But outside us, in every other
country, in every other age, there has been going
on from the beginning a more fictitious kind of
fiction. I mean the kind now called folklore, the
literature of the people. Our modern novels,
which deal with men as they are, are chiefly produced
by a small and educated section of the society.
But this other literature deals with men<span class="pagenum" id="Page_84">84</span>
greater than they are—with demi-gods and heroes;
and that is far too important a matter to be trusted
to the educated classes. The fashioning of these
portents is a popular trade, like ploughing or bricklaying;
the men who made hedges, the men who
made ditches, were the men who made deities.
Men could not elect their kings, but they could
elect their gods. So we find ourselves faced with
a fundamental contrast between what is called fiction
and what is called folklore. The one exhibits
an abnormal degree of dexterity operating within
our daily limitations; the other exhibits quite normal
desires extended beyond those limitations.
Fiction means the common things as seen by the
uncommon people. Fairy tales mean the uncommon
things as seen by the common people.</p>
<p>As our world advances through history towards
its present epoch, it becomes more specialist, less
democratic, and folklore turns gradually into fiction.
But it is only slowly that the old elfin fire
fades into the light of common realism. For ages
after our characters have dressed up in the clothes
of mortals they betray the blood of the gods.
Even our phraseology is full of relics of this.
When a modern novel is devoted to the bewilderments
of a weak young clerk who cannot decide
which woman he wants to marry, or which new<span class="pagenum" id="Page_85">85</span>
religion he believes in, we still give this knock-kneed
cad the name of “the hero”—the name
which is the crown of Achilles. The popular preference
for a story with “a happy ending” is not,
or at least was not, a mere sweet-stuff optimism;
it is the remains of the old idea of the triumph of
the dragon-slayer, the ultimate apotheosis of the
man beloved of heaven.</p>
<p>But there is another and more intangible trace
of this fading supernaturalism—a trace very vivid
to the reader, but very elusive to the critic. It is
a certain air of endlessness in the episodes, even in
the shortest episodes—a sense that, although we
leave them, they still go on. Our modern attraction
to short stories is not an accident of form; it
is the sign of a real sense of fleetingness and fragility;
it means that existence is only an impression,
and, perhaps, only an illusion. A short story of
to-day has the air of a dream; it has the irrevocable
beauty of a falsehood; we get a glimpse of grey
streets of London or red plains of India, as in an
opium vision; we see people,—arresting people,
with fiery and appealing faces. But when the
story is ended, the people are ended. We have no
instinct of anything ultimate and enduring behind
the episodes. The moderns, in a word, describe
life in short stories because they are possessed with<span class="pagenum" id="Page_86">86</span>
the sentiment that life itself is an uncommonly
short story, and perhaps not a true one. But in
this elder literature, even in the comic literature
(indeed, especially in the comic literature), the
reverse is true. The characters are felt to be fixed
things of which we have fleeting glimpses; that is,
they are felt to be divine. Uncle Toby is talking
for ever, as the elves are dancing for ever. We
feel that whenever we hammer on the house of
Falstaff, Falstaff will be at home. We feel it as a
Pagan would feel that, if a cry broke the silence
after ages of unbelief, Apollo would still be listening
in his temple. These writers may tell short
stories, but we feel they are only parts of a long
story. And herein lies the peculiar significance,
the peculiar sacredness even, of penny dreadfuls
and the common printed matter made for our
errand-boys. Here in dim and desperate forms,
under the ban of our base culture, stormed at by
silly magistrates, sneered at by silly schoolmasters,—here
is the old popular literature still popular;
here is the unmistakable voluminousness, the thousand
and one tales of Dick Deadshot, like the
thousand and one tales of Robin Hood. Here
is the splendid and static boy, the boy who remains
a boy through a thousand volumes and a thousand
years. Here in mean alleys and dim shops, shadowed<span class="pagenum" id="Page_87">87</span>
and shamed by the police, mankind is still
driving its dark trade in heroes. And elsewhere,
and in all other ages, in braver fashion, under
cleaner skies the same eternal tale-telling goes on,
and the whole mortal world is a factory of immortals.</p>
<p>Dickens was a mythologist rather than a novelist;
he was the last of the mythologists, and perhaps
the greatest. He did not always manage to
make his characters men, but he always managed,
at the least, to make them gods. They are creatures
like Punch or Father Christmas. They live
statically, in a perpetual summer of being themselves.
It was not the aim of Dickens to show the
effect of time and circumstance upon a character;
it was not even his aim to show the effect of a
character on time and circumstance. It is worth
remark, in passing, that whenever he tried to describe
change in a character, he made a mess of it,
as in the repentance of Dombey or the apparent
deterioration of Boffin. It was his aim to show
character hung in a kind of happy void, in a world
apart from time—yes, and essentially apart from
circumstance, though the phrase may seem odd in
connection with the godlike horse-play of “Pickwick.”
But all the Pickwickian events, wild as
they often are, were only designed to display the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_88">88</span>
greater wildness of souls, or sometimes merely to
bring the reader within touch, so to speak, of that
wildness. The author would have fired Mr. Pickwick
out of a cannon to get him to Wardle’s by
Christmas; he would have taken the roof off to
drop him into Bob Sawyer’s party. But once put
Pickwick at Wardle’s, with his punch and a group
of gorgeous personalities, and nothing will move
him from his chair. Once he is at Sawyer’s party,
he forgets how he got there; he forgets Mrs.
Bardell and all his story. For the story was but
an incantation to call up a god, and the god (Mr.
Jack Hopkins) is present in divine power. Once
the great characters are face to face, the ladder by
which they climbed is forgotten and falls down,
the structure of the story drops to pieces, the plot
is abandoned, the other characters deserted at
every kind of crisis; the whole crowded thoroughfare
of the tale is blocked by two or three talkers,
who take their immortal ease as if they were already
in Paradise. For they do not exist for the
story; the story exists for them; and they know it.</p>
<p>To every man alive, one must hope, it has in
some manner happened that he has talked with
his more fascinating friends round a table on some
night when all the numerous personalities unfolded
themselves like great tropical flowers. All fell into<span class="pagenum" id="Page_89">89</span>
their parts as in some delightful impromptu play.
Every man was more himself than he had ever
been in this vale of tears. Every man was a beautiful
caricature of himself. The man who has
known such nights will understand the exaggerations
of “Pickwick.” The man who has not
known such nights will not enjoy “Pickwick”
nor (I imagine) heaven. For, as I have said,
Dickens is, in this matter, close to popular religion,
which is the ultimate and reliable religion. He
conceives an endless joy; he conceives creatures
as permanent as Puck or Pan—creatures whose
will to live æons upon æons cannot satisfy. He
is not come, as a writer, that his creatures may
copy life and copy its narrowness; he is come
that they may have life, and that they may
have it more abundantly. It is absurd indeed
that Christians should be called the enemies of
life because they wish life to last for ever; it is
more absurd still to call the old comic writers dull
because they wished their unchanging characters
to last for ever. Both popular religion, with its
endless joys, and the old comic story, with its endless
jokes, have in our time faded together. We
are too weak to desire that undying vigour.
We believe that you can have too much of a good
thing—a blasphemous belief, which at one blow<span class="pagenum" id="Page_90">90</span>
wrecks all the heavens that men have hoped for.
The grand old defiers of God were not afraid of
an eternity of torment. We have come to be afraid
of an eternity of joy. It is not my business here
to take sides in this division between those who
like life and long novels and those who like death
and short stories; my only business is to point out
that those who see in Dickens’s unchanging characters
and recurring catch-words a mere stiffness and
lack of living movement miss the point and nature
of his work. His tradition is another tradition
altogether; his aim is another aim altogether to
those of the modern novelists who trace the alchemy
of experience and the autumn tints of character.
He is there, like the common people of all
ages, to make deities; he is there, as I have said, to
exaggerate life in the direction of life. The spirit
he at bottom celebrates is that of two friends drinking
wine together and talking through the night.
But for him they are two deathless friends talking
through an endless night and pouring wine from
an inexhaustible bottle.</p>
<p>This, then, is the first firm fact to grasp about
“Pickwick”—about “Pickwick” more than
about any of the other stories. It is, first and foremost,
a supernatural story. Mr. Pickwick was a
fairy. So was old Mr. Weller. This does not<span class="pagenum" id="Page_91">91</span>
imply that they were suited to swing in a trapeze
of gossamer; it merely implies that if they had
fallen out of it on their heads they would not have
died. But, to speak more strictly, Mr. Samuel
Pickwick is not the fairy; he is the fairy prince;
that is to say, he is the abstract wanderer and wonderer,
the Ulysses of Comedy—the half-human
and half-elfin creature—human enough to wander,
human enough to wonder, but still sustained with
that merry fatalism that is natural to immortal
beings—sustained by that hint of divinity which
tells him in the darkest hour that he is doomed to
live happily ever afterwards. He has set out walking
to the end of the world, but he knows he will
find an inn there.</p>
<p>And this brings us to the best and boldest
element of originality in “Pickwick.” It has not,
I think, been observed, and it may be that Dickens
did not observe it. Certainly he did not plan it;
it grew gradually, perhaps out of the unconscious
part of his soul, and warmed the whole story like
a slow fire. Of course it transformed the whole
story also; transformed it out of all likeness to
itself. About this latter point was waged one of
the numberless little wars of Dickens. It was a
part of his pugnacious vanity that he refused to
admit the truth of the mildest criticism. Moreover,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_92">92</span>
he used his inexhaustible ingenuity to find an
apologia that was generally an afterthought. Instead
of laughingly admitting, in answer to criticism,
the glorious improbability of Pecksniff, he
retorted with a sneer, clever and very unjust, that
he was not surprised that the Pecksniffs should
deny the portrait of Pecksniff. When it was objected
that the pride of old Paul Dombey breaks
as abruptly as a stick, he tried to make out that
there had been an absorbing psychological struggle
going on in that gentleman all the time, which
the reader was too stupid to perceive. Which is,
I am afraid, rubbish. And so, in a similar vein, he
answered those who pointed out to him the obvious
and not very shocking fact that our sentiments
about Pickwick are very different in the second part
of the book from our sentiments in the first; that
we find ourselves at the beginning setting out in
the company of a farcical old fool, if not a farcical
old humbug, and that we find ourselves at the end
saying farewell to a fine old English merchant, a
monument of genial sanity. Dickens answered
with the same ingenious self-justification as in the
other cases—that surely it often happened that a
man met us first arrayed in his more grotesque
qualities, and that fuller acquaintance unfolded his
more serious merits. This, of course, is quite true;<span class="pagenum" id="Page_93">93</span>
but I think any honest admirer of “Pickwick”
will feel that it is not an answer. For the fault
in “Pickwick” (if it be a fault) is a change, not
in the hero but in the whole atmosphere. The
point is not that Pickwick turns into a different
kind of man; it is that “The Pickwick Papers”
turns into a different kind of book. And however
artistic both parts may be, this combination must,
in strict art, be called inartistic. A man is quite
artistically justified in writing a tale in which a
man as cowardly as Bob Acres becomes a man as
brave as Hector. But a man is not artistically
justified in writing a tale which begins in the style
of “The Rivals” and ends in the style of the
“Iliad.” In other words, we do not mind the
hero changing in the course of a book; but we are
not prepared for the author changing in the course
of the book. And the author did change in the
course of this book. He made, in the midst of this
book a great discovery, which was the discovery
of his destiny, or, what is more important, of his
duty. That discovery turned him from the author
of “Sketches by Boz” to the author of “David
Copperfield.” And that discovery constituted the
thing of which I have spoken—the outstanding
and arresting original feature in “The Pickwick
Papers.”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_94">94</span></p>
<p>“Pickwick,” I have said, is a romance of adventure,
and Samuel Pickwick is the romantic adventurer.
So much is indeed obvious. But the
strange and stirring discovery which Dickens made
was this—that having chosen a fat old man of the
middle classes as a good thing of which to make
a butt, he found that a fat old man of the middle
classes is the very best thing of which to make a
romantic adventurer. “Pickwick” is supremely
original in that it is the adventures of an old man.
It is a fairy tale in which the victor is not the
youngest of the three brothers, but one of the
oldest of their uncles. The result is both noble
and new and true. There is nothing which so
much needs simplicity as adventure. And there
is no one who so much possesses simplicity as an
honest and elderly man of business. For romance
he is better than a troop of young troubadours;
for the swaggering young fellow anticipates his
adventures, just as he anticipates his income.
Hence, both the adventures and the income,
when he comes up to them, are not there. But
a man in late middle-age has grown used to the
plain necessities, and his first holiday is a second
youth. A good man, as Thackeray said with such
thorough and searching truth, grows simpler as he
grows older. Samuel Pickwick in his youth was<span class="pagenum" id="Page_95">95</span>
probably an insufferable young coxcomb. He
knew then, or thought he knew, all about the
confidence tricks of swindlers like Jingle. He
knew then, or thought he knew, all about the
amatory designs of sly ladies like Mrs. Bardell.
But years and real life have relieved him of this
idle and evil knowledge. He has had the high
good luck in losing the follies of youth, to lose
the wisdom of youth also. Dickens has caught,
in a manner at once wild and convincing, this
queer innocence of the afternoon of life. The
round, moon-like face, the round, moon-like spectacles
of Samuel Pickwick move through the tale
as emblems of a certain spherical simplicity. They
are fixed in that grave surprise that may be seen
in babies; that grave surprise which is the only real
happiness that is possible to man. Pickwick’s
round face is like a round and honourable mirror,
in which are reflected all the fantasies of earthly
existence; for surprise is, strictly speaking, the only
kind of reflection. All this grew gradually on
Dickens. It is odd to recall to our minds the
original plan, the plan of the Nimrod Club, and
the author who was to be wholly occupied in playing
practical jokes on his characters. He had
chosen (or somebody else had chosen) that corpulent
old simpleton as a person peculiarly fitted to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_96">96</span>
fall down trap-doors, to shoot over butter slides,
to struggle with apple-pie beds, to be tipped out
of carts and dipped into horse-ponds. But Dickens,
and Dickens only, discovered as he went on
how fitted the fat old man was to rescue ladies,
to defy tyrants, to dance, to leap, to experiment
with life, to be a <i xml:lang="la" lang="la">deus ex machinâ</i>, and even a
knight-errant. Dickens made this discovery.
Dickens went into the Pickwick Club to scoff, and
Dickens remained to pray.</p>
<p>Molière and his marquises are very much
amused when M. Jourdain, the fat old middle-class
fellow, discovers with delight that he has been
talking prose all his life. I have often wondered
whether Molière saw how in this fact M. Jourdain
towers above them all and touches the stars.
He has the freshness to enjoy a fresh fact, the
freshness to enjoy an old one. He can feel that
the common thing prose is an accomplishment like
verse; and it is an accomplishment like verse; it
is the miracle of language. He can feel the
subtle taste of water, and roll it on his tongue like
wine. His simple vanity and voracity, his innocent
love of living, his ignorant love of learning,
are things far fuller of romance than the weariness
and foppishness of the sniggering cavaliers.
When he consciously speaks prose, he unconsciously<span class="pagenum" id="Page_97">97</span>
thinks poetry. It would be better for
us all if we were as conscious that supper is supper
or that life is life, as this true romantic was that
prose is actually prose. M. Jourdain is here the
type, Mr. Pickwick is elsewhere the type, of this
true and neglected thing, the romance of the middle
classes. It is the custom in our little epoch to
sneer at the middle classes. Cockney artists profess
to find the bourgeoisie dull; as if artists had
any business to find anything dull. Decadents
talk contemptuously of its conventions and its set
tasks; it never occurs to them that conventions
and set tasks are the very way to keep that greenness
in the grass and that redness in the roses—which
they had lost for ever. Stevenson, in his
incomparable “Lantern Bearers,” describes the
ecstasy of a schoolboy in the mere fact of buttoning
a dark lantern under a dark great-coat. If
you wish for that ecstasy of the schoolboy, you
must have the boy; but you must also have the
school. Strict opportunities and defined hours are
the very outline of that enjoyment. A man like
Mr. Pickwick has been at school all his life, and
when he comes out he astonishes the youngsters.
His heart, as that acute psychologist, Mr. Weller,
points out, had been born later than his body. It
will be remembered that Mr. Pickwick also, when<span class="pagenum" id="Page_98">98</span>
on the escapade of Winkle and Miss Allen, took
immoderate pleasure in the performances of a
dark lantern which was not dark enough, and was
nothing but a nuisance to everybody. His soul
also was with Stevenson’s boys on the grey sands
of Haddington, talking in the dark by the sea.
He also was of the league of the “Lantern Bearers.”
Stevenson, I remember, says that in the
shops of that town they could purchase “penny
Pickwicks (that remarkable cigar).” Let us hope
they smoked them, and that the rotund ghost of
Pickwick hovered over the rings of smoke.</p>
<p>Pickwick goes through life with that godlike
gullibility which is the key to all adventures. The
greenhorn is the ultimate victor in everything; it
is he that gets the most out of life. Because Pickwick
is led away by Jingle, he will be led to the
White Hart Inn, and see the only Weller cleaning
boots in the courtyard. Because he is bamboozled
by Dodson and Fogg, he will enter the
prison house like a paladin, and rescue the man
and the woman who have wronged him most.
His soul will never starve for exploits or excitements
who is wise enough to be made a fool of.
He will make himself happy in the traps that have
been laid for him; he will roll in their nets and
sleep. All doors will fly open to him who has a<span class="pagenum" id="Page_99">99</span>
mildness more defiant than mere courage. The
whole is unerringly expressed in one fortunate
phrase—he will be always “taken in.” To be
taken in everywhere is to see the inside of everything.
It is the hospitality of circumstance. With
torches and trumpets, like a guest, the greenhorn
is taken in by Life. And the sceptic is cast out
by it.</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_100">100</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="toclink_100">CHAPTER V<br />
<span class="subhead">THE GREAT POPULARITY</span></h2>
</div>
<p class="in0"><span class="firstword">There</span> is one aspect of Charles Dickens which
must be of interest even to that subterranean race
which does not admire his books. Even if we are
not interested in Dickens as a great event in English
literature, we must still be interested in him
as a great event in English history. If he had
not his place with Fielding and Thackeray, he
would still have his place with Wat Tyler and
Wilkes; for the man led a mob. He did what no
English statesman, perhaps, has really done; he
called out the people. He was popular in a sense
of which we moderns have not even a notion. In
that sense there is no popularity now. There are
no popular authors to-day. We call such authors
as Mr. Guy Boothby or Mr. William Le Queux
popular authors. But this is popularity altogether
in a weaker sense; not only in quantity, but in
quality. The old popularity was positive; the new
is negative. There is a great deal of difference
between the eager man who wants to read a book,
and the tired man who wants a book to read. A<span class="pagenum" id="Page_101">101</span>
man reading a Le Queux mystery wants to get to
the end of it. A man reading the Dickens novel
wished that it might never end. Men read a
Dickens story six times because they knew it so
well. If a man can read a Le Queux story six
times it is only because he can forget it six times.
In short, the Dickens novel was popular, not because
it was an unreal world, but because it was
a real world; a world in which the soul could live.
The modern “shocker” at its very best is an interlude
in life. But in the days when Dickens’s work
was coming out in serial, people talked as if real
life were itself the interlude between one issue of
“Pickwick” and another.</p>
<p>In reaching the period of the publication of
“Pickwick,” we reach this sudden apotheosis of
Dickens. Henceforward he filled the literary
world in a way hard to imagine. Fragments of
that huge fashion remain in our daily language; in
the talk of every trade or public question are
embedded the wrecks of that enormous religion.
Men give out the airs of Dickens without even
opening his books; just as Catholics can live in a
tradition of Christianity without having looked at
the New Testament. The man in the street has
more memories of Dickens, whom he has not read,
than of Marie Corelli, whom he has. There is<span class="pagenum" id="Page_102">102</span>
nothing in any way parallel to this omnipresence
and vitality in the great comic characters of Boz.
There are no modern Bumbles and Pecksniffs, no
modern Gamps and Micawbers. Mr. Rudyard
Kipling (to take an author of a higher type than
those before mentioned) is called, and called justly,
a popular author; that is to say, he is widely read,
greatly enjoyed, and highly remunerated; he has
achieved the paradox of at once making poetry and
making money. But let any one who wishes to
see the difference try the experiment of assuming
the Kipling characters to be common property like
the Dickens characters. Let any one go into an
average parlour and allude to Strickland as he
would allude to Mr. Bumble, the Beadle. Let
any one say that somebody is “a perfect Learoyd,”
as he would say “a perfect Pecksniff.” Let any
one write a comic paragraph for a halfpenny paper,
and allude to Mrs. Hawksbee instead of to Mrs.
Gamp. He will soon discover that the modern
world has forgotten its own fiercest booms more
completely than it has forgotten this formless tradition
from its fathers. The mere dregs of it
come to more than any contemporary excitement;
the gleaning of the grapes of “Pickwick” is more
than the whole vintage of “Soldiers Three.”
There is one instance, and I think only one, of an<span class="pagenum" id="Page_103">103</span>
exception to this generalization; there is one figure
in our popular literature which would really be
recognized by the populace. Ordinary men would
understand you if you referred currently to Sherlock
Holmes. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would no
doubt be justified in rearing his head to the stars,
remembering that Sherlock Holmes is the only
really familiar figure in modern fiction. But let
him droop that head again with a gentle sadness,
remembering that if Sherlock Holmes is the only
familiar figure in modern fiction, Sherlock Holmes
is also the only familiar figure in the Sherlock
Holmes tales. Not many people could say offhand
what was the name of the owner of Silver Blaze,
or whether Mrs. Watson was dark or fair. But
if Dickens had written the Sherlock Holmes
stories, every character in them would have been
equally arresting and memorable. A Sherlock
Holmes would have cooked the dinner for Sherlock
Holmes; a Sherlock Holmes would have
driven his cab. If Dickens brought in a man
merely to carry a letter, he had time for a touch
or two, and made him a giant. Dickens not only
conquered the world, he conquered it with minor
characters. Mr. John Smauker, the servant of
Mr. Cyrus Bantam, though he merely passes
across the stage, is almost as vivid to us as Mr.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_104">104</span>
Samuel Weller, the servant of Mr. Samuel Pickwick.
The young man with the lumpy forehead,
who only says “Esker” to Mr. Podsnap’s foreign
gentleman, is as good as Mr. Podsnap himself.
They appear only for a fragment of time, but
they belong to eternity. We have them only for
an instant, but they have us for ever.</p>
<p>In dealing with Dickens, then, we are dealing
with a man whose public success was a marvel and
almost a monstrosity. And here I perceive that
my friend, the purely artistic critic, primed with
Flaubert and Turgenev, can contain himself no
longer. He leaps to his feet, upsetting his cup of
cocoa, and asks contemptuously what all this has to
do with criticism. “Why begin your study of an
author,” he says, “with trash about popularity?
Boothby is popular, and Le Queux is popular, and
Mother Siegel is popular. If Dickens was even
more popular, it may only mean that Dickens was
even worse. The people like bad literature. If
your object is to show that Dickens was good
literature, you should rather apologize for his
popularity, and try to explain it away. You should
seek to show that Dickens’s work was good literature,
although it was popular. Yes, that is your
task, to prove that Dickens was admirable, although
he was admired!”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_105">105</span></p>
<p>I ask the artistic critic to be patient for a little
and to believe that I have a serious reason for
registering this historic popularity. To that we
shall come presently. But as a manner of approach
I may perhaps ask leave to examine this actual and
fashionable statement, to which I have supposed
him to have recourse—the statement that the people
like bad literature, and even like literature
because it is bad. This way of stating the thing
is an error, and in that error lies matter of much
import to Dickens and his destiny in letters. The
public does not like bad literature. The public
likes a certain kind of literature and likes that kind
of literature even when it is bad better than another
kind of literature even when it is good. Nor
is this unreasonable; for the line between different
types of literature is as real as the line between
tears and laughter; and to tell people who can only
get bad comedy that you have some first-class
tragedy is as irrational as to offer a man who is
shivering over weak warm coffee a really superior
sort of ice.</p>
<p>Ordinary people dislike the delicate modern
work, not because it is good or because it is bad,
but because it is not the thing that they asked for.
If, for instance, you find them pent in sterile streets
and hungering for adventure and a violent secrecy,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_106">106</span>
and if you then give them their choice between
“A Study in Scarlet,” a good detective
story, and “The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford,”
a good psychological monologue, no
doubt they will prefer “A Study in Scarlet.” But
they will not do so because “The Autobiography
of Mark Rutherford” is a very good monologue,
but because it is evidently a very poor detective
story. They will be indifferent to “Les Aveugles,”
not because it is good drama, but because it is bad
melodrama. They do not like good introspective
sonnets; but neither do they like bad introspective
sonnets, of which there are many. When they
walk behind the brass of the Salvation Army band
instead of listening to harmonies at Queen’s Hall,
it is always assumed that they prefer bad music.
But it may be merely that they prefer military
music, music marching down the open street, and
that if Dan Godfrey’s band could be smitten with
salvation and lead them, they would like that even
better. And while they might easily get more
satisfaction out of a screaming article in <i>The War
Cry</i> than out of a page of Emerson about the Over-soul,
this would not be because the page of Emerson
is another and superior kind of literature. It
would be because the page of Emerson is another
(and inferior) kind of religion.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_107">107</span></p>
<p>Dickens stands first as a defiant monument of
what happens when a great literary genius has a
literary taste akin to that of the community. For
this kinship was deep and spiritual. Dickens was
not like our ordinary demagogues and journalists.
Dickens did not write what the people wanted.
Dickens wanted what the people wanted. And
with this was connected that other fact which
must never be forgotten, and which I have more
than once insisted on, that Dickens and his school
had a hilarious faith in democracy and thought
of the service of it as a sacred priesthood. Hence
there was this vital point in his popularism, that
there was no condescension in it. The belief that
the rabble will only read rubbish can be read between
the lines of all our contemporary writers,
even of those writers whose rubbish the rabble
reads. Mr. Fergus Hume has no more respect
for the populace than Mr. George Moore. The
only difference lies between those writers who will
consent to talk down to the people, and those
writers who will not consent to talk down to the
people. But Dickens never talked down to the
people. He talked up to the people. He approached
the people like a deity and poured out
his riches and his blood. This is what makes the
immortal bond between him and the masses of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_108">108</span>
men. He had not merely produced something
they could understand, but he took it seriously,
and toiled and agonized to produce it. They were
not only enjoying one of the best writers, they
were enjoying the best he could do. His raging
and sleepless nights, his wild walks in the darkness,
his note-books crowded, his nerves in rags,
all this extraordinary output was but a fit sacrifice
to the ordinary man. He climbed towards the
lower classes. He panted upwards on weary wings
to reach the heaven of the poor.</p>
<p>His power, then, lay in the fact that he expressed
with an energy and brilliancy quite uncommon
the things close to the common mind. But
with this mere phrase, the common mind, we
collide with a current error. Commonness and the
common mind are now generally spoken of as
meaning in some manner inferiority and the inferior
mind; the mind of the mere mob. But the
common mind means the mind of all the artists
and heroes; or else it would not be common.
Plato had the common mind; Dante had the
common mind; or that mind was not common.
Commonness means the quality common to the
saint and the sinner, to the philosopher and the
fool; and it was this that Dickens grasped and
developed. In everybody there is a certain thing<span class="pagenum" id="Page_109">109</span>
that loves babies, that fears death, that likes sunlight:
that thing enjoys Dickens. And everybody
does not mean uneducated crowds; everybody
means everybody: everybody means Mrs. Meynell.
This lady, a cloistered and fastidious writer, has
written one of the best eulogies of Dickens that
exist, an essay in praise of his pungent perfection
of epithet. And when I say that everybody understands
Dickens I do not mean that he is suited to
the untaught intelligence. I mean that he is so
plain that even scholars can understand him.</p>
<p>The best expression of the fact, however, is to
be found in noting the two things in which he is
most triumphant. In order of artistic value, next
after his humour, comes his horror. And both
his humour and his horror are of a kind strictly
to be called human; that is, they belong to the
basic part of us, below the lowest roots of our
variety. His horror for instance is a healthy
churchyard horror, a fear of the grotesque defamation
called death; and this every man has, even
if he also has the more delicate and depraved fears
that come of an evil spiritual outlook. We may
be afraid of a fine shade with Henry James; that
is, we may be afraid of the world. We may be
afraid of a taut silence with Maeterlinck; that is,
we may be afraid of our own souls. But every<span class="pagenum" id="Page_110">110</span>
one will certainly be afraid of a Cock Lane Ghost,
including Henry James and Maeterlinck. This
latter is literally a mortal fear, a fear of death;
it is not the immortal fear, or fear of damnation,
which belongs to all the more refined intellects of
our day. In a word, Dickens does, in the exact
sense, make the flesh creep; he does not, like the
decadents, make the soul crawl. And the creeping
of the flesh on being reminded of its fleshly
failure is a strictly universal thing which we can
all feel, while some of us are as yet uninstructed
in the art of spiritual crawling. In the same way
the Dickens mirth is a part of man and universal.
All men can laugh at broad humour, even the
subtle humourists. Even the modern <i xml:lang="fr" lang="fr">flâneur</i>, who
can smile at a particular combination of green and
yellow, would laugh at Mr. Lammle’s request for
Mr. Fledgeby’s nose. In a word—the common
things are common—even to the uncommon
people.</p>
<p>These two primary dispositions of Dickens, to
make the flesh creep and to make the sides ache,
were a sort of twins of his spirit; they were never
far apart and the fact of their affinity is interestingly
exhibited in the first two novels.</p>
<p>Generally he mixed the two up in a book and
mixed a great many other things with them. As<span class="pagenum" id="Page_111">111</span>
a rule he cared little if he kept six stories of quite
different colours running in the same book. The
effect was sometimes similar to that of playing six
tunes at once. He does not mind the coarse tragic
figure of Jonas Chuzzlewit crossing the mental
stage which is full of the allegorical pantomime of
Eden, Mr. Chollop and <i>The Watertoast Gazette</i>, a
scene which is as much of a satire as “Gulliver,”
and nearly as much of a fairy tale. He does not
mind binding up a rather pompous sketch of prostitution
in the same book with an adorable impossibility
like Bunsby. But “Pickwick” is so far
a coherent thing that it is coherently comic and
consistently rambling. And as a consequence his
next book was, upon the whole, coherently and
consistently horrible. As his natural turn for terrors
was kept down in “Pickwick,” so his natural
turn for joy and laughter is kept down in “Oliver
Twist.” In “Oliver Twist” the smoke of the
thieves’ kitchen hangs over the whole tale, and the
shadow of Fagin falls everywhere. The little
lamp-lit rooms of Mr. Brownlow and Rose Maylie
are to all appearance purposely kept subordinate,
a mere foil to the foul darkness without. It was
a strange and appropriate accident that Cruikshank
and not “Phiz” should have illustrated
this book. There was about Cruikshank’s art a<span class="pagenum" id="Page_112">112</span>
kind of cramped energy which is almost the definition
of the criminal mind. His drawings have
a dark strength: yet he does not only draw morbidly,
he draws meanly. In the doubled-up figure
and frightful eyes of Fagin in the condemned cell
there is not only a baseness of subject; there is a
kind of baseness in the very technique of it. It is
not drawn with the free lines of a free man; it has
the half-witted secrecies of a hunted thief. It does
not look merely like a picture of Fagin; it looks
like a picture by Fagin. Among these dark and
detestable plates there is one which has with a
kind of black directness, the dreadful poetry that
does inhere in the story, stumbling as it often is.
It represents Oliver asleep at an open window in
the house of one of his humaner patrons. And
outside the window, but as big and close as if
they were in the room stand Fagin and the foul-faced
Monk, staring at him with dark monstrous
visages and great, white wicked eyes, in the style
of the simple deviltry of the draughtsman. The
very <i xml:lang="fr" lang="fr">naïveté</i> of the horror is horrifying: the very
woodenness of the two wicked men seems to make
them worse than mere men who are wicked. But
this picture of big devils at the window-sill does
express, as has been suggested above, the thread
of poetry in the whole thing; the sense, that is, of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_113">113</span>
the thieves as a kind of army of devils compassing
earth and sky, crying for Oliver’s soul and besieging
the house in which he is barred for safety. In
this matter there is, I think, a difference between
the author and the illustrator. In Cruikshank
there was surely something morbid; but, sensitive
and sentimental as Dickens was, there was nothing
morbid in him. He had, as Stevenson had, more
of the mere boy’s love of suffocating stories of
blood and darkness; of skulls, of gibbets, of all the
things, in a word, that are sombre without being
sad. There is a ghastly joy in remembering our
boyish reading about Sikes and his flight; especially
about the voice of that unbearable pedlar
which went on in a monotonous and maddening
sing-song, “will wash out grease-stains, mud-stains,
blood-stains,” until Sikes fled almost screaming.
For this boyish mixture of appetite and
repugnance there is a good popular phrase, “supping
on horrors.” Dickens supped on horrors as
he supped on Christmas pudding. He supped on
horrors because he was an optimist and could sup
on anything. There was no saner or simpler
schoolboy than Traddles, who covered all his
books with skeletons.</p>
<p>“Oliver Twist” had begun in Bentley’s <i>Miscellany</i>,
which Dickens edited in 1837. It was<span class="pagenum" id="Page_114">114</span>
interrupted by a blow that for the moment broke
the author’s spirit and seemed to have broken his
heart. His wife’s sister, Mary Hogarth, died suddenly.
To Dickens his wife’s family seems to
have been like his own; his affections were heavily
committed to the sisters, and of this one he was
peculiarly fond. All his life, through much conceit
and sometimes something bordering on selfishness,
we can feel the redeeming note of an almost tragic
tenderness; he was a man who could really have
died of love or sorrow. He took up the work of
“Oliver Twist” again later in the year, and finished
it at the end of 1838. His work was incessant
and almost bewildering. In 1838 he had
already brought out the first number of “Nicholas
Nickleby.” But the great popularity went booming
on; the whole world was roaring for books by
Dickens, and more books by Dickens, and Dickens
was labouring night and day like a factory.
Among other things he edited the “Memoirs of
Grimaldi.” The incident is only worth mentioning
for the sake of one more example of the silly
ease with which Dickens was drawn by criticism
and the clever ease with which he managed, in
these small squabbles, to defend himself. Somebody
mildly suggested that, after all, Dickens had
never known Grimaldi. Dickens was down on<span class="pagenum" id="Page_115">115</span>
him like a thunderbolt, sardonically asking how
close an intimacy Lord Braybrooke had with Mr.
Samuel Pepys.</p>
<p>“Nicholas Nickleby” is the most typical perhaps
of the tone of his earlier works. It is in
form a very rambling, old-fashioned romance, the
kind of romance in which the hero is only a convenience
for the frustration of the villain. Nicholas
is what is called in theatricals a stick. But any
stick is good enough to beat a Squeers with. That
strong thwack, that simplified energy is the whole
object of such a story; and the whole of this tale
is full of a kind of highly picturesque platitude.
The wicked aristocrats, Sir Mulberry Hawk, Lord
Frederick Verisopht and the rest are inadequate
versions of the fashionable profligate. But this
is not (as some suppose) because Dickens in his
vulgarity could not comprehend the refinement of
patrician vice. There is no idea more vulgar or
more ignorant than the notion that a gentleman
is generally what is called refined. The error of
the Hawk conception is that, if anything, he is
too refined. Real aristocratic blackguards do not
swagger and rant so well. A real fast baronet
would not have defied Nicholas in the tavern with
so much oratorical dignity. A real fast baronet
would probably have been choked with apoplectic<span class="pagenum" id="Page_116">116</span>
embarrassment and said nothing at all. But Dickens
read into this aristocracy a grandiloquence and
a natural poetry which, like all melodrama, is
really the precious jewel of the poor.</p>
<p>But the book contains something which is much
more Dickensian. It is exquisitely characteristic
of Dickens that the truly great achievement of the
story is the person who delays the story. Mrs.
Nickleby with her beautiful mazes of memory does
her best to prevent the story of Nicholas Nickleby
from being told. And she does well. There is
no particular necessity that we should know what
happens to Madeline Bray. There is a desperate
and crying necessity that we should know that
Mrs. Nickleby once had a foot-boy who had a
wart on his nose and a driver who had a green
shade over his left eye. If Mrs. Nickleby is a
fool, she is one of those fools who are wiser than
the world. She stands for a great truth which we
must not forget; the truth that experience is not
in real life a saddening thing at all. The people
who have had misfortunes are generally the people
who love to talk about them. Experience is really
one of the gaieties of old age, one of its dissipations.
Mere memory becomes a kind of debauch.
Experience may be disheartening to those who are
foolish enough to try to co-ordinate it and to draw<span class="pagenum" id="Page_117">117</span>
deductions from it. But to those happy souls,
like Mrs. Nickleby, to whom relevancy is nothing,
the whole of their past life is like an inexhaustible
fairyland. Just as we take a rambling walk because
we know that a whole district is beautiful,
so they indulge a rambling mind because they know
that a whole existence is interesting. A boy does
not plunge into his future more romantically and
at random, than they plunge into their past.</p>
<p>Another gleam in the book is Mr. Mantalini.
Of him, as of all the really great comic characters
of Dickens, it is impossible to speak with any
critical adequacy. Perfect absurdity is a direct
thing, like physical pain, or a strong smell. A
joke is a fact. However indefensible it is it
cannot be attacked. However defensible it is it
cannot be defended. That Mr. Mantalini should
say in praising the “outline” of his wife, “The
two Countesses had no outlines, and the Dowager’s
was a demd outline,” this can only be called
an unanswerable absurdity. You may try to analyse
it, as Charles Lamb did the indefensible joke
about the hare; you may dwell for a moment on
the dark distinctions between the negative disqualification
of the Countesses and the positive disqualification
of the Dowager, but you will not
capture the violent beauty of it in any way. “She<span class="pagenum" id="Page_118">118</span>
will be a lovely widow; I shall be a body. Some
handsome women will cry; she will laugh
demnedly.” This vision of demoniac heartlessness
has the same defiant finality. I mention the
matter here, but it has to be remembered in connection
with all the comic masterpieces of Dickens.
Dickens has greatly suffered with the critics
precisely through this stunning simplicity in his
best work. The critic is called upon to describe
his sensations while enjoying Mantalini and
Micawber, and he can no more describe them than
he can describe a blow in the face. Thus Dickens,
in this self-conscious, analytical and descriptive
age, loses both ways. He is doubly unfitted for
the best modern criticism. His bad work is below
that criticism. His good work is above it.</p>
<p>But gigantic as were Dickens’s labours, gigantic
as were the exactions from him, his own plans
were more gigantic still. He had the type of mind
that wishes to do every kind of work at once; to
do everybody’s work as well as its own. There
floated before him a vision of a monstrous magazine,
entirely written by himself. It is true that
when this scheme came to be discussed, he suggested
that other pens might be occasionally employed;
but, reading between the lines, it is sufficiently
evident that he thought of the thing as a<span class="pagenum" id="Page_119">119</span>
kind of vast multiplication of himself, with Dickens
as editor, opening letters, Dickens as leader-writer
writing leaders, Dickens as reporter reporting
meetings, Dickens as reviewer reviewing books,
Dickens, for all I know, as office-boy, opening and
shutting doors. This serial, of which he spoke to
Messrs. Chapman and Hall, began and broke off
and remains as a colossal fragment bound together
under the title of “Master Humphrey’s Clock.”
One characteristic thing he wished to have in the
periodical. He suggested an Arabian Nights of
London, in which Gog and Magog, the giants of
the city, should give forth chronicles as enormous
as themselves. He had a taste for these schemes
or frameworks for many tales. He made and
abandoned many; many he half-fulfilled. I
strongly suspect that he meant Major Jackman, in
“Mrs. Lirriper’s Lodgings” and “Mrs. Lirriper’s
Legacy,” to start a series of studies of that
lady’s lodgers, a kind of history of No. 81 Norfolk
Street, Strand. “The Seven Poor Travellers”
was planned for seven stories; we will not
say seven poor stories. Dickens had meant, probably,
to write a tale for each article of “Somebody’s
Luggage”: he only got as far as the hat
and the boots. This gigantesque scale of literary
architecture, huge and yet curiously cosy, is characteristic<span class="pagenum" id="Page_120">120</span>
of his spirit, fond of size and yet fond
of comfort. He liked to have story within story,
like room within room of some labyrinthine but
comfortable castle. In this spirit he wished
“Master Humphrey’s Clock” to begin, and to
be a big frame or bookcase for numberless novels.
The clock started; but the clock stopped.</p>
<p>In the prologue by Master Humphrey reappears
Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller, and of that resurrection
many things have been said, chiefly expressions
of a reasonable regret. Doubtless they do
not add much to their author’s reputation, but they
add a great deal to their author’s pleasure. It was
ingrained in him to wish to meet old friends. All
his characters are, so to speak, designed to be old
friends; in a sense every Dickens character is an
old friend, even when he first appears. He comes
to us mellow out of many implied interviews, and
carries the firelight on his face. Dickens was simply
pleased to meet Pickwick again, and being
pleased, he made the old man too comfortable to
be amusing.</p>
<p>But “Master Humphrey’s Clock” is now
scarcely known except as the shell of one of the
well-known novels. “The Old Curiosity Shop”
was published in accordance with the original
“Clock” scheme. Perhaps the most typical thing<span class="pagenum" id="Page_121">121</span>
about it is the title. There seems no reason in particular,
at the first and most literal glance, why the
story should be called after the Old Curiosity Shop.
Only two of the characters have anything to do
with such a shop, and they leave us for ever in the
first few pages. It is as if Thackeray had called
the whole novel of “Vanity Fair” “Miss Pinkerton’s
Academy.” It is as if Scott had given the
whole story of “The Antiquary” the title of
“The Hawes Inn.” But when we feel the situation
with more fidelity we realize that this title
is something in the nature of a key to the whole
Dickens romance. His tales always started from
some splendid hint in the streets. And shops, perhaps
the most poetical of all things, often set off
his fancy galloping. Every shop, in fact, was to
him the door of romance. Among all the huge
serial schemes of which we have spoken, it is a
matter of wonder that he never started an endless
periodical called “The Street,” and divided it
into shops. He could have written an exquisite
romance called “The Baker’s Shop”; another
called “The Chemist’s Shop”; another called
“The Oil Shop,” to keep company with “The Old
Curiosity Shop.” Some incomparable baker he
invented and forgot. Some gorgeous chemist
might have been. Some more than mortal oilman<span class="pagenum" id="Page_122">122</span>
is lost to us for ever. This Old Curiosity
Shop he did happen to linger by: its tale he did
happen to tell.</p>
<p>Around “Little Nell,” of course, a controversy
raged and rages; some implored Dickens not to
kill her at the end of the story: some regret that
he did not kill her at the beginning. To me the
chief interest in this young person lies in the fact
that she is an example, and the most celebrated
example of what must have been, I think, a personal
peculiarity, perhaps a personal experience of
Dickens. There is, of course, no paradox at all
in saying that if we find in a good book a wildly
impossible character it is very probable indeed that
it was copied from a real person. This is one of
the commonplaces of good art criticism. For although
people talk of the restraints of fact and the
freedom of fiction, the case for most artistic purposes
is quite the other way. Nature is as free as
air: art is forced to look probable. There may be
a million things that do happen, and yet only one
thing that convinces us as likely to happen. Out
of a million possible things there may be only one
appropriate thing. I fancy, therefore, that many
stiff, unconvincing characters are copied from the
wild freak-show of real life. And in many parts
of Dickens’s work there is evidence of some peculiar<span class="pagenum" id="Page_123">123</span>
affection on his part for a strange sort of little
girl; a little girl with a premature sense of responsibility
and duty; a sort of saintly precocity.
Did he know some little girl of this kind? Did she
die, perhaps, and remain in his memory in colours
too ethereal and pale? In any case there are a
great number of them in his works. Little Dorrit
was one of them, and Florence Dombey with her
brother, and even Agnes in infancy; and, of course,
Little Nell. And, in any case, one thing is evident;
whatever charm these children may have
they have not the charm of childhood. They are
not little children: they are “little mothers.” The
beauty and divinity in a child lie in his not being
worried, not being conscientious, not being like
Little Nell. Little Nell has never any of the
sacred bewilderment of a baby. She never wears
that face, beautiful but almost half-witted, with
which a real child half understands that there is
evil in the universe.</p>
<p>As usual, however, little as the story has to do
with the title, the splendid and satisfying pages
have even less to do with the story. Dick Swiveller
is perhaps the noblest of all the noble creations
of Dickens. He has all the overwhelming absurdity
of Mantalini, with the addition of being
human and credible, for he knows he is absurd.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_124">124</span>
His high-falutin is not done because he seriously
thinks it right and proper, like that of Mr. Snodgrass,
nor is it done because he thinks it will serve
his turn, like that of Mr. Pecksniff, for both these
beliefs are improbable; it is done because he really
loves high-falutin, because he has a lonely literary
pleasure in exaggerative language. Great draughts
of words are to him like great draughts of wine—pungent
and yet refreshing, light and yet leaving
him in a glow. In unerring instinct for the
perfect folly of a phrase he has no equal, even
among the giants of Dickens. “I am sure,” says
Miss Wackles, when she had been flirting with
Cheggs, the market-gardener, and reduced Mr.
Swiveller to Byronic renunciation, “I am sure I’m
very sorry if—” “Sorry,” said Mr. Swiveller,
“sorry in the possession of a Cheggs!” The
abyss of bitterness is unfathomable. Scarcely less
precious is the pose of Mr. Swiveller when he
imitates the stage brigand. After crying, “Some
wine here! Ho!” he hands the flagon to himself
with profound humility, and receives it haughtily.
Perhaps the very best scene in the book is that
between Mr. Swiveller and the single gentleman
with whom he endeavours to remonstrate for having
remained in bed all day: “We cannot have
single gentlemen coming into the place and sleeping<span class="pagenum" id="Page_125">125</span>
like double gentlemen without paying extra....
An equal amount of slumber was never
got out of one bed, and if you want to sleep like
that you must pay for a double-bedded room.”
His relations with the Marchioness are at once
purely romantic and purely genuine; there is nothing
even of Dickens’s legitimate exaggerations
about them. A shabby, larky, good-natured clerk
would, as a matter of fact, spend hours in the
society of a little servant girl if he found her about
the house. It would arise partly from a dim kindliness,
and partly from that mysterious instinct
which is sometimes called, mistakenly, a love
of low company—that mysterious instinct which
makes so many men of pleasure find something
soothing in the society of uneducated people, particularly
uneducated women. It is the instinct
which accounts for the otherwise unaccountable
popularity of barmaids.</p>
<p>And still the pot of that huge popularity boiled.
In 1841 another novel was demanded, and “Barnaby
Rudge” supplied. It is chiefly of interest as
an embodiment of that other element in Dickens,
the picturesque or even the pictorial. Barnaby
Rudge, the idiot with his rags and his feathers and
his raven, the bestial hangman, the blind mob—all
make a picture, though they hardly make a<span class="pagenum" id="Page_126">126</span>
novel. One touch there is in it of the richer and
more humorous Dickens, the boy-conspirator, Mr.
Sim Tappertit. But he might have been treated
with more sympathy—with as much sympathy, for
instance, as Mr. Dick Swiveller; for he is only
the romantic guttersnipe, the bright boy at the
particular age when it is most fascinating to found
a secret society and most difficult to keep a secret.
And if ever there was a romantic guttersnipe on
earth it was Charles Dickens. “Barnaby Rudge”
is no more an historical novel than Sim’s secret
league was a political movement; but they are both
beautiful creations. When all is said, however, the
main reason for mentioning the work here is that
it is the next bubble in the pot, the next thing that
burst out of that whirling, seething head. The
tide of it rose and smoked and sang till it boiled
over the pot of Britain and poured over all America.
In the January of 1842 he set out for the
United States.</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_127">127</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="toclink_127">CHAPTER VI<br />
<span class="subhead">DICKENS AND AMERICA</span></h2>
</div>
<p class="in0"><span class="firstword">The</span> essential of Dickens’s character was the conjunction
of common sense with uncommon sensibility.
The two things are not, indeed, in such
an antithesis as is commonly imagined. Great
English literary authorities, such as Jane Austen
and Mr. Chamberlain, have put the word “sense”
and the word “sensibility” in a kind of opposition
to each other. But not only are they not
opposite words: they are actually the same word.
They both mean receptiveness or approachability
by the facts outside us. To have a sense of colour
is the same as to have a sensibility to colour. A
person who realizes that beef-steaks are appetizing
shows his sensibility. A person who realizes
that moonrise is romantic shows his sense. But it
is not difficult to see the meaning and need of the
popular distinction between sensibility and sense,
particularly in the form called common sense.
Common sense is a sensibility duly distributed in
all normal directions; sensibility has come to mean
a specialized sensibility in one. This is unfortunate,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_128">128</span>
for it is not the sensibility that is bad, but
the specializing; that is, the lack of sensibility to
everything else. A young lady who stays out all
night to look at the stars should not be blamed
for her sensibility to starlight, but for her insensibility
to other people. A poet who recites his
own verses from ten to five with the tears rolling
down his face should decidedly be rebuked for his
lack of sensibility—his lack of sensibility to those
grand rhythms of the social harmony, crudely
called manners. For all politeness is a long poem,
since it is full of recurrences. This balance of all
the sensibilities we call sense; and it is in this
capacity that it becomes of great importance as an
attribute of the character of Dickens.</p>
<p>Dickens, I repeat, had common sense and uncommon
sensibility. That is to say, the proportion
of interests in him was about the same as that of
an ordinary man, but he felt all of them more
excitedly. This is a distinction not easy for us to
keep in mind, because we hear to-day chiefly of
two types, the dull man who likes ordinary things
mildly, and the extraordinary man who likes extraordinary
things wildly. But Dickens liked
quite ordinary things; he merely made an extraordinary
fuss about them. His excitement was sometimes
like an epileptic fit; but it must not be confused<span class="pagenum" id="Page_129">129</span>
with the fury of the man of one idea or one
line of ideas. He had the excess of the eccentric,
but not the defects, the narrowness. Even when
he raved like a maniac he did not rave like a
monomaniac. He had no particular spot of sensibility
or spot of insensibility: he was merely a
normal man minus a normal self-command. He
had no special point of mental pain or repugnance,
like Ruskin’s horror of steam and iron, or Mr.
Bernard Shaw’s permanent irritation against romantic
love. He was annoyed at the ordinary
annoyances: only he was more annoyed than was
necessary. He did not desire strange delights,
blue wine or black women with Baudelaire, or
cruel sights east of Suez with Mr. Kipling. He
wanted what a healthy man wants, only he was
ill with wanting it. To understand him, in a word,
we must keep well in mind the medical distinction
between delicacy and disease. Perhaps we shall
comprehend it and him more clearly if we think
of a woman rather than a man. There was much
that was feminine about Dickens, and nothing
more so than this abnormal normality. A woman
is often, in comparison with a man, at once more
sensitive and more sane.</p>
<p>This distinction must be especially remembered
in all his quarrels. And it must be most especially<span class="pagenum" id="Page_130">130</span>
remembered in what may be called his great quarrel
with America, which we have now to approach.
The whole matter is so typical of Dickens’s attitude
to everything and anything, and especially of
Dickens’s attitude to anything political, that I may
ask permission to approach the matter by another,
a somewhat long and curving avenue.</p>
<p>Common sense is a fairy thread, thin and faint,
and as easily lost as gossamer. Dickens (in large
matters) never lost it. Take, as an example, his
political tone or drift throughout his life. His
views, of course, may have been right or wrong;
the reforms he supported may have been successful
or otherwise: that is not a matter for this book.
But if we compare him with the other men that
wanted the same things (or the other men that
wanted the other things) we feel a startling absence
of cant, a startling sense of humanity as it
is, and of the eternal weakness. He was a fierce
democrat, but in his best vein he laughed at the
cocksure Radical of common life, the red-faced
man who said, “Prove it!” when anybody said
anything. He fought for the right to elect; but
he would not whitewash elections. He believed in
parliamentary government; but he did not, like
our contemporary newspapers, pretend that parliament
is something much more heroic and imposing<span class="pagenum" id="Page_131">131</span>
than it is. He fought for the rights of the
grossly oppressed Nonconformists; but he spat out
of his mouth the unction of that too easy seriousness
with which they oiled everything, and held up
to them like a horrible mirror the foul fat face of
Chadband. He saw that Mr. Podsnap thought
too little of places outside England. But he saw
that Mrs. Jellaby thought too much of them. In
the last book he wrote he gives us, in Mr. Honeythunder,
a hateful and wholesome picture of all
the Liberal catchwords pouring out of one illiberal
man. But perhaps the best evidence of this
steadiness and sanity is the fact that, dogmatic
as he was, he never tied himself to any passing
dogma: he never got into any <i xml:lang="fr" lang="fr">cul de sac</i> of civic
or economic fanaticism: he went down the broad
road of the Revolution. He never admitted that
economically, we must make hells of workhouses,
any more than Rousseau would have admitted it.
He never said the State had no right to teach
children or save their bones, any more than Danton
would have said it. He was a fierce Radical;
but he was never a Manchester Radical. He used
the test of Utility, but he was never a Utilitarian.
While economists were writing soft words he
wrote “Hard Times,” which Macaulay called
“sullen Socialism,” because it was not complacent<span class="pagenum" id="Page_132">132</span>
Whiggism. But Dickens was never a Socialist any
more than he was an Individualist; and, whatever
else he was, he certainly was not sullen. He was
not even a politician of any kind. He was
simply a man of very clear, airy judgment on
things that did not inflame his private temper, and
he perceived that any theory that tried to run the
living State entirely on one force and motive was
probably nonsense. Whenever the Liberal philosophy
had embedded in it something hard and
heavy and lifeless, by an instinct he dropped it out.
He was too romantic, perhaps, but he would have
to do only with real things. He may have cared
too much about Liberty. But he cared nothing
about “Laissez faire.”</p>
<p>Now, among many interests of his contact with
America this interest emerges as infinitely the
largest and most striking, that it gave a final example
of this queer, unexpected coolness and candour
of his, this abrupt and sensational rationality.
Apart altogether from any question of the accuracy
of his picture of America, the American indignation
was particularly natural and inevitable.
For the large circumstances of the age must be
taken into account. At the end of the previous
epoch the whole of our Christian civilization had
been startled from its sleep by trumpets to take<span class="pagenum" id="Page_133">133</span>
sides in a bewildering Armageddon, often with
eyes still misty. Germany and Austria found
themselves on the side of the old order, France
and America on the side of the new. England, as
at the Reformation, took up eventually a dark
middle position, maddeningly difficult to define.
She created a democracy, but she kept an aristocracy:
she reformed the House of Commons, but
left the magistracy (as it is still) a mere league
of gentlemen against the world. But underneath
all this doubt and compromise there was in England
a great and perhaps growing mass of dogmatic
democracy; certainly thousands, probably
millions expected a Republic in fifty years. And
for these the first instinct was obvious. The first
instinct was to look across the Atlantic to where
lay a part of ourselves already Republican, the van
of the advancing English on the road to liberty.
Nearly all the great Liberals of the nineteenth
century enormously idealized America. On the
other hand to the Americans, fresh from their
first epic of arms, the defeated mother country,
with its coronets and county magistrates, was
only a broken feudal keep.</p>
<p>So much is self-evident. But nearly halfway
through the nineteenth century there came out of
England the voice of a violent satirist. In its<span class="pagenum" id="Page_134">134</span>
political quality it seemed like the half-choked cry
of the frustrated republic. It had no patience with
the pretence that England was already free, that
we had gained all that was valuable from the Revolution.
It poured a cataract of contempt on the
so-called working compromises of England, on
the oligarchic cabinets, on the two artificial parties,
on the government offices, on the J.P.’s, on the
vestries, on the voluntary charities. This satirist
was Dickens, and it must be remembered that he
was not only fierce, but uproariously readable. He
really damaged the things he struck at, a very
rare thing. He stepped up to the grave official
of the vestry, really trusted by the rulers, really
feared like a god by the poor, and he tied round
his neck a name that choked him; never again
now can he be anything but Bumble. He confronted
the fine old English gentleman who gives
his patriotic services for nothing as a local magistrate,
and he nailed him up as Nupkins, an owl in
open day. For to this satire there is literally no
answer; it cannot be denied that a man like Nupkins
can be and is a magistrate, so long as we
adopt the amazing method of letting the rich man
of a district actually be the judge in it. We can
only avoid the vision of the fact by shutting our
eyes, and imagining the nicest rich man we can<span class="pagenum" id="Page_135">135</span>
think of; and that, of course, is what we do. But
Dickens, in this matter, was merely realistic; he
merely asked us to look on Nupkins, on the wild,
strange thing that we had made. Thus Dickens
seemed to see England not at all as the country
where freedom slowly broadened down from precedent
to precedent, but as a rubbish heap of seventeenth
century bad habits abandoned by everybody
else. That is, he looked at England almost
with the eyes of an American democrat.</p>
<p>And so, when the voice, swelling in volume,
reached America and the Americans, the Americans
said, “Here is a man who will hurry the old
country along, and tip her kings and beadles into
the sea. Let him come here, and we will show him
a race of free men such as he dreams of, alive upon
the ancient earth. Let him come here and tell
the English of the divine democracy towards which
he drives them. There he has a monarchy and an
oligarchy to make game of. Here is a republic
for him to praise.” It seemed, indeed, a very
natural sequel, that having denounced undemocratic
England as the wilderness, he should announce
democratic America as the promised land.
Any ordinary person would have prophesied that
as he had pushed his rage at the old order almost
to the edge of rant, he would push his encomium<span class="pagenum" id="Page_136">136</span>
of the new order almost to the edge of cant. Amid
a roar of republican idealism, compliments, hope,
and anticipatory gratitude, the great democrat entered
the great democracy. He looked about him;
he saw a complete America, unquestionably progressive,
unquestionably self-governing. Then,
with a more than American coolness, and a more
than American impudence, he sat down and wrote
“Martin Chuzzlewit.” That tricky and perverse
sanity of his had mutinied again. Common sense
is a wild thing, savage, and beyond rules; and it
had turned on them and rent them.</p>
<p>The main course of action was as follows; and
it is right to record it before we speak of the justice
of it. When I speak of his sitting down and
writing “Martin Chuzzlewit,” I use, of course, an
elliptical expression. He wrote the notes of the
American part of “Martin Chuzzlewit” while
he was still in America; but it was a later decision
presumably that such impressions should go into
a book, and it was little better than an afterthought
that they should go into “Martin Chuzzlewit.”
Dickens had an uncommonly bad habit (artistically
speaking) of altering a story in the middle as
he did in the case of “Our Mutual Friend.” And
it is on record that he only sent young Martin
to America because he did not know what else<span class="pagenum" id="Page_137">137</span>
to do with him, and because (to say truth) the
sales were falling off. But the first action, which
Americans regarded as an equally hostile one, was
the publication of “American Notes,” the history
of which should first be given. His notion of visiting
America had come to him as a very vague
notion, even before the appearance of “The Old
Curiosity Shop.” But it had grown in him through
the whole ensuing period in the plaguing and persistent
way that ideas did grow in him and live
with him. He contended against the idea in a
certain manner. He had much to induce him to
contend against it. Dickens was by this time not
only a husband, but a father, the father of several
children, and their existence made a difficulty in
itself. His wife, he said, cried whenever the project
was mentioned. But it was a point in him
that he could never, with any satisfaction, part
with a project. He had that restless optimism,
that kind of nervous optimism, which would always
tend to say “Yes”; which is stricken with an
immortal repentance, if ever it says “No.” The
idea of seeing America might be doubtful, but the
idea of not seeing America was dreadful. “To
miss this opportunity would be a sad thing,” he
says. “... God willing, I think it <em>must</em> be managed
somehow!” It was managed somehow.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_138">138</span>
First of all he wanted to take his children as well
as his wife. Final obstacles to this fell upon him,
but they did not frustrate him. A serious illness
fell on him; but that did not frustrate him. He
sailed for America in 1842.</p>
<p>He landed in America, and he liked it. As
John Forster very truly says, it is due to him, as
well as to the great country that welcomed him,
that his first good impression should be recorded,
and that it should be “considered independently
of any modification it afterwards underwent.”
But the modification it afterwards underwent was,
as I have said above, simply a sudden kicking
against cant, that is, against repetition. He was
quite ready to believe that all Americans were
free men. He would have believed it if they had
not all told him so. He was quite prepared to be
pleased with America. He would have been pleased
with it if it had not been so much pleased with
itself. The “modification” his view underwent did
not arise from any “modification” of America as
he first saw it. His admiration did not change because
America changed. It changed because
America did not change. The Yankees enraged
him at last, not by saying different things, but by
saying the same things. They were a republic;
they were a new and vigorous nation; it seemed<span class="pagenum" id="Page_139">139</span>
natural that they should say so to a famous foreigner
first stepping on to their shore. But it
seemed maddening that they should say so to each
other in every car and drinking saloon from morning
till night. It was not that the Americans in
any way ceased from praising him. It was rather
that they went on praising him. It was not merely
that their praises of him sounded beautiful when
he first heard them. Their praises of themselves
sounded beautiful when he first heard them. That
democracy was grand, and that Charles Dickens
was a remarkable person, were two truths that
he certainly never doubted to his dying day. But,
as I say, it was a soulless repetition that stung his
sense of humour out of sleep; it woke like a wild
beast for hunting, the lion of his laughter. He
had heard the truth once too often. He had
heard the truth for the nine hundred and ninety-ninth
time, and he suddenly saw that it was falsehood.</p>
<p>It is true that a particular circumstance sharpened
and defined his disappointment. He felt
very hotly, as he felt everything, whether selfish
or unselfish, the injustice of the American piracies
of English literature, resulting from the American
copyright laws. He did not go to America with
any idea of discussing this; when, some time afterwards,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_140">140</span>
somebody said that he did, he violently
rejected the view as only describable “in one of
the shortest words in the English language.” But
his entry into America was almost triumphal; the
rostrum or pulpit was ready for him; he felt
strong enough to say anything. He had been most
warmly entertained by many American men of
letters, especially by Washington Irving, and in
his consequent glow of confidence he stepped up
to the dangerous question of American copyright.
He made many speeches attacking the American
law and theory of the matter as unjust to English
writers and to American readers. The effect appears
to have astounded him. “I believe there
is no country,” he writes, “on the face of the earth
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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_141">141</span>
this country is devoted to the question, and not one
of them <em>dares</em> 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.”</p>
<p>That is almost a portrait of Dickens. We can
almost see the erect little figure, its face and hair
like a flame.</p>
<p>For such reasons, among others, Dickens was
angry with America. But if America was angry
with Dickens, there were also reasons for it. I
do not think that the rage against his copyright
speeches was, as he supposed, merely national insolence
and self-satisfaction. America is a mystery
to any good Englishman; but I think Dickens
managed somehow to touch it on a queer nerve.
There is one thing, at any rate, that must strike
all Englishmen who have the good fortune to have
American friends; that is, that while there is no<span class="pagenum" id="Page_142">142</span>
materialism so crude or so material as American
materialism, there is also no idealism so crude or
so ideal as American idealism. America will always
affect an Englishman as being soft in the
wrong place and hard in the wrong place; coarse
exactly where all civilized men are delicate, delicate
exactly where all grown-up men are coarse.
Some beautiful ideal runs through this people, but
it runs aslant. The only existing picture in which
the thing I mean has been embodied is in Stevenson’s
“Wrecker,” in the blundering delicacy of
Jim Pinkerton. America has a new delicacy, a
coarse, rank refinement. But there is another way
of embodying the idea, and that is to say this—that
nothing is more likely than that the Americans
thought it very shocking in Dickens, the divine
author, to talk about being done out of money.
Nothing would be more American than to expect
a genius to be too high-toned for trade. It is
certain that they deplored his selfishness in the
matter, it is probable that they deplored his indelicacy.
A beautiful young dreamer, with flowing
brown hair, ought not to be even conscious of his
copyrights. For it is quite unjust to say that the
Americans worship the dollar. They really do
worship intellect—another of the passing superstitions
of our time.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_143">143</span></p>
<p>If America had then this Pinkertonian propriety,
this new, raw sensibility, Dickens was the
man to rasp it. He was its precise opposite in
every way. The decencies he did respect were old-fashioned
and fundamental. On top of these he
had that lounging liberty and comfort which can
only be had on the basis of very old conventions,
like the carelessness of gentlemen and the deliberation
of rustics. He had no fancy for being strung
up to that taut and quivering ideality demanded
by American patriots and public speakers. And
there was something else also, connected especially
with the question of copyright and his own pecuniary
claims. Dickens was not in the least desirous
of being thought too “high-souled” to want his
wages, nor was he in the least ashamed of asking
for them. Deep in him (whether the modern
reader likes the quality or no) was a sense very
strong in the old Radicals—very strong especially
in the old English Radicals—a sense of personal
<em>rights</em>, one’s own rights included, as something not
merely useful but sacred. He did not think a claim
any less just and solemn because it happened to be
selfish; he did not divide claims into selfish and
unselfish, but into right and wrong. It is significant
that when he asked for his money, he never
asked for it with that shamefaced cynicism, that<span class="pagenum" id="Page_144">144</span>
sort of embarrassed brutality, with which the modern
man of the world mutters something about
business being business or looking after number
one. He asked for his money in a valiant and
ringing voice, like a man asking for his honour.
While his American critics were moaning and
sneering at his interested motives as a disqualification,
he brandished his interested motives like
a banner. “It is nothing to them,” he cries in
astonishment, “that, of all men living, I am the
greatest loser by it” (the Copyright Law). “It
is nothing that I have a claim to speak and be
heard.” The thing they set up as a barrier he
actually presents as a passport. They think that
he, of all men, ought not to speak because he is
interested. He thinks that he, of all men, ought to
speak because he is wronged.</p>
<p>But this particular disappointment with America
in the matter of the tyranny of its public opinion
was not merely the expression of the fact that
Dickens was a typical Englishman; that is, a man
with a very sharp insistence upon individual freedom.
It also worked back ultimately to that
larger and vaguer disgust of which I have spoken—the
disgust at the perpetual posturing of the
people before a mirror. The tyranny was irritating,
not so much because of the suffering it inflicted<span class="pagenum" id="Page_145">145</span>
on the minority, but because of the awful glimpses
that it gave of the huge and imbecile happiness of
the majority. The very vastness of the vain race
enraged him, its immensity, its unity, its peace.
He was annoyed more with its contentment than
with any of its discontents. The thought of that
unthinkable mass of millions, every one of them
saying that Washington was the greatest man on
earth, and that the Queen lived in the Tower of
London, rode his riotous fancy like a nightmare.
But to the end he retained the outlines of his
original republican ideal and lamented over America
not as being too Liberal, but as not being Liberal
enough. Among others, he used these somewhat
remarkable words: “I tremble for a Radical
coming here, unless he is a Radical on principle,
by reason and reflection, and from the sense of
right. I fear that if he were anything else he
would return home a Tory.... I say no more
on that head for two months from this time, save
that I do fear that the heaviest blow ever dealt at
liberty will be dealt by this country, in the failure
of its example on the earth.”</p>
<p>We are still waiting to see if that prediction has
been fulfilled; but nobody can say that it has been
falsified.</p>
<p>He went west on the great canals; he went south<span class="pagenum" id="Page_146">146</span>
and touched the region of slavery; he saw America
superficially indeed, but as a whole. And the great
mass of his experience was certainly pleasant,
though he vibrated with anticipatory passion
against slave-holders, though he swore he would
accept no public tribute in the slave country (a
resolve which he broke under the pressure of the
politeness of the south), yet his actual collisions
with slavery and its upholders were few and brief.
In these he bore himself with his accustomed vivacity
and fire, but it would be a great mistake to convey
the impression that his mental reaction against
America was chiefly, or even largely, due to his
horror at the negro problem. Over and above the
cant of which we have spoken, the weary rush of
words, the chief complaint he made was a complaint
against bad manners; and on a large view
his anti-Americanism would seem to be more
founded on spitting than on slavery. When, however,
it did happen that the primary morality of
man-owning came up for discussion, Dickens displayed
an honourable impatience. One man, full
of anti-abolitionist ardour, buttonholed him and
bombarded him with the well-known argument in
defence of slavery, that it was not to the financial
interest of a slave-owner to damage or weaken his
own slaves. Dickens, in telling the story of this<span class="pagenum" id="Page_147">147</span>
interview, writes as follows: “I told him quietly
that it was not a man’s interest to get drunk, or
to steal, or to game, or to indulge in any other
vice; but he <em>did</em> indulge in it for all that. That
cruelty and the abuse of irresponsible power were
two of the bad passions of human nature, with the
gratification of which considerations of interest or
of ruin had nothing whatever to do....” It
is hardly possible to doubt that Dickens, in telling
the man this, told him something sane and logical
and unanswerable. But it is perhaps permissible
to doubt whether he told it to him quietly.</p>
<p>He returned home in the spring of 1842, and
in the later part of the year his “American Notes”
appeared, and the cry against him that had begun
over copyright swelled into a roar in his rear. Yet
when we read the “Notes” we can find little
offence in them, and, to say truth, less interest than
usual. They are no true picture of America, or
even of his vision of America, and this for two
reasons. First, that he deliberately excluded from
them all mention of that copyright question which
had really given him his glimpse of how tyrannical
a democracy can be. Second, that here he chiefly
criticizes America for faults which are not, after
all, especially American. For example, he is indignant
with the inadequate character of the prisons,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_148">148</span>
and compares them unfavourably with those in
England, controlled by Lieutenant Tracey, and
by Chesterton at Coldbath Fields, two reformers
of prison discipline for whom he had a high regard.
But it was a mere accident that American
gaols were inferior to English. There was and is
nothing in the American spirit to prevent their
effecting all the reforms of Tracey and Chesterton,
nothing to prevent their doing anything that
money and energy and organization can do.
America might have (for all I know, does have) a
prison system cleaner and more humane and more
efficient than any other in the world. And the
evil genius of America might still remain—everything
might remain that makes Pogram or Chollop
irritating or absurd. And against the evil
genius of America Dickens was now to strike a
second and a very different blow.</p>
<p>In January, 1843, appeared the first number of
the novel called “Martin Chuzzlewit.” The
earlier part of the book and the end, which have
no connection with America or the American problem,
in any case require a passing word. But except
for the two gigantic grotesques on each side
of the gateway of the tale, Pecksniff and Mrs.
Gamp, “Martin Chuzzlewit” will be chiefly admired
for its American excursion. It is a good<span class="pagenum" id="Page_149">149</span>
satire embedded in an indifferent novel. Mrs.
Gamp is, indeed, a sumptuous study, laid on in
those rich, oily, almost greasy colours that go to
make the English comic characters, that make the
very diction of Falstaff fat, and quaking with jolly
degradation. Pecksniff also is almost perfect, and
much too good to be true. The only other thing
to be noticed about him is that here, as almost
everywhere else in the novels, the best figures are
at their best when they have least to do. Dickens’s
characters are perfect as long as he can keep them
out of his stories. Bumble is divine until a dark
and practical secret is entrusted to him—as if anybody
but a lunatic would entrust a secret to Bumble.
Micawber is noble when he is doing nothing;
but he is quite unconvincing when he is spying on
Uriah Heep, for obviously neither Micawber nor
any one else would employ Micawber as a private
detective. Similarly, while Pecksniff is the best
thing in the story, the story is the worst thing in
Pecksniff. His plot against old Martin can only
be described by saying that it is as silly as old
Martin’s plot against him. His fall at the end
is one of the rare falls of Dickens. Surely it was
not necessary to take Pecksniff so seriously. Pecksniff
is a merely laughable character; he is so laughable
that he is lovable. Why take such trouble<span class="pagenum" id="Page_150">150</span>
to unmask a man whose mask you have made
transparent? Why collect all the characters to
witness the exposure of a man in whom none of the
characters believe? Why toil and triumph to
have the laugh of a man who was only made to be
laughed at?</p>
<p>But it is the American part of “Martin Chuzzlewit”
which is our concern, and which is memorable.
It has the air of a great satire; but if it
is only a great slander, it is still great. His serious
book on America was merely a squib, perhaps a
damp squib. In any case, we all know that America
will survive such serious books. But his fantastic
book may survive America. It may survive
America as “The Knights” has survived Athens.
“Martin Chuzzlewit” has this quality of great
satire that the critic forgets to ask whether the
portrait is true to the original, because the portrait
is so much more important than the original.
Who cares whether Aristophanes correctly describes
Kleon, who is dead, when he so perfectly
describes the demagogue, who cannot die? Just
as little, it may be, will some future age care
whether the ancient civilization of the west, the
lost cities of New York and St. Louis, were fairly
depicted in the colossal monument of Elijah
Pogram. For there is much more in the American<span class="pagenum" id="Page_151">151</span>
episodes than their intoxicating absurdity; there is
more than humour in the young man who made
the speech about the British Lion, and said, “I
taunt that lion. Alone I dare him;” or in the
other man who told Martin that when he said that
Queen Victoria did not live in the Tower of London
he “fell into an error not uncommon among
his countrymen.” He has his finger on the nerve
of an evil which was not only in his enemies, but
in himself. The great democrat has hold of one
of the dangers of democracy. The great optimist
confronts a horrible nightmare of optimism.
Above all, the genuine Englishman attacks a sin
that is not merely American, but English also.
The eternal, complacent iteration of patriotic half-truths;
the perpetual buttering of one’s self all
over with the same stale butter; above all, the big
defiances of small enemies, or the very urgent challenges
to very distant enemies; the cowardice so
habitual and unconscious that it wears the plumes
of courage—all this is an English temptation as
well as an American one. “Martin Chuzzlewit”
may be a caricature of America. America may be
a caricature of England. But in the gravest college,
in the quietest country house of England,
there is the seed of the same essential madness that
fills Dickens’s book, like an asylum, with brawling<span class="pagenum" id="Page_152">152</span>
Chollops and raving Jefferson Bricks. That essential
madness is the idea that the good patriot
is the man who feels at ease about his country.
This notion of patriotism was unknown in the little
pagan republics where our European patriotism
began. It was unknown in the Middle Ages. In
the eighteenth century, in the making of modern
politics, a “patriot” meant a discontented man.
It was opposed to the word “courtier,” which
meant an upholder of the <i xml:lang="la" lang="la">status quo</i>. In all other
modern countries, especially in countries like
France and Ireland, where real difficulties have
been faced, the word “patriot” means something
like a political pessimist. This view and these
countries have exaggerations and dangers of their
own; but the exaggeration and danger of England
is the same as the exaggeration and danger of
<i>The Watertoast Gazette</i>. The thing which is
rather foolishly called the Anglo-Saxon civilization
is at present soaked through with a weak pride.
It uses great masses of men not to procure discussion
but to procure the pleasure of unanimity; it
uses masses like bolsters. It uses its organs of
public opinion not to warn the public, but to soothe
it. It really succeeds not only in ignoring the rest
of the world, but actually in forgetting it. And
when a civilization really forgets the rest of the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_153">153</span>
world—lets it fall as something obviously dim
and barbaric—then there is only one adjective for
the ultimate fate of that civilization, and that
adjective is “Chinese.”</p>
<p>Martin Chuzzlewit’s America is a mad-house:
but it is a mad-house we are all on the road to.
For completeness and even comfort are almost the
definitions of insanity. The lunatic is the man who
lives in a small world but thinks it is a large one:
he is the man who lives in a tenth of the truth,
and thinks it is the whole. The madman cannot
conceive any cosmos outside a certain tale or conspiracy
or vision. Hence the more clearly we see
the world divided into Saxons and non-Saxons, into
our splendid selves and the rest, the more certain
we may be that we are slowly and quietly going
mad. The more plain and satisfying our state
appears, the more we may know that we are living
in an unreal world. For the real world is not
satisfying. The more clear become the colours
and facts of Anglo-Saxon superiority, the more
surely we may know we are in a dream. For the
real world is not clear or plain. The real world
is full of bracing bewilderments and brutal surprises.
Comfort is the blessing and the curse of
the English, and of Americans of the Pogram type
also. With them it is a loud comfort, a wild comfort,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_154">154</span>
a screaming and capering comfort; but comfort
at bottom still. For there is but an inch of
difference between the cushioned chamber and the
padded cell.</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_155">155</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="toclink_155">CHAPTER VII<br />
<span class="subhead">DICKENS AND CHRISTMAS</span></h2>
</div>
<p class="in0"><span class="firstword">In</span> the July of 1844 Dickens went on an Italian
tour, which he afterwards summarized in the book
called “Pictures from Italy.” They are, of
course, very vivacious, but there is no great need
to insist on them, considered as Italian sketches;
there is no need whatever to worry about them as
a phase of the mind of Dickens when he travelled
out of England. He never travelled out of England.
There is no trace in all these amusing pages
that he really felt the great foreign things which
lie in wait for us in the south of Europe, the Latin
civilization, the Catholic Church, the art of the
centre, the endless end of Rome. His travels are
not travels in Italy, but travels in Dickensland.
He sees amusing things; he describes them amusingly.
But he would have seen things just as good
in a street in Pimlico, and described them just as
well. Few things were racier even in his raciest
novel, than his description of the marionette play
of the death of Napoleon. Nothing could be more
perfect than the figure of the doctor, which had<span class="pagenum" id="Page_156">156</span>
something wrong with its wires, and hence “hovered
about the couch and delivered medical opinions
in the air.” Nothing could be better as a
catching of the spirit of all popular drama than
the colossal depravity of the wooden image of
“Sir Udson Low.” But there is nothing Italian
about it. Dickens would have made just as good
fun, indeed just the same fun, of a Punch and
Judy show performing in Long Acre or Lincoln’s
Inn Fields.</p>
<p>Dickens uttered just and sincere satire on Plornish
and Podsnap; but Dickens was as English as
any Podsnap or any Plornish. He had a hearty
humanitarianism, and a hearty sense of justice to
all nations, so far as he understood it. But that
very kind of humanitarianism, that very kind of
justice, were English. He was the Englishman of
the type that made Free Trade, the most English
of all things, since it was at once calculating and
optimistic. He respected catacombs and gondolas,
but that very respect was English. He wondered
at brigands and volcanoes, but that very wonder
was English. The very conception that Italy consists
of these things was an English conception.
The root things he never understood, the Roman
legend, the ancient life of the Mediterranean, the
world-old civilization of the vine and olive, the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_157">157</span>
mystery of the immutable Church. He never
understood these things, and I am glad he never
understood them: he could only have understood
them by ceasing to be the inspired cockney that he
was, the rousing English Radical of the great
Radical age in England. That spirit of his was
one of the things that we have had which were
truly national. All other forces we have borrowed,
especially those which flatter us most. Imperialism
is foreign, socialism is foreign, militarism is
foreign, education is foreign, strictly even Liberalism
is foreign. But Radicalism was our own; as
English as the hedge-rows.</p>
<p>Dickens abroad, then, was for all serious purposes
simply the Englishman abroad; the Englishman
abroad is for all serious purposes, simply the
Englishman at home. Of this generalization one
modification must be made. Dickens did feel a
direct pleasure in the bright and busy exterior of
the French life, the clean caps, the coloured uniforms,
the skies like blue enamel, the little green
trees, the little white houses, the scene picked out
in primary colours, like a child’s picture-book.
This he felt, and this he put (by a stroke of
genius) into the mouth of Mrs. Lirriper, a London
landlady on a holiday: for Dickens always knew
that it is the simple and not the subtle who feel<span class="pagenum" id="Page_158">158</span>
differences; and he saw all his colours through the
clear eyes of the poor. And in thus taking to his
heart the streets as it were, rather than the spires
of the Continent, he showed beyond question that
combination of which we have spoken—of common
sense with uncommon sensibility. For it is
for the sake of the streets and shops and the coats
and hats, that we should go abroad; they are far
better worth going to see than the castles and
cathedrals and Roman camps. For the wonders
of the world are the same all over the world, at
least all over the European world. Castles that
throw valleys in shadow, minsters that strike the
sky, roads so old that they seem to have been made
by the gods, these are in all Christian countries.
The marvels of man are at all our doors. A
labourer hoeing turnips in Sussex has no need to be
ignorant that the bones of Europe are the Roman
roads. A clerk living in Lambeth has no need not
to know that there was a Christian art exuberant
in the thirteenth century; for only across the river
he can see the live stones of the Middle Ages surging
together towards the stars. But exactly the
things that do strike the traveller as extraordinary
are the ordinary things, the food, the clothes, the
vehicles; the strange things are cosmopolitan, the
common things are national and peculiar. Cologne<span class="pagenum" id="Page_159">159</span>
spire is lifted on the same arches as Canterbury;
but the thing you cannot see out of Germany is
a German beer-garden. There is no need for a
Frenchman to go to look at Westminster Abbey
as a piece of English architecture; it is not, in the
special sense, a piece of English architecture. But
a hansom cab is a piece of English architecture; a
thing produced by the peculiar poetry of our cities,
a symbol of a certain reckless comfort which is
really English; a thing to draw a pilgrimage of
the nations. The imaginative Englishman will be
found all day in a <i xml:lang="fr" lang="fr">café</i>; the imaginative Frenchman
in a hansom cab.</p>
<p>This sort of pleasure Dickens took in the Latin
life; but no deeper kind. And the strongest of all
possible indications of his fundamental detachment
from it can be found in one fact. A great part of
the time that he was in Italy he was engaged in
writing “The Chimes,” and such Christmas tales,
tales of Christmas in the English towns, tales full
of fog and snow and hail and happiness.</p>
<p>Dickens could find in any street divergences between
man and man deeper than the divisions of
nations. His fault was to exaggerate differences.
He could find types almost as distinct as separate
tribes of animals in his own brain and his own
city, those two homes of a magnificent chaos. The<span class="pagenum" id="Page_160">160</span>
only two southerners introduced prominently into
his novels, the two in “Little Dorrit,” are popular
English foreigners, I had almost said stage foreigners.
Villainy is, in English eyes, a southern
trait, therefore one of the foreigners is villainous.
Vivacity is, in English eyes, another southern trait,
therefore the other foreigner is vivacious. But we
can see from the outlines of both that Dickens
did not have to go to Italy to get them. While
poor panting millionaires, poor tired earls and
poor God-forsaken American men of culture are
plodding about Italy for literary inspiration,
Charles Dickens made up the whole of that Italian
romance (as I strongly suspect) from the faces
of two London organ-grinders.</p>
<p>In the sunlight of the southern world, he was
still dreaming of the firelight of the north. Among
the palaces and the white campanile, he shut his
eyes to see Marylebone and dreamed a lovely
dream of chimney-pots. He was not happy he
said, without streets. The very foulness and smoke
of London were lovable in his eyes and fill his
Christmas tales with a vivid vapour. In the clear
skies of the south he saw afar off the fog of London
like a sunset cloud and longed to be in the
core of it.</p>
<p>This Christmas tone of Dickens, in connection<span class="pagenum" id="Page_161">161</span>
with his travels is a matter that can only be expressed
by a parallel with one of his other works.
Much the same that has here been said of his
“Pictures from Italy” may be said about his
“Child’s History of England;” with the difference
that while the “Pictures from Italy,” do in
a sense add to his fame, the “History of England”
in almost every sense detracts from it. But the
nature of the limitation is the same. What Dickens
was travelling in distant lands, that he was
travelling in distant ages; a sturdy, sentimental
English Radical with a large heart and a narrow
mind. He could not help falling into that besetting
sin or weakness of the modern progressive,
the habit of regarding the contemporary questions
as the eternal questions and the latest word as the
last. He could not get out of his head the instinctive
conception that the real problem before St.
Dunstan was whether he should support Lord John
Russell or Sir Robert Peel. He could not help
seeing the remotest peaks lit up by the raging bonfire
of his own passionate political crisis. He lived
for the instant and its urgency; that is, he did what
St. Dunstan did. He lived in an eternal present
like all simple men. It is indeed “A Child’s History
of England;” but the child is the writer and
not the reader.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_162">162</span></p>
<p>But Dickens in his cheapest cockney utilitarianism,
was not only English, but unconsciously historic.
Upon him descended the real tradition of
“Merry England,” and not upon the pallid
mediævalists who thought they were reviving it.
The Pre-Raphaelites, the Gothicists, the admirers
of the Middle Ages, had in their subtlety and sadness
the spirit of the present day. Dickens had in
his buffoonery and bravery the spirit of the Middle
Ages. He was much more mediæval in his attacks
on mediævalism than they were in their
defences of it. It was he who had the things of
Chaucer, the love of large jokes and long stories
and brown ale and all the white roads of England.
Like Chaucer he loved story within story, every
man telling a tale. Like Chaucer he saw something
openly comic in men’s motley trades. Sam
Weller would have been a great gain to the Canterbury
Pilgrimage and told an admirable story.
Rossetti’s Damozel would have been a great bore,
regarded as too fast by the Prioress and too priggish
by the Wife of Bath. It is said that in the
somewhat sickly Victorian revival of feudalism
which was called “Young England,” a nobleman
hired a hermit to live in his grounds. It is also
said that the hermit struck for more beer.
Whether this anecdote be true or not, it is always<span class="pagenum" id="Page_163">163</span>
told as showing a collapse from the ideal of the
Middle Ages to the level of the present day. But
in the mere act of striking for beer the holy man
was very much more “mediæval” than the fool
who employed him.</p>
<p>It would be hard to find a better example of
this than Dickens’s great defence of Christmas.
In fighting for Christmas he was fighting for the
old European festival, Pagan and Christian, for
that trinity of eating, drinking and praying which
to moderns appears irreverent, for the holy day
which is really a holiday. He had himself the
most babyish ideas about the past. He supposed
the Middle Ages to have consisted of tournaments
and torture-chambers, he supposed himself to be a
brisk man of the manufacturing age, almost a Utilitarian.
But for all that he defended the mediæval
feast which was going out against the Utilitarianism
which was coming in. He could only see all
that was bad in mediævalism. But he fought for
all that was good in it. And he was all the more
really in sympathy with the old strength and simplicity
because he only knew that it was good and
did not know that it was old. He cared as little
for mediævalism as the mediævals did. He cared
as much as they did for lustiness and virile laughter
and sad tales of good lovers and pleasant tales of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_164">164</span>
good livers. He would have been very much
bored by Ruskin and Walter Pater if they had
explained to him the strange sunset tints of Lippi
and Botticelli. He had no pleasure in looking on
the dying Middle Ages. But he looked on the
living Middle Ages, on a piece of the old uproarious
superstition still unbroken; and he hailed it
like a new religion. The Dickens character ate
pudding to an extent at which the modern mediævalists
turned pale. They would do every kind of
honour to an old observance, except observing it.
They would pay to a Church feast every sort of
compliment except feasting.</p>
<p>And (as I have said) as were his unconscious
relations to our European past, so were his unconscious
relations to England. He imagined himself
to be, if anything, a sort of cosmopolitan; at any
rate to be a champion of the charms and merits of
continental lands against the arrogance of our
island. But he was in truth very much more a
champion of the old and genuine England against
that comparatively cosmopolitan England which
we have all lived to see. And here again the
supreme example is Christmas. Christmas is, as I
have said, one of numberless old European feasts
of which the essence is the combination of religion
with merry-making. But among those feasts it is<span class="pagenum" id="Page_165">165</span>
also especially and distinctively English in the
style of its merry-making and even in the style of
its religion. For the character of Christmas (as
distinct, for instance, from the continental Easter)
lies chiefly in two things: first on the terrestrial
side the note of comfort rather than the note of
brightness; and on the spiritual side, Christian
charity rather than Christian ecstasy. And comfort
is, like charity, a very English instinct. Nay,
comfort is, like charity, an English merit; though
our comfort may and does degenerate into materialism,
just as our charity may (and does) degenerate
into laxity and make-believe.</p>
<p>This ideal of comfort belongs peculiarly to England;
it belongs peculiarly to Christmas; above
all it belongs pre-eminently to Dickens. And it is
astonishingly misunderstood. It is misunderstood
by the continent of Europe, it is, if possible, still
more misunderstood by the English of to-day. On
the Continent the restaurateurs provide us with
raw beef, as if we were savages; yet old English
cooking takes as much care as French. And in
England has arisen a parvenu patriotism which
represents the English as everything but English;
as a blend of Chinese stoicism, Latin militarism,
Prussian rigidity, and American bad taste. And
so England, whose fault is gentility and whose<span class="pagenum" id="Page_166">166</span>
virtue is geniality, England with her tradition of
the great gay gentlemen of Elizabeth, is represented
to the four quarters of the world (as in
Mr. Kipling’s religious poems) in the enormous
image of a solemn cad. And because it is very
difficult to be comfortable in the suburbs, the
suburbs have voted that comfort is a gross and
material thing. Comfort, especially this vision of
Christmas comfort, is the reverse of a gross or
material thing. It is far more poetical, properly
speaking, than the Garden of Epicurus. It is far
more artistic than the Palace of Art. It is more
artistic because it is based upon a contrast, a contrast
between the fire and wine within the house
and the winter and the roaring rains without. It
is far more poetical, because there is in it a note
of defence, almost of war; a note of being besieged
by the snow and hail; of making merry
in the belly of a fort. The man who said that
an Englishman’s house is his castle said much more
than he meant. The Englishman thinks of his
house as something fortified, and provisioned, and
his very surliness is at root romantic. And this
sense would naturally be strongest in wild winter
nights, when the lowered portcullis and the lifted
drawbridge do not merely bar people out, but bar
people in. The Englishman’s house is most sacred,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_167">167</span>
not merely when the King cannot enter it, but
when the Englishman cannot get out of it.</p>
<p>This comfort, then, is an abstract thing, a principle.
The English poor shut all their doors and
windows till their rooms reek like the Black Hole.
They are suffering for an idea. Mere animal
hedonism would not dream, as we English do, of
winter feasts and little rooms, but of eating fruit
in large and idle gardens. Mere sensuality would
desire to please all its senses. But to our good
dreams this dark and dangerous background is
essential; the highest pleasure we can imagine is a
defiant pleasure, a happiness that stands at bay.
The word “comfort” is not indeed the right
word, it conveys too much of the slander of mere
sense; the true word is “cosiness,” a word not
translatable. One, at least, of the essentials of
it is smallness, smallness in preference to largeness,
smallness for smallness’s sake. The merry-maker
wants a pleasant parlour, he would not give
twopence for a pleasant continent. In our difficult
time, of course, a fight for mere space has become
necessary. Instead of being greedy for ale and
Christmas pudding we are greedy for mere air,
an equally sensual appetite. In abnormal conditions
this is wise; and the illimitable veldt is an
excellent thing for nervous people. But our fathers<span class="pagenum" id="Page_168">168</span>
were large and healthy enough to make a thing
humane, and not worry about whether it was hygienic.
They were big enough to get into small
rooms.</p>
<p>Of this quite deliberate and artistic quality in
the close Christmas chamber, the standing evidence
is Dickens in Italy. He created these dim
firelit tales like little dim red jewels, as an artistic
necessity, in the centre of an endless summer.
Amid the white cities of Tuscany he hungered for
something romantic, and wrote about a rainy
Christmas. Amid the pictures of the Uffizi he
starved for something beautiful, and fed his memory
on London fog. His feeling for the fog was
especially poignant and typical. In the first of his
Christmas tales, the popular “Christmas Carol,”
he suggested the very soul of it in one simile, when
he spoke of the dense air, suggesting that “Nature
was brewing on a large scale.” This sense of the
thick atmosphere as something to eat or drink,
something not only solid but satisfactory, may
seem almost insane, but it is no exaggeration of
Dickens’s emotion. We speak of a fog “that you
could cut with a knife.” Dickens would have liked
the phrase as suggesting that the fog was a colossal
cake. He liked even more his own phrase of
the Titanic brewery, and no dream would have<span class="pagenum" id="Page_169">169</span>
given him a wilder pleasure than to grope his way
to some such tremendous vats and drink the ale
of the giants.</p>
<p>There is a current prejudice against fogs, and
Dickens, perhaps, is their only poet. Considered
hygienically no doubt this may be more or less
excusable. But, considered poetically, fog is not
undeserving, it has a real significance. We have in
our great cities abolished the clean and sane darkness
of the country. We have outlawed night and
sent her wandering in wild meadows; we have lit
eternal watch-fires against her return. We have
made a new cosmos, and as a consequence our own
sun and stars. And, as a consequence also, and
most justly, we have made our own darkness. Just
as every lamp is a warm human moon, so every
fog is a rich human nightfall. If it were not for
this mystic accident we should never see darkness,
and he who has never seen darkness has never seen
the sun. Fog for us is the chief form of that
outward pressure which compresses mere luxury
into real comfort. It makes the world small, in
the same spirit as in that common and happy cry
that the world is small, meaning that it is full of
friends. The first man that emerges out of the
mist with a light, is for us Prometheus, a saviour
bringing fire to men. He is that greatest and best<span class="pagenum" id="Page_170">170</span>
of all men, greater than the heroes, better than
the saints, Man Friday. Every rumble of a cart,
every cry in the distance, marks the heart of humanity
beating undaunted in the darkness. It is
wholly human; man toiling in his own cloud. If
real darkness is like the embrace of God, this is
the dark embrace of man.</p>
<p>In such a sacred cloud the tale called “The
Christmas Carol” begins, the first and most typical
of all his Christmas tales. It is not irrelevant
to dilate upon the geniality of this darkness, because
it is characteristic of Dickens that his atmospheres
are more important than his stories.
The Christmas atmosphere is more important than
Scrooge, or the ghosts either; in a sense, the background
is more important than the figures. The
same thing may be noticed in his dealings with
that other atmosphere (besides that of good humour)
which he excelled in creating, an atmosphere
of mystery and wrong, such as that which
gathers round Mrs. Clennam, rigid in her chair,
or old Miss Havisham, ironically robed as a bride.
Here again the atmosphere altogether eclipses the
story, which often seems disappointing in comparison.
The secrecy is sensational; the secret
is tame. The surface of the thing seems more
awful than the core of it. It seems almost as if<span class="pagenum" id="Page_171">171</span>
these grisly figures, Mrs. Chadband and Mrs.
Clennam, Miss Havisham and Miss Flite, Nemo
and Sally Brass, were keeping something back
from the author as well as from the reader. When
the book closes we do not know their real secret.
They soothed the optimistic Dickens with something
less terrible than the truth. The dark house
of Arthur Clennam’s childhood really depresses
us; it is a true glimpse into that quiet street in
hell, where live the children of that unique dispensation
which theologians call Calvinism and
Christians devil-worship. But some stranger crime
had really been done there, some more monstrous
blasphemy or human sacrifice than the suppression
of some silly document advantageous to the silly
Dorrits. Something worse than a common tale
of jilting lay behind the masquerade and madness
of the awful Miss Havisham. Something worse
was whispered by the misshapen Quilp to the sinister
Sally in that wild, wet summer-house by the
river, something worse than the clumsy plot
against the clumsy Kit. These dark pictures seem
almost as if they were literally visions; things,
that is, that Dickens saw but did not understand.</p>
<p>And as with his backgrounds of gloom, so with
his backgrounds of good-will, in such tales as
“The Christmas Carol.” The tone of the tale is<span class="pagenum" id="Page_172">172</span>
kept throughout in a happy monotony, though the
tale is everywhere irregular and in some places
weak. It has the same kind of artistic unity that
belongs to a dream. A dream may begin with the
end of the world and end with a tea-party; but
either the end of the world will seem as trivial
as a tea-party or that tea-party will be as terrible
as the day of doom. The incidents change wildly;
the story scarcely changes at all. “The Christmas
Carol” is a kind of philanthropic dream, an enjoyable
nightmare, in which the scenes shift bewilderingly
and seem as miscellaneous as the pictures in
a scrap-book, but in which there is one constant
state of the soul, a state of rowdy benediction and
a hunger for human faces. The beginning is about
a winter day and a miser; yet the beginning is in
no way bleak. The author starts with a kind of
happy howl; he bangs on our door like a drunken
carol singer; his style is festive and popular; he
compares the snow and hail to philanthropists who
“come down handsomely”; he compares the fog
to unlimited beer. Scrooge is not really inhuman
at the beginning any more than he is at the end.
There is a heartiness in his inhospitable sentiments
that is akin to humour and therefore to humanity;
he is only a crusty old bachelor, and had (I
strongly suspect) given away turkeys secretly all<span class="pagenum" id="Page_173">173</span>
his life. The beauty and the real blessing of the
story do not lie in the mechanical plot of it, the
repentance of Scrooge, probable or improbable;
they lie in the great furnace of real happiness that
glows through Scrooge and everything round him;
that great furnace, the heart of Dickens. Whether
the Christmas visions would or would not convert
Scrooge, they convert us. Whether or no the
visions were evoked by real Spirits of the Past,
Present, and Future, they were evoked by that
truly exalted order of angels who are correctly
called High Spirits. They are impelled and sustained
by a quality which our contemporary artists
ignore or almost deny, but which in a life decently
lived is as normal and attainable as sleep, positive,
passionate, conscious joy. The story sings from end
to end like a happy man going home; and, like a
happy and good man, when it cannot sing it yells.
It is lyric and exclamatory, from the first exclamatory
words of it. It is strictly a Christmas Carol.</p>
<p>Dickens, as has been said, went to Italy with
this kindly cloud still about him, still meditating
on Yule mysteries. Among the olives and the
orange-trees he wrote his second great Christmas
tale, “The Chimes” (at Genoa in 1844), a
Christmas tale only differing from “The Christmas
Carol” in being fuller of the grey rains of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_174">174</span>
winter and the north. “The Chimes” is, like the
“Carol,” an appeal for charity and mirth, but it
is a stern and fighting appeal: if the other is a
Christmas carol, this is a Christmas war-song. In
it Dickens hurled himself with even more than
his usual militant joy and scorn into an attack upon
a cant, which he said made his blood boil. This
cant was nothing more nor less than the whole
tone taken by three-quarters of the political and
economic world towards the poor. It was a vague
and vulgar Benthamism with a rollicking Tory
touch in it. It explained to the poor their duties
with a cold and coarse philanthropy unendurable
by any free man. It had also at its command a
kind of brutal banter, a loud good-humour which
Dickens sketches savagely in Alderman Cute. He
fell furiously on all their ideas: the cheap advice
to live cheaply, the base advice to live basely,
above all, the preposterous primary assumption
that the rich are to advise the poor and not the
poor the rich. There were and are hundreds of
these benevolent bullies. Some say that the poor
should give up having children, which means that
they should give up their great virtue of sexual
sanity. Some say that they should give up
“treating” each other, which means that they
should give up all that remains to them of the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_175">175</span>
virtue of hospitality. Against all of this Dickens
thundered very thoroughly in “The Chimes.” It
may be remarked in passing that this affords another
instance of a confusion already referred to,
the confusion whereby Dickens supposed himself
to be exalting the present over the past, whereas
he was really dealing deadly blows at things
strictly peculiar to the present. Embedded in this
very book is a somewhat useless interview between
Trotty Veck and the church bells, in which
the latter lectures the former for having supposed
(why I don’t know) that they were expressing
regret for the disappearance of the Middle Ages.
There is no reason why Trotty Veck or any one
else should idealize the Middle Ages, but certainly
he was the last man in the world to be asked to
idealize the nineteenth century, seeing that the
smug and stingy philosophy, which poisons his life
through the book, was an exclusive creation of that
century. But, as I have said before, the fieriest
mediævalist may forgive Dickens for disliking the
good things the Middle Ages took away, considering
how he loved whatever good things the Middle
Ages left behind. It matters very little that
he hated old feudal castles when they were already
old. It matters very much that he hated the New
Poor Law while it was still new.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_176">176</span></p>
<p>The moral of this matter in “The Chimes” is
essential. Dickens had sympathy with the poor
in the Greek and literal sense; he suffered with
them mentally; for the things that irritated them
were the things that irritated him. He did not
pity the people, or even champion the people, or
even merely love the people; in this matter he
was the people. He alone in our literature is the
voice not merely of the social substratum, but even
of the subconsciousness of the substratum. He
utters the secret anger of the humble. He says
what the uneducated only think, or even only feel,
about the educated. And in nothing is he so
genuinely such a voice as in this fact of his fiercest
mood being reserved for methods that are counted
scientific and progressive. Pure and exalted atheists
talk themselves into believing that the working-classes
are turning with indignant scorn from
the churches. The working-classes are not indignant
against the churches in the least. The things
the working-classes really are indignant against
are the hospitals. The people has no definite disbelief
in the temples of theology. The people has
a very fiery and practical disbelief in the temples
of physical science. The things the poor hate are
the modern things, the rationalistic things—doctors,
inspectors, poor law guardians, professional<span class="pagenum" id="Page_177">177</span>
philanthropy. They never showed any reluctance
to be helped by the old and corrupt monasteries.
They will often die rather than be helped by the
modern and efficient workhouse. Of all this anger,
good or bad, Dickens is the voice of an accusing
energy. When, in “The Christmas Carol,”
Scrooge refers to the surplus population, the Spirit
tells him, very justly, not to speak till he knows
what the surplus is and where it is. The implication
is severe but sound. When a group of superciliously
benevolent economists look down into
the abyss for the surplus population, assuredly
there is only one answer that should be given to
them; and that is to say, “If there is a surplus,
you are a surplus.” And if any one were ever
cut off, they would be. If the barricades went up
in our streets and the poor became masters, I think
the priests would escape, I fear the gentlemen
would; but I believe the gutters would be simply
running with the blood of philanthropists.</p>
<p>Lastly, he was at one with the poor in this
chief matter of Christmas, in the matter, that is,
of special festivity. There is nothing on which
the poor are more criticized than on the point of
spending large sums on small feasts; and though
there are material difficulties, there is nothing in
which they are more right. It is said that a Boston<span class="pagenum" id="Page_178">178</span>
paradox-monger said, “Give us the luxuries of
life and we will dispense with the necessities.”
But it is the whole human race that says it, from
the first savage wearing feathers instead of clothes
to the last costermonger having a treat instead of
three meals.</p>
<p>The third of his Christmas stories, “The
Cricket on the Hearth,” calls for no extensive comment,
though it is very characteristic. It has all
the qualities which we have called dominant qualities
in his Christmas sentiment. It has cosiness,
that is the comfort that depends upon a discomfort
surrounding it. It has a sympathy with the poor,
and especially with the extravagance of the poor;
with what may be called the temporary wealth of
the poor. It has the sentiment of the hearth, that
is, the sentiment of the open fire being the red
heart of the room. That open fire is the veritable
flame of England, still kept burning in the midst
of a mean civilization of stoves. But everything
that is valuable in “The Cricket on the Hearth”
is perhaps as well expressed in the title as it is in
the story. The tale itself, in spite of some of those
inimitable things that Dickens never failed to say,
is a little too comfortable to be quite convincing.
“The Christmas Carol” is the conversion of an
anti-Christmas character. “The Chimes” is a<span class="pagenum" id="Page_179">179</span>
slaughter of anti-Christmas characters. “The
Cricket,” perhaps, fails for lack of this crusading
note. For everything has its weak side, and when
full justice has been done to this neglected note of
poetic comfort, we must remember that it has its
very real weak side. The defect of it in the work
of Dickens was that he tended sometimes to pile
up the cushions until none of the characters could
move. He is so much interested in effecting his
state of static happiness that he forgets to make
a story at all. His princes at the start of the
story begin to live happily ever afterwards. We
feel this strongly in “Master Humphrey’s Clock,”
and we feel it sometimes in these Christmas stories.
He makes his characters so comfortable that his
characters begin to dream and drivel. And he
makes his reader so comfortable that his reader
goes to sleep.</p>
<p>The actual tale of the carrier and his wife
sounds somewhat sleepily in our ears; we cannot
keep our attention fixed on it, though we are conscious
of a kind of warmth from it as from a great
wood fire. We know so well that everything will
soon be all right that we do not suspect when
the carrier suspects, and are not frightened when
the gruff Tackleton growls. The sound of the
Christmas festivities at the end comes fainter on<span class="pagenum" id="Page_180">180</span>
our ears than did the shout of the Cratchits or the
bells of Trotty Veck. All the good figures that
followed Scrooge when he came growling out of
the fog fade into the fog again.</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_181">181</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="toclink_181">CHAPTER VIII<br />
<span class="subhead">THE TIME OF TRANSITION</span></h2>
</div>
<p class="in0"><span class="firstword">Dickens</span> was back in London by the June of
1845. About this time he became the first editor
of <i>The Daily News</i>, a paper which he had largely
planned and suggested, and which, I trust, remembers
its semi-divine origin. That his thoughts
had been running, as suggested in the last chapter,
somewhat monotonously on his Christmas domesticities,
is again suggested by the rather singular
fact that he originally wished <i>The Daily News</i>
to be called <i>The Cricket</i>. Probably he was
haunted again with his old vision of a homely,
tale-telling periodical such as had broken off in
“Master Humphrey’s Clock.” About this time,
however, he was peculiarly unsettled. Almost as
soon as he had taken the editorship he threw it
up; and having only recently come back to England,
he soon made up his mind to go back to the
Continent. In the May of 1846 he ran over to
Switzerland and tried to write “Dombey and
Son” at Lausanne. Tried to, I say, because his
letters are full of an angry impotence. He could<span class="pagenum" id="Page_182">182</span>
not get on. He attributed this especially to his
love of London and his loss of it, “the absence of
streets and numbers of figures.... <em>My</em> figures
seem disposed to stagnate without crowds about
them.” But he also, with shrewdness, attributed
it more generally to the laxer and more wandering
life he had led for the last two years, the American
tour, the Italian tour, diversified, generally speaking,
only with slight literary productions. His
ways were never punctual or healthy, but they
were also never unconscientious as far as work
was concerned. If he walked all night he could
write all day. But in this strange exile or inter-regnum
he did not seem able to fall into any habits,
even bad habits. A restlessness beyond all his
experience had fallen for a season upon the most
restless of the children of men.</p>
<p>It may be a mere coincidence: but this break in
his life very nearly coincided with the important
break in his art. “Dombey and Son,” planned in
all probability some time before, was destined to
be the last of a quite definite series, the early novels
of Dickens. The difference between the books
from the beginning up to “Dombey,” and the
books from “David Copperfield” to the end may
be hard to state dogmatically, but is evident to
every one with any literary sense. Very coarsely,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_183">183</span>
the case may be put by saying that he diminished,
in the story as a whole, the practice of pure caricature.
Still more coarsely it may be put in the
phrase that he began to practise realism. If we
take Mr. Stiggins, say, as a clergyman depicted at
the beginning of his literary career, and Mr.
Crisparkle, say, as a clergyman depicted at the
end of it, it is evident that the difference does not
merely consist in the fact that the first is a less
desirable clergyman than the second. It consists
in the nature of our desire for either of them.
The glory of Mr. Crisparkle partly consists in the
fact that he might really exist anywhere, in any
country town into which we may happen to stray.
The glory of Mr. Stiggins wholly consists in the
fact that he could not possibly exist anywhere except
in the head of Dickens. Dickens has the
secret recipe of that divine dish. In some sense,
therefore, when we say that he became less of a
caricaturist we mean that he became less of a
creator. That original violent vision of all things
which he had seen from his boyhood began to be
mixed with other men’s milder visions and with
the light of common day. He began to understand
and practise other than his own mad merits;
began to have some movement towards the merits
of other writers, towards the mixed emotion of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_184">184</span>
Thackeray, or the solidity of George Eliot. And
this must be said for the process; that the fierce
wine of Dickens could endure some dilution. On
the whole, perhaps, his primal personalism was all
the better when surging against some saner restraints.
Perhaps a flavour of strong Stiggins
goes a long way. Perhaps the colossal Crummles
might be cut down into six or seven quite credible
characters. For my own part, for reasons which
I shall afterwards mention, I am in real doubt
about the advantage of this realistic education of
Dickens. I am not sure that it made his books
better; but I am sure it made them less bad. He
made fewer mistakes undoubtedly; he succeeded
in eliminating much of the mere rant or cant of
his first books; he threw away much of the old
padding, all the more annoying, perhaps, in a
literary sense, because he did not mean it for padding,
but for essential eloquence. But he did not
produce anything actually better than Mr. Chuckster.
But then there is nothing better than Mr.
Chuckster. Certain works of art, such as the
Venus of Milo, exhaust our aspiration. Upon the
whole this may, perhaps, be safely said of the
transition. Those who have any doubt about
Dickens can have no doubt of the superiority of
the later books. Beyond question they have less<span class="pagenum" id="Page_185">185</span>
of what annoys us in Dickens. But do not, if
you are in the company of any ardent adorers of
Dickens (as I hope for your sake you are) do
not insist too urgently and exclusively on the splendour
of Dickens’s last works, or they will discover
that you do not like him.</p>
<p>“Dombey and Son” is the last novel in the first
manner: “David Copperfield” is the first novel
in the last. The increase in care and realism in
the second of the two is almost startling. Yet
even in “Dombey and Son” we can see the coming
of a change, however faint, if we compare it with
his first fantasies, such as “Nicholas Nickleby”
or “The Old Curiosity Shop.” The central story
is still melodrama, but it is much more tactful and
effective melodrama. Melodrama is a form of
art, legitimate like any other, as noble as farce,
almost as noble as pantomime. The essence of
melodrama is that it appeals to the moral sense
in a highly simplified state, just as farce appeals
to the sense of humour in a highly simplified state.
Farce creates people who are so intellectually simple
as to hide in packing-cases or pretend to be
their own aunts. Melodrama creates people so
morally simple as to kill their enemies in Oxford
Street, and repent on seeing their mother’s photograph.
The object of the simplification in farce<span class="pagenum" id="Page_186">186</span>
and melodrama is the same, and quite artistically
legitimate, the object of gaining a resounding rapidity
of action which subtleties would obstruct.
And this can be done well or ill. The simplified
villain can be a spirited charcoal sketch or a mere
black smudge. Carker is a spirited charcoal
sketch: Ralph Nickleby is a mere black smudge.
The tragedy of Edith Dombey teems with unlikelihood,
but it teems with life. That Dombey should
give his own wife censure through his own business
manager is impossible, I will not say in a
gentleman, but in a person of ordinary sane self-conceit.
But once having got the inconceivable
trio before the footlights, Dickens gives us good
ringing dialogue, very different from the mere
rants in which Ralph Nickleby figures in the unimaginable
character of a rhetorical money-lender.
And there is another point of technical improvement
in this book over such books as “Nicholas
Nickleby.” It has not only a basic idea, but a
good basic idea. There is a real artistic opportunity
in the conception of a solemn and selfish
man of affairs, feeling for his male heir his first
and last emotion, mingled of a thin flame of tenderness
and a strong flame of pride. But with all
these possibilities, the serious episode of the Dombeys
serves ultimately only to show how unfitted<span class="pagenum" id="Page_187">187</span>
Dickens was for such things, how fitted he was for
something opposite.</p>
<p>The incurable poetic character, the hopelessly
non-realistic character of Dickens’s essential genius
could not have a better example than the story of
the Dombeys. For the story itself is probable;
it is the treatment that makes it unreal. In attempting
to paint the dark pagan devotion of the
father (as distinct from the ecstatic and Christian
devotion of the mother), Dickens was painting
something that was really there. This is no wild
theme, like the wanderings of Nell’s grandfather,
or the marriage of Gride. A man of Dombey’s
type would love his son as he loves Paul. He
would neglect his daughter as he neglects Florence.
And yet we feel the utter unreality of it
all, while we feel the utter reality of monsters
like Stiggins or Mantalini. Dickens could only
work in his own way, and that way was the wild
way. We may almost say this: that he could only
make his characters probable if he was allowed to
make them impossible. Give him license to say
and do anything, and he could create beings as
vivid as our own aunts and uncles. Keep him to
likelihood and he could not tell the plainest tale
so as to make it seem likely. The story of “Pickwick”
is credible, although it is not possible. The<span class="pagenum" id="Page_188">188</span>
story of Florence Dombey is incredible although
it is true.</p>
<p>An excellent example can be found in the same
story. Major Bagstock is a grotesque, and yet he
contains touch after touch of Dickens’s quiet and
sane observation of things as they are. He was
always most accurate when he was most fantastic.
Dombey and Florence are perfectly reasonable,
but we simply know that they do not exist. The
Major is mountainously exaggerated, but we all
feel that we have met him at Brighton. Nor is
the rationale of the paradox difficult to see; Dickens
exaggerated when he had found a real truth
to exaggerate. It is a deadly error (an error at
the back of much of the false placidity of our
politics) to suppose that lies are told with excess
and luxuriance, and truths told with modesty and
restraint. Some of the most frantic lies on the
face of life are told with modesty and restraint;
for the simple reason that only modesty and restraint
will save them. Many official declarations
are just as dignified as Mr. Dombey, because they
are just as fictitious. On the other hand, the man
who has found a truth dances about like a boy
who has found a shilling; he breaks into extravagances,
as the Christian churches broke into gargoyles.
In one sense truth alone can be exaggerated;<span class="pagenum" id="Page_189">189</span>
nothing else can stand the strain. The
outrageous Bagstock is a glowing and glaring exaggeration
of a thing we have all seen in life—the
worst and most dangerous of all its hypocrisies.
For the worst and most dangerous hypocrite is
not he who affects unpopular virtue, but he who
affects popular vice. The jolly fellow of the saloon
bar and the racecourse is the real deceiver
of mankind; he has misled more than any false
prophet, and his victims cry to him out of hell.
The excellence of the Bagstock conception can best
be seen if we compare it with the much weaker
and more improbable knavery of Pecksniff. It
would not be worth a man’s while, with any
worldly object, to pretend to be a holy and high-minded
architect. The world does not admire
holy and high-minded architects. The world does
admire rough and tough old army men who swear
at waiters and wink at women. Major Bagstock
is simply the perfect prophecy of that decadent
jingoism which corrupted England of late years.
England has been duped, not by the cant of goodness,
but by the cant of badness. It has been
fascinated by a quite fictitious cynicism, and
reached that last and strangest of all impostures
in which the mask is as repulsive as the face.</p>
<p>“Dombey and Son” provides us with yet another<span class="pagenum" id="Page_190">190</span>
instance of this general fact in Dickens.
He could only get to the most solemn emotions
adequately if he got to them through the grotesque.
He could only, so to speak, really get into the inner
chamber by coming down the chimney, like his
own most lovable lunatic in “Nicholas Nickleby.”
A good example is such a character as Toots.
Toots is what none of Dickens’s dignified characters
are, in the most serious sense, a true lover.
He is the twin of Romeo. He has passion, humility,
self-knowledge, a mind lifted into all magnanimous
thoughts, everything that goes with the
best kind of romantic love. His excellence in the
art of love can only be expressed by the somewhat
violent expression that he is as good a lover as
Walter Gay is a bad one. Florence surely deserved
her father’s scorn if she could prefer Gay
to Toots. It is neither a joke nor any kind of
exaggeration to say that in the vacillations of
Toots, Dickens not only came nearer to the
psychology of true love than he ever came elsewhere,
but nearer than any one else ever came.
To ask for the loved one, and then not to dare to
cross the threshold, to be invited by her, to long
to accept, and then to lie in order to decline, these
are the funny things that Mr. Toots did, and that
every honest man who yells with laughter at him<span class="pagenum" id="Page_191">191</span>
has done also. For the moment, however, I only
mention this matter as a pendent case to the case
of Major Bagstock, an example of the way in
which Dickens had to be ridiculous in order to
begin to be true. His characters that begin solemn
end futile; his characters that begin frivolous end
solemn in the best sense. His foolish figures are
not only more entertaining than his serious figures,
they are also much more serious. The Marchioness
is not only much more laughable than Little
Nell; she is also much more of all that Little Nell
was meant to be; much more really devoted, pathetic,
and brave. Dick Swiveller is not only a
much funnier fellow than Kit, he is also a much
more genuine fellow, being free from that slight
stain of “meekness,” or the snobbishness of the
respectable poor, which the wise and perfect
Chuckster wisely and perfectly perceived in Kit.
Susan Nipper is not only more of a comic character
than Florence; she is more of a heroine than
Florence any day of the week. In “Our Mutual
Friend” we do not, for some reason or other, feel
really very much excited about the fall or rescue
of Lizzie Hexam. She seems too romantic to be
really pathetic. But we do feel excited about the
rescue of Miss Lammle, because she is, like Toots,
a holy fool; because her pink nose and pink elbows,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_192">192</span>
and candid outcry and open indecent affections
do convey to us a sense of innocence helpless
among human dragons, of Andromeda tied naked
to a rock. Dickens had to make a character humorous
before he could make it human; it was the
only way he knew, and he ought to have always
adhered to it. Whether he knew it or not, the
only two really touching figures in “Martin Chuzzlewit”
are the Misses Pecksniff. Of the things
he tried to treat unsmilingly and grandly we can
all make game to our heart’s content. But when
once he has laughed at a thing it is sacred for ever.</p>
<p>“Dombey,” however, means first and foremost
the finale of the early Dickens. It is difficult to
say exactly in what it is that we perceive that the
old crudity ends there, and does not reappear in
“David Copperfield” or in any of the novels after
it. But so certainly it is. In detached scenes and
characters, indeed, Dickens kept up his farcical note
almost or quite to the end. But this is the last
farce; this is the last work in which a farcical
license is tacitly claimed, a farcical note struck to
start with. And in a sense his next novel may be
called his first novel. But the growth of this great
novel, “David Copperfield,” is a thing very interesting,
but at the same time very dark, for it is
a growth in the soul. We have seen that Dickens’s<span class="pagenum" id="Page_193">193</span>
mind was in a stir of change; that he was
dreaming of art, and even of realism. Hugely
delighted as he invariably was with his own books,
he was humble enough to be ambitious. He was
even humble enough to be envious. In the matter
of art, for instance, in the narrower sense, of arrangement
and proportion in fictitious things, he
began to be conscious of his deficiency, and even,
in a stormy sort of way, ashamed of it; he tried
to gain completeness even while raging at any one
who called him incomplete. And in this matter of
artistic construction, his ambition (and his success
too) grew steadily up to the instant of his death.
The end finds him attempting things that are at
the opposite pole to the frank formlessness of
“Pickwick.” His last book, “The Mystery of
Edwin Drood,” depends entirely upon construction,
even upon a centralized strategy. He staked
everything upon a plot; he who had been the
weakest of plotters, weaker than Sim Tappertit.
He essayed a detective story, he who could never
keep a secret; and he has kept it to this day. A
new Dickens was really being born when Dickens
died.</p>
<p>And as with art, so with reality. He wished to
show that he could construct as well as anybody.
He also wished to show that he could be as accurate<span class="pagenum" id="Page_194">194</span>
as anybody. And in this connection (as
in many others) we must recur constantly to the
facts mentioned in connection with America and
with his money-matters. We must recur, I mean,
to the central fact that his desires were extravagant
in quantity, but not in quality; that his wishes
were excessive, but not eccentric. It must never be
forgotten that sanity was his ideal, even when he
seemed almost insane. It was thus with his literary
aspirations. He was brilliant; but he wished
sincerely to be solid. Nobody out of an asylum
could deny that he was a genius and an unique
writer; but he did not wish to be an unique writer,
but an universal writer. Much of the manufactured
pathos or rhetoric against which his enemies
quite rightly rail, is really due to his desire to give
all sides of life at once, to make his book a cosmos
instead of a tale. He was sometimes really vulgar
in his wish to be a literary Whiteley, an universal
provider. Thus it was that he felt about realism
and truth to life. Nothing is easier than to defend
Dickens as Dickens, but Dickens wished to be
everybody else. Nothing is easier than to defend
Dickens’s world as a fairyland, of which he alone
has the key; to defend him as one defends Maeterlinck,
or any other original writer. But Dickens
was not content with being original, he had a wild<span class="pagenum" id="Page_195">195</span>
wish to be true. He loved truth so much in the
abstract that he sacrificed to the shadow of it his
own glory. He denied his own divine originality,
and pretended that he had plagiarized from life.
He disowned his own soul’s children, and said he
had picked them up in the street.</p>
<p>And in this mixed and heated mood of anger
and ambition, vanity and doubt, a new and great
design was born. He loved to be romantic, yet he
desired to be real. How if he wrote of a thing
that was real and showed that it was romantic?
He loved real life; but he also loved his own way.
How if he wrote his own real life, but wrote it in
his own way? How if he showed the carping
critics who doubted the existence of his strange
characters, his own yet stranger existence? How
if he forced these pedants and unbelievers to admit
that Weller and Pecksniff, Crummles and Swiveller,
whom they thought so improbably wild and
wonderful, were less wild and wonderful than
Charles Dickens? What if he ended the quarrels
about whether his romances could occur, by confessing
that his romance had occurred?</p>
<p>For some time past, probably during the greater
part of his life, he had made notes for an autobiography.
I have already quoted an admirable
passage from these notes, a passage reproduced<span class="pagenum" id="Page_196">196</span>
in “David Copperfield,” with little more alteration
than a change of proper names—the passage
which describes Captain Porter and the debtor’s
petition in the Marshalsea. But he probably perceived
at last what a less keen intelligence must
ultimately have perceived, that if an autobiography
is really to be honest it must be turned into
a work of fiction. If it is really to tell the truth,
it must at all costs profess not to. No man dare
say of himself, over his own name, how badly he
has behaved. No man dare say of himself, over
his own name, how well he has behaved. Moreover,
of course a touch of fiction is almost always
essential to the real conveying of fact, because
fact, as experienced, has a fragmentariness which
is bewildering at first hand and quite blinding at
second hand. Facts have at least to be sorted into
compartments and the proper head and tail given
to each. The perfection and pointedness of art
are a sort of substitute for the pungency of actuality.
Without this selection and completion our
life seems a tangle of unfinished tales, a heap of
novels, all volume one. Dickens determined to
make one complete novel of it.</p>
<p>For though there are many other aspects of
“David Copperfield,” this autobiographical aspect
is, after all, the greatest. The point of the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_197">197</span>
book is, that unlike all the other books of Dickens,
it is concerned with quite common actualities,
but it is concerned with them warmly and with the
war-like sympathies. It is not only both realistic
and romantic; it is realistic because it is romantic.
It is human nature described with the human exaggeration.
We all know the actual types in the
book; they are not like the turgid and preternatural
types elsewhere in Dickens. They are not
purely poetic creations like Mr. Kenwiggs or Mr.
Bunsby. We all know that they exist. We all
know the stiff-necked and humorous old-fashioned
nurse, so conventional and yet so original, so dependent
and yet so independent. We all know the
intrusive stepfather, the abstract strange male,
coarse, handsome, sulky, successful; a breaker-up
of homes. We all know the erect and sardonic
spinster, the spinster who is so mad in small things
and so sane in great ones. We all know the cock
of the school; we all know Steerforth, the creature
whom the gods love and even the servants respect.
We know his poor and aristocratic mother,
so proud, so gratified, so desolate. We know the
Rosa Dartle type, the lonely woman in whom
affection itself has stagnated into a sort of
poison.</p>
<p>But while these are real characters they are<span class="pagenum" id="Page_198">198</span>
real characters lit up with the colours of youth
and passion. They are real people romantically
felt; that is to say, they are real people felt as
real people feel them. They are exaggerated, like
all Dickens’s figures: but they are not exaggerated
as personalities are exaggerated by an artist; they
are exaggerated as personalities are exaggerated
by their own friends and enemies. The strong
souls are seen through the glorious haze of the
emotions that strong souls really create. We have
Murdstone as he would be to a boy who hated
him; and rightly, for a boy would hate him. We
have Steerforth as he would be to a boy who
adored him; and rightly, for a boy would adore
him. It may be that if these persons had a mere
terrestrial existence, they appeared to other eyes
more insignificant. It may be that Murdstone in
common life was only a heavy business man with
a human side that David was too sulky to find.
It may be that Steerforth was only an inch or
two taller than David, and only a shade or two
above him in the lower middle classes; but this
does not make the book less true. In cataloguing
the facts of life the author must not omit that
massive fact, illusion.</p>
<p>When we say the book is true to life we must
stipulate that it is especially true to youth; even<span class="pagenum" id="Page_199">199</span>
to boyhood. All the characters seem a little larger
than they really were, for David is looking up at
them. And the early pages of the book are in
particular astonishingly vivid. Parts of it seem
like fragments of our forgotten infancy. The
dark house of childhood, the loneliness, the things
half understood, the nurse with her inscrutable
sulks and her more inscrutable tenderness, the sudden
deportations to distant places, the seaside and
its childish friendships, all this stirs in us when
we read it, like something out of a previous existence.
Above all, Dickens has excellently depicted
the child enthroned in that humble circle which
only in after years he perceives to have been
humble. Modern and cultured persons, I believe,
object to their children seeing kitchen company or
being taught by a woman like Peggoty. But
surely it is more important to be educated in a
sense of human dignity and equality than in anything
else in the world. And a child who has once
had to respect a kind and capable woman of the
lower classes will respect the lower classes for
ever. The true way to overcome the evil in class
distinctions is not to denounce them as revolutionists
denounce them, but to ignore them as children
ignore them.</p>
<p>The early youth of David Copperfield is psychologically<span class="pagenum" id="Page_200">200</span>
almost as good as his childhood. In
one touch especially Dickens pierced the very core
of the sensibility of boyhood; it was when he made
David more afraid of a manservant than of anybody
or anything else. The lowering Murdstone,
the awful Mrs. Steerforth are not so alarming to
him as Mr. Littimer, the unimpeachable gentleman’s
gentleman. This is exquisitely true to the
masculine emotions, especially in their undeveloped
state. A youth of common courage does not
fear anything violent, but he is in mortal fear of
anything correct. This may or may not be the
reason that so few female writers understand their
male characters, but this fact remains: that the
more sincere and passionate and even headlong a
lad is the more certain he is to be conventional.
The bolder and freer he seems the more the traditions
of the college or the rules of the club will
hold him with their gyves of gossamer; and the
less afraid he is of his enemies the more cravenly
he will be afraid of his friends. Herein lies indeed
the darkest peril of our ethical doubt and chaos.
The fear is that as morals become less urgent,
manners will become more so; and men who have
forgotten the fear of God will retain the fear of
Littimer. We shall merely sink into a much
meaner bondage. For when you break the great<span class="pagenum" id="Page_201">201</span>
laws, you do not get liberty; you do not even get
anarchy. You get the small laws.</p>
<p>The sting and strength of this piece of fiction,
then, do (by a rare accident) lie in the circumstance
that it was so largely founded on fact.
“David Copperfield” is the great answer of a
great romancer to the realists. David says in
effect: “What! you say that the Dickens tales
are too purple really to have happened! Why,
this is what happened to me, and it seemed the
most purple of all. You say that the Dickens
heroes are too handsome and triumphant! Why,
no prince or paladin in Ariosto was ever so handsome
and triumphant as the Head Boy seemed to
me walking before me in the sun. You say the
Dickens villains are too black! Why, there was
no ink in the devil’s ink-stand black enough for
my own stepfather when I had to live in the same
house with him. The facts are quite the other
way to what you suppose. This life of grey
studies and half tones, the absence of which you
regret in Dickens, is only life as it is looked at.
This life of heroes and villains is life as it is lived.
The life a man knows best is exactly the life he
finds most full of fierce certainties and battles between
good and ill—his own. Oh, yes, the life
we do not care about may easily be a psychological<span class="pagenum" id="Page_202">202</span>
comedy. Other people’s lives may easily be human
documents. But a man’s own life is always
a melodrama.”</p>
<p>There are other effective things in “David
Copperfield;” they are not all autobiographical,
but they nearly all have this new note of quietude
and reality. Micawber is gigantic; an immense
assertion of the truth that the way to live is to
exaggerate everything. But of him I shall have to
speak more fully in another connection. Mrs.
Micawber, artistically speaking, is even better.
She is very nearly the best thing in Dickens. Nothing
could be more absurd, and at the same time
more true, than her clear, argumentative manner
of speech as she sits smiling and expounding in the
midst of ruin. What could be more lucid and logical
and unanswerable than her statement of the
prolegomena of the Medway problem, of which
the first step must be to “see the Medway,” or
of the coal-trade, which required talent and capital.
“Talent Mr. Micawber has. Capital Mr. Micawber
has not.” It seems as if something should
have come at last out of so clear and scientific an
arrangement of ideas. Indeed if (as has been
suggested) we regard “David Copperfield” as
an unconscious defence of the poetic view of life,
we might regard Mrs. Micawber as an unconscious<span class="pagenum" id="Page_203">203</span>
satire on the logical view of life. She sits as a
monument of the hopelessness and helplessness of
reason in the face of this romantic and unreasonable
world.</p>
<p>As I have taken “Dombey and Son” as the
book before the transition, and “David Copperfield”
as typical of the transition itself, I may
perhaps take “Bleak House” as the book after
the transition. “Bleak House” has every characteristic
of his new realistic culture. Dickens
never, as in his early books, revels now in the
parts he likes and scamps the parts he does not,
after the manner of Scott. He does not, as in
previous tales, leave his heroes and heroines mere
walking gentlemen and ladies with nothing at all
to do but walk: he expends upon them at least
ingenuity. By the expedients (successful or not)
of the self-revelation of Esther or the humorous
inconsistencies of Rick, he makes his younger figures
if not lovable at least readable. Everywhere
we see this tighter and more careful grip. He
does not, for instance, when he wishes to denounce
a dark institution, sandwich it in as a mere episode
in a rambling story of adventure, as the debtor’s
prison is embedded in the body of Pickwick or the
low Yorkshire school in the body of Nicholas
Nickleby. He puts the Court of Chancery in the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_204">204</span>
centre of the stage, a sombre and sinister temple,
and groups round it in artistic relation decaying
and fantastic figures, its offspring and its satirists.
An old dipsomaniac keeps a rag and bone shop,
type of futility and antiquity, and calls himself
the Lord Chancellor. A little mad old maid hangs
about the courts on a forgotten or imaginary lawsuit,
and says with perfect and pungent irony,
“I am expecting a judgment shortly, on the Day
of Judgment.” Rick and Ada and Esther are not
mere strollers who have strayed into the court of
law, they are its children, its symbols, and its victims.
The righteous indignation of the book is
not at the red heat of anarchy, but at the white
heat of art. Its anger is patient and plodding, like
some historic revenge. Moreover, it slowly and
carefully creates the real psychology of oppression.
The endless formality, the endless unemotional urbanity,
the endless hope deferred, these things
make one feel the fact of injustice more than the
madness of Nero. For it is not the activeness of
tyranny that maddens, but its passiveness. We
hate the deafness of the god more than his
strength. Silence is the unbearable repartee.</p>
<p>Again we can see in this book strong traces of
an increase in social experience. Dickens, as his
fame carried him into more fashionable circles,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_205">205</span>
began really to understand something of what is
strong and what is weak in the English upper
class. Sir Leicester Deadlock is a far more effective
condemnation of oligarchy than the ugly
swagger of Sir Mulberry Hawke, because pride
stands out more plainly in all its impotence and
insolence as the one weakness of a good man, than
as one of the million weaknesses of a bad one.
Dickens, like all young Radicals, had imagined in
his youth that aristocracy rested upon the hardness
of somebody; he found, as we all do, that it rests
upon the softness of everybody. It is very hard
not to like Sir Leicester Deadlock, not to applaud
his silly old speeches, so foolish, so manly, so
genuinely English, so disastrous to England. It
is true that the English people love a lord, but
it is not true that they fear him; rather, if anything,
they pity him; there creeps into their love
something of the feeling they have towards a baby
or a black man. In their hearts they think it
admirable that Sir Leicester Deadlock should be
able to speak at all. And so a system, which no
iron laws and no bloody battles could possibly force
upon a people, is preserved from generation to
generation by pure, weak good-nature.</p>
<p>In “Bleak House” occurs the character of Harold
Skimpole, the character whose alleged likeness<span class="pagenum" id="Page_206">206</span>
to Leigh Hunt has laid Dickens open to so much
disapproval. Unjust disapproval, I think, as far
as fundamental morals are concerned. In method
he was a little clamorous and clumsy, as, indeed,
he was apt to be. But when he said that it was
possible to combine a certain tone of conversation
taken from a particular man with other characteristics
which were not meant to be his, he surely
said what all men who write stories know. A
work of fiction often consists in combining a pair
of whiskers seen in one street with a crime seen
in another. He may quite possibly have really
meant only to make Leigh Hunt’s light philosophy
the mask for a new kind of scamp, as a variant on
the pious mask of Pecksniff or the candid mask
of Bagstock. He may never once have had the
unfriendly thought, “Suppose Hunt behaved
like a rascal!” he may have only had the
fanciful thought, “Suppose a rascal behaved like
Hunt!”</p>
<p>But there is a good reason for mentioning Skimpole
especially. In the character of Skimpole,
Dickens displayed again a quality that was very
admirable in him—I mean a disposition to see
things sanely and to satirize even his own faults.
He was commonly occupied in satirizing the Gradgrinds,
the economists, the men of Smiles and Self-Help.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_207">207</span>
For him there was nothing poorer than
their wealth, nothing more selfish than their self-denial.
And against them he was in the habit of
pitting the people of a more expansive habit—the
happy Swivellers and Micawbers, who, if they
were poor, were at least as rich as their last penny
could make them. He loved that great Christian
carelessness that seeks its meat from God. It was
merely a kind of uncontrollable honesty that forced
him into urging the other side. He could not disguise
from himself or from the world that the
man who began by seeking his meat from God
might end by seeking his meat from his neighbour,
without apprising his neighbour of the
fact. He had shown how good irresponsibility
could be; he could not stoop to hide how bad it
could be. He created Skimpole; and Skimpole is
the dark underside of Micawber.</p>
<p>In attempting Skimpole he attempted something
with a great and urgent meaning. He attempted
it, I say; I do not assert that he carried it through.
As has been remarked, he was never successful in
describing psychological change; his characters are
the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. And
critics have complained very justly of the crude
villainy of Skimpole’s action in the matter of Joe
and Mr. Bucket. Certainly Skimpole had no need<span class="pagenum" id="Page_208">208</span>
to commit a clumsy treachery to win a clumsy
bribe; he had only to call on Mr. Jarndyce. He
had lost his honour too long to need to sell it.</p>
<p>The effect is bad; but I repeat that the aim was
great. Dickens wished, under the symbol of Skimpole,
to point out a truth which is perhaps the most
terrible in moral psychology. I mean the fact that
it is by no means easy to draw the line between
light and heavy offence. He desired to show that
there are no faults, however kindly, that we can
afford to flatter or to let alone; he meant that
perhaps Skimpole had once been as good a man as
Swiveller. If flattered or let alone, our kindliest
fault can destroy our kindliest virtue. A thing
may begin as a very human weakness, and end as
a very inhuman weakness. Skimpole means that
the extremes of evil are much nearer than we think.
A man may begin by being too generous to pay his
debts, and end by being too mean to pay his debts.
For the vices are very strangely in league, and
encourage each other. A sober man may become
a drunkard through being a coward. A brave
man may become a coward through being a drunkard.
That is the thing Dickens was darkly trying
to convey in Skimpole—that a man might become
a mountain of selfishness if he attended only to the
Dickens virtues. There is nothing that can be<span class="pagenum" id="Page_209">209</span>
neglected; there is no such thing (he meant) as a
peccadillo.</p>
<p>I have dwelt on this consciousness of his because,
alas, it had a very sharp edge for himself.
Even while he was permitting a fault, originally
small, to make a comedy of Skimpole, a fault,
originally small, was making a tragedy of Charles
Dickens. For Dickens also had a bad quality, not
intrinsically very terrible, which he allowed to
wreck his life. He also had a small weakness that
could sometimes become stronger than all his
strengths. His selfishness was not, it need hardly
be said, the selfishness of Gradgrind; he was particularly
compassionate and liberal. Nor was it
in the least the selfishness of Skimpole. He was
entirely self-dependent, industrious, and dignified.
His selfishness was wholly a selfishness of the
nerves. Whatever his whim or the temperature
of the instant told him to do, must be done. He
was the type of man who would break a window if
it would not open and give him air. And this
weakness of his had, by the time of which we
speak, led to a breach between himself and his wife
which he was too exasperated and excited to heal
in time. Everything must be put right, and put
right at once, with him. If London bored him, he
must go to the Continent at once; if the Continent<span class="pagenum" id="Page_210">210</span>
bored him, he must come back to London at once.
If the day was too noisy, the whole household
must be quiet; if night was too quiet, the whole
household must wake up. Above all, he had this
supreme character of the domestic despot—that
his good temper was, if possible, more despotic
than his bad temper. When he was miserable
(as he often was, poor fellow), they only had
to listen to his railings. When he was happy they
had to listen to his novels. All this, which was
mainly mere excitability, did not seem to amount
to much; it did not in the least mean that he had
ceased to be a clean-living and kind-hearted and
quite honest man. But there was this evil about it—that
he did not resist his little weakness at all;
he pampered it as Skimpole pampered his. And
it separated him and his wife. A mere silly trick
of temperament did everything that the blackest
misconduct could have done. A random sensibility,
started about the shuffling of papers or the
shutting of a window, ended by tearing two clean,
Christian people from each other, like a blast of
bigamy or adultery.</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_211">211</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="toclink_211">CHAPTER IX<br />
<span class="subhead">LATER LIFE AND WORKS</span></h2>
</div>
<p class="in0"><span class="firstword">I have</span> deliberately in this book mentioned only
such facts in the life of Dickens as were, I will
not say significant (for all facts must be significant,
including the million facts that can never
be mentioned by anybody), but such facts as illustrated
my own immediate meaning. I have observed
this method consistently and without shame
because I think that we can hardly make too evident
a chasm between books which profess to be
statements of all ascertainable facts, and books
which (like this one) profess only to contain a
particular opinion or a summary deducible from
the facts. Books like Forster’s exhaustive work
and others exist, and are as accessible as St. Paul’s
Cathedral; we have them in common as we have
the facts of the physical universe; and it seems
highly desirable that the function of making an
exhaustive catalogue and that of making an individual
generalization should not be confused. No
catalogue, of course, can contain all the facts even
of five minutes; every catalogue, however long and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_212">212</span>
learned, must be not only a bold, but, one may
say, an audacious selection. But if a great many
facts are given, the reader gains a blurred belief
that all the facts are being given. In a professedly
personal judgment it is therefore clearer and
more honest to give only a few illustrative facts,
leaving the other obtainable facts to balance them.
For thus it is made quite clear that the thing is a
sketch, an affair of a few lines.</p>
<p>It is as well, however, to make at this point a
pause sufficient to indicate the main course of
the later life of the novelist. And it is best to
begin with the man himself, as he appeared in
those last days of popularity and public distinction.
Many are still alive who remember him in his
after-dinner speeches, his lectures, and his many
public activities; as I am not one of these, I cannot
correct my notions with that flash of the living
features without which a description may be subtly
and entirely wrong. Once a man is dead, if it be
only yesterday, the newcomer must piece him together
from descriptions really as much at random
as if he were describing Cæsar or Henry II. Allowing,
however, for this inevitable falsity, a figure
vivid and a little fantastic, does walk across the
stage of Forster’s “Life.”</p>
<p>Dickens was of a middle size and his vivacity<span class="pagenum" id="Page_213">213</span>
and relative physical insignificance probably gave
rather the impression of small size; certainly of
the absence of bulk. In early life he wore, even
for that epoch, extravagant clusters of brown hair,
and in later years, a brown moustache and a fringe
of brown beard (cut like a sort of broad and bushy
imperial) sufficiently individual in shape to give
him a faint air as of a foreigner. His face had a
peculiar tint or quality which is hard to describe
even after one has contrived to imagine it. It
was the quality which Mrs. Carlyle felt to be, as
it were, metallic, and compared to clear steel. It
was, I think, a sort of pale glitter and animation,
very much alive and yet with something deathly
about it, like a corpse galvanized by a god. His
face (if this was so) was curiously a counterpart
of his character. For the essence of Dickens’s
character was that it was at once tremulous and yet
hard and sharp, just as the bright blade of a sword
is tremulous and yet hard and sharp. He vibrated
at every touch and yet he was indestructible; you
could bend him, but you could not break him.
Brown of hair and beard, somewhat pale of visage
(especially in his later days of excitement and ill-health)
he had quite exceptionally bright and
active eyes; eyes that were always darting about
like brilliant birds to pick up all the tiny things of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_214">214</span>
which he made more, perhaps, than any novelist
has done; for he was a sort of poetical Sherlock
Holmes. The mouth behind the brown beard was
large and mobile, like the mouth of an actor; indeed
he was an actor, in many things too much of
an actor. In his lectures, in later years, he could
turn his strange face into any of the innumerable
mad masks that were the faces of his grotesque
characters. He could make his face fall suddenly
into the blank inanity of Mrs. Raddle’s servant, or
swell, as if to twice its size, into the apoplectic
energy of Mr. Sergeant Buzfuz. But the outline
of his face itself, from his youth upwards, was cut
quite delicate and decisive, and in repose and its
own keen way, may even have looked effeminate.</p>
<p>The dress of the comfortable classes during the
later years of Dickens was, compared with ours,
somewhat slipshod and somewhat gaudy. It was
the time of loose pegtop trousers of an almost
Turkish oddity, of large ties, of loose short jackets
and of loose long whiskers. Yet even this expansive
period, it must be confessed, considered Dickens
a little too flashy or, as some put it, too Frenchified
in his dress. He wore velvet coats; he wore
wild waistcoats that were like incredible sunsets;
he wore large hats of an unnecessary and startling
whiteness. He did not mind being seen in sensational<span class="pagenum" id="Page_215">215</span>
dressing-gowns; nay, he had his portrait
painted in one of them. All this is not meritorious;
neither is it particularly discreditable; it is a characteristic
only, but an important one. He was an
absolutely independent and entirely self-respecting
man. But he had none of that old dusty, half-dignified
English feeling upon which Thackeray
was so sensitive; I mean the desire to be regarded
as a private gentleman, which means at bottom the
desire to be left alone. This again is not a merit;
it is only one of the milder aspects of aristocracy.
But meritorious or not, Dickens did not possess it.
He had no objection to being stared at, if he were
also admired. He did not exactly pose in the
oriental manner of Disraeli; his instincts were too
clean for that; but he did pose somewhat in the
French manner, of some leaders like Mirabeau and
Gambetta. Nor had he the dull desire to “get
on” which makes men die contented as inarticulate
Under Secretaries of State. He did not desire
success so much as fame, the old human glory,
the applause and wonder of the people. Such he
was as he walked down the street in his white hat,
probably with a slight swagger.</p>
<p>His private life consisted of one tragedy and ten
thousand comedies. By one tragedy I mean one
real and rending moral tragedy—the failure of his<span class="pagenum" id="Page_216">216</span>
marriage. He loved his children dearly, and more
than one of them died; but in sorrows like these
there is no violence and above all no shame. The
end of life is not tragic like the end of love. And
by the ten thousand comedies I mean the whole
texture of his life, his letters, his conversation,
which were one incessant carnival of insane and
inspired improvisation. So far as he could prevent
it, he never permitted a day of his life to be ordinary.
There was always some prank, some impetuous
proposal, some practical joke, some sudden
hospitality, some sudden disappearance. It is
related of him (I give one anecdote out of a hundred)
that in his last visit to America, when he
was already reeling as it were under the blow that
was to be mortal, he remarked quite casually to
his companions that a row of painted cottages
looked exactly like the painted shops in a pantomime.
No sooner had the suggestion passed his
lips than he leapt at the nearest doorway and in
exact imitation of the clown in the harlequinade,
beat conscientiously with his fist, not on the door
(for that would have burst the canvas scenery of
course), but on the side of the doorpost. Having
done this he lay down ceremoniously across
the doorstep for the owner to fall over him if he
should come rushing out. He then got up gravely<span class="pagenum" id="Page_217">217</span>
and went on his way. His whole life was full of
such unexpected energies, precisely like those of
the pantomime clown. Dickens had indeed a great
and fundamental affinity with the landscape, or
rather house-scape, of the harlequinade. He liked
high houses, and sloping roofs, and deep areas.
But he would have been really happy if some good
fairy of the eternal pantomime had given him the
power of flying off the roofs and pitching harmlessly
down the height of the houses and bounding
out of the areas like an indiarubber ball. The
divine lunatic in “Nicholas Nickleby” comes nearest
to his dream. I really think Dickens would
rather have been that one of his characters than
any of the others. With what excitement he would
have struggled down the chimney. With what
ecstatic energy he would have hurled the cucumbers
over the garden wall.</p>
<p>His letters exhibit even more the same incessant
creative force. His letters are as creative as any
of his literary creations. His shortest postcard is
often as good as his ablest novel; each one of them
is spontaneous; each one of them is different. He
varies even the form and shape of the letter as far
as possible; now it is in absurd French! now it is
from one of his characters; now it is an advertisement
for himself as a stray dog. All of them are<span class="pagenum" id="Page_218">218</span>
very funny; they are not only very funny, but they
are quite as funny as his finished and published
work. This is the ultimately amazing thing about
Dickens; the amount there is of him. He wrote,
at the very least, sixteen thick important books
packed full of original creation. And if you
had burnt them all he could have written sixteen
more, as a man writes idle letters to his
friend.</p>
<p>In connection with this exuberant part of his
nature there is another thing to be noted, if we are
to make a personal picture of him. Many modern
people, chiefly women, have been heard to object
to the Bacchic element in the books of Dickens,
that celebration of social drinking as a supreme
symbol of social living, which those books share
with almost all the great literature of mankind,
including the New Testament. Undoubtedly there
is an abnormal amount of drinking in a page of
Dickens, as there is an abnormal amount of fighting,
say, in a page of Dumas. If you reckon up
the beers and brandies of Mr. Bob Sawyer, with
the care of an arithmetician and the deductions of
a pathologist, they rise alarmingly, like a rising
tide at sea. Dickens did defend drink clamorously,
praised it with passion, and described whole
orgies of it with enormous gusto. Yet it is wonderfully<span class="pagenum" id="Page_219">219</span>
typical of his prompt and impatient nature
that he himself drank comparatively little. He
was the type of man who could be so eager in
praising the cup that he left the cup untasted. It
was a part of his active and feverish temperament
that he did not drink wine very much. But it
was a part of his humane philosophy, of his
religion, that he did drink wine. To healthy
European philosophy, wine is a symbol; to
European religion it is a sacrament. Dickens
approved it because it was a great human institution,
one of the rites of civilization, and this it
certainly is. The teetotaller who stands outside
it may have perfectly clear ethical reasons of his
own, as a man may have who stands outside education
or nationality, who refuses to go to an University
or to serve in an Army. But he is neglecting
one of the great social things that man has
added to nature. The teetotaller has chosen a
most unfortunate phrase for the drunkard when
he says that the drunkard is making a beast of
himself. The man who drinks ordinarily makes
nothing but an ordinary man of himself. The
man who drinks excessively makes a devil of himself.
But nothing connected with a human and
artistic thing like wine can bring one nearer to
the brute life of nature. The only man who is, in<span class="pagenum" id="Page_220">220</span>
the exact and literal sense of the words, making
a beast of himself is the teetotaller.</p>
<p>The tone of Dickens towards religion, though
like that of most of his contemporaries, philosophically
disturbed and rather historically ignorant,
had an element that was very characteristic
of himself. He had all the prejudices of his time.
He had, for instance, that dislike of defined dogmas,
which really means a preference for unexamined
dogmas. He had the usual vague notion
that the whole of our human past was packed with
nothing but insane Tories. He had, in a word,
all the old Radical ignorances which went along
with the old Radical acuteness and courage and
public spirit. But this spirit tended, in almost all
the others who held it, to a specific dislike of the
Church of England; and a disposition to set the
other sects against it, as truer types of inquiry, or
of individualism. Dickens had a definite tenderness
for the Church of England. He might have
even called it a weakness for the Church of England,
but he had it. Something in those placid
services, something in that reticent and humane
liturgy pleased him against all the tendencies of
his time; pleased him in the best part of himself,
his virile love of charity and peace. Once, in a
puff of anger at the Church’s political stupidity<span class="pagenum" id="Page_221">221</span>
(which is indeed profound), he left it for a week
or two and went to an Unitarian Chapel; in a
week or two he came back. This curious and
sentimental hold of the English Church upon him
increased with years. In the book he was at
work on when he died he describes the Minor
Canon, humble, chivalrous, tender-hearted, answering
with indignant simplicity the froth and platform
righteousness of the sectarian philanthropist.
He upholds Canon Crisparkle and satirizes Mr.
Honeythunder. Almost every one of the other
Radicals, his friends, would have upheld Mr.
Honeythunder and satirized Canon Crisparkle.</p>
<p>I have mentioned this matter for a special reason.
It brings us back to that apparent contradiction
or dualism in Dickens to which, in one
connection or another, I have often adverted, and
which, in one shape or another, constitutes the
whole crux of his character. I mean the union of
a general wildness approaching lunacy, with a sort
of secret moderation almost amounting to mediocrity.
Dickens was, more or less, the man I have
described—sensitive, theatrical, amazing, a bit of
a dandy, a bit of a buffoon. Nor are such characteristics,
whether weak or wild, entirely accidents
or externals. He had some false theatrical tendencies
integral in his nature. For instance, he<span class="pagenum" id="Page_222">222</span>
had one most unfortunate habit, a habit that often
put him in the wrong, even when he happened to
be in the right. He had an incurable habit of explaining
himself. This reduced his admirers to
the mental condition of the authentic but hitherto
uncelebrated little girl who said to her mother, “I
think I should understand if only you wouldn’t
explain.” Dickens always would explain. It was
a part of that instinctive publicity of his which
made him at once a splendid democrat and a little
too much of an actor. He carried it to the craziest
lengths. He actually wanted to have printed in
<i>Punch</i>, it is said, an apology for his own action in
the matter of his marriage. That incident alone
is enough to suggest that his external offers and
proposals were sometimes like screams heard from
Bedlam. Yet it remains true that he had in him a
central part that was pleased only by the most
decent and the most reposeful rites, by things of
which the Anglican prayer-book is very typical.
It is certainly true that he was often extravagant.
It is most certainly equally true that he detested
and despised extravagance.</p>
<p>The best explanation can be found in his literary
genius. His literary genius consisted in a contradictory
capacity at once to entertain and to deride—very
ridiculous ideas. If he is a buffoon, he is<span class="pagenum" id="Page_223">223</span>
laughing at buffoonery. His books were in some
ways the wildest on the face of the world. Rabelais
did not introduce into Paphlagonia or the
Kingdom of the Coqcigrues satiric figures more
frantic and misshapen than Dickens made to walk
about the Strand and Lincoln’s Inn. But for all
that, you come, in the core of him, on a sudden
quietude and good sense. Such, I think, was the
core of Rabelais, such were all the far-stretching
and violent satirists. This is a point essential to
Dickens, though very little comprehended in our
current tone of thought. Dickens was an immoderate
jester, but a moderate thinker. He was an
immoderate jester because he was a moderate
thinker. What we moderns call the wildness of
his imagination was actually created by what we
moderns call the tameness of his thought. I mean
that he felt the full insanity of all extreme tendencies,
because he was himself so sane; he felt
eccentricities, because he was in the centre. We
are always, in these days, asking our violent
prophets to write violent satires; but violent
prophets can never possibly write violent satires.
In order to write satire like that of Rabelais—satire
that juggles with the stars and kicks the world
about like a football—it is necessary to be one’s
self temperate, and even mild. A modern man<span class="pagenum" id="Page_224">224</span>
like Nietzsche, a modern man like Gorky, a modern
man like d’Annunzio, could not possibly write
real and riotous satire. They are themselves too
much on the borderlands. They could not be a
success as caricaturists, for they are already a great
success as caricatures.</p>
<p>I have mentioned his religious preference merely
as an instance of this interior moderation. To
say, as some have done, that he attacked Nonconformity
is quite a false way of putting it. It
is clean across the whole trend of the man and
his time to suppose that he could have felt bitterness
against any theological body as a theological
body; but anything like religious extravagance,
whether Protestant or Catholic, moved him to an
extravagance of satire. And he flung himself into
the drunken energy of Stiggins, he piled up to the
stars the “verbose flights of stairs” of Mr. Chadband,
exactly because his own conception of religion
was the quiet and impersonal Morning
Prayer. It is typical of him that he had a peculiar
hatred for speeches at the graveside.</p>
<p>An even clearer case of what I mean can be
found in his political attitude. He seemed to some
an almost anarchic satirist. He made equal fun
of the systems which reformers made war on, and
of the instruments on which reformers relied. He<span class="pagenum" id="Page_225">225</span>
made no secret of his feeling that the average
English premier was an accidental ass. In two
superb sentences he summed up and swept away
the whole British constitution: “England, for the
last week, has been in an awful state. Lord Coodle
would go out, Sir Thomas Doodle wouldn’t come
in, and there being no people in England to speak
of except Coodle and Doodle, the country has been
without a government.” He lumped all cabinets
and all government offices together, and made the
same game of them all. He created his most staggering
humbugs, his most adorable and incredible
idiots, and set them on the highest thrones of our
national system. To many moderate and progressive
people, such a satirist seemed to be insulting
heaven and earth, ready to wreck society for some
mad alternative, prepared to pull down St. Paul’s,
and on its ruins erect a gory guillotine. Yet, as
a matter of fact, this apparent wildness of his came
from his being, if anything, a very moderate politician.
It came, not at all from fanaticism, but
from a rather rational detachment. He had the
sense to see that the British constitution was not
democracy, but the British constitution. It was
an artificial system—like any other, good in some
ways, bad in others. His satire of it sounded wild
to those that worshipped it; but his satire of it<span class="pagenum" id="Page_226">226</span>
arose not from his having any wild enthusiasm
against it, but simply from his not having, like
every one else, a wild enthusiasm for it. Alone, as
far as I know, among all the great Englishmen of
that age, he realized the thing that Frenchmen and
Irishmen understand. I mean the fact that popular
government is one thing, and representative
government another. He realized that representative
government has many minor disadvantages,
one of them being that it is never representative.
He speaks of his “hope to have made every
man in England feel something of the contempt
for the House of Commons that I have.” He
says also these two things, both of which are wonderfully
penetrating as coming from a good Radical
in 1855, for they contain a perfect statement
of the peril in which we now stand, and which may,
if it please God, sting us into avoiding the long
vista at the end of which one sees so clearly the
dignity and the decay of <span class="locked">Venice—</span></p>
<p>“I am hourly strengthened,” he says, “in my
old belief, that our political aristocracy and our
tuft-hunting are the death of England. In all
this business I don’t see a gleam of hope. As to
the popular spirit, it has come to be so entirely
separated from the Parliament and the Government,
and so perfectly apathetic about them both,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_227">227</span>
that I seriously think it a most portentous sign.”
And he says also this: “I really am serious in
thinking—and I have given as painful consideration
to the subject as a man with children to live
and suffer after him can possibly give it—that
representative government is become altogether a
failure with us, that the English gentilities and
subserviences render the people unfit for it, and the
whole thing has broken down since the great seventeenth
century time, and has no hope in it.”</p>
<p>These are the words of a wise and perhaps
melancholy man, but certainly not of an unduly
excited one. It is worth noting, for instance, how
much more directly Dickens goes to the point than
Carlyle did, who noted many of the same evils.
But Carlyle fancied that our modern English government
was wordy and long-winded because it
was democratic government. Dickens saw, what
is certainly the fact, that it is wordy and long-winded
because it is aristocratic government, the
two most pleasant aristocratic qualities being a love
of literature and an unconsciousness of time. But
all this amounts to the same conclusion of the
matter. Frantic figures like Stiggins and Chadband
were created out of the quietude of his
religious preference. Wild creations like the Barnacles
and the Bounderbys were produced in a kind<span class="pagenum" id="Page_228">228</span>
of ecstasy of the ordinary, of the obvious in
political justice. His monsters were made out of
his level and his moderation, as the old monsters
were made out of the level sea.</p>
<p>Such was the man of genius we must try to imagine;
violently emotional, yet with a good judgment;
pugnacious, but only when he thought himself
oppressed; prone to think himself oppressed,
yet not cynical about human motives. He was a
man remarkably hard to understand or to reanimate.
He almost always had reasons for his
action; his error was that he always expounded
them. Sometimes his nerve snapped; and then he
was mad. Unless it did so he was quite unusually
sane.</p>
<p>Such a rough sketch at least must suffice us in
order to summarize his later years. Those years
were occupied, of course, in two main additions to
his previous activities. The first was the series of
public readings and lectures which he now began
to give systematically. The second was his successive
editorship of <i>Household Words</i> and of <i>All
the Year Round</i>. He was of a type that enjoys
every new function and opportunity. He had been
so many things in his life, a reporter, an actor, a
conjurer, a poet. As he had enjoyed them all, so
he enjoyed being a lecturer, and enjoyed being an<span class="pagenum" id="Page_229">229</span>
editor. It is certain that his audiences (who sometimes
stacked themselves so thick that they lay
flat on the platform all round him) enjoyed his
being a lecturer. It is not so certain that the sub-editors
enjoyed his being an editor. But in both
connections the main matter of importance is the
effect on the permanent work of Dickens himself.
The readings were important for this reason, that
they fixed, as if by some public and pontifical pronouncement,
what was Dickens’s interpretation of
Dickens’s work. Such a knowledge is mere tradition,
but it is very forcible. My own family has
handed on to me, and I shall probably hand on
to the next generation, a definite memory of how
Dickens made his face suddenly like the face of
an idiot in impersonating Mrs. Raddle’s servant,
Betsy. This does serve one of the permanent purposes
of tradition; it does make it a little more
difficult for any ingenious person to prove that
Betsy was meant to be a brilliant satire on the
over-cultivation of the intellect.</p>
<p>As for his relation to his two magazines, it is
chiefly important, first for the admirable things
that he wrote in the magazines himself (one cannot
forbear to mention the inimitable monologue
of the waiter in “Somebody’s Luggage”), and
secondly for the fact that in his capacity of editor<span class="pagenum" id="Page_230">230</span>
he made one valuable discovery. He discovered
Wilkie Collins. Wilkie Collins was the one man
of unmistakable genius who has a certain affinity
with Dickens; an affinity in this respect, that they
both combine in a curious way a modern and cockney
and even commonplace opinion about things
with a huge elemental sympathy with strange oracles
and spirits and old night. There were no two
men in Mid-Victorian England, with their top-hats
and umbrellas, more typical of its rationality and
dull reform; and there were no two men who could
touch them at a ghost story. No two men would
have more contempt for superstitions; and no two
men could so create the superstitious thrill. Indeed,
our modern mystics make a mistake when
they wear long hair or loose ties to attract the
spirits. The elves and the old gods when they
revisit the earth really go straight for a dull top-hat.
For it means simplicity, which the gods love.</p>
<p>Meanwhile his books, which, as brilliant as ever,
were appearing from time to time, bore witness to
that increasing tendency to a more careful and
responsible treatment which we have marked in
the transition which culminated in “Bleak House.”
His next important book, “Hard Times,” strikes
an almost unexpected note of severity. The characters
are indeed exaggerated, but they are bitterly<span class="pagenum" id="Page_231">231</span>
and deliberately exaggerated; they are not exaggerated
with the old unconscious high spirits of
Nicholas Nickleby or Martin Chuzzlewit. Dickens
exaggerates Bounderby because he really hates
him. He exaggerated Pecksniff because he really
loved him. “Hard Times” is not one of the
greatest books of Dickens; but it is perhaps in a
sense one of his greatest monuments. It stamps
and records the reality of Dickens’s emotion on a
great many things that were then considered unphilosophical
grumblings, but which since have
swelled into the immense phenomenon of the socialist
philosophy. To call Dickens a Socialist is a
wild exaggeration; but the truth and peculiarity
of his position might be expressed thus: that even
when everybody thought that Liberalism meant
individualism he was emphatically a Liberal and
emphatically not an individualist. Or the truth
might be better still stated in this manner: that
he saw that there was a secret thing, called humanity,
to which both extreme socialism and extreme
individualism were profoundly and inexpressibly
indifferent, and that this permanent and presiding
humanity was the thing he happened to understand;
he knew that individualism is nothing and
non-individualism is nothing but the keeping of the
commandment of man. He felt, as a novelist<span class="pagenum" id="Page_232">232</span>
should, that the question is too much discussed as
to whether a man is in favour of this or that scientific
philosophy; that there is another question,
whether the scientific philosophy is in favour of
the man. That is why such books as “Hard
Times” will remain always a part of the power
and tradition of Dickens. He saw that economic
systems are not things like the stars, but things
like the lamp-posts, manifestations of the human
mind, and things to be judged by the human
heart.</p>
<p>Thenceforward until the end his books grow
consistently graver and, as it were, more responsible;
he improves as an artist if not always as a
creator. “Little Dorrit” (published in 1857)
is at once in some ways so much more subtle and
in every way so much more sad than the rest of
his work that it bores Dickensians and especially
pleases George Gissing. It is the only one of the
Dickens tales which could please Gissing, not only
by its genius, but also by its atmosphere. There is
something a little modern and a little sad, something
also out of tune with the main trend of
Dickens’s moral feeling, about the description of
the character of Dorrit as actually and finally
weakened by his wasting experiences, as not lifting
any cry above the conquered years. It is but a<span class="pagenum" id="Page_233">233</span>
faint fleck of shadow. But the illimitable white
light of human hopefulness, of which I spoke at
the beginning, is ebbing away, the work of the
revolution is growing weaker everywhere; and
the night of necessitarianism cometh when no man
can work. For the first time in a book by Dickens
perhaps we really do feel that the hero is forty-five.
Clennam is certainly very much older than
Mr. Pickwick.</p>
<p>This was indeed only a fugitive grey cloud;
he went on to breezier operations. But whatever
they were, they still had the note of the later days.
They have a more cautious craftsmanship; they
have a more mellow and a more mixed human
sentiment. Shadows fell upon his page from the
other and sadder figures out of the Victorian decline.
A good instance of this is his next book,
“The Tale of Two Cities” (1859). In dignity
and eloquence it almost stands alone among the
books by Dickens, but it also stands alone among
his books in this respect, that it is not entirely by
Dickens. It owes its inspiration avowedly to the
passionate and cloudy pages of Carlyle’s “French
Revolution.” And there is something quite essentially
inconsistent between Carlyle’s disturbed and
half-sceptical transcendentalism and the original
school and spirit to which Dickens belonged, the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_234">234</span>
lucid and laughing decisiveness of the old convinced
and contented Radicalism. Hence the
genius of Dickens cannot save him, just as the
great genius of Carlyle could not save him from
making a picture of the French Revolution, which
was delicately and yet deeply erroneous. Both
tend too much to represent it as a mere elemental
outbreak of hunger or vengeance; they do not see
enough that it was a war for intellectual principles,
even for intellectual platitudes. We, the
modern English, cannot easily understand the
French Revolution, because we cannot easily understand
the idea of bloody battle for pure common
sense; we cannot understand common sense
in arms and conquering. In modern England common
sense appears to mean putting up with existing
conditions. For us a practical politician really
means a man who can be thoroughly trusted to do
nothing at all; that is where his practicality comes
in. The French feeling—the feeling at the back
of the Revolution—was that the more sensible a
man was, the more you must look out for
slaughter.</p>
<p>In all the imitators of Carlyle, including Dickens,
there is an obscure sentiment that the thing
for which the Frenchmen died must have been
something new and queer, a paradox, a strange
idolatry. But when such blood ran in the streets,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_235">235</span>
it was for the sake of a truism; when those cities
were shaken to their foundations, they were shaken
to their foundations by a truism.</p>
<p>I have mentioned this historical matter because
it illustrates these later and more mingled influences
which at once improve and as it were perplex
the later work of Dickens. For Dickens had in
his original mental composition capacities for
understanding this cheery and sensible element
in the French Revolution far better than Carlyle.
The French Revolution was, among other things,
French, and, so far as that goes, could never have
a precise counterpart in so jolly and autochthonous
an Englishman as Charles Dickens. But there was
a great deal of the actual and unbroken tradition
of the Revolution itself in his early radical indictments;
in his denunciations of the Fleet Prison
there was a great deal of the capture of the Bastille.
There was, above all, a certain reasonable
impatience which was the essence of the old Republican,
and which is quite unknown to the Revolutionist
in modern Europe. The old Radical did
not feel exactly that he was “in revolt;” he felt
if anything that a number of idiotic institutions
had revolted against reason and against him.
Dickens, I say, had the revolutionary idea, though
an English form of it, by clear and conscious inheritance;
Carlyle had to rediscover the Revolution<span class="pagenum" id="Page_236">236</span>
by a violence of genius and vision. If Dickens,
then, took from Carlyle (as he said he did)
his image of the Revolution, it does certainly mean
that he had forgotten something of his own youth
and come under the more complex influences of
the end of the nineteenth century. His old hilarious
and sentimental view of human nature seems
for a moment dimmed in “Little Dorrit.” His
old political simplicity has been slightly disturbed
by Carlyle.</p>
<p>I repeat that this graver note is varied, but it
remains a graver note. We see it struck, I think,
with particular and remarkable success in “Great
Expectations” (1860–61). This fine story is told
with a consistency and quietude of individuality
which is rare in Dickens. But so far had he
travelled along the road of a heavier reality, that
he even intended to give the tale an unhappy
ending, making Pip lose Estella for ever; and he
was only dissuaded from it by the robust romanticism
of Bulwer-Lytton. But the best part of the
tale—the account of the vacillations of the hero
between the humble life to which he owes everything,
and the gorgeous life from which he expects
something, touch a very true and somewhat tragic
part of morals; for the great paradox of morality
(the paradox to which only the religions have<span class="pagenum" id="Page_237">237</span>
given an adequate expression) is that the very
vilest kind of fault is exactly the most easy kind.
We read in books and ballads about the wild fellow
who might kill a man or smoke opium, but who
would never stoop to lying or cowardice or to
“anything mean.” But for actual human beings
opium and slaughter have only occasional charm;
the permanent human temptation is the temptation
to be mean. The one standing probability is the
probability of becoming a cowardly hypocrite.
The circle of the traitors is the lowest of the
abyss, and it is also the easiest to fall into. That
is one of the ringing realities of the Bible, that it
does not make its great men commit grand sins;
it makes its great men (such as David and
St. Peter) commit small sins and behave like
sneaks.</p>
<p>Dickens has dealt with this easy descent of
desertion, this silent treason, with remarkable accuracy
in the account of the indecisions of Pip.
It contains a good suggestion of that weak romance
which is the root of all snobbishness: that the
mystery which belongs to patrician life excites us
more than the open, even the indecent virtues of
the humble. Pip is keener about Miss Havisham,
who may mean well by him, than about Joe Gargery,
who evidently does. All this is very strong<span class="pagenum" id="Page_238">238</span>
and wholesome; but it is still a little stern. “Our
Mutual Friend” (1864) brings us back a little
into his merrier and more normal manner; some
of the satire, such as that upon Veneering’s election,
is in the best of his old style, so airy and
fanciful, yet hitting so suddenly and so hard. But
even here we find the fuller and more serious treatment
of psychology; notably in the two facts that
he creates a really human villain, Bradley Headstone,
and also one whom we might call a really
human hero, Eugene, if it were not that he is much
too human to be called a hero at all. It has been
said (invariably by cads) that Dickens never described
a gentleman; it is like saying that he never
described a zebra. A gentleman is a very rare
animal among human creatures, and to people
like Dickens, interested in all humanity, not a
supremely important one. But in Eugene Wrayburne
he does, whether consciously or not, turn
that accusation with a vengeance. For he not only
describes a gentleman but describes the inner weakness
and peril that belong to a gentleman, the devil
that is always rending the entrails of an idle and
agreeable man. In Eugene’s purposeless pursuit
of Lizzie Hexam, in his yet more purposeless
torturing of Bradley Headstone, the author has
marvellously realized that singular empty obstinacy<span class="pagenum" id="Page_239">239</span>
that drives the whims and pleasures of a
leisured class. He sees that there is nothing that
such a man more stubbornly adheres to, than the
thing that he does not particularly want to do.
We are still in serious psychology.</p>
<p>His last book represents yet another new departure,
dividing him from the chaotic Dickens of
days long before. His last book is not merely an
attempt to improve his power of construction in
a story: it is an attempt to rely entirely on that
power of construction. It not only has a plot, it
is a plot. “The Mystery of Edwin Drood”
(1870) was in such a sense, perhaps, the most
ambitious book that Dickens ever attempted. It
is, as every one knows, a detective story, and certainly
a very successful one, as is attested by the
tumult of discussion as to its proper solution. In
this, quite apart from its unfinished state, it stands,
I think, alone among the author’s works. Elsewhere,
if he introduced a mystery, he seldom took
the trouble to make it very mysterious. “Our
Mutual Friend” was finished, but if only half
of it were readable, I think any one could see that
John Rokesmith was John Harman. “Bleak
House” is finished, but if it were only half finished
I think any one would guess that Lady Deadlock
and Nemo had sinned in the past. “Edwin<span class="pagenum" id="Page_240">240</span>
Drood” is not finished; for in the very middle of
it Dickens died.</p>
<p>He had altogether overstrained himself in a
last lecturing tour in America. He was a man in
whom any serious malady would naturally make
very rapid strides; for he had the temper of an
irrational invalid. I have said before that there
was in his curious character something that was
feminine. Certainly there was nothing more entirely
feminine than this, that he worked because
he was tired. Fatigue bred in him a false and
feverish industry, and his case increased, like the
case of a man who drinks to cure the effects of
drink. He died in 1870; and the whole nation
mourned him as no public man has ever been
mourned; for prime ministers and princes were
private persons compared with Dickens. He had
been a great popular king, like a king of some
more primal age whom his people could come and
see, giving judgment under an oak tree. He had
in essence held great audiences of millions, and
made proclamations to more than one of the nations
of the earth. His obvious omnipresence in
every part of public life was like the omnipresence
of the sovereign. His secret omnipresence in
every house and hut of private life was more like
the omnipresence of a deity. Compared with that<span class="pagenum" id="Page_241">241</span>
popular leadership all the fusses of the last forty
years are diversions in idleness. Compared with
such a case as his it may be said that we play
with our politicians, and manage to endure our
authors. We shall never have again such a popularity
until we have again a people.</p>
<p>He left behind him this almost sombre fragment,
“The Mystery of Edwin Drood.” As one
turns it over the tragic element of its truncation
mingles somewhat with an element of tragedy in
the thing itself; the passionate and predestined
Landless, or the half maniacal Jasper carving
devils out of his own heart. The workmanship
of it is very fine; the right hand has not only not
lost, but is still gaining its cunning. But as we
turn the now enigmatic pages the thought creeps
into us again which I have suggested earlier, and
which is never far off the mind of a true lover of
Dickens. Had he lost or gained by the growth of
technique and probability in his later work? His
later characters were more like men; but were not
his earlier characters more like immortals? He
has become able to perform a social scene so that
it is possible at any rate; but where is that Dickens
who once performed the impossible? Where is
that young poet who created such majors and
architects as nature will never dare to create?<span class="pagenum" id="Page_242">242</span>
Dickens learnt to describe daily life as Thackeray
and Jane Austen could describe it; but Thackeray
could not have thought such a thought as Crummles;
and it is painful to think of Miss Austen
attempting to imagine Mantalini. After all, we
feel there are many able novelists; but there is
only one Dickens, and whither has he fled?</p>
<p>He was alive to the end. And in this last dark
and secretive story of Edwin Drood he makes
one splendid and staggering appearance, like a
magician saying farewell to mankind. In the centre
of this otherwise reasonable and rather melancholy
book, this grey story of a good clergyman
and the quiet Cloisterham Towers, Dickens has
calmly inserted one entirely delightful and entirely
insane passage. I mean the frantic and inconceivable
epitaph of Mrs. Sapsea, that which describes
her as “the reverential wife” of Thomas
Sapsea, speaks of her consistency in “Looking up
to him,” and ends with the words, spaced out so
admirably on the tombstone, “Stranger pause.
And ask thyself this question, Canst thou do likewise?
If not, with a blush retire.” Not the wildest
tale in Pickwick contains such an impossibility
as that; Dickens dare scarcely have introduced it,
even as one of Jingle’s lies. In no human churchyard
will you find that invaluable tombstone; indeed,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_243">243</span>
you could scarcely find it in any world where
there are churchyards. You could scarcely have
such immortal folly as that in a world where there
is also death. Mr. Sapsea is one of the golden
things stored up for us in a better world.</p>
<p>Yes, there were many other Dickenses: a clever
Dickens, an industrious Dickens, a public-spirited
Dickens; but this was the great one. This last
outbreak of insane humour reminds us wherein
lay his power and his supremacy. The praise of
such beatific buffoonery should be the final praise,
the ultimate word in his honour. The wild epitaph
of Mrs. Sapsea should be the serious epitaph
of Dickens.</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_244">244</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="toclink_244">CHAPTER X<br />
<span class="subhead">THE GREAT DICKENS CHARACTERS</span></h2>
</div>
<p class="in0"><span class="firstword">All</span> criticism tends too much to become criticism
of criticism; and the reason is very evident. It is
that criticism of creation is so very staggering a
thing. We see this in the difficulty of criticizing
any artistic creation. We see it again in the difficulty
of criticizing that creation which is spelt with
a capital C. The pessimists who attack the Universe
are always under this disadvantage. They
have an exhilarating consciousness that they could
make the sun and moon better; but they also have
the depressing consciousness that they could not
make the sun and moon at all. A man looking at
a hippopotamus may sometimes be tempted to regard
a hippopotamus as an enormous mistake; but
he is also bound to confess that a fortunate inferiority
prevents him personally from making such
mistakes. It is neither a blasphemy nor an exaggeration
to say that we feel something of the same
difficulty in judging of the very creative element
in human literature. And this is the first and last
dignity of Dickens; that he was a creator. He<span class="pagenum" id="Page_245">245</span>
did not point out things, he made them. We may
disapprove of Mr. Guppy, but we recognize him
as a creation flung down like a miracle out of an
upper sphere; we can pull him to pieces, but we
could not have put him together. We can destroy
Mrs. Gamp in our wrath, but we could not have
made her in our joy. Under this disadvantage
any book about Dickens must definitely labour.
Real primary creation (such as the sun or the birth
of a child) calls forth not criticism, not appreciation,
but a kind of incoherent gratitude. This is
why most hymns about God are bad; and this is
why most eulogies on Dickens are bad. The eulogists
of the divine and of the human creator are
alike inclined to appear sentimentalists because
they are talking about something so very real. In
the same way love-letters always sound florid and
artificial because they are about something real.</p>
<p>Any chapter such as this chapter must therefore
in a sense be inadequate. There is no way of dealing
properly with the ultimate greatness of Dickens,
except by offering sacrifice to him as a god;
and this is opposed to the etiquette of our time.
But something can perhaps be done in the way of
suggesting what was the quality of this creation.
But even in considering its quality we ought to remember
that quality is not the whole question. One<span class="pagenum" id="Page_246">246</span>
of the godlike things about Dickens is his quantity,
his quantity as such, the enormous output, the incredible
fecundity of his invention. I have said
a moment ago that not one of us could have invented
Mr. Guppy. But even if we could have
stolen Mr. Guppy from Dickens we have still to
confront the fact that Dickens would have been
able to invent another quite inconceivable character
to take his place. Perhaps we could have created
Mr. Guppy; but the effort would certainly have
exhausted us; we should be ever afterwards
wheeled about in a bath-chair at Bournemouth.</p>
<p>Nevertheless there is something that is worth
saying about the quality of Dickens. At the very
beginning of this review I remarked that the
reader must be in a mood, at least, of democracy.
To some it may have sounded irrelevant; but the
Revolution was as much behind all the books of
the nineteenth century as the Catholic religion
(let us say) was behind all the colours and carving
of the Middle Ages. Another great name of the
nineteenth century will afford an evidence of this;
and will also bring us most sharply to the problem
of the literary quality of Dickens.</p>
<p>Of all these nineteenth century writers there
is none, in the noblest sense, more democratic than
Walter Scott. As this may be disputed, and as<span class="pagenum" id="Page_247">247</span>
it is relevant, I will expand the remark. There
are two rooted spiritual realities out of which grow
all kinds of democratic conception or sentiment of
human equality. There are two things in which
all men are manifestly unmistakably equal. They
are not equally clever or equally muscular or
equally fat, as the sages of the modern reaction
(with piercing insight) perceive. But this is a
spiritual certainty, that all men are tragic. And
this again, is an equally sublime spiritual certainty,
that all men are comic. No special and private
sorrow can be so dreadful as the fact of having
to die. And no freak or deformity can be so
funny as the mere fact of having two legs. Every
man is important if he loses his life; and every
man is funny if he loses his hat, and has to run
after it. And the universal test everywhere of
whether a thing is popular, of the people, is
whether it employs vigorously these extremes of
the tragic and the comic. Shelley, for instance,
was an aristocrat, if ever there was one in this
world. He was a Republican, but he was not a
democrat: in his poetry there is every perfect quality
except this pungent and popular stab. For the
tragic and the comic you must go, say, to Burns,
a poor man. And all over the world, the folk
literature, the popular literature, is the same. It<span class="pagenum" id="Page_248">248</span>
consists of very dignified sorrow and very undignified
fun. Its sad tales are of broken hearts; its
happy tales are of broken heads.</p>
<p>These, I say, are two roots of democratic reality.
But they have in more civilized literature, a
more civilized embodiment or form. In literature
such as that of the nineteenth century the two elements
appear somewhat thus. Tragedy becomes
a profound sense of human dignity. The other
and jollier element becomes a delighted sense of
human variety. The first supports equality by
saying that all men are equally sublime. The second
supports equality by observing that all men
are equally interesting.</p>
<p>In this democratic aspect the interest and variety
of all men, there is, of course, no democrat
so great as Dickens. But in the other matter, in
the idea of the dignity of all men, I repeat that
there is no democrat so great as Scott. This fact,
which is the moral and enduring magnificence of
Scott, has been astonishingly overlooked. His rich
and dramatic effects are gained in almost every
case by some grotesque or beggarly figure rising
into a human pride and rhetoric. The common
man, in the sense of the paltry man, becomes the
common man in the sense of the universal man.
He declares his humanity. For the meanest of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_249">249</span>
all the modernites has been the notion that the
heroic is an oddity or variation, and that the
things that unite us are merely flat or foul. The
common things are terrible and startling, death,
for instance, and first love: the things that are
common are the things that are not commonplace.
Into such high and central passions the comic Scott
character will suddenly rise. Remember the firm
and almost stately answer of the preposterous
Nicol Jarvie when Helen Macgregor seeks to
browbeat him into condoning lawlessness and
breaking his bourgeois decency. That speech is
a great monument of the middle class. Molière
made M. Jourdain talk prose; but Scott made him
talk poetry. Think of the rising and rousing
voice of the dull and gluttonous Athelstane when
he answers and overwhelms De Bracy. Think of
the proud appeal of the old beggar in the “Antiquary”
when he rebukes the duellists. Scott was
fond of describing kings in disguise. But all his
characters are kings in disguise. He was, with
all his errors, profoundly possessed with the old
religious conception (the only possible democratic
basis), the idea that man himself is a king in
disguise.</p>
<p>In all this Scott, though a Royalist and a Tory,
had in the strangest way the heart of the Revolution.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_250">250</span>
For instance, he regarded rhetoric, the art
of the orator, as the immediate weapon of the
oppressed. All his poor men make grand speeches,
as they did in the Jacobin Club, which Scott would
have so much detested. And it is odd to reflect
that he was, as an author, giving free speech to
fictitious rebels while he was, as a stupid politician,
denying it to real ones. But the point for us here
is this: that all this popular sympathy of his rests
on the graver basis, on the dark dignity of man.
“Can you find no way?” asks Sir Arthur Wardour
of the beggar when they are cut off by the
tide. “I’ll give you a farm.... I’ll make
you rich.” ... “Our riches will soon be
equal,” says the beggar, and looks out across the
advancing sea.</p>
<p>Now, I have dwelt on this strong point of Scott
because it is the best illustration of the one weak
point of Dickens. Dickens had little or none of
this sense of the concealed sublimity of every separate
man. Dickens’s sense of democracy was
entirely of the other kind; it rested on the other
of the two supports of which I have spoken. It
rested on the sense that all men were wildly interesting
and wildly varied. When a Dickens character
becomes excited he becomes more and more
himself. He does not, like the Scott beggar, turn<span class="pagenum" id="Page_251">251</span>
more and more into man. As he rises he grows
more and more into a gargoyle or grotesque. He
does not, like the fine speaker in Scott, grow more
classical as he grows more passionate, more universal
as he grows more intense. The thing can
only be illustrated by a special case. Dickens did
more than once, of course, make one of his quaint
or humble characters assert himself in a serious
crisis or defy the powerful. There is, for instance,
the quite admirable scene in which Susan Nipper
(one of the greatest of Dickens’s achievements)
faces and rebukes Mr. Dombey. But it is still true
(and quite appropriate in its own place and manner)
that Susan Nipper remains a purely comic
character throughout her speech, and even grows
more comic as she goes on. She is more serious
than usual in her meaning, but not more serious
in her style. Dickens keeps the natural diction
of Nipper, but makes her grow more Nipperish
as she grows more warm. But Scott keeps the
natural diction of Bailie Jarvie, but insensibly
sobers and uplifts that style until it reaches a plain
and appropriate eloquence. This plain and appropriate
eloquence was (except in a few places
at the end of “Pickwick”) almost unknown to
Dickens. Whenever he made comic characters
talk sentiment comically, as in the instance of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_252">252</span>
Susan, it was a success, but an avowedly extravagant
success. Whenever he made comic characters
talk sentiment seriously it was an extravagant failure.
Humour was his medium; his only way of
approaching emotion. Wherever you do not get
humour, you get unconscious humour.</p>
<p>As I have said elsewhere in this book Dickens
was deeply and radically English; the most English
of our great writers. And there is something
very English in this contentment with a grotesque
democracy; and in this absence of the eloquence
and elevation of Scott. The English democracy
is the most humorous democracy in the world.
The Scotch democracy is the most dignified, while
the whole abandon and satiric genius of the English
populace come from its being quite undignified
in every way. A comparison of the two types
might be found, for instance, by putting a Scotch
Labour leader like Mr. Keir Hardie alongside an
English Labour leader like Mr. Will Crooks.
Both are good men, honest and responsible and
compassionate; but we can feel that the Scotchman
carries himself seriously and universally, the
Englishman personally and with an obstinate humour.
Mr. Hardie wishes to hold up his head
as Man, Mr. Crooks wishes to follow his nose
as Crooks. Mr. Keir Hardie is very like a poor<span class="pagenum" id="Page_253">253</span>
man in Walter Scott. Mr. Crooks is very like a
poor man in Dickens.</p>
<p>Dickens then had this English feeling of a
grotesque democracy. By that is more properly
meant a vastly varying democracy. The intoxicating
variety of men—that was his vision and
conception of human brotherhood. And certainly
it is a great part of human brotherhood. In one
sense things can only be equal if they are entirely
different. Thus, for instance, people talk with a
quite astonishing gravity about the inequality or
equality of the sexes; as if there could possibly
be any inequality between a lock and a key.
Wherever there is no element of variety, wherever
the items literally have an identical aim, there
is at once and of necessity inequality. A woman
is only inferior to man in the matter of being not
so manly; she is inferior in nothing else. Man is
inferior to woman in so far as he is not a woman;
there is no other reason. And the same applies
in some degree to all genuine differences. It is a
great mistake to suppose that love unites and unifies
men. Love diversifies them, because love is
directed towards individuality. The thing that
really unites men and makes them like to each
other is hatred. Thus, for instance, the more we
love Germany the more pleased we shall be that<span class="pagenum" id="Page_254">254</span>
Germany should be something different from ourselves,
should keep her own ritual and conviviality
and we ours. But the more we hate Germany
the more we shall copy German guns and German
fortifications in order to be armed against Germany.
The more modern nations detest each
other the more meekly they follow each other;
for all competition is in its nature only a furious
plagiarism. As competition means always similarity,
it is equally true that similarity always means
inequality. If everything is trying to be green,
some things will be greener than others; but there
is an immortal and indestructible equality between
green and red. Something of the same kind of
irrefutable equality exists between the violent and
varying creations of such a writer as Dickens.
They are all equally ecstatic fulfilments of a separate
line of development. It would be hard to say
that there could be any comparison or inequality,
let us say between Mr. Sapsea and Mr. Elijah
Pogram. They are both in the same difficulty; they
can neither of them contrive to exist in this world;
they are both too big for the gate of birth.</p>
<p>Of the high virtue of this variation I shall speak
more adequately in a moment; but certainly this
love of mere variation (which I have contrasted
with the classicism of Scott) is the only intelligent<span class="pagenum" id="Page_255">255</span>
statement of the common case against the exaggeration
of Dickens. This is the meaning, the
only sane or endurable meaning, which people have
in their minds when they say that Dickens is a
mere caricaturist. They do not mean merely that
Uncle Pumblechook does not exist. A fictitious
character ought not to be a person who exists;
he ought to be an entirely new combination, an
addition to the creatures already existing on the
earth. They do not mean that Uncle Pumblechook
could not exist; for on that obviously they
can have no knowledge whatever. They do not
mean that Uncle Pumblechook’s utterances are
selected and arranged so as to bring out his essential
Pumblechookery; to say that is simply to
say that he occurs in a work of art. But what they
do really mean is this, and there is an element of
truth in it. They mean that Dickens nowhere
makes the reader feel that Pumblechook has any
kind of fundamental human dignity at all. It is
nowhere suggested that Pumblechook will some
day die. He is felt rather as one of the idle and
evil fairies, who are innocuous and yet malignant,
and who live for ever because they never really
live at all. This dehumanized vitality, this fantasy,
this irresponsibility of creation, does in some
sense truly belong to Dickens. It is the lower side<span class="pagenum" id="Page_256">256</span>
of his hilarious human variety. But now we come
to the higher side of his human variety, and it is
far more difficult to state.</p>
<p>Mr. George Gissing, from the point of view of
the passing intellectualism of our day, has made
(among his many wise tributes to Dickens) a
characteristic complaint about him. He has said
that Dickens, with all his undoubted sympathy for
the lower classes, never made a working man, a
poor man, specifically and highly intellectual. An
exception does exist, which he must at least have
realized—a wit, a diplomatist, a great philosopher.
I mean, of course, Mr. Weller. Broadly,
however, the accusation has a truth, though it is
a truth that Mr. Gissing did not grasp in its entirety.
It is not only true that Dickens seldom
made a poor character what we call intellectual;
it is also true that he seldom made any character
what we call intellectual. Intellectualism was not
at all present to his imagination. What was present
to his imagination was character—a thing
which is not only more important than intellect,
but is also much more entertaining. When some
English moralists write about the importance of
having character, they appear to mean only the
importance of having a dull character. But character
is brighter than wit, and much more complex<span class="pagenum" id="Page_257">257</span>
than sophistry. The whole superiority of the
democracy of Dickens over the democracy of such
a man as Gissing lies exactly in the fact that Gissing
would have liked to prove that poor men could
instruct themselves and could instruct others. It
was of final importance to Dickens that poor men
could amuse themselves and could amuse him. He
troubled little about the mere education of that
life; he declared two essential things about it—that
it was laughable, and that it was livable. The
humble characters of Dickens do not amuse each
other with epigrams; they amuse each other with
themselves. The present that each man brings
in hand is his own incredible personality. In the
most sacred sense, and in the most literal sense
of the phrase, he “gives himself away.” Now,
the man who gives himself away does the last act
of generosity; he is like a martyr, a lover, or a
monk. But he is also almost certainly what we
commonly call a fool.</p>
<p>The key of the great characters of Dickens is
that they are all great fools. There is the same
difference between a great fool and a small fool
as there is between a great poet and a small poet.
The great fool is a being who is above wisdom
rather than below it. That element of greatness
of which I spoke at the beginning of this book is<span class="pagenum" id="Page_258">258</span>
nowhere more clearly indicated than in such characters.
A man can be entirely great while he is
entirely foolish. We see this in the epic heroes,
such as Achilles. Nay, a man can be entirely great
because he is entirely foolish. We see this in all
the great comic characters of all the great comic
writers of whom Dickens was the last. Bottom
the Weaver is great because he is foolish; Mr.
Toots is great because he is foolish. The thing
I mean can be observed, for instance, in innumerable
actual characters. Which of us has not known,
for instance, a great rustic?—a character so incurably
characteristic that he seemed to break
through all canons about cleverness or stupidity;
we do not know whether he is an enormous idiot
or an enormous philosopher; we know only that
he is enormous, like a hill. These great, grotesque
characters are almost entirely to be found where
Dickens found them—among the poorer classes.
The gentry only attain this greatness by going
slightly mad. But who has not known an unfathomably
personal old nurse? Who has not
known an abysmal butler? The truth is that our
public life consists almost exclusively of small men.
Our public men are small because they have to
prove that they are in the common-place interpretation
clever, because they have to pass examinations,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_259">259</span>
to learn codes of manners, to imitate a fixed
type. It is in private life that we find the great
characters. They are too great to get into the
public world. It is easier for a camel to pass
through the eye of a needle than for a great man
to enter into the kingdoms of the earth. The
truly great and gorgeous personality, he who talks
as no one else could talk and feels with an elementary
fire, you will never find this man on any
cabinet bench, in any literary circle, at any society
dinner. Least of all will you find him in artistic
society; he is utterly unknown in Bohemia. He
is more than clever, he is amusing. He is more
than successful, he is alive. You will find him
stranded here and there in all sorts of unknown
positions, almost always in unsuccessful positions.
You will find him adrift as an impecunious commercial
traveller like Micawber. You will find
him but one of a batch of silly clerks, like Swiveller.
You will find him as an unsuccessful actor,
like Crummles. You will find him as an unsuccessful
doctor, like Sawyer. But you will always
find this rich and reeking personality where Dickens
found it—among the poor. For the glory of
this world is a very small and priggish affair, and
these men are too large to get in line with it.
They are too strong to conquer.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_260">260</span></p>
<p>It is impossible to do justice to these figures
because the essential of them is their multiplicity.
The whole point of Dickens is that he not only
made them, but made them by myriads; that he
stamped his foot, and armies came out of the
earth. But let us, for the sake of showing the true
Dickens method, take one of them, a very sublime
one, Toots. It affords a good example of
the real work of Dickens, which was the revealing
of a certain grotesque greatness inside an obscure
and even unattractive type. It reveals the great
paradox of all spiritual things; that the inside is
always larger than the outside.</p>
<p>Toots is a type that we all know as well as we
know chimney-pots. And of all conceivable human
figures he is apparently the most futile and the
most dull. He is the blockhead who hangs on at a
private school, overgrown and underdeveloped.
He is always backward in his lessons, but forward
in certain cheap ways of the world; he can smoke
before he can spell. Toots is a perfect and pungent
picture of the wretched youth. Toots has, as
this youth always has, a little money of his own;
enough to waste in a semi-dissipation, he does not
enjoy, and in a gaping regard for sports, in which
he could not possibly excel. Toots has, as this
youth always has, bits of surreptitious finery, in<span class="pagenum" id="Page_261">261</span>
his case the incomparable ring. In Toots, above
all, is exactly rendered the central and most startling
contradiction; the contrast between a jauntiness
and a certain impudence of the attire, with the
profound shame and sheepishness of the visage and
the character. In him, too, is expressed the larger
contrasts between the external gaiety of such a
lad’s occupations, and the infinite, disconsolate sadness
of his empty eyes. This is Toots; we know
him, we pity him, and we avoid him. Schoolmasters
deal with him in despair or in a heartbreaking
patience. His family is vague about
him. His low-class hangers-on (like the Game
Chicken) lead him by the nose. The very parasites
that live on him despise him. But Dickens
does not despise him. Without denying one of
the dreary details which make us avoid the man,
Dickens makes him a man whom we long to meet.
He does not gloss over one of his dismal deficiencies,
but he makes them seem suddenly like
violent virtues that we would go to the world’s
end to see. Without altering one fact he manages
to alter the whole atmosphere, the whole
universe of Toots. He makes us not only like,
but love; not only love, but reverence this little
dunce and cad. The power to do this is a power
truly and literally to be called divine.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_262">262</span></p>
<p>For this is the very wholesome point. Dickens
does not alter Toots in any vital point. The thing
he does alter is us. He makes us lively where we
were bored, kind where we were cruel, and above
all, free for an universal human laughter where
we were cramped in a small competition about that
sad and solemn thing, the intellect. His enthusiasm
fills us, as does the love of God, with a
glorious shame; after all, he has only found in
Toots what we might have found for ourselves.
He has only made us as much interested in Toots
as Toots is in himself. He does not alter the proportions
of Toots; he alters only the scale; we
seem as if we were staring at a rat risen to the
stature of an elephant. Hitherto we have passed
him by; now we feel that nothing could induce us
to pass him by; that is the nearest way of putting
the truth. He has not been whitewashed in the
least; he has not been depicted as any cleverer
than he is. He has been turned from a small fool
into a great fool. We know Toots is not clever;
but we are not inclined to quarrel with Toots because
he is not clever. We are more likely to
quarrel with cleverness because it is not Toots.
All the examinations he could not pass, all the
schools he could not enter, all the temporary
tests of brain and culture which surrounded<span class="pagenum" id="Page_263">263</span>
him shall pass, and Toots shall remain like a
mountain.</p>
<p>It may be noticed that the great artists always
choose great fools rather than great intellectuals
to embody humanity. Hamlet does express the
æsthetic dreams and the bewilderments of the intellect;
but Bottom the Weaver expresses them
much better. In the same manner Toots expresses
certain permanent dignities in human nature more
than any of Dickens’s more dignified characters
can do it. For instance, Toots expresses admirably
the enduring fear, which is the very essence of
falling in love. When Toots is invited by Florence
to come in, when he longs to come in, but still
stays out, he is embodying a sort of insane and
perverse humility which is elementary in the lover.</p>
<p>There is an apostolic injunction to suffer fools
gladly. We always lay the stress on the word
suffer, and interpret the passage as one urging
resignation. It might be better, perhaps, to lay
the stress upon the word gladly, and make our
familiarity with fools a delight, and almost a dissipation.
Nor is it necessary that our pleasure in
fools (or at least in great and godlike fools)
should be merely satiric or cruel. The great fool
is he in whom we cannot tell which is the conscious
and which the unconscious humour; we laugh with<span class="pagenum" id="Page_264">264</span>
him and laugh at him at the same time. An obvious
instance is that of ordinary and happy marriage.
A man and a woman cannot live together
without having against each other a kind of everlasting
joke. Each has discovered that the other
is a fool, but a great fool. This largeness, this
grossness and gorgeousness of folly is the thing
which we all find about those with whom we are
in intimate contact; and it is the one enduring
basis of affection, and even of respect. When we
know an individual named Tomkins, we know that
he has succeeded where all others have failed; he
has succeeded in being Tomkins. Just so Mr.
Toots succeeded; he was defeated in all scholastic
examinations, but he was the victor in that visionary
battle in which unknown competitors vainly
tried to be Toots.</p>
<p>If we are to look for lessons, here at least is the
last and deepest lesson of Dickens. It is in our
own daily life that we are to look for the portents
and the prodigies. This is the truth, not merely
of the fixed figures of our life; the wife, the husband,
the fool that fills the sky. It is true of the
whole stream and substance of our daily experience;
every instant we reject a great fool merely
because he is foolish. Every day we neglect
Tootses and Swivellers, Guppys and Joblings, Simmerys<span class="pagenum" id="Page_265">265</span>
and Flashers. Every day we lose the last
sight of Jobling and Chuckster, the Analytical
Chemist, or the Marchioness. Every day we are
missing a monster whom we might easily love, and
an imbecile whom we should certainly admire.
This is the real gospel of Dickens; the inexhaustible
opportunities offered by the liberty and the
variety of man. Compared with this life, all
public life, all fame, all wisdom, is by its nature
cramped and cold and small. For on that defined
and lighted public stage men are of necessity
forced to profess one set of accomplishments, to
rise to one rigid standard. It is the utterly unknown
people, who can grow in all directions like
an exuberant tree. It is in our interior lives that
we find that people are too much themselves. It
is in our private life that we find people intolerably
individual, that we find them swelling into the
enormous contours, and taking on the colours of
caricature. Many of us live publicly with featureless
public puppets, images of the small public
abstractions. It is when we pass our own private
gate, and open our own secret door, that we step
into the land of the giants.</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_266">266</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="toclink_266">CHAPTER XI<br />
<span class="subhead">ON THE ALLEGED OPTIMISM OF DICKENS</span></h2>
</div>
<p class="in0"><span class="firstword">In</span> one of the plays of the decadent period, an
intellectual expressed the atmosphere of his epoch
by referring to Dickens as “a vulgar optimist.”
I have in a previous chapter suggested something
of the real strangeness of such a term. After all,
the main matter of astonishment (or rather of
admiration) is that optimism should be vulgar.
In a world in which physical distress is almost the
common lot, we actually complain that happiness
is too common. In a world in which the majority
is physically miserable we actually complain of the
sameness of praise; we are bored with the abundance
of approval. When we consider what the
conditions of the vulgar really are, it is difficult to
imagine a stranger or more splendid tribute to
humanity than such a phrase as vulgar optimism.
It is as if one spoke of “vulgar martyrdom” or
“common crucifixion.”</p>
<p>First, however, let it be said frankly that there
is a foundation for the charge against Dickens
which is implied in the phrase about vulgar optimism.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_267">267</span>
It does not concern itself with Dickens’s
confidence in the value of existence and the intrinsic
victory of virtue; that is not optimism but
religion. It is not concerned with his habit of
making bright occasions bright, and happy stories
happy; that is not optimism, but literature. Nor
is it concerned even with his peculiar genius for
the description of an almost bloated joviality; that
is not optimism, it is simply Dickens. With all
these higher variations of optimism I deal elsewhere.
But over and above all these there is a
real sense in which Dickens laid himself open to
the accusation of vulgar optimism, and I desire
to put the admission of this first, before the discussion
that follows. Dickens did have a disposition
to make his characters at all costs happy,
or, to speak more strictly, he had a disposition to
make them comfortable rather than happy. He
had a sort of literary hospitality; he too often
treated his characters as if they were his guests.
From a host is always expected, and always ought
to be expected as long as human civilization is
healthy, a strictly physical benevolence, if you will,
a kind of coarse benevolence. Food and fire and
such things should always be the symbols of the
man entertaining men; because they are the things
which all men beyond question have in common.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_268">268</span>
But something more than this is needed from the
man who is imagining and making men, the artist,
the man who is not receiving men, but rather sending
them forth.</p>
<p>As I shall remark in a moment in the matter of
the Dickens villains, it is not true that he made
every one thus at home. But he did do it to a
certain wide class of incongruous characters; he
did it to all who had been in any way unfortunate.
It had indeed its origin (a very beautiful origin)
in his realization of how much a little pleasure
was to such people. He knew well that the greatest
happiness that has been known since Eden is
the happiness of the unhappy. So far he is admirable.
And as long as he was describing the
ecstasy of the poor, the borderland between pain
and pleasure, he was at his highest. Nothing that
has ever been written about human delights, no
Earthly Paradise, no Utopia has ever come so
near the quick nerve of happiness as his descriptions
of the rare extravagances of the poor; such
an admirable description, for instance, as that of
Kit Nubbles taking his family to the theatre. For
he seizes on the real source of the whole pleasure;
a holy fear. Kit tells the waiter to bring the beer.
“And the waiter, instead of saying, ‘Did you
address that language to me?’ only said, ‘Pot of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_269">269</span>
beer, sir; yes, sir.’” That internal and quivering
humility of Kit is the only way to enjoy life or
banquets; and the fear of the waiter is the beginning
of dining. People in this mood “take
their pleasures sadly”; which is the only way of
taking them at all.</p>
<p>So far Dickens is supremely right. As long as
he was dealing with such penury and such festivity
his touch was almost invariably sure. But when
he came to more difficult cases, to people who for
one reason or another could not be cured with
one good dinner, he did develop this other evil,
this genuinely vulgar optimism of which I speak.
And the mark of it is this: that he gave the characters
a comfort that had no especial connection
with themselves; he threw comfort at them like
alms. There are cases at the end of his stories
in which his kindness to his characters is a careless
and insolent kindness. He loses his real
charity and adopts the charity of the Charity Organization
Society; the charity that is not kind,
the charity that is puffed up, and that does behave
itself unseemly. At the end of some of his stories
he deals out his characters a kind of out-door
relief.</p>
<p>I will give two instances. The whole meaning
of the character of Mr. Micawber is that a man<span class="pagenum" id="Page_270">270</span>
can be always almost rich by constantly expecting
riches. The lesson is a really important one in
our sweeping modern sociology. We talk of the
man whose life is a failure; but Micawber’s life
never is a failure, because it is always a crisis.
We think constantly of the man who if he looked
back would see that his existence was unsuccessful;
but Micawber never does look back; he always
looks forward, because the bailiff is coming
to-morrow. You cannot say he is defeated, for his
absurd battle never ends; he cannot despair of life,
for he is so much occupied in living. All this is
of immense importance in the understanding of the
poor; it is worth all the slum novelists that ever
insulted democracy. But how did it happen, how
could it happen, that the man who created this
Micawber could pension him off at the end of
the story and make him a successful colonial
mayor? Micawber never did succeed, never ought
to succeed; his kingdom is not of this world. But
this is an excellent instance of Dickens’s disposition
to make his characters grossly and incongruously
comfortable. There is another instance in
the same book. Dora, the first wife of David
Copperfield, is a very genuine and amusing figure;
she has certainly far more force of character than
Agnes. She represents the infinite and divine irrationality<span class="pagenum" id="Page_271">271</span>
of the human heart. What possessed
Dickens to make her such a dehumanized prig as
to recommend her husband to marry another
woman? One could easily respect a husband who
after time and development made such a marriage,
but surely not a wife who desired it. If Dora had
died hating Agnes we should know that everything
was right, and that God would reconcile the irreconcilable.
When Dora dies recommending Agnes
we know that everything is wrong, at least if hypocrisy
and artificiality and moral vulgarity are
wrong. There, again, Dickens yields to a mere
desire to give comfort. He wishes to pile up
pillows round Dora; and he smothers her with
them, like Othello.</p>
<p>This is the real vulgar optimism of Dickens;
it does exist, and I have deliberately put it first.
Let us admit that Dickens’s mind was far too much
filled with pictures of satisfaction and cosiness and
repose. Let us admit that he thought principally
of the pleasures of the oppressed classes; let us
admit that it hardly cost him any artistic pang to
make out human beings as much happier than they
are. Let us admit all this, and a curious fact
remains.</p>
<p>For it was this too easily contented Dickens,
this man with cushions at his back and (it sometimes<span class="pagenum" id="Page_272">272</span>
seems) cotton wool in his ears, it was this
happy dreamer, this vulgar optimist who alone of
modern writers did really destroy some of the
wrongs he hated and bring about some of the
reforms he desired. Dickens did help to pull
down the debtors’ prisons; and if he was too much
of an optimist he was quite enough of a destroyer.
Dickens did drive Squeers out of his Yorkshire
den; and if Dickens was too contented, it was
more than Squeers was. Dickens did leave his
mark on parochialism, on nursing, on funerals, on
public executions, on workhouses, on the Court of
Chancery. These things were altered; they are
different. It may be that such reforms are not
adequate remedies; that is another question altogether.
The next sociologists may think these old
Radical reforms quite narrow or accidental. But
such as they were, the old radicals got them done;
and the new sociologists cannot get anything done
at all. And in the practical doing of them Dickens
played a solid and quite demonstrable part;
that is the plain matter that concerns us here. If
Dickens was an optimist he was an uncommonly
active and useful kind of optimist. If Dickens
was a sentimentalist he was a very practical sentimentalist.</p>
<p>And the reason of this is one that goes deep<span class="pagenum" id="Page_273">273</span>
into Dickens’s social reform, and like every other
real and desirable thing, involves a kind of mystical
contradiction. If we are to save the oppressed,
we must have two apparently antagonistic
emotions in us at the same time. We must think
the oppressed man intensely miserable, and, at the
same time, intensely attractive and important. We
must insist with violence upon his degradation;
we must insist with the same violence upon his
dignity. For if we relax by one inch the one assertion,
men will say he does not need saving.
And if we relax by one inch the other assertion,
men will say he is not worth saving. The optimists
will say that reform is needless. The
pessimists will say that reform is hopeless. We
must apply both simultaneously to the same oppressed
man; we must say that he is a worm and
a god; and we must thus lay ourselves open to
the accusation (or the compliment) of transcendentalism.
This is, indeed, the strongest argument
for the religious conception of life. If the
dignity of man is an earthly dignity we shall be
tempted to deny his earthly degradation. If it
is a heavenly dignity we can admit the earthly
degradation with all the candour of Zola. If we
are idealists about the other world we can be realists
about this world. But that is not here the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_274">274</span>
point. What is quite evident is that if a logical
praise of the poor man is pushed too far, and if
a logical distress about him is pushed too far, either
will involve wreckage to the central paradox of
reform. If the poor man is made too admirable
he ceases to be pitiable; if the poor man is made
too pitiable he becomes merely contemptible.
There is a school of smug optimists who will deny
that he is a poor man. There is a school of scientific
pessimists who will deny that he is a man.</p>
<p>Out of this perennial contradiction arises the
fact that there are always two types of the reformer.
The first we may call for convenience
the pessimistic, the second the optimistic reformer.
One dwells upon the fact that souls are being lost;
the other dwells upon the fact that they are worth
saving. Both, of course, are (so far as that is
concerned) quite right, but they naturally tend to a
difference of method, and sometimes to a difference
of perception. The pessimistic reformer points out
the good elements that oppression has destroyed;
the optimistic reformer, with an even fiercer joy,
points out the good elements that it has not destroyed.
It is the case for the first reformer that
slavery has made men slavish. It is the case for
the second reformer that slavery has not made
men slavish. The first describes how bad men are<span class="pagenum" id="Page_275">275</span>
under bad conditions. The second describes how
good men are under bad conditions. Of the first
class of writers, for instance, is Gorky. Of the
second class of writers is Dickens.</p>
<p>But here we must register a real and somewhat
startling fact. In the face of all apparent probability,
it is certainly true that the optimistic reformer
reforms much more completely than the pessimistic
reformer. People produce violent changes by
being contented, by being far too contented. The
man who said that revolutions are not made with
rose-water was obviously inexperienced in practical
human affairs. Men like Rousseau and Shelley
do make revolutions, and do make them with
rose-water; that is, with a too rosy and sentimental
view of human goodness. Figures that come before
and create convulsion and change (for instance,
the central figure of the New Testament)
always have the air of walking in an unnatural
sweetness and calm. They give us their peace
ultimately in blood and battle and division; not
as the world giveth give they unto us.</p>
<p>Nor is the real reason of the triumph of the
too-contented reformer particularly difficult to define.
He triumphs because he keeps alive in the
human soul an invincible sense of the thing being
worth doing, of the war being worth winning,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_276">276</span>
of the people being worth their deliverance. I
remember that Mr. William Archer, some time
ago, published in his interesting series of interviews,
an interview with Mr. Thomas Hardy.
That powerful writer was represented as saying,
in the course of the conversation, that he did not
wish at the particular moment to define his position
with regard to the ultimate problem of
whether life itself was worth living. There are,
he said, hundreds of remediable evils in this world.
When we have remedied all these (such was his
argument), it will be time enough to ask whether
existence itself under its best possible conditions
is valuable or desirable. Here we have presented,
with a considerable element of what can only be
called unconscious humour, the plain reason of the
failure of the pessimist as a reformer. Mr.
Hardy is asking us, I will not say to buy a pig
in a poke; he is asking us to buy a poke on the
remote chance of there being a pig in it. When
we have for some few frantic centuries tortured
ourselves to save mankind, it will then be “time
enough” to discuss whether they can possibly be
saved. When, in the case of infant mortality, for
example, we have exhausted ourselves with the
earth-shaking efforts required to save the life of
every individual baby, it will then be time enough<span class="pagenum" id="Page_277">277</span>
to consider whether every individual baby would
not have been happier dead. We are to remove
mountains and bring the millennium, because then
we can have a quiet moment to discuss whether the
millennium is at all desirable. Here we have the
low-water mark of the impotence of the sad reformer.
And here we have the reason of the
paradoxical triumph of the happy one. His triumph
is a religious triumph; it rests upon his perpetual
assertion of the value of the human soul
and of human daily life. It rests upon his assertion
that human life is enjoyable because it is
human. And he will never admit, like so many
compassionate pessimists, that human life ever
ceases to be human. He does not merely pity the
lowness of men; he feels an insult to their elevation.
Brute pity should be given only to the
brutes. Cruelty to animals is cruelty and a vile
thing; but cruelty to a man is not cruelty, it is
treason. Tyranny over a man is not tyranny, it
is rebellion, for man is loyal. Now, the practical
weakness of the vast mass of modern pity for the
poor and the oppressed is precisely that it is merely
pity; the pity is pitiful, but not respectful. Men
feel that the cruelty to the poor is a kind of
cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is
injustice to equals; nay, it is treachery to comrades.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_278">278</span>
This dark, scientific pity, this brutal pity, has an
elemental sincerity of its own; but it is entirely
useless for all ends of social reform. Democracy
swept Europe with the sabre when it was founded
upon the Rights of Man. It has done literally
nothing at all since it has been founded only upon
the wrongs of man. Or, more strictly speaking,
its recent failures have been due to its not admitting
the existence of any rights or wrongs, or indeed
of any humanity. Evolution (the sinister enemy
of revolution) does not especially deny the existence
of God; what it does deny is the existence of
man. And all the despair about the poor, and the
cold and repugnant pity for them, has been largely
due to the vague sense that they have literally
relapsed into the state of the lower animals.</p>
<p>A writer sufficiently typical of recent revolutionism—Gorky—has
called one of his books by
the eerie and effective title “Creatures that Once
were Men.” That title explains the whole failure
of the Russian revolution. And the reason why
the English writers, such as Dickens, did with all
their limitations achieve so many of the actual
things at which they aimed, was that they could
not possibly have put such a title upon a human
book. Dickens really helped the unfortunate in
the matters to which he set himself. And the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_279">279</span>
reason is that across all his books and sketches
about the unfortunate might be written the common
title, “Creatures that Still are Men.”</p>
<p>There does exist, then, this strange optimistic
reformer; the man whose work begins with approval
and yet ends with earthquake. Jesus Christ
was destined to found a faith which made the
rich poorer and the poor richer; but even when
He was going to enrich them, He began with the
phrase, “Blessed are the poor.” The Gissings
and the Gorkys say, as an universal literary motto,
“Cursed are the poor.” Among a million who
have faintly followed Christ in this divine contradiction,
Dickens stands out especially. He said, in
all his reforming utterances, “Cure poverty”; but
he said in all his actual descriptions, “Blessed are
the poor.” He described their happiness, and men
rushed to remove their sorrow. He described
them as human, and men resented the insults to
their humanity. It is not difficult to see why, as
I said at an earlier stage of this book, Dickens’s
denunciations have had so much more practical an
effect than the denunciations of such a man as
Gissing. Both agreed that the souls of the people
were in a kind of prison. But Gissing said that
the prison was full of dead souls. Dickens said
that the prison was full of living souls. And the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_280">280</span>
fiery cavalcade of rescuers felt that they had not
come too late.</p>
<p>Of this general fact about Dickens’s descriptions
of poverty there will not, I suppose, be any
serious dispute. The dispute will only be about
the truth of those descriptions. It is clear that
whereas Gissing would say, “See how their poverty
depresses the Smiths or the Browns,” Dickens
says, “See how little, after all, their poverty can
depress the Cratchits.” No one will deny that he
made a special feature a special study of the subject
of the festivity of the poor. We will come
to the discussion of the veracity of these scenes
in a moment. It is here sufficient to register in
conclusion of our examination of the reforming
optimist, that Dickens certainly was such an optimist,
and that he made it his business to insist
upon what happiness there is in the lives of the
unhappy. His poor man is always a Mark Tapley,
a man the optimism of whose spirit increases
if anything with the pessimism of his experience.
It can also be registered as a fact equally solid and
quite equally demonstrable that this optimistic
Dickens did effect great reforms.</p>
<p>The reforms in which Dickens was instrumental
were, indeed, from the point of view of our sweeping,
social panaceas, special and limited. But perhaps,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_281">281</span>
for that reason especially, they afford a compact
and concrete instance of the psychological
paradox of which we speak. Dickens did definitely
destroy—or at the very least help to destroy—certain
institutions; he destroyed those institutions
simply by describing them. But the crux and
peculiarity of the whole matter is this, that, in a
sense, it can really be said that he described these
things too optimistically. In a real sense, he described
Dotheboys Hall as a better place than it is.
In a real sense, he made out the workhouse as a
pleasanter place than it can ever be. For the chief
glory of Dickens is that he made these places
interesting; and the chief infamy of England is
that it has made these places dull. Dulness was
the one thing that Dickens’s genius could never
succeed in describing; his vitality was so violent
that he could not introduce into his books the
genuine impression even of a moment of monotony.
If there is anywhere in his novels an instant of
silence, we only hear more clearly the hero whispering
with the heroine, the villain sharpening his
dagger, or the creaking of the machinery that is
to give out the god from the machine. He could
splendidly describe gloomy places, but he could
not describe dreary places. He could describe
miserable marriages, but not monotonous marriages.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_282">282</span>
It must have been genuinely entertaining
to be married to Mr. Quilp. This sense of a still
incessant excitement he spreads over every inch
of his story, and over every dark tract of his landscape.
His idea of a desolate place is a place
where anything can happen; he has no idea of that
desolate place where nothing can happen. This is
a good thing for his soul, for the place where
nothing can happen is hell. But still, it might
reasonably be maintained by the modern mind that
he is hampered in describing human evil and sorrow
by this inability to imagine tedium, this
dulness in the matter of dulness. For, after all,
it is certainly true that the worst part of the lot
of the unfortunate is the fact that they have long
spaces in which to review the irrevocability of their
doom. It is certainly true that the worst days of
the oppressed man are the nine days out of ten
in which he is not oppressed. This sense of sickness,
and sameness Dickens did certainly fail or
refuse to give. When we read such a description
as that excellent one—in detail—of Dotheboys
Hall, we feel that, while everything else is accurate,
the author does, in the words of the excellent
Captain Nares in Stevenson’s “Wrecker,” “draw
the dreariness rather mild.” The boys at Dotheboys
were, perhaps, less bullied, but they were certainly<span class="pagenum" id="Page_283">283</span>
more bored. For, indeed, how could any
one be bored with the society of so sumptuous a
creature as Mr. Squeers? Who would not put up
with a few illogical floggings in order to enjoy
the conversation of a man who could say, “She’s
a rum ’un, is Natur’.... Natur’ is more easier
conceived than described”? The same principle
applies to the workhouse in “Oliver Twist.” We
feel vaguely that neither Oliver nor any one else
could be entirely unhappy in the presence of the
purple personality of Mr. Bumble. The one thing
he did not describe in any of the abuses he denounced
was the soul-destroying potency of routine.
He made out the bad school, the bad parochial
system, the bad debtors’ prison as very
much jollier and more exciting than they may
really have been. In a sense, then, he flattered
them; but he destroyed them with the flattery. By
making Mrs. Gamp delightful he made her impossible.
He gave every one an interest in Mr.
Bumble’s existence; and by the same act gave
every one an interest in his destruction. It would
be difficult to find a stronger instance of the utility
and energy of the method which we have, for the
sake of argument, called the method of the optimistic
reformer. As long as low Yorkshire schools
were entirely colourless and dreary, they continued<span class="pagenum" id="Page_284">284</span>
quietly tolerated by the public, and quietly intolerable
to the victims. So long as Squeers was dull
as well as cruel he was permitted; the moment he
became amusing as well as cruel he was destroyed.
As long as Bumble was merely inhuman he was
allowed. When he became human, humanity
wiped him out. For in order to do these great acts
of justice we must always realize not only the
humanity of the oppressed, but even the humanity
of the oppressor. The satirist had, in a sense, to
create the images in the mind before, as an iconoclast,
he could destroy them. Dickens had to make
Squeers live before he could make him die.</p>
<p>In connection with the accusation of vulgar
optimism, which I have taken as a text for this
chapter, there is another somewhat odd thing to
notice. Nobody in the world was ever less optimistic
than Dickens in his treatment of evil or the
evil man. When I say optimistic in this matter
I mean optimism, in the modern sense, of an attempt
to whitewash evil. Nobody ever made less
attempt to whitewash evil than Dickens. Nobody
black was ever less white than Dickens’s black.
He painted his villains and lost characters more
black than they really are. He crowds his stories
with a kind of villain rare in modern fiction—the
villain really without any “redeeming point.”<span class="pagenum" id="Page_285">285</span>
There is no redeeming point in Squeers, or in
Monck, or in Ralph Nickleby, or in Bill Sikes, or
in Quilp, or in Brass, or in Mr. Chester, or in Mr.
Pecksniff, or in Jonas Chuzzlewit, or in Carker, or
in Uriah Heep, or in Blandois, or in a hundred
more. So far as the balance of good and evil in
human characters is concerned, Dickens certainly
could not be called a vulgar optimist. His emphasis
on evil was melodramatic. He might be called
a vulgar pessimist.</p>
<p>Some will dismiss this lurid villainy as a detail
of his artificial romance. I am not inclined to do
so. He inherited, undoubtedly, this unqualified
villain as he inherited so many other things, from
the whole history of European literature. But he
breathed into the blackguard a peculiar and vigorous
life of his own. He did not show any tendency
to modify his blackguardism in accordance with the
increasing considerateness of the age; he did not
seem to wish to make his villain less villainous;
he did not wish to imitate the analysis of George
Eliot, or the reverent scepticism of Thackeray.
And all this works back, I think, to a real thing in
him, that he wished to have an obstreperous and
incalculable enemy. He wished to keep alive the
idea of combat, which means, of necessity, a combat
against something individual and alive. I do not<span class="pagenum" id="Page_286">286</span>
know whether, in the kindly rationalism of his
epoch, he kept any belief in a personal devil in his
theology, but he certainly created a personal devil
in every one of his books.</p>
<p>A good example of my meaning can be found,
for instance, in such a character as Quilp. Dickens
may, for all I know, have had originally some
idea of describing Quilp as the bitter and unhappy
cripple, a deformity whose mind is stunted along
with his body. But if he had such an idea, he soon
abandoned it. Quilp is not in the least unhappy.
His whole picturesqueness consists in the fact that
he has a kind of hellish happiness, an atrocious
hilarity that makes him go bounding about like an
indiarubber ball. Quilp is not in the least bitter;
he has an unaffected gaiety, an expansiveness, an
universality. He desires to hurt people in the
same hearty way that a good-natured man desires
to help them. He likes to poison people with the
same kind of clamorous camaraderie with which
an honest man likes to stand them drink. Quilp
is not in the least stunted in mind; he is not in
reality even stunted in body—his body, that is,
does not in any way fall short of what he wants
it to do. His smallness gives him rather the
promptitude of a bird or the precipitance of a
bullet. In a word, Quilp is precisely the devil of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_287">287</span>
the Middle Ages; he belongs to that amazingly
healthy period when even the lost spirits were
hilarious.</p>
<p>This heartiness and vivacity in the villains of
Dickens is worthy of note because it is directly
connected with his own cheerfulness. This is a
truth little understood in our time, but it is a very
essential one. If optimism means a general approval,
it is certainly true that the more a man
becomes an optimist the more he becomes a melancholy
man. If he manages to praise everything,
his praise will develop an alarming resemblance to
a polite boredom. He will say that the marsh is
as good as the garden; he will mean that the
garden is as dull as the marsh. He may force
himself to say that emptiness is good, but he will
hardly prevent himself from asking what is the
good of such good. This optimism does exist—this
optimism which is more hopeless than pessimism—this
optimism which is the very heart of
hell. Against such an aching vacuum of joyless
approval there is only one antidote—a sudden and
pugnacious belief in positive evil. This world
can be made beautiful again by beholding it as a
battlefield. When we have defined and isolated
the evil thing, the colours come back into everything
else. When evil things have become evil,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_288">288</span>
good things, in a blazing apocalypse, become good.
There are some men who are dreary because they
do not believe in God; but there are many others
who are dreary because they do not believe in the
devil. The grass grows green again when we
believe in the devil, the roses grow red again when
we believe in the devil.</p>
<p>No man was more filled with the sense of this
bellicose basis of all cheerfulness than Dickens.
He knew very well the essential truth, that the
true optimist can only continue an optimist so long
as he is discontented. For the full value of this
life can only be got by fighting; the violent take
it by storm. And if we have accepted everything,
we have missed something—war. This life of
ours is a very enjoyable fight, but a very miserable
truce. And it appears strange to me that so few
critics of Dickens or of other romantic writers
have noticed this philosophical meaning in the
undiluted villain. The villain is not in the story
to be a character; he is there to be a danger—a
ceaseless, ruthless, and uncompromising menace,
like that of wild beasts or the sea. For the full
satisfaction of the sense of combat, which everywhere
and always involves a sense of equality, it
is necessary to make the evil thing a man; but it
is not always necessary, it is not even always artistic,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_289">289</span>
to make him a mixed and probable man. In
any tale, the tone of which is at all symbolic, he
may quite legitimately be made an aboriginal and
infernal energy. He must be a man only in the
sense that he must have a wit and will to be
matched with the wit and will of the man chiefly
fighting. The evil may be inhuman, but it must
not be impersonal, which is almost exactly the
position occupied by Satan in the theological
scheme.</p>
<p>But when all is said, as I have remarked before,
the chief fountain in Dickens of what I have called
cheerfulness, and some prefer to call optimism, is
something deeper than a verbal philosophy. It is,
after all, an incomparable hunger and pleasure
for the vitality and the variety, for the infinite
eccentricity of existence. And this word “eccentricity”
brings us, perhaps, nearer to the matter
than any other. It is, perhaps, the strongest mark
of the divinity of man that he talks of this world
as “a strange world,” though he has seen no other.
We feel that all there is is eccentric, though we do
not know what is the centre. This sentiment of
the grotesqueness of the universe ran through
Dickens’s brain and body like the mad blood of
the elves. He saw all his streets in fantastic perspectives,
he saw all his cockney villas as top heavy<span class="pagenum" id="Page_290">290</span>
and wild, he saw every man’s nose twice as big as
it was, and every man’s eyes like saucers. And
this was the basis of his gaiety—the only real basis
of any philosophical gaiety. This world is not to
be justified as it is justified by the mechanical optimists;
it is not to be justified as the best of all
possible worlds. Its merit is not that it is orderly
and explicable; its merit is that it is wild and
utterly unexplained. Its merit is precisely that
none of us could have conceived such a thing, that
we should have rejected the bare idea of it as
miracle and unreason. It is the best of all impossible
worlds.</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop" />
<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_291">291</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="toclink_291">CHAPTER XII<br />
<span class="subhead">A NOTE ON THE FUTURE OF DICKENS</span></h2>
</div>
<p class="in0"><span class="firstword">The</span> hardest thing to remember about our own
time, of course, is simply that it is a time; we all
instinctively think of it as the Day of Judgment.
But all the things in it which belong to it merely
as this time will probably be rapidly turned upside
down; all the things that can pass will pass.
It is not merely true that all old things are already
dead; it is also true that all new things are
already dead; for the only undying things are the
things that are neither new nor old. The more
you are up with this year’s fashion, the more (in
a sense) you are already behind next year’s. Consequently,
in attempting to decide whether an author
will, as it is cantly expressed, live, it is necessary
to have very firm convictions about what part,
if any part, of man is unchangeable. And it is
very hard to have this if you have not a religion;
or, at least, a dogmatic philosophy.</p>
<p>The equality of men needs preaching quite as
much as regards the ages as regards the classes
of men. To feel infinitely superior to a man in<span class="pagenum" id="Page_292">292</span>
the twelfth century is just precisely as snobbish
as to feel infinitely superior to a man in the Old
Kent Road. There are differences between the
man and us, there may be superiorities in us over
the man; but our sin in both cases consists in thinking
of the small things wherein we differ when
we ought to be confounded and intoxicated by the
terrible and joyful matters in which we are at
one. But here again the difficulty always is that
the things near us seem larger than they are, and
so seem to be a permanent part of mankind, when
they may really be only one of its parting modes of
expression. Few people, for instance, realize that
a time may easily come when we shall see the
great outburst of Science in the nineteenth century
as something quite as splendid, brief, unique, and
ultimately abandoned, as the outburst of Art at
the Renascence. Few people realize that the general
habit of fiction, of telling tales in prose, may
fade, like the general habit of the ballad, of telling
tales in verse, has for the time faded. Few people
realize that reading and writing are only arbitrary,
and perhaps temporary sciences, like heraldry.</p>
<p>The immortal mind will remain, and by that
writers like Dickens will be securely judged. That
Dickens will have a high place in permanent literature
there is, I imagine, no prig surviving to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_293">293</span>
deny. But though all prediction is in the dark,
I would devote this chapter to suggesting that his
place in nineteenth century England will not only
be high, but altogether the highest. At a certain
period of his contemporary fame, an average
Englishman would have said that there were at
that moment in England about five or six able and
equal novelists. He could have made a list, Dickens,
Bulwer-Lytton, Thackeray, Charlotte Brontë,
George Eliot, perhaps more. Forty years or more
have passed and some of them have slipped to a
lower place. Some would now say that the highest
platform is left to Thackeray and Dickens;
some to Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot;
some to Dickens, Thackeray, and Charlotte
Brontë. I venture to offer the proposition that
when more years have passed and more weeding
has been effected, Dickens will dominate the whole
England of the nineteenth century; he will be left
on that platform alone.</p>
<p>I know that this is an almost impertinent thing
to assert, and that its tendency is to bring in those
disparaging discussions of other writers in which
Mr. Swinburne brilliantly embroiled himself in
his suggestive study of Dickens. But my disparagement
of the other English novelists is
wholly relative and not in the least positive. It is<span class="pagenum" id="Page_294">294</span>
certain that men will always return to such a
writer as Thackeray, with his rich emotional autumn,
his feeling that life is a sad but sacred
retrospect, in which at least we should forget nothing.
It is not likely that wise men will forget
him. So, for instance, wise and scholarly men do
from time to time return to the lyrists of the
French Renascence, to the delicate poignancy of
Du Bellay: so they will go back to Thackeray.
But I mean that Dickens will bestride and dominate
our time as the vast figure of Rabelais dominates
Du Bellay, dominates the Renascence and
the world.</p>
<p>Yet we put a negative reason first. The particular
things for which Dickens is condemned
(and justly condemned) by his critics, are precisely
those things which have never prevented a
man from being immortal. The chief of them is
the unquestionable fact that he wrote an enormous
amount of bad work. This does lead to a man
being put below his place in his own time: it does
not affect his permanent place, to all appearance,
at all. Shakespeare, for instance, and Wordsworth
wrote not only an enormous amount of bad
work, but an enormous amount of enormously bad
work. Humanity edits such writers’ works for
them. Virgil was mistaken in cutting out his inferior<span class="pagenum" id="Page_295">295</span>
lines; we would have undertaken the job.
Moreover in the particular case of Dickens there
are special reasons for regarding his bad work
as in some sense irrelevant. So much of it was
written, as I have previously suggested, under a
kind of general ambition that had nothing to do
with his special genius; an ambition to be a public
provider of everything, a warehouse of all human
emotions. He held a kind of literary day of judgment.
He distributed bad characters as punishments
and good characters as rewards. My meaning
can be best conveyed by one instance out of
many. The character of the kind old Jew in
“Our Mutual Friend” (a needless and unconvincing
character) was actually introduced because
some Jewish correspondent complains that the bad
old Jew in “Oliver Twist” conveyed the suggestion
that all Jews were bad. The principle is so
lightheadedly absurd that it is hard to imagine any
literary man submitting to it for an instant. If
ever he invented a bad auctioneer he must immediately
balance him with a good auctioneer; if he
should have conceived an unkind philanthropist,
he must on the spot, with whatever natural agony
and toil, imagine a kind philanthropist. The complaint
is frantic; yet Dickens, who tore people in
pieces for much fairer complaints, liked this complaint<span class="pagenum" id="Page_296">296</span>
of his Jewish correspondent. It pleased
him to be mistaken for a public arbiter: it pleased
him to be asked (in a double sense) to judge
Israel. All this is so much another thing, a non-literary
vanity, that there is much less difficulty
than usual in separating it from his serious genius:
and by his serious genius, I need hardly say, I
mean his comic genius. Such irrelevant ambitions
as this are easily passed over, like the sonnets of
great statesmen. We feel that such things can
be set aside, as the ignorant experiments of men
otherwise great, like the politics of Professor Tyndall
or the philosophy of Professor Haeckel.
Hence, I think, posterity will not care that Dickens
has done bad work, but will know that he has
done good.</p>
<p>Again, the other chief accusation against Dickens
was that his characters and their actions were
exaggerated and impossible. But this only meant
that they were exaggerated and impossible as
compared with the modern world and with certain
writers (like Thackeray or Trollope) who
were making a very exact copy of the manners
of the modern world. Some people, oddly enough
have suggested that Dickens has suffered or will
suffer from the change of manners. Surely this
is irrational. It is not the creators of the impossible<span class="pagenum" id="Page_297">297</span>
who will suffer from the process of
time: Mr. Bunsby can never be any more impossible
than he was when Dickens made him.
The writers who will obviously suffer from time
will be the careful and realistic writers; the writers
who have observed every detail of the fashion of
this world which passeth away. It is surely obvious
that there is nothing so fragile as a fact,
that a fact flies away quicker than a fancy. A
fancy will endure for two thousand years. For
instance, we all have fancy for an entirely fearless
man, a hero: and the Achilles of Homer still
remains. But exactly the thing we do not know
about Achilles is how far he was possible. The
realistic narrators of the time are all forgotten
(thank God); so we cannot tell whether Homer
slightly exaggerated or wildly exaggerated or did
not exaggerate at all, the personal activity of a
Mycenæan captain in battle: for the fancy has
survived the facts. So the fancy of Podsnap may
survive the facts of English commerce: and no
one will know whether Podsnap was possible, but
only know that he is desirable, like Achilles.</p>
<p>The positive argument for the permanence of
Dickens comes back to the thing that can only be
stated and cannot be discussed: creation. He
made things which nobody else could possibly<span class="pagenum" id="Page_298">298</span>
make. He made Dick Swiveller in a very different
sense to that in which Thackeray made Colonel
Newcome. Thackeray’s creation was observation:
Dickens’s was poetry, and is therefore permanent.
But there is one other test that can be added. The
immortal writer, I conceive, is commonly he who
does something universal in a special manner. I
mean that he does something interesting to all men
in a way in which only one man or one land can
do. Other men in that land, who do only what
other men in other lands are doing as well, tend
to have a great reputation in their day and to
sink slowly into a second or a third or a fourth
place. A parallel from war will make the point
clearer. I cannot think that any one will doubt
that, although Wellington and Nelson were always
bracketed, Nelson will steadily become more
important and Wellington less. For the fame of
Wellington rests upon the fact that he was a good
soldier in the service of England, exactly as twenty
similar men were good soldiers in the service of
Austria or Prussia or France. But Nelson is the
symbol of a special mode of attack, which is at
once universal and yet specially English, the sea.
Now Dickens is at once as universal as the sea
and as English as Nelson. Thackeray and George
Eliot and the other great figures of that great<span class="pagenum" id="Page_299">299</span>
England, were comparable to Wellington in this,
that the kind of thing they were doing,—realism,
the acute study of intellectual things, numerous
men in France, Germany, and Italy were doing
as well or better than they. But Dickens was
really doing something universal, yet something
that no one but an Englishman could do. This is
attested by the fact that he and Byron are the
men who, like pinnacles, strike the eye of the continent.
The points would take long to study: yet
they may take only a moment to indicate. No
one but an Englishman could have filled his books
at once with a furious caricature and with a positively
furious kindness. In more central countries,
full of cruel memories of political change, caricature
is always inhumane. No one but an Englishman
could have described the democracy as
consisting of free men, but yet of funny men. In
other countries where the democratic issue has
been more bitterly fought, it is felt that unless
you describe a man as dignified you are describing
him as a slave. This is the only final greatness of
a man; that he does for all the world what all
the world cannot do for itself. Dickens, I believe,
did it.</p>
<p>The hour of absinthe is over. We shall not be
much further troubled with the little artists who<span class="pagenum" id="Page_300">300</span>
found Dickens too sane for their sorrows and too
clean for their delights. But we have a long way
to travel before we get back to what Dickens
meant: and the passage is along a rambling English
road, a twisting road such as Mr. Pickwick
travelled. But this at least is part of what he
meant; that comradeship and serious joy are not
interludes in our travel; but that rather our travels
are interludes in comradeship and joy, which
through God shall endure for ever. The inn does
not point to the road; the road points to the inn.
And all roads point at last to an ultimate inn,
where we shall meet Dickens and all his characters:
and when we drink again it shall be from
the great flagons in the tavern at the end of the
world.</p>
<p class="p2 center wspace">THE END</p>
<div class="chapter"><div class="transnote">
<h2 class="nobreak" id="Transcribers_Notes">Transcriber’s Notes</h2>
<p>Simple typographical errors were corrected.</p>
<p>Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made
consistent when a predominant preference was found
in the original book; otherwise they were not changed.</p>
</div></div>
<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 68682 ***</div>
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