CHARLES DICKENS




  CHARLES DICKENS

  A CRITICAL STUDY


  BY
  G. K. CHESTERTON

  Author of Varied Types, Heretics, Etc.


  NEW YORK
  DODD MEAD & COMPANY
  1911




  COPYRIGHT, 1906, BY
  DODD, MEAD & COMPANY

  ❦

  _First Edition Published in September, 1906_




  To
  RHODA BASTABLE




CONTENTS


  CHAPTER I
                                          PAGE
  THE DICKENS PERIOD                         1


  CHAPTER II

  THE BOYHOOD OF DICKENS                    24


  CHAPTER III

  THE YOUTH OF DICKENS                      43


  CHAPTER IV

  “THE PICKWICK PAPERS”                     71


  CHAPTER V

  THE GREAT POPULARITY                     100


  CHAPTER VI

  DICKENS AND AMERICA                      127


  CHAPTER VII

  DICKENS AND CHRISTMAS                    155


  CHAPTER VIII

  THE TIME OF TRANSITION                   181


  CHAPTER IX

  LATER LIFE AND WORKS                     211


  CHAPTER X

  THE GREAT DICKENS CHARACTERS             244


  CHAPTER XI

  ON THE ALLEGED OPTIMISM OF DICKENS       266


  CHAPTER XII

  A NOTE ON THE FUTURE OF DICKENS          291




CHAPTER I

THE DICKENS PERIOD


Much 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 is a difference simple but enormous. The first
period was full of evil things, but it was full of hope. The second
period, the _fin de siècle_, 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.

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 think
injustice distressing; he must think injustice _absurd_, 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.

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. 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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. 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.

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 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, 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.

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 _encouraged_ 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 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.

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.

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
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 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.

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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. 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 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.

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 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.

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 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.




CHAPTER II

THE BOYHOOD OF DICKENS


Charles Dickens 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 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 affectionate and happy, and
yet in some strange way fundamentally exasperated and dangerously close
to tears.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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, 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 _faux pas_. 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 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.

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 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 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.

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 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.

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 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 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.




CHAPTER III

THE YOUTH OF DICKENS


There 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 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.

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 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.

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; 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.

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 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 _moor eeffocish_ things. A man sees them because he does not look
at them.

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 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.

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 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.

“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 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.”

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.

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 your very best--the VERY _best_
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 in Johnson’s Alamode Beef House in
Clare Court, Drury Lane, and magnificently ordering a small plate of
_à-la-mode_ 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.”

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 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.

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, 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.

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
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 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.

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
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.

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 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.

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 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 _was_ such a shorthand writer.”

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 _The True Sun_, then by _The Mirror of
Parliament_, and last by _The Morning Chronicle_. 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 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 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.

It cannot be too often said, then, that we must 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 _Morning Chronicle_.
“And what gentlemen they were to serve,” he exclaimed, “in such things
at the old _Morning Chronicle_. 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 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.

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 _Old Monthly Magazine_.
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 _Evening
Chronicle_, an off-shoot of the morning paper of the same name. These
were the pieces afterwards published and known as the “Sketches 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 _Chronicle_, 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 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 _Times_, 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.

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. 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.

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 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.




CHAPTER IV

“THE PICKWICK PAPERS”


Round 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 _de minimis non curat lex_.
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 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.

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 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 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.

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 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.

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 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 we are
halfway through the book the stock characters of dead and damned farces
astonish us like splendid strangers.

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. 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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. 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 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.

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 _moving_ machinery exists
only to display entirely _static_ 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 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 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 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.

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 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.

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 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 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.

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 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.

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, 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; 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.”

“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 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 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 _deus
ex machinâ_, and even a knight-errant. Dickens made this discovery.
Dickens went into the Pickwick Club to scoff, and Dickens remained to
pray.

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 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 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.

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 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.




CHAPTER V

THE GREAT POPULARITY


There 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 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.

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 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 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. 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.

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!”

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.

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, 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 _The War
Cry_ 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 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 _flâneur_, 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.

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.

Generally he mixed the two up in a book and mixed a great many other
things with them. As 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 _The Watertoast Gazette_, 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 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 _naïveté_ 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 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.

“Oliver Twist” had begun in Bentley’s _Miscellany_, which Dickens
edited in 1837. It was 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 him like a
thunderbolt, sardonically asking how close an intimacy Lord Braybrooke
had with Mr. Samuel Pepys.

“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
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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 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 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.

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.

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 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 is lost to us for ever.
This Old Curiosity Shop he did happen to linger by: its tale he did
happen to tell.

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 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.

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. 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
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.

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 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.




CHAPTER VI

DICKENS AND AMERICA


The 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, 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.

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 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.

This distinction must be especially remembered in all his quarrels.
And it must be most especially 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.

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 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 _cul de sac_ 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 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.”

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 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.

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 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 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.

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 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.

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 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 _must_ be managed somehow!” It was managed
somehow. 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.

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 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.

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, 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 this country is devoted to the question, and not one of them
_dares_ to raise his voice and complain of the atrocious state of the
law.... The wonder is that a breathing man can be found with temerity
enough to suggest to the Americans the possibility of their having done
wrong. I wish you could have seen the faces that I saw down both sides
of the table at Hartford when I began to talk about Scott. I wish you
could have heard how I gave it out. My blood so boiled when I thought
of the monstrous injustice that I felt as if I were twelve feet high
when I thrust it down their throats.”

That is almost a portrait of Dickens. We can almost see the erect
little figure, its face and hair like a flame.

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 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.

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 _rights_, 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 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.

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 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.”

We are still waiting to see if that prediction has been fulfilled; but
nobody can say that it has been falsified.

He went west on the great canals; he went south 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 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 _did_ 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.

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, 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.

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 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 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?

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 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 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 _status quo_. 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 _The Watertoast Gazette_. 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 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.”

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, 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.




CHAPTER VII

DICKENS AND CHRISTMAS


In 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 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.

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
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.

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 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 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 _café_; the imaginative Frenchman
in a hansom cab.

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.

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 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.

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.

This Christmas tone of Dickens, in connection 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 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, not merely when
the King cannot enter it, but when the Englishman cannot get out of it.

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 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.

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 given him a wilder pleasure than to grope his way to some such
tremendous vats and drink the ale of the giants.

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 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.

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 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.

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 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 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.

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 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 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.

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 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.

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
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.

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 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.

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 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.




CHAPTER VIII

THE TIME OF TRANSITION


Dickens was back in London by the June of 1845. About this time he
became the first editor of _The Daily News_, 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 _The Daily News_ to be called _The Cricket_. 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 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.... _My_ 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.

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, 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 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
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.

“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 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 Dickens was for
such things, how fitted he was for something opposite.

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 story of Florence Dombey is
incredible although it is true.

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; 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.

“Dombey and Son” provides us with yet another 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 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, 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.

“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
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.

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 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 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.

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?

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 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.

For though there are many other aspects of “David Copperfield,” this
autobiographical aspect is, after all, the greatest. The point of the
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.

But while these are real characters they are 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.

When we say the book is true to life we must stipulate that it is
especially true to youth; even 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.

The early youth of David Copperfield is psychologically 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 laws, you do not get liberty; you do not even get anarchy. You
get the small laws.

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 comedy. Other people’s lives may easily be
human documents. But a man’s own life is always a melodrama.”

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 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.

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
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.

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, 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.

In “Bleak House” occurs the character of Harold Skimpole, the character
whose alleged likeness 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!”

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. 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.

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 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.

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 neglected; there is no such
thing (he meant) as a peccadillo.

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 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.




CHAPTER IX

LATER LIFE AND WORKS


I have 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 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.

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.”

Dickens was of a middle size and his vivacity 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 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.

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 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.

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 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 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.

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 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.

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 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 the exact and literal sense of the words, making a
beast of himself is the teetotaller.

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 (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.

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 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 _Punch_, 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.

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 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 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.

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.

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 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 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 Venice--

“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,
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.”

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 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.

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.

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 _Household Words_ and of
_All the Year Round_. 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 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.

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 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.

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 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 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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, 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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
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 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.

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 Drood” is not finished; for in the very middle of it
Dickens died.

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 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.

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? 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?

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, 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.

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.




CHAPTER X

THE GREAT DICKENS CHARACTERS


All 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
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.

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 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.

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.

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 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 consists of very dignified sorrow and very undignified fun.
Its sad tales are of broken hearts; its happy tales are of broken heads.

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.

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 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.

In all this Scott, though a Royalist and a Tory, had in the strangest
way the heart of the Revolution. 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.

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 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 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.

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 man in Walter Scott. Mr. Crooks is very like a poor
man in Dickens.

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 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.

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
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 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.

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 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.

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 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, 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.

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.

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 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.

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 him shall
pass, and Toots shall remain like a mountain.

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.

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 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.

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 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.




CHAPTER XI

ON THE ALLEGED OPTIMISM OF DICKENS


In 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.”

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. 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. 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.

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 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.

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.

I will give two instances. The whole meaning of the character of
Mr. Micawber is that a man 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 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.

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.

For it was this too easily contented Dickens, this man with cushions
at his back and (it sometimes 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.

And the reason of this is one that goes deep 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 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.

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 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.

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.

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, 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 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. 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.

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 reason is that across
all his books and sketches about the unfortunate might be written the
common title, “Creatures that Still are Men.”

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 fiery cavalcade of
rescuers felt that they had not come too late.

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.

The reforms in which Dickens was instrumental were, indeed, from the
point of view of our sweeping, social panaceas, special and limited.
But perhaps, 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. 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
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 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.

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.” 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.

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 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.

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 the Middle Ages; he belongs to that amazingly healthy period
when even the lost spirits were hilarious.

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, 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.

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, 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.

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 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.




CHAPTER XII

A NOTE ON THE FUTURE OF DICKENS


The 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.

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
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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 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 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.

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 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.

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 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 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.

The hour of absinthe is over. We shall not be much further troubled
with the little artists who 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.


THE END




Transcriber’s Notes


Simple typographical errors were corrected.

Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they
were not changed.