 Chapter 11 of Charles Dickens by G. K. Chesterton This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Dick Durett. Chapter 11 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 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 a 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 that 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' 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 ideal elsewhere, but over and above all these, there is a real sense in which Dickens laid himself open to the accusation of a 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 things which all men beyond question have in common. But something more than this is needed from a 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 everyone thus at home, but he did do it in a certain wide class of incongruous characters. He did it to all who had been in any way unfortunate. It had needed 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 had 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 the 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 as admirable description, for instance, as that of Kit Nubbles taking his family to the theater. 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, said, part 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 special 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 outdoor relief. I will give you two instances. The whole meaning of the character of Mr. Mycarber is that a man can be almost rich by constantly expecting riches. The lesson is a really important one in our sweeping mordance of sociology. We talk of the man whose life is a failure, but Mycarber's life never is a failure because it is always a crisis. We think constantly of the man if he looked back would see that his existence was unsuccessful, but Mycarber never does look back. He always looks forward because the bailiff is coming tomorrow. 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 alum, novelists that ever insulted democracy. But how did it happen that the man who created this Mycarber could pension his off at the end of the story and make him a successful colonial mayor? Mycarber never did succeed, never ought to succeed. His kingdom is not of this world. But this is an excellent instance of Dickinson'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 Dickinson 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 recommended Agnes, we know that everything is wrong, at least if hypocrisy and artificiality and moral vulgarity are wrong. There again Dickinson's yields to a mere desire to give comfort. He wishes to pile up pillows around Dora and he smothers her with him like Othello. This is the real vulgar optimism of Dickinson. It does exist and I have deliberately put it first. Let us admit that Dickinson's mind was far too much filled with pictures of satisfaction and coziness and repose. Let us admit that he thought principality of the pressures of the oppressed classes. Let us admit that it hardly cost him any artistic pain to make out human beings as such happier than they are. Let us admit all this and a curious fact remains. For it was this too easily contented Dickinson's. 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 that really destroys some of the wrongs he hated and bring about some of the reforms he desired. Dickinson's did help to pull down the debtor's prisons and if he was too much of an optimist he was quite enough of a destroyer. Dickinson's did drive squares out of his Yorkshire den and if Dickinson's was too contented it was more than squares was. Dickinson's did leave his mark on parochialism, on nursing, on funerals, on public executions, on work houses, on history. 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 a new sociologist could not get anything done at all. And in the practical doing of them Dickinson's played a solid and quite demonstrable part. That is the plain matter that concerns us here. If Dickinson's was an optimist he was an uncommonly active and useful kind of optimist. If Dickinson's was a sentimentalist he was a very practical sentimentalist. And the reason of this is one that goes deep into Dickinson's social reform unlike 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 men intensely miserable and at the same time intensely attractive and important. We must insist that 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 candor 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 improve wreckage to the central paradox of reform. If a 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 optimist 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 convulsions 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 give it, 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 one of 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 opinion 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 humor 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 as 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 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 the 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 low-ness of men he feels an insult to their elevation. Brute pity should be given only to brute 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 royal. Now the practical weakness of the vast mass of modern pity for the poor and the oppressed is precisely that it is merely pity that 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 justice to equals nay it is treachery to comrades. This dark scientific pity this brutal pity has an element in sincerity of its own but it is entirely useless for all ends of social reform. Democracy swept Europe with a saber 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 failure has been due to its not admitting the existence of any rights or wrongs or a deed of any humanity. Evolution the sinister minister 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. It has 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 man. 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 ends with earthquake. Jesus Christ was destined to found a faith which made the rich poorer and the poor rich but even when he was going to enrich them he began with a phrase blessed are the poor the gissings and the Gorkys say as a 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 incels 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 and 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 these 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 cratchets no one will deny that he made a special feature 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 marked taplie 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 helped 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 be really be said that he described these things too optimistically and in a real sense he described Dothaboy's 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 dullness was the thing that Dickens 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 in 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 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 track of his landscape his idea of a desolate place is a place where anything can happen he has no idea of that desolate place 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 dullness in the matter of dullness 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 refused to give when we read such a description as that excellent one in detail of dothaboy's hall we feel that while everything else is accurate the author does in his words of the excellent captain narras in Stevenson's record draw the dreariness rather mild the boys dothaboy's were perhaps less bullied but they were certainly more bored for indeed how could anyone be bored with a 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 Roman his nature nature is more easier conceived than described the same principle applies to the workhouse in Oliver Twist we feel vaguely that neither Oliver nor anyone 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 a 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 everyone an interest in Mr. Bumble's existence and by the same act gave everyone 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 colorless 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 right 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 optimist 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' 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 Monks or in Ralph Nickelby or in Bill Sykes or in Quilp or in Brass or in Mr. Chester or in Mr. Peckiniff or in Jonas Chuzzlewit or in Cracker or in Uriah Leap or in Blandoise 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 black god a peculiar and vigorous life of his own he did not show any tendency to modify his black godism 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 skepticism of Thackery 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 Quillp Dickens May for all I know have had originally some idea of describing Quillp 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 Quillp is not in the least unhappy his whole picturesqueness consists in the fact that he has a kind of hellish happiness and atrocious hilarity that makes him go bounding about like an Indian rubber ball Quillp is not in the least bitter he has an unaffected gait and expansiveness and universality he desires to hurt people in the same hardy way that a good natured man desires to help them he likes to poison people in the same kind of clamorous camaraderie with which an honest man likes to stand them drink Quillp 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 Quillp is precisely the devil of the middle ages he belongs to that amazingly healthy period when even lost spirits were hilarious this hardiness 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 would 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 colors 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 jury because they do not believe in God but there are many others who are jury 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 a sense of this bellicose basis than all cheerfulness than dickens he knew very well the essential truth that the true optimist can only continue as 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 uncompromising menace like that of wild beasts of 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 in a 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 a wit and will of the man chiefly fighting the evil may be inhuman but it must not be impersonal which is almost exactly the opposite occupied by Satan in a theological scheme but when all is said as I have remarked before the chief fountain and 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 center this sentiment of the gothness of the universe ran through dickens' brain and body like the mad blood of the elves he saw all his streets and 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 and 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 End of Chapter 11 Recording by Dick Durett Manchester, New Hampshire, USA Chapter 12 of Charles Dickens This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org This reading by Lucy Burgoyne Charles Dickens by G.K. Chesterton Chapter 12 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 judgement 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 things are already dead for the only undying things are the things that are neither new nor old the more you are up with the years fashion the more in a sense you are already behind next years 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 12th 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 we're in with Gither 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 party modes of expression few people for instance realise that a time may easily come when we shall see the great outburst of science in the 19th century as something quite as splendid, brief, unique and ultimately abandoned as we see outburst of art at the Renaissance few people realise that the general habit of fiction of telling tales in prose may fade like the general habit at the ballad of telling tales in verse has for the time faded few people realise that reading and writing are only arbitrary 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 19th century England will not only be high but all together 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, Bowe Leighton, Thackeray Charlotte Broncoe, George Elliott, 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 Elliott some to Dickens, Thackeray and Charlotte Broncoe I venture to offer the proposition that when more years have passed and more weeding has been affected Dickens will dominate the whole England of the 19th 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 French renaissance to the delicate poignancy of Duvalo so they will go back to Thackeray but I mean that Dickens will be stride and dominate our time as the vast figure of rebellious dominates Duvalay, dominates the renaissance and the world let me put a negative reason first the particular thing 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 editors 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 I have previously suggested under a kind of general ambition 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 judgement he distributed bad characters as punishments and good characters as rewards my meaning can be best conveyed by one instance out of many but 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 light headly 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 yet Dickens who tore people in pieces for much fairer complains like 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 a difficulty the 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 Tindall 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 cheap 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 Zachary or Trollop 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 who have observed every detail of the passion 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 2,000 years for instance we all have fancy for an entirely fearless man the 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 narratives 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 mercenarian 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 is 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's swivel in a very different sense from that in which Thackeray made Colonel Newcomb Thackeray's creation was observation Dickens was poetry and is therefore permanent but there is one other test that can be added the immortal writer I conceived 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 in other lands are doing as well tend to have a great reputation in their day and to sink slowly into a second or third or a fourth place a parallel from more will make the point clear I cannot think that anyone 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 20 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 especially English the sea now Dickens is at once as universal as the sea and as English as Nelson 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 similar as men in France Germany and Italy were doing as well or better than they that 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 to study yet they may take only a moment to indicate no one but an Englishman could have filled his books at once with the 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 can describe 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 as 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 artist 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 forever 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 flagans in the taverns at the end of the world End of Chapter 12 End of Charles Dickens by G.K. Chesterton