 Chapter 4 of G. K. Chesterson's Charles Dickens. The Pickwick Papers. Around 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 misdemeanor 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 that even his sacred sense of humor 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 didn't understand the principle of de minimis non-courant 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 Chesowitz, any penia liner who chose to say that Dickens, where 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 that merely 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 unsupportable to him. His weakness was that he found the unfair claim or charge, however small, equally unsupportable 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 end 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 seemed 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 and Hall, wish to produce some kind of serial with comic illustrations by a popular care-cuturist named Seymour. This artist was chiefly famous for his running of the farscal site of sport, and to suit his 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 for doomed 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 fatal 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 brief interval of the employment of a man named Busse Dickens obtained the assistance of Hablett K. Brown, whom he called Fizz, and may almost, in a certain sense, be said to have gone into partnership with him. They were assuded 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 and 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 it out of it the proposition that somehow or another 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 and 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 have said to have been employed to illustrate Seymour, but that Seymour invented anything in the letterpress large or small, that he invented either the outline of Mr. Pickwick's character or the number of Mr. Pickwick's cab man, 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 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, Tubman or Jingle, Dickens would 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 anyone 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 perceptual torrent of ingenious and inventive treatment. The theme, at least at the beginning, simply does not exist. The idea of Tubman, the fat lady killer, is in itself quite dreary and vulgar. It is the detailed Tubman, as he has 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 stop characters of dead and damned forces 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 tail. He could have breathed the 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 instance 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 one 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 man. The actual circumstances of the writing and publishing of Pickwick shows that while Seymour's specific claim was absurd, Dickens' indignant exactitude about every jot and title 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 a story on a Nimrod Club, but they succeeded in basing it on a club. Seymour, by his virtue of 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 gators and lived at Richmond. In this sense, we were 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, and the Pickwick papers Dickens sprang suddenly from a comparatively low level to a very high one. To the levels of sketches by Baas, 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 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, can 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 printer matter terminates, is not an end in any artistic sense of the word. Even as a boy I believe 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 grew released by Mr. Knupkins, 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 Dolwich. 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 anchor 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 any novels at all. Dickens's work is to be reckoned always by characters, sometimes by groups, often or 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 following and mixed substance called Dickens. A substance of which any given length will be certain to contain a given proportion of brilliant or of bad stuff. You could say, according to your assumptions, the crumbles part is perfect or the boffins are a mistake. Just as a man watching river go by him could count here a floating flower and then a streak of scum. But you cannot artistically divide the outpost into two 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 Dorit is not a good novel. But the description of the Circumlocution Office in Little Dorit is quite as good as a description of Telsen'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 Maccabre. Nor is there any reason why the superb creatures as a general rule should be in one novel any more than the other. There is no reason why Sam Weller, in the course of his wanderings, should not wander into Nicholas Nicobie. There is no reason why Major Backstock, in his brisk way, should not walk straight out of Dombien's son and straight into Martin Chesilwit. To this generalization some modification should be added. Pickwick stands by itself and has even a sort of unity and 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 exist 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 Newcombe. Newcombe 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 and being less fictitious. It imitates not only life but the limitations of life and not only reproduces life it reproduces death. But outside us in every other country and 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 truly produced by a small and educated section of society. But this other literature deals with men greater than they are with demigods 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 plowing or bricklaying. The men who made hedges the men who made ditches or 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 are 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-knead cab 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 hypothesis 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 or perhaps only an illusion. A short story of today has the air of a dream and has the irrevocable beauty of a falsehood. We get a glimpse of great 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 in enduring behind these 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 forever as the elves are dancing forever. We feel that whenever we hammer on the house of Falstaff, Falstaff will be at home. We feel it has 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 particular significance, the particular sacredness even, of penny dreadfuls and the common printed matter made for our errand boys. Herein 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 in the 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 tail-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 didn't 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 is not the aim of Dickens to show the effect of the time and circumstance upon a character. It is not even his aim to show the effect of a character on time and circumstance. It is worth remarking in passing that whenever he tried to describe change in a character, he made a mess of it, as in the repentance of Domby or the apparent deterioration of Boffin. It was his aim to show character hung in a kind of happy void and a world apart from time. Yes, and essentially apart from circumstance, though the phrase may seem odd in connection with the godlike horseplay 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 Whartles by Christmas. He would have taken the roof off to drop him into Bob Sawyer's party, but once Pickwick at Whartles, with his punch and a group of gorgeous personalities, and nothing will move him from his chair, once he is at Sawyer's party, forgets how he got there, he forgets Mrs. Bartle 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 latter by which they climb 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 crowd 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 around 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 veil 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 eons upon eons cannot satisfy. He has not come as a writer, that his creatures may copy life and copy its narrowness, he has come that they may have life, 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 forever. It is more absurd still to call the old comic writers dull because they wish their unchanging characters to last forever. 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 vigor. 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 exhaustible 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 wanderer, the Ulysses of comedy, the half-human and half-elven creature, human enough to wander, human enough to wander, but still sustain 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 laughing and admitting an answer to criticism, the glorious improbability of Pecksniff he retorted with the sneer, clever and very unjust, that he is not surprised that the Pecksniffs should deny the portrait of Pecksniff. When it was objected that the pride of old Paul Dombie 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 England merchant, a monument of genial sanity. Dickens answered with the same ingenious self-justification as in other cases. That surely it often happened that a man met his 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 an honest admirer of Pickwick will feel that is not an answer. For the fault in Pickwick, if it be a fault, is a change 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 Akers becomes a man as brave as Hector. A man is quite artistically justified in writing a tale, in which a man as cowardly as Bob Akers becomes a man as brave as Hector. But a man is not artistically justified in writing a tale which begins 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 a 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 fairytale 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, but 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 Stackeray 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 confident tricks of swindlers like jingle. He knew then, or thought he knew, all about the amateury 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 and 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 moonlight face, the round moonlight 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 honorable mirror, and 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, as odd to recall to our mind 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 butterslides, to struggle with apple pie beds, to be tipped out of carts, and dipped into horseponds. But Dickens, and Dickens only, discovered as he went on how fitted that fat old man was to rescue ladies, to defy tyrants, to dance, to leap, to experiment with life, to be a dough and machine, and even a night errant. Dickens made this discovery. Dickens went into the Pickwick Club to scoff, and Dickens remained to pray. Molière and his marquee are very much amused when Monsieur Jourdain, the fat old middle-class fellow, discovers with the light that he has been talking prose all his life. I have often wondered whether Molière saw how, in this fact, Monsieur Jourdain towers above them all, and touches the stars. He has the freshness to enjoy a fresh fact, the freshness to enjoy even an old one. He can feel that the common thing prose is an accomplishment like verse, and it is the 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 his true romantic was that prose is actually prose. Monsieur 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. Decadence taught contemptuously if its conventions and its set tasks. It never occurs to them that conventions and set tasks are the very way to keep the greenness in the grass and the redness in the roses, which they have lost forever. Stevenson, in his incomparable lantern-bearers, describes the ecstasy of a schoolboy and the mere fact of buttoning a dark lantern under a dark gray 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 of 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 Ellen, took a moderate 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 gray sands of Haddington. Talking in the dark by the sea, he was also of the league of the lantern-bearers. Stevenson, I remember, says that in the shops of that town they could purchase penny Pickwick's, 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 a 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 heart inn, and see the only weather 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 skeptic is cast out by it. 5. 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 were 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 what Tyler and Wilkes. For the man led a mob. He did what no English statesman, perhaps, has rarely 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 today. We call such authors as Mr. Guy Boothby or Mr. William LeCue 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 LeCue mystery wants to get to the end of it. A man reading the Dickens novel wished that it might never end. Men read Dickens' story six times because they knew it so well. If a man can read a LeCue story six times it's 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 reached 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 heirs 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 Carelli whom he has. There is nothing in any way parallel to the omnipresence and vitality in the great comic characters of bars. There are no modern bumbles or pecsniffs, no modern gamps and macabres. 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 anyone who wishes to see the difference try the experiment of assuming the Kipling characters to be common property like the Dickens characters. Let anyone go into an average parlor and allude to Strickland as he would allude to Mr. Bumble the Beedle. Let anyone say that anybody is a perfect Leroy as he would say a perfect pecsniff. Let anyone write a comic paragraph for a hate me paper and allude to Mrs. Hawksby instead of Mrs. Gamp. He will soon discover that the modern world has forgotten its own fiercest wounds 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 III. 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 Smorker, 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 himself with flowbearer and turganovkin, 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 Cue 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 a course, 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 should 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 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 Lise Wurgler, 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 is merely that they prefer military music, music marching down the open street, and that if Dan Godfrey's band could be snitten 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 Oversoul, 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 to the 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 that 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 notebooks 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 spoke 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 the mind that 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. Mannell. This bladea, 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 mighter link, that is, we may be afraid of our own souls, but every one will certainly be afraid of a cock-lain ghost, including Henry James and mighter link. 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 decadence, 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 that Dickens mirth is a part of man and universal, all men can laugh at broad humour, even the subtle humorists, even the modern flaneur who can smile at a particular combination of green and yellow would laugh at Mr. Lambel'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 Chuzzlewitt crossing the mental stage, which is full of the allegorical pantomime of Eden, Mr. Chollup and the Watertoast Gazette, a scene which is as much of a satire as Gulliver and nearly as much of a fairytale. He does not mind binding up a rather pompous sketch of prostitution in the same book with an adorable impossibility like Barnesby, 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 thief's kitchen hangs over the whole tail, and the shadow of Fagin falls everywhere. The little lamplit rooms of Mr. Brownlow and Rosemaley are to all appearance purposely kept subordinate, a mere foil to the foul darkness without. It was a strange and appropriate accident that Crookshank, not Fizz, should have illustrated this book. There was about Crookshank'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 secreces 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 not in here in the story, stumbling as it often is. It represents Oliver asleep at an open window in the house of one of his human patrons. And outside the window, about as big and close as if they were in the room, stand Fagin and the foul-laced monks staring at him with dark monstrous visages and great white wicked eyes in the style of the simple devoury of the draughtsmen. The very naivety 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 Crookshank 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 sculls, of gibbits, of all the things in a word that are somber without being sad. There is a ghastly joy in remembering our boyish reading about Sykes and his flight, especially about the voice of that unbearable peddler which went on in a monotonous and maddening sing-song. We'll wash out grease stains, mud stains, blood stains, until Sykes 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 supp on anything. There was no saner or simpler school boy 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 seems 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 Nicolby, but the great popularity went booming on. The whole world was roaring for books by Dickens and—more books by Dickens and Dickens was laboring 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. Someone mildly suggested that after all Dickens had never known Grimaldi. Dickens was down on him like a thunderbolt, sardonically asking how close and intimacy Lord Babrook had with Mr. Samuel Peeps. Nicholas Nicolby 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 square's width. That strong thwack, that simplified energy, is the whole object for such a story, and the whole of this tale is full of a kind of highly picturesque platitude. The wicked aristocrats—Somalbury Hawke, Lord Verysoft, 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 Hawke conception is that, if anything, he is too refined. Real aristocratic blackards 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 grand eloquence and a natural poetry which, like all melodrama, is rarely 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. Nicolby, with her beautiful mazes of memory, does her best to prevent the story of Nicholas Nicolby from being told, and she does well. There is no particular necessity that we should know what happens to Madeleine Bray. There is a desperate and crying necessity that we should know Mrs. Nicolby 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. Nicolby is a fool, she is one of those fools who are wiser than the world. She stands for a great truth that 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 forgetties 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 and coordinate it, to draw deductions from it, but to those happy souls like Mrs. Nicolby, to whom relevancy is nothing, the whole of their past life is like an inexhaustible fairy-land. 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 this book is Mr. Mantellini. 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. Mantellini should say in praising the outline of his wife. The two countesses had no outlines, and the dowagers was a damned outline. This can only be called an unanswerable absurdity. You may try to analyze it, as Charles Lamb did the indefensible joke about the hair. You may dwell for a moment on the dark distinctions between the negative disqualification of the countess 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 damnably. 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 Mantellinia and Micorba, 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 labors, 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, is off his boy opening and shutting doors. This serial, of which he spoke to Mrs. 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 Knights of London, in which the Garg 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. Leroper's Lodgings and Mrs. Leroper'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 gigantic 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 book case for numberless novels. The clock started, but the clock stopped. In the prologue by Master Humphrey reappear Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller, and of that resurrection many things have been said, chiefly expressions of a reasonable regret. Diaklis 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 the 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, and 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 pages have anything to do with such a shop, and they leave it forever 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 Haws Inn. But when we feel the situation with more fidelity, we realise 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 didn't 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 common places 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, yet only one thing that convinces us is 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 girl with a primitive sense of responsibility and duty, a sort of sinkly precocity. Did he know some little girl of this kind? Did she die, perhaps, and remain in his memory and colours to ethereal and pale? In any case, there are a great number of them in his works. Little Dorit was one of them, and Florence Dombie 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 Mantellini, with the addition of being human and credible, for he knows that he is absurd. His hyphalutin is not done because he seriously thinks it is right and proper, like that of Mr Snodgrass, nor is it done because he thinks it will serve his turn, like that of Mr Peck sniff. For both these beliefs are improbable. It is done because he really loves hyphalutin, 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 unearing instinct for the perfect folly of a phrase he has no equal, even among the giants of Dickens. I am sure, says Mrs Wackles, when she has been flirting with Cheggs, the market gardener, and reduced Mr Swiveller to bioronic renunciation. I am sure, I am 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 poise of Mr Swiveller when he imitates the stage-brigand. After crying, some wine here. Ho! He hands the flag unto 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 gentleman coming into the place and sleeping like double gentleman 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 Marchenaise are at once purely romantic and purely genuine. There is nothing even of Dickens's legitimate exaggerations about them. A shabby, blocky, good-natured clerk would, as a matter of fact, spend hours in the society of a little servant-girl if you 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 bar-maids. And still, the pot of that huge popularity boiled. In 1841 another novel was demanded, and Barnaby Raj supplied. It is chiefly of interest as an embodiment of that other element in Dickens, the picturesque or even the pictorial. Barnaby Raj, 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, tap at it. But he might have been treated with more sympathy, with as much sympathy, for instance, as Mr. Dick Sweveller, for he is only the romantic gutter snipe, the bright boy at the particular age when it is most fascinating to find a secret society, and most difficult to keep a secret. And if ever there was a romantic gutter snipe on earth, it was Charles Dickens. Barnaby Raj's 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. End of Chapter 5 Chapter 6 of G.K. Chesterton's 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, recording by Anna Simon. G.K. Chesterton's Charles Dickens Chapter 6 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 color is the same as to have a sensibility to color. A person who realizes that beef steaks are appetizing shows his sensibility. A person who realizes that moon rises 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 manas. 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 here today chiefly of two types, the dull man who likes ordinary things mildly, and the extraordinary man who likes extraordinary things wildly. But Dickens liked quiet 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 incident 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 man that wanted the same things, or the other man that wanted the other things, we feel a startling absence of Kent, a startling sense of humanity as it is, and of 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 non-conformists, 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 phase of chat-band. He saw that Mr. Pottsnap 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 a 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 or civic or economic fanaticism. He went down the broad road of the revolution. He never admitted that economically we must make hells of work houses, any more than Rousseau would have admitted it. He never said the state had no right to teach children or to 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 wigginsome. 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 candor 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 coordinates 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 olacarctic cabinets, on the two artificial parties, on the government offices, on the JPs, 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 17th 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 beetles into the sea. Let him come here, and we will show him a race of free man such as he dreams of, alive upon the ancient earth. Let him come here, and tell the English of the divine democracy to watch which he drives them. There he is 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 rent, he would push his encomium of the new order almost to the edge of Kent. 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 Choselwit, 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 cause 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 Choselwit, I use, of course, an elliptical expression. He wrote the notes of the American part of Martin Choselwit 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 Choselwit. 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, a 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 appointed him that he could never, with any satisfaction, part with the 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 Kant, 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 views 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 onto 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 seized 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 999th 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, sometime afterwards, somebody said that he did, he violently rejected the view as only describable, quote, in one of the shortest words in the English language, end quote. 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 boulders dumb. Washington Irving, Prescott, Hoffman, Bryant, Halleck, Dana, Washington Alston, 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 the breeding 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 monsters and justice 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, mainly 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. Of course, 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 a slant. 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 tort 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 desires of being thought too high-soul 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 radical, 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 than 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 shame-faced 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 honor. 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 ride as 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 principle by reason and reflection and from the sense of right. I fear that if he were anything else he would return home at 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 slaveholders, 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 ferocity 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 can of which we have spoken, the wary 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, button-hulled him and bombarded him with a 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. End quote. 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 Tracy and by Captain Chesterton at Colbath Fields, two reformers of prison discipline for whom he had a high regard. But it was a mere accident that American jails were inferior to English. There was, and is, nothing in the American spirit to prevent their affecting all the reforms of Tracy 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 pogrom more 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 Chuzzlewood, 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, Paxniff and Mrs. Gamp, Martin Chuzzlewood will be chiefly admired for its American excursion. It is a good setire embedded in an indifferent novel. Mrs. Gamp is indeed a sumptuous study laid on in those rich, orly, almost greasy colors that go to make the English comic characters that make the very diction of full-staff fat and quaking with jolly degradation. Paxniff 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 a divine, until dark and practical secret is entrusted to him, as if anybody but a lunatic would entrust a secret to Bumble. McCorber is noble when he's doing nothing, but he's quite unconvincing when he's spying on Uriah Heep, for obviously neither McCorber nor anyone else would employ McCorber as a private detective. Similarly, while Paxniff is the best thing in the story, the story is the worst thing in Paxniff. 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 Paxniff so seriously. Paxniff is a merely laughable character. He is so laughable that he's 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 is only made to be laughed at? But it is the American part of Martin Choselwit 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 Choselwit 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 Aristophanus correctly described Cleon, 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 Pogrom. For there is much more on the American episodes than their intoxicating absurdity. There is more than humour in the young man who made this 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 tire 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 oneself all over with the same still butter. Above all, the big defiances of small enemies are the very urgent challenges to very distant enemies. The coward is so habitual and unconscious that it wears the plumes of courage. All this is an English temptation as well as an American one. Martin Chosewit 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' book like an asylum with brawling chollips 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 18th century, in the making of modern politics, a patriot meant a discontented man. It was opposed to the word quarcho, which meant an upholder of present conditions. 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 water-toed 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 man, not to procure a 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, that's full 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 Choslawith's America is a madhouse, but it is a madhouse 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 colors 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 program 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. End of chapter 6