 CHAPTER V Oliver Twist In considering Dickens, as we almost always must consider him, as a man of rich originality, we may possibly miss the forces from which he drew even his original energy. It is not well for man to be alone. We in the modern world are ready enough to admit that when it is applied to some problem of monasticism or of an ecstatic life, but we will not admit that our modern artistic claim to absolute originality is really a claim to absolute unsociability. A Claim to Absolute Loneliness The anarchist is at least as solitary as the ascetic, and the men of very vivid vigor in literature, the men such as Dickens, have generally displayed a large sociability towards the society of letters, always expressed in the happy pursuit of pre-existent themes, sometimes expressed, as in the case of Molière or Stern, in downright plagiarism. For even theft is a confession of our dependence on society. In Dickens, however, this element of the original foundations on which he worked is quite especially difficult to determine. This is partly due to the fact that for the present reading public he is practically the only one of his long line that is read at all. He sums up Smollett and Goldsmith, but he also destroys them. This one giant, being closest to us, cuts off from our view even the giants that begat him. But much more is this difficulty due to the fact that Dickens mixed up with the old material, materials so subtly modern, so made of the French Revolution, that the whole is transformed. If we want the best example of this, the best example is Oliver Twist. Relatively to the other works of Dickens, Oliver Twist is not of great value, but it is of great importance. Some parts of it are so crude and of so clumsy a melodrama that one is almost tempted to say that Dickens would have been greater without it. But even if he had been greater without it, he would still have been incomplete without it. With the exception of some gorgeous passages, both of humor and horror, the interest of the book lies not so much in its revelation of Dickens' literary genius as in its revelation of those moral, personal, and political instincts which were the make-up of his character and the permanent support of that literary genius. It is by far the most depressing of all his books. It is in some ways the most irritating, yet its ugliness gives the last touch of honesty to all that spontaneous and splendid output. Without this one discordant note, all his merriment might have seemed like levity. Dickens had just appeared upon the stage and set the whole world laughing with his first great story, Pickwick. Oliver Twist was his encore. It was the second opportunity given to him by those who had rolled about with laughter over Tubman and Jinkle, Weller and Dowler. Under such circumstances, a stagy reciter will sometimes take care to give a pathetic piece after his humorous one, and with all his many moral merits there was much that was stagy about Dickens. But this explanation alone is altogether inadequate and unworthy. There was in Dickens this other kind of energy, horrible, uncanny, barbaric, capable in another age of coarseness, greedy for the emblems of established ugliness, the coffin, the jippet, the bones, the bloody knife. Dickens liked these things, and he was all the more of a man for liking them, especially he was all the more of a boy. We can all recall with pleasure the fact that Miss Ptoker, afterwards Mrs. Lilyvick, was in the habit of reciting a poem called The Blood Drinker's Burial. I cannot express my regret that the words of this poem are not given, for Dickens would have been quite as capable of writing The Blood Drinker's Burial as Mrs. Ptoker was of reciting it. This strain existed in Dickens, alongside of his happy laughter. Both were allied to the same robust romance. Here as elsewhere, Dickens is close to all the permanent human things. He is close to religion, which he has never allowed the thousand devils on its churches to stop the dancing of its bells. He has allied to the people, to the real poor, who love nothing so much as to take a cheerful glass and to talk about funerals. The extremes of his gloom and gaiety are the mark of religion and democracy. They mark him all from the moderate happiness of philosophers and from that stoicism, which is the virtue and the creed of aristocrats. There is nothing odd in the fact that the same man, who conceived the humane hospitalities of Pickwick, should also have imagined the inhuman laughter of Fagin's Den. They are both genuine, and they are both exaggerated, and the whole human tradition has tied up together in a strange knot these strands of festivity and fear. It is over the cups of Christmas Eve that men have always competed in telling ghost stories. This first element was present in Dickens, and it is very powerfully present in Oliver Twist. It had not been present with sufficient consistency or continuity in Pickwick to make it remain on the reader's memory at all. For the tale of Gabriel Grubb is grotesque rather than horrible, and the two gloomy stories of the madman and the queer client are so utterly irrelevant to the tale that even if the reader remember them, he probably does not remember that they occur in Pickwick. Critics have complained of Shakespeare and others for putting comic episodes into a tragedy. It required a man with the courage and coarseness of Dickens actually to put tragic episodes into a farce. But they are not caught up into the story at all. In Oliver Twist, however, the thing broke out with an almost brutal inspiration, and those who had fallen in love with Dickens for his generous buffoonery may very likely have been startled at receiving such very different fare at the next helping. When you have bought a man's book because you like his writing about Mrs. Wardle's punch-bowl and Mr. Winkle's skates, it may very well be surprising to open it and read about the sickening thuds that beat out the life of Nancy, or that mysterious villain whose face was blasted with disease. As a nightmare, the work is really admirable. Characters which are not very clearly conceived as regards their own psychology are yet at certain moments managed so as to shake to its foundations our own psychology. Bill Sykes is not exactly a real man, but for all that he is a real murderer. Nancy is not really impressive as a living woman, but as the phrase goes she makes a lovely corpse. Being quite childish and eternal in us, something which is shocked with the mere simplicity of death, quivers when we read of those repeated blows, or see Sykes cursing the tell-tale cur who will follow his bloody footprints. And this strange, sublime, vulgar melodrama, which is melodrama and yet is painfully real, reaches its hideous height in that fine scene of the death of Sykes. The besieged house, the boys screaming within, the crowd screaming without, the murderer turned almost a maniac and dragging his victim uselessly up and down the room. He escaped over the roof, the rope swiftly running taut, and death, sudden, startling, and symbolic. A man hanged. There is in this and similar scenes something of the quality of Hogarth, and many other English moralists, of the early eighteenth century. It is not easy to define this Hogarthian quality in words beyond saying that this is a sort of alphabetical realism, like the cruel candor of children. But it has about it these two special principles which separated from all that we call realism in our time. First, that with us a moral story means a story about moral people. With them a moral story meant more often a story about immoral people. Second, that with us realism is always associated with some subtle view of morals. With them realism was always associated with some simple view of morals. The end of Bill Sykes, exactly in the way that the law would have killed him, this is a Hogarthian incident. It carries on that tradition of startling and shocking platitude. All this element in the book was a sincere thing in the author. But nonetheless it came from old soils, from the graveyard and the gallows, and the lane where the ghost walked. Dickens was always attracted to such things, as Forrester says, with inimitable simplicity, but for his strong sense might have fallen into the follies of spiritualism. As a matter of fact, like most of the men of strong sense in his tradition, Dickens was left with a half-belief in spirits which became in practice a belief in bad spirits. The great disadvantage of those who have too much strong sense to believe in supernaturalism is that they keep last the low and little forms of the supernatural, such as omens, curses, speckers, and retributions, but find a high and happy supernaturalism quite incredible. Thus the Puritans denied the sacraments, but went on burning witches. This shadow does rest, to some extent, upon the rational English writers like Dickens. Supernaturalism was dying, but its ugliest roots died last. Dickens would have found it easier to believe in a ghost than in a vision of the Virgin with angels. There, for good or evil, however, was the root of the old Diablory in Dickens, and there it is in Oliver Twist. But this was only the first of the New Dickens Elements, which must have surprised those Dickensians who eagerly bought his second book. The second of the New Dickens Elements is equally indisputable and separate. It swelled afterward to enormous proportions in Dickens work, but it really has its rise here. Again, as in the case of the element of Diablory, it would be possible to make technical exceptions in favor of Pickwick, just as there were quite inappropriate scraps of the gruesome element in Pickwick, so there are quite inappropriate allusions to this other topic in Pickwick. And nobody by merely reading Pickwick would even remember this topic. No one by merely reading Pickwick would know what this topic is. The third great subject of Dickens, this second great subject of the Dickens of Oliver Twist. This subject is social oppression. It is surely fair to say that no one could have gathered from Pickwick how this question boiled in the blood of the author of Pickwick. There are indeed passages, particularly in connection with Mr. Pickwick in The Deader's Prison, which proves to us, looking back on a whole public career, that Dickens had been from the beginning bitter and inquisitive about the problem of our civilization. No one could have imagined at the time that this bitterness ran in an unbroken river under all the surges of that superb gaiety and exuberance. With Oliver Twist, this sterner side of Dickens was suddenly revealed. For the very first pages of Oliver Twist are stern, even when they are funny. They amuse, but they cannot be enjoyed, as can the passages about the follies of Mr. Snodgrass or the humiliations of Mr. Winkle. The difference between the old easy humor and this new harsh humor is a difference not of degree but of kind. Dickens makes game of Mr. Bumble because he wants to kill Mr. Bumble. He made game of Mr. Winkle because he wanted him to live forever. Dickens has taken the sword in hand against what is he declaring war? It is just here that the greatness of Dickens comes in. It is just here that the difference lies between the pedant and the poet. Dickens enters the social and political war, and the first stroke he deals is not only significant but even startling. Fully to see this, we must appreciate the national situation. It was an age of reform, and even of radical reform. The world was full of radicals and reformers, but only too many of them took the line of attacking everything and anything that was opposed to some particular theory among the many political theories that possessed the end of the 18th century. Some had so much perfected the perfect theory of republicanism that they almost lay awake at night because Queen Victoria had a crown on her head. Others were so certain that mankind had hitherto been merely strangled in the bonds of the state that they saw truth only in the destruction of tariffs or in bylaws. The greater part of that generation held that clearness, economy, and a hard common sense would soon destroy the errors that had been erected by the superstition and sentimentalities of the past. In pursuance of this idea, many of the new men of the new century, quite confident that they were invigorating the new age, sought to destroy the old sentimental clericalism, the old sentimental feudalism, the old world belief in priests, the old world belief in patrons, and, among other things, the old world belief in beggars. They sought, among other things, to clear away the old visionary kindliness on the subject of vagrants. Hence those reformers enacted not only a new reform bill, but also a new poor law. In creating many other modern things, they created the modern workhouse, and when Dickens came out to fight, it was the first thing that he broke with his battle-ex. This is where Dickens' social revolt is of more value than mere politics and avoids the vulgarity of the novel with a purpose. His revolt is not a revolt of the commercialist against the feudalist, of the nonconformist against the churchman, of the free trader against the protectionist, of the liberal against the Tory. If he were among us now, his revolt would not be the revolt of the socialist against the individualist or of the anarchist against the socialist. His revolt was simply, and solely, the eternal revolt. It was the revolt of the weak against the strong. He did not dislike this or that argument for oppression. He disliked oppression. He disliked a certain look on the face of a man when he looks down on another man. And that look on the face is, indeed, the only thing in the world that we have really to fight between here and the fires of hell. That which pedants of that time and this time would have called the sentimentalism of Dickens was really simply the detached sanity of Dickens. He cared nothing for the fugitive explanations of the constitutional conservatives. He cared nothing for the fugitive explanations of the Manchester school. He would have cared quite as little for the fugitive explanations of the Fabian society or of the modern scientific socialist. He saw that under many forms there was one fact, the tyranny of man over man, and he struck at it when he saw it whether it was old or new. When he found that footmen and rustics were too much afraid of Sir Leichester Deadlock, he attacked Sir Leichester Deadlock. He did not care whether Sir Leichester Deadlock said he was attacking England, or whether Mr. Roundswell, the iron master, said he was attacking an Afita oligarchy. In that case he pleased Mr. Roundswell, the iron master, and displeased Sir Leichester Deadlock, the aristocrat. But when he found that Mr. Roundswell's workmen were much too frightened of Mr. Roundswell, then he displeased Mr. Roundswell in turn. He displeased Mr. Roundswell very much by calling him Mr. Bounderby. When he imagined himself to be fighting old laws, he gave a sort of vague and general approval to new laws. But when he came to the new laws, they had a bad time. When Dickens found that after a hundred economic arguments and granting a hundred economic considerations, the fact remained that paupers in modern workhouses were much too afraid of the beetle, just as vassals in an ancient castle were much too afraid of the deadlocks, then he struck suddenly and at once. This is what makes the opening chapters of Oliver Twist so curious and important. The very fact of Dickens' distance from and independence of, the elaborate financial arguments of his time, makes more definite than dazzling his sudden assertion that he sees the old human tyranny in front of him as plain as the sun at noon day. Dickens attacks the modern workhouse with a sort of inspired simplicity as of a boy in a fairytale who had wandered about, sword in hand, looking for ogres, and who had found an indisputable ogre. All the other people of his time are attacking things because they are bad economics or because they are bad politics or because they are bad science. He alone is attacking things because they are bad. All the others are radicals with a large R. He alone is radical with a small one. He encounters evil with that beautiful surprise which, as it is the beginning of all real pleasure, is also the beginning of all righteous indignation. He enters the workhouse just as Oliver Twist enters it, as a little child. This is the real power and pathos of that celebrated passage in the book which has passed into a proverb, but which has not lost its terrible humor even in being hackneyed. I mean, of course, the everlasting quotation about Oliver Twist asking for more. The real poignancy that there is in this idea is a very good study in that strong school of social criticism which Dickens represented. A modern realist describing the dreary workhouse would have made all the children utterly crushed, not daring to speak at all, not expecting anything, not hoping anything, past all possibility of affording, even ironical contrast, or a protest of despair. A modern, in short, would have made all the boys in the workhouse pathetic by making them all pessimists. But Oliver Twist is not pathetic because he is a pessimist. Oliver Twist is pathetic because he is an optimist. The whole tragedy of that incident is in the fact that he does expect the universe to be kind to him, that he does believe that he is living in a just world. He comes before the guardians as the ragged peasants of the French Revolution came before the kings and parliaments of Europe. That is to say he comes, indeed with gloomy experiences, but he comes with a happy philosophy. He knows that there are wrongs of a man to be reviled, but he believes also that there are rights of a man to be demanded. It has often been remarked as a singular fact that the French poor, who stand in historic tradition as typical of all the desperate men who have dragged down tyranny, were, as a matter of fact, by no means worse off than the poor of many other European countries before the Revolution. The truth is that the French were tragic because they were better off. The others had known the sorrowful experiences, but they alone had known the splendid expectation and the original claims. It was just here that Dickens was so true a child of them, and of that happy theory, so bitterly applied. They were the one oppressed people that simply asked for justice. They were the one parish boy who innocently asked for more. End of Section 10 Chapter 6 The Old Curiosity Shop, Part 1 Nothing is important except the fate of the soul, and literature is only redeemed from an utter triviality, surpassing that of knots and crosses, by the fact that it describes not the world around us or the things on the retina of the eye or the enormous irrelevancy of encyclopedias, but some condition to which the human spirit can come. All good writers express the state of their souls, even as occurs in some cases of very good writers, if it is a state of damnation. The first thing that has to be realized about Dickens is this ultimate spiritual condition of the man, which lay behind all his creations. This Dickens state of mind is difficult to pick out in words, as are all elementary states of mind. They cannot be described, not because they are too subtle for words, but because they are too simple for words. Perhaps the nearest approach to a statement of it would be this. That Dickens expresses an eager anticipation of everything that will happen in the motley affairs of men. He looks at the quiet crowd, waiting for it to be picturesque and to play the fool. He expects everything. He is torn with a happy hunger. Thackery is always looking back to yesterday. Dickens is always looking forward to tomorrow. Both are profoundly humorous, for there is a humor of the morning and a humor of the evening. But the first guesses at what it will get, at all the grotesqueness and variety which a day may bring forth. The second looks back on what the day has been, and sees even its solemnities as slightly ironical. Nothing can be too extravagant for the laughter that looks forward, and nothing can be too dignified for the laughter that looks back. It is an idle but obvious thing, which many must have noticed, that we often find in the title of one of an author's books what might very well stand for a general description of all of them. Thus all Spencer's works might be called a hymn to heavenly beauty, or all Mr. Bernard Shaw's bound books might be called You Never Can Tell. In the same way, the whole substance and spirit of Thackery might be gathered under the general title Vanity Fair. In the same way, too, the whole substance and spirit of Dickens might be gathered under the general title Great Expectations. In a recent criticism on this position, I saw it remarked that all this is reading into Dickens something that he did not mean, and I had been told that it would have greatly surprised Dickens to be informed that he went down the broad road of the revolution. Of course it would. Criticism does not exist to say about authors the things that they knew themselves. It exists to say the things about them which they did not know themselves. If a critic says that the Iliad has a pagan rather than a Christian pity, or that it is full of pictures made by one epithet, of course he does not mean that Homer could have said that. If Homer could have said that, the critic would leave Homer to say it. The function of criticism, if it has a legitimate function at all, can only be one function, that of dealing with the subconscious part of the author's mind, which only the critic can express, and not with the conscious part of the author's mind, which the author himself can express. Either criticism is no good at all, a very defensible position, or else criticism means saying about an author the very things that would have made him jump out of his boots. Doubtless the name in this case, Great Expectations, is an empty coincidence, and indeed it is not in the books of the later Dickens period, the period of Great Expectations, that we should look for the best examples of this sanguine and expectant spirit, which is the essential of the man's genius. There are plenty of good examples of it, especially in the earlier works, but even in the earlier works there is no example of it more striking or more satisfactory than the old curiosity shop. It is particularly noticeable in the fact that its opening and original framework express the ideas of a random experience. A thing come across in the street, a single face in the crowd, followed until it tells its story. Though the thing ends in a novel, it begins in a sketch. It begins as one of the sketches by Bose. There is something unconsciously artistic in the very clumsiness of this opening. Master Humphrey starts to keep a scrapbook of all his adventures, and he finds that he can fill the whole scrapbook with the sequels and the developments of one adventure. He goes out to notice everybody, and he finds himself busily and variedly occupied, only in watching somebody. In this there is a very profound truth about the true excitement and inexhaustible poetry of life. The truth is not so much that eternity is full of souls, as that one soul can fill eternity. In strict art there is something quite lame and lumbering about the way in which the benevolent old storyteller starts to tell many stories, and then drops away altogether, while one of his stories takes his place. But in a larger art, his collision with little Nell and his complete eclipse by her personality and narrative have a real significance. They suggest the random richness of such meetings, and their uncalculated results. It makes the whole book a sort of splendid accident. It is not true, as is commonly said, that the Dickens' pathos as pathos is bad. It is not true, as is still more commonly said, that the whole business about little Nell is bad. The case is more complex than that. Yet complex as it is, it admits of one sufficiently clear distinction. Those who have written about the death of little Nell have generally noticed the crudities of the character itself, the little girls unnatural and staring innocents, her constrained and awkward piety. But they have nearly all of them entirely failed to notice that there is, in the death of little Nell, one quite definite and really artistic idea. It is not an artistic idea that a little child should die rhetorically on the stage like Paul Donby, and little Nell does not die rhetorically upon the stage like Paul Donby. But it is an artistic idea that all the good powers and personalities in the story should set out in pursuit of one insignificant child to repair an injustice to her, should track her from town to town over England with all the resources of wealth, intelligence, and travel, and should all arrive too late. All the good fairies, and all the kind magicians, all the just kings, and all the gallant princes, with chariots and flying dragons and armies and navies, go after one little child who had strayed into a wood and find her dead. That is the conception which Dickens' artistic instinct was really aiming at when he finally condemned little Nell to death after keeping her, so to speak, so long with the rope around her neck. The death of little Nell is open certainly to the particular denial which its enemies make about it. The death of little Nell is not pathetic. It is perhaps tragic. It is, in reality, ironic. Here is a very good case of the injustice to Dickens on his purely literary side. It is not that I say that Dickens achieved what he designed. It is that the critics will not see what the design was. They go on talking of the death of little Nell as if it were a mere example of maudlin description like the death of little Paul. As a fact it is not described at all, so it cannot be objectionable. It is not the death of little Nell, but the life of little Nell that I object to. In this, in the actual picture of her personality, if you can call it personality, Dickens did fall into some of his fissile vices. The real objection to much of his pathos belongs really to another part of his character. It is connected with his vanity, his voracity for all kinds of praise, his restive experimentalism, and even perhaps his envy. He strained himself to achieve pathos. His humor was inspiration, but his pathos was ambition. His laughter was lonely. He would have laughed on a desert island, but his grief was gregarious. He liked to move great masses of men, to melt them into tenderness, to play on the people as the great pianist plays on them, to make them mad or sad. His pathos was to him a way of showing his power, and for that reason it was really powerless. He could not help making people laugh, but he tried to make them cry. We come in this novel as we often do come in his novels upon hard lumps of unreality, upon a phrase that suddenly sickenes. That is always due to his conscious despotism over the delicate feelings. That is always due to his love of fame as distinct from his love of fun. But it is not true that all Dickens' pathos is like this. It is not even true that all the passages about little now are like this. There are two strands almost everywhere, and they can be differentiated as the sincere and the deliberate. There is great difference between Dickens thinking about the tears of his characters and Dickens thinking about the tears of his audience. When all this is allowed, however, and the exaggerated contempt for the Dickens' pathos is properly corrected, the broad fact remains that to pass from the solemn characters in this book to the comic characters in this book is to be like some Ulysses who should pass suddenly from the land of shadows to the mountain of the gods. Little now has her own position in careful and reasonable criticism, even that wobbling old ass her grandfather has his position in it. Perhaps even the dissipated Fred, whom long acquaintance with Mr. Dick Swiveller has not made any less dismal in his dissipation, has a place in it also. But when we come to Swiveller and Samson Brass and Quilp and Mrs. Charlie, then Fred and now and the grandfather simply do not exist. There are no such people in the story. The real hero and heroine of the old curiosity shop are of course Dick Swiveller and the Marchioness. It is significant in a sense that these two sane, strong, living and lovable human beings are the only two, or almost the only two people in the story, who do not run after Little Now. They have something better to do than go on that shadowy chase after that cheerless phantom. They have to build up between them a true romance. Perhaps the one true romance in the whole of Dickens. Dick Swiveller really has all the half-heroic characteristics which make a man respected by a woman, and which are the male contribution to virtue. He is brave, magnanimous, sincere about himself, amusing, absurdly hopeful. Above all, he is both strong and weak. On the other hand, the Marchioness really has all the characteristics the entirely heroic characteristics which make a woman respected by a man. She is female, that is, she is at once incurably candid and incurably loyal. She is full of terrible common sense. She expects little pleasure for herself, and yet she can enjoy bursts of it above all. She is physically timid, and yet she can face anything. All this solid rocky romanticism is really implied in the speech and action of these two characters, and can be felt behind them all the time. Because they are the two most absurd people in the book, they are also the most vivid, human, and imaginable. There are two happy, really fine love affairs in Dickens, and I almost think only two. One is the happy courtship of Swiveller and the Marchioness. The other is the tragic courtship of Toots and Florence Donby. When Dick Swiveller wakes up in a bed and sees the Marchioness playing cribbage, he thinks that he and she are a prince and a princess in a fairy tale. He thinks right. End of Section 11 Chapter 6 The Old Curiosity Shop, Part 1 This is a LibraVox recording. All LibraVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibraVox.org. Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens by G. K. Chesterton. Section 12 Chapter 6 The Old Curiosity Shop, Part 2 I speak thus seriously of such characters with the deliberate purpose, for the frivolous characters of Dickens are taken much too frivolously. It has been quite insufficiently pointed out that all the serious moral ideas that Dickens did contrive to express, he expressed altogether through this fantastic medium. In such figures as Swiveller and the Little Servant, the warmest upholder of Dickens would not go to the solemn or sentimental passages for anything fresh or suggestive in faith or philosophy. No one would pretend that the death of Little Donby, with its What Are the Wild Waves Seeing, told us anything new or real about death. A good Christian dying one would imagine, not only would not know what the wild waves were saying, but would not care. No one would pretend that the repentance of old Paul Donby throws any light on the psychology or philosophy of repentance. No doubt old Donby, white-haired and nameable, was a great improvement on old Donby, brown-haired and unpleasant. But in his case the softening of the heart seems to bear two closer resemblance to softening of the brain. Whether these serious passages are as bad as the critical people or as good as the sentimental people find them, at least they do not convey anything in the way of an illuminating glimpse of a bold suggestion about men's moral nature. The serious figures do not tell one anything about the human soul. The conic figures do. Take anything almost at random out of these admirable speeches of Dick Swiveller. As for instance how exquisitely Dickens has caught a certain very deep and delicate quality at the bottom of this idle kind of man. I mean that odd impersonal sort of intellectual justice by which the frivolous fellow sees things as they are, and even himself as he is, and is above irritation. Mr. Swiveller, you remember, asks the Marchioness whether the brass family ever talked about him. She nods her head with vivacity. Complementary, inquired Mr. Swiveller. The motion of the little servant's head altered. But she says, continue the little servant, that you ain't to be trusted. Well, you know, Marchioness said Mr. Swiveller thoughtfully many people, not exactly professional people, but tradesmen have had the same idea. The excellent citizen from whom I ordered this beer inclined strongly to that opinion. This philosophical freedom from all resentment, this strange love of truth which seems actually to come through carelessness, is the very real piece of spiritual observation. Even among liars there are two classes. One immeasurably better than another. The honest liar is the man who tells the truth about his old lies, who says on Wednesday I told a magnificent lie on Monday. He keeps the truth in circulation. No one version of things stagnates in him and becomes an evil secret. He does not have to live with old lies, a horrible domesticity. Mr. Swiveller may mislead the waiter about whether he has the money to pay, but he does not mislead his friend, and he does not mislead himself on the point. He is quite as well aware as any one can be of the accumulating falsity of his position of the gentleman, who by his various debts has closed up all the streets into the strand except one, and who is going to close that tonight with a pair of gloves. He shuts up the street with a pair of gloves, but he does not shut up his mind with a secret. The traffic of truth is still kept open through his soul. It is exactly in these absurd characters, then, that we can find a mass of psychological and ethical suggestion. This cannot be found in the serious characters, except indeed in some of the later experiments. There is a little of such psychological and ethical suggestion in figures like Gridley, like Jasper, like Bradley Headstone. But in these earlier books, at least, such as the Old Curiosity Shop, the grave or moral figures throw no light upon morals. I should maintain this generalization even in the presence of that apparent exception, the Christmas Carol, with its trio of didactic ghosts. Charity is certainly splendid, at once a luxury and a necessity. But Dickens is not most effective when he is preaching charity seriously. He is most effective when he is preaching it uproariously, when he is preaching it by means of massive personalities and vivid scenes. One might say that he is best not when he is preaching his human love, but when he is practicing it. In his grave pages he tells us to love men, but in his wild pages he creates men whom we can love. By his solemnity he commands us to love our neighbors. By his caricature he makes us love them. There is an odd literary question, which I wonder is not put more often in literature. How far can an author tell a truth without seeing it himself? Perhaps an actual example will express my meaning. I was once talking to a highly intelligent lady about Thackeray's newcoms. We were speaking of the character of Mrs. McKenzie, the campaigner, and in the middle of the conversation the lady leaned across to me and said in a low, hoarse, but emphatic voice. She drank. Thackeray didn't know it, but she drank. And it is really astonishing what a shaft of white light this sheds on the campaigner, on her terrible temperament, on her agonized abusiveness, and her almost more agonized urbanity, on her clamor, which is nevertheless not open or exitable, on her temper, which is not so much bad temper as insatiable, bloodthirsty, man-eating temper. How far can a writer thus indicate by accident a truth of which he is himself ignorant? If truth is a plan or a pattern of things that really are, or in other words, if truth truly exists outside ourselves, or in other words, if truth exists at all, it must be often possible for a writer to uncover a corner of it which he happens not to understand, but which his reader does happen to understand. The author sees only two lines. The reader sees where they meet and what is the angle. The author sees only an arc or fragment of a curve. The reader sees the size of the circle. The last thing to say about Dickens, and especially about books like The Old Curiosity Shop, is that they are full of these unconscious truths. The careless reader may miss them. The careless author almost certainly did miss them. But from them can be gathered an impression of real truth to life, which is for the great critics of Dickens an almost unknown benefit, buried treasure. Here for instance is one of them out of the Old Curiosity Shop. I mean the passage in which, by a blazing stroke of genius, the dashing Mr. Chuckster, one of the glorious Apollo's of whom Mr. Swiveller was the perpetual grand, is made to entertain a hatred bordering upon frenzy for the styled, patient, respectful, and laborious Kitt. Now in the formal plan of the story, Mr. Chuckster is a fool, and Kitt is almost a hero. At least he is a noble boy. Yet unconsciously Dickens made the idiot Chuckster say something profoundly suggestive on the subject. In speaking of Kitt, Mr. Chuckster makes use of these two remarkable phrases. That Kitt is meek, and that he is a snob. Now Kitt is really a very fresh and manly picture of a boy. Firm, sane, chivalrous, reasonable, full of those three great Roman virtues which Mr. Bellock has so often celebrated, virtues and vercundia and paedas. He is a sympathetic but still a straightforward study of the best type of that most respectable of all human classes, the respectable poor. All this is true. All that Dickens utters in praise of Kitt is true. Nevertheless, the awful words of Chuckster remain written on the eternal skies. Kitt is meek, and Kitt is a snob. His natural dignity does not include and is partly marred by that instinctive subservience to the employing class, which has been the comfortable weakness of the whole English democracy, which has prevented their making any revolution for the last two hundred years. Kitt would not serve any wicked man for money, but he would serve any moderately good man, and the money would give a certain dignity and decisiveness to the goodness. All this is the English popular evil, which goes along with the English popular virtues of genealogy, of homeliness, tolerance, and strong humor, hope, and an enormous appetite for hand-to-mouth happiness. The scene in which Kitt takes his family to the theater is a monument of the massive qualities of old English enjoyment. If what we want is merry England, our antiquarians ought not to revive the Maypole or the Morris dancers. They ought to revive Astley and Saddler's Wells, and the old solemn circus, and the old stupid pantomime, and all the sawdust, and all the oranges. Of all this strength and joy in the poor, Kitt is a splendid and final symbol. But amid all his masculine and English virtue, he has this weak touch of meekness or acceptance of the powers that be. It is a sound touch. It is a real truth about Kitt. But Dickens did not know it. Mr. Chuckster did. Dickens' stories, taken as a whole, have more artistic unity than appears at the first glance. It is the immediate impulse of a modern critic to dismiss them as mere disorderly scrapbooks with very brilliant scraps. But this is not quite so true as it looks. In one of Dickens' novels there is generally no particular unity of construction, but there is often a considerable unity of sentiments and atmosphere. Things are irrelevant, but not somehow inappropriate. The whole book is written carelessly, but the whole book is generally written in one mood. To take a brood parallel from the other arts, we may say that there is not much unity of form, but there is much unity of color. In most of the novels this can be seen. Nicholas Nicolby, as I have remarked, is full of a certain freshness, a certain light, and open air curiosity, which irradiates from the image of the young man swinging along the Yorkshire roads in the sun. Hence the comic characters with whom he falls in are comic characters in the same key. They are a band of strolling players, charlatans, and poseurs, but too humane to be called humbugs. In the same way the central story of Oliver Twist is somber, and hence even its comic character is almost somber. At least he is too ugly to be merely amusing. Mr. Bumble is in some ways a terrible grotesque. His apopleptic vision calls the fire red cherubim's face, which added such horror to the height and stature of Chaucer's Sompignure. In both these cases even the riotous and absurd characters are a little touched with the tint of the whole story. But this neglected merit of Dickens can certainly be seen best in the old Curiosity Shop. The Curiosity Shop itself was a lumber of grotesque and sinister things, outlandish weapons, twisted and diabolic decorations. The comic characters in the book are all like images brought in an old Curiosity Shop. Quillp might be a gargoyle. He might be some sort of devilish doorknocker dropped down and crawling about the pavement. The same applies to the sinister and really terrifying stiffness of Sally Brass. She is like some old staring figure cut out of wood. Samson Brass, her brother, again is a grotesque in the same rather inhuman manner. He is especially himself when he comes in with the green shade over his eye. We bought all this group of bad figures in the old Curiosity Shop. There is a sort of Diablory. There is also within this atmosphere an extraordinary energy of irony and laughter. The scene in which Samson Brass draws up the description of Quillp supposing him to be dead reaches a point of fiendish fun. We will not say very bandy, Mrs. Jinoen, he says, of his friend's legs. We will confine ourselves to bandy. He is gone, my friends, where his legs would never be called in question. They go on to the discussion of his nose, and Mrs. Jinoen whips and climbs to the view that it is flat. Aqueline, you hag, Aqueline, cries Mr. Quillp, pushing in his head and striking his nose with his fist. There is nothing better in the whole brutal exuberance of the character than that gesture with which Quillp punches his own face with his own fist. It is indeed a perfect symbol, for Quillp is always fighting himself for want of anybody else. He is energy, and energy by itself is always suicidal. He is that primordial energy, which tears, and which destroys itself. The end of Section 12. The end of Chapter 6. THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. APRECIATIONS AND CRITICISMS OF THE WORKS OF CHARLES DICKENS by G. K. Chesterton. CHAPTER VII BARNABY RUDGE. Barnaby Rudge was written by Dickens in the spring, and the first flowing tide of his popularity. He came immediately after the old curiosity shop, and only a short time after Pickwick. Dickens was one of those rare, but often very sincere men in whom the high moment of success almost coincides with the high moment of youth. The calls upon him at the time were insistent and overwhelming. This necessarily happens at a certain stage of a successful writer's career. He was just successful enough to invite offers, and not successful enough to reject them. At the beginning of his career, he could throw himself into Pickwick because there was nothing else to throw himself into. At the end of his life, he could throw himself into a tale of two cities, because he refused to throw himself into anything else. But there was an intervening period, early in his life, when there was almost too much work for his imagination, and yet not quite enough work for his housekeeping. To this period Barnaby Rudge belongs, and it is a curious tribute to the quite curious greatness of Dickens, that in this period of youthful strain we do not feel the strain, but feel only the youth. His own amazing wish to write, equaled or outstripped even his reader's amazing wish to read. Working too hard did not cure him of his abstract love of work. Unreasonable publishers asked him to write ten novels at once, but he wanted to write twenty novels at once. All this period is strangely full of his own sense at once of fertility and of utility. He did work, which no one else could have done, and yet he could not be certain as yet that he was anybody. Barnaby Rudge marks this epic because it marks the fact that he is still confused about what kind of person he is going to be. He has already struck the note of the normal romance in Nicholas Nicolby. He has already created some of his highest comic characters in Pickwick and The Old Curiosity Shop, but here he betrays the fact that it is still a question what ultimate guy he shall follow. Barnaby Rudge is a romantic, historical novel. Its design reminds us of Scott. Some parts of its fulfillment remind us the last of Harrison Ainsworth. It is a very fine, romantic, historical novel. Scott would have been proud of it, but it is still so far different from the general work of Dickens that it is permissible to wonder how far Dickens was proud of it. The book, effective as it is, is almost entirely devoted to dealings with a certain artistic element, which in its mere isolation Dickens did not commonly affect, an element which many men of infinitely less genius have often seemed to affect more successfully. I mean the element of the picturesque. It is the custom in many quarters to speak somewhat sneeringly of that element, which is broadly called the picturesque. It's always felt to be inferior, a vulgar and even an artificial form of art. Yet two things may be remarked about it. The first is that, with few exceptions, the greatest literary artists have been not only particularly clever at the picturesque, but particularly fond of it. Shakespeare, for instance, delighted in certain merely pictorial contrasts, which are quite distinct from, even when they are akin to, the spiritual view involved. For instance, there is an admirable satire in the idea of touchstone, teaching worldly wisdom and worldly honor to the woodland yokels. There is excellent philosophy in the idea of the fool being the representative of civilization in the forest. But quite apart from this deeper meaning in the incident, the mere figure of the gesture in his bright motley and his cap and bells against the green background of the forest and the rude forms of the shepherds is a strong example of the purely picturesque. There is excellent tragic irony in the confrontation of the melancholy philosopher among the tombs with the cheerful digger of the graves. It sums up the essential point that dead bodies can be comic. It is only dead souls that can be tragic. But quite apart from such irony, the mere picture of the grotesque grave digger, the black clad prince and the skull, is a picture in the strongest sense, picture-esque. Caliban and the two shepherds are an admirable symbol, but they are also an admirable scene. Bottom, with the ass's head sitting in rings of elves, is excellent movie and comedy, but also excellent still life. Falstaff, with his huge body, Bartolf, with his burning nose, are masterpieces of the pen, but they would define sketches even for the pencil. King Lear in the storm is a landscape as well as a character study. There is something decorative even about the insistence on the swarthiness of Othello or the deformity of Richard III. Shakespeare's work is much more than picture-esque. But it is picture-esque. And the same which is said here of him by way of example is largely true of the highest class of literature. Dante's divine comedy is supremely important as philosophy, but it is important merely as a panorama. Spencer's fairy queens pleases us as an allegory, but it would please us even as a wallpaper. Stronger still is the case of Chaucer, who loved the pure picture-esque, which always includes something of what we commonly call the ugly. The huge stature and startling scarlet face of the Somp Noir is in just the same spirit as Shakespeare's skulls and bodily. The same spirit gave Chaucer's Miller bagpipes and clad his doctor in crimson. It is the spirit which, while making many other things, loves to make a picture. Now the second thing to be remarked in apology for the picture-esque is that the very thing which makes it seem trivial ought really to make it seem important. I mean the fact that it consists necessarily of contrasts. It brings together types that stand out from their background, but are abruptly different from each other like the clown among the fairies or the fool in the forest. And his audacious reconciliation is a mark not of frivolity, but of extreme seriousness. A man who deals in harmonies, who only matches stars with angels or lambs with spring flowers, he indeed may be frivolous, for he is taking one mood at a time and perhaps forgetting each mood as it passes. But a man who ventures to combine an angel and an octopus must have some serious view of the universe. The man who should write a dialogue between two early Christians might be a mere writer of dialogues. But a man who should write a dialogue between an early Christian and the missing link would have to be a philosopher. The more widely different the types talked of, the more serious and universal must be the philosophy which talks of them. The mark of the light and thoughtless writer is the harmony of his subject matter. The mark of the thoughtful writer is its apparent diversity. The most flippant lyric poet might write a pretty poem about lambs. But it requires something bolder and graver than a poet. It requires an ecstatic prophet to talk about the lion lying down with the lamb. Dickens, at any rate, strongly supports this conception that great literary men as such do not despise the purely pictorial. No man's works have so much the quality of illustrating themselves. Few men's works have been more thoroughly and eagerly illustrated. Few men's works cannot have been better fun to illustrate. As a rule, this fascinating quality in the mere fantastic figures of the tale was inseparable from their farcical quality in the tale. Stiggens' red nose is distinctly connected with the fact that he is a member of the Ebenezer Temperance Association. Quilp is little because a little of him goes a long way. Mr. Karker smiles, and smiles, and is a villain. Mr. Shad banned his fat because, in his case, to be fat is to be hated. The story is immeasurably more important than the picture. It is not mere indulgence in the picture, ask. Generally, it is an intellectual love of the comic. Not a pure love of the grotesque. But in one book Dickens suddenly confesses that he likes the grotesque even without the comic. In one case he makes clear that he enjoys pure pictures with a pure love of the picturesque. That place is Barnaby-Rudge. There had indeed been hints of it in many episodes in his books, notably, for example, in that fine scene in the Death of Quilp, a scene in which the dwarf remains fantastic long after he has ceased to be in any way funny. Still the dwarf was meant to be funny. Humor of a horrible kind, but still humor, is the purpose of Quilp's existence and position in the book. Laughter is the object of all his oddities. But the laughter is not the object of Barnaby-Rudge's oddities. His idiot costume and his ugly raven are used for the purpose of the pure grotesque solely to make a certain kind of gothic sketch. It is commonly this love of pictures that drives men back upon the historical novel. But it is very typical of Dickens, living interest in his own time, that though he wrote two historical novels, they were neither of them very ancient history. They were both indeed a very recent history. Only they were those parts of recent history which were especially picturesque. I do not think that this was due to enemy or consciousness on its part that he knew no history. Undoubtedly he knew no history, and he may or may not have been conscious of the fact. But the consciousness did not prevent him from writing a history of England. Nor did it prevent him from interlarding all or any of his works with tales of the pictorial past, such as the tale of the broken swords in Master Humphrey's clock or the indefensively delightful nightmare of the lady in the stagecoach, which helps to soften the amiable end of Pickwick. Neither, worst of all, did it prevent him from dogmatizing anywhere and everywhere about the past, of which he knew nothing. It did not prevent him from telling the bells to tell Troc-TVec that the Middle Ages were a failure, nor from solemnly declaring that the best thing that the medieval monks did was to create the mean and snubbish quietude of a modern cathedral city. No, it was not historical reverence that held him back from dealing with the remote past, but rather something much better, a living interest in the living century in which he was born. He would have thought himself quite intellectually capable of writing a novel about the Council of Trent or the First Crusade. He would have thought himself quite equal to analyzing the psychology of Abelard, or giving a bright, satiric sketch of St. Augustine. It must frankly be confessed that it was not a sense of his own unworthiness that held him back. I fear it was rather a sense of St. Augustine's unworthiness. He could not see the point of any history before the first slow swell of the French Revolution. He could understand the revolutions of the 18th century. All the other revolutions of history, so many and so splendid, were unmeaning to him. But the revolutions of the 18th century he did understand, and to them therefore he went back, as all historical novelists go back, in search of the picturesque. And from this fact an important result follows. The result that follows is this, that his only two historical novels are both tales of revolutions of 18th century revolutions. These two 18th century revolutions may seem to differ, and perhaps do differ in everything except in being revolutions and of the 18th century. The French Revolution, which is the theme of a tale of two cities, was a revolt in favour of all that is now called Enlightenment and Liberation. The great Gordon Riot, which is the theme of Barnaby Rudge, was a revolt in favour of something which would now be called mere ignorant and obscurantist Protestantism. Nevertheless, both belonged more typically to the age out of which Dickens came, the great sceptical and yet creative 18th century of Europe. Whether a mob rose on the right side or the wrong, they both belonged to the time in which a mob could rise, in which a mob could conquer. No growth of intellectual science or of moral cowardice had made it impossible to fight in the streets, whether for the Republic or for the Bible. If we wished to know what was the real link, existing actually an ultimate truth, existing unconsciously in Dickens' mind, which connected the Gordon Riots with the French Revolution, the link may be defined, though not within a great adequacy. The nearest and truest way of stating it is that neither of the two could possibly happen in Fleet Street tomorrow evening. Another point of resemblance between the two books might be found in the fact that they both contained the sketch of the same kind of 18th century aristocrat, if indeed that kind of aristocrat really existed in the 18th century. The diabolical dandy with the rapier and the sneer is at any rate a necessity of all normal plays and romances. Hence Mr. Chester has a right to exist in this romance, and Foulon a right to exist in a page of history, almost as cloudy and disreputable as a romance. What Dickens and other romances do probably admit from the picture of the 18th century oligarch is probably his liberality. It must never be forgotten that even when he was a despot in practice, he was generally a liberal in theory. Dickens and romances make the pre-revolution tyrant a sincere believer in tyranny. Generally he was not. He was a skeptic about everything, even about his own position. The romantic Foulon says of the people let them eat grass with bitter and deliberate contempt. The real Foulon, if ever he said it at all, probably said it as a sort of dreary joke, because he couldn't think of any other way out of the problem. Simply Mr. Chester, as cynic as he is, believes seriously in the beauty of being a gentleman. A real man of that type probably disbelieved in that, as in everything else. Dickens was too bracing. One may say too bouncing himself to understand the psychology of fatigue in a protected and leisure class. He could understand a tyrant like Quillp, a tyrant who is on his throne because he has climbed up into it like a monkey. He could not understand a tyrant who is on his throne because he is too weary to get out of it. The old aristocrats were in a dead way, quite good natured. They were even humanitarians, which perhaps accounts for the extent to which they roused against themselves the healthy hatred of humanity. But they were tired humanitarians, tired with doing nothing. Figures like that of Mr. Chester therefore fail somewhat to give the true sense of something hopeless and helpless, which led men to despair of the upper class. He has a boyish pleasure in play-acting. He has an interest in life. Being a villain is his hobby. But the true man of that type had found all hobbies fail him. He had wearied of himself as he had wearied of a hundred women. He was graceful and could not even admire himself in the glass. He was witty and could not even laugh at his own jokes. Dickens could never understand tedium. There is no mark more strange and perhaps sinister of the interesting and not very sane condition of our modern literature than the fact that tedium has been admirably described in it. Our best modern writers are never so exciting as they are about dullness. Mr. Rudyard Kipling is never so powerful as when he is painting yawning deserts, aching silences, sleeping nights, or in infernal isolation. The excitement in one of the stories of Mr. Henry James becomes tense, thrilling, and almost intolerable in all the half hours during which nothing whatever is said or done. We are entering again into the mind, into the real mind of Fulon and Mr. Chester. We begin to understand the deep despair of those tyrants whom our fathers pulled down. But Dickens could never have understood that despair. It was not in his soul, and it is an interesting coincidence that here, in this book of Barnaby Rudge, there is a character meant to be Holy Grotesque who nevertheless expresses much of that element in Dickens which prevented him from being a true interpreter of the tired and skeptical aristocrat. In Tapertite is a fool, but a perfectly honorable fool. It requires some sincerity to pose. Posing means that one has not dried up in oneself all the youthful and innocent vanities with that slow paralysis of mere pride. Posing means that one is still fresh enough to enjoy the good opinion of one's fellows. On the other hand, the true cynic has not enough truth in him to attempt the effectation. He has never even seen the truth far less dry to imitate it. Now we might very well take the type of Mr. Chester on the one hand and of Sim-Tapertite on the other, as marking the issue, the conflict, and the victory, which really ushered in the nineteenth century. Dickens was very like Sim-Tapertite. The liberal revolution was very like a Sim-Tapertite revolution. It was vulgar. It was overdone. It was absurd, but it was alive. Dickens was vulgar, was absurd, overdid everything, but he was alive. The aristocrats were perfectly correct, but quite dead, dead long before they were guillotined. The classics and critics who lamented that Dickens was no gentleman were quite right, but quite dead. The revolution thought itself rational, but so did Sim-Tapertite. It was really a huge revolt of romanticism against a reason which had grown sick even of itself. Sim-Tapertite rose against Mr. Chester, and, thank God, he put his foot upon his neck. The end of CHAPTER XII. Preciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens by G. K. Chesterton. American Notes American Notes was written soon after Dickens had returned from his first visit to America. That visit had, of course, been a great epic in his life. But how much of an epic men did not truly realize until some time after, in the middle of a quiet story about Salisbury and a ridiculous architect? His feelings flamed out and flared up to the stars in Martin Cheslowit. In the American Notes, however, are not interesting because in them he betrays his feelings when he does not know that he is betraying them. Dickens' first visit to America was from his own point of view and, at the beginning, a happy and festive experiment. It is very characteristic of him that he went among the Americans, enjoyed them, even admired them, and then had a quarrel with them. Nothing was ever so unmistakable as his good will, except his ill will, and they were never far apart. And this was not, as some bloodless moderns have sneeringly insinuated, a mere repetition of the proximity between the benevolent stage and the quarrelsome stage of drink. It was a piece of pure optimism. He believed so readily that men were going to be good to him, that an injury to him was something more than an injury. It was a shock. What was the exact nature of the American shock must, however, be more carefully stated. The famous quarrel between Dickens and America, which finds its most elaborate expression in American Notes, though its most brilliant expression in Martin Chuzzlewit, is an incident about which a great deal remains to be said. But the thing which most specially remains to be said is this. This old Anglo-American quarrel was much more fundamentally friendly than most Anglo-American alliances. In Dickens' day, each nation understood the other enough to argue. In our time neither nation understands itself even enough to quarrel. There was an English tradition from Fox and 18th century England. There was an American tradition from Franklin and 18th century America. They were still close enough together to discuss their differences with acrimony, perhaps, but with certain fundamental understandings. The 18th century belief in a liberal civilization was still a dogma, for dogma is the only thing that makes argument or reasoning possible. America, under all its swagger, did still really believe that Europe was its fountain and its mother, because Europe was more fully civilized. Dickens, under all his disgust, did still believe that America was in advance of Europe, because it was more democratic. It was an age, in short, in which the word progress could still be used reasonably, because the whole world looked to one way of escape, and there was only one kind of progress under discussion. Now, of course, progress is a useless word, for progress takes for granted an already defined direction, and it is exactly about the direction that we disagree. Do not let us therefore be misled into any mistaken optimism or special self-congratulation upon what many people would call the improved relations between England and America. The relations are improved because America has finally become a foreign country, and with foreign countries all sane men take care to exchange a certain consideration and courtesy. And even as late as the time of Dickens' first visit to the United States, we English still felt America as a colony, an insolent, offensive, and even unintelligible colony sometimes, but still a colony, a part of our civilization, a limb of our life. And America itself, as I have said, under all its bounds and independence, really regarded us as a mother country. This being the case, it was possible for us to quarrel like kinsmen. Now we only bow and smile like strangers. This tone, as a sort of family responsibility, can be felt quite specially all through the sad tires or suggestions of these American notes. Dickens is cross with America because he is worried about America as if he were its father. He explores his industrial, legal, and educational arrangements like a mother looking at the housekeeping of a married son. He makes suggestions with a certain acidity. He takes a strange pleasure in being pessimistic. He advises them to take note how much better certain things are done in England. All this is very different from Dickens' characteristic way of dealing with a foreign country. In countries really foreign, such as France, Switzerland, and Italy, he had two attitudes, neither of them in the least worried or paternal. When he found a thing in Europe which he did not understand, such as the Roman Catholic Church, he simply called it an old world superstition and sat looking at it like a moonlit ruin. When he found something that he did understand, such as lunch and baskets, he burst into carol's appraise over the superior sense in our civilization and good management to continental methods. An example of the first attitude may be found in one of his letters, in which he describes the backwardness and idleness of Catholics who would not build the Birmingham in Italy. He seems quite unconscious of the obvious truth that the backwardness of Catholics was simply the refusal of Bob Cratchit to enter the house of Gredgegrind. An example of the second attitude can be found in the purple patches of fun in Mugbee Junction, in which the English waitress denounces the profligate French habit of providing new bread and clean food for people traveling by rail. The point is, however, that in neither case has he the air of one suggesting improvements or sharing a problem with the people engaged on it. He does not go carefully with a notebook through Jesuit schools nor offer friendly suggestions to the governors of Parisian prisons. Or if he does, it is in different spirit. It is in the spirit of an ordinary tourist being shown over the Coliseum or the pyramids, but he visited America in the spirit of a government inspector dealing with something it was his duty to inspect. This is never felt either in his praise or blame of continental countries. When he did not leave a foreign country to decay like a dead dog, he merely watched it play like a kitten. France he mistook for a kitten, Italy he mistook for a dead dog. But with America he could feel and fear. There he could hate, because he could love. There he could feel not the past alone nor the present, but the future also, and like all brave men when he saw the future he was a little afraid of it. For all tests by which good citizen and strong reformer can be distinguished from the vague fattest and inhuman skeptic, I know no better test than this, that the unreal reformer sees in front of him one certain future. The future of his fad, while the real reformer sees before him ten or twenty futures among which his country must choose, and may in some dreadful hour choose the wrong one. The true patriot is always doubtful of victory, because he knows that he is dealing with a living thing, a thing with free will. To be certain of free will is to be uncertain of success. The subject matter of the real difference of opinion between Dickens and the public of America can only be understood if it is thus treated as the dispute between brothers about the destiny of a common heritage. The point at issue might be stated like this. Dickens on his side did not in his heart doubt for a moment that England would eventually follow America along the road towards real political equality and purely Republican institutions. He lived, it must be remembered, before the revival of aristocracy which has since overwhelmed us. The revival of aristocracy works through popular science and commercial dictatorship, and which has nowhere been more manifest than in America itself. He knew nothing of this. In his heart he conceded to the Yankees that not only was their revolution right, but would ultimately be completed everywhere. But on the other hand, his whole point against the American experiment was this, that if it ignored certain ancient English contributions, it would go to pieces for lack of them. Of this the first was good manners, and the second individual liberty, liberty that is to speak and write against the trend of the majority. In these things he was much more serious and much more sensible than it is the fashion to think he was. He was indeed one of the most serious and sensible critics England has ever had of current and present problems, though his criticism is useless to the point of non-engity about all things remote from him in style of civilization or in time. His point about good manners is really important. All his brumblings through his book of American notes, all his shrieking satire in Martin Chuselwit, are expressions of a grave and reasonable fear he had touching the future of democracy. And remember again what has been already remarked instinctively he paid America the compliment of looking at her as the future of democracy. The mistake which he attacked still exists. I cannot imagine why it is that social equality is somehow supposed to mean social familiarity. Why should equality mean that all men are equally rude? Should it not rather mean that all men are equally polite? Might it not quite reasonably mean that all men should be equally ceremonious and stately and pontifical? What is there especially equalitarian, for instance, in calling your political friends and even your political enemies by their Christian names in public? There is something very futile in the way in which certain socialist leaders call each other Tom, Dick and Harry. Especially when Tom is accusing Harry of having basely imposed upon the well-known impassility of Dick. There is something quite undemocratic in all men calling each other by the special and affectionate term comrade. Especially when they say it with a sneer and smart inquiry about the funds. Democracy would be quite satisfied if every man called every other man sir. Democracy would have no conceivable reason to complain if every man called every other man your excellency or your holiness or brother of the sun and moon. The only democratic essential is that it should be a term of dignity and that it should be given to all. To abolish all terms of dignity is no more specially democratic than the Roman emperor's wish to cut off everybody's head at once was especially democratic. That involved equality certainly, but it was lacking in respect. Dickens saw America as markedly the seat of this danger. He saw that there was a perilous possibility that Republican ideals might be allied to a social anarchy, good neither for them nor for any other ideals. Republican simplicity, which is difficult, might be quickly turned into Bohemian brutality, which is easy. Sincenatus, instead of putting his hand to the plow, might put his feet on the tablecloth, and an impression prevail that it was all part of the same rugged equality and freedom. This might become a tradition. Bad manners might have all the sanctity of good manners. There you are, cries Martin Chuzzlewitt indignantly when the American has befouled the butter. A man deliberately makes a hug of himself, and that is an institution. But the threat of thought, which we must always keep in hand in this matter, is that he would not thus have worried about the degradation of Republican simplicity into general rudeness if he had not from first to last instinctively felt that America held human democracy in her hand, to exalt it or to let it fall. In one of his gloomier moments he wrote down his fear that the greatest blow ever struck at liberty would be struck by America in the failure of her mission upon the earth. This brings us to the other ground of his alarm, the matter of liberty of speech. Here also he was much more reasonable and philosophic than has commonly been realized. The truth is that the lurid individualism of Carlisle has with its violent colors killed the tones of most criticism of his time, and just as we can often see a scheme of decoration better if we cover some flaming picture, so you can judge nineteenth-century England much better if you leave Carlisle out. He is important to moderns because he led that return to Toreism which has been the chief feature of modernity. But his judgments were often not only spiritually false, but really quite superficial. Dickens understood the dangers of democracy far better than Carlisle, just as he understood the merits of democracy far better than Carlisle. And of this fact we can produce one plain evidence in the matter of which we speak. Carlisle, in general dislike of the revolutionary movement, lumped liberty and democracy together and said that the chief objection to democracy was that it involved the excess and misuse of liberty. He called democracy anarchy or no rule. Dickens, with far more philosophical insight and spiritual delicacy, saw that the real danger of democracy is that it tends to the very opposite of anarchy, even to the very opposite of liberty. He lamented in America the freedom of manners, but he lamented even more the absence of freedom of opinion. I believe there is no country on the face of the earth, he says, where there is less freedom of opinion on any subject in reference to which there is a broad difference of opinion than in this. There I write the words with reluctance, disappointment, and sorrow, but I believe it from the bottom of my soul. The notion that I, a man alone by myself in America, should venture to suggest to the Americans that there was one point on which they were neither just to their own countrymen nor to us, actually struck the boldest dumb. Washington, Irving, Prescott, Hoffman, Bryant, Halleck, Dana, Washington, Elliston. Every man who writes in this country is devoted to the question and not one of them dares to raise his voice and complain of the atrocious state of the law. The wonder is that a breathing man can be found with timarity enough to suggest to the Americans the possibility of their having done wrong. I wish you could have seen the faces that I saw down both sides of the table at Hartford when I began to talk about Scott. I wish you could have heard how I gave it out. My blood so boiled when I thought of the monstrous injustice that I felt as if it were twelve feet high when I thrust it down their throats. Dickens knew no history, but he had all history behind him in feeling that a pure democracy does tend, when it goes wrong, to be too traditional and absolute. The truth is indeed a singular example of the unfair attack upon democracy in our own time. Everybody can repeat the platitude that the mob can be the greatest of all tyrants. But few realize or remember the corresponding truth which goes along with it. That the mob is the only permanent and unassailable high priest. Today drives its traditions too hard, but democracy is the only thing that keeps any traditions. An aristocracy must always be going after some new thing. The severity of democracy is far more of a virtue than its liberty. The decorum of a democracy is far more of a danger than its lawlessness. Dickens discovered this in his great quarrels about the copyright, when a whole nation acted on a small point of opinion as if it were going to lynch him. But fortunately for the purpose of this argument, there is no need to go back to the forties for such a case. Another great literary man has of late visited America, and it is possible that Maxim Gorky may be in a position to state how far democracy is likely to err on the side of mere liberty and laxity. He may have found like Dickens some freedom of manners. He did not find much freedom of morals. Along with such American criticism should really go his very characteristic summary of the questions of the Red Indian. It marks the combination between the mental narrowness and the moral justice of the old liberal. Dickens can see nothing in the Red Indian except that he is barbaric, retrograde, bellicose, uncleanly, and superstitious. In short, that he is not a member of the special civilization of Birmingham or Brighton. It is curious to note the contrast between the cheery Nacogny contempt with which Dickens speaks of the American Indian and that chivalrous and pathetic essay in which Washington Irving celebrates the virtues of the vanishing race. Between Washington Irving and his friends Charles Dickens, there was always indeed this ironical comedy of inversion. It is amusing that the Englishman should have been the pushing and even pert modernist and the American, the stately antiquarian and lover of lost causes. But while a man of more mellow sympathies may well dislike Dickens' dislike of savages, and even disdain his disdain, he ought to sharply remind himself of the admirably ethical fairness and equity which meet with that restricted outlook. In the very act of describing Red Indians as devils who, like so much dirt, it would pay us to sweep away, he pauses to deny emphatically, that we have any right to sweep them away. We have no right to wrong the man, he means to say, even if he himself be a kind of wrong. Here we strike the ringing iron of the old conscience and sense of honor which mark the best men of his party and of his epic. This rigid and even reluctant justice towers at any rate far above modern views of savages, above the sentimentalism of the mere humanitarian, and the far weaker sentimentalism that pleas for brutality to wrong people, because they are nasty or humanitarian who cannot be just to them without pretending that they are nice. Pictures from Italy The pictures from Italy are excellent in themselves, and excellent as a foil to the American notes. Here we have none of that air of giving decisions like a judge or sending in a report like an inspector. Here we have only glimpses, light, and even fantastic glimpses of a world that is really alien to Dickens. It is so alien that he can almost entirely enjoy it, for no man can entirely enjoy that which he loves. Contentment is always unpatriotic. The difference can indeed be put with approximate perfection in one phrase. In Italy he was on a holiday. In America he was on a tour. But indeed Dickens himself has quite sufficiently conveyed the difference in the two phrases that he did actually use for the titles of the two books. Dickens often told unconscious truths, especially in small letters. The American notes, really are notes, like the notes of a student or a professional witness. The pictures from Italy are only pictures from Italy, like the miscellaneous pictures that all tourists bring from Italy. To take another, and perhaps closer, figure of speech, almost all Dickens' works, such as these, may best be regarded as private letters addressed to the public. His private correspondence was quite as brilliant as his public works, and many of his public works are almost as formless and casual as his private correspondence. If he had been struck insensible for a year, I really think that his friends and family could have brought out one of his best books by themselves if they had happened to keep his letters. The homogeneity of his public and private work was indeed strange in many ways. On the one hand there was little that was pompously and unmistakably public in the publications, and on the other hand there is very little that was private in the private letters. His hilarity had almost a kind of hardness about it. No man's letters, I should think, ever needed less expurgation on the ground of weakness or undue confession. The main part, and certainly the best part of such a book as pictures from Italy, can certainly be criticized best as part of that perpetual taunt of entertaining autobiography which he flung at his children as if they were his readers, and his readers as if they were his children. There are some brilliant patches of sense and nonsense in this book, but there is always something accidental in them as if they might have occurred somewhere else. Perhaps the most attractive of them is the incomparable description of the Italian marionette theater in which they acted a play about the death of Napoleon in St. Helena. The description is better than that of Codlan and Schwartz's Punch and Judy, and almost as good as that of Mrs. Jarlies' waxworks. Indeed, the humor is similar, for Punch is supposed to be funny, but Napoleon, as Mrs. Jarlies said when asked if her show was funnier than Punch, was not funny at all. The idea of a really tragic scene being enacted between tiny wooden dolls with large heads is delightfully dealt with by Dickens. We can almost imagine the scene in which the wooden Napoleon haughtily rebukes his wooden jailer for calling him General Bonaparte. Sir Hudson Lowe, call me not thus. I am Napoleon, Emperor of the French. There is also something singularly gratifying about the scene of Napoleon's death, in which he lay in bed with his little wooden hands outside the counterpane, and the doctor, who was hung on wires too short, delivered medical opinions in the air. It may seem flippant to dwell on such flippancies in connection with the book which contains many romantic descriptions and many moral generalizations, which Dickens probably valued highly, but it is not for such things that he is valued. In all his writings, from his most reasoned and sustained novel, to his maddest private note, it is always this obstreperous instinct for farce, which stands out as his in the highest sense. His wisdom is at the best talent. His foolishness is genius. Just that exuberant levity which we associate with the moment we associate in his case with immortality, it is said of certain old masonry that the mortar was so hard that it has survived the stones. So if Dickens could revisit the thing he built, he would be surprised to see all the work he thought solid and responsible wasted almost utterly away, but the shortest frivolities and the most momentous jokes remaining lie colossal rocks forever.