 Chapter 7 of G. K. Chesterton's Charles Dickens. Dickens and Christmas In the July of 1844, Dickens went on an Italian tour, which he afterward summarized in the book called Pictures from Italy. They are, of course, very vivacious, but there is no great need to insist on them considered as Italian sketches. There is no need, whatever, to worry about them as a phase in the mind of Dickens when he traveled out of England. He never traveled out of England. There is no trace in all these amusing pages that he really felt the great foreign things which lie in wait for us in the south of Europe. The Latin civilization, the Catholic Church, the art of the centre, the endless end of Rome. His travels are not travels in Italy, but travels in Dickens' land. He sees amusing things, he describes them amusingly, but he would have seen things just as good in a street in Pimlico, and describe them just as well. Few things were racier, even in his raciest novel, than his description of the marionette play of the death of Napoleon. Nothing could be more perfect than the figure of the doctor, which had something wrong with its wires and hence hovered above the couch and delivered medical opinions in the air. Nothing could be better as catching of the spirit of all popular drama than the colossal depravity of the wooden image of Sir Udston Lowe. But there is nothing Italian about it. Dickens would have made just as good fun, indeed just the same fun, of a punch in Judy Show performing in Longacre or in Lincoln's Inn Fields. Dickens uttered just and sincere satire on a plonish in a pod snap, but Dickens was as English as any pod snap or any plonish. He had a hearty humanitarianism and a hearty sense of justice to all nations so far as he understood it. But that very kind of humanitarianism, that very kind of justice, were English. He was the Englishman of the type that made free trade the most English of all things, since it was at once calculating and optimistic. He respected catacombs and gondolas, but that very respect was English. He wondered at brigands and volcanoes, but that very wonder was English. The very conception that Italy consists of these things was an English conception. The root of things he never understood. The Roman legend, the ancient life of the Mediterranean, the world-old civilization of the vine and olive, the mystery of the immutable church. He never understood these things, and I am glad to say he never understood them. He could only have understood them by ceasing to be the inspired cockney that he was, the rousing English radical of the great radical age in England. That spirit of his was one of the things that we have had which were truly national. All other forces we have borrowed, especially those which flatter us most. Imperialism is foreign, Socialism is foreign, Militarism is foreign, Education is foreign. Strictly even Liberalism is foreign, but Radicalism was our own, as English as the heteros. Dickens abroad then was for all serious purposes simply the Englishman abroad. The Englishman man abroad is for all serious purposes simply the Englishman at home. Of this generalization one modification must be made. Dickens did feel a direct pleasure in the bright and busy exterior of the French life. The clean caps, the colored uniforms, the skies like blue and ammel, the little green trees, the little white houses, the scene picked out in primary colors like a child's picture book. As he felt, and as he put, by a stroke of genius, into the mouth of Mrs. Lyriper, a London landlady on a holiday, where Dickens always knew that it is the simple and not the subtle who feel differences, and he saw all his colors through the clear eyes of the poor. And in thus taking to his heart the streets, as it were, rather than the spires of the Continent, he showed beyond question that combination of which we have spoken, for it is for the sake of the streets and shops and the coats and the hats that we should go abroad. They are far better worth going to see than the castles and cathedrals and Roman camps. For the wonders of the world are the same all over the world, at least all over the European world. Marvels that throw valleys in the shadow, ministers that strike the sky, roads so old that they seem to have been made by the gods, these are all Christian countries. The marvels of man are at all our doors. A laborer hoeing turnips in Sussex has no need to be ignorant that the bones of Europe are the Roman roads. A clerk living in Lambeth has no need not to know that there was a Christian art exuberant in the thirteenth century, for only across the river he can see the live stones of the Middle Ages surging together towards the stars. But exactly the things that do strike the traveler as extraordinary are the ordinary things, the food, the clothes, the vehicles, the strange things are cosmopolitan, the common things are national and peculiar. Marvel's spire is lifted on the same arches as Canterbury, but the thing you cannot see out of Germany is a German beer garden. There's no need for a Frenchman to go look at Westminster Abbey as a piece of English architecture, it is not in the special sense a piece of English architecture, but a handsome cab is a piece of English architecture, a thing produced by the peculiar poetry of our cities, the symbol of a certain reckless comfort which is really English, a thing to draw a pilgrimage of the nations, the imaginative Englishman will be found all day in a cafe, the imaginative Frenchman in a handsome cab. This sort of pleasure Dickens took in the Latin life, but no deeper kind, and the strongest of all possible indications of his fundamental detachment from it can be found in one fact. A great part of the time that he was in Italy, he was engaged in writing the chimes, and such Christmas tales, tales of Christmas in the English towns, tales full of fog and snow and hail and happiness. Dickens could find in any street divergences between man and man deeper than the divisions of nations. His fault was to exaggerate differences. He could find types almost as distinct as separate tribes of animals in his own brain and his own city, those two homes of a magnificent chaos. The only two Southerners introduced prominently into his novels, the two in Little Dorrit, are popular English foreigners, a had almost said stage foreigners. Villainy is, in English eyes, a southern trait. Therefore one of the foreigners is villainous. Vivacity is, in English eyes, another southern trait, therefore the other foreigner is vivacious. But we can see from the outlines of both that Dickens did not have to go to Italy to get them. While poor panting millionaires, poor tired earls, and poor God-forsaken American men of culture are plotting about in Italy for literary inspiration, Charles Dickens made up the whole of that Italian romance, as I strongly suspect, from the faces of two London organ grinders. In the sunlight of the southern world he was still dreaming of the firelight of the north. Among the palaces and the white campanelli he shut his eyes to see Marleybone and dreamed a lovely dream of chimney-pots. He was not happy, he said, without streets. The very foulness and smoke of London were lovable in his eyes and fill his Christmas tales with the vivid vapor. In the clear skies of the south he saw a far-off, the fog of London, like a sunset cloud, and longed to be in the core of it. This Christmas tone of Dickens, in connection with his travels, is a matter that can only be expressed by a parallel with one of his other works. Much the same that has here been said of his pictures from Italy may be said about his child's history of England. But the difference that, while the pictures from Italy do in a sense add to his fame, the history of England, in his almost every sense, detracts from it. But the nature of the limitation is the same. What Dickens was, travelling in distant lands, that he was travelling in distant ages, a sturdy, sentimental English radical, with a large heart and a narrow mind. He could not help falling into that besetting the sin or weakness of the modern progressive, the habit of regarding the contemporary questions as the eternal questions and the latest word as the last. He could not get out of his head the instinctive conception that the real problem before St. Dunstan was whether he should support Lord John Russell or Sir Robert Peel. He could not help seeing the remotest peaks lit up by the raging bonfire of his own passionate political crisis. He lived for the instant and its urgency. That is, he did what St. Dunstan did. He lived in an eternal present like all simple men. It is indeed a child's history of England. But the child is the writer and not the reader. But Dickens in his cheapest cockney utilitarianism was not only English, but unconsciously historic. Even him descended the real tradition of Mary England and not upon the pellet medievalists who thought they were reviving it. The pre-Raphaelites, the gothicists, the admirers of Middle Ages, had in their subtlety and sadness the spirit of the present day. Dickens had in his buffoonery and bravery the spirit of the Middle Ages. He was much more medieval in his attacks on medievalism than they were in their defences of it. It was he who had the things of Chaucer, the love of large jokes and long stories and brown ale, and all the white roads of England. Like Chaucer he loved story within story, every man telling a tale. Like Chaucer he saw something openly comic in men's motley trades. Sam Weller would have been a great gain to the Canterbury pilgrimage and told an admirable story. Zeddy's Demoiselle would have been a great bore, regarded as too fast by the pyrrhus and too frigish by the wife of Bath. It is said that in the somewhat sickly Victorian revival of feudalism, which was called Young England, a nobleman hired a hermit to live in his grounds. It is also said that the hermit struck for more beer. Whether this anecdote be true or not, it is always told as showing a collapse from the ideal of the Middle Ages to the level of the present day. But in the mere act of striking for beer, the holy man was much more medieval than the fool who employed him. It would be hard to find a better example of this than Dickon's great defense of Christmas. In fighting for Christmas he was fighting for the old European festival, pagan and Christian, for that trinity of eating, drinking and praying, which to moderns appears irreverent, for the holy day, which is really a holiday. He had himself the most babyish ideas about the past. He supposed the Middle Ages to have consisted of tournaments and torture chambers. He supposed himself to be a brisk man of the manufacturing age, almost the utilitarian. But for all that he defended the medieval feast, which was going out against the utilitarianism which was coming in. He could only see all that was bad in medievalism, but he fought for all that was good in it. And he was all the more reliant sympathy with the old strength and simplicity, because he only knew that it was good, and did not know that it was old. He cared as little for medievalism as a medievalist did. He cared as much as they did for lustiness and virile laughter and lustiness had tales of good lovers and pleasant tales of good livers. He would have been very much bored by Ruskin and Walter Pater if they had explained to him the strange, sunset tints of lippy and butter-chelly. He had no pleasure in looking on the dying Middle Ages, but he looked on the living Middle Ages, on a piece of the old, uproarious superstition still unbroken, and he hailed it like a new religion. The Dickens character ate pudding to an extent at which the modern medievalists turned pale. They would do every kind of honor to an old observance, except observing it. They would pay to a church feast every sort of compliment except feasting. And as I have said, as were his unconscious relations to our European past, so were his unconscious relations to England. He imagined himself to be, if anything, a sort of cosmopolitan. At any rate, to be a champion of the charms and merits of continental lands against the arrogance of our island. But he was in truth very much more a champion of the old in genuine England against that comparatively cosmopolitan England, which we have all lived to see. And here again the supreme example is Christmas. Christmas is, as I have said, one of numberless old European feasts, of which the essence is the combination of religion with merry-making. But among those feasts it is also especially and distinctively English in the style of its merry-making, and even in the style of its religion. For the character of Christmas, as distinct, for instance, from the continental Easter, lies chiefly in two things. First on the terrestrial side, the note of comfort rather than the note of brightness. And on the spiritual side, Christian charity rather than Christian ecstasy. And comfort is, like charity, a very English instinct. Nay, comfort is, like charity, an English merit. Though our comfort may and does degenerate into materialism, just as our charity may and does degenerate into laxity and make-believe. This ideal of comfort belongs peculiarly to England. It belongs peculiarly to Christmas. Above all, it belongs preeminently to Dickens, and it is astonishingly misunderstood. It is misunderstood by the continent of Europe. It is, if possible, still more misunderstood by the English of today. On the continent, the restauranters provide us with raw beef, as if we were savages. Yet, bold English cooking takes as much care as French. And in England has arisen a parvenu patronism, which represents the English as everything but English. As a blend of Chinese stoicism, Latin militarism, Prussian rigidity, and American bad taste. And so England, whose fault is gentility and whose virtue is geniality. England, with her tradition of the great gay gentleman of Elizabeth, is represented to the four quarters of the world, as in Mr. Kipling's religious pawns, in the enormous image of a solemn cad. And because it is very difficult to be comfortable in the suburbs, the suburbs have voted that comfort is a gross and material thing. Comfort, especially this vision of Christmas comfort, is the reverse of a gross material thing. It is far more poetical, properly speaking, than the garden of Epicurus. It is far more artistic than the palace of art. It is more artistic because it is based upon a contrast, a contrast between the fire and wine within the house and the winter and the roaring rains without. It is far more poetical, because there is in it a note of defense, almost of war, a note of being besieged by the snow and hail, of making merry in the belly of a fort, the man who said that an Englishman's house is his castle, said much more than he meant. The Englishman thinks of his house as something fortified and provisioned, and his very surliness is at root romantic. And this sense would naturally be strongest in wild winter nights, when the lowered portacolis and the lifted drawbridge do not merely bar people out, but bar people in. The Englishman's house is most sacred, not merely when a king cannot enter it, but when the Englishman cannot get out of it. This comfort, then, is an abstract thing, a principle. The English poor shut all their doors and windows till their rooms reek like the black hall. They are suffering for an idea. Mere animal hedonism would not dream, as we English do, of winter feasts and little rooms, but of eating fruit in large and idle gardens. Mere sensuality would desire to please all its senses, but to our good dreams this dark and dangerous background is essential. The highest pleasure we can imagine is a defiant pleasure, a happiness that stands at bay. The word comfort is not indeed the right word. It conveys too much of the slander of mere sense. The true word is coziness, a word not translatable. One, at least, of the essentials of it is smallness. Smallness in preference to largeness. Smallness for smallness sake. The merry-maker wants a pleasant parlor. He would not give two pence for a pleasant continent. In our difficult time, of course, a fight for mere space has become necessary. Instead of being greedy for ale and the Christmas pudding, we are greedy for mere air. An equally sensual appetite. In abnormal conditions, this is wise, and the illimitable veldt is an excellent thing for nervous people. But our fathers were large and healthy enough to make a thing humane and not worry about whether it was hygienic. They were big enough to get into smaller rooms. Of this, quite deliberate and artistic quality in the close Christmas chamber. The standing evidence is Dickens in Italy. He created these dim, fire-lit tales like little dim red jewels as an artistic necessity in the center of an endless summer. Amid the white cities of Tuscany, he hungered for something romantic and wrote about a rainy Christmas. Amid the pictures of the Euphesie, he starved for something beautiful and fed his memory on London fog. His feeling for the fog was especially poignant and typical. In the first of his Christmas tales, the popular Christmas Carol, he suggested the very soul of it in one simile, when he spoke of the dense air, suggesting that nature was brewing on a large scale. This sense of the thick atmosphere as something to eat or drink, something not only solid but satisfactory, may seem almost insane. But it is no exaggeration of Dickens' emotion. We speak of a fog that cut with a knife. Dickens would have liked the phrase as suggesting that the fog was a colossal cake. He liked even more his own phrase of the titanic brewery. And no dream would have given him a wilder pleasure than to grope his way to some such tremendous vats and drink the ale of the giants. There is a current prejudice against fogs, and Dickens perhaps is their only poet. Considered hygienically, no doubt this may be more or less excusable. But considered poetically, fog is not undeserving. It has a real significance. We have in our great cities abolished the clean and sane darkness of the country. We have outlawed night and sent her wandering in wild meadows. We have lit eternal watchfires against her return. We have made a new cosmos, and as a consequence, our own sun and stars. And as a consequence also, and most justly, we have made our own darkness. Just as every lamp is a warm human moon, so every fog is a rich human nightfall. If it were not for this mystic accident, we should never see darkness, and he who has never seen darkness has never seen the sun. Fog for us is the chief form of that outward pressure, which compresses mere luxury into real comfort. It makes the world small, in the same spirit, in that common and happy cry that the world is small, meaning that it is full of friends. The first man that emerges out of the mist with a light is for us Prometheus, a savior bringing fire to man. He is that greatest and best of all men, greater than the heroes, better than the saints, man Friday. Every rumble of a cart, every cry in the distance, marks the heart of humanity beating, undaunted in the darkness. It is holy human, man toiling in his own cloud. If real darkness is like the embrace of God, this is the dark embrace of man. In such a sacred cloud the tale called the Christmas Carol begins, the first and most typical of all his Christmas tales. It is not irrelevant to dilate upon the genealogy of this darkness, because it is characteristic of Dickens that his atmospheres are more important than his stories. The Christmas atmosphere is more important than Scrooge, or the ghosts either. In a sense the background is more important than the figures. The same thing may be noticed in his dealings with that other atmosphere beside that of good humor, which he excelled in creating an atmosphere of mystery and wrong, such as that what she gathers round Mrs. Clinton, rigid in her chair, or old Miss Havisham, ironically robed as a bride. Here again the atmosphere altogether eclipses the story, which often seems disappointing in comparison. The secrecy is sensational, the secret is tame. The surface of the thing seems more awful than the core of it. It seems almost as if these grizzly figures, Mrs. Shadband and Mrs. Clinton, Miss Havisham and Miss Flight, Nemo and Sally Brass, were keeping something back from the author, as well as from the reader. When the book closes we do not know their real secret. They soothe the optimistic Dickens with something less terrible than the truth. The dark house of Arthur Klanum's childhood really depresses us. It is a true glimpse into that quiet street in hell, where live the children of that unique dispensation, which theologians call Calvinism, and Christians devil worship. But some stranger crime had really been done there. Some more monstrous blasphemy or human sacrifice than the suppression of some silly document advantageous to the silly Doritz. Something worse than a common tale of jilting lay behind the masquerade and madness of the awful Miss Havisham. Something worse was whispered by the misshapen quilt to the sinister Sally in that wild, wet summer house by the river. Something worse than the clumsy plot against the clumsy kit. These dark pictures seemed almost as if they were literally visions, things that is, that Dickens saw, but did not understand. And as with his backgrounds of gloom, so with his backgrounds of goodwill, in such tales as the Christmas Carol, the tone of the tale is kept throughout in a happy monotony, though the tale is everywhere regular and in some places weak. It has the same kind of artistic unity that belongs to a dream. A dream may begin with the end of the world and end with a tea party, but either the end of the world will end as a trivial as a tea party, or that tea party will be as terrible as the day of doom. The incidents change wildly. The story scarcely changes at all. The Christmas Carol is the kind of philanthropic dream and enjoyable nightmare in which the scene shift bewilderingly and seem as miscellaneous as the pictures in a scrapbook, but in which there is one constant state of the soul, a state of rowdy benediction and a hunger for human faces. The beginning is about a winter day and a miser, yet the beginning is in no way bleak. The author starts with a kind of happy howl. He bangs on our door like a drunken Carol singer. His style is festive and popular. He compares the snow and hail to philanthropists who come down handsomely. He compares the fog to unlimited beer. Scrooge is not really inhuman at the beginning any more than he is at the end. There is a hardiness in his inhospitable sentiments that is akin to humor and therefore to humanity. He is only across the old bachelor and had, I strongly suspect, given away turkey secretly all his life. The beauty and the real blessing of the story do not lie in the mechanical plot of it. The repentance of Scrooge, probable or improbable, they lie in the great furnace of real happiness that glows through Scrooge and everything around him, that great furnace, the heart of Dickens. Whether the Christmas visions would or would not convert Scrooge, they convert us. Whether or no, the visions were evoked by real spirits of the past, present, and future, they were evoked by that truly exalted order of angels who are correctly called high spirits. They are impelled and sustained by a quality which our contemporary artists ignore or almost deny, but which in a life decently lived as a normal and attainable asleep, a positive, passionate, conscious joy. The story sings from end to end like a happy man going home and like a happy and good man when it cannot sing it yells. It is lyric and exclamatory from the first exclamatory words of it. It is strictly a Christmas carol. Dickens has been said, went illy, with this kindly great cloud still about him, still meditating on yule mysteries. Among the olives and the orange trees, he wrote his second great Christmas tale, The Chimes, at Genoa in 1844, a Christmas tale only differing from the Christmas carol in being fuller of the gray rains of winter in the north. The Chimes is like the carol, an appeal for charity and mirth, but it is a stern and fighting appeal. If the other is a Christmas carol, then this is a Christmas war song. In it Dickens hurled himself with even more than his usual militant joy and scorn into an attack upon a cant, which he said made his blood boil. This cant was nothing more nor less than the whole tone taken by three quarters of the political and economic world towards the fore. It was a vague and vulgar benthenism, with a rollicking Tory touch in it. It explained to the poor their duties with a cold and coarse philanthropy, unendurable by any free man. It had also, at its command, a kind of brutal banter, allowed a good humor which Dickens sketches savagely and all them in cute. He felt furiously, on all their ideas, the cheap advice to live cheaply, the base advice to live basely, above all the preposterous primary assumption that the rich are to advise the poor, and not the poor the rich. There were and are hundreds of these benevolent bullies. Some say that the poor should give up having children, which means that they should give up their great virtue of sexual sanity. Some say that they should give up treating each other, which means that they should give up all the remains to them of the virtue of hospitality. Against all of this Dickens thundered very thoroughly in the chimes. It may be remarked in passing that this affords another instance of a confusion already referred to. The confusion whereby Dickens supposed himself to be exalting the present over the past, whereas he was really dealing deadly blows at things strictly peculiar to the present. Embedded in this book is a somewhat useless interview between Trotivec and the church bells, in which the latter lecture the former for having supposed, why I don't know, that they were expressing regret for the disappearance of the Middle Ages. There is no reason why Trotivec or anyone else should idealize the Middle Ages. But certainly he was the last man in the world to be asked to idealize the nineteenth century, seeing that the smug and stingy philosophy which poisons his life throughout the book was an exclusive creation of that century. But as I have said before, the fireiest, medievalist may forgive Dickens for disliking the good things the Middle Ages took away, considering how he loved whatever good things the Middle Ages left behind. It matters very little that he hated old feudal castles, when they were already old. It matters very much that he hated the new poor law while it was still new. The moral of this matter in the chimes is essential. Dickens had sympathy with the poor in the Greek and literal sense. He suffered with them mentally, for the things that irritated them were the things that irritated him. He did not pity the people, or even champion the people, or even merely loved the people. In this matter he was the people. He alone in our literature is the voice not merely of the social substratum, but even of the subconsciousness of the substratum. He utters the secret anger of the humble. He says what the uneducated only think, or even only feel, about the educated. And in nothing does he so genuinely such a voice as in this fact of his fiercest mood being reserved for methods that are counted scientific and progressive. Pure and exalted atheists talk themselves into believing that the working classes are turning with indignate scorn from the churches. The working classes are not indignate against the churches in the least. The things the working classes really are indignate against are the hospitals. The people has no definite disbelief in the temples of theology. The people has a fiery, unpractical disbelief in the temples of physical science. The things the poor hate are the modern things, the rationalistic things, doctors, inspectors, poor law guardians, professional philanthropy. They never showed any reluctance to be helped by the old and corrupt monasteries. They will often die rather than be helped by the modern and efficient workhouse. Of all this anger, good or bad, Dickens is the voice of an accusing energy. When in the Christmas Carol, Scrooge refers to the surplus population, the spirit tells him very justly not to speak until he knows what the surplus is and where it is. The implication is severe but sound, when a group of superciliously benevolent economists look down into the abyss with a surplus population, assuredly there is only one answer that should be given to them, and that is to say, if there is a surplus, you are a surplus. And if anyone were ever cut off, they would be. If the barricades went up in our streets and the poor became masters, I think the priests would escape. I fear the gentlemen would, but I believe the gutters would be simply running with the blood of philanthropists. Lastly he was at one with the poor in this chief matter of Christmas, in the matter that is a special festivity. There is nothing on which the poor are more criticized than on the point of spending large sums on small feasts, and though there are material difficulties, there is nothing in which they are more right. It is sad that a Boston paradox monger said, give us the luxuries of life, and we will dispense with the necessities. But it is the whole human race that says it, from the first savage wearing feathers instead of clothes, to the last costar monger having a treat instead of three meals. The third of his Christmas stories, The Cricket on the Hearth, calls for no extensive comment, though it is very characteristic. It has all the qualities which we call dominant qualities in his Christmas sentiment. It has coziness, that is comfort, that depends upon a discomfort surrounding it. It has a sympathy with the poor, and especially with the extravagance of the poor, with what may be called the temporary wealth of the poor. It has the sentiment of the hearth, that is the sentiment of the open fire being the red heart of the room. That open fire is a veritable flame of England, still kept burning in the midst of a mean civilization of stoves. But everything that is valuable in The Cricket on the Hearth is perhaps as well expressed in the title as it is in the story. The tale itself, in spite of some of those inhibitable things that Dickens never failed to say, is a little too comfortable to be quite convincing. The Christmas Carol is the conversion of an anti-Christmas character. The chimes is a slaughter of anti-Christmas characters. The Cricket perhaps fails for lack of this crusading note. For everything has its weak side, and when full justice has been done to this neglected note of poetic comfort, we must remember that it has its very real weak side. The defect of it in the work of Dickens was that he tended sometimes to pile up the cushions till none of the characters could move. He is so much interested in effecting his state of static happiness that he forgets to make a story at all. His princes, at the start of the story, begin to live happily ever afterwards. We feel this strongly in Master Humphrey's clock, and we feel this sometimes in these Christmas stories. He makes his characters so comfortable that his characters begin to dream and drivel, and he makes his readers so comfortable that his reader goes to sleep. The actual tale of the Carrier and his wife sounds somewhat sleeveless in our ears. We cannot keep our attention fixed on it, though we are conscious of a kind of warmth from it, as from a great wood fire. We know so well that everything will soon be all right, that we do not suspect what the Carrier suspects and are not frightened when the gruff tackleton growls. The sound of the festivities at the end come fainter on our ears, and did the shout of the cradgets or the bells of Trotivec. All the good figures that followed Scrooge when he came growling out of the fog, paid into the fog again. CHAPTER 8 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. THE TIME OF TRANSITION Dickens was back in London by June of 1845. About this time he became the first editor of the Daily News, a paper which he had largely planned and suggested, in which I trust remembers its semi-divine origin. It is his thought had been running as suggested in the last chapter, somewhat monotonously on his Christmas domesticities, is again suggested by the rather singular fact that he originally wished the Daily News to be called the cricket. Probably he was haunted again with his old vision of a homely, tail-telling periodical, such as had broken off in Master Humphrey's clock. About this time, however, he was peculiarly unsettled. Almost as soon as he had taken the editorship, he threw it up, and having only recently come back to England, he soon made up his mind to go back to the continent. In the May of 1846 he ran over to Switzerland and tried to write Dombie and Son at Luzon. Tried to, I say, because his letters are full of an angry impotence. He could not get on. He attributed this especially to his love of London and his loss of it. The absence of streets and numbers of figures. My figures seemed disposed to stagnate without crowds about them. But he also, with shrewdness, attributed it more, generally, to the laxer and more wandering life he had led for the last two years. The American tour, the Italian tour, diversified, generally speaking, only with slight literary productions. His ways were never punctual or healthy, but they were also never unconscious as far as work was concerned. If he walked all night, he could write all day. But in this strange exile or interregnum, he did not seem able to fall into any habits, even bad habits. A restlessness beyond all his experience had fallen for a season upon the most restless of the children of men. It may be a mere coincidence, but this break in his life very nearly coincided with the important break in his art. Dombie and Son, planned in all probability some time before, was destined to be the last of a quite definite series, the early novels of Dickens. The difference between the books from the beginning up to Dombie and the books from David Copperfield to the end may be hard to state dogmatically, but it is evident to everyone with any literary sense. Very coarsely the case may be put by saying that he diminished in the story as a whole the practice of pure caricature. Still more coarsely, it may be put in the phrase that he began to practice realism. If we take Mr. Stiggen's say as the clergyman depicted at the beginning of his literary career, and Mr. Chris Barkle say as the clergyman depicted at the end of it, it is evident that the difference does not merely consist in the fact that the first is a less desirable clergyman than the second. It consists in the nature of our desire for either of them. The glory of Mr. Chris Barkle partly consists in the fact that he might really exist anywhere in any country town into which we may happen to stray. The glory of Mr. Stiggen's wholly consists in the fact that he could not possibly exist anywhere, except in the head of Dickens. Dickens has the secret recipe of that divine dish. In some sense therefore, when we say that he became less of a caricaturist, we mean that he became less of a creator. That original violent vision of all things which he had seen from his boyhood began to be mixed with other men's milder visions and with the light of common day. He began to understand and practice other than his own mad merits, began to have some movement toward the merits of other writers, toward the mixed emotion of Thackeray, or the solidity of George Eliot, and this must be said for the process that the fierce whine of Dickens could endure some delusion. On the whole, perhaps his primal personalism was all the better when surging against some saner restraints. Perhaps a flavor of strong Stiggen's goes a long way. Perhaps the colossal crumbless might be cut down into six or seven quite creditable characters. For my own part, for reasons which I shall afterwards mention, I am in real doubt about the advantage of this realistic education of Dickens. I'm not sure that it made his books better, but I am sure it made them less bad. He made fewer mistakes, undoubtedly. He succeeded in eliminating much of the mere rant or can't of his first books. He threw away much of the old padding, all the more annoying perhaps in a literary sense, because he did not mean it for padding, but for essential eloquence. But he did not produce anything actually better than Mr. Chuckster. But then there is nothing better than Mr. Chuckster. Certain works of art, such as the Venus of Milo, exhaust our aspiration. Upon the whole, this may perhaps be safely set of the transition. Those who have any doubt about Dickens can have no doubt of the superiority of the later books. Beyond question, they have less of what are noises in Dickens. But do not, if you are in the company of any ardent adores of Dickens, as I hope for your sake you are, do not insist too urgently and exclusively on the splendor of Dickens' last works, or they will discover that you do not like him. Domby and Son is the last novel in the first manner. David Copperfield is the first novel in the last. The increase in care and realism in the second of the two is almost startling. Yet even in Domby and Son we can see the coming of a change, however faint, if we compare it with his first fantasies, such as Nicholas Nicaldi or the Old Curiosity Shop. The central story is still melodrama, but it is much more tactful and effective melodrama. Melodrama is a form of art, legitimate like any other, as noble as farce, almost as noble as pantomime. The essence of melodrama is that it appeals to the moral sense in a highly simplified state, just as farce appeals to the sense of humor in a highly simplified state. Farce creates people who are so intellectually simple as to hide in pecking cases or pretend to be their own aunts. Melodrama creates people so morally simple as to kill their enemies in Oxford Street and repent on seeing their mother's photograph. The object of the simplification in farce and melodrama is the same and quite artistically legitimate, the object of gaining a resounding rapidity of action which subtleties would obstruct. And this can be done well or ill. The simplified villain can be spirited charcoal sketch or a mere black smudge. Parker is a spirited charcoal sketch. Ralph Nicaldi, a mere black smudge. The tragedy of Edith Donby teams with unlikelihood, but it teams with life. The Donby should give his own wife censure through his own business manager is impossible. I will not say in a gentleman, but in a person of ordinary sane self-conceit. But once having got the inconceivable trio before the footlights, Dickens gives us good ringing dialogue very different from the mere rants in which Ralph Nicaldi figures in the unimaginable character of a rhetorical moneylender. And there is another point of tactical improvement in this book over such books as Nicholas Nicaldi. It is not only a basic idea, but a good basic idea. There is a real artistic opportunity in the conception of a solemn and selfish man of affairs feeling for his male heir, his first and last emotion mingled of a thin flame of tenderness and a strong flame of pride. But with all these possibilities, the serious episode of the Donbys serves ultimately only to show how unfitted Dickens was for such things, how fitted he was for something opposite. The incurable poetic character, a hopelessly non-realistic character of Dickens' essential genius, could not have a better example than the story of the Donbys. For the story itself is probable. It is the treatment that makes it unreal. In attempting to paint the dark pagan devotion of the father as distant from the ecstatic and Christian devotion of the mother, Dickens was painting something that was really there. This is no wild theme like the wanderings of Nell's grandfather or the marriage of Gryde. A man of Donbys' type would love his son as he loves Paul. He would neglect his daughter as he neglects Florence, and yet we feel the utter unreality of it all, the utter reality of monsters like Stiggens or Mantellini. Dickens could only work in his own way, and that way was the wild way. We may almost say this, that he could only make his characters probable if he was allowed to make them impossible. Give him license to say and do anything that he could create beings as vivid as our own aunts and uncles. Keep him to likelihood, and he could not tell the plainest tale so as to make it seem likely. The story of Pickwick is credible, though it is not possible. The story of Florence, Donby, is incredible, although it is true. An excellent example can be found in the same story. Major Bagstock is a grotesque, and yet he contains touch after touch of Dickens' quiet and sane observation of things as they are. He was always most accurate when he was most fantastic. Dickens' beauty and Florence are perfectly reasonable, but we simply know that they do not exist. The Major is mountainously exaggerated, but we all feel that we have met him at Brighton. Nor is the rationale of the paradox difficult to see. Dickens exaggerated when he had found a real truth to exaggerate. It is a deadly error, an error at the back of much of the false placidity of our politics, to suppose that lies are told with excess and luxuriance, and truths told with modesty and restraint. Some of the most frantic lies on the face of life are told with modesty and restraint, for the simple reason that only modesty and restraint will save them. Many official declarations are just as dignified as Mr. Donby because they are just as fictitious. On the other hand, the man who has found a truth dances about like a boy who has found a shilling. He breaks into extravagances as the Christian churches broke into gargoyles. In one sense truth alone can be exaggerated. Nothing else can stand the strain. The outrageous bagstock is a glowing and glaring exaggeration of a thing we have all seen in life. The worst and most dangerous of all its hypocrisies. For the worst and most dangerous hypocrite is not he who affects unpopular virtue, but he who affects popular vice. The jolly fellow of the saloon bar and the race course is the real deceiver of mankind. He has misled more than any false prophet, and his victims cry to him out of hell. The excellence of the bagstock conception can best be seen if we compare it with the much weaker and more improbable navery of Peck Sniff. It would not be worth a man's while with any worldly object to pretend to be a holy and high-minded architect. The world does not admire holy and high-minded architects. The world does admire rough and tough old army men who swear at waiters and wink at women. Major bagstock is simply the perfect prophecy of that decadent jingoism which corrupted England of late years. Man has been duped, not by the can't of goodness, but by the can't of badness. It has been fascinated by a quite fictitious cynicism and reached that last and strangest of all impostuers in which the mask is as repulsive as the face. Domby and Son provides us with yet another instance of this general fact in Dickens. He could only get to the most solemn emotions adequately if he got to them through the grotesque. He could only, so to speak, really get into the inner chamber by coming down the chimney. Like his own most lovable lunatic and Nicholas Nicolby, a good example is such a character as Toots. Toots is what none of Dickens' dignified characters are in the most serious sense. A true lover. He is the twin of Romeo. He has a passion, humility, self-knowledge, a mind lifted into all magnanimous thoughts, everything that goes with the best kind of romantic love. His excellence in the art of love can only be expressed by the somewhat violent expression that he is as good a lover as Walter Gay is a bad one. Florence surely deserved her father's corn if she could prefer Gay to Toots. It is neither a joke nor any kind of exaggeration to say that in the vacillation of Toots, Dickens not only came nearer to the psychology of true love than he ever came anywhere else, but nearer than anyone else ever came. To ask for the loved one, and then not to dare cross the threshold, to be invited by her, to long to accept and then to lie in order to decline. These are the funny things that Mr. Toots did, and that every honest man who yells with laughter at him has done also. For the moment, however, I can only mention this matter as a pendant case to be the case of Major Bagstock, an example of the way in which Dickens had to be ridiculous in order to begin to be true. His characters that begin solemn and futile, his characters that begin frivolous and solemn in the best sense, his foolish figures are not only more entertaining than his serious figures, they are also much more serious. His marchiness is not only much more laughable than Little Nell, she is also much more evolved that Little Nell was meant to be, much more really devoted, pathetic, and brave. Dick Swiveller is not only a much funnier fellow than Kitt, he is also a much more genuine fellow, being free from that slight strain of meekness or the snobbishness of the respectable poor which the wise and perfect chuckster wisely and perfectly perceived in Kitt. Susan Nipper is not only more of a comic character than Florence, she is more of a heroine than Florence any day of the week. In our mutual friend, we do not for some reason or another feel really very much excited about the fall or rescue of Lizzie Hexham. She seems too romantic to be really pathetic, but we do feel excited about the rescue of Miss Podsnap because she is, like Toots, a holy fool. Because her pink nose and pink elbows and candid outcry and open indecent defections do convey to us a sense of innocence because her pink nose and pink elbows and candid outcry and open indecent infections do convey to us a sense of innocence helpless among human dragons of Andromeda tied naked to a rock. Dickens had to make a character humorous before he could make it human. It was the only way he knew and he ought to have always adhered to it. Whether he knew it or not, the only two really touching figures in Martin Chuselwit are the Mrs. Pexniff. Of the things he tried to treat unsmilingly and grandly, we can all make game to our hearts content, but when once he has laughed at a thing, it is sacred for ever. Donby, however, means first and foremost the finale of the early Dickens. It is difficult to say exactly in what it is that we perceive that the old crudity ends here and does not reappear in David Copperfield or in any of the novels after it, but so it certainly is. In detached scenes and in characters indeed, Dickens kept up his farcical note almost or quite to the end. But this is the last farce, this is the last work in which a farcical license is tacitly claimed, a farcical note struck to start with. And in a sense his next novel may be called his first novel, but the growth of this great novel, David Copperfield, is a thing very interesting but at the same time very dark, for it is a growth in the soul. We have seen that Dickens' mind was in stir of change, that he was dreaming of art and even of realism. Hugely delighted as he invariably was with his own books, he was humble enough to be ambitious. He was even humble enough to be envious. In the matter of art, for instance, in the narrow sense of arrangement and proportion in fictitious things, he began to be conscious of his deficiency and even in a stormy sort of way ashamed of it. He tried to gain completeness even while raging at anyone who called him incomplete, and in this manner of artistic construction, his ambition and his success too grew steadily up to the instant of his death. The end finds him attempting things that are at the opposite pole to the frank formlessness of Fickwick. His last book, The Mystery of Edwin Drude, depends entirely upon construction, even upon a centralized strategy. He staked everything upon a plot, he who had been the weakest of plotters, weaker than Sim Tapper Tit, he essayed a detective story, he who could never keep a secret, and he has kept it to this day. A new Dickens was really being born when Dickens died, and as with art so with reality. He wished to show that he could be as struck as well as anybody. He also wished to show that he could be as accurate as anybody. And in this connection, as in many others, we must recur constantly to the facts mentioned in connection with America and with his money matters. We must recur, I mean, to the central fact that his desires were extravagant in quantity, but not in quality, that his wishes were excessive but not eccentric. It must never be forgotten that sanity was his ideal, even when he seemed almost insane. It was thus with his literary aspirations. He was brilliant, but he wished sincerely to be solid. Nobody out of an asylum could deny that he was a genius and a unique writer. But he did not wish to be a unique writer but a universal writer. Much of the manufactured pathos or rhetoric against which his enemies quite rightly rail is really due to his desire to give all sides of life at once to make his book a cosmos instead of a tale. He was sometimes really vulgar in his wish to be a literary Whitley, a universal provider. Thus it was that he felt about realism and truth to life. Nothing is easier than to defend Dickens as Dickens, but Dickens wished to be everybody else. Nothing is easier than to defend Dickens' world as a fairyland, of which he alone has the key to defend him as one defends Materlinked or any other original writer. But Dickens was not content with being original. He had a wild wish to be true. He loved truth so much in the abstract that he sacrificed to the shadow of it in his own glory. He denied his own divine originality and pretended that he had plagiarized from life. He disowned his soul's children and said that he had picked them up in the street. And in this mix then he did mood of anger and ambition, vanity and doubt, and knew a great design was born. He loved to be romantic, yet he desired to be real. How if he wrote of a thing that was real and showed that it was romantic? He loved real life, but he also loved his own way. How if he wrote of his own life, but wrote it in his own way? How if he showed the carping critics who doubted the existence of his strange characters, his own yet stranger existence? How if he forced these pendants and unbelievers to admit that Weller and Pexniff, crumbless and swiveller, whom they thought so improbably wild and wonderful, were less wild and wonderful than Charles Dickens? What if he ended the quarrels about whether his romances could occur, by confessing that his romance had occurred? For some time passed, probably during the greater part of his life, he had made notes for an autobiography. I have already quoted an ad-rebel passage from these notes, a passage reproduced in David Copperfield with little more alteration than a change of proper names. The passage which describes Captain Porter and the debtor's petition in the Marshall Say. But he probably perceived at last what a less keen intelligence must ultimately have perceived, that if an autobiography is really to be honest, it must be turned into a work of fiction. If it is to really tell the truth, it must that all costs profess not to. No man dares say of himself over his own name how badly he has behaved. No man dares say of himself over his own name how well he has behaved. Moreover, of course, a touch of fiction is almost always essential to the real conveying of fact, because fact is experienced as a fragment terrainless which is bewildering at first hand, and quite blinding at second hand. Facts have at least to be sorted into compartments and the proper head and tail given back to each. The perfection and pointedness of art are sort of a substitute for the pungency of actuality. Without this selection and a completion, our life seems a tangle of unfinished tales, a heap of novels, all volume one. Dickens determine to make one complete novel of it. For though there are many other aspects of David Copperfield, this autobiographical aspect is after all the greatest. The point of the book is that unlike all the other books of Dickens, it is concerned with quite common actualities, but it is concerned with them warmly, and with war-like sympathies. Yet not only both realistic and romantic, it is realistic because it is romantic. It is a human nature described with human exaggeration. We all know the actual types in the book. They're not like the turgid and preternatural types elsewhere in Dickens. They're not purely poetic creations like Mr. Kenwigs or Mr. Bonesby. We all know that they exist. We all know the stiff necked and humorous old-fashioned nurse, so conventional and yet so original, so dependent and yet so independent. We all know the intrusive stepfather, the abstract, strange male, coarse, handsome, sulky, successful, a breaker up of homes. We all know the erect and sardonic spinster, the spinster who is so mad and small things and so sane great ones. We all know the cock of the school. We all know Steerforth, the creature whom the gods love and even the servants respect. We know his poor and artistic mother, so proud, so gratified, so desolate. We know the Rosa Dartle type, the lonely woman in whom affection itself has stagnated into a sort of poison. But while these are real characters, they are real characters lit up with the colors of youth and passion. They are real people romantically felt. That is to say, they are real people felt as real people feel them. They are exaggerated, like all Dickens figures, but they are not exaggerated as personalities are exaggerated by an artist. They're exaggerated as personalities are exaggerated by their own friends and enemies. The strong souls are seen through the glorious haze of the emotions that strong souls really create. We have Mirdstone as he would be to a boy who hated him, and rightly, for a boy would hate him. We have Steerforth as he would be to a boy who adored him, and rightly, for a boy would adore him. It may be that if these persons had a mere terrestrial existence, they appeared to other eyes more insignificant. It may be that Mirdstone in common life was only a heavy businessman with a human side. The David was too sulky to find. It may be that Steerforth was only an inch or two taller than David, and only a shade or two above him in the lower middle classes. But this does not make the book less true. In cataloging the facts of life, the author must not omit that massive fact, illusion. When we say the book is true to life, we must stipulate that it is especially true to youth, even to boyhood. All the characters seem a little larger than they really were, for David is looking up at them, and the early pages of the book are in particular astonishingly vivid. Parts of it seem like fragments of our forgotten infancy. The dark house of childhood, the loneliness, the things half understood. The nurse with her inscrutable sulks, and her more inscrutable tenderness. The sudden deportations to distant places, the seaside and its childish friendships. All this stirs in us when we read it, like something out of a previous existence. Above all Dickens has excellently depicted the child enthroned in that humble circle, which only in after years he perceives to have been humble. Children and cultured persons, I believe, object to their children seeing kitchen company, or being taught by a woman like Pegatee. But surely it is more important to be educated in a sense of human dignity and equality than in anything else in the world. And a child who has once had to respect the kind and capable woman of the lower classes will respect the lower classes forever. The true way to overcome the evil in class distinction is not to denounce them as revolutionists denounce them, but to ignore them as children ignore them. The early youth of David Topperfield is psychologically almost as good as his childhood. In one touch especially Dickens pierced the very core of the sensibilities of boyhood. It was when he made David more afraid of a man-servant than of anybody or anything else, the lowering Murdstone, the awful Mrs. Tierforth, are not so alarming to him as Mr. Littimer, the unimpeachable gentleman's gentleman. This is exquisitely true to the masculine emotions, especially in their underdeveloped state. A youth of common courage does not fear anything violent, but he is in mortal fear of anything correct. This may or may not be the reason that so few female writers understand their male characters. But this fact remains that the more sincere and passionate and even headlong a lad is, the more certain he is to be conventional. The bolder and freer he seems, the more the traditions of the college or the rules of the club will hold him with their jives of gossamer, and the less afraid he is of his enemies, the more cravenly he will be afraid of his friends. Herein lies indeed the darkest period of our ethical doubt and chaos. The fear is that as mortals become less urgent, manners will become more so, and men who have forgotten the fear of God will retain the fear of Littimer. We shall merely sink into a much meaner bondage, or when you break the great laws you do not get liberty, you do not even get anarchy, you get the small laws. The sting and strength of this piece of fiction then, due by a rare accident, lie in the circumstance that it was so largely founded on fact. David Copperfield is the great answer of a great romance to the realists. David says in effect what? You say the Dickens' tales are too purple really to have happened? Why, this is what happened to me, and it seemed the most purple of all. You say that the Dickens' heroes are too handsome and triumphant? Why, no prince or paladin or ristio was ever so handsome and triumphant as the head boys seemed to me walking before me in the sun. You say the Dickens' villains are too black? Why, there was no ink in the Devil's Ink Stand black enough for my own stepfather when I had to live in the same house with him. The facts are quite the other way to what you suppose. This life of gray studies and half-tones, the absence of which you regret in Dickens, is only life as it is looked at. This life of heroes and villains is life as it is lived. The life a man knows best is exactly the life he finds most full of fierce certainties and battles between good and deal, his own. Oh yes, the life we do not care about may easily be a psychological comedy. Other people's lives may easily be human documents, but a man's own life is always a melodrama. There are other effective things in David Copperfield, they are not all autobiographical, but they nearly all have this new note of quietude and reality. Maccabre is gigantic, an immense assertion of the truth that the way to live is to exaggerate everything, but of him I shall have to speak more fully in another connection. Mrs. Maccabre, artistically speaking, is even better. She is very nearly the best thing in Dickens. Nothing could be more absurd and at the same time more true than her clear argumentative manner of speech as she sits smiling and expounding in the midst of ruin. What could be more lucid and logical and unanswerable than her statement of the pro-legomina of the medway problem of which the first step must be to see the medway, or of the coal trade which required talent and capital? Talent Mr. Maccabre has. Capital Mr. Maccabre has not. It seems as if something should have come at last out of so clearer in scientific arrangement of the ideas. Indeed, if, as it is suggested, we regard David Copperfield as an unconscious defense of the poetic view of life, we might regard Mrs. Maccabre as an unconscious satire on the logical view of life. She says as a monument of the hopelessness and helplessness of reason in the face of this romantic and unreasonable world. As I have taken Don Viansan as the book before the transition, and David Copperfield as typical of the transition itself, I may perhaps take Bleak House as the book after the transition, and so complete the description. Bleak House has every characteristic of his new realistic culture. Dickens never now, as in his early books, revels in parts he likes and scamps the parts he does not, after the manner of Scott. He does not, as in previous tales, leave his heroes and heroines mere walking gentlemen and ladies, with nothing at all to do but walk. He expends upon them at least ingenuity. By the expedience, successful or not, of the self-revelation of Esther, or the humorous inconsistencies of Rick, he makes his younger figures, if not lovable, at least not readable. Everywhere we see this tighter and more careful grip. He does not, for instance, when he wishes to denounce a dark institution, sandwich it in as a mere episode in a rambling story of adventure, as the debtor's prison is embedded in the body of Pickwick, or the low Yorkshire school in the body of Nicholas Nicolby. He puts the court of chancery in the center of the stage, the somber and sinister temple, and groups rounded in artistic relations, decaying and frantic figures, its offspring and its satirists. An old lipsomaniac keeps a rag and bone shop type of utility and antiquity, and calls himself the Lord Chancellor. A little mad old maid hangs about the courts on a forgotten or imaginary lawsuit and says, with perfect and pungent irony, I am expecting a judgment shortly, on the day of judgment. Rick and Ada and Esther are not mere strollers who have strayed into the court of law, they are its children, its symbols, and its victims. The righteous indignation of the book is not at the red heat of anarchy, but at the white heat of art. Its anger is patient and plotting like some historic revenge. Moreover it slowly and carefully creates the real psychology of oppression, the endless formality, the endless unemotional urbanity, the endless hope deferred. These things make one feel the fact of injustice more than the madness of Nero, for it is not the activeness of tyranny that mattens, but its passiveness. We hate the deafness of the God more than his strength. Dickens is the unbearable repartee. Again we can see in this book strong traces of an increase in social experience. Dickens, as his fame carried him into more fashionable circles, began really to understand something of what is strong and what is weak in the English upper class. Sir Leistichier Dedlock is far more effective condemnation of oligarchy than the ugly swagger of Sir Mulberry Hawk, because pride stands out more plainly in all his impotence and insolence as the one weakness of a good man than as one of the million weaknesses of a bad one. Dickens, like all young radicals, had imagined in his youth that aristocracy rested upon the hardiness of somebody. He found it, as we all do, that it rests upon the softness of everybody. It is very hard, not to like Sir Leistichier Dedlock, not to applaud his silly old speeches so foolish, so manly, so genuinely English, so disastrous to England. It is true that the English people love a lord, but it is not true that they fear him. Rather, if anything, they pity him. They are creeps into their love something of the feeling they have towards a baby or a black man. In their hearts they think it in admirable that Sir Leistichier Dedlock should be able to speak at all, and so a system which no iron laws and no bloody battles could possibly force upon a people is preserved from generation to generation by pure, weak, good nature. In Bleak House occurs the character of Harold Skimpole, the character whose alleged likeness to lay hunt, as laid dickens open to so much disapproval. Unjust disapproval, I think, as far as fundamental morals are concerned. In Method he was a little clamorous and clumsy, as indeed he was apt to be, but when he said that it was possible to combine a certain tone of conversation taken from a particular man with other characteristics which were not meant to be his, he surely said what all men who write stories know. A work of fiction often consists in combining a pair of whiskers seen in one street, with a crime seen in another. He may point possibly have really meant only to make lay hunt's light philosophy the mask for a new kind of scamp as a variant on the pious mask of peck sniff, or the candid mask of bag stock. He may never once have had the unfriendly thought, suppose hunt behaved like a rascal. He may have only had the fanciful thought, suppose a rascal behaved like hunt. But there is good reason for mentioning Skimpole, especially in the character of Skimpole. Dickens displayed again a quality that was very admirable in him. I mean a disposition to see things sanely and to satirize even his own faults. He was commonly occupied in satirizing the Gadgrinds, the economists, the men of smiles and self-help. For him there was nothing poorer than their wealth, nothing more selfish than their self-denial, and against them he was in the habit of pitting the people of a more expensive habit. The happy swivellers and the macawbers, who if they were poor, were at least as rich as their last penny could make them. He loved that great Christian carelessness that seeks its meat from God. It was merely a kind of uncontrollable honesty that forced him into urging the other side. He could not disguise from himself or from the world that man who began by seeking his meat from his neighbor without uprising his neighbor of the fact. He had shown how good irresponsibility could be. He could not stoop to hide how bad it could be. He created Skimpol, and Skimpol is the dark underside of Macawber. In attempting Skimpol he attempted something with great and urgent meaning. He attempted, as I say, I do not assert that he carried it through. As has been remarked, he was never successful in describing psychological change. His characters are the same yesterday, today, and forever, and critics have complained very justly of the crude villainy of Skimpol's action in the matter of Joe and Mr. Bucket. Certainly Skimpol had no need to commit a clumsy treachery, to win a clumsy bribe. He had only to call on Mr. Jarnedice. He had lost his honor too long to need to sell it. The effect is bad, but I repeat that the aim was great. Dickens wished under the symbol of Skimpol to point out a truth, which is, perhaps, the most terrible in moral psychology. I mean the fact that it is by no means easy to draw the line between light and heavy offense. He desired to show that there are no faults, however kindly, that we can afford to flatter or to let alone. He meant that perhaps Skimpol had once been as good a man as Swiveller. If flattered or let alone, our kindliest fault can destroy our kindliest virtue. The thing may begin as very human weakness and end as very inhuman weakness. Skimpol means that the extremes of evil are much nearer than we think. A man may begin by being too generous to pay his debts and end by being too mean to pay his debts. For the vices are very strangely in league and encourage each other. A sober man may become a drunkard through being a coward. A brave man may become a coward through being a drunkard. That is the thing Dickens was darkly trying to convey in Skimpol, that a man might become a mountain of selfishness if he attended only to the Dickens' virtues. There is nothing that can be neglected. There is no such thing, he meant, as a peccadillo. I had dwelt on this consciousness of his because, alas, it had a very sharp edge for himself. Even while he was permitting a fault originally small to make a comedy of Skimpol, a fault originally small was making a tragedy of Charles Dickens. For Dickens also had a bad quality, not intrinsically very terrible, which he allowed to wreck his life. He also had a small weakness that could sometimes become stronger than all his strengths. His selfishness was not, it need hardly be said, the selfishness of Greg Grind. He was particularly compassionate and liberal, nor was it in the least the selfishness of Skimpol. He was entirely self-dependent, industrious, and dignified. His selfishness was hardly a selfishness of the nerves. Whatever his whim or the temperature of the instant told him to do must be done. He was the type of man who would break a window if it would not open or give him air. And this weakness of his had, by the time of which we speak, led to a breach between himself and his wife, which he was too exasperated and excited to heal in time. Everything must be put right and put right at once with him. If London bored him, he must go to the continent at once. If the continent bored him, he must come back to London at once. If the day was too noisy, the whole household must be quiet. If night was too quiet, the whole household must wake up. Above all he had the supreme character of the domestic despot, that his good temper was, if possible, more despotic than his bad temper. When he was miserable, as he often was, poor fellow, they only had to listen to his railings. When he was happy, they had to listen to his novels. All this, which was mainly mere excitability, did not seem to amount to much. It did not in the least mean that he had ceased to be a clean living and kind-hearted and quite honest man. But there was this evil about it, that he did not resist his little weakness at all. He pampered it, as skimful pampered his, and it separated him and his wife. Amir's silly trick of temperament did everything that the blackest misconduct could have done. A random sensibility started about the shuffling of papers or the shutting of a window, ended by tearing two clean Christian people from each other, like a blast of bigamy or adultery. End of Chapter 8 The Transition