 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens by G. K. Chesterton. Section 0, Introduction, Part 1. These papers were originally published as prefaces to the separate books of Dickens in one of the most extensive of those cheap libraries of the classics, which are one of the real improvements of recent times. Thus they were harmless, being diluted by or rather drowned in Dickens. My scrap of theory was a mere dry biscuit to be taken with the grand tawny porch of great English comedy, and by most people it was not taken at all, like the biscuit. Nevertheless, the essays were not in intention so aimless as they appear in fact. I had a general notion of what needed saying about Dickens to the new generation, though probably I did not say it. I will make another attempt to do so in this prologue, and possibly fail again. There was a painful moment, somewhere about the 80s, when we watched anxiously to see whether Dickens was fading from the modern world. We have watched a little longer and with great relief we begin to realize that it is the modern world that is fading. All that universe of ranks and respectabilities in comparison with which Dickens was called a caricaturist, all that Victorian universe in which he seemed vulgar, all that in itself breaking up like a cloudland, and only the caricatures of Dickens remain, like things carved in stone. This of course is an old story in the case of a man reproached with any excess of the poetic. Again and again when the man of visions was pinned by the sly dog who knows the world, the man recovered of the bite, the dog it was that died. To call Fakari a cynic, which means a sly dog, was indeed absurd, but it is fair to say that in comparison with Dickens he felt himself a man of the world. Nevertheless, that world of which he was a man is coming to an end before our eyes. Its aristocracy has grown corrupt, its middle class insecure, and things that he never thought of are walking about the drawing-rooms of both. Fakari has described for ever the Anglo-Indian Colonel. But what on earth would he have done with the Australian Colonel? What can it matter whether Dickens' clerks talked cockney now that half the Duchesses talk American? What would Fakari have made of an age in which a man in the position of Lord Q may actually be the born brother of Mr. Moss of Order Street? Nor does this apply merely to Fakari, but to all those Victorians who prided themselves on the realism or sobriety of their descriptions. It applies to Anthony Trollop, and as much as anyone to George Elliot. For we have not only survived that present which Fakari described, we have even survived that future to which George Elliot looked forward. It is no longer adequate to say that Dickens did not understand that old world of gentility, of parliamentary politeness, and the balance of the Constitution. That world is rapidly ceasing to understand itself. It is vain to repeat the complaint of the old quarterly reviewers that Dickens had not enjoyed a university education. What would the old quarterly reviewers themselves have thought of the Rhodes Scholarships? It is useless to repeat the old tag that Dickens could not describe a gentleman. A gentleman in our time has become something quite indescribable. Now the interesting fact is this. That Dickens, whom so many considered to be at the best of vulgar enthusiast, saw the coming change in our society much more soberly and scientifically than did his better educated and more pretentious contemporaries. I give but one example out of many. Fakari was a good Victorian radical, who seemed to have gone through his grave quite contented with the early Victorian radical theory. The theory which Mowkley preached with unparalleled luminosity and completeness. The theory that true progress goes on so steadily through human history that while reaction is indefensible, revolution is unnecessary. Fakari seems to have been quite content to think that the world would grow more and the more liberal in the limited sense that free trade would get freer, that ballot boxes would grow more and more secret, that at last, as some satirist of liberalism puts it, every man would have two votes instead of one. There is no trace in Fakari of the slightest consciousness that progress could ever change its direction. There is in Dickens. The whole of hard times is the expression of just such a realization. It is not true to say that Dickens was a socialist, but it is not absurd to say so, and it would be simply absurd to say it of any of the great individualist novelists of the Victorian time. Dickens saw far enough ahead to know that the time was coming when the people would be imploring the state to save them from mere freedom as from some frightful foreign oppressor. He felt the society changing, and Fakari never did. As talking about socialism and individualism is one of the greatest boars ever endured among men, I will take another instance to illustrate my meaning, even though the instance be queer and even a delicate one. Even if the reader does not agree with my deduction, I ask his attention to the fact itself, which I think a curiosity of literature. In the last important work of Dickens, that excellent book, Our Mutual Friend, there is an odd thing about which I cannot make up my mind. I do not know whether it is unconscious observation or fiendish irony, but it is this. In Our Mutual Friend is an old patriarch named Aaron, who is a saintly Jew made to do the dirty work of an abominable Christian usurer, in an artistic sense. I think the patriarch Aaron as much of a humbug as the patriarch Casby. In a moral sense, there is no doubt at all that Dickens introduced the Jew with the philanthropic idea of doing justice to Judaism, which he was told he had affronted by the great gargoyle of Fagan. If this was his motive, it was morally a most worthy one, but it is certainly unfortunate for the Hebrew cause that the bad Jew should be so very much more convincing than the good one. Old Aaron is not an exaggeration of Jewish virtues. He is simply not Jewish, because he is not human. There is nothing about him that in any way suggests the noveler sort of view such a man as Spinoza or Mr. Zangwill. He is simply a public apology, and like most public apologies he is very stiff and not very convincing. So far so good. Now we come to the funny part. To describe the high visionary and mystic Jew like Spinoza or Zangwill is a great and delicate task in which even Dickens might have failed. But most of us know something of the make and manners of the low Jew, who is generally the successful one. Most of us know the Jew who calls himself the villain court. Now to anyone who knows a low Jew by sight or hearing the story called Our Mutual Friend is literally full of Jews. Like all Dickens best characters they are vivid. We know them, and we know them to be Hebrew. Mr. Veneering, the man from nowhere, dark, sphinx-like, smiling with black curling hair and a taste in florid vulgar furniture of what stock was he. Mr. Lamely, with too much nose on his face, too much ginger in his whiskers, too much sparkle in his studs and manners of what blood was he. Mr. Lamely's friends, coarse and thick-lipped, with fingers so covered with rings that they could hardly hold their gold pencils. Do they remind us of anybody? Mr. Fledgeby, with his little ugly eyes and his social flashiness and craven bodily servility, might not some fanatic like Mr. Drumont make interesting conjectures about him. The particular types that people hate in Jewry, the types that are the shame of all good Jews, absolutely run riot in this book, which is supposed to contain an apology to them. It looks at first sight as if Dickon's Apology were one hideous sneer. It looks as if he put one good Jew whom nobody could believe in and then balanced him with ten bad Jews whom nobody could fail to recognize. It seems as if he had avenged himself for the doubt about Fagan by introducing five or six Fagans, triumphant Fagans, fashionable Fagans, Fagans who had changed their names. The impeccable old Aaron stands up in the middle of this ironic carnival with a peculiar solemnity and silliness. He looks like one particularly stupid Englishman pretending to be a Jew amidst all that crowd of clever Jews who are pretending to be Englishmen. End of part one of the introduction. End of section zero. This is a Libra box recording all Libra box 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 one. Introduction part two. But this notion of a sneer is not admissible. Dickens was far too frank and generous a writer to employ such an elaborate plot of silence. His satire was always intended to attack, never to entrap. Moreover, he was far too vain a man not to wish the crowd to see all his jokes. Vanity is more divine than pride because it is more democratic than pride. Third and most important Dickens was a good liberal and would have been horrified at the notion of making so venomous a vendetta against one race or creed. Nevertheless, the fact is there, as I say, if only as a curiosity of literature. I defy any man to read through our mutual friend after hearing the suggestion and to get out of his head the conviction that Lambly is the wrong kind of Jew. The explanation lies, I think, in this. That Dickens was so wonderfully sensitive to that change that has come over our society, that he noticed the type of the Oriental and cosmopolitan financier without even knowing that it was Oriental or cosmopolitan. He had, in fact, fallen a victim to a very simple fallacy affecting this problem. Somebody said, with great wit and truth, that treason cannot prosper because when it prospers it cannot be called treason. The same argument soothed all possible anti-Semitism in men like Dickens. Jews cannot be sneaks and snobs because when they are sneaks and snobs, they do not admit that they are Jews. I have taken his case of the growth of the cosmopolitan financier because it is not so stale in discussion as its parallel, the growth of socialism. But as regards Dickens, the same criticism applies to both. Dickens knew that socialism was coming, though he did not know its name. Similarly, Dickens knew that the South African millionaire was coming, though he did not know the millionaire's name. Nobody does. He was not a type of mind to disentangle either the abstract truths touching the socialist nor the high personal truth about the millionaire. He was a man of impressions. He has never been equaled in the art of conveying what a man looks like at first sight. And he simply felt the two things as atmospheric facts. He felt that the mercantile power was oppressive, past all bearing by Christian men. And he felt that this power was no longer holy in the hands even of heavy English merchants like Podsnap. It was largely in the hands of a feverish and unfamiliar type like lambly and veneering. The fact that he felt these things is almost more impressive because he did not understand them. Now for this reason, Dickens must definitely be considered in the light of the changes which his soul foresaw. Thackeray has become classical, but Dickens has done more. He has remained modern. The grand retrospective spirit of Thackeray is by its nature attached to places and times. He belongs to Queen Victoria as much as Edison belongs to Queen Anne. And it is not only Queen Anne who is dead, but Dickens in a dark prophetic kind of way belongs to the developments. He belongs to the times since his death when hard times grew harder and when veneering became not only a member of parliament, but a cabinet minister. The times when the very soul and spirit of Fledgeby carried war into Africa. Dickens can be criticized by contemporary Bernard Shaw or Anatole France or CFG Masterman. In talking of him, one need no longer talk merely of the Manchester school or a puseism or the charge of the Light Brigade. His name comes to the tongue when we are talking of Christian socialists or Mr. Roosevelt or County Council steamboats or guilds of play. He can be considered under new lights, some larger and some meaner than his own, and it is a very rough effort so to consider him, which is the excuse of these pages. Of the essays in this book I desire to say as little as possible. I will discuss any other subject in preference for the readiness which reaches to avidity. But I may very curtly apply the explanation used above to the cases of two or three of them. Thus in the article on David Copperfield I have done far less than justice to that fine book considered in its relation to eternal literature. But I had waltzed some length upon a particular element in it which has grown enormous in England after Dickon's death. Thus again in introducing sketches by Bose I have felt chiefly that I am introducing them to a new generation in sufficiently in sympathy with such palpable and unsophisticated fun. A board school education evolved since Dickon's day has given to our people a queer and inadequate sort of refinement, one which prevents them from enjoying the raw jests of the sketches by Bose, but leaves them easily open to that slight but poisonous sentimentalism which I note amid all the merits of David Copperfield. In the same way I shall speak of Little Dorot with reference to a school of pessimistic fiction which did not exist when it was written of hard times in the light of the most modern crises of economics and of the child's history of England in the light of the most matured authority of history. In short these criticisms are an intrinsically ephemeral comment from one generation upon work that will delight many more. Dickon's was a very great man and there are many ways of testing and stating the fact. But one permissible way is to say this that he was an ignorant man ill-read in the past and often confused about the present. Yet he remains great and true and even essentially reliable if we suppose him to have known not only all that went before his lifetime but also all that was to come after. From this vanishing of the Victorian compromise, I might say the Victorian illusion there begins to emerge a menacing and even monstrous thing. We may begin again to behold the English people. If that strange dawn ever comes it will be the final vindication of Dickon's. It will be proved that he is hardly even a caricaturist. That he is something very like a realist. Those comic monstrosities which the critics found incredible will be found to be the immense majority of the citizens of this country. We shall find that Sweetlepipe cuts our hair and Pumblechook sells our serials. That Sam Weller blacks our boots and Tony Weller drives our omnibus. For the exaggerated notion of the exaggerations of Dickon's as was admirably pointed out by my old friend and enemy, Mr. Blatchford, in a Clarion review is very largely due to our mixing with only one social class whose conventions are very strict and to whose affections we are accustomed. In cab men, in cobblers, in char women individuality is often pushed to the edge of insanity. But as long as the Thackerian platform of gentility stood firm all this was comparatively speaking concealed. For the English of all nations have the most uniform upper class and the most varied democracy. In France it is the peasants who are solid to uniformity. It is the Marqueses who are a little mad. But in England, while good form restrains and levels the universities and the army, the poor people are the most motley and amusing creatures in the world, full of humorous affections and prejudices and twists of irony. They tend to be alike because they are all soldiers, Prussians because they are all something else, probably policemen. Even Americans are all something, though it is not easy to say what it is. It goes with hawk-like eyes and in irrational eagerness. Perhaps it is savages. But two English cab men will be as grotesquely different as Mr. Weller and Mr. Wedge. Nor is it true to say that I see in my own people, for I do not see the same degree of variety in my own class or in the class above it. There is more superficial resemblance between two Kensington doctors or two Highland dukes. Now the democracy is really composed of Dickens characters for the simple reason that Dickens was himself one of the democracy. There remains one thing to be added to this attempt to exhibit Dickens in the midst of our time. God forbid that anyone, especially any Dickensian, should dilute or discourage the great efforts toward social improvement. But I wish that social reformers would more often remember that they are imposing their rules not on dots and numbers, but on Bob Sawyer and Tom Lincolnwater on Mrs. Leraper and Dr. Marigold. I wish Mr. Sidney Webb would shut his eyes until he finds Sam Weller. A great many circumstances have led to the neglect in literature of these exuberant types, which do actually exist in the Router classes of society. Perhaps the principal cause is that since Dickens' time, the study of the poor has ceased to be an art and become a sort of sham science. Dickens took the poor individually. All modern writing tends to take them collectively. It is said that the modern realist is a photograph rather than a picture. But this is an inadequate objection. The real trouble with the realist is not that he produces a photograph but that he produces a composite photograph. It is like all composite photographs blurred, like all composite photographs hideous, and like all composite photographs unlike anything or anybody. The new sociological novels which attempt to describe the abstract type of the working classes sin in practice against the first canon of literature true when all others are subject to exception. Literature must always be pointing out of what is interesting in life. But these books are duller than the life they represent. Even supposing that Dickens did exaggerate the greed to which one man differs from another, that was at least an exaggeration upon the side of literature. It was better than a mere attempt to discuss what is actually vivid and unmistakable to what is in comparison, colorless or unnoticeable. Even the creditable and necessary efforts of our time in certain matters of social reform have discouraged the old distinctive Dickens treatment. People are so anxious to do something for the poor man that they have a sort of subconscious desire to think there is only one kind of man to do it for. Thus, while the old accounts were sometimes too steep and crazy, the new became too sweeping and flat. People write about the problem of drink, for instance, as if it were one problem. Dickens could have told them that there is the abyss between heaven and hell, between the incongruous excesses of Mr. Pickwick and the fatalistic sulking of Mr. Wickfield. You've shown that there was nothing in common between the brandy and water above Sawyer and the rum and water of Mr. Stiggins. People talk of imprudent marriages among the poor, as if it were all one question. Dickens could have told him that it is one thing to marry without much money, like Stephen Blackpool and quite another to marry without the smallest intention of ever trying to get any, like Harold Skimpel. People talk about husbands in the working class as being kind or brutal to their wives, as if that was the one permanent problem and no other possibility need to be considered. Dickens could have told him that there was the case, the by no means uncommon case of the husband of Mrs. Gargery as well as of the wife of Mr. Quillop. In short, Dickens saw the problem of the poor not as dead and definite business, but as a living and very complex one. In some ways he would be called much more conservative than the modern sociologists. In some ways much more revolutionary. End of the Introduction Part 2 End of Section 1 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens by G. K. Chesterton Section 2 Introduction Part 3 Subheading Little Dorot In the time of the decline and death of Dickens and even more strongly after it there arose a school of criticism which substantially maintained the world better when he was ill. It was some such sentiment as this that made Mr. George Gissing, that able writer, come near to contending that Little Dorot is Dickens best book. It was the principle of his philosophy to maintain, I know not why, that a man was more likely to perceive the truth when in low spirits than when in high spirits. Reprinted Pieces The three articles on Sunday of which I speak are almost the last expression of an articulate sort of English literature of the ancient and existing morality of the English people. It is always asserted that Puritanism came in with the 17th century and thoroughly soaked and absorbed the English. We are now, it is constantly said, an incurably Puritanic people. Personally I had my doubts about this. I shall not refuse to admit to the Puritans that they conquered the English people, but I do not think that they ever transformed it. My doubt is chiefly derived from three historical facts. First, that England was never so richly and recognizably English as in the Shakespearean age before the Puritan had appeared. Second, that ever since he did appear, there had been a long unbroken line of brilliant and typical Englishmen who belonged to the Shakespearean and not the Puritanic tradition. Johnson, Wilkes, Fox, Nelson were hardly Puritans. And third, that the real rise of a new cold and illiberal morality in these matters seems to me to have occurred in the time of Queen Victoria and not of Queen Elizabeth. All things considered is likely that future historians will say that the Puritans first really triumphed in the 20th century and that Dickens was the last cry of merry England. At about these additional miscellaneous and even inferior works of Dickens there is moreover another use and fascination which all the Kenzians will understand which after a manner is not for the profane. All who love Dickens have a strange sense that he is really inexhaustible. It is this fantastic infinity that divides him from the strongest, the healthiest romantic artists of a later day from Stevenson, for example. I have read Treasure Island twenty times. Nevertheless I know it. But I do not really feel as if I knew all Pickwick, as I have not so much read it twenty times as read in it a million times, and it almost seemed as if I always read something new. We of the true faith look at each other and understand. Yes, our master was a magician. I believe the books are alive. I believe that leaves still grow in them as leaves grow on the trees. I believe that this fairy library flourishes and increases like a fairy forest. But the world is listening to us and we will put our hand upon our mouth. Our Mutual Friend One thing at least seems certain. Dickens may or may not have been socialist in his tendencies. One might quote on the affirmative side his satire against Mr. Potsnap, who thought centralization un-English. One might quote and reply the fact that he satirized quite as unmercifully state and municipal officials of the most modern type. But there is one condition of affairs which Dickens would certainly have detested and denounced. And that is the condition in which we actually stand today. At this moment it is vain to discuss whether men's liberty for bread. The men have already sold the liberty. Only they have not yet got the bread. A most incessant and exacting interference with the poor is already in operation. They are already ruled like slaves. Only they are not fed like slaves. The children are forcibly provided with a school. Only they are not provided with a house. Officials give the most detailed domestic about the fire guard. Only they do not give the fire guard. Officials bring round the most rigid directions about the milk. Only they do not bring round the milk. The situation is perhaps the most humorous in the whole history of oppression. We force the black to dig. But as a concession to him we do not give him a spade. We compel him to cook but we consult his dignity so far as to refuse him a fire. This state of things at least cannot conceivably endure. We must either give the workers more property and liberty or we must feed them properly as we work them properly. If we insist on sending the menu into them they will naturally send the bill into us. This may possibly result, it is not my purpose here to prove that it will, in the drilling of the English people into hordes of humanely herded animals. And this again may mean the fading from our consciousness of all those elves and giant monsters and fantastics whom we are faintly beginning to feel and remember in the land. If this be so, the work of Dickens may be considered as a great vision. A vision, as Swineburn said, between a sleep and a sleep. It can be said that between the gray past of territorial depression and the gray future of economic wealth, the strange clouds lifted and we beheld the land of the living. Lastly Dickens is even astonishingly right about Eugene Rayburn. So far from approaching him with not understanding a gentleman, the critic will be astonished at the accuracy with which he has really observed the worth and weakness of the aristocrat. He is quite right when he suggests that such a man has intelligence enough to despise the invitations which he has urged to refuse. He is quite right when he makes Eugene, like Mr. Belfort, constantly write an argument, even when he is obviously wrong in fact. Dickens is quite right when he describes Eugene as capable of cultivating a sort of secondary and false industry about anything that is not profitable or pursuing with passion anything that is not his business. He is quite right in making Eugene honestly appreciative of essential interests in other people. He is quite right in making him really good at the graceful combination of satire and sentiment, both perfectly sincere. He is also right in indicating that the only cure for this intellectual condition is a violent blow on the head, David Copperfield. The real achievement of the earlier part of David Copperfield lies in a certain impression of the little Copperfield living in a land of giants. It is at once gargantuan in its fancy and grossly vivid in its facts, like Oliver in the land of Broddingnag when he describes mountainous hands and faces filling the sky, bristles as big as hedges or moles as big as mole hills. To him, parents and guardians are not Olympians as in Mr. Kenneth Graham's clever book, mysterious and dignified, dwelling upon a cloudy hill. Rather they are all the more visible for being large. They come out all the closer because they are colossal. Their queer features and weaknesses stand out large in a sort of gigantic domesticity, like the hairs and freckles of a Broddingnagian. We feel the somber myrtle stone coming upon the house like a tall storm striding through the sky. We watch every pucker of Pegatee's pleasant face in its moods of flinty prejudice or whimsical hesitation. We look up and feel that Aunt Betsy in her garden gloves was really terrible, especially her garden gloves. But one cannot avoid the impression that as the boy grows larger, these figures grow smaller, and are not perhaps so completely satisfactory. Christmas books. And there is doubtless a certain poetic unity and irony in gathering together three or four of the crudest and most conch-sure modern theorists with their shrill voices and metallic virtues under the fullness and the sonorous sanity of Christian bells. But the figures satarized in the chimes, cross each other's path, and spoil each other in some degree. The main purpose of the book was a protest against that impudent and hard-hearted utilitarianism which arranges the people only in rows of men or even in rows of figures. It is a flaming denunciation of that strange mathematical morality which was twisted often unfairly out of Bentham and Mill, a morality by which each citizen must regard himself as a fraction and a very vulgar fraction. Though the particular form of this insolent patronage has changed, this revolt and rebuke is still of value. And it may be wholesome for those who are teaching the poor to be provident. Doubtless it is a good idea to be provident in the sense that providence is provident. But that should mean being kind and certainly not being cold. The cricket on the hearth, though popular, I think with many sections on the Great Army of Dickensians, cannot be spoken of in any such abstract or serious terms. It is a brief domestic glimpse. It is an interior. It must be remembered that Dickens was fond of interiors as such. He was like a romantic tramp who should go from window to window, looking in at the parlors. He had that solid, indescribable delight in the mere solidity and neatness of funny little humanity in its funny little houses, like Dowell's houses. To him every house was a box, a Christmas box, in which a dancing human doll was tied up in bricks and slates instead of strings and brown paper. He went from one gleaming window to another looking in at the lamp-lit parlors. Thus he stood for a little while looking in at this cozy of commonplace interior of the carrier and his wife. But he did not stand there very long. He was on his way to Quintertowns and villages. Already the plants were sprouting upon the balcony of Miss Tox and the great wind was rising that flung Mr. Pexniff against his own front door. The end of part three of the introduction. End of section two. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Appreciations and criticisms of the works of Charles Dickens by G. K. Chesterton. Section three. Introduction part four. Subhead. Tale of two cities. It was well for him at any rate that the people rose in France. It was well for him at any rate that the guillotine was set up in the place de la Concorde. Unconsciously, but not accidentally, Dickens was here working out the whole true comparison between switch-revolutionism in Paris and slow-evolutionism in London. Sydney Carton is one of those sublime aesthetics whose head offends them and who cuts it off. For him at least, it was better that the blood should flow in Paris than the wine should flow any longer in London. And if I say that even now the guillotine might be the best cure for many a London lawyer, I ask you to believe that I am not merely flippant, but you will not believe it. Barnaby Rudge It may be said that there is no comparison between that explosive opening of the intellect in Paris and an antiquated madmen leading in not a provincial protestance. The man of the hill, says Victor Hugo somewhere, fights for an idea. The man of the forest, for a prejudice. Nevertheless, it remains true that the enemies of the red cap were to represent it as a sham decoration in the style of Sim-Tapertite. Long after the revolutionists had shown more than the qualities of men, it was common among lords and lackeys to attribute to them the stagey and piratical pretentiousness of urchins. The kings called Napoleon's pistol a toy pistol, even while it was holding up their coach and mastering their money They called his sword a stage sword, even while they ran away from it. Something of the same senile inconsistency can be found in an English and an American habit common until recently, that of painting the South Americans at once as ruffians, waiting in carnage, and also as paultrons playing at war. They blame them first for the cruelty of having a fight and then for the weakness of having a fight. Such, however, since the French Revolution and before it has been the fatuous attitude of certain Anglo-Saxons toward the whole revolutionary tradition. Sim-Tapertite was a sort of answer to everything and the young men were mocked as Prentices long after they were masters. The rising fortune of the South American republics today is symbolical and it may be that the romance of riot will not be so much extinguished as extended. And near home we may have boys being boys again. And in London the cry of clubs. The Uncommercial Traveler The Uncommercial Traveler is a collection of Dickens memories rather than of his literary purposes. But it is due to him to say that memory is often more startling in him than prophecy in anybody else. They have the character which belongs to all his vivid incidental writing that they attach themselves always to some text which is a fact rather than an idea. He was one of those sons of Eve who are fonder of the tree of life than the tree of knowledge even of the knowledge of good and evil. He was in this profoundest sense a realist. Critics have talked of an artist who had his eye on the object. Dickens as an essayist always had his eye on the object before he had the faintest notion of the subject. All these works of his can best be considered as letters. They are notes of personal travel scribbles in a diary about this or that that really happened. But Dickens was one of the few men who have the two talents that are the whole of literature and have them both together. He could make a thing happen over again. And second, he could make it happen better. He can be called exaggerative but mere exaggeration conveys nothing of his typical talent. Mere whirlwinds of words mere melodramas of earth and heaven do not affect us as Dickens affects us because they are exaggerations of nothing. If asked for an exaggeration of something their inventors would be entirely dumb. They would not know how to exaggerate a broomstick. For the life of them they could not exaggerate a 10-penny nail. Dickens always began with the nail or the broomstick. He always began with a fact. And even when he was most fanciful and even when he drew the long bow he was careful to hit the white. This riotous realism of Dickens has its disadvantages. A disadvantage that comes out clearly in these casual sketches than in his constructed romances. One grave defect in his greatness is that he was altogether too indifferent to theories. On large matters he went right by the very largeness of his mind. But in small matters he suffered from the lack of any logical test and ready reckoner. Hence his comment upon the details of civilization or reform are sometimes apt to be jerky and jarring and even grossly inconsistent. So long as the thing was heroic enough to admire Dickens admired it. Whenever it was absurd enough to laugh at he laughed at it. So far he was on shore ground. But about all the small human projects that lie between the extremes of the sublime and the ridiculous his criticism was apt to have an accidental quality. As Matthew Arnold said of the remarks of the young man from the country about the perambulator they are felt not to be at the heart of the situation. On a great many occasions the un-commercial traveler seems like other hasty travelers to be criticizing elements and institutions which he has quite inadequately understood. And once or twice the un-commercial traveler might almost as well be a commercial traveler for all he knows of the countryside. An instance of what I mean may be found in the amusing article about the nightmare of the nursery. Superficially read it might almost be taken to mean that Dickens disapproved of ghost stories. Disapproved of that old and genial horror which nurses can hardly supply fast enough for the children who want it. Dickens one would have thought should have been the last man in the world to object to horrible stories having himself written some of the most horrible that exist in the world. The author of the Mad Man's manuscript of the disease of Monk and the death of Crook cannot be considered fastidious in the matter of revolting realism or of revolting mysticism. If artistic horror is to be kept from the young it is at least as necessary to keep little boys from reading Pickwick or Bleakhouse as to refrain from telling them the story of Captain Murder or terrible tale of chips. If there was something appalling in the rhyme of chips and pips and chips it was nothing compared to that infernal refrain of mud stains, blood stains which Dickens himself in one of his highest moments of hellish art put into Oliver Twist. I take this one instance of the excellent article called Nurses' Stories because it is quite typical of all the rest. Dickens accused of superficiality by those who cannot grasp that there is foam upon deep seas was really deep about human beings. That is, he was original and creative about them. But about ideas he did tend to be a little superficial. He judged them by whether they hit him and not by what they were trying to hit. Thus in this book the great Wizard of the Christmas Ghost seems almost the enemy of ghost stories. Thus the almost melodramatic moralist who created Ralph Nicolby and Jonah's Chuselwit cannot see the point in original sin. Thus the great denouncer of official oppression in England may be found far too indulgent to the basis aspects of the modern police. His theories were less important than his creations because he was a man of genius. But he himself thought his theories the more important because he was a man. End of section 3 End of the introduction This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Part 1 The greatest mystery about almost any great writer is why he was ever allowed to write it all. The first efforts of imminent men are always imitations and very often they are bad imitations. The only question is whether the publisher had as his name would seem to imply some subconscious connection or sympathy with the public and thus felt instinctively the presence of something that might ultimately tell or whether the choice was merely a matter of chance and one Dickens was chosen and another Dickens left. The fact is almost unquestionable. Most authors made their reputation by bad books and afterwards supported it by good ones. This is in some degree true of Dickens. The public continued to call him Bose long after the public had forgotten the sketches by Bose. Numberless writers of the time speak of Bose as having written Martin Chuzzlewit and Bose as having written David Copperveiled. Yet if they had gone back to the original book signed Bose they might even have felt that it was vulgar and flippant. This is indeed the chief tragedy that they may easily refuse at the same moment the wrong manuscript and the right man. It is easy to see of Dickens now that he was the right man. But a man might have been very well excused if he had not realized that the sketches was the right book. Dickens, I say, is a case for this primary query whether there was in the first work any clear sign of his higher creative spirit. But Dickens is much less a case for this query than almost all the other great men of his period. The very earliest works of Thackery are much more unimpressive than those of Dickens. Nay, they are much more vulgar than those of Dickens. And worst of all they are much more numerous than those of Dickens. Thackery came much nearer to being the ordinary literary failure than Dickens ever came. Read some of the earliest criticisms of Mr. Yellow Plush or Michelangelo Titmarsh and you will realize that at the very beginning there was more potential clumsiness and silliness in Thackery than there ever was in Dickens. Nevertheless there was some potential clumsiness and silliness in Dickens and what there is of it appears here and there in the admirable sketches by Bose. Perhaps we may put the matter this way this is the only one of Dickens' works of which it is ordinarily necessary to know the date. To a close and delicate comprehension it is indeed very important that Nicholas Nickelby was written at the beginning of Dickens' life and our mutual friend toward the end of it. Nevertheless anybody could understand or enjoy these books written. If our mutual friend was written in the Latin in the Dark Ages we would still want it translated. If we thought that Nicholas Nickelby would not be written until 30 years hence we should all wait for it eagerly. The general impression is the destruction of time. Thomas Aquinas said that there was no time in the sight of God. However this may be there was no time in the sight of Dickens. As the general rule Dickens can be read in any order not only in any order of books but even any order of chapters. In an average Dickens book every part is so amusing and alive that you can read the parts backwards you can read the quarrel first and then the cause of the quarrel you can fall in love with a woman in the tenth chapter and then turn back to the first chapter to find out who she is. This is not chaos it is eternity. It means merely that Dickens instinctively felt all his figures to be immortal souls who existed whether he wrote of them or not and whether the reader read of them or not. There is a peculiar quality as of celestial pre-existence about the Dickens characters. Not only did they exist before we heard of them they existed also before Dickens heard of them. As a rule this unchangeable air in Dickens deprives any discussion about date of his point. But as I have said this is the one of Dickens works of which the date is essential. It is really an important part of the criticism of this book to say that it is his first book. Certain elements of clumsiness of obviousness of evident blunder actually require the chronological explanation. It is biographically important that this is his first book almost exactly in the same way that it is biographically important that the mystery of Edwin Drude was his last book. Change or no change Edwin Drude has this plain point of a last story about it that it is not finished. But if the last book is unfinished the first book is more unfinished still. The sketches divide themselves of course into two broad classes. One half consists of sketches that are truly and in the strict sense sketches. That is they are things that have no story in their outline none of the character or creation. They are merely facts from the street or the tavern or the town hall noted down as they occurred by an intelligence of quite exceptional vivacity. The second class consists of purely creative things farces, romances, stories in any case with a non-natural perfection or a poetical justice to round them off. One class is admirably represented for instance by the sketch describing the charity dinner the other by such a story as that of Horatio Sparkens. These things were almost certainly written by Dickens at very different periods of his youth and early as the harvest is no doubt it is a harvest he had ripened during a reasonably long time. Nevertheless it is with these two types of narrative that the young Charles Dickens first enters English literature. He enters it with a number of journalistic notes of such things as he has seen happen in streets or offices and with a number of short stories which air on the side of the extravagant and even the superficial. Journalism had not then indeed sunk to the low level that it has since reached. His sketches of dirty London would not have been dirty enough for the modern imperialist press. Still these first efforts of his are journalism and sometimes vulgar journalism. It was as a journalist that he attacked the world as a journalist that he conquered it. The biographical circumstances will not of course be forgotten. The life of Dickens brought up in a family just poor enough to be painfully conscious of its prosperity and its respectability he had been suddenly flung by a financial calamity into a social condition far below his own. For man on that exact edge of the educated class such a transition is really tragic. A duke may become a navy for a joke, but a clerk cannot become a navy for a joke. Dickens' parents went to debtor's prison. Dickens himself went to a far more unpleasant place. The debtor's prison had aboutered at least that element of amiable compromise and kindly decay which belonged and belongs still to all the official institutions of England. But Dickens was doomed to see the very blackest aspect of the 19th century England something far blacker than any mere bad government. He went not to a prison but to a factory. In the must-see traditionalism of the Marshall See old John Dickens could easily remain optimistic. In the ferocious efficiency of the modern factory young Charles Dickens narrowly escaped being a pessimist. He did escape this danger. Finally he even escaped the factory itself. His next step in life was if possible even more eccentric. He was sent to school. He was sent off like an innocent little boy in Eaton collars to learn the rudiments of Latin grammar without any reference to the fact that he had already taken his part in the horrible competition and actuality of the age of manufacturers. It was like giving a sacked bank manager a satchel and sending him to a Dames school. The third was the third stage of this career unconnected with the oddity of the others. On leaving the school he was made a clerk in a lawyer's office as if hence forward this child of ridiculous changes was to settle down into a silent assistant for a quiet solicitor. It was exactly at this moment that his fundamental rebellion began to cede. It ceded more against the quiet finality of his legal occupation than it had ceded against the squalor and slavery of his days of poverty. There must have been in his mind I think a dim feeling. Did all my dark crises mean only this? Was I crucified only that I might become a solicitor's clerk? Whatever be the truth about this conjecture there can be no question about the facts themselves. It was about this time that he began to burst and bubble over to insist upon his own intellect to claim a career. It was about this time that he put together a loose pile of papers sat tires on institutions pictures of private persons fairy tales of the vulgarity of his world, odds and ends such as come out of the facility and the fierce vanity of youth. It was about this time at any rate that he decided to publish them and gave them the name of sketches by Bose. End of Section 4 Chapter 2 Part 1 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Appreciations and criticisms of the works of Charles Dickens by G.K. Chesterton Section 5 Chapter 2 Sketches by Bose Part 2 They must, I think, be read in the light of this useful explosion. In some psychological sense he had really been wronged but he had only become conscious of his wrongs as his wrongs had been gradually righted. Similarly, it has often been found that a man who can patiently endure penal servitude through a judicial blunder will nevertheless, when once his cause is well asserted, quarrel about the amount of compensation or complain of small slights in his professional existence. These are the marks of the first literary action of Dickens. It has ended all the peculiar hardness of youth, a hardness which in those who have in any fairly treated reaches even to impudence. It is a terrible thing for any man to find out that his elders are wrong. And this almost unkindly courage of youth must partly be held responsible for the smartness of Dickens. That almost offensive smartness which in these earlier books of his sometimes irritates us like the showy jibes in the tall talk of a schoolboy. These first pages bear witness both to the energy of his genius and also to its unenlightenment. He seems more ignorant and more cocksure than so great a man should be. Dickens was never stupid, but he was sometimes silly and he is occasionally silly here. All this must be said to prepare the more fastidious modern for these papers if he has never read them before. But when all this has been said there remains in them exactly what always remains in Dickens when you have taken away everything that can be taken away by the most fastidious modern who ever dissected his grandmother. There remains that primimobile of which all the mystics have spoken. Energy, the power to create. I will not call it the will to live for that is a priggish phrase of German professors. Even German professors I suppose have the will to live. But Dickens had exactly what German professors have not. He had the power to live and indeed it is most valuable to have these early specimens of the Dickens' work if only because they are specimens of his spirit apart from his matured intelligence. It is well to be able to realize that contact with the Dickens' world is almost like a physical contact. It is like stepping suddenly into the hot smells of a greenhouse or into the bleak smell of the sea. We know that we are there. Let anyone read for instance one of the foolish but amusing farces in the Dickens' first volume. Let him read for instance such a story as that of Horatio Sparkens or that of the tugs at Ramsgate. You will not find very much of that verbal felicity or fantastic irony that Dickens afterward developed. The incidents are upon the plain lines of the stock comedy of the day. Sharpers who win trap simpletons. Spinsters who angle for husbands. Youths who try to look byronic and only look foolish. Yet there is something in these stories which there is not in the ordinary stock comedies of that day. An indefinable flavor of emphasis and richness. A hint as of infinity of fun. Doubtless for instance a million comic writers of that epic had made game of the dark romantic young man who pretended to abysses of philosophy and despair. And it is not easy to say exactly why we feel that the few metaphysical remarks of Mr. Horatio Sparkens are in some way really much funnier than any of those old stock jokes. It is in a certain quality of deep enjoyment in the writer as well as the reader as if the few words written had been dipped in dark nonsense and were as it were wreaking with derision. Because if effect be the result of cause and cause be the precursor of effect said Mr. Horatio Sparkens I apprehend that you are wrong. Nobody can get at the real secret of sentences like that. Sentences which were afterwards strewed with reckless liberality over the conversation of Dick Swiveller or Mr. Mantellini Sim Tappertite or Mr. Peck Sniff. Though the joke seems almost superficial one has only to read it a certain number of times to see that it is most subtle. The joke does not lie in Mr. Sparkens merely using long words any more than the joke lies merely in Mr. Swiveller drinking or in Mr. Mantellini deceiving his wife. It is something in the arrangement of the words something in the last inspired turn of absurdity given to a sentence. In spite of everything Horatio Sparkens is funny. We cannot tell why he is funny when we know why he is funny we shall know why Dickens is great. Standing as we do as it were, of the works of Dickens it may be well perhaps to state this truth as being after all the most important one. This first work had, as I have said the faults of first work and the special faults that arose from its author's accidental history. He was deprived of education and therefore was in some ways uneducated. He was confronted with the folly and failure of his natural superiors and guardians and therefore it was in some ways pert and insolent. Nevertheless the main fact about the work is worth stating here for any reader who should follow the chronological order and read the sketches by Boz before embarking on the stormy and splendid sea of Pickwick. For the sea of Pickwick though splendid does make some people seasick. The great point to be emphasized at such an initiation is this. That people, especially refined people are not to judge of Dickens by what they would call the coarseness or common-placeness of his subject. It is quite true that his jokes are often on the same subjects as the jokes in half-penny comic paper. Only they happen to be good jokes. He does make jokes about drunkenness, jokes about others in law, jokes about hand-packed husbands, jokes which is much more really unpardonable, about spinsters, jokes about physical cowardice, jokes about fatness, jokes about sitting down on one's hat. He does make fun of all these things and the reason is not very far to seek. He makes fun of all these things because all these things or nearly all of them are really funny. But a large number of those who might otherwise read and enjoy Dickens are undoubtedly put off as the phrase goes by the fact that he seems to be echoing a poor kind of clap-trap in his choice of incidents and images. Partly, of course, he suffers from the very fact of his success. His play with these topics was so good that everyone else has played with them increasingly since. He indeed have copied the old jokes, but he certainly renewed them. For instance, Allie Sloper was certainly copied from Wilkins McAlber. To this day you may see, in the front page of that fine periodical, the bald head and the high-shirt collar that betray the high original from which Allie Sloper is derived. But exactly because Sloper was stolen from McAlber, for that very reason the new generation feels as if McAlber were stolen from Sloper. Many modern readers feel as if Dickens were copying the comic papers, whereas in truth the comic papers are still copying Dickens. Dickens showed himself to be an original man, by always accepting old and established topics. There is no clearer sign of the absence of originality among modern poets than their disposition to find new themes. Really original poets write poems about the spring. They are always fresh, just as the spring is always fresh. Men wholly without originality write poems about torture or new religions of some perversion of obscenity, hoping the mere sting of the subject may speak for them. But we do not sufficiently realize that what is true of the classic ode is also true of the classic joke. A true poet writes about the spring being beautiful because after a thousand springs the spring really is beautiful. In the same way the true humorist writes about a man sitting down on his hat because the act of sitting down on one's hat however often and however admirably performed really is extremely funny. We must not dismiss a new poet because his poem is called to a skylark, nor must we dismiss a humorist because his new farce is called my mother-in-law. He may really have splendid and inspiring things to say upon an eternal problem. The whole question is whether he has. Now this is exactly where Dickens and the possible mistake about Dickens both come in. Numbers of sensitive ladies, numbers of simple esthetes have had vague shrinking from that element in Dickens which begins vaguely in the tugs at Ramsgate and culminates in Pickwick. They have a vague shrinking from the mere subject matter from the mere fact that so much of the fun is about drinking or fighting or falling down or eloping with old ladies. It is to the it is to these that the first appeal must be made upon the threshold of Dickens' criticism. Let them really read the thing and really see whether the humor is the gross and half-witted jeering which they imagine it to be. It is exactly here that the whole genius of Dickens is concerned. His subjects are indeed stock subjects, like the skylark of Shelley and the autumn of Keats. But all the more, because they are stock subjects, the reader realizes what a magician is at work. The notion of a clumsy fellow who falls off his horse is indeed a stock and stale subject. But Mr. Winkle is not a stock and stale subject, nor is his horse a stock and stale subject. It is as immortal as the horses of Achilles. The notion of a fat old gentleman proud of his legs might easily be vulgar, but Mr. Pickwick, proud of his legs, is not vulgar. Somehow we feel that they were legs to be proud of. And it is exactly this that we must look for in these sketches. We must not leap to any cheap fancy that they are low farces. We must see that they are not low farces and see that nobody but Dickens could have prevented them from being so. The end of chapter 2 End of section 5 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens by G. K. Chesterton Section 6 Chapter 3 Pickwick Papers Part 1 There are those who deny with enthusiasm the existence of God and are happy in a hobby which they call the Mistakes of Moses. I have not studied their labors in detail, but it seems the chief mistake of Moses was that he neglected to write the Pentateuch. The lesser errors apparently were not made by Moses but by another person equally unknown. These controversialists cover the very widest field and their attacks upon the Scripture are very to the point of wildness. They range from the proposition that the unexpurgitated Bible is almost as unfit for American girl school as is an unexpurgitated Shakespeare. They descend to the proposition that kissing the book is almost as hygienically dangerous as kissing the babies of the poor. The superficial critic might well imagine that there was not one single sentence left of the Hebrew or Christian Scripture which this school had not marked with some ingenious and uneducated comment. But there is one passage at least upon which they have never pounced at least to my knowledge. And in pointing it out to them I feel I am or ought to be providing material for quite a multitude of Hyde Park orations. I mean that singular arrangement in the mystical account of the creation by which light is created first and all the luminous bodies afterward. One could not imagine a process more open to the elephantine logic of the Bible smasher than this that the sun should be created after the sunlight. The conception that lies at the back of the phrase is indeed profoundly antagonistic to much of the modern point of view. To many modern people it would sound like saying that foliage existed before the first leaf. It would sound like saying that childhood existed before a baby was born. The idea is, as I have said, alien to most modern thought. And like many other ideas which are alien to most modern thought it is a very subtle and very sound idea. Whatever be the meaning of the passage in the actual primeval poem there is a very real metaphysical meaning in the idea that light existed before the sun and stars. It is not barbaric, it is rather platonic. The idea existed before any of the machinery which made manifest the idea. Justice existed when there was no need of judges. And mercy existed before any man was oppressed. However this may be in the matter of religion and philosophy it can be said with little exaggeration that this truth is the very key of literature. The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this. That a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed. Everything created is loved before it exists as the mother can love the unborn child. In creative art the essence of a book exists before the book or even the details or main features of the book. The author enjoys it and lives in it with a kind of prophetic rapture. He wishes to write a comic story before he has thought of a single comic incident. He desires to write a sad story before he knows anything sad. He knows atmosphere before he knows anything. There is a low, priggish maxim sometimes uttered by men so frivolous as to take humor seriously. A maxim that a man should not laugh at his own jokes. But the great artist not only laughs at his own jokes he laughs at his own jokes before he has even made them. In the case of a man really humorous we can see humor in his eye before he has thought of any amusing words at all. So the creative writer laughs at his comedy before he creates it and he has tears for his tragedy before he knows what it is. When the symbols and the fulfilling facts do come to him they come generally in a manner very fragmentary and inverted almost in irrational glimpses of crises or consummation. The last page comes before the first before his romance has begun he knows it has ended well. He sees the wedding before the wooing he sees the death before the duel but most of all he sees the color and character of the whole story prior to any possible events in it. This is the real argument for art and style only that the artists and the stylists have not the sense to use it. In one very real sense style is far more important than either a character or narrative. For a man knows what style a book he wants to write when he knows nothing else about it. Pickwick is, in Dickens' career, the mere mass of light before the creation of sun or moon. It is the splendid shapeless substance of which all his stars were ultimately made. You might split up Pickwick into innumerable novels as you could split up that primeval light into innumerable solar systems. The Pickwick papers constitute first and foremost a kind of wild promise a prenatal vision of all the children of Dickens. He had not yet settled down into the plain professional habit of picking out a plot and characters of attending to one thing at a time, writing a separate sensible novel and sending it off to his publishers. He is still in the youthful world of the kind that he would like to create. He has not yet really settled down what story he will write but only what sort of story he will write. He tries to tell ten stories all at once. He pours into the pot all the chaotic fancies and crude experiences of his boyhood. He sticks in irrelevant short stories shamelessly as into a scrapbook. He adopts designs and abandons them, begins episodes, and leaves them unfinished. But from the first page to the last, there is a nameless and elemental ecstasy the head of the man who is doing the kind of thing he can do. Dickens, like every other honest and effective writer came at last to some degree of care and self-restraint. He learned how to make his dramatist persona assist his drama. He learned how to write stories which were full of rambling publicity but which were stories. But before he wrote a single real story he had a kind of vision. It was a vision of the Dickens world. A maze of white roads a map full of fantastic towns thundering coaches clamorous marketplaces uproarious inns, strange and swaggering figures. That vision was pickwick. It must be remembered that this is true even in connection with the man's contemporaneous biography. Apart from anything else about it pickwick was his first great chance. It was a big commission given in some sense to an untried man that he might show what he could do. It was in a strict sense a sample. And just as a sample of leather can only be a piece of leather or a sample of coal, a lump of coal, may most properly be regarded as simply a lump of Dickens. He was anxious to show all that was in him. He was more concerned to prove that he could write well than to prove they could write this particular book well. And he did prove this at any rate. No one ever sensed such a sample as the sample of Dickens. His roll of leather blocked up the street his lump of coal set the themes on fire. The book originated in the suggestion of a publisher as many more good books have done than the arrogance of the man of letters is commonly inclined to admit. Very much is said in our time about Apollo and Edmatus and the impossibility of asking genius to work within prescribed limits or assist in alien design. But after all, as a matter of fact, some of the greatest geniuses have done it from Shakespeare botching up bad comedies and dramatizing bad novels down to Dickens writing a masterpiece as the mere framework for Mr. Seymour's sketches. Nor is the true explanation irrelevant to the spirits and power of Dickens. Very delicate, slender and bizarre talents are indeed incapable of being used for an outside purses, whether of public good or public mean. But about very great and rich talent there goes a certain disdainful generosity which can turn its hand to anything. Minor poets cannot write to order but very great poets can write to order. The larger the man's mind the wider his scope of vision. The more likely it will be that anything suggested to him will seem significant and promising. The more he has a grasp of everything he will be to write anything. It is very hard if that is the question to throw a brick at a man and ask him to write an epic. But the more he is a great man the more able he will be to write about the brick. It is very unjust if that is all to point out to the hoarding of Coleman's mustard and demand a flood of philosophical eloquence. But the greater the man is the more likely he will be so it was proved not for the first time in this great experiment of the early employment of Dickens. Mr. Chapman and Hall came to him with a scheme for a string of sporting stories to serve as the context and one might almost say the excuse for a string of sketches by Seymour the sporting artist. Dickens made some modifications in the plan but he adopted its main feature and its main feature was Mr. Winkle. To think of what Mr. Winkle might have been in the hands of a dull farceur and then to think of what he is is to experience the feeling that Dickens made a man out of rags and refuse. Dickens was to work splendidly and successfully in many fields and to send forth many brilliant books and brave figures. He was destined to have the applause of continents like a statesman to indicate to his publishers like a despot. But perhaps he never worked again so supremely well as here where he worked in chains. It may well be questioned whether his one hack book is not his masterpiece. End of Section 6, Chapter 3, Part 1 Please visit LibriVox.org Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens by G. K. Chesterton Section 7, Chapter 3, Pickwick Papers Part 2 Of course it is true that as he went on his independence increased and he kicked quite free of the influence that had suggested his story. So Shakespeare declared his independence of the original Chronicle of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark eliminating altogether with some wisdom another uncle called Wiglerus. At the start the Nimrod Club of Chapman and Hall may have even had equal chances with the Pickwick Club of young Mr. Dickens. But the Pickwick Club became something much better than any publisher had dared to dream of. Some of the old links were indeed severed by accident or extraneous trouble. Seymour, for whose sake the whole had perhaps been planned blew his brains out before he had drawn ten pictures. But such things were trifles compared to Pickwick itself. It mattered little now whether Seymour blew his brains out so long as Charles Dickens blew his brains in. The work became systematically full and masterly. Many critics have commented on the somewhat discordant and inartistic change between the earlier part of Pickwick and the later. They have pointed out, not without good sense, that the character of Mr. Pickwick changes from that of a silly buffoon to that of a solid merchant. But the case, if these critics had noticed it, is much stronger in the minor characters of the great company. Mr. Winkle who has been an idiot even, perhaps as Mr. Pickwick says an impostor, suddenly becomes a romantic and even a reckless lover, scaling a forbidden wall and planning a bold elobement. Mr. Snodgrass, who has behaved in ridiculous manner in all serious positions, suddenly finds himself in a ridiculous position, that of a gentleman surprised in a secret love affair and behaves in a manner perfectly serious and honorable. Mr. Tubman alone has no serious emotional development and for this reason it is, presumably that we hear less and less of Mr. Tubman toward the end of the book. Dickens has by this time got into a thoroughly serious mood. A mood expressed, indeed by extravagant incidents, but nonetheless serious for that and into this Winkle and Snodgrass in the character of romantic lovers could be made to fit. Mr. Tubman had to be left out of the love affairs, therefore Mr. Tubman is left out of the book. Much of the change was due to the entrance of the greatest character in the story. It may seem strange at the first glance to say that Sam Weller helped to make the story serious. Nevertheless this is strictly true. The introduction of Sam Weller had to begin with some merely accidental and superficial effects when Sam Weller had appeared. Samuel Pickwick was no longer the chief farcical character. Weller became the joker and Pickwick in some sense the butt of his jokes. Thus it was obvious that the more simple, solemn and really respectable this book could be made the better. Mr. Pickwick had been the figure capering before the footlights but with the advent of Sam Mr. Pickwick had become a sort of villain, had to behave as such. But this explanation though true as far as it goes is a mean and unsatisfactory one leaving the great elements unexplained. For a much deeper and more righteous reason Sam Weller introduces the more serious tone of Pickwick. He introduces it because he introduces something which it was the chief business of Dickens to preach throughout his life. Something which he never preached so well as when he preached it unconsciously. Sam Weller introduces the English people. Sam Weller is the great symbol in English literature of the populace peculiar to England. His incessant stream of sane nonsense is a wonderful achievement of Dickens. It is no great falsification of the incessant stream of sane nonsense as it really exists among the English poor. The English poor live in an atmosphere of humor. They think in humor. Irony is the very air that they breathe. A joke comes suddenly from time to time into the head of a politician or gentleman, and then as a rule he makes the most of it. But when a serious word comes into the mind of a coaster, it is almost as startling as a joke. The word shaft was, I suppose originally applied to band and age to express its barren and unsustaining character. But to the English poor, shaft is as sustaining as grain. The phrase that leaps to their lips is the ironical phrase. I remember once being driven in a handsome cab down a street that turned out to be a cul-de-sac and brought us bang up against a wall. The driver and I simultaneously said something. But I said, this will never do. And he said, this is all right. Even in the act of pulling back his horse's nose from a brick wall that confirms satirists thought in terms of his highly trained and traditional satire, while I belong into a duller and simpler class, express my feelings in words as innocent and literal as those of a rustic or a child. This eternal output of divine derision has never been so truly typified as by the character of Sam. He is the grotesque fountain which gushes the living waters forever. Dickens is accused of exaggeration and he is often guilty of exaggeration. But here he does not exaggerate. He merely symbolizes and sublimates like any other great artist. Sam Weller does not exaggerate the wit of the London Street Arab, one Adam or then Colonel Newcomb let us say exaggerates the stateliness of an ordinary soldier and gentleman or then Mr. Collins exaggerates the fatuity of a certain kind of country clergyman. And this breath from the boisterous brotherhood of the poor, lent a special seriousness and smell of reality to the whole story. The unconscious follies of Winkle and Tubman are blown away like leaves before the solid and conscious volley of Sam Weller. Moreover the relations between Pickwick and his servant Sam are in some ways new and valuable in literature. Many comic writers had described the clever rascal and his ridiculous dupe. But here, in a fresh and very human atmosphere we have a clever servant who was not a rascal and a dupe who was not ridiculous. Sam Weller stands in some ways for a cheerful image of the world. Mr. Pickwick stands for a still more cheerful ignorance of the world and Dickens responded to a profound human sentiment the sentiment that has made saints and the sanctity of children when he made the gentler and less travel type the type which moderates and controls. Knowledge and innocence are both excellent things and they are both very funny. It is right that knowledge should be the servant and innocence the master. The sincerity of this study of Sam Weller has produced one particular effect in the book which I wonder that critics of Dickens have never noticed or discussed. Because it has no Dickens pathos certain parts of it are truly pathetic. Dickens realizing rightly that the whole tone of the book was fun felt that he ought to keep out of it any great experiments in sadness and keep within limits those that he put in. He used this restraint in order not to spoil the humor. But if he had known himself better he might well have used it in order not to spoil the pathos. This is the one book in which Dickens was, as it were forced to trample down his tender feelings and for that very reason it is the one book where all the tenderness there is is quite unquestionably true. An admirable example of what I mean may be found in the scene in which Sam Weller goes down to see his bereaved father after the death of his stepmother. The most loyal admirer of Dickens can hardly prevent himself from giving a slight shudder when he thinks of what Dickens might have made of that scene in some of his more expansive and maudlin moments. For all I know old Mrs. Weller might have asked what the waves were saying. And for all I know old Mr. Weller might have told her. As it is Dickens being forced to keep the tale taught in humorous gives a picture of humble respect and decency which is manly, dignified and really sad. There is no attempt made by these simple and honest men, the father and son, to pretend that the dead woman was anything greatly other than she was. Respect is for death and for the human weakness and mystery which it must finally cover. Old Tony Weller does not tell his shrewish wife that she is already a white winged angel. He speaks to her with an admirable good nature and good sense. Susan, I says, you've been a very good wife to me all together. Keep a good heart, my dear, and you'll live to see me punch that ear-stigan's head yet. She smiled at this, Samville, but she died at her all. That is perhaps the first and last time that Dickens ever touched the extreme dignity of Pathos. He is restraining his compassion and afterwards he let it go. Now laughter is a thing that can't be let go. Laughter has in it a quality of liberty, but sorrow has in it by its very nature a quality of confinement. Pathos by its very nature fights with itself. Humor is expansive, it bursts outward. The fact is attested by the common expression holding one's sides. But sorrow is not expansive, and it was afterwards the mistake of Dickens that he tried to make it expansive. It is the one great weakness of Dickens as a great writer, that he did try to make that sudden sadness that abrupt pity which we call Pathos a thing quite obvious, infectious, public, as if it were journalism or the measles. It is pleasant to think that in this supreme masterpiece done in the dawn of his career, there is not even this faint fleck upon the sun of his just splendor. Pickwick will always be remembered as the great example of everything that made Dickens great. Of the solemn conviviality of great friendships, of the erratic adventures of old English roads, of the hospitality of old English ends, of the great fundamental kindness and honor of old English manners. First of all, however, it will always be remembered for its laughter, or if you will for its folly. A good joke is the one ultimate and sacred thing which cannot be criticized. Our relations with a good joke are direct and even divine relations. We speak of seeing a joke just as we speak of seeing a ghost or vision. If we have seen it, it is futile to argue with us, and if we have seen the vision of Pickwick. Pickwick may be the top of Dickens' humor, I think upon the whole of it is. But the broad humor of Pickwick he broadened over many wonderful kingdoms, the narrow Pathos of Pickwick he never found again. End of Section 7 End of Pickwick Papers This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Appreciations and Criticisms of the Work of Charles Dickens by G. K. Chesterton Section 8 Chapter 4 Nicholas Nickelby Part 1 Romance is perhaps the highest point of human expression except indeed religion to which it is closely aligned. Romance resembles religion especially in this that it is not only a simplification but a shortening of existence. Both romance and religion see everything as it were foreshortened. They see everything in an abrupt and fantastic perspective coming to an apex. It is the whole essence of perspective that it comes to a point. Similarly religion comes to a point, to the point. Thus religion is always insisting on the shortness of human life but it does not insist on the shortness of human life as the pessimists insist on it. Pessimism insists on the shortness of human life in order to show that life is valueless. Religion insists on the shortness of human life in order to show that life is frightfully valuable is almost horribly valuable. Pessimism says that life is so short that it gives nobody a chance. Religion says that life is so short that it gives everybody his final chance. And brevity means futility in the second case opportunity. But the case is even stronger than this. Religion shortens everything. Religion shortens even eternity where science submitting to the false standard of time sees evolution which is slow religion sees creation which is sudden. Philosophically speaking the process is neither slow nor quick since we have nothing to compare it with. Religion prefers to think of it as quick. For religion the flowers shoot up suddenly like rockets. For religion the mountains are lifted up suddenly like waves. Those who quote that fine passage which says that in God's sight a thousand years are as yesterday that is past as a watch in the night do not realize the full force of the meaning. To God a thousand years are not only a watch but an exciting watch. For God time goes at a gallop as it does to a man reading a good tale. All this is in a humble manner true for romance. Romance is a shortening and sharpening of the human difficulty where you and I have to vote against a man or write rather feebly against a man with noble petitions against a man. Romance does for him what we should really like to see done. It knocks him down. It shortens the slow process of historical justice. All romances consist of three characters. Other characters may be introduced but those other characters are certainly merely scenery as far as the romance is concerned. They are bushes that wave rather excitedly. They are posts that stand up with a certain pride. They are correctly painted rocks that frown very correctly. But they are all landscape. They are all a background. In every pure romance there are three living and moving characters. For the sake of argument they may be called St. George and the Dragon and the Princess. In every romance there are elements of loving and fighting. In every romance there must be the three characters. There must be the Princess who is the thing to be loved. There must be the Dragon who is the thing to be fought. And there must be St. George who is the thing that both loves and fights. There have been many symptoms of cynicism and decay in our modern civilization. But of all the signs of modern feebleness and grasp on morals as they actually must be there has been none quite so silly or so dangerous as this. That the philosophers of today have started to divide loving from fighting and to put them into opposite camps. There could be no worse sign than that a man even nightly can be found to say that we should go in for fighting instead of loving. There can be no worse sign that a man even Tolstoy can be found to tell us that we should go in for loving instead of fighting. The two things imply each other. They implied each other in the old romance and in the old religion which were the two permanent things of humanity. You cannot love a thing without wanting to fight for it. It is something to fight for. To love a thing without wishing to fight for it is not to love it at all. It is lust. It may be an airy, philosophical and disinterested lust. It may be so to speak a virgin lust. But it is lust. Because it is holy, self-indulgent and invites no attack. On the other hand, fighting for a thing without loving it is not even fighting. It can be called a kind of horse-play that is occasionally fatal. Wherever human nature is human and unspoiled by any special sophistry there exists this natural kinship between war and wooing and that natural kinship is called romance. It comes upon a man especially in the great hour of youth and every man who has ever been young at all has felt, if only for a moment, this ultimate and poetic paradox. He knows that loving the world is the same thing as fighting the world. It was at the very moment when he offered to like everybody. He also offered to hit everybody. To almost every man that can be called a man this special moment of the romantic culmination has come. In the first resort the man wished to live a romance in the second resort but in the worst resort he was content to write one. Now there is a certain moment when this element enters independently into the life of Dickens. There is a particular time when we can see him suddenly realize that he wants to write a romance and nothing else. In reading his letters and appreciating his character this point emerges clearly enough. He was full of the afterglow he was still young and psychologically ignorant. Above all he was now really for the first time sure that he was going to be at least some kind of success. There is, I repeat, a certain point at which one feels that Dickens will either begin to write romances or go off on something different altogether. This crucial point in his life is marked by Nicholas Nickelby. It must be remembered that this issue of Nicholas Nickelby his work, successful as it was had not been such as to dedicate him seriously or irrevocably to the writing of novels. He had already written three books and at least two of them are classed among the novels under his name. But if we look at the actual origin and formation of these books we see that they came from another source and were really designed upon another plan. The three books were, of course, the sketches by Bows, the Pickwick Papers, and Oliver Twist. It is, I suppose, sufficiently well understood that the sketches by Bows are, as their name implies, only sketches. But surely it is quite equally clear that the Pickwick Papers are, as their name implies, merely Papers. Nor is the case at all different in spirit and essence when we come to Oliver Twist. There is indeed a sort of romance in Oliver Twist, but it is such an uncommonly bad one that it can hardly be regarded as greatly interrupting the previous process. And if the reader chooses to pay very little attention to it he cannot pay less attention to it than the author did. But in fact the case lies far deeper. Oliver Twist is so much apart from the ordinary track of Dickens. It is so gloomy. It is so much all in one atmosphere that it can best be considered as an exception or a solitary excursus in his work. Perhaps it can best be considered as the extension of one of his old sketches, of some sketch that happened to be about a visit to a workhouse or a goal. In the sketches by Bows he might well have visited a workhouse where he saw Bumble. In the sketches by Bows he might well have visited a prison where he saw Fagan. We are still in the realm of sketches and sketchiness. The Pickwick papers may be called an extension of one of his bright sketches. Oliver Twist may be called an extension of one of his gloomy ones. How do you continue to along this line? All his books might very well have been notebooks. It would be very easy to split up all his subsequent books into scraps and episodes which make up the sketches by Bows. It would be easy enough for Dickens, instead of publishing Nicholas Nickleby, to have published a book of sketches, one of which was called A Yorkshire School, another called A Provincial Theatre, and another called Sir Mulberry Hawk or High Life Revealed, another called Mrs. Nickleby or A Lady's Monologue. It would have been very easy to have thrown over the rather chaotic plan of the old Curiosity Shop. He might have merely written short stories called The Glorious Apollo's Mrs. Quillips Tea Party, Mrs. Jarlie's Waxwork, The Little Servant, and The Death of a Dwarf. Martin Chuselwit might have been twenty stories instead of one story. Dalbury and Son might have been twenty stories instead of one story. We might have lost all Dickens' novels. We might have lost altogether Dickens the novelist. We might have lost that steady love of a seminal and growing romance which grew on him steadily as the years advanced and which gave us toward the end some of his greatest triumphs. All his books might have been sketches by bows. But he did turn away from this. And the turning point is Nicholas Nickleby. End of Section 8 Nicholas Nickleby, Part 1. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens by G. K. Chesterton. Section 9 Chapter 4 Nicholas Nickleby, Part 2 Everything has a supreme moment and is crucial. That is where our friends the evolutionists go wrong. I suppose that there is an instant of mid-summer as there is an instant of midnight. If in the same way there is a supreme point of spring, Nicholas Nickleby is the supreme point of Dickens' spring. I do not mean that it is the best book that he wrote in his youth. Quick is a better book. I do not mean that it contains more striking characters than any of the other books in his youth. The old Curiosity Shop contains at least two more striking characters. But I mean that this book coincided with his resolution to be a great novelist and his final belief that he could be one. Henceforward his books are novels, very commonly bad novels. There are many indications of the change I mean. Here is one for instance which is more or less final. Nicholas Nickleby is Dickens' first romantic novel because it is his first novel with a proper and dignified romantic hero which means of course a somewhat chivalrous young donkey. The hero of Pickwick is an old man. The hero of Oliver Twist is a child. Even after Nicholas Nickleby this non-romantic custom continued. The old Curiosity Shop has no hero in particular. The hero of Barnaby Rudge is a lunatic. But Nicholas Nickleby is a proper, formal and ceremonial hero. He has no psychology. He has not even any particular character. But he has made deliberately a hero. Young, poor, brave, unimpeachable and ultimately triumphant. He is in short the hero. Mr. Vincent Crumless had a colossal intellect and I always have had a fancy that under all his pomposity he saw things more keenly than he allowed others to see. The moment he saw Nicholas Nickleby almost in rags and limping along the high road he engaged him you will remember the first walking gentleman. He was right. Nobody could possibly be more of a first walking gentleman than Nicholas Nickleby was. He was the first walking gentleman before he went on to the boards of Mr. Vincent Crumless Theatre and he remained the first walking gentleman after he had come off. Now this romantic method involves a certain element of climax which to us appears to be a kind of continuity. Nicholas Nickleby, for instance, wanders through the world. He takes the situation as assistant to a Yorkshire schoolmaster. He sees an act of tyranny of which he strongly disapproves. He cries out stop in a voice that makes the rafters ring. He thrashes the old schoolmaster within an inch of his life. He throws the schoolmaster away like an old cigar The modern intellect is positively prostrated and flattened by this rapid and romantic way of writing wrongs. If a modern philanthropist came to Doth Boy's Hall I fear he would not employ the simple, sacred, and truly Christian solution of beating Mr. Squeers with a stick. I fancy he would petition the government to appoint a royal commission to inquire into Mr. Squeers. I think he would every now and then write letters to newspapers reminding people that in spite of all appearances to the contrary there was a royal commission to inquire into Mr. Squeers. I agree that he might even go the length of calling a crowd meeting at St. James Hall on the subject of his best policy with regard to Mr. Squeers. At this meeting some very heated and daring speak might even go the length of alluding sternly to Mr. Squeers. Occasionally, even horse voices from the back of the hall might ask in vain what was going to be done with Mr. Squeers. The royal commission would report about three years afterwards and would say that many things that happened which were certainly most regrettable, that Mr. Squeers was the victim of a bad system, that Mrs. Squeers was also the victim of a bad system, but that the man who sold Squeers his cane had really thought to be spoken to kindly. Something like this would be what after four years the royal commission would have said but it would not matter in the least what the royal commission had said for by that time the philanthropists would have been off on a new tack and the world would have forgotten all about Dothboy's Hall and everything connected with it. By that time the philanthropists would be petitioning parliament for another royal commission perhaps a royal commission to inquire into whether Mr. Mantellini was extravagant with his wife's money. Perhaps a commission to inquire into whether Mr. Vincent Crumlis kept the infant phenomenon short by means of gin. If we wish to understand the spirit and period of Nicholas Nicolby we must endeavor to comprehend and to appreciate the old more decisive remedies, or if we prefer to put it so, the old more desperate remedies. Our fathers had a plain sort of pity if you will, a gross and coarse pity. They had their own sort of sentimentalism they were quite willing to weep over smike but it certainly never occurred to them to weep over squares even those who opposed the French war opposed it exactly in the same way as their enemies opposed the French soldiers. They fought with fighting. Charles Fox was full of horror at the bitterness and useless bloodshed but if anyone had insulted him over the matter he would have gone out and shot him in a duel as coolly as any of his contemporaries. All their interference was heroic interference all their legislation was heroic legislation all their remedies were heroic remedies. No doubt they were often narrow and often visionary. No doubt they often looked like a political formula when they should have looked at an elemental fact. No doubt they were pedantic in some of their principles and clumsy in some of their solutions. No doubt in short they were all very wrong and no doubt we are the people and wisdom shall die with us. But when they saw something which in their eyes such as they were really violated their morality such as it was when I investigate they did not cry educate they did not cry improve they did not cry evolve like Nicholas Nicolby they cried stop and it did stop. This is the first mark of the purely romantic method the swiftness and simplicity with which St. George kills the dragon. The second mark of it is exhibited here as one of the weaknesses I mean the tendency and the purely romantic story to regard the heroine merely as something to be won to regard the princess solely as something to be saved from the dragon. The father of Madeleine Bray is really a very respectable dragon his selfishness is suggested with much more psychological tact and truth than that of any other of the villains that Dickens described about this time. A woman with whom Nicholas is in love we do not care a wrap about Madeleine Bray personally I should have preferred Cecilia Bobster here is one real point where the Victorian romance falls below the Elizabethan romantic drama Shakespeare always made his heroines heroic as well as his heroes. In Dickens actual literary career it is this romantic quality in Nicholas that is most important it is his first definite attempt to write a young and chivalrous novel in this sense the comic characters and the comic scenes are secondary and indeed the comic characters and the comic scenes admirable as they are could never be considered as in themselves superior to such characters and such scenes in many of the other books but in themselves how unforgettable they are Mr. Crumless and the whole of his theatrical business is an admirable case of that first and most splendid quality in Dickens I mean the art of making something which in life we call pompous and dull becoming in literature pompous and delightful I have remarked before that nearly every one of the amusing characters of Dickens is in reality a great fool but I might go further almost every one of his amusing characters is in reality a great bore the very people that we fly to in Dickens are the very people that we fly from in life and there is more in Crumless than in the mere entertainment of his solemnity and his tedium the enormous seriousness with which he takes his art is always an exact touch in regard to the unsuccessful artist if an artist is successful everything then depends upon a dilemma of his moral character if he is a mean artist successful make him a society man if he is a magnanimous artist successful make him an ordinary man but only as long as he is unsuccessful he will be an unfathomable and serious artist like Mr. Crumless Dickens was always particularly good at expressing thus the treasures that belong to those who do not succeed in this world there are vast prospects and splendid songs in the point of view of the typically unsuccessful man if all the used up actors and spoiled journalists and broken clerks could give a chorus it would be a wonderful chorus in praise of the world but these unsuccessful men commonly cannot even speak Dickens is the voice of them and a very ringing voice because he was perhaps the only one of these unsuccessful men that was ever successful End of Section 9 End of Chapter 4