 G. K. Chesterton's Charles Dickens Chapter 9 Later Life and Works This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, visit LibriVox.org. I have deliberately, in this book, mentioned only such facts in the life of Dickens, as were, I will not say significant, for all facts must be significant, including the million facts that can never be mentioned by anybody. But such facts has illustrated my own immediate meaning. I have observed this method consistently and without shame, because I think that we can hardly make too evident a chasm between books with professed-to-be statements of all the ascertainable facts and books which like this one profess only to contain a particular opinion or a summary deducible from the facts. Books like Forster's Exhaustive Work and Others Exist and are as accessible as St. Paul's Cathedral. We have them in common as we have the facts of the physical universe, and it seems highly desirable that the function of making an exhausted catalogue and that of making an individual generalization should not be confused. No catalogue, of course, can contain all the facts even of five minutes. Every catalogue, however long and learned, must not only be a bold, but one may say an audacious, solution. But if a great many facts are given, the reader gains a blurred belief that all the facts are being given. In a professedly personal judgment, it is therefore clearer and more honest to give only a few illustrative facts, leaving the other attainable facts to balance them, for thus it is made quite clear that the thing is a sketch and a fair of a few lines. It is as well, however, to make at this point the pause sufficient to indicate the main course of the later life of the novelist. And it's best to begin with the man himself, as he appeared in those last days of popularity and public distinction. Many are still alive who remember him in his after-dinner speeches, his lectures, and his many public activities. As I'm not one of these, I cannot correct my notions with that flash of the living features, without which a description may be subtly and entirely wrong. Once a man is dead, if it only be yesterday, the newcomer must piece him together from descriptions really as much at random as if he were describing Caesar or Henry II. Allowing, however, for this inevitable falsity, a figure vivid and a little fantastic, does walk across the stage of Forster's life. Dickens was of a middle size, and his vivacity and relative physical insignificance probably gave rather the impression of small size, certainly of the absence of bulk. In early life he wore even for that epic extravagant clusters of brown hair, and in later years a brown moustache and a fringe of brown beard cut like a sort of broad and bushy imperial, sufficiently individual in shape to give him a faint air as of a foreigner. His face had a peculiar tint or quality which is hard to describe even after one has contrived to imagine it. It was the quality which Mrs. Carlyle felt to be as it were metallic, and compared to clear steel. It was, I think, a sort of pale glitter in animation, very much alive and yet with something deadly about it, like a corpse galvanized by God. His face, if this was so, was curiously a counterpart of his character, but the essence of all Dickens characters was that it wasn't once tremulous and yet hard and sharp, just as the bright blade of a sword is tremulous and yet hard and sharp. He vibrated at every touch and yet he was indestructible. You could bend in but you could not break him. Brown of hair and beard, somewhat pale and visage, especially in his later years of excitement and ill health, he had quite exceptionally bright and active eyes that were always darting about like brilliant birds, to pick up all the tiny things of which he had made more perhaps than any novelist has done, or he was a sort of poetical Sherlock Holmes. The mouth behind the brown beard was large and mobile like the mouth of an actor. Indeed, he was an actor in many things too much of an actor. In his lectures in later years he could turn his strange face into any of the innumerable mad masks that were the blank innanity of Mrs. Rattles' servant, or swell as if to twice its size into the apocalyptic energy of Mr. Sergeant Buzzfuzz. The outline of his face itself, from his youth upwards, was cut quite delicate and decisive in repose, and in its own cane way may even have looked effeminate. The dress of the comfortable classes during the later years of Dickens was compared with ours, somewhat slip-shot and somewhat gaudy. It was the time of loose peg-top trousers of an almost Turkish oddity of large ties of loose short jackets and of loose long whiskers. Yet even in this expansive period, it must be confessed, considered Dickens a little too flashy, whereas some put it too frenchified in his dress. Such a man would wear velvet coats and wild waistcoats that were like incredible sunsets. He would wear those old white hats of an unnecessary and startling whiteness. He did not mind being seen in sensational dressing gowns that it said he had his portrait painted in one of them. All of this is not meritorious, neither is it particularly discreditable. It is a characteristic only, but an important one. He was an absolutely independent and entirely self-respecting man, but he had none of that old, lusty, half-dignified English feeling upon which Thackeray was so sensitive. I mean the desire to be regarded as a private gentleman, which means at bottom the desire to be left alone. This again is not a merit. It is only one of the milder aspects of aristocracy. But meritorious or not, Dickens did not possess it. He had no objection to being stared at, if he were also admired. He did not exactly pose in the oriental manner of Disraeli. His instincts were too clean for that, but he did pose somewhat in the French manner of some leaders like Mirabeau and Gambetta. Nor had he the dull desire to get on, which makes men die, contented as inarticulate undersecretaries of state. He did not desire success so much as fame, the old human glory, the applause and wonder of the people. Such he was as he walked down the street in his French-ified clothes, probably with a slight swagger. His private life consisted of one tragedy and 10,000 comedies. By one tragedy I mean one real and rending moral tragedy, the failure of his marriage. He loved his children dearly and more than one of them died, but in sorrows like these there is no violence and above all no shame. The end of life is not tragic like the end of love. And by the 10,000 comedies I mean the whole texture of his life, his letters, his conversation, which were one incessant carnival of insane and inspired improvisation. So far as he could prevent it, he never permitted a day of his life to be ordinary. There was always some prank, some impetuous proposal, some practical joke, some sudden hospitality, some sudden disappearance. It is related of him, I give one anecdote out of a hundred, that in his last visit to America, when he was already reeling as it were under the blow that was to be mortal, he remarked quite casually to his companions that a row of painted cottages looked exactly like the painted shops in a pantomime. No sooner had the suggestion passed his lips than he left to the nearest doorway, and in exact imitation of the clown of the harlequin aid, be conscientiously with his fist, not on the door, for that would have burst the canvas scenery, of course, but on the side of the door post. Having done this he laid down ceremoniously across the doorstep for the owner to fall over him if he shook him rushing out. He then got up gravely and went on his way. His whole life was full of such unexpected energies, precisely like those of the pantomime clown. Dickens had indeed a great and fundamental affinity with the landscape, or rather house-scape, of the harlequin aid. He liked high houses and sloping roofs in deep areas, but he would have been really happy if some good fairy of the eternal pantomime had given him the power of flying off the roofs and pitching harmlessly down the height of the houses and bounding out of the areas like his India rubber ball. The divine lunatic and Nicholas Nicolby comes near as his dream. I really think Dickens would rather have been that one of his characters than any of the others. With what excitement he would have struggled down the chimney, with what ecstatic energy he would have hurled cucumbers over the garden wall. His letters exhibit even more the same incessant creative force. His letters are as creative as any of his literary creation. His shortest postcard is often as good as his ableist novel. Each one of them is spontaneous, each one of them is different. He varies even the form and shape of the letter as far as possible. Now it is in absurd French, now it is from one of his characters, now it is an advertisement for himself as a stray dog. All of them are very funny, they're not only very funny, but they're quite as funny as his finished and published work. This is the ultimately amazing thing about Dickens, the amount there is of him. He wrote at the very least 16 thick important books packed full of original creation, and if you had burnt them all he could have written 16 more as a man writes idle letters to a friend. In connection with this exuberant part of his nature there is another thing to be noted if we are to make a personal picture of him. Many modern people, chiefly women, have been heard to object to the backick element in the books of Dickens, that celebration of social drinking as a supreme symbol of social living, which those books share with almost all the great literature of mankind, including the New Testament. Undoubtedly there is an abnormal amount of drinking in a page of Dickens, just as there is an abnormal amount of fighting say in a page of Dumas. If you reckon up the beers and brandies of Mr. Bob Sawyer with the care of an arithmetician and the deductions of a pathologist, they rise alarmingly like a rising tide at sea. Dickens did defend drink clamorously, praised it with passion, and described whole orgies of it with enormous gusto. Yet it is wonderfully typical of his prompt and impatient nature that he himself drank comparatively little. He was the type of man who could be so eager in praising the cup that he left the cup untasted. It was a part of his activity and feverish temperament that he did not drink wine very much, but it was a part of his humane philosophy of his religion that he did not drink wine. To healthy European philosophy wine is a symbol. To European religion it is a sacrament. Dickens approved it because it was a great human institution, one of the rights of civilization, and this it certainly is. The teetotaler who stands outside it may have perfectly clear ethical reasons of his own, as a man may have who stands outside education nor nationality, who refuses to go to a university or to serve an army. But he is neglecting one of the great social things that man has added to nature. The teetotaler has chosen a most unfortunate phrase for the drunkard when he says that the drunkard is making a beast of himself. The man who drinks ordinarily makes nothing but an ordinary man of himself. The man who drinks excessively makes a devil of himself. But nothing connected with a human and artistic thing like wine can bring one nearer to the brute life of nature. The only man who is, in the exact and literal sense of the words, making a beast of himself, is the teetotaler. Tone of Dickens toward religion, though like that of most of his contemporaries philosophically disturbed and rather historically ignorant, had an element that was very characteristic of himself. He had all the prejudices of his time. He had, for instance, that dislike of defined dogma which really means a preference for unexamined dogmas. He had the usual vague notion that the whole of our human past was packed with nothing but insane tories. He had, in a word, all the old radical ignorances which went along with the old radical acuteness and courage and public spirit. But this spirit tended in almost all the others who held it to a specific dislike of the Church of England and a disposition to set the other sex against it as truer types of inquiry or of individualism. Dickens had a definite tenderness for the Church of England. He might even called it a weakness for the Church of England. But he had it. Something in those placid services, something in that reticent and humane liturgy pleased him against all tendencies of his time. Pleased him in the best part of himself, his viral love of charity and peace. Once in a puff of anger at the Church's political stupidity, which is indeed profound, he left it for a week or two and went to a Unitarian chapel. In a week or two he came back. This curious and sentimental hold of the English Church upon him increased with years. In the book he was at work on when he died, he describes the minor canon, humble, chivalrous, tender-hearted, answering with indignant simplicity to the froth and platform righteousness of the sectarian philanthropist. He upholds canon, Chris Barkle, and satirizes Mr. Honey Thunder. Almost every one of the other radicals, his friends, would have upheld Mr. Honey Thunder and satirized canon, Chris Barkle. I have mentioned this matter for a special reason. It brings us back to that apparent contradiction or dualism in Dickens, to which in one connection or another I have often inverted and which in one shape or another constitutes the whole crux of his character. I mean the union of a general wildness approaching lunacy with a sort of secret moderation almost demanding to mediocrity. Dickens was more or less the man I have described, sensitive, theatrical, amazing, a bit of a dandy, a bit of a buffoon. Nor are such characters, this whether weak or wild, entirely accidents or externals. He had some false theatrical tendencies integral in his nature. For instance, he had one most unfortunate habit, a habit that often put him in the wrong even when he happened to be in the right. He had an incurable habit of explaining himself. This reduced his admirers to the mental condition of the authentic but hitherto uncelebrated little girl who said to her mother, I think I should understand if only you wouldn't explain. Dickens always would explain. It was a part of that instinctive publicity of his which made him at once a splendid Democrat and a little too much of an actor. He carried it to the craziest lengths. He actually printed in household words an apology for his own action in the matter of his marriage. That incident alone is enough to suggest that his external offers and proposals were sometimes like screams heard from Bedlam. Yet it remains true that he had in him a central part that was pleased only by the most decent and most reposal rights, by things of which the Anglican prayer book is very typical. It is certainly true that he was often extravagant. It is most certainly equally true that he detested and despised extravagance. The best explanation can be found in his literary genius. His literary genius consisted in a contradictory capacity at once to entertain and to deprive very ridiculous ideas. If he is a buffoon, he is laughing at buffoonery. His books were in some ways the wildest on the face of the world. Rabelais did not introduce in Tapeflegania, or the Kingdom of the Cochegous, satiric figures more frantic and misshapen than Dickens made to walk about the Strand and the Lincoln's Inn. But for all that, you come in in the core of him on a sudden quietude and good sense. Such, I think, was the core of Rabelais. Such were all the far-stretching and violent satirists. This is the point essential to Dickens, though very little comprehended in our current tone of thought. Dickens was an immoderate gesture, but a moderate thinker. He was an immoderate gesture because he was a moderate thinker. What we moderns call the wildness of his imagination was actually created by what we moderns call the tameness of his thought. I mean that he felt the full insanity of all extreme tendencies because he was himself so sane. He felt eccentricities because he was in the center. We're always in these days asking our violent prophets to write violent satires. But violent prophets can never possibly write violent satires. In order to write satires like that of Rabelais, satire that juggles with the stars and kicks the world about like a football, it is necessary to be one self-tempered and even mild. A modern man like Nietzsche, a modern man like Gorky, a modern man like Dionunzio, could not possibly write real and riotous satire. They are themselves too much on the borderlands. They could not be a success as caricaturists, for they are already a great success as caricatures. I have mentioned his religious preference merely as an instance of this interior moderation. To say as some have done that he attacked non-conformity is quite a false way of putting it. It is clean across the whole trend of the man and his time to suppose that he could have felt bitterness against any theological body as a theological body. But anything like religious extravagance, whether Protestant or Catholic, moved him to an extravagance of satire, and he flung himself into the drunken energy of stiggens. He piled up to the stars the verbose flights of stairs of Mr. Chad Band. Exactly because his own conception of religion was the quiet and impersonal morning prayer. It is typical of him that he had a peculiar hatred for speeches at the graveside. An even clearer case of what I mean can be found in his political attitude. He seemed to some an almost anarchic satirist. He made equal fond of the system which reformers made war on and of the instruments on which the reformers rely. He made no secret of his feelings that the average English Premier was an accidental ass. In two superb sentences he summed up and swept away the whole British Constitution. England for the last week has been in an awful state. Lord Coodle would go out, Sir Thomas Doodle wouldn't come in, and there being no people in England to speak of except Coodle and Doodle, the country has been without a government. He lumped all cabinets and all government offices together and made the same game of them all. He created his most staggering humbugs, his most adorable and incredible idiots, and set them on the highest thrones of our national system. To many moderate and progressive people such a satirist seemed to be insulting heaven and earth, ready to wreck society for some mad alternative, prepared to pull down St. Paul's and on its runes erect a gory guillotine. Yet as a matter of fact, this apparent wildness of his came from his being, if anything, a very moderate politician. He came not at all from fanaticism, but from a rather rational detachment. He had the sense to see that the British Constitution was not democracy, but the British Constitution. It was an artificial system, like any other, good in some ways, bad in others. His satire of it sounded wild to those who worshiped it, but his satire of it arose not from his having any wild enthusiasm against it, but simply from his not having, like everyone else, a wild enthusiasm for it. Alone, as far as I know, among all the great Englishmen of that age, he realized the thing that Frenchmen and Irishmen understand. I mean the fact that popular government is one thing and representative government is another. He realized that representative government has many minor disadvantages, one of them being that it is never representative. He speaks of his hope to have made every man in England feel something of the contempt for the House of Commons that I have. He says also, these two things, both of which are wonderfully penetrating as coming from a good radical in 1855, where they contain a perfect statement of the peril in which we now stand, and which may, if it please God, sting us into avoiding the long vista at the end of which one sees so closely the dignity and the decay of Venice. I am hourly strengthened, he says, in my old belief that our political aristocracy and our tough hunting are the death of England. In all this business I don't see a gleam of hope. As to the populous spirit, it has come to be so entirely separated from the parliament and the government, and so perfectly apathetic about them both, that I seriously think it is a most portentious sign. And he says also this, I really am serious in thinking, and I have given as painful consideration to the subject as a man with children to live and suffer after him can possibly give it, that representative government is become altogether a failure with us, that the English gentilities and subserviences render the people more unfit for it, and the whole thing has broken down since the great 17th century time, and has no hope in it. These are the words of a wise and perhaps melancholy man, but certainly not of an unduly excited one. It is worth noting, for instance, how much more directly Dickens goes to the point than Carlisle did, who noted many of the same evils. But Carlisle fancied that our modern English government was wordy and long-winded because it was democratic government. Dickensall would is certainly the fact that it is wordy and long-winded, because it is an aristocratic government. The two most pleasant aristocratic qualities being a love of literature and an unconsciousness of time. But all this amounts to the same conclusion of the matter. Prantic figures like Dickens and Shadbrand were created out of the quietude of his religious preference. Wild creations like the barnacles and the boundaries were produced in a kind of ecstasy of ordinary, of the obvious in political justice. His monsters were made out of his level and his moderation, as the old monsters were made out of the sea. Such was the man of genius we must try to imagine. Violently emotional yet with a good judgment. Ignatious, but only when he thought himself oppressed. Prone to think himself oppressed, yet not cynical about human motives. He was a man remarkably hard to understand or to reanimate. He almost always had reasons for his action. His error was that he always expounded them. Sometimes his nerve snapped and then he was mad. Unless it did so, he was quite unusually sane. Such a rough sketch at least much suffice us in order to summarize his later years. Those years were occupied, of course, in two main additions to his previous activities. The first was the series of public readings and lectures, which he now began to give systematically. The second was his successive editorship of household words and of all the year round. He was of a type that enjoys every new function and opportunity. He had been so many things in his life, a reporter, an actor, a conjurer, a poet, as he had enjoyed them all so he enjoyed being a lecturer and enjoyed being an editor. It is certain that his audiences, who sometimes stacked themselves so thick that they lay flat on the platform all around him, enjoyed his being a lecturer. It is not so certain that the sub-editors enjoyed his being an editor. But in both connections, the main matter of importance is the effect on the permanent work of Dickens himself. The readings were important for this reason that they fixed, as if by some public and pontifical pronouncement, what was Dickens' interpretation of Dickens' work. Such a knowledge is mere tradition, but it is very forcible. My own family has handed on to me and I shall probably hand on to the next generation a definite memory of how Dickens made his face suddenly like the face of an idiot in impersonating Mrs. Rattle's servant Betsy. This does serve one of the permanent purposes of tradition. It does make a little more difficult for any ingenious person to prove that Betsy was meant to be a brilliant satire on the over-cultivation of intellect. As for his relation to his two magazines, it is chiefly important, first for the admirable things which he wrote, for the magazines themselves. One cannot forbear to mention the intimate monologue of the waiter in somebody's luggage. And secondly, for the fact that in his capacity of editor, he made one valuable discovery. He discovered Wilkie Collins. Wilkie Collins was the one man of unmistakable genius who has a certain affinity with Dickens. An affinity in this respect that they both combine in a curious way a modern and a cockney, and even commonplace opinion about things with huge elemental sympathy with strange oracles and spirits and old night. There were no two men in mid-Victorian England with their top hats and umbrellas more typical of its rationality and dull reform. And there were no two men who could touch them in a ghost story. No two men would have had more contempt for superstitions, and no two men could so create the superstitious thrill. Indeed, our modern mystics make a mistake when they wear long hair or loose ties to attract the spirits. The elves and the old gods, when they revisit the earth, really go straight for a dull top hat. For it means simplicity, which the gods love. Meanwhile, his books appearing from time to time, while as brilliant as ever, bore witness to that increasing tendency to a more careful and responsible treatment, which we have remarked in the transition which culminated in Bleak House. His next important book, Hard Times, strikes in almost unexpected notice severity. The characters are indeed exaggerated, but they are bitterly and deliberately exaggerated. They're not exaggerated with the old unconscious high spirits of Nicholas Nicolby or Martin Chiselwood. Dickens exaggerates boundary because he really hates him. He exaggerated pecsnip because he really loved him. Hard Times is not one of the greatest books of Dickens, but it is perhaps in a sense one of the greatest monuments. It stamps and records the reality of Dickens' emotions on a great many things that were then considered unphilosophical grumblings, but which sense has swelled into the immense phenomena of the socialist philosophy. To call Dickens a socialist is a wild exaggeration, but the truth and peculiarity of his position might be expressed thus. That even when everybody thought that liberalism meant individualism, he was emphatically a liberal and emphatically not an individualist. Or the truth might be better still stated in this manner. That he saw that there was a secret thing called humanity, to which both extreme socialism and extreme individualism were profoundly and inexpressibly indifferent, and that this permanent and presiding humanity was the thing he happened to understand. He knew that individualism is nothing and non-individualism is nothing but the keeping of the commandment of man. He felt, as a novelist should, that the question is too much discussed as to whether man is in favor of this or that scientific philosophy. That there is another question, whether the scientific philosophy is in favor of man. That is why such books as Hard Times will remain always a part of the power and tradition of Dickens. He saw that economic systems are not things like the stars, but things like the lampposts, manifestations of the human mind, and things to be judged by the human heart. Thence forward until the end, his books grow consistently graver and as it were more responsible. He improves as an artist if not always as a creator. Little Dorot, published in 1857, is at once in some ways so much more subtle and in every way so much more sad than the rest of his work that it bores Dickensians and especially pleases George Gissing. It is the only one of the Dickens tales which could please Gissing, and not by its genius, but also by its atmosphere. There is something a little modern and a little sad, something also out of tune with the main trend of Dickens moral feeling about the description of the character of Dorot as actually and finally weakened by his wasting experiences as not lifting any cry above the conquered years. It is but a faint fleck of shadow, but the inimitable white light of human hopefulness of which I spoke at the beginning is ebbing away. The work of the revolution is growing weaker everywhere and the night of necessitarianism cometh when no man can work. For the first time in a book by Dickens perhaps, we really do feel that the hero is forty-five. Plenimus certainly very much older than Mr. Pickwick. This was indeed only a fugitive grey cloud. He went on to breezy your operations, but whatever they were they still had the note of the latter days. They have a more cautious craftsmanship. They have a more mellow and more mixed human sentiment. Chattels fell upon his page from the other and sadder figures out of the Victorian decline. A good instance of this is his next book, The Tale of Two Cities. In dignity and eloquence it almost stands alone among the books by Dickens, but it also stands alone among his books in this respect, that it is not entirely by Dickens. It owes its inspiration avowedly to the passionate and cloudy pages of Carlisle's French Revolution, and there's something quite essentially inconsistent between Carlisle's disturbed and half skeptical transcendentalism and the original school in spirit to which Dickens belonged, the lucid and laughing decisiveness of the old, convinced and contented radicalism. Hence the genius of Dickens cannot save him, just as the great genius of Carlisle could not save him from making a picture of the French Revolution, which was delicately and yet deeply erroneous. Both tend too much to represent it as a mere elemental outbreaking of hunger or vengeance. They do not see enough that it was a war for intellectual principles, even for intellectual platitudes. We, the modern English, cannot easily understand the French Revolution because we cannot easily understand the ideas of bloody battle for pure common sense. We cannot understand common sense in arms and conquering. In modern England common sense appears to mean footing up with existing conditions. For us a practical politician really means a man who can be thoroughly trusted to do nothing at all. That is where his practicality comes in. The French feeling, the feeling at the back of the revolution, was that the more sensible a man was, the more you must look out for slaughter. In all the imitators of Carlisle, including Dickens, there is an obscure sentiment that the thing for which the Frenchmen died must have been something new and queer, a paradox, a strange idolatry. But when such blood ran in the streets, it was for the sake of a truism, when those cities were shaken to their foundation. They were shaken to their foundations by a truism. I have mentioned this historical matter because it illustrates these later and more mingled influences, which at once improve, and as it were perplex, the later work of Dickens. For Dickens had in his original mental composition capacities for understanding this cheery and sensible element in the French Revolution, far better than Carlisle. The French Revolution was, among other things, French. And so, as far as that goes, one could never have a precise counterpart in so jolly and autochrothonous in Englishmen as Charles Dickens. But there was a great deal of the actual and unbroken tradition of the revolution itself in his early radical indictments, in his denunciation of the fleet prison. There was a great deal of the capture of the best deal. There was, above all, a certain reasonable impatience, which was the essence of the old republican, and which is quite unknown to the revolutionist in modern Europe. The old radical did not feel exactly that he was in revolt. He felt, if anything, that a number of idiotic institutions had revolted against reason and against him. Dickens, I say, had the revolutionary idea, though in English form of it, by clear and conscious inheritance. Carlisle had to rediscover the revolution by a violence of genius and vision. If Dickens then took from Carlisle, as he said he did, his image of the revolution, it does certainly mean that he had forgotten something of his own youth and come under the more complex influences of the end of the 19th century. His old hilarious and sentimental view of human nature seems, for a moment, dimmed in Little Dora. His old political simplicity has been slightly disturbed by Carlisle. I repeat that this graver note is varied, but it remains a graver note. We see it struck, I think, with particular and remarkable success in great expectations. This fine story is told with the consistency and quietude of individuality, which is rare in Dickens. But so far, had he traveled along the road of a heavier reality, that he even intended to give the tale an unhappy ending, making Pip lose Estella forever. And he was only dissuaded from it by the robust romanticism of Valwerlitten, the best part of the tale, the account of the vacillations of the hero between the humble life to which he owes everything, and the gorgeous life from which he expects something, touches a very true and somewhat tragic part of morals. For the great paradox of morality, the paradox to which only the religions have given an adequate expression, is that the very vilest kind of fault is exactly the most easy kind. We read in books and ballads about the wild fellow who might kill a man or smoke opium, but who would never stoop to lying or cowardice or to anything mean. But for actual human beings, opium and slaughter have only occasional charm. The permanent human temptation is the temptation to be mean. The one standing probability is the probability of becoming a cowardly hypocrite. The circle of the traitors is the lowest of the abyss, and it is also the easiest to fall into. That is one of the ringing realities of the bible, that it does not make its great men commit grand sins, it makes its great men such as David and St. Peter commit small sins and behave like sneaks. Dickens has dealt with this easy dissent of desertion, this silent treason with remarkable accuracy in the account of the indecisions of Pip. It contains a good suggestion of that weak romance which is at the root of all snobbishness, that the mystery which belongs to patrician life excites us more than the open, even the indecent virtues of the humble. Pip is keener about Miss Havisham, who may mean well by him, than about Joe Gargary, who evidently does. All this is very strong and wholesome, but it is still a little stern. Our mutual friend, 1864, brings us back a little into his merrier and more normal manner. Some of the satire, such as that upon Veneering's election, is in the best of his old style, so airy and fanciful, yet hitting so suddenly and so hard. But even here we find the fuller and more serious treatment of psychology, notably in the two facts that he creates a really human villain, Bradley Headstone, and also one whom we might call a really human hero, Eugene. If it were not that he is much too human, he'd be called a hero at all. It has been said, invariably by Katz, that Dickens never described the gentleman, and it's like saying that he never described the zebra. The gentleman is a very rare animal among human creatures, and to people like Dickens interested in all humanity, not a supremely important one. But in Eugene Weyburn, he does, whether he consciously or not, turn that accusation with a vengeance, for he not only describes a gentleman, but describes the inner weaknesses and peril that belong to a gentleman, the devil that is always rending the entrails of an idle and agreeable man. In Eugene's purposeless pursuit of Lizzie Hexham in his yet more purposeless torturing of Bradley Headstone, the author has marvelously realized that singularly empty obstinacy that drives the whims and pleasures of a leisure class. He sees that there is nothing that such a man more stubbornly adheres to than the thing that he does not particularly want to do. We are still in serious psychology. His last book represents yet another new departure, dividing him from the chaotic Dickens of days long before. His last book is not merely an attempt to improve his power of construction in a story, it is an attempt to rely entirely on that power of construction. Yet not only has a plot, it is a plot. The mystery of Edwin Drude, 1870, was in such a sense, perhaps, the most ambitious book that Dickens ever attempted. It is, as everyone knows, a detective story, and certainly a very successful one, as it is attested by the tumult of discussion as to its proper solution. In this, quite apart from its unfinished state, it stands, I think, alone among the author's works. Elsewhere, if he introduced a mystery, he seldom took the trouble to make it very mysterious. Bleakhouse is finished, but if it were only half finished, I think anyone would guess that Lady Deadlock and Nemo had sinned in the past. Edwin Drude is not finished, or in the very middle of it, Dickens died. He had altogether overstrained himself in a last lecturing tour in America. He was a man in whom any serious malady would naturally make very rapid strides, for he had the temper of international invalid. I've said before that there wasn't his curious character, something that was feminine. Certainly there was nothing more entirely feminine than this, that he worked because he was tired. Betig bred in him a false and feverish industry, and his case increased like the case of a man who drinks to cure the effects of drink. He died in 1870, and the whole nation mourned him, as no public man has ever been marmed, for prime ministers and princes were private persons compared with Dickens. He had been a great popular king, like a king of some more primal age, whom his people could come and see, giving judgment under an oak tree. He had, in essence, held great audiences of millions, and made proclamations to more than one of the nations of the earth. His obvious omnipresence in every part of public life was like the omnipresence of the sovereign. His secret omnipresence in every house and hut of private life was more like the omnipresence of a deity. Compared with that popular leadership, all the fusses of the last forty years are diversions and idolists. Compared with such a case as his, it may be said that we play with our politicians and manage to endure our authors. We shall never have, again, such a popularity, until we have, again, a people. He left behind him this almost somber fragment, the mystery of Edwin Drude. As one turns it over, the tragic element of its truncation mingles somewhat with an element of tragedy in the thing itself. The passionate and predestined landless, or the half-maniacal jasper carving devils out of his own heart. The workmanship of it is very fine. The right hand has not only lost, but is still gaining its cunning. But as we turn the now enigmatic pages, the thought creeps into us again, which I have suggested earlier, and which is never far off the mind of a true lover of Dickens. Had he lost or gained by the growth of this technique and probability in his later work. His later characters were more like men, but were not his earlier characters more like immortals. He has become able to perform a social scene so that it is possible at any rate. But where is that Dickens who once performed the impossible? Where is that young poet who created such majors and architects as nature will never dare to create? Dickens learned to describe daily life as Thackeray and Jane Austen could describe it. But Thackeray could not have thought such a thought as crumbless, and it is painful to think of Miss Austen attempting to imagine Mantellini. After all, we feel are many able novelists, but there is only one Dickens, and wither as he fled. He was alive to the end, and in this last dark and secretive story of Edwin Drude, he makes one splendid and staggering appearance, like a magician saying farewell to mankind. In the center of this otherwise reasonable and rather melancholy book, this gray story of a good clergyman and the quiet Cloisterham Towers, Dickens has calmly inserted one entirely delightful and entirely insane passage. I mean the frantic and inconceivable epithet of Mrs. Sapsy, that which describes her as the reverential wife of Thomas Sapsy, speaks of her consistency in looking up to him, and ends with the words spaced out so admirably on the tombstone. Stranger pause and ask thyself this question. Can't thou do likewise, if not with a blush retire? Not the wildest tale in Pickwick contains such an impossibility as that. Dickens dares scarcely have introduced it, even as one of Jingle's lies. In no human churchyard will you find that invaluable tombstone. Indeed, you could scarcely find it in any world where there are churchards. You could scarcely have such immortal folly as that in a world where there is also death. Mr. Sapsy is one of the golden things stored up for us in a better world. Yes, there were many other Dickens's, a clever Dickens, an industrious Dickens, a public spirited Dickens, but this was the great one. This last outbreak of insane humor reminds us wherein lay his power and his supremacy. The praise of such beatific buffoonery should be the final praise, the ultimate word in his honour. The wild epithet of Mrs. Sapsy should be the serious epithet of Dickens. G.K. Chesterton's Charles Dickens Chapter 10 The Great Dickens Characters All criticism tends too much to become criticism of criticism, and the reason is very evident. It is that criticism of creation is so very staggering a thing. We see this in the difficulty of criticising any artistic creation. We see it again in the difficulty of criticising that creation which is spelt with a capital C. The pessimists who attack the universe are always under this disadvantage. They have an exhilarating consciousness that they could make the sun and moon better, but they also have the depressing consciousness that they could not have made the sun and moon at all. A man looking at a hippopotamus may sometimes be tempted to regard a hippopotamus as an enormous mistake, but he is also bound to confess that a fortunate inferiority prevents him personally from making such mistakes. It is neither a blasphemy nor an exaggeration to say that we feel something of the same difficulty in judging of the very creative element in human literature. And this is the first and last dignity of Dickens, that he was a creator. He did not point out things. He made them. We may disapprove of Mr. Guppy, but we recognise him as a creation flung down like a miracle out of an other sphere. We can pull him to pieces, but we could not have put him together. We can destroy Mrs. Gamp in our wrath, but we could not have made her in our joy. Under this disadvantage any book about Dickens must definitely labour. Real primary creation, such as the sun or the birth of a child, calls forth not criticism, not appreciation, but a kind of incoherent gratitude. This is why most hymns about God are bad, and this is why most eulogies on Dickens are bad. The eulogists of the divine and of the human creator are alike inclined to appear sentimentalists, because they are talking about something as very real. In the same way, love letters always sound florid and artificial, because they are about something real. Any chapter such as this chapter must therefore in a sense be inadequate. There is no way of dealing properly with the ultimate greatness of Dickens, except by offering sacrifice to him as a God, and this is opposed to the etiquette of our time. But something can perhaps be done in the way of suggesting what was the quality of this creation, but even in considering its quality, we ought to remember that quality is not the whole question. One of the God-like things about Dickens is his quantity. His quantity as such the enormous output, the incredible fecundity of his invention. I have said a moment ago that not one of us could have invented Mr. Guppy. But even if we could have stolen Mr. Guppy from Dickens, we have still to confront the fact that Dickens would have been able to invent another quite inconceivable character to take his place. Perhaps we could have created Mr. Guppy, but the effort would certainly have exhausted us. We should be ever afterwards wheeled about in a bath chair at Bournemouth. Nevertheless, there is something that is worth saying about the quality of Dickens. At the very beginning of this review, I remarked that the reader must be in a mood at least of democracy. To some it may have sounded irrelevant, but the revolution was as much behind all the books of the nineteenth century as the Catholic religion, let us say, was behind all the colors and carvings of the Middle Ages. Another great name of the nineteenth century will afford an evidence of this, and will also bring us most sharply to the problem of the literary quality of Dickens. Of all these nineteenth century writers, there is none in the noblest sense more democratic than Walter Scott. As this may be disputed, and as it is relevant, I will expand the remark. There are two rooted spiritual realities out of which grow all kinds of democratic conception or sentiment of human quality. There are two things in which all men are manifestly and unmistakably equal. They are not equally clever, or equally muscular, or equally fat, as the sages of the modern reaction with piercing insight perceive. But this is a spiritual certainty that all men are tragic, and this, again, is an equally sublime spiritual certainty, that all men are comic. No special and private sorrow can be so dreadful as the fact of having to die, and no freak or deformity can be so funny as the mere fact of having two legs. Every man is important if he loses his life, and every man is funny if he loses his hat and has to run after it, and the universal test everywhere of whether a thing is popular, of the people, is whether it employs vigorously these extremes of the tragic and the comic. Shelley, for instance, was an aristocrat, if ever there was one in the world. He was a Republican, but he was not a Democrat. In his poetry, there is every perfect quality except this pungent and popular stab. For the tragic and the comedy, you must go, say, to Burns, a poor man. And all over the world, the folk literature, the popular literature is the same. It consists of very dignified sorrow and very undignified fun. Its sad tales are of broken hearts, its happy tales are of broken heads. These, I say, are two roots of democratic reality, but they have in more civilized literature a more civilized embodiment of form. In literature such as that of the 19th century, the two elements appear somewhat thus. Tragedy becomes a profound sense of human dignity. The other, and jollier element, becomes a delighted sense of human variety. The first supports equality by saying that all men are equally sublime. The second supports equality by observing that all men are equally interesting. In this democratic aspect of the interest and variety of all men, there is, of course, no democrat so great as Dickens, but in the other matter, in the idea of the dignity of all men, I repeat that there is no democrat so great as Scott. This fact, which is the moral and enduring magnificence of Scott, has been astonishingly overlooked. His rich and dramatic effects are gained in almost every case by some grotesque or beggarly figure rising into a human pride and rhetoric. The common man, in the sense of the paltry man, becomes the common man in the sense of the universal man. He declares his humanity, for the meanest of all the modernities has been the notion that the heroic is an oddity or variation, and that the things that unite us are merely flat or foul. The common things are terrible and startling, death, for instance, and first love. The things that are common are the things that are not commonplace. Into such high and central passions, the comic Scott character will suddenly rise. Remember the firm and almost stately answer of the preposterous Nicole Jarvie, when Helen McGregor seeks to browbeat him into condoning lawlessness and breaking his bourgeois decency. That speech is a great monument of the middle class. Molière made Monsieur Jourdain talk prose, but Scott made him talk poetry. Think of the rising and rousing voice of the dull and gluttonous Athelstain, when he answers and overwhelms Debracy. Think of the proud appeal of the old beggar in the antiquary, when he rebukes the dualists. Scott was fond of describing kings in disguise, but all his characters are kings in disguise. He was, with all his errors, profoundly possessed with an old religious conception, the only possible democratic basis, the idea that man himself is a king in disguise. In all this, Scott, though a royalist and a Tory, had in the strangest way the heart of the revolution. For instance, he regarded rhetoric, the art of the orator, as the immediate weapon of the oppressed. All his poor men make grand speeches, as they did in the Jacobin club, which Scott would have so much detested. And it is odd to reflect that he was, as an author, giving free speech to fictitious rebels, while he was, as a stupid politician, denying it to real ones. But the point for us here is that all this popular sympathy of his rests on the graver basis, on the dark dignity of man. Can you find no way, asks Sir Arthur Warder of the beggar when they are cut off by the tide. I'll give you a farm, I'll make you rich. Our riches will soon be equal, says the beggar, and looks out across the advancing sea. Now I have dwelt on this strong point of Scott, because it is the best illustration of the one weak point of Dickens. Dickens had little or none of this sense of the concealed sublimity of every separate man. Dickens' sense of democracy was entirely of the other kind. It rested on the other of the two supports of which I have spoken. It rested on the sense that all men were wildly interesting and wildly varied. When a Dickens character becomes excited, he becomes more and more himself. He does not, like the Scott beggar, turn more and more into man. As he rises, he grows more and more into a gargoyle or grotesque. He does not, like the fine speaker in Scott, grow more classical as he grows more passionate, more universal as he grows more intense. The thing can only be illustrated by a special case. Dickens did more than once, of course, make one of his quaint or humble characters assert himself in a serious crisis, or defy the powerful. There is, for instance, the quite admirable scene in which Susan Nipper, one of the greatest of Dickens' achievements, faces and rebukes Mr. Domby. But it is still true, and quite appropriate in its own place and manner, that Susan Nipper remains a purely comic character throughout her speech, and even grows more comic as she goes on. She is more serious than usual in her meaning, but not more serious in her style. Dickens keeps the natural diction of Nipper, but makes her grow more nipperish as she grows more warm. But Scott keeps the natural diction of Bailey Jarvie, but insensibly sobers and uplifts the style until it reaches a plain and appropriate eloquence. This plain and appropriate eloquence was, except in a few places at the end of Pickwick, almost unknown to Dickens. Whenever he made comic characters talk sentiment comically, as in the instance of Susan, it was a success, but an avowedly extravagant success. Whenever he made comic characters talk sentiment seriously, it was an extravagant failure. Humor was his medium, his only way of approaching emotion. Wherever you do not get humor, you get unconscious humor. As I have said elsewhere in this book, Dickens was deeply and radically English, the most English of our great writers. And there was something very English in this contentment with a grotesque democracy and in this absence of the eloquence and elevation of Scott. The English democracy is the most humorous democracy in the world. The Scotch democracy is the most dignified, while the whole abandoned and satiric genius of the English populace come from its being quite undignified in every way. A comparison of the two types can be found, for instance, by putting a Scotch labor leader like Mr. Keir Hardy alongside an English labor leader like Mr. Will Crooks. Both are good men, honest and responsible and compassionate, but we can feel that the Scotchman carries himself seriously and universally, the Englishman personally and with an obstinate humor. Mr. Keir Hardy wishes to hold up his head as man. Mr. Crooks wishes to follow his nose as Crooks. Mr. Keir Hardy is very like a poor man in Walter Scott. Mr. Crooks is very much like a poor man in Dickens. Dickens then had this English feeling of a grotesque democracy, but that has more properly meant a vastly varying democracy. The intoxicating variety of men, that was his vision and conception of human brotherhood, and certainly it is a great part of human brotherhood. In one sense, things can only be equal if they are entirely different. Thus, for instance, people talk with a quite astonishing gravity about the inequality or equality of the sexes, as if there could possibly be any inequality between a lock and a key. Wherever there is no element of variety, wherever all the items literally have an identical aim, there is at once and of necessity inequality. A woman is only inferior to man in the matter of being not so manly. She is inferior in nothing else. Man is inferior to woman insofar as he is not a woman. There is no other reason. And the same applies in some degree to all genuine differences. It is a great mistake to suppose that love unites and unifies men. Love diversifies them, because love is directed toward individuality. The thing that really unites men and makes them like to each other is hatred. Thus, for instance, the more we love Germany, the more pleased we shall be that Germany should be something different from ourselves, should keep her own ritual and conviviality and we ours. But the more we hate Germany, the more we shall copy German guns and German fortifications in order to be armed against Germany. The more modern nations detest each other, the more meekly they follow each other, for all competition is in its nature only a furious plagiarism. As competition means always similarity, it is equally true that similarity always means inequality. If everything is trying to be green, some things will be greener than others. But there is an immortal and indestructible equality between green and red. Something of the same kind of irrefutable equality exists between the violent and varying creations of such a writer as Dickens. They are all equally ecstatic fulfillments of a separate line of development. It would be hard to say that there could be any comparison or inequality, let us say, between Mr. Sapsi and Mr. Elijah Pogrom. They are both in the same difficulty. They can neither of them contrive to exist in this world. They are both too big for the gate of birth. Of the high virtue of this variation I shall speak more adequately in a moment, but certainly this love of mere variation, which I have contrasted with the classicism of Scott, is the only intelligent statement of the common case against the exaggeration of Dickens. This is the meaning, the only sane or endurable meaning, which people have in their minds when they say that Dickens is a mere caricaturist. They do not mean merely that Uncle Pemblechuk does not exist. A fictitious character ought not to be a person who exists. He ought to be an entirely new combination and addition to the creatures already existing on the earth. They do not mean that Uncle Pemblechuk could not exist. For on that obviously they can have no knowledge whatever. They do not mean that Uncle Pemblechuk's utterances are selected and arranged so as to bring out his essential Pemblechukery. To say that is simply to say that he occurs in a work of art, but what they do really mean is this, and there is an element of truth in it. They mean that Dickens nowhere makes the reader feel that Pemblechuk has any kind of fundamental human dignity at all. It is nowhere suggested that Pemblechuk will someday die. He is rather as one of the idle and evil fairies who are innocuous and yet malignant and who live forever because they never really live at all. This dehumanized vitality, this fantasy, this irresponsibility of creation, does in some sense truly belong to Dickens. It is the lower side of his hilarious human variety. But now we come to the higher side of his human variety, and it is far more difficult to state. Mr. George Gissing, from the point of view of the passing intellectualism of our day, has made among his many wise tributes to Dickens a characteristic complaint about him. He has said that Dickens, with all his undoubted sympathy for the lower classes, never made a working man, a poor man, specifically and highly intellectual. An exception does exist, which he must at least have realized. A wit, a diplomatist, a great philosopher, I mean, of course, Mr. Weller. Broadly, however, the accusation has a truth, though it is a truth that Mr. Gissing did not grasp in its entirety. It is not only true that Dickens seldom made a poor character, what we call intellectual, it is also true that he seldom made any character, what we call intellectual. Intellectualism was not at all present to his imagination. What was present to his imagination was character, a thing which is not only more important than intellect, but is also much more entertaining. When some English moralists write about the importance of having character, they appear to mean only the importance of having a dull character. But character is brighter than wit, and much more complex than sophistry. The whole superiority of the democracy of Dickens over the democracy of such a man as Gissing lies exactly in the fact that Gissing would have liked to prove that poor men could instruct themselves and could instruct others. It was of final importance to Dickens that poor men could amuse themselves and could amuse him. He troubled little about the mere education of that life. He declared two essential things about it, that it was laughable and that it was livable. The humble characters of Dickens do not amuse each other with epigrams, they amuse each other with themselves. The present that each man brings in hand is his own incredible personality. In the most sacred sense, and in the most literal sense of the phrase, he gives himself away. Now the man who gives himself away does the last act of generosity. He is like a martyr, a lover, or a monk. But he is also almost certainly what we commonly call a fool. The key of the great characters of Dickens is that they are all great fools. There is the same difference between a great fool and a small fool as there is between a great poet and a small poet. The great fool is a being who is above wisdom, rather than below it. That element of greatness of which I spoke at the beginning of this book is nowhere more clearly indicated than in such characters. A man can be entirely great while he is entirely foolish. We see this in the epic heroes such as Achilles. Now a man can be entirely great because he is entirely foolish. We see this in all the great comic characters of all the great comic writers of whom Dickens was the last. Bottom the weaver is great because he is foolish. Mr. Toots is great because he is foolish. The thing I mean can be observed, for instance, in innumerable actual characters. Which of us has not known, for instance, a great rustic, a character so incurably characteristic that he seemed to break through all canons about cleverness or stupidity. We do not know whether he is an enormous idiot or an enormous philosopher. We know only that he is enormous, like a hill. These great grotesque characters are almost entirely to be found where Dickens found them, among the poorer classes. The gentry only attained this greatness by going slightly mad. But who has not known an unfathomably personal old nurse? Who has not known an abysmal butler? The truth is that our public life consists almost exclusively of small men. Our public men are small because they have to prove that they are in the commonplace interpretation clever. Because they have to pass examinations to learn codes of manner to imitate a fixed type. It is in private life that we find the great characters. They are too great to get into the public world. It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a great man to enter into the kingdoms of the earth. The truly great and gorgeous personality, he who talks as no one else could talk and feels with an elementary fire, you will never find this man on any cabinet bench, in any literary circle, at any society dinner. Least of all, will you find him in artistic society? He is utterly unknown in Bohemia. He is more than clever. He is amusing. He is more than successful. He is alive. You will find him stranded here and there in all sorts of unknown positions, almost always in unsuccessful positions. You will find him adrift as an impecunious commercial traveller like Macalber. You will find him but one of a batch of silly clerks like Swiveller. You will find him as an unsuccessful actor like Crumless. You will find him an unsuccessful doctor like Sawyer. But you will always find this rich and reeking personality where Dickens found it, among the poor. For the glory of this world is a very small and priggish affair, and these men are too large to get in line with it. They are too strong to conquer. It is impossible to do justice to these figures, because the essential of them is their multiplicity. The whole point of Dickens is that he not only made them, but made them by myriads, that he stamped his foot and armies came out of the earth. But let us, for the sake of showing the true Dickens method, take one of them, a very sublime one, Toots. It affords a good example of the real work of Dickens, which was the revealing of a certain grotesque greatness inside an obscure and even unattractive type. It reveals the great paradox of all spiritual things, that the inside is always larger than the outside. Toots is a type that we all know as well as we know chimney pots. And of all conceivable human figures he is apparently the most futile and the most dull. He is the blockhead who hangs on at a private school, overgrown and underdeveloped. He is always backward in his lessons, but forward in certain cheap ways of the world. He can smoke before he can spell. Toots is a perfect and pungent figure of the wretched youth. Toots has, as this youth always has, a little money of his own, enough to waste in a semi-dissipation he does not enjoy, and in a gaping regard for sports in which he could not possibly excel. Toots has, as this youth always has, bits of surreptitious finery, in his case the incomparable ring. In Toots, above all, is exactly rendered the central and most startling contradiction, the contrast between a jauntiness and a certain impudence of the attire, with the profound shame and sheepishness of the visage and the character. In him too is expressed the larger contrast between the external gaiety of such a lad's occupations and the infinite, disconsolate sadness of his empty eyes. This is Toots. We know him, we pity him, and we avoid him. Schoolmasters deal with him in despair, or in a heartbreaking patience. His family is vague about him. His low-class hangers on, like the game chicken, lead him by the nose. The very parasites that live on him despise him, but Dickens does not despise him. Without denying one of the dreary details which make us avoid the man, Dickens makes him a man whom we long to meet. He does not gloss over one of his dismal deficiencies, but he makes them seem suddenly like violent virtues that we would go to the world's end to see. Without altering one fact, he manages to alter the whole atmosphere, the whole universe of Toots. He makes us not only like, but love. Not only love, but reverence, this little dunce and cad. The power to do this is a power truly and literally to be called divine. For this is the very wholesome point. Dickens does not alter Toots in any vital point. The thing he does alter is us. He makes us lively where we were bored, kind where we were cruel, and above all free for an universal human laughter, where we were cramped in a small competition about that sad and solemn tiling, the intellect. His enthusiasm fills us, as does the love of God, with a glorious shame. After all, he has only found in Toots what we might have found for ourselves. He has only made us as interested in Toots as Toots is in himself. He does not alter the proportions of Toots. He alters only the scale. We seem as if we were staring at a rat risen to the stature of an elephant. Hitherto we could have passed him by. Now we feel that nothing could induce us to pass him by. That is the nearest way to putting the truth. He has not been whitewashed in the least. He has not been depicted as any cleverer than he is. He has been turned from a small fool into a great fool. We know Toots is not clever, but we are not inclined to quarrel with Toots because he is not clever. We are more likely to quarrel with cleverness because it is not Toots. All the examinations he could not pass, all the schools he could not enter, all the temporary tests of brain and culture which surrounded him shall pass, and Toots shall remain like a mountain. It may be noticed that the great artists always choose great fools rather than great intellectuals to embody humanity. Hamlet does express the aesthetic dreams and the bewilderments of the intellect, but bottom the weaver expresses them much better. In the same manner, Toots expresses certain permanent dignities in human nature more than any of Dickens's more dignified characters can do it. For instance, Toots expresses admirably the enduring fear which is the very essence of falling in love. When Toots is invited by Florence to come in, when he longs to come in but still stays out, he is embodying a sort of insane and perverse humility which is elementary in the lover. There is an apostolic injunction to suffer fools gladly. We always lay the stress on the word suffer and interpret the passage as one urging resignation. It might be better perhaps to lay the stress on the word gladly and make our familiarity with fools a delight and almost a dissipation. Nor is it necessary that our pleasure in fools, or at least in great and godlike fools, should be merely satiric or cruel. The great fool is he in whom we cannot tell which is the conscious and which is the unconscious humor. We laugh with him and laugh at him at the same time. An obvious instance is that of ordinary and happy marriage. A man and a woman cannot live together without having against each other a kind of everlasting joke. Each has discovered that the other is a fool but a great fool. This largeness, this grossness and gorgeousness of folly is the thing which we all find about those with whom we are in intimate contact, and it is the one enduring basis of affection and even of respect. When we know an individual named Tomkins, we know that he has succeeded where all others have failed. He has succeeded in being Tomkins. Just so Mr. Toots succeeded, he was defeated in all scholastic examinations, but he was the victor in that visionary battle in which unknown competitors vainly tried to be Toots. If we are to look for lessons, here at least is the last and deepest lesson of Dickens. It is in our own daily life that we are to look for the portents and the prodigies. This is the truth not merely of the fixed figures of our life, the wife, the husband, the fool that fills the sky. It is true of the whole stream and substance of our daily experience. Every instant we reject a great fool merely because he is foolish. Every day we neglect Tootses and swivellers, guppies and jobblings, simeries and flashers. Every day we lose the last sight of jobbling and chuckster, the analytical chemist, or the martianess. Every day we are missing a monster whom we might easily love and an imbecile whom we should certainly admire. This is the real gospel of Dickens, the inexhaustible opportunities offered by the liberty and the variety of man. Compared with this life, all public life, all fame, all wisdom, is by its nature cramped and cold and small. For on that defined and lighted public stage men are of necessity forced to profess one set of accomplishments, to rise to one rigid standard. It is the utterly unknown people who can grow in all directions like an exuberant tree. It is in our interior lives that we find that people are too much themselves. It is in our private life that we find them swelling into the enormous contours and taking on the colors of caricature. Many of us live publicly with featureless public puppets, images of the small public abstractions. It is when we pass our own private gate and open our own secret door that we step into the land of the giants.