 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Questions and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens by G.K. Chesterton Section 16, Chapter 10, Martin Chuzzlewit There is a certain quality or element which broods over the whole of Martin Chuzzlewit, to which it is difficult for either friends or foes to put a name. I think the reader who enjoys Dickens' other books has an impression that it is a kind of melancholy. There are grotesque figures of the most gorgeous kind. There are scenes that are farcical, even by the standard of the farcical license of Dickens. There is humor, both of the heaviest and of the lightest kind. There are two great comic personalities who run like a rich vein through the whole story. Pexnip and Mrs. Gamm. There is one blinding patch of brilliancy, the satire on American cant. There is Targer's boarding house, there is Bailey, there is Mr. Mould, the incomparable undertaker. But yet, in spite of everything, in spite even of the undertaker, the book is sad. No one, I think, ever went to it in that mixed mood of a tired tenderness and a readiness to believe and laugh in which most of Dickens' novels are most enjoyed. We go for a particular novel to Dickens as we go for a particular inn. We go to the sign of the Pickwick Papers. We go to the sign of the Rudge and Raven. We go to the sign of the old curiosities. We go to the sign of the two cities. We go to each or all of them according to what kind of hospitality and what kind of happiness we require. But it is always some kind of hospitality and some kind of happiness that we require. And, as in the case of Inns, we also remember that while there was shelter in all and food in all, and some kind of fire and some kind of wine in all, yet one has left upon us an indescribable and unaccountable memory of mortality and decay, of dreariness in the rooms and even of tastelessness in the banquet. So anyone who has enjoyed the stories of Dickens as they should be enjoyed has a nameless feeling that this one story is sad and almost sodden. Dickens himself had this feeling, though his breezy vanity forbade him to express it in so many words. In spite of Pexnip, in spite of Mrs. Gamp, in spite of the yet greater Bailey, the story went lumberingly and even lifelessly. He found the sales falling off, he fancied his popularity waning, and, by a sudden impulse, most inartistic and yet most artistic, he dragged in the episode of Martin's visit to America, which is the blazing jewel and the sudden redemption of the book. He wrote it at an uneasy and unhappy period of his life, when he had ceased wandering in America, but could not cease wandering altogether. When he had lost his original routine of work, which was violent but regular, and had not yet settled down to the full enjoyment of his success and his later years, he poured into this book genius that might make the mountains laugh, invention that juggled with the stars, but the book was sad, and he knew it. The just reason for this is really interesting, yet it is one that is not easy to state without guarding oneself on the one side and the other against greatness-understandings, and these stipulations or preliminary allowances must in such a case as this of necessity be made first. Dickens was among other things a satirist, a pure satirist. I have never been able to understand why this title is always specially and sacredly reserved for Thackery. Thackery was a novelist in the strict and narrow sense, that at any rate Thackery was a far greater novelist than Dickens. But Dickens certainly was the satirist. The essence of satire is that it perceives some absurdity inherent in the logic of some position, and that it draws that absurdity out of it and isolates it so that all can see it. Thus, for instance, when Dickens says, Lord Coodle would go out, Sir Thomas Doodle wouldn't come in, and there being no people to speak of in England except Coodle and Doodle, the country has been without a government. When Dickens says this, he suddenly pounces on and plucks out the one inherent absurdity in the English party system, which is hidden behind all its paraphernalia of parliaments and statuettes, elections, and ballot papers. And all the dignity, and all the patriotism, and all the public interest of the English constitutional party conflict have been fully allowed for, there does remain the bold bleak question which Dickens in substance asks. Suppose I want somebody else who is neither Coodle nor Doodle. This is the great quality called satire. It is a kind of taunting reasonableness, and it is inseparable from a certain insane logic which is often called exaggeration. Dickens was more of a satirist than Thackeray for this simple reason, that Thackeray carried a man's principles as far as that man carried them. Dickens carried a man's principles as far as a man's principles would go. Dickens, in short, as people put it, exaggerated the man and his principles. That is to say, he emphasized them. Dickens drew a man's absurdity out of him. Thackeray left the man's absurdity in him. Of this last fact, we can take any example we like. Take, for instance, the comparison between the city man as treated by Thackeray in the midst of his satiric novels with the city man as treated by Dickens in one of the mildest and maturest of his. Compare the character of old Mr. Osborn in Vanity Fair with the character of Mr. Potsnap in Our Mutual Friend. In the case of Mr. Osborn, there is nothing except a solid blocking in of a brutal, dull, convincing character. Vanity Fair is not a satire on the city except in so far as it happens to be true. Vanity Fair is not a satire on the city, in short, except in so far as the city is the satire on the city. But Mr. Potsnap is a pure satire. He is an extracting out of the city man of those purely intellectual qualities which happens to make that kind of city man a particularly exasperating fool. One might almost say that Mr. Potsnap is all Mr. Osborn's opinions separated from Mr. Osborn and turned into a character. In short, the satirist is more purely philosophical than the novelist. The novelist may only be an observer. The satirist must be a thinker. He must be a thinker. He must be a philosophical thinker for this simple reason that he exercises his philosophical thought in deciding what part of his subject he is to satirize. You may have the dullest possible intelligence and be a portrait painter, but a man must have a serious intellect in order to be a caricaturist. He has to select what thing he will caricature. True satire is always of this intellectual kind. True satire is always, so to speak, a variation or fantasia upon the air of pure logic. The satirist is the man who carries men's enthusiasms further than they carry it themselves. He outstrips the most extravagant phonetic. He is years ahead of the most audacious prophet. He sees where men's detached intellect will eventually lead them, and he tells them the name of the place, which is generally hell. Now with this detached and rational use of satire, there is one great example in this book. Even Gulliver's Travels is hardly more reasonable than Martin Chuzzlewith's Travels in this incredible land of the Americans. Before considering the humor of this description in its more exhaustive and liberal aspects, it may be, first remark, that in this American part of Martin Chuzzlewith, Dickens quite specifically sharpens up his own more controversial and political intelligence. There are more things here than anywhere else in Dickens that partake of the nature of pamphleteering, a positive challenge of sudden repartee, of pugnacious and exasperating query, in a word of everything that belongs to the pure art of controversy, as distinct not only from the pure art of fiction, even also from the pure art of satire. I am inclined to think, to put the matter not only shortly but clumsily, that Dickens was never in all his life so strictly clever as he is in the American part of Martin Chuzzlewith. There are places where he was more inspired, almost in the sense of being intoxicated, as for instance in the macabre feasts of David Tuberfield. There are places where he wrote more carefully and cunningly, as for instance in the mystery of the mystery of Edwin Drude. There are places where he wrote much more humanly, more close to the ground, and to the growing things, as in the whole of that admirable book great expectations. But I do not think that his mere abstract acuteness and rapidity of thought were ever exercised, which says startling exactitude, as they are in this place in Martin Chuzzlewith. It is to be noted, for instance, that his American experience had actually worked him up to a heat and habit of argument. A slave owner in the southern states tells Dickens that slave owners do not ill-treat their slaves, that is not in the interest of slave owners to ill-treat their slaves. Dickens flashes back that it is not to the interest of a man to get drunk, but he does get drunk. This pugnacious atmosphere of perry and repost much first of all be allowed for and understood in all the satiric excursions of Martin in America. Dickens is arguing all the time, and to do him justice arguing very well. These chapters are full not merely of exuberant satire on America in the sense that Dothboy's Hall and Mr. Bumble's Workhouse are exuberant satires in England. They are full also of sharp argument with America, as if the man who wrote expected retort and was prepared with rejoinder. The rest of the book, like the rest of Dickens' books, possesses humor. This part of the book, like hardly any of Dickens' books, possesses wit. The Republican gentleman who receives Martin on landing is horrified on hearing an English servant speak of the employer as the master. There are no masters in America, says the gentleman. All owners, are they, says Martin? This sort of verbal parenthood is out of the ordinary scope of Dickens, but we find it frequently in this particular part of Martin's juzzle wit. Martin himself is constantly breaking out into a controversial lucidity, which is elsewhere not at all a part of his character. When they talk to him about the institutions of America, he asks sarcastically whether buoy knives and swordsticks and revolvers are the institutions of America. All this, if I may summarize, is expressive of one main fact. Being a satirist means being a philosopher. Dickens was not always very philosophical, but he had this permanent quality of the philosopher about him, that he always remembered people by their opinions. Elijah's program was to him, the man who said that his boastful answer to the tyrant and the desperate was that his bright home was the land of the setting sun. Mr. Scatter and Mr. Jefferson Brick were to him, the man who said, in cooperation, that the libation of freedom must sometimes be quaffed in blood. And in these chapters, more than anywhere else, he falls into the extreme habit of satire, that of treating people as if there were nothing about them except their opinions. It is therefore difficult to accept these pages as pages in a novel, splendid as they are considered as pages in a parody. I do not dispute that men have said and do say that the libation of freedom must sometimes be quaffed in blood, that their bright homes are the land of the setting sun, that they taunt that lion, that alone they dare him, or that softly sleeps the calm ideal in the whispering chambers of imagination. I have read too much American journalism to deny that any of these sentences and any of these opinions may, at some time or other, have been uttered. I do not deny that there are such opinions, but I do deny that there are such people. Elijah Pilgrim had some other business in life besides defending defaulting postmasters. He must have been a son, or father, or husband, or at least admirable thought, a lover. Mr. Chalup had some moments in his existence when he was not threatening his fellow creatures with his swordstick and his revolver. Of all this human side of such American types, Dickens does not really give any hint at all. He does not suggest that the bully Chalup had even such coarse good humor as bullies almost always have. He does not suggest that the humbug Elijah Pilgrim had even as much greasy amiability as humbugs almost always have. He is not studying them as human beings, even as bad human beings. He is studying them as conceptions, as points of view, as symbols of a state of mind with characters, as symbols of a state of mind with which he is in violent disagreement. To put it roughly, he is not describing character. He is persecuting heresies. There is one thing really to be said against his American satire. It is a serious thing to be said. It is an argument. And it is true. This can be said of Martin's wanderings in America. That from the time he lands in America, to the time he sets sail from it, he never meets a living man. He has traveled about in the land of Laputa. All the people he has met have been absurd opinions walking about. The whole art of Dickens in such passages as these consisted in one thing. It consisted in finding an opinion that had not a leg to stand on, and then giving it two legs to stand on. So much may be allowed. It may be admitted that Dickens is in this sense the great satirist, in that he can imagine absurd opinions walking by themselves about the street. It may be admitted that Thackery would not have allowed an absurd opinion to walk about the street without at least tying a man on it for the sake of safety. But while this first truth may be evident, the second truth which is the compliment of it may easily be forgotten. On the one hand there was no man who could so much enjoy mere intellectual satire apart from humanity as Dickens. On the other hand there was no man who, with another and more turbulent part of his nature, demand humanity and demanded its supremacy over intellect more than Dickens. To put it shortly, there never was a man so fitted for saying that everything was wrong, and there never was a man who was so desirous of saying that everything was right. Thus when he met with whom he violently disagreed, he described them as devils or lunatics. He could not bear to describe them as men. If they could not think with him on essentials, he could not stand the idea that they were human souls. He cast them out, he forgot them, and if he could not forget them, he caricatured them. He was too emotional to regard them as anything but enemies, if they were not friends. He was too humane not to hate them. Charles Lamb said with his inimitable, sleek pungency, that he could read all the books there were. He excluded books that obviously were not books, as cookery books, chess boards, mounds, so as to look like books, and all the works of modern historians and philosophers. One might say in much the same style that Dickens loved all the men in the world, that he loved all the men whom he was able to recognize as men. The rest he turned into griffins and chimeras, without any serious semblance to humanity. Even in his books he never hates a human being. If he wishes to hate him, he adopts the simple expedient of making him an inhuman being. Now of these two strands, almost the whole of Dickens is made up. They are not only different strands, they are even antagonistic strands. I mean that the whole of Dickens is made up of the strand of satire and the strand of sentimentalism. And the strand of satire is quite unnecessarily merciless and hostile, and the strand of sentimentalism is quite unnecessarily humanitarian and even modeling. On the proper interweaving of these two things depends the great part of Dickens' success in a novel, and by the consideration of them we can probably best arrive at the solution of the particular emotional enigma of the novel called Martin Chuzzlewit. Martin Chuzzlewit is, I think, vaguely unsatisfactory to the reader, vaguely sad and heavy even to the reader who loves Dickens, because in Martin Chuzzlewit, more than anywhere else in Dickens works, more even than in Oliver Twist, there is a predominance of the harsh and hostile sort of humor over the hilarious and the humane. It is absurd to lay down any such little rules for the testing of literature, but this may be broadly said, and yet with confidence, that Dickens is always at his best when he is laughing at the people whom he really admires. He is at his most humorous in writing of Mr. Pickwick, who represents passive virtue. He is at his most humorous in writing of Mr. Sam Weller, who represents active virtue. He is never so funny as when he is speaking of people in whom fun itself is a virtue, like the poor people in the fleet or the Marshall Sea. And in the stories that had immediately preceded Martin Chuzzlewit, he had consistently concerned himself in the majority of cases with the study of such genial and honorable eccentricities. If they are lunatics, they are admirable lunatics. In the last important novel before Martin Chuzzlewit, Barnaby Rudge, the hero himself is an admirable lunatic, and the novel before that, The Old Curiosity Shop, the two comic figures, Dick Swivler and the Marchioness, are not only the most really entertaining, but also the most really sympathetic characters in the bulk. Before that came Oliver Twist, which is, as I have said, an exception, and before that Pickwick, where the hero is, as Mr. Weller says, an angel in Gators. Hitherto then on a whole, the central Dickens character had been the man who gave to the poor many things, gold and wine and feasting and good advice, but among other things gave them a good laugh at himself. The jolly old English merchant of the Pickwick type was popular on both counts. People like to see him throw his money in the gutter. They also like to see him throw himself there occasionally. In both acts, they recognize the common quality of virtue. Now I think it is certainly the disadvantage of Martin Chuzzlewit, that none of its absurd characters are thus sympathetic. There are in the book two celebrated characters who are both especially exuberant and amusing, even for Dickens, and who are both specifically heartless and abominable, even for Dickens. I mean of course Mr. Pexnip on the one hand, and Mrs. Gamp on the other. The humor of both of them is gigantesque. No one will ever forget the first time he reads the words. Now I should be very glad to see Mrs. Targer's idea of a wooden leg. It is like remembering first love. There is still some sort of ancient sweetness and sting. I'm afraid that, in spite of many criticisms to the contrary, I am still unable to take Mr. Pexnip's hypocrisy seriously. He does not seem to me so much a hypocrite as a red torition. He reminds me of Sergeant Buzzfuzz. A very capable critic, Mr. Noyes, said that I was wrong when I suggested, in another place, that Dickens must have loved Pexnip. Mr. Noyes thinks it clear that Dickens hated Pexnip. I cannot believe it. Hatred does indeed linger around its objects as much as love, but not in that way. Dickens is always making Pexnip say things which have a wild poetical truth about them. Hatred allows no such outbursts of original innocence. But however that may be, the broad fact remains. Dickens may or may not have loved Pexnip comically, but he did not love him seriously. He did not respect him as he certainly respected Sam Weller. The same, of course, is true of Mrs. Gamp. To anyone who appreciates her unctuous and sumptuous conversation, it is difficult indeed not to feel that it would be almost better to be killed by Mrs. Gamp than to be saved by a better nurse. But the fact remains. In this book Dickens has not allowed us to love the most absurd people seriously, and absurd people ought to be loved seriously. Pexnip has to be amusing all the time. The instant he ceases to be laughable, he becomes detestable. Pickwick can take his ease at his inn. He can be leisurely. He can be spacious. He can fall into moods of gravity and even of dullness. He is not bound to be always funny or to forfeit the reader's concern, for he is a good man, and therefore even his dullness is beautiful. Just as the dullness of the animal we can leave Pickwick a little while by the fire to thank, for the thoughts of Pickwick, even if they were to go slowly, would be full of all the things that all men care for, old friends and old inns and memory and the goodness of God. But we dare not leave Pexnip alone for a moment. We dare not leave him thinking by the fire, for the thoughts of Pexnip would be too frightful. The end of Section 16, Chapter 10, Martin Chuzzlewick. 11 Christmas Books The mystery of Christmas is in a manner identical with the mystery of Dickens. If ever we adequately explain the one, we may adequately explain the other. And indeed in the treatment of the two, the chronological or historical order must in some degree be remembered. Before we come to the question of what Dickens did for Christmas, we must consider the question of what Christmas did for Dickens. How did it happen that this bustling, 19th century man, full of the almost cocksure common sense of the utilitarian and liberal epic, came to associate his name chiefly in literary history with the perpetuation of a half-pagan and half-catholic festival which he would certainly have called an antiquity and might easily have called a superstition? Christmas has indeed been celebrated before in English literature, but it had in most noticeable cases been celebrated in connection with that kind of feudalism with which Dickens would have severed his connection with an ignorant and even excessive scorn. Sir Roger DeCoverly kept Christmas, but it was a feudal Christmas. Sir Walter Scott sang in praise of Christmas, but it was a feudal Christmas. And Dickens was not only indifferent to the dignity of the old country gentleman or to the genial archaeology of Scott, he was even harshly and insolently hostile to it. If Dickens had lived in the neighborhood of Sir Roger DeCoverly, he would undoubtedly, like Tom Touchy, have been always having the law on him. If Dickens had stumbled in among the old armor and quaint folios of Scott's study, he would certainly have read his brother novelist a lesson in no measured terms about the futility of thus fumbling in the dustbins of old depression and error. So far from Dickens being one of those who like a thing because it is old, he was one of those cruder kind of reformers, in theory at least, who actually dislike a thing because it is old. He was not merely the more righteous kind of radical who tries to uproot abuses. He was partly also that more suicidal kind of radical who tries to uproot himself. In theory at any rate he had no adequate conception of the importance of human tradition in his time it had been twisted and falsified into the form of an opposition to democracy. In truth, of course, tradition is the most democratic of all things, for tradition is merely a democracy of the dead as well as the living. But Dickens and his special group or generation had no grasp of this permanent position. They had been called to a special war for the writing of special wrongs. Insofar as such an institution as Christmas was old, Dickens would have tended to despise it. He could never have put the matter to himself in the correct way. That while there are some things whose antiquity does prove that they are dying, there are some things whose antiquity only proves that they cannot die. If some radical contemporary and friend of Dickens had happened to say to him that in defending the mince pies and the mummaries of Christmas, he was defending a piece of barbaric and brutal ritualism doomed to disappear in the light of reason along with the boy-bishop and the lord of misrule, I am not sure that Dickens, though he was one of the readiest and most rapid masters of reply in history, would have found it very easy upon his own principles to answer. It was by a great ancestral instinct that he defended Christmas, by that sacred subconsciousness which is called tradition, which some have called a dead thing, but which is really a thing far more living than the intellect. There is a dark kinship and brotherhood of all mankind, which is much too deep to be called heredity or to be in any way explained in scientific formula. Blood is thicker than water, and is especially very much thicker than water on the brain. But this unconscious and even automatic quality in Dickens' defense of the Christmas Feast, the fact that his defense might almost be called animal rather than mental, though in proper language it should be called merely virile, all this brings us back to the fact that we must begin with the atmosphere of the subject itself. We must not ask Dickens what Christmas is, for with all his heat and eloquence he does not know. Rather we must ask Christmas what Dickens is, and how this strange child of Christmas came to be born out of due time. Dickens devoted his genius, in a somewhat special sense, to the description of happiness. No other literary man of his eminence has made this central human aim so specially his subject matter. Happiness is a mystery, generally a momentary mystery which seldom stops long enough to submit itself to artistic observation, and which, even when it is habitual, has something about it which renders artistic description almost impossible. There are twenty tiny, minor poets who can describe fairly impressively an eternity of agony. There are very few, even of the eternal poets, who can describe ten minutes of satisfaction. Nevertheless, mankind being half divine is always in love with the impossible, and numberless attempts have been made from the beginning of human literature to describe a real state of felicity. Upon the whole I think the most successful have been the most frankly physical and symbolic. The flowers of Eden or the jewels of the New Jerusalem. Many writers, for instance, have called the gold and chrysalite of the holy city a vulgar lump of jewelry. But when these critics themselves attempt to describe their conceptions of future happiness, it is always some prigish nonsense about planes, about cycles of fulfillment, or spirals of spiritual evolution. Now a cycle is just as much a physical metaphor as a flower of Eden. A spiral is just as much a physical metaphor as a precious stone. But after all a garden is a beautiful thing, whereas this is by no means necessarily true of a cycle, as can be seen in the case of a bicycle. A jewel, after all, is a beautiful thing, but this is not necessarily so of a spiral, as can be seen in the case of a corkscrew. Nothing is gained by dropping the old material metaphors which did hint at heavenly beauty, and adopting other material metaphors which do not even give a hint of earthly beauty. This modern or spiral method of describing indescribable happiness may, I think, be dismissed. Then there has been another method, which has been adopted by many men, a very real poetical genius. It was the method of the old pastoral poets like theocritus. It was in another way that adopted by the elegance and piety of Spencer. It was certainly expressed in the pictures of Watteau, and it had a very sympathetic and even manly expression in modern England in the decorative poetry of William Morris. These men of genius, from theocritus to Morris, occupied themselves in endeavoring to describe happiness as a state of certain human beings, the atmosphere of a commonwealth, the enduring climate of certain cities or islands. They poured forth treasures of the truest kind of imagination upon describing the happy lives and landscapes of Utopia or Atlantis or the earthly paradise. They traced with the most tender accuracy the tracery of its fruit trees, or the glimmering garments of its women. They used every ingenuity of color or intricate shape to suggest its infinite delight, and what they succeeded in suggesting was always its infinite melancholy. William Morris described the earthly paradise in such a way that the only strong emotional note left on the mind was the feeling of how homeless his travelers felt in that alien Elysium, and the readers sympathized with them, feeling that he would prefer not only Elizabethan England, but even 20th century Camberwell to such a land of shining shadows. Thus literature has almost always failed in endeavoring to describe happiness as a state. Human tradition, human custom, and folklore, though far more true and reliable than literature as a rule, have not often succeeded in giving quite the correct symbols for a real atmosphere of comradean joy. But here and there the note has been struck with the sudden vibration of the vox humana. In human tradition it has been struck chiefly in the old celebrations of Christmas. In literature it has been struck chiefly in Dickens' Christmas Tales. In the historic celebration of Christmas, as it remains from Catholic times in certain northern countries, and it is to be remembered that in Catholic times the northern countries were, if possible, more Catholic than anybody else, there are three qualities which explain, I think, its hold upon the human sense of happiness, especially in such men as Dickens. There are three notes of Christmas, so to speak, which are also notes of happiness, and which the pagans and the utopians forget. If we state what they are in the case of Christmas, it will be quite sufficiently obvious how important they are in the case of Dickens. The first quality is what may be called the dramatic quality. The happiness is not a state, it is a crisis. All the old customs surrounding the celebration of the birth of Christ are made by human instincts, so as to insist and re-insist upon this crucial quality. Everything is so arranged that the whole household may feel, if possible, as a household does when a child is actually being born in it. The thing is a vigil, and a vigil with a definite limit. People sit up at night till they hear the bells ring, or they try to sleep at night in order to see their presence the next morning. Everywhere there is a limitation, a restraint. At one moment the door is shut, at the moment after it is opened. The hour has come, or it has not come. The partials are undone, or they are not undone. There is no evolution of Christmas presence. The sharp and theatrical quality and pleasure, which human instinct and the mother-wit of the world has wisely put into the popular celebrations of Christmas, is also a quality which is essential in such romantic literature as Dickens wrote. In romantic literature the hero and the heroine must indeed be happy, but they must also be unexpectedly happy. This is the first connecting link between literature and the old religious feasts. This is the first connecting link between Dickens and Christmas. The second element to be found in all such festivity and all romance is the element which is represented as well as it could be represented by the mere fact that Christmas occurs in the winter. It is the element not merely of contrast, but actually of antagonism. It preserves everything that was best in the merely primitive or pagan view of such ceremonies or such banquets. If we are carousing, at least we are warriors carousing, we hang above us as it were the shields and battle-axes with which we must do battle with the giants of the snow and hail. All comfort must be based on discomfort. Man chooses when he wishes to be most joyful, the very moment when the whole material universe is most sad. It is this contradiction and mystical defiance which gives a quality of manliness and reality to the old winter feasts, which is not characteristic of the sunny felicities of the earthly paradise. And this curious element has been carried out, even in all the trivial jokes and tasks that have always surrounded such occasions as these. The object of the jovial customs was not to make everything artificially easy. On the contrary, it was rather to make everything artificially difficult. Idealism is not only expressed by shooting an arrow at the stars. The fundamental principle of idealism is also expressed by putting a leg of mutton at the top of a greasy pole. There is, in all such observances, a quality which can be called only the quality of divine obstruction. For instance, in the game of Snapdragon, that admirable occupation, the conception is that raisins taste much nicer if they are brands saved from the burning. About all Christmas things there is something a little nobler, if only nobler in form and theory, than mere comfort. Even Holly is prickly. It is not hard to see the connection of this kind of historic instinct with a romantic writer like Dickens. The healthy novelist must always play Snapdragon with his principal characters. He must always be snatching the hero and heroine, like raisins, out of the fire. The third great Christmas element is the element of the grotesque. The grotesque is the natural expression of joy, and all the utopias and new edens of the poets fail to give a real impression of enjoyment, very largely because they leave out the grotesque. A man in most modern utopias cannot really be happy. He is too dignified. A man in Morris's earthly paradise cannot really be enjoying himself. He is too decorative. When real human beings have real delights, they tend to express them entirely in grotesques. I might say almost entirely in goblins. On Christmas Eve one may talk about ghosts, so long as they are turnip ghosts. But one would not be allowed, I hope, in any decent family, to talk on Christmas Eve about astral bodies. The boar's head of old yule time was as grotesque as the donkey head of bottom the weaver. But there is only one set of goblins quite wild enough to express the wild goodwill of Christmas. Those goblins are the characters of Dickens. Arcadian poets and Arcadian painters have striven to express happiness by means of beautiful figures. Dickens understood that happiness is best expressed by ugly figures. In beauty perhaps there is something allied to sadness. Certainly there is something akin to joy in the grotesque, nay, in the uncouth. There is something mysteriously associated with happiness, not only in the corpulence of Falstaff and the corpulence of Tony Weller, but even in the red nose of Bartoff or the red nose of Mr. Stiggens. A thing of beauty is an inspiration for ever, a matter of meditation for ever. It is rather a thing of ugliness that is strictly a joy for ever. All Dickens books are Christmas books, but this is still truest of his two or three famous yuletide tales, The Christmas Carol, The Chimes, and The Cricket on the Hearth. Of these the Christmas Carol is beyond comparison the best as well as the most popular. Indeed Dickens is in so profound and spiritual a sense a popular author, that in his case, unlike most others, it can generally be said that the best work is the most popular. It is for Pickwick that he is best known, and upon the whole it is for Pickwick that he is best worth knowing. In any case, this superiority of the Christmas Carol makes it convenient for us to take it as an example of the generalizations already made. If we study the very real atmosphere of rejoicing and of riotous charity in the Christmas Carol, we shall find that all the three marks I have mentioned are unmistakably visible. The Christmas Carol is a happy story first because it describes an abrupt and dramatic change. It is not only the story of a conversion, but of a sudden conversion, a sudden as the conversion of a man at a Salvation Army meeting. Popular religion is quite right in insisting on the fact of a crisis in most things. It is true that the man at the Salvation Army meeting would probably be converted from the punch pole, whereas Scrooge was converted to it. That only means that Scrooge and Dickens represented a higher and more historic Christianity. Again, the Christmas Carol owes much of its hilarity to our second source, the fact of its being a tale of winter, and of a very wintery winter. There is much about comfort in the story, yet the comfort is never innervating. It is saved from that by a tingle of something bitter and bracing in the weather. Lastly, the story exemplifies throughout the power of the Third Principle, the kinship between gaiety and the grotesque. Everybody is happy because nobody is dignified. We have a feeling somehow that Scrooge looked even uglier, when he was kind, than he had looked when he was cruel. The turkey that Scrooge brought was so fat, says Dickens, that he could never have stood upright. That top-heavy and monstrous bird is a good symbol of the top-heavy happiness of the stories. It is less profitable to criticize the other two tales in detail, because they represent variations on the theme in two directions, and variations that were not upon the whole improvements. The chimes is a monument of Dickens' honourable quality of pugnacity. He could not admire anything, even peace, without wanting to be warlike about it. And that was all as it should be. End of Section 17, Chapter 11, Christmas Books 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 18, Chapter 12, Domby and Son, Part 1 In Dickens' literary life, Domby and Son represents a break, so important as to necessitate our casting back to a summary and a generalization. In order fully to understand what this break is, we must say something of the previous character of Dickens' novels, and even something of the general character of novels in themselves. How essential this is, we shall see shortly. It must first be remembered that the novel is the most typical of modern forms. It is typical of modern forms especially in this, that it is essentially formless. All the ancient modes or structures of literature were definite and severe. Anyone composing them had to abide by their rules. They were what their name implied. Thus a tragedy might be a bad tragedy, but it was always a tragedy. Thus an epic might be a bad epic, but it was always an epic. Now in the sense in which there is such a thing as an epic, in that sense there is no such thing as a novel. We call any long, felicitous narrative in prose a novel, just as we call any short piece of prose without any narrative an essay. Both these forms are really quite formless, and both of them are really quite new. The difference between a good epic by Mr. John Milton and a bad epic by Mr. John Milton was simply the difference between the same thing done well and the same thing done badly, but it was not, for instance, like the difference between Clarissa Harlow and The Time Machine. If we class Richardson's book with Mr. Wells' book, it is really only for convenience. If we say that they are both novels, we shall certainly be puzzled in that case to say what on earth a novel is. But the note of our age, both for good and evil, is a highly poetical and largely illogical faith in liberty. Liberty is not a negation or a piece of nonsense, as the cheap reactionaries say. It is a belief in variety and growth, but it is a purely poetic and even a merely romantic belief. The 19th century was an age of romance as certainly as the Middle Ages was an age of reason. Medievals like to have everything defined and defensible. The modern world prefers to run some risks for the sake of spontaneity and diversity. Consequently, the modern world is full of a phenomena peculiar to itself. I mean the spectacle of small or originally small things swollen to enormous size and power. The modern world is like a world in which toadstools should be as big as trees, and insects should walk about in the sun as large as elephants. Thus, for instance, the shopkeeper, almost an unimportant figure in carefully ordered states, has in our time become the millionaire and has more power than ten kings. Thus again a practical knowledge of nature of the habits of animals or the properties of fire and water was in the old ordered state, either an almost-survile labor or a sort of joke. It was left to old women and gamekeepers and boys who went for birds nesting. In our time this commonplace daily knowledge has swollen into the enormous miracle of physical size, weighing the stars and talking under the sea. In short our age is a sort of splendid jungle, in which some of the most towering weeds and blossoms have come from the smallest seed. And this is generally speaking the explanation of the novel. The novel is not so much the filling up of an artistic plan, however new or fantastic. It is a thing that has grown from some germ of suggestion, and has often turned out much larger than the author intended. And this lastly is the final result of these facts, that the critic can generally trace in a novel what was the original artistic type or shape of thought from which the whole matter started. And he will generally find that this is different in every case. In one novel he will find that the first impulse is a character. In another novel he will find that the first impulse is a landscape, the atmosphere of some special countryside. In another novel he will find that the first impulse is the last chapter. Or it may be a thrust with a sword or dagger. It may be a theology. It may be a song. Somewhere, embedded in every ordinary book, are the five or six words for which really all the rest will be written. Some of our enterprising editors who set their readers to hunt for bank notes and missing ladies might start a competition for finding those words in every novel. But whether or no this is possible, there is no doubt that the principle in question is of great importance in the case of Dickens, and especially in the case of Dombie and Son. In all the Dickens novels can be seen, so to speak, the original thing that they were before they were novels. The same may be observed, for the matter of that, in the great novels of most of the great modern novelist. For example, Sir Walter Scott wrote poetical romances before he wrote prose romances. Hence it follows that with all their much greater merit, his novels may still be described as poetical romances in prose. While adding a new and powerful element of popular humours and observation, Scott still retains a certain purely poetical right, a right to make his heroes and outlaws and great kings speak at the great moments with a rhetoric so rhythmical that it partakes of the nature of song. The same quite metrical rhetoric which is used in the metrical speeches of Marmion or Roderick Dew. In the same way, although Don Quixote is a modern novel in its irony and subtlety, we can see that it comes from the old long romances of chivalry. In the same way, although Clarissa is a modern novel in its intimacy and actuality, we can see that it comes from the old polite letter writing and polite essays of the period of the spectator. Anyone can see that Scott formed in the lay of the Last Minstrel, the style that he applied again and again afterward, like the reappearances of a star taking leave of the stage. All his other romances were positively last appearances of the positively last minstrel. Anyone can see that Thackeray formed in fragmentary satires, like the book of snobs or the yellow plush papers, the style, the rather fragmentary style in which he was to write Vanity Fair. In most modern cases, in short, until very lately at any rate, the novel is an enormous outgrowth from something that was not a novel, and indicates this is very important. All his novels are outgrowths of the original notion of taking notes, splendid and inspired notes of what happens in the street. Those in the modern world who cannot reconcile themselves to his method, those who feel there is about his books something intolerably clumsy or superficial, have either no natural taste for strong literature at all, or else have fallen into their error by too persistently regarding Dickens as a modern novelist and expecting all his books to be modern novels. Dickens did not know at what exact point he really turned into a novelist, nor do we. Dickens did not know in his deepest soul whether he ever really did turn into a novelist, nor do we. The novel, being a modern product, is one of the few things to which we really can apply that disgusting method of thought, the method of evolution. But even in evolution there are great gaps, there are giant breaks, there are great crises. I have said that the first of these breaks in Dickens may be placed at the point when he wrote Nicholas Nickelby. This was his first serious decision to be a novelist in any sense at all, to be anything except a maker of momentary farces. The second break, and that a far more important break, is in Domby and Son. This marks his final resolution to be a novelist and nothing else, to be a serious constructor of fiction in the serious sense. Before Domby and Son, even his pathos had been really frivolous. After Domby and Son, even his absurdity was intentional and grave. In case this transition is not understood, one or two tests may be taken at random. The episodes in Domby and Son, the episodes in David Copperfield, which came after it, are no longer episodes merely stuck in the middle of the story, without any connection with it, like most of the episodes in Nicholas Nickelby, or most of the episodes even in Martin Chuzzlewitt. Take for instance, by way of American incidents, the fact that three schools for boys are described successively in Nicholas Nickelby, in Domby and Son, and in David Copperfield. But the difference is enormous. Dothboy's Hall does not exist to tell us anything about Nicholas Nickelby. Rather, Nicholas Nickelby exists entirely in order to tell us about Dothboy's Hall. It does not in any way affect his history or his psychology. He enters Mr. Squire's school and leaves Mr. Squire's school with the same character, or rather absence of character. It is a mere episode, existing for itself. But when little Paul Domby goes to an old fashion but kindly school, it is in a very different sense and for a very different reason, from that which Nicholas Nickelby goes to an old-fashioned and cruel school. The sending of little Paul to Dr. Blimbers is a real part of the history of little Paul, such as it is. Dickens deliberately invents all that elderly pedantry in order to show up Paul's childishness. Dickens deliberately invents all that rather heavy kindness in order to show up Paul's predestination and tragedy. The Dothboy's Hall is not meant to show up anything, except Dothboy's Hall. But although Dickens, doubtless enjoy Dr. Blimber quite as much as Mr. Squire's, it remains true that Dr. Blimber is really a very good foil to Paul, whereas Squire's is not a foil to Nicholas. Nicholas is merely a lame excuse for Squire's. The change can be seen continued in the school, or rather the two schools to which David Copperfield goes. The whole idea of David Copperfield's life is that he had the dregs of life before the wine of it. He knew the worst of the world before he knew the best of it. His childhood at Dr. Strong's is the second childhood. Now for this purpose the two schools are perfectly well adapted. Mr. Creekel's school is not only like Mr. Squire's school, a bad school, it is a bad influence upon David Copperfield. Dr. Strong's school is not only a good school. It is a good influence upon David Copperfield. I have taken this case of the schools as a case casual but concrete. The same, however, can be seen in any of the groups or incidents of the novel, on both sides of the boundary. Mr. Crumless, the atrical company, is only a society that Nicholas happens to fall into. America is only a place to which Martin Chuzzawit happens to go. These things are isolated sketches and nothing else. Even Todger's boarding house is only a place where Mr. Pexniff can be delightfully hypocritical. It is not a place which throws any new light on Mr. Pexniff's hypocrisy. But the case is different with that more subtle hypocrite in Dombie and Son. I mean Major Bagstock. Dickens does mean it as a deliberate light on Mr. Dombie's character that he basks with a fatuous calm in the blazing sun of Major Bagstock's tropical and defensive flattery. Here, then, is the essence of the change. He not only wishes to write a novel, this he did as early as Nicholas Nicolby. He wishes to have as little as possible in the novel that does not really assist it as a novel. Previously, he had asked with the assistance of what incidents could his hero wander farther and farther from the pathway. Now, he has really begun to ask with the assistance of what incidents his hero can get nearer and nearer to the goal. The end of Section 18, Chapter 12, Dombie and Son, 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 19, Chapter 12, Dombie and Son, Part 2. The change made Dickens a greater novelist. I'm not sure that it made him a greater man. One good character by Dickens requires all eternity to stretch its legs in, and the characters in his later books are always being tripped up by some tiresome nonsense about the story. For instance, in Dombie and Son, Mrs. Scuton is really very funny. But nobody with a love of the real smell of Dickens would compare her for a moment, for instance, with Mrs. Nickelby. And the reason the Mrs. Scuton's inferiority is simply this, that she has something to do with the plot. She has to entrap, or assist to entrap, Mr. Dombie into marrying Edith. Mrs. Nickelby, on the other hand, has nothing at all to do in the story except to get in everybody's way. The consequence is that we complain not of her for getting in everybody's way, but of everyone for getting in hers. What are sons and stars? What are times and seasons? What is the mere universe that it should presume to interrupt Mrs. Nickelby? Mrs. Scuton, though supposedly, of course, to be a much vile sort of woman, has something of the same quality of splendid and startling irrelevancy. In her also, there is the same feeling of wild threads hung from world to world like the webs of gigantic spiders, of things connected that seem to have no connection, saved by this one adventurous filament of frail and daring folly. Nothing could be better than Mrs. Scuton, when she finds herself, after convolutions of speech, somehow on the subject of Henry VIII, and pauses to mention with approval his dear little P.P. eyes and his benevolent chin. Nothing could be better than her attempt at Mohammedan resignation, when she feels almost inclined to say that there is no what's his name but thing-gummy, and what you may call it is his prophet. But she has not so much time as Mrs. Nickelby to say these good things. Also, she has not sufficient human virtue to say them constantly. She is always intent upon her worldly plans, among other things, upon the worldly plan of assisting Charles Dickens to get a story finished. She is always advancing her shriveled ear to listen to what Dambi is saying to Edith. Worldliness is the most solemn thing in the world. It is far more solemn than other worldliness. Mrs. Nickelby can afford to ramble as a child does in a field, or as a child does to laugh at nothing, for she is like a child, innocent. It is only the good who can afford to be frivolous. Broadly speaking, what is said here of Mrs. Scuton applies to the great part of Dambi and Son, even to the comic part of it. It shows an advance in art and unity. It does not show an advance in genius and creation. In some cases, in fact, I cannot help feeling it shows a falling off. It may be a personal idiosyncrasy, but there is only one comic character really prominent in Dickens upon whom Dickens has really lavished the wealth of his invention, and who does not amuse me at all. And that character is Captain Cuddle. But three great exceptions must be made to any such disparagement of Dambi and Son. They are all three of that royal order in Dickens' creation which can no more be described or criticized than strong wine. The first is Major Bagstock, the second is Cousin Phoenix, the third is Twitz. In Bagstock Dickens is blasted forever that type which pretends to be sincere by the simple operation of being explosively obvious. He tells about a quarter of the truth and then poses as truthful because a quarter of the truth is much simpler than the whole of it. He is the kind of man who goes about with posers for bishops or for socialists, with plain questions to which he wants a plain answer. His questions are plain, only in the same sense that he himself is plain, in the sense of being uncommonly ugly. He is the man who always bursts with satisfaction because he can call a spade a spade as if there were any kind of logical or philosophical use in merely saying the same word twice over. He is the man who wants things down in black and white as if black and white were the only two colors as if blue and green and red and gold were not facts of the universe. He is too selfish to tell the truth and too impatient even to hear it. He cannot endure the truth because it is subtle. This man is almost always like Bagstock, a sink-a-fint and a toad-eater. A man is not any the less a toad-eater because he eats his toads with a huge appetite and gobbles them up, as Bagstock did his breakfast, with the eyes starting out of his purple face. He flatters brutally, he cringes with a swagger, and men of the world like Dombie are always taken in by him because men of the world are probably the simplest of all the children of Adam. Cousin Phoenix, again, is an exquisite suggestion with his rickety chivalry and rambling compliments. It was about the period of Dombie and son that Dickens began to be taken up by good society. One can use only vulgar terms for an essentially vulgar process. And his sketches of The Man of Good Family and the books of this period show that he had glimpses of what that singular world is like. The aristocrats in his earliest books are simply dragons and griffons for his heroes to fight with, monsters like Sir Mulberry Hawk or Lord Berrysoft. They are merely created upon the old principle that your scoundrel must be polite and powerful, a very sound principle. The villain must be not only a villain, but a tyrant. The giant must be larger than Jack. But in the books of the Dombie period we have many shrew glimpses of the queer realities of English aristocracy. Of these Cousin Phoenix is one of the best. Cousin Phoenix is a much better sketch of the essentially decent and chivalrous aristocrat than Sir Leichester Dedlock. Both of the men are, if you will, fools, as both are honorable gentlemen. Now, if one may attempt a classification among fools, Sir Leichester Dedlock is a stupid fool, while Cousin Phoenix is a silly fool, which is much better. The difference is that the silly fool has a folly which is always on the borderland of wit, and even of wisdom. His wandering wits come often upon undiscovered truths. The stupid fool is as consistent and as homogeneous as wood. He is as invincible as the ancestral darkness. Cousin Phoenix is a good sketch of the sort of well-bred old ass, who is so fundamentally genuine that he is always saying very true things by accident. His whole tone, also, though exaggerated like everything in Dickens, is very true to the bewildered good nature which marks English aristocratic life. The statement that Dickens could not describe a gentleman is, like most popular anima versions, against Dickens, so very thin and one-sided a truth as to be for serious purposes a falsehood. When people say that Dickens could not describe a gentleman, what they mean is this, and so far what they mean is true. They mean that Dickens could not describe a gentleman as gentlemen feel a gentleman. They mean that he could not take that atmosphere easily, except as the normal atmosphere, or describe that world from the inside. This is true. In Dickens' time there was such a thing as the English people, and Dickens belonged to it, because there is no such thing as an English people now. Almost all literary men drift towards what is called society. Almost all literary men either are gentlemen or pretend to be. Hence, as I say when we talk of describing a gentleman, we always mean describing a gentleman from the point of view of one who either belongs to or is interested in perpetuating that type. Dickens did not describe a gentleman in a way that gentleman described a gentleman. He described them in the way in which he describes waders, or railway guards, or men drawing with chalk on the pavement. He described them in short, and this we may freely concede, from the outside as he described any other oddity or special trade. But when it comes to saying that he did not describe them well, then that is quite another matter, and that I should emphatically deny. The things that are really odd about the English upper class he saw with startling promptitude and penetration. And if the English upper class does not see these odd things in itself, it is not because they are not there, but because we are all blind to our own oddities. It is for the same reason that tramps do not feel dirty, or that blacks do not feel black. I have often heard a dear old English oligarch say that Dickens could not describe a gentleman, while every note of his own voice and turn of his own hand recalled Sir Leichester Deadlock. I have often been told by some old book that Dickens could not describe a gentleman, and been told so in the shaky voice and with all the vague elusiveness of Cousin Phoenix. Cousin Phoenix has really many of the main points of the class that governs England. Take for an instance his hazy notion that he is in a world where everybody knows everybody, whenever he mentions a man it is a man with whom my friend Davy is no doubt acquainted. That pierces to the very helpless soul of aristocracy. Take again the stupendous gravity with which he leads up to a joke. That is the very soul of the House of Commons and the Cabinet of the High Class English Politics, where a joke is always enjoyed solemnly. Take his insistence upon the technique of Parliament, his regret for the time when the rules of debate were perhaps better observed than they are now. Take that wonderful mixture in him, which is the real human virtue of our aristocracy, of a fair amount of personal modesty with an innocent assumption of rank. Of a man who saw all these genteel foibles so clearly, it is absurd merely to say without further explanation that he could not describe a gentleman. Let us confine ourselves to saying that he did not describe a gentleman as gentleman like to be described. Lastly there is the admirable study of Toots, who may be considered as being in some ways the masterpiece of Dickens. Nowhere else did Dickens express with such astonishing insight and truth his main contention, which is that to be good and idiotic is not a poor fate, but on the contrary an experience of primeval innocence, which wonders at all things. Dickens did not know any more than any great man ever knows what was the particular thing that he had to preach. He did not know it, he only preached it. But the particular thing that he had to preach was this, that humility is the only possible basis of enjoyment, that if one has no other way of being humble except being poor then it is better to be poor and to enjoy, that if one has no other way of being humble except being imbecile then it is better to be imbecile and to enjoy. That is the deep unconscious truth in the character of Toots, that all his externals are flashy and false, all his internals unconscious, obscure, and true. He wears loud clothes, and he is silent inside them. His shirts and waistcoats are covered with bright spots of pink and purple, while his soul is always covered with the sacred shame. He always gets all the outside things of life wrong, and all the inside things right. He always admires the right Christian people, and gives them the wrong Christian names. Dimly connecting Captain Cuddle with the shop of Mr. Solomon Gills, he always addresses the astonished Mariner as Captain Gills. He turns Mr. Walter Gay by a most improving transformation into Lieutenant Walters. But he always knows which people upon his own principles to admire. He forgets who they are, but he remembers what they are. With clear eyes of humility he perceives the whole world as it is. He respects the game chicken for being strong, as even the game chicken ought to be respected for being strong. He respects Florence for being good, as even Florence ought to be respected for being good. And he has no doubt about which he admires most. He prefers goodness to strength, as do all masculine men. It is through the eyes of such characters as Toots that Dickens really sees the whole of his tales. For even if one calls him a half-wit, it still makes a difference that he keeps the right half of his wits. When we think of the unclean and craven spirit in which Toots might be treated in a psychological novel of today, how he might walk with a moon, calf face, and a brain of beastial darkness, the soul rises in real homage to Dickens for showing how much simple gratitude and happiness can remain in the lopped roots of the most simplified intelligence. If scientists must treat a man as a dog, it need not be always as a mad dog. They might grant him, like Toots, a little of the dog's loyalty and the dog's reward. The end of Section 19, Chapter 12, Dombie and Son. Appreciations and criticisms of the works of Charles Dickens by G. K. Chesterton Section 20, Chapter 13, David Copperfield In this book, Dickens is really trying to write a new kind of book, and the enterprise is almost as chivalrous as a cavalry charge. He is making a romantic attempt to be realistic. That is almost the definition of David Copperfield. In his last book, Dombie and Son, we see a certain maturity and even a certain mild exhaustion in his earlier farcical method. He never failed to have fine things in any of his books, and Toots is a very fine thing. Still, I could never find Captain Curry and Mr. Saul Gill's very funny, and the whole wooden midshipman seems to me very wooden. In David Copperfield, he suddenly unseals a new torrent of truth, the truth out of his own life. The impulse of the thing is autobiography. He is trying to tell all the absurd things that have happened to himself, and not the least absurd thing is himself. Yet, though it is Dickens' ablest and clearest book, there is in it a falling away of an almost singular kind. Generally speaking, there was astonishing little of fatigue in Dickens' books. He sometimes wrote bad work. He sometimes wrote even unimportant work. But he wrote hardly a line, which is not full of his own fierce vitality and fancy. If he is dull, it is hardly ever because he cannot think of anything. It is because by some silly excitement or momentary lapse of judgment, he has thought of something that was not worth thinking of. If his joke is feeble, it is as an impromptu joke at an uproarious dinner table, maybe feeble. It is no indication of any lack of vitality. The joke is feeble, but it is not a sign of feebleness. Broadly speaking, this is true of Dickens. If his writing is not amusing us, at least it is amusing him. Even when he is tiring, he is not tired. But in the case of David Copperfield, there is a real reason for noting an air of fatigue. For although this is the best of all Dickens' books, it constantly disappoints the critical and intelligent reader. The reason is that Dickens began it under his sudden emotional impulse of telling the whole truth about himself and gradually allowed the whole truth to be more and more diluted. Until towards the end of the book, we are back in the old pedantic and decorative art of Dickens, an art which we justly admired in its own place and on its own terms, but which we resent when we feel it gradually returning through a tale pitched originally in a more practical and piercing key. Here, I say, is the one real example of the fatigue of Dickens. He begins his story in a new style and then slips back into an old one. The earlier part is in his later manner. The later part is in his earlier manner. There are many marks of something weak and shadowy in the end of David Copperfield. Here, for instance, is one of them which is not without its bearing on many tendencies of modern England. Why did Dickens at the end of his book give way to that typically English optimism about emigration? He seems to think that he can cure the souls of a whole cartload, or rather, boatload, of his characters by sending them all to the colonies. Pegatee is a desolate and insulted parent whose house has been desecrated, and his pride laid low. Therefore, let him go to Australia. Emily is a woman whose heart is broken and whose honour is blasted. But she will be quite happy if she goes to Australia. Mr. MacCover is a man whose soul cannot be made to understand the tyranny of time or the limits of human hope. But he will understand all these things if he goes to Australia. For it must be noted that Dickens does not use this emigration merely as a mode of exit. He does not send these characters away on a ship merely as a symbol suggesting that they pass wholly out of his hearer's life. He does definitely suggest that Australia is a sort of island valley of Avalon, where the soul may heal it of its grievous wound. It is seriously suggested that Pegatee finds peace in Australia. It is really indicated that Emily regains her dignity in Australia. It is positively explained of Mr. MacCover, not that he was happy in Australia, for he would be that anywhere, but that he was definitely prosperous and practically successful in Australia, and that he would certainly be nowhere. Colonising is not talked of merely as a course economic expedient for going to a new market. It is really offered as something that will cure the hopeless tragedy of Pegatee as something that will cure the still more hopeless comedy of MacCover. I will not dwell here on the subsequent adventures of this very sentimental and extremely English illusion. It would be an exaggeration to say that Dickens, in this matter, is something of a forerunner of much more modern imperialism. His political views were such that he would have regarded modern imperialism with horror and contempt. Nevertheless, there is here something of that hazy sentimentalism which makes some imperialists prefer to talk of the fringe of the empire of which they know nothing, rather than that of the heart of the empire which they know is diseased. It is said that in the twilight and decline of Rome, close to the Dark Ages, the people in Gaul believed that Britain was a land of ghosts. Perhaps it was foggy, and that the dead were ferried across to it from the northern coast of France. If, as is not entirely impossible, our own century appears to future ages as a time of temporary decay and twilight, it may be said that there was attached to England a blessed island called Australia to which the souls of the socially dead were ferried across to remain in bliss forever. This element which is represented by the colonial optimism at the end of David Copperfield is a moral element. The truth is that there is something a little mean about this sort of optimism. I do not like the notion of David Copperfield sitting down comfortably to his tea-table with Agnes, having got rid of all the inconvenient or distressing characters of the story by sending them to the other side of the world. The whole thing has too much about it of the selfishness of a family which sends escape grace to the colonies to starve with its blessing. There is too much in the whole thing of that element which was satirized by an ironic interpretation of the epithet, peace, perfect peace, with loved ones far away. We should have thought more of David Copperfield and also of Charles Dickens if he had endeavored for the rest of his life by conversation and comfort to bind up the wounds of his old friends from the seaside. We should have thought more of David Copperfield and also of Charles Dickens if he had faced the possibility of going on till his dying day, lending money to Mr. Wilkins McCauber. We should have thought more of David Copperfield and also of Charles Dickens if he had not looked upon the marriage with Dora merely as a flirtation, an episode which he survived and ought to survive. And yet the truth is that there is nowhere in fiction where we feel so keenly the primary human instinct and principle that a marriage is a marriage and irrevocable, that such things do leave a wound and also a bond, as in this case of David's short connection with his silly little wife. When all is said and done, when Dickens has done his best and his worst, when he has sentimentalized for pages and tried to tie up everything in the pink tape of optimism, the fact in the psychology of the reader still remains. The reader does still feel that David's marriage to Dora was a real marriage and that his marriage to Agnes was nothing, a middle-aged compromise, a taking of the second best, a sort of spiritualized and sublimated marriage of convenience. For all the readers of Dickens, Dora is thoroughly avenged. The modern world, intent on anarchy and everything, even in government, refuses to perceive the permanent element of tragic constancy, which inheres in all passion and which is the origin of marriage. Marriage rests upon the fact that you cannot have your cake and eat it, that you cannot lose your heart and have it. But as I have said, there is perhaps no place in literature where we feel more vividly the sense of this monogamous instinct in a man than in David Copperfield. A man is monogamous, even if he is only monogamous for a month. Love is eternal, even if it is only eternal for a month. It always leaves behind it the sense of something broken and betrayed. But I have mentioned Dora in this connection only because she illustrates the same fact which Macauber illustrates, the fact that there is at the end of this book too much tendency to bless people and get rid of them. Macauber is a nuisance. Dickens the despot condemns him to exile. Dora is a nuisance. Dickens the despot condemns her to death. But it is the whole business of Dickens, in the world, to express the fact that such people are the spice and interest of life. It is the whole point of Dickens that there is nobody more worth living with than a strong, splendid, entertaining, immortal nuisance. Macauber interrupts practical life. But what is practical life that it should venture to interrupt Macauber? Dora confuses the housekeeping. But we're not angry with Dora because she confuses the housekeeping. We're angry with the housekeeping because it confuses Dora. I repeat, and it cannot be too much repeated, that the whole lesson of Dickens is here. It is better to know Macauber than not to know the minor worries that arise out of knowing Macauber. It is better to have a bad debt than to have a good friend. In the same way, it is better to marry a human and a healthy personality, which happens to attract you, than to marry a mere housewife. For a mere housewife is a mere housekeeper. All this was what Dickens stood for, that the very people who are most irritating in small business circumstances are often the people who are most delightful in long stretches of experience of life. It is just the man who is maddening when he is ordering a cutlet, or arranging an appointment, who is probably the man in whose company it is worthwhile to journey steadily toward the grave. Distribute the dignified people and the capable people, and the highly business-like people among all the situations which their ambition or their innate corruption may demand. But keep close to your heart, keep deep in your inner counsels, the absurd people. Let the clever people pretend to govern you, let the unimpeachable people pretend to advise you, but let the fools alone influence you. Let the laughable people whose faults you see and understand be the only people who are really inside your life, who really come near you or accompany you on your lonely march towards the last impossibility. That is the whole meaning of Dickens, that we should keep the absurd people for our friends. And here at the end of David Copperfield, he seems in some dim way to deny it. He seems to want to get rid of the preposterous people, simply because they will always continue to be preposterous. I have a horrible feeling that David Copperfield will send even his aunt to Australia if she worries him too much about donkeys. I repeat then that this wrong ending of David Copperfield is one of the very few examples in Dickens of a real symptom of fatigue. Having created splendid beings for whom alone life might be worth living, he cannot endure the thought of his hero living with him. Having given his hero superb and terrible friends, he is afraid of the awful and tempestuous vista of their friendship. He slips back into a more superficial kind of story and ends it in a more superficial way. He is afraid of the things he has made, of that terrible figure Macauber, of that yet more terrible figure Dora. He cannot make up his mind to see his hero perpetually entangled in the splendid tortures and sacred surprises that come from living with really individual and unmanageable people. He cannot endure the idea that his fairy prince will not have henceforward a perfectly peaceful time. But the wise old fairy tales, which are the wisest things in the world, at any rate the wisest things of worldly origin, the wise old fairy tales never were so silly as to say that the prince and the princess lived peacefully ever afterward. The fairy tales say that the prince and the princess lived happily ever afterwards, and so they did. They lived happily, though it is very likely that from time to time they threw the furniture at each other. Most marriages, I think, are happy marriages, but there is no such thing as a contented marriage. The whole pleasure of marriage is that it is a perpetual crisis. David Copperfield and Dora quarreled over the cold mutton, and if they had gone on quarreling to the end of their lives they would have gone on loving each other to the end of their lives. It would have been a human marriage. But David Copperfield and Agnes would agree about the cold mutton, and that cold mutton would be very cold. I have here endeavored to suggest some of the main merits of Dickens within the framework of one of his faults. I have said that David Copperfield represents a rather sad transition from his strongest method to his weakest. Nobody would ever complain of Charles Dickens going on writing his own kind of novels, his old kind of novels. If there be anywhere a man who loves good books, that man wishes that there were four Oliver twists and at least forty-four pickwicks. If there be anyone who loves laughter and creation, he would be glad to read a hundred of Nicholas Nicolby and two hundred of the old curiosity shop. But while any one would have welcomed one of Dickens own ordered and conventional novels, it was not in this spirit that they welcomed David Copperfield. David Copperfield begins as if it were going to be a new kind of Dickens novel. Then it gradually turns into an old kind of Dickens novel. It is here that many readers of this blended book have been subtly and secretly irritated. Nicholas Nicolby is all very well. We accept him as something which is required to tie the whole affair together. Nicholas is a sort of string, or clothesline, on which are hung the limp figures of Smike, the jumping jack of Mr. Squeers, and the twin dolls named Cherry Bull. If we do not accept Nicholas Nicolby as the hero of the story, at least we accept him as the title of the story. But in David Copperfield, Dickens begins something which looks for the moment fresh and startling. In the early chapters, the amazing early chapters of this book, he does seem to be going to tell the living truth about a living boy and a man. It is melancholy to see that sudden fire fading. It is sad to see David Copperfield gradually turning into Nicholas Nicolby. Nicholas Nicolby does not exist at all. He is a quite colorless, primary condition of the story. We look through Nicholas Nicolby at the story, just as we look through a plain paint of glass at the street. But David Copperfield does begin by existing. It is only gradually that he gives up that exhausting habit. Any fair critical account of Dickens must always make him out much smaller than he is. For any fair criticism of Dickens must take account of his evident errors, as I have taken account of one of the most evident of them during the last two or three pages. It would not even be loyal to conceal them. No honest criticism, no criticism, though it spoke with the tongues of men and angels, could ever really talk about Dickens. In all this that I have said, I have not been talking about Dickens at all. I say it with equanimity. I say it even with arrogance. I have been talking about the gaps of Dickens. I have been talking about the omissions of Dickens. I have been talking about the slumber of Dickens, and the forgetfulness and unconsciousness of Dickens. In one word I have been talking not about Dickens, but about the absence of Dickens. But when we come to him and his work itself, what is there to be said? What is there to be said about Earthquake and the Dawn? He has created, especially in this book of David Copperfield, he has created creatures who cling to us and tyrannize over us, creatures whom we would not forget if we could, creatures whom we could not forget if we would, creatures who are more actual than the man who made them. This is the excuse for all that indeterminate and rambling and sometimes sentimental criticism of which Dickens, more than anyone else, is the victim, which I fear that I for one have made him the victim in this place. When I was a boy, I could not understand why the Dickensians worried so wearily about Dickens, about where he went to school and where he ate his dinners, about how he wore his trousers and when he cut his hair. I used to wonder why they did not write something that I could read about a man like Macalber. But I have come to the conclusion that this almost hysterical worship of the man, combined with a comparatively feeble criticism on his works, is just and natural. Dickens was a man like ourselves. We can see where he went wrong and study him without being stunned or getting the sunstroke. But Macalber is not a man. Macalber is the Superman. We can only walk round and round him, wondering what we shall say. All the critics of Dickens, when all is said and done, have only walked round and round Macalber, wondering what they should say. I am myself at this moment, walking round and round Macalber, wondering what I shall say. And I have not found out yet. End of Session 20 Chapter 13 David Copperfield Chapter 14 Christmas Stories The power of Dickens is shown even in the scraps of Dickens, just as the virtue of a saint is said to be shown in fragments of his property or rags from his robe. It is with such fragments that we are chiefly concerned in the Christmas stories. Many of them are fragments in the literal sense. Dickens began them and then allowed someone else to carry them on. There are almost rejected notes. In all the other cases we have been considering the books that he wrote. Here we have rather to consider the books that he might have written. And here we find the final evidence and the unconscious stamp of greatness, as we might find it in some broken bust or some rejected molding in the studio of Michelangelo. These sketches or parts of sketches all belong to that period in his later life, when he had undertaken the duties of an editor, the very heavy duties of a very popular editor. He was not by any means naturally fitted for that position. He was the best man in the world for founding papers, but many people wish that he could have been buried under the foundations, like the first builder in some pagan and prehistoric pile. He called the daily news into existence, but when once it existed it objected to him strongly. It is not easy and perhaps it is not important to state truly the cause of this incapacity. It was not in the least what is called the ordinary fault or weakness of the artist. It was not that he was careless. Rather it was that he was too conscientious. It was not that he had the irresponsibility of genius. Rather it was that he had the irritating responsibility of genius. He wanted everybody to see things as he saw them. But in spite of all this he certainly ran two great popular periodicals. household words and all the year round, with enormous popular success. And he certainly so far succeeded in throwing himself into the communism of journalism, into the nameless brotherhood of a big paper, that many earnest Dickensians are still engaged in picking out pieces of Dickens from the anonymous pages of household words and all the year round. And those parts which have been already, beyond question, picked out and proved are often fragmentary. The genuine writing of Dickens breaks off at a certain point, and the writing of someone else begins. But when the writing of Dickens breaks off, I fancy that we know it. The singular thing is that some of the best work that Dickens ever did, better than the work in his best novels, can be found in these slight and composite scraps of journalism. For instance, the solemn and self-satisfied account of the duty and dignity of a waiter, given in the opening chapters of somebody's luggage, is quite as full and fine as anything done anywhere by its author in the same vein of sumptuous satire. It is as good as the account which Mr. Bumble gives of outdoor relief, which properly understood is the parochial safeguard. The great thing is to give the paupers what they don't want. And then they never come again. It is as good as Mr. Pottsnap's description of the British Constitution, which was bestowed on him by Providence. None of these celebrated passages is more obviously Dickens at his best than this. The admirable description of the true principles of waitering, in itself an act of madness on the part of a waiter, and how he expired, repeating continually, two and sixes, three and four is nine. That waiter's explanatory soliloquy might easily have opened an excellent novel, as Martin Chiselwit is opened by the clever nonsense about the genealogy of the Chiselwits, or as Bleak House is opened by a satiric account of the damp, dim life of a law court. Yet Dickens practically abandoned the scheme of somebody's luggage. He only wrote two sketches out of those obviously intended. He may almost be said to have only written a brilliant introduction to another man's book. Yet it is exactly in such broken outbreaks that his greatness appears. If a man has flung away bad ideas, he has shown his sense. But if he has flung away good ideas, he has shown his genius. He has proved that he actually has that overpressure of pure creativeness, which we see in nature itself, that of a hundred seeds she often brings but one to bear. Dickens had to be malethusian about his spiritual children. Critics have called Keats and others who died young the great might have bins of literary history. Dickens certainly was not merely a great might have been. Dickens, to say the least of him, was a great was. Yet this fails fully to express the richness of his talent, for the truth is that he was a great was and also a great might have been. He said what he had to say, and yet not all he had to say, wild pictures, possible stories, tantalizing and attractive trains of thought, perspectives of adventure crowded so continually upon his mind that at the end there was a vast mass of them left over, ideas that he literally had not the opportunity to develop, tales that he literally had not the time to tell. This is shown clearly in his private notes and letters, which are full of schemes singularly striking and suggestive, schemes which he never carried out. It is indicated even more clearly by these Christmas stories, collected out of the chaotic opulence of household words and all the year round. He wrote short stories, actually because he had not time to write long stories. He often put into the short story a deep and branching idea, which would have done very well for a long story. Many of his long stories, so to speak, broke off short. This is where he differs from most who are called the might have beens of literature. Marlowe and Chatterton failed because of their weakness. Dickens failed because of his force. Examined, for example, this case of the waiter in somebody's luggage. Dickens obviously knew enough about that waiter to have made him a running spring of joy throughout a whole novel, as the Beatle is in Oliver Twist or The Undertaker in Martin Chuzzlewit. Every touch of him tingles with truth from the vague gallantry with which he asks, wouldst thou know, fair reader, if of the adorable female sex, to the official severity with which he takes the chambermaid down, as many pegs as is desirable for the future comfort of all parties. If Dickens had developed this character at full length in a book, he would have preserved for ever in literature a type of great humor and great value, and a type which may only too soon be disappearing from English history. He would have eternalized the English waiter. He still exists in some sound old taverns and decent country-ins, but there is no one left really capable of singing his praises. I know that Mr. Bernard Shaw has done something of the sort, in the delightfully whimsical account of William, in You Never Can Tell, but nothing will persuade me that Mr. Bernard Shaw can really understand the English waiter. He can never have ordered wine from him, for instance. He can never have ordered wine from him, for instance. And though the English waiter is, by the nature of things, solemn about everything, he can never reach the true height and ecstasy of his salinity, except about wine. What the real English waiter would do or say, if Mr. Shaw asked him for a vegetarian meal, I cannot dare to predict. I rather think that, for the first time in his life, he would laugh. A horrible sight. Dickens' waiter is described by one who is not merely witty, truthful, and observant, like Mr. Bernard Shaw, but one who really knew the atmosphere of the Inns, one who knew and even liked the smell of beef and beer and brandy. Hence there is a richness in Dickens' portrait, which does not exist in Mr. Shaw's. Mr. Shaw's waiter is merely a man of tact. Dickens is a man of principle. Mr. Shaw's waiter is an opportunist, just as Mr. Shaw is an opportunist in politics. Dickens' waiter is ready to stand up seriously for the true principles of waitering, just as Dickens was ready to stand up for the true principles of liberalism. Mr. Shaw's waiter is agnostic, his motto is, you never can tell. Dickens' waiter is a dogmatist, his motto is, you can tell, I will tell you. And the true old-fashioned English waiter had really this grave and even moral attitude. He was the servant of the customers, as a priest is the servant of the faithful, but scarcely in any less dignified sense. Surely it is not merely patriotic partiality that makes one lament the disappearance of this careful and honorable figure crowded out by meaner men at meaner wages, by the German waiter, who has learned five languages in the course of running away from his own, or the Italian waiter, who regards those he serves with a darkling contempt, which must certainly be that either of a dynamiter or an exiled prince. The human and hospitable English waiter is vanishing, and Dickens might perhaps have saved him as he saved Christmas. I have taken this case of the waiter in Dickens and his equally important counterpart in England as an example of the sincere and genial sketches scattered about these short stories. But there are many others, and one at least demands special mention. I mean Mrs. Leripper, the London landlady. Not only did Dickens never do anything better in a literary sense, but he never performed more perfectly his main moral function. That of insisting through laughter and flippancy upon the virtue of Christian charity. There has been much broad farce against the lodging housekeeper. He alone could have written broad farce in her favour. It is fashionable to represent the landlady as a tyrant. It is too much forgotten that if she is one of the oppressors, she is at least as much of one of the oppressed. If she is bad tempered, it is often for the same reasons that make all women bad tempered. I suppose the exasperating qualities of the other sex. If she is grasping, it is often because when a husband makes generosity of vice, it is often necessary that a wife should make avarice a virtue. All this Dickens suggested very soundly and in a few strokes in the more remote character of Miss Walsenheim. But in Mrs. Lyripper he went further and did not fare worse. In Mrs. Lyripper he suggested quite truly how huge a mass of real good humor, of grand unconscious patience, of unfailing courtesy and constant and difficult benevolence, is concealed behind many a lodging house door and compact in the red-faced person of many a preposterous landlady. Any one could easily excuse the ill-humour of the poor. But the great masses of the poor have not even any ill-humour to be excused. Their cheeriness is startling enough to be the foundation of a miracle play, and certainly is startling enough to be the foundation of a romance. Yet I do not know of any romance in which it is expressed, except this one. Of the landlady as of the waiter. It may be said that Dickens left in a slight sketch what he might have developed through a long and strong novel. For Dickens had hold of one great truth, the neglect of which has, as it were, truncated and made meager, the works of many brilliant modern novelists. Modern novelists tried to make long novels out of subtle characters. But a subtle character soon comes to an end, because it works in and in to its own centre, and dies there. But a simple character goes on forever in a fresh interest and energy, because it works out and out to the infinite universe. Mr. George Moore in France is not by any means so interesting as Mrs. Lyriper in France, for she is trying to find France, and he is only trying to find George Moore. Mrs. Lyriper is the female equivalent of Mr. Pickwick. Unlike Mrs. Bardell, another and lesser landlady, she was fully worthy to be Mrs. Pickwick, for in both cases the essential truth is the same. That original innocence which alone deserves adventures, and because it alone can appreciate them. We have had Mr. Pickwick in England, and we can imagine him in France. We have had Mrs. Lyriper in France, and we can imagine her in Mesopotamia or in Heaven. The subtle character in the modern novels we cannot really imagine anywhere, except in the suburbs or in Limbo.