 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 22. Chapter 15. Bleak House Bleak House is not certainly Dickens' best book, but perhaps it is his best novel. Such a distinction is not a mere verbal trick. It has to be remembered rather constantly in connection with his work. This particular story represents the highest point of his intellectual maturity. Maturity does not necessarily mean perfection. It is idle to say that a mature potato is perfect. Some people like new potatoes. A mature potato is not perfect, but it is a mature potato. The mind of an intelligent epicure may find it less adapted to his particular purpose, but the mind of an intelligent potato would at once admit it is being, beyond all doubt, a genuine, fully developed specimen of his own particular species. The same is in some degree true, even of literature. We can say more or less when a human being has come to his full mental growth, even if we go so far as to wish that he had never come to it. Children are very much nicer than grown-up people, but there is such a thing as growing up. When Dickens wrote Bleak House, he had grown up. Like Napoleon, he had made his army on the march. He had walked in front of his mob of aggressive characters, as Napoleon did in front of the half-baked battalions of the Revolution. And like Napoleon, he won battle after battle before he knew his own plan of campaign. Like Napoleon, he put the enemy's forces to route before he had put his own force into order. Like Napoleon, he had a victorious army almost before he had an army. After his decisive victories, Napoleon began to put his house in order. After his decisive victories, Dickens also began to put his house in order. The house, when he had put it in order, was Bleak House. There was one thing common to nearly all the other Dickens' tales, with the possible exception of Donbien's son. They were all rambling tales, and they all had a perfect right to be. They were all rambling tales for the very simple reason that they were all about rambling people. They were novels of adventure. They were even diaries of travel. Since the hero strayed from place to place, it did not seem unreasonable that the story should stray from subject to subject. This is true of the bulk of the novels up to and including David Copperfield, up to the very brink or threshold of Bleak House. Mr. Pickwick wanders about on the white English roads, always looking for antiquities, and always finding novelties. Poor Oliver Twist wanders along the same white roads to seek his fortune, and to find his misfortune. Nicholas Nicolby goes walking across England because he is young and hopeful. Little Nell's grandfather does the same thing because he is old and silly. There is not much in common between Samuel Pickwick and Oliver Twist. There is not much in common between Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nicolby. There is not much in common, let us hope, between Little Nell's grandfather and any other human being. But they all have this in common, that they may actually all have trodden in each other's footprints. They were all wanderers on the face of the same fair English land. Martin Chuzzlewit was only made popular by the travels of the hero in America. When we come to Donby and Son, we find, as I have said, an exception. But even here it is odd to note the fact that it was an exception almost by accident. In Dickens' original scheme of the story, much greater prominence was to have been given to the travels and trials of Walter Gay. In fact, the young man was to have had a deterioration of character which could only have been adequately detailed in him, in his character, of a vagabond and wastrel. The most important point, however, is that when we come to David Copperfield in some sense, the summit of his serious literature, we find the things still there. The hero still wanders from place to place. His genius is still gypsy. The adventures in the book are less violent and less improbable than those which wait for Pickwick and Nicholas Nicolby. But they are still adventures and not merely events. They are still things met on a road. The facts of the story fall away from David as such facts do fall away from a traveler walking fast. We are more likely, perhaps, to pass by Mr. Creakles' school than to pass by Mrs. Jarlies' waxworks. The only point is that we should pass by both of them. Up to this point in Dickens' development, his novel, however true, is still pick-a-resk. His hero never really rests anywhere in the story. No one seems really to know where Mr. Pickwick lived. Here he has no abiding city. When we come to Bleak House, we come to a change in artistic structure. The thing is no longer a string of incidents. It is a cycle of incidents. It returns upon itself. It has recurrent melody and poetic justice. It has artistic constancy and artistic revenge. It preserves the unities. Even to some extent, it preserves the unities of time and place. The story circles round two or three symbolic places. It does not go straggling irregularly all over England like one of Mr. Pickwick's coaches. People go from one place to another place, but not from one place to another place on the road to everywhere else. Mr. Jarlies goes from Bleak House to visit Mrs. Boythorn. But he comes back to Bleak House. Ms. Clare and Ms. Summerson go from Bleak House to visit Mr. and Mrs. Bam Badger. But they come back to Bleak House. The whole story strays from Bleak House and plunges into the foul fogs of Chancery and the autumn mists of Chesney-Wold. But the whole story comes back to Bleak House. The domestic title is appropriate. It is a permanent address. Dickens' openings are almost always good, but the opening of Bleak House is good in quite a new and striking sense. Nothing could be better, for instance, than the first foolish chapter about the genealogy of the Chusselwitz. But it has nothing to do with the Chusselwitz. Nothing could be better than the first chapter of David Copperfield, the breezy entrance and banging exit of Miss Betsy Trotwood. But if there is ultimately any crisis or a serious subject matter of David Copperfield, it is the marred marriage with Dora, the final return to Agnes, and all this in no way involved in the highly amusing fact that his aunt expected him to be a girl. We may repeat that the matter is picker-esque. The story begins in one place and ends in another place, and there is no real connection between the beginning and the end, except the biographical connection. A picker-esque novel is only a very eventful biography, but the opening of Bleak House is quite another business altogether. It is admirable in quite another way. The description of the fog in the first chapter of Bleak House is good in itself, but it is not merely good in itself. Like the description of the wind in the opening of Martin Chusselwitz, it is also good in the sense that Mater Link is good. It is what the modern people call an atmosphere. Dickens begins in the chancery fog because he means to end in the chancery fog. He did not begin in the Chusselwitz wind because he meant to end in it. He began in it because it was a good beginning. This is perhaps the best short way of stating the peculiarity of the position of Bleak House. In this, the Bleak House beginnings, we have the feeling that it is not only a beginning. We have the feeling that the author sees the conclusion and the whole. The beginning is alpha and omega. The beginning and the end. He means that all the characters and all the events shall be read through the smoky colors of that sinister and unnatural vapor. The same is true throughout the whole tale. The whole tale is symbolic and crowded with symbols. Miss Flight is a funny character like Miss Lacrievi. But Miss Lacrievi means only Miss Lacrievi. Miss Flight means chancery. The rag and bone man Crook is a powerful grotesque. So is Quilp. But in the story, Quilp only means Quilp. Crook means chancery. Rick Carstone is a kind of tragic figure like Sydney Carton. But Sydney Carton only means the tragedy of human nature. Rick Carstone means the tragedy of chancery. Little Joe dies pathetically like Little Paul. But for the death of Little Paul, we can only blame Dickens. For the death of Little Joe, we blame chancery. Thus the artistic unity of the book, compared to all the author's earlier novels, is satisfying, almost suffocating. There is the motif and again the motif. Almost everything is calculated to assert and reassert the savage morality of Dickens' protest against a particular social evil. The whole theme is that which another Englishman, as dovial as Dickens, defines shortly and finally as the law's delay. The fog of the first chapter never lifts. In this twilight he traced wonderful shapes, those people who fancy that Dickens was a mere clown, that he could not describe anything delicate or deadly in the human character. Those who fancy this are mostly people whose position is explicable in many easy ways. The vast majority of the fastidious critics have, in the quite strict and solid sense of the words, never read Dickens at all. Hence their opposition is due to and inspired by a hearty innocence, which will certainly make them enthusiastic Dickensians if they ever by some accident happen to read him. In other cases it is due to a certain habit of reading books under the eye of a conventional critic, admiring what we expect to admire, regretting what we are told to regret, waiting for Mr. Bumble to admire him, waiting for little now to despise her. Yet again, of course, it is sometimes due to that basest of all artistic indulgences, certainly far baser than the pleasure of absence or the pleasure of opium, the pleasure of appreciating works of art which ordinary men cannot appreciate. Surely the vilest point of human vanity is exactly that. To ask to be admired for admiring what your admirers do not admire. But whatever be the reason, whether rude or subtle, which has prevented any particular man from personally admiring Dickens, there is in connection with a book like Bleak House, something that may be called a solid and impressive challenge. Let anyone who thinks that Dickens could not describe the semitones of the abrupt instincts of real human nature simply take the trouble to read the stretch of chapters which detailed the way in which Carstone's mind grew gradually morbid about his chances in chancery. Let him note the manner in which the mere masculinity of Carstone is caught, how he grows more mad, he grows more logical, nay more rational. Good women who love him come to him and point out the fact that Jarn-Dice is a good man, a fact to them solid like an object of the senses. In answer he asks them to understand his position. He does not say this, he does not say that. He only urges that Jarn-Dice may have become cynical in the affair in the same sense that he himself may have become cynical in the affair. He is always a man, that is to say, he is always unanswerable, always wrong. The passionate certainty of the woman beats itself like battering waves against the thin smooth wall of his insane consistency. I repeat, let anyone who thinks that Dickens with a gross and indelicate artist read that part of his book. If Dickens had been the clumsy journalist that such people represent, he never could have written such an episode at all. A clumsy journalist would have made Rick Carstone in his mad career cast off Esther and Ada and the others. The great artist knew better. He knew that even if all the good in a man is dying, the last sense that dies is the sense that knows a good woman from a bad. It is like the scent of a noble hound. The clumsy journalist would have made Rick Carstone turn on Jarn-Jarn-Dice with an explosion of hatred as of one who had made an exposure who had found out what low people call a false friend in what they call his true colors. The great artist knew better. He knew that the good man going wrong tries to sell his soul to the last with the sense of generosity and intellectual justice. He will try to love his enemy if only out of mere love of himself. As the wolf dies fighting, the good man gone wrong dies arguing. This is what constitutes the true and real tragedy of Richard Carstone. It is strictly the one and the only great tragedy that Dickens wrote. It is like the tragedy of Hamlet. The others are not tragedies because they deal almost with dead men. The tragedy of Old Dorot is merely the sad spectacle of a daughter dragged about Europe in his last childhood. The tragedy of Steerforth is only that of one who dies suddenly. The tragedy of Old Dombie only that of one who was dead all the time. But Rick is a real tragedy, for he is still alive when the quicksand sucks him down. It is impossible to avoid putting in the first place this pall of smoke which Dickens has deliberately spread over the story. It is quite true that the country underneath is clear enough to contain any number of unconscious comedians or of merry monsters such as he was in the custom of introducing in the carnival of his tales. But he meant us to take the smoky atmosphere seriously. Charles Dickens, who was like all men who are really funny about funny things, horribly serious about serious things, certainly meant us to read this story in terms of his protest and his insurrection against the emptiness and arrogance of law against the folly and pride of judges. Everything else that there is in this story entered into it through the unconscious or accidental energy of his genius which broke in at every gap. But it was the tragedy of Richard Carstone that he meant not the comedy of Harold Skimpal. He could not help being amused, but he meant to be depressing. Another case might be taken as testing the greater seriousness of this tale. The passages about Mrs. Jellybee and her philanthropic schemes showed Dickens at his best in his old and more familiar satiric manner. But in the midst of the Jellybee pandemonians, which is in itself described with the same abandon and irrelevance as the boarding house of Mrs. Todgers or the travelling theatre of Mr. Crumless, the elder Dickens introduced another piece of pure truth and even tenderness. I mean the account of Catty Jellybee. If Carstone is truly masculine study of how a man goes wrong, Catty is a perfectly feminine study of how a girl goes right. Nowhere else perhaps in fiction and certainly nowhere else in Dickens is the mere female paradox so well epitomized. The unjust use of words covering so much capacity for a justice of ultimate estimate, the seeming irresponsibility in language concealing such a fixed and pitiless sense of responsibility about things. The air of being always at daggers drawn with her own kindred, yet the confession of incurable kinship implied in pride and shame, and above all that thirst for order and beauty for something physical, that strange female power of hating ugliness and waste as good men can only hate sin and bad men virtue. Every touch in her is true from her first bewildering outburst of hating people because she likes them, down to the sudden quietude and good sense which announces that she has slipped into her natural place as a woman. Miss Claire is a figurehead. Miss Summerson in some ways a failure. But Miss Catty Jellybee is by far the greatest, the most human, and the most really dignified of all the heroines of Dickens. With one or two exceptions all the effects in this story are of somewhat quieter kind, though none of them are so subtly successful as Rick Carstone and Catty. Harold Skimpole begins as a sketch drawn with a pencil, almost as airy and fanciful as his own. The humor of the earlier scenes is delightful, the scenes in which Skimpole looks on at other people paying his debts with the air of a kindly outsider, and suggests in formless legal phraseology that they might sign something or make over something. Or the scene in which he tries to explain the advantages of accepting everything to the epiplectic Mr. Boythorn. But it was one of the defects of Dickens as a novelist, that his characters always became coarser and clumsier as they passed through the practical events of a story. And this would necessarily be sold with Skimpole, whose position was conceivably even to himself, only on the assumption that he was a mere spectator of life. Poor Skimpole only asked to be kept out of the business of this world, and Dickens ought to have kept him out of the business of Bleak House. By the end of the tale, he has brought Skimpole to doing acts of mere low villainy. This altogether spoils the ironical daintiness of the original notion. Skimpole was meant to end with a note of interrogation. As it is, he ends with a big black, unmistakable blot. Speaking purely artistically, we may say that this is as great a collapse or vulgarization as if Richard Tarstone had turned into a common blackguard and wife-beater, or cat a jellybee into a comic and illiterate landlady. Upon the whole, it may I think be said that the character of Skimpole is rather a piece of brilliant moralizing than of pure observation or creation. Dickens had a singularly just mind. He was wild in his caricatures, but very sane in his impressions. Many of his books were devoted, and this book is partly devoted to a denunciation of aristocracy, of the idle class that lives easily upon the toil of nations. But he was fairer than many modern revolutionists, and he insisted on satirizing, also, those who prey on society, not in the name of rank or law, but in the name of intellect and beauty. Sir Leichester Dedlock and Mr. Harold Skimpole are alike in accepting with royal unconsciousness the anomaly and evil of their position. But the idleness and insolence of the aristocrat is human and humble compared to the idleness and insolence of the artist. With the exception of a few fine freaks such as Turvey Drop and Chad Band, all the figures in this book are touched more delicately, even more faintly than is common with Dickens. But if the figures are touched more faintly, it is partly because they are figures in a fog, the fog of chancery. Dickens meant that twilight to be oppressive, for it was the symbol of oppression. Deliberately, he did not dispel the darkness at the end of this book, as he does dispel it at the end of most of his books. Pickwick gets out of the fleet prison. Carstone never gets out of chancery, but by death. This tyranny, Dickens said, shall not be lifted by the light subterfuge of a fiction. This tyranny shall never be lifted till all Englishmen lift it together. The end of Section 22, Chapter 15, Bleak House. Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens by G. K. Chesterton Section 23, Chapter 16, Child's History of England There are works of great authors manifestly inferior to their typical work, which are yet necessary to their fame and their figure in the world. It is not difficult to recall examples of them. No one, for instance, would talk of Scott's tales of grandfather, as indicating the power that produced Kenilworth and Guy Manoring. Nevertheless, without this chance minor compilation, we should not really have the key of Scott. Without this one insignificant book, we should not see his significance. For the truth was that Scott loved history more than romance, because he was so constituted as to find it more romantic than romance. He preferred the deeds of Wallace and Douglas to those of Marmian and Ivanhoe, therefore his garrulous gossip of old times, his rambles in dead centuries, give us the real material and impulse of all his work. They represent the quarry in which he dug and the food on which he fed. Almost alone among novelists, Scott actually preferred those parts of his historical novels, which he had not invented himself. He exalts when he can boast in an eager note that he has stolen some saying from history. Thus the tales of a grandfather, though small, is in some sense the frame of all the Waverly novels. We realize that all Scott's novels are tales of a grandfather. What has been said here about Scott might be said in a less degree about Thackery's Four Georges. Though standing higher among his works than the tales of a grandfather among Scott's, they are not his works of genius. Yet they seem in some way to surround, supplement, and explain such works. Without the Four Georges we should know less of the link that bound Thackery to the beginning and to the end of the eighteenth century. Hence we should have known less of Colonel Esmond and also less of Lord Stein. To these two examples I have given the slight historical experiments of two novelists. A third has to be added. The third great master of English fiction, whose glory fills the nineteenth century, also produced a small experiment in the popularization of history. It is separated from the other two parts by a great difference of merit, but partly also by an utter difference of tone and outlook. We seem to hear it suddenly, as in the first words, spoken by a new voice, a voice gay, colloquial, and impatient. Scott and Thackery were tenderly attached to the past. Dickens, in his consciousness at any rate, was impatient with everything, but especially impatient with the past. A collection of the works of Dickens would be incomplete in an essential as well as a literal sense, without his child's history of England. It may not be important as a contribution to history, but it is important as a contribution to biography, as a contribution to the character and the career of the man who wrote it, a typical man of his time, that he had made no personal historical researches, that he had no special historical learning, that he had not had in truth even anything that could be called a good education. All this only accentuates not the merit, but at least the importance of the book. For here we may read in plain popular language, written by a man whose genius for popular exposition has never been surpassed among men, a brief account of the origin and meaning of England, as it seemed to the average Englishman of that age. When subtler views of our history, some more false, some more true than his, have become popular, or at least well known, when in the near future Carlylean, or Catholic, or Marxian views of history has spread themselves among the meeting public, this book will always remain a bright and brisk summary of the cocksure healthy minded essentially manly and essentially un-gently view of history, which characterized the radicals of that particular radical era. The history tells us nothing about the periods that it talks about, but it tells us a great deal about the period that it does not talk about, the period in which it was written. It is in no sense a history of England from the Roman invasion, but it is certainly one of the documents which will contribute to a history of England in the nineteenth century. Of the actual nature of its philosophical and technical limitations, it is, I suppose, unnecessary to speak. They all resolve themselves into one fault common in the modern world, and certainly characteristic of historians much more learned and pretentious than Dickens. That fault consists simply in ignoring or underrating the variety of strange evils and unique dangers in the world. The radicals of the nineteenth century were engaged, and most righteously engaged, dealing with one particular problem of human civilization. They were shifting and apportioning more equally a load of custom that had really become un-meaning, often accidental and nearly always unfair. Thus, for instance, a fierce and fighting penal code, which had been perfectly natural when the robbers were as strong as the government, had become in more ordered times nothing but a base and bloody habit. Thus again church powers and dues, which had been human when every man felt the church as the best part of himself, were mere mean privileges when the nation was full of sex and full of free thinkers. This clearing away of external symbols that no longer symbolized anything was an honorable and needful work, but it was so difficult that to the many engaged in it, it blocked up the perspective and filled the sky so that they slid into a very natural mental mistake which colored all their views of history. They supposed that this particular problem on which they were engaged was the one problem upon which all mankind had always been engaged. They got it into their heads that breaking away from a dead past was the perpetual process of humanity. The truth is obviously that humanity has found itself in many difficulties very different from that. Sometimes the best business of an age is to resist some alien invasion. Sometimes to preach practical self-control in a world too self-indulgent and diffused. Sometimes to prevent the growth in the state of great new private enterprises that would poison or oppress it. Above all it may sometimes happen that the highest task of thinking citizen may be to do the exact opposite of the work which the radicals had to do. It may be his highest duty to cling on to every scrap of the past that he can find if he feels that the ground is giving way beneath him and sinking into mere savagery and forgetfulness of all human culture. This was exactly the position of all thinking men in what we call the Dark Ages, say from the 6th to the 10th century. The cheap progressive history can never make head or tail of that epic. It was an epic upside down. We think of the old things as barbaric and the new things as enlightened. In all that age all the enlightened things were old. All the barbaric and brutally ignorant things were new and up to date. Republicanism was a fading legend. Despotism was a new and successful experiment. Christianity was not only better than the clans that rebelled against it. Christianity was more rationalistic than they were. When men looked back and saw progress and reason, when they looked forward and saw shapeless tradition and tribal terror touching such an age it is obvious that all our modern terms, describing reform or conservation, are foolish and beside the mark. The conservative was then the only possible reformer. If a man did not strengthen the remains of Roman order and the root of Roman Christianity, he was simply helping the world to roll down hill into ruin and idiocy. Remember all these evident historical truths and then turn to the account given by Charles Dickens of that great man St. Dunstan. It is not that the pert cognitone of the abuse is irritating to the nerves, is that he has got the whole hang of the thing wrong. His head is full of the 19th century situation. That a priest imposing discipline is a person somehow blocking the way to equality and light. Whereas the point about such a man as Dunstan was that nobody in the place except he cared a button about equality or light, and that he was defending what was left of them against the young and growing power of darkness and division and caste. Nevertheless the case against such books as this is commonly stated wrong. The fault of Dickens is not, as is often said, that he applies the same moral standard to all ages. Every sane man must do that. A moral standard must remain the same or it is not a moral standard. If we call St. Anthony of Padua a good man, we must mean what we mean when we call Huxley a good man, or else there is no sense in using the word good. The fault of the Dickens school of popular history lies not in the application of a plain rule of right and wrong to all circumstances, but in ignorance of the circumstances to which it was applied. It is not that they wrongly enforce the fixed principle that life should be saved. It's that they take a fire engine to a shipwreck and a life boat to a house on fire. The business of a good man in Dickens time to bring justice up to date, the business of a good man in Dunstan's time, was to toil to ensure the survival of any justice at all. In Dickens, though being a living and fighting man of his own time, kept the health of his own heart and so saw many truths with a singular eye. Truths that were spoiled for subtler eyes. He was much more really right than Carlisle, immeasurably more right than Frude. Carlisle was more right precisely because he applied plain human morals to all facts as he saw them. Carlisle really had a vague idea that in coarse and cruel times it was right to be coarse and cruel, that tyranny was excusable in the twelfth century as if the twelfth century did not denounce tyrants as much or more than any other. Carlisle in fact fancied that Rufus was the right sort of man, a true which was not only not shared by Anselm, but was probably not shared by Rufus. In this connection, or rather in connection with the other case of Frude, it is worthwhile to take another figure from Dickens' history, which illustrates the other and better side of the fissile and popular method. Sheer ignorance of the environment made him wrong about Dunstan, but sheer instinct and good moral tradition made him right, for instance, about Henry VIII. Right where Frude is wildly wrong. Dickens' imagination could not repicture an age where learning and liberty were dying rather than being born, but Henry VIII lived in a time of expanding knowledge and unrest, a time therefore somewhat like the Victorian, and Dickens in his childish but robust way does perceive the main point about him, that he was a wicked man. He misses all the fine shades, of course. He makes him every kind of wicked man at once. He leaves out the serious interests of the man, his strange but real concern for theology, his love of certain legal and moral forms, his half unconscious patriotism. But he sees the solid bulk of definite badness, simply because it was there, and Frude cannot see it at all, because Frude followed Carlisle and played tricks with the eternal conscience. Henry VIII was a blot of blood and grease upon the history of England, for he was the embodiment of the devil in the Renaissance. That wild worship of mere pleasure and scorn, which with its pictures and its palaces, has enriched and ruined the world. The time will soon come when the mere common sense of Dickens, like the sense of Macaulay, though his was poisoned by learning and wig politics, will appear to give a planar and therefore a truer picture of the mass of history than the mystical perversity of a man of genius writing only out of his own temperament, like Carlisle or Tain. If a man has a new theory of ethics, there is one thing he must not be allowed to do. Let him give laws on Sinai, let him dictate a Bible, let him fill the world with cathedrals if he can, but he must not be allowed to write a history of England, or a history of any country. All history was conducted on ordinary morality. With his extraordinary morality he is certain to read it all askew. Thus Carlisle tries to write of the Middle Ages with a bias against humility and mercy, that is, with a bias against the whole theoretic morality of the Middle Ages. The result is that he turns into a mere turmoil of arrogant German savages, what was really the most completely and logical, if not the highest of human civilizations. Historically speaking, it is better to be Dickens than to be this, better to be ignorant, provincial, slapdash, seeing only the passing moment, but in that moment to be true to eternal things. It must be remembered, of course, that Dickens deliberately offers this only as a child's history of England. That is, he only professes to be able to teach history, as any father of a little boy of five professes to be able to teach him history. And although the history of England would certainly be taught very differently, as regards the actual criticism of events and men in a family with a wider culture, with another religion, the general method would be the same. For the general method is quite right. This black and white history of heroes and villains is history full of pugnacious ethics and of nothing else, is the right kind of history for children. I have often wondered how the scientific Marxians and the believers in the materialist view of history will ever manage to teach their dreary economic generalizations to children. But I suppose they will have no children. Dickens' history will always be popular with the young, almost as popular as Dickens' novels and for the same reason, because it is full of moralizing. Science and art without morality are not dangerous in the sense commonly supposed. They are not dangerous like a fire, but dangerous like a fog. A fire is dangerous in its brightness, a fog in its dullness, and thought without morals is merely dull, like a fog. The fog seems to be creeping up the street, putting out lamp after lamp. But this cockney lamp post which the children love is still crowned with its flame and when the fathers have forgotten ethics, their babies will turn and teach them. CHILD'S HISTORY OF INGLAND CHAPTER XVII. HARD TIMES. I have heard that in some debating clubs there is a rule that the members may discuss anything except religion and politics. I cannot imagine what they do discuss, but it is quite evident they have ruled out the only two subjects which are either important or amusing. The thing is a part of a certain modern tendency to avoid things because they lead to warmth, whereas obviously we ought even in social sense to seek those things especially. The warmth of the discussion is as much a part of hospitality as the warmth of the fire. And it is singularly suggestive that in English literature the two things have died together. The very people who would blame Dickens for his sentimental hospitality are the very people who would also blame him for his narrow political conviction. The very people who would mock him for his narrow radicalism are those who would mock him for his broad fireside. Real conviction and real charity are much nearer than people suppose. Dickens was capable of loving all men, but he refused to love all opinions. The modern humanitarian can love all opinions, but he cannot love all men. He seems sometimes in the ecstasy of his humanitarianism even to hate them all. He can love all opinions, including the opinion that men are unlovable. In feeling Dickens as a lover we must never forget him as a fighter, and a fighter for a creed. But indeed there is no other kind of fighter. The geniality which he spread over all his creations was geniality spread from one center, from one flaming peak. He was willing to excuse Mr. McAlber for being extravagant, but Dickens and Dickens doctrine were strictly to decide how far he was to be excused. He was willing to like Mr. Twimlow in spite of his snobbishness. But Dickens and Dickens doctrine were alone to be judges of how far he was snobbish. There was never a more didactic writer. Hence there was never one more amusing. He had no mean modern notion of keeping the moral doubt. He would have regarded this as a mere piece of slovenliness like leaving the last page illegible. Everywhere in Dickens' work these angles of his absolute opinion stood up out of the confusion of his general kindness, just as sharp and splintered peaks stand up out of the soft confusion of the forests. Dickens is always generous. He is generally kindhearted. He is often sentimental. He is sometimes intolerably maudlin. But you never know when you will not come upon one of the convictions of Dickens. And when you do come upon it, you do know it. It is as hard and as high as any precipice or peak of the mountains. The highest and hardest of these peaks is hard times. It is here more than anywhere else that the sternness of Dickens emerges as separate from his softness. It is here most obviously, so to speak, that his bones stick out. There are indeed many other books of his which are written better and written on a set or tone. Great expectations is melancholy, in a sense, but it is doubtful of everything, even of its own melancholy. The tale of two cities is a great tragedy, but it is still a sentimental tragedy. It is a great drama, but it is still a melodrama. But this tale of hard times is in some way harsher than all these, for it is the expression of a righteous indignation which cannot condescend a humor and which cannot even condescend to pathos. Twenty times we have taken Dickens' hand, and it has been sometimes hot with revelry and sometimes weak with weariness. But this time we start a little, for it is inhumanly cold, and then we realize that we have touched his gauntlet of steel. One cannot express the real value of this book without being irrelevant. It is true that one cannot express the real value of anything without being irrelevant. If we take a thing frivolously, we can take it separately. But the moment we take a thing seriously, if it were only an old umbrella, it is obvious that umbrella opens above us into the immensity of the whole universe. But there are rather peculiar reasons why the value of the book called hard times should be referred back to great historic and theoretic matters with which it may appear superficially to have little or nothing to do. The chief reason can perhaps be stated thus, that English politics had, for more than a hundred years, been getting into more and more of a hopeless tangle, a tangle which of course has since become even worse, and that Dickens did in some extraordinary way see what was wrong, even if he did not see what was right. The liberalism which Dickens and nearly all of his contemporaries professed had begun in the American and French revolutions. Almost all modern English criticism upon those revolutions has been videated by the assumption that those revolutions burst upon a world which was unprepared for their ideas, a world ignorant of the possibility of such ideas. Somewhat the same mistake is made by those who suggest that Christianity was adopted by a world incapable of criticizing it, whereas obviously it was adopted by a world that was tired of criticizing everything. The vital mistake that it has made about the French revolution is merely this, that everyone talks about it as the introduction of a new idea. It was not the introduction of a new idea. There are no new ideas, or if there are new ideas, they would not cause the least irritation if they were introduced into political society. Because the world, having never got used to them, there would be no massive men ready to fight for them at a moment's notice. That which was irritating about the French revolution was this, that it was not the introduction of a new ideal, but the practical fulfillment of an old one. From the time of the first fairy tales men had always believed ideally in equality. They had always thought that something ought to be done, if anything could be done, to redress the balance between Cinderella and the Ugly Sisters. The irritating thing about the French was not that they said this ought to be done. Everybody said that. The irritating thing about the French was that they did it. They proposed to carry out into a positive scheme what had been the vision of humanity, and humanity was naturally annoyed. The kings of Europe did not make war upon the revolution because it was a blasphemy, but because it was a copy book maxim which had been just too accurately copied. It was a platitude which they had always held in theory unexpectedly put into practice. The tyrants did not hate democracy because it was a paradox. They hated it because it was a truism which seemed in some danger of coming through. Now it happens to be hugely important to have this right view of the revolution in considering its political effects upon England, for the English being deeply and indeed excessively romantic people could never be quite content with this quality of cold and bold obviousness about the Republican formula. The Republican formula was merely this, that the state must consist of its citizens ruling equally, however unequally they may do anything else. In their capacity of members of the state they are all equally interested in its preservation. But the English soon began to be romantically restless about this eternal truism. They were perpetually trying to turn it into something else, into something more picturesque, progress perhaps, or anarchy. At last they turned it into the highly exciting and highly unsound system of politics which was known as the Manchester School and which was expressed with a sort of logical flightiness. More excusable in literature by Mr. Herbert Spencer, of course Danton or Washington or any of the original Republicans would have thought these people were mad. They would never have admitted for a moment that the state must not interfere with commerce or competition. They would merely have insisted that if the state did interfere it must really be the state, that is the whole people. But the distance between the common sense of Danton and the mere ecstasy of Herbert Spencer marks the English way of colouring and altering the revolutionary idea. The English people as a body went blind, as the saying is, for interpreting democracy entirely in terms of liberty. They said in substance that if they had more and more liberty it did not matter whether they had any equality or any fraternity. But this was violating the sacred trinity of true politics. They confounded the persons and they divided the substance. Now the really odd thing about England in the nineteenth century is this, that there was one Englishman who happened to keep his head. The men who lost their heads lost highly scientific and philosophical heads. They were great cosmic systematizers like Spencer, great social philosophers like Bentham, great practical politicians like Bright, great political economists like Mill, the man who kept his head, kept the head full of fantastic nonsense. He was a writer of rowdy farces, a demagogue of fiction, a man without education in any serious sense whatever, a man whose whole business was to turn ordinary cockies into extraordinary caricatures. Yet when all these other children of the revolution went wrong, he, by a mystical something in his bones, went right. He knew nothing of the revolution, yet he struck the note of it. He returned to the original sentimental commonplace upon which it is for ever founded, as the church is founded on a rock. In an England gone mad about a minor theory, he reasserted the original idea. The idea that no one in the state must be too weak to influence the state. This man was Dickens. He did this work much more genuinely than it was done by Carlisle or Ruskin, where they were simply Tories making out a romantic case for the return of Toreism. But Dickens was a real liberal demanding the return of real liberalism. Dickens was there to remind people that England had rubbed out two words of the revolutionary motto, had left only liberty and destroyed equality and fraternity. In this book of hard times he specially champions equality. In all his books he champions fraternity. The atmosphere of this book and what it stands for can be very adequately conveyed in the note of the book by Lord Macaulay, who may stand as a very good example of the spirit of England in those years of eager emancipation and expanding wealth, the years in which liberalism was turned from an independent truth to a weak scientific system. Macaulay's private comment on hard times runs, one or two passages of exquisite pathos and the rest sullen socialism. That is not an unfair and certainly not a specially hostile criticism, but it exactly shows how the book struck those people who were mad on political liberty and dead about everything else. Macaulay mistook for a new formula called socialism, what was in truth only the old formula called political democracy. He and his wigs had so thoroughly mauled and modified the original idea of Rousseau or Jefferson, that when they saw it again they positively thought that it was something quite new and eccentric. But the truth was that Dickens was not a socialist, but an unspoiled liberal. He was not sullen, nay, rather he had remained strangely hopeful. They called him a sullen socialist only to disguise their astonishment at finding still loose about the London streets a happy Republican. Dickens is the one living link between the old kindness and the new, between the good will of the past and the good works of the future. He links May Day with Bank Holiday, and he does it almost alone. All the men around him, great and good as they were, were in comparison puritanical, and never so puritanical as when they were also atheistic. He is a sort of solitary pipe down which pours to the 20th century the original river of Mary England. And although this hard times is, as its name implies, the hardest of his works, although there is less in it perhaps than in any of the others of the abandon and the buffoonery of Dickens, this only emphasizes the more clearly, the fact that he stood almost alone for a more humane and hilarious view of democracy. None of his great and much more highly educated contemporaries could help him in this. Carl Isle was as gloomy on the one side as Herbert Spencer on the other. He protested against the commercial oppression simply and solely because it was not only an oppression but a depression. And this protest of his was made specially in the case of the book before us. It may be bitter, but it was a protest against bitterness. It may be dark, but it is the darkness of the subject and not of the author. He is by his own account dealing with hard times, but not with a hard eternity, not with the hard philosophy of the universe. Nevertheless, this is the one place in his work where he does not make us remember human happiness by example as well as by precept. This is, as I have said, not the saddest but certainly the harshest of his stories. It is perhaps the only place where Dickens, in defending happiness, for a moment, forgets to be happy. He describes Boundary B. and Graggrind with a degree of grimness and somber hatred very different from the half affectionate derision which he directed against the old tyrants or humbugs of the earlier nineteenth century, the pompous deadlock or the fatuous snupkins, the grotesque bumble or the inane tig. In those old books his very abuse was benign and in hard times even his sympathy is hard. And the reason is again to be found in the political facts of the century. Dickens could be half genial with the older generation of oppressors because it was a dying generation. It was evident, or at least it seemed evident then, that nupkins could not go on much longer making up the law of England to suit himself. That Sir Leichester deadlock could not go on much longer being kind to his tenants as if they were dogs and cats. And some of these evils, the nineteenth century, did really eliminate or improve. For the first half of the century Dickens and all his friends were justified in feeling that the chains were falling from mankind. At any rate the chains did fall from Mr. Roundswell the Iron Master, and when they fell from him he picked them up and put them upon the poor. CHAPTER XVIII. THE BEST OF THE BOOKS OF HIS LATER PERIOD. Great expectations is certainly the best of the later novels. Some even think it the best of all the novels. Nor is it the novel most concerned with strictly recent problems. That title must be given to hard times. Nor again is it the most finely finished or well constructed of the later books. That claim can probably be made for Edwin Drude. By a queer verbal paradox the most carefully finished of his later tales is the tale that is not finished at all. In form indeed the book bears a superficial resemblance to those earlier works by which the young Dickens had set the whole world laughing long ago. Much of the story refers to a remote time early in the nineteenth century. Much of it was actually recalled and copied from the life of Dickens' father in the old Marshall C. prison. Also the narrative has something of the form or rather absence of form which belongs to Nicholas Nickelby or Martin Chuzzlewit. It has something of the old era being a string of disconnected adventures like a boy's book about bears and Indians. The Doritz go wandering for no particular reason on the continent of Europe. Just as young Martin Chuzzlewit went wandering for no particular reason on the continent of America. The story of Little Dorit stops and lingers at the doors of the circumlocution office. Much in the same way that the story of Samuel Pickwick stops and lingers in the political excitement of Eaton's will. The villain Blandoy is a very stagy villain indeed. Quite as stagy as Ralph Nickelby or the mysterious Monk. The secret of the dark house of Clendon is a very silly secret. Quite as silly as the secret of Ralph Nickelby or the secret of Monk. Yet all these external similarities between Little Dorit and the earliest books. All this loose melodramatic quality only serves to make more obvious and startling the fact that some change has come over the soul of Dickens. Hard times is harsh, but then hard times is the social pamphlet. Perhaps it is only harsh as the social pamphlet must be harsh. Bleak house is a little somber, but then Bleak house is almost the detective story. Perhaps it is only somber in the sense that a detective story must be somber. A tale of two cities is a tragedy, but then a tale of two cities is a tale of the French Revolution. Perhaps it is only a tragedy because the French Revolution was a tragedy. The mystery of Edwin Drude is dark, but then the mystery of everybody must be dark. In all these other cases the later books and artistic reason can be given. A reason of theme or of construction for the slight sadness that seems to cling to them. But exactly because Little Dorit is a mere Dickens novel, it shows that something must somehow have happened to Dickens himself. Even in resuming his old liberty he cannot resume his old hilarity. He can recreate the anarchy, but not the revelry. It so happens that this strange difference between the new and the old mode of Dickens can be symbolized and stated in one separate and simple contrast. Dickens' father had been a prisoner in a debtor's prison, and Dickens' works contain two pictures partly suggested by the personality of that prisoner. Mr. McAlber is one picture of him. Mr. Dorit is another. This truth is almost incredible, but it is the truth. The joyful McAlber, whose very despair was exultant, and the desolate Dorit whose very pride was pitiful, were the same man. The valiant McAlber and the nervous shaking Dorit were the same man. The defiant McAlber and the snobbish essentially obsequious Dorit were the same man. I do not mean, of course, that either of the pictures was an exact copy of anybody. The whole Dickens genius consisted of taking hints and turning them into human beings. As he took twenty real persons and turned them into one fictitious person, so he took one real person and turned him into twenty fictitious persons. This quality would suggest one character. That quality would suggest another. But in this case at any rate he did take one real person and turn him into two. And what is more, he turned him into two persons who seemed to be quite opposite persons. Two ordinary readers of Dickens to say that McAlber and Dorit had, in any sense, the same original, will appear unexpected and wild. No conceivable connection between the two would ever have occurred to anybody who had read Dickens with simple and superficial enjoyment. As all good literature ought to be read. It will seem to them just as silly as saying that the fat boy and Mr. Alford Jingle were both copied from the same character. It will seem as insane as saying that the character of Smike and the character of Major Bagstock were both copied from Dickens' father. Yet it is an unquestionable historical fact that McAlber and Dorit were both copied from Dickens' father, in the only sense that any figures in good literature are ever copied from anything or anybody. Dickens did get the main idea of McAlber from his father. That is, the poor man is not conquered by the world. And Dickens did get the main idea of Dorit from his father. And that idea is that a poor man may be conquered by the world. I shall take the opportunity of discussing in a moment which of these ideas is true. Doubtless old John Dickens included both the gay and the sad moral most men do. My only purpose here is to point out that Dickens drew the gay moral in 1849 and the sad moral in 1857. There must have been some real sadness at this time creeping like a cloud over Dickens himself. It is nothing that a man dwells on the darkness of dark things. All healthy men do that. It is when he dwells on the darkness of bright things that we have reason to fear some disease of the emotions. There must really have been some depression when a man can only see the sad side of flowers or the sad side of holidays or the sad side of wine. And there must be some depression of an uncommonly dark and genuine character when a man has reached such a point that he can see only the sad side of Mr. Wilkins McAlber. Yet this is in reality what had happened to Dickens about this time. Starting at Wilkins McAlber he could see only the weakness and the tragedy that was made possible by his indifference, his indulgence, and his bravado. He had already indeed been slightly moved towards this study of the feebleness and ruin of the old Epicurean type with which he had once sympathized. The type of Bob Sawyer or Dick Swibbler he had already attacked the evil of it in Bleak House in the character of Harold Skimpol with his essentially cowardly carelessness and highly selfish communism. Nevertheless, as I have said before, it must have been no small degree of actual melancholia which led Dickens to look for a lesson of disaster and slavery in the very same career from which he had once taught lessons of continual recuperation and a kind of fantastic freedom. There must have been at this time some melancholy behind the writings. There must have existed on this earth at that time that portentant paradox of somewhat depressed Dickens. Perhaps it was a reminiscence of that metaphorical proverb which tells us that truth lies at the bottom of a well. Perhaps these people thought that the only way to find truth in the well was to drown oneself. But on whatever thin theoretic basis the type and period of George Gissing did certainly consider that Dickens, so far as he went, was all the worse for the optimism of the story of McCauber. Hence it is not unnatural that they should think him all the better for the comparative pessimism of the story of Little Dorot. The very things in the tale that would naturally displease the ordinary admirers of Dickens are the things which would naturally please a man like George Gissing. There are many of these things but one of them emerges preeminent and unmistakable. This is the fact that when all is said and done, the main business of the story of Little Dorot is to describe the victory of circumstances over a soul. The circumstances are the financial ruin and long imprisonment of Edward Dorot. The soul is Edward Dorot himself. Let it be granted that the circumstances are exceptional and oppressive, are denounced as exceptional and oppressive, are finally exploded and overthrown. Still they are circumstances. Let it be granted that the soul is that of a man perhaps weak in any case and retaining many merits to the last. Still it is a soul. Let it be granted above all that the admission that such spiritual tragedies do occur does not decrease by so much as an iota, our faith in the validity of any spiritual struggle. For example, Stevenson has made a study of the breakdown of a good man's character under a burden for which he is not to blame in the tragedy of Henry Dury, the Master of Ballantry. Yet he has added in the mouth of McKellar the exact common sense and good theology of the matter, saying, it matters not a jot, for he that is to pass judgment upon the records of our life is the same that formed us in frailty. Let us concede then all this, and the fact remains that the study of the slow demoralization of a man through mere misfortune was not a study congenial to Dickens, not in accordance with his original inspiration, not connected in any manner with the special thing that he had to say. In a word the thing is not quite a part of himself and he was not quite himself when he did it. He was still quite a young man. His depression did not come from age. In fact, as far as I know, mere depression never does come from mere age. Age can pass into a beautiful reverie. Age can pass into a sort of beautiful idiocy. But I do not think the actual decline and close of our ordinary vitality brings with it any particular heaviness of the spirits. The spirits of the old do not, as a rule, seem to become more and more dangerous until they sink into the earth. Rather the spirits of the old seem to grow lighter and lighter until they float away like the seldom. Whatever there is in the definite phenomena called depression, it commonly means that something else has been closer to us than so normal a thing as death. There has been a disease, bodily or mental, or there has been sin, or there has been some struggle or effort breaking past the ordinary boundaries of human custom. In the case of Dickens there had been two things that are not of the routine of a wholesome human life. There had been the quarrel with his wife, and there had been the strain of incessant and exaggerated intellectual labor. He had not an easy time, and on top of that, or perhaps rather at the bottom of it, he had not an easy nature. Not only did his life necessitate work, but his character necessitated worry about work. And that combination is always one which is very dangerous to the temperament which is exposed to it. The only people who ought to be allowed to work are the people who are able to shirk. The only people who ought to be allowed to worry are the people who have nothing to worry about. When the two are combined, as they were in Dickens, you are very likely to have at least one collapse. Little Dorth is a very interesting, sincere, and fascinating book, but for all that I fancy it is the one collapse. The complete proof of this depression may be difficult to advance, because it will be urged, and entirely with reason, that the actual examples of it are artistic and appropriate. Dickens, the guessing school will say, was here pointing out certain sad truths of psychology. Can anyone say that he ought not to point them out? That may be, in any case, to explain depression is not to remove it. But the instances of this more somber quality of which I have spoken are not very hard to find. The thing can easily be seen by comparing a book like Little Dorth with a book like David Copperfield. David Copperfield and Arthur Clinton have both been brought up in unhappy homes under bitter guardians, and a black, disheartening religion. It is the whole point of David Copperfield that he is broken out of a Calvinistic tyranny, which he cannot forgive. But it is the whole point of Arthur Clinton that he has not broken out of the Calvinistic tyranny, but is still under his shadow. Copperfield has come from a gloomy childhood. Clinton, though forty years old, is still in a gloomy childhood. When David meets the Murchstones again, it is to define them with the health and hilarious anger that go with his happy delirium about Dora. But when Clinton re-enters his sepulchral house, there is a weight upon his soul which makes it impossible for him to answer with any spirit the morbidities of his mother, or even the grotesque interferences of Mr. Flintwench. This is only another example of the same quality which makes the Dickens of Little Doret insist on the degradation of the debtor, while the Dickens of David Copperfield insisted on the blended irresponsibility, his essential emancipation. Imprisonments passed over Macauber like summer clouds, but the imprisonment in Little Doret is like a complete natural climate and environment. It has positively modified the shapes and functions of the animals that dwell in it. A horrible thing has happened to Dickens. He has almost become an evolutionist. Worse still in studying the Calvinism of Mrs. Clinton's house, he has almost become a Calvinist. He halfway believes as do some of the modern scientists that there is really such a thing as a child of wrath, that a man on whom such an early shadow has fallen could never shake it off. For ancient Calvinism and modern evolutionism are essentially the same things. They are both ingenious logical blasphemies against the dignity and liberty of the human soul. The workmanship of the book in detail is often extremely good. The one passage in the older and heartier Dickens' manner I mean the description of the circumlocution office is beyond praise. It is a complete picture of the way England is actually governed at this moment. The very core of our politics is expressed in the light and easy young barnacle who told Clinton with the kindly frankness that he, Clinton, would never go on with it. Dickens hit the mark so that the bell rang when he made all the lower officials who were cadds tell Clinton coldly that his claim was absurd, until the last official who is a gentleman tells him genially that the whole business is absurd. Even here perhaps there is something more than the old exuberant derision of Dickens. There is a touch of experience that verges on skepticism. Everywhere else certainly there is the note which I have called Calvinistic especially in the predestined passion of Taddy Quorum or the incurable cruelty of Miss Wade. Even little Dorot herself had, as we are told, one stain from her prison experience, and it is spoken of like a bodily stain like something that cannot be washed away. There is no denying that this is Dickens' dark moment. It adds enormously to the value of his general view of life that such a dark moment came. He did what all the heroes and all the really happy men have done. He descended into hell. Nor is it irreverent to continue the quotation from the creed, for in the next book he was to write, he was to break out of all these dreams of fate and failure, and with his highest voice to speak of the triumph of the weak of this world. His next book was to leave us saying, as Sidney Carton mounted the scaffold, words which splendid in themselves have never been so splendidly quoted. I am the resurrection and the life, who so believeth in me, though he be dead, yet shall he live. In Sidney Carton, at least, Dickens shows none of that dreary submission to the environment of the irrevocable that had for an instant been on him like a cloud. On this occasion he sees with the old heroic clearness that to be a failure may be one step to being a saint. On the third day he rose again from the dead. End of Section Twenty-Five, Chapter Eighteen, Little Dorot. Variations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens by G. K. Chesterton. Section Twenty-Six, Chapter Nineteen, A Tale of Two Cities. As an example of Dickens' literary work, A Tale of Two Cities is not wrongly named. It is his most typical contact with the civic ideals of Europe. All his other tales have been the tales of one city. He was in spirit, a cockney, though that title has been quite unreasonably twisted to mean a cad. By the old sound and proverbial test, a cockney was a man born within sound of bow bells. That is, he was a man born within the immediate appeal of high civilization and of eternal religion. Shakespeare, in the heart of his fantastic forest, turns with a splendid suddenness to the cockney ideal as being the true one after all. For a jest, for a reaction, for an idle summer love, or a still idler summer hatred, it is well to wander away into the bewildering forest of Arden. It is well that those who are sick with love are sick with the absence of love. Those who weary of the folly of courts or weary yet more of their wisdom. It is natural that these should trail away into the twinkling twilight of the woods. Yet it is here that Shakespeare makes one of his most arresting and startling assertions of the truth. Here is one of those rare and tremendous moments of which one may say that there is a stage direction. Enter Shakespeare. He has admitted that for men weary of courts, for men sick of cities, the wood is the wisest place, and he has praised it with his purest lyric ecstasy. But when a man enters suddenly upon that celestial picnic, a man who is not sick of cities but sick of hunger, a man who is not weary of courts but weary of walking, then Shakespeare lets through his own voice with a shattering sincerity and cries the praise of practical human civilization. If ever you have looked on better days, if ever you have sat at good men's feasts, if ever been where bells have knoll to church, if ever from your eyelids wiped a tear, or know what is to pity and be pity, there is nothing finer even in Shakespeare than that conception of the circle of rich men all pretending to rough it in the country, and the one really hungry man entering sword in hand and praising the city. If ever been where bells have knoll to church, if you have ever been within sound of bow bells, if you have ever been happy and haughty enough to call yourself a cockney. We must remember this distinction always in the case of Dickens. Dickens is the great cockney, at once tragic and comic, who enters abruptly upon the Arcadian banquet of the aesthetics and says, forbear, and eat no more, and tells them that they shall not eat until necessity be served. If there was one thing he would have favored instinctively, it would have been the spreading of the town as meaning the spreading of civilization. And we, should, I hope, all favor the spreading of the town, if it did mean the spreading of civilization. The objection to the spreading of the modern Manchester or Birmingham suburb is simply that such a suburb is much more barbaric than any village in Europe could ever conceivably be. And again, if there is anything that Dickens would have definitely hated, it is that general treatment of nature as a dramatic spectacle, a piece of scene painting which has become the common mark of the culture of our wealthier classes. Despite many fine pictures of natural scenery, especially along the English road sides, he was upon the whole emphatically on the side of the town. He was on the side of bricks and mortar. He was a citizen. And after all, a citizen means a man of the city. His strength was, after all, in the fact that he was a man of the city. But after all, his weakness, his calamitous weakness, was that he was a man of one city. For all practical purposes he had never been outside such places as Chatham and London. He did indeed travel on the continent, but surely no man's travel was ever so superficial as his. He was more superficial than the smallest and commonest tourist. He went about Europe on stilts. He never touched the ground. There is one good test and one only of whether a man has traveled to any prophet in Europe. An Englishman is, as such, a European, and as he approaches the central splendors of Europe he ought to feel that he is coming home. If he does not feel at home, he had much better have stopped at home. England is a real home. London is a real home. And all the essential feelings of adventure or the picturesque can easily be gained by going out at night upon the flats of Essex or the cloven hills of Surrey. Your visit to Europe is useless unless it gives you the sense of an exile returning. Your first sight of Rome is futile unless you feel that you have seen it before. Thus useless and thus futile were the foreign experiments and the continental raids of Dickens. He enjoyed them as he would have enjoyed as a boy, a scamper out of Chatham into some strange meadows, as he would have enjoyed when a grown man, a steam in a police boat out into the fins to the far east of London. But he was the cockney venturing far. He was not the European coming home. He is still the splendid cockney Orlando of whom I spoke above. He cannot but suppose that any strange man being happy in some pastoral way are mysterious foreign scoundrels. Dickens' real speech to the lazy and laughing civilization of southern Europe would really have run in the Shakespearean words. But who are you be, who in this desert inaccessible, under the shade of melancholy boughs, lose and neglect the creeping hours of time, if ever you have looked on better things, if ever been where bells have knelt to church? If in short you ever have the advantage of being born within sound of bow bells, Dickens could not really conceive that there was any other city but his own. It is necessary thus to insist that Dickens never understood the continent, because only thus can we appreciate the really remarkable thing he did in a tale of two cities. It is necessary to feel first of all the fact that to him London was the center of the universe. He did not understand at all the real sense in which Paris is the capital of Europe. He had never realized that all roads lead to Rome. He had never felt, as an Englishman can feel, that he was an Athenian before he was a Londoner. Yet with everything against him he did this astonishing thing. He wrote a book about two cities, one of which he understood, the other he did not understand, and his description of the city he did not know is almost better than his description of the city he did know. This is the entrance of the unquestionable thing about Dickens, the thing called genius, the thing which everyone has to talk about directly and distinctly because no one knows what it is. For a plain word, as for instance the word fool, always covers an infinite mystery. A tale of two cities is one of the more tragic tense of the later life of Dickens. It might be said that he grew sadder as he grew older, but this would be false for two reasons. First, a man never or hardly ever does grow sad as he grows old. On the contrary, the most melancholy young lovers can be found forty years afterwards, chuckling over their port wine. And second, Dickens never did grow old even in a physical sense. What weariness did appear in him appeared in the prime of life. It was due not to age, but to overwork, and his exaggerated way of doing everything. To call Dickens a victim of elderly disenchantment would be as absurd as to say the same of Keats. Such fatigue as there was was due not to the slowing down of his blood, but rather to its unremitting rapidity. He was not wearied by his age, rather he was wearied by his youth. And though a tale of two cities is full of sadness, it is full also of enthusiasm. That pathos is a young pathos rather than an old one. Yet there is one circumstance which does render important the fact that a tale of two cities is one of the later works of Dickens. This fact is the fact of his dependence upon another of the great writers of the Victorian era. And it is in connection with this that we can best see the truth of which I have been speaking. The truth that his actual ignorance of France went with amazing intuitive perception of the truth about it. It is here that he has most clearly the plain mark of the man of genius. That he can understand what he does not understand. Dickens was inspired to the study of the French Revolution and to the writing of a romance about it by the example and influence of Carlisle. Thomas Carlisle undoubtedly rediscovered for Englishmen the revolution that was at the back of all their policies and reforms. It is an entertaining side-joke that the French revolution should have been discovered for Britons by the only British writer who did not really believe in it. Nevertheless the most authoritative and the most recent critics on that great renaissance agree in considering Carlisle's work one of the most searching and detailed power. Carlisle had read a great deal about the French Revolution. Dickens had read nothing at all except Carlisle. Carlisle was a man who collected his ideas by the careful collation of documents and the verification of references. Dickens was a man who collected his ideas from loose hints in the streets, and those always the same streets. As I have said, he was the citizen of one city. Carlisle was in his way learned. Dickens was in every way ignorant. Dickens was an Englishman cut off from France. Carlisle was a Scotsman historically connected with France, and yet when all this is said and certified Dickens is more right than Carlisle. Dickens French Revolution is probably more like the real French Revolution than Carlisle's. It is difficult, if not impossible, to state the grounds of this strong conviction. One can only talk of it by employing that excellent method which Cardinal Newman employed when he spoke of the notes of Catholicism. There were certain notes of the Revolution. One note of the Revolution was the thing which silly people call optimism and sensible people call high spirits. Carlisle could never quite get it, because with all his spiritual energy he had no high spirits. That is why he preferred prose to poetry. He could understand rhetoric, for rhetoric means singing with an object. But he could not understand lyrics, for the lyric means singing without an object, as everyone does when he is happy. Now for all his blood and its black guillotines the French Revolution was full of mere high spirits. Nay, it was full of happiness. This actual lilt and levity Carlisle never really found in the Revolution, because he could not find it in himself. Dickens knew less of the Revolution, but he had more of it. When Dickens attacked abuses he battered them down with exactly that sort of cheery and quite one-sided satisfaction, with which the French mob battered down the best deal. Dickens utterly and innocently believed in certain things. He would, I think, have drawn the sword for them. Carlisle half believed in half a hundred things. He was at once more of a mystic and more of a skeptic. Carlisle was the perfect type of the grumbling servant, the old grumbling servant of the aristocratic comedies. He followed the aristocracy, but he growled as he followed. He was obedient without being servile, just as Caleb Baldurstone was obedient without being servile. But Dickens was the type of man who might really have rebelled instead of grumbling. He might have gone out into the street and fought like the man who took the best deal. It is somewhat nationally significant that when we talk of the man in the street it means a figure silent, slouching, and even feeble. When the French speak of the man in the street it means danger in the street. No one can fail to notice this deep difference between Dickens and Carlisle whom he avowedly copied. Splendid and symbolic is our Carlisle scenes of the French Revolution. We have in reading them a curious sense that everything is happening at night. In Dickens even massacre happens by daylight. Carlisle always assumes that because things were tragedies therefore the men who did them felt tragic. Dickens knows that the man who works the worst tragedies is the man who feels comic, as for example Mr. Quilpe. The French Revolution was much simpler world than Carlisle could understand, for Carlisle was subtle and not simple. Dickens could understand it for he was simple and not subtle. He understood that plain rage against plain political injustice. He understood again that obvious vindictiveness and that obvious brutality which followed. Cruelty and the abuse of absolute power, he told an American slave owner, are two of the bad passions of human nature. Carlisle was quite incapable of rising to the height of that uplifted common sense. He must always find something mystical about the cruelty of the French Revolution. The effect was equally bad whether he found it mystically bad and called the thing anarchy or whether he found it mystically good and called it the rule of the strong. In both cases he could not understand the common sense justice or the common sense vengeance of Dickens and the French Revolution. Yet Dickens has, in this book, given a perfect and final touch to this whole conception of mere rebellion and mere human nature. Carlisle had written the story of the French Revolution and had made the story a mere tragedy. Dickens writes the story about the French Revolution and does not make the revolution itself the tragedy at all. Dickens knows that an outbreak is seldom a tragedy. Generally it is the avoidance of a tragedy. All the real tragedies are silent. Men fight each other with furious cries because men fight each other with chivalry and an unchangeable sense of brotherhood. But trees fight each other in utter stillness because they fight each other cruelly and without quarter. In this book, as in history, the guillotine is not the calamity, but rather the solution of the calamity. The sin of Sidney Carton is a sin of habit, not a revolution. His gloom is the gloom of London, not the gloom of Paris. CHAPTER XX. GREAT EXPECTATIONS. GREAT EXPECTATIONS, which was written in the afternoon of Dickens' life and fame, has a quality of serene ironing and the quality of ironing and the quality of ironing and the quality of ironing and the quality of ironing and the quality of ironing and the quality of ironing has a quality of serene ironing and even sadness, which puts it quite alone among his other works. At no time could Dickens possibly be called cynical. He had too much vitality, but relative to the other books, this book is cynical. But it has the soft and gentle cynicism of old age, not the hard cynicism of youth. To be a young cynic is to be a young brute. But Dickens, who had been so perfectly romantic and sentimental in his youth, could afford to admit this touch of doubt into the mixed experience of his middle age. At no time could any books by Dickens have been called Thakarayan. Both of the two men were too great for that. But relative to the other Dickensian productions, this book may be called Thakarayan. It is a study in human weakness and the slow human surrender. It describes how easily a free lad of fresh and decent instincts can be made to care more for rank and pride and the degrees of our stratified society than for old affection and for honour. It is an extra chapter to the book of snobs. The best way of stating the change which this book marks in Dickens can be put in one phrase. In this book, for the first time, the hero disappears. The hero had descended to Dickens by a long line which begins with the gods, perhaps if one may say so, which begins with God. First comes deity, and then the image of deity. First comes the god, and then the demigod. The Hercules, who labours and conquers before he receives his heavenly crown. That idea, with continual mystery and modification, has continued behind all romantic tales. The demigod became the hero of paganism. The hero of paganism became the night errant of Christianity. The night errant who wandered and was foiled before he triumphed became the hero of the latter prose romance. The romance in which the hero had to fight a duel with the villain, but always survived, in which the hero drove desperate horses through the night in order to rescue the heroine, but always rescued her. This heroic, modern hero, this demigod, in a top hat, may be said to reach his supreme moment and typical example about the time when Dickens was writing that thundering and thrilling and highly unlikely scene in Nicholas Nickleby. The scene where Nicholas hopelessly denounces the atrocious grind in his hour of grinning triumph, and a thud upon the floor above tells them that the heroine's tyrannical father has died just in time to set her free. That is the apotheosis of the pure heroic, as Dickens found it, and as Dickens in some sense continued it. It may be that it does not appear with quite so much unmistakable youth, beauty, valor, and virtue, as does in Nicholas Nickleby. Walter Gay is a simpler and a more careless hero, but when he is doing any of the business of the story he is purely heroic. Kit Nubbles is a humbler hero, but he is a hero when he is good he is very good. Even David Copperfield, who confesses to boyish tremors and boyish evasions in his account of his boyhood, acts the strict stiff part of the chivalrous gentleman in all the active and determining scenes of the tale. But great expectations may be called, like Vanity Fair, a novel without a hero. Almost all Thackeray's novels, except Esmond, are novels without a hero. But only one of Dickens' novels can be so described. I do not mean that it is a novel without a Jeune Première, a young man to make love. Pickwick is that and Oliver Twist and perhaps the old Curiosity Shop. I mean that it is a novel without a hero in the same far deeper and more deadly sense, in which Penn Dennis is also a novel without a hero. I mean that it is a novel which aims chiefly at showing that the hero is unheroic. All such phrases as these must appear, of course, to overstate the case. Pip is a much more delightful person than Nicholas Nicolby, or to take a stronger case for the purpose of our argument, Pip is a much more delightful person than Sydney Carton. Still the fact remains. Most of Nicholas Nicolby's personal actions are meant to show that he is heroic. Most of Pip's actions are meant to show that he is not heroic. The study of Sydney Carton is meant to indicate that with all his vices Sydney Carton was a hero. The study of Pip is meant to indicate that with all his virtues Pip was a snob. The motive of the literary explanation is different. Pip and Penn Dennis are meant to show how circumstances can corrupt men. Sam Weller and Hercules are meant to show how heroes can subdue circumstances. This is the preliminary view of the book, which is necessary if we are to regard it as a real and separate fact in the life of Dickens. Dickens had many moods because he was an artist, but he had one great mood because he was a great artist. Any real difference, therefore, from the general drift, or rather, I apologize to Dickens, the general drive of his creation is very important. This is one place in his work in which he does, I will not say feel like Thackeray, far less think like Thackeray, less still write like Thackeray, but this is one of his works in which he understands Thackeray. He puts himself in some sense in the same place. He considers mankind at somewhat the same angle as mankind is considered in one of the sociable and sarcastic novels of Thackeray. When he deals with Pip, he sets out not to show his strength, like the strength of Hercules, but to show his weakness, like the weakness of Penn Dennis. When he sets out to describe Pip's great expectations, he does not set out as in a fairy tale with the idea that these great expectations will be fulfilled. He sets out from the first with the idea that these great expectations will be disappointing. We made very well, as I have remarked elsewhere, apply to all Dickens' books the title Great Expectations. All his books are full of an airy and yet ardent expectation of everything, of the next person who shall happen to speak, of the next chimney that shall happen to smoke, of the next event, of the next ecstasy, of the next fulfillment of any eager human fancy. All his books might be called Great Expectations, but the only book to which he gave the name Great Expectations was the only book in which the expectation was never realized. It was so with the whole of the splendid and unconscious generation to which he belonged. The whole glory of that old English middle class was that it was unconscious. Its excellence was entirely in that, that it was the culture of the nation and that it did not know it. If Dickens had ever known that he was optimistic he would have ceased to be happy. It is necessary to make this first point clear that in Great Expectations Dickens was really trying to be a quiet, a detached and even a cynical observer of human life. Dickens was trying to be thackery. And the final and startling triumph of Dickens is this, that even to this moderate and modern story he gives an incomparable energy, which is not moderate and which is not modern. He is trying to be reasonable, but in spite of himself he is inspired. He is trying to be detailed, but in spite of himself he is gigantic. Compared to the rest of Dickens this is thackery, but compared to the whole of thackery we can only say in supreme praise of it that it is Dickens. Take for example the one question of snobbishness. Dickens has achieved admirably the description of the doubts and vanities of the wretched Pip as he walks down the street in his new gentlemanly clothes, the clothes of which he is so proud and so ashamed. Nothing could be so exquisitely human. Nothing especially be so exquisitely masculine as that combination of self-love and self-assertion and even insolence with a naked and helpless sensibility to the slightest breath of ridicule. Pip thinks himself better than everyone else and yet anybody can snub him. That is the everlasting male and perhaps the everlasting gentleman. Dickens has described perfectly this quivering and defenseless dignity. Dickens has described perfectly how ill-armed it is against the course humor of real humanity. The real humanity which Dickens loved, but which idealists and philanthropists do not love. The humanity of Cabman, the Kostermongers, and the men singing in a third-class carriage, the humanity of Traves Boy. In describing Pip's weakness, Dickens is as true and as delicate as Thackeray. But Thackeray might have been easily as true and as delicate as Dickens. This quick and quiet eye for the tremors of mankind is the thing which Dickens possessed, but which others possessed also. George Eliot or Thackeray could have described the weakness of Pip. Exactly what George Eliot and Thackeray could not have described was the vigor of Traves Boy. There would have been an admirable humor and observation in their accounts of that intolerable urchin. Thackeray would have given us little light touches of Traves Boy. Absolutely true to the qualities and color of the Traves Boy. Just as in his novels of the 18th century the glimpses of steel or balling-broke or Dr. Johnson are exactly and perfectly true to the color and quality of their humor. George Eliot in her earlier books would have given us shrewd authentic scraps of the real dialect of Traves Boy, just as she gave us shrewd and authentic scraps of the real talk in a Midland country town. In her later books she would have given us highly rationalistic explanations of Traves Boy, which we should not have read. But exactly what they could never have given and exactly what Dickens does give is the bounce of Traves Boy. It is the real unconquerable rush and energy in a character which was the supreme and quite indescribable greatness of Dickens. He conquered by rushes. He attacked in masses. He carried things at the spear point in a charge of spears. He was the rooper to fiction. The thing about any figure of Dickens, about Sam Weller or Dick Swivler or McCauber or Bagstock or Traves Boy, the thing about each one of these persons is that he cannot be exhausted. A Dickens character hits you first on the nose and then in the waistcoat and then in the eye and then in the waistcoat again with a blinding rapidity of some battering engine. The scene in which Traves Boy continually overtakes Pip in order to reel and stagger as at first encounter is the thing quite within the real competence of such a character. It might have been suggested by Thackeray or George Elliott or any realist, but the point with Dickens is that there is a rush in the boys' rushings. The writer and the reader rush with him. They start with him. They stare with him. They stagger with him. They share an inexpressible vitality in the air which emanates from this violent and capering satirist. Traves Boy is among other things a boy. He has a physical rapture in hurling himself like a boomerang and in bouncing to the sky like a ball. It is just exactly in describing this quality that Dickens is Dickens and that no one else comes near him. No one feels in his bones that Felix Holt was strong as he feels in his bones that little Quilp was strong. No one can feel even that Rodson Crawley's splendid smack across the face of Lord Stein is quite so living and life-giving as the kick after kick which old Mr. Weller dealt the dancing and quivering Stiggens as he drove him towards the trough. This quality, whether expressed intellectually or physically, is the profoundly popular and eternal quality in Dickens. It is the thing that no one else could do. This quality is the quality which has always given its continuous power and poetry to the common people everywhere. It is life. It is the joy of life felt by those who have nothing else but life. It is the thing that all aristocrats have always hated and dreaded in the people and it is the thing which poor Pip really hates and dreads in Traves Boy. A great man of letters or any great artist is symbolic without knowing it. The things he describes are types because they are truths. Shakespeare may or may not have ever put it to himself that Richard II was a philosophical symbol, but all good criticism must necessarily see him so. It may be a reasonable question whether the artist should be allegorical. There can be no doubt among sane men that the critic should be allegorical. Spencer may have lost by being less realistic than Fielding, but any good criticism of Tom Jones must be as mystical as the fairy queen. Hence it is unavoidable in speaking of a fine book like Great Expectations that we should give even to its unpretentious and realistic figures a certain massive mysticism. Pip is Pip, but he is also the well-meaning snob, and this is even more true of those two great figures in the tale which stand for English democracy. For indeed the first and last word upon the English democracy is said in Joe Gargery and Trabbe's Boy. The actual English populace, as distinct from the French populace or the Scotch or Irish populace, may be said to lie between those two types. The first is the poor man who does not assert himself at all, and the second is the poor man who asserts himself entirely with the weapon of sarcasm. The only way in which the English now ever rise in revolution is under the symbol and leadership of Trabbe's Boy. What pikes and chelalies were to the Irish populace, what guns and barricades were to the French populace, that shaft is to the English populace. It is their weapon, the use of which they really understand. It is the one way in which they can make a rich man feel uncomfortable and they use it very justifiably for all it is worth. If they do not cut off their heads of tyrants, at least they sometimes do their best to make the tyrants lose their heads, the gutter boy knows the great towns carry the art of personal criticism to so rich and delicate degree some well dressed persons when they walk past a file of them feel as if they were walking past a row of omniscient critics or judges with the power of life and death here and there only is some ordinary human custom some natural human pleasure suppressed in deference to the fastidiousness of the rich but all the rich tremble before the fastidiousness of the poor of the other type of democracy it is far more difficult to speak it is always hard to speak of good things or good people for insatisfying the soul they take away a certain spur to speech Dickens was often called a sentimentalist in one sense he sometimes was a sentimentalist but if sentimentalism be held to mean something artificial or theatrical then in the core and reality of his character Dickens was the very reverse of a sentimentalist he seriously and definitely loved goodness to see sincerity and charity satisfied him like a meal what some critics call his love of sweet stuff is really his love of plain beef and bread sometimes one is tempted to wish that in the long dickens dinner the sweet courses could be left out but this does not make the whole banquet other than a banquet singularly solid and simple the critics complain of the sweet things but not because they are so strong as to like simple things they complain of the sweet things because they are so sophisticated as to like sour things their tongues are tainted with a bitterness of absinthe yet because of the very simplicity of dickens moral tastes it is impossible to speak adequately of them and Joe Gargary must stand as he stands in the book a thing too obvious to be understood but this may be said of him in one of his minor aspects that he stands for a certain long suffering in the English poor a certain weary patience and politeness which almost breaks the heart one cannot help wondering whether that great mass of silent virtue will ever achieve anything on this earth the end of section twenty seven chapter twenty great expectations