 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. APRECIATIONS AND CRITICISMS OF THE WORKS OF CHARLES DICKENS by G. K. Chesterton Chapter 21 Our Mutual Friend Our mutual friend marks a happy return to the earlier manner of Dickens at the end of Dickens life. One might call it a sort of Indian summer of his farce. Those who most truly love Dickens love the earlier Dickens, and any return to his farce must be welcomed, like a young man come back from the dead. In this book indeed he does not merely return to his farce, he returns in a manner to his vulgarity. It is the old democratic and even uneducated Dickens who is writing here. The very title is illiterate. Any Prigish pupil teacher could tell Dickens that there is no such phrase in English as our mutual friend. Anyone could tell Dickens that our mutual friend means our reciprocal friend, and that our reciprocal friend means nothing. If he had only had all the solemn advantages of academic learning, the absence of which in him was lamented by the quarterly review, he would have known better. He would have known that the correct phrase for a man known to two people is our common friend. But if one calls one's friend a common friend, even that phrase is open to misunderstanding. I dwelt with a gloomy pleasure on this mistake in the very title of the book, because I for one am not pleased to see Dickens gradually absorbed by modern culture and good manners. Dickens, by class and genius, belong to the kind of people who do talk about a mutual friend, and for that class there is a very great deal to be said. These two things can at least be said. That this class does understand the meaning of the word friend and the meaning of the word mutual. I know that for some long time before he had been slowly and subtly sucked into the whirlpool of the fashionable views of later England. I know that in Bleak House he treats the aristocracy far more tenderly than he treats them in David Copperfield. I know that in a tale of two cities, having come under the influence of Carlisle, he treats revolution as strange and weird, whereas under the influence of Cobit he would have treated it as obvious and reasonable. I know that in the mystery of the dissenting demagogue, Honey Thunder, I know that even he took the last and most disastrous step in the modern English reaction. While blaming the old Cloyster Ham monks, who were democratic, he praised the old world peace that they had left behind them, an old world peace which is simply one of the last amusements of aristocracy. The modern rich feel quite at home with the dead monks. They would have felt anything but comfortable with the live ones. I know in short how the simple democracy of Dickens was gradually dimmed by the decay and reaction of the middle of the 19th century. I know that he fell into some of the bad habits of aristocratic sentimentalism. I know that he used the word gentleman as meaning a good man. But all this only adds to the unholy joy with which I realize that the very title of one of his best books was a vulgarism. It is pleasant to contemplate this last unconscious knock in the eye for the gentility with which Dickens was half impressed. Dickens is the old self-made man. You may take him or leave him. He has its disadvantages and its merits. No university man would have written the title. No university man could have written the book. If it were a mere matter of the accident of a name, it would not be worthwhile thus to dwell on it, even as a preface. But the title is in disrespect typical of the tale. The novel Dickens called Our Mutual Friend is in many ways a real reaction towards the earlier Dickens' manner. I have remarked that Little Dorrid was a reversion to the form of the first books, but not to their spirit. Our Mutual Friend is a reversion to the spirit, as well as the form. Compare, for instance, the public figures that make a background in each book. Mr. Myrtle is a commercial man, having no great connection with the plot. Similarly, Mr. Podsnap is a commercial man, having no great connection with the plot. This is altogether in the spirit of the earlier books. The whole point of an early Dickens' novel was to have as many people as possible entirely unconnected with the plot. But exactly because both studies are irrelevant, the contrast between them can be more clearly perceived. Dickens goes out of his way to describe Myrtle, and it is a gloomy description, but Dickens goes out of his way to describe Podsnap, and it is a happy and hilarious description. It recalls the days when he hunted great game, when he went out of his way to entrap such adorable monsters as Mr. Pexniff or Mr. Vincent Crumless. With these wild beings we never bother about the cause of their coming. Such guests in a story may be uninvited, but they are never detraught. They earn their nights lodging in any tale, by being so uproariously amusing. Like Little Tommy Tucker in The Legend, they sing for their supper. This is really the mark of truth about our mutual friend, as the stage in the singular latter career of Dickens. It is like the leaping up and the flaming of a slowly dying fire. The best things in the book are the old best manner of the author. They have that great Dickens quality of being something which is pure farce and yet which is not superficial. An unfathomable farce, a farce that goes down to the roots of the universe. The highest compliment that can ever be paid to the humor of Dickens is paid when some lady says with the sudden sincerity of her sex that it is too silly. The phrase is really a perfectly sounded and acute criticism. Humor does consist in being too silly, in passing the borderland, in breaking through the floor of sense and falling into some starry abyss of nonsense far below our ordinary human life. This too silly quality is really present in our mutual friend. It is present in our mutual friend just as it is present in Pickwick or Martin Shuzzlewick, just as it is not present in Little Dorot or in our times. Many tests might be employed. One is the pleasure in purely physical jokes, jokes about the body. The general dislike which everyone felt for Mr. Stiggins' nose is of the same kind as the ardent desire which Mr. Lamlee felt for Mr. Fledgerby's nose. Give me your nose, sir, said Mr. Lamlee. That sentence alone would be enough to show that the young Dickens had never died. The opening of a book goes for a great deal. The opening of our mutual friend is much more instinctively energetic and light-hearted than that of any of the other novels of his concluding period. Dickens had always enough optimism to make his stories end well. He had not in his later years always enough optimism to make them begin well. Even great expectations, the saddest of his later books, ends well. It ends well in spite of himself who had intended it to end badly. But if we leave the evident case of good endings and take the case of good beginnings, we see how much our mutual friend stands out from among the other novels of the evening or the end of Dickens. The tale of Little Dorth begins in a prison. One of the prisoners is a villain and his villainy is as dreary as the prison. That might matter nothing. But the other prisoner is vivacious, and even his vivacity is dreary. The first note struck is sad. In the tale of Edwin Drude the first scene is an opium den, suffocated with every sort of fantasy and falsehood. Nor is it true that these openings are merely accidental. They really cast their shadow over the tales. The people of Little Dorth begin in prison, and it is the whole point of the book that people never get out of prison. The story of Edwin Drude begins amid the fumes of opium, and it never gets out of the fumes of opium. The darkness of that strange and horrible smoke is deliberately rolled over the whole story. Dickens in his later years permitted more and more his story to take the cue from its inception. All the more remarkable, therefore, is the real jerk and spurt of good spirits with which he opens our mutual friend. It begins with a good piece of rowdy satire, wildly exaggerated and extremely true. It belongs to the same class as the first chapter of Martin Chuzzlewood, with its preposterous pedigree of the Chuzzlewood family, or even the first chapter of Pickwick, with its immortal imbecilities about the theory of Tittlebats, and Mr. Blontom of Eldgate. Doubtless the early satiric chapter in our mutual friend is of a more strategic and ingenious kind of satire that can be found in these earlier and explosive parodies. Still there is equality common to both, and that quality is the whole of Dickens. It is a quality difficult to define, hence the whole difficulty of criticizing Dickens. Perhaps it can be best stated in two separate statements, or as two separate symptoms. The first is the mere fact that the reader rushes to read it. The second is the mere fact that the writer rushed to write it. This beginning, which is like a burst of the old exuberant Dickens, is of course the veneering dinner party. In its own way it is as good as anything that Dickens ever did. There is the old faculty of managing a crowd, of making character clash with character that had made Dickens not only the Democrat, but even the demagogue of fiction. For if it is hard to manage a mob, it is hardest of all to manage a swell mob. The particular kind of chaos that is created by the hospitality of a rich upstart has perhaps never been so accurately and outrageously described. Every touch about the thing is true. To this day anyone can test it if he goes to a dinner in this particular kind. How admirable, for instance, is the description of the way in which all the guests ignored the host, how the host and hostess peered and gaped for some stray attention, as if they had been a pair of poor relations. Again, how well, as a matter of social color, the distinctions between the type and tone of the guests are made even in the matter of this unguest-like insolence. How well Dickens distinguishes the ill-bred indifference of Podsnap from the well-bred indifference of Mortimer Lightwood and Eugene Rayburn. How well he distinguishes the bad manners of the merchant from the equally typical bad manners of the gentleman. Above all, how well he catches the character of the creature, who is really the master of all these, the impenetrable male servant. Nowhere in literature is the truth about servants better told. For that truth is simply this, that the secret of aristocracy is hidden even from all aristocrats. Servants, bottlers, footmen, are the high priests, who have the real dispensation, and even gentlemen are afraid of them. Dickens was never more right than when he made the new people, the veneerings, employ a butler who despise not only them but all their guests and acquaintances. The admirable person, called the analytical chemist, shows his perfection particularly in the fact that he regards all the sham gentlemen and all the real gentlemen with the same gloomy and incurable contempt. He offers wine to the offensive pod snap or the shrieking tippens with a melancholy sincerity and silence, but he offers his letter to the aristocratic and unconscious Mortimer with the same sincerity and with the same silence. It is a great pity that the analytical chemist only occurs in two or three scenes of this excellent story. As far as I know, he never really says a word from one end of the book to the other, but he is one of the best characters in Dickens. Round the veneering dinner table are collected not indeed the best characters in Dickens, but certainly the best characters in our mutual friend. Certainly one exception must be made. Fledgby is unaccountably absent. There was really no reason why he should not have been present at a dinner party given by the veneerings and including the lamblies. His money was at least more genuine than theirs. If he had been present the party would really have included all that is important in our mutual friend. For indeed outside Mr. Fledgby and the people at the dinner party there is something a little heavy and careless about the story. Mr. Silas Weg is really funny. He serves the purpose of a necessary villain in the plot, but his humor and his villainy seem to have no particular connection with each other. When he is not scheming, he seems the last man likely to scheme. He is rather like one of Dickens's agreeable bohemians, a pleasant companion, a quota-of-fine verse. His villainy seems an artificial thing, attached to him like his wooden leg. For while his villainy is supposed to be of a dull, mean and bitter sort, quite unlike, for instance, the uproarious villainy of Quillop. His humor is of the sincere, flowing and lyric character, like that of Dick's wibbler or Mr. Macawber. He tells Mr. Boffin that he will drop into poetry in a friendly way. He does drop into it in a friendly way. Much too really a friendly way to make him convincing as a mere calculating knave. He and Mr. Venus are such natural and genuine companions that one does not see why if Venus repents Wegg should not repent, too. In short, Wegg is a convenience for a plot, and not a very good plot at that. But if he is one of the blots on the business, he is not the principal one. If the real degradation of Wegg is not very convincing, it is at least immeasurably more convincing than the pretended degradation of Boffin. The passage in which Boffin appears as a sort of miser, and then afterwards explains that he only assumed the character for reasons of his own, has something about it highly jerky and unsatisfactory. The truth of the whole matter, I think, almost certainly is that Dickens did not originally mean Boffin's lapse to be fictitious. He originally meant Boffin really to be corrupted by wealth, slowly to degenerate, and as slowly to repent. But the story went too quickly for this long, double and difficult process. Therefore Dickens at the last moment made a sudden recovery possible by representing that the whole business had been a trick. Consequently, this episode is not an error, merely in the sense that we may find many errors in a great writer like Dickens. It is a mistake patched up with another mistake. It is a case of that ossification which occurs around the healing of an actual fracture. The story had been broken down and had been mended. If Dickens had fulfilled what was probably his original design, and described the slow freezing of Boffin's soul in prosperity, I do not say that he would have done the thing well. He was not good at describing change in anybody, especially not good at describing a change for the worse. The tendency of all his characters is upwards, like bubbles, never downwards like stones. But at least it would probably have been more credible than the story as it stands. For the story as it stands is actually less credible than any conceivable kind of moral room for Boffin. Such a character is his, rough, simple, and lumberingly unconscious. Might be more easily conceived as really sinking in self-respect and honor than as keeping up month after month, so strained and inhuman at theatrical performance. To a good man of that particular type, it would be easier to be bad than to pretend to be bad. It might have taken years to turn Naughty Boffin into a miser, but it would have taken centuries to turn him into an actor. This unreality in the later Boffin scenes makes the end of the story of John Harmon somewhat more unimpressive, perhaps than it might otherwise have been. Upon no hypotheses, however, can he be made one of the more impressive figures of Dickens. It is true that it is an unfair criticism to object as some have done, that Dickens does not succeed in disguising the identity of John Harmon with John Rokesmith. Dickens never intended to disguise it. The whole story would be mainly unintelligible and largely uninteresting if it had been successfully disguised. But though John Harmon or Rokesmith was never intended to be merely a man of mystery, it is not quite so easy to say what he was intended to be. Mella is a possible and pretty sketch. This is Will for her mother, is an entirely impossible and entirely delightful one. Miss Potsnap is not only excellent, she is to a healthy taste positively attractive. There is a real suggestion in her of the fact that humility is akin to truth, even when humility takes its more atomic form of shyness. There is not, in all literature, a more human cry to core than that with which Georgiana Potsnap receives the information that a young man has professed himself to be attracted by her. Oh, what a fool he must be. Two other figures require praise, though they are in the more tragic manner which Dickens touched from time to time in his later period. Bradley Headstone is really a successful villain, so successful that he fully captures our sympathies. Also there is something original in the very conception. It was a new notion to add to the villain's affiction, whose thoughts go quickly, this villain whose thoughts go slow but sure, and it was a new notion to combine a deadly criminality, not with high life for the slums, the usual haunts for villains, but with a laborious respectability of the lower middle classes. The other good conception is the boy, Bradley Headstone's pupil, with his dull inexhaustible egoism, his pert unconscious cruelty, and the strict decorum and incredible baseness of his views of life. It is singular that Dickens, who was not only a radical and a social reformer, but one who would have been particularly concerned to maintain the principle of modern popular education, should nevertheless have seen so clearly this potential evil in the mere educationalism of our time. The fact that merely educating the democracy may easily mean setting work to despoil it of all the democratic virtues. It is better to be Lizzie Hexham and not know how to read and write than to be Charlie Hexham and not know how to appreciate Lizzie Hexham. It is not only necessary that the democracy should be taught. It is also necessary that the democracy should be taught democracy. Otherwise it will certainly fall a victim to that snobbishness and the system of worldly standards which is the most natural and easy of all the forms of human corruption. This is one of the many dangers which Dickens saw before it existed. Dickens was really a prophet. Far more of a prophet than Carlisle. CHAPTER XXII EDWIN DRUDE Pickwick was a work partly designed by others, but ultimately filled up by Dickens. Edwin Drude, the last book, was a book designed by Dickens, but ultimately filled up by others. The Pickwick papers showed how much Dickens could make out of other people's suggestions. The mystery of Edwin Drude shows how very little other people can make out of Dickens' suggestions. Dickens was meant by Heaven to be the great melodromatist, so that even his literary end was melodramatic. Something more seems hinted at in the cutting short of Edwin Drude by Dickens than the mere cutting short of a good novel by a great man. It seems rather like the last taunt of some elf leaving the world that it should be this story which is not ended, this story which is only a story. The only one of Dickens' novels, which he did not finish, was the only one that really needed finishing. He never had but one thoroughly good plot to tell, and that he has only told in Heaven. This is what separates the case in question from any parallel cases of novelists cut off in the act of creation. That great novelist, for instance, with whom Dickens is constantly compared, died also in the middle of Dennis Duvall. But anyone can see in Dennis Duvall the qualities of the later work of Thackeray, the increasing discursiveness, the increasing retrospective poetry, which had been in part the charm and in part the failure of Philip and the Virginians. But to Dickens it was permitted to die at a dramatic moment, and to leave a dramatic mystery. Any Thackerayan could have completed the plot of Dennis Duvall, except indeed, that a really sympathetic Thackerayan might have had some doubt as to whether there was any plot to complete. But Dickens, having had far too little plot in his stories previously, had far too much plot in the story he never told. Dickens dies in the act of telling not his tenth novel, but his first news of murder. He drops down dead as he is in the act of denouncing the assassin. It is permitted to Dickens in short to come to a literary end, as strange as his literary beginning. He began by completing the old romance of travel. He ended by inventing the new detective story. It is as a detective story first and last that we have to consider the mystery of Edwin Druid. This does not mean, of course, that the details are not often admirable in their swift and penetrating humor. To say that of the book would be to say that Dickens did not write it. Nothing could be trueer, for instance, than the manner in which the dazed and drunken dignity of dirtles illustrates a certain bitterness at the bottom of the bewilderment of the poor. Nothing could be better than the way in which the haughty and elusive conversation between Miss Twinkleton and the landlady illustrates the maddening preference of some females for skating upon thin social ice. There is an even better example than these of the original humors inside of Dickens, and one not very often remarked because of its brevity and its unimportance in the narrative. But Dickens never did anything better than the short account of Mr. Grugia's dinner being brought from the tavern by two waders, a stationary waiter and a flying waiter. The flying waiter brought the food and the stationary waiter quarreled with him. The flying waiter brought glasses and the stationary waiter looked through them. Finally it will be remembered the stationary waiter left the room, casting a glance which indicated, let it be understood that all emoliments are mine, and that Nil is the reward of this slave. Still Dickens wrote the book as a detective story. He wrote it as the mystery of Edwin Drude, and alone, perhaps among detective story writers, he never lived to destroy his mystery. Here alone then among Dickens novels it is necessary to speak of the plot and of the plot alone, and when we speak of the plot it becomes immediately necessary to speak of the two or three standing explanations which celebrated critics have given of the plot. The story, so far as it was written by Dickens, can be read here. It describes as will be seen the disappearance of the young architect Edwin Drude after a night of festivity which was supposed to celebrate his reconciliation with the temporary enemy Neville Landless, and was held at the house of his uncle John Jasper. Dickens continued the tale long enough to explain or to explode the first and most obvious of his riddles. Long before the existing part terminates it has become evident that Drude has been put away, not by his obvious opponent Landless, but by his uncle, who professes for him an almost painful affection. The fact that we all know this, however, ought not in fairness to blind us to the fact that, considered as the first fraud in a detective story, it has been with great skill at once suggested and concealed. Nothing, for instance, could be cleverer as a piece of artistic mystery than the fact that Jasper, the uncle, always kept his eyes fixed on Drude's face with a dark and watchful tenderness. The thing is so told that at first we really take it as only indicating something morbid in the affection. It is only afterwards that the frightful fancy breaks upon us that it is not morbid affection, but morbid antagonism. This first mystery, which is no longer a mystery of Jasper's guilt, is only worth remarking because it shows that Dickens meant and felt himself able to mask all his batteries with real artistic strategy and artistic caution. The manner of the unmasking of Jasper marks the manner and tone in which the whole tale was to be told. Here we have not got to do with Dickens simply giving himself away, as he gave himself away in Pickwick, or the Christmas Carol, not that one complains of him giving himself away. There was no better gift. What was the mystery of Edwin Drude from Dickens' point of view? We shall never know, except perhaps from Dickens in Heaven, and then he will very likely have forgotten. But the mystery of Edwin Drude from our point of view, from that of his critics and those who have with some courage after his death attempted to be his collaborators, is simply this. There is no doubt that Jasper either murdered Drude or supposed that he had murdered him. This certainly we have from the fact that it is the whole point of a scene between Jasper and Drude's lawyer, Grugius, in which Jasper is struck down with remorse when he realizes that Drude has been killed from his point of view needlessly and without profit. The only question is whether Jasper's remorse was as needless as his murder. In other words, the only question is whether, while he certainly thought he had murdered Drude, he had really done it. It need hardly be said that such a doubt would not have been raised for nothing. Gentlemen like Jasper do not as a rule waste good remorse except upon successful crime. The origin of the doubt about the real death of Drude is this. Towards the latter end of the existing chapters there appears very abruptly, and with quite ostentatious air of mystery, a character called Datchery. He appears for the purpose of spying upon Jasper and getting up some case against him. At any rate, if he has not this purpose in the story, he has no other earthly purpose in it. He is an old gentleman of juvenile energy with a habit of carrying his hat in his hand even in the open air, which some have interpreted as meaning that he feels the unaccustomed weight of a wig. Now there are one or two people in the story who this person might possibly be. Notably, there is one person in the story who seems as if he were meant to be something but who hitherto has certainly been nothing. I mean, Bazzard, Mr. Grugius Clerk, a sulky fellow, interested in theatricals, of whom an unnecessary fuss is made. There is also Mr. Grugius himself, and there is also another suggestion, so much more startling, that I shall have to deal with it later. For the moment, however, the point is this, that ingenious writer Mr. Proctor started the highly plausible theory that this datuary was Drude himself who had not really been killed. He adduced a most complex and complete scheme covering nearly all the details, but the strongest argument he had was rather one of general artistic effect. This argument has been quite perfectly summed up by Mr. Andrew Lang in one sentence. If Edwin Drude is dead, there is not much mystery about him. This is quite true. Dickens, when writing in So Deliberte, in a dark and conspiratorial manner, would surely have kept the death of Drude and the guilt of Jasper hidden a little longer if the only real mystery had been the guilt of Jasper and the death of Drude. It certainly seems, artistically more likely, that there was a further mystery of Edwin Drude. Not the mystery that he was murdered, but the mystery that he was not murdered. It is true indeed that Mr. Coming Walters has a theory of datuary, to which I have already darkly alluded. A theory which is wild enough to be the center, not only of any novel, but of any harlequin aid. But the point is that, even Mr. Coming Walters' theory, though it makes the mystery more extraordinary, does not make it any more of a mystery of Edwin Drude. It should not have been called the mystery of Edwin Drude, but the mystery of datuary. This is the strongest case for Procter. If the story tells of Drude coming back as datuary, the story does at any rate fulfill the title upon its title page. The principal objection to Procter's theory is that there seems no adequate reason why Jasper should not have murdered his nephew if he wanted to, and there seems even less reason why Drude, if unsuccessfully murdered, should not have raised the alarm. Happy young architects went nearly strangled by elderly organists. Do not generally stroll away and come back some time afterwards in a wig with a false name. Superficially it would seem almost as odd to find the murderer investigating the origin of the murder. To find the corpse investigating it. To this problem, two of the ableist literary critics of our time, Mr. Andrew Lang and Mr. William Archer, both of them persuaded generally of the Procter theory, have specially addressed themselves. Both have come to the same substantial conclusion, and I suspect that they are right. They hold that Jasper, whose mania for opium is much insisted on in the tale, had some sort of fit, or trance, or other physical seizure as he was committing the crime, so that he left it unfinished. And they also hold that he had drugged Drude so that Drude, when he recovered from the attack, was doubtful about who had been his assailant. This might really explain, if a little fancifully, his coming back into town in the character of a detective. He might think it do his uncle, whom he last remembered in a kind of murderous vision, to make an independent investigation as to whether he was really guilty or not. He might say, as Hamlet said of a vision equally terrifying, I'll have grounds more relative than this. In fairness it must be said that there is something vaguely shaky about this theory. Chiefly, I think, in this respect, that there is a sort of farcical cheerfulness about Tatry, which does not seem altogether appropriate to a lad who ought to be in an agony of doubt as to whether his best friend was or was not his assassin. Still there are many such incongruities in Dickens, and the explanation of Mr. Archer and Mr. Lang is an explanation. I do not believe that any explanation as good can be given to account for the tale being called The Mystery of Edwin Drude, if the tale practically starts with his corpse. If Drude is really dead, one cannot help feeling the story ought to end where it does. And not by accident, but by design. The murder is explained, Jasper is ready to be hanged, and everyone else in a decent novel ought to be ready to be married. If there was much more of anything, it must have been of an anticlimax. Nevertheless there are degrees of anticlimax. Some of the more obvious explanations of Tatry are quite reasonable, but they are distinctly tame. For instance, Tatry may be buzzard, but it is not very exciting if he is, for we know nothing about buzzard and care less. Again he might be grugious, but there is something pointless about one grotesque character dressing up as another grotesque character, actually less amusing than himself. Now Mr. Cumming Walters has at least had the distinction of inventing a theory, which makes the story at least an interesting story, even if it is not exactly the story that is promised on the cover of the book. The obvious enemy of Drude, on whom suspicion first falls, the swarthy and sulky landlis, has a sister even swarthier, and except for her queenly dignity, even sulkier than he. This barbaric princess is evidently meant to be in a somber way in love with Chris Barkle, the clergyman and muscular Christian, who represents the breezy element in the emotions of the tale. Mr. Cumming Walters seriously maintains that it is this barbaric princess who puts on a wig and dresses up as Mr. Datchery. He urges his case with much ingenuity of detail. Helena Landlis certainly had a motive to save her brother, who was accused falsely by accusing Jasper justly. She certainly had some of the faculties, it is elaborately stated in the earlier part of her story that she was accustomed as a child to dress up in male costume and run into the wildest adventures. There may be something in Mr. Cumming Walters' argument that the very flippancy of Datchery is the self-conscious flippery of a strong woman in such an odd situation. Certainly there is the same flippancy in Portia and in Rosalind. Nevertheless, I think there is one final objection to the theory, and that is simply this. That it is comic. It is generally wrong to represent a great master of the grotesque as being grotesque exactly where he does not intend to be. And I am persuaded that if Dickens had really meant Helena to turn into Datchery, he would have made her from the first in some way more light, eccentric, and laughable. He would have made her at least as light and laughable as Rosa. As it is, there is something strangely stiff and incredible about the idea of a lady so dark and dignified, dressing up as a swaggering old gentleman in a blue coat and gray trousers. We might almost as easily imagine Edith Dombrey dressing up as Major Bagstock. We might almost as easily imagine Rebecca in Ivanhoe dressing up as Isaac of York. Of course, such a question can never really be settled precisely, because it is the question not merely of a mystery but of a puzzle. For here the detective novel differs from every other kind of novel. The ordinary novelist desires to keep his readers to the point. The detective novelist actually desires to keep his readers off the point. In the first case, every touch must help to tell the reader what he means. In the second case, most of the touches must conceal or even contradict what he means. You are supposed to see and appreciate the smallest gestures of a good actor, but you do not see all the gestures of a conjurer if he is a good conjurer. Hence, into the critical estimate of such works as this, there is introduced a problem, an extra perplexity, which does not exist in other cases. I mean the problem of the things commonly called blinds. Some of the points which we pick out as suggestive may have been put in as deceptive. Thus the whole conflict between a critic with one theory, like Mr. Lang, and a critic with another theory, like Mr. Cummings-Walter, becomes eternal and a trifle farcical. Mr. Walter says that all Mr. Lang's clues were blinds. Mr. Lang says that all Mr. Walter's clues were blinds. Mr. Walter can say that some passages seem to show that Helena was daddury. Mr. Lang can reply that those passages were only meant to deceive simple people, like Mr. Walter's, into supposing that she was daddury. Similarly, Mr. Lang can say that the return of Drude is foreshadowed, and Mr. Walter's can reply that it was foreshadowed, because it was never meant to come off. There seems no end to this insane process. Anything that Dickens wrote may or may not mean the opposite of what it says. Upon this principle I should be very ready for one to declare that all the suggested dadduries were really blinds, merely because they can naturally be suggested. I would undertake to maintain that Mr. Daddury is really Miss Twinkleton, who has a mercenary interest in keeping Rosa Budd at her school. This suggestion does not seem to me to be really much more humorous than Mr. Cummings' Walter's theory. Yet either may certainly be true. Dickens is dead, and a number of splendid scenes and startling adventures have died with him. Even if we get the right solution, we shall not know that it is right. The tale might have been, and yet it has not been. And I think there is no thought so much calculated to make one doubt death itself, to feel that sublime doubt which has created all religion, the doubt that found death incredible. Edwin Drude may or may not have really died, but surely Dickens did not really die. Surely our real detective liveth, and shall appear in the latter days of the earth. For a finished tale may give a man immortality in the light and literary sense. But an unfinished tale suggests another immortality, more essential and more strange. The end of Section 29, Chapter 22, Edwin Drude. 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 30, Chapter 23, Master Humphrey's Clock It is quite indispensable to include a criticism of Master Humphrey's Clock in any survey of Dickens, although it is not one of the books which his admirers would chiefly boast, though perhaps it is almost the only one of which he would not have boasted himself. As a triumph of Dickens, at least, it is not a great importance. But as a sample of Dickens it happens to be of quite remarkable importance. The very fact that it is for the most part somewhat more level and even monotonous than most of his creations makes us realize, as it were, against what level and monotony those creations commonly stand out. This book is the background of his mind. It is the basis and minimum of him which was always there. Alone of all written things, this shows how he felt when he was not writing. Dickens might have written it in his sleep. That is to say it is written by a sluggish Dickens, a half-automatic Dickens, a dreaming and drifting Dickens, but still by the enduring Dickens. But this truth can only be made evident by beginning nearer to the root of the matter. Nicholas Nicolby had just completed, or to speak more strictly, confirmed the popularity of the young author. Wonderful as Pickwick was it might have been a nine days wonder. Oliver Twist had been powerful but painful. It was Nicholas Nicolby that proved the man to be a great productive force of which one could ask more, of which one could ask all things. His publishers, Chapman and Hall, seem to have taken, at about this point, that step which sooner or later most publishers do take with regard to a half-successful man who is becoming wholly successful. Instead of asking him for something, they asked him for anything. They made him, so to speak, the editor of his own works. And indeed it is literally, as the editor of his own works, that he next appears, for the next thing to which he proposes to put his name is not a novel, but for all practical purposes a magazine. Yet although it is a magazine, it is a magazine entirely written by himself. The publishers, in one point of fact, wanted to create a kind of Dickens miscellany, in a much more literal sense than that in which we speak of a Bentley miscellany. Dickens was in no way disposed to dislike such a job, for the more miscellany as he was the more he enjoyed himself. And indeed this early experiment of his bears a great deal of resemblance to those later experiences in which he was the editor of two popular periodicals. The editor of Master Humphrey's clock was a kind of type of precursor of the editor of household words and all the year round. There was the same sense of absolute ease and atmosphere of infinite gossip. There was the same great advantage gained by a man of genius who wrote best scrappily and by episodes. The omnipotence of the editor helped the eccentricities of the author. He could excuse himself for all his own shortcomings. He could begin a novel, get tired of it, and turn it into a short story. He could begin a short story, get fond of it, and turn it into a novel. Thus in the days of household words he could begin a big scheme of stories, such as somebody's luggage or seven poor travelers, and after writing a tale or two, toss the rest to his colleagues. Thus on the other hand in the time of Master Humphrey's clock he could begin one small adventure of Master Humphrey and find himself unable to stop it. It is quite clear, I think, though only from moral evidence, which some call reading between the lines, that he originally meant to tell many separate tales of Master Humphrey's wanderings in London, only one of which, and that a short one, was to have been concerned with a little girl going home. Fortunately for us, that little girl had a grandfather, and that grandfather had a curiosity shop and also a nephew, and that nephew had an entirely irrelevant friend, whom men and angels called Richard Swivler. Once having come into the society of Swivler it is not unnatural that Dickens stayed there for a whole book. The essential point for us here, however, is that Master Humphrey's clock was stopped by the size and energy of the thing that had come of it. It died in childbirth. There is, however, another circumstance which, even in ordinary public opinion, makes this miscellany important besides the great novel that came out of it. I mean that the ordinary reader can remember one great thing about Master Humphrey's clock. Besides the fact that it was the framework of the old curiosity shop, he remembers that Mr. Pickwick and the Wellers rise again from the dead. Dickens makes Samuel Pickwick become a member of Master Humphrey's clock society, and he institutes a parallel society in the kitchen under the name of Mr. Weller's watch. Before we consider the question of whether Dickens was wise when he did this, it is worth remarking how really odd it is that this is the only place where he did it. Dickens, one would have thought, was the one man who might naturally have introduced old characters into new stories. Dickens, as a matter of fact, was almost the only man who never did it. It would have seemed natural to him for a double reason. First that his characters were very valuable to him, and second that they were not very valuable to his particular stories. They were dear to him, and they are dear to us, but they really might as well have turned up within reason in one environment as well as another. We, I am sure, should be delighted to meet Mr. Mantellini and the story of Dombie and Son, and he certainly would not be much missed from the plot of Nicholas Nicolby. I am an affectionate father, said Dickens, to all the children of my fancy, but like many other parents I have in my heart of hearts a favorite child, and his name is David Copperfield. Yet although his heart must often have yearned backwards to the children of his fancy, whose tale was already told, yet he never touched one of them again, even with the point of his pen. The characters in David Copperfield, as in all the others, were dead for him after he had done the book. If he loved them as children it was as dead and sanctified children. It is a curious test of the strength and even the reticence that underlay the seeming exuberance of Dickens that he never did yield at all to exactly that in discretion or act of sentimentalism, which would seem most natural to his emotions and his art. Rather, he never did yield to it, except here in this one case, the case of Master Humphrey's clock. And it must be remembered that nearly everybody else did yield to it, especially the adults writers who are commonly counted Dickens' superiors in art and exactitude and closeness to connected reality. Thackeray wallowed in it. Anthony Trollup lived on it. Those modern artists who prided themselves most on the separation and unity of a work of art have indulged in it often. Thus, for instance, Stevenson gave a glimpse of Alan Breck and the Master of Ballantry, and meant to give a glimpse of the Master of Ballantry in another unwritten tale called The Rising Sun. The habit of revising old characters is so strong at Thackeray that Vanity Fair, Pendennis, the Newcombs, and Philip are in one sense all one novel. Certainly the reader sometimes forgets which one of them he is reading. Afterwards, he cannot remember whether the best description of Lord Stein's red whiskers or Mr. Wag's rude jokes occurred in Vanity Fair or in Pendennis. He cannot remember whether his favorite dialogue between Mr. and Mrs. Pendennis occurred in the Newcombs or in Philip. Whenever two Thackeray characters in two Thackeray novels could by any possibility have been contemporary, Thackeray delights to connect them. He makes Major Pendennis nod to Dr. Furman, and Colonel Newcomb asks Major Dobbin to dinner. Whenever two characters could not possibly have been contemporary, he goes out of his way to make one the remote ancestor of the other. Thus he created the Great House of Warrington solely to connect a blue-bearded bohemian journalist with the blood of Henry Esmond. It is quite impossible to conceive Dickens keeping up the elaborate connection between all these characters and all these books, especially across the ages. It would give us a kind of shock if we learned from Dickens that Major Bagstock was the nephew of Mr. Chester. Still less can we imagine Dickens carrying on an almost systematic family chronicle, as was in some sense done by Trollop. There must be some reason for such a paradox, for in itself it is a very curious one. The writers who wrote carefully were always putting, as it were, afterwards and dependices to their already finished portraits. The man who did splendid and flamboyant but faulty portraits never attempted to touch them up, or rather we may say again he attempted it once and then he failed. The reason lay, I think, in the very genius of Dickens' creation. The child he bore of his soul quitted him when his term was passed like a veritable child born of the body. It was independent of him as a child is of his parents. It had become dead to him even in becoming alive. When Thackeray studied Penn Dennis or Lord Stein, he was studying something outside himself, and therefore something that might come nearer and nearer. But when Dickens brought forth Sam Weller or Pickwick, he was creating something that had once been inside himself, and therefore, when once created, could only go further and further away. It may seem a strange thing to say of such laughable character or so lively an author, yet I say it quite seriously. I think it is possible that there arose between Dickens and his characters that strange and almost supernatural shyness that arises often between parents and children, because they are too close to each other to be open with each other. Too much hot and high emotion had gone to the creation of one of his great figures for it to be possible for him without embarrassment ever to speak with it again. This is a thing which some fools call fickleness, but which is not the death of feeling, but rather it is dreadful perpetuation. This shyness is the final seal of strong sentiment. This coldness is an eternal constancy. This one case where Dickens broke through his rule was not such a success as to tempt him, in any case, to try the thing again. There is weakness in the strict sense of the word in this particular reappearance of Samuel Pickwick and Samuel Weller. In the original Pickwick papers Dickens had with quite remarkable delicacy and vividness contrived to suggest a certain fundamental sturdiness and spirit in that corpulent and complacent old gentleman. Mr. Pickwick was a mild man, a respectable man, a placid man, but he was very decidedly a man. He couldn't denounce his enemies and fight for his nightcap. He was fat, but he had a backbone. In Master Humphrey's clock the backbone seemed somehow to be broken. His good nature seems limp instead of alert. He gushes out of his good heart instead of taking a good heart for granted as a part of any decent gentleman's furniture as did the older and stronger Pickwick. The truth is, I think that Mr. Pickwick in complete repose loses some part of the whole point of his existence. The quality which makes the Pickwick papers one of the greatest human fairy tales is the quality which all the great fairy tales possess and which marks them out from the most modern writing. A modern novelist generally endeavours to make his story interesting by making his hero odd. The most typical modern books are those in which the central figure is himself or herself an exception, a cripple, a courtesan, a lunatic, a swindler, or a person of the most perverse temperament. Such stories, for instance, are Sir Richard Kelmedy, dodo, croissant, lob at humane, even the egoist, but in a fairy tale the boy sees all the wonders of fairy land because he is an extraordinary boy. In the same way Mr. Samuel Pickwick sees an extraordinary England because he is an extraordinary old gentleman. He does not see things through the rosy spectacles of the modern optimist or the green smoke spectacles of the pessimist. He sees it through the crystal glasses of his own innocence. One must see the world clearly, even in order to see its wildest poetry. One must see it sanely, even in order to see that it is insane. Mr. Pickwick, then, relieved against the background of heavy kindliness and quiet club life, does not seem to be quite the same heroic figure as Mr. Pickwick relieved against the background of the fighting police constables at Ipswich, or the roaring mobs of Eaton's Will. Of the degeneration of the Wellers, though it has been commonly assumed by critics, I am not sure. Some of the things said in the humorous assembly round Mr. Weller's watch are really human and laughable and all together in the old manner. Especially, I think, the vague and awful elusiveness of old Mr. Weller when he reminds his little grandson of his delinquencies under the trope or figure of their being those of another little boy is really the style both of the irony and the domesticity of the poorer classes. Sam also says one or two things really worthy of himself. We feel almost as if Sam were a living man and could not appear for an instant without being amusing. The other elements in the make-up of Master Humphrey's clock come under the same paradox which I have applied to the whole work, though not very important in literature they are somehow quite important in criticism. They show us, better than anything else, the whole unconscious trend of Dickens, the stuff of which his very dreams were made. If he had made up tales to amuse himself when half awake as I have no doubt he did, they would be just such tales as these. They would have been ghostly legends of the nooks and holes of London, echoes of old love and laughter from the taverns or the inns of court. In a sense, also, one may say that these tales are the great might-have-bins of Dickens. They are chiefly designs which he fills up here slightly and unsatisfactorily, but which he might have filled up with his own brightest and most incredible colors. Nothing, for instance, could have been nearer to the heart of Dickens than his great gargantuan conception of Gog and Magog telling London legends to each other all through the night. Those two giants might have stood on either side of some new great city of his invention, swarming with fanciful figures and noisy with new events. But as it is, the two giants stand alone in a wilderness guarding either side of a gate that leads to nowhere. APRECIATIONS AND CRITICISMS OF THE WORKS OF CHARLES DICKENS BY G. K. CHESTERTON SECTION 31 CHAPTER XXIV REPRINTED PIECES THOSE ABUSES WHICH ARE SUPPOSED TO BELONG SPECIALLY TO RELIGION BELONG TO ALL HUMAN INSTITUTIONS. They are not the sins of supernaturalism but the sense of nature. In this respect it is interesting to observe that all the evils which our rationalist or Protestant tradition associates with the idolatrous veneration of sacred figures, arises in the merely human atmosphere of literature and history. Every extravagance of hagiology can be found in hero worship. Every folly alleged in the worship of saints can be found in the worship of poets. There are those who are honorably and intensely opposed to the atmosphere of religious symbolism or religious archaeology. There are people who have a vague idea that the worship of saints is worse than the imitation of sinners. There are some, like a lady I once knew, who think that hagiology is the scientific study of hags. But these slightly prejudiced persons generally have idolatries and superstitions of their own. Particularly idolatries and superstitions in connection with celebrated people. Mr. Stead preserves a pistol belonging to Oliver Cromwell in the Office of the Review of Reviews, and I am sure he worships it in his rare moments of solitude and leisure. A man who could not be induced to believe in God by all the arguments of all the philosophers professed himself ready to believe if he could see it stated on a postcard in the handwriting of Mr. Gladstone. Persons not otherwise noted for their religious exercise have been known to procure and preserve portions of the hair of Pateruski. Named by this time blasphemy itself is a sacred tradition and almost as much respect would be paid to the alleged relics of an atheist as to the alleged relics of a god. If anyone has a fork that belonged to Voltaire he could probably exchange it in the open market for a knife that belonged to St. Teresa. Of all the instances of this there is none stranger than the case of Dickens. It should be pondered very carefully by those who reproached Christianity with having been easily corrupted into a system of superstitions. If ever there was a message full of what modern people call true Christianity, the direct appeal to the common heart, a faith that was simple, a hope that was infinite, and a charity that was omnivorous. If ever there came among men what they call the Christianity of Christ it was in the message of Dickens. Christianity has been in the world nearly two thousand years and it is not yet quite lost its enemies being judges, its first fire and charity. But friends and enemies would agree that it was from the very first more detailed and doctrinal than the spirit of Dickens. The spirit of Dickens has been in the world about sixty years and already it is a superstition, already it is loaded with relics, already it is stiff with antiquity. Everything that can be said about the perversion of Christianity can be said about the perversion of Dickens. It is said that Christ's words are repeated by the very high priests and scribes whom he meant to denounce. It is just as true that the jokes in pickwick are quoted with delight by the very big wigs of bench and bar whom Dickens wished to make absurd and impossible. It is said that text from Scripture are constantly taken in vain by Judas and Herod, by Caiaphas and Ennis. It is just as true that text from Dickens are rapturously quoted on all our platforms by Potsnap and Honey Thunder, by Particle and Veneering, by Tig when he is forming a company or Pot when he is founding a newspaper. People joke about bumble in defense of Bumbledome. People elude playfully to Mrs. Jellybee while agitating for Bore Ogula Ga. The very things which Dickens tried to destroy are preserved as relics of him. The very houses he wished to pull down are propped up as monuments of Dickens. We wish to preserve everything of him, except his perilous public spirit. This antiquarian attitude towards Dickens has many manifestations, some of them somewhat ridiculous. I give one startling instance out of a hundred of the irony remarked upon above. In his first important book, Dickens lashed the lonesome corruption of our oligarchial politics, their blaring servility and dirty diplomacy of bribes under the name of an imaginary town called Eaton's Will. If Eaton's Will, wherever it was, had been burned to the ground by its indignant neighbors the day after the exposure, it would have been not inappropriate. If it had been entirely deserted by its inhabitants, if they had fled to hide themselves in holes and caverns, one could have understood it. If it had been struck by a thunderbolt out of heaven or outlawed by the whole human race, all that would seem quite natural. What has really happened is this. The two respectable towns in Suffolk are still disputing for the honor of having been the original Eaton's Will, as if two innocent hamlets each claimed to be Gomorrah. I make no comment. The thing is beyond speech. But this strange, sentimental, and relic hunting worship of Dickens has many more innocent manifestations. One of them is that which takes advantage of the fact that Dickens happened to be a journalist by trade. It occupies itself, therefore, with hunting through papers and magazines for unsigned articles which may possibly be proved to be his. Only a little time ago one of these enthusiasts ran up to me, rubbing his hands, and told me that he was sure he had found two and a half short paragraphs in all the year round, which were certainly written by Dickens whom he called, I regret to say, The Master. Something of his archaeological weakness must cling to all mere reprints of his minor work. He was a great novelist, but he was also, among other things, a good journalist and a good man. It is often necessary for a good journalist to write bad literature. It is sometimes the first duty of a good man to write it. Pot boilers, to my feeling, are sacred things, but they may well be secret as well as sacred, like the holy pot which it is their purpose to boil. In the collection called Reprinted Pieces there are some, I think, which demand or deserve this apology. There are many which fall below the level of his recognized books or fragments such as The Sketches by Bose and The Uncommercial Traveller. Two or three elements in the compilation, however, make it quite essential to any solid appreciation of the author. Of these, the first in importance is that which comes last in order. I mean the three remarkable pamphlets upon the English Sunday called Sunday Under Three Heads. Here at least we find the eternal Dickens, though not the eternal Dickens of fiction. His other political and sociological suggestions in this volume are so far unimportant that they are incidental and even personal. Any man might have formed Dickens' opinions about flogging for geritors and altered it afterwards. Anyone might have come to Dickens' conclusion about model prisons or to any other conclusion equally reasonable and unimportant. These things have no color of the great man's character. But on the subject of the English Sunday he does stand for his own philosophy. He stands for a particular view, remote at present, both from liberals and conservatives. He was in a conscious sense the first of its spokesmen. He was in every sense the last. In his appeal for the pleasures of the people, Dickens has remained alone. The pleasures of the people have now no defender. Radical or Tory. The Tories despise the people. The Radicals despise the pleasures. The End of Section 31 Chapter 24 Reprinted Pieces The End of Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens by G. K. Chesterton