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Biography of Charles Dickens - by G.K. Chesterton - FREE FULL AUDIOBOOK

Charles John Huffam Dickens (/ˈdɪkɪnz/; 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English novelist and social critic who created some of the world's best-known fictional characters, and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era.[1] His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime and, by the 20th century, critics and scholars had recognised him as a literary genius. His novels and short stories are widely read today.[2][3] Born in Portsmouth, Dickens left school at the age of 12 to work in a boot-blacking factory when his father John was incarcerated in a debtors' prison. After three years he returned to school, before he began his literary career as a journalist. Dickens edited a weekly journal for 20 years, wrote 15 novels, five novellas, hundreds of short stories and non-fiction articles, lectured and performed readings extensively, was an indefatigable letter writer, and campaigned vigorously for children's rights, for education, and for other social reforms. Dickens's literary success began with the 1836 serial publication of The Pickwick Papers, a publishing phenomenon—thanks largely to the introduction of the character Sam Weller in the fourth episode—that sparked Pickwick merchandise and spin-offs. Within a few years, Dickens had become an international literary celebrity, famous for his humour, satire and keen observation of character and society. His novels, most of them published in monthly or weekly installments, pioneered the serial publication of narrative fiction, which became the dominant Victorian mode for novel publication.[4][5] Cliffhanger endings in his serial publications kept readers in suspense.[6] The instalment format allowed Dickens to evaluate his audience's reaction, and he often modified his plot and character development based on such feedback.[5] For example, when his wife's chiropodist expressed distress at the way Miss Mowcher in David Copperfield seemed to reflect her own disabilities, Dickens improved the character with positive features.[7] His plots were carefully constructed and he often wove elements from topical events into his narratives.[8] Masses of the illiterate poor would individually pay a halfpenny to have each new monthly episode read to them, opening up and inspiring a new class of readers.[9] His 1843 novella A Christmas Carol remains especially popular and continues to inspire adaptations in every creative medium. Oliver Twist and Great Expectations are also frequently adapted and, like many of his novels, evoke images of early Victorian London. His 1859 novel A Tale of Two Cities (set in London and Paris) is his best-known work of historical fiction. The most famous celebrity of his era, he undertook, in response to public demand, a series of public reading tours in the later part of his career.[10] The term Dickensian is used to describe something that is reminiscent of Dickens and his writings, such as poor social or working conditions, or comically repulsive characters.[11][12] The above details is sourced for Wikipedia. For more details:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dickens

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GK chesterton's Charles Dickens chapter 1 the  Dickens period much of our modern difficulty in religion and other things arises merely from  this that we confuse the word indefinable with the word vague if someone speaks of a spiritual  fact as indefinable we promptly picture something Misty a cloud with indeterminate edges but this  is an error even in commonplace Logic the thing that cannot be defined is the first thing the  primary fact it is our arms and legs our pots and pans that are indef
inable the indefinable is  the indisputable the man next door is indefinable because he's too actual to be defined and there  are some to whom spiritual things have the same Fierce and practical proximity some to whom whom  God is too actual to be defined but there is a third class of primary terms there are popular  Expressions which everyone uses and no one can explain which the wise man will accept and  reverence as IR reverences desire or Darkness or any Elemental thing the prigs of the deba
ting  Club will demand that he should Define his terms and being a wise man he will flatly refuse this  first inexplicable term is the most important term of all the word that has no definition is  the word that has no substitute if a man falls back a gang and a gang on some such word as  vulgar or manly do not suppose that the word means nothing because he cannot say what it means  if he could say what the word means he would say what it means instead of saying the word when the  game chicken t
hat fine thinker kept on saying to Mr tootes it's mean that's what it is it's mean  he was using language in the wisest possible way for what else could he say there is no word  for mean except mean a man must be very mean himself before he comes to defining meanness  precisely because the word is indefinable the word is indispensable in everyday talk or in any  of our journals we find the loose but important phrase why have we no great men today why have  we know great men like thary or cile or
Dickens do not let us dismiss this expression because  it appears loose or arbitrary great does mean something and the test of its actuality is to be  found by noting how instinctively and decisively we do apply it to some men and not to others above  all how instinctively and decisively we do apply it to four or five men in the Victorian era four  or five men of whom Dickens was not the least the term is found to fit a definite thing whatever the  word great means Dickens was what it means eve
n the fastidious and unhappy who cannot read his  books without a continuous critical exasperation would use the word of him without stopping to  think they feel that Dickens is a great writer even if he is not a good writer he is treated as a  classic that is as a king who may now be deserted but who cannot now be dethroned the atmosphere of  this word clings to him and the Curious thing is that we cannot get it to cling to any of the men  of our own generation great is the first adjective whic
h the most supercilious modern critic would  apply to Dickens and great is the last adjective that the most supercilious modern critic would  apply to himself we dare not claim to be great men even when we claim to be superior to them  is there then any vital meaning in this idea of greatness or in our laments over its absence  in our own time some people say indeed that this sense of mass is but a mirage of distance and that  men always think dead men great and live men small they seem to think
that the law of perspective  in the mental world is the precise opposite to the law of perspective in the physical world they  think that figures grow larger as they walk away but this Theory cannot be made to correspond with  the facts we do not lack great men in our own day because we decline to look for them in our own  day on the contrary we're looking for them all day long we're not as a matter of fact mere  examples of those who Stone the prophets and leave it to their posterity to build
their sepers  if the world would only produce our perfect profit solemn searching Universal nothing would give us  Keener pleasure than to build his Seiler in our eagerness we might even bury him alive nor is it  true that the Great Men of the Victorian era were not called great in their own time by many they  were called great from the first Charlotte Bronte held this heroic language about ther Ruskin held  it about kalle a definite School regarded Dickens as a great man from the first days of
his Fame  Dickens certainly belonged to this school in reply to this question why have we no great men today  many modern explanations are offered advertisement cigarette smoking the decay of religion the decay  of Agriculture too much humanitarianism too little humanitarianism the fact that people are educated  insufficiently the fact that they are educated at all all the these reasons are given if I give  my own explanation it's not for its intrinsic value it's because the answer to the questi
on why  have we no great men is a short way of stating the deepest and most catastrophic difference between  the age in which we live and the early 19th century the age under the shadow of the French  Revolution the age in which Dickens was born the soundest of the Dickens critics and man of Genius  Mr George gissing opens his criticism by remarking that the world in which Dickens grew up was a  hard and cruel world he notes its gross feeding its Fierce Sports its fighting and foul humor and  al
l this he summarizes in the words hard and cruel it is curious how different are the impressions of  men to me this Old English world seems infinitely less hard and cruel than the world described in  G own novels course external Customs are merely relative and easily assimilated a man soon learned  to harden his hands and Harden his head faced with the world of guessing he can do little but Harden  his heart but the fundamental difference between the beginning of the 19th century and the end of 
it is a difference simple but enormous the first period was full of evil things but it was full of  Hope the second period the fandle was even full in some sense of good things but it was occupied  in asking what was the good of good things Joy itself became joyless and the fighting of cobber  was happier than the feasting of water Peter the men of cober's day were sturdy enough to Ure and  inflict brutality but they were also sturdy enough to alter it this Harden cruel age was after all  the a
ge of Reform the jibit stood up black above them but it was black against the dawn this Dawn  against which the jibit and all the old cruelties stood out so black and clear was the developing  idea of liberalism the French Revolution it was a clear and happy philosophy and only AG such  philosophers to evils appear evident at all The Optimist is a better reform than the pessimist  and the man who believes life to be excellent is the man who oughts it most it seems a paradox yet  the reason of it
is very plain the pessimist can be enraged at evil but only The Optimist can be  surprised at it from the reformer is required a Simplicity of surprise he must have the faculty of  a violent and virgin astonishment it is not enough that he should think Injustice distressing he must  think in Injustice absurd and anomaly in existence a matter less for Tears than for a shattering  laughter on the other hand the pessimists at the end of the century could hardly curse even  the blackest thing for t
hey could hardly see it against its black and eternal background nothing  was bad because everything was bad life in prison was Infamous like life anywhere else the fires of  persecution were VI like the stars we perpetually find this Paradox of a contented discontent  Dr Johnson takes too sad a view of humanity but he's also too satisfied a conservative Russo  takes too Rosy a view of humanity but he causes a revolution Swift is angry but a Tory shell is  happy and rebel Dickens The Optimist sa
tirizes the Fleet and the fleet is gone gissing the  pessimist satirizes Suburbia and suburbia remains Mr gissing's error then about the early  Dickens period we may put thus in calling it hard and cruel he emits the wind of Hope and Humanity  that was blowing through it it may have been full of inhuman institutions but it was full of  humanitarian people and this humanitarianism was very much the better in my view because it  was a rough and even rowy humanitarianism it was free from all the fa
ults that cling to the name  it was if you will a coarse humanitarianism it was a shouting fighting drinking philanthropy a  noble thing but in any case this atmosphere was the atmosphere of the Revolution and its main idea  was the idea of human equality I am not concerned here to defend the egalitarian idea against the  solemn and babyish attacks made upon it by the rich and learned of today I am merely concerned to  State one of its practical consequences one of the actual and certain consequ
ences of the idea that  all men are equal is immediately to produce very great men I would say Superior men only that  the hero thinks of himself as great but not as Superior this has been hidden from us of Late  by a foolish worship of sinister and exceptional men men without comradeship or any infectious  virtue this type of Caesar does exist there is a great man who makes every man feel small but  the real great man is the man who makes every man feel great the spirit of the early Century  pr
oduced Great Men because it believed that men were great it made strong men by encouraging  weak men its education its public habits its rhetoric were all addressed towards encouraging  the greatness in everybody and by encouraging the greatness in everybody it naturally encouraged  superlative greatness in some superiority came out of the high Rapture of equality it is precisely  in this sort of passionate unconsciousness and bewildering community of thought that men do  become more than themse
lves no man by taking thought can add one cubit to his stature but a man  may add many cubits to his stature by not taking thought the best men of the Revolution were simply  common men at their best this is why our age can never understand Napoleon because he was something  great and triumphant we suppose that he must have been something extraordinary something in human  some say he was the devil some say he was the Superman was he a very very bad man was he a good  man with some greater moral
code we strive in vain to invent the Mysteries behind that Immortal  mask of brass the modern world with all its subtleness will never guess his strange secret for  his strange secret was that he was very like other people and almost without exception all the great  men have come out of this atmosphere of equality great men may make despotisms but democracies make  great men the other main Factory of Heroes besides A revolution is a religion and a religion gang  is a thing which by its nature do
es not think of men as more or less valuable but of men as all  intensively and painfully valuable a democracy of Eternal danger for religion all men are equal as  all pennies are equal because the only value in any of them is that they bear the image of the  king this fact has been quite insufficiently observed in the study of religious Heroes  piety produces intellectual greatness precisely because piety in itself is quite indifferent to  intellectual greatness the strength of Cromwell was tha
t he cared for religion but the strength of  religion was that it did not care for Cromwell did not care for him that is any more than for anybody  else he and his footmen were equally welcome to warm places in the hospitality of her it has often  been said very truly that religion is the thing that makes the ordinary man feel extraordinary but  it is an equally important truth that religion is the thing that makes the extraordinary man feel  ordinary cile killed the heroes there have been none
since his time he killed the heroic which  he sincerely loved by forcing upon each man this question am I strong or weak to which the answer  from any honest man whatever yes from Caesar or bismar would weak he asked for candidates for  a definite aristocracy for men who should hold themselves consciously above their fellows he  advertised for them so to speak he promised them Glory he promised them omnipotence they have not  appeared yet they never will for the real heroes of whom he wrote had
appeared out of an ecstasy of  the ordinary I have already instanced such a case as Cromwell but there's no need to go through all  the Great Men of cile Kile himself was as greaty as any of them and if ever there was a typical  child of the French Revolution it was he he began with the wildest hopes from the Reform Bill and  although he soured afterwards he had been made and molded by those hopes he was disappointed with  equality but equality was not disappointed with him equality is Justified
of all her children but  we in the postcon period have become fastidious about Great Men every man examines himself every  man examines his neighbors to see whether they or he quite come up to the exact line of greatness  the answer is naturally no and many a man calls himself contentedly a minor poet who would then  have been inspired to be a major prophet we are hard to please and of little faith we can hardly  believe that there is such a thing as a great man they could hardly believe that t
here was such a  thing as a small one but we are always praying that our eyes may behold greatness instead of  praying that our hearts may be filled with it thus for instance the Liberal Party to which I  belong was in its period of Exile always saying oh for a glad Stone and such things we were  always asking that it might be strengthened from above instead of ourselves strengthening it  from below with our hope and our anger and our youth every man was waiting for a leader every man  ought to
be waiting for a chance to lead if a God does come upon the Earth he will descend at the  sight of the Brave our prostrations and lers are of no avail our new moons and our sabbaths are  an Abomination the great man will come when all of us are feeling great not when all of us are  feeling small he will ride in at some Splendid moment when we all feel that we could do without  him we are then able to answer in some manner the question why have we no great men we have no great  men chiefly becaus
e we're always looking for them we are connoisseurs of greatness and connoisseurs  can never be great we are fastidious that is we are small when Dianes went about with the lantern  looking for an honest man I'm afraid he had very little time to be honest himself and when anybody  goes about in his hands and knees looking for a great man to worship he is making sure that one  man at any rate shall not be great now the error of diogenes is evident the error of diogenes lay  in the fact that he ad
mitted to notice that every man is both an honest man and a dishonest man  Dianes looked for his honest man inside every Crypton Cavern but he never thought of looking  inside the thief and that is where the founder of Christianity found the honest man he found  him on a jibit and promised him Paradise just as Christianity looked for the honest man inside the  thief democracy looked for the wise man inside the fool it encouraged the fool to be wise we can call  this thing sometimes optimism some
times equality the nearest name for it is encouragement it had  its exaggerations failure to understand original sin Notions that education would make all men  good the childlike yet pedantic philosophies of human perfectability but the whole was full  of a faith in the Infinity of human Souls which is in itself not only Christian but Orthodox  and this we have lost amid the limitations of a pessimistic science Christianity said that any  man could be a saint if he chose democracy that any man c
ould be a citizen if he chose the note  of the last few decades in art and ethics has been that a man is stamped with an irrevocable  psychology and is cramped for perpetuity in the prison of his skull it was a world that expected  everything of everybody it was a world that has encouraged anybody to be anything and in England  and literature its living expression was Dickens we shall consider Dickens in many other capacitors  but let us put this one first he was the voice in England of this Hum
ane intoxication and expansion  this encouraging of anybody to be anything thing his best books are a carnival of Liberty and  there is more of the real Spirit of the French revolution in Nicholas nickelby than in the tale  of two sitters his work has the great glory of the Revolution the bidding of every man to be himself  it also has the Revolutionary deficiency it seems to think that this mere emancipation is enough no  man encouraged his characters so much as Dickens I am an affectionate fat
her he says to every child  of my fancy he was not only an affectionate father he was an overindulgent father the children of  his fancy are spoiled children they shake the house like heavy and shouting school boys they  smash the story to pieces like so much Furniture when we moderns write stories our characters are  better controlled but alas our characters are rather easier to control we are in no danger from  the gigantic gambles of creatures like manalia mcba we are in no danger of giving o
ur readers  too much Weller or WG we've not got it to give when we experience the ungovernable sense of Life  which goes along with the old Dickens sense of Liberty we experience the best of the Revolution  we're filled with the first of all Democratic doctrines that all men are interesting Dickens  tried to make some of his people appear dull people but he couldn't keep them dull he could  not make a monotonous man the BS in his books are brighter than the wits in other books I've put  this pos
ition first for a defined reason it is useless for us to attempt to imagine Dickens and  his life unless we are able at least to imagine this old atmosphere for Democratic optimism  a confidence in common men Dickens depends upon such a comprehension in a rather unusual  manner a manner worth explanation or at least remark the disadvantage under which Dickens has  fallen both as an artist and a moralist is very plim his Misfortune is that neither of the two  last movements in literary criticism
has done him any good he has suffered a light from his  enemies and from the enemies of his enemies the facts to which I refer are familiar when the  world first awoke from the mere hypnotism of Dickens from the direct tyranny of his temperament  there was of course a reaction at the head of it came the realists with their documents like Miss  flight they declared that scenes and types and Dickens were wholly impossible in which they were  perfectly right and on this rather paradoxical ground ob
jected to them as literature they were  not like life and there they thought was an end of the matter the realist for a Time prevailed  but realists did not enjoy their Victory if they enjoyed anything very long a more symbolic  School of criticism soon arose men saw that it was necessary to give a much deeper and more delicate  meaning to the expression like life streets are not life cities and civilizations not life faces  and even voices not life itself life is within and no man hath seen it
at any time as for our  meals and our manners and our daily dress these are things exactly like sonnets they're random  symbols of the Soul one man man tries to express himself in books another in Boots both probably  fail our solid houses and square meals are in the strict sense fiction they are things made up to  typify our thoughts the coat a man wears may be wholly fictitious the movement of his hands may  be quite unlike life this much the intelligence of man soon perceived and by this much
dickens's  Fame should have greatly profited for Dickens is like life in the truer sense in the sense that he  is akin to the living principle in us and in the universe he is like life at least in this detail  that he is alive his art is like life because like life it cares for nothing outside itself and goes  on its way rejoicing both produce monsters with a kind of carelessness like enormous byproducts  life producing the rhinoceros and art Mr bunsby art indeed copies life in not copying Life
For  Life copies nothing dickens's art is like life because like life it is irresponsible because  like life it is incredible yet the return of this realization has not greatly profited Dickens  the return of romance has been almost useless to this great romantic he has gained as little  from the fall of the realists as from their Triumph there has been a revolution there has been  a counterrevolution there has been no restoration and the reason of this brings us back to that  atmosphere of pop
ular optimism of which I spoke and the shortest way of expressing the more recent  neglect of Dickens is to say that for our time and taste he exaggerates the wrong thing exaggeration  is the definition of art that's both both Dickens and the moderns understood art is in its inmost  nature fantastic time brings queer Revengers and while the realists were yet living the art of  Dickens was justified by Aubrey Bley but men like Aubry Bley were allowed to be fantastic because  the mood which they o
ver strained and overstated was a mood which their period understood Dickens  over strains and over States a mood alod does not understand the truth he exaggerates is exactly  this old Revolution sense of infinite opportunity and boisterous Brotherhood and we resent his  undue sense of it because we ourselves have not even a due sense of it we feel troubled  with too much where we have too little we wish he would keep it within bounds for we are all  exact and scientific on the subjects we do no
t care about we all immediately detect exaggeration  in an exposition of Mormonism or patriotic speech from Paraguay we all require sobriety on the  subject of the sea serpent but the moment we begin to believe a thing ourselves that moment  We Begin easily to overstate it and the moment our souls become serious our words become a little  wild and certain moderns are thus placed towards exaggeration they permit any writer to emphasize  doubts for instance for doubts are their religion but they p
ermit no man to emphasize dogmas if  a man be the mildest Christian they smell K but he can be a raving whim of pessimism and they call  it temperament if a moralist paints a wild picture of immorality they doubt its truth they say that  devils are not as black as they are painted but if a pessimist paints a wild picture of melancholy  they accept the whole horrible psychology and they never ask if devils are as blue as they are  painted it is evident in short why even those who admire exaggerat
ion do not admire Dickens he is  exaggerating the wrong thing they know what it is to feel a sadness so strange and deep that  only Impossible characters can express it they do not know what it is to feel the joy so vital  and violent that only only Impossible characters can express that they know that the soul can be so  sad as to dream naturally of the blue faces of the corpses of balair they do not know that the soul  can be so cheerful as to dream naturally of the blue face of major bagstock
they know that there  is a point of depression at which One Believes In tenter Zeal they do not know that there is a point  of exhilaration at which one believes in Mr WG to them the impossibilities of Dickens seem much more  impossible than they really are because they're already attuned to the opposite impossibilities  of metalink for every mood there is an appropriate impossibility a decent and tactful impossibility  fitted to the frame of mind every train of thought may end in an ecstasy an
d all roads lead to  elfland but few now walk far enough along the street of Dickens to find the place where the  Cockney Villas grow so comic that they become poetical people do not know how far mere good  spirits will go for instance we never think as the old folkl did of good spirits reaching to  the spiritual world we see this in the complete absence from Modern popular supernaturalism of  the old popular m we hear plenty today of the wisdom of the spiritual world but we do not hear  as our
father did of the Folly of the spiritual world of the tricks of the Gods and the jokes  of the patron saints our popular Tales tell us of a man who is so wise that he touches the  supernatural like Dr Nicola but they never tell us like the popular tales of the past of a man  who is so silly that he touched the supernatural like Boton the Weaver we do not understand the  dark and transcendental sympathy between fairies and fools we understand a devout occultism an  evil occultism a tragic occulti
sm but a faral occultism is beyond us yet a faral occultism is  the very essence of the midsummer Knight's dream it is also the right incredible essence of the  Christmas carol whether we understand it depends on whether we can understand that exhilaration is  not a physical accident but a mystical fact that exhilaration can be infinite like sorrow that  a joke can be so big that it breaks the roof of the Stars by simply going on being absurd  a thing could become Godlike there is but one step f
rom the ridiculous to the sublime Dickens  was great because he was IM moderately possessed with all this if we are to understand him at all  we must also be moderately possessed with it we must understand this old Limitless hilarity and  human confidence at least least enough to be able to endure it when it is pushed a great deal too  far for Dickens did push it too far he did push the hilarity to the point of incredible character  drawing he did push the human confidence to the point of an unc
onvincing sentimentalism you can  trace if you will the Revolutionary Joy till it reaches the incredible sapy epit you can trace the  Revolutionary hope till it reaches the repentance of D there is plenty to Carp at in this man if  you inclined to carp you may easily find him vulgar if you cannot see that he is divine and if  you cannot laugh with Dickens undoubtedly you can laugh at him I believe myself that this bra world  of his will certainly return for I believe that it is bound up with the
realities like mourning  in the spring but for those who Beyond remedy regard it as an error I put this appeal before  any other observations on Dickens first let us sympathize if only for an instant with the hopes  of the Dickens period with that cheerful trouble of change if democracy has disappointed you do  not think of it as a burst bubble but at least as a broken heart an old love affair do not sneer  at the time when the Creed of humanity was on its honeymoon treat it with the Dreadful r
everence  that is due to you youth for you perhaps a dreier philosophy has covered and eclipsed the Earth the  fierce poet of the Middle Ages wrote abandon hope all ye who enter here over the gates of the lower  world the emancipated Poets of today have written it across the gates of this world but if we are to  understand the story which follows we must erase that apocalyptic writing if only for an hour we  must recreate the Faith of Our Fathers if only as an artistic atmosphere if then you a p
essimist  in reading this story forgo for a little the pleasures of pessimism dream for one mad moment  that the grass is green unlearn that Sinister learning that you think so clear deny that deadly  knowledge that you think you know surrender the very flow of your culture give up the very Jewel  of your pride abandon hopelessness all ye who enter here end of chapter one GK chesterton's  Charles Dickens Chapter two The Boyhood of Dickens Charles Dickens was born at landport  in porty on Februar
y 7th 1812 his father was a clerk in the Navy pay office and was temporarily  on duty in the neighborhood very soon after the birth of Charles Dickens however the family moved  for a short period to norfol Street bloomsberry and then for a long period to Chatham which thus  became the real home and for all serious purposes the native place of Dickens the whole story of his  life moves like a canterberry pilgrimage along the great roads of Kent John Dickens his father was  as stated a clerk but s
uch mere terms of trade tell us little of the tone or status of a family  Browning's father to take an instance at random would also be described as a clerk and a man of  the middle class but the Browning family and the Dickens family have the color of two different  civilizations the difference cannot be conveyed merely by saying that Browning stood many strata  above Dickens it must also o be conveyed that Browning belonged to that section of the middle  class which tends in the small social s
ense to rise the Dickens is to that section which tends  in the same sense to fall if Browning had not been a poet he would have been a better clerk  than his father and his son probably a better and richer clerk than he but if they had not been  lifted in the air by the enormous accident of a man of Genius the dickens's I fancy would have  appeared appeared in poorer and poorer places as inventory clerks as caretakers as addressers  of envelopes until they melted into the masses of the poor yet
at the time of dickens's birth  and childhood this weakness in their worldly Destiny was in no way apparent especially it  was not apparent to the little Charles himself he was born and grew up in a paradise of small  Prosperity he fell into the family so to speak during one of its comfortable periods and he  never in those early days thought of himself as anything but as a comfortable middle class  child the son of a comfortable middle class man the father whom he found provided for him was on
e  from whom Comfort Drew forth his most Pleasant and reassuring qualities though not perhaps his most  interesting and peculiar John Dickens seemed most probably a hearty and kindly character a a little  flid of speech a little careless of Duty in some details notably in the detail of Education his  neglect of his son's mental training in later and more trying times was a piece of unconscious  selfishness which remained a little acrimoniously in his son's Mind through life but even in this  ear
lier and easier period what records there are of John Dickens give out the air of a somewhat  idle and irresponsible fatherhood he exhibited towards his son that contradiction in conduct  which is always shown by the to thoughtless parent to the too thoughtful child he contrived at once  to neglect his mind and also to overstimulate it there are many recorded tales and traits of the  author's infancy but one small fact seems to me more than any other to strike the note and give  the key to his w
hole strange character his father found it more amusing to be an audience than to  be an instructor and instead of giving the child intellectual pleasure called upon him almost  before he was out of petticoats to provide it some of the earliest glimpses we have of Charles  Dickens shows him to us perched on some chair or table singing comic songs in an atmosphere of  Perpetual Applause so almost as soon as he can toddle he steps into the glare of the Footlights  he never stepped out of it until
he died he was a good man as men go in this bewildering world of  ours Brave transparent tenderhearted scrupulously independent and honorable he was not a man  whose weaknesses should be spoken of without some delicacy and doubt but there did mingle  with his merits all his life this theatrical quality this atmosphere of being shown off a sort  of hilarious self-consciousness his literary life was a a triumphal procession he died drunken with  glory and behind all this nine years wonder that fil
led the world behind his gigantic tours and  his 10,000 editions the crowded lectures and the crashing brass behind all the thing we really see  is the flushed face of a little boy singing Music Hall songs to a circle of aunts and uncles and  this precocious pleasure explains much too in the moral way Dickens had all his life The Faults  of the little boy who is kept up too late at night the boy in such a case exhibits a psychological  Paradox he is a little too irritable because he is a little
too happy Dickens was always a little too  irritable because he was a little too happy like the overwrought child in society he was splendidly  sociable and yet suddenly quarrelsome in all the Practical relations of his life life was what the  child is in the last hours of an evening party genuinely delighted genuinely delightful genuinely  affectionate and happy and yet in some strange way fundamentally exasperated and dangerously close  to tears there was another touch about the boy which made
his case more peculiar and perhaps  his intelligence more fervid the touch of ill health it could not be called more than a touch  for he suffered from no formidable malady and could always through life endure a great degree  of exertion even if it was only the exertion of walking violently all night still the streak of  sickness was sufficient to take him out of the common unconscious life of the community of boys  and for good or evil that withdrawal is always a matter of deadly importance to
the mind he was  thrown back perpetually upon the pleasures of the intelligence and these these began to burn in his  head like a pent and painful furnace in his own unaringa Garrett and there found in a Dusty Heap  the undying literature of England the books he mentions chiefly are hrey clinker and Tom Jones  when he opened those two books in the Garrett he caught hold of the only past with which he is at  all connected the great comic writers of England of whom he was destined to be the last
it must  be remembered as I have suggested before that there was something about the country in which he  lived and the great roads along which he traveled that sympathized with and stimulated his pleasure  in this old picaresque literature the groups that came along the road that passed through his own  town out of it were of the mly laughable type that tumbled into ditches or beat down the doors of  taverns under the escort of smallet and Fielding in our time the main roads of Kent have upon t
hem  very often a Perpetual procession of Tramps and Tinkers unknown on the quiet Hills of Sussex and  it may have been so also in Dickens boyhood in his neighborhood were definite Memorials of yet older  and yet greater English comedy from the height of gad's Hill at which he stared unceasingly there  looked down upon him the mon ous ghost of Falstaff Falstaff who might well have been the spiritual  father of all dickens's adorable naves Falstaff the great mountain of English laughter and Engli
sh  sentimentalism the great healthy Humane English humbug not to be matched among the Nations at this  Eminence of gads Hill Dickens used to stare even as a boy with the steady purpose of someday  making it his own it is characteristic of the consistency which underlies the superficially  erratic career of Dickens that he actually did live to make it his own the truth is that he  was a precocious child precocious not only on the more poetical but on the more prosaic side  of life he was ambitio
us as well as enthusiastic no one can ever know what Visions they were that  crowded into the head of the clever little brat as he ran about the streets of Chatham or stood  flowering at gad's Hill but I think that quite mundane Visions had a very considerable share in  the matter he longed to go to school a strange wish to go to college to make a name nor did he  merely aspire to these things the great number of them he also expected he regarded himself as  a child of good position just about t
o enter on a life of good luck he thought his home and family  a very good springboard or jumping off place from which to fling himself to the positions which  he desired to reach and almost as he was about to Spring the whole structure broke under him and  he and all that belonged to him disappeared into a Darkness far below everything had been struck  down as with the finality of a thunderbolt his lordly father was a bankrupt and in the Marshal  Le prison his mother was in a mean home in the n
orth of London wildly proclaiming herself the  principal of a girl school a girl school to which nobody would go and he himself the Conqueror of  the world and the prospective purchaser of gads Hill pass some distracted and bewildering days imp  pawning the household necessity to fagans and foul shops and then found himself somehow or other  one of a row of ragged boys in a great dreary Factory pasting the same kinds of labels onto the  same kinds of blacking bottles from morning till night alth
ough it seemed sudden enough to him the  disintegration had as a matter of fact of course been going on for a long time he had only heard  from his father dark and melodramatic Illusions to a deed which from the way it was mentioned might  have been a claim to the crown or a compact with the devil but which was in truth an unsuccessful  documentary attempt on the part of John Dickens to come to a composition with his creditors  and now in the lurid light of his Sunset the character of John Dicke
ns began to take on those  Purple colors which have made him under another name absurd and Immortal it required a tragedy  to bring out this man's comedy so long as John Dickens was in Easy circumstances he seemed  only an easy man a little long and luxuriant in his phrases a little careless in his business  routine he seemed only a wordy man who lived on bread and beef like his neighbors but as bread  and beef were successfully taken away from him it was discovered that he lived on words for  h
im to be involved in a Calamity only meant to be cast for the first part in a tragedy for him  blank ruin was only a subject for blank phrase henceforth we feel scarcely inclined to call him  John Dickens at all we feel inclined to call him by the name through which his son celebrated this  Preposterous and Sublime victory of the human Spirit over circumstances Dickens and David  Copperfield called him Wilkins mobber in his personal correspondence he called him the prodigal  father young Charles
had been hurriedly flung into the factory by the more or less careless good  nature of James lam mert a relation of his mothers it was a black Laing Factory supposed  to be run as a rival to Warren by another and original Warren both practically conducted by  another of the lam merts it was situated near Hungerford Market Dickens worked there drearily  like one stunned with disappointment to a child excessively intellectualized and at this time  I fear excessively egotistical the coarseness of
the whole thing the work the rooms the boy  the language was a sort of beastial nightmare not only did he scarcely speak of it then but he  scarcely spoke of it afterwards years later in the fullness of his Fame he heard from Forester  that a man had spoken of knowing him on hearing the name he somewhat curtly acknowledged it and  spoke of having seen the man once Forester in his innocence answered that the man said he had seen  Dickens many times in a a factory by Hungerford Market Dickens was
suddenly struck with a long and  extraordinary silence then he invited Forester as his best friend to a particular interview and with  every appearance of difficulty and distress told him the whole story for the first and the last  time a long while after that he told the world some part of the matter in the account of merstone  and grimy in David Copperfield he never spoke of the whole experience except once or twice and he  never spoke of it otherwise than as a man might speak of hell it need
not be suggested I think  that this Agony of the child was exaggerated by the man it is true that he was not incapable of  the vice of exaggeration if it be a vice there was about him much vanity and a certain virulence in  his version of many things upon the whole indeed it would hardly be too much much to say that he  would have exaggerated any sorrow he talked about but this was a sorrow with a very strange position  in dickens's life it was a sorrow he did not talk about upon this particular
dark spot he kept a  sort of deadly silence for 20 years an accident revealed part of the truth to the dearest of  all his friends he then told the whole truth to the dearest of all his friends he never told  anybody else I do not think that this arose from any social sense of disgrace if he had it slightly  at the time he was far to self-satisfied a man to have taken it seriously in afterlife I really  think that his pain at this time was so real and ugly that the thought of it filled him with
  the sort of impersonal but unbearable shame with which we are filled for instance by the notion  of physical torture of something that humiliates human ity he felt that such Agony was something  obscene moreover there are two other good reasons for thinking that his sense of hopelessness  was very genuine first of all this starless Outlook is common in the calamities of Boyhood the  bitterness of boyish distresses does not lie in the fact that they are large it lies in the fact  that we do not
know that they are small about any early disaster there is a dreadful finality a lost  child can suffer like a lost soul it is currently said that hope goes with youth and lends to youth  its wings of a butterfly but I fancy that hope is the last gift given to man and the only gift  not given to youth youth is preeminently the period in which a man Can Be lyric fanatical  poetic but youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless the end of every episode is the  end of the world but the powe
r of hoping through everything the knowledge that the soul survives  its Adventures that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged God has kept the good wine until  now it is from the backs of the elderly gentlemen that the wings of the butterfly should burst  there is nothing that so much mystifies the young as the consistent frivolity of the old they  have discovered their indestructibility they are in their second and clearer childhood and there  is a meaning in the Mart of their eyes they h
ave seen the end of the end of the world first then  the desolate finality of dickens's childish mood makes me think it was a real one and there is  another thing to be remembered Dickens was not a saintly child after the style of little dor or  Little Nail he had not at this time at any rate set his heart holy upon higher things even upon  things such as personal tenderness or loyalty he had been and was unless I am very much mistaken  sincerely stubbornly bitterly ambitious he had I fancy a fa
irly clear idea previous to the downfall  of all his family's hopes of what he wanted to do in the world and of the mark that he meant to  make there if no dishonorable sense but still in a definite sense he might in early life be called  worldly and the children of this world are in their generation infinitely more sensitive than  the children of light a saint after repentance will forgive himself for a sin a man about town  will never forgive himself for a faux there are ways of getting absolv
ed for murder there are no  ways of getting absolved for upsetting the soup this thin-skinned quality in all very mundane  people is a thing too little remembered and it must not be wholly forgotten in connection with  a clever Restless lad who dreamed of a destiny that part of his distress which concerned himself  and his social standing was among the other parts of it the least Noble but perhaps it was the most  painful for pride is not only as the modern world fails to understand a sin to be
condemned it is  also as it understands even less a weakness to be very much commiserated a very vitalizing touch  is given in one of his own reminiscences his most unendurable moment did not come in any bullying in  the factory or any famine in the streets it came when he went to see his sister Fanny take a prize  at the Royal Academy of Music I could not bear to think of myself beyond the reach of all such  honorable emulation and success the tears ran down my face I felt as if my heart were r
ent I prayed  when I went to bed that night to be lifted out of the humiliation and neglect in which I was I  never had suffered so much more there was no Envy in this I do not think that there was though the  poor little wretch could hardly have been blamed if there had been there was only a furious sense  of frustration a spirit like a wild beast in a cage it was only a small matter in the external  and obvious sense it was only Dickens prevented from being Dickens if we put these facts togeth
er  that the tragedy seemed final and that the tragedy was concerned with the super sensitive matters of  the ego and the gentleman I think we can imagine a pretty genuine case of internal depression and  when we add to the case of internal depression the case of the external oppress ression the case  of the material circumstances by which he was surrounded we have reached a sort of midnight all  day he worked on insufficient food at a factory it is sufficient to say that it afterwards appeared 
in his works at merstone and grimy at night he returned disconsolately to a lodging house for  such Lads kept by an old lady it is sufficient to say that she appeared afterwards as Mrs pipchin  once a week only he saw anybody for whom he cared a straw that was when he went to the Marshall sea  prison and that gave his juvenile Pride half manly and half snobbish a bitter annoyance of Another  Kind add to this finally that physically he was always very weak and never very well once he was  struck
down in the middle of his work with sudden bodily pain the boy who worked next to him of  course and and heavy lad named Bob Fagan who had often attacked Dickens on the most unreasonable  ground of his being a gentleman suddenly showed that enduring sanity of compassion which Dickens  had destined to show so often in the characters of the common and unclean Fagan made a bed for his  sick companion out of the straw in the workroom and filled empty blacking bottles with hot water  all day when th
e evening came and Dickens was somewhat recovered Bob insisted on escorting  the boy home to his father the situation was as poignant as a sort of tragic farce Fagan in  his wooden headed shy would have died in order to take Dickens to his family Dickens in his bitter  gentility would have died rather than let Fagan know that his family were in the Marshall sea  so these two young idiots tramped the tedious streets both stubborn both suffering for an idea  the advantage certainly was with Fagan
who was suffering for a Christian Compassion while Dickens  was suffering for a pagan Pride at last Dickens flung off his friend with desperate farewell and  thanks and dashed up the steps of a strange house on the Su side he knocked and rang as Bob Fagan  his benefactor and his Incubus disappeared round the corner and when the servant came to open the  door he asked apparently with gravity whether Mr Robert Fagan lived there it is a strange touch  the immortal Dickens woken him for an instant i
n that last wild joke of that weary evening  next morning however he was again well enough to make himself ill again and the wheels of  the great Factory went on they manufactured a number of bottles of Warren's blacking and in  the course of the process they manufactured also the greatest Optimist of the 19th century this  boy who dropped down groaning at his work who was hungry four or five times a week whose best  feelings and worst feelings were alike fled alive was the man on whom two gener
ations of comfortable  critics have visited the complaint that his view of life was too Rosy to be anything but unreal  afterwards and in its proper place I shall speak of what is called the optimism of Dickens and of  whether it was really too cheerful or too smooth but this Boyhood of his may be recorded now  as a mere fact if he was too happy this was where he learned it if his school of thought was  a vulgar optimism this is where he went to school if he leared to whitewash the universe it w
as  in a blacking Factory that he learned it as a fact there is no shred of evidence to show that  those who have had sad experiences tend to have a sad philosophy there are numberless points upon  which Dickens is spiritually at one with the poor that is with the great mass of mankind but there  is no point in which he is more perfectly at one with them than in showing that there is no kind  of connection between a man being unhappy and a man being pessimistic sorrow and pessimism are  indeed i
n a sense opposite things since sorrow is founded on the value of something and pessimism  upon the value of nothing and in practice we find that those poets or political leaders who come  from the people and whose experiences have really been searching and cruel are the most sanguin  people in the world these men out of the old Agony are always Optimist they are sometimes offensive  Optimist a man like Robert Burns whose father like dickens's Father goes bankrupt whose whole life  is a struggle
against miserable external powers and internal weaknesses yet more miserable a man  whose Life Begins gray and ends black burns does not merely sing about the goodness of life he  positively Rants and can'ts about it rouso whom all his friends and acquaintances treated almost  as badly as he treated them rouso does not grow merely eloquent he grows gushing and sentimental  about the inherent goodness of human nature Charles Dickens who was most miserable at the  receptive age when most people a
re most happy is afterwards happy when all men weep circumstances  break men's bones it has never been shown that they break men's optimism these great popular  leaders do all kinds of desperate things under the immediate scourge of tragedy they become  drunkards they become demagogues they become morph Maniacs they never become pessimists most  unquestionably there are ragged and unhappy men who we could easily understand being pessimist  but as a matter of fact they are not pessimists most unq
uestionably there are whole dim hordes of  humanity whom we should promptly pardon if they cursed God but they don't the pessimists are  Aristocrats like Byron The Men Who Curse God are Aristocrats like swinburn but when those who  starve and suffer speak for a moment they do not profess merely an optimism they profess a cheap  optimism they are too poor to afford a dear one they cannot indulge in any detailed or merely  logical defense of life that would be to delay the enjoyment of it these hi
gher optimists of whom  Dickens was one do not approve of the universe they do not even admire the universe they fall  in love with it they Embrace Life too close to criticize or even see it it existence to such men  has the wild beauty of a woman and those love her with most intensity who love her with least cause  existence to such men has the wild beauty of a woman and those who love her with most intensity  who love her with least cause end of chapter 2 GK cheston's Charles Dickens chapter 3
the Youth of  Dickens there are popular phrases so picturesque that even when they are intentionally funny they  are unintentionally poetical I remember to take one instance out of many hearing a heated  secularist in Hyde Park appli to some person or other the Exquisite expression a sky pilot  subsequent inquiry has taught me that the term is intended to be comic and even contemptuous but in  the first freshness of it I went home repeating it to myself like a new poem few of the pious Legends 
have conceived so strange and yet Celestial a picture as this of a pilot in the sky leaning on  his Helm above the empty heavens and carrying his cargo of souls higher than the loneliest Cloud  the phras is like a lyric of Shelly or to take another instance from another language the French  have an incomparable idiom for a boy playing truant he goes to the bushy school or the school  among the bushes how admirably this accidental expression the bushy school not to be lightly  confounded with th
e art school at bushy how admirably this bushy School expresses half the  modern Notions of a more natural education the two words Express the whole poetry of woodsworth  the whole philosophy of thorough and are quite as good literature as either now among a million of  such scraps of inspired slang there is one which describes a certain side of Dickens better than  pages of explanation the phrase appropriately enough occurs at least once in his works and  that on a fitting occasion when job tro
tton is sent by Sam on a wild chase after Mr perer the  solicitor Mr perus Clark condoles with job upon the lateness of the hour and the fact that all  habitable places are shut up my friend said Mr perus Clark you've got the key of the street Mr  Clark who was a flippant and scornful young man May perhaps be pardoned if he used this expression  in a flippant and scornful sense but let us hope that Dickens did not let us hope that Dickens saw  the strange yet satisfying imaginative Justice of th
e words for Dickens himself had in the most  sacred and serious sense of the term the key of the street when we shut out anything we  are shut out of that thing when we shut out the street we are shut out of the street few of  us understand the street even when we step into it as into a house or room of strangers few of  us see through The Shining riddle of the street the strange folk that belong to the street only  the street walker or the street Arab the nomads who generation after generation
have kept their  ancient secrets in the full blaze of the sun of the street at night many of us know even less  the street at night is a great house locked up but but Dickens had if ever man had the key of the  street his stars were the lamps of the street his hero was the man in the street he could open the  inmost door of his house the door that leads into that secret passage which is lined with houses and  roofed with stars this silent transformation into a citizen of the street took place du
ring those  dark days of Boyhood when Dickens was drudging at the factory whenever he had done drudging he  had no other resource but drifting and he drifted over half London he was a dreamy child thinking  mostly of his own dreary prospects yet he saw and remembered much of the streets and squares he  passed indeed as a matter of fact he went the right way to work unconsciously to do so he did  not go in for observation a prick habit he did not look at chering Cross to improve his mind  or coun
t the lamposts in hbor to practice his arithmetic but unconsciously he made all these  places the scenes of the Monstrous drama in his miserable little soul he walked in darkness under  the Lambs of hbor and was crucified at Charing Cross so for him ever afterwards these places had  the beauty that only belongs to battlefields for our memory never fixes the facts which we have  merely observed the only way to remember a place forever is to live in the place for an hour and  the only way to live
in the place for an hour is to forget the place for an hour the UN dying  scenes we can all see if we shut our eyes are not the scenes that we have stared at under the  direction of guide books the scenes we see are the scenes at which we did not look at all the  scenes in which we walked when we were thinking about something else about a sin or a love affair  or some Childish sorrow we can see the background now because we did not see it then so Dickens did  not stamp these places on his mind h
e stamped his mind on these places for him ever after these  streets were mortally romantic they were dipped in the purple dyes of Youth and its tragedy and  Rich with irrevocable sunsets herein is the whole secret of that Eerie realism with which Dickens  could always vitalize some dark or dull corner of London there are details in the dickens's  descriptions a window or a railing or the keyhole of a door which he endows with demoniac life the  things seem more actual than things really are ind
eed that degree of realism does not exist in  reality it is the unbearable realism of a dream and this kind of realism can only be gained  by walking dreamily in a place it cannot be gained by walking observantly digus himself has  given a perfect instance of how these nightmare manuser grew upon him in his trans of abstraction  he mentions among the coffee shops into which he crept in those wretched days one in St Martin's  Lane quote of which I only recollect it stood near the church and that
in the door there was  an oval glass plate with coffee room painted on it addressed towards the street if I ever find  myself in a very different kind of coffee room now but where there is an inscription on glass and  read it backwards on the wrong side more epoc as I often used to do then in a dismal Ry a shock  goes through my blood end quote that wild word more epok is the motto of all effective realism it  is the Masterpiece of the good realistic principle the principle that the most fantast
ic thing of all  is often the precise fact and that elfish kind of realism Dickens adopted everywhere his world was  alive with inanimate object the date on the door danced over Mr Gres the knocker grinned at Mr  Scrooge the Roman on the ceiling pointed down at Mr tolken horn the elderly armchair Leed at Tom  smart these are all more eish things a man sees them because he does not look at them and so the  little Dickens dickon sized London he prepared the way for all his personages into whatever
cranny  of our city his characters might crawl Dickens had been there before them however wild were the  events he narrated as outside him they could not be wilder than the things that had gone on within  however ever queer a character of Dickens might be he could hardly be queerer than Dickens was the  whole secret of his afterw writings is sealed up in those silent years of which no written word  remains those years did him harm perhaps as his biographer forer has thoughtfully suggested by  s
harpening a certain Fierce individualism in him which once or twice during his genial Life fleshed  Like a half-hidden Knife he was always generous but things had gone too hardly with him for him to  be always easygoing he was always kind-hearted he was not always good humored those years may also  in their strange mixture of morbidity and reality have increased in him his tendency to exaggeration  but we can scarcely lament this in a literary sense exaggeration is almost the definition  of Art
and it is entirely the definition of dickens's art those years may have given him  many moral and mental wounds from which he never recovered but they gave him the key of the street  there's a weird contradiction in the soul of the born optimist he can be happy and unhappy at the  same time with Dickens the Practical depression of his life at this time did nothing to prevent him  from laying up those hilarious memories of which all his books are made no doubt he was genuinely  unhappy in the poo
r place where his mother kept School nevertheless it was there that he noticed  the unfathomable quaintness of the little servant whom he made into the marchess no doubt he was  comfortless enough at The Boarding House of Mrs roylands but he perceived with a dreadful joy that  Mrs rollin's name was pipchin there seems to be no incompatibility between taking in tragedy and  giving out comedy they are able to run parallel in the same personality one incident which he  described in his unfinished a
utobiography and which he afterwards transferred almost verbatim  to David Copperfield was peculiarly rich and impressive it was the inauguration of a petition  to the king for a bounty drawn up by a committee of the prisoners in a marshal SE a committee of  which dickens's father was the president no doubt in virtue of his oratory and also the Scribe no  doubt in virtue of his genuine love of literary flights quote as many of the principal officers  of this body as could be got into a small roo
m without filling it up supported him in front of  the petition and my old friend Captain Porter who had washed himself to do honor to so solemn an  occasion stationed himself close to it to read it to all who were unacquainted with its contents the  door was then thrown open and they began to come in in a long file several waiting on the landing  outside while one entered affixed his signature and went out to everybody in sucession Captain  Porter said would you like to hear it read if he weakl
y showed the least dis position to hear it  Captain Porter in a loud sonorous voice gave him every word of it I remember a certain luscious  role he gave to such words as Majesty gracious Majesty your gracious Majesty's unfortunate  subjects your Majesty's well-known munificence as if the words were something real in his mouth  and delicious to taste my poor father meanwhile listening with a little of an author's vanity  and contemplating not clearly the spike on the opposite wall whatever was c
omical or pathetic in  this scene I sincerely believe I perceived in my corner whether I demonstrated it or not quite as  well as I should perceive it now I made out my own little character and story for every man who put  his name to the sheet of paper end quote here we see very plainly that Dickens did not merely look  back in after days and see that these humors had been delightful he was delighted at the same  moment that he was desperate the two opposite things existed in him simultaneously
and each in  its full strength his soul was not a mixed color like gray and purple caused by no component color  being quite itself his soul was like a shot silk of black and Crimson a shot silk of misery and  joy seen from the outside his little pleasures and extravagances seem more pathetic than his  grief once the solemn little figure went into a public house in Parliament street and addressed  the man behind the bar in the following terms what is your very best the very best ale a glass  th
e man replied tuppens then said the infant just draw me a glass of that if you please with a good  head to it the landlord says Dickens in telling the story looked at me in return over the bar from  head to foot with a strange smile on his face and instead of drawing the beer looked around the  screen and said something something to his wife who came out from behind it with her work in her  hand and joined him in surveying me they asked me a good many questions as to what my name was how  old I
was where I lived how I was employed etc etc to all of which that I might commit nobody I  invented appropriate answers they served me with the eil though I suspected was not the strongest  on the prises and the landlord's wife opening the little half door and bending down gave me a  kiss end quote here he touches that other side of common life which he was chiefly to Champion  he was to show that there is no a like the Alee of a poorman's festival and no Pleasures like  the pleasures of the poo
r at other places of refreshment he was yet more Majestic I remember  he says tucking my own bread which I had brought from home in the morning under my arm wrapped up  in a piece of paper like a book and going into the best dining room in Johnson's elode Beef House in  CLA C jewy Lane and magnificently ordering a small plate of alamode beef to eat with it what the  waiter thought of such a strange little Apparition coming in all alone I don't know but I can see him  now staring at me as I ate m
y dinner and bringing up the other waiter to look I gave him a happeny  and I wish now that he hadn't taken it end quote for the boy individually the prospect seemed to  be growing dreier and dreier this phrase indeed hardly expresses the fact for as he felt it it was  not so much a run of worsening luck as the closing in of a certain and quiet Calamity like the coming  on of Twilight and Dark he felt that he would die and be buried in blacking through all this he does  not seem to have said muc
h to his parents of his distress they who were in prison had certainly a  much jollier time than he who was free but of all the strange ways in which the human being proves  that he's not a rational being whatever else he is no case is so mysterious and unaccountable as the  secrecy of childhood we learn of the cruelty of some school or child Factory from journalists we  learn it from inspectors we learn it from doctors we learn it even from sham stricken School  Masters and repented sweaters bu
t we never learn it from the children we never learn it from  the victims it would seem as if a living creature had to be taught like an art of culture the art  of crying out when it is heard it would seem as if patience were the natural thing it would seem  as if impatience were an accomplishment like Wist however this may be it is wholly certain that  Dickens might have drudged and died drudging and buried The Unborn pck but for an external accident  he was as has been said in the habit of vis
iting his father at the Marshall sea every week the  talks between the two must have been a comedy at once more cruel and more delicate than Dickens  ever described Merith might picture the comparison between the child whose troubles were so childish  but who felt them like a damned Spirit and the middle-aged man whose trouble was Final Ru and who  felt it no more than a baby once it would appear the boy broke down all together perhaps under  the unbearable buoyancy of his oratorical papa and im
plored to be freed from the factory implored  it I fear with a precautious and almost horrible eloquence the old Optimist was astounded too much  astounded to do anything in particular whether the incident had really anything to do with what  followed cannot be decided but ostensibly it had not ostensibly the cause of Charles's ultimate  Liberation was a quarrel between his father and lammer the head of the factory Dickens the Elder  who had at last left the Marshall SE could no doubt conduct a
quarrel with the magnificence of  a MOBA the result of this Talent at Earnie rate was to leave Mr lamit in a tower ing rage he had  a stormy interview with Charles in which he tried to be good tempered to the boy but could hardly  Master his tongue about the boy's father finally he told him he must go and with every observance  the little creature was solemnly expelled from Hell his mother with a touch of strange harshness  was for patching up the quarrel and sending him back perhaps with a fier
ce feminine responsibility  she felt that the first necessity was to keep the family out of debt but old John dick put his foot  down here put his foot down with that ringing but very rare decision with which once in 10 years  and often on some trivial matter the weakest man will overwhelm the strongest woman the boy was  miserable the boy was clever the boy should go to school the boy went to school he went to the  Wellington House Academy Mornington place it was an odd experience for anyone to
go from the world  to a school instead of going from school to the world they can we may say had his Boyhood after  his youth he had seen life at its courses before he began his training for it and knew the worst  words in the English language probably before the best this odd chronology it will be remembered he  retained in his semi-autobiographical account of The Adventures of David Copperfield who went  into the business of Merton and grimy before he went to the school kept by Dr Strong Davi
d  Copperfield also went to be carefully prepared for for a world they had seen already outside  David Copperfield the records of Dickens at this time reduced themselves to a few glimpses  provided by accidental Companions of his school days and little can be deduced from them about  his personality beyond the general impression of sharpness and perhaps of bravado of bright eyes  and bright speeches probably the young creature was recuperating himself for his misfortunes  was making the most of
his Liberty was flapping the wings of that Wild Spirit that had just  not been broken we hear of things that sound suddenly juvenile after his mature Troubles of  a secret language sounding like mere gibberish and of a small theater with paint and red fire  such as that which Stevenson loved it was not an accident that Dickens and Stevenson loved it  it is a stage unsuited for psychological realism the cardboard characters cannot analyze each other  with any effect but it is a stage almost divin
ely suited for making surroundings for making that  situation and background which belongs pecly to romance a Toy Theater in fact is the opposite  of private theatricals in the latter you can do anything with the people if you do not ask much  from the scenery in the former you can do anything in scenery if you do not ask much from the people  in a Toy Theater you could hardly manage a modern Dialogue on marriage but the day of judgment would  be quite easy after leaving school Dickens found emp
loyment as a Clark to Mr Blackmore a solicitor  as one of those inconspicuous under Clarks whom he afterwards turned to many grotesque uses here  no doubt he met Lon and swiveler Cher and wobbler in so far as such sacred creatures ever had  embodiments on this lower Earth but it is typical of him that he had no fancy at all to remain a  solicitor's clerk the resolution to rise which had glowed in him even as a dling boy when he gazed  at gats Hill which had been darkened but not quite destroyed
by his fall into the factory routine  which had been released Again by his return to normal Boyhood and the boundaries of school was  not likely to content itself now with the copying out of agreements he set to work without any  advice or help to learn to be a reporter he worked all day at law and all night at shorthand it is an  art which can only be affected by time and yet to affect it by overtime but learn learning the thing  under every disadvantage without a teacher without the possibilit
y of concentration or complete  mental Force without ordinary human sleep he made himself one of the most rapid reporters  then alive there is a curious contrast between the casualness of the mental training to which his  parents and others subjected him and the Savage seriousness of the training to which he subjected  himself somebody once asked old John Dickens where his son Charles was educated well really said  the great creature in a spacious way he may be said um to have educated himself h
e might indeed  this practical intensity of Dickens is worth our dwelling on because it illustrates an elementary  antithesis in his character or what appears as an antithesis in our modern popular psychology  we are always talking about strong man against weak man but Dickens was not only both a weak  man and a strong man he was a very weak man and also a very strong man he was everything that  we currently call a weak man he was a man hung on wires he was a man who might at any moment cry  lik
e a child he was so sensitive to criticism that one may say that he lacked a skin he was so  nervous that he allowed great tragedies in his life to arise only out of nerves but in the matter  where all ordinary strong men are miserably weak in the matter of concentrated Toil and clear  purpose and unconquerable worldly courage he was like a straight sword Mrs Carlile who in  her human epithets often hit the right nail so that it rang said of him once he has a face made  of steel this was probabl
y felt in a flash when she saw in some social crowd the clear eager face  of Dickens cutting through those near him like a knife any people who had met him from year to year  would each year have found a man weakly troubled about his his worldly Decline and each year they  would have found him higher up in the world his was a character very hard for any man of slow  and placable temperament to understand he was the character whom anybody can hurt and nobody  can kill when he began to report in t
he House of Commons he was still only 19 his father who  had been released from his prison a short time before Charles had been released from his had  also become among many other things a reporter but old John Dickens could enjoy doing anything  without any particular respiration after doing it well but Charles was of a very different temper  he was as I have said consumed with an enduring and almost angry thirst to excel he learned  shorthand with a dark self-devotion as if it were a sacred he
roglyph of this self-instruction  as of everything else he has left humorous and Illuminating phrases he describes how after he  had learned the whole exact alphabet quote there then appeared A procession of new Horrors called  arbitrary characters the most despotic characters I've ever known who insisted for instance  that a thing like the beginning of a cobweb meant expectation and that a pen and ink Skyrocket  stood for disadvantageous end quote he concludes it was almost heartbreaking but it
is significant  that somebody else a colleague of his concluded there never was such a shorthand writer Dickens  succeeded in becoming a shorthand writer succeeded in becoming a reporter succeeded ultimately  in becoming a highly effective journalist he was appointed as a reporter of the speeches in  Parliament first by the true son then by the mirror of Parliament and last by the morning  Chronicle he reported the speeches very well and if we must analyze his internal opinions  much better tha
n they deserved for it must be remembered that this lad went into the reporters  Gallery full of of the triumphant radicalism which was then the rising tide of the world he was it  must be confessed very little overpowered by the Dignity of the mother of parliament he regarded  the House of Commons much as he regarded the House of Lords as a sort of venerable joke it was  perhaps while he watched pale with weariness from the reporters gallery that there sank into him  a thing that never left him
his unfathomable contempt for the British constitution then perhaps  he heard from the government benches The Immortal apologies of the circumlocution office quote  then with the noble Lord or right honorable gentleman in whose Department it was to defend the  circumlocution office put an orange in his pocket and make a regular field day of the occasion then  would he come down to that house with a slap upon the table and meet The Honorable gentleman  foot to foot then would he be there to tell
that honorable gentleman that the circumlocution  office was not only blameless in this matter but was commendable in this matter was exible to the  skies in this matter then would he be there to tell that honorable gentleman that although the  circumlocution office was invariably right and wholly right it never was so right in this matter  then would he be there to tell the honorable gentleman that it would have been more to his  honor more to his credit more to his good taste more to his Good
Sense more to half the dictionary  of common place if he had left the circumlocution office alone and never approached this matter  then would he keep one eye upon a coach or crammer from the circumlocution office below the  bar and smashed The Honorable gentleman with the circumlocution office account of this matter and  although one of two things always happened namely either that the circumlocution office had nothing  to say and said nothing or that it had something to say of which the noble
Lord or right honorable  gentleman blundered one heart and forgot the other the circumlocution office was always voted  Immaculate by an accommodating majority end quote we are now generally told that Dickens has  destroyed these abuses and that this is no longer a true picture of public life such at any rate is  the circumlocution office account of this matter but Dickens as a good radical would I fancy much  prefer that we should continue his battle than that we should celebrate his Triumph e
specially  when it has not come England is still ruled by the great Barnacle family Parliament is still ruled  by the great Barnacle Trinity the solemn Old Barnacle who knew that the circumlocution office  was protection the spritely young Barnacle who knew that it was a fraud and the bewildered young  Barnacle who knew nothing about it from these three types our cabinets are still exclusively  recruited people talk of the tyrannies and anomalies which Dickens denounced as things of the  past li
ke the Star Chamber they believe that that the days of the old stupid optimism and the old  brutal indifference are gone forever in truth this very belief is only the countenance of the old  stupid optimism and the old brutal indifference we believe in a free England and a pure England  because we still believe in the circumlocution of his account of this matter undoubtedly our  Serenity is widespread we believe that England is really reformed we believe that England is really  Democratic we bel
ieve that English politics are free from corruption but this General satisfaction  of ours does not show that Dickens has beaten the Barnacles it only shows that the Barnacles have  beaten Dickens it cannot be too often said then that we must read into young Dickens and his  works this old radical tone towards institutions that tone was a sort of happy impatience and when  Dickens had to listen for hours to the speech of the noble Lord in defense of the circumlocution  office when that is he had
to listen to what he regarded as the last vaporing of a Vanishing  oligarchy the impatience rather predominated over the happiness his incurably Restless nature found  more pleasure in the wandering side of Journalism he went about wildly in post chases to report  political meetings for the morning Chronicle and what gentlemen they were to serve he exclaimed  in such things at the old morning Chronicle great or small it did not matter I've had to charge for  half a dozen breakdowns in half a do
zen times as many miles I've had to charge for the damage of  a great coat from the drippings of a blazing wax candle in writing through the smallest hours of  the night in a swift flying carriage and peir end quot and againe I have often transcribed for the  printer from my shorthand notes important public speeches in which the strictest accuracy was  required and a mistake in which would have been to a young man severely compromising writing on  the palm of my hand by the light of a dark Lante
rn in a post Chas and fall Galloping through a wild  country and through the dead of the night at the then surprising raate of 15 M an hour end quote  the whole of dickens's life goes with the throb of that nocturnal Gallop all its real wildness  shot through with an imaginative wickedness he afterwards uttered in the drive of Jonas chuwit  through the storm all this time and indeed from a time of which no measure can be taken the  creative part of his mind had been in a stir or even a fever whi
le still a small boy he had  written for his own Amusement some sketches of queer people he had met notably one of his uncle's  Bara whose principal hobby was pointing out what Napoleon ought to have done in the matter of  military tactics he had a notebook full of such sketches he had sketches not only of persons  but of places which were to him almost more personal than persons in the December of 1833  he published one of these fragments in the old monthly magazine this was followed by nine ot
hers  in the same paper and when the paper which was a romantically radical Venture run by a veteran  soldier of Bolivar itself collapsed Dickens continued the series in the Evening Chronicle  an offshoot of the morning paper of the same name these were the pieces afterwards published  and known as the sketches by BOS and with them Dickens enters literature he also enters upon  many things about this time he enters manhood and among other things marriage a friend of his on  The Chronicle George
Hogarth had several daughters with all of them Dickens appears to have been on  terms of great affection this sketch is wholly literary and I do not feel it necessary to do more  than touch upon such incidents as his marriage just as I shall do no more than touch upon the  tragedy that ultimately overtook it but it may be suggested here that the final misfortunes were  in some degree due to the circumstances attending the original action a very young man fighting  his way and AC excessively poor
with no memories for years past that were not monotonous and mean  and with its strongest and most personal memories quite ignominious and unendurable was suddenly  thrown into the Society of a whole family of girls I think it does not overstate his weakness  and I think it partly constitutes the excuse to say that he fell in love with a Chance of love  as sometimes happens in the undeveloped youth an abstract femininity simply intoxicated him in what  came afterwards he was enormously to blame
but I do not think that his was a case of cold division  from a woman whom he had once seriously and singly loved he had been bewildered in a burning Haze  I will not say even of first love but of first flirtations the whole family stimulated him before  he fell in love with one of them and it continued to stimulate him long after he' quarreled with her  for causes that did not even destroy his affection for her this view is strikingly supported by  all the the details of his attitude towards a
ll the other members of the Sacred House of  Hogarth one of the sisters remained of course his dearest friend till death another who had died  he worshiped like a saint and he always asked to be buried in her grave he was married on April 2nd  1836 Forster remarks that the few days before the announcement of their marriage in the times the  same paper contained another announcement that on the 31st would be published the first number of  a work called the postumus papers of the pck club it is th
e beginning of his career the sketches  a part from Splendid splashes of humor here and there are not manifestations of the man of Genius  we might almost say that this book is one of the few books by Dickens which would not standing  alone have made his Fame and yet standing alone it did make his Fame his contemporaries could  see a new spirit in it where we familiar with the larger fruits of that Spirit can only see a  continuous a of the praic and almost wooden wit of the comic books of that
day but in any case  we should hardly look in the Man's first book for the fullness of his contribution to letters  youth is almost everything else but it is hardly ever original we read of young man bursting on the  old world with a new message but Youth and actual experience is the period of imitation and even of  obedience subjectively its emotions may be furious and headlong but its only external outcome is a  fur imitation and headlong obedience as we grow older we learn the special thing w
e have to do  as a man goes on towards the grave he discovers gradually a philosophy he can really call Fresh a  style he can really call his own and as he becomes an older man he becomes a new writer Ipson in his  youth wrote almost classic plays about Vikings it was in his old age that he began to break windows  and throw fireworks the only fold that was said of Browning's first poems was that they had too  much beauty of imagery and too little wealth of thought the only fault that is of Brown
ing's  first poems was that they were not brownings in one way however the sketches by bosss do stand  out very symbolically in the life of Dickens they constitute in a manner the dedication of him  to his special task the sympathetic and yet exaggerated painting of the poor middle class he  was to make men feel that this dull middle class was actually a kind of elfland but here again the  work is rude and undeveloped and this is shown in the fact that it is a great deal more exaggerative  than
it is sympathetic we are not of course concerned with the kind of people who say that  they wish that Dickens was more refined if those people are ever refined it will be by fire but  there is in this earliest work an element which almost vanished in the later ones an element which  is typical of the middle classes in England and which is in a more real sense to be called vulgar  I mean that in these little fces there is a trace in the author as well as in the characters of that  petty sense of
social precedence that Hub up of little unheard of uies which is the only serious  sin of bourjois of Britain it may seem pragmatical for example to instance such Rowdy false as the  story of Horatio sparkin which tells how a tough hunting family entertained a rhetorical youth  thinking he was a Lord and found he was a Draper's assistant no doubt they were very snobbish in  thinking the Lord must be eloquent but we cannot help feeling that Dickens is almost equally  snobbish in feeling it is so
very funny that a Draper's assistant should be eloquent a free man  one would think would despise the family quite as much if Horatio had been a peer here and here only  there is just a touch of the vulgarity of the only vulgarity of the world out of which Dickens came  for the only element of loness that there really is in our populace is exactly that they are full  full of superiorities and very conscious of class Shades imperceptible to the eyes of others but as  hard and hay as a Brahman cas
t separate one kind of charwoman from another kind of charwoman  Dickens was destined to show with inspired symbolism all the immense virtues of the Democracy  he was to show them as the most humorous part of our civilization which they certainly are he was  to show them as the most promptly and practically compassionate part of our civilization which they  certainly are the democracy has 100 exuberant good qualities the democracy has only one outstanding  sin it is not Democratic end of chapter
3 GK Chester's Charles Dickens chapter 4 the pck papers  round the birth of pck broke one of those literary quarrels that were too common in the life of  Dickens such quarrels indeed generally arose from some definite mistake or misdemeanor on the part  of somebody else but they were also made possible by an indefinite touchiness and susceptibility in  Dickens himself he was so sensitive on points of personal authorship that even his sacred sense of  humor deserted him he turned people into mor
tal enemies whom he might have turned very easily into  Immortal jokes it was not that he was lawless in a sense it was that he was too legal but he did  understand the principle of De Minimus non kurat Lex anybody could draw him any fool could make a  fool of him any obscure madman who chose to say that he had written the whole of Martin cherwitz  and penel liner who chose to say that Dickens were no shirt collar could call forth the most  passionate and public denials as of a man pleading not
guilty to Witchcraft or high treason hence  the letters of Dickens are filled with a certain singular type of quarrels and complaints quarrels  and complaints in which one cannot say that he was on the wrong side but that merely even in being  on the right side he was in the wrong place he was not only a generous man he was even a just man to  have made against anybody a charge or claim which was unfair would have been unsupportable to him  his weakness was that he found the unfair claim or char
ge however small equally unsupportable  when brought against himself no one can say of him that he was often wrong we can only say  of him as a many pugnacious people that he was too often right the incidents attending the  inauguration of the pck papers are not perhaps a perfect example of this trait because Dickens was  here a hand-to-mouth journalist and the blow might possibly have been more disabling than those  struck at him in his days of Triumph but all through those days of Triumph and
the end of his  death Dickens took this old teacup Tempest with the most terrible gravity Drew up declarations  called Witnesses preserved pulverizing documents and handed on to his children the Forgotten Folly  as if it had been a Highland Feud yet the unjust claim made on him was so much more ridiculous even  than it was unjust that it seemed strange that he should have remembered it for a month except for  his Amusement the facts are simple and familiar to most people the Publishers Chapman a
nd Hall  wish to produce some kind of Serial with comic illustrations by a popular caricaturist named  Seymour this artist was chiefly famous for his running of the faral side of sport and to suit  his specialty it was very vaguely suggested to Dickens by the Publishers he should write about a  nimrod club or some such thing a club of amateur Sportsmen for doomed to Perpetual ignominies  Dickens objected in substance upon two very sensible grounds first that sporting sketches  were stale and sec
ond that he knew nothing about sport he changed the idea to that of a general  club for travel and investigation the pck club and only retained one fatal Sportsman Mr Winkle  The Melancholy remnant of the Nimrod club that never was the first seven pictures appeared with  the signature of Seymour and the letter press of Dickens and in them Winkle and his woes were  fairly but not extraordinarily prominent before the eighth picture appeared Seymour had blown his  brains out after brief interval of
the employment of a man named bus Dickens obtained the assistance  of habblet K Brown whom he called Fizz and may almost in a certain sense be said to have gone  into partnership with him they were as suited to each other and to the common creation of unique  thing as Gilbert and Sullivan no other illustrator ever created the true Dickens characters with  the precise and correct Quantum of exaggeration no other illustrator ever breathed the true  dickens's atmosphere in which clerks are clerks
and yet at the same time elves to the tame mind  the above Affair does not seem to offer anything very promising ing in the way of a row but  Seymour's Widow managed to evolve it out of it the proposition that somehow or another her husband  had written pck or at least had been responsible for the genius and success of it it does not  appear that she had anything at all resembling a reason for this opinion except the unquestionable  fact that the Publishers had started with the idea of employing
Seymour this was quite true and  Dickens who over and above his honesty was far too quarrelsome a man not to try and keep in the  right and who showed a sort a fierce carefulness in telling the truth in such cases never denied  it or attempted to conceal it it was quite true that at the beginning instead of Seymour being  employed to illustrate Dickens Dickens may have said to have been employed to illustrate Seymour  but that Seymour invented anything in the letter press large or small that he
invented either the  outline of Mr pickwick's character or the number of Mr pwi's cabman that he invented either the  story or so much as a semicolon in the story story was not only never proved but was never very  lucidly alleged dickin fills his letters with all that there is to be said against Mrs Seymour's  idea is not very clear whether there was anything definitely said for it upon the mere superficial  fact and law of the affair Dickens ought to have been Superior to this silly business
but in a  much deeper and a much more real sense he want to have been Superior to it it did not really touch  him or his greatness at all even as an abstract Alle ation if Seymour had started the story had  provided Dickens with his puppets tutman or jingle Dickens would still have been Dickens and Seymour  only Seymour as a matter of fact it happened to be a contemptible lie but it would have been an  equally contemptible Truth for the fact is that the greatness of Dickens and especially the  g
reatness of Pickwick is not of a kind that could be affected by somebody else suggesting the  first idea it could not be affected by somebody else writing the first chapter if it could be  shown that another man had suggested to Hawthorne let us say the primary conception of The Scarlet  Letter Hawthorne who worked it out would still be an Exquisite Workman but he would be by so much  less a Creator but in a case like pck there's a simple test if Seymour gave Dickens the main  idea of pck what w
as it there is no primary con section of pck for anyone to suggest Dickens not  only did not get the general plan from SE more he did not get it at all in pck and indeed in Dickens  generally it is in the details that the author is creative it is in the details that he is vast the  power of the book Lies in the perceptual torrent of ingenious and inventive treatment the theme at  least the beginning simply does not exist the idea of tutman the fat lady killer is in itself quite  Drury and vulgar
is the detailed tutman as as he is developed who is unexpectedly amusing the idea  of Winkle the clumsy Sportsman is in itself quite stale it is as he goes on repeating himself  that he becomes original we hear of men whose imagination can touch with magic the dull facts  of our life but dickens's yet more indomitable fancy could touch with magic even our dull fiction  before we are halfway through the book the stock characters of dead and Damned forces astonish  us like Splendid strangers Seym
our's claim then viewed symbolically was even a compliment it was  true in spirit that Dickens obtained or might have obtained the start of pck from somebody else  from anybody else for he had a more gigantic energy than the energy of the intense artist the  energy which is prepared to write something he had the energy which is prepared to write anything he  could have finished any man's Tale he could have breathed the Mad life into any man's characters  if it had been true that Seymour had plan
ned out pck if seore had fixed the chapters and named  and numbered the characters his slave would have shown even in these shackles such a freedom  as would have shaken the world if Dickens had been forced to make his instance out of a chapter in  a child's reading book or the names in a scrap of newspaper he would have turned them in 10 pages  into creatures of his own Seymour as I say was in a manner right in spirit Dickens would at this  time get his materials from anywhere in the sense that
he cared little what materials they were  he would not have stolen but if he had stolen he would never have imitated the power which he  proceeded at once to exhibit was the one power in letters which literally cannot be imitated the  primary inexhaustible Creative Energy the enormous pedality of Genius which no one but another genius  could pair par it to claim to have originated an idea of Dickens is like claiming to have  contributed one glass of water to Niagara wherever this stream or that
stream started the Colossal  cataract of absurdity went roaring night and day the volume of his invention overwhelmed all doubt  of his inventiveness Dickens was evidently a great man unless he was a thousand man the actual  circumstances of the writing and Publishing of pck shows that while Seymour's specific claim was  absurd dickens's indignant exactitude about every jot and title of authorship was also inappropriate  and misleading the pck papers when all is said and done did emerge out of
a haze of suggestions  and proposals in which more than one person was involved the Publishers failed to base a story on  a nimrod Club but they succeeded in basing it on a club Seymour by his virtue of idiosyncrasy if  he did not create brought about the creation of Mr Winkle Seymour sketched Mr Pickwick as a tall  thin man Mr Chapman apparently without any word from Dickens boldly turned him into a short fat  man Chapman took the type from a corpulent old Dandy named Foster who wore tights and
Gators and  lived at Richmond in this sense we were affected by this idle aspect of the thing we might call  Chapman the real originator of pck but as I have suggested originating pck is not the point it  was quite easy to originate pck the difficulty was to write it however such things may be there  can be no question of the result of this chaos in the pck papers Dickens sprang suddenly from a  comparatively low level to a very high one to the levels of sketches by boss he never afterwards  de
scended to the level of the pck papers it is doubtful if he ever afterwards Rose pck indeed  indeed is not a good novel but is not a bad novel for it is not a novel at all in one sense indeed  it is something nobler than a novel for no novel with a plot and a proper termination can emit that  sense of everlasting youth a sense as of the Gods gone wandering in England this is not a novel for  all novels have an end and pck properly speaking has no end he is equal unto the angels the point  at whi
ch as a fact we find the printer matter terminates is not an end in any artistic sense  of the word even as a boy I believe there was some more pages that were torn out of my copy and  I am looking for them still the book might have been cut short anywhere else it might have been  cut short after Mr pck was released by Mr nutkins or after Mr pck was fished out of the water or at  a hundred other places and we should still have known that this was not not really the story's  end we should have kn
own that Mr pck was still having the same high Adventures on the same High  Roads as it happens the book ends after Mr pck has taken a house in the neighborhood of dowitch  but we know he did not stop there we know he broke out that he took again the road of the high  Adventures we know that if we take it ourselves in any acre of England we may come suddenly upon him  in a lane but this relation of pck to the strict form of fiction demands a further word which  should indeed be said in any case
before the consideration of any or all of the Dickens Tales  dickens's work is not to be reckoned in any novels at all dickens's work is to be reckoned Always  by characters sometimes by groups oftener by episodes but never by novels you cannot discuss  whether Nicholas nickelby is a good novel or whether our mutual friend is a bad novel strictly  there is no such novel as Nicholas nickelby there is no such novel as our mutual friend they are  simply lengths cut from the following a mixed substa
nce called Dickens A substance of which  any given length will be certain to contain a given proportion of brilliant or of bad stuff you  can say according to your assumptions the crummel part is perfect or the boffins are a mistake  just as a man watching a river go by him could count here a floating flower and then a streak  of scum but you cannot artistically divide The Outpost into two books the best of his work can  be found in the worst of his Works The Tale of Two Cities is a good novel l
ittle Dora is not a good  novel but the description of the circumlocution office in little doret is quite as good as a  description of Telson Bank in The Tale of Two Cities the old curiosity shop is not so good as  David Copperfield but swiveler is quite a as good as maber nor is there any reason why the superb  creatures as a general rule should be in one novel any more than the other there's no reason why Sam  Weller in the course of his wanderings should not wander into Nicholas nickelby ther
e is no reason  why major backstock in his brisk way should not walk straight out of dban sun and straight into  Martin chuzzlewit to this generalization some modification should be added pck stands by itself  and has even a sort of unity and not pretending to Unity David Copperfield in a less degree stands  by itself as being the only book in which Dickens wrote of himself and the Tor of Two Cities stands  by itself as being the only book in which Dickens slightly altered himself but as a whole
this  should be firmly grasped that the units of Dickens the primary elements are not the stories but the  characters who affect the stories or more often still the characters who do not affect the stories  this is a plain matter but unless it be stated and felt Dickens may be greatly misunderstood  and greatly underrated for not only is his whole Machinery directed to facilitating the  self-display of certain characters but something more deep and more unmodern still is also true of  him it is
also true that all the moving machinery exist only to display entirely static character  things in the Dickens story shift and change only in order to give us glimpses of great characters  that do not change at all if we had a sequel of pck 10 years afterwards pck would be exactly the  same age we know he would not have fallen into that strange and beautiful second childhood which  soothed and simplified the end of Colonel newom newom throughout the book is an an atmosphere  of time pck through
out the book is not this will probably be taken by most modern people as Praise  of thery and dispraise of Dickens but this only shows how few modern people understand Dickens it  also shows how few understand the faiths and the fables of mankind the matter can only be roughly  stated in one way Dickens did not strictly make a literature he made a mythology for a few few years  our corner of Western Europe has had a fancy for this thing we call fiction that is for writing  down our own lives or
similar lives in order to look at them but though we call it fiction it  differs from older literatures chiefly and being less fictitious it imitates not only life but the  limitations of life and not only reproduces life it reproduces death but outside Us in every other  country and every every other age there has been going on from the beginning a more fictitious kind  of fiction I mean the kind now called folklore the literature of the people our modern novels which  deal with men as they are
are truthly produced by a small and educated section of society but this  other literature deals with men greater than they are with demigods and heroes and that is far  too important a matter to be trusted to the educated classes the fashioning of these portant  is a popular trade like plowing or brick laying the men who made Hedges The Men Who Made ditches  were the men who made deities men could not elect their kings but they could elect their gods  so we find ourselves faced with a fundamen
tal contrast between what is called fiction and what  is called folklore the one exhibits an abnormal degree of dexterity operating with within our  daily limitations the other exhibits quite normal desires extended Beyond those limitations fiction  means the common things are seen by The Uncommon people fairy tales mean The Uncommon things as  seen by the common people as our world advances through history towards its present Epoch it  becomes more specialist less Democratic and folklore turns
gradually into fiction but it  is only slowly that the old Elfin fire Fades into the light of common realism for ages after  our characters have dressed up in the clothes of Mortals they betray the blood of the Gods even  our phraseology is full of relics of this when a modern novel is devoted to the bewilderments of a  weak young clerk who cannot decide which woman he wants to marry or which new religion he believes  in we still give this knock need CAD the name of the hero the name which is th
e crown of Achilles  the popular preference for a story with a happy ending is not or at least was not a mere sweet  stuff optimism it is the remains of the old idea of the Triumph of the Dragon Slayer the ultimate  hypothesis of the man beloved of heaven but there is another and more intangible trace of this  fading supernaturalism a trace very Vivid to the reader but very elusive to the critic it is  a certain air of endlessness in the episodes even in the shortest episodes a sense that althou
gh we  leave them they still go on our modern attraction to short stories is Not an Accident of form it  is the sign of a real sense of fleetingness and frugality it means that existence is only an  impression or perhaps only an illusion a short story of today has the air of a dream it has  the irrevocable Beauty beauty of a falsehood we get a glimpse of great Streets of London or  red Plains of India as in an opium Vision we see people arresting people with fiery and appealing  faces but when t
he story is ended the people are ended we have no Instinct of anything ultimate  enduring Behind these episodes the moderns in a word describe life in short stories because they  are possessed with the sentiment that life itself is an uncommonly short story and perhaps not a  true one but in this elder literature even in the comic literature indeed especially in the comic  literature the reverse is true the characters are felt to be fixed things of which we have fleeting  glimpses that is they a
re felt to be divine Uncle Toby is talking forever as the elves are dancing  forever we feel that whenever we hammer on the house of fala fala will be at home we feel it as  a pagan would feel feel that if a cry broke the silence after ages of unbelief Apollo would still  be listening in his Temple these writers may tell short stories but we feel they are only parts  of a long story and here in lies the particular significance the particular sacredness even of  Penny dreadfuls and the common pri
nted matter made for our Aon boys here in dim and desperate  forms under the ban of our BAS culture stormed up by by silly magistrates sneered at by silly  School Masters here is the old popular literature still popular here is the unmistakable voluminous  the Thousand And1 Tales of Dick Deadshot like the Thousand And1 Tales of Robin Hood here is the  splendid and static Boy the boy who remains a boy through a thousand volumes and a thousand  years here in mean alleys and dim shops shadowed in S
hame by the police mankind is still driving  its dark trade in Heroes and elsewhere and in all other ages in braver fashion under cleaner  Skies the same Eternal tal telling goes on and the whole mortal world is a factory of Immortals  Dickens was a mythologist rather than a novelist he was the last of the mythologists and perhaps  the greatest he didn't always managed to make his characters men but he always managed at the  least to make them gods they are creatures like punch or father Christm
as they live statically  in a Perpetual summer of being themselves it is not the aim of Dickens to show the effect of the  time and Circumstance upon a character it is not even his aim to show the effect of a character  on time and Circumstance it is worth remark in passing that whenever he tried to describe change  in a character he made a mess of it as in the repentance of DMI or the apparent deterioration  of boffin it was his aim to show character hung in a kind of happy void in a world apar
t from time  yes and essentially apart from circumstance though the phrase may seem odd in connection with the  Godlike horse play of pck but all the pickwickian events wild as they often are were only designed  to display the greater wildness of souls or sometimes merely to bring the reader within touch  so to speak of that wildness the author would have fired Mr pck out of a Kinnon to get him to wles  by Christmas he would have taken the roof off to drop him into Bob Sawyer's party but once pc
k  at wles with his punch and a group of gorgeous personalities and nothing will move him from his  chair once he is at Sawyer's party he forgets how he got there he forgets Mrs ble and all his story  for the story was but an incantation to call up a God and the god Mr Jack Hopkins is present in  divine power once the great characters are face to face the ladder by which they climb is forgotten  and falls down the structure of the story drops to Pieces the plot is abandoned the other characters 
deserted at every kind of Crisis the whole crowd thoroughfare of the taale is blocked by two or  three talkers who take their Immortal ease as if they were already in Paradise for they do not  exist for the story the story exists for them and they know it to every man alive one must hope  it has in some manner happened that he has talked with his more fascinating friends around a table  on some night when all the numerous personalities unfolded themselves like great tropical flowers  all fell i
nto their parts as in some delightful impromptu play every man was more himself than he  had ever been in this veil of Tears every man was a beautiful caricature of himself self the man  who has known such Knights will understand the exaggerations of pck the man who has not known  such Knights will not enjoy pck nor I imagine heaven for as I have said Dickens is in this  matter close to popular religion which is the ultimate and reliable religion he conceives an  endless Joy he conceives creatur
es as permanent as Puck or pan creatures whose will to live  eons upon eons cannot SA satisfy he is not come as a writer that his creatures May copy  life and copy its narrowness he is come that they may have life that they may have it more  abundantly it is absurd indeed that Christians should be called the enemies of life because they  wish life to last forever it is more absurd still to call the old comic writers dull because they  wish their unchanging characters to last forever both popular
religion with its endless L Joys and  the old comic story with its endless jokes have in our time faded together we are too weak to desire  that undying Vigor we believe that you can have too much of a good thing a Blasphemous belief  which at one blow Wrecks All The Heavens that men have hoped for the grand old def fires of God  were not afraid of an eternity of Torment we have come to be afraid of an eternity of Joy it is not  my business here to take sides in this division between those who
like life and long novels and  those who like death and short stories my only business is to point out that those who see in  dickens's unchanging characters and recurring catch wordss a mere stiffness and lack of living  movement missed the point and nature of his work his tradition is another tradition altogether  his aim is another aim altogether to those of the modern novelists who trace the Alchemy of  experience and the Autumn tints of character he is there like the common people of all ag
es to make  deities he is there as I have said to exaggerate life in the direction of Life the spirit he  at bottom celebrates is that of two friends drinking wine together and talking through the  night but for him they are two deathless friends talking through an endless night and pouring wine  from an exhaustible bottle this then is the first firm fact to grasp about pck about pck more than  about any of the other stories it is first and foremost a Supernatural story Mr pck was a fairy  so wa
s old Mr Weller this does not imply that they were suited to swing in a trapas of gossamer it  merely implies that if they had fallen out of it on their heads they would not have died but a  speak more strictly Mr Samuel Pickwick is not the fairy he is the fairy Prince that is to say he  is the abstract Wanderer and wonderer the ulses of Comedy the half human and half Elven creature  human enough to wonder human enough to wonder but still sustain with that Merry fatalism that is  natural to Immo
rtal beings sustained by that hint of divinity which tells him in the darkest hour  that he is doomed to live happily ever afterwards he has set out walking to the end of the world but  he knows he will find an end there and this brings us to the best and boldest element of originality  in pck it has not I think been observed and it may be that Dickens did not observe it certainly  he did not plan it it grew gradually perhaps out of the unconscious part of his soul and warmed  the whole story li
ke a slow fire of course it transformed the whole story also transformed it  out of all likeness to itself about this latter point was waged one of the numberless little Wars  of Dickens it was a part of his pugnacious vanity that he refused to admit the truth of the mildest  criticism moreover he used his inexhaustible Ingenuity to find an apologia that was generally  an afterthought instead of laughing admitting in answer to criticism the Glorious improbability  of PEC sniff he retorted with a
sneer clever and very unjust that he was not surprised that the PEC  sniffs should deny the portrait of PEC sniff when it was objected that the pride of old Paul dby  breaks as abruptly as a stick he tried to make out that there had been an absorbing psychological  struggle going on in that gentleman all the time which the reader was too stupid to perceive which  is I am afraid rubbish and so in a similar vein he answered those who pointed out to him the obvious  and not very shocking fact that
our sentiments about pck are very different in the second part of  the book from our sentiments in the first that we find ourselves at the beginning setting out in  the company of a faral old fool if not a faral old humbug and that we find ourselves at the end  saying farewell to a fine old England Merchant a monument of genial sanity Dickens answered with  the same ingenious self-justification as in other cases that surely it often happened that a man met  as first array and his more grotesque
qualities and that Fuller acquaintance unfolded his more  serious merits this of course is quite true but I think an honest admir of pck we feel that is  not an answer for The Fault in pck if it be a fault is a change not in the hero but in the whole  atmosphere the point is not that pck turns into a different kind of man it is that the pck papers  turns into a different kind of book and however artistic both parts may be this combination must  in strict art be called inartistic a man is quite
artistically justified in writing a tail in which  a man as cowly as Bob Acres becomes a man as Brave as Hector a man is quite artistically justified in  writing a tale in which a man as cowardly as Bob Acres becomes a man as Brave as Hector but a man  is not artistically justified in writing a tale which begins in the style of the rivals and ends  in the style of The Iliad in other words we do not mind the hero changing in the course of a book  but we are not prepared for the author changing in
the course of the book and the author did  change in the course of this book he made in the midst of this book a great discovery which was a  discovery of his Destiny or what is more important of his duty that Discovery turned him from the  author of sketches by BOS to the author of David Copperfield and that Discovery constituted the  thing of which I have spoken the outstanding and arresting original feature in the pck papers pck  I have said is a romance of adventure and Samuel pck is the Ro
mantic Adventurer so much is indeed  obvious but the strange and stirring discovery which Dickens made was this that having chosen a  fat old man of the middle classes as a good thing of which to make a butt he found that a fat old  man of the middle classes is the very best thing of which to make a romantic Adventurer pck is  supremely origin and that it is the adventures of an old man it is a fairy tale in which the Victor  is not the youngest of the Three Brothers but one of the oldest of the
ir uncles the result is both  Noble and new and true there is nothing which so much needs Simplicity as Adventure but there  is no one who so much possesses Simplicity as an honest and elderly man of business for romance  he is better than a troop of young troubadors for the swaggering young fellow anticipates his  adventures just as he anticipates his income hence both the adventures and the income when he  comes up to them are not there but a man in late middle age has grown used to the plain
necessities  and his first holiday is a second youth a good man as sakur said with such thorough and searching  truth grow simpler as he grows older Samuel pck in his youth was probably an insufferable young  coxone he knew then or thought he knew all about The Confident tricks of swindlers like jingle he  knew then or thought he knew all about the amatory designs of Sly ladies like Mrs bardell but years  and real life have relieved him of this idle and evil knowledge he has had the high good lu
ck and  losing the Follies of Youth to lose the wisdom of Youth also Dickens has caught in a manner at  once wild and convincing this queer innocence of the afternoon of Life the round moonlike face  the round moonlike spectacles of Samuel pck move through the tail as emblems of a certain  spherical Simplicity they are fixed in that grave surprise that may be seen in babies that  grave surprise which is the only real happiness that that is possible to man pwi's round face is  like a round and ho
norable mirror in which are reflected all the fantasies of Earthly existence  for surprise is strictly speaking the only kind of reflection all this grew gradually on Dickens  is odd to recall to our minds the original plan the plan of the Nimrod club and the author who  was to be wholly occupied in playing practical jokes on his characters he had chosen or somebody  else had chosen that corpulent old simpleton as a person peculiarly fitted to fall down trap doors  to shoot over butter slides to
struggle with apple pie beds to be tipped out of carts and dipped  into horse ponds but Dickens and Dickens only discovered as he went on how fitted that fat  old man was to rescue ladies to defy tyrants to dance to LEAP to experiment with life to be a  do Machina and even a night errant Dickens made this discovery Dickens went into the pck club  to scoff and Dickens remained to pray molier and his Marquee are very much amused When Miss  Jordan the fat old middle class fellow discovers with the
light that he has been talking Pros all  his life I have often wondered whether muler saw how in this fact Miss jordane Towers above them  all and touches the Stars he has the freshness to enjoy a fresh fact the freshness to enjoy  even an old one he can feel that the common thing Pros is an accomplishment like verse and  in is an accomplishment like verse it is the miracle of language he can feel the subtle Taste  of water and roll it on his tongue like wine his simp simple vanity and verocity
his innocent  love of living his ignorant love of learning are things far Fuller of Rance than the weariness  and fishness of the sniggering Cavaliers when he consciously speaks Pros he unconsciously thinks  poetry it would be better for us all if we were as conscious that supper is supper or that life  is life as this true romantic was that Pros is actually Pros Miss Jordan is here the type Mr pck  is elsewhere the type of this true and neglected thing the Romance of the middle classes it is 
the custom in our little Epoch to sneer at the middle classes cochni artists profess to find the  Bourgeois dull as if artists had any business to find anything dull decadence talk contemptuously  if its conventions and its set tasks it never occurs to them that conventions and set tasks are  the very very way to keep the greenness in the grass and the redness in the Roses which they have  lost forever Stevenson in his incomparable Lantern bearers describes the Ecstasy of a school boy and  the m
ere fact of buttoning a dark Lantern under a dark gray coat if you wish for that Ecstasy of the  school boy you must have the boy but you must also have the school strict opportunities and defined  hours are the the very outline of that enjoyment a man like Mr pck has been at school all of his  life and when he comes out he astonishes the youngsters his heart as that acute psychologist  Mr Weller points out had been born later than his body it will be remembered that Mr pck also  when on the Esc
apade of Winkle and Miss Ellen took imoderate pleasure in the performances of a dark  Lantern which was not dark enough and was nothing but a new to everybody his soul also was with  Stevenson's boys on the gray Sands of hattington talking in the dark by the Sea he was also of the  league of the lantern Bears Stevenson I remember says that in the shops of that town they could  purchase penny pcks that remarkable cigar let us hope they smoked them and that the rotund ghost  of pck hovered over th
e rings of smoke pck goes through life with that Godlike gullibility which  is the key to all Adventures the greenh horn is the ultimate Victor in everything it is he that  gets the most out of life because pck is Led Away by jingle he will be led to the white heart in  and see the only weather cleaning boots in the courtyard because he is bamboozled by Dotson and  fog he will enter the prison house like a paladin and rescue the man and the woman who have wronged  him most his soul will never st
arve for exploits or excitements who is wise enough to be made a  fool of he will make himself happy in the traps that have been laid for him he will roll in their  Nets and sleep all doors will fly open to him who has a mildness more defiant than mere Courage the  whole is unerringly expressed in one fortunate phrase he will be always taken in to be taken in  everywhere is to see the inside of everything it is the hospitality of circumstance with torches  and Trumpets like a guest the greenhorn
is taken in by life and the skeptic is cast out by it end  of chapter four GK chesterton's Charles Dickens chapter five the great popularity there is one  aspect of Charles Dickens which which must be of interest even to that Subterranean race which  does not admire his books even if we were not interested in Dickens as a great event in English  literature we must still be interested in him as a great event in English History if he had not his  place with fielding and thery he would still have
his place with what Tyler and wils for the man  led a mob he did what no English Statesman perhaps has rarely done he called out the people he was  popular in a sense of which we moderns have not even a notion in that sense there is no popularity  now there are no popular authors today we call such authors as Mr guy boothby or Mr William L  popular authors but this is popularity altogether in a weaker sense not only in quantity but in  quality the old popularity was positive the new is negative
there is a great deal of difference  between the eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read a man  reading a leue mystery wants to get to the end of it a man reading the Dickens novel wished that it  might never End Men read a Dickens story six times because they knew it so well if a man can read a  l story six times it's only because he can forget it six times in short the diin novel was popular  not because it was an unreal world but because it was a real wor
ld a world in which the soul could  live the modern shocker at its very best is an interlude in life but in the days when dickens's  work was coming out in serial people talked as if real life were itself the interlude between one  issue of pck and another in reaching the period of the publication of pck we reach this sudden  apotheosis of Dickens hence forward he filled the literary World in a way hard to imagine fragments  of that huge fashion remain in our daily language in the talk of every
trade or public question  are embedded the wrecks of that enormous religion men give out the hires of Dickens without even  opening his books just as Catholics can live in a tradition of Christianity without without having  looked at the New Testament the man in the street has more memories of Dickens whom he has not read  than of Marie Carelli whom he has there is nothing in any way parallel to the omnipresence and  vitality in the great Comic characters of B there are no modern bumbles or PEC
sniffs no modern  gamps and MCAS Mr rard Kipling to take an author of a higher type than those before mentioned is  called called and called justly a popular author that is to say he is widely read greatly enjoyed  and highly remunerated he has achieved the Paradox of at once making poetry and making money but  let anyone who wishes to see the difference try the experiment of assuming the Kipling characters  to be common property like the Dickens characters let anyone go into an average parlor a
nd allude to  Strickland as he would allude to Mr to Bumble the beetle let anyone say that anybody is a perfect  Leroy as he would say a perfect PEC sniff let anyone write a comic paragraph for a HA paper  and allude to Mrs hawksby instead of Mrs gamb he will soon discover that the modern world has  forgotten its own fiercest woms more completely than it has forgotten this formless tradition  from its fathers the mere drgs of it come to more than any contemporary excitement the gleaning of  The
Grapes of pck is more than the whole vintage of soldiers 3 there is one instance and I think  only one of an exception to this generalization there is one figure in our popular literature  which would rarely be recognized by the populace ordinary men would understand you if you referred  currently to Sherlock Holmes sir arthon and doy would no doubt be justified in rearing his head  to the Stars remembering that Sherlock Holmes is the only really familiar figure in modern fiction  but let him dr
oop that head again with a gentle sadness remembering that if Sherlock Holmes  is the only familiar figure in modern fiction Sherlock Holmes is also the only familiar figure  in the Sherlock's Holmes Tales not many people could say off hand what was the name of the owner  of Silver Blaze or whether Mrs Watson was dark or Fair fair but if Dickens had written the Sherlock  Holmes stories every character in them would have been equally arresting and memorable a Sherlock  Holmes would have cooked th
e dinner for Sherlock Holmes a Sherlock Holmes would have driven his  cab if Dickens brought in a man merely to carry a letter he had time for a touch or two and  made him a giant Dickens not only conquered the world he conquered it with minor characters  Mr John smoker the Fant of Mr cus Bantam though he merely passes across the stage he's almost as  Vivid to us as Mr Samuel Weller the servant of Mr Samuel pck the young man with the lumpy  forehead who only says Esa to Mr podsnap's foreign gent
leman is as good as Mr pod snap  himself they appear only for a fragment of time but they belong to Eternity we have them  only for an instant but they have us forever in dealing with Dickens then we are dealing  with a man whose public success was a Marvel and almost a monstrosity and here I perceive  that my friend the purely artistic critic primed himself with flowar and turgenev  can contain himself no longer he leaps to his feet upsetting his cup of cocoa and asks  contemptuously what all t
his has to do with criticism why begin your study of an author  he says with trash about popularity boothby is popular and L is popular and mother seagull  is popular if Dickens was even more popular it may only mean that Dickens was even worse the  people like bad literature if your object is to show that Dickens was good literature you should  rather apologize for his popularity and try to explain it away you should seek to show that  dickens's work was good literature although it was popular
yes that is your task to prove that  Dickens was admirable although he was admired I ask the artistic critic to be patient for  a little and to believe that I have a serious reason for registering this historic popularity  to that we shall come presently but as a manner of approach I may perhaps ask leave to examine  this actual and fashionable statement to which I have supposed him to have recourse the statement  that the people like bad literature and even like literature because it is bad thi
s way of  stating the thing is an error and in that error lies matter of much import to Dickens and  his Destiny in letters the public does not like bad literature the public likes a certain kind  of literature and likes that kind of literature even when it is bad better than another kind  of literature even when it's good nor is this unreasonable for the line between different types  of literature is as real as the line between tears and laughter and to tell people who can only get  bad comedy
that you should have some first class tragedy is as irrational as to offer a man who is  shivering over weak warm coffee a really Superior sort of ice ordinary people dislike the delicate  modern work not because it is good or because it is bad but because it is not the thing that they  asked for if for instance you find them pent in sterile streets and hungering for adventure and a  violent secrecy and if you give them their choice between a study in Scarlet a good detective  story and the auto
biography of Mark Rutherford a good psychological monologue no doubt they will  prefer a study in Scarlet but they will not do so because the autobiography of Mark Rutherford  is a very good monologue but because it is evidently a very poor detective story they will  be indifferent to lerg not because it is good drama because it is bad melodrama they do not  like good introspective sonnets but neither do they like bad introspective sonnets of which  there are many when they walk behind the brass
of the Salvation Army Band instead of listening  to harmonies at Queen's Hall it is always assumed that they prefer bad music but it is merely that  they prefer military music music marching down the open Street and that if Dan Godfrey's band could  be sitten with salvation and lead them they would like that even better and while they might easily  get more satisfaction out of a screaming article in the war cry than out of a page of Emerson about  the overso this would not be because the page o
f Emerson is another and Superior kind of literature  it would be because the page of Emison is another and inferior kind of religion Dickens stands first  as a defiant Monument of what happens when a great literary genius has a literary taste akin to to  that of the community for this kinship was deep and spiritual dickins was not like our ordinary  demagogues and journalists Dickens did not write what the people wanted Dickens wanted what the  people wanted and with this was connected the othe
r fact which must never be forgotten and  which I have more than once insisted on that Dickens and his school had a hilarious faith  in democracy and thought of the service of it as a sacred priesthood hence there was this  vital point in his popularism but there was no condescension in it the belief that the rabble  will only read rubbish can be read between the lines of all our contemporary writers even of  those writers whose rubbish the Rabel reads Mr Fergus Hume has no more respect for the
populace  than Mr George Moore the only difference lies between those writers Who Will consent to talk  down to the people and those writers who will not consent to talk down down to the people but  Dickens never talked down to the people he talked up to the people he approached the people like  a deity and poured out his riches and his blood this is what makes the immortal bond between him  and the masses of men he had not merely produced something that they could understand but he took  it ser
iously and toiled and agonized to produce it they were not only enjoying one of the best  writers they were enjoying the best he could do his raging and sleepless nights his wild walks in  the darkness his notebooks crowded his nerves in rags all this extraordinary output was but a fit  sacrifice to the ordinary man he climbed towards the lower classes he panted upwards on weary Wings  to reach the heaven of the poor his power then lay in the fact that he expressed with an energy and  brilliancy
quite uncommon the things close to the common mind but with this mere phrase the common  mind we collide with a current error commonness and the common mind are now generally spoke of  as meaning in some manner inferiority and the inferior mind the mind of the mere mob but the  common mind means the mind of all the artists and heroes or else it would not be common Plato  had the common mind Dante had the common mind or the mind that was not common commonness means  the quality common to the Sai
nt and The Sinner to the philosopher and the fool and it was this  that Dickens grasped and developed in everybody there is a certain thing that loves babies that  fears death that likes sunlight that thing enjoys Dickens and everybody does not mean uneducated  crowds everybody means everybody everybody means Miss is Manel this lady a cled and fastidious  writer has written one of the best eules of Dickens that exist an essay In Praise of his  pungent Perfection of epithet and when I say that ev
erybody understands Dickens I do not mean  that he is suited to the untaught intelligence I mean that he is so plain that even Scholars  can understand him the best expression of the fact however is to be found in noting the two  things in which he is most triumphant in order of artistic value next after his humor comes his  horror and both his humor and his horror are of a Kind strictly to be called human that is they  belong to the basic part of us below the lowest roots of our variety his hor
ror for instance  is a healthy churchyard horror a fear of the grotesque defamation called death and this every  man has even if he also has the more delate and depraved fears that come of an evil spiritual  Outlook we may be afraid of a fine shade with Henry James that is we may be afraid of the  world we may be afraid of a taught Silence with mellink that is we may be afraid of our own  Souls but everyone will certainly be afraid of a cocklane ghost including Henry James and mink  this latter
is literally a mortal fear a fear of death it is not the immortal fear or fear  of damnation which belongs to all the more refined intellects of our day in a word Dickens  does in the exact sense make the flesh creep he does not like the decadence make the soul crawl  and the creeping of the Flesh on being reminded of its fleshly failure is a strictly Universal  thing which we can all feel while some of us are as yet uninstructed in the art of spiritual  crawling in the same way the dick K's mir
th is a part of man and Universal all men can laugh at  Broad humor even the subtle humorists even the modern flaner who can smile at her particular  combination of green and yellow would laugh at Mr ll's request for Mr fledgeby's nose in a word  the common things are common even to the uncommon people these two primary dispositions of Dickens  to make the flesh creep and to make the sides ache were a sort of twins of his Spirit they were  never far apart and the fact of their Affinity is intere
stingly exhibited in the first two  novels generally he mixed the two up in a book and mixed a great many other things with  them as a rule he cared little if he kept six stories of quite different colors running  in the same book the effect was sometimes similar to that of playing six Tunes at once  he does not mind the coarse tragic figure of Jonas chuzzlewit crossing the mental stage which  is full of the allegorical pantomime of Eden Mr chop and the water toast Gazette a scene which  is as m
uch of a Sati as guliver and nearly as much of a fairy tale he does not mind binding up  a rather pompous sketch of prostitution in the same book with an adorable impossibility like  BBY but pck is so far a coherent thing that it is coherent ly comic and consistently rambling  and as a consequence his next book was upon the whole coherently and consistently horrible as his  natural turn for Terrors was kept down in pck so his natural turn for drawing laughter is kept down  in Oliver Twist in Oli
ver Twist the smoke of the thieves kitchen hangs over the whole tail and the  shadow of Fagan Falls everywhere the little lamp lit rooms of Mr Brown low and rosem M are to all  appearance purposely kept subordinate a mere foil to the foul Darkness without it was a strange  and appropriate accident that crook shank not Fizz should have Illustrated this book there was  about crook shank's art a kind of cramped energy which is almost the definition of the Criminal  Mind his drawings have a dark str
ength yet he does not only draw morbidly he draws meanly in the  doubled up figure and frightful eyes of Fagan in The Condemned cell there is not only a baseness  of subject there is a kind of baseness in the very technique of it it is not drawn with the  free lines of a free man it has the half-witted secrecies of a hunted Thief it does not look  merely like a picture of Fagan it looks like a picture by Fagan among these dark and detestable  plates there is one which has with a kind of black di
rectness the Dreadful poetry that does not  inhere in the story stumbling as it often is it represents Oliver asleep at an open window  in the house of one of his human patrons and outside the window but as big and close as if they  were in the room stand Fagan and the foul laced monks staring at him with dark monstrous visages  and great white Wicked eyes in the style of the simple devilry of the draftsman the very naivity  of the horror is horrifying the very woodenness of the two wicked men s
eems to make them worse  than Mere Men Who are wicked but this picture of big Devils at the window sill does Express as has  been suggested above the thread of poetry in the whole thing the sense that is of the thieves as  a kind of army of devils compassing Earth and Sky crying for Oliver's soul and besieging the house  in which he is barred for safety in this matter there is I think a difference between the author  and the illustrator in Crookshank there was surely something morbid but sensiti
ve and sentimental  as Dickens was there was nothing morbid in him he had as Stevenson had more of the mere boy love  of suffocating stories of blood and darkness of skulls of jbits of all the things in a word that  are somber without being sad There is a ghastly J in Remembering our boyish reading about Sykes  and his flight especially about the voice of that unbearable Peddler which went on in a manous and  maddening sing song We'll Wash out grease stains mud stains blood stains until Sykes fl
ed almost  screaming for this boyish mixture of appetite and repugnance there is a good popular phrase  sapping on Horrors Dickens sapped on Horrors as he sapped on Christmas pudding he sapped on  Horrors because he was an optimist and could sap on anything there was no serer or simpler school  boy than trattles who covered all his books with skeletons Oliver Twist had begun in Bentley's  miscellany which Dickens edited in 1837 it was interrupted by a blow that for the moment broke  the author's
spirit and seems to have broken his heart his wife's sister Mary Hogarth died  suddenly to Dickens his wife's family seems to have been like his own his affections were heavily  committed to the sisters and of this one he was peculiarly fond all his life through much conceit  and sometimes something bordering on selfishness we can feel the redeeming note of an almost tragic  tenderness he was a man who could really have died of Love or sorrow he took up the work of Oliver  Twist Again later in
the year and finished it at the end of 1838 his work was incessant and almost  bewildering in 1838 he had already brought out the first number of Nicholas nickelby but the great  popularity went booming on the whole world was roaring for books by Dickens and more books by  Dickens and Dickens was laboring night and day like a factory among other things he edited the  Memoirs of Grimaldi the incident is only worth mentioning for the sake of one more example of  the silly ease with which Dickens w
as drawn by critic ISM and the clever ease with which he  managed in these small squabbles to defend himself someone mildly suggested that after all  Dickens had never known Grimaldi Dickens was down on him like a thunderbolt sardonically asking how  close an intimacy Lord Baybrook had with Mr Samuel peeps Nicholas nickelby is the most typical  perhaps of the tone of his earlier works it is in form a very rambling old-fashioned Romance  the kind of romance in which the hero is only a convenience
for the frustration of the villain  Nicholas is what is called in theatricals a stick but any stick is good enough to beat a squares  with that strong thwack that simplified energy is the whole object of such a story and the  whole of this tale is full of a kind of Highly picturesque platitude the wicked Aristocrats sir  malb Hawk Lord varisoft and the rest are in quate versions of the fashionable proplate but this  is not as some suppose because Dickens in his vulgarity could not comprehend th
e refinement  of patrician Vice there is no idea more vulgar or more ignorant than the notion that a gentleman  is generally what is called refined the error of the hawk conception is that if anything he is  too refined real aristocratic blackards do not Swagger and rant so well a real fast baronet  would not have defied Nicholas in the tavern with so much oratorical dignity a real fast  baronet would probably have been choked with apoplectic embarrassment and said nothing at all  but Dickens re
ad into this aristocracy a grand eloquence and a natural poetry which like all  melodrama is rarely the precious Jewel of the poor but the book contains something which is  much more deenan it is ex isly characteristic of Dickens that the truly great achievement of  the story is the person who delays the story Mrs nickelby with her beautiful Mazes of memory does  her best to prevent the story of Nicholas nickelby from being told and she does well there is no  particular necessity that we should
know what happens to meline Bray there is a desperate and  crying necessity that we should know Mrs nickelby once had a foot boy who had a wart on his nose and  a driver who had a green shade over his left eye if Mrs nickelby is a fool she is one of those  fools who are wiser than the world she stands for a great truth that we must not forget the  truth that experience is not in real life a saddening thing at all the people who have had  misfortunes are generally the people who love to talk abou
t them experience is RAR one of the  gaties of old age one of its dissipations mere memory becomes a kind of debor experience Maybe  heartening to those who are foolish enough to try and coordinate it to draw deductions from it but  to those happy Souls like Mrs nickelby to whom relevancy is nothing the whole of their past life  is like an inexhaustible Fairy Land just as we take a rambling walk because we know that a whole  district is beautiful so they indulge a rambling mind because they know
that a whole existence is  interesting a boy does not plunge into his future more romantically and at random then they plunge  into their past another gleam in this book is Mr manini of him as of all the really great Comic  characters of Dickens it is impossible to speak with any critical adequacy perfect absurdity is a  direct thing like physical pain or a strong smell a joke is a fact however indefensible it it is  it cannot be attacked however defensible it is it cannot be defended that Mr m
anini should say in  praising the outline of his wife the two contestes had no outlines and the dowagers was a damned  outline this can only be called an unanswerable absurdity you may try to analyze it as Charles  Lamb did the indefensible joke about the hair you may dwell for a moment on the dark distinctions  between the negative disqualification of the ctis and the positive disqualification of the doger but  you will not capture the violence beauty of it in any way she will be a lovely Widow
I shall be a  body some handsome women will cry she will laugh dambly this vision of demoniac heartlessness  has the same defiant finality I mention the matter here but it has to be remembered in  connection with all the comic masterpieces of Dickens Dickens has greatly suffered with the  critics precisely through this stunning Simplicity in his best work the critic is called upon to  describe his Sensations while enjoying manalia mcba and he can no more describe them than he  can describe a bl
ow in the face thus dickin in this self-conscious analytical and descriptive  age loses both ways he is doubly unfitted for the best modern criticism his bad work is below  that criticism his good work is above it but gigantic as wordin his labors gigantic as were  the exactions from him his own plans were more gigantic still he had the type of mind that wishes  to do every kind of work at once to do everybody's work as well as its own there floated before him  a vision of a monstrous magazine e
ntirely written by himself it is true that when this scheme came  to be discussed he suggested that other pens might be occasionally employed but reading between the  lines it is sufficiently evident that he thought of the thing as a kind of vast multiplication of  himself with Dickens as editor opening letters Dickens as leader writer writing leaders Dickens  as reporter reporting meetings Dickens as reviewer reviewing books Dickens for all I know is office  boy opening and shutting doors this
serial of which he spoke to Mrs Chapman and Hall began and  broke off and remains as a colossal fragment bound together under the title of Master Humphrey's  clock one characteristic thing he wished to have in the periodical he suggested an Arabian  Knights of London in which the Gog and Magog the Giants of the city should give forth Chronicles  as enormous as themselves he had a taste for these schemes or Frameworks for many tales he  made and abandoned many many he half fulfilled I strongly su
spect that he meant major Jackman in  Mrs lia's lodgings and miss lpa's Legacy to start a series of studies of that lady's Lodgers a  kind of history of number 81 Norfolk Street strand the seven poor Travelers was planned for  seven stories we will not say seven poor stories Dickens had meant probably to write a tale for  each article of somebody's luggage he only got As far as the hat and the boots this gigantesque  scale of literary architecture huge and yet curious cozy is characteristic of h
is Spirit fond  of size and yet fond of comfort he liked to have story within story like room within room of some  labyrinthine but comfortable Castle in this Spirit he wished Master Humphrey's clock to begin and to  be a big frame or bookcase for numberless novels the clock started but the clock stopped in the  prologue by Master Humphrey reappear Mr pck and Sam Weller and of that Resurrection many things  have been said chiefly expressions of a reasonable regret doubtless they do not add much
to their  author's reputation but they add a great deal to their author's pleasure it was ingrained in him  to wish to meet old friends all his characters are so to speak designed to be old friends in the  sense every Dickens character is an old friend even when he first appears he comes to us mellow  out of many imp side interviews and carries the fire light on his face Dickens was simply pleased  to meet pck again and being pleased he made the old man too comfortable to be amusing but Master 
Humphrey's clock is now scarcely known except as the shell of one of the well-known novels the  old curiosity shop was published in accordance with the original clock scheme perhaps the most  typical thing about it is the title there seems no reason in particular at the first and most  literal glance why the story should be called after the old curiosity shop only two of the  pages have anything to do with such a shop and they leave it forever in the first few pages  it is as if ther had called
the whole novel of Vanity Fair Miss pinkerton's Academy it is  as if Scott had given the whole story of the antiquary the title of the [ __ ] in but when we  feel the situation with more Fidelity we realize that this title is something in the nature of a a  key to the whole dickins romance his tales always started from some Splendid hint in the streets  and shops perhaps the most poetical of all things often set off his fancy Galloping every shop in  fact was to him the door of romance among all
the huge serial schemes of which we have spoken it  is a matter of wonder that he never started an endless periodical called the street and divided  it into shops he could have written an Exquisite romance called The Baker's shop another called  the chemist's shop another called the oil shop to keep company with the old curiosity shop some  incomparable Baker he invented and forgot some gorgeous chemist might have been some more  than mortal oil man is lost to us forever this old curiosity shop
he did happen to linger  by its tale he did happen to tell around little Nell of course a controversy raged and rages some  implored Dickens not to kill her at the end of the story some regret that he didn't kill her at the  beginning to me the chief interest in this young person lies in the fact that she is an example and  the most celebrated example of what must have been I think a personal peculiarity perhaps a personal  experience of Dickens there there is of course no Paradox at all in say
ing that if we find in a  good book a wildly impossible character it is very probable indeed that it was copied from  a real person this is one of the common places of good art criticism for although people talk of  the restraints of fact and the freedom of fiction the case for most artistic purposes is quite the  other way nature is as free as air art is forced to look probable there may be a million things  that do happen yet only one thing that convinces us is likely to happen out of a millio
n possible  things there may be only one appropriate thing I fancy therefore that many stiff unconvincing  characters are copied from the wild freak Show of real life and in many parts of dickens's work  there is evidence of some peculiar affection on his part for a strange sort of little girl a girl  with a premature sense of responsibility and Duty a sort of saintly precocity did he know some  little girl of this kind did she die perhaps and remain in his memory in colors to ethereal and  pale
in any case there are a great number of them in his Works little doret was one of them and  Florence dby with her brother and even Agnes in infancy and of course little Nell and in any case  one thing is evident whatever charm these children may have they have not the charm of childhood they  are not little children they are little mothers the beauty and Divinity in a child lie in his not  being worried not being conscientious not being like little Nell little Nell has never any of  the Sacred
bewilderment of a baby she never wears that face beautiful but almost half witted with  which a real Child Half understands that there is evil in the universe as usual however little as  the story has to do with the title The Splendid and satisfying p have even less to do with the  story dick swiveler is perhaps the noblest of all the noble creations of Dickens he has all the  overwhelming absurdity of manini with the addition of Being Human and credible for he knows that he's  absurd his huttin
is not done because he seriously thinks it's right and proper like that of Mr  Snodgrass nor is it done because he thinks it will serve his turn like that of Mr peff for both these  beliefs are improbable it is done because he real loves High futin because he has a lonely literary  pleasure in exaggerative language great drafts of words are to him like great drafts of wine pungent  and yet refreshing light and yet leaving him in a glow in unerring Instinct for the perfect Folly of  a phrase he
has no equal even among the Giants of Dickens I am sure says Mrs wackel when she has  been flirting with CHS the market Garden and reduced Mr swiveler to byonic renunciation I'm  sure I'm very sorry if sorry said Mr swiveler sorry in the possession of a CHS the abyss of  bitterness is unfathomable scarcely less precious is the Poise of Mr swiveler when he imitates  the stage brigand after crying some wine here ho he hands the flagen to himself with profound  humility and re receives it haughtily
perhaps the very best scene in the book is that between  Mr swiveler and the single gentleman with whom he Endeavors to remonstrate for having remained in  bed all day we cannot have single gentleman coming into the place and sleeping like double gentleman  without paying extra an equal amount of Slumber was never got out of one bed and if you want to  sleep like that you must pay for a double beded room his relations with the maranz are at  once purely romantic and purely genuine there is noth
ing even of dickens's legitimate  exaggerations about them a Shabby blocky good natured Clark would as a matter of fact spend  hours in the Society of a little servant girl if you found her about the house it would arise  partly from a dim kindliness and partly from that mysterious instinct which is sometimes  called mistakenly a love of low company that mysterious instinct which makes so many men of  pleasure find something soothing in the Society of uneducated people particularly uneducated  w
omen it is the instinct which accounts for the otherwise unaccountable popularity of bids  and still the pot of that huge popularity boiled in 1841 another novel was demanded and barnab  Raj supplied it is chiefly of Interest as an embodiment of that other element in dickins  the picturesque or even the pictorial Barnaby rajj the idiot with his rags and his feathers  and his Raven the bestial hangman the blind mob all make a picture though they hardly make a  novel One Touch there is in it of th
e Richer and more humorous Dickens the boy conspirator Mr Sim  tapetit but he might have been treated with more sympathy with as much sympathy for instance as  Mr dick seler for he is only the Romantic gutter snipe the bright boy at the particular age when  it is most fascinating to found a secret society and most difficult to keep a secret and if ever  there was a romantic gutter snipe on Earth it was Charles Dickens barnab Raj is no more an  historical novel than Sims secret League was a polit
ical movement but they are both beautiful  Creations when all is said however the main reason for mentioning the work here is that it is the  next bubble in the pot the next thing that burst out of that whirling seething head the tide of it  Rose and smoked and sang till it boiled over the pot of Britain and poured Over All America in  the January of 1842 he set out for the United States end of chapter 5 GK chesterton's  Charles Dickens chapter 6 Dickens and America the essential of dickens's ch
aracter was  the conjunction of common sense with uncommon sensibility the two things are not indeed in  such an antithesis as is commonly imagined great English literary authorities such as Jane  Austin and Mr Chamberlain have put the word sense and the word sensibility in a kind of opposition  to each other but not only are they not opposite words they are actually the same word they both  mean receptiveness or approachability by the facts Outsiders to have a sense of color is the  same as to
have a sensibility to color a person who realizes that beef steaks are appetizing  shows his sensibility a person who realizes that moonrise is romantic shows his sense but  it is not difficult to see the meaning and need of the popular distinction between sensibility and  sense particularly in the form called Common Sense Common Sense is a sensibility duly distributed  in all normal directions sensibility has come to mean a specialized sensibility in one this is  unfortunate for it is not the s
ensibility that is bad but the specializing that is the lack of  sensibility to everything else a young lady who stays out all night to look at the stars should  not be blamed for her sensibility to Starlight but for her insensibility to other people  a poet who recites his own verses from 10 to 5 with the tears rolling down his face should  decidedly be rebuked for his lack of sensibility his lack of sensibility to those grand rhythms  of the social harmony crudely called maners for all politen
ess is a long poem since it is full of  recurrences this balance of all the sensibilities we call sense and it is in this capacity that  it becomes of great importance as an attribute of the character of Dickens Dickens I repeat had  common sense and uncommon sensibility that is to say the proportion of interests in him was about  the same as that of an ordinary man but he felt all of them more excitedly this is a distinction  not easy for us to keep in mind because we hear today chiefly of two
types the dull man who likes  ordinary things mildly and the extraordinary man who likes extraordinary things wildly but Dickens  liked quiet ordinary things he merely made an extraordinary fuss about them his excitement was  sometimes like an epileptic fit but it must not be confused with the fury of the man of one idea  or one line of ideas he had the excess of the Ecentric but not the defects the narrowness  even when he raved like a maniac he did not Rave like a monomaniac he had no particul
ar spot  of sensibility or spot of insensibility he was merely a normal man minus a normal self-command he  had no special point of mental pain or repugnance like ruskin's horror of steam and iron or Mr  Bernard Shaw's permanent irritation against romantic love he was annoyed at the ordinary  annoyances only he was more annoyed than was necessary he did not desire strange Delights  blue wine or black women with bodair or cruel sights east of sew with Mr Kipling he wanted what  a healthy man want
s only he was Ill with wanting it to understand him in a word we must keep well  in mind the medical distinction between delicate and disease perhaps we shall comprehend it and him  more clearly if we think of a woman rather than a man there was much that was feminine about Dickens  and nothing more so than this abnormal normality a woman is often in comparison with a man at once  more sensitive and more sane this distinction must be especially Remembered in all his quarrels and  it must be most
especially Remembered in what may be called his great quarrel with America which  we have now to approach the whole incident is so typical of dickenson's attitude to everything  and anything and especially of dickens's attitude to anything political that I may ask permission to  approach the matter by another a somewhat long and curving Avenue Common Sense is a fairy threat thin  and faint and as easily lost as Gosser Dickens in large matters never lost it take as an example his  political tone
or drift throughout his life his views of course may have been right or wrong the  reforms he supported may have been successful or otherwise that is not a matter for this book but  if we compare him with the other man that wanted the same things or the other man that wanted  the other things we feel a startling absence of k a startling sense of humanity as it is and of  Eternal weakness he was a fierce Democrat but in his best vein he laughed at the [ __ ] Shure  radical of common life the red
-faced man who said prove it when anybody said anything he fought  for the right to elect but he would not whitewash elections he believed in parliamentary government  but he did not like our contemporary newspapers pretend that Parliament is something much more  heroic and imposing than it is he fought for the rights of the grossly oppressed non-conformists  but he sped out of his mouth the unction of that too easy seriousness with which they oiled  everything and held up to them like a horri w
ill mirror the foul fat face of chat band he saw that  Mr pot snap thought too little of places outside England but he saw that Mrs jellby thought too  much of them in the last book he wrote he gives us in Mr honey Thunder a hateful and wholesome  picture of all the liberal catchwords pouring out of one illiberal man but perhaps the best evidence  of this steadiness and Sanity is the fact that dogmatic as he was he never tied himself to any  passing do ma he never got into any KAC or Civic or ec
onomic fanaticism he went down the broad  Road of the Revolution he never admitted that economically we must make Hells of workhouses any  more than rouso would have admitted it he never said the state had no right to teach children  or to save their bones any more than donon would have said it he was a fierce radical but he was  never a Manchester radical he used the test of utility but he was never were utilitarian while  economists were writing soft words he wrote Hard Times which MCCA called
suen socialism because  it was not complacent wigm but Dickens was never a socialist anymore than he was an individualist  and whatever else he was he certainly was not suen he was not even a politician of any kind he was  simply a man of very clear ay judgment on things that did not inflame his private temper and he  perceived that any theory that tried to run the living State entirely on one force and motive was  probably nonsense whenever the liberal philosophy had embedded in it something h
ard and heavy and  lifeless by an instinct he dropped it out he was too romantic perhaps but he would have to do only  with real things he may have cared too much about Liberty but he cared nothing about less Fair now  among many interests of his contact with America this interest emerges as infinitely the largest  and most striking that it gave a final example of this queer unexpected coolness and cander of  his this abrupt and Sensational rationality apart altogether from any question of the a
ccuracy of  his picture of America the American indignation was particularly natural and inevitable for the  large circumstances of the age must be taken into account at the end of the previous Epoch the  whole of our Christian civilization had been startled from its sleep by trumpets to take sides  in a bewildering Armageddon often with eyes still Misty Germany and Austria found themselves on the  side of the old order France and America on the side of the New England as at the Reformation took
  up eventually a dark middle position maddeningly difficult to Define she created a democracy  but she kept an aristocracy she reformed the House of Commons but left the magistracy as it  is still a mere League of gentlemen against the world but underneath all this doubt and compromise  there was in England a great and perhaps growing mass of dogmatic democracy certainly thousands  probably Millions expected a republic in 50 years and for these the first instinct was obvious the  first instinct
was to look across the Atlantic to where lay a part of ourselves already Republican  the van of the advancing English on the road to Liberty nearly all the great liberals of the  19th century enormously idealized America on the other hand to the Americans fresh from their  first epic of arms the defeated mother country with its coronat and County magistrates was only  a broken feudal keep so much is self-evident but nearly halfway through the 19th century there came  out of England the voice of
a violent satirist in its political quality it seemed like the half  choked Cry of the frustrated Republic it had no pain with a pretense that England was already  free that we had gained all that was valuable from the revolution it poured a cataract of contempt  on the so-called working compromises of England on the oligarchic cabinets on the two artificial  parties on the government offices on the JPS on the vestries on the voluntary Charities this  satirist was Dickens and it must be remembe
red that he was not only fierce but uously readable  he really damaged the things he struck at a very rare thing he stepped up to the Grave official  of the vestri really trusted by the rulers really feared like a God by the poor and he tied round  his neck a name that choked him never again now can he be anything but Bumble he confronted the  fine Old English gentleman who gives his patriotic services for nothing as a local magistrate and he  nail them up as napkins an owl in open day for to th
is satire there is literally no answer it cannot  be denied that a man like nokins can be and is a magistrate so long as we adopt the amazing method  of letting the rich man of a district actually be the judge in it we can only avoid the vision  of the fact by shutting our eyes and Imagining the nicest rich man we can think of and that of  course is what we do but Dickens in this matter was merely realistic he merely asked us to look  on nkin on the wild strange thing that we had made thus Dicke
ns seemed to see England not at all  as the country where Freedom slowly broadened down from precedent to precedent but as a rubbish heap  of 17th century bad habits abandoned by everybody else that is he looked at England almost with  the eyes of an American Democrat and so when the voice swelling in volume reached America and  the Americans the Americans said here is a man who will hurry the old country along and Tipper  Kings and Beatles into the sea let him come here and we will show him a r
ace of free man such as  he dreams of alive upon the ancient Earth let him come here and tell the English of the Divine  democracy toward which he drives them there he has a monarchy and an oligarchy to make game of  here is a republic for him to praise it seemed indeed a very natural sequel that having denounced  undemocratic England as the Wilderness he should announce Democratic America as the promised land  and any ordinary person would have prophesied that as he had pushed his rage at the o
ld order almost  to the edge of rant he would push his encomium of the New Order almost to the edge of Kent amid  a roar of Republican idealism compliments hope and anticipatory gratitude the great Democrat  entered the great democracy he looked about him he saw a complete America unquestionably  Progressive unquestionably self-governing then with a more than American coolness and a more  than American impudence he sat down and wrote Martin chuzzlewit that tricky and perverse sanity  of his had
mutinied again Common Sense is a wild thing Savage and Beyond rules and it had turned  on them and rent them the main cause of action was as follows and it is right to record it  before we speak of the justice of it when I speak of his sitting down and writing Martin jwi  I use is of course an elliptical expression he wrote the notes of the American part of Martin CHT  while he was still in America but it was a later decision presumably that such Impressions should  go into a book and it was lit
tle better than an afterthought that it should go into Martin chwi  Dickens had an uncommonly bad habit artistically speaking of altering a story in the middle as he  did in the case of our mutual friend and it is on record that he only sent Y Martin to America  because he did not know what else to do with him and because to say truth the sales were falling  off but the first action which Americans regarded as an equally hostile one was the publication  of American notes the history of which sho
uld first be given his notion of visiting America had  come to him as a very vague notion even before the appearance of the old curiosity shop but it had  grown in him through the whole ensuing period in the plaguing and persistent way that ideas  did grow in him and live with him he contended against the idea in a certain manner he had much  to induce him to contend against it Dickens was by this time not only a husband but the Father the  father of several children and their existence made a d
ifficulty in itself his wife he said  cried whenever the project was mentioned but it was a point in him that he could never with  any satisfaction part with a project he had that Restless optimism that kind of nervous  optimism which would always tend to say yes which is stricken with an immortal repentance if  ever it says no the idea of seeing America might be doubtful but the idea of not seeing America  was Dreadful to miss this opportunity would be a sad thing he says God willing I think it
must  be managed somehow it was managed somehow first of all he wanted to take his children as well as  his wife final obstacles to this fell upon him but they did not frustrate him a serious illness  fell on him but that did not frustrate him he sailed for America in 1842 he landed in America  and he liked it as John fer very truly says it is due to him as well as to the great country that  welcomed him that his first good impression should be recorded and that it should be considered  indepen
dently of any modification it afterwards underwent but the modification it afterwards  underwent was as I have said above simply a sudden kicking against Kent that is against  repetition he was quite ready to believe that all Americans were free men he would have believed  it if they had not all told him so he was quite prepared to be pleased with America he would have  been pleased with it if it had not been so much pleased with itself the modification his views  underwent did not arise from an
y modification of America as he first saw it his admiration did not  change because America changed it changed because America did not change the Yankees enraged him  at last not by saying different things but by saying the same things they were a republic they  were a new and vigorous Nation it seemed natural that they should say so to a famous Foreigner  first stepping onto their Shore but it seemed maddening that they should say so to each  other in every car and drinking Saloon from morning
till night it was not that the Americans  in any way ceased from praising him it was rather that they went on praising him it was not merely  that their praises of him sounded beautiful when he first heard them their praises of themselves  sounded beautiful when he first heard them that democracy was Grand and that Charles Dickens  was a remarkable person were two truths that he certainly never doubted to his dying day but  as I say it was a soulless repetition that stung his sense of humor out
of sleep it woke like a  wild beast for hunting the lion of his laughter he had heard heard the truth once too often he  had heard the truth for the 999th time and he suddenly saw that it was falsehood it is true  that a particular circumstance sharpened and defined his disappointment he felt very hotly as  he felt everything whether selfish or unselfish the Injustice of the American piracies of English  literature resulting from the American copyright laws he did not go to America with any idea
  of discussing this when sometime afterwards somebody said that he did he violently rejected  the view as only describable quote in one of the shortest words in the English language end  quote but his entry into America was almost triumphal the rostrom or Pulpit was ready for  him he felt strong enough to say anything he'd been most warmly entertained by many American men  of letters especially by Washington Irving and in his consequent glow of confidence he stepped up  to the dangerous questio
n of American copyright he made many speeches attacking the American law and  theory of the matter as unjust to English writers and to American readers the effect appears  to have astounded him I believe there is no country he writes on the face of the Earth where  there is less freedom of opinion on any subject in reference to which there is a broad difference  of opinion than in this there I write the words with reluctance disappointment and sorrow but I  believe it from the bottom of my soul
the notion that I a man alone by myself in America should  venture to suggest to the Americans that there was one point on which they were neither just to  their own countrymen nor to us actually struck the boldest dumb Washington Irving Prescot Hoffman  Bryant HCK Dana Washington Alston every man who writes in this country is devoted to the question  and not one of them dares to raise his voice and complain of the atrocious state of the law the  Wonder is that the breeding man can be found with
tarity enough to suggest to the Americans the  possibility of their having done wrong I wish you could have seen the faces that I saw down both  sides of the table at hardford when I began to talk about Scott I wish you could have heard how  I gave it out my blood so boiled when I thought of the Monstrous Injustice that I felt as if I were  12T high when I thrust it down their throats that is almost a portrait of Dickens we can almost see  the erect little figure its face and hair like a flame
for such reasons among others Dickens was  angry with America but if America was angry with Dickens there were also reasons for it I do not  think that the rage against his copyright speeches was as he supposed merely National insolence and  self-satisfaction America is a mystery to any good Englishman but I think Dickens managed somehow  to touch it on a queer nerve there is one thing at any rate that must strike all Englishmen who  have the Good Fortune to have American friends that is that wh
ile there is no materialism so  crude or so material as American materialism there is also no idealism so crudee or so ideal  as American idealism America will always affect an Englishman as being soft in the wrong place and  hard in the wrong place course exactly where all civilized men are delicate delicate exactly where  all grown-up men are cause some beautiful ideal runs through this people but it runs a sland the  only existing picture in which the thing I mean has been embodied is in Stev
enson's reer in the  blundering delicacy of Jim Pinkerton America has a new delicacy a coarse rank refinement but there  is another way of embodying the idea and that is to say this that nothing is more likely than  that the Americans thought it it very shocking in Dickens the Divine author to talk about being  done out of money nothing would be more American than to expect a genius to be too high toned  for trade it is certain that they deplored his selfishness in the matter it is probable that
  they deplored his indelicacy a beautiful young dreamer with flowing brown hair ought not to  be even conscious of his copyrights for it is quite unjust to say that the Americans worship the  dollar they really do worship intellect another of the passing superstitions of our time if America  had then this patoni propriety this new raw sensibility Dickens was the man to rasp it he was  its precise opposite in every way the decencies he did respect were oldfashioned and fundamental  on top of the
se he had that lounging Liberty and comfort which can only be had on the basis of  very old conventions like the carelessness of gentlemen and the deliberation of rustics he had  no fancy for being strung up to that taught and quivering ideality demanded by American Patriots  and public speakers and there was something else also connected especially with the question of  copyright in his own pecuniary claims Dickens was not in the least desirous of being thought  too high sold to want his wages
nor was he in the least ashamed of asking for them deep in  him whether the modern reader likes the quality or no was a sense very strong in the old radicals  very strong especially in the Old English radical a sense of personal rights one's own rights  included as something not merely useful but sacred he did not think a claim any less just and  solemn because it happened to be selfish he did not divide claims into selfish and unselfish  but into right and wrong it is significant that when he a
sked for his money he never asked  for it with that shamefaced cynism that sort of embarrassed brutality with which the modern man  of the world mutters something about business being business or looking after number one he  asked for his money in a valiant and ringing voice like a man asking for his honor while his  American critics were moaning and sneering at his interested motives as a disqualification he  brandished his interested motives like a banner it is nothing to them he cries in asto
nishment  that of all men living I am the greatest Loser by it the copyright law it is nothing that I have  a claim to speak and be heard the thing they set up as a barrier he actually presents as a passport  they think that he of all men ought not to speak because he is interested he thinks that he of all  men ought to speak because he is wronged but this particular disappointment with America in the  matter of the tyranny of its public opinion was not merely the expression of the fact that Dic
kens  was a typical Englishman that is a man with a very sharp insistence upon individual Freedom it also  worked back ultimately to that larger and vager disgust of which I have spoken the disgust at the  Perpetual posturing of the people before a mirror The Tyranny was irritating not so much because  of the suffering it inflicted on the minority but because of the awful glimpses that it gave of  the huge and imbecile happiness of the majority the very vastness of the vain race enraged him its 
immensity its Unity its peace he was annoyed more with its contempt than with any of its discontents  the thought of that Unthinkable mass of millions every one of them saying that Washington was  the greatest man on Earth and that the queen lived in the Tower of London rode his right  as fancy like a nightmare but to the end he retained the outlines of his original Republican  ideal and lamented Over America not as being too liberal but as not being liberal enough among  others he used these s
omewhat remarkable words I tremble for a radical coming here unless he is  a radical and principal by reason and reflection and from the sense of right I fear that if he were  anything else he would return home at Tori I say no more on that hat for two months from this time  save that I do fear that the heaviest blow ever dealt at Liberty will be dealt by this country in  the failure of its example on the earth end quote we are still waiting to see if that prediction  has been fulfilled but nobo
dy can say that it has been falsified he went West on the great  canals he went South and touched the region of slavery he saw America superficially indeed but  as a whole and the great mass of his experience was certainly Pleasant though he vibrated with  anticipatory passion against slaveholders though he swore he would accept no public tribute in the  slave country a resolve which he broke under the pressure of the politeness of the South yet his  actual collisions with slavery and its uphold
ers were few and breef grief in these he bore himself  with his accustomed vivacity and fire but it would be a great mistake to convey the impression  that his mental reaction against America was chiefly or even largely due to his horror at the  Negro problem over and above the C of which we have spoken the weary Rush of words the chief  complaint he made was a complaint against Bad Manners and on a large view his anti-americanism  would seem to be more founded on spitting than on slavery when h
owever it did happen that  the primary morality of man owning came up for discussion Dickens displayed an honorable  impatience one man full of anti-abolitionist ardor buttonholed him and bombarded him with a  well-known argument in defense of slavery that it was not to the financial interest of a slave  owner to damage or weaken his own slaves Dickens in telling the story of this interview writes as  follows I told him quietly that it was not a man's interest to get drunk or to steal or to game
or  to indulge in any other Vice but he did indulge in it for all that that cruelty and the abuse of  irresponsible power were two of the bad passions of human nature with the gratification of which  considerations of Interest or of Ru had nothing whatever to do end quote it is hardly possible to  doubt that Dickens in telling the man this told him something sane and logical and unanswerable  but it is perhaps permissible to doubt whether he told it to him quietly he returned home in the  sprin
g of 1842 and in the later part of the year his American notes appeared and the cry against  him that had begun over copyright swelled into a roar in his rear yet when we read the notes we  can find little offense in them and to say truth less interest than usual they are no true picture  of America or even of his vision of America and this for two reasons first that he deliberately  excluded from them all mention of that copyright question which had really given him his glimpse of  how tyrannic
al a democracy can be second that here he chiefly criticizes America for faults which are  not after all especially American for example he is indignant with the inadequate character of  the prisons and Compares them unfavorably with those in England controlled by Lieutenant Tracy  and by Captain Chesterton at coldbath Fields two reformers of prison discipline for whom he had  a high regard but it was a mere accident that American jails were inferior to English there was  and is nothing in the A
merican Spirit to prevent their affecting all the reforms of Tracy and  testin nothing to prevent their doing anything that money and energy and organization Can Do  America might have for all I know does have a prison system cleaner and more Humane and more  efficient than any other in the world and the Evil Genius of America might might still remain  everything might remain that makes pogram more chop irritating or absurd and against the Evil  Genius of America Dickens was now to strike a seco
nd and a very different blow in January  1843 appeared the first number of the novel called March and chuzzlewit the earlier part of  the book and the end which have no connection with America or the American problem in any case  require a passing word but except for the two gigantic grotesque on each side of the Gateway of  the tail PE Sniff and Mrs gamp Martin CHT will be chiefly admired for its American Excursion it  is a good Saar embedded in an indifferent novel Mrs gamp is indeed a Sumptuo
us study laid on in  those Rich oily almost greasy colors that go to make the English Comic characters that make the  very diction of full star fat and quaking with jolly degradation paff also is almost perfect  and much too good to be true the only other thing to be noticed about him is that here as  almost everywhere else in the novels the best figures are at their best when they have least  to do dickenson's characters are perfect as long as he can keep them out of his stories Bumble  is a Di
vine until dark and practical secret is entrusted to him as if anybody but a lunatic would  entrust a secret to Bumble mcber is Noble when he's doing nothing but he's quite unconvinced  when he's spying on Uriah Heap for obviously neither mcber nor anyone else would employ mcber  as a private detective similarly while pecn is the best thing in the story the story is the worst  thing in peff his plot against old Martin can only be described by saying that it is as silly  as old Martin's plot agai
nst him his fall at the end is one of the rare Falls of Dickens surely it  was not necessary to take peff so seriously peff is a merely laughable character he is so laughable  that he's lovable why take such trouble to unmask a man whose mask you have made transparent why  collect all the characters to witness the exposure of a man in whom none of the characters believe  why toil and Triumph to have the laugh of a man who is only made to be laughed at but it is the  American part of March and ch
uzzlewit which is our concern and which is memorable it has the air  of a great Saar but if it is only a great slander it is still great his serious book on America was  merely a squip perhaps a damp squip in any case we all know that America Will Survive such serious  books but his fantastic book May survive America it may survive America as the knights has survived  Athens Martin chuzzlewit has this quality of great satire that the critic forgets to ask whether  the portrait is true to the ori
ginal because the portrait is so much more important than the  original who cares whether aristophanous could correctly described cleen who is dead when he so  perfectly describes the demagogue who cannot die just as little it may be will some future age care  whether the ancient civilization of the West the lost cities of New York and St Louis were fairly  depicted in the Colossal Monument of Elijah pogm for there is much more in the American episodes  than their intoxicating absurdity there is
more than humor in the young man who made the speech  about the British Lion and said I taunt that lion alone I dare him or in the other man who told  Marson that when he said that Queen Victoria did not live in the tire of London he fell into an  error not uncommon among his countrymen he has his finger on the nerve of an evil which was not only  in his enemies but in himself the great Democrat has hold of one of the dangers of democracy the  great Optimist confronts a horrible nightmare of op
timism above all the genuine Englishman attacks  a sin that is not merely American but English also the Eternal complacent iteration of patriotic half  truths the Perpetual buttering of oneself all over with the same still butter above all the big Defan  of small enemies or the very urgent challenges to very distant enemies the coward is so habitual and  unconscious that it wears the plumes of Courage all this is an English temptation as well as an  American one Martin ch it may be a caricature
of America America may be a caricature of England  but in the gravest college in the quietest Country House of England there is the seed of the  same essential Madness that fills dickens's book like an asylum with brawling chops and raving  Jefferson bricks that essential Madness is the idea that the good Patriot is the man who feels at  ease about his country this notion of patriotism was unknown in the little Pagan republics where  our European patriotism began it was unknown in the Middle Age
s in the 18th century in the making  of modern politics a patriot meant a discontented man it was opposed to the word cure which meant  an upholder of present conditions in all other modern countries especially in countries like  France and Ireland where real difficulties have been faced the word patriot means something like a  political p IST this View and these countries have exaggerations and dangers of their own but the  exaggeration and danger of England is the same as the exaggeration and
danger of the water toast  Gazette the thing which is rather foolishly called the Anglo sexon civilization is at present soaked  through with a weak Pride it uses great masses of men not to procure discussion but to procure the  pleasure of unanimity it uses masses like bolster it uses its organs of public opinion not to warn  the public but to soothe it it really succeeds not only in ignoring the rest of the world but  actually in forgetting it and when a civilization really forgets the rest of
the world lets it fall  as something obviously dim and barbaric then there is only one adjective for the ultimate fate of  That civilization and that adjective is Chinese Mar J's America is a mad house but it is a mad  house we are all on the road to for completeness and even Comfort are almost the definitions of  insanity the lunatic is the man who lives in a small world but thinks it is a large one he is  the man who lives in a tenth of the truth and thinks it is the whole the mad man cannot
conceive  any Cosmos outside a certain tale or conspiracy or Vision hence the more clearly we see the world  divided into sex and non seex into our Splendid selves and the rest the more certain we may be  that we are slowly and quietly going mad the more plain and satisfying our state appears the more  we may know that we are living in an unreal world for the real world is not satisfying the more  clear become the colors and facts of anglo-saxon superiority the more surely we may know we are  in
a dream for the real world world is not clear or plain the real world is full of bracing  bewilderments and brutal surprises Comfort is the blessing and the curse of the English and of  Americans of the pogram type also with them it is a loud Comfort a wild Comfort a screaming capering  Comfort but Comfort at bottom still for there is but an inch of difference between the cushioned  chamber and the padded cell end of chapter 6 Dickens and Christmas in the July of 1844 Dickens  went on an Italia
n tour which he afterward summarized in the book called pictures from Italy  they are of course Very vivacious but there is no great need to insist on them considered as Italian  sketches there is no need whatever to worry about them as a phase in the mind of Dickens when he  traveled out of England he never traveled out of England there's no Trace in all these amusing  pages that he really felt the great foreign things which lie in wait for us in the south of Europe  the Latin civilization the
Catholic Church the art of the center the endless end of Rome his travels  are not travels in Italy but travels in Dickens land he sees amusing things he describes them  amusingly but he would have seen things just as good in a street in pimo and described them just  as well few things were racier even in his raciest novel than his description of the marionette play  of the death of Napoleon nothing could be more perfect than the figure of the doctor which  had something wrong with its wires and
hence hovered above the couch and delivered medical  opinions in the air nothing could be better as catching of the spirit of all popular drama  than the colossal depravity of the wooden image of Sir udston low but there is nothing Italian  about it Dickens would have made just as good fun indeed just the same fun of a Punch and Judy  show performing in Longacre or in Lincoln's in fields Dickens uttered just and sinere satire  on a plish and a pod snap but Dickens was as English as any pod snap
or any florish he had  a hearty humanitarianism and a hearty sense of justice to all nations so far as he understood  it but that very kind of humanitarianism that very kind of Justice were English he was the  Englishman of the type that made free trade the most English of all things since it was at once  calculating and optimistic he respected catacombs and gondolas but that very respect was English  he wondered at brigan and volcanoes but that very Wonder was English the very conception  that
Italy consists of these things was an English conception the root of things he never  understood the Roman Legend the ancient life of the Mediterranean the world old civilization of  the Vine and Olive The Mystery of the immutable church he never understood these things and I  am glad to say he never understood them he could only have understood them by ceasing to be the  inspired Cockney that he was the rousing English radical of the great radical age in England that  Spirit of his was one of
the things that we have had which were truly National all other forces  we have borrowed especially those which flatter us most imperialism is foreign socialism is for  militarism is forign education is for strictly even liberalis m is foreign but radicalism was  our own as English as the HED R Dickens abroad then was for all serious purposes simply the  Englishman abroad the Englishman man abroad is for all serious purposes simply the English man  at home of this generalization one modification
must be made Dickens did feel a direct pleasure  in the bright and busy exterior of the French life the clean caps the colored uniforms the skies  like blue enamel the little green trees the little white houses the scene picked out in primary  colors like a child's picture book this he felt and this he put by a stroke of Genius into the  mouth of Mrs ler a London land lady on a holiday for Dickens always knew that it is the simple and  not the subtle who feel differences and he saw all his colo
rs through the Clear Eyes of the poor and  in thus taking to his heart the streets as it were rather than the spires of the continent he showed  Beyond question that combination of which we have spoken for it is for the sake of the streets and  shops and the coats and the hats that we should go abroad they are far better worth going to see  than the castles and Cathedrals and Roman camps for the wonders of the world are the same all over  the world at least all over the European World castles th
at throw valleys in the shadow ministers  that strike the sky roads so old that they seem to have been made by the gods these are all Christian  countries the marvels of man are at all our doors a laborer hoing turn-ups in Sussex has no need to  be ignorant that the bones of Europe are the Roman roads a clerk living in Lambeth has no need not to  know that there was a Christian art exuberant in the 13th century or only across the river he can  see the live stones of the Middle Ages surging toget
her towards the stars but exactly the things  that do strike the traveler as extraordinary are the ordinary things the food the clothes the  vehicles the strange things are Cosmopolitan the common things are National and peculiar  cologne Spire is lifted on the same arches as Canterbury but the thing you cannot see out of  Germany is a German beer garden there's no need for a Frenchman to go look at Westminster Abbey as  a piece of English architecture it is not in the special sense a piece of E
nglish architecture but  a handsome cab is a piece of English architecture a thing produced by The Peculiar poetry of our  cities the symbol of a certain Reckless Comfort which is really English a thing to draw a pill  gmage of the Nations the imaginative Englishman will be found all day in a cafe the imaginative  Frenchman in a handsome cab this sort of pleasure Dickens took in the Latin life but no deeper kind  and the strongest of all possible indications of his fundamental Detachment from it
can be found in  one fact a great part of the time that he was in Italy he was engaged in writing the Chimes and  such Christmas Tales Tales of Christmas in the English towns Tales full of fog and snow and  hail and happiness Dickens could find in any Street divergences between man and man deeper  than the divisions of Nations his fault was to exaggerate differences he could find types almost  as distinct as separate tribes of animals in his own brain and his own City those two homes of  a magn
ificent chaos the only two Southerners introduced prominently into his novels the two  in little dorit are popular English foreigners I had almost said stage foreigners villain is  in English eyes a southern trait therefore one of the foreigners is villainous vivacity is in  English eyes another southern trait therefore the other Foreigner is vivacious but we can see  from the outlines of both that Dickens did not have to go to Italy to get them while poor panting  millionaires poor tired Earls
and poor godforsaken American men of culture are plotting about in  Italy for literary inspiration Charles Dickens made up the whole of that Italian romance as I  strongly suspect from the faces of two London organ Grinders in the sunlight of the Southern  world he was still dreaming of the Fire Light of the north among the Palaces and the white  Campanelli he shut his eyes to see marleybone and dreamed a lovely dream of Chimney pots he was  not happy he said without streets the very fness and s
moke of London were lovable in his eyes and  F his Christmas tales with the Vivid vapor in the clear skies of the South he saw a far off the fog  of London like a sunset cloud and longed to be in the core of it this Christmas tone of Dickens  in connection with his travels is a matter that can only be expressed by a parallel with one of  his other works much the same that has here been said of his pictures from Italy may be said about  his child's history of England but the difference that while
the pictures from Italy do in a sense  add to his Fame the history of England is almost every sense detracts from it but the nature of the  limitation is the same what Dickens was traveling in distance lands that he was traveling in distant  ages a sturdy sentimental English radical with a large heart and a narrow mind he could not help  falling into that besetting sin or weakness of the modern Progressive the habit of regarding the  Contemporary questions as the Eternal questions and the lates
t word as the last he could not get  out of his head the instinctive conception that the real problem before for St Dunston was whether  he should support Lord John Russell or Sir Robert Peele he could not help seeing the remotest Peaks  lit up by the Raging bonfire of his own passionate political crisis he lived for the instant and  its urgency that is he did what St Dunston did he lived in an eternal present like all simple  men it is indeed a child's history of England but the child is the wr
iter and not the reader but  Dickens in his cheapest Cockney utilitarianism was not only English but unconsciously historic upon  Him descended the real tradition of marry England and not upon the pad medievalists who thought  they were Reviving it the pelites the gothics the admirers of Middle Ages had in their subtlety  and sadness the spirit of the present day Dickens had in his buffoonery and bravery the spirit of  the Middle Ages he was much more medieval in his attacks on medievalism than
they were in their  defenses of it it was he who had the things of choser the love of large jokes and long stories  and brown ale and all the white roads of England like choser he loved story within story every man  telling a tale like choser he saw something openly comic in men's mly trades Sam Weller would have  been a great gain to the canterbary pilgrimage and told an admirable story Rosetti's demoiselle would  have been a great boore regarded as too fast by the pyus and to prish by the wife
of baath it is  said that in the somewhat sickly Victorian Revival of feudalism which was called young England a  nobleman hired a Hermit to live in his grounds it is also said that the hermit struck for more beer  whether this antidote be true or not it is always told the showing a collapse from the ideal of the  Middle Ages to the level of the present day but in the mere Act of striking for beer the holy man  was much more medieval than the fool who employed him it would be hard to find a bet
ter example of  this than dickens's great defense of Christmas in fighting for Christmas he was fighting for  the old European Festival Pagan and Christian for that Trinity of eating drinking and praying  which to moderns appears irreverent for the holy day which is really a holiday he had himself the  most babyish ideas about the past he supposed the Middle Ages to have consisted of tournaments and  torture chambers he supposed himself to be a Brisk man of the manufacturing age almost a utilita
rian  but for all that he defended the medieval Feast which was going out against the utilitarianism  which was coming in he could only see all that was bad in medievalism but he fought for all that was  good in it and he was all the more reant sympathy with the old strength and simplicity because he  only knew that it was good and did not know that it was old he cared as little for medievalism as  a medievalist did he cared as much as they did for lustiness and viril laughter and sad Tales of 
good lovers and pleasant Tales of good livers he would have been very much bored by rusken and  Walter perer if they had explained to him the strange Sunset tints of Lippy and butelli he had  no pleasure in looking on the dying Middle Ages but he looked on the living Middle Ages on a piece  of the old uproarious Superstition still unbroken and he hailed it like a new religion the Dickens  character ate putting to an extent at which the modern medieval is turned pale they do every kind  of honor
to an old observ ANS except observing it they would pay to a church Feast every sort of  compliment except feasting and as I have said as were his unconscious relations to our European  past so were his unconscious relations to England he imagined himself to be if anything a sort of  Cosmopolitan at any rate to be a champion of the charms and merits of Continental lands against  the arrogance of our Island but he was in truth very much more a champion of the old and genuine  England against that
comparatively Cosmopolitan England which we have all lived to see and here  again the Supreme example is Christmas Christmas is as I have said one of numberless old European  feasts of which the essence is the combination of religion with merry making but among those  feasts it is also especially and distinctively English in the style of its merry making and  even in the style of its religion for the character of Christmas as distinct for instance  from the Continental Easter lies chiefly in tw
o things first on the terrestrial side the note of  comfort rather than the note of brightness and on the spiritual side Christian charity rather than  Christian ecstasy and comfort is like charity a very English instinct nay Comfort is like charity  an English Merit though our comfort May and does degenerate into materialism just as our charity  May and does degenerate into laxity and make belief this ideal of comfort belongs peculiarly to  England it belongs peculiarly to Christmas above all i
t belongs preeminently to Dickens and it is  astonishingly misunderstood it is misunderstood by the continent of Europe it is if possible still  more misunderstood by the English of today on the continent the restauranter provide us with raw  beef as if we were Savages yet Old English cooking takes as much care as French and in England has  arisen a parvenue Patronis which represents the English as everything but English as a blend of  Chinese stoicism Latin militarism Russian rigidity and Ameri
can bad taste and so England whose fault  is gentility and whose virtue is geniality England with her tradition of the great gay gentleman of  Elizabeth is represented to the four quarters of the world as in Mr Kipling's religious poems in  the enormous image of a solemn Cad and because it is very difficult to be comfortable in the  suburbs the suburbs have voted that Comfort is a gross and material thing comfort Fort especially  this vision of Christmas Comfort is the reverse of a gross materia
l thing it is far more poetical  properly speaking than the garden of epicurus it is far more artistic than the Palace of art it is  more artistic because it is based upon a contrast a contrast between the fire and wine within the  house and the winter and the Roaring rains without it is far more poetical because there is in it  a note of defense almost of War a note of being besieged by the snow and hail of making merry  in the belly of a fort the man who said that an englishman's house is his
castle said much more  than he meant the Englishman thinks of his house as something fortified and provisioned and his  very surliness is at root romantic and this sense would naturally be strongest in Wild winter nights  when the lowered pullus and the lifted drawbridge do not merely bar people out but bar people in the  englishman's house is most sacred not merely when the king cannot enter it but when the Englishman  cannot get out of it this comfort then is an abstract thing a principle the
English poor shut  all their doors and windows till their rooms wreak like the black hole they are suffering for an idea  mere animal Hedonism would not dream as we English do of winter feasts and little rooms but of eating  fruit in large and idle Gardens mere sensuality would desire to please all its senses but to our  good dreams this dark and dangerous background is essential the highest pleasure we can imagine is  a defiant pleasure a happiness that stands at Bay the word Comfort is not ind
eed the right word it  conveys too much of the slander of of mere sense the true word is coziness a word not translatable  one at least of the essentials of it is smallness smallness in preference to largess smallness for  smallness sake the merry maker wants a pleasant parlor he would not give two pence for a pleasant  continent in our difficult time of course a fight for mere space has become necessary instead of  being greedy for ale and the Christmas pudding we are greedy for mere air and eq
ually cenal  appetite in abnormal conditions this is wise and the illimitable velt is an excellent thing  for nervous people but our fathers were large and healthy enough to make a thing Humane and not  worry about whether it was hygienic they were big enough to get into small rooms of this quite  deliberate and artistic quality in the close Christmas chamber the standing evidence is Dickens  in Italy he created these dim firet Tales like little dim red jewels as an artistic necessity  in the ce
nter of an Endless Summer amid the white cities of Tuscany he hungered for something  romantic and wrote about a rainy Christmas amid the pictures of the eizi he starved for something  beautiful and fed his memory on London Fog his feeling for the fog was especially poignant and  typical in the first of his Christmas Tales the popular Christmas Carol he suggested the very  soul of it in one simile when he spoke of the dense air suggesting that nature was brewing on a  large scale this sense of t
he thick atmosphere as something to eat or drink something not only solid  but satisfactory may seem almost insane but it is no exaggeration of Dickens emotion we speak of a  fog that you cut with a knife Dickens would have liked the phrase as suggesting that the fog was a  colossal cake he liked even more his own phrase of the Titanic Brewery and no dream would have given  him a Wilder pleasure than to grope his way to some such tremendous fats and drink the ale of the  Giants there is a curren
t prejudice against fogs and Dickens perhaps is their only poet considered  hygienically no doubt this may be more or less excusable but considered poetically fog is not  undeserving it has a real significance we have in our great cities abolished the clean and sane  darkness of the country we have outlawed night and sent her wandering in Wild Meadows we have lit  Eternal watchfires against her return we have made a new Cosmos and as a consequence our own sun and  stars and as a consequence also
and most justly we have made our own Darkness just as every lamp  is a warm human Moon so every fog is a rich human Nightfall if it were not for this Mystic accident  we should never see darkness and he who has never seen Darkness has never seen the sun fog for us  is the chief form of that outward pressure which compresses mere luxury into real Comfort it makes  the world small In The Same Spirit in that common and happy cry that the world is small meaning that  it is full of friends the first
man that emerges out of the midst with a light is for us Prometheus  a savior bringing fire to man he is that greatest and best of all men greater than the heroes better  than the Saints man Friday every Rumble of a cart every cry in the distance marks the heart of  humanity beating undaunted in the darkness it is wholly human man toiling in his own cloud if  real darkness is is like the Embrace of God this is the dark Embrace of man in such a sacred Cloud  the tale called the Christmas carol B
egins the first and most typical of all his Christmas Tales  it is not irrevelant to dilate upon the geniality of this Darkness because it is characteristic of  Dickens that his atmospheres are more important than his stories the Christmas atmosphere is  more important than Scrooge or the ghost either in a sense the background is more important than  the figures the same thing may be noticed in his dealings with that other atmosphere beside that  of good humor which he excelled in creating an at
mosphere of mystery and wrong such as that which  he gathers around Mrs clenon rigid in her chair or Old Miss havisham ironically robed as a bride  here again the atmosphere altogether eclipses the story which often seems disappointing  in comparison the secrecy is Sensational the secret is tame the surface of the thing seems  more awful than the core of it it seems almost as if these Grizzly figures Mrs Shad band and Mrs  clinam Miss havisham and Miss flight Nemo and Sally brass were keeping so
mething back from the  author as well as from the reader when the book closes we do not know their real secret they  soothed the optimistic Dickens with something less terrible than the truth the dark house  of Arthur clam's childhood really depresses us it is a true glimpse into that quiet street  in hell where live the children of that unique dispensation which theologians call Calvinism and  Christians devil worship but some stranger crime had really been done there some more monstrous  blasp
hemy or human sacrifice than the suppression of some silly document advantageous to the silly  dorats something worse than a common tale of jilting lay behind the Masquerade and Madness  of the awful miss havisham something worse was whispered by the misshapen quilp to the Sinister  Sally in that wild wet summer house by the river something worse than the clumsy plot against the  clumsy kit these dark pictures seemed almost as if they were literally Visions things that is that  Dickens saw but d
id not understand and as with his backgrounds of Gloom so with with his backgrounds  of Goodwill in such tales as the Christmas carol the tone of the tale is kept throughout in a  happy monotony though the tale is everywhere irregular and in some places weak it has the same  kind of artistic Unity that belongs to a dream a dream may begin with the end of the world and end  with a tea party but either the end of the world will end as a trivial as a tea party or that tea  party will be as terrible
as the day of Doom the incidents changed wildly the story scarcely  changes at all the Christmas carol is a kind of philanthropic dream an enjoyable nightmare  in which the scen shift bewilderingly and seem as miscellaneous as the pictures in a scrapbook  but in which there is one constant state of the Soul a state of Rowdy benediction and a hunger  for human faces the beginning is about a winter day and a miser yet the beginning is in no way  bleak the author starts with a kind of happy howl h
e bangs on our door like a drunken Carol singer  his style is festive and popular he compares the snow and hail to philanthropists who come down  handsomely he compares the fog to unlimited beer Scrooge is not really inhuman at the beginning any  more than he is at the end there is a hardiness in his inhospitable sentiments that is akin to humor  and therefore to humanity he is only a crusty old old Bachelor and had I strongly suspect given  away turkey secretly all his life the Beauty and the r
eal blessing of the story do not lie in the  mechanical plot of it the repentance of Scrooge probable or improbable they lie in the great  furnace of real happiness that glows through Scrooge and everything around him that great  furnace the heart of Dickens whether the Christmas Visions would or would not convert Scrooge they  convert us whether or no the Visions were evoked by real spirits of the past present and future  they were evoked by that truly exalted order of angels who are correctly
called High Spirits they  are impelled and sustained by a quality which our contemporary artists ignore or almost deny but  which in a life decently lived as in normal and attainable as sleep a positive passionate  conscious Joy the story sings from end to end like a happy man going home and like a happy and  good man when it cannot sing it yells it is lyric and exclamatory from the first exclamatory words  of it it is strictly A Christmas Carol Dickens has been said went IL with this kindly Clo
ud still  about him still meditating on Ule Mysteries among the olives and the orange trees he wrote his  second great Christmas Tale the chimes at Genoa in 1844 the Christmas hail only differing from  the Christmas Carol and being Fuller of the gray rains of winter in the north the Chimes is like  the Carol and appeal for charity and mirth but it is a Stern and fighting appeal if the other  is a Christmas carol then this is a Christmas War song in it Dickens hurled himself with even  more than
his usual militant joy and Scorn into an attack Upon A can which he said made his blood  boil this can was nothing more nor less than the whole tone taken by three4 of the political and  economic World towards the poor it was a vague and vulgar bism with rolicking Tory touch in it it  explained to the poor their duties with a cold and coarse philanthropy unendurable by any free man  it had also at its command a kind of brutal banter aoud good humor which Dickens sketches savagely  and Alderman c
ute he felt furiously on all their ideas the chap advice to live cheaply the Bas  advis to live basely above all the Preposterous primary assumption that the rich are to advise  the poor and not the poor the rich there were and are hundreds of these benevolent bullies some  say that the poor should give up having children which means that they should give up their great  virtue of sexual sanity some say that they should give up treating each other which means that they  should give up All That R
emains to them of the virtue of hospitality against all of this Dickens  thundered very thoroughly in the Chimes it may be remarked in passing that this affords another  instance of a confusion already referred to the confusion whereby Dickens supposed himself to be  exalting the present over the past whereas he was really dealing deadly blows at things strictly  peculiar to the present embedded in this book is a somewhat useless interview between Evac and  the church bills in which the latter l
ectur the former for having supposed why I don't know that  they were expressing regret for The Disappearance of the Middle Ages there is no reason why Trot  VEC or anyone else should idealize the Middle Ages but certainly he was the last man in the  world to be asked to idealize the 19th century seeing that the smug and stingy philosophy  which poisons his life throughout the book was an exclusive creation of that century but  as I have said before the fieriest medievalist May forgive Dickens f
or disliking the good things  the Middle Ages took away considering how he loved whatever good things the Middle Ages left behind  it matters very little that he hated old feudal castles when they were already old it matters very  much that he hated the new poor law while it was still new the moral of this matter in the Chimes  is essential dick and had sympathy with the poor in the Greek and literal sense he suffered with  them mentally or the things that irritated them were the things that irr
itated him he did not  pity the people or even Champion the people or even merely love the people in this matter he was  the people he alone in our literature is the voice not merely of the social substratum but even of  the subconsciousness of the substratum he utters the secret anger of the humble he says what the  uneducated only think or even only feel about the educated and in nothing is he so genuinely such a  voice as in this fact of his fiercest mood being reserved for methods that are c
ounted scientific  and Progressive pure and exalted atheists talk themselves into believing that the working classes  are turning with indignant scorn from the churches the working classes are not indignant against  the churches in the least the things the working classes really are indignant against are the  hospitals the people has no definite disbelief in the temples of theology the people has a fiery  unpractical disbelief in the temples of physical science the things the poor hate are the m
odern  things the rationalistic things doctors inspectors poor law Guardians professional philanthropy  they never showed any reluctance to be helped by the old and corrupt monasteries they they will  often die rather than be helped by the modern and efficient workhouse of all this anger good or  bad Dickens is the voice of an accusing energy when in the Christmas carol Scrooge refers  to the Surplus population the spirit tells him very justly not to speak until he knows what  the Surplus is and
where it is the implication is severe but sound when a group of superciliously  benevolent economists look down into the abyss with the Surplus population assuredly there's only  one answer that should be given to them and that is to say if there is a surplus you are a surplus  and if anyone were ever cut off they would be if the barricades went up in our streets and the poor  became Masters I think the priests would Escape I fear the gentleman would but I believe the  gutters would be simply r
unning with the blood of philanthropists lastly he was at one with the  poor in this Chief matter of Christmas in the matter that is a special festivity there is  nothing on which the poor are more criticized than on the point of spending large sums on small  feasts and though there are material difficulties there is nothing in which they are more right it  is sad that a Boston Paradox Monger said give us the luxuries of life and we will dispense  with the Necessities but it is the whole human r
ace that says it from the first Savage  wearing feathers instead of clothes to the last costermonger having a treat instead of three  meals the third of his Christmas Stories the cricket on the hear calls for no extensive comment  though it is very characteristic it has all the qualities which we called dominant qualities  in his Christmas sentiment it has coziness that is comfort that depends upon a discomfort  surrounding it it has a sympathy with the poor and especially with the extravagance
of the poor  with what may be called the temporary wealth of the poor it has the sentiment of the Hearth  that is the sentiment of the Open Fire being the red heart of the room that open fire is a  veritable flame of England still kept burning in the midst of a mean civilization of stoves but  everything that is valuable in the cricket on the earth is perhaps as well expressed in the title  as it is in the story The Tale itself in spite of some of those inevitable things that Dickens  never fail
ed to say is a little too comfortable to be quite convincing the Christmas carol is  the conversion of an anti-christmas character the Chimes is a Slaughter of anti-christmas  characters the cricket perhaps fails for lack of this crusading note for everything has its  weak side and when full justice has been done to this neglected note of poetic Comfort we  must remember that it has its very real weak side the defect of it in the work of Dickens  was that he tended sometimes to pile up the cushi
ons till none of the characters could move  he is so much interested in affecting his state of static happiness that he forgets to make a  story at all his princes at the start of the story begin to live happily ever afterwards we  feel this strongly in master Humphrey's clock and we feel it sometimes in the Christmas stories  he makes his characters so comfortable that his characters begin to dream and driil and he makes  his reader so comfortable that his reader goes to sleep the actual tale o
f the carrier and his  wife sounds somewhat sleeply in our ears we cannot keep our attention fixed on it that we are  conscious of a kind of warmth from it as from a great wood fire we know so well that everything  will soon be all right that we do not suspect what the carrier suspects and are not frightened  when the gruff tackleton growls the sound of the festivities at the end come fainter on our ears  than did the shout of the crets or the bells of trotty VEC all the good figures that follow
ed  Scrooge when he came growling out of the fog Fade Into the fog again end of chapter 7 chapter  8 of K chesterton's Charles Dickens the time of transition Dickens was back in London by June of  1845 about this time he became the first editor of the Daily News a paper which he had largely  planned and suggested in which I trust remembers its semi divine origin that is his thought  had been running as suggested in the last chapter somewhat monotonously on his Christmas  domesticities is again s
uggested by the rather singular fact that he originally wished The  Daily News to be called The Cricket probably he was haunted again with his old vision of a homely  tail telling periodical such has had broken off in master Humphrey's clock about this time however he  was peculiarly unsettled almost as soon as he had taken in the editorship he threw it up and having  only recently come back to England he soon made up his mind to go back to the continent in the May of  1846 he ran over to Switze
rland and tried to write dambi and son at Luzan tried to I say because his  letters are full of an angry impotence he could not get on he attributed this especially to his  love of London and his loss of it the absence of streets and numbers of figures my figures seemed  exposed to stagnate without crowds about them but he also with shrewdness attributed it more  generally to the laxer and more wandering life he had led for the last two years the American  tour the Italian tour Diversified gener
ally speaking only with slight literary Productions  his ways were never punctual or healthy but they were also never unconscientious as far as work  was concerned if he walked all night he could write all day but in this strange Exile or  internum he did not seem able to fall into any habits even bad habits a restlessness beyond  all his experience had fallen for a season upon the most Restless of the children of men it may  be a mere coincidence but this break in his life very nearly coincided
with the important break in  his art damb and Son planned in all probability some time before was destined to be the last  of a quite definite series The Early novels of Dickens the difference between the books from  the beginning up to dumi and the books from David Copper field to the end may be hard to state  dogmatically but it is evident to everyone with any literary sense very coarsely the case may be  put by saying that he diminished in the story as a whole the practice of pure caricature
still  more coarsely it may be put in the phrase that he began to practice realism if we take Mr stigan  say as the clergyman depicted at the beginning of his literary career and Mr Chris Sparkle say as  the clergy depicted at the end of it it is evident that the difference does not merely consist in the  fact that the first is a less desirable clergyman than the second it consists in the nature of  our desire for either of them the glory of Mr Chris Sparkle partly consists in the fact that  he
might really exist anywhere in any Country Town into which we may happen to stray the glory  of Mr stiggins wholly consists in the fact that he could not possibly exist anywhere except in the  head of Dickens Dickens has the secret recipe of that Divine dish in some sense therefore when  we say that he became less of a caricaturist we mean that he became less of a creator that  original violent vision of all things which he had seen from his Boyhood began to be mixed with  other men's milder vi
sions and with the light of common day he began to understand and practice  other than his his own mad merits began to have some movement toward the merits of other writers  toward the mixed emotion of ther or the solidity of George Elliott and this must be said for  the process that the fierce wine of Dickens could endure some delution on the whole perhaps  his Primal personalism was all the better when surging against some serer restraints perhaps a  flavor of strong stiggins goes a long way p
erhaps the Colossal crumes might be cut down into six or  seven quite creditable characters for my own part for reasons which I shall afterwards mention  I am in real doubt about the advantage of this realistic education of Dickens I'm not sure that  it made his books better but I am sure it made them less bad he made fewer mistakes undoubtedly  he succeeded in eliminating much of the mere rant or can't of his first books he threw away much  of the old padding all the more annoying perhaps in a
literary sense because he did not mean it  for padding but for essential eloquence but he did not produce anything actually better than Mr  chucker but then there is nothing better than Mr chucker certain works of art such as the Venus  of Milo exhaust our aspiration upon the whole this may perhaps be safely said of the transition  those who have any doubt about Dickens can have no doubt of the superiority of the later books  Beyond question they have less of what annoys Us in Dickens but do not
if you are in the company  of any Ardent adorers of Dickens as I hope for your sake you are do not insist too urgently  and exclusively on the Splendor of dickens's last works or they will discover that you do not  like him dambi and sun is the the last novel in the first manner David Copperfield is the first  novel in the last the increase in care and realism in the second of the two is almost startling  yet even in danan Sun we can see the coming of a change however faint if we compare it wit
h his  first fantasies such as Nicholas nickelby or the old curiosity shop the central story is still  melodrama but it is much more tax and effective melodrama melodrama is a form of art legitimate  like any other as Noble as farce almost as Noble as pantomine the essence of melodrama is that it  appeals to the moral sense in a highly simplified State just as fars appeals to the sense of humor  in a highly simplified State fars creates people who are so intellectually simple as to hide in  pack
ing cases or pretend to be their own ants melodrama creates people so morally simple as to  kill their enemies in Oxford Street and repent on seeing their mother's photograph the object  of the simplification in farce and melodrama is the same and quite artistically legitimate  the object of gaining a resounding rapidity of action which subtleties would obstruct and this  can be done well or ill the simplified villain can be spirited charcoal sketch or a mere black  smudge carker is a spirited c
harcoal sketch Ralph nickelby a mere black smudge the tragedy of Edith  dumi teams with unlikelihood but it teams with life the dumi should give his own wife centure  through his own business manager is impossible I will not say in a gentleman but in a person of  ordinary sane self-conceit but once having got the inconceivable Trio before the foot lights Dickens  gives us good ringing dialogue very different from the mere rants in which Ralph nickelby figures in  the unimaginable character of a
rhetorical money lender and there is another point of technical  Improvement in this book over such books as Nicholas nickelby it is not only a basic idea  but a good basic idea there is a real artistic opportunity in the conception of a solemn and  selfish man of Affairs feeling for his male Heir his first and last emotion mingled of a  thin flame of tenderness and a strong flame of Pride but with all these possibilities the serious  episode of the dumbies serves ultimately only to show how unf
itted Dickens was for such things how  fitted he was for something opposite the incurable poetic character the hopelessly non-realistic  character of Dickens essential genius could not have a better example than the story of the  dmes for the story itself is probable it is the treatment that makes it unreal in attempting to  paint the dark Pagan devotion of the father as distant from the ecstatic and Christian devotion  of the mother Dickens was painting something that was really there this is n
o Wild theme like the  wanderings of Nell's grandfather or the marriage of gride a man of D's type would love his son  as he loves Paul he would neglect his daughter as he neglects Florence and yet we feel the utter  unreality of it all the utter reality of monsters like stiggins or mantellini Dickens could only  work in his own way and that way was the wild way we may almost say this that he could only  make his characters probable if he was allowed to make them imp possible give him license to
  say and do anything that he could create beings as Vivid as our own ants and uncles keep him to  likelihood and he could not tell the plainest tale so as to make it seem likely the story of  pck is credible though it is not possible the story of Florence dby is incredible although it  is true an excellent example can be found in the same story maor bag stock is a grotesque and yet  he contains touch after Touch of dickens's quiet and sane observation of things as they are he was  always most a
ccurate when he was most fantastic DMI and Florence are perfectly reasonable but we  simply know that they do not exist the major is mously exaggerated but we all feel that we have  met him at Brighton nor is the rationale of the the Paradox difficult to see Dickens exaggerated  when he had found a real truth to exaggerate it is a deadly error an error at the back of much of  the false placidity of our politics to suppose that lies are told with excess and luxuriance and  truths told with modest
y and restraint some of the most frantic lies on the face of Life are told  with modesty and restraint for the simple reason that only modesty and restraint will save them  many official declarations are just as dignified as Mr dby because they are just as fictitious  on the other hand the man who has found a truth dances about like a boy who has found a shilling  he breaks into extravagances as the Christian churches broke into gargoyles in one sense truth  alone can be exaggerated nothing else
can stand the strain the outrageous bagstock is a glowing  and glaring exaggeration of a thing we have all seen in life the worst and most dangerous of all  its hypocrisies for the worst and most dangerous hypocrite is not he who affects unpopular virtue  but he who affects popular Vice the Jolly fellow of The Saloon bar and the racecourse is the real  deceiver of mankind he is misled more than any false Propet and his victims cry to him out of  hell the Excellence of the bagstock conception ca
n best be seen if we compare it with the  much weaker and more improbable Navy of PEC sniff it would not be worth a man's while with  any worldly object to pretend to be a holy and high-minded architect the world does not admire  holy and high-minded Architects the world does admire rough and tough old army men who swear  at waiters and wink at women major bagstock is simply the perfect prophecy of that decadent  jingoism which corrupted England of late years England has been duped not by the C
of goodness  but by the C of Badness it has been fascinated by a quite fictitious cynicism and reached that last  and strangest of all imposters in which the mask is as repulsive as the face dambi and Sun provide  us with yet another instance of this general fact in Dickens he could only get to the most solemn  emotions adequately if he got to them through the grotesque he could only so to speak really get  into the inner chamber by coming down the chimney like his own most lovable lunatic and N
icholas  nickelby a good example is such a character as tootes tootes is what none of dickens's dignified  characters are in the most serious sense a true Lover he is the twin of Romeo he has a passion  humility self- knowledge a mind lifted into all magnimous thoughts everything that goes with  the best kind of romantic love his excellence in the art of love can only be expressed by the  somewhat violent expression that he is as good a lover as Walter gay is a bad one Florence surely  deserved
her father's scorn if she could prefer gay toes it is neither a joke nor any kind kind  of exaggeration to say that in the vacillation of tootes Dickens not only came nearer to the  psychology of true love than he ever came anywhere else but nearer than anyone else ever came to ask  for the loved one and then not to DARE cross the threshold to be invited by her to long to accept  and then to lie in order to decline these are the funny things that Mr Toots did and that every  honest man who yells
with laughter at him has done also for the moment however I can only mention  this matter as a pendant case to be the case of major bagstock an example of the way in which  Dickens had to be ridiculous in order to begin to be true his characters that begin solemn and fule  his characters that begin frivolous and solemn in the best sense his foolish figures are not only  more entertaining than his serious figures they are also much more serious the marchess is not  only much more laughable than
little Nell she is also much more of all that little Nell was meant  to be much more really devoted pathetic and brave dick swiveler is not only a much funnier fellow  than kit he is also a much more genuine fellow being free from that slight strain of meekness or  the snobbishness of the respectable poor which the wise and perfect chuckster wisely and perfectly  perceived in kit Susan Nipper is not only more of a comic character than Florence she is more  of a heroine than Florence any day of t
he week in our mutual friend we do not for some reason  or another feel really very much excited about the fall or Rescue of Lizzie Hexum she seems  too romantic to be really pathetic but we do feel excited about the rescue of Miss pod snap  because she is like to a holy fool because her pink nose and pink elbows and candid outcry and  open indecent affections do convey to us a sense of Innocence because her pink nose and pink elbows  and candid outcry and open indecent affections do conf to us
a sense of Innocence helpless among  human dragons of Andromeda tied naked to a rock Dickens had to make a character humorous before  he could make it human it was the only way he knew and he ought to have always adhered to it  whether he knew it or not the only two really touching figures in Martin chuzzlewit are the  Mrs PEC sniff of the things he tried to treat UNS smilingly and grandly we can all make game  to our heart's content but when once he has laugh at a thing it is sacred forever DBI
however means  first and foremost the finale of the early Dickens it is difficult to say exactly in what it is that  we perceive that the old crudity ends here and does not reappear in David Copperfield or in any  of the novels after it but so it certainly is in detached scenes and in characters indeed Dickens  kept up his farsal note almost or quite to the end but this is the last farce this is the last  work in which a farsal license is tacit claimed a farsal note struck to start with and in
a  sense his next novel may be called his first novel but the growth of this great novel David  Copperfield is a thing very interesting but at the same time very dark for it is a growth in  the soul we have seen that dickens's mind was in Stir of change that he was dreaming of Art and  even of realism hugely delighted as he invariably was with his own books he was Umble enough to  be ambitious he was even humble enough to be envious in the matter of art for instance in  the narrow sense of arran
gement and proportion in fictitious things he began to be conscious of  his deficiency and even in the stormy sort of way ashamed of it he tried to gain completeness even  while raging at anyone who called him incomplete and in this manner of artistic instruction his  ambition and his success too grew steadily up to to the instant of his death the end finds him  attempting things that are at the opposite Pole to the Frank formlessness of Pickwick his last book  The Mystery of Edwin drood depends
entirely upon construction even Upon A centralized strategy he  staked everything upon a plot he who had been the weakest of plotters weaker than Sim tappertit he  essayed a detective story he who could never keep a secret and he has kept it to this day a new  Dickens was really being born when Dickens died and as with art so with reality he wished to show  that he could instruct as well as anybody he also wished to show that he could be as accurate as  anybody and in this connection as in many
others we must recur constantly to the facts mentioned in  connection with America and with his money matters we must recur I mean to the Cent natural fact  that his desires were extravagant in quantity but not in quality that his wishes were excessive  but not eccentric it must never be forgotten that sanity was his ideal even when he seemed almost  insane it was thus with his literary aspirations he was brilliant but he wished sincerely to be  solid nobody out of an asylum could deny that he
was a genius and a unique writer but he did  not wish to be a unique writer but a universal writer much of the manufactured pathos or rhetoric  against which his enemies quite rightly rail is really due to his desire to give all sides of  Life at once to make his book a cosmos instead of a tale he was sometimes really vulgar in his  wish to be a literary whitly a universal provider thus it was that he felt about realism and Truth  to live nothing is easier than to defend Dickens as Dickens but D
ickens wish to be everybody else  nothing is easier than to defend Dickens world as a fairy land of which he alone has the key  to defend him as one defends Mater link or any other original writer but Dickens was not content  with being original he had a wild wish to be true he loved truth so much in the abstract that he  sacrificed to the shadow of it in his own Glory he denied his own Divine originality and pretended  that he had plagiarized from life he disowned his Soul's children and said t
hat he had picked them  up in the street and in this mixed and heated M of anger and ambition vanity and doubt and knew a  great design was born he loved to be romantic yet he desired to be real how if he wrote of a thing  that was real and showed that it was romantic he loved real life but he also loved his own way how  if he wrote of his own life but wrote it in his own way how if he showed the carping critics who  doubted the existence of his strange characters his own yet stranger existence
how if he foresees  pendants and unbelievers to admit that Weller and peek Sniff crumes and swiveler whom they thought  so improbably wild and wonderful were less wild and wonderful than Charles Dickens what if he  ended the quarrels about whether his Romance could occur by confessing that his romance had  occurred for some time past probably during the greater part of his life he had made notes for an  autobiography I have already quoted an admirable passage from these notes a passage reproduce
d  in David Copperfield with little more alteration than a change of proper names the passage which  describes Captain Porter and the debtor's petition in the Marshall say but he probably Pro pered at  last what a less Keen intelligence must ultimately have perceived that if an autobiography is  really to be honest it must be turned into a work of fiction if it is to really tell the  truth it must at all cost profess not to no man dare say of himself over his own name how badly  he has behaved n
o man dare say of himself over his own name how well he has behaved moreover  of course A Touch of fiction is almost always the ential to the real conveying of fact because  fact is experienced has a fragmentariness which is bewildering at firstand and quite blinding at  second hand facts have at least to be sorted into compartments and the proper head and tail given  back to each the Perfection and pointedness of art are sort of a substitute for the pungency of  actuality without this selection
and a completion our life seems a tangle of unfinished Tales a  heap of novels all volume one Dickens determined to make one complete novel of it for though there  are many other aspects of David Copperfield this autobiographical aspect is after all the greatest  the point of the book is that unlike all the other books of Dickens it is concerned with quite common  actualities but it is concerned with them warmly and with warlike sympathies it not not only both  realistic and romantic it is real
istic because it is romantic it is a human nature described  with human exaggeration we all know the actual types in the book They're not like the turit and  pronatural types elsewhere in Dickens they're not purely poetic Creations like Mr kenwigs or  Mr bunsby we all know that they exist we all know the stiff necked and humorous old-fashioned  nurse so conventional and yet yet so original so dependent and yet so independent we all know the  intrusive stepfather the abstract strange male coarse
handsome sulky successful a breaker up of  homes we all know the erect and sardonic spinster the spinster who was so mad in small things and  so sane in great ones we all know the [ __ ] of the school we all know steerforth the creature  whom the gods love and even the servants respect we know his poor and artistic mother so proud so  gratified so desolate we know the Rosa dartle type the Lonely Woman in whom affection itself has  stagnated into a sort of poison but while these are real characte
rs they are real characters lit  up with the colors of Youth and passion they are real people romantically felt that is to say  they are real people felt as real people feel them they are exaggerated like all Dickens figures  but they are not exaggerated as personalities are exaggerated by an artist they are exaggerated as  personalities are exaggerated by their own friends and enemies the strong souls are seen through the  Glorious Haze of the emotions that strong Souls really create we have me
rstone as he would be to  a boy who hated him and rightly for a boy would hate him we have steerforth as he would be to a  boy who adored him and rightly for a boy would adore him it may be that if these persons had a  mere terrestrial existence they appeared to other eyes more insignificant it may be that merstone  in common life was only a heavy businessman with a human side that David was too sulky to find it  may be that steerforth was only an inch or two taller than David and only a shade o
r two above  him in the lower middle classes but this does not make the book less true in cataloging The Facts  of Life the author must not omit that massive fact illusion when we say the book is true to life we  must stipulate that it is especially true to youth even to Boyhood all the characters seem a little  larger than they really were for David is looking up at them and the early pages of the book are in  particular astonishingly Vivid parts of it seem like fragments of our forgotten infan
cy the dark  house of childhood the loneliness the things half understood the nurse with her inscrutable sulks  and her more inscrutable tenderness the sudden deportations to distant places the seaside and its  childish friendships all this stirs in us when we read it like something out of a previous existence  a above all Dickens has excellently depicted the child enthroned in that humble Circle which only  in after years he perceives to have been humble modern and cultured persons I believe ob
ject to  their children seeing kitchen company or being taught by a woman like pegate but surely it is  more important to be educated in a sense of human dignity and equality than in anything else in the  world and a child who has once had to respect a kind and capable woman of the lower classes will  respect the lower classes forever the true way to overcome the evil in class distinction is not to  denounce them as revolutionists denounce them but to ignore them as children ignore them the earl
y  youth of David Copperfield is psychologically almost as good as his childhood in one touch  especially Dickens pierced the very core of the sensibilities of Boyhood it it was when he  made David more afraid of a manservant than of anybody or anything else the lowering merstone the  awful Mrs steerforth are not so alarming to him as Mr ler the unimpeachable gentleman's gentleman  this is exquisitly true to the masculine emotions especially in their underdeveloped state a youth  of common coura
ge does not fear anything violent but he is in Mortal fear of anything correct this  may or may not be the reason that so few female writers understand their male characters but this  fact remains that the more sincere and passionate and even headlong a lad is the more certain he  is to be conventional the Bolder and Freer he seems the more the traditions of the college or  the rules of the club will hold him with their jives of gossamer and the less afraid he is of  his enemies the more cravenl
y he will be afraid of his friends herein lies indeed the darkest  period of our ethical doubt and Chaos the fear is that as Mortals become less urgent manners will  become more so and men who have forgotten the fear of God will retain the fear of ler we shall merely  sink into a much meaner bondage for when you break the great laws you do not get Liberty you do not  even get Anarchy you get the small laws the sting and strength of this piece of fiction then do by  a rare accident lie in the cir
cumstance that it was so largely founded on fact David Copperfield  is the great answer of a great romancer to the realists David says in effect what you say  the Dickens Tales are too purple really to have happened why this is what happened to me and  it seemed the most purple of all you say that the Dickens heroes are too handsome and triumphant why  no Prince or Paladin ariso was ever so handsome and triumphant as the head boy seemed to me  walking before me in the sun you say the Dickens vil
lains are too black why there was no ink in  the devil's inkstand black enough for my own stepfather when I had to live in the same house  with him the facts are quite the other way to what you suppose this life of gray studies and T tones  the absence of which you regret and Dickens is only life as it is looked at this life of heroes  and villains is life as it is lived the life a man knows best is exactly the life he finds most full  of Fierce certainties and battles between good and Ill his o
wn oh yes the life we do not care  about May easily be a psychological comedy other people's lives may easily be human documents but  a man's own life is always a melodrama there are other effective things in David Copperfield they  are not all autobiographical but they nearly all have this new note of quietude and reality mobber  is gigantic an immense assertion of the truth that the way to live is to exaggerate everything  but of him I shall have to speak more fully in another connection Mrs m
ob artistically  speaking is even better she is very nearly the best thing in Dickens nothing could be more  absurd and at the same time more true than her clear argumentative manner of speech as she sits  smiling and expounding in the midst of Ruin what could be more lucid and logical and unanswerable  than her statement of the pr legoa of the Medway problem of which the first step must be to see the  Medway or of the coal trade which required talent and capital Talent Mr mobber has Capital Mr
mobber  has not it seems as if something should have come at last out of so clearer and scientific  arrangement of the ideas indeed if as has been suggested we regard David Copperfield as an  unconscious defense of the poetic view of life we might regard Mrs mobber as an un conscious satire  on The Logical view of life she sits as a monument of the hopelessness and helplessness of Reason in  the face of this romantic and unreasonable world as I have taken dambi and Son as the book before  the tr
ansition and David Copperfield is typical of the transition itself I may perhaps take  Bleak House as the book after the transition and so complete the description Bleak House has  every characteristic of his new realistic culture Dickens never now as in his early books Revels  in Parts he likes and scamps the parts he does not after the manner of Scott he does not as  in previous Tales leave his Heroes and heroins mere walking gentlemen and ladies with nothing at  all to do but walk he expends
upon them at least ingenuity by the expedience successful or not  of the self-revelation of Esther or the humorous inconsistencies of Rick he makes his younger  figures if not lovable at least not readable everywhere we see this Tighter and more careful  grip he does not for instance when he wishes to denounce a dark institution sandwich it in as a  mere episode in a rambling story of Adventure as the the D's prison is embedded in the body of  pck with a low Yorkshire School in the body of Nicho
las nickelby he puts the Court of Chancery  in the center of the stage a somber and Sinister Temple and groups round it in artistic relations  decaying and frantic figures its Offspring and its sists an old lipom Maniac keeps a Rag and Bone  shop type of futility and Antiquity and calls him s the Lord Chancellor a little mad Old Maid  hangs about the courts on a forgotten or imaginary lawsuit and says with perfect and pungent irony  I am expecting a judgment shortly on the day of judgment Rick a
nd aah and Esther Are Not Mere  strollers who have strayed into the court of law they are its children its symbols and its victims  the righteous indignation of the book is not at the red heat of Anarchy but at the white heat of  art its anger is patient and plotting like some historic Revenge moreover it slowly and carefully  creates the real psychology of Oppression the endless formality the endless unemotional urbanity  the endless hope deferred these things make one feel the fact of Injustic
e More Than The Madness  of Nero for it is not the activeness of tyranny that maddens but its passiveness we hate the  deafness of the God more than his strength silence is the unbearable reparte again we can  see in this book strong traces of an increase in social experience Dickens as his Fame carried  him into more fashionable circles began really to understand something of what is strong and  what is weak in the English upper class sir l deadlock is far more effective condemnation of  oligar
chy than the ugly Swagger of Sir mberry Hawk because Pride stands out more plainly in all  its impotence and insolence as the one weakness of a good man than as one of the million weaknesses  of a bad one Dickens like all young radicals had imagined in his youth that aristocracy rested upon  the hardiness of somebody he found it as we all do that it rests upon the softness of everybody  it is very hard not to like sir Lester deadlock not to applaud his silly old speeches so foolish  so manly so
genuinely English so disastrous to England it is true that the English people love a  Lord but it is not true that they fear Him rather if anything they pity him there creeps into their  love something of the feeling they have towards a baby or a black man man in their hearts they think  it in admirable that sir Lester deadlock should be able to speak at all and so a system which no  iron laws and no bloody battles could possibly Force Upon A people is preserved from generation  to Generation by
pure weak good nature in Bleak House occurs the character of Harold skimpole the  character whose alleged likeness to lay hunt has laid Dickens open to so much disapproval unjust  disapproval I think as far as fundamental morals are concerned in method he was a little clamorous  and clumsy as indeed he was apt to be but when he said that it was possible to combine a certain  tone of conversation taken from a particular man with other characteristics which were not meant  to be his he surely sai
d what all men who write stories know a work of fiction often consists in  combining a pair of whiskers seen in one Street with a crime seen in another he may quite possibly  have really meant only to make lay Hunt's light philosophy the mask for a new kind of scamp as  a variant on the pious mask of PEC sniff or the candid mask of bagstock he may never once have had  the unfriendly thought suppose hunt behaved like a rascal he may have only had the fanciful thought  suppose a rascal behaved lik
e hun but there is good reason for mentioning skimpole especially in  the character of skimpole Dickens displayed again a quality that was very admirable in him I mean  a disposition to see things sanely and to saiz even his own faults he was commonly occupied in  sterzing the Gad grinds the economists the men of smiles and self-help for him there was nothing  poorer than their wealth nothing more selfish than their self-denial and and against them he  was in the habit of pitting the people of a
more expansive habit the happy swivels and the mobbers  who if they were poor were at least as rich as their last penny could make them he loved that  great Christian carelessness that seeks its meat from God it was merely a kind of uncontrollable  honesty that forced him into urging the other side he could not disguise from himself or from  the world that man who began by seeking his meat from his neighbor without apprising his neighbor  of the fact he had shown how good irresponsibility could
be he could not stoop to hide how bad  it could be he created skimpole and skimpole is the dark underside of mobber in attempting  skimpole he attempted something with great and Urgent meaning he attempted it I say I do not  assert that he carried it through as has been remarked he was never successful in describing  psychological change his characters are the same yesterday today and forever and critics have  complained very justly of the crude villainy of skimp Po's action in the matter of Jo
e and Mr  Bucket certainly skimpole had no need to commit a clumsy treachery to win a clumsy bribe he had only  to call on Mr jise he had lost his honor too long to need to sell it the effect is bad but I repeat  that the aim was great Dickens wished under the symbol of skimpole to point out a truth which is  perhaps the most terrible in moral psychology I mean the fact that is by no means easy to draw the  line between light and heavy offense he desired to show that there are no Faults however
kindly  that we can afford to flatter or to let alone he meant that perhaps skimpole had once been as  good a man as swiveler if flattered or let alone our kindliest fault can destroy our kindliest is  virtue a thing May begin as very human weakness and end as very inhuman weakness skimpole means  that the extremes of evil are much nearer than we think a man May Begin by being too generous  to pay his debts and end by being too mean to pay his debts for the vises are very strangely  in league an
d encourage each other a sober man may be become a drunkard through being a coward  a brave man may become a coward through being a drunkard that is the thing Dickens was Darkly  trying to convey in skimpole that a man might become a mountain of selfishness if he attended  only to the Dickens virtues there is nothing that can be neglected there is no such thing he meant  as the padillo I have dwelt on this consciousness of his because alas it had a very sharp edge  for himself even while he was
permitting a fault originally small to make a comedy of skimpole  a fault originally small was making a tragedy of Charles Dickens for Dickens also had a bad  quality not intrinsically very terrible which he allowed to wreck his life he also had a small  weakness that could sometimes be become stronger than all his strengths his selfishness was not it  need hardly be said the selfishness of drad grind he was particularly compassionate and liberal nor  was it in the least the selfishness of skimp
ole he was entirely self-dependent industrious and  dignified his selfishness was wholly a selfishness of the nerves whatever his whim or the temperature  of the instant told him to do must be done he was the type of man who would break a window if it  would not open or give him air and this weakness of his had by the time of which we speak led to  a breach between himself and his wife which he was too exasperated and excited to heal in time  everything must be put right and put right at once wi
th him if London board him he must go to  the continent at once if the continent Bard him he must come back to London at once if the day  was too noisy the whole household must be quiet if night was too quiet the whole household must  wake up above all he had the Supreme character of the domestic desperate that his good temper was  if possible more despotic than his bad temper when he was miserable as he often was poor fellow  they only had to listen to his railings when he was happy they had to
listen to his novels all  this which was mainly mere excitability did not seem to amount to much it did not in the least  mean that he had ceased to be a clean living and kind-hearted and quite honest man but there  was this evil about it that he did not resist his little weak at all he pampered it as skimp  pampered his and it separated him and his wife a mere silly trick of temperament did everything  that the blackest misconduct could have done a random sensibility started about the shufflin
g  of papers or the shutting of a window ended by tearing two clean Christian people from each other  like a blast of bamy or adultery end of chapter 8 GK chesterton's Charles Dickens chapter n later  life and works I have deliberately in this book mentioned only such facts in the life of Dickens  as were I will not say significant for all facts must be significant including the million facts  that can never be mentioned by anybody but such facts has illustrated my own immediate meaning I  have
observe this method consistently and without shame because I think that we can hardly make too  evident a Chasm between books which profess to be statements of all the ascertainable facts and  books which like this one profess only to contain a particular opinion or a summary deducible from  the facts books like forester's exhaustive work and others exist and are as accessible as St  Paul's Cathedral we have them in common as we have the facts of the physical universe and  it seems highly desira
ble that the function of making an exhausted catalog and that of making an  individual generalization should not be confused no catalog of course can contain all the facts  even of five minutes every catalog however long and learned must not only be a bold but one may  say an audacious solation but if a great many facts are given the reader gains the Blurred  belief that all the facts are being given in a professedly personal judgment it is therefore  clearer and more honest to give only a few i
llustrative facts leaving the other attainable  facts to balance them for thus it is made quite clear that the thing is a sketch an affair of a  few lines it is as well however to make at this point a pause sufficient to indicate at the  main course of the later life of the novelist and it's best to begin with the man himself as  he appeared in those last days of popularity and public distinction many are still alive  who remember him in his after dinner speeches his lectures and his many public
activities as  I'm not one of these I cannot correct my Notions with that flash of the living features without  which a description may be subtly and entirely wrong once a man is dead if it only  be yesterday the newcomer must piece him together from descriptions really as  much at random as if he were describing Caesar or Henry II allowing however  for this inevitable falsity a figure Vivid and a little fantastic does  walk across the stage of forer's Life Dickens was of a middle size and his
vivacity  and relative physical insignificance probably gave rather the impression of small size certainly of  the absence of bulk in early life he wore even for that epic extravagant clusters of brown hair  and in later years a brown mustache and a fringe of brown beard cut like a sort of Broad and bushy  Imperial sufficiently individual in shape to give him a faint air as of a foreigner his face Had A  peculiar tint or quality which is hard to describe even after one has contrived to imagine i
t it  was the quality which Mrs carile felt to be as it were metallic and compared to clear steel it  was I think a sort of pale glitter in animation very much alive and yet with something deathly  about it like a corpse galvanized by God his face if this was so was curiously a counterpart  part of his character but the essence of all dickens's characters was that it was at once  tremulous and yet hard and sharp just as the bright blade of a sword is tremulous and yet  hard and sharp he vibrated
at every touch and yet he was indestructible you could Bend him  but you could not break him Brown of hair and beard somewhat pale of Visage especially in his  later years of excitement and ill health he had quite exceptionally bright and active eyes that  were always darting about like brilliant Birds to pick up all the tiny things of which he had  made more perhaps than any novelist has done or he was a sort of poetical Sherlock Holmes  the mouth behind the brown beard was large and mobile li
ke the mouth of an actor indeed he was an  actor in many things too much of an actor in his lectures in later years he could turn his strange  face into any of the innumerable mad masks that were the blank inanity of Mrs rattle servant were  swell as if to twice its size into the apocalyptic energy of Mr Sergeant Buzz fuz the outline of his  face itself from his youth upwards was cut quite delicate and decisive in Repose and in its own  Keen way may even have looked effeminate the dress of the c
omfortable classes during the latter years  of Dickens was compared with ours some whatat slip shot and somewhat gy it was the time of loose Peg  top trousers of an almost Turkish odity of large ties of loose short jackets and of loose long  whiskers yet even this expansive period must be confessed considered Dickens a little too flashy  or as some put it too frenchified in his dress such a man would wear velvet coats and wild waste  coats that were like incredible sunsets he would wear those ol
d white hats of an unnecessary and  startling whiteness he did not mind being seen in Sensational dressing gowns it is said he had  his portrait painted in one of them all of this is not meritorious neither is it particularly  discreditable it is a characteristic only but an important one he was an absolutely independent  and entirely self-respecting man but he had none of that old Lusty half signified English feeling  upon which th was so sensitive I mean the desire to be regarded as a private
gentleman which means  at bottom the desire to be left alone this again is not a merit it is only one of the milder  aspects of aristocracy but meritorious or not Dickens did not possess it he had no objection  to being stared at if he were also admired he did not exactly pose in the Oriental manner of  Disraeli his instincts were too clean for that but he did pose somewhat in the French manner of some  leaders like mirabo and Gamba nor had he the dull desire to get on which makes men die conten
ted as  inarticulate under secretaries of State he did not desire success so much as Fame the old human Glory  the Applause and wonder of the people such he was as he walked down the Street in his frenchify  clothes probably with a slight Swagger his private life consisted of one tragedy and 10,000 comedies  by one tragedy I mean one real and rending moral tragedy the failure of his marriage he loved his  children dearly and more than one of them died but in Sorrows like these there is no violen
ce and  above all no shame the end of life is not tragic like the end of love and by the 10,000 comedies I  mean the whole texture of his life his letters his conversation which were one incessant Carnival  of insane and inspired improvisation so far as he could prevent it he never permitted a day of  his life to be ordinary there was always some prank some impetuous proposal some practical joke  some sudden Hospitality some sudden disappearance it is related of him I give one anecdote out of a 
100 that in his last visit to America when he was already reading as it were under the blow that  was to be mortal he remarked quite casually to his companions that a row of painted Cottages  looked exactly like the painted shops in a panamine no sooner had the suggestion passed his  lips than he left to the nearest doorway and in exact imitation of the clown of the harlequinade  beat conscientiously with his his fist not on the door but that would have burst the canvas scenery  of course but o
n the side of the door post having done this he laid down ceremoniously across the  doorstep for the owner to fall over him if he should come rushing out he then got up Gravely  and went on his way his whole life was full of such unexpected energies precisely like those of  the pantomine clown Dickens had indeed a great and fundamental Affinity with the landscape or  rather housescape of the Harlequin a he liked High houses and sloping roofs and deep areas but  he would have been really happy if
some good Fairy of the Eternal pantomine had given him the power  of flying off the roofs and pitching harmlessly down the height of the houses and bounding out of  the areas like his India rubber ball the Divine lunatic and Nicholas nickelby comes nearest his  dream I really think Dickens would rather have been that one of his characters than any of  the others with what excitement he would have struggled down the chimney with what ecstatic  energy he would have hurled the Cucumbers Over the G
arden Wall his letters exhibit even more  the same incessant creative Force his letters are as creative as any of his literary creation  his shortest postcard is often as good as his aess novel each one of them is spontaneous each  one of them is different he varies even the form and shape of the letter as far as possible now  it is in absurd French now it is from one of his characters now it is an advertisement for himself  as a stray dog all of them are very funny they're not only very funny b
ut they're quite as funny  as his finished and published work this is the ultimately amazing thing about Dickens the amount  there is of him he wrote at the very least 16 thick important books packed full of original  creation and if you had burnt them all he could have written 16 more as a man writes idle letters  to a friend in connection with this exuberant part of his nature there is another thing to be noted  if we are to make a personal picture of him many modern people chiefly women have
been heard  to object to the Bic element in the books of Dickens that celebration of social drinking as  a supreme symbol of social living which those books share with almost all the great literature  of mankind including the New Testament undoubtedly there is an abnormal amount of drinking in a page  of Dickens just as there is an abnormal amount of fighting say in a page of Dumas if you reckon up  the beers and brandies of Mr Bob Sawyer with the care of an arithmetician and the dedu s of a  pa
thologist they rise alarmingly like a rising tide at Sea Dickens did defend drink clamorously  praised it with passion and described whole orgies of it with enormous Gusto yet it is wonderfully  typical of his prompt and impatient nature that he himself drank comparatively little he was the  type of man who could be so eager in praising the cup that he left the cup untasted it was a part  of his activity and feverish temperament that he did not drink wine very much but it was a part of  his Huma
ne philosophy of his religion that he did not drink wine to healthy European philosophy wine  is a symbol to European religion it is a Sacrament Dickens approved it because it was a great Human  Institution one of the rights of civilization and this it certainly is the T Toler who stands  outside it may have perfect perly clear ethical reasons of his own as a man may have who stands  outside education nor nationality who refuses to go to a university or to serve an army but he is  neglecting one
of the great social things that man has added to Nature the T Toler has chosen a most  unfortunate phrase for the drunkard when he says that the drunkard is making a beast of himself  the man who drinks ordinarily makes nothing but an ordinary man of himself the man who drinks  excessively makes a devil of himself but nothing connected with human and artistic thing like wine  can bring one nearer to The Brute life of nature the only man who is in the exact and literal sense  of the words making
a beast of himself is the T Toler tone of Dickens toward religion though like  that of most of his contemporaries philosophically Disturbed and rather historically ignorant  at an element that was very characteristic of himself he had all the prejudices of his time  he had for instance that dislike of defined Dogma which really means a preference for unexamined  dogmas he had the usual vague notion that the whole of our human past was packed with nothing  but insane Tories he had in a word all
the old radical ignorances which went along with the old  radical acuteness and courage and public Spirit but this Spirit tended in almost all the others  who held it to a specific dislike of the Church of England and a disposition to set the other  sex against it as trer types of inquiry or of individualism Dickens had a definite tenderness  for the Church of England he might even called it a weakness for the Church of England but he had  it something in those pled Services something in that re
ticent and humane liturgy pleased him  against all Tendencies of his time pleased him in the best part of himself his viral love of Charity  and peace once in a puff of anger at the church's political stupidity which is indeed profound he  left it for a week or two and went to a Unitarian Chapel in a week or two he came back this curious  and sentimental hold of the English church upon Him increased with years in the book he was at  work on when he died he describes the minor Canon humble chival
rous tenderhearted answering with  indignant Simplicity to the froth and platform righteousness of the sectarian philanthropist  he upholds Canon Chris Sparkle and saiz Mr honey Thunder almost every one of the other radicals  his friends would have upheld Mr honey Thunder and sazed Canon Chris parkle I have mentioned this  matter for a special reason it brings us back to that apparent contradiction or dualism in Dickens  to which in one connection or another I have often adverted and which in on
e shape or another  constitutes the whole Crux of his character I mean the union of a general wildness approaching  lunacy with a sort of secret moderation almost amounting to mediocrity Dickens was more or less  the man I have described sensitive theatrical amazing a bit of a Dandy a bit of a buffoon  nor are such characteristics whether weak or wild entirely accidents or externals he had some  false theatrical Tendencies integral in his nature for instance he had one most unfortunate habit a 
habit that often put him in the wrong even when he happened to be in the right he had an incurable  habit of explaining himself this reduced his admirers to the mental condition of the authentic  but hitherto uncelebrated little girl who said to her mother I think I should understand if only you  wouldn't explain Dickens always would explain it was a part of that instinctive publicity of his  which made him at once a splendid Democrat and a little too much of an actor he carried it to the  crazi
est lengths he actually printed in household words and apology for his own action in the matter  of his marriage that incident alone is enough to suggest that his external offers and proposals  were sometimes like screams heard from bedum yet it remains true that he had in him a central part  that was pleased only by the most decent and most reposable rights by things of which the Anglican  prayer book is very typical it it is certainly true that he was often extravagant it is most  certainly eq
ually true that he detested and despised extravagance the best explanation can be  found in his literary genius his literary genius consisted in a contradictory capacity at once to  entertain and to deride very ridiculous ideas if he is a buffoon he is laughing at buffoonery his  books were in some ways the wildest on the face of the world Rabel a did not introduce into pania  or the kingdom of the cokus satiric figures more frantic and misshapen than Dickens made to walk  about the Strand and t
he Lincoln in but for all that you come in in the core of him on a sudden  quietude and good sense such I think was the core of rabet such were all the far stretching and  violent sists this is a point essential to Dickens though very little comprehended in our current  tone of thought Dickens was an imoderate Jester but a moderate thinker he wasn't a moderate Jester  because he was a moderate thinker what we moderns call the wildness of his imagination was actually  created by what we moderns c
all the Tess of his thought I mean that he felt the full insanity of  all extreme Tendencies because he was himself so sane he felt eccentricities because he was in  the center we're always in these days asking our violent prophets to write violent satires  but violent prophets can never possibly write violent satires in order to write satires like  that of rabet satire that juggles with the Stars and kicks the world about like a football it  is necessary to be one self- temperate and even mile
a modern man like nii a modern man like gorki  a modern man like Diono could not possibly write real and riotous satire they are themselves  too much on the Borderlands they could not be as success as caricaturists for they are already  a great success as caricatures I have mentioned his religious preference merely as an instance of  this interior moderation to say as some have done that he attacked non-conformity is quite a false  way of putting it it is clean across the whole trend of the man
and his time to suppose that he  could have felt bitterness against any theological body as a theological body but anything like  religious extravagance whether Protestant or Catholic moved him to an extravagance of satire  and he flung himself into the drunken energy of stiggins He piled up to the Stars the verbose  flights of stairs of Mr chadband exactly because his own conception of religion was the quiet and  impersonal morning prayer it is typical of him that he had a peculiar hatred for s
peeches at the  gravite an even clearer case of what I mean can be found in his political attitude he seemed to  some an almost anarchic sist he made equal fun of the system which reformers made war on and of the  instruments on which the reformers relied he made no secret of his feelings that the average English  premere was an accidental ass in two superb sentences he summed up and swept away the whole  British constitution England for the last week has been in an awful State Lord kud would go
out  Sir Thomas doodle wouldn't come in and there being no people in England to speak of except kud and  doodle the country has been without a government he lumped all cabinets and all government offices  together and made the same game of them all he created his most staggering humbugs his most  adorable and incredible idiots and set them on the highest Thrones of our national system  to many moderate and Progressive people such a satus seemed to be insulting Heaven and Earth  ready to wreck S
ociety for some mad alternative prepared to pull down St Paul's and on its runes  erect the Gory guillotin King yet as a matter of fact this apparent wildness of his came from his  being if anything a very moderate politician he came not at all from fanaticism but from a rather  rational Detachment he had the sense to see that the British constitution was not democracy but  the British constitution it was an artificial system like any other good in some ways bad in  others his satire of it sound
ed Wild to those who worshiped it but his satire it arose not from his  having any wild enthusiasm against it but simply from his not having like everyone else a wild  enthusiasm for it alone as far as I know among all the great Englishmen of that age he realized  the thing that Frenchmen and Irishmen understand I mean the fact that popular government is one  thing and representative government is another he realized representative government has many  minor disadvantages one of them being that
it is never representative he speaks of his hope to  have made every man in England feel something of the contempt for the House of Commons that  I have he says also these two things both of which are wonderfully penetrating as coming  from a good radical In 1855 but they contain a perfect statement of the Peril in which we now  stand and which may if it please God sting us into avoiding the long Vista at the end of which  one sees so closely the dignity and the decay of Venice I am hourly stren
gthened he says in my  old belief that our political aristocracy and our tough hunting are the death of England in all  this business I don't see a gleam of Hope as to the populist Spirit it has come to be so entirely  separated from the Parliament and the government and so perfectly apathetic about them both that I  seriously think it is a most portentious sign and he says also this I really am serious in thinking  and I have given as painful consideration to the subject as a man with children
to live and suffer  after him can possibly give it that representative government is become allog together a failure with  us that the English gentili and subserviency the people more unfit for it and the whole thing has  broken down since the great 17th century time and has no hope in it these are the words of a wise  and perhaps Melancholy Man but certainly not of an unduly excited one it is worth noting for  instance how much more directly Dickens goes to the point than carile did who noted m
any of  the same evils but carile fancied that our Modern English government was wordy and long-winded  because it was democratic government dick and saw what is certainly the fact that it is wordy  and long-winded because it is an aristocratic government the two most Pleasant aristocratic  qualities being a love of literature and an unconsciousness of time but all this amounts to  the same conclusion of the matter frantic figures like stiggins and Shad brand were created out  of the quietude of
his religious preference wild Creations like the Barnacles and the Bounder bees  were produced in a kind of ecstasy of ordinary of the obvious in political Justice his monsters  were made out of his level and his moderation as the old monsters were made out of the sea such was  the man of Genius we must try to imagine violently emotional yet with a good judgment pugnacious but  only when he thought himself oppressed prone to think himself oppressed yet not cynical about  human motives he was a
man remarkably hard to understand or to reanimate he almost always had  reasons for his action his error was that he always expounded them sometimes his neres snapped  and then he was mad unless it did so he was quite unusually sane such a rough sketch at least much  suffice Us in order to summarize his later years those years were occupied of course in two main  additions to his previous activities the first was the series of public readings and lectures which  he now began to give systematical
ly the second was his successive editorship of household words and  of all the year round he was of a type that enjoys every new function and opportunity he had been  so many things in his life a reporter an actor a conjurer a poet as he had enjoyed them all so  he enjoyed being a lecturer and enjoyed being an editor it is certain that his audiences who  sometimes stacked themselves so thick that they lay flat on the platform all around  him enjoyed his being electure it is not so certain that t
he sub editors enjoyed his  being an editor but in both connections the main manner of importance is the effect on the  permanent work of Dickens himself the readings were important for this reason that they fixed  as if by some public un pontifical pronouncement what was Dickens interpretation of of dickens's  work such a knowledge is mere tradition but it is very forcible my own family has handed on  to me and I shall probably hand On to the Next Generation a definite memory of how Dickens mad
e  his face suddenly like the face of an idiot in impersonating Mrs rattles servant Betsy this does  serve one of the permanent purposes of tradition it does make a little more difficult for any  ingenious person to prove that Betsy was meant to be a brilliant satire on the over cultivation  of intellect as for his relation to his two magazines it is chiefly important first for the  admirable things which he wrote for the magazines themselves when cannot forbear to mention the  intimate monologu
e of the waiter in somebody's luggage and secondly for the fact that in his  capacity of editor he made one valuable Discovery he discovered wiy Collins Wilkey Collins was the  one man of unmistakable genius who has a certain Affinity with Dickens an affinity in this respect  that they both combine in a curious way a modern and a cockney and even commonplace opinion about  things with huge Elemental sympathy with strange oracles and spirits and old night there were no  two men in mid Victorian E
ngland with their top hats and umbrellas more typic of its rationality  and dull reform and there were no two men who could touch them at a ghost story no two men  would have had more contempt for superstitions and no two men could so create the superstitious  thrill indeed our modern Mystics make a mistake when they wear long hair or loose ties to attract  the spirits The Elves and the old gods when they revisit the Earth really go straight for a dull  top hat for it means Simplicity which the
gods love meanwhile his books appearing from time to  time while is brilliant as ever bore witness to that increasing tendency to a more careful and  responsible treatment which we have remarked in the transition which culminated in Bleak House his  next important book Hard Times strikes an almost unexpected notice sity the characters are indeed  exaggerated but they are bitterly and deliberately exaggerated they're not exaggerated with the old  unconscious High Spirits of Nicholas nickelby or M
artin chisle Dickens exaggerates bounderby  because he really hates him he exaggerated PEC sniff because he really loved him hard times  is not one of the greatest books of Dickens but it is perhaps in a sense one of the greatest  monuments it stamps and Records the reality of dickens's emotions on a great great many  things that were then considered unphilosophical grumblings but which since have swelled  into the immense phenomena of the Socialist philosophy to call Dickens a socialist is a  w
ild exaggeration but the truth and peculiarity of his position might be expressed thus that  even when everybody thought that liberalism meant individualism he was emphatically a  liberal and emphatically not an individual or the truth might be better still stated in this  manner that he saw that there was a secret thing called Humanity to which both extreme socialism  and extreme individualism were profoundly and inexpressibly indifferent and that this permanent  and presiding Humanity was the
thing he happened to understand he knew that individualism is  nothing and non- individualism is nothing but the keeping of the Commandment of man man he felt  as a novelist should that the question is too much discussed as to whether man is in favor of this or  that scientific philosophy that there is another question whether the scientific philosophy is  in favor of man that is why such books as hard times will remain always a part of the power and  tradition of Dickens he saw that economic sy
stems are not things like the stars but things like  the lamposts manifestations of the human mind and things to be judged by the human heart then  forward until the end his books grow consistently Graver and as it were more responsible he improves  as an artist if not always as a Creator little dor published in 1857 is at once in some ways so much  more subtle and in every way so much more sad than the rest of his work that it bores to kenian and  especially pleases George gissing it is the onl
y one of the Dickens Tales which could please  gissing and not by its genius but also by its atmosphere there is something a little modern and  a little sad something also Out Of Tune with the main trend of dickens's moral feeling about the  description of the character of dor as actually and finally weakened by his wasting experiences as  not lifting any cry above the conquered years it is but a faint Fleck of Shadow but the illimitable  white light of human hopefulness of which I spoke at the
beginning is ebbing away the work of the  revolution is growing weaker everywhere and the night of necessitarianism cometh when no man  can work for the first time in a book by Dickens perhaps we really do feel that the hero was 45  Plum is certainly very much older than Mr pck this was indeed only a fugitive gray cloud he went on  to breezier operations but whatever they were they still had the note of the latter days they have  a more cautious craftsmanship they have a more mellow and more mix
ed human sentiment Shadows fell  upon his page from the other and sadder figures out of the Victorian decline a good instance of  this is his next book The Tale of Two Cities in dignity and eloquence it almost stands alone  among the books by Dickens but it also stands alone among his books in this respect that it is  not entirely by Dickens it owes its inspiration AOW to the passionate and cloudy pages of  carlile's French Revolution and there's something quite essentially inconsistent between
carlile's  Disturbed and half skeptical transcendentalism and the original school and spirit to which Dickens  belonged the lucid and laughing decisiveness of the old convinced and contented radicalism hence  the genius of Dickens cannot save him just as the great Genius of carile could not save him  from making a picture of the French Revolution which was delicately and yet deeply erroneous both  tend too much to represent it as a mere Elemental outbreaking of hunger or Vengeance they do not se
e  enough that it was a war for intellectual princip principles even for intellectual platitudes we the  Modern English cannot easily understand the French Revolution because we cannot easily understand  the ideas of bloody battle for Pure Common Sense we cannot understand common sense in arms and  conquering in modern England Common Sense appears to mean putting up with existing conditions  for us a practical politician really means a man who can be thoroughly trusted to do nothing  at all that
is where his practicality comes in the French feeling the feeling at the back of the  Revolution was that the more sensible a man was the more you must look out for Slaughter in all  the imitators of car including Dickens there is an obscure sentiment that the thing for which the  Frenchman died must have been something new and queer a paradox a strange idolatry but when such  blood ran in the streets it was was for the sake of a truism when those cities were shaken to their  Foundation they we
re shaken to their foundations by a truism I have mentioned this historical  matter because it illustrates these later and more mingled influences which at once improve and  as it were perplex the later work of Dickens for Dickens had in his original mental composition  capacities for understanding this cheery and sensible element in the French Revolution far  better than carile the French Revolution was among other things French and so as far as that goes one  could never have a precise counter
part in so jolly and autocon an Englishman as Charles Dickens but  there was a great deal of the actual and unbroken tradition of the Revolution itself in his early  radical indictments in his denunciation of the fleet prison it was a great deal of the capture  of the best deal there was above all a certain reasonable impatience which was the essence of the  old Republican and which is quite unknown to the revolutionist in modern Europe the old radical did  not feel exactly that he was in Revolt
he felt if anything that a number of idiotic institutions had  revolted against reason and against him Dickens I say had the Revolutionary idea though an English  form of it by clear C and conscious inheritance carile had to ReDiscover the Revolution by a  violence of genius and vision if Dickens then took from Carlile as he said he did his image of  the Revolution it does certainly mean that he had forgotten something of his own Youth and come  under the more complex influences of the end of t
he 19th century his old hilarious and sentimental  view of human nature seems for a moment dimmed in Little D his old political Simplicity has been  slightly disturbed by carile I repeat that this Graver note is varied but it remains a Graver  note we see it struck I think with particular and remarkable success in Great Expectations this  fine story is told with a consistency and quietude of individuality which is rare in Dickens but so  far had he traveled along the road of a heavier reality th
at that he even intended to give  the tale an unhappy ending making pip lose Estella forever and he was only dissuaded from  it by the robust Romanticism of B Lon the best part of the tale the account of the vacillations  of the hero between the humble life to which he owes everything and a gorgeous life from which he  expects something touches a very true and somewhat tragic part of morals for the great Paradox of  morality the Paradox to which only the religions have given an adequate expressi
on is that the very  viest kind of fault is exactly the most easy kind we read in books and ballads about the wild fellow  who might kill a man or smoke Opium but who would never stoop to lying or cowardice or to anything  mean but for actual human beings opium and Slaughter have only occasional charm the permanent  human temptation is the temptation to be mean the one standing probability is the probability of  becoming a cowardly hypocrite the circle of the traitors is the lowest of the abyss
and it is  also the easiest to fall into that is one of the ringing realities of the Bible that it does not  make its Great Men commit Grand sins it makes its great men such as David and St Peter commit small  sins and behave like snakes Dickens has dealt with this easy Descent of desertion this silent treason  with remarkable accuracy in the account of the indecisions of pip it contains a good suggestion  of that weak romance which is at the root of all snobbishness that the mystery which belon
gs to  Patrician life excites us more than the open even the indecent Virtues Of The Humble pip is Keener  about Miss havisham who may mean well by him than about Joe gargery who evidently does all this  is very strong and wholesome but it is still a little Stern our mutual friend 1864 brings us back  a little into his merrier and more normal manner some of the satire such as that upon veneering's  election is in the best of his old style so Airy and fanciful yet hitting so suddenly and so hard 
but even here we find the full and more serious treatment of psychology notably in the two facts  that he creates a really human villain Bradley headstone and also one whom we might call a  really human hero Eugene if it were not that he is Much Too Human to be called a hero at all  it has been said invariably by cads that Dickens never described the gentleman it is like saying  that he never described a zebra a gentleman is a very rare animal among human creatures and to  people like Dickens i
nterested in all Humanity not a supremely important one but in Eugene wbr  he does whether he consciously or not turn that accusation with a Vengeance for he not only  describes a gentleman but describes the inner weaknesses and Peril that belong to a gentleman  the devil that is always rending the anils of an idle and agreeable man in Eugene's purposeless  pursuit of Lizzy Hexum in his yet more purposeless torturing of Bradley headstone the author  has marvelously realize that singularly empty
obstinacy that drives the whims and pleasures of  a leisured class he sees that there is nothing that such a man more stubbornly aderes to than the  thing that he does not particularly want to do we are still in serious psychology his last book  represents yet another new departure dividing him from the chaotic Dickens of days long before  his last book is not merely an attempt to improve his power of construction in the story it is  an attempt to rely entirely on that power of construction it n
ot only has a plot it is a  plot the mystery of Edwin drood 1870 was in such a sense perhaps the most ambitious book that  Dickens ever attempted it is as everyone knows a detective story and certainly a very successful  one as it is attested by the tumult of discussion as to its proper solution in this quite apart from  its unfinished state it stands I think alone among the author's Works elsewhere if he introduced  a mystery he seldom took the trouble to make it very mysterious Bleek house is
finished but if  it were only half finished I think anyone would guess that lady deadlock and Nemo had sned in the  in the past Edwin drw is not finished for in the very middle of it Dickens died he had altogether  overstrained himself in a last lecturing tour in America he was a man in whom any serious malady  would naturally make very rapid strides for it had the temper of an irrational invalid I've said  before that there wasn't his curious character something that was feminine certainly ther
e was  nothing more entirely feminine than this that he worked because he was tired fatigue bred in him a  false and feverish industry and his case increased like the case of a man who drinks to cure the  effects of drink he died in 1870 and the whole nation mourned him as no public man has ever been  mmed for prime ministers and princes were private persons compared with Dickens he had been a great  popular King like a king of some more primal age whom his people could come and see giving judgm
ent  under an oak tree he had in essence held great audiences of millions and made proclamations  to more than one of the nations of the earth his obvious omnipresence in every part of public  life was like the omnipresence of The Sovereign his secret omnipresence in every house and Hut  of private life was more like the omnipresence of a deity compared with that popular leadership  all the fusses of the last 40 years are diversions in idleness compared with such a case as his it  may be said th
at we play with our politicians and manage to endure our authors we shall never  have again such a popularity until we have again a people he left behind him this almost  somber fragment the mystery of Edwin drood as One turns it over the tragic element of its  truncation mingles somewhat with an element of tragedy in the thing itself the passionate  and predestined landless or the half maniacal Jasper carving Devils out of his own heart the  workmanship of it is very fine the right hand has not
only lost but is still gaining its cunning  but as we turn the now enigmatic Pages the thought creeps into us again which I have suggested  earlier and which is never far off the mind of a true lover of Dickens had he lost or gained  by the growth of this technique and probability in his later work his later characters were more  like men but were not his earlier characters more like Immortals he has become able to perform a  social scene so that it is possible at any rate but where is that Dic
kens who once performed the  impossible where is that young poet who created such majors and Architects as nature will never  dare to create Dickens learned to describe daily life as Zachary and Jane Austin could describe it  but Zachary could not have thought such a thought as Cress and it is painful to think of M Austin  attempting to imagine manini after all we feel there are many able novelists but there is only  one Dickens and wither has he fled he was alive to the end and in this last dar
k and secretive  story of Edwin drud he makes one Splendid and staggering appearance like a magician saying  farewell to Mankind in the center of this otherwise reasonable and rather Melancholy book  this gray story of a good clergyman and the quiet cler hem Towers Dickens has calmly inserted one  entirely delightful and entirely insane passage I mean the Frantic and inconceivable epith  of Mrs sapsi that which describes her as the reverential wife of Thomas sapy speaks of her  consistency in lo
oking up to him and ends with the words spaced out so admirably on the tombstone  stranger paus and ask thyself this question can't thou do likewise if not with a blush retire  not the wildest Tale in pck contains such an impossibility as that Dickens dare scarcely  have introduced it even as one of Jingles lies in no human churchyard will you find that  invaluable Tombstone indeed you could scarcely find it in any world where there are churchyards  you scarcely have such Immortal Folly as that
in a world where there is also death Mr sap C is  one of the golden things stored up for us in a better world yes there were many other dickens's  a clever Dickens an industrious Dickens a public spirited Dickens but this was the great one this  last outbreak of insane humor reminds us where in lay his power and his Supremacy the praise of such  beatific buffoonery should be the final praise the ultimate word in his honor the wild epithet  of Mrs sapsi should be the serious epith of Dickens end
of chapter n GK chesterton's Charles  Dickens chapter 10 the great Dickens characters all criticism tends too much to become criticism  of criticism and the reason is very evident it is that criticism of creation is so very staggering a  thing we see this in the difficulty of criticizing any artistic creation we see it again in the  difficulty of criticizing that creation which is spelled with a Capital C The pessimists Who attack  the universe are always under this disadvantage they have an exh
ilarating Consciousness that  they could make the Sun and Moon better but they also have the depressing consciousness that  they could not have made the sun and moon at all a man looking at a hippopotamus May sometimes be  tempted to regard a hippopotamus as an enormous mistake but he is also bound to confess that a  fortunate inferiority prevents him personally from making such mistakes it is neither a  blasphemy nor an exaggeration to say that we feel something of the same difficulty in judgin
g  of the very creative element in human literature and this is the first and last Dignity of Dickens  that he was a Creator he did not point out things he made them we may disapprove of Mr guppy but  we recognize him as a creation flung down like a miracle out of an upper sphere we can pull him to  pieces but we could not have put him together we can destroy Mrs gamp in our wrath but we could not  have made her in our joy under this disadvantage any book about Dickens must definitely labor real
  primary creation such as the son or the birth of a child calls forth not criticism not appreciation  but a kind of incoherent gratitude this is why most hymns about God are bad and this is why most  eulogies on Dickens are bad the eulogists of the Divine and of the human Creator are alike inclined  to appear sentimentalists because they are talking about something as very real in the same way  love letters always sound fluid and artificial because they are about something real any chapter  suc
h as this chapter must therefore in a sense be inadequate there is no way of dealing properly  with the ultimate greatness of Dickens except by offering sacrifice to him as a God and this is  opposed to the etiquette of our time but something can perhaps be done in the way of suggesting  what was the quality of this creation but even in considering its quality we ought to remember  that quality is not the whole question one of the Godlike things about Dickens is his quantity  his quantity as suc
h the enormous output the incredible fund of his invention I have said a  moment ago that not one of us could have invented Mr guppy but even if we could have stolen Mr Guppy  from Dickens we have still to confront the fact that Dickens would have been able to invent  another quite inconceivable character to take his place perhaps we could have created Mr guppy  but the effort would certainly have exhausted us we should be ever afterwards wheeled about in a  bath chair at Bourne mouth neverthele
ss there is something that is worth saying about the quality  of Dickens at the very beginning of this review I remarked that the reader must be in a mood at  least of democracy to some it may have sounded irrelevant but the Revolution was as much behind  all the books of the 19th century as the Catholic religion let us say was behind all the colors  and carvings of the Middle Ages another great name of the 19th century will afford an Evidence  of this and will also bring us most sharply to the
problem of the literary quality of Dickens of all  these 19th century writers there is none in the noblest sense more democratic than Walter Scott  as this may be disputed and as it is relevant I will expand the remark there are two rooted  spiritual realities out of which grow all kinds of democratic conception or sentiment of human  quality there are two things in which all men are manifestly and unmistakably equal they are not  equally clever or equally muscular or equally fat as the sages of
the modern reaction with piercing  Insight perceive but this is a spiritual certainty that all men are tragic and this again is an  equally Sublime spiritual certainty that all men are comic no special and private sorrow can be so  Dreadful as the fact of having to die and no freak or deformity can be so funny as the mere fact of  having two legs every man is important if he loses his life and every man is fun funny if he loses  his hat and has to run after it and the universal test everywhere
of whether a thing is popular of  the people is whether it employs vigorously these extremes of the tragic and the comic Shelly  for instance was an aristocrat if ever there was one in the world he was a republican but he  was not a democrat in his poetry there is every perfect quality except this pungent and popular  stab for the tragic and the comic you must go say to Burns a poor man and all over the world  the folk literature the popular literature is the same it consists of very dignified s
orrow  and very undignified fun its sad Tales are of broken hearts its happy Tales are of broken heads  these I say are two roots of democratic reality but they have in more civilized literature a more  civilized embodiment of form in literature such as that of the 19th century the two elements appear  somewhat thus tragedy becomes a profound sense of human dignity the other and jollier element  becomes a delighted sense of human variety the first supports equality by saying that all men are  eq
ually Sublime the second supports equality by observing that all men are equally interesting  in this Democratic aspect of the interest and VAR y of all men there is of course no Democrat  so great as Dickens but in the other matter in the idea of the Dignity of all men I repeat that  there is no Democrat so great as Scott this fact which is the moral and enduring magnificence of  Scott has been astonishingly overlooked his rich and dramatic effects are gained in almost every  case by some grote
sque or beggarly figure Rising into a human pride and and rhetoric the common  man in the sense of the poultry man becomes the common man in the sense of the universal man he  declares his Humanity for the meanest of all the modernities has been the notion that the heroic  is an odity or variation and that the things that unite us are merely flat or foul the common things  are terrible and startling death for instance and first love the things that are common are the  things that are not commonp
lace into such high and Central passions the comic Scott character  will suddenly rise remember the firm and almost stately answer of the Preposterous Nicol jarvey  when Helen McGregor seeks to browbeat him into condoning lawlessness and breaking his Bourgeois  decency that speech is a great Monument of the middle class mulier made mure Jan talk Pros but  Scott made him talk poetry think of the rising and rousing voice of the dull and gluttonous  athlin when he answers and overwhelms de bracie t
hink of The Proud appeal of the old beggar in  the antiquary when he rebukes the Duelists Scott was fond of describing Kings in Disguise but  all his characters are Kings in Disguise he was with all his errors profoundly possessed with  an old religious conception the only possible Democratic basis the idea that man himself is  a king in Disguise in all this Scott though a royalist and a Tory had in the strangest way the  heart of the Revolution for instance he regarded rhetoric the art of the o
rator as the immediate  weapon of the oppressed all his poor men make Grand speeches as they did in the Jacobin club  which Scott would have so much detested and it is odd to reflect that he was as an author giving  free speech to fictitious Rebels while he was as a stupid politician denying it to real ones but  the point for us here is that all this popular sympathy of his rests on the Graver basis on the  dark Dignity of man can you find no way asks Sir Arthur wardor of the beggar when they ar
e cut  off by the tide I'll give you a farm I'll make you rich our riches will soon be equal says the  beggar and looks out across the advancing sea now I have dwelt on this strong point of Scott  because it is the best illustration of the one weak point of Dickens Dickens had little or  none of this sense of the concealed Sublimity of every separate man dickens's sense of democracy  was entirely of the other kind it rested on the other of the two supports of which I have spoken  it rested on th
e sense that all men were wildly interesting and wildly varied when a dickens's  character becomes excited he becomes more and more himself he does not like the Scott beggar  turn more and more into man as he rises he grows more and more into a gargoyle or grotesque he  does not like the fine speaker in Scott grow more classical as he grows more passionate more  Universal as he grows more intense the thing can only be illustrated by a special case Dickens did  more than once of course make one o
f his quaint or humble characters assert himself in a serious  crisis or defy the powerful there is for instance the quite admirable scene in which Susan Nipper  one of the greatest of dickens's achievements faces and rebukes Mr domby but it is still true  and quite appropriate in its own place and manner that Susan Nipper remains a purely Comic character  throughout her speech and even grows more comic as she goes on she is more serious than usual in her  meaning but not more serious in her sty
le dickin keeps the natural diction of Nipper but makes her  grow more Nipper as she grows more warm but Scott keeps the natural diction of biley jarvey but  insensibly sobers and uplifts the style until it reaches a plain and appropriate eloquence this  plain and appropriate eloquence was except in a few places at the end of pck almost unknown to  Dickens whenever he made Comic characters talk sentiment comically as in the of Susan it was  a success but an avowedly extravagant success whenever
he made Comic characters talk sentiment  seriously it was an extravagant failure humor was his medium his only way of approaching emotion  wherever you do not get humor you get unconscious humor as I have said elsewhere in this book  Dickens was deeply and radically English the most English of our great writers and there was  something very English in the this contentment with a grotesque democracy and in this absence of  the eloquence and elevation of Scott the English democracy is the most hum
orous democracy in the  world the scotch democracy is the most dignified while the whole abandoned and satiric Genius  of the English populace come from its being quite undignified in every way a comparison  of the two types can be found for instance by putting a scotch labor leader like Mr Kier  Hardy alongside an English lab leader like Mr will Crooks both are good men honest and  responsible and compassionate but we can feel that the Scotchman carries himself seriously and  universally the En
glishman personally and with an obstinate humor Mr Kier Hardy wishes to hold up  his head as man Mr Crooks wishes to follow his nose as Crooks Mr Kier Hardy is very like a poor  man in Walter Scott Mr Kooks is very much like a poor man in Dickens Dickens then had this English  feeling of a grotesque democracy but that is more properly meant a vastly varying democracy the  intoxicating variety of men that was his vision and conception of human Brotherhood and certainly  it is a great part of huma
n Brotherhood in one sense things can only be equal if they are  entirely different thus for instance people talk with a quite astonishing gravity about the  inequality or equality of the SE Es as if there could possibly be any inequality between a lock  and a key wherever there is no element of variety wherever all the items literally have an identical  aim there is at once and of necessity inequality a woman is only inferior to man in the matter of  being not so manly she is inferior in nothin
g else man is inferior to woman in so far as he  is not a woman there is no other reason reason and the same applies in some degree to all genuine  differences it is a great mistake to suppose that love unites and unifies Men love diversifies them  because love is directed toward individuality the thing that really unites men and makes them like  to each other is hatred thus for instance the more we love Germany the more pleased we shall  be that Germany should be something different from oursel
ves should keep her own ritual and  conviviality and we ours but the more we hate Germany the more we shall copy German guns and  German fortifications in order to be armed against Germany the more modern Nations detest each  other the more meekly they follow each other for all competition is in its nature only a furious  plagiarism as competition means always similarity it is equally true that similarity always means  inequality if everything is trying to be green some things will be greener th
an others but there  is an immortal and indestructible equality between green and red something of the same kind  of irrefutable equality exists between the violent and varying creations of such a writer as  Dickens they are all equally ecstatic fulfillments of a separate line of development it would be  hard to say that there could be any comparison or inequality let us say between Mr sapi and Mr  Elijah pgrm they are both in the same difficulty they can neither of them contrive to exist in  th
is world they are both too big for the Gate of birth of the high virtue of this variation  I shall speak more adequately in a moment but certainly this love of mere variation which I  have contrasted with the classicism of Scott is the only intelligent statement of the common case  against the exaggeration of Dickens this is the meaning the only sane or endurable meaning which  people have in their minds when they say that that Dickens is a mere caricaturist they do not mean  merely that Uncle p
emble chuk does not exist a fictitious character ought not to be a person who  exists he ought to be an entirely new combination an addition to the creatures already existing  on the earth they do not mean that Uncle pemble chuk could not exist for on that obviously they  can have no knowledge whatever they do not mean that Uncle pemble chuks utterances are selected  and arranged so as to bring out his essential pemble chery to say that is simply to say that he  occurs in a work of art but what
they do really mean is this and there is an element of Truth in  it they mean that Dickens nowhere makes the reader feel that pemble chuk has any kind of fundamental  human dignity at all it is nowhere suggested that pemble chuk will someday die he is rather as one  of the idol and evil fairies who are innocuous and yet malignant and who live forever because they  never never really live at all this dehumanized Vitality this fantasy this irresponsibility  of creation does in some sense truly bel
ong to Dickens it is the lower side of his hilarious  human variety but now we come to the higher side of his human variety and it is far more difficult  to State Mr George gissing from the point of view of the passing intellectualism of our day has  made among his many wise tributes to Dickens A characteristic complaint about him he has said  that Dickens with all his undoubted Sympathy for the lower classes never made a working man a  poor man specifically and highly intellectual an exception
does exist which he must at least have  realized a wit a diplomatist a great philosopher I mean of course Mr Weller broadly however the  accusation has a truth though it is a truth that Mr gissing did not not grasp in its entirety  it is not only true that Dickens seldom made a poor character what we call intellectual it is  also true that he seldom made any character what we call intellectual intellectualism was not at  all present to his imagination what was present to his imagination was char
acter a thing which is  not only more important than intellect but is also much more entertaining when some English moralists  write about the importance of having character they appear to mean only the importance of having  a dull character but character is brighter than wit and much more complex than sophistry the whole  superiority of the Democracy of Dickens over the Democracy of such a man as gissing lies exactly  in the fact that gissing would have liked to prove that poor men could instru
ct themselves and could  instruct others it was of final importance to Dickens that poor men could amuse themselves and  could amuse him he troubled little about the mere education of that life he declared two essential  things about it that it was laughable and that it was livable The Humble characters of Dickens do  not amuse each other with epigrams they amuse each other with themselves the present that each man  brings in hand is his own incredible personality in the most sacred sense and in
the most literal  sense of the phrase he gives himself away now the man who gives him self away does the last Act of  generosity he is like a martyr a lover or a monk but he is also almost certainly what we commonly  call a fool the key of the great characters of Dickens is that they are all great fools there  is the same difference between a great fool and a small fool as there is between a great poet  and a small poet the great fool is a being who is above wisdom rather than below it that ele
ment  of greatness of which I spoke at the the beginning of this book is nowhere more clearly indicated  than in such characters a man can be entirely great while he is entirely foolish we see this in  the Epic Heroes such as Achilles nay a man can be entirely great because he is entirely foolish  we see this in all the great Comic characters of all the great comic writers of whom Dickens was  the last bottom the Weaver is great because he is foolish Mr Toots is great because he is foolish  the
thing I mean can be observed for instance in innumerable actual characters which of us has not  known for instance a great rustic a character so incurably characteristic that he seemed to break  through all cannons about cleverness or stupidity we do not know whether he is an enormous idiot  or an enormous philosopher we know only that he is enormous like a hill these great grotesque  characters are almost entirely to be found where Dickens found them among the poorer classes  the Gentry only at
tain this Greatness by going slightly mad but who has not known an unfathomably  personal old nurse who has not known an abysmal Butler the truth is that our public life consists  almost exclusively of small men our public men are small because they have to prove that they are in  the commonplace interpretation clever because they have to pass examinations to learn codes of manner  to imitate a fixed type it is in private life that we find the great characters they are too great  to get into the
public world it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than  for a great man to enter into the kingdoms of the Earth the truly great and gorgeous personality  he who talks as no one else could talk and feels with an elementary fire you will never find this  man on any cabinet bench in any literary Circle at any society dinner least of all will you find  him in artistic Society he is utterly unknown in Bohemia he is more than clever he is amusing he is  more than successful he
is alive you will find him stranded here and there in all sorts of unknown  positions almost always in unsuccessful positions you will find him a drift as an impecunious  commercial traveler like mcber you will find him but one of a batch of silly clerks like swiveler  you will find him as an unsuccessful actor like crumbless you will find him an unsuccessful doctor  like Sawyer but you will always find this rich and wreaking personality where Dickens found it among  the poor for the glory of t
his world is a very small and priggish Affair and these men are too  large to get in line with it they are too strong to conquer it is impossible to do justice to these  figures because the essential of them is their multiplicity the whole point of Dickens is that he  not only made them but made them by myriads that he stamped his foot and armies came out of the  Earth but let us for the sake of showing the true Dickens method take one of them a very Sublime one  toots it affords a good example
of the real work of Dickens which was the revealing of a certain  grotesque greatness inside an obscure and even unattractive type it reveals the great Paradox  of all spiritual things that the inside is always larger than the outside toots is a type that we  all know as well as we know chimney pots and of all conceivable human figures he is apparently the  most futile and the most dull he is the blockhead who hangs on at a private school overgrown and  underdeveloped he is always backward in hi
s lessons but forward in certain cheap ways of the  world he can smoke before he can spell toots is a perfect and pungent figure of The Wretched youth  toots has as this youth always has a little money of his own enough to waste in a semi dissipation  he does not enjoy and in a gaping regard for Sports in which he could not possibly Excel toots  has as this youth always has bits of surreptitious finery in his case the incomparable ring in tots  above all is exactly rendered the Central and most
startling contradiction the contrast between a  jauntiness and a certain impudence of the attire with the profound shame and sheepishness of the  VIS and the character in himm too is expressed the larger contrast between the external gity of such  a lad's occupations and the infinite disconsolate sadness of his empty eyes this is tots we know  him we pity him and we avoid him School Masters deal with him in despair or in a heartbreaking  patience his family is vague about him his low class Hange
rs On like the game Chicken lead him  by the nose the very parasites that live on him despise him but Dickens does not despise him  without denying one of the dreary details which make us avoid the man Dickens makes him a man  whom we long to meet he does not gloss over one of his dismal deficiencies but he makes them seem  suddenly like violent virtues that we would go to the World's End to see without altering one fact  he manages to alter the whole atmosphere the whole universe of tots he mak
es us not only like but  love not only love but reverence this little duns and CAD the power to do this is a power truly and  literally to be called Divine for this is the very wholesome Point Dickens does not not alter toots  in any vital point the thing he does alter is us he makes us Lively where we were bored kind where  we were cruel and above all free for an Universal human laughter where we were cramped in a small  competition about that sad and solemn tiling the intellect his enthusiasm
fills us as does the love  of God with a glorious shame after all he has only found in TS what we might have found for ourselves  he has only made us as interested in tots as toots is in himself he does not alter the proportions  of toots he Alters only the scale we seem as if we were staring at a rat risen to the stature of  an elephant hither to we could have passed him by now we feel that nothing could induce us to  pass him by that is the nearest way to putting the truth he has not been whit
ewashed in the least  he has not been depicted as any clever clever than he is he has been turned from a small fool into  a great fool we know toots is not clever but we are not inclined to quarrel with toots because  he is not clever we are more likely to quarrel with cleverness because it is not tots all the  examinations he could not pass all the schools he could not enter all the temporary tests of  brain and culture which surrounded him shall pass and toots shall remain like a mountain it 
may noticed that the great artists always choose great fools rather than great intellectuals  to embody Humanity Hamlet does Express the aesthetic dreams and the bewilderments of the  intellect but bottom the Weaver expresses them much better in the same manner toots expresses  certain permanent dignities in human nature more than any of dickens's more dignified characters  can do it for instance toots expresses admirably the enduring fear which is the very essence  of falling in love when toots
is invited by Florence to come in when he longs to come in but  still stays out he is embodying a sort of insane and perverse humility which is Elementary in the  lover there is an Apostolic injunction to suffer fools gladly we always lay the stress on the word  suffer and interpret the passage as one urging resignation it might be better perhaps to lay the  stress on the word gladly and make our familiarity with fools a delight and almost a dissipation nor  is it necessary that our pleasure in
fools or at least in great and Godlike fools should be merely  satiric or cruel the great fool is he in whom we cannot tell which is the conscious and which is  the unconscious humor we laugh with him and laugh at him at the same time an obvious instance is  that of ordinary and happy marriage a man and a woman cannot live together without having against  each other a kind of everlasting joke each has discovered that the other is a fool but a great  fool this largess this grossness and gorgeous
ness of folly is the thing which we all find about  those with whom we are in Intimate contact and it is the one enduring basis of affection and  even of respect when we know an individual named Tomkins we know that he has succeeded where  all others have failed he has succeeded in being Tomkins just so Mr Toots succeeded he was  defeated in all Scholastic examinations but he was the Victor in that Visionary battle in which  unknown competitors vainly tried to be toots if we are to look for less
ons here at least is the  last and deepest lesson of Dickens it is in our own daily life that we are to look for the portant  and the prodigies this is the truth not merely of the fixed figures of our life the wife the  husband the fool that fills the sky it is true of the whole stream and substance of our daily  experience every instant we reject a great fool merely because he is foolish every day we neglect  totas and swivels Guppies and jobling simmer and flashers every day we lose the last s
ight of  jobling and chuckster the analytical chemist or the Martian s every day we are missing a monster  whom we might easily love and an imbecile whom we should certainly admire this is the real Gospel of  Dickens the inexhaustible opportunities offered by the liberty and the variety of Man compared with  this life all public life all Fame all wisdom is by its nature cramped and cold and small for  on that defined and lighted public stage men are of necessity forced to profess one set of  acc
omplishments to rise to one rigid standard it is the utterly unknown people who can grow in  all directions like an exuberant tree it is in our interior lives that we find that people are too  much themselves it is in our private life that we find them swelling into the enormous Contours and  taking on the colors of caricature many of us live publicly with featureless public puppets images  of the small public abstractions it is when we pass our own private gate and open our own secret  door tha
t we step into the Land of the Giants end of chapter 10 chapter 11 on the alleged optimism  of Dickens in one of the plays of the decadent period an intellectual expressed the atmosphere  of his Epoch by referring to Dickens as a vulgar Optimist I have in previous chapter suggested  something of the real strangeness of such a term after all the main matter of astonishment or  rather of admiration is that optimism should be vulgar in a world in which physical distress  is almost a common lot we a
ctually complain that happiness is too common in a world in which  the majority is physically miserable we actually complain of the sameness of Praise we are bored  with the abundance of approval when we consider that the conditions of the vulgar really are it is  difficult to imagine a stranger or more Splendid tribute to humanity than such a phrase as vulgar  optimism it is as if one spoke of vulgar modom or common crucifixion first however let it be  said frankly that there is a foundation fo
r the charge against Dickens which is implied in the  phrase about vulgar optimism it does not concern itself with dickens's confidence in the value of  existence and the intrinsic victory of virtue that is not optimism but religion it is not concerned  with his habit of making bright occasions bright and happy stories happy that is not optimism  but literature nor is it concerned even with his peculiar genius for the description of an  almost bloated joviality that is not optimism it is simply
Dickens with all these higher variations  of optimism ideal elsewhere but over and above all these there is a real sense in which Dickens  laid himself open to the accusation of a vulgar optimism and I desire to put the admission of this  first before the discussion that follows Dickens did have a disposition to make his characters  at all costs happy or to speak more strictly he had a disposition to make them comfortable rather  than happy he had a sord of lit AR Hospitality he too often TR tre
ated his characters as if they  were his guests from a host is always expected and always ought to be expected as long as  human civilization is healthy a strictly physical benevolence if you will a kind of coarse  benevolence food and fire and such things should always be the symbols of the man entertaining  men because they are things which all men Beyond question have in common but something more than  this is needed from a man who is imagining and making men the artist the man who is not rec
eiving  men but rather sending them forth As I Shall remark in a moment in the matter of the Dickens  villains it is not true that he made everyone thus at home but he did do it in a certain wide class  of in congruous characters he did it to all who had been in any way unfortunate it had needed its  origin a very beautiful origin in his realization of how much a little pleasure was to such people  he knew well that the greatest happiness that had been known since Eden is the happiness of  the u
nhappy so far he is admirable and as long as he was describing the Ecstasy of the poor the  Borderland between pain and pleasure he was at his highest nothing that has ever been written about  the human Delights no earthly Paradise no Utopia has ever come so near the quick nerve of Happiness  as his descriptions of the rare extravagances of the poor such as admirable description for  instance as that of kit nubles taking his family to the theater for he seizes on the real  source of the whole pl
easure a holy fear kit tells the waiter to bring the beer and the waiter  instead of saying did you address that language to me said part of beer sir yes sir that internal  and quivering humility of Kit is the only way to enjoy life or Banquets and the fear of the waiter  is the beginning of dining people and this mood take their Pleasures sadly which is the only way  of taking them at all so far Dickens is supremely right as long as he was dealing with such penury  and such festivity his touch
was almost invariably sure but when he came to more difficult es to  people who for one reason or another could not be cured with one good dinner he did develop this  other evil this genuinely vulgar optimism of which I speak and the mark of it is this that he gave  the characters a comfort that had no ESP special connection with themselves he threw Comfort at  them like arms there are cases at the end of his stories in which his kindness to his characters  is a careless and insolent kindness he
loses his real charity and adopts the charity of the charity  organization Society the charity that is not kind the charity that is puffed up and that does behave  itself unseemly at the end of some of his stories he deals out his character as a kind of outdoor  relief I will give you two instances the whole meaning of the character of Mr mobber is that  a man can be always almost Rich by constantly expecting riches the lesson is a really important  one in our sweeping modern so sociology we ta
lk of the man whose life is a failure but maer's life  never is a failure because it is always a a crisis we think constantly of the man if he looked back  would see that his existence was unsuccessful but mber never does look back he always looks forward  because the baii is coming tomorrow you cannot say he is defeated for his obsurd battle never ends he  cannot despair of life for he is so much occupied and living all this is of immense importance in  the understanding of the poor it is with
all the Alum novelists that ever insulted democracy but  how did it happen that the man who created this maaba could pension his off at the end of the  story and make him a successful Colonial mayor maaba never did succeed never ought to succeed  his kingdom is not of this world but this is an excellent instance of Dickinson's disposition  to make his characters grossly and incongruously comfortable there is another instance in the same  book Dora the first wife of David Copperfield is a very ge
nuine and amusing figure she has certainly  far more force of character than Agnes she represents the infinite and divine irrationality  of the human heart what possessed Dickens to make her such a dehumanized prig as to recommend her  husband to marry another woman one could easily respect a husband who after time and development  made such a marriage but surely not a wife who desired it if Dora had died hating Agnes we should  know that everything was right and and that God would reconcile the
Eric consolable when Dar dies  recommended Agnes we know that everything is wrong at least if hypocrisy and artificiality and moral  vulgarity are wrong there again Dickens yields to a mere desire to give Comfort he wishes to pile  up pillows around Dora and he smothers her with him like Othello this is the real vulgar optimism  of Dickens it does exist and I have deliberately put it first let us admit that dickens's mind was  far too much filled with pictures of satisfaction and coziness and R
epose let us admit that he  thought principality of the pressures of the oppressed classes let us admit that it hardly  cost him any any artistic pay to make out human beings as such happier than they are let us  admit all this and a curious fact remains for it was this to easily contended Dickens this  man with cushions at his back and it sometimes seems cotton wool in his ears it was this happy  dreamer this vulgar Optimist who alone of modern writers that really destroy some of the wrongs  he
hated and bring about some of the reforms he desired Dickens did help to pull down the deaders  prisons and if he was too much of an optimist he was quite enough of a destroyer Dickens did drive  squar out of his yorkshare den and if Dickens was too contented it was more than squeers was Dickens  did leave his March on parochialism on nursing on funerals on public executions on workhouses on the  Court of Chancery these things were altered they are different it may be that such reforms are  not
adequate remedies that is another question altogether the next sociologists may think these  old radical reforms quite narrow or actually ental but such as they were the old radicals got them  done and a new sociologist cannot get anything done at all and in the Practical doing of them  Dickens played a solid and quite demonstrable part that is the plain matter that concerns  us here if Dickens was an optimist he was an uncommonly active and useful kind of optimist if  Dickens was a Sentimental
he was a very practical sentimentalist and the reason of this is one  that goes deep into dickens's social reform unlike every other real and desirable thing  involves a kind of mystical contradiction if we are to save the oppressed we must have  two apparently antagonistic emotions in us at the same time we must think the oppressed  man intensely miserable and at the same time intensely attractive and important we must insist  that violence upon his degradation we must insist with the same vio
lence upon his dignity for if we  relax by one inch the one assertion men will say he does not need saving and if we relax by one  inch the other assertion men will say he is not worth saving the optimists will say that reform  is needless the pessimists will say that reform is hopeless we must apply both simultaneously to  the same oppressed man we must say that he is a worm and a God and we must thus lay ourselves  open to the accusation or the compliment of transcendentalism this is indeed th
e strongest  argument for the religious conception of life if the Dignity of man is an Earthly dignity we shall  be tempted to deny his Earthly degradation if it is a Heavenly dignity we can admit the Earthly  degradation with all the cander of Zola if we are idealists about the other world we can be realists  about this world but that is not here the point what is quite evident is that if a logical Praise  of the poor man is pushed too far and if a logical distress about him is pushed too far e
ither will  improve wreckage to the central Paradox of Reform if a poor man is made too admirable he ceases to  be pitiable if the poor man is made too pitiable he becomes merely contemptible there is a school  of smug optimists who will deny that he is a poor man there is a school of scientific pessimists who  will deny that he is a man out of this perennial contradiction arises the fact that there are  always two types of the reformer the first we may call for convenience the pessimistic the 
second the optimistic reformer one dwells upon the fact that souls are being lost the other dwells  upon the fact that they are worth saving both of course are so far as that is concerned quite right  but they naturally tend to a difference of method and sometimes to a difference of perception the  pessimistic reformer points out the good elements that oppression has destroyed The Optimist  reformer with an even fiercer Joy points out the good elements that it has not destroyed it is  the case f
or the first reformer that slavery has made men slavish it is the case for the second  reformer that slavery has not made men slavish the first describes how bad men are under bad  conditions the second describes how good men are under bad conditions of the first class of  writers for instance is Gorky of the second class of writers is Dickens but here we must register  a real and somewhat startling fact in the face of all apparent probability it is certainly true  that the optimistic reformer r
eforms much more completely than the pessimistic reformer people  produce violent changes by being contented by being far too contented the man who said that  revolutions are not made with rosewater was obviously inexperienced in practical human Affairs  men like Russo and Shelly do make revolutions and do make them with rose waterer that is with a  two Rosy and sentimental view of human goodness figures that come before and create convulsions  and change for instance the central figure of the N
ew Testament always have the air of walking  in an unnatural sweetness and and calm they give us their peace ultimately in Blood and battle  and division not as the world giveth give they unto us nor is the real reason of the Triumph of  the two contended reform particularly difficult to Define he triumphs because he keeps alive in  the human soul an invincible sense of the thing being worth doing of the war being worth winning  of the people being worth their Deliverance I remember that Mr Will
iam Archer some time ago  published in one of his interesting series of interviews an interview with Mr Thomas Hardy that  powerful writer was represented as saying in the course of the conversation that he did not wish  at the particular moment to Define his opinion with regard to the ultimate problem of whether  life itself was worth living there are he said hundreds of remediable evils in this world when we  have remedied all these such was his argument it will be time enough to ask whether e
xistence  itself under its best possible conditions is valuable or desirable here we have presented with  a considerable element of what can only be called unconscious humor the plain reason of the failure  of the pessimist as a reformer Mr hardy is asking us I will not say to buy a pig in a poke he is  asking as to buy a poke on the remote chance of there being a pig in it when we have for some  few frantic centuries tortured ourselves to save mankind it will then be time enough to discuss  whe
ther they can possibly be saved when in the case of infant mortality for example we have  exhausted ourselves with the earthshaking efforts required to save the life of every individual baby  it will then be time enough to consider whether every individual baby would not have been happier  dead we are to remove mountains and bring the Millennium because then we have a quiet moment to  discuss whether the Millennium is at all desirable here we have the low water mark of the impotence  of the sad
reformer and here we have the reason of the paradoxical Triumph of the happy one his  Triumph is a religious Triumph it rests upon the Perpetual assertion of the value of the human  soul and of human daily life it rests upon his assertion that human life is enjoyable because  it is human and he will never admit like so many compassionate pessimists that human life ever  ceases to be human he does not merely pity the less of men he feels an insult to their elevation  brute pity should be given on
ly to brutes cruelty to animals is cruelty and a vile thing but cruelty  to a man is not cruelty it is treason tyranny over a man is not tyranny it is rebellion for man  is Royal now the Practical weakness of the vast mass of modern pity for the poor and the  oppressed is precisely that it is merely pity the pity is pitiful but not respectful men feel  that the cruelty to the poor is a kind of Cruelty to animals they never feel that it is Justice to  equals nay it is treachery to comrades this d
ark scientific pity this brutal pity has an element  in sincerity of its own but it is entirely useless for all ends of social reform democracy swept  Europe with a saber when it was founded upon the rights of man it has done literally nothing at all  since it has been founded only upon the wrongs of man or more strictly speaking its recent failure  has been due to its not admitting the existence of any rights or wrongs or a deed of any Humanity  Evolution the Sinister minister of Revolution doe
s not especially deny the existence of God what  it does deny is the existence of man and all the spare about the poor and the cold and repugnant  pity for them it has largely do to the vague sense that they have literally relapsed into the  state of the lore animals a writer sufficiently typical of recent revolutionism gorki has called  one of his books by the Eerie and effective title creatures that once were man that title explains  the whole failure of the Russian Revolution and the reason w
hy the English writers such as  Dickens did with all their limitations achieve so many of the actual things at which they aimed  was that they could not possibly have put such a title upon a human book Dickens really helped the  unfortunate in the matters to which he set himself and the reason is that across all his books and  sketches about the unfortunate might be written a common title creatures that still are men there  does exist then this strange optimistic reformer the man whose work begi
ns with approval and ends  with earthquake Jesus Christ was destined to found a faith which made the rich poorer and the poor  Rich but even when he was going to enrich them he began with the phrase blessed are the poor the  jings and the gorkys say as a universal literary Morel cursed are the poor among a million who  have faintly followed Christ in this Divine contradiction Dickens stands out especially he  said in all his reforming utterances cure poverty but he said in all his actual descrip
tions blessed  are the poor he described their happiness and Men rushed to remove their sorrow he described them  as human and Men resented the insults to their Humanity it is not difficult to see why as I  said at an earlier stage of this book dickens's denunciations have had so much more practical  and effect than the denunciations of such a man as Jing both agreed that The Souls of the people  were in a kind of prison but gissing said that the prison was full of dead Souls Dickens said  that
the prison was full of living souls and the fiery Cavalcade of Rescuers felt that they had not  come too late of this general fact about dickens's descriptions of poverty there will not I suppose  be any serious dispute the dispute will only be about the truth of these descriptions it is clear  that whereas gissing would say see how their poverty depresses The Smiths or the Browns Dickens  says see how little after all their poverty can depress the crotchets no one will deny that he  made a spec
ial feature of the poor we will come to the discussion of the veracity of these scenes in  a moment it is here suff to register in conclusion of our examination of the reforming Optimist that  Dickens certainly was such an optimist and that he made it his business to insist upon What happiness  there is in the lives of the unhappy his poor man is always a mark Tapley a man the optimism of who  Spirit increases if anything with the pessimism of his experience it can also be registered as a fact 
equally solid and quite equally demonstrable that this optimistic Dickens did effect great reforms  the reforms in which Dickens was instrumental were indeed from the point of view of our sweeping  social panaceas special and limited but perhaps for that reason especially they afford a compact  and concrete instance of the psychological Paradox of which we speak Dickens did definitely destroy  or at the very least helped to destroy certain institutions he destroyed those institutions  simply by
describing them but the Crux and peculiarity of the whole matter is this that in a  sense it can be really be said that he described these things too optimistically Ally and in a real  sense he described Darth boy's Hall as a better place than it is in a real sense he made out the  workhouse as a pleasanter place than it can ever be for the chief Glory of Dickens is that he made  these places interesting and the chief infamy of England is that it has made these places dull  dullness was a thing
that Dickens genius could never succeed in describing his Vitality was  so violent that he could not introduce into his books the genuine impression even of a moment  of monotony if there is anywhere in his novels in an instant of Silence we only hear more clearly  the hero Whispering with the heroine the villain sharpening his dagger or the creaking of the  Machinery that is to give out the god from the machine he could splendidly describe gloomy places  but he could not describe dreary places
he could describe miserable marriages but not monotonous  marriages it must have been genuinely entertaining to be married to Mr quilp this sense of a still  incessant excitement he spreads over every inch of his story and over every dark track of his  landscape his idea of a desolate place is a place where anything can happen he has no idea of that  desolate place where nothing can happen this is a good thing for his soul for the place where  nothing can happen is hell but still it might reason
ably be maintained by the modern mind that  he is hampered in describing human human evil and Sorrow by this inability to imagine tedium this  dullness in the matter of dullness for after all it is certainly true that the worst part of the  lot of the unfortunate is the fact that they have long spaces in which to review the irrevocability  of their Doom it is certainly true that the worst days of the oppressed man are the nine days  days out of 10 in which he is not oppressed this sense of sickn
ess and sameness Dickens did  certainly fail or refuse to give when we read such a description as that excellent one in detail of  darthur boy's Hall we feel that while everything else is accurate the author does in his words of  the excellent captain naris in Stevenson's recer draw the the dreariness rather mild the Boys At  darthur boys were perhaps less bullied but they were certainly more bored for indeed how could  anyone be bored with a society of so Sumptuous a creature as Mr sque who wou
ld not put up with  a few illogical floggings in order to enjoy the conversation of a man who could say she's a  Roman is nature nature is more easier conceived than described the same principle applies to  the workhouse in Oliver Twist we feel vaguely that neither Oliver nor anyone else could be  entirely unhappy in the presence of the purple personality of Mr Bumble the one thing he did not  describe in any of the abuses he denounced was a soul destroying potency of routine he made out the  ba
d school the bad parochial system the bad de's prison as very much jollier and more exciting  than they may really have been in a sense then he flattered them but he destroyed them with the  flattery by making Mrs gamp delightful he made her impossible he gave everyone an interest in  Mr bumble's existence and by the same act gave everyone an interest in his destruction it would  be difficult to find a stronger instance of the utility and energy of the method which we have  for the sake of argum
ent called the method of the optimistic reformer as long as low Yorkshire  schools were entirely colorless and dreary they continued quietly tolerated by the public and  quietly intolerable to the victims so long as sque was dull as well as cruel he was permitted  the moment he became amusing as well as cruel he was destroyed as long as Bumble was merely  inhuman he was allowed when he became human Humanity wiped him right out for in order to  do these great acts of Justice we must always realiz
e not only the humanity of the oppressed but  even the humanity of the oppressor the saturnist had in a sense to create the images in the mind  before as an icono class he could destroy them Dickens had to make squares live before he could  make him die in connection with the accusation of vulgar optimism which I have taken as a text  for this chapter there is another somewhat odd thing to notice nobody in the world was ever less  optimistic than Dickens in his treatment of evil or the evil man
when I say Optimist in this matter  I mean optimism in the modern sense of an attempt to whitewash evil nobody ever made less attempt to  whitewash evil than Dickens nobody black was ever less white than dickens's black he painted his  villains and Lost characters more black than they really are he crowds his stories with a kind of  villain rare in modern fiction the villain readly without any redeeming point there is no redeeming  point in sque or in Monks or in Ralph nickelby or in bill syes o
r in in quilp or in brass or in  Mr Chester or in Mr peff or in Jonas chuzzlewit or in Cracker or in Uriah neep or in blo or in  100 more so far as the balance of Good and Evil in human characters is concerned Dickens certainly  could not be called a vulgar Optimist his emphasis on evil was melodramatic he might be called a  vulgar pessimist some will dismiss this lued V villainy As a detail of his artificial romance I  am not inclined to do so he inherited undoubtedly this unqualified villain a
s he inherited so many  other things from the whole history of European literature but he breathed into the black God A  peculiar and vigorous life of his his own he did not show any tendency to modify his black godism  in accordance with the increasing considerateness of the age he did not seem to wish to make his  villain less villainess he did not wish to imitate the analysis of George Elliot or the reverent  skepticism of thery and all this works back I think to a real thing in him that he w
ish wished  to have an abrous and incalculable enemy he wished to keep alive the idea of combat which means of  necessity a combat against something individual and alive I do not know whether in the kindly  rationalism of his Epoch he kept any belief in a personal devil in his theology but he certainly  created a personal devil in every one of his books a good example of my meaning can be found for  instance in such a character as quilp thickens May for all I know have had originally some idea 
of describing quilp as the bitter and unhappy [ __ ] a deformity whose mind is stunted along  with his body but if he had such an idea he soon abandoned it quilp is not in the least unhappy his  whole picturesqueness consists in the fact that he has a kind of hellish happiness an atrocious  hilarity that makes him go bounding about like an Indian Rubber Ball quilp is not in the least  bitter he has an unaffected gity and expansiveness and universality he desires to hurt people in  the same hoty
way that a good nature man desires to help them he likes to poison people with the  same kind of clamorous camaraderie with which an honest man likes to stand them drink quilp is not  in the least stunted in mind he is not in reality even stunted in body his body that is does not  in any way fall short of what he wants it to do his smallness gives him rather the promptitude of  a bird or the precipitance of a bullet in a word quilp is precisely the devil of the Middle Ages  he belongs to that am
azingly healthy period when even lost Spirits were hilarious this hardiness  and vivacity in the villains of Dickens is worthy of note because it is directly connected with his  own cheerfulness this is a truth little understood in our Tong time but it is a very essential one if  optimism means a general approval it is certainly true that the more a man becomes an optimist the  more he becomes a Melancholy Man if he manages to praise everything his praise will develop an  alarming resemblance to
a polite boredom he will say that the marsh is as good as the garden he  will mean that the garden is as dull as the Marsh he may force himself to say that Emptiness is good  but he would hardly prevent himself from asking what is the good of such good this optimism does  exist this optimism which is more hopeless than pessimism this optimism which is the very heart  of Hell against such an aching vacuum of joyless approval there is only one antidote a sudden  and pugnacious belief in positive
evil this world can be made beautiful Again by beholding  it as a battlefield when we have defined and isolated the evil thing the colors come back into  everything else when evil things have become evil good things in a blazing apocalypse become good  there are some men who are jury because they do not believe in God but there are many others who  are jury because they do not believe in the devil the grass grows green again when we believe in  a devil the Roses Grow red again when we believe in
the devil no man was more filled with a sense  of this bellicose basis of all cheerfulness than Dickens he knew very well the essential truth  that the true optimist can can only continue as an optimist so long as he is discontented for  the full value of this life can only be got by fighting the violent take it by storm and if we  have accepted everything we have missed something War this life of ours is a very enjoyable fight  but a very miserable truce and it appears strange to me that so fe
w critics of Dickens or of other  romantic writers have noticed this philosophical meaning in the undiluted villain the villain  is not in the story to be a character he is there to be a danger a ceaseless ruthless and UNC  uncompromising Menace like that of wild beasts of the sea for the full satisfaction of the sense of  combat which everywhere and always invol involves a sense of equality it is necessary to make the  evil thing a man but it is not always necessary it is not even always autist
ic to make him a  mixed and probable man in any Tale the tone of which is at all symbolic he may quite legitimately  be made an Aboriginal and infernal energy he must be a man only in a sense that he must have a wit  and will to be matched with a wit and will of the man chiefly fighting the evil may be inhuman but  it must not be impersonal which is almost exactly the opposite occupied by Satan in the theological  scheme but when all is said as I have remarked before the chief Fountain and dicko
ns of what  I have called cheerfulness and some prefer to call optimism is something deeper than a verbal  philosophy it is after all an incomparable hunger and pleasure for the vitality and the variety for  the infinite eccentricity of existence and this word eccentricity brings us perhaps nearer to the  matter than any other it is perhaps the strongest Mark of the Divinity of man that he talks of this  world as a strange World though he has seen no other we feel that all there is is eccentric 
though we do not know what is the center this centiment of the goes of the universe ran through  dickens's brain and body like the Mad Blood Of The Elves he saw all his streets and fantastic  perspectives he saw all his Cockney Villas as topheavy and wild he saw Every Man's nose twice  as big as it was and Every Man's eyes like saucers and this was the basis of his gayet the only real  basis of any philosophical gayety this world is not to be justified and it is justified by the  mechanical opt
imists it is not to be justified as the best of all possible worlds its Merit is  not that it is orderly and explicable its Merit is that it is wild and utterly unexplained its Merit  is precisely that none of us could have conceived such a thing that we should have rejected the  bare idea of it as miracle and unreason it is the best of all impossible worlds end of chapter  11 Charles Dickens by GK Chesterton chapter 12 a note on the future of Dickens the hardest thing  to remember about our own
time of course is simply that it is a time we all instinctively think of  it as the day of judgment but all the things in it which belong to it merely as this time will  probably be rapidly turned upside down all the things that can pass will pass it is not merely  true that all old things are already dead it is also true that all things are already dead for  the only undying things are the things that are neither new nor old the more you are up with the  year's fashion the more in a sense you
are already behind next years consequently in attempting  to decide whether an author will as it is cly expressed live it is necessary to have very firm  convictions about what part if any part of man is unchangeable and it is very hard to have this  if you have not a religion or at least a dogmatic philosophy the equality of men needs preaching  quite as much as regards the ages as regards the classes of men to feel infinitely Superior to  a man in the 12th century is just precisely as snobbish
as to feel infinitely Superior to a man  in the Old Kent Road there are differences between the man and us there may be superiorities in US  over the man but our sin in both cases consists in thinking of the Small Things wherein we differ  when we ought to be confounded and Intoxicated by the terrible and joyful matters in which we are  at one but here again the difficulty always is that the things near us seem larger than they are  and so seem to be a permanent part of mankind when they may re
ally be only one of its party modes of  expression few people for instance realize that a time May easily come when we shall see the  great Outburst of Science in the 19th century as something quite as Splendid brief unique  and ultimately abandoned as the Outburst of art at the Renaissance few people realize that  the general habit of fiction of telling tales in Pros May fade like the general habit of The  Ballad of telling tales in verse has for the time faded few people realize that reading a
nd writing  are only arbitrary and perhaps temporary Sciences like heraldry the immortal mind will remain and by  that writers like Dickens will be securely judged that Dickens will have a high place in permanent  literature there is I imagine no PR surviving to deny but though all prediction is in the dark I  would devote this chapter to suggesting that his place in 19th century England will not only be  high but allog together the highest at a certain period of his contemporary Fame an average
  Englishman would have said that there were at that moment in England about five or six able and  equal novelists he could have made a list Dickens bware Lon thery Charlotte Bronte George Elliot  perhaps more 40 years or more have passed and some of them have slipped to a lower Place some  would now say that the highest platform is left to thery and Dickens some to Dickens thary and  George Elliot some to Dickens thary and Charlotte Bronte I venture to offer the proposition that  when more year
s have passed and more weeding has been affected Dickens will dominate the whole  England of the 19th century he will be left on that platform alone I know that this is an almost  impertinent thing to assert and that its tendency is to bring in those disparaging discussions of  other writers in which Mr swinburn brilliantly embroiled himself in his suggestive study of  Dickens but my disparagement of their other English novelists is wholly relative and not  in the least positive it is certain th
at men will always return to such a right as fery with  his Rich emotional Autumn he's feeling that life is a sad but sacred retrospect in which at least  we should forget nothing it is not likely that wise men will forget him so for instance wise and  scholarly men do from time to time return to the lycs of French Renaissance to the delicate pancy  of Ju so they will go back to thery but I mean that Dickens will be stride and dominate our time  as the vast figure of rebellis dominates Duell dom
inates the Renaissance and the world let me put  a negative reason first the particular thing for which Dickens is condemned and justly condemned  by his critics are precisely those things which have never prevented a man from being Immortal  the chief of them is the unquestionable fact that he wrote an enormous amount of bad work this  does lead to a man being put below his place in his own time it does not affect his permanent  place to all appearance at all shakesphere for instance and Wordsw
orth wrote not only an enormous  amount of bad bad work but an enormous amount of enormously bad work Humanity EDS such writers  works for them Virgil was mistaken in cutting out his inferior lines we would have undertaken  the job moreover in the particular case of Dickens there are special reasons for regarding his  bad work as I have previously suggested under a kind of General ambition that had nothing to  do with his special genius an ambition to be a public provider of everything a warehou
se of  all human emotions he held a kind of literary day of judgment he distributed Bad characters  as punishments and good characters as rewards my meaning can be best conveyed by one instance  out of me many the character of the kind old Jew in our mutual friend a needless and unconvincing  character was actually introduced because some Jewish correspondent complains that the bad old  Jew in Oliver Twist conveyed the suggestion that all Jews were bad the principle is so ladly  absurd that it i
s hard to imagine any litery man submitting to it for an instant if ever he  invented a bad auctioner he must immediately balance him with a good Auctioneer if he should  have conceived an unkind philanthropist he must on the spot with whatever natural Agony and toil  imagine a kind philanthropist the complaint is frantic yet Dickens who tore people in pieces for  much fairer complaints like this complaint of his Jewish correspondent it pleased him to be mistaken  for a public Arbiter it pleased
him to be asked in a double sense to judge Israel all this is so much  another thing a non-literary vanity and there is much less difficulty than usual in separating it  from his serious genius and by his serious genius I need hardly say I mean his comic genius such  irrelevant Ambitions as this are easily passed over like the sonnets of great Statesmen we  feel that such things can be set aside as the ignorant experiments of men otherwise great  like the politics of Professor Tindle or the phi
losophy of professor H hence I think posterity  will not care that Dickens has done bad work but will know that he has done good again the other  chap accusation against Dickens was that his characters and their actions were exaggerated  and impossible but this only meant that they were exaggerated and impossible as compared with  the modern world and with certain writers like or trollop who were making a very exact copy of  the manners of the modern world some people oddly enough have suggested
that Dickens has suffered  or will suffer from the change of manners surely this is irrational it is not the creators of the  impossible who will suffer from the process of time Mr bunsby can never be any more impossible  than he was when Dickens made him the writers who will obviously suffer from time will be the  careful and realistic writers the writers who have observed every detail of the fashion of this world  which passeth away it is surely obvious that there is nothing so fragile as a f
act that a fact flies  away quicker than a fancy a fancy will endure for 2,000 years for instance we all have fancy for an  entirely Fearless man a hero and the Achilles of Homer Still Remains but exactly the thing we  do not know about Achilles is how far he was possible the realistic narrators of the time are  all forgotten thank God so we cannot tell whether home is slightly exaggerated or wildly exaggerated  or did not exaggerate at all the personal activity of a mercenari captain in battle
for the fancy  has survived the facts so the fancy of pod snap May survive the facts of English Commerce and no  one will know whether pod snap was possible but only know that he is desirable like Achilles the  positive argument for the permanence of Dickens comes back to the thing that can only be stated  and cannot be discussed creation he made things which nobody else could possibly make he made dick  swiveler in a very different sense from that in which ther made Colonel nem ther's creation
was  observation Dickens was poetry and is therefore permanent but there there is one other test that  can be added the immortal writer I conceive is commonly he who does something Universal in a  special manner I mean that he does something interesting to all men in a way in which only one  man or one land can do other men in that land who do only what other men in other lands are doing  as well tend to have a great reputation in their day and to sink slowly into a second or third or  a fourth
place a parallel from war will make the point clear I cannot think that anyone will doubt  that although Wellington and Nelson were always bracketed Nelson will steadily become more  important and Wellington less for the fame of Wellington rests upon the fact fact that he was a  good soldier in the service of England exactly as 20 similar men were good soldiers in the service  of Austria or Pria or France but Nelson is the symbol of a special mode of attack which is at  once Universal and yet es
pecially English the sea now Dickens is at once as universal as the sea and  as English as Nelson terer and George Elliot and the other great figures of that great England were  comparable to Wellington in this that the kind of thing they were doing realism the acute study of  intellectual things numerous men in France Germany and Italy were doing as well or better than they  but Dickens was really doing something Universal yet something that no one but an Englishman could  do this is attested b
y the fact that he and Byron are the men who like Pinnacles strike the eye of  the continent the points would take long to study yet they may take only a moment to indicate  no one but an Englishman could have filled his books at once with the Furious character and  with a positively Furious kindness in more Central countries full of cruel memories of political  change caricature is always inhumane no one but an Englishman could have described the Democracy  as consisting of free men but yet a f
unny men in other countries where the Democratic issue has  been more bitterly for it is felt that unless you describe a man as dignified you you are describing  him as a slave this is the only final greatness of a man that he does for all the world what all  the world cannot do for itself Dickens I believe did it the hour of absin is over we shall not be  much further troubled with the little artist who found Dickens too sane for their sorrows and too  clean for their Delights but we have a lon
g way to travel before we get back to what Dickens meant  and the passage is along a rambling English Road a twisting Road such as Mr pck traveled but this  at least is part of what he meant that comradeship and serious Joy are not interludes in our travel  but that rather our travels are interludes in comradeship and joy which through God God shall  endure forever the in does not point to the road the road points to the in and all roads Point  At Last to an ultimate end where we shall meet Dick
ens and all his characters and when we drink  again it shall be from the great flagons in the taverns at the end of the world end of chapter  12 end of Charles Dickens by GK Chesterton

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