by Ian Ker
Although the operation failed to produce any children, instead of becoming bitter and jealous of other more fortunate couples, the Chestertons lavished the affection they could not lavish on their own children on those of others. Not that it came easily to Frances, as she was the first to confess to her friends. When her neighbour Mrs Saxon Mills told her she was expecting another child, it took her some days before she could bring herself to see her again. She told her sister Ethel, married to Lucian Oldershaw, that she could hardly bear it when her sister brought her first child when she visited Frances in hospital. She confided to one of Chesterton’s secretaries that she had hoped ‘to have seven beautiful children’.14
Since Chesterton was fascinated by childhood, it is not surprising that nothing delighted him more than playing with children. He had written the marvellous nonsense poem ‘Of the Dangers Attending Altruism on the High Seas’ in Greybeards at Play for Frances’s young cousin Rhoda Bastable, who was to be one of her bridesmaids, as part of a conspiracy against Frances. The two of them had founded a ‘Society for the Encouragement of Rain’, which the sun-loving Frances hated like most people—but which Chesterton loved with a passion:
I have just been out and got soaking and dripping wet; one of my favourite dissipations. I never enjoy weather so much as when it is driving, drenching, rattling, washing rain. … Yes, I like rain. It means some thing, I am not sure what; some thing freshening, cleaning, washing out, taking in hand, not caring-a-damn-what-you-think, doing-its-duty, robust, noisy, moral, wet.15
There were membership cards: Rhoda was president, Chesterton secretary, and Miss Blogg the ‘Eternal Enemy’. Meetings were to take place on Salisbury Plain under the sign of an umbrella, at which members would be served coffee and cakes under the rain. He wrote out Greybeards for Rhoda, with more illustrations than are in the published version, and fastened the pages together with one of her mother’s hairpins. Doris Child, the other bridesmaid at their wedding, remembered what she called ‘the battle of potatoes and port’ that Frances fought against Chesterton’s increasing obesity. Returning an autograph book to Doris, Chesterton apologized in verse for keeping it so long with a rueful reference to his former shape when he had borrowed it:
When I was graceful, slim and strong
And very like a Norman Knight;
My collars did not feel so tight,
My trousers bagged not at the knee:
I was a lovely, lovely sight
When first this book was lent to me.
In a Daily News article, after they had moved to Battersea, Chesterton did not hesitate to inform his readers: ‘In the flat immediately under mine there is a Liberal Imperialist baby, on whose judgment I rely a great deal.’ This was the eldest Saxon Mills boy, who enjoyed mischievously asking his father to ‘make pictures for me like Uncle Gilbert’, knowing that his father was incapable of drawing anything, while also asking the totally unmusical Chesterton to ‘sing a song for me like Daddy does’. One of the Saxon Mills girls was to recall, ‘When I was alone with him, I felt I was an important person worth talking to.’16
2
On 30 August 1906 Charles Dickens, the first of Chesterton’s half-a-dozen or so great works, was published. It is his best critical study, one of the classics of English literary criticism, and a book that is widely considered the best criticism of Dickens ever written. Both realist and symbolist writers had reacted sharply against Dickens; Chesterton’s unfashionable defence of him is also his finest tribute to the despised, recently departed Victorian era. Five years later in 1911, as a kind of supplementary volume to Charles Dickens, he published Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens, which consisted of introductions to Dickens’s novels commissioned for the new Everyman Library edition. Both books may conveniently be considered together.
Chesterton begins Charles Dickens by hailing the novelist as the ‘living expression of the French Revolution’s philosophy of equality and liberty. This ‘happy philosophy’, this ‘idea that all men are equal’, had the effect of producing ‘very great men’. But Chesterton insists that the great man is the opposite of Shaw’s Superman, ‘who makes every man feel small’, for ‘the real great man is the man who makes every man feel great’. The early nineteenth century ‘produced great men, because it believed that men were great. It made strong men by encouraging weak men.’ Far from the common man being despised as in Chesterton’s time, ‘the high rapture of equality’ meant that the ‘best men of the Revolution were simply common men at their best’. The ‘other main factory of heroes’ is a religion ‘which, by its nature, does not think of men as more or less valuable, but of men as all intensely 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.’ Religion not only ‘makes the ordinary man feel extraordinary’, but ‘makes the extraordinary man feel ordinary’. By contrast, Carlyle had killed the heroes and the heroic ‘by forcing upon each man this question: “Am I strong or weak?” What Carlyle failed to understand was that real heroes come out of ‘an ecstasy of the ordinary’. The idea would have been as strange to him as it was shocking to twentieth-century intellectuals and writers with their contempt for the common man. But the democratic Chesterton believed that people are great when they feel great. The founder of Christianity found the honest man in a thief on a gibbet ‘and promised him Paradise’. Democracy ‘encouraged the fool to be wise’. Naturally this optimism about human potential had, in the Christian Chesterton’s view, its serious limitations: it failed to understand original sin, it thought that education would make everyone good, and it believed in ‘human perfectibility’.17
Dickens, then, was ‘the voice in England of this humane intoxication and expansion, this encouraging of anybody to be anything’. No writer has ever ‘encouraged his characters so much’ in books that are ‘a carnival of liberty’. Indeed, they are like ‘spoilt children. They shake the house like heavy and shouting schoolboys; they smash the story to pieces like so much furniture.’ The fundamental democratic doctrine is that ‘all men are interesting; Dickens tried to make some of his people appear dull people, but he could not keep them dull. He could not make a monotonous man. The bores in his books are brighter than the wits in other books.’ Dickens is ‘like life, at least in this detail, that he is alive’, and his art is ‘like life because like life, it is irresponsible, because, like life, it is incredible’. ‘Exaggeration is the definition of art,’ and the now unfashionable truth Dickens exaggerated was the ‘old Revolution sense of infinite opportunity and boisterous brotherhood’. Writers now may emphasize doubts for instance, for doubts are their religion’, but they are not allowed to emphasize dogmas’. Similarly, they ‘know what it is to feel a sadness so strange and deep that only impossible characters can express it’, but they do not know what it is to feel a joy so vital and violent that only impossible characters can express that’. Again, it was a familiar Chesterton complaint, the modern world cannot understand how humour can and should accompany seriousness: it speaks of the wisdom of the spiritual world’ but never of the jokes of ‘the patron saints’, ‘of a man who was so silly that he touched the supernatural, like Bottom the weaver’. But Dickens knew that ‘exhilaration is … 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 can become godlike; there is but one step from the ridiculous to the sublime.’ Like all writers with a very distinctive, idiosyncratic style, Chesterton hovers constantly on the verge of self-parody, always liable to abuse or overuse of paradox; but equally the use of paradox can be brilliantly illuminating and stimulating, as here. He ends his introduction to the world of Dickens with an inversion of the words Dante wrote over the gates of hell: abandon hopelessness, all ye who enter here.’18
For Chesterton, the central paradox of Dickens’s life was that the
hated blacking factory of his unhappy boyhood manufactured also the greatest optimist of the nineteenth century’, so that, if (as his critics complain) he learnt to whitewash the universe, it was in a blacking factory that he learnt it’. He proved that there is no kind of connection between a man being unhappy and a man being pessimistic’. Of the numberless points’ on which Dickens was spiritually at one with the poor, that is, with the great mass of mankind’, on none was he more perfectly at one with them’. He was one of the higher optimists’ who 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 to see 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.’ So it was with Dickens: those unhappy early years, which may have given him many moral and mental wounds, from which he never recovered’, did nothing to prevent him from laying up those hilarious memories of which all his books are made’—they gave him the key of the street’. He may have been desperate’ at that time but he was ‘delighted at the same moment’: His soul was like a shot silk of black and crimson, a shot silk of misery and joy.’19
The hell of Dickens’s boyhood London, the hell that would be the source of his creativity, is evoked by Chesterton in one of his greatest passages, a rhetorical triumph, rich in compelling paradox, that is also one of the most creative pieces of biographical criticism ever written of an author.
He did not go in for observation’, a priggish habit; he did not look at Charing Cross to improve his mind or count the lamp-posts in Holborn to practise 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 lamps of Holborn, 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 for ever 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 undying scenes we can all see if we shut our eyes are not the scenes that we have stared at under the direction of guidebooks; 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 scenes on his mind; he stamped his mind on these places. For him ever afterwards 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 descriptions—a window, or a railing, or the key-hole of a door—which he endows with demoniac life. The things seem more actual than things really are. Indeed, 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. Dickens himself has given a perfect instance of how these nightmare minutiae grew upon him in his trance of abstraction. He mentions among the coffee-shops into which he crept in those wretched days one in St Martin’s Lane, ‘of which I only recollect that it stood near the church, and that in the door there was an oval 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 such an inscription on glass, and read it backwards on the wrong side (as I often used to do then in a dismal reverie), a shock goes through my blood.’ That wild word, ‘Moor Eeffoc,’ is the motto of all effective realism; it is the masterpiece of the good realistic principle—the principle that the most fantastic thing of all is often the precise fact. And that elvish kind of realism Dickens adopted everywhere. His world was alive with inanimate objects. The date on the door danced over Mr Grewgious’s, the knocker grinned at Mr Scrooge, the Roman on the ceiling pointed down at Mr Tulkinghorn, the elderly armchair leered at Tom Smart—these are all moor eeffocish things. A man sees them because he does not look at them.20
For Dickens as for Chesterton, there was at least as much, or rather more, poetry and romance in the city as in the countryside. And when Chesterton wonders why Dickens gave the name The Old Curiosity Shop for no apparent reason to one of his novels, he realizes that ‘this title is something in the nature of a key to the whole Dickens 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.’21 One is reminded of the street in north Kensington with its row of shops that actually included an old curiosity shop that gave Chesterton the idea of Pump Street and The Napoleon of Notting Hill.
The young Dickens had spent his boyhood with the poor, the masses, of London, and a central theme of Chesterton’s critical study is Dickens’s total empathy with them. Because he knew their life from the inside, rather than as an observer from the outside, he understood, for instance, that there were ‘no pleasures like the pleasures of the poor’. Chesterton quotes an ‘intellectual’ in a fin de siècle play as complaining that Dickens was a ‘vulgar optimist’. Chesterton concedes that the term could be applied negatively to Dickens when he threw comfort’ at his characters like alms’ and when his literary hospitality’, whereby he treated his characters as if they were his guests’, failed with characters who for one reason or another could not be cured with one good dinner’. Then he could act like the hated philanthropist with his careless and insolent kindness’, the ‘charity’ that was not real’ but the charity that is puffed up, and that does behave itself unseemly’. ‘At the end of some of his stories,’ Chesterton admits in the severest criticism he ever made of Dickens, he deals out his characters a kind of out-door relief’. He gives two examples. Mr Micawber in David Copperfield showed how ‘a man can be always almost rich by constantly expecting riches’; his life could not be a failure, because it is always a crisis’, ‘he cannot despair of life, for he is too much occupied in living’. How, then, could Dickens pension him off at the end of the story and make him a successful colonial mayor? Micawber never did succeed, never ought to succeed; his kingdom is not of this world.’ Chesterton’s second example from the same novel is Dora, who ‘represents the infinite and divine irrationality of the human heart’; whatever, then, possessed Dickens to make her such a dehumanised prig as to recommend her husband to marry another woman’? And yet Chesterton also thought the term vulgar optimist’ had a very positive sense: When we consider what 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 was like speaking of a ‘vulgar martyrdom’ or ‘common crucifixion’. Dickens was talking about what he knew about: he knew from personal experience what a little pleasure’ meant to the poor, he knew that there was no greater happiness than the happiness of the unhappy’. No other writer, claims Chesterton, has ‘ever come so near the quick nerve of happiness as his descriptions of the rare extravagances of the poor’. When, for example, Kit Nubbles takes his family to the theatre, Dickens seizes on the real source of the whole pleasure; a holy fear’, the fear that, when he asks the waiter for a pot of beer, the waiter may respond, as one poor man to another, with a snub. But, as Chesterton conveys with a brilliant paradox, Dickens enters fully into the immense relief of Kit, when the waiter, ‘instead of saying, “Did you address that language to me,” said, “Pot 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.’22
However, Dickens also understood only too well the privations of the poor, and hated nothing more than the patronizing attitude of intellectuals towards them—‘the whole tone ta
ken by three-quarters of the political and economic world’: It was a vague and vulgar Benthamism with a rollicking Tory touch in it. It explained to the poor their duties with a cold and coarse philanthropy unendurable by any free man. It also had at its command a kind of brutal banter, a loud good-humour… He fell furiously on all their ideas: the cheap advice to live cheaply, the base advice to live basely, above all, the preposterous primary assumption that the rich are to advise the poor and not the poor the rich.’ Dickens did not have to sympathize with the poor in the usual sense of that word, since he actually sympathized with them in the literal sense of the word—unlike the philanthropists’:
Dickens had sympathy with the poor in the Greek and literal sense; he suffered with them mentally; for the things that irritated them were the things that irritated 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 counted 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 things the poor hate are the modern 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 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…. If the barricades went up in our streets and the poor became masters, I think the priests would escape, I fear the gentlemen would; but I believe the gutters would be simply running with the blood of philanthropists.23