G. K. Chesterton:A Biography

by Ian Ker

  The reference to the poor in the Middle Ages and their monasteries brings us to the other central, critical rather than biographical, paradox of Chesterton’s study: Dickens’s attitude to the Middle Ages. No one was more contemptuous of the Middle Ages than Dickens or more enthusiastic about modern progress—and yet Dickens loved whatever good things the Middle Ages left behind’ and loathed the smug and stingy philosophy’ of Benthamism, the exclusive creation’ of progressive nineteenth-century England. One of the good things’ that the Middle Ages had left behind was the feast of Christmas, and Dickens was at one with the poor in this chief matter… of special festivity’. There was ‘nothing on which the poor are more criticized’—not least by philanthropic intellectuals—than on the point of spending large sums on small feasts; and … there is nothing in which they are more right’. Christmas is a recurring theme in Chesterton, and the Christmas sentiment’ in Dickens, the cosiness, that is the comfort that depends upon a discomfort surrounding it’, was one that was very close to Chesterton’s own heart. Apart from comfort and cosiness, there were two other very Chestertonian features of Christmas: first, its ‘dramatic quality’ of limitation’, such as the time for opening the presents—the hour has come or it has not come’; and, second, the great Christmas element’ was the element of the grotesque’—that is, what Chesterton elsewhere calls the genial grotesque’, which he thought so characteristic of English literature24—like the ghost stories traditionally told on Christmas Eve. Nowhere in English literature, Chesterton thought, was the state known as happiness better described than in Dickens’s Christmas tales.25

  But Christmas was only one, if the most obvious, example of the medievalism of Dickens. To Chesterton the great paradox was that, for all his cheapest cockney utilitarianism’, upon Dickens paradoxically descended the real tradition of “Merry England”, and not upon the pallid mediaevalists who thought they were reviving it’, as he explains in one of the great passages in Charles Dickens:

  The Pre-Raphaelites, the Gothicists, the admirers of the 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 mediaeval in his attacks on mediaevalism than they were in their defences of it. It was he who had the things of Chaucer, the love of large jokes and long stories and brown ale and all the white roads of England. Like Chaucer he loved story within story, every man telling a tale. Like Chaucer he saw something openly comic in men’s motley trades. Sam Weller would have been a great gain to the Canterbury Pilgrimage and told an admirable story. Rossetti’s Damozel would have been a great bore, regarded as too fast by the Prioress and too priggish by the Wife of Bath. 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 anecdote be true or not, it is always told as 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 very much more mediaeval’ than the fool who employed him.

  But nothing was so medieval in Dickens as his defence 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.’ Yet in spite of all his unconscious medievalism, Dickens had no time at all for the Middle Ages: 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 Utilitarian.’ And yet there he was defending ‘the mediaeval feast which was going out against the Utilitarianism which was coming in’, there he was fighting for all that was good in the medievalism, while only seeing all that was bad in it. But then, after all, he was no more interested than were the medievals themselves in medievalism:

  He cared as little for mediaevalism as the mediaevals did. He cared as much as they did for lustiness and virile laughter and sad tales of good lovers and pleasant tales of good lovers. He would have been very much bored by Ruskin and Walter Pater if they had explained to him the strange sunset tints of Lippi and Botticelli. 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 pudding to an extent at which the modern mediaevalists turned pale. They would do every kind of honour to an old observance, except observing it. They would pay to a Church feast every sort of compliment except feasting.

  Theologically, Dickens was hardly a Christian in any way the Middle Ages would have recognized: no doubt he did not believe in a personal devil’, and yet paradoxically he certainly created a personal devil in every one of his books’. And a devil like Quilp ‘is precisely the devil of the Middle Ages; he belongs to that amazingly healthy period when even the lost spirits were hilarious’. To be a devil seriously meant for Chesterton being a devil humorously.

  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 indiarubber ball. Quilp is not in the least bitter; he has an unaffected gaiety, an expansiveness, an universality. He desires to hurt people in the same hearty way that a good-natured 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.26

  Being medieval in spirit meant inevitably also being Catholic in spirit, although again Dickens had about as much sympathy for and understanding of the Roman Catholic Church as he had for the Middle Ages: not only did he never understand the mystery of the immutable Church’, but when he came across it in Europe he simply called it an old-world superstition, and sat looking at it like a moonlit ruin’. In arguing that Dickens was unconsciously medieval and even Catholic, Chesterton was exercising the true role of the literary critic as he saw it: Criticism does not exist to say about authors the things that they knew themselves. It exists to say the things about them which they did not know themselves.’ Defending the exaggeration of Dickens’s caricatures, Chesterton explains that their creator knew what it is to feel a joy so vital and violent that only impossible characters can express that’. For, just as Catholic Christianity says that ‘any man could be a saint if he chose’, so Dickens believed in the encouraging of any body to be any thing’—so much so that, although he tried to make some of his people appear dull people … he could not keep them dull’. Even in Scrooge Chesterton finds ‘a heartiness in his inhospitable sentiments that is akin to humour and therefore to humanity’, for there ‘glows’ through him the great furnace of real happiness … that great furnace, the heart of Dickens’. Perhaps it is not altogether fanciful to detect an allusion here to the Catholic cult of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, given that Chesterton attributes divinity to Dickens as creator: One of the godlike things about Dickens is his quantity, as such, the enormous output, the incredible fecundity of his invention,’ so much so that his power’ is shown even in his scraps’, just as the virtue of a saint is said to be shown in fragments of his property or rags from his robe’. But like the divine Creator, Chesterton does not create cardboard characters; they have the same sort of relation to him as human creatures to God; they are dependent on him, but they are not puppets: 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, and that they may have it more abundantly.’ And, like God, he loves and values even his most unattractive creatures, like Mr Toots: He makes us not only like, but love, not only love, but reverence this little dunce and cad. The power to do this is a power truly and literally to be called divine.’ Because Dickens conceives an endless joy’ in conceiving his immortal creations, he is close to popular religion, which is
the ultimate and reliable religion’. That this popular religion is Catholicism is made plain a few pages later, when Chesterton speaks of how the fragments’ and ‘the wrecks of that enormous religion’, the cult of Dickens, have become part of ordinary language spoken by people who may never have opened a novel by Dickens—just as Catholics can live in a tradition of Christianity without having looked at the New Testament’. Again, the abnormal amount of drinking in a page of Dickens’—If you reckon up the beers and brandies of Mr Bob Sawyer, with the care of an arithmetician and the deductions of a pathologist, they rise alarmingly like a rising tide at sea’—is only the celebration of social drinking as a supreme symbol of social living’ that Dickens’s novels share with almost all the great literature of mankind, including the New Testament’, where wine is a sacrament’. Indeed, Charles Dickens ends with the sentence: And all roads point at last to an ultimate inn, where we shall meet Dickens and all his characters; and when we drink again it shall be from the great flagons in the tavern at the end of the world.’27

  The concept of the holy fool’ was hardly familiar to the Protestantism with which Dickens was familiar. It is very much, though, a Catholic and even more an Eastern Orthodox idea (one has only to think of Dostoievsky). Yet again, according to Chesterton, Dickens unconsciously created characters that conform to the type. Not only that, but his great characters’ are ‘all great fools’. Thus Miss Podsnap in Our Mutual Friend ‘is, like Toots, a holy fool’. And, just as ‘Bottom the Weaver is great because he is foolish’, so too Mr Toots is great because he is foolish’. Mr Pickwick is wise enough to be made a fool of’, ‘he will be always “taken in”’; but then literally to be taken in everywhere is to see the inside of everything’. Mrs Nickleby is one of those fools who are wiser than the world’. These holy fools, like the Misses Pecksniff in Martin Chuzzlewit, are certainly not treated reverently, otherwise they would be just cardboard characters, as the characters Dickens tried to treat unsmilingly and grandly’ are the very characters who are not human: Dickens had to make a character humorous before he could make it human … when once he had laughed at a thing it is sacred for ever.’ The secret of Dickens’s ‘humble characters’ is that they are all great fools’, a great fool’ being someone who is above wisdom rather than below it’. And this kind of fool is defined in very Catholic terms:

  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 himself away does the last act of generosity; he is like a martyr, a lover, or a monk. But he is almost certainly what we commonly call a fool.

  A character like Toots is ‘turned from a small fool into a great Fool’ not by being altered ‘in any vital point’ but by Dickens’s ‘enthusiasm’, which ‘fills us, as does the love of God, with a glorious shame; after all he has only found in Toots what we might have found for ourselves’. It is Dickens again who has properly understood the gospel 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 upon the word “gladly”, and make our familiarity with fools a delight, and almost a dissipation.’ In the same way, with Dickens we can even suffer bores gladly: ‘Almost every one of his amusing characters is in reality a great bore. The very people that we fly to in Dickens are the very people that we fly from in life.’ And Chesterton even claims that Toots in Dombey and Son, not one of Dickens’s better-known characters, is ‘in some ways the masterpiece of Dickens’. The reason he gives is that in this creation, more than anywhere else, Dickens shows how essential humility is for that wonder which was the basis of Chesterton’s own philosophy, and indeed his Christianity.

  Nowhere else does Dickens express with such astonishing insight and truth his main contention, which is that to be good and idiotic is not a poor fate, but, on the contrary, an experience of primeval innocence, which wonders at all things. Dickens did not know, any more than any great man ever knows, what was the particular thing that he had to preach. He did not know it; he only preached it. But the particular thing that he had to preach was this: That humility is the only possible basis of enjoyment; that if one has no other way of being humble except being poor, then it is better to be poor, and to enjoy; that if one has no other way of being humble except being imbecile, then it is better to be imbecile, and to enjoy.28

  These great, grotesque characters are almost entirely to be found where Dickens found them—among the poorer classes’. Public personalities (like intellectuals) have to prove’ that they are clever’, and are consequently small men’. Among them will not be found the rich and reeking personality’, the truly great and gorgeous personality… who talks as no one else could talk’. Such a person is ‘too large’ for ‘the glory of this world’, which is a very small and priggish affair’. But, quite apart from that, Dickens ‘could only get to the most solemn emotions adequately if he got to them through the grotesque’, for he had to be ridiculous in order to begin to be true’. Toots, for example, is a ridiculous character, but it is Toots who is ‘in the most serious sense, a true lover’, for Dickens had revealed ‘a certain grotesque greatness inside an obscure and even unattractive type’. Chesterton understands perfectly why Dickens’s serious’ characters fail, while his comic characters succeed brilliantly: His characters that begin solemn end futile; his characters that begin frivolous end solemn in the best sense.’ The phenomenon was a particularly striking example of Chesterton’s great paradoxical theme that to be serious is to be humorous: His foolish figures are not only more entertaining than his serious figures, they are also much more serious.’ Chesterton does not deny that the later, more ‘serious’ Dickens achieved a human and social realism that is not there in the earlier novels—‘but were not his earlier characters more like immortals?’ After all, there was ‘beatific buffoonery’. But that does not mean that Chesterton thought that Dickens’s comic characters, his caricatures’, existed only in the world of Dickens’s imagination. They were real people but writ large. They were the ordinary people the intellectuals of Chesterton’s day dismissed, but for the democratic Dickens they were the real people not those who bestride the ‘defined and lighted public stage’. This is the last and deepest lesson of Dickens’, explains Chesterton in a magnificent passage that raises literary criticism to the level of creative art:

  It is in our own daily life that we are to look for the portents and the prodigies…. 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 Tootses and Swivellers, Guppys and Joblings, Simmerys and Flashers. Every day we lose the last sight of Jobbling and Chuckster, the Analytical Chemist, or the Marchioness. 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…. 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 people intolerably individual, that we find them swelling into the enormous contours, and taking on the colours of caricatures.29

  Because Dickens’s realism lies in realizing the vividness of everyday life, there was one thing he could not depict—dullness: his vitality was so violent that he could not introduce into his books the genuine impression even of a moment of monotony.’ This ‘inability to imagine tedium’ meant that he could splendidly describe gloomy places, but he could not describe dreary places’. He could attack any abuse except the soul-destroying potency of routine’. Nevertheless, by making characters like Squeers and Bumble so vivid, ‘he flattered them; but he destroyed them with the flattery’. Before he could make them die, he had to make them live.30

  For Chesterton, the novels of Dickens a
re really the characters of Dickens. Strictly speaking, he exaggerates, there are no novels—there are ‘simply lengths cut from the flowing and mixed substance called Dickens’. Characters do not necessarily particularly belong to the novel in which they appear: ‘There is no reason why Sam Weller, in the course of his wanderings, should not wander into “Nicholas Nickleby”. There is no reason why Major Bagstock, in his brisk way, should not walk straight out of “Dombey and Son” and straight into “Martin Chuzzlewit”.’ And so the ‘primary elements’ of Dickens’s novels ‘are not the stories, but the characters who affect the stories—or, more often still, the characters who do not affect the story’. Indeed, they

  are at their best when they have least to do. Dickens’s characters are perfect as long as he can keep them out of his stories. Bumble is divine until a dark and practical secret is entrusted to him—as if anybody but a lunatic would entrust a secret to Bumble. Micawber is noble when he is doing nothing; but he is quite unconvincing when he is spying on Uriah Heep, for obviously neither Micawber nor any one else would employ Micawber as a private detective.