by Ian Ker
Chesterton suggests that Dickens was a mythologist’ rather than a novelist, who created gods’ rather than men:
They live statically, in a perpetual summer of being themselves. It was not the aim of Dickens to show the effect of time and circumstances upon a character; it was not even his aim to show the effect of a character on time and circumstance. It is worth remarking … that whenever he tried to describe change in a character, he made a mess of it …
Critics who complain about Dickens’s unchanging characters and recurring catch-words’ as though they indicated a mere stiffness and lack of living movement miss the point and nature of his work’. The ‘old comic writers’ were not dull because they wished their unchanging characters to last for ever’. But the undying vigour’ of the old comic story with its endless jokes’, like popular religion, with its endless joys’, is no longer fashionable in a culture that believes 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 defiers of God were not afraid of an eternity of torment. We have come to be afraid of an eternity of joy.’31
It should have become obvious by now why Chesterton is the perfect commentator on Dickens—because they had so much in common, as reviewers noted. And it is no surprise that Chesterton finds his gospel of wonder in Dickens, with his incomparable hunger and pleasure for the vitality and the variety, for the infinite eccentricity of existence’. Like Chesterton, he felt the strangeness of the world: This sentiment of the grotesqueness of the universe ran through Dickens’s brain and body like the mad blood of the elves.’ For Chesterton, ‘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.’ And he knew that that was how Dickens saw it too. That, for instance, was why ‘the round, moon-like spectacles of Samuel Pickwick… are fixed in that grave surprise which is the only real happiness that is possible to man. Pickwick’s round face is like a round and honourable mirror, in which are reflected all the fantasies of earthly existence; for surprise is, strictly speaking, the only kind of reflection.’ Pickwick does not ‘see things through the rosy spectacles of the modern optimist or the green-smoked spectacles of the pessimist; he sees it through the crystal glasses of his own innocence. One must see the world clearly even in order to see its wildest poetry.’ Chesterton is delighted that Dickens chose an old, middle-class man as his hero for a romantic adventure’, as it gives him the opportunity to defend the middle classes so despised by the writers and intellectuals of his day. Molière in his day had laughed at M. Jourdain for delightedly discovering that he had been talking prose all his life—but M. Jordain ‘towers above’ the writer because he had the freshness to enjoy a fresh fact, the freshness to enjoy even an old one’. M. Jourdain was a true romantic’, like Pickwick the type’ of the romance of the middle classes’. Intellectuals like artists
profess to find the bourgeoisie dull; as if artists had any business to find anything dull. Decadents talk contemptuously of its conventions and its set tasks; it never occurs to them that conventions and set tasks are the very way to keep that greenness in the grass and that redness in the roses—which they have lost for ever. Stevenson, in his incomparable Lantern Bearers’, describes the ecstasy of a schoolboy in the mere fact of buttoning a dark lantern under a dark great-coat. If you wish for the ecstasy of the schoolboy, you must have the boy; but you must also have the school. Strict opportunities and defined hours are the very outline of that enjoyment.
Again we touch on that key Chestertonian theme, for it is the very despised limitations of the bourgeoisie that he maintains are conducive to, not destructive of, the romance of wonder.32
Another paradox Chesterton enjoys highlighting is what he calls the conjunction of common sense with uncommon sensibility’ in Dickens. His interests’ were the same as the ordinary man’, but he felt all of them more excitedly’. He had the power of expressing ‘with an energy and brilliance quite uncommon the things close to the common mind’. And Chesterton has his answer to those twentieth-century intellectuals who elevated the artist and writer above the masses and praised art that was esoteric and incomprehensible to the ordinary person:
Commonnness and the common mind are now generally spoken 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…. 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.
His closeness to the common mind’ was shown in the two things in which he excelled as a writer: not only his humour’, but his horror’: he supped on horrors as he supped on Christmas puddings’. The same writer imagined the humane hospitalities of Pickwick’ as well as the inhuman laughter of Fagin’s den’. But while he knew how to make the flesh creep’, unlike the Decadents he did not ‘make the soul crawl’. This ability ‘to make the flesh creep and to make the sides ache were a sort of twins of his spirit’. Both humour and horror are ‘universal’. And they are the best expression’ of Dickens’s liking for quite ordinary things’—although he made an extraordinary fuss about them’. It was hardly surprising that Dickens had fallen out of favour by the time Chesterton was writing: he was merely a normal man’ with an abnormal normality’. He was undeniably a genius and an unique writer, but he did not wish to be an unique writer’. So uninterested was he in being original’ that he denied his own divine originality, and pretended that he had plagiarized from life’. Similarly, when abroad Dickens was not interested in the things intellectuals are interested in: he took to his heart the streets, as it were, rather than the spires of the Continent’. It was the differences from ordinary English life that struck him—‘the things that do strike the traveller as extraordinary are the ordinary things, the food, the clothes, the vehicles; the strange things are cosmopolitan, the common things are national and peculiar’. The Gothic architecture of France or Germany can be seen in England—but not the German beer-garden. The differences from England that interested Dickens were the differences that the simple and not the subtle’ see: he saw all his colours through the clear eyes of the poor.’33
A similar paradox in Chesterton’s view was that, while Dickens is in an obvious sense an eccentric and extravagant writer, he himself detested and despised extravagance’; he was an immoderate jester because he was a moderate thinker’; insofar as he was a buffoon’ he was laughing at buffoonery’. His own innate ‘good sense’ and ‘sanity’ made him feel ‘the full insanity of all extreme tendencies’. In politics he might look like an almost anarchic satirist’, but he was in fact a very moderate politician’. And so, while he created Stiggins and Chadband out of the quietude of his religious preference’, the Barnacles and Bounderbys were produced in a kind of’ (and Chesterton enjoys reusing a striking phrase he had already used earlier in the book) ecstasy of the ordinary, of the obvious in political justice’.34
Chesterton knew that there was what he called a growth of technique and probability’ in the later novels, where Dickens’s characters were more like men’, and Dickens improved as an artist if not always as a creator’. Modern critics would regard these serious’ novels as the best novels of Dickens; but Chesterton insists that Dickens’s serious genius’ was his ‘comic genius’. Dickens for Chesterton is the supreme embodiment of his conviction not only that serious’ is not the opposite of humorous’, but that the most serious truths can be expressed through the medium of humour. Indeed, Chesterton had a quasi-religious conception of humour: ‘A good joke is the one ultimate and sacred thing which cannot be criticized. Our relations with a good joke are direct and even divine relations. We speak of “seeing” a joke just as we speak of “seeing” a ghost or a vision.’ And in the case of Dick
ens supremely, Humour was his medium; his only way of approaching emotion.’ His pure farce’ is not ‘superficial’ but ‘goes down to the roots of the universe’. He, on the other hand, would have been surprised to see all the work he thought solid and responsible wasted almost utterly away, but the shortest frivolities and the most momentary jokes remaining like colossal rocks for ever’. When a Dickens character becomes emotional, he grows more and more into a gargoyle or grotesque’. However, it was not only emotion that Dickens expressed through humour, but also his serious moral ideas’ that again he expressed through the fantastic medium’ of frivolity. It is the comic not the serious characters who tell us about the human soul’—although Chesterton makes an exception for some of the later experiments’. The whole superiority’ of Dickens over an ‘intellectual’ like Gissing, in Chesterton’s view, was that ‘Gissing would have liked to prove that poor men could instruct themselves and could instruct others’, whereas what was important for Dickens was 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.’ Intellectuals can amuse themselves with epigrams’, but the ‘humble characters’ of Dickens ‘amuse each other with themselves’. Even in the very last, unfinished novel, the comic genius of Dickens ‘makes one splendid and staggering appearance, like a magician saying farewell to mankind’. It is as if Dickens had kept the best joke till the end. In this dark and secretive story’, he has calmly inserted one entirely delightful and entirely insane passage’:
I mean the frantic and inconceivable epitaph of Mrs Sapsea, that which describes her as the reverential wife’ of Thomas Sapsea, speaks of her consistency in looking up to him’, and ends with the words, spaced out so admirably on the tombstone, Stranger pause. And ask thyself this question, Canst thou do likewise? If not, with a blush retire.’ Not the wildest tale in Pickwick contains such an impossibility as that; Dickens dare scarcely have introduced it, even as one of Jingle’s 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 could scarcely have such an immortal folly as that in a world where there is also death. Mr Sapsea is one of the golden things stored up for us in a better world.35
But this wonderfully funny passage is one of the golden things’ that Chesterton has stored up’ for us in this world, and, if the wild epitaph of Mrs Sapsea should be the serious epitaph of Dickens’,36 then this passage makes a suitable epitaph for Charles Dickens, one of Chesterton’s finest achievements, possibly his finest achievement, and one of the great works of literary criticism. Chesterton’s lack of attention to and interest in the later novels makes the study certainly incomplete and one-sided, but his study of the earlier novels is criticism where the critic becomes as much a creator as the subject of his criticism.
Reviewers noted, as usual, a number of factual inaccuracies, including the statement that everything Dickens wrote was a work of art, even the very postcards he wrote. When it was pointed out that this was impossible, since postcards had not yet been invented, Chesterton’s response was: A wonderful instance of Dickens’s never-varying propensity to keep ahead of his age.’37
More seriously, Dickens’s daughter Kate Perugini wrote from 32 Victoria Rd, Kensington, a couple of months after publication on 26 October to correct him on two points of fact. But, first, she wanted to thank him for his very interesting’ book—‘nothing so interesting’, including Gissing’s study, which was delightful in many ways’, had appeared since Forster’s Life. However, she had noticed two mistakes, ‘one particularly’.38 Chesterton had said that the young Dickens had been ‘suddenly thrown into the society of a whole family of girls’ and had fallen ‘in love with all of them’, but by a kind of accident he got hold of the wrong sister’.39 In fact, while her mother was aged between eighteen and nineteen’ when she was courted by her father, the next oldest Hogarth sister, Mary, was only ‘aged between fourteen and fifteen, very young and childish in appearance’. As for the two youngest sisters, they were only aged eight and three and were still in the nursery and not even able to attend their older sister’s wedding! The truth was that there was ‘no sister with whom it was possible to fall in love’ except the one Dickens did fall in love with!40 The ‘other little mistake’ that Chesterton had made was to assume that his family had to listen to Dickens’s railings’ when, as was true, he was often unhappy’. In fact, ‘when he was really sorrowful, he was very quiet, and depression with him never took the form of petulance, for in his unhappy moods he was singularly gentle, and thoughtful of those surrounding him’.41 It seems that Chesterton and Frances called on Mrs Perugini at the end of November or early in December, for Frances wrote to the publisher Methuen on 25 November, presumably with regard to a reprint: Mrs Perugini and Miss Hogarth are a little agitated about a paragraph in my husband’s Dickens. Until my husband has seen them, which he is going to do early next week, please do not print (if you are doing so) as some alteration may be necessary. I fancy it is only a matter of a few words.’42 Subsequently, Kate Perugini wrote to Frances to say that she had been thinking over our interview’ and felt that she did not adequately express all the gratitude I really feel to your husband for his extreme kindness in wishing to meet our views upon the subject of the Hogarth family’. She was ‘chiefly’ anxious for her mother’s sake that ‘this thing should be set straight’. She was sure that when engaged to her father her mother was a very winning and affectionate creature, and although the marriage … turned out “a dismal failure”, I am also convinced that my dear father gained much from her refining influence’ and that of her family and perhaps’ otherwise would never have been quite what he became’.43 In the event, Chesterton never rectified either of the mistakes to which Kate Perugini had drawn his attention.44 Perhaps she never realized. At any rate, she kept in touch with the Chestertons, writing, for example, nearly four years later a letter to Frances in which she discusses the characters in her father’s novels, and says that she was always glad to see them both.45 Even after they moved to Beaconsfield, she used to visit, according to Dorothy Collins, and talk about the Dickens family life.46
Shaw also wrote to express his concern about one or two inaccuracies in Charles Dickens, which he had ‘pounced on… and read… right slap through’.47 He took the opportunity to point out to his bibulous friend that Dickens’s moderation in drinking must be interpreted according to the old standard for mail coach travellers’.
In the Staplehurst railway accident … he congratulated himself on having a bottle and a half of brandy with him; and he killed several of the survivors by administering hatfuls of it as first aid. I invite you to consider the effect on the public mind if, in a railway accident today, Mr Gilbert Chesterton were reported as having been in the train with a bottle and a half of brandy on his person as normal refreshment.48
William James wrote from America: O Chesterton, but you are a darling! I have just read your “Dickens”—it’s as good as Rabelais. Thanks!’49 Swinburne’s Grand Vizier’, Watts-Dunton, wrote to Frances to say that the high priest’ liked the book very much and would like to talk to him about it. An English theatre critic who had visited President Theodore Roosevelt reported that Chesterton was the only English writer he had mentioned and that he had just been reading Charles Dickens with great appreciation.50 In 1927 T. S. Eliot was to write, ‘there is no better critic of Dickens living than Mr Chesterton’.51
3
Meanwhile, Chesterton’s life in Fleet Street continued as usual. Recalling it in his Autobiography, he pondered on the ‘profound problem of how I ever managed to fall on my feet in Fleet Street’; it was a mystery’. His success’ he attributed on the whole to having listened respectfully and rather bashfully to the very best advice, given by all the best journalists who had achieved the best sort of success in journalism; and then going away and doing the exact oppos
ite’. Their unanimous advice was to find out what the particular paper wanted and write accordingly. On the contrary, partly by accident and ignorance and partly through the real rabid certainties of youth’, he never wrote any article that was at all suitable to any paper’. On the Nonconformist Daily News he wrote about French cafes and Catholic cathedrals—‘and they loved it, because they had never heard of them before’. On the Socialist Clarion he defended medieval theology and all the things their readers had never heard of; and their readers did not mind me a bit’. This old Bohemian life of Fleet Street’, with its taverns and ragged pressmen and work and recreation coming at random at all hours of the night’, had since been destroyed by the materialism of machinery’. And Chesterton had sadly to agree with a newspaper proprietor who assured him that a newspaper office was now like any other office.52
One of the Fleet Street characters Chesterton enjoyed recalling was a Johnston Stephen, of the same Scottish family as Leslie Stephen, who told him that he would be a Roman Catholic if it was not that he did not think that he believed in God. A patriotic Scotsman, Stephen did not endear himself to his Presbyterian countrymen with such sentiments: when asked if he did not agree that a corrupt Church was crying out for a Reformation, ‘he answered with disconcerting warmth, “Who can doubt it? How horrible must have been the corruption which could have tolerated for so long three Catholic priests like John Knox and John Calvin and Martin Luther.”’53