DICKENS AND AMERICA
The essential of Dickens’s character 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 Austen 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 outside us. To have a sense of colour is the same as to
have a sensibility to colour. 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 sensibility 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 ten to five 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 manners. For all politeness 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 to-day
chiefly of two types, the dull man who likes ordinary things mildly,
and the extraordinary man who likes extraordinary things wildly. But
Dickens liked quite 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 eccentric, but not
the defects, the narrowness. Even when he raved like a maniac he did
not rave like a monomaniac. He had no particular 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 Baudelaire, or
cruel sights east of Suez with Mr. Kipling. He wanted what a healthy
man wants, only he was ill with wanting it. To understand him, in
a word, we must keep well in mind the medical distinction between
delicacy 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
matter is so typical of Dickens’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 thread, thin and faint, and as easily lost
as gossamer. 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 men that wanted the same things (or
the other men that wanted the other things) we feel a startling absence
of cant, a startling sense of humanity as it is, and of the eternal
weakness. He was a fierce democrat, but in his best vein he laughed at
the cocksure 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 Nonconformists;
but he spat out of his mouth the unction of that too easy seriousness
with which they oiled everything, and held up to them like a horrible
mirror the foul fat face of Chadband. He saw that Mr. Podsnap thought
too little of places outside England. But he saw that Mrs. Jellaby
thought too much of them. In the last book he wrote he gives us, in
Mr. Honeythunder, 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 dogma: he never got into
any _cul de sac_ of civic or economic fanaticism: he went down the
broad road of the Revolution. He never admitted that economically,
we must make hells of workhouses, any more than Rousseau would have
admitted it. He never said the State had no right to teach children
or save their bones, any more than Danton 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 a Utilitarian. While economists were
writing soft words he wrote “Hard Times,” which Macaulay called “sullen
Socialism,” because it was not complacent Whiggism. But Dickens was
never a Socialist any more than he was an Individualist; and, whatever
else he was, he certainly was not sullen. He was not even a politician
of any kind. He was simply a man of very clear, airy 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 hard 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 “Laissez faire.”
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 candour of
his, this abrupt and sensational rationality. Apart altogether from
any question of the accuracy 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 fifty 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
nineteenth century enormously idealized America. On the other hand to
the Americans, fresh from their first epic of arms, the defeated mother
country, with its coronets and county magistrates, was only a broken
feudal keep.
So much is self-evident. But nearly halfway through the nineteenth
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 patience with the pretence 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 J.P.’s, on the
vestries, on the voluntary charities. This satirist was Dickens, and
it must be remembered that he was not only fierce, but uproariously
readable. He really damaged the things he struck at, a very rare thing.
He stepped up to the grave official of the vestry, 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 nailed
him up as Nupkins, an owl in open day. For to this satire there is
literally no answer; it cannot be denied that a man like Nupkins 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 Nupkins, on the wild, strange thing that we had made. Thus
Dickens 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 seventeenth 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 tip her kings and beadles into the sea. Let him come
here, and we will show him a race of free men such as he dreams of,
alive upon the ancient earth. Let him come here and tell the English
of the divine democracy towards 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. Any ordinary person would have
prophesied that as he had pushed his rage at the old order almost to
the edge of rant, he would push his encomium of the new order almost
to the edge of cant. 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 course 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 Chuzzlewit,” I use, of course, an elliptical
expression. He wrote the notes of the American part of “Martin
Chuzzlewit” while he was still in America; but it was a later decision
presumably that such impressions should go into a book, and it was
little better than an afterthought that they should go into “Martin
Chuzzlewit.” 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 young
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 should 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 a father, the father of several children, and their existence made
a difficulty 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 Forster 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 independently of any modification it afterwards
underwent.” But the modification it afterwards underwent was, as I have
said above, simply a sudden kicking against cant, 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 view underwent did not arise from any “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 on to 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 humour out of sleep; it woke like a wild beast for hunting, the lion
of his laughter. He had heard the truth once too often. He had heard
the truth for the nine hundred and ninety-ninth 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, some
time afterwards, somebody said that he did, he violently rejected
the view as only describable “in one of the shortest words in the
English language.” But his entry into America was almost triumphal;
the rostrum or pulpit was ready for him; he felt strong enough to say
anything. He had 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 question 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, Prescott,
Hoffman, Bryant, Halleck, Dana, Washington Allston--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 a breathing man can be found with temerity
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 Hartford 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 twelve feet 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 while there is no materialism so crude or so
material as American materialism, there is also no idealism so crude 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; coarse
exactly where all civilized men are delicate, delicate exactly where
all grown-up men are coarse. Some beautiful ideal runs through this
people, but it runs aslant. The only existing picture in which the
thing I mean has been embodied is in Stevenson’s “Wrecker,” 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 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 Pinkertonian 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 old-fashioned
and fundamental. On top of these 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 taut and quivering
ideality demanded by American patriots and public speakers. And there
was something else also, connected especially with the question of
copyright and his own pecuniary claims. Dickens was not in the least
desirous of being thought too “high-souled” 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 Radicals--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 asked for his money, he never asked for it with that
shamefaced cynicism, 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 honour. 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 astonishment, “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 Dickens 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 vaguer 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 contentment 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 riotous 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 somewhat remarkable
words: “I tremble for a Radical coming here, unless he is a Radical on
principle, by reason and reflection, and from the sense of right. I
fear that if he were anything else he would return home a Tory.... I
say no more on that head 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.”
We are still waiting to see if that prediction has been fulfilled; but
nobody 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 slave-holders, 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 upholders were few and
brief. 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 cant 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,
however, it did happen that the primary morality of man-owning came up
for discussion, Dickens displayed an honourable impatience. One man,
full of anti-abolitionist ardour, buttonholed him and bombarded him
with the well-known argument in defence 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 ruin
had nothing whatever to do....” 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 spring 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 offence 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 tyrannical 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 unfavourably with those in England, controlled by Lieutenant
Tracey, and by Chesterton at Coldbath Fields, two reformers of prison
discipline for whom he had a high regard. But it was a mere accident
that American gaols were inferior to English. There was and is nothing
in the American spirit to prevent their effecting all the reforms of
Tracey and Chesterton, 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 still remain--everything might remain that makes Pogram or
Chollop irritating or absurd. And against the evil genius of America
Dickens was now to strike a second and a very different blow.
In January, 1843, appeared the first number of the novel called “Martin
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 grotesques on each
side of the gateway of the tale, Pecksniff and Mrs. Gamp, “Martin
Chuzzlewit” will be chiefly admired for its American excursion. It is
a good satire embedded in an indifferent novel. Mrs. Gamp is, indeed,
a sumptuous study, laid on in those rich, oily, almost greasy colours
that go to make the English comic characters, that make the very
diction of Falstaff fat, and quaking with jolly degradation. Pecksniff
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. 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.
Similarly, while Pecksniff is the best thing in the story, the story is
the worst thing in Pecksniff. His plot against old Martin can only be
described by saying that it is as silly as old Martin’s plot against
him. His fall at the end is one of the rare falls of Dickens. Surely it
was not necessary to take Pecksniff so seriously. Pecksniff is a merely
laughable character; he is so laughable that he is 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 was only made to be laughed at?
But it is the American part of “Martin Chuzzlewit” which is our
concern, and which is memorable. It has the air of a great satire; but
if it is only a great slander, it is still great. His serious book on
America was merely a squib, perhaps a damp squib. 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
original, because the portrait is so much more important than the
original. Who cares whether Aristophanes correctly describes Kleon,
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
Pogram. For there is much more in the American episodes than their
intoxicating absurdity; there is more than humour 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 Martin that when he
said that Queen Victoria did not live in the Tower 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 optimism. 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 one’s self all over with the
same stale butter; above all, the big defiances of small enemies, or
the very urgent challenges to very distant enemies; the cowardice so
habitual and unconscious that it wears the plumes of courage--all
this is an English temptation as well as an American one. “Martin
Chuzzlewit” 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 Chollops 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 Ages. In the eighteenth
century, in the making of modern politics, a “patriot” meant a
discontented man. It was opposed to the word “courtier,” which meant an
upholder of the _status quo_. 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 pessimist.
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 Watertoast Gazette_. The thing which
is rather foolishly called the Anglo-Saxon 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 bolsters. 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.”
Martin Chuzzlewit’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 madman cannot
conceive any cosmos outside a certain tale or conspiracy or vision.
Hence the more clearly we see the world divided into Saxons and
non-Saxons, 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 colours and facts of Anglo-Saxon superiority, the more
surely we may know we are in a dream. For the real 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 and capering comfort; but comfort at bottom
still. For there is but an inch of difference between the cushioned
chamber and the padded cell.