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 new things are already dead; for
the only undying things are the things that are neither new nor old.
The more you are up with this year’s fashion, the more (in a sense)
you are already behind next year’s. Consequently, in attempting to
decide whether an author will, as it is cantly 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 twelfth 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
really be only one of its parting 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 nineteenth century as something quite
as splendid, brief, unique, and ultimately abandoned, as the outburst
of Art at the Renascence. Few people realize that the general habit of
fiction, of telling tales in prose, may fade, like the general habit
of the ballad, of telling tales in verse, has for the time faded. Few
people realize that reading and 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 prig surviving to deny. But
though all prediction is in the dark, I would devote this chapter
to suggesting that his place in nineteenth century England will not
only be high, but altogether 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, Bulwer-Lytton,
Thackeray, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, perhaps more. Forty 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 Thackeray and
Dickens; some to Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot; some to Dickens,
Thackeray, and Charlotte Brontë. I venture to offer the proposition
that when more years have passed and more weeding has been effected,
Dickens will dominate the whole England of the nineteenth 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. Swinburne brilliantly embroiled himself in his suggestive
study of Dickens. But my disparagement of the other English novelists
is wholly relative and not in the least positive. It is certain that
men will always return to such a writer as Thackeray, with his rich
emotional autumn, his 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 lyrists of the French Renascence, to the
delicate poignancy of Du Bellay: so they will go back to Thackeray. But
I mean that Dickens will bestride and dominate our time as the vast
figure of Rabelais dominates Du Bellay, dominates the Renascence and
the world.
Yet we put a negative reason first. The particular things 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. Shakespeare, for instance, and Wordsworth
wrote not only an enormous amount of bad work, but an enormous amount
of enormously bad work. Humanity edits 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 in some sense
irrelevant. So much of it was written, 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 warehouse 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 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 lightheadedly absurd that it is hard to imagine any literary man
submitting to it for an instant. If ever he invented a bad auctioneer
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, liked 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, that 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 Tyndall or the philosophy of Professor Haeckel. Hence, I
think, posterity will not care that Dickens has done bad work, but will
know that he has done good.
Again, the other chief 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 Thackeray or Trollope)
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 fact, that a fact
flies away quicker than a fancy. A fancy will endure for two thousand
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 Homer slightly exaggerated or wildly exaggerated or did
not exaggerate at all, the personal activity of a Mycenæan captain in
battle: for the fancy has survived the facts. So the fancy of Podsnap
may survive the facts of English commerce: and no one will know whether
Podsnap 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
Swiveller in a very different sense to that in which Thackeray made
Colonel Newcome. Thackeray’s creation was observation: Dickens’s was
poetry, and is therefore permanent. But 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 a third or a fourth place. A parallel from
war will make the point clearer. I cannot think that any one 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 that he was a good soldier in the
service of England, exactly as twenty similar men were good soldiers
in the service of Austria or Prussia or France. But Nelson is the
symbol of a special mode of attack, which is at once universal and yet
specially English, the sea. Now Dickens is at once as universal as the
sea and as English as Nelson. Thackeray and George Eliot 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 by 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 a furious
caricature 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 of funny men. In other
countries where the democratic issue has been more bitterly fought, it
is felt that unless you describe a man as dignified 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 absinthe is over. We shall not be much further troubled
with the little artists who found Dickens too sane for their sorrows
and too clean for their delights. But we have a long 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. Pickwick travelled.
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 shall
endure for ever. The inn does not point to the road; the road points to
the inn. 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.
THE END
Transcriber’s Notes
Simple typographical errors were corrected.
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they
were not changed.