These papers were originally published as prefaces to the separate books
of Dickens in one of the most extensive of those cheap libraries of the
classics which are one of the real improvements of recent times. Thus
they were harmless, being diluted by, or rather drowned in Dickens. My
scrap of theory was a mere dry biscuit to be taken with the grand tawny
port of great English comedy; and by most people it was not taken at
all--like the biscuit. Nevertheless the essays were not in intention so
aimless as they appear in fact. I had a general notion of what needed
saying about Dickens to the new generation, though probably I did not
say it. I will make another attempt to do so in this prologue, and,
possibly fail again.
There was a painful moment (somewhere about the eighties) when we
watched anxiously to see whether Dickens was fading from the modern
world. We have watched a little longer, and with great relief we begin
to realise that it is the modern world that is fading. All that universe
of ranks and respectabilities in comparison with which Dickens was
called a caricaturist, all that Victorian universe in which he seemed
vulgar--all that is itself breaking up like a cloudland. And only the
caricatures of Dickens remain like things carved in stone. This, of
course, is an old story in the case of a man reproached with any excess
of the poetic. Again and again when the man of visions was pinned by the
sly dog who knows the world,
"The man recovered of the bite,
The dog it was that died."
To call Thackeray a cynic, which means a sly dog, was indeed absurd; but
it is fair to say that in comparison with Dickens he felt himself a man
of the world. Nevertheless, that world of which he was a man is coming
to an end before our eyes; its aristocracy has grown corrupt, its middle
class insecure, and things that he never thought of are walking about
the drawing-rooms of both. Thackeray has described for ever the
Anglo-Indian Colonel; but what on earth would he have done with an
Australian Colonel? What can it matter whether Dickens's clerks talked
cockney now that half the duchesses talk American? What would Thackeray
have made of an age in which a man in the position of Lord Kew may
actually be the born brother of Mr. Moss of Wardour Street? Nor does
this apply merely to Thackeray, but to all those Victorians who prided
themselves on the realism or sobriety of their descriptions; it applies
to Anthony Trollope and, as much as any one, to George Eliot. For we
have not only survived that present which Thackeray described: we have
even survived that future to which George Eliot looked forward. It is no
longer adequate to say that Dickens did not understand that old world of
gentility, of parliamentary politeness and the balance of the
constitution. That world is rapidly ceasing to understand itself. It is
vain to repeat the complaint of the old Quarterly Reviewers, that
Dickens had not enjoyed a university education. What would the old
Quarterly Reviewers themselves have thought of the Rhodes Scholarships?
It is useless to repeat the old tag that Dickens could not describe a
gentleman. A gentleman in our time has become something quite
indescribable.
Now the interesting fact is this: That Dickens, whom so many considered
to be at the best a vulgar enthusiast, saw the coming change in our
society much more soberly and scientifically than did his better
educated and more pretentious contemporaries. I give but one example out
of many. Thackeray was a good Victorian radical, who seems to have gone
to his grave quite contented with the early Victorian radical
theory--the theory which Macaulay preached with unparalleled luminosity
and completeness; the theory that true progress goes on so steadily
through human history, that while reaction is indefensible, revolution
is unnecessary. Thackeray seems to have been quite content to think that
the world would grow more and more liberal in the limited sense; that
Free Trade would get freer; that ballot boxes would grow more and more
secret; that at last (as some satirist of Liberalism puts it) every man
would have two votes instead of one. There is no trace in Thackeray of
the slightest consciousness that progress could ever change its
direction. There is in Dickens. The whole of _Hard Times_ is the
expression of just such a realisation. It is not true to say that
Dickens was a Socialist, but it is not absurd to say so. And it would
be simply absurd to say it of any of the great Individualist novelists
of the Victorian time. Dickens saw far enough ahead to know that the
time was coming when the people would be imploring the State to save
them from mere freedom, as from some frightful foreign oppressor. He
felt the society changing; and Thackeray never did.
As talking about Socialism and Individualism is one of the greatest
bores ever endured among men, I will take another instance to illustrate
my meaning, even though the instance be a queer and even a delicate one.
Even if the reader does not agree with my deduction, I ask his attention
to the fact itself, which I think a curiosity of literature. In the last
important work of Dickens, that excellent book _Our Mutual Friend_,
there is an odd thing about which I cannot make up my mind; I do not
know whether it is unconscious observation or fiendish irony. But it is
this. In _Our Mutual Friend_ is an old patriarch named Aaron, who is a
saintly Jew made to do the dirty work of an abominable Christian usurer.
In an artistic sense I think the patriarch Aaron as much of a humbug as
the patriarch Casby. In a moral sense there is no doubt at all that
Dickens introduced the Jew with a philanthropic idea of doing justice to
Judaism, which he was told he had affronted by the great gargoyle of
Fagin. If this was his motive, it was morally a most worthy one. But it
is certainly unfortunate for the Hebrew cause that the bad Jew should be
so very much more convincing than the good one. Old Aaron is not an
exaggeration of Jewish virtues; he is simply not Jewish, because he is
not human. There is nothing about him that in any way suggests the
nobler sort of Jew, such a man as Spinoza or Mr. Zangwill. He is simply
a public apology, and like most public apologies, he is very stiff and
not very convincing.
So far so good. Now we come to the funny part. To describe the high
visionary and mystic Jew like Spinoza or Zangwill is a great and
delicate task in which even Dickens might have failed. But most of us
know something of the make and manners of the low Jew, who is generally
the successful one. Most of us know the Jew who calls himself De
Valancourt. Now to any one who knows a low Jew by sight or hearing, the
story called _Our Mutual Friend_ is literally full of Jews. Like all
Dickens's best characters they are vivid; we know them. And we know them
to be Hebrew. Mr. Veneering, the Man from Nowhere, dark, sphinx-like,
smiling, with black curling hair, and a taste in florid vulgar
furniture--of what stock was he? Mr. Lammle, with "too much nose in his
face, too much ginger in his whiskers, too much sparkle in his studs and
manners"--of what blood was he? Mr. Lammle's friends, coarse and
thick-lipped, with fingers so covered with rings that they could hardly
hold their gold pencils--do they remind us of anybody? Mr. Fledgeby,
with his little ugly eyes and social flashiness and craven bodily
servility--might not some fanatic like M. Drumont make interesting
conjectures about him? The particular types that people hate in Jewry,
the types that are the shame of all good Jews, absolutely run riot in
this book, which is supposed to contain an apology to them. It looks at
first sight as if Dickens's apology were one hideous sneer. It looks as
if he put in one good Jew whom nobody could believe in, and then
balanced him with ten bad Jews whom nobody could fail to recognise. It
seems as if he had avenged himself for the doubt about Fagin by
introducing five or six Fagins--triumphant Fagins, fashionable Fagins,
Fagins who had changed their names. The impeccable old Aaron stands up
in the middle of this ironic carnival with a peculiar solemnity and
silliness. He looks like one particularly stupid Englishman pretending
to be a Jew, amidst all that crowd of clever Jews who are pretending to
be Englishmen.
But this notion of a sneer is not admissible. Dickens was far too frank
and generous a writer to employ such an elaborate plot of silence. His
satire was always intended to attack, never to entrap; moreover, he was
far too vain a man not to wish the crowd to see all his jokes. Vanity is
more divine than pride, because it is more democratic than pride. Third,
and most important, Dickens was a good Liberal, and would have been
horrified at the notion of making so venomous a vendetta against one
race or creed. Nevertheless the fact is there, as I say, if only as a
curiosity of literature. I defy any man to read through _Our Mutual
Friend_ after hearing this suggestion, and to get out of his head the
conviction that Lammle is the wrong kind of Jew. The explanation lies, I
think, in this, that Dickens was so wonderfully sensitive to that change
that has come over our society, that he noticed the type of the oriental
and cosmopolitan financier without even knowing that it was oriental or
cosmopolitan. He had, in fact, fallen a victim to a very simple fallacy
affecting this problem. Somebody said, with great wit and truth, that
treason cannot prosper, because when it prospers it cannot be called
treason. The same argument soothed all possible Anti-Semitism in men
like Dickens. Jews cannot be sneaks and snobs, because when they are
sneaks and snobs they do not admit that they are Jews.
I have taken this case of the growth of the cosmopolitan financier,
because it is not so stale in discussion as its parallel, the growth of
Socialism. But as regards Dickens, the same criticism applies to both.
Dickens knew that Socialism was coming, though he did not know its name.
Similarly, Dickens knew that the South African millionaire was coming,
though he did not know the millionaire's name. Nobody does. His was not
a type of mind to disentangle either the abstract truths touching the
Socialist, nor the highly personal truth about the millionaire. He was a
man of impressions; he has never been equalled in the art of conveying
what a man looks like at first sight--and he simply felt the two things
as atmospheric facts. He felt that the mercantile power was oppressive,
past all bearing by Christian men; and he felt that this power was no
longer wholly in the hands even of heavy English merchants like Podsnap.
It was largely in the hands of a feverish and unfamiliar type, like
Lammle and Veneering. The fact that he felt these things is almost more
impressive because he did not understand them.
Now for this reason Dickens must definitely be considered in the light
of the changes which his soul foresaw. Thackeray has become classical;
but Dickens has done more: he has remained modern. The grand
retrospective spirit of Thackeray is by its nature attached to places
and times; he belongs to Queen Victoria as much as Addison belongs to
Queen Anne, and it is not only Queen Anne who is dead. But Dickens, in a
dark prophetic kind of way, belongs to the developments. He belongs to
the times since his death when Hard Times grew harder, and when
Veneering became not only a Member of Parliament, but a Cabinet
Minister; the times when the very soul and spirit of Fledgeby carried
war into Africa. Dickens can be criticised as a contemporary of Bernard
Shaw or Anatole France or C. F. G. Masterman. In talking of him one need
no longer talk merely of the Manchester School or Puseyism or the Charge
of the Light Brigade; his name comes to the tongue when we are talking
of Christian Socialists or Mr. Roosevelt or County Council Steam Boats
or Guilds of Play. He can be considered under new lights, some larger
and some meaner than his own; and it is a very rough effort so to
consider him which is the excuse of these pages. Of the essays in this
book I desire to say as little as possible; I will discuss any other
subject in preference with a readiness which reaches to avidity. But I
may very curtly apply the explanation used above to the cases of two or
three of them. Thus in the article on _David Copperfield_ I have done
far less than justice to that fine book considered in its relation to
eternal literature; but I have dwelt at some length upon a particular
element in it which has grown enormous in England after Dickens's death.
Thus again, in introducing the _Sketches by Boz_ I have felt chiefly
that I am introducing them to a new generation insufficiently in
sympathy with such palpable and unsophisticated fun. A Board School
education, evolved since Dickens's day, has given to our people a queer
and inadequate sort of refinement, one which prevents them from enjoying
the raw jests of the _Sketches by Boz_, but leaves them easily open to
that slight but poisonous sentimentalism which I note amid all the
merits of David Copperfield. In the same way I shall speak of _Little
Dorrit_, with reference to a school of pessimistic fiction which did not
exist when it was written, of _Hard Times_ in the light of the most
modern crises of economics, and of _The Child's History of England_ in
the light of the most matured authority of history. In short, these
criticisms are an intrinsically ephemeral comment from one generation
upon work that will delight many more. Dickens was a very great man, and
there are many ways of testing and stating the fact. But one permissible
way is to say this, that he was an ignorant man, ill-read in the past,
and often confused about the present. Yet he remains great and true, and
even essentially reliable, if we suppose him to have known not only all
that went before his lifetime, but also all that was to come after.
From this vanishing of the Victorian compromise (I might say the
Victorian illusion) there begins to emerge a menacing and even monstrous
thing--we may begin again to behold the English people. If that strange
dawn ever comes, it will be the final vindication of Dickens. It will be
proved that he is hardly even a caricaturist; that he is something very
like a realist. Those comic monstrosities which the critics found
incredible will be found to be the immense majority of the citizens of
this country. We shall find that Sweedlepipe cuts our hair and
Pumblechook sells our cereals; that Sam Weller blacks our boots and
Tony Weller drives our omnibus. For the exaggerated notion of the
exaggerations of Dickens (as was admirably pointed out by my old friend
and enemy Mr. Blatchford in a _Clarion_ review) is very largely due to
our mixing with only one social class, whose conventions are very
strict, and to whose affectations we are accustomed. In cabmen, in
cobblers, in charwomen, individuality is often pushed to the edge of
insanity. But as long as the Thackerayan platform of gentility stood
firm all this was, comparatively speaking, concealed. For the English,
of all nations, have the most uniform upper class and the most varied
democracy. In France it is the peasants who are solid to uniformity; it
is the marquises who are a little mad. But in England, while good form
restrains and levels the universities and the army, the poor people are
the most motley and amusing creatures in the world, full of humorous
affections and prejudices and twists of irony. Frenchmen tend to be
alike, because they are all soldiers; Prussians because they are all
something else, probably policemen; even Americans are all something,
though it is not easy to say what it is; it goes with hawk-like eyes and
an irrational eagerness. Perhaps it is savages. But two English cabmen
will be as grotesquely different as Mr. Weller and Mr. Wegg. Nor is it
true to say that I see this variety because it is in my own people. For
I do not see the same degree of variety in my own class or in the class
above it; there is more superficial resemblance between two Kensington
doctors or two Highland dukes. No; the democracy is really composed of
Dickens characters, for the simple reason that Dickens was himself one
of the democracy.
There remains one thing to be added to this attempt to exhibit Dickens
in the growing and changing lights of our time. God forbid that any one
(especially any Dickensian) should dilute or discourage the great
efforts towards social improvement. But I wish that social reformers
would more often remember that they are imposing their rules not on dots
and numbers, but on Bob Sawyer and Tim Linkinwater, on Mrs. Lirriper and
Dr. Marigold. I wish Mr. Sidney Webb would shut his eyes until he _sees_
Sam Weller.
A great many circumstances have led to the neglect in literature of
these exuberant types which do actually exist in the ruder classes of
society. Perhaps the principal cause is that since Dickens's time the
study of the poor has ceased to be an art and become a sort of sham
science. Dickens took the poor individually: all modern writing tends to
take them collectively. It is said that the modern realist produces a
photograph rather than a picture. But this is an inadequate objection.
The real trouble with the realist is not that he produces a photograph,
but that he produces a composite photograph. It is like all composite
photographs, blurred; like all composite photographs, hideous; and like
all composite photographs, unlike anything or anybody. The new
sociological novels, which attempt to describe the abstract type of the
working-classes, sin in practice against the first canon of literature,
true when all others are subject to exception. Literature must always be
a pointing out of what is interesting in life; but these books are
duller than the life they represent. Even supposing that Dickens did
exaggerate the degree to which one man differs from another--that was at
least an exaggeration upon the side of literature; it was better than a
mere attempt to reduce what is actually vivid and unmistakable to what
is in comparison colourless or unnoticeable. Even the creditable and
necessary efforts of our time in certain matters of social reform have
discouraged the old distinctive Dickens treatment. People are so anxious
to do something for the poor man that they have a sort of subconscious
desire to think that there is only one kind of man to do it for. Thus
while the old accounts were sometimes too steep and crazy, the new
became too sweeping and flat. People write about the problem of drink,
for instance, as if it were one problem. Dickens could have told them
that there is the abyss between heaven and hell between the incongruous
excesses of Mr. Pickwick and the fatalistic soaking of Mr. Wickfield. He
could have shown that there was nothing in common between the brandy and
water of Bob Sawyer and the rum and water of Mr. Stiggins. People talk
of imprudent marriages among the poor, as if it were all one question.
Dickens could have told them that it is one thing to marry without much
money, like Stephen Blackpool, and quite another to marry without the
smallest intention of ever trying to get any, like Harold Skimpole.
People talk about husbands in the working-classes being kind or brutal
to their wives, as if that was the one permanent problem and no other
possibility need be considered. Dickens could have told them that there
was the case (the by no means uncommon case) of the husband of Mrs.
Gargery as well as of the wife of Mr. Quilp. In short, Dickens saw the
problem of the poor not as a dead and definite business, but as a living
and very complex one. In some ways he would be called much more
conservative than the modern sociologists, in some ways much more
revolutionary.