In considering Dickens, as we almost always must consider him, as a man
of rich originality, we may possibly miss the forces from which he drew
even his original energy. It is not well for man to be alone. We, in the
modern world, are ready enough to admit that when it is applied to some
problem of monasticism or of an ecstatic life. But we will not admit
that our modern artistic claim to absolute originality is really a claim
to absolute unsociability; a claim to absolute loneliness. The anarchist
is at least as solitary as the ascetic. And the men of very vivid vigour
in literature, the men such as Dickens, have generally displayed a large
sociability towards the society of letters, always expressed in the
happy pursuit of pre-existent themes, sometimes expressed, as in the
case of Moliere or Sterne, in downright plagiarism. For even theft is a
confession of our dependence on society. In Dickens, however, this
element of the original foundations on which he worked is quite
especially difficult to determine. This is partly due to the fact that
for the present reading public he is practically the only one of his
long line that is read at all. He sums up Smollett and Goldsmith, but he
also destroys them. This one giant, being closest to us, cuts off from
our view even the giants that begat him. But much more is this
difficulty due to the fact that Dickens mixed up with the old material,
materials so subtly modern, so made of the French Revolution, that the
whole is transformed. If we want the best example of this, the best
example is _Oliver Twist_.
Relatively to the other works of Dickens _Oliver Twist_ is not of great
value, but it is of great importance. Some parts of it are so crude and
of so clumsy a melodrama, that one is almost tempted to say that Dickens
would have been greater without it. But even if he had been greater
without it he would still have been incomplete without it. With the
exception of some gorgeous passages, both of humour and horror, the
interest of the book lies not so much in its revelation of Dickens's
literary genius as in its revelation of those moral, personal, and
political instincts which were the make-up of his character and the
permanent support of that literary genius. It is by far the most
depressing of all his books; it is in some ways the most irritating; yet
its ugliness gives the last touch of honesty to all that spontaneous and
splendid output. Without this one discordant note all his merriment
might have seemed like levity.
Dickens had just appeared upon the stage and set the whole world
laughing with his first great story _Pickwick_. _Oliver Twist_ was his
encore. It was the second opportunity given to him by those who had
rolled about with laughter over Tupman and Jingle, Weller and Dowler.
Under such circumstances a stagey reciter will sometimes take care to
give a pathetic piece after his humorous one; and with all his many
moral merits, there was much that was stagey about Dickens. But this
explanation alone is altogether inadequate and unworthy. There was in
Dickens this other kind of energy, horrible, uncanny, barbaric, capable
in another age of coarseness, greedy for the emblems of established
ugliness, the coffin, the gibbet, the bones, the bloody knife. Dickens
liked these things and he was all the more of a man for liking them;
especially he was all the more of a boy. We can all recall with pleasure
the fact that Miss Petowker (afterwards Mrs. Lillyvick) was in the habit
of reciting a poem called "The Blood Drinker's Burial." I cannot express
my regret that the words of this poem are not given; for Dickens would
have been quite as capable of writing "The Blood Drinker's Burial" as
Miss Petowker was of reciting it. This strain existed in Dickens
alongside of his happy laughter; both were allied to the same robust
romance. Here as elsewhere Dickens is close to all the permanent human
things. He is close to religion, which has never allowed the thousand
devils on its churches to stop the dancing of its bells. He is allied to
the people, to the real poor, who love nothing so much as to take a
cheerful glass and to talk about funerals. The extremes of his gloom and
gaiety are the mark of religion and democracy; they mark him off from
the moderate happiness of philosophers, and from that stoicism which is
the virtue and the creed of aristocrats. There is nothing odd in the
fact that the same man who conceived the humane hospitalities of
Pickwick should also have imagined the inhuman laughter of Fagin's den.
They are both genuine and they are both exaggerated. And the whole human
tradition has tied up together in a strange knot these strands of
festivity and fear. It is over the cups of Christmas Eve that men have
always competed in telling ghost stories.
This first element was present in Dickens, and it is very powerfully
present in _Oliver Twist_. It had not been present with sufficient
consistency or continuity in _Pickwick_ to make it remain on the
reader's memory at all, for the tale of "Gabriel Grubb" is grotesque
rather than horrible, and the two gloomy stories of the "Madman" and the
"Queer Client" are so utterly irrelevant to the tale, that even if the
reader remember them he probably does not remember that they occur in
_Pickwick_. Critics have complained of Shakespeare and others for
putting comic episodes into a tragedy. It required a man with the
courage and coarseness of Dickens actually to put tragic episodes into a
farce. But they are not caught up into the story at all. In _Oliver
Twist_, however, the thing broke out with an almost brutal inspiration,
and those who had fallen in love with Dickens for his generous
buffoonery may very likely have been startled at receiving such very
different fare at the next helping. When you have bought a man's book
because you like his writing about Mr. Wardle's punch-bowl and Mr.
Winkle's skates, it may very well be surprising to open it and read
about the sickening thuds that beat out the life of Nancy, or that
mysterious villain whose face was blasted with disease.
As a nightmare, the work is really admirable. Characters which are not
very clearly conceived as regards their own psychology are yet, at
certain moments, managed so as to shake to its foundations our own
psychology. Bill Sikes is not exactly a real man, but for all that he is
a real murderer. Nancy is not really impressive as a living woman; but
(as the phrase goes) she makes a lovely corpse. Something quite childish
and eternal in us, something which is shocked with the mere simplicity
of death, quivers when we read of those repeated blows or see Sikes
cursing the tell-tale cur who will follow his bloody foot-prints. And
this strange, sublime, vulgar melodrama, which is melodrama and yet is
painfully real, reaches its hideous height in that fine scene of the
death of Sikes, the besieged house, the boy screaming within, the crowd
screaming without, the murderer turned almost a maniac and dragging his
victim uselessly up and down the room, the escape over the roof, the
rope swiftly running taut, and death sudden, startling and symbolic; a
man hanged. There is in this and similar scenes something of the quality
of Hogarth and many other English moralists of the early eighteenth
century. It is not easy to define this Hogarthian quality in words,
beyond saying that it is a sort of alphabetical realism, like the cruel
candour of children. But it has about it these two special principles
which separate it from all that we call realism in our time. First, that
with us a moral story means a story about moral people; with them a
moral story meant more often a story about immoral people. Second, that
with us realism is always associated with some subtle view of morals;
with them realism was always associated with some simple view of morals.
The end of Bill Sikes exactly in the way that the law would have killed
him--this is a Hogarthian incident; it carries on that tradition of
startling and shocking platitude.
All this element in the book was a sincere thing in the author, but none
the less it came from old soils, from the graveyard and the gallows, and
the lane where the ghost walked. Dickens was always attracted to such
things, and (as Forster says with inimitable simplicity) "but for his
strong sense might have fallen into the follies of spiritualism." As a
matter of fact, like most of the men of strong sense in his tradition,
Dickens was left with a half belief in spirits which became in practice
a belief in bad spirits. The great disadvantage of those who have too
much strong sense to believe in supernaturalism is that they keep last
the low and little forms of the supernatural, such as omens, curses,
spectres, and retributions, but find a high and happy supernaturalism
quite incredible. Thus the Puritans denied the sacraments, but went on
burning witches. This shadow does rest, to some extent, upon the
rational English writers like Dickens; supernaturalism was dying, but
its ugliest roots died last. Dickens would have found it easier to
believe in a ghost than in a vision of the Virgin with angels. There,
for good or evil, however, was the root of the old _diablerie_ in
Dickens, and there it is in _Oliver Twist_. But this was only the first
of the new Dickens elements, which must have surprised those Dickensians
who eagerly bought his second book. The second of the new Dickens
elements is equally indisputable and separate. It swelled afterwards to
enormous proportions in Dickens's work; but it really has its rise here.
Again, as in the case of the element of _diablerie_, it would be
possible to make technical exceptions in favour of _Pickwick_. Just as
there were quite inappropriate scraps of the gruesome element in
_Pickwick_, so there are quite inappropriate allusions to this other
topic in _Pickwick_. But nobody by merely reading _Pickwick_ would even
remember this topic; no one by merely reading _Pickwick_ would know what
this topic is; this third great subject of Dickens; this second great
subject of the Dickens of _Oliver Twist_.
This subject is social oppression. It is surely fair to say that no one
could have gathered from _Pickwick_ how this question boiled in the
blood of the author of _Pickwick_. There are, indeed, passages,
particularly in connection with Mr. Pickwick in the debtor's prison,
which prove to us, looking back on a whole public career, that Dickens
had been from the beginning bitter and inquisitive about the problem of
our civilisation. No one could have imagined at the time that this
bitterness ran in an unbroken river under all the surges of that superb
gaiety and exuberance. With _Oliver Twist_ this sterner side of Dickens
was suddenly revealed. For the very first pages of _Oliver Twist_ are
stern even when they are funny. They amuse, but they cannot be enjoyed,
as can the passages about the follies of Mr. Snodgrass or the
humiliations of Mr. Winkle. The difference between the old easy humour
and this new harsh humour is a difference not of degree but of kind.
Dickens makes game of Mr. Bumble because he wants to kill Mr. Bumble; he
made game of Mr. Winkle because he wanted him to live for ever. Dickens
has taken the sword in hand; against what is he declaring war?
It is just here that the greatness of Dickens comes in; it is just here
that the difference lies between the pedant and the poet. Dickens enters
the social and political war, and the first stroke he deals is not only
significant but even startling. Fully to see this we must appreciate the
national situation. It was an age of reform, and even of radical reform;
the world was full of radicals and reformers; but only too many of them
took the line of attacking everything and anything that was opposed to
some particular theory among the many political theories that possessed
the end of the eighteenth century. Some had so much perfected the
perfect theory of republicanism that they almost lay awake at night
because Queen Victoria had a crown on her head. Others were so certain
that mankind had hitherto been merely strangled in the bonds of the
State that they saw truth only in the destruction of tariffs or of
by-laws. The greater part of that generation held that clearness,
economy, and a hard common-sense, would soon destroy the errors that had
been erected by the superstitions and sentimentalities of the past. In
pursuance of this idea many of the new men of the new century, quite
confident that they were invigorating the new age, sought to destroy the
old sentimental clericalism, the old sentimental feudalism, the
old-world belief in priests, the old-world belief in patrons, and among
other things the old-world belief in beggars. They sought among other
things to clear away the old visionary kindliness on the subject of
vagrants. Hence those reformers enacted not only a new reform bill but
also a new poor law. In creating many other modern things they created
the modern workhouse, and when Dickens came out to fight it was the
first thing that he broke with his battle-axe.
This is where Dickens's social revolt is of more value than mere
politics and avoids the vulgarity of the novel with a purpose. His
revolt is not a revolt of the commercialist against the feudalist, of
the Nonconformist against the Churchman, of the Free-trader against the
Protectionist, of the Liberal against the Tory. If he were among us now
his revolt would not be the revolt of the Socialist against the
Individualist, or of the Anarchist against the Socialist. His revolt was
simply and solely the eternal revolt; it was the revolt of the weak
against the strong. He did not dislike this or that argument for
oppression; he disliked oppression. He disliked a certain look on the
face of a man when he looks down on another man. And that look on the
face is, indeed, the only thing in the world that we have really to
fight between here and the fires of Hell. That which pedants of that
time and this time would have called the sentimentalism of Dickens was
really simply the detached sanity of Dickens. He cared nothing for the
fugitive explanations of the Constitutional Conservatives; he cared
nothing for the fugitive explanations of the Manchester School. He would
have cared quite as little for the fugitive explanations of the Fabian
Society or of the modern scientific Socialist. He saw that under many
forms there was one fact, the tyranny of man over man; and he struck at
it when he saw it, whether it was old or new. When he found that footmen
and rustics were too much afraid of Sir Leicester Dedlock, he attacked
Sir Leicester Dedlock; he did not care whether Sir Leicester Dedlock
said he was attacking England or whether Mr. Rouncewell, the
Ironmaster, said he was attacking an effete oligarchy. In that case he
pleased Mr. Rouncewell, the Iron-master, and displeased Sir Leicester
Dedlock, the Aristocrat. But when he found that Mr. Rouncewell's workmen
were much too frightened of Mr. Rouncewell, then he displeased Mr.
Rouncewell in turn; he displeased Mr. Rouncewell very much by calling
him Mr. Bounderby. When he imagined himself to be fighting old laws he
gave a sort of vague and general approval to new laws. But when he came
to the new laws they had a bad time. When Dickens found that after a
hundred economic arguments and granting a hundred economic
considerations, the fact remained that paupers in modern workhouses were
much too afraid of the beadle, just as vassals in ancient castles were
much too afraid of the Dedlocks, then he struck suddenly and at once.
This is what makes the opening chapters of _Oliver Twist_ so curious and
important. The very fact of Dickens's distance from, and independence
of, the elaborate financial arguments of his time, makes more definite
and dazzling his sudden assertion that he sees the old human tyranny in
front of him as plain as the sun at noon-day. Dickens attacks the modern
workhouse with a sort of inspired simplicity as of a boy in a fairy tale
who had wandered about, sword in hand, looking for ogres and who had
found an indisputable ogre. All the other people of his time are
attacking things because they are bad economics or because they are bad
politics, or because they are bad science; he alone is attacking things
because they are bad. All the others are Radicals with a large R; he
alone is radical with a small one. He encounters evil with that
beautiful surprise which, as it is the beginning of all real pleasure,
is also the beginning of all righteous indignation. He enters the
workhouse just as Oliver Twist enters it, as a little child.
This is the real power and pathos of that celebrated passage in the book
which has passed into a proverb; but which has not lost its terrible
humour even in being hackneyed. I mean, of course, the everlasting
quotation about Oliver Twist asking for more. The real poignancy that
there is in this idea is a very good study in that strong school of
social criticism which Dickens represented. A modern realist describing
the dreary workhouse would have made all the children utterly crushed,
not daring to speak at all, not expecting anything, not hoping anything,
past all possibility of affording even an ironical contrast or a protest
of despair. A modern, in short, would have made all the boys in the
workhouse pathetic by making them all pessimists. But Oliver Twist is
not pathetic because he is a pessimist. Oliver Twist is pathetic because
he is an optimist. The whole tragedy of that incident is in the fact
that he does expect the universe to be kind to him, that he does believe
that he is living in a just world. He comes before the Guardians as the
ragged peasants of the French Revolution came before the Kings and
Parliaments of Europe. That is to say, he comes, indeed, with gloomy
experiences, but he comes with a happy philosophy. He knows that there
are wrongs of man to be reviled; but he believes also that there are
rights of man to be demanded. It has often been remarked as a singular
fact that the French poor, who stand in historic tradition as typical
of all the desperate men who have dragged down tyranny, were, as a
matter of fact, by no means worse off than the poor of many other
European countries before the Revolution. The truth is that the French
were tragic because they were better off. The others had known the
sorrowful experiences; but they alone had known the splendid expectation
and the original claims. It was just here that Dickens was so true a
child of them and of that happy theory so bitterly applied. They were
the one oppressed people that simply asked for justice; they were the
one Parish Boy who innocently asked for more.