_Great Expectations_, which was written in the afternoon of Dickens's
life and fame, has a quality of serene irony and even sadness, which
puts it quite alone among his other works. At no time could Dickens
possibly be called cynical, he had too much vitality; but relatively to
the other books this book is cynical; but it has the soft and gentle
cynicism of old age, not the hard cynicism of youth. To be a young cynic
is to be a young brute; but Dickens, who had been so perfectly romantic
and sentimental in his youth, could afford to admit this touch of doubt
into the mixed experience of his middle age. At no time could any books
by Dickens have been called Thackerayan. Both of the two men were too
great for that. But relatively to the other Dickensian productions this
book may be called Thackerayan. It is a study in human weakness and the
slow human surrender. It describes how easily a free lad of fresh and
decent instincts can be made to care more for rank and pride and the
degrees of our stratified society than for old affection and for honour.
It is an extra chapter to _The Book of Snobs_.
The best way of stating the change which this book marks in Dickens can
be put in one phrase. In this book for the first time the hero
disappears. The hero had descended to Dickens by a long line which
begins with the gods, nay, perhaps if one may say so, which begins with
God. First comes Deity and then the image of Deity; first comes the god
and then the demi-god, the Hercules who labours and conquers before he
receives his heavenly crown. That idea, with continual mystery and
modification, has continued behind all romantic tales; the demi-god
became the hero of paganism; the hero of paganism became the
knight-errant of Christianity; the knight-errant who wandered and was
foiled before he triumphed became the hero of the later prose romance,
the romance in which the hero had to fight a duel with the villain but
always survived, in which the hero drove desperate horses through the
night in order to rescue the heroine, but always rescued her.
This heroic modern hero, this demi-god in a top-hat, may be said to
reach his supreme moment and typical example about the time when Dickens
was writing that thundering and thrilling and highly unlikely scene in
_Nicholas Nickleby_, the scene where Nicholas hopelessly denounces the
atrocious Gride in his hour of grinning triumph, and a thud upon the
floor above tells them that the heroine's tyrannical father has died
just in time to set her free. That is the apotheosis of the pure heroic
as Dickens found it, and as Dickens in some sense continued it. It may
be that it does not appear with quite so much unmistakable youth,
beauty, valour, and virtue as it does in Nicholas Nickleby. Walter Gay
is a simpler and more careless hero, but when he is doing any of the
business of the story he is purely heroic. Kit Nubbles is a humbler
hero, but he is a hero; when he is good he is very good. Even David
Copperfield, who confesses to boyish tremors and boyish evasions in his
account of his boyhood, acts the strict stiff part of the chivalrous
gentleman in all the active and determining scenes of the tale. But
_Great Expectations_ may be called, like _Vanity Fair_, a novel without
a hero. Almost all Thackeray's novels except Esmond are novels without a
hero, but only one of Dickens's novels can be so described. I do not
mean that it is a novel without a _jeune premier_, a young man to make
love; _Pickwick_ is that and _Oliver Twist_, and, perhaps, _The Old
Curiosity Shop_. I mean that it is a novel without a hero in the same
far deeper and more deadly sense in which _Pendennis_ is also a novel
without a hero. I mean that it is a novel which aims chiefly at showing
that the hero is unheroic.
All such phrases as these must appear of course to overstate the case.
Pip is a much more delightful person than Nicholas Nickleby. Or to take
a stronger case for the purpose of our argument, Pip is a much more
delightful person than Sydney Carton. Still the fact remains. Most of
Nicholas Nickleby's personal actions are meant to show that he is
heroic. Most of Pip's actions are meant to show that he is not heroic.
The study of Sydney Carton is meant to indicate that with all his vices
Sydney Carton was a hero. The study of Pip is meant to indicate that
with all his virtues Pip was a snob. The motive of the literary
explanation is different. Pip and Pendennis are meant to show how
circumstances can corrupt men. Sam Weller and Hercules are meant to show
how heroes can subdue circumstances.
This is the preliminary view of the book which is necessary if we are
to regard it as a real and separate fact in the life of Dickens. Dickens
had many moods because he was an artist; but he had one great mood,
because he was a great artist. Any real difference therefore from the
general drift, or rather (I apologise to Dickens) the general drive of
his creation is very important. This is the one place in his work in
which he does, I will not say feel like Thackeray, far less think like
Thackeray, less still write like Thackeray, but this is the one of his
works in which he understands Thackeray. He puts himself in some sense
in the same place; he considers mankind at somewhat the same angle as
mankind is considered in one of the sociable and sarcastic novels of
Thackeray. When he deals with Pip he sets out not to show his strength
like the strength of Hercules, but to show his weakness like the
weakness of Pendennis. When he sets out to describe Pip's great
expectation he does not set out, as in a fairytale, with the idea that
these great expectations will be fulfilled; he sets out from the first
with the idea that these great expectations will be disappointing. We
might very well, as I have remarked elsewhere, apply to all Dickens's
books the title _Great Expectations_. All his books are full of an airy
and yet ardent expectation of everything; of the next person who shall
happen to speak, of the next chimney that shall happen to smoke, of the
next event, of the next ecstasy; of the next fulfilment of any eager
human fancy. All his books might be called _Great Expectations_. But the
only book to which he gave the name of _Great Expectations_ was the only
book in which the expectation was never realised. It was so with the
whole of that splendid and unconscious generation to which he belonged.
The whole glory of that old English middle class was that it was
unconscious; its excellence was entirely in that, that it was the
culture of the nation, and that it did not know it. If Dickens had ever
known that he was optimistic, he would have ceased to be happy.
It is necessary to make this first point clear: that in _Great
Expectations_ Dickens was really trying to be a quiet, a detached, and
even a cynical observer of human life. Dickens was trying to be
Thackeray. And the final and startling triumph of Dickens is this: that
even to this moderate and modern story, he gives an incomparable energy
which is not moderate and which is not modern. He is trying to be
reasonable; but in spite of himself he is inspired. He is trying to be
detailed, but in spite of himself he is gigantic. Compared to the rest
of Dickens this is Thackeray; but compared to the whole of Thackeray we
can only say in supreme praise of it that it is Dickens.
Take, for example, the one question of snobbishness. Dickens has
achieved admirably the description of the doubts and vanities of the
wretched Pip as he walks down the street in his new gentlemanly clothes,
the clothes of which he is so proud and so ashamed. Nothing could be so
exquisitely human, nothing especially could be so exquisitely masculine
as that combination of self-love and self-assertion and even insolence
with a naked and helpless sensibility to the slightest breath of
ridicule. Pip thinks himself better than every one else, and yet anybody
can snub him; that is the everlasting male, and perhaps the everlasting
gentleman. Dickens has described perfectly this quivering and
defenceless dignity. Dickens has described perfectly how ill-armed it is
against the coarse humour of real humanity--the real humanity which
Dickens loved, but which idealists and philanthropists do not love, the
humanity of cabmen and costermongers and men singing in a third-class
carriage; the humanity of Trabb's boy. In describing Pip's weakness
Dickens is as true and as delicate as Thackeray. But Thackeray might
have been easily as true and as delicate as Dickens. This quick and
quiet eye for the tremors of mankind is a thing which Dickens possessed,
but which others possessed also. George Eliot or Thackeray could have
described the weakness of Pip. Exactly what George Eliot and Thackeray
could not have described was the vigour of Trabb's boy. There would have
been admirable humour and observation in their accounts of that
intolerable urchin. Thackeray would have given us little light touches
of Trabb's boy, absolutely true to the quality and colour of the humour,
just as in his novels of the eighteenth century, the glimpses of Steele
or Bolingbroke or Doctor Johnson are exactly and perfectly true to the
colour and quality of their humour. George Eliot in her earlier books
would have given us shrewd authentic scraps of the real dialect of
Trabb's boy, just as she gave us shrewd and authentic scraps of the real
talk in a Midland country town. In her later books she would have given
us highly rationalistic explanations of Trabb's boy; which we should not
have read. But exactly what they could never have given, and exactly
what Dickens does give, is the _bounce_ of Trabb's boy. It is the real
unconquerable rush and energy in a character which was the supreme and
quite indescribable greatness of Dickens. He conquered by rushes; he
attacked in masses; he carried things at the spear point in a charge of
spears; he was the Rupert of Fiction. The thing about any figure of
Dickens, about Sam Weller or Dick Swiveller, or Micawber, or Bagstock,
or Trabb's boy,--the thing about each one of these persons is that he
cannot be exhausted. A Dickens character hits you first on the nose and
then in the waistcoat, and then in the eye and then in the waistcoat
again, with the blinding rapidity of some battering engine. The scene in
which Trabb's boy continually overtakes Pip in order to reel and stagger
as at a first encounter is a thing quite within the real competence of
such a character; it might have been suggested by Thackeray, or George
Eliot, or any realist. But the point with Dickens is that there is a
rush in the boy's rushings; the writer and the reader rush with him.
They start with him, they stare with him, they stagger with him, they
share an inexpressible vitality in the air which emanates from this
violent and capering satirist. Trabb's boy is among other things a boy;
he has a physical rapture in hurling himself like a boomerang and in
bouncing to the sky like a ball. It is just exactly in describing this
quality that Dickens is Dickens and that no one else comes near him. No
one feels in his bones that Felix Holt was strong as he feels in his
bones that little Quilp was strong. No one can feel that even Rawdon
Crawley's splendid smack across the face of Lord Steyne is quite so
living and life-giving as the "kick after kick" which old Mr. Weller
dealt the dancing and quivering Stiggins as he drove him towards the
trough. This quality, whether expressed intellectually or physically,
is the profoundly popular and eternal quality in Dickens; it is the
thing that no one else could do. This quality is the quality which has
always given its continuous power and poetry to the common people
everywhere. It is life; it is the joy of life felt by those who have
nothing else but life. It is the thing that all aristocrats have always
hated and dreaded in the people. And it is the thing which poor Pip
really hates and dreads in Trabb's boy.
A great man of letters or any great artist is symbolic without knowing
it. The things he describes are types because they are truths.
Shakespeare may, or may not, have ever put it to himself that Richard
the Second was a philosophical symbol; but all good criticism must
necessarily see him so. It may be a reasonable question whether the
artist should be allegorical. There can be no doubt among sane men that
the critic should be allegorical. Spenser may have lost by being less
realistic than Fielding. But any good criticism of _Tom Jones_ must be
as mystical as the _Faery Queen_. Hence it is unavoidable in speaking of
a fine book like _Great Expectations_ that we should give even to its
unpretentious and realistic figures a certain massive mysticism. Pip is
Pip, but he is also the well-meaning snob. And this is even more true of
those two great figures in the tale which stand for the English
democracy. For, indeed, the first and last word upon the English
democracy is said in Joe Gargery and Trabb's boy. The actual English
populace, as distinct from the French populace or the Scotch or Irish
populace, may be said to lie between those two types. The first is the
poor man who does not assert himself at all, and the second is the poor
man who asserts himself entirely with the weapon of sarcasm. The only
way in which the English now ever rise in revolution is under the symbol
and leadership of Trabb's boy. What pikes and shillelahs were to the
Irish populace, what guns and barricades were to the French populace,
that chaff is to the English populace. It is their weapon, the use of
which they really understand. It is the one way in which they can make a
rich man feel uncomfortable, and they use it very justifiably for all it
is worth. If they do not cut off the heads of tyrants at least they
sometimes do their best to make the tyrants lose their heads. The gutter
boys of the great towns carry the art of personal criticism to so rich
and delicate a degree that some well-dressed persons when they walk past
a file of them feel as if they were walking past a row of omniscient
critics or judges with a power of life and death. Here and there only is
some ordinary human custom, some natural human pleasure suppressed in
deference to the fastidiousness of the rich. But all the rich tremble
before the fastidiousness of the poor.
Of the other type of democracy it is far more difficult to speak. It is
always hard to speak of good things or good people, for in satisfying
the soul they take away a certain spur to speech. Dickens was often
called a sentimentalist. In one sense he sometimes was a sentimentalist.
But if sentimentalism be held to mean something artificial or
theatrical, then in the core and reality of his character Dickens was
the very reverse of a sentimentalist. He seriously and definitely loved
goodness. To see sincerity and charity satisfied him like a meal. What
some critics call his love of sweet stuff is really his love of plain
beef and bread. Sometimes one is tempted to wish that in the long
Dickens dinner the sweet courses could be left out; but this does not
make the whole banquet other than a banquet singularly solid and simple.
The critics complain of the sweet things, but not because they are so
strong as to like simple things. They complain of the sweet things
because they are so sophisticated as to like sour things; their tongues
are tainted with the bitterness of absinthe. Yet because of the very
simplicity of Dickens's moral tastes it is impossible to speak
adequately of them; and Joe Gargery must stand as he stands in the book,
a thing too obvious to be understood. But this may be said of him in one
of his minor aspects, that he stands for a certain long-suffering in the
English poor, a certain weary patience and politeness which almost
breaks the heart. One cannot help wondering whether that great mass of
silent virtue will ever achieve anything on this earth.