There is a certain daily paper in England towards which I feel very much
as Tom Pinch felt towards Mr. Pecksniff immediately after he had
found him out. The war upon Dickens was part of the general war on all
democrats, about the eighties and nineties, which ushered in the brazen
plutocracy of to-day. And one of the things that it was fashionable to
say of Dickens in drawing-rooms was that he had no subtlety, and could
not describe a complex frame of mind. Like most other things that are
said in drawing-rooms, it was a lie. Dickens was a very unequal writer,
and his successes alternate with his failures; but his successes
are subtle quite as often as they are simple. Thus, to take “Martin
Chuzzlewit” alone, I should call the joke about the Lord No-zoo a simple
joke: but I should call the joke about Mrs. Todgers’s vision of a wooden
leg a subtle joke. And no frame of mind was ever so self-contradictory
and yet so realistic as that which Dickens describes when he says, in
effect, that, though Pinch knew now that there had never been such a
person as Pecksniff, in his ideal sense, he could not bring himself
to insult the very face and form that had contained the legend. The
parallel with Liberal journalism is not perfect; because it was once
honest; and Pecksniff presumably never was. And even when I come to feel
a final incompatibility of temper, Pecksniff was not so Pecksniffian as
he has since become. But the comparison is complete in so far as I share
all the reluctance of Mr. Pinch. Some old heathen king was advised by
one of the Celtic saints, I think, to burn what he had adored and adore
what he had burnt. I am quite ready, if anyone will prove I was wrong,
to adore what I have burnt; but I do really feel an unwillingness
verging upon weakness to burning what I have adored. I think it is a
weakness to be overcome in times as bad as these, when (as Mr. Orage
wrote with something like splendid common sense the other day) there is
such a lot to do and so few people who will do it. So I will devote
this article to considering one case of the astounding baseness to which
Liberal journalism has sunk.