G.K.Chesterton As Large as Life In Dickens
Nothing
is more characteristic of Dickens, nothing has so handi-capped him with
the languid modem reader as the vast crowding his stage with innumerable
and bewilderingly well-painted characters. He has passed through a period
in which it has been customary among certain people to deride him; but the
whole indifference to Dickens has arisen from the strange idea that
literature should copy life. While realism was in full swing it was ;y to
point out that no person ever existed so horrible as Quilp, so
grandiloquent as Snodgrass, or unscrupulous as Ralph Nickleby, so entirely
pathetic as Little Nell. But we have tired of realism. We have suddenly
awakened to the fact that art has thing to do with copying. It is strange,
but true, that the same movement and discovery which has been the
justification of Aubrey Beardsley has been the justification of Dickens
Dickens, of course, has been a great deal handicapped by the common
habit among his admirers of praising him for the wrong things. He is
praised for being "true to life," while his true merit is not
that he is true to life, but alive. It is common to hear a man say when
Dickens is accused of exaggeration, "I have met a man exactly like
Pecksniff." Of course, to begin with, he has not met a person like
Pecksniff any more than he has met one like Caliban. And further, if he
had met a man exactly like Pecksniff, it would go far to show that Dickens
was not a great novelist. Since no two men in real life are exactly like
each other, so no fictitious character ought to be exactly like a real
character. He ought to be an addition to the existing stock of real
characters. His passions and traditions, his instincts and memories,
should be blended together in entirely new quantities into an entirely new
colour never seen before from the beginning upon the palette of life. If
it be true (as I believe it is) that no person precisely like Mrs.
Micawber ever existed or ever will exist in the whole domain of the
universe, then we know that Mrs. Micawber is like life. We know that
Dickens created as Life itself creates.
This is the far higher sense in which great art is "like
life," far higher, that is, than the ordinary sense in which the
phrase is used. Great literature is like life. Not because it is accurate
to the leaves on the tree and the pattern on the carpet and the words men
actually employ; it is like life because it has in it the exuberant energy
of life, its power of production, its sense of hope and memory, its
consciousness of an almost immortal vitality. Great literature, in short,
is like life because it also is living. An admirer of Dickens, therefore,
ought to be ashamed of defending the great master by pretending that he
did not exaggerate. He exaggerated by the same living law which makes the
birds chatter in pairing time or the kitten fight with its own tail. The
passion behind all his work was joy, and the final touch of exaggeration
is the absolute necessity of the great literature of joy.
This mistake about
Dickens arose, of course, because a critical generation had forgotten
altogether that there even was such a thing as the great literature of
joy. We have fallen into the way of thinking that literature is a refuge
for weak temperaments, that literature may express all the darker and
quainter moods, all the moods of regret or rebellion or hesitation, but
never that one universal mood, streaming like a river through heaven and
earth, by which alone all things consent to live. Dickens has seemed to us
vulgar and impossible, and sprawlingly inartistic, for the simple reason
that he is too strong for us. His bewildering crowds and mobs of
characters, his vast mazy travels over England and America, his endless
banquets and conversations, his intense realism and his frantic unreality,
are all manifestations of a quite insatiable and omnivorous power of
mental pleasure to which our period has lost the key. He was the last of
the great comic writers; since his time we have lost the power of
realizing the connection between the words "great" and
"comic." We have forgotten that Aristophanes and Rabelais stand
with Aeschylus and Dante; that their folly was wiser and more solid than
our wisdom, and that their levity has outlasted a hundred philosophies.
Dickens exaggerates, and it is not a fault but a merit; it is of the
same kind as the exaggerations of the great French humorist, whose
vigorous and almost monstrous power of happiness was only contented with a
giant who could lift his head above Notre Dame and ride away with the
bells upon his bridle. Therefore
Dickens has become to the orthodox artistic world of today what Rabelais
has become to many of the modem schoolsa thing obscure with excess of
jesting, a positive darkness of joy.
There are many evidences that the great truth and passion behind
the work of Dickens was this sense of joy in things; just as much as the
great truth and passion behind Thackeray was a sense of their almost
sacred pathos, or the great truth and passion behind
Hawthorne
a sense of their weird
significance. But the best evidence of all lies in the fact that Dickens
was never so triumphantly successful as in describing the type of man
whose existence in this world, in which he has neither money nor honour,
seems to depend entirely on his high spirits and his capacity for
realizing the magnificence the flying moment. All Dickens' sticks of
heroes and dolls of heroines may, of course, be thrown aside: the real
ideal figure of Dickens is William Micawber, Dick Swiveller, his next best
character, is a man of the same type; they both represent a kind of shabby
poet, whose continual lack of money and utter antagonism to the order of
society can never kill him, because of his everlasting pleasure in old
memories and very old quotations. They have alike the same mutability, the
same impecuniosity, the same florid, but genuine, taste in literature,
the same continual and crushing misfortunes, the same mysterious, but
unbreakable, immortality. They are never ended, because, fools and rascals
as they are they hold on to something
which belongs, not to society but to the soul: the power of joy.
And note here that Dickens, in describing these men who are nearest to his
heart, is not only vigorous, living and entertaining, as he always is, but
far truer to the facts even than is his wont. Pecksniff is a spirited and
amusing bogey for a pure farce, but such a hypocrite never lived in this
mean earth; we shall meet him in a better and bolder world. Mr. Squeers is
a good, black grotesque figure from the outside, but he has no inside. But
Micawber and Swiveller (especially the latter) are true to the tenor of
life; they see the humour of their own exaggerations, they live avowedly
on their own good spirits. And in them Dickens really touches problems and
elements of greatness which are as old as the world and as great as any
tragedy. He touches, for example, the great tragedy of
Ireland
, which, after
innumerable sorrows still lives upon an outrageous gaiety. Above all he
touches the case of the great masses of the poor, whom he loved. He saw
deeper than a hundred statisticians and philanthropic economists. No man
on earth was ever a more fierce and mutinous Radical than he; but he saw
that all calculations of the mortal hours of men left out the everlasting
moment.
