The Adelphi, DECEMBER 1933
There is one great advantage about Mr. Chesterton’s manner of approaching Dickens, and that is that it is not too purely literary. Most modern literary criticism is literary and nothing else—that is, it concentrates on an author’s style and thinks it rather vulgar to notice his subject matter. Undoubtedly the influence of this type of criticism has been healthy (it has saved us from Shakespeare the Great Moral Teacher and all that, and from the windy platitudes of the Bernard Shaw era, when duds like Brieux were foisted upon us for the sake of their sermons), but it misses part of the point with such a writer as Dickens. Dickens was essentially a moralist, and he cannot be treated as though he were, say, Flaubert.
Being a moralist, Dickens did not invent his characters merely as characters, but rather as embodiments of the human qualities that he liked and disliked. And it is probably the secret of their vitality, that Dickens’s likes and dislikes are such as any decent man would share. He was always, when he understood the issue, on the side of the weak against the strong. As Mr. Chesterton says, Dickens ‘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.’ This is perfectly true. Dickens’s view of life was sometimes one-eyed and he was not free from a rather disagreeable petty-bourgeois class-feeling, but on the whole his instincts were sound. It was only when he outraged them he went astray, artistically as well as morally.
The best instance is in David Copperfield. As Mr. Chesterton points out, the artistic collapse of David Copperfield has an ethical cause. It is perfectly clear that David Copperfield is autobiography (imaginative autobiography, of course), and it is equally clear if one looks closely that towards the end Dickens begins telling lies. He wrenches the book out of its natural channel and gives it a conventional happy ending, which is not only unconvincing but also abominably priggish. Dora is made to die of nothing in particular, the improvident and lovable characters are hustled off to Australia, and David marries the insufferable Agnes—a marriage which has, like so many marriages in Victorian fiction, a nasty suggestion of incest. The result is disaster, culminating in the rather horrible saturnalia at the end, in which everything is turned upside down and Dickens temporarily loses not only his comic genius but even his sense of decency. The prison scene in the last chapter is really disgusting. It is worthy of Edgar Wallace. Dickens had some ugly moods upon which Mr. Chesterton evidently does not care to dwell. The essay on David Copperfield is, however, an excellent piece of writing, and by a great deal the most interesting thing in the book.
Of course, Mr. Chesterton would not be himself if he did not make Dickens a mouthpiece for various of his own fads. Where Dickens’s opinion happens to coincide with Mr. Chesterton’s, as for instance upon the subject of the English Poor Law, well and good, that is Dickens’s opinion; where it happens not to coincide, as for instance on the subject of the Middle Ages, or the French Revolution, or the Roman Catholic Church, Mr. Chesterton explains that Dickens did not really think that, he only thought he thought it. Dickens is used as a stick to beat all modern novelists and most nineteenth-century ones, including Thackeray. (Why are Dickens and Thackeray always compared? They are completely unlike. The novelist among Dickens’s contemporaries who most resembled him was Surtees.) Again, some of Dickens’s faults—his morbid love of corpses, for instance—are exalted into virtues because Mr. Chesterton either shares them or feels that he ought to share them. There is an attempt, though it is not as pronounced as it might be, to affiliate Dickens with the Middle Ages—the mythical Middle Ages beloved of Roman Catholics, when peasants were boozy but monogamous, and there was no serfdom and no Holy Inquisition. However, there is one thing which Mr. Chesterton has not said, and which he must be honoured for not saying. He has not said that if Dickens had had a little more brains he would have turned Roman Catholic. Not many of our Catholic apologists would have refrained from saying that. It would be absurd to pretend that Mr. Chesterton is not a Catholic apologist, but at least he has never joined in the great game of pretending that no book by a Protestant author can be readable.
Mr. Chesterton is at his best when he writes about Dickens. He has this in common with Dickens, too, that however much one may disagree with him, and even when one considers him a definitely bad and cheap writer, one cannot help liking him. It would be interesting to see his special method of criticism applied to some of our other major novelists—in particular, to Fielding.