BOOKS.

MR. CHESTERTON ON DICKENS.*

The present reviewer came to this book half fearing to find Dickens—" the great, the generous, the humane; the thousand and one times to be forgiven" (as a poet once wrote of another novelist with the same initial)—yet again the quarry of the new cleverness ; or, at any rate, from his knowledge of the critic, fearing that Dickens, if extolled, might be extolled rather for what he was not than for what he was. But all is well ; Mr. Chesterton is on the side of the angels; and the book, taken as a whole, is as warm and understanding a tribute as any hand has laid on the great writer's grave. To differ from Mr. Chesterton now and then is inevitable; but with his praise of the comic invention of the master, his joy in Micawber and Toots, Pecksniff and Swiveller, which make up the backbone of the book, we have nothing but the heartiest agreement; and we find ourselves also largely in accordance with him when he blames and demurs. The only effect of his work must be to send readers again to Pickwick * Charles Dickens. By G. K. Chesterton. London : Methuen and Co. [is. 61. net.]

and The Old Curiosity Shop, and that alone would be its jttstification apart from its brilliance as a constructive critical essay.

But we are not blind to the obstacles which the book must encounter among readers. Mr. Chesterton has many ex- ceedingly irritating habits, which seem to grow stronger rather than weaker with years : his trick, for example, of

inventing an antagonist in order to demolish him ; his tendency, permissible enough in a schoolmaster or lecturer, but bad in a contributor to belles-lettres, to say everything

twice, as though his readers lacked the intelligence to receive a statement made but once; his embroideries ; his exaggerated emphasis ; his improvisation, often so heartless and shameless as to be indecently visible in its workings, like vinous talk, or the processes of generation in a French dime museum,—all these things can but annoy; and with too many persons who knew their Dickens before Mr. Chesterton was born, and who consider themselves adepts at egg-sucking, they are likely, we fear, to prevent the perusal of the book at all. But it will be very wrong to give way to impatience, for it is a work of the highest interest and never-failing suggestiveness.

That the book will be found very wearisome if taken at a sitting, we do not deny ; but that is no dispraise of Mr.

Chesterton. His mind is always so intensely alert, his pen is always so witty, that one lives in a rarefied air, and must now and then descend if one would be comfortable at all. The wise reader will take small doses. For Mr. Chesterton not only brings highly explosive thought to everything, but demands thought from his readers as well : so much so that as one reads one is filled with a grim foreboding that some day there may be a book on Mr. Chesterton too, the author of which, in his turn, will go behind his motives. If by the irony of fate it were a Dickens who was to write it, symmetry would be achieved indeed; for we should then have an objective humourist on a subjective theorist, just as we now have a subjective theorist on an objective humourist. No matter : so much the more fun.

Any one familiar with Mr. Chesterton's other writings—

and to-day it is not easy to be ignorant of them—knows that it is his generous custom to bring every gun in his battery into action every time. In this he resembles the great Victorian of whom in this volume he writes so enthusiasti- cally: he has abundance. The gift has become so rare that we find ourselves able to forgive much to any one possessing it. Nor must it be confused with copiousness. Any one can have that ; but Mr. Chesterton has abundance. It will come as no surprise to his admirers when we say that this book is not less a criticism of life than a criticism of Dickens. In a way, that is as it should be, for Dickens's works are a microcosm seen through a slightly distorted and highly coloured lens. No matter what his nominal subject, Mr. Chesterton is always first and foremost a critic of life.

Now and then he sinks very low, as in the following passage :-

I remember, to take one instance out of many, hearing a heated Secularist in Hyde Park apply to some parson or other the exquisite expression, a sky-pilot.' Subsequent inquiry has taught me that the term is intended to be comic and even con- temptuous; but in that first freshness of it I went home repeating it to myself like a new poem. Few of the pious legends have conceived so strange and yet celestial a picture as this of the pilot in the sky, leaning on his helm above the empty heavens, and carrying his cargo of souls higher than the loneliest cloud. The phrase is like a lyric of Shelley. Or, to take another instance from another language, the French have an incomparable idiom for a boy playing truant :'Ii fait reeds buissonnidre '—he goes to the bushy school, or the school among the bushes. How admirably this accidental expression, 'the bushy school' (not to be lightly confounded with the Art School at Bushey)—how admirably this bushy school' expresses half the modern notions of a more natural education! The two words express the whole poetry of Wordsworth, the whole philosophy of Thoreau, and are quite as good literature as either?'

There are three defects in this passage. One is the foolish extravagance of the praise of the first piece of slang ; the second is the poor pun in parenthesis, an example of Mr.

Chesterton's inability to resist temptation; and the third is the dreadful critical lapse by which he would at a blow sub- stitute for all Wordsworth's poetry a French idiom. It is into such dangers as these that brilliant improvisation may lead a man whose exultation in the use of words amounts to a passion, and who is so liable to intoxication over the rapture of his own discoveries. But none the less, with all his faults, Mr. Chesterton undoubtedly has something very like genius, and some of his flashes of intuition in this book are wonderful. The whole of the analysis of the charm and significance of Pickwick is masterly. It has never been done before, and might never have been done but for this new critic. We quote a passage :—

" 'Pickwick,' I have said, is a romance of adventure, and Samuel Pickwick is the romantic adventurer. So much is indeed obvious. But the strange and stirring discovery which Dickens made was this—that having chosen a fat old man of the middle classes as a good thing of which to make a butt, he found that a fat old man of the middle classes is the very best thing of which to make a romantic adventurer. 'Pickwick' is supremely original in that it is the adventures of an old man. It is a fairy tale in which the victor is not the youngest of the three brothers, but one of the oldest of their uncles. The result is both noble and new and true. There is nothing which so much needs simplicity as adventure. And there is no one who so much possesses simplicity as an honest and elderly man of business. For romance he is better than a troop of young troubadours ; for the swaggering young fellow anticipates his adventures, just as he anticipates his income. Hence both the adventures and the income, when he comes up to them, are not there. But a man in late middle-age has grown used to the plain necessities, and his first holiday is a second youth. A good man, as Thackeray said with such thorough and searching truth, grows simpler as he grows older. Samuel Pickwick in his youth was probably an insufferable young coxcomb. He know then, or thought he knew, all about the confidence tricks of swindlers like Jingle. He knew then, or thought he knew, all about the amatory designs of sly ladies like Mrs. Bardell. But years and real life have relieved him of this idle and evil knowledge. He has had the high good luck in losing the follies of youth to lose the wisdom of youth also. Dickens has caught, in a manner at once wild and con- vincing, this queer innocence of the afternoon of life. The round, moon-like face, the round, moon-like spectacles of Samuel Pick- wick move through the tale as emblems of a certain spherical simplicity. They are fixed in that grave surprise that may be seen in babies; that grave surprise which is the only real happi- ness that is possible to man.'

And this is the end of the chapter :—

" Pickwick goes through life with that god-like gullibility which is the key to all adventures. The greenhorn is the ultimate victor in everything ; it is he that gets the most out of life. Because Pickwick is led away by Jingle, he will be led to the White Hart Inn, and see the only Weller cleaning boots in the courtyard. Because he is bamboozled by Dodson and Fogg, he will enter the prison house like a paladin, and rescue the man and the woman who have wronged him most. His soul will never starve for exploits or excitements who is wise enough to be made a fool of. He will make himself happy in the traps that have been laid for him : he will roll in their nets and sleep. All doors will fly open to him who has a mildness more defiant than mere courage. The whole is unerringly expressed in one fortunate phrase—he will be always taken in.' To be taken in everywhere is to see the inside of everything. It is the hospitality of circumstance. With torches and trumpets, like a guest, the greenhorn is taken in by Life. And the sceptic is oast out."

The whole passage on the French Revolution and the hopes from it that still survived among our democracy in the early years of the nineteenth century is admirable.

The opening chapters are the best (always excepting the impossible first three pages), for in these the critic is showing

the effect on Dickens of his times ; deducing him from these times; showing how his hard boyhood affected him ; examining the early books,—the novels between Pickwick and Dombey and Son. Later we get some repetitions, and the critic flags

a little; but it is unsafe to deal lightly with any page, because one never can tell where an inspired flash of thought may strike one. We pick out a few suggestive sentences which we have marked :—

"The optimist is a better reformer than the pessimist; and the man who believes life to be excellent is the man who alters it most. It seems a paradox, yet the reason of it is very plain. The pessimist can be enraged at evil. But only the optimist can be surprised at it. From the reformer is required a simplicity of surprise."

" You cannot discuss whether 'Nicholas Nickleby' is a good novel, or whether Our Mutual Friend' is a bad novel. Strictly, there is no such novel as 'Nicholas Nickleby.' There is no such novel as Our Mutual Friend.' They are simply lengths cut from the flowing and mixed substance called Dickens—a substance of which any given length will be certain to contain a given pro- portion of brilliant and of bad stuff." "Dickens was not like our ordinary demagogues and journalists. Dickens did not write what the people wanted. Dickens wanted what the people wanted."

" Dickens was a mythologist rather than a novelist ; he was the last of the mythologists, and perhaps the greatest. He did not always manage to make his characters men, but he always managed, at the least, to make them gods."

"If Mrs. Nickleby is a fool, she is one of those fools who ate wiser than the world. She stands for a great truth which we must not forget ; the truth that experience is not in real life a saddening thing at all. The people who have had misfortunes are generally the people who love to talk about them."

"Among all the huge serial schemes of which we have spoken, it Is a matter of wonder that he never started an endless periodical called The Street,' and divided it into shops. He could have written an exquisite romance called The Baker's Shop ' ; another called The Chemist's Shop ' ; another called 'The Oil Shop ' ; to keep company with The Old Curiosity Shop.' "

"His was a character very hard for any man of slow and placable temperament to understand; he was the character whom anybody can hurt and nobody can kill."

"For the only element of lowness that there really is in our populace is exactly that they are full of superiorities and very conscious of class. Shades, imperceptible to the eyes of others, but as hard and haughty as a Brahmin caste, separate one kind of charwoman from another kind of charwoman."

"Dickens always knew that it is the simple and not the subtle who feel differences."

"Fiction means the common things as seen by the uncommon people. Fairy tales mean the uncommon things as seen by the common people."

"Mr. Samuel Pickwick is not the fairy ; he is the fairy prince; that is to say, he is the abstract wanderer and wonderer, the Ulysses of comedy ; the half-human and half-elfin creature— human enough to wander, human enough to wonder, but still sustained with that merry fatalism that is natural to immortal beings—sustained by that hint of divinity which tells him in the darkest hour that he is doomed to live happily ever afterwards. He has set out walking to the end of the world, but he knows he will find an inn there."

"It was be who had the things of Chaucer, the love of large jokes and long stories and brown ale and all the white roads of England. Like Chaucer he loved story within story, every man telling a tale. Like Chaucer he saw something openly comic in men's motley trades. Sam Weller would have been a great gain to the Canterbury Pilgrimage and told an admirable story."

"He is doubly unfitted for the best modern criticism. His bad work is below that criticism. His good work is above it."

Let us close with a fine passage very characteristic of its author, a passage—it might be called a sonnet in prose— bearing upon Dickens's appalling experiences as a boy in the blacking factory :—

"It is currently said that hope goes with youth, and lends to youth its wings of a butterfly ; but I fancy that hope is the last gift given to man, and the only gift not given to youth. Youth is pre-eminently the period in which a man can be lyric, fanatical, poetic ; but youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged ; God has kept that good wine until now. It is from the backs of the elderly gentlemen that the wings of the butterfly should burst. There is nothing that so much mystifies the young as the consistent frivolity of the old. They have dis- covered their indestructibility. They are in their second and clearer childhood, and there is a meaning in the merriment of their eyes. They have seen the end of the End of the World."

That is poetry, as much of Mr. Chesterton's criticism is. Indeed, if the extent of a man's poetical possessions is to be measured by their owner's capacity to display wonder—as Mr. Watts-Dunton has suggested—then Mr. Chesterton is no mean poet, for his work is the renascence of wonder essentialised.