The Popularity of Dickens rit last attempt to treat a Victorian
hero as a whited pulehre, and create a sensation by scraping off the whitewash, failed in a special degree for a special reason. It failed, not only because the whiteness was not merely whitewash, but even more because it was not enough of a sepulchre. Dickens was not exactly what is implied, either among the iconoclasts or the idolators, by a Victorian hero. He was not even really Victorian, let alone heroic. He did not really belong to that world of seriousness which some call Victorian, when they mean rather Tennysonian. He had no more real respect for what Mr. Garvin has aptly called " the blue blood of the brain " than he had fot any other sort of blue blood. What he really represented was red blood ; and he got it from Smollett and Fielding and men who lived before the delicate compromise of Victorian virtue was known. It is too often forgotten that themost Dickensian of Dickens's works was not Victorian at all. The Queen was barely crowned when Pickwick was filling the land with laughter over. the descriptions of a pre-Victorian social life. It was long afterwards. that Carlyle began to fill the land with the solemn litanies of Hero-Worship ; and the entirely new and rather German notion of taking men of genius seriously. This idea of gravity about great men did not greatly possess the drinking and dicing England of the eighteenth century ; and it did not possess Dickens at all. He had not even enough hero-Worship ; and his prospects in life did not particularly -encourage hiM to be a hero.. But the point to seize is that the atmorsphere of the beginning of the nineteenth century in England was rather an atmosphere of the grotesque and a jolly uglinesS. It was the end of the nineteenth century that has left us, for good and evil, with the memory of a Tennysonian prettiness. " Her court was pure,' her life serene " does not exhaust the ways in which the first volumes of Punch talked about the Court. Indeed, the very figure of Punch is typical of the change. There is something pathetic in the efforts of the last Victorian artists to irradiate the face of Mr. Punch with the most pious and idealistic emotions. But men who had set out intending to express all the ideals of the " Idylls of the King " would never have chosen a figure like Mr. Punch at all.
Now the first thing to realize about the maker of Pickwick is that he originally breathed the same air as the makers of Punch. While he rose in the social scale and took on some of the Mid-Victorian conventions, and generally gained a sober colouring from a world that was being toned down by the high-toned Ruskin and the rest, there remained in him something that was never quite serious, any more than one of his favourite shownien or cheapjacks were quite serious: He had any amount of anger and vanity ; he boasted and picked quarrels as cheapjacks do ; but he did not really see himself in a prophet's mantle as Carlyle and Ruskin and Tennyson did. It is characteristic that tradition would vaguely imagine the other three men as tall ; but we do not think of Dickens as tall, though he was not abnormally short. We think of him as a vivacious little figure, making every- body laugh, chiefly with him, but occasionally at him. He was Sam Weller ; he was the English poor man, whose weapon is humour. He was always in a sense the comic servant mocking the solemn master, like Sancho Panza following Don Quixote. And the serious charges against him have failed ; not only for the simple reason that they were false, but also for the more subtle reason that they were serious. You cannot tear the mask off Dick Swiveller ; it is like trying to tear the wig off Mr. Micawber and finding he does not wear one.
For this 'reason, as well as many others, I think that Dickens's- popularity is secure ; if we ever reach con- .clitiOns in which there can be a true popularity, unaffected by what is called publicity and ought to be called pluto- cracy. There is no real test, in an American atmosphere where the best-seller is only a tribute to the best salesman. But if ever we recover anything like a human quiet in which people can hear themselves think, I have no doubt that they will think it more fun to read Dickens than to read Dreiser. It is said that many have no patience to read Dickens ; it would be truer to say that they have no time to read Dickens ; their time being occupied with wasting their time, on things they do not really want to read. But if we ever see again the psychological miracle of liberty, that is of men wanting. anything, I have no doubt that masses will still' want Dickens, and many who never before really knew what they wanted. In . some respects, indeed, Dickens does not suffer from being too old a writer, but from being too new a writer. In many ways he was singularly free from, the illusions of his time ; m much more free than a good many people in our time. He did not imagine, as so many men much better educated did imagine, that Parliament was a Pattern to the whole world. He has left on record words that might have been written by a Fascist or Syndicalist in the twentieth eeniury, rather than a respeetabIe'Radical in the nine- . - nine- teenth. Mich of his satire can be best understood in relation to much more recent satirists ; who have been accused of exaggeration by much more recent critics. Mr. Veneering's Election had its immediate- sequel in Mr. Clutterbuek's -Election ; and anyone who will read Little Dorrit, and the description of the great affiliated families of Barnacle and Stiltstalking, will know that Dickens discovered forty years before what Mr. Belloc discovered forty years afterwards, only many critics have not discovered it even now. But the point is important touching popularity. Dickens will not suffer with the change of costumes. He will gain by the decay of-dis- guises. Thackeray thought just a little too much of Major Pendennis because he was then in the height of fashion. Dickens did -not -care a button about Major Bagstock ; and it will not matter whether he is old- fashioned. This potential victory over time comes from the same popular root of popularity. • Sam- Weller may have grown more decorous as Mr. Pickwick grew more grave ; but Sam is still Sam ; he is still making fun of everything, including Mr. Pickwick. He was not born a butler, like the solemn servants of the Merdles or the Veneerings. It is not for nothing that he ran wild in the streets and was a waggoner's boy and a carter's boy before he ever put on livery. So there was something in Dickens that had run wild with the old coarse and candid and popular satire of the past. " He could not describe a gentleman " ; which means that he could never quite keep a straight face while describing one. He served the ideals of his generation, or all that was best in them, with brilliant courage and zeal ; humanity and liberty and tenderness to the fallen and hope for all. But he never really served the idols of his generation ; or he could never serve them without smiling ; he was outside the clubs and the cliques and the constitutional- movements. That is what was meant by calling him a caricaturist. To him these things were still strange things, like monsters. He had his weaknesses, though they were small beside his enthusiasm and his pity ; but he was curiously without a weakness of much stronger men ; he was not really deceived by the pomps and vanities of this wicked world.
G. K. CHESTERTON.
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