As Large as Life in Dickens

from The Spice of Life, by G. K. Chesterton

NOTHING IS more characteristic of Dickens, nothing has so handicapped him with the languid modern reader as the vast crowding of 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 easy to point out that no person ever existed so horrible as Quilp, or 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 nothing 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’, fax 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’ andcomic’. 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 modern schools - a 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 of 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, 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 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.

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