DISPUTES ON DICKENS

AN INTERESTING little controversy began some time ago in the Academy on the position of Dickens, and it throws a flood of light on the real character of the temporary reaction against that great novelist's fame. `E.A.B.', the able and decisive Academy critic is a typical representative of the school devoted to `Art' in its more technical sense, and like all the critics of that school he has a clear, hard and almost scientific critical method of critical test. Dickens falls in his eyes beause of what he calls his `artistic ignorance and indifference' and his lack of `feeling for literature', all of which means that Dickens was not an artist of the particular pattern which French fiction in the nineteenth century has made essential and even popular.

Of course, this particular scheme of criticism will say what it has to say and pass, as so many other schemes of criticism have passed. We shall never, thank Heaven, have a sound and conclusive scheme of literary art, any more than we shall have a scheme of theology which makes the universe as obvious as a figure in geometry. If there were produced a really final and satisfactory justification of religion on logical gounds, most healthy-minded people would immediately cease to believe in religion; and if there were such a justification of art, most healthy-minded people would cease to believe in art. Touching these high matters we can endure anything except that they should turn out to be so small that we can even understand them. And so the `Art for Art's Sake school of criticism will be found to be merely relative and in a century or so Flaubert the critic will be as dead and as interesting as Aristotle. But Flaubert the novelist will remain impeccable and also Dickens the novelist. For it is only the things which are deliberately built to last for ever which cannot do so.

The real reason of the temporary eclipse of the fame of Dickens is not that he was a faulty artist but that he expressed almost faultlessly a certain class of thoughts and emotions which happen at this moment to be almost absent from the cultivated class. It was not that he expressed badly but that we know nothing at all about the kind of thought and sen timent that he expressed well. It was not that he had a deficiency in his art, it is we that have a deficiency in our experience. The work of Dickens appears to us rambling and shapeless for precisely the same reason that the work of Maeterlinck would have appeared to Dickens rambling and shapeless. There is a mood at the back of the whole work of Dickens as much as there is a mood at the back of the whole work of Maeterlinck; and it must be confessed with shame, as far as I am concerned, that our mood is the mood of Maeterlinck and not the mood of Dickens. To `E.A.B.' and his school, `Pickwick' is not exactly either good or bad; it is simply not a novel at all. To the very best critics of Dickens' time, `Pelleas and Melisande' would have been something not exactly good or bad but simply not a drama at all. If they had seen it acted they would not have thought that the drama was deteriorating. They would only have thought that they themselves were going mad.

The truth is that whole schools of art and of great art can become merely mysterious and imbecile to the most enlightened generations if those generations do not cultivate the particular emotions by which those schools of art are inspired. Thus, for example, the whole of the Italian art, from Giotto to Botticelli would have appeared and did appear to the critics of the eighteenth century an ugly and infantile exhibition like the scrawlings of a child upon a slate. To the eighteenth century it was quite obvious that these medieval pictures were mere despicable beginnings. Their lines were drawn wrong, their colours were arranged wrong, their figures were anatomical monstrosities, their landscapes had the absurdity of Noah's Ark, their saints had the grimness of an army of idiots. No blasphemer had ever dared to draw upon his darkest page a picture so impious as this picture of an insane universe with its grinning angels, its gaping saints. Not the most secret volume of eighteenth-century atheism had conceived in its wrath and satire such a celestial parody as these painters had conceived in their humility and faith. Such was the impression which Christian art produced on the whole of the `age des philosophes': that it was an example of an almost shocking innocence like a baby's picture of God.

Then came the nineteenth century when man felt again the same emotions which had been felt in the time of Giotto. Men of the boldest and most liberal intellects began to dream the great medieval dream of a united and devout Christendom. Men of the ripest taste and opinion began to join celibate brotherhoods and school themselves with fast and flagellation. Poets, painters and musicians went back to the splendid superstitions of medieval Europe, and collected tales and delusions as industriously as a scientist could collect facts. Upon the whole nation descended again the great mood of mystery, the nameless convictions, the certainties that have no origin and the hopes that have no end. And with a start of indescribable surprise men found themselves looking at those dark old Italian pictures with new eyes. The lines that went wrong now went right; they perfectly expressed a quaint and delicate severity. The landscapes that looked absurd now looked enchanted; they were lit with the morning of the world. The faces that had been hideous had grown beautiful like the face of a good man when we have come to know him and cannot imagine any other features being the perfect picture of his soul. This is what has happened again and again in the world and will continue to happen until the end. When a set of emotions are unfamiliar to a people, the art which expresses them will appear not only superstitious but obviously inartistic. When a set of emotions become familiar to a people, the art which expresses them will appear not only philosophical but obviously artistic.

People who do not share the sentiment of Maeterlinck do not say that he is not moral or true to life, they say he does not write plays. People who do not share the sentiment of Whitman do not say that he is not right or not worthy, they say that he does not write poetry. People who do not share the sentiment of Dickens do not say that he is too optimistic or too conventional, they say that he had "absolutely no feeling for literature".

When we come to examine the case of Dickens carefully, we find that this is exactly what has happened. The characteristics which `E.A.B.' and other critics note as the defects of Dickens are in a great many instances the proper and inevitable modes of expressing a certain gigantic conviviality and cordiality. For example, `E.A.B.' speaks of the formless ness of `Pickwick', but he does not notice that what he calls formlessness was in fact a well-known and celebrated artistic form among the elder and more convivial writers. The sprawling and seemingly disconnected novel of comic adventure was a recognized and excellent form of art. Recent criticism I believe is accustomed to describe it as the `picaresque' novel. For when we come to think of it, the whole point is very simple. The new impressionist method of brevity, restraint, and an adhesion to one central image or incident is the right and proper literary form to express the kind of things which the new Impressionist novel wishes to express; the little ironies, the sad small stories that end without an ending; the faces that are too bitter for tears. About these sort of things it may be said, not as a commonplace phrase, but as a sound and telling rule of art, that the less said about them the better. One flash of literary lightning revealing a woman dead in a garret with a victorious army marching by is enough if the sentiment concerned is the sentiment of a pitiful irony. But it is not enough if the sentiment is that of the ancient camaraderies and immortal enterprises of the `picaresque' novel.

You cannot exhibit Sam Weller in a flash of lightning. The whole emotional significance of Sam Weller depends upon the idea that like some warrior of the mythic ages, he has passed unscathed through infinite adventures and will pass unscathed through innumerable adventures. The reason of the whole matter is that of misfortune we all desire to say little and that the words in a French short story should be few, like the words in a house of mourning. But the moment we come into the atmosphere of positive delight and exultation a new element enters in, the desire to linger. Books like `Pickwick' are the most lingering. Men linger over their walks, over their talks, over their stories, over their dinners. All the characters seem friends who are talking together far into an immortal night to which no grey morning ever comes.

The formlessness of `Pickwick' is therefore its form. This mood of exuberance has two natural expressions, the desire to linger and the desire to ramble. If Pickwick and his friends were not continually crossing a crowded stage which was for ever changing like a transformation scene and of which they only were the constant factors, it would not be a better book but a worse. If the whole story revolved round one incident like a story by Guy de Maupassant, if everything turned on the Fancy Dress Ball at Eatonswill or the Cricket Match at Dingley Dell, if the central symbol of the whole story were Mr. Sawyer's red handkerchief or Mr. Winkle's horse; if the Pickwick Papers in short were only a brilliant fragment of psychology about the fat boy, or a sad sea-green little idyll about Mr. Stiggins, it would not be a better book but a worse, for it would have lost its supreme meaning even as we have lost its sense of a world almost chocked with adventure and a hero constant only in the mutability of a comic Ulysses, faithful only to his own omnivorous fickleness.