Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens | Page 2

this apply merely to Thackeray, but to all those Victorians
who prided themselves on the realism or sobriety of their descriptions;
it applies to Anthony Trollope and, as much as any one, to George Eliot.
For we have not only survived that present which Thackeray described:
we have even survived that future to which George Eliot looked
forward. It is no longer adequate to say that Dickens did not understand
that old world of gentility, of parliamentary politeness and the balance
of the constitution. That world is rapidly ceasing to understand itself. It
is vain to repeat the complaint of the old Quarterly Reviewers, that

Dickens had not enjoyed a university education. What would the old
Quarterly Reviewers themselves have thought of the Rhodes
Scholarships? It is useless to repeat the old tag that Dickens could not
describe a gentleman. A gentleman in our time has become something
quite indescribable.
Now the interesting fact is this: That Dickens, whom so many
considered to be at the best a vulgar enthusiast, saw the coming change
in our society much more soberly and scientifically than did his better
educated and more pretentious contemporaries. I give but one example
out of many. Thackeray was a good Victorian radical, who seems to
have gone to his grave quite contented with the early Victorian radical
theory--the theory which Macaulay preached with unparalleled
luminosity and completeness; the theory that true progress goes on so
steadily through human history, that while reaction is indefensible,
revolution is unnecessary. Thackeray seems to have been quite content
to think that the world would grow more and more liberal in the limited
sense; that Free Trade would get freer; that ballot boxes would grow
more and more secret; that at last (as some satirist of Liberalism puts it)
every man would have two votes instead of one. There is no trace in
Thackeray of the slightest consciousness that progress could ever
change its direction. There is in Dickens. The whole of Hard Times is
the expression of just such a realisation. It is not true to say that
Dickens was a Socialist, but it is not absurd to say so. And it would be
simply absurd to say it of any of the great Individualist novelists of the
Victorian time. Dickens saw far enough ahead to know that the time
was coming when the people would be imploring the State to save them
from mere freedom, as from some frightful foreign oppressor. He felt
the society changing; and Thackeray never did.
As talking about Socialism and Individualism is one of the greatest
bores ever endured among men, I will take another instance to illustrate
my meaning, even though the instance be a queer and even a delicate
one. Even if the reader does not agree with my deduction, I ask his
attention to the fact itself, which I think a curiosity of literature. In the
last important work of Dickens, that excellent book Our Mutual Friend,
there is an odd thing about which I cannot make up my mind; I do not

know whether it is unconscious observation or fiendish irony. But it is
this. In Our Mutual Friend is an old patriarch named Aaron, who is a
saintly Jew made to do the dirty work of an abominable Christian
usurer. In an artistic sense I think the patriarch Aaron as much of a
humbug as the patriarch Casby. In a moral sense there is no doubt at all
that Dickens introduced the Jew with a philanthropic idea of doing
justice to Judaism, which he was told he had affronted by the great
gargoyle of Fagin. If this was his motive, it was morally a most worthy
one. But it is certainly unfortunate for the Hebrew cause that the bad
Jew should be so very much more convincing than the good one. Old
Aaron is not an exaggeration of Jewish virtues; he is simply not Jewish,
because he is not human. There is nothing about him that in any way
suggests the nobler sort of Jew, such a man as Spinoza or Mr. Zangwill.
He is simply a public apology, and like most public apologies, he is
very stiff and not very convincing.
So far so good. Now we come to the funny part. To describe the high
visionary and mystic Jew like Spinoza or Zangwill is a great and
delicate task in which even Dickens might have failed. But most of us
know something of the make and manners of the low Jew, who is
generally the successful one. Most of us know the Jew who calls
himself De Valancourt. Now to any one who knows a low Jew by sight
or hearing, the story called Our Mutual Friend is literally full of Jews.
Like all Dickens's best characters they are vivid;