Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens | Page 5

not see the same degree of variety in my own class or in the class
above it; there is more superficial resemblance between two
Kensington doctors or two Highland dukes. No; the democracy is really
composed of Dickens characters, for the simple reason that Dickens
was himself one of the democracy.
There remains one thing to be added to this attempt to exhibit Dickens
in the growing and changing lights of our time. God forbid that any one
(especially any Dickensian) should dilute or discourage the great efforts
towards social improvement. But I wish that social reformers would
more often remember that they are imposing their rules not on dots and
numbers, but on Bob Sawyer and Tim Linkinwater, on Mrs. Lirriper
and Dr. Marigold. I wish Mr. Sidney Webb would shut his eyes until he
sees Sam Weller.
A great many circumstances have led to the neglect in literature of
these exuberant types which do actually exist in the ruder classes of
society. Perhaps the principal cause is that since Dickens's time the
study of the poor has ceased to be an art and become a sort of sham
science. Dickens took the poor individually: all modern writing tends to
take them collectively. It is said that the modern realist produces a
photograph rather than a picture. But this is an inadequate objection.
The real trouble with the realist is not that he produces a photograph,

but that he produces a composite photograph. It is like all composite
photographs, blurred; like all composite photographs, hideous; and like
all composite photographs, unlike anything or anybody. The new
sociological novels, which attempt to describe the abstract type of the
working-classes, sin in practice against the first canon of literature, true
when all others are subject to exception. Literature must always be a
pointing out of what is interesting in life; but these books are duller
than the life they represent. Even supposing that Dickens did
exaggerate the degree to which one man differs from another--that was
at least an exaggeration upon the side of literature; it was better than a
mere attempt to reduce what is actually vivid and unmistakable to what
is in comparison colourless or unnoticeable. Even the creditable and
necessary efforts of our time in certain matters of social reform have
discouraged the old distinctive Dickens treatment. People are so
anxious to do something for the poor man that they have a sort of
subconscious desire to think that there is only one kind of man to do it
for. Thus while the old accounts were sometimes too steep and crazy,
the new became too sweeping and flat. People write about the problem
of drink, for instance, as if it were one problem. Dickens could have
told them that there is the abyss between heaven and hell between the
incongruous excesses of Mr. Pickwick and the fatalistic soaking of Mr.
Wickfield. He could have shown that there was nothing in common
between the brandy and water of Bob Sawyer and the rum and water of
Mr. Stiggins. People talk of imprudent marriages among the poor, as if
it were all one question. Dickens could have told them that it is one
thing to marry without much money, like Stephen Blackpool, and quite
another to marry without the smallest intention of ever trying to get any,
like Harold Skimpole. People talk about husbands in the
working-classes being kind or brutal to their wives, as if that was the
one permanent problem and no other possibility need be considered.
Dickens could have told them that there was the case (the by no means
uncommon case) of the husband of Mrs. Gargery as well as of the wife
of Mr. Quilp. In short, Dickens saw the problem of the poor not as a
dead and definite business, but as a living and very complex one. In
some ways he would be called much more conservative than the
modern sociologists, in some ways much more revolutionary.

LITTLE DORRIT
In the time of the decline and death of Dickens, and even more strongly
after it, there arose a school of criticism which substantially maintained
that a man wrote better when he was ill. It was some such sentiment as
this that made Mr. George Gissing, that able writer, come near to
contending that Little Dorrit is Dickens's best book. It was the principle
of his philosophy to maintain (I know not why) that a man was more
likely to perceive the truth when in low spirits than when in high
spirits.
REPRINTED PIECES
The three articles on Sunday of which I speak are almost the last
expression of an articulate sort in English literature of the ancient and
existing morality of the English people. It is always asserted that
Puritanism came in with the seventeenth