The Chimes
is, the mere football of everyone who knows more than he? Let us drop the ‘cultivated-class’ standpoint and judge Mr. Sinclair’s novels from the standpoint of the proletariat itself. They arouse the emotion of self-pity. Does that stimulate the worker or does it merely ‘console’ him? They arouse the emotion of hatred. Does that teach him how to grapple with his oppressors or does it place him all the more at his oppressors’ mercy. The most elementary knowledge of human nature tells us that there is only one answer to these questions.”
With the justice or injustice of Mr. Brooks’s estimate of Mr. Sinclair, I am not directly concerned. The interesting thing is his substantial agreement with Mr. Chesterton that the pessimistic reformer is ineffective. And Mr. Brooks is thoroughly modern in his attitude towards both literature and life, whatever may be said of Mr. Chesterton. Perhaps, after all, it may not have been mere cowardice or middle-class creature-comfort which led Dickens to include humour and optimism in his pictures of the poor.
I began this study of The Chimes with the statement that it afforded a test case for the study of Dickens. The nineteenth century is not yet very far away from us in point of time: it would hardly seem that any great feat of orientation should be a necessary preliminary to understanding it. Yet if, as the advocates of the millennium tell us, we are now moving more rapidly in the course of fifty years than we used to travel through the course of centuries, then it may, now and then, be necessary to check up carefully on our prepossessions, in studying nineteenthxxxii
