The Chimes (Rackham)/Introduction
Introduction
🙛The enormous vogue of A Christmas Carol has probably served, in a measure, to draw the attention of at least the casual reader away from the fact that Dickens wrote also four other Christmas books on a somewhat similar plan. I do not claim that The Chimes is worthy to stand beside the incomparable Carol. Indeed, I do not think it even attains the stature of The Cricket on the Hearth. But it does happen to afford an unusually interesting “test case” for the study of Dickens as both artist and prophet: first, because we know much more about the circumstances of its genesis and growth than is the case with many of his works; and, second, because its social and moral teaching is not only daring in the extreme but astonishingly anticipative of certain more recent attitudes.
The Chimes was written in Genoa, in 1844. This time Dickens began, not with a story or a situation, but with an idea, a character, and a purpose. Just as, in his Child’s History of England, he found it impossible to write about the past without importing all the problems and prejudices of the present into it, so now, during his Italian journey, he found it impossible, as he gazed upon foreign scenes, to withdraw his mind from a constant preoccupation with the sorrows and the problems of the London poor. “Ah!” he cried to Forster upon his return, describing the glories of Venice, “when I saw those places, how I thought that to leave one’s hand upon the time, lastingly upon the time, with one tender touch for the mass of toiling people that nothing could obliterate, would be to lift oneself above the dust of all the Doges in their graves, and stand upon a giants staircase that Sampson [sic!] couldn’t overthrow!” The purpose, then, here as in the Carol, was to strike a blow for the poor, and never was Dickens more passionately sincere, never did he give stronger evidence of his astonishing capacity for complete surrender to the emotional appeal of the creatures of his own fancy than when he was writing this book.
The method of The Chimes differs widely, however, from that which had been used in the Carol. Here the protagonist, Scrooge, was an enemy of the poor, a man himself in comfortable circumstances, and the story, detailing his conversion, became in effect an appeal to the prosperous people of England, begging them to extend help and sympathy to those less fortunate than themselves. Implicitly, to be sure, this appeal inheres also in The Chimes. Indeed, at the very end it becomes explicit, in the authors direct appeal to the “listener,” to “try to bear in mind the stern realities from which these shadows come; and in your sphere—none is too wide, and none too limited for such an end—endeavour to correct, improve, and soften them.” But this is secondary. The principal character in The Chimes is the poverty-stricken ticket-porter, Toby Veck. He represents the poor themselves, not their oppressors, and it is as a symbol of the poor that he seems to Dickens to stand in need of conversion. Essentially the problem of The Chimes is a problem of faith—of the individual’s faith in himself and in his ability to adjust his life to the world. Whatever else happens, Dickens seems to be saying, the poor must on no account be allowed to stop believing in themselves. Beauty and faithfulness and love are not incompatible with poverty; glee and merriment may even, on occasion, join hands with it. But once destroy the poor man’s faith in himself and in the goodness of life, and there will be no hope left. Drunkenness, prostitution, arson, suicide, murder—they must follow as the night the day.
In order to show that I have not misread his purpose, and to provide a basis for what is to follow, I must transcribe the following long sketch of how Dickens originally planned to develop The Chimes. It was sent in a letter to Forster, along with the First Quarter of the tale, in October, 1844:
“The general notion is this. That what happens to poor Trotty in the first part, and what will happen to him in the second (when he takes the letter to a punctual and great man of business, who is balancing his books and making up his accounts, and complacently expatiating on the necessity of clearing off every liability and obligation, and turning over a new leaf and starting fresh with the new year), so dispirits him, who can’t do this, that he comes to the conclusion that his class and order have no business with a new year, and really are ‘intruding.’ And though he will pluck up for an hour or so, at the christening (I think) of a neighbour’s child, that evening: still, when he goes home, Mr. Filer’s precepts will come into his mind, and he will say to himself, ‘we are a long way past the proper average of children, and it has no business to be born’: and will be wretched again. And going home, and sitting there alone, he will take that newspaper out of his pocket, and reading of the crimes and offences of the poor, especially of those whom Alderman Cute is going to put down, will be quite confirmed in his misgiving that they are bad; irredeemably bad. In this state of mind, he will fancy that the Chimes are calling to him; and saying to himself ‘God help me! Let me go up to ’em. I feel as if I were going to die in despair—of a broken heart; let me die among the bells that have been a comfort to me!’—will grope his way up into the tower; and fall down in a kind of swoon among them. Then the third quarter, or in other words the beginning of the second half of the book, will open with the goblin part of the thing: the bells ringing, and innumerable spirits (the sound or vibration of them) flitting and tearing in and out of the church-steeple, and bearing all sorts of missions and commissions and reminders and reproaches, and comfortable recollections and what not, to all sorts of people and places. Some bearing scourges; and others flowers, and birds, and music; the others pleasant faces in mirrors, and others ugly ones: the bells haunting people in the night (especially the last of the old year) according to their deeds. And the bells themselves, who have a goblin likeness to humanity in the midst of their proper shapes, and who shine in a light of their own, will say (the Great Bell being the chief spokesman): ‘Who is he that being of the poor doubts the right of poor men to the inheritance which Time reserves for them, and echoes the unmeaning cry against his fellows?’ Toby, all aghast, will tell him it is he, and why it is. Then the spirits of the bells will bear him through the air to various scenes, charged with this trust: That they show him how the poor and wretched, at the worst—yes, even in the crimes that aldermen put down, and he has thought so horrible—have some deformed and hunchbacked goodness clinging to them; and how they have their right and share in Time. Following out the history of Meg, the Bells will show her, that marriage broken off and all friends dead, with an infant child; reduced so low, and made so miserable, as to be brought at last to wander out at night. And in Toby’s sight, her father’s, she will resolve to drown herself and the child together. But before she goes down to the water, Toby will see how she covers it with a piece of her own wretched dress, and adjusts its rags so as to make it pretty in its sleep, and hangs over it, and smooths its little limbs, and loves it with the dearest love God ever gave to mortal creatures; and when she runs down to the water, Toby will cry ‘Oh spare her! Chimes, have mercy on her! Stop her!’—and the bells will say, ‘Why stop her? She is bad at heart—let the bad die.’ And Toby on his knees will beg and pray for mercy: and in the end the bells will stop her, by their voices, just in time. Toby will see, too, what great things the punctual man has left undone on the close of the old year, and what accounts he has left unsettled: punctual as he is. And he will see a great many things about Richard, once so near being his son-in-law, and about a great many people. And the moral of it all will be, that he has his portion in the new year no less than any other man, and that the poor require a deal of beating out of shape before their human shape is gone; that even in their frantic wickedness there may be good in their hearts triumphantly asserting itself, though all the aldermen alive say ‘No,’ as he has learnt from the agony of his own child; and that the truth is Trustfulness in them, not doubt, nor putting down, nor filing them away. And when at last a great sea rises, and this sea of Time comes sweeping down, bearing the alderman and such mudworms of the earth away to nothing, dashing them to fragments in its fury—Toby will climb a rock and hear the bells (now faded from his sight) pealing out upon the waters. And as he hears them, and looks round for help, he will wake up and find himself with the newspaper lying at his foot; and Meg sitting opposite to him at the table, making up the ribbons for her wedding to-morrow; and the window open, that the sound of the bells ringing the old year out and the new year in may enter. They will just have broken out, joyfully; and Richard will dash in to kiss Meg before Toby, and have the first kiss of the new year (he’ll get it too); and the neighbours will crowd round with good wishes; and a band will strike up gaily (Toby knows a Drum in private); and the altered circumstances, and the ringing of the bells, and the jolly music, will so transports the old fellow that he will lead off a country dance forthwith in an entirely new step, consisting of his old familiar trot. Then quoth the inimitable—Was it a dream of Toby’s after all? Or is Toby but a dream? and Meg a dream? and all a dream! In reference to which, and the realities of which dreams are born, the inimitable will be wiser than he can be now, writing for dear life, with the post just going, and the brave C. booted. … Ah, how I hate myself, my dear fellow, for this lame and halting outline of the Vision I have in mind. But it must go to you … You will say what is best for the frontispiece.”
Forster himself pointed out some of the principal differences between this first sketch and the story as it was finally written: “Fern the farm-labourer is not here, nor yet his niece the little Lilian (at first called Jessie), who is to give the tale its most tragical scene; and there are intimations of poetic fancy at the close of my sketch which the published story fell short of.” Other differences remain still to be mentioned. For example, the story as it now stands leaves no place for the christening of the neighbour’s child which was at first intended to occupy Toby’s New Year’s Eve; and the contemplated exposure of Sir Joseph Dowley has been omitted altogether. But the most striking and important change of all is that in the published story the Chimes do not intervene to save Meg from infanticide and self-destruction.
For all these changes the Ferns are directly responsible. When Toby unexpectedly takes them into his house, it immediately becomes impossible for him to spend the evening with his neighbours. Dickens seems to have stumbled across them in the dark quite as suddenly as Toby himself did, and when they entered the story, they brought tragedy along with them. The writer’s mood seems now to have changed, and from here on he becomes more and more earnest, more and more relentless. He does not abandon his plan for the conversion of Toby, but in his most serious moments he is thinking, increasingly, of others. “You comfortable ones,” one can almost hear him say, “you who regard the outcasts of the world as outcasts by choice, inferior creatures, evil to the heart’s core. I will show you a child, an innocent, lovable child who will awaken all your sympathies. Then, virtually without preparation, I will plunge her, almost simultaneously, into girlhood and vice, and you who have loved her will not dare, as you read my pages, to tell me that you would have done better in her place.” And if Lilian were to be destroyed, why not Meg also? He would employ no last-minute rescue, no jot of supernatural melodrama: he would let them go—Meg and her child—they must die. Those readers of his who had often shuddered with horror over newspaper stories of women killing their children; he would show them why women kill their children. He would show a Dickens heroine doing it, not because she was had but because she was good, because she wanted to save her child from something worse than death. And Richard? Richard should not be a good and happy husband. Instead he should become a disillusioned drunk and and a criminal. For once Dickens would eschew romance: he would study relentlessly the forces that doom the poor to the loss of their bodies and their souls. Why not?—since the moral lesson could be made all the more powerful in that way. And so, calamity having thus been piled upon calamity, the contemplated return to the earlier mood of the story and the re-introduction of Sir Joseph Cowley were seen to be impossible, and the apocalyptic splendours originally planned for were dropped as unnecessary and ineffective.
I have not forgotten that it is Dickens whose mood I am here attempting to reconstruct, and I am not unaware that all this seems—for him—somewhat bitter. But not any more bitter, I believe, than the story itself, and we have his own explicit testimony that his experience in writing it was wholly unusual. “This book … has made my face white in a foreign land. My cheeks, which were beginning to fill out, have sunk again; my eyes have grown immensely large; my hair is very lank; and the head inside the hair is hot and giddy. Read the scene at the end of the third part, twice. I wouldn’t write it twice for something. … Since I conceived, at the beginning of the second part, what must happen in the third, I have undergone as much sorrow and agitation as if the thing were real; and have wakened up with it at night. I was obliged to lock myself in when I finished it yesterday, for my face was swollen for the time to twice its proper size, and was hugely ridiculous.” Again: “Third of November, 1844. Half-past two, afternoon. Thank God! I have finished The Chimes. This moment I take up my pen again to-day, to say only that much; and to add that I have had what women call ‘a real good cry!’ ”
Concerning Forster’s own suggestions for the improvement of the story, while it was yet in the manuscript stage, the biographer has, as usual, told us little, though what details he does give are in this instance rather clearer and more definite than usual. “The red-faced gentleman with the blue coat” who appears in the First Quarter with Alderman Cute and Mr. Filer, we owe indirectly to Forster: he replaces a “Young England gentleman” to whom the biographer objected. It is fairly clear also that Forster softened Mr. Filer on the ground that, as Dickens had originally drawn him, he would offend the political economists, which, for that matter, he did, even as he now stands. “File away at Filer, as you please; but bear in mind that the Westminster Review considered Scrooge’s presentation of the turkey to Bob Cratchit as grossly incompatible with political economy.”
In the Preface to the First Cheap Edition of his Christmas Books, Dickens explained of all of them that “The narrow space within which it was necessary to confine these Christmas Stories when they were originally published, rendered their construction a matter of some difficulty, and almost necessitated what is peculiar in their machinery. I never attempted great elaboration of detail in the working out of character within such limits, believing that it could not succeed.” The effect on characterisation here alluded to will be considered later. Here let us glance at the effect on construction. As we have already seen, the end of The Chimes was not in sight from the beginning. Still, it did appear at a comparatively early stage. By the beginning of the Second Quarter the general outline was fixed and the space to be allotted to each portion at least roughly determined. The advantage of this comparatively careful planning—so different from the haphazard growth of the long novels—may be judged by its results: The Chimes is, in every way, an admirably constructed tale.
Especially skilful is the way the story opens. The First Quarter begins with an introductory paragraph in which, after earnestly declaring that “a story-teller and a story-reader should establish a mutual understanding as soon as possible,” Dickens runs off into burlesque, in his usual style, and issues a mock-challenge to his readers, offering to meet all doubters individually if need be, and thus to demonstrate the unquestionable truth of his initial statement that “There are not many people … who would care to sleep in a church.” There follows, in the second paragraph, the famous personified description of the Night Wind, which is extremely likely to be the most fearsome and awe-inspiring element in the experience of anyone who should attempt such a rash experiment. The third paragraph takes us and the Wind alike “high up in the steeple,” inevitably the most ghostly part of the church. Now that we are in the steeple, we are, of course, ready for the introduction of the Chimes themselves, the description of which comes in the fourth and fifth paragraphs. Along with them, the principal character, Toby Veck, enters the story also quite casually and incidentally.
In paragraphs six to eleven, Toby is described—his character, his occupation, his station in life. Then, in paragraph twelve, the connection between Toby and the Chimes is made more definite, first in the description of the old man’s love for the bells, then in the author’s fanciful elucidation of the “points of resemblance between themselves and him.” In the thirteenth paragraph, we have more of Toby’s love for the Chimes, of how “he invested them with a strange and solemn character.” “For all this, Toby scouted with indignation a certain flying rumour that the Chimes were haunted…” Hereupon the introduction ends; Meg enters with Toby’s dinner; the dramatic method is employed, and the story proper may be said to have begun.
Now what has been accomplished so far? More, I think, than may as yet be apparent. The tone of the story has been determined and the principal character introduced and described. The very first statement of all—idle as it seems and humorously as it is maintained—(“There are not many people … who would care to sleep in a church.”)—has a certain suggestiveness in the way of foreshadowing, while the later insinuation of a “certain flying rumour that the Chimes were haunted” still further suggests the supernatural character of the tale. The air of weirdness may thus be said to predominate, but there are undertones which are quite as important. Thus, at the close of the second paragraph, we find this: “Ugh! Heaven preserve us, sitting round the fire!”—the appeal to the homing instinct and domestic comfort, always so characteristic of Dickens, the skilful suggestion that domestic comfort is to be a part of the tale. A little later, the sympathetic quality of the Chimes is even more carefully suggested: they are “bent upon being heard on stormy nights, by some poor mother watching a sick child, or some lone wife whose husband was at sea.” Then, the casual introduction of Toby Veck, as a kind of afterthought to the description of the Chimes themselves, suggests the curious way in which his life is to be bound up with them. Finally, this connection is made all the more unescapable by means of the comparison between Toby and the Chimes which has already been referred to.
It is not necessary to go through the entire story in such detail. But the element of careful preparation and foreshadowing is everywhere apparent. The first two quarters prepare carefully for the last two: all the elements which enter into Toby’s waking life are given forth again, in new and hideous combinations, in his dream. Thus the dream is consistently presented to us from Toby’s own point of view.
When he first appears before us, Toby is already a man whose faith in himself, in his class, and in life has been somewhat disturbed. There follows in quick succession a series of experiences all calculated to increase his doubts: Mr. Filer’s demonstration that Toby himself is unpardonably past the average age, and that when he eats tripe he is stealing his food out of the mouths of widows and orphans; Alderman Cute’s denunciation of Meg’s desire to wed; Sir Joseph Bowley’s horror that, unlike himself, Toby is not entering the New Year with a clean slate; finally, the hideous newspaper account of the poverty-stricken mother who has slain herself and her child. No one of these details is included idly. Each contributes to Toby’s mood; each is to be used in working out the final resolution of the tale.
In the vision itself there are other careful bits of foreshadowing. Especially noteworthy for its delicate handling of a gross subject is the scene between Meg and Lilian in the Third Quarter, where we get the first hint that Lilian is to become a prostitute. Equally effective is Toby’s repeated wondering, as he searches the throngs of his vision, concerning the whereabouts of Richard. In this way suspense is developed, and Richard’s final appearance, dissipated and broken by hardship and disappointment, is made all the more impressive. The Chickenstalker episode, at the beginning of the Fourth Quarter, serves as legitimate comic relief, but it does more than that. It has a vital connexion with the story, and the conversation between Mrs. Chickenstalker and Tugby includes a careful summary of the various influences that have conspired to wreck Meg and Richard. Best of all is the use which is made of Meg’s love for her child. “ ‘Thank God!’ cried Trotty, holding up his folded hands. ‘O God he thanked! She loves the child!’ ” But soon comes the warning voice: “ ‘Follow her!’ was sounded through the house. ‘Learn it from the creature dearest to your heart!’ ”
It would he interesting to know what were the original contents of the note which Toby carries to Sir Joseph Bowley. By the time this message is delivered, in the Second Quarter, Dickens has, as we have seen, made up his mind concerning the roles which Lilian and her uncle are to play in the working out of his story. But at the time the note is sent, this idea has not yet been developed. It is nevertheless entirely possible that the note may have been conceived originally just as it now stands—an expression of Alderman Cute’s stern determination to put Will Fern down. Originally, we may suppose, the incident was intended simply to illustrate the character of Cute and of Bowley, and this before the idea had come to Dickens of introducing Will Fern into the story as anything more than a name. Is it not probable that this was the case? As the thing stands, it does illustrate perfectly the obsequiousness of Cute and the impotent grandiloquence of Bowley: what other purpose could any other note, in this contingency, have served? It is probable, then, that when the idea of Lilian came to Dickens, he picked up this thread, and made the incident, originally a very minor one, a bit of preparation for more important matters.
Dickens’s own opinion with regard to characterization in his Christmas Books has already been cited. In The Chimes, Toby alone is anything more than the suggestion of a character. While there is no character-development even in the case of Toby, there is a progressive revelation of character. This extends through the first half of the tale. Here it is dropped, and our attention is centred upon the vision. Toby is individualized through description, soliloquy, and conversation or dramatic scene. The crowning revelation of his character comes in the Second Quarter, where he offers shelter to Lilian and Will Fern.
The other serious characters can hardly be said to be characterized at all. Lilian must have been real in Dickens’s imagination, or he could not have been so moved as he was by her fall, but it can hardly he claimed that he succeeded in communicating a sense of reality to the reader. For this reason, the scene at the close of the Third Quarter seems to me artistically ineffective, though its social implications are suggestive indeed. Alderman Cute, Mr. Filer, and Sir Joseph Bowley—though we catch hardly more than a glimpse of each—are, for that matter, much more vivid, much more real than Lilian, Meg or Richard. Next to Toby himself, Sir Joseph is certainly the most effective character in the story. His passion for entering the New Year with all the obligations of the old behind him is a convenient “tag” of the kind Dickens used so skilfully, but better than that is his highly characteristic speech—his curious hesitancy, his hovering on the edge of pious generalities only to lapse immediately again into the mundane.
So much for the art of The Chimes: what now of its spirit? First of all, there is a definite affinity with the teachings of Carlyle. After finishing the story in Genoa, Dickens made a special trip to England for the purpose of reading it to a group of his friends. “Shall I confess to you,” he writes Forster, “that I particularly want Carlyle above all to see it before the rest of the world?…” The tale has often been criticized on the ground of Dickens’s alleged ignorance of the real causes of social misery. Even the admiring E.P. Whipple wrote in this connection: “Now, we must suppose that John Stuart Mill was a good and brave man, and that he had some love as well as perception of truth, yet certainly his opinion would have substantially agreed with that of Mr. Filer, so mercilessly ridiculed for his opposition to improvident marriages among the poor.” There is no denying a somewhat naïve assumption running all through Dickens’s utterances on social questions—the assumption that nothing more than the spirit of good will is needed to solve all our menacing social problems, that if only we have that, the means will somehow take care of themselves. Yet surely if either Mill or Whipple seriously believed that marriages among the poor could be made to cease simply because they were “improvident,” then these gentlemen were themselves much more naïve, much more “romantic” and unscientific than Dickens, in his wildest fights of fancy, ever dreamed of being!
The most startling thing about The Chimes, however, is that here, in 1844, we find Dickens asserting without compromise that prostitution, drunkenness, murder, arson, and revolution come into the world, not because prostitutes, drunkards, revolutionaries, and their kind are by nature viler than other human beings, and certainly not because they love darkness better than light, but simply because, as our social order is constituted, some members of it never do have a fair chance for their share of the decencies of life. I do not pretend that Dickens would defend all his criminals thus: certainly no such plea would serve for Fagin or for Bill Sikes. Nevertheless, this is unmistakably his teaching in The Chimes. Lilian becomes a prostitute because her soul is crushed by unrewarded toil; Richard, frightened away from marriage and domestic happiness by his poverty, sinks lower and lower into drunkenness and sloth until at last he revenges himself upon his betters as a revolutionary firebrand; Meg slays her child to obviate the possibility that she may live to follow in Lilian’s footsteps. And in every case, says Dickens, it is Society, and not these poor outcasts, that is to blame.
It was startling beyond belief in 1844, so startling that probably not very many people understood all its implications. If they had, the matter could hardly have passed of so quietly. For, on a broader scale, Dickens here lays down precisely the same principle which George Bernard Shaw was to enunciate with regard to prostitution at the close of the century. Listen to Mr. Shaw’s defence of Mrs. Warren’s Profession:
“The play is, simply, a study in prostitution, and its aim is to show that prostitution is not the prostitute’s fault, but the fault of a society which pays for a poor and pretty woman’s prostitution in solid gold, and pays for her honesty with starvation, drudgery, and pious twaddle.”
It is surely not necessary to enlarge here on the consternation with which Mrs. Warren’s Profession was greeted well into the twentieth century. In some cases, the anxiety went to the length of expressing itself in police prosecution. Even William Winter, then dean of American dramatic critics, saw in this play and in others like it the overthrow of whatever was pure in the drama. And what was shocking in Winter’s time must, I should say, have been immensely more shocking in 1844, or else our ancestors were much more liberal than we have been taught to believe!
The case of Richard has a definite bearing also on the much-mooted matter of Dickens’s sentimentality. In Toby’s dream, Meg and Richard do finally marry, but they marry too late. As Mrs. Chickenstalker explains to Tugby: “He went on better for a short time; but his habits were too old and strong to be got rid of; he soon fell back a little; and was falling fast back, when his illness came so strong upon him.” And even as she speaks the word comes that Richard has passed away.
Now if there is anything characteristic of the sentimentalist, it is the belief that good resolutions can effect anything. It is notable, and it should be considered in the discussion of Dickens, that in this case at least good resolutions accomplish precisely nothing. As irrevocably as any determinist to-day, Dickens says: It is too late. The die is cast. Richard must perish.
But there is still another aspect of the story which we have not yet considered, and the thought of which may bring us closer than anything we have done thus far to the secret of Dickens’s art. It must be remembered that all the terrible things of which I have spoken take place in a dream. When Toby wakes up, it is to learn that Meg is going ahead with her marriage in spite of Alderman Cute, and the story ends in general festivity and merrymaking. The enemy of Dickens points triumphantly to this as an example of Dickens’s shallowness and cowardice. When he did touch the realities of life, it was only a dream! Dreams are realities and realities become dreams. The happy ending remains with us. We close in a stifling atmosphere of bourgeois respectability. But let us see.
In the first place, it must be remembered that out-and-out realism was not the fashion in Dickens’s day, and great writers, as well as small ones, are bound by the literary fashions of their time. This is nowhere more evident than among the very people who object to Dickens’s alleged optimism: they are simply following the pessimistic, naturalistic trend of their day. If they would really be independent and original, let them turn to romance. It would be far more audacious, in this year of grace, to write like Dickens (if they could!) than to write like Gorky. In the second place, a dream within a dream can hardly be considered, in any appreciable degree, more unreal than the dream itself. The whole story of The Chimes in the imagination: that which Toby only dreams is quite as vividly presented as that which actually happens to him, and he who pretends that it would take a very brave man to present these things as having actually happened while any coward might present them as dreams has surely forgotten that he is dealing, not with life, but with a work of fiction. Finally, it may be urged, the exigencies of his plan and purpose compelled Dickens to use the method he chose. the theme of the story was the restoration of Toby’s faith in himself and his class. Following as it did in the wake of A Christmas Carol, supernatural machinery was absolutely necessary. Toby, like Scrooge, sees in a dream the dark road whither he is tending: he wakens with relief and turns his feet in another direction.
Dickens probably did believe that something like that actually could be effected in human experience. Though he had not read Twice-Born Men, he was not so sophisticated—or is it unsophisticated?—as to imagine that no human being had ever experienced an efficacious change of heart. And it is here, I believe, that we touch the difference between Dickens and many of the modern realists. It was not that he saw evil less clearly than they do, certainly not that they are more courageous than he was, but rather (to employ, as I must, words which very inadequately express my meaning) that, unlike many of the moderns, Dickens was still a man of faith. And by this I do not mean faith in God merely (though that is involved in it) but faith in humanity and in the world’s destiny. Consequently, where they deal in fears and despairs, he deals in hopes and promises. Consequently (though I assert no parity with Dante!) his work is a great comedy, not a great tragedy.
Mr. Chesterton has animadverted upon this fact in his inquiry why it was that “this too easily contented Dickens, this man with cushions at his hack and (it sometimes seems) cotton wool in his ears, this happy dreamer, this vulgar optimist … alone among modern writers did really destroy some of the wrongs he hated and bring about some of the reforms he desired.” And he goes on to answer his own question in words that are beautifully illustrated in The Chimes:
“And the reason of this is one that goes deep into Dickens’s social reform, and, like every other real and desirable thing, involves a kind of mystical contradiction. If we are to save the oppressed, we must have two apparently antagonistic emotions in us at the same time. We must think the oppressed man immensely miserable, and, at the same time, intensely attractive and important. We must insist with violence upon his degradation; we must insist with the same violence upon his dignity. For if we relax by one inch the one assertion, men will say he does not need saving. And if we relax by one inch the other assertion, men will say he is not worth saving….
“Out of this perennial contradiction arises the fact that there are always two types of the reformer. The first we may call for convenience the pessimistic, the second the optimistic reformer. One dwells upon the fact that souls are being lost; the other dwells upon the fact that they are worth saving…. The first describes how bad men are under bad conditions. The second describes how good men are under bad conditions….”
There is much more to the same effect that I have not space to quote. Now turn, for illustration of the other method, to the suggestive analysis by Mr. Van Wyck Brooks (in his book of essays, Emerson and Others) of the reasons for Mr. Upton Sinclair’s failure as a social reformer through fiction:
“But suppose now, that one wishes to see the dispossessed rise in their might and really, in the name of justice, take possession of the world. Suppose one wishes to see the class-system abolished, along with all the other unhappy things that Mr. Sinclair writes about. This is Mr. Sinclair’s own desire; and he honestly believes that in writing as he does he contributes to this happy consummation. I cannot agree with him. In so far as Mr. Sinclair’s books show us anything real they show us the utter helplessness, the benightedness, the naïveté of the American workers’ movement. Jimmie Higgins does not exist as a character. He is a symbol, however, and one can read reality into him. He is the American worker incarnate. Well, was there ever a worker so little the master of his fate? That, in point of fact, is just the conclusion Mr. Sinclair wishes us to draw. But why is he so helpless? Because, for all his kindness and his courage, he is, from an intellectual and social point of view, unlike the English worker, the German, Italian, Russian, the merest infant; he knows nothing about life or human nature or economics or philosophy or even his enemies. How can he possibly set about advancing his own cause, how can he circumvent the wily patrioteers, how can he become anything but what he 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 nineteenth as well as sixteenth century, lest we judge them by the standards of our day rather than by those of their own. Many of the unfavourable judgments of Dickens which have been made in our time are due to this failure of the historic sense, though there are other aspects in which he is still far ahead of us rather than behind us.
Edward Wagenknecht
Note—Some of the points made in the latter portion of this introduction have been anticipated in my book, The Man Charles Dickens, from which I have been permitted to quote two or three paragraphs through the courtesy of the publishers, Messrs. Houghton Mifflin Company.—E.W.