Nine men out of ten in this country, above the most unlettered class, could tell you with some confidence who Pepys was. He was a funny fellow who kept a Diary. He was a roguish fellow, and the fun of his Diary consists chiefly in his confessions of infidelity to a wife, or flirtations with a chambermaid. He wrote in quaint short sentences, often parodied in the newspapers; and he ended as many entries as possible with the phrase, “and so to bed”. Now it is a very queer thing that this should be so universally known, and that nothing else about the same man should be known at all. For this mildly scandalous journal was only kept for a short time, comparatively early in his life; and even so the proportion of scandal is exaggerated. There were not many men in England then, or possibly now, whose sincere confessions in youth would be very different. Meanwhile, the rest of his life was a public life of practical usefulness and profound importance. He, with about one other man, made modern England a great naval power. The reply, it will be generally supposed, is that the public heard of the Diary first, long ago, while curious scholars have lately dug up the details about the permanent official. But in mere common sense, the case is exactly the other way. The Diary was kept in a close cipher, apparently impenetrable and long unpenetrated. But the political life of Pepys had been no more private than the public life of Cromwell or Cardinal Wolsey. Political foes tried to impeach him as openly as Warren Hastings in Westminster Hall; that he might be executed as openly as Charles I at Whitehall. In the famous phrase of the Regicide, this thing was not done in a corner. His foes were the first men of the age, like Shaftesbury and Halifax; and they filled the streets with mobs of the Brisk Boys with the Green Ribbons, roaring for the blood of such servants of the Crown. And the roguish little fellow of the Diary stood up under that storm and steered like a ship the policy that has launched the ships of England. He fought for a fighting fleet, more or less of the modern model, exactly as Cobden fought for Free Trade or Gladstone for Home Rule. And he did not write anything corresponding to “and so to bed” till he had seen those ships make their harbour. Now why is that most exciting passage in patriotic history practically left out of our rather too patriotic histories? Why is the hero of it known only as a buffoon winking at a maidservant? There is no reason that can be called simple, in the sense of superficial. Pepys was a very normal national man; Protestant like any other and as insular as most. Englishmen, especially English historians, are excessively devoted to what is national and very particularly to what is novel. And it is hardly exaggerative to say he could have written “Samuel Pepys”, like the signature of a craftsman or architect, under the word Victory where it shone upon the ship of Nelson.

  There is only one explanation. There can be no other; and it is simply this. You cannot praise the patriotism of Pepys without also praising the patriotism of James II, then James, Duke of York. You cannot tell the story at all, without letting it stand out with startling clearness that Samuel Pepys the Protestant might never have started work, and would certainly never have done the work, without the devoted practical support, and even prompting, of James Stuart the Papist. And his story had to be told so as to enforce only one moral; that Papistry was the enemy of Patriotism. In plain words, you have to admit that the prince, who did more than any other to enable Britannia to rule the waves, was the same Prince who was driven across the same waves into exile, simply and solely because he was a Roman Catholic. And that was more than the English historians dared to admit; merely to do justice to the patriotism of a poor little Government official. That single catastrophe, in the way of letting the Catholic cat out of the Protestant bag, would have turned upside-down the whole orthodox official academic History of England.

  But the point is, as I have said, that the thing is almost unthinkably subtle, often semi-conscious; and at once collective and secretive. It is a sort of vague but repeated gesture (like that of somebody stroking the cat) which has gradually put all this lively part of history to sleep; and moulded the story so as to soothe the successful side. There is no veto on studying the period; no overt official command to take a certain line; there was simply an instinct to take the line of least resistance. The main facts of the time were seldom even contradicted; they were only neglected. And I can imagine with what a stare of simple wonder I should be regarded, by the man in the street, who is quite willing to talk to me about Pepys, if I said there was a sort of conspiracy to connect Pepys only with his Diary. Is not the Diary a very amusing book? Yes. Was not Pepys a Protestant? Yes. Do we not generally praise patriots, especially Protestant patriots? Yes. But if Pitt or Palmerston or Disraeli had written a very amusing Diary, people would discuss each statesman with reference to his statesmanship; and then say, “I always think he is most delightful in his Diary. Have you read his Diary?”

  By this vast vague corporate craft or silent strategy, there has been built up in this country a quite abnormal condition of mental and moral Comfort. And we know, because Mr. Winston Churchill tells us in the Strand Magazine, that we have a noble Parliament and more freedom than any foreigners; and a poor man has as much chance as a rich man in our courts of law. And so to bed.

  AS LARGE AS LIFE IN DICKENS

  NOTHING IS more characteristic of Dickens, nothing has so handicapped him with the languid modern reader as the vast crowding of his stage with innumerable and bewilderingly well-painted characters. He has passed through a period in which it has been customary among certain people to deride him; but the whole indifference to Dickens has arisen from the strange idea that literature should copy life. While realism was in full swing it was easy to point out that no person ever existed so horrible as Quilp, or so grandiloquent as Snodgrass, or unscrupulous as Ralph Nickleby, so entirely pathetic as Little Nell. But we have tired of realism. We have suddenly awakened to the fact that art has nothing to do with copying. It is strange, but true, that the same movement and discovery which has been the justification of Aubrey Beardsley has been the justification of Dickens.

  Dickens, of course, has been a great deal handicapped by the common habit among his admirers of praising him for the wrong things. He is praised for being `true to life’, while his true merit is not that he is true to life, but alive. It is common to hear a man say when Dickens is accused of exaggeration, “I have met a man exactly like Pecksniff” Of course, to begin with, he has not met a person like Pecksniff any more than he has met one like Caliban. And further, if he had met a man exactly like Pecksniff, it would go far to show that Dickens was not a great novelist. Since no two men in real life are exactly like each other, so no fictitious character ought to be exactly like a real character. He ought to be an addition to the existing stock of real characters. His passions and traditions, his instincts and memories, should be blended together in entirely new quantities into an entirely new colour never seen before from the beginning upon the palette of life. If it be true (as I believe it is) that no person precisely like Mrs. Micawber ever existed or ever will exist in the whole domain of the universe, then we know that Mrs. Micawber is like life. We know that Dickens created as Life itself creates.

  This is the far higher sense in which great art is `like life’, far higher, that is, than the ordinary sense in which the phrase is used. Great literature is like life. Not because it is accurate to the leaves on the tree and the pattern on the carpet and the words men actually employ; it is like life because it has in it the exuberant energy of life, its power of production, its sense of hope and memory, its consciousness of an almost immortal vitality. Great literature, in short, is like life because it also is living. An admirer of Dickens, therefore, ought to be ashamed of defending the great master by pretending that he did not exaggerate. He exaggerated by the same living law which makes the birds chatter in pairing time or the kitten fight with its own tail. The passion behind all his work was joy, and the final touch of exaggeration is the absolute necessity of the great literature of joy.

  This mistake about Dickens arose, of course, because a critical generation had forgotten altogether that there even was such a thing as the great literature of joy. We have fallen into the way of thinking that literature is a refuge for weak temperaments, that literature may express all the darker and quainter moods, all the moods of regret or rebellion or hesitation, but never that one universal mood, streaming like a river through heaven and earth, by which alone all things consent to live. Dickens has seemed to us vulgar and impossible, and sprawlingly inartistic, for the simple reason that he is too strong for us. His bewildering crowds and mobs of characters, his vast mazy travels over England and America, his endless banquets and conversations, his intense realism and his frantic unreality, are all manifestations of a quite insatiable and omnivorous power of mental pleasure to which our period has lost the key. He was the last of the great comic writers; since his time we have lost the power of realizing the connection between the words `great’ and `comic’. We have forgotten that Aristophanes and Rabelais stand with Aeschylus and Dante; that their folly was wiser and more solid than our wisdom, and that their levity has outlasted a hundred philosophies. Dickens exaggerates, and it is not a fault but a merit; it is of the same kind as the exaggerations of the great French humorist, whose vigorous and almost monstrous power of happiness was only contented with a giant who could lift his head above Notre Dame and ride away with the bells upon his bridle. Therefore Dickens has become to the orthodox artistic world of today what Rabelais has become to many of the modern schools - a thing obscure with excess of jesting, a positive darkness of joy.

  There are many evidences that the great truth and passion behind the work of Dickens was this sense of joy in things; just as much as the great truth and passion behind Thackeray was a sense of their almost sacred pathos, or the great truth and passion behind Hawthorne a sense of their weird significance. But the best evidence of all lies in the fact that Dickens was never so triumphantly successful as in describing the type of man whose existence in this world, in which he has neither money nor honour, seems to depend entirely on his high spirits and his capacity for realizing the magnificence of the flying moment. All Dickens’ sticks of heroes and dolls of heroines may, of course, be thrown aside: the real ideal figure of Dickens is William Micawber. Dick Swiveller, his next best character, is a man of the same type; they both represent a kind of shabby poet, whose continual lack of money and utter antagonism to the order of society can never kill him, because of his everlasting pleasure in old memories and very old quotations. They have alike the same mutability, the same impecuniosity, the same florid, but genuine, taste in literature, the same continual and crushing misfortunes, the same mysterious, but unbreakable, immortality. They are never ended, because, fools and rascals as they are they hold on to something which belongs, not to society but to the soul: the power of joy. And note here that Dickens, describing these men who are nearest to his heart, is not only vigorous, living and entertaining, as he always is, but far truer to the facts even than is his wont. Pecksniff is a spirited and amusing bogey for a pure farce, but such a hypocrite never lived in this mean earth; we shall meet him in a better and bolder world. Mr. Squeers is a good, black grotesque figure from the outside, but he has no inside. But Micawber and Swiveller (especially the latter) are true to the tenor life; they see the humour of their own exaggerations, they live avowedly on their own good spirits. And in them Dickens really touches problems and elements of greatness which are as old as the world and as great as any tragedy. He touches, for example, the great tragedy of Ireland, which after innumerable sorrows still lives upon an outrageous gaiety. Above all he touches the case of the great masses of the poor, whom he loved. He saw deeper than a hundred statisticians and philanthropic economists. No man on earth was ever a more fierce and mutinous Radical than he; but he saw that all calculations of the mortal hours of men left out the everlasting moment..

  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 because 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 grounds, 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 sentiment 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”.