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Gilbert Keith Chesterton. From As Large as Life in Dickens (1902)
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Gilbert Keith Chesterton. From As Large as Life in Dickens (1902)
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… 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…
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…
…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.
…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.
Anthony Trollope. From Autobiography (1883)
I have always desired to " hew out some lump of the earth, " and to make men and women walk upon it just as they do walk here among us, --with not more of excellence, nor with exaggerated baseness, - so that my readers might recognise human beings like to themselves, and not feel themselves to be carried away among gods or demons. If I could do this, then I thought I might succeed in impregnating the mind of the novel-reader with a feeling that honesty is the best policy; that truth prevails while falsehood fails; that a girl will be loved as she is pure; and sweet, and unselfish; that a man will be honoured as he is true, and honest, and brave of heart; that things meanly done are ugly and odious, and things nobly done beautiful and gracious. I do not say that lessons such as these may not be more grandly taught by higher flights than mine. Such lessons come to us from our greatest poets. But there are so many who will read novels and understand them, who either do not read the works of our great poets, or reading them miss the lesson! And even in prose fiction the character whom the fervid imagination of the writer has lifted somewhat into the clouds, will hardly give so plain an example to the hasty normal reader as the humbler personage whom that reader unconsciously feels to resemble himself or herself…There are many who would laugh at the idea of a novelist teaching either virtue or nobility, - those, for instance, who regard the reading of novels as a sin, and those also who think it to be simply an idle pastime. They look upon the tellers of stories as among the tribe of those who pander to the wicked pleasures of a wicked world. I have regarded my art from so different a point of view that I have ever thought of myself as a preacher of sermons, and my pulpit as one which I could make both salutary and agreeable to my audience…The writer of stories must please, or he will be nothing. And he must teach whether he wish to teach or no. How shall he teach lessons of virtue and at the same time make himself a delight to his readers? Those sermons are not in themselves often thought to be agreeable we all know. Nor are disquisitions on moral philosophy supposed to be pleasant reading for our idle hours. But the novelist, if he have a conscience, must preach his sermons with the same purpose as the clergyman, and must have his own system of ethics……Among English novels of the present day, and among English novelists, a great division is made. There are sensational novels and anti-sensational, sensational novelists and anti-sensational, sensational readers and anti-sensational. The novelists who are considered to be anti-sensational are generally called realistic. I am realistic. My friend Wilkie Collins is generally supposed to be sensational. The readers who prefer the one are supposed to take delight in the elucidation of character. Those who hold by the other are charmed by the continuation and gradual development of a plot. All this is, I think, a mistake, -which mistake arises from the inability of the imperfect artist to be at the same time realistic and sensational. A good novel should be both, and both in the highest degree. If a novel fails in either, there is a failure in art. Let those readers who believe that they do not like sensational scenes in novels think of some of those passages from our great novelists which have charmed them most: - of Rebecca in the castle with Ivanhoe; …of the mad lady tearing the veil of the expectant bride, in Jane Eyre… Will any one say that the authors of these passages have sinned in being over-sensational? No doubt, a string of horrible incidents, bound together without truth in detail, and told as affecting personages without character, - wooden blocks, who cannot make themselves known to the reader as men and women, does not instruct or amuse, or even fill the mind with awe. Horrors heaped upon horrors, and which are horrors only in themselves, and not as touching any recognised and known person, are not tragic, and soon cease even to horrify. And such would-be tragic elements of a story may be increased without end, and without difficulty. I may tell you of a woman murdered, - murdered in the same street with you, in the next house, - that she was a wife murdered by her husband, - a bride not yet a week a wife. I may add to it for ever. I may say that the murderer roasted her alive. There is no end to it.
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…It is so that I have lived with my characters, and thence has come whatever success I have obtained. There is a gallery of them, and of all in that gallery I may say that I know the tone of the voice, and the colour of the hair, every flame of the eye, and the very clothes they wear. Of each man I could assert whether he would have said these or the other words; of every woman, whether she would then have smiled or so have frowned.
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…In all this human nature must be the novel-writer's guide. No doubt effective novels have been written in which human nature has been set at defiance. I might name Caleb Williams as one and Adam Blair as another. But the exceptions are not more than enough to prove the rule. But in following human nature he must remember that he does so with a pen in his hand, and that the reader who will appreciate human nature will also demand artistic ability and literary aptitude.
…I do not hesitate to name Thackeray the first. His knowledge of human nature was supreme, and his characters stand out as human beings, with a force and a truth which has not, I think, been within the reach of any other English novelist in any period. I know no character in fiction, unless it be Don Quixote, with whom the reader becomes so intimately acquainted as with Colonel Newcombe. Among all our novelists his style is the purest, as to my ear it is also the most harmonious. Sometimes it is disfigured by a slight touch of affectation, by little conceits which smell of the oil; - but the language is always lucid. The reader, without labour, knows what he means, and knows all that he means. As well as I can remember, he deals with no episodes. I think that any critic, examining his work minutely, would find that every scene, and every part of every scene, adds something to the clearness with which the story is told...
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