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Tolstoy is not. Tolstoy's characters can cross a frontier, Dickens's can be portrayed on a cigarettecard.
But one is no more obliged to choose between them than between a sausage and a rose. Their
purposes barely intersect.
6
If Dickens had been merely a comic writer, the chances are that no one would now remember his
name. Or at best a few of his books would survive in rather the same way as books like Frank
Fairleigh, Mr Verdant Green and Mrs Caudle's Curtain Lectures, 10 as a sort of hangover of the
Victorian atmosphere, a pleasant little whiff of oysters and brown stout. Who has not felt sometimes
that it was "a pity" that Dickens ever deserted the vein of Pickwick for things like Little Dorrit and
Hard Times? What people always demand of a popular novelist is that he shall write the same book
over and over again, forgetting that a man who would write the same book twice could not even write
it once. Any writer who is not utterly lifeless moves upon a kind of parabola, and the downward
curve is implied in the upward one. Joyce has to start with the frigid competence of Dubliners and
end with the dream-language of Finnegans Wake, but Ulysses and Portrait of the Artist are part of
the trajectory. The thing that drove Dickens forward into a form of art for which he was not really
suited, and at the same time caused us to remember him, was simply the fact that he was a moralist,
the consciousness of "having something to say." He is always preaching a sermon, and that is the final
secret of his inventiveness. For you can only create if you can care. Types like Squeers and
Micawber could not have been produced by a hack writer looking for something to be funny about. A
joke worth laughing at always has an idea behind it, and usually a subversive idea. Dickens is able to
go on being funny because he is in revolt against authority, and authority is always there to be laughed
at. There is always room for one more custard pie.
His radicalism is of the vaguest kind, and yet one always knows that it is there. That is
the difference between being a moralist and a politician. He has no constructive suggestions, not even
a clear grasp of the nature of the society he is attacking, only an emotional perception that something
is wrong. All he can finally say is, "Behave decently," which, as I suggested earlier, is not necessarily
so shallow as it sounds. Most revolutionaries are potential Tories, because they imagine that
everything can be put right by altering the shape of society; once that change is effected, as it
sometimes is, they see no need for any other. Dickens has not this kind of mental coarseness. The
vagueness of his discontent is the mark of its permanence. What he is out against is not this or that
institution, but, as Chesterton put it, "an expression on the human face." Roughly speaking, his
morality is the Christian morality, but in spite of his Anglican upbringing he was essentially a Bible-
Christian, as he took care to make plain when writing his will. In any case he cannot properly be
described as a religious man. He "believed," undoubtedly, but religion in the devotional sense does
not seem to have entered much into his thoughts. * Where he is Christian is in his quasi-instinctive
siding with the oppressed against the oppressors. As a matter of course he is on the side of the
underdog, always and everywhere. To carry this to its logical conclusion one has got to change sides
when the underdog becomes an upperdog, and in fact Dickens does tend to do so. He loathes the
Catholic Church, for instance, but as soon as the Catholics are persecuted ( Barnaby Rudge) he is on
their side. He loathes the aristocratic class even more, but as soon as they are really overthrown (the
revolutionary chapters in A Tale of Two Cities) his sympathies swing round. Whenever he departs