VI
His is a crowded world then, tumultuous and full of fierce hurry: but a world (let us grant it) strangely empty of questioning ideas, subtle nuisances that haunt many thoughtful men’s souls, through this pass of existence “still clutching the inviolable shade.” He wrote far better novels than John Inglesant, novels far, far, better than Robert Ellesmere; but you cannot conceive him as interested in the matter of these books—which yet is serious matter. Still less, or at least as little, can you imagine him pursuing the track of so perplexed a spirit as Prince André in Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Churches annoyed him. He will, of a christening or a marriage service (let be a funeral), make the mouldiest ceremony in the world. We offer the baby up; we give the blushing bride away; but in the very act we catch ourselves longing for that subsequent chat with the pew-opener which he seldom denies us for reward. Dickens, in short, had little use for religious forms or religious mysteries: for he carried his own religion about with him and it was the religion of James—so annoying alike to the mystic and the formalist—“to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.” This again belongs to his “universality.” Is it not the religion of most good fellows not vocal? It is observable how many of his heroes and heroines—his child heroes and heroines especially—pass through his thronged streets and keep themselves unspotted.
But, if careless of mysteries, Dickens had a hawk’s eye for truth of morals. You never find him mocking a good or condoning an evil thing: here his judgment and its resultant passion of love or of hate, I dare to say, never went wrong. Sinners—real sinners—in Dickens have the very inferno of a time: the very forces of Nature—“fire and hail, snow and vapours, wind and storm, fulfilling God’s word”—hunt the murderer to the pit that yawns; till he perishes, and the sky is clear again over holy and humble men of heart. Again, witness, here, the elemental flight of Jonas Chuzzlewit. Carlyle never said an unjuster thing (and that is saying a deal) than when he accused Dickens’ theory of life as entirely wrong. “He thought men ought to be buttered up ... and all sorts of fellows have turkey for their Christmas dinner.” It is false. Dickens had a keener eye for sin than Carlyle ever had; and a relentless eye: “a military eye,” said Henry James of it, recalling his first introduction to the great man—“a merciless military eye.” “A field-punishment eye,” I say!