Pickwick and Plato

Somehow, when revising my Plato paper, I found myself wading through a page of G.K. Chesterton reviewing Dickens. Don't ask me how I got there; how does the ladybug happen to land on your finger or the butterfly wend its way into the heart of a city? What errant turn sends the swallow to the coast instead of Capistrano, the goose to California rather than Canada? On one of those invisible paths, I lost my way, but it was to my great fortune and your own:

Now laughter is a thing that can be let go; laughter has in it a quality of liberty. But sorrow has in it by its very nature a quality of confinement; pathos by its very nature fights with itself. Humour is expansive; it bursts outwards; the fact is attested by the common expression, "holding one's sides."

But sorrow is not expansive; and it was afterwards the mistake of Dickens that he tried to make it expansive. It is the one great weakness of Dickens as a great writer, that he did try to make that sudden sadness, that abrupt pity, which we call pathos, a thing quite obvious, infectious, public, as if it were journalism or the measles. It is pleasant to think that in this supreme masterpiece, done in the dawn of his career, there is not even this faint fleck upon the sun of his just splendour.

Pickwick will always be remembered as the great example of everything that made Dickens great; of the solemn conviviality of great friendships, of the erratic adventures of old English roads, of the hospitality of old English inns, of the great fundamental kindliness and honour of old English manners. First of all, however, it will always be remembered for its laughter, or, if you will, for its folly. A good joke is the one ultimate and sacred thing which cannot be criticised. Our relations with a good joke are direct and even divine relations. We speak of "seeing" a joke just as we speak of "seeing" a ghost or a vision. If we have seen it, it is futile to argue with us; and we have seen the vision of Pickwick. Pickwick may be the top of Dickens's humour; I think upon the whole it is. But the broad humour of Pickwick he broadened over many wonderful kingdoms; the narrow pathos of Pickwick he never found again.

Of all Dickens' works, I must say I found the most of life in The Pickwick Papers. And I think, Chesterton nails the greatness of Dickens without diminishing his other works. I was so affected by Mr. Murdstone I once dreamt he was the anti-Christ, who was storming about town, literally ripping people apart. But every time I reread David Copperfield, it is Mr. Micawber who lures me back (to whom credit goes for the quote: "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.") Similarly, though Pip does make the heart ache on occasion, aided largely by that venomous vixen Estella, it was not his torments that draw me back to Great Expectations, but Wemmick and "The Aged."

Insofar as that corresponds to what Chesterton is arguing, I agree wholeheartedly. I will now proceed to reread every book Dickens wrote before I continue my papers.