PICKWICK AND THE ENGLISH PEOPLES
[From “The Empire Review”, Vol XXXVIII, October 1923, No. 273. Reprinted in 1927.]
The English character has been wronged more by praise than by blame. It has been wronged most of all by accepting one sort of blame as if it were a sort of praise. The irony of such an incident is in itself rather curious and interesting. It is as if a man were wrongly accused of being a murderer, and was faintly flattered because the charge made: him look like a desperado. An entertaining little comedy might be written about such a respectable householder, who had a delicacy about entirely clearing his character, because he could not help hankering after the chance of looking as picturesque as a pirate. The comedy is common enough in real life, I imagine, in connection with the lighter vices of a man of the world. Many a young man has allowed himself to be thought immoral; and locked in his bosom the dark secret that he was perfectly moral. Now, the misunderstanding about the Englishman is of the same type but in the opposite direction. He has allowed himself to be considered much less gay and picturesque than he really is, because there was something more insidiously flattering in the way in which he was called grave and prosaic.
Continental criticism, broadly speaking, has made a mistake about England. It was a very natural mistake, founded on certain superficial truths, such as those which have so long hidden from England the thrift and the tenacity of France. It largely arose out of the religious quarrel and the rise of the Puritans. And the Puritan was the sort of solitary figure which, when it happens to appear in one particular country, frequently falsifies international impressions. Such a person is associated with such a place, not so much because he is often found there as because he is never found anywhere else. Foreign critics have presented the Englishman as a Puritan with a long face, very much as foreign caricaturists have presented the English soldier as a Scotchman with a short kilt. Most British soldiers are not Highland soldiers, but all Highland soldiers are British soldiers. Highlanders are not seen in any other army; and therefore nobody else except Highlanders are seen in that army. In the same way the Puritan is an exception in England; only he is more of an exception in Europe. Nowhere else has the Puritan been dominant as he was in this island; for his presence there was despotic rather than democratic. His original power was due to militarism. His more modern power is due to plutocracy. But the English populace has never been Puritan, even in the sense in which the Scotch populace has been Puritan; still less in the sense in which the Irish populace has been Catholic. Nobody who thinks in terms of real popularity, right or wrong, can have the smallest doubt about whether our democracy is normally on the march to Exeter Hall or to the Derby.
Along with this historical accident of the Puritan aristocracy went several other things equally accidental. A certain shyness and moody embarrassment that come from much more complex causes; the fact that like most northern peoples, including the northern French, we have not the rapid gestures of the South, an exaggerated reputation for roughness, curiously compounded of the legend of physical exercise and the legend that business is business, combined with the puzzle of Protestanism to create on the Continent an imaginary Englishman as stiff and stern as a Prussian. So far the mistake need not have troubled us very much. Nations normally do misunderstand each other; and it is not worse than the notion that the Frenchman is immoral or that the Irishman does not know what he wants. Unfortunately, this slander had in it something horribly like a compliment. Still more unfortunately, some Englishmen were so weak as to accept the compliment. They liked to be called stiff because they thought it meant that they were strong. They liked to be called solemn because they thought it meant that they were responsible. Vanity of this sort is not of course peculiar to them; it is common to the whole human race. But it was simply out of the weakness of vanity that they confessed to the sin of pride. In reality, they are not particularly proud and certainly not in the least stern; they are an exceptionally kindly and even soft-hearted people. They do not even take their pleasures sadly; they only take an incidental and I think regrettable pleasure in being called sad.
The meaning of Merry England was in this old original character of the English. In mediaeval times their public and proverbial character was festive and full of fun; and even in modern times their private and personal character is the same. The witness to it is the wonderful English literature; but of late years it has been overlaid by the cross-purposes about the Continental criticism and the false ideal thus imposed. It is not only a false but even a foreign ideal. The Englishman actually dresses up as the French picture of himself. To get clear of this complication, the right course is to appeal to the authority of that great national literature, especially as it was when it was still entirely normal, and had not been crossed and confused by the self-conscious poses of more recent times. The last full and free manifestation of this normal and national spirit is represented by the name of Pickwick. It is the last expression of the complete freedom and fullness, not only in the literature of England, but even in the literature of Dickens. Though the work of Dickens continued to be great, though in some matters of subtlety and reality it became much greater, there was something that it never quite recovered again; and it was something that can only be called the liberty of our fathers. The author of “Our Mutual Friend” was not quite so free as the author of “Pickwick”; not even so free as the author of “Oliver Twist.” Though his insight into the growth of modern plutocracy was far deeper than that of any of his contemporaries, he has himself suffered a little from passing successfully into more plutocratic circles. He no longer represents quite so realistically the inspired prejudices of the whole people. He is touched a little with the newspaper notion of good taste. There has fallen on him a little of that fatal sort of broad-mindedness which looks at maps rather than places. He has no longer the wisdom of the uneducated man, who says what he thinks. He has begun to have too much of the knowledge of the half-educated man, who says what he thinks he ought to think.. Wild and fantastic as the first books of Dickens may appear, they are in one sense more realistic than his realistic books. The young Dickens describes things because they are real, and laughs at them because they are laughable. He may exaggerate them, but it is because they are there to be exaggerated. He describes the Eatonswill election as comic and corrupt because it was comic and corrupt. He is not concerned, or is only very incidentally concerned, with the consequences of his argument as affecting representative government, as affecting an existing oligarchy or a possible democracy. Similarly the young Dickens described Fagin the Jew exactly as any poor man in a poor street would have described him, and would still describe him. The older Dickens of “Our Mutual Friend” had grown faintly afraid of being an anti-Semite. I do not mean that he was insincere or intimidated; on the contrary, he was much bolder and franker than anybody else. But his mind had been modified by a modern refinement and lost the old popular realism of Ben Jonson or Fielding. The Puritan in “Pickwick” is just like the Puritan in “Bartholomew Fair.” But if Mr. Stiggins had intruded on the domestic happiness of Mr. Wilfer instead of Mr. Weller, I doubt if that Free Church Minister’s nose would have been quite so red or his character quite so black as it was painted.
In short, Dickens gained only liberality when he lost liberty. It is a melancholy exchange; and though Dickens, as has been said, kept his superiority to his own rather snobbish generation to the very last, it is in his first books, and especially in “Pickwick,” that we must seek the full and frank expression of that old traditional truth about the English people. That truth certainly bears no resemblance to the image of the stern inarticulate stoic which foreigners have invented as a criticism and we have accepted as a compliment. On the other hand, it does bear a marked resemblance to the mediaeval tradition about England as we have it in Chaucer or in the ballads about Robin Hood. That spirit is not at all stoical and is certainly the very reverse of Puritan. It is full of precisely that almost illogical indulgence, that charity to the indefensible, that made possible the sympathy for the Wife of Bath, for Falstaff, and for Friar Tuck.
And that is the truth about the English adventure even outside England. Its type of endurance has not been stoicism but rather tolerance. We might say it was much too tolerant, if it had not the rare virtue of tolerating the intolerable. What has really made the English, apart from mere jingo journalistic flatteries, a success in colonies and in campaigns in savage countries, was a certain comic acceptance of the incongruous; a certain capacity in the English cockney or yokel of continuing to be absurdly like himself even when, in the ritual formula, he don’t know where he are. This is a national merit which, like other national merits, is gained at the expense of missing other things; of missing, for instance, the full status of the citizen and the full inherited experience that comes of remaining rooted in very old civilisations. But it is perhaps the most humorous and attractive of all national virtues; and men who really know from the inside the various nations of European humanity have found nothing more human than the ordinary English comic song or the talk of the Tommies in the trenches. Of all that great popular tradition “Pickwick” is the supreme artistic sympathetic masterpiece and even the miracle. Its very faults are its merits; since they correspond to this particular national morality. If the story is chaotic, it is because the philosophy of the people has long been chaotic, and indeed even perilously chaotic. If it is even in one sense superficial, as being a skimming of the surface of a vast and varied society, it is because it is true. In that sense the English spirit really has a certain superficiality of which the very deep motive is sociability. It loses something, indeed, it loses a great deal, in not thinking its way back to first principles or facing fundamental truths. But it also gains a great deal in the great virtue of charity; both in the form of patience with comrades and hospitality to strangers. Friendships are not broken up by the feuds of the intellect; and if there is far too little recognition of the idea of truth, there is a very valuable recognition of the idea of trust.
Nothing is more English or more characteristic in the Pickwick epic than the fact that the band of comrades are comic in their incongruity. They differ and do not quarrel; or they quarrel and do not part. There is an assumption and atmosphere of absurd toleration spread over the whole story, so that we never expect ridicule to be anything except ridiculous. Mr. Pickwick calls Mr. Winkle an imposter; but he does not seem to object to impostors. He denounces his followers for trifling with feminine feelings and then only laughs when the denunciation is turned against himself. There runs through the whole story an implication that the absurd company will go through with its absurd adventure; and that implication has been tacit in many companies of English people. There must have been many groups of Englishmen in camps and colonial holes and corners, consisting of men who got on with each other somehow, though each was regarded lightly enough as an individual. They were comic characters, if not to themselves, at least to each other. And even in isolation, any one of them who had with him (as he often had) a tattered volume of Pickwick, must have felt that he carried his country in his pocket.
G. K. Chesterton.
PICKWICK AND THE ENGLISH PEOPLES
[From “The Empire Review”, Vol XXXVIII, October 1923, No. 273. Reprinted in 1927.]
The English character has been wronged more by praise than by blame. It has been wronged most of all by accepting one sort of blame as if it were a sort of praise. The irony of such an incident is in itself rather curious and interesting. It is as if a man were wrongly accused of being a murderer, and was faintly flattered because the charge made: him look like a desperado. An entertaining little comedy might be written about such a respectable householder, who had a delicacy about entirely clearing his character, because he could not help hankering after the chance of looking as picturesque as a pirate. The comedy is common enough in real life, I imagine, in connection with the lighter vices of a man of the world. Many a young man has allowed himself to be thought immoral; and locked in his bosom the dark secret that he was perfectly moral. Now, the misunderstanding about the Englishman is of the same type but in the opposite direction. He has allowed himself to be considered much less gay and picturesque than he really is, because there was something more insidiously flattering in the way in which he was called grave and prosaic.
Continental criticism, broadly speaking, has made a mistake about England. It was a very natural mistake, founded on certain superficial truths, such as those which have so long hidden from England the thrift and the tenacity of France. It largely arose out of the religious quarrel and the rise of the Puritans. And the Puritan was the sort of solitary figure which, when it happens to appear in one particular country, frequently falsifies international impressions. Such a person is associated with such a place, not so much because he is often found there as because he is never found anywhere else. Foreign critics have presented the Englishman as a Puritan with a long face, very much as foreign caricaturists have presented the English soldier as a Scotchman with a short kilt. Most British soldiers are not Highland soldiers, but all Highland soldiers are British soldiers. Highlanders are not seen in any other army; and therefore nobody else except Highlanders are seen in that army. In the same way the Puritan is an exception in England; only he is more of an exception in Europe. Nowhere else has the Puritan been dominant as he was in this island; for his presence there was despotic rather than democratic. His original power was due to militarism. His more modern power is due to plutocracy. But the English populace has never been Puritan, even in the sense in which the Scotch populace has been Puritan; still less in the sense in which the Irish populace has been Catholic. Nobody who thinks in terms of real popularity, right or wrong, can have the smallest doubt about whether our democracy is normally on the march to Exeter Hall or to the Derby.
Along with this historical accident of the Puritan aristocracy went several other things equally accidental. A certain shyness and moody embarrassment that come from much more complex causes; the fact that like most northern peoples, including the northern French, we have not the rapid gestures of the South, an exaggerated reputation for roughness, curiously compounded of the legend of physical exercise and the legend that business is business, combined with the puzzle of Protestanism to create on the Continent an imaginary Englishman as stiff and stern as a Prussian. So far the mistake need not have troubled us very much. Nations normally do misunderstand each other; and it is not worse than the notion that the Frenchman is immoral or that the Irishman does not know what he wants. Unfortunately, this slander had in it something horribly like a compliment. Still more unfortunately, some Englishmen were so weak as to accept the compliment. They liked to be called stiff because they thought it meant that they were strong. They liked to be called solemn because they thought it meant that they were responsible. Vanity of this sort is not of course peculiar to them; it is common to the whole human race. But it was simply out of the weakness of vanity that they confessed to the sin of pride. In reality, they are not particularly proud and certainly not in the least stern; they are an exceptionally kindly and even soft-hearted people. They do not even take their pleasures sadly; they only take an incidental and I think regrettable pleasure in being called sad.
PICKWICK E I POPOLI INGLESI
[Da “The Empire Review”, Vol. XXXVIII, ottobre 1923, N. 273. Ristampato nel 1927.]
Il carattere inglese è stato offeso più dalla lode che dal biasimo. È stato offeso soprattutto per aver accettato una certa specie di biasimo come se fosse una specie di lode. L’ironia di un simile caso è di per sé piuttosto curiosa e interessante. È come se un uomo fosse accusato a torto di essere un assassino, e si sentisse debolmente lusingato perché l’accusa gli conferiva l’aria di un fuorilegge. Si potrebbe scrivere una divertente piccola commedia su un tale rispettabile padrone di casa, che avesse uno scrupolo a scagionarsi interamente, perché non poteva fare a meno di vagheggiare la possibilità di apparire pittoresco come un pirata. La commedia è abbastanza comune nella vita reale, immagino, in rapporto ai vizi più lievi di un uomo di mondo. Più d’un giovanotto si è lasciato credere immorale; e ha custodito chiuso nel petto l’oscuro segreto di essere perfettamente morale. Ora, l’equivoco riguardo all’inglese è dello stesso tipo, ma in direzione opposta. Egli si è lasciato ritenere assai meno gaio e pittoresco di quanto realmente sia, perché c’era qualcosa di più insidiosamente lusinghiero nel modo in cui veniva chiamato serio e prosaico.
La critica continentale, in linea di massima, ha commesso un errore riguardo all’Inghilterra. Era un errore molto naturale, fondato su certe verità superficiali, come quelle che tanto a lungo hanno nascosto all’Inghilterra la parsimonia e la tenacia della Francia. Nasceva in gran parte dalla contesa religiosa e dall’ascesa dei puritani. E il puritano era quella sorta di figura solitaria che, quando capita di comparire in un particolare paese, falsifica spesso le impressioni internazionali. Una simile persona viene associata a un simile luogo, non tanto perché la si trovi spesso lì quanto perché non la si trova mai altrove. I critici stranieri hanno presentato l’inglese come un puritano dal viso lungo, proprio come i caricaturisti stranieri hanno presentato il soldato inglese come uno scozzese col kilt corto. La maggior parte dei soldati britannici non sono soldati delle Highland, ma tutti i soldati delle Highland sono soldati britannici. Gli highlander non si vedono in nessun altro esercito; e perciò nessun altro all’infuori degli highlander si vede in quell’esercito. Allo stesso modo il puritano è un’eccezione in Inghilterra; solo che è ancor più un’eccezione in Europa. In nessun altro luogo il puritano è stato dominante come lo fu in quest’isola; poiché la sua presenza vi era dispotica piuttosto che democratica. Il suo potere originario era dovuto al militarismo. Il suo potere più moderno è dovuto alla plutocrazia. Ma il popolo inglese non è mai stato puritano, nemmeno nel senso in cui il popolo scozzese è stato puritano; e ancor meno nel senso in cui il popolo irlandese è stato cattolico. Nessuno che ragioni in termini di reale popolarità, a torto o a ragione, può avere il minimo dubbio sul fatto che la nostra democrazia sia normalmente in marcia verso l’Exeter Hall o verso il Derby.
Assieme a questo accidente storico dell’aristocrazia puritana andarono parecchie altre cose ugualmente accidentali. Una certa timidezza e un imbarazzo umorale che nascono da cause assai più complesse; il fatto che, come la maggior parte dei popoli nordici, compresi i francesi del nord, non abbiamo i gesti rapidi del Sud, una reputazione esagerata di rozzezza, curiosamente composta della leggenda dell’esercizio fisico e della leggenda che gli affari sono affari, combinata con l’enigma del protestantesimo, a creare sul Continente un inglese immaginario, rigido e severo come un prussiano. Fin qui l’errore non avrebbe dovuto turbarci granché. Le nazioni normalmente si fraintendono a vicenda; e non è peggio dell’idea che il francese sia immorale o che l’irlandese non sappia ciò che vuole. Sfortunatamente, questa calunnia aveva in sé qualcosa di orribilmente simile a un complimento. Ancor più sfortunatamente, alcuni inglesi furono tanto deboli da accettare il complimento. Amavano essere chiamati rigidi perché credevano significasse che erano forti. Amavano essere chiamati solenni perché credevano significasse che erano responsabili. La Vanità di questa specie non è naturalmente peculiare a loro; è comune a tutto il genere umano. Ma fu semplicemente per la debolezza della vanità che confessarono il peccato d’orgoglio. In realtà, non sono particolarmente orgogliosi e di certo non sono minimamente severi; sono un popolo eccezionalmente gentile e persino tenero di cuore. Non prendono nemmeno con tristezza i loro piaceri; provano soltanto un incidentale e, credo, deplorevole piacere nell’essere chiamati tristi.
The meaning of Merry England was in this old original character of the English. In mediaeval times their public and proverbial character was festive and full of fun; and even in modern times their private and personal character is the same. The witness to it is the wonderful English literature; but of late years it has been overlaid by the cross-purposes about the Continental criticism and the false ideal thus imposed. It is not only a false but even a foreign ideal. The Englishman actually dresses up as the French picture of himself. To get clear of this complication, the right course is to appeal to the authority of that great national literature, especially as it was when it was still entirely normal, and had not been crossed and confused by the self-conscious poses of more recent times. The last full and free manifestation of this normal and national spirit is represented by the name of Pickwick. It is the last expression of the complete freedom and fullness, not only in the literature of England, but even in the literature of Dickens. Though the work of Dickens continued to be great, though in some matters of subtlety and reality it became much greater, there was something that it never quite recovered again; and it was something that can only be called the liberty of our fathers. The author of “Our Mutual Friend” was not quite so free as the author of “Pickwick”; not even so free as the author of “Oliver Twist.” Though his insight into the growth of modern plutocracy was far deeper than that of any of his contemporaries, he has himself suffered a little from passing successfully into more plutocratic circles. He no longer represents quite so realistically the inspired prejudices of the whole people. He is touched a little with the newspaper notion of good taste. There has fallen on him a little of that fatal sort of broad-mindedness which looks at maps rather than places. He has no longer the wisdom of the uneducated man, who says what he thinks. He has begun to have too much of the knowledge of the half-educated man, who says what he thinks he ought to think.. Wild and fantastic as the first books of Dickens may appear, they are in one sense more realistic than his realistic books. The young Dickens describes things because they are real, and laughs at them because they are laughable. He may exaggerate them, but it is because they are there to be exaggerated. He describes the Eatonswill election as comic and corrupt because it was comic and corrupt. He is not concerned, or is only very incidentally concerned, with the consequences of his argument as affecting representative government, as affecting an existing oligarchy or a possible democracy. Similarly the young Dickens described Fagin the Jew exactly as any poor man in a poor street would have described him, and would still describe him. The older Dickens of “Our Mutual Friend” had grown faintly afraid of being an anti-Semite. I do not mean that he was insincere or intimidated; on the contrary, he was much bolder and franker than anybody else. But his mind had been modified by a modern refinement and lost the old popular realism of Ben Jonson or Fielding. The Puritan in “Pickwick” is just like the Puritan in “Bartholomew Fair.” But if Mr. Stiggins had intruded on the domestic happiness of Mr. Wilfer instead of Mr. Weller, I doubt if that Free Church Minister’s nose would have been quite so red or his character quite so black as it was painted.
In short, Dickens gained only liberality when he lost liberty. It is a melancholy exchange; and though Dickens, as has been said, kept his superiority to his own rather snobbish generation to the very last, it is in his first books, and especially in “Pickwick,” that we must seek the full and frank expression of that old traditional truth about the English people. That truth certainly bears no resemblance to the image of the stern inarticulate stoic which foreigners have invented as a criticism and we have accepted as a compliment. On the other hand, it does bear a marked resemblance to the mediaeval tradition about England as we have it in Chaucer or in the ballads about Robin Hood. That spirit is not at all stoical and is certainly the very reverse of Puritan. It is full of precisely that almost illogical indulgence, that charity to the indefensible, that made possible the sympathy for the Wife of Bath, for Falstaff, and for Friar Tuck.
Il significato della Allegra Inghilterra risiedeva in questo antico carattere originario degli inglesi. In tempi medievali il loro carattere pubblico e proverbiale era festoso e pieno di allegria; e persino in tempi moderni il loro carattere privato e personale è lo stesso. Ne è testimone la meravigliosa letteratura inglese; ma negli ultimi anni essa è stata offuscata dai malintesi riguardo alla critica continentale e dal falso ideale così imposto. Non è soltanto un ideale falso ma persino straniero. L’inglese si traveste addirittura da come lo raffigurano i francesi. Per liberarsi di questa complicazione, la via giusta è appellarsi all’autorità di quella grande letteratura nazionale, specialmente com’era quando era ancora del tutto normale, e non era stata contrariata e confusa dalle pose affettate di sé dei tempi più recenti. L’ultima piena e libera manifestazione di questo spirito normale e nazionale è rappresentata dal nome di Pickwick. È l’ultima espressione della completa libertà e pienezza, non solo nella letteratura d’Inghilterra, ma persino nella letteratura di Dickens. Sebbene l’opera di Dickens continuasse a essere grande, sebbene in certe questioni di sottigliezza e realtà divenisse assai più grande, vi era qualcosa che essa non riacquistò mai più del tutto; ed era qualcosa che si può solo chiamare la libertà dei nostri padri. L’autore di “Our Mutual Friend” non era altrettanto libero quanto l’autore di “Pickwick”; nemmeno tanto libero quanto l’autore di “Oliver Twist”. Per quanto la sua penetrazione della crescita della moderna plutocrazia fosse assai più profonda di quella di qualsiasi suo contemporaneo, egli stesso ha sofferto un poco per essere passato con successo in cerchie più plutocratiche. Non rappresenta più tanto realisticamente i pregiudizi ispirati dell’intero popolo. È toccato un poco dalla nozione giornalistica del buon gusto. È caduta su di lui un poco di quella fatale sorta di larghezza di vedute che guarda le carte geografiche piuttosto che i luoghi. Non ha più la saggezza dell’uomo incolto, che dice ciò che pensa. Ha cominciato ad avere troppo della cognizione dell’uomo semicolto, che dice ciò che pensa di dover pensare.. Per quanto selvaggi e fantastici possano apparire i primi libri di Dickens, essi sono in un certo senso più realistici dei suoi libri realistici. Il giovane Dickens descrive le cose perché sono reali, e ne ride perché sono ridicole. Può esagerarle, ma è perché sono lì pronte a essere esagerate. Descrive l’elezione di Eatanswill come comica e corrotta perché era comica e corrotta. Non si preoccupa, o si preoccupa solo molto incidentalmente, delle conseguenze del suo ragionamento in quanto tocca il governo rappresentativo, in quanto tocca un’oligarchia esistente o una possibile democrazia. Similmente il giovane Dickens descrisse Fagin l’ebreo esattamente come qualunque pover’uomo di una strada povera lo avrebbe descritto, e lo descriverebbe ancora. Il Dickens più anziano di “Our Mutual Friend” era diventato lievemente timoroso di essere un antisemita. Non voglio dire che fosse insincero o intimidito; al contrario, era molto più audace e franco di chiunque altro. Ma la sua mente era stata modificata da una moderna raffinatezza e aveva perduto il vecchio realismo popolare di Ben Jonson o di Fielding. Il puritano nel “Pickwick” è proprio come il puritano nel “Bartholomew Fair”. Ma se Mr. Stiggins si fosse intromesso nella felicità domestica di Mr. Wilfer invece che di Mr. Weller, dubito che il naso di quel Ministro della Libera Chiesa sarebbe stato così rosso, o il suo carattere così nero come fu dipinto.
Insomma, Dickens guadagnò soltanto liberalità quando perse la libertà. È uno scambio malinconico; e sebbene Dickens, come si è detto, abbia conservato fino all’ultimo la sua superiorità rispetto alla propria generazione piuttosto snob, è nei suoi primi libri, e specialmente nel “Pickwick”, che dobbiamo cercare la piena e franca espressione di quell’antica verità tradizionale sul popolo inglese. Quella verità non porta certo alcuna somiglianza con l’immagine dello stoico severo e inarticolato che gli stranieri hanno inventato come critica e noi abbiamo accettato come complimento. D’altro canto, porta una marcata somiglianza con la tradizione medievale sull’Inghilterra quale l’abbiamo in Chaucer o nelle ballate su Robin Hood. Quello spirito non è affatto stoico ed è di certo l’esatto rovescio del puritano. È pieno proprio di quella indulgenza quasi illogica, di quella carità verso l’indifendibile, che rese possibile la simpatia per la Comare di Bath, per Falstaff e per Fra Tuck.
And that is the truth about the English adventure even outside England. Its type of endurance has not been stoicism but rather tolerance. We might say it was much too tolerant, if it had not the rare virtue of tolerating the intolerable. What has really made the English, apart from mere jingo journalistic flatteries, a success in colonies and in campaigns in savage countries, was a certain comic acceptance of the incongruous; a certain capacity in the English cockney or yokel of continuing to be absurdly like himself even when, in the ritual formula, he don’t know where he are. This is a national merit which, like other national merits, is gained at the expense of missing other things; of missing, for instance, the full status of the citizen and the full inherited experience that comes of remaining rooted in very old civilisations. But it is perhaps the most humorous and attractive of all national virtues; and men who really know from the inside the various nations of European humanity have found nothing more human than the ordinary English comic song or the talk of the Tommies in the trenches. Of all that great popular tradition “Pickwick” is the supreme artistic sympathetic masterpiece and even the miracle. Its very faults are its merits; since they correspond to this particular national morality. If the story is chaotic, it is because the philosophy of the people has long been chaotic, and indeed even perilously chaotic. If it is even in one sense superficial, as being a skimming of the surface of a vast and varied society, it is because it is true. In that sense the English spirit really has a certain superficiality of which the very deep motive is sociability. It loses something, indeed, it loses a great deal, in not thinking its way back to first principles or facing fundamental truths. But it also gains a great deal in the great virtue of charity; both in the form of patience with comrades and hospitality to strangers. Friendships are not broken up by the feuds of the intellect; and if there is far too little recognition of the idea of truth, there is a very valuable recognition of the idea of trust.
Nothing is more English or more characteristic in the Pickwick epic than the fact that the band of comrades are comic in their incongruity. They differ and do not quarrel; or they quarrel and do not part. There is an assumption and atmosphere of absurd toleration spread over the whole story, so that we never expect ridicule to be anything except ridiculous. Mr. Pickwick calls Mr. Winkle an imposter; but he does not seem to object to impostors. He denounces his followers for trifling with feminine feelings and then only laughs when the denunciation is turned against himself. There runs through the whole story an implication that the absurd company will go through with its absurd adventure; and that implication has been tacit in many companies of English people. There must have been many groups of Englishmen in camps and colonial holes and corners, consisting of men who got on with each other somehow, though each was regarded lightly enough as an individual. They were comic characters, if not to themselves, at least to each other. And even in isolation, any one of them who had with him (as he often had) a tattered volume of Pickwick, must have felt that he carried his country in his pocket.
G. K. Chesterton.
E questa è la verità sull’avventura inglese anche fuori dall’Inghilterra. Il suo tipo di resistenza non è stato lo stoicismo, ma piuttosto la tolleranza. Potremmo dire che fosse fin troppo tollerante, se non avesse la rara virtù di tollerare l’intollerabile. Ciò che ha davvero reso gli inglesi, al di là delle mere adulazioni giornalistiche e sciovinistiche, un successo nelle colonie e nelle campagne in paesi selvaggi, fu una certa comica accettazione dell’incongruo; una certa capacità, nel cockney o nel villano inglese, di continuare a essere assurdamente simile a se stesso anche quando, nella formula rituale, non sa più dove diavolo si trova. Questo è un merito nazionale che, come altri meriti nazionali, si acquista a prezzo di perdere altre cose; di perdere, per esempio, il pieno status del cittadino e la piena esperienza ereditata che viene dal restare radicati in civiltà antichissime. Ma è forse la più umoristica e attraente di tutte le virtù nazionali; e uomini che conoscono davvero dall’interno le varie nazioni dell’umanità europea non hanno trovato nulla di più umano dell’ordinaria comica canzone inglese o dei discorsi dei Tommies nelle trincee. Di tutta quella grande tradizione popolare “Pickwick” è il supremo capolavoro artistico e comprensivo, e persino il miracolo. I suoi difetti stessi sono i suoi meriti; poiché corrispondono a questa particolare moralità nazionale. Se la storia è caotica, è perché la filosofia del popolo è stata a lungo caotica, e anzi persino pericolosamente caotica. Se è persino, in un certo senso, superficiale, essendo una scrematura della superficie di una società vasta e variegata, è perché è vera. In quel senso lo spirito inglese ha davvero una certa superficialità il cui movente più profondo è la socievolezza. Perde qualcosa, in verità, perde moltissimo, nel non pensare a ritroso fino ai primi principi o nell’affrontare le verità fondamentali. Ma guadagna anche moltissimo nella grande virtù della carità; sia nella forma della pazienza con i compagni sia nell’ospitalità agli stranieri. Le amicizie non vengono spezzate dalle faide dell’intelletto; e se vi è fin troppo poco riconoscimento dell’idea di verità, vi è un preziosissimo riconoscimento dell’idea di fiducia.
Nulla è più inglese o più caratteristico nell’epopea di Pickwick del fatto che la brigata di compagni è comica nella sua incongruità. Divergono e non litigano; oppure litigano e non si separano. Vi è un presupposto e un’atmosfera di assurda tolleranza distesa su tutta la storia, così che non ci aspettiamo mai che il ridicolo sia altro che ridicolo. Il signor Pickwick chiama il signor Winkle un impostore; ma non pare avere nulla in contrario agli impostori. Denuncia i suoi seguaci per aver giocato con i sentimenti femminili e poi si limita a ridere quando la denuncia si rivolge contro se stesso. Corre per tutta la storia l’implicazione che l’assurda compagnia porterà a termine la sua assurda avventura; e quell’implicazione è stata tacita in molte compagnie di persone inglesi. Devono esserci stati molti gruppi di inglesi in accampamenti e in buchi e cantucci coloniali, composti di uomini che in qualche modo andavano d’accordo, per quanto ciascuno fosse considerato assai poca cosa come individuo. Erano personaggi comici, se non a se stessi, almeno l’uno all’altro. E persino nell’isolamento, chiunque di loro avesse con sé (come spesso aveva) un logoro volume del Pickwick, deve aver sentito di portare il suo paese nella tasca.
G. K. Chesterton.