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at the bottom, but at the top too, became so numerous and complicated
as the arrivals thickened, that Mr Toots was continually fingering
that article of dress, as if he were performing on some instrument;
and appeared to find the incessant execution it demanded, quite
bewildering.
It's all grist to the mill of Dickens's marvellous talent for seeing the big in the
small and the small in the big. Buttoning waistcoats becomes a subject for "judicious"
reaoning, for "calm revision of all the circumstances".
Human oddity is demonstrated as such, but seen, through the irony, with kindness,
justice, and a perception of the fact that from the inside it doesn't seem odd at all. It's
difficult not to see Dickens's own personal dandysim as an exuberant experiment in what
it might feel like to treat such things so seriously.
Dickens, then, was not a connoisseur. His philistinism has, I think, been exaggerated.
He was not incapable of appreciating the best in the arts. But he did so in a haphazard
way, revealing a judgment inclined to seize upon what time has diminished and to dismiss
what time merely proves. And above all, he displayed an open and hearty relish of the
trifling, the odd, the quaint and the queer.
Yet were his instincts so very wrong? I have said that his was not a classic age,
an age in which good taste was easy. His unfailing irony protected him from witless
admiration of the merely fashionable; his hearty populist tastes prevented his withdrawing
into the elitist aestheticism that is the characteristic response of the fastidious in an age
of uncertainty. No bad thing very often, of course, but who now actually listens to Ruskin
on the Gothic, or Morris on craftsmanship? Dickens's robust devouring of all his age had
to offer, his delight in its absurdities, his treating even what he hated with the same even-
handed accomodating irony - all these things, I suggest to you, enabled him to achieve
a poise unrivalled by those who prided themselves on finer sensibilities, by those indeed
in whom we ourselves detect such. And they enabled him, moreover, to create works of
art which may show some of the deficiencies of their age, but which for all that are
incomparable in their vitality and humanity.
Dickens House Museum and Library
