The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

After Cervantes, as a writer who combines literary talent and a mythopoeic imagination, comes Dickens and, of his many mythical creations, Mr. Pickwick is one of the most memorable. Though the appeal of mythical characters trans­cends all highbrow-lowbrow frontiers of taste, it is not un­limited; every such character is symbolic of some important and perpetual human concern, but a reader must have ex­perienced this concern, even if he cannot define it to himself, before the character can appeal to him. Judging by my own experience, I would say that Pickwick Papers is emphatically

not a book for children and the reflections which follow are the result of my asking myself: "Why is it that I now read with such delight a book which, when I was given it to read as a boy, I found so boring, although it apparently contains nothing which is too 'grown-up' for a twelve-year-old?" The conclusion I have come to is that the real theme of Pickwick Papers

—I am not saying Dickens was consciously aware of it and, indeed, I am pretty certain he was not—is the Fall of Man. It is the story of a man who is innocent, that is to say, who has not eaten of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and is, therefore, living in Eden. He then eats of the Tree, that is to say, he becomes conscious of the reality of Evil but, instead of falling from innocence into sin—this is what makes him a mythical character—he changes from an innocent child into an innocent adult who no longer lives in an imaginary Eden of his own but in the real and fallen world.

If my conclusion is correct, it explains why Pickwick Papers said nothing to me as a boy because, though no boy is inno­cent, he has no clear notion of innocence, nor does he know that to be no longer innocent, but to wish that one were, is part of the definition of an adult.

However he accounts for it, every adult knows that he lives in a world where, though some are more fortunate than others, no one can escape physical and mental suffering, a world where everybody experiences some degree of contradic­tion between what he desires to do and what his conscience tells him he ought to do or others will allow him to do. Every­body wishes that this world were not like that, that he could live in a world where desires would conflict neither with each other nor with duties nor with the laws of nature, and a great number of us enjoy imagining what such a world would be like.

Our dream pictures of the Happy Place where suffering and evil are unknown are of two kinds, the Edens and the New Jerusalems. Though it is possible for the same individual to imagine both, it is unlikely that his interest in both will be equal and I suspect that between the Arcadian whose favorite daydream is of Eden, and the Utopian whose favorite daydream is of New Jerusalem there is a characterological gulf as unbridgeable as that between Blake's Prolifics and Devourers.

In their relation to the actual fallen world, the difference between Eden and New Jerusalem is a temporal one. Eden is a past world in which the contradictions of the present world have not yet arisen; New Jerusalem is a future world in which they have at last been resolved. Eden is a place where its inhabitants may do whatever they like to do; the motto over its gate is, "Do what thou wilt is here the Law." New Jeru­salem is a place where its inhabitants like to do whatever they ought to do, and its motto is, "In His will is our peace."

In neither place is the moral law felt as an imperative; in Eden because the notion of a universal law is unknown, m New Jerusalem because the law is no longer a law-for, com- mantling that we do this and abstain from doing that, but a Iaw-of, like the laws of nature, which describes how, in fact, its inhabitants behave.

To be an inhabitant of Eden, it is absolutely required that one be happy and likable; to become an inhabitant of New Jerusalem it is absolutely required that one be happy and good. Eden cannot be entered; its inhabitants are born there. No unhappy or unlikable individual is ever born there and, should one of its inhabitants become unhappy or un­likable, he must leave. Nobody is born in New Jerusalem but, to enter it, one must, either through one's own acts or by Divine Grace, have become good. Nobody ever leaves New Jerusalem, but the evil or the unredeemed are forever excluded.