Chesterton on the besetting sin of progressivism

In GK Chesterton’s 1906 book Charles Dickens: A Critical Study, Chesterton, an admirer of Dickens, nevertheless points out some of Dickens’s flaws. One of the most characteristic was his chronological parochialism, a tendency typical of the “sturdy, sentimental English Radical with a large heart and a narrow mind”—a recognizable activist type even today. In Chapter VII, “Dickens and Christmas,” Chesterton observes that

“[Dickens] could not help falling into that besetting sin or weakness of the modern progressive, the habit of regarding the contemporary questions as the eternal questions and the latest word as the last.”

— GKC

Chesterton spoofs the progressive tendency to read current politics into every past event with a funny (but dated) example, writing that Dickens “could not get out of his head the instinctive conception that the real problem before St. Dunstan was whether he should support Lord John Russell or Sir Robert Peel.” The political crises of these two sets of men—an Anglo-Saxon Archbishop of Canterbury and two of Victoria’s prime ministers—were separated by almost a thousand years.

Dickens “could not help seeing the remotest peaks lit up by the raging bonfire of his own passionate political crisis. He lived for the instant and its urgency.” This weakness is not limited to the modern progressive’s view of the past, either. The problem with such a politically informed perspective, writes Chesterton, is that one ends up, like Dickens, “liv[ing] in an eternal present like all simple men.”

As I’ve noted here before (re. Donald Hall’s warning that “the penalty for ignoring two thousand years is that you get stuck in the last hundred”), such narrow-mindedness can cut an artist off entirely from artistic tradition and strangle his work. The consequences on a society-wide scale, a political scale, are manifestly more serious. Fortunately for Dickens, he lived in an age that was still deeply enough informed by the past and by tradition not to neglect it entirely—unlike some other periods I could mention—and after his death he had a cheerleader—Chesterton himself.

Chesterton’s Charles Dickens helped revive interest in and critical appreciation of Dickens’s work. It’s a worthwhile read, especially if you enjoy both men’s work and want an incisive but appreciative appraisal of Dickens. The whole book is available from Wikisource here.