The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

Sir, while we remember that Muggleton has given birth to a Dumkins and a Podder, let us never forget that Dingley Dell can boast of a Luffey and a Struggles. Every gentleman who hears me, is probably acquainted with the reply made by an individual who—to use an ordinary figure of speech—"hung out" in a tub, to the Emperor Alexander:—"If I were not Diogenes," said he, "I would be Alexander": I can well imagine these gentle­men to say. If I were not Dumkins, I would be Luffey; If I were not Podder, I would be Struggles.

The vice of Imaginary Innocence consists in regarding an action in the open world of reality as if it were an action in the closed world of the game.

If this world were the worst of all possible worlds, a world where everybody was obliged to do what he dislikes doing and prohibited from doing anything he enjoyed, this vice would be impossible. It is only possible because some people have the good fortune to enjoy doing something which society requires to be done; what, from the point of view of society, is their necessary labor, is, from their own, voluntary play. Men fall into this vice when, because of the pleasure which the exercise of their calling gives them, they forget that what is play for them may for others concern real needs and passions.

Before Mr. Pickwick has to suffer in person from this human failing, he has already witnessed a manifestation of it in the party politics of Eatonswill.

Party politics presupposes that it is possible for two people, equally rational and well-meaning, to hold different opinions about a policy and possible for a man to be convinced by argument that his opinion has been mistaken. It is also pre­supposes that, however widely their political opinions may differ, all voters are agreed that the goal of politics is the establishment of a just and smoothly running society. But in Eatonswill the pleasure of party rivalry and debate has be­come an end in itself to both parties, a closed game world, and the real goal of politics has been forgotten.

The Blues lost no opportunity of opposing the Buffs and the Buffs lost no opportunity of opposing the Blues ... If the Buffs proposed to new skylight the market place, the Blues got up public meeting and denounced the proceeding; if the Blues proposed the erection of an additional pump in the High Street, the Buffs rose as one man and stood aghast at the enormity. There were Blue shops and Buff shops, Blue Inns and Buff Inns; there was a Blue aisle and a Buff aisle in the very church itself.

On such a parochial scale politics as a game is relatively harm­less, though on a national scale it is vicious, but there can be no circumstances in which the practice of Law as a game is not vicious. People who are not lawyers never come into court for fun; they come, either because they have been arrested or be­cause they believe they have been wronged and see no other way of redress. Winning or losing their case is never a mock victory or defeat but always a real one; if they lose, they go to prison or suffer social disgrace or are made to pay money.

Righdy or wrongly, it is believed in our culture that, in most criminal and civil trials, the best means of arriving at the ethical judgment guilty-or-not-guilty is through a kind of aesthetic verbal combat between a prosecuting and a defend­ing counsel, to which the judge acts as a referee, and the verdict is given by a jury. To say that a lawyer is a good lawyer, therefore, is an aesthetic not an ethical description; a good lawyer is not one who causes justice to be done, but one who wins his cases, whether his client be innocent or guilty, in the right or in the wrong, and nothing will enhance his reputation for being a good lawyer so much as winning a case against apparently hopeless odds, a state of affairs which is more likely to arise if his client is really guilty than if he is really innocent. As men, Dodson and Fogg are scoundrels but, as lawyers, their decent colleague Mr. Perkins has to admit that they are very good.

Mrs. Bardell, supported by Mrs. Chappins, was led in and placed in a drooping state at the other end of the seat on which Mr. Pickwick sat . . . Mrs. Saunders then appeared, leading in Master Bardell. At sight of her child, Mrs. Bardell started: suddenly recollecting herself, she kissed him in a frantic manner; then relapsing into a state of hysterical imbecility the good lady requested to be informed where she was. In reply to this, Mrs. Chap- pins and Mrs. Saunders turned their heads away and wept, while Messrs Dodson and Fogg intreated the plain­tiff to compose herself . . . "Very good notion, that in­deed," whispered Perkins to Mr. Pickwick. "Capital fellows those Dodson and Fogg; excellent ideas of effect, my dear sir, excellent."