Chesterton on the Tragedy of Bleak House: "As the wolf dies fighting, the good man gone wrong dies arguing."

I'm reading "Bleak House" now for the first time, one of those books that one is supposed to read but whose intimidating size has dissuaded me in the past. By reputation, it's also a book that figures ubiquitously in the 'law and literature' canon (though I cannot imagine that most courses require students to read the whole thing, which is a pity). And, indeed, I can see why from the vantage point of a certain sort of legal academic. The portrait of the law that emerges in the book is not flattering, and there is a good deal of rather generously larded reformist sanctimony in it.

And yet there are parts of "Bleak House" that complicate the nature of Dickens's critique of law in interesting and even brilliant ways. It is notable, for example, that the site of all the foggy, sickly malaise hanging over English society in the book is generated not by a court of law, but a court of equity. It is the endless legal proceeding ostensibly concerning contesting wills in Chancery, and all of its intricate workings and doings and plots to keep the affair going for as long as possible, that is the principal villain of the story. Law as the embodiment and dispensation of human fairness is law in its most detestable state.

"Bleak House" also illustrates the special sort of deformity of mind that is caused particularly by law. One can see this in the tragedy of Richard Carstone, one of the wards of the benevolent John Jarndyce whose interests are implicated in the law suit. Richard begins as a callow and rather inconstant spirit, but still someone of noble instincts. As the book proceeds, his obsession with the law suit and the vindication of his rights under it transforms him. The law suit becomes the only thing he can be constant about. And the legal frame of mind, with its insistence on rationality and rights, is depicted as a kind of psychological crookedness, albeit one that cures, in its way, Richard's own personal flaws.

My edition of "Bleak House" is followed in an appendix by an essay of Chesterton in which he offers this:

Let anyone who thinks that Dickens could not describe the semitones and the abrupt instincts of ordinary human nature simply take the trouble to read the stretch of chapters which detail the way in which Carstone's mind grew gradually morbid about his chances in Chancery. Let him note the manner in which the mere masculinity of Carstone is caught; how as he grows more mad he grows more logical, nay, more rational. Good women who love him come to him, and point out the fact that Jarndyce is a good man, a fact to them solid like an object of the senses. In answer he asks them to understand his position. He does not say this; he does not say that. He only urges that Jarndyce may have become cynical in the affair in the same sense that he himself may have become cynical in the affair. He is always a man; that is to say, he is always unanswerable, always wrong. The passionate certainty of the woman beats itself like battering waves against the thin smooth wall of his insane consistency....

The clumsy journalist would have made Rick Carstone turn on John Jarndyce with an explosion of hatred, as of one who had made an exposure....The great artist knew better; he knew that a good man going wrong tries to salve his soul with the sense of generosity and intellectual justice. He will try to love his enemy if only out of mere love of himself. As the wolf dies fighting, the good man gone wrong dies arguing.