by F. R. Leavis
As to the recent fashion for attributing as characteristic of Dickens’s art deforming terrors and fixations set up by nursery tales of horror, folk-tales and fairy-tales imparted in his childhood, it is surely decisive that he never, in any novel, to my knowledge, shows a child suffering from such an heritage but, on the contrary, stresses that children essentially need the old folk-lore and fairy-tales and the magic cycle of the Arabian Nights, as part of their full imaginative development. That he should write up for purposes of journalism, with obvious playfulness and pleasure in blood-curdling reminiscence, tales of horror and popular nursery bogies of the time (such as Susan Nipper harmlessly uses to chasten little Miss Floy) is quite beside the point. Dickens the journalist was a lightly assumed personality very often, and we can surely gather from his style and tone how seriously to take him on such occasions. What his letters show, besides the same histrionic attitudes and high spirits, is the confident and devoted writer for whom his profession was the main consideration in his life. Dickens’s consistent courtesy, generosity and unstinted helpfulness to his contributors as an editor, and his high standard of conscientious professionalism throughout his writing life and in spite of his later physical and other handicaps, suggest that he had exceptional self-control and was as far as possible from being dependent on moods or uncontrollable drives in any direction, and this is borne out by the experience of many who knew him in his maturity. It is also borne out, as we argue in discussing the later fiction, by the evidence from the creative work itself, that he was not a psychically sick man or anything like a ‘case’. This is the only deduction possible to the literary critic.
The arguments drawn from Dickens’s passion at the end of his life for giving dramatic readings from his novels is a more interesting and not so simple a question as is implied in the claim that Dickens thus killed himself and that his satisfaction in the readings was the morbid one of sending his audience into fainting fits. In common with other literary artists, such as Henry James and T. S. Eliot for example, who launched deliberately into play-writing for the purpose, Dickens obviously, as his hold on life began to fail, felt the need, overpoweringly in his case as in theirs, for a visible instead of an invisible audience, to prove that the public were still responsive to his powers as an artist; the only difference in Dickens’s case was that, with his early and never-satisfied impulse to become a professional actor, he made himself his own vehicle for the purpose, taxing his exhausted physical strength and giving at times (the accounts vary widely) performances in poor taste with over-acting, and subsequently expressing excitement at the audiences’ violently responsive reactions. We should however remember such reports of an opposite kind as Annie Thackeray’s (Lady Ritchie) of ‘the last London reading from David Copperfield’ to which she was taken by her friend Kate Dickens:
It was for all the rest of my life that I heard his voice … The slight figure stood alone quietly facing the long rows of people. He seemed to be holding the great audience in some mysterious way from the empty stage. Quite immediately the story began; Copperfield and Steerforth, Yarmouth and the fishermen, and then the rising storm, all were there before us. It was not acting, it was not music, nor harmony of sound and colour, and yet I still have an impression of all these things as I think of that occasion.
Intimate with the Dickens household from childhood, her testimony to Dickens’s personality is valuable since she knew everyone in art and literature in her time, and she writes of Dickens as always impressing her by ‘that curious life-giving power of his’ which he exercised on others ‘quietly’, adding: ‘I know not what to call that power by which he inspired everyone with spirit and interest.’ Dickens is not a case for the simple-minded or the amateur psychologist to exercise himself upon; what a crazy structure even academic ‘Dickens specialists’ have reared on selected, confidently interpreted, miscellaneous or incompatible, so-called facts! One notes that a distinguished specialist like Russell Brain, in the book cited in Chapter 6 below, Some Reflections on Genius, though he recognizes in Swift a well-known and unfortunate type of case, whose disabilities in life and, consequent constricted and damaged creativeness he understands and can account for, he has no such impression of Dickens but only, in the essay devoted to him, admiration for his exceptional range of intuitive powers and his objective interest in life. It would be wiser to bear in mind Jung’s caution:
The creative aspect of life which finds its clearest expression in art baffles all attempts at rational formulation. Any reaction to stimulus may be causally explained; but the creative act, which is the absolute antithesis of mere reaction, will for ever elude the human understanding. It can only be described in its manifestations; it can be obscurely sensed but never wholly grasped.
Q.D.L.
1
The First Major Novel: Dombey and Son
I REMEMBER to have somewhere heard in childhood, feelingly rendered, the Victorian song that was inspired by Dombey and Son:
What are the wild waves saying
Sister the whole day long?
I cannot pretend that it struck me as anything but an eminently fit tribute to the book. The book was vividly in my mind; I had heard it read out, and read admirably, by my father, for family reading was still an institution in those days, and Dickens of course was before all others the classic for such use. He suffered, I think, a consequent disadvantage in one’s later experience – a disadvantage not shared, for instance, by Shakespeare, with whom also one had a vivid early acquaintance through much family reading of him. Shakespeare, once one could read him at all, one inevitably went on reading, and he could never be thought of as a writer qualified for fullest appreciation in one’s less mature and sophisticated days.
But that is just how, looking back, one naturally thought of Dickens. With so much else before one that had to be read – so much that there was the need and the urgent impulsion to read, one remembered Dickens as the classic it was perhaps on the whole best to leave, piously and affectionately, to the memory and associations of the early acquaintance. When one dipped one found very readily the kind of thing one had recalled, though divested now, where some of the most cherished manifestations of the Dickensian genius were concerned, of some of the magic. And one could too easily light on places where the wonderful vitality clearly ran too much to repetitiveness or to the cheapnesses and banalities of Victorian popular art.
Resistances and reluctances, then, in the way of the serious re-reading of many, at any rate, of Dickens’s novels (that an exceptional kind of strength, challenging a mature appreciation, is to be found in certain of them is generally recognized) have been, I think, a common experience. I myself confess to a very long abstention from Dombey and Son, which I remembered vividly and thought I remembered fully enough.
Dombey and Son marks a decisive moment in Dickens’s career; he offered it as a providently conceived whole, presenting a major theme, and it was his first essay in the elaborately plotted Victorian novel. There can be no denying that the theme in actuality serves as licence for endless overworked pathos, for lush unrealities of high moral insistence, for childish elaborations of sensational plot, and for all the disqualifying characteristics (a serious theme being proposed) of melodrama – Victorian melodrama. On the other hand, of course, the genial force of Dickens’s inexhaustible creativity is also strongly present, in the vigour of the perception and rendering of life, the varied comedy, the vitality of expression as manifested even in the melodramatic high moments and tours de force and in the flights of rhetorical and sentimental art to which we don’t respond, at any rate in the massive way proposed to us. But there is, to make Dombey and Son remarkable, something more than this account suggests. There is a kind of strength that, while it is profoundly Dickensian, cannot be thought of as characterizing Dickens’s work in general. No one is likely to have carried a full and fair memory of it from a childhood acquaintance with Dombey and Son; it is too closely associated in that elaborately planned novel with t
he copious other – the varied and quite different, yet certainly not less Dickensian – qualities, and in any case it demands some maturity of experience in the reader for a full recognition.
Yet, for anyone starting to re-read, it is a strength that makes its impact immediately; it is there, and very impressively, in the first chapter, which must be as good an opening chapter as Dickens ever wrote. The scene of the death, with its economy, its precision, and its delicate sureness of tone and touch, is something that only Dickens could have done; yet, as the description I have given must suggest, it is not ordinarily Dickensian: the genius functions with an unusual intensity and there is a control from an unusual depth. It is a bold, rapid and highly simplifying art that evokes and establishes Dombey – his brand of pride and self-importance, and the cold inhumanity of his egotism – in so brief a space. Yet, close as it might again and again seem to caricature, it has none of the limitations that that description would suggest.
‘The house will once again, Mrs Dombey,’ said Mr Dombey, ‘be not only in name but in fact Dombey and Son; Dom-bey and Son!’
The words had such a softening influence, that he appended a term of endearment to Mrs Dombey’s name (though not without some hesitation, as being a man but little used to that form of address): and said, ‘Mrs Dombey, my – my dear.’
A transient flush of faint surprise overspread the sick lady’s face as she raised her eyes toward him.
‘He will be christened Paul, my – Mrs Dombey – of course.’
She feebly echoed, ‘Of course,’ or rather expressed it by the motion of her lips, and closed her eyes again.
‘His father’s name, Mrs Dombey, and his grandfather’s! I wish his grandfather were alive this day!’ And again he said ‘Dom-bey and Son,’ in exactly the same tone as before.
We respond as to the fullness of immediately felt life: this is poignantly – the more poignantly because of the pathos of Mrs Dombey’s past life – a death-chamber. What I have called the boldness of the art is something that we feel to be one with the intensity of the realization, sensuous and imaginative:
‘Well, Sir,’ said Doctor Parker Peps, in a round deep, sonorous voice, muffled for the occasion, like the knocker; ‘do you find that your lady is at all roused by your visit?’
‘Stimulated as it were?’ said the family practitioner faintly: bowing at the same time to the Doctor, as much as to say,
‘Excuse my putting in a word, but this is a valuable connexion.’
Mr Dombey was quite discomfited by the question. He had thought so little of the patient, that he was not in a condition to answer it. He said it would be a satisfaction to him if Doctor Parker Peps would walk upstairs again.
Mr Dombey’s sister does think of her sister-in-law:
‘Well!’ said Mrs Chick with a sweet smile, ‘after this I can forgive Fanny everything!’
It was a declaration in a Christian spirit, and Mrs Chick felt that it did her good.
This element of robust ironic comedy, which figures so much in the scene, plays its essential part in effects of the greatest delicacy and actually ministers to the total solemn pathos. Dombey’s inhumanness of personified Pride tells so strongly because of the way in which, by Dickens’s astonishing art, human life is evoked in its fullness. The self-important professionality of the two doctors is beautifully got, but we feel no surprise when (unlike Mr Dombey) they turn out to be capable of compassion:
There was such a solemn stillness round the bed; and the two medical attendants seemed to look on the impassive form with so much compassion and so little hope, that Mrs Chick was for the moment diverted from her purpose. But presently summoning courage, and what she called presence of mind, she sat down by the bedside, and said in the low precise tone of one who endeavours to waken a sleeper:
‘Fanny! Fanny!’
There was no sound in answer but the loud ticking of Mr Dombey’s watch and Doctor Parker Peps’s watch, which seemed in the silence to be running a race.
The close of that illustrates in the most obvious of ways what I meant above by ‘intensity of sensuous and imaginative realization’. The two watches ‘running a race’ – with what a sharp precision that peculiarly and impertinently insistent noise is evoked, giving us in immediacy the stillness of the death-chamber, and giving it as the fact and presence of death. The close of the chapter might seem to be utterly remote from any conceivable note of ironic comedy, but it comes in perfect consonance:
The race in the ensuing pause was fierce and furious. The watches seemed to jostle, and to trip each other up.
‘Fanny!’ said Louisa, glancing round, with a gathering alarm. ‘Only look at me. Only open your eyes to show me that you hear and understand me; will you? Good Heaven, gentlemen, what is to be done?’
The two medical attendants exchanged a look across the bed; and the physician, stooping down, whispered in the child’s ear. Not having understood the purport of his whisper, the little creature turned her perfectly colourless face, and deep dark eyes towards him; but without loosening her hold in the least.
The whisper was repeated.
‘Mamma!’ said the child.
The little voice, familiar and dearly loved, awakened some show of consciousness, even at that ebb. For a moment, the closed eyelids trembled, and the nostrils quivered, and the faintest shadow of a smile was seen.
‘Mamma!’ the child cried, sobbing aloud. ‘Oh dear Mamma! oh dear Mamma!’
The Doctor gently brushed the scattered ringlets of the child aside from the face and mouth of the mother. Alas how calm they lay there: how little breath there was to stir them!
Thus, clinging fast to that slight spar within her arms, the mother drifted out upon the dark and unknown sea that rolls round all the world.
What Dickens does later in the book with the potentialities of pathos in his theme we know, and it is impossible to say that there is not the clearest continuity of relation between the effect struck in this close to the opening scene and the later insistent lushness that plays so large a part in Dombey and Son. Yet what we have here in the treatment of Mrs Dombey’s death is all the same an essentially different kind of effect. The theme as Dickens is possessed by it here is a very different thing from what it becomes. For he is possessed by it: he is possessed by an intense and penetrating perception of the real – his theme here is that. The art that serves it does not run to the luxuries of pathos and sensation or to redundancies. And it is astonishingly sensitive and flexible.
It is in the second chapter that the theme represented by Mr Dombey gets its most pregnant poetic and dramatic definition. There is the problem of keeping the baby alive. ‘Couldn’t something temporary be done with a tea-pot?’ asks Mr Chick. The question, put as it is to Mrs Chick, has the air of being just a random (if apt) snubbability of the snub-attracting Mr Chick, Dickensian figure of comedy; but it illustrates fairly the peculiar strength of the humour in the supreme ranges of Dickens’s art. If a solution of the tea-pot kind could have been found, Mr Dombey would have been spared his painful and characteristic inner conflict. Actually, of course, the cruel irony of the situation for Mr Dombey is that, to save the baby’s life, what is needed is a living agent, a woman and a mother, and that, if she can be found, she will inevitably, in the nature of the case, be of the lower orders. The need of a wet-nurse is desperately urgent, yet Mr Dombey viewed, we are told, ‘with so much bitterness the thought of being dependent for the very first step towards the accomplishment of his soul’s desire, on a hired serving-woman who would be to the child, for a time, all that even his alliance could have made his own wife, that in every new rejection of a candidate he felt a secret pleasure’.