Dickens the Novelist

by F. R. Leavis

  It is she who, at the core of all the constrained formalities and conventionalities of his life, has been a stock of living tenderness and love, susceptible as nothing else is of being struck with the agony he feels. He sees her, almost to the exclusion of himself; and cannot bear to look upon her cast down from the high place she graces so well.

  And even to the point of his sinking down on the ground, oblivious of his sufferings, he can yet pronounce her name with something like distinctness in the midst of those intrusive sounds, and in a tone of mourning and compassion rather than reproach.

  It is in keeping with this use of Chesney Wold that the penultimate chapter of the book is given up to an elegy on the passing of the great house in the Victorian Age, which Dickens sees as the victory of the iron-master over the gentry (‘the great old Dedlock family is breaking up’) – a lament for the human loss this means:

  The greater part of the house is shut up, and it is a show-house no longer … Closed in by night with broad screens, and illuminated only in that part, the light of the drawing-room seems gradually contracting and dwindling until it shall be no more … Thus Chesney Wold. With so much of itself abandoned to darkness and vacancy … with no family to come and go, no visitors to be the souls of pale, cold shapes of rooms, no stir of life about it; – passion and pride, even to the stranger’s eye, have died away from the place in Lincolnshire, and yielded it to dull repose.

  It is Dickens the artist, the poet, who mourns the loss of ‘passion and pride’, which only can be nourished by such a cultural context,15 and who sees that ‘dull repose’ is the death of the spirit which the light of the drawing-room had formerly kept alive. A parallel tribute to this is that George Rouncewell rejects his brother’s offer of a post in his works, preferring personal service to Sir Leicester who needs him and whom he also needs. Sir Leicester, who started as a butt, ends in pathos and dignity and is like Gridley in representing that moral courage which in our Chancery world is heroism. However, he is still at war with Boythorn – ‘the quarrel goes on to the satisfaction of both’ to the last, reaffirming Dickens’s original point that the idea of the gentleman cannot lead us out of Chancery, perhaps led us in.

  But, Dickens has asked himself, there is yet another professional man, the artist. What does the practice of the arts imply? Skimpole, unnecessary to the plot but essential to the theme, was created as a means of testing the popular idea of the practitioner of the arts (any of them – he composes a little, paints and draws, sings and plays, writes verse and is a man of sensibility, also a gifted talker). After the theme has been systematically advanced in the first five chapters, Dickens takes the three children of this world away from Chancery London into the country, through what seems to be idyllic countryside and to a paradise of a home (chapter VI, ‘Quite at Home’). There is however a serpent in this paradise. As soon as they are installed the theme is taken up again with the worthy John Jarndyce’s opening: ‘“There’s no one here but the finest creature upon earth – a child.”’

  ‘I don’t mean literally a child,’ pursued Mr Jarndyce; ‘not a child in years. He is grown up – he is at least as old as I am – but in simplicity, and freshness, and enthusiasm, and a fine guileless inaptitude for all worldly affairs, he is a perfect child.’

  We all felt that he must be very interesting.

  The formulation is ironic. What has hitherto been for Dickens an uncritically accepted Romantic image of childhood is now exposed to criticism (as I noted its being uneasily reconsidered in the form of David Copperfield’s dangerous innocence) – the criticism being intimated through the ‘innocent’ enthusiasm of Mr Jarndyce. It is thus suggested that the idea of a grown-up child – an adult who has never matured – is the reverse of valuable.

  ‘He is a musical man; an Amateur, but might have been a Professional. He is an Artist, too; an Amateur, but might have been a Professional. He is a man of attainments and of captivating manners …’

  Dickens is particular to specify at the outset that Skimpole is essentially a dilettante – no professional musician or artist could be a Skimpole; Dickens of course was, and prided himself on being, thoroughly professional in all his undertakings. And by now Dickens, the author of Dombey and Copperfield, had ceased to find satisfaction solely in his ‘inimitable’ powers as entertainer, humourist and so forth, realizing that his self-respect depended on his being an Artist, his status that of serious novelist with a responsibility to his art (‘the art that he holds in trust’ as his own noble formulation ran when in his obituary notice on Thackeray he rebuked him for irresponsibility). How, he must now have been asking himself, how to justify the profession of writing novels in this Bleak House, a world bursting with sin and sorrow, where men are in Chancery? While Dickens is not ready with an answer, he is clear about what he is not: as a novelist he is not a Skimpole, who is an Amateur, a dilettante, and something even worse. Skimpole, essentially an entertainer in private life, is also an actor and nothing else; singing for his supper, always acting a part, he has no real self; a parasite, he has no sense of responsibility either as an artist, a husband or parent. Skimpole is not of course, as used to be claimed, Leigh Hunt, except in the conveniently happy temperament which Dickens borrowed and the appropriate appearance (which had to be toned down by the artist to avoid trouble). Except in his claims to be childlike Skimpole is a recognizable later Victorian type, an aesthete, who systematically substitutes aesthetic reactions for human ones. Henry James’s Gabriel Nash (in The Tragic Muse) might be Skimpole’s brother, and he like Skimpole is something of an Oscar Wilde without the vice. Skimpole already uses the paradox as a means of explaining the principles he follows in his practices.

  What is truly remarkable about the conception of Skimpole is not merely that Dickens predicted the aesthetic movement through him – the signs were there already to be read by an acute observer of the literary and social scene – but that Dickens who, we are so frequently assured by Dickens specialists, had no powers of thought, should have gone straight to the centre of the Skimpole case and exposed its philosophical basis – not as such but by the novelist’s true art of dramatizing it. Skimpole’s style of amusing, playful fantasy which refuses to be serious and therefore cannot be easily reprehended since only a prig would be hostile to such a butterfly, is maintained throughout, as in his opening apologia, which even flutters from idea to idea in a butterfly movement:

  ‘I covet nothing,’ said Mr Skimpole in the same light way. ‘Possession is nothing to me. Here is my friend Jarndyce’s excellent house. I feel obliged to him for possessing it. I can sketch it and alter it. I can set it to music. When I am here, I have sufficient possession of it, and have neither trouble, cost, nor responsibility.’

  This subjectivism seems harmless and delightful, but on it Skimpole erects a technique of flattery: he is necessary to society as an exponent of beauty, he argues, and therefore those practical worldly people who can’t of course feel exquisitely like himself are indebted to him and are in the enviable position of owing him a living:

  ‘I envy you your power of doing what you do … I almost feel as if you ought to be grateful to me, for giving you the opportunity of enjoying the luxury of generosity. I know you like it. For anything I can tell, I may have come into the world expressly for the purpose of increasing your stock of happiness,’ etc.

  Esther, the truly sensitive recording consciousness of the book, notes that ‘Of all his playful speeches (playful, yet always fully meaning what they expressed) none seemed to be more to the taste of Mr Jarndyce than this … We were all enchanted.’ Skimpole is more plausible as an object for Jarndyce to lay out his money on than the philanthropists. Esther soon realizes that Jarndyce blinds himself to the ugly truth about Skimpole because he needs to believe that it is possible to beat the system, that Skimpole has successfully opted out of it. ‘I thought I could understand,’ writes Esther, ‘how such a nature as my guardian’s, experienced in the world, and forced to contemplate the miserable
evasions and contentions of the family misfortune, found an immense relief in Mr Skimpole’s avowal of his weaknesses and display of guileless candour’, ‘to find one perfectly undesigning and candid man … could not fail to give him pleasure.’ Keeping to his principles, on his first meeting with the young people Skimpole fleeces them; taken with them to Bell Yard to see the desolate orphan children, Skimpole’s ‘usual gay strain’ grates on us as outrageously inappropriate to the occasion (chapter XV.) This has been brought about partly by Esther’s natural sympathy for the heroically self-reliant little creatures and partly by bringing in Gridley who in spite of his own genuine and deeply-felt grievances against life has shown active helpfulness to the children. All Skimpole can produce is an affectation of sympathy, a display of egotism:

  ‘He said … he had been a benefactor to Coavinses; that he had actually been enabling Coavinses to bring up these charming children in this agreeable way developing these social virtues! Insomuch that his heart had just now swelled, and the tears had come into his eyes, when he had looked round the room, and thought, ‘I was the great patron of Coavinses, and his little comforts were my work!’

  We are therefore ready on Skimpole’s next appearance for a complete exposure of his theory of life, his philosophy and his apologia. This is managed wholly dramatically in chapter XVIII by taking them all down to the Chesney Wold neighbourhood and bringing Skimpole up against his opposite, Boythorn, a man of convictions that he is always ready to put into practice energetically, and whose excessive energies are always channelled into violent expressions of principle, a man proud of the fact that he is always in deadly earnest. As Skimpole points out, this is liable to make him disagreeable, and for Skimpole it is axiomatic that ‘everybody’s business in the social system is to be agreeable. It’s a system of harmony, in short.’ To which Boythorn makes the very relevant objection: ‘“Is there such a thing as principle, Mr Harold Skimpole?”’. Skimpole’s reply is that he doesn’t know what such a thing is.

  Dickens has been a good deal accused by academic and literary Skimpoles of being characteristically (that is, self-indulgently) angry, but it seems not to have been noticed that in comparing the angry men Gridley and Boythorn with Skimpole in the setting of their Chancery world he has defended himself adequately, by showing the contemptible nature of the man who plays for safety and comfort. Skimpole ends this protracted argument with Boythorn by a full and candid statement of the aesthetic and solipsistic position which he systematically adopts. He has candour here, in not shrinking from the conclusions that will strike the average man as morally objectionable:

  ‘Enterprise and effort,’ he would say to us (on his back), are delightful to me. I believe I am truly cosmopolitan. I have the deepest sympathy with them. I lie in a shady place like this, and think of the adventurous spirits going to the North Pole, of penetrating to the heart of the Torrid Zone, with admiration. Mercenary creatures ask, ‘What is the use of a man’s going to the North Pole! What good does it do?’ I can’t say; but, for anything I can say, he may go for the purpose – though he don’t know it – of employing my thoughts as I lie here. Take an extreme case. Take the case of the Slaves on the American plantations. I daresay they are worked hard, I dare say they don’t altogether like it, I dare say theirs is an unpleasant experience on the whole; but they people the landscape for me, they give it a poetry for me, and perhaps that is one of the pleasanter objects of their existence. I am very sensible of it, if it be, and I shouldn’t wonder if it were!’

  This is surely as brilliant an intellectual exercise for the purpose as a novel could show, something we are more accustomed to thinking of as Peacock’s forte. The explanation exposes itself. Other people don’t exist for Skimpole in their own right, and yet he demands their services since he can’t, being a social parasite, exist without them. Skimpole’s claim to preferential treatment is that as an artist he has sensibility, and he needs to feed it, we see, but at the cost of excluding human considerations (the Southern slave issue was then very much in the public eye as well as the ground for taking it as ‘an extreme case’ which Skimpole agrees he is willing to face as the test of his position). He is therefore committed by his theory of non-involvement, in order to live agreeably, either to the most callous heartlessness, as to such issues as the slavery question, taking a purely picturesque view of them, or to an equally vicious self-indulgent sentimentality, as we see the next time he is brought on the scene (in chapter XXXI). There Jo, with the fever on him, is brought home by Esther and Charley to be helped; Skimpole with his basic selfishness instantly objects to Jo’s being brought in to infect them all: ‘“He’s not safe, you know.”’ Skimpole has in fact had a training in medicine16 but couldn’t be bothered to practise: he is an anti-doctor (we must remember the symbolic part played by the medical man in this novel), refusing to operate the medical code of obligation to the sick. He advises turning Jo out – after all, other people don’t really exist for him – and subsequently assists Mr Bucket in surreptitiously putting Jo out into the night.17 When Esther returns from seeing Jo looked after she finds Skimpole ‘playing snatches of pathetic airs, and sometimes singing to them with great expression and feeling. When we rejoined him in the drawing-room he said he would give us a little ballad, which had come into his head, “apropos of our young friend”; and he sang one about a Peasant boy,

  “Thrown on the wide world, doom’d to wander and roam, Bereft of his parents, bereft of a home”,

  – quite exquisitely. It was a song that always made him cry, he told us.’ It would hardly be possible to give a better illustration of sentimentality.

  We see him adapting his form of candour to flattering Sir Leicester Dedlock:

  Sir Leicester seemed to approve of this sentiment highly. ‘An artist, sir?’

  ‘No,’ returned Mr Skimpole. ‘A perfectly idle man. A mere amateur.’

  Sir Leicester seemed to approve of this even more.

  Here we have a fresh budding-off of Dickens’s thinking, which is going to throw up Henry Gowan in a later novel. Like Taine, in his Notes sur l’Angleterre, Dickens had noted that in England, unlike France, artists had no accepted social position based on recognition of their value to the community. In a utilitarian, puritanical society they were looked at askance for various reasons and Dickens was sensitive to status. The essential sign of a gentleman in the vulgar mind was that he didn’t work for a living, and in rejecting the title of artist in favour of being an amateur, Skimpole is showing that he is a gentleman, to Sir Leicester’s approval; Dickens notes this against both of them. In due course one sign of Mr Dorrit’s contemptible snobbery is that he has doubts about letting the apparently Bohemian Henry Gowan paint his portrait until he is assured Gowan is not really an artist but a gentleman of good family. Dickens has taken the case further with Gowan who is seen as the enemy of all disinterestedness and hating the real thing, the artist. Skimpole has talent and abilities but never finishes anything – having no real belief in the value of what he is doing or any sense of serving something outside himself. Skimpole, his charm gradually dispelled for us, fades out of the novel leaving a bad taste behind him (exactly like Henry James’s Gabriel Nash, who is played off in The Tragic Muse against the man who has a real vocation as painter). Skimpole’s epitaph is given to Esther by the experienced Bucket: ‘“Whenever a person proclaims to you ‘In worldly matters I’m a child’, you consider that that person is only a-crying off from being held accountable, and that you’ve got that person’s number, and it’s Number One.”’ Skimpole then is in one aspect Dickens’s reconsidering in the context of social responsibility the habits of Micawber (though Micawber of course is not offered as an artist); in another, he is one stage in Dickens’s attempt to prove himself something other than an entertainer, a demonstration that the writer is not less concerned than others for his fellow-slaves but more, not irresponsible and self-indulgent but peculiarly responsible in his understanding of ‘the family misfortune’. Dickens
is saying that the artist must be ‘held accountable’ in life and art, that these two are inseparable; sensibility and taste can’t exist in a void; indifference to one’s fellows means paying the penalty as an artist of sterility; refusal to make a stand on principle is to commit an artist to parasitism; to have no concern for justice is to be condemned to triviality. Dickens shows himself now ready to assent to Lawrence’s ‘I write for the race’, and writing Dombey and Son, David Copperfield and Bleak House were his path to it.