Dickens the Novelist

by F. R. Leavis

  After this strange speech, she lay silent for some time.

  ‘But there is something – not an Ology at all – that your father has missed, or forgotten, Louisa. I don’t know what it is. I have often sat with Sissy near me, and thought about it. I shall never get its name now. But your father may. It makes me restless. I want to write to him, to find out, for God’s sake, what it is. Give me a pen, give me a pen.’

  Even the power of restlessness was gone, except for the poor head, which could just turn from side to side.

  She fancied, however, that her request had been complied with, and that the pen she could not have held was in her hand. It matters little what figures of wonderful no-meaning she began to trace upon her wrappers. The hand soon stopped in the midst of them; the light that had always been feeble and dim behind the weak transparency, went out; and even Mrs Gradgrind, emerged from the shadow in which man walketh and disquieteth himself in vain, took upon her the dread solemnity of the sages and patriarchs.

  With this kind of thing before us, we talk not of style but of dramatic creation and imaginative genius.

  NOTE

  The following is a pretty recent pronouncement on Dickens in general and on Hard Times in particular – it comes from Dr John Holloway’s contribution to Dickens in the Twentieth Century (edited by John Gross):

  What the discussion [Dr Holloway’s of Hard Times] seems to issue in is a view of the novel’s moral intention that accords with the quality and development of Dickens’s whole mind. He was not a profound or prophetic genius with insight into the deepest levels of experience; but (leaving his immense gifts aside for a moment) a man whose outlook was amiable and generous, though it partook a little of the shallowness of the merely topical, and the defects of the bourgeois – the word is not too hard – Philistine.

  That is explicit enough; with my avowed purpose as criterion, I don’t ask for better, and the deliberately emphatic ‘Philistine’ gives a good concluding resonance. The passage seems worth quoting because, bluntly challenging as it offers to be, the critic isn’t to be charged with any brashness of originality; the view of Dickens he states doesn’t quarrel with that generally held. It’s my own account of Hard Times that he challenges – he explicitly writes with his eye on what I wrote in Scrutiny.

  The gifts that made Dickens one of the very greatest of creative writers are not, in fact, merely ‘left aside for a moment’; they are flatly denied and dismissed. I won’t spend words on Dr Holloway’s offer to disprove my account of Hard Times by adducing what Dickens said at Birmingham in a speech after a civic dinner. It goes, that offer, with the conviction (shared with Humphrey House and others) that Dickens, unlike his critics, hadn’t the intellectual capacity for understanding Bentham, and with the attempt to show that Hard Times (a moral fable being an essay turned into art) is not an alpha, or even a beta, essay on Utilitarianism. What reply is there to such an approach? – unless, with a finger on a place in the text: ‘But take this, and ponder what it does and to what it owes its power’?

  If, however, inappropriate assumptions preclude any recognition of the nature of creative expression as Dickens practises it, there will be no recognition of the power, and the reply fails. Thus Dr Holloway dismisses my commentary on the significance of the Horse-riding with this:

  It doesn’t seem to be anything even remotely Lawrentian (this was after all, a pre-Nietzsche novel).

  On the contrary, it too, like its opposite, operated (for all its obvious common sense and its genuine value) at a relatively shallow level of consciousness, one represented by the Slearies, not as vital horsemen, but as plain entertainers.

  In fact, the creed which Dickens champions in the novel against the Gradgrinds seems to be in the main that of ‘all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.’ How unwilling many will be to admit this!

  Unwilling! I can’t but observe that the critical consciousness to which this kind of confidence belongs operates at decidedly a not-profound level. Lawrence didn’t need to learn from Nietzsche that life flows from sources far below the level of will and ego-enforced idea; that it is spontaneous, unmeasurable and creative; and that men, all the same, are continually trying, in one way and another, to ignore or defeat these truths. If he had needed to find them in other writers he could have learnt them from Shakespeare and the Greek tragic poets and from all the creative writers and artists he studied with the insight of genius. My immediate point is that he could have learnt them from Dickens, with whom he has special affinities, and to whom, like the post-Dickensian novelists in general, he was immensely indebted.

  The robust realism of commonsense, however, assures us that Dickens is to be thought of, not as a great artist and novelist, but as an entertainer (a genius, of course). The Horse-riding is a circus, and a circus is entertainment, and all the meaning we can reasonably take from the part it plays in Hard Times is that all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. This chimes with the notion of Dickens that has been generally endorsed by the authorities on his ‘social criticism’. To this day a specialist on Dickens’s relation to the Victorian age will, when he holds forth publicly, pay his due tribute to the creative writer with a comic-turn rendering of some selected ‘Dickens characters’.

  I hadn’t, in the way Dr Holloway implies, thought of any conventional symbolic value belonging to horses; but all that we see of the Horse-riding evokes for us spontaneous and daring vitality disciplined into skill and grace. It brings together the elements and aspects of an intense, deep and embracing significance – that which animates the whole dramatic poem.

  This, however, is to postulate something that doesn’t exist for my critic, for whom there is no ‘dramatic poem’ – no conceivable significance of such a kind as could justify that description. He has, it seems, the Dickens authorities with him. And yet the insistence developed in Hard Times has been, explicitly and implicitly, present in Dickens’s work from before Dombey and Son, where it plays so central a part. Dr Holloway might, I suppose, say that little Paul died of ‘all work and no play’ added to deprivation of a mother’s love. What, then, does he make of Paul’s weakness for old Glubb, which Dickens obviously intends us to see as highly significant? The fact is that ‘all work and no play’ in Dr Holloway’s use of the phrase is – as Dickens’s genius has not availed to bring home to him – grossly reductive. Years before Hard Times, and years before Dombey and Son too, Dickens was insisting that ‘play’ as a need is intimately bound up with ‘wonder’, imagination and creativity, and that any starving of the complex need is cruel, denaturing and sterilizing, and may be lethal. There is, for instance, in The Old Curiosity Shop (chapter XXXI), the scene in Miss Monflathers’ Boarding and Day Establishment, with the rebuke inflicted on Little Nell and elaborated for the edification of those present.

  ‘Don’t you feel how naughty it is of you,’ resumed Miss Monflathers, ‘to be a waxwork child, when you might have the proud consciousness of assisting, to the extent of your infant powers, the manufactures of your country; of improving your mind by the constant contemplation of the steam-engine; and of earning a comfortable and independent subsistence of from two-and-ninepence to three shillings per week?’

  Immediately before Hard Times comes Bleak House, and there we have the Smallweeds.

  During the whole time consumed in the slow growth of this family tree, the house of Smallweed, always early to go out and late to marry, has strengthened itself in its practical character, has discarded all amusements, discountenanced all story-books, fairy tales, fictions and fables, and banished all levities whatsoever. Hence the gratifying fact, that it has had no child born to it, and that the complete little men and women whom it has produced have been observed to bear a likeness to old monkeys with something depressing on their minds.

  Of the sister-twin we are told:

  Judy never owned a doll, never heard of Cinderella, never played at any game.

  Her twin-brother:

  couldn’t wind up a top for his l
ife. He knows no more of Jack the Giant Killer, or of Sinbad the Sailor, than he knows of the people in the stars. He could as soon play at leapfrog, or at cricket, as change into a cricket or a frog himself. But he is so much the better off than his sister that on his narrow world of fact an opening has dawned, into such broader regions as lie within the ken of Mr Guppy. Hence, his admiration and his emulation of that shining enchanter.

  The basic utilitarian principle of self-interest gets its explicit statement here:

  ‘Aye, aye, Bart!’ says Grandfather Smallweed. ‘How are you, hey?’

  ‘Here I am,’ says Bart.

  ‘Been along with your friend again, Bart?’ Small nods.

  ‘Dining at his expense, Bart?’ Small nods again.

  ‘That’s right. Live at his expense as much as you can, and take warning by his foolish example. That’s the use of such a fool. The only use you can put him to,’ says the venerable sage.

  Bleak House leads on to Hard Times, and Hard Times leads on to Little Dorrit.

  Those who rest complacently or resolutely on the conviction that Dickens was a Philistine will see little point in that last clause. But the characteristic insistence as developed in Little Dorrit, where, as a proud and conscious major artist, Dickens conducts a sustained and searching inquiry into contemporary civilization, entails a full overtness of preoccupation with the place, and the human necessity, of art.

  The passage quoted at the bottom of page 267 contains, it will have been seen, this sentence:

  In gauging fathomless deeps with his little mean excise rod, and in staggering over the universe with his rusty stiff-legged compasses, he had meant to do great things.

  If Dickens had written this in an age in which Blake reproductions were familiar to all cultivated persons, we should have been sure that he had ‘The Ancient of Days’ – Urizen – bending forward over the cosmic deeps, as well as the Godlike Newton bending over his diagram, both with opened compasses in the down-stretched hand.

  1. In relation to ‘redundant’ and ‘abundant’, see (e.g.) page 297 below.

  5

  Dickens and Blake: Little Dorrit

  I

  THE indisputable but misleading proposition that the Dickensian genius is the genius of a great entertainer can be, we have seen, advanced, Hard Times being in question, to justify a blankness to the sharply focused power – that is, to the clear significance – of that highly concentrated work, and so to its distinction as creative literature; for if you can’t take the significance you will hardly see Hard Times as the patent classic it is. Little Dorrit, on the other hand, answers so obviously and abundantly to what has for so long been the prevailing notion of the essentially Dickensian that it enjoys general recognition as one of the master’s major performances. Yet that it is one of the very greatest of novels – that its omission from any brief list of the great European novels would be critically indefensible – is not a commonplace. The significance focused with a sharp economy in Hard Times – a significance the force and bearing of which can’t be too insistently impressed on an age of statistical method, social studies and the computer – is at the deep centre of Little Dorrit; but published commentary on Dickens doesn’t encourage the recognition that any book of his has a deep centre. Little Dorrit is one that has; it exhibits a unifying and controlling life such as only the greatest kind of creative writer can command.

  There seems to be a pretty general conviction among us that in recent years we have achieved, in regard to the ‘art of the novel’, a critical sophistication unknown in the Victorian age. Perhaps we have. But the truly portentous effect of the changes that have transformed civilization in the hundred years since Dickens died is not that he strikes the reader as antiquated, naïve and Victorian, but that the conditions of the kind of greatness represented by Little Dorrit have disappeared from the world and a corresponding blindness results, induced by the climate of implicit assumptions and ideas that now prevails. The firmly established cult of Shakespeare generates no effective light.

  I won’t offer to elaborate the parallel between Shakespeare’s development and achievement as the great popular playwright of our dramatic efflorescence and Dickens’s as the marvellously fertile, supremely successful and profoundly creative exploiter of the Victorian market for fiction. There is clearly, however, a need to insist that Dickens no more than Shakespeare started from nothing and created out of a cultural void. ‘A waif himself, he was totally disinherited’: Santayana’s observation illuminates nothing except the assumptions behind it; it is stultifyingly false. Dickens belonged as a popular writer, along with his public, to a culture in which the arts of speech were intensely alive. That was a good start. Anyone concerned to enforce the truth that he wrote out of a peculiarly rich inheritance – rich in relation to the needs of an artist of his gift and destiny – would have good reason to think first of the part of Shakespeare himself in it; Shakespeare – the point is an essential one – who then really was a national author. The most important aspect of Dickens’s notorious indebtedness to the theatre (though this is not the point usually made) is to be seen there. Not that the life and power of Shakespeare for Dickens were merely a matter of the theatre. He read immensely, with the intelligence of genius, and his inwardness with Shakespeare, the subtlety of the influence manifest, and to be divined, in his own creative originality, can’t be explained except by a reader’s close and pondering acquaintance. I will add, by way of enforcing this kind of comment on the view that the author of Dombey and Son, Little Dorrit and Great Expectations was a Philistine, the related note that he knew the Romantic poets – one can’t, by the time one comes to Little Dorrit, fail to see it as an important enough truth to be affirmed.

  He mixed freely in the cultivated company he needed: class did indeed, as his novels make us very much aware, exist in Victorian England, but class constituted no barrier that got in his way. The higher cultural world of intellect and spirit was quick to recognize his genius, and he hadn’t to form any sense of finding it difficult of access. We see these as pregnantly significant points when we ask how it was that, just as Shakespeare could be both the established favourite of the groundlings in the popular theatre and the supreme poetic mind of the Renaissance, master explorer of human experience, so Dickens, pursuing indefatigably his career as best-selling producer of popular fiction, could develop into a creative writer of the first order, the superlatively original creator of his art.

  He was intensely an artist, unlike as he was either to Flaubert or to Henry James, and as he develops he becomes more and more describable as a dedicated one. Dombey and Son, in ways I have discussed, solved only partially Dickens’s problem: that of achieving the wholly significant work of art as a successful serial-writer, writing always against time and for the popular market. Bleak House again, rich and diverse as it is in the creative felicities of a great novelist and poet, doesn’t altogether solve that problem. But in Little Dorrit the thing is done. There are no large qualifications to be urged, and the whole working of the plot, down to the melodramatic dénouement, is significant – that is, serves the essential communication felicitously. When the secret of Arthur Clennam’s birth is revealed, it completes the presented significance of Mrs Clennam and the Clennam house:

  … Satan entered into that Frederick Dorrit, and counselled him that he was a man of innocent and laudable tastes who did kind actions, and that here was a poor girl with a voice for singing music with. Then he is to have her taught. Then Arthur’s father, who has all along been secretly pining, in the ways of virtuous ruggedness, for those accursed snares which are called the Arts, becomes acquainted with her. And so a graceless orphan, training to be a singing girl, carries it, by that Frederick Dorrit’s agency, against me, and I am humbled and deceived.

  This emphasis on art at the moment of confession – Mrs Clennam’s characteristic kind of confession – has nothing gratuitous about it. What Dickens hated in the Calvinistic commercialism of the early and middle
Victorian age – the repressiveness towards children, the hard righteousness, the fear of love, the armed rigour in the face of life – he sums up now in its hatred of art. That he should do so is eloquent of the place he gave to art in human life and of the conception of art that informs his practice (it seems to be essentially Blake’s). He conveyed his criticism of Victorian civilization in a creative masterpiece, a great work of art, which it would be fatuous to suppose he achieved accidentally and unconsciously, without meaning it and without knowing it. What, at a religious depth, Dickens hated about the ethos figured by the Clennam house was the offence against life, the spontaneous, the real, the creative, and, at this moment preceding the collapse of the symbolic house, he represents the creative spirit of life by art.

  For Arthur Clennam the ethos is that which oppressed his childhood, glowering on spontaneity, spirit and happiness and inculcating guilt, and which, in its institutional manifestation, appals him as the English Sunday, wrapping London in a pall of gloom on his first morning back, he being bound towards the old childhood home to see his ‘mother’ again after twenty years of exile. It is the beginning of the sustained criticism of English life that the book enacts. For Clennam himself it is the beginning of an urgently personal criticism of life in Arnold’s sense – that entailed in the inescapable and unrelenting questions: ‘What shall I do? What can I do? What are the possibilities of life – for me, and, more generally, in the very nature of life? What are the conditions of happiness? What is life for?’ Despondent, muted, earnest, with an earnestness derived from the upbringing the anti-life ethos of which he intensely rejects, he can’t but find himself with such a criticism of life as his insistent preoccupation.