Dickens the Novelist

by F. R. Leavis

  But Doyce, all said, is not an artist. Cavalletto carves things in wood, but that hardly makes him, either, an artist in a sense that licenses us to set him, as an actual creative presence in the book, over against Gowan, the anti-artist and arch-nihilist. The fact is that if a novelist sees reason for having among his characters an artist whose raison d’être is to be an artist all he can do is to introduce someone of whom we are told that he is an artist, and show him behaving in a way that seems to make the allegation plausible. Dickens’s conception of art and its importance was too serious, profound and intelligent to let him think such a solution worth resorting to. Doyce, however, doesn’t represent all that is done in Little Dorrit to make creativity-as-the-artist an actual presence – a potent presence in relation to which Gowan takes on his full value.

  Dickens is a different kind of creative writer from both James and Tolstoy, neither of whom could have produced Flora Casby. The relevance of bringing in Flora at this point is given here, as it might be in a passage quoted from any one of her characteristic dramatic appearances – and they are all characteristic:

  Flora, uttering these words in a deep voice, enjoyed herself immensely.

  ‘To paint,’ said she, ‘the emotions of that morning when all was marble within and Mr F’s Aunt followed in a glass-coach which it stands to reason must have been in shameful repair, or it never could have broken down two streets from the house and Mr F’s Aunt brought home like the fifth of November in a rush-bottomed chair I will not attempt, suffice it to say that the hollow form of breakfast took place in the dining-room downstairs that papa partaking too freely of pickled salmon was ill for weeks and that Mr F and myself went upon a continental tour to Calais where people fought for us on the pier until they separated us though not for ever that was not yet to be.’

  The statue bride, hardly pausing for breath, went on, with the greatest complacency, in a rambling manner, sometimes incident to flesh and blood.

  ‘I will draw a veil over that dreamy life, Mr F was in good spirits his appetite was good he liked the cookery he considered the wine weak but palatable and all was well, we returned to the immediate neighbourhood of Number Thirty Little Gosling Street London Docks and settled down, ere we had yet fully detected the housemaid in selling the feathers out of the spare bed Gout flying upwards soared with Mr F to another sphere.’

  His relict, with a glance at his portrait, shook her head and wiped her eyes.

  ‘I revere the memory of Mr F as an estimable man and most indulgent husband, only necessary to mention Asparagus and it appeared or to hint at any little delicate thing to drink and it came like magic in a pint-bottle it was not ecstasy but it was comfort, I returned to papa’s roof and lived secluded if not happy during some years until one day papa came smoothly blundering in and said that Arthur Clennam awaited me below, I went below and found him ask me not what I found him except that he was still unmarried still unchanged.’

  Flora obviously enjoys herself (as we are told she does) in these astonishing expressive flights. It is obvious too that Dickens enjoys them, and takes delight in imagining Flora; and what is in fact astonishing is the ease and fertility with which he conceives her copious unpredictabilities, which, with all their leaps, poetic compressions and feats of imaginative linkage and substitution, are essentially sequential and coherent. It is important, however, not to convey a false implication in thus imputing enjoyment to Dickens. The enjoyment here is not different in kind from that which we may properly see in all his creating. Flora, that is, is not a piece of gratuitous ‘Dickensian’ exuberance; she has a major value in relation to Dickens’s comprehensive design, and needs, for a full appreciation, to be seen as part of a whole finely nerved organism.

  She is talking, in the quoted passage, to Little Dorrit, towards whom from the outset she shows a warm-hearted sympathy. She has indeed a great deal in common with the ‘dear little thing’ – the differences serving, among other things, to emphasize that fact. She is disinterested, spontaneous and good-natured and – for all her addiction to romantic self-dramatization – ‘real’, with a robust basic reality that her addiction sets off. She is as incapable of snobbery as Little Dorrit herself, a truth that, with an innocent unconsciousness, she demonstrates in the interview she achieves with the embarrassed William Dorrit Esquire in his London hotel – giving proof in the whole episode of the kind of courage that doesn’t recognize itself as courage (Part the Second, chapter XVII). Though we are told that ‘when she worked herself into full mermaid condition, she did actually believe whatever she said in it’, we are also told, correctively, that she ‘had a decided tendency to be always honest when she gave herself time to think about it’. And, talking with Little Dorrit in the pie-shop at the end of the book (Part the Second, chapter XXXIV), she ‘earnestly begs’ her ‘to let Arthur understand that I don’t know after all whether it wasn’t all nonsense between us though pleasant at the time’. The ‘full mermaid condition’ is much in the nature of the condition produced by her other indulgence, brandy. But it mustn’t be suggested that her adventurous expressive flights are nothing but romantic irresponsibilities of self-indulgence. They are also poetic in a strong way, and register, in their imaginative freedom and energy, much vivid perception and an artist’s grasp of the real. Thus, correcting Mr Dorrit’s impression that the Clennam of Clennam & Co. must be Arthur, she replies: ‘It’s a very different person indeed, with no limbs and wheels instead and the grimmest of women though his mother.’

  Mr Dorrit looked as if he must immediately be driven out of his mind by this account. Neither was it rendered more favourable to sanity by Flora’s dashing into a rapid analysis of Mr Flintwinch’s cravat, and describing him, without the lightest boundary line of separation between his identity and Mrs Clennam’s, as a rusty screw in gaiters.

  The reader, however, sees the felicity. And when, in the passage I have quoted above from Flora’s unbosoming eloquence to Little Dorrit, we arrive at ‘until one day papa came smoothly blundering in’ we note how perfectly that gives us the Patriarch. Responding appreciatively to these felicities of creative utterance – and they abound – we can’t help being conscious, to the point of full and explicit recognition, that the genius here, in these inspired improvisations, is Dickens’s own. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t take the flights as Flora, and Flora as a person who is ‘there’ beyond all possible doubt.

  There are other characters in Little Dorrit who invite the description ‘Dickensian’ – the adjective used in this way implying that they so little fall within the expectation suggested by the word ‘realism’ that they could occur only in a context boldly or licentiously unrealistic. It will be sufficient for my purpose to adduce Pancks.

  Pancks, who may reasonably be thought of as a stylized Dickensian figure of comedy, associates easily in personal intercourse, not only with Flora, but with Little Dorrit herself and with Clennam who, tending to be very largely the reader’s own presence in the imagined drama, is for us at the centre of realistic ‘normality’. His significance, half-detected by Clennam in the abrupt factual dryness (is it sardonic?), as creative life imprisoned in the tyrannical mechanisms of a business civilization, is brought out by contrast with Cavalletto.

  The foreigner … – they called him Mr Baptist in the Yard – was such a chirping, easy, hopeful little fellow, that his attraction to Pancks was probably the force of contrast. Solitary, weak, and scantily acquainted with the most necessary words in the only language in which he could communicate with the people about him, he went with the stream of his fortunes, in a way that was new in those parts.19

  This is Pancks:

  ‘Yes, I have always some of ’em to look up, or something to look after. But I like business,’ said Pancks, getting on a little faster. ‘What’s a man made for?’

  ‘For nothing else?’ said Clennam.

  Pancks put the counter question, ‘What else?’ It packed up, in the smallest compass, a weight that had rested on C
lennam’s life; and he made no answer.

  ‘That’s what I ask our weekly tenants,’ said Pancks. ‘Some of ’em will pull long faces to me, and say, Poor as you see us, master, we’re always grinding, drudging, toiling, every minute we’re awake. I say to them, What else are you made for? It shuts them up. They haven’t a word to answer. What else are you made for? That clinches it.’

  ‘Ah dear, dear, dear!’ sighed Clennam.20

  Pancks’s briskness is that of a nippy steam-tug (he ‘docks’ in the office of Casby’s house), snorting about mechanically on his ‘proprietor’s’ business. ‘You oughtn’t to be anybody’s proprietor, Mr Clennam’, he remarks. ‘You’re much too delicate.’ The signs of vital energy, converted by repression into dangerous potentiality, are there, however, in insistent traits:

  His little black eyes sparkled electrically. His very hair seemed to sparkle as he roughened it. He was in that highly-charged state that one might have expected to draw sparks and snaps from him by presenting a knuckle to any part of his figure.21

  The great eruptive discharge takes place in the scene (Book the Second, chapter XXXII), towards the end of the book, that has its climax in the cropping, with Pancks’s suddenly drawn scissors, of the Patriarch’s venerable locks, the shearing-off of the broad hat-brim, and the replanting of the lopped crown on the now unpatriarchal head. But what I want to emphasize in order to bring out the point of proceeding in this way from Flora Casby to Mr Pancks is the nature of the eloquence with which Pancks accompanies his dramatic demonstrations. This excerpt from the sustained and abundantly felicitous episode will suffice for my purpose:

  Mr Pancks and the Patriarch were instantly the centre of a press, all eyes and ears; windows were thrown open, and doorsteps were thronged.

  ‘What do you pretend to be?’ said Mr Pancks. ‘What’s your moral game? What do you go in for? Benevolence, ain’t it? YOU benevolent!’ Here Mr Pancks, apparently without the intention of hitting him, but merely to relieve his mind and expend his superfluous power in wholesome exercise, aimed a blow at the bumpy head, which the bumpy head ducked to avoid. This singular performance was repeated, to the ever-increasing admiration of the spectators, at the end of every succeeding article of Mr Pancks’s oration.

  ‘I have discharged myself from your service,’ said Pancks, ‘that I may tell you what you are. You’re one of a lot of impostors that are the worst lot of all the lots that are to be met with. Speaking as a sufferer by both, I don’t know that I wouldn’t as soon have the Merdle lot as your lot. You’re a driver in disguise, a screwer by deputy, a wringer, a squeezer, and a shaver by substitute. You’re a philanthropic sneak. You’re a shabby deceiver!’

  (The repetition of the performance at this point was received with a burst of laughter.)

  ‘Ask these good people who’s the hard man here. They’ll tell you Pancks, I believe.’

  This was confirmed by cries of ‘Certainly’, and ‘Hear!’

  ‘But I tell you, good people – Casby! This mound of meekness, this lump of love, this bottle-green smiler, this is your driver!’ said Pancks. ‘If you want to see the man who would flay you alive – here he is! Don’t look for him in me, at thirty shillings a week, but look for him in Casby, at I don’t know how much a year!’

  ‘Good!’ cried several voices. ‘Hear Mr Pancks!’

  ‘Hear Mr Pancks?’ cried that gentleman (after repeating the popular performance). ‘Yes, I should think so! It’s almost time to hear Mr Pancks. Mr Pancks has come down into the Yard tonight, on purpose that you should hear him. Pancks is only the Works, but here’s the Winder.’

  The audience would have gone over to Mr Pancks, as one man, woman, and child, but for the long, grey, silken locks, and the broad-brimmed hat.

  ‘Here’s the Stop,’ said Pancks, ‘that’s the man that sets the tune to be ground. And there’s but one tune, and its name is Grind, Grind, Grind! Here’s the Proprietor, and here’s his Grubber. Why, good people, when he comes smoothly spinning through the Yard tonight, like a slow-going benevolent Humming-Top …’

  Dramatic utterance of that kind couldn’t (nor, of course, could the accompanying kind of action) be contained in a novel by Tolstoy any more than in one by James. And as of Flora’s, so of Pancks’s, we can say that he enjoys his creative flights and felicities, adding that so, again, does Dickens. And, again, to say this is not to pass, or to suggest, an adverse criticism on the novelist.

  When we have in this way taken conscious note of the one case after the other we realize that the presence of Dickens they represent can be pointed to in numberless manifestations; diverse, but continuous in the sense that they belong to, they have their part in building up, a unity of effect. We take them, whether or not in full consciousness, not only in characters, but in the vivid energy of descriptions and the evocations of décor and atmosphere (as, for instance, of the Alps, Italy, Rome, Boulogne and London – to suggest the diversity and range of function and expressive value). In short, we see that we are not playing with a fanciful idea but recording a critical observation of major critical importance when we say that, opposing and placing Henry Gowan, the real artist is present in Little Dorrit – concretely present. He is present, the only way he could be, as Dickens himself, the creative Dickens. It is a presence potently enough felt, and at the same time impersonal enough, to perform perfectly its function in the organic whole. It is a success that is conditioned by the astonishing flexibility of Dickens’s art – its supple sureness in combining modes and conventions that might well have seemed irreconcilable.

  What I have been pointing to is an emphasis (so to speak) in the total creativity of the book – it is apparent for instance when Little Dorrit is brought into close relation with Flora; an emphasis that prompts us to the recognition that Little Dorrit, though she may be the heroine, doesn’t represent the whole of Dickens’s answer to Henry Gowan, and, further, that her marriage with Arthur Clennam, though (solving the personal problem of each) it may be right and happy, is neither a romantically exalted ‘happy ending’, nor a triumphant upshot of the inquiry, the complex intensity of questioning, that the book so largely is. Dickens is neither a romantic optimist nor a pessimist (a proposition that holds of Blake too). And it isn’t that Little Dorrit is being criticized when we are moved to wish that she weren’t so docile to Mrs General. Dickens doesn’t simplify (nor does Blake). His human concern, being profound, is inescapably a concern with society and civilization, and, in face of Mrs General, Henry Gowan, Gowan’s mother, the Patriarch, the Barnacles and Merdle, he insists that qualities and energies not represented by Little Dorrit are indispensable too.

  Nevertheless, there is no infelicity in the book’s being called by her name. She is at its centre, and the subtlety, delicacy and penetration with which Dickens conveys her distinctive paradoxical strength are, though not what ‘Dickensian’ commonly suggests, profoundly characteristic of his genius. In the painful scene after the rejection of young Chivery, her father’s line being to suggest, with a mastery of inexplicitness and of non-recognition in himself of what he means, that, in aid of the process by which (though a prisoner) he has succeeded heroically in preserving his self-respect as a gentleman, she should keep young John on a string, she gives us a representative instance of the way in which, by force of a complete and unquestionable disinterestedness, she can bring her father to the point of glimpsing from time to time the reality of what he is – and in so doing make him for us something of a tragic figure. Disinterestedness in her is goodness and love; she differs from Sissy in that, while manifested in scenes of this kind as a decisive presence, she can’t be called a challenging one – there are no dark hair and eyes and lustrous gleams (these in Little Dorrit belong to Tattycoram). Yet her decisiveness, with its peculiar quality, leaves us in no doubt, it is brought so potently home to us.

  Of course, the art in general of Little Dorrit is more complex in its subtlety than that of Hard Times: the large book is not merely larger; it offers
something in its point-to-point treatment of life that doesn’t go and couldn’t, with moral-fable economy, the scale and abundance of the work being necessary to the distinctive preoccupation with significance and to the accompanying local pregnancy. This truth is illustrated by the way in which the episode (Book the First, chapter XIX) I have referred to – and it is relevant to note that, without any effect of mere repetition, there have already been a number of the kind – comes in the whole generously charged and delicately modulated chapter that contains it. For a just critical consideration one has to re-read the whole chapter.

  It gives us first the two brothers, William urging the broken Frederick22 to profit by the model in front of him:

  The Father of the Marshalsea said, with a shrug of modest self-depreciation, ‘Oh! You might be like me, my dear Frederick; you might be, if you chose!’ and forbore, in the magnanimity of his strength, to press his fallen brother further.

  William Dorrit’s possession of his role is complete, and magnificently confident. It carries him over the jar of the elder Chivery’s surliness, which he meets by turning an enhanced sublimity of patronizing solicitude on Frederick.

  ‘Be so kind as to keep the door open a moment, Chivery, that I may see him go along the passage and down the steps. Take care, Frederick! (He is very infirm.) Mind the steps! (He is so very absent.) Be careful how you cross, Frederick! (I really don’t like the notion of his wandering at large, he is so extremely liable to be run over.)’

  With these words, and with a face expressive of many uneasy doubts and much anxious guardianship, he turned his regards upon the assembled company in the Lodge: so plainly indicating that his brother was to be pitied for not being under lock and key, that an opinion to that effect went round among the Collegians assembled.