by F. R. Leavis
The air had been warm and transparent through the whole of the bright day … The snowy mountain-tops had been so clear that unaccustomed eyes, cancelling the intervening country, and slighting their rugged height for something fabulous, would have measured them as within a few hours’ easy reach. Mountain-tops of great celebrity in the valleys whence no trace of their existence was visible sometimes for months together, had been since morning plain and near, in the blue sky. And now, when it was dark below, though they seemed solemnly to recede, like spectres who were going to vanish, as the red dye of the sunset faded out of them and left them coldly white, they were yet distinctly defined in their loneliness, above the mists and shadows.
Seen from those solitudes, and from the Pass of the Great Saint Bernard, which was one of them, the ascending night came up the mountain like a rising water. When it at last rose to the walls of the convent of the Great Saint Bernard, it was as if that weather-beaten structure were another Ark, and floated on the shadowy waves.
. . . . .
At length, a light on the summit of the rocky staircase gleamed through the snow and mist. The guides called to the mules, the mules pricked up their drooping heads, the travellers’ tongues were loosened, and in a sudden burst of slipping, climbing, jingling, clinking and talking, they arrived at the convent door.
Other mules had arrived not long before, some with peasant riders and some with goods, and had trodden the snow about the door into a pool of mud. Riding-saddles and bridles, pack-saddles and strings of bells, mules and men, lanterns, torches, sacks, provender, barrels, cheeses, kegs of honey and butter, straw bundles and packages of many shapes, were crowded confusedly together in this thawed quagmire, and about the steps. Up here in the clouds, everything was seen through cloud, and seemed dissolving into cloud. The breath of the men was cloud, the breath of the mules was cloud, the lights were encircled by cloud, speakers close at hand were not seen for cloud, though their voices and all other sounds were surprisingly clear. Of the cloudy line of mules hastily tied to rings in the wall, one would bite another, or kick another, then the whole mist would be disturbed with men diving into it, and cries of men and beasts coming out of it, and no bystander discerning what was wrong. In the midst of this, the great stable of the convent, occupying the basement story, and entered by the basement door, outside which all the disorder was, poured forth its contribution of cloud, as if the whole rugged edifice were filled with nothing else, and would collapse as if it had emptied itself, leaving the snow to fall upon the bare mountain summit.
While all this noise and hurry was rife among the living travellers, there, too, silently assembled in a grated house, half-a-dozen paces removed, with the same cloud enfolding them, and the same snowflakes drifting in upon them, were the dead travellers found upon the mountain. The mother, storm-belated many winters ago still standing in the corner with her baby at her breast; the man who had frozen with his arm raised to his mouth in fear or hunger, still pressing it with his dry lips after years and years. An awful company, mysteriously come together! A wild destiny for the mother to have foreseen! ‘Surrounded by so many and such companions upon whom I have never looked, and never shall look, I and my child will dwell together inseparable on the Great Saint Bernard, outlasting generations who will come to see us, and will never know our name, or one word of our story but the end.’
The living travellers thought nothing of the dead just then.
We are very soon given them within the convent, reinstalled in their confident egos, and being absolute Society. But it is impossible (for the reader, I mean) to have forgotten the potent evocation of time, eternity, the non-human universe, the de-realizing lights and vapours, and death. The effect is to bring out with poetic force the nothingness of the Dorrit–Gowan–Barnacle human world. But it is not merely that Society, as figured in its sheltered conceit by the party enjoying warmth, wine, food and the mutual assurance of its superiority, is, for us, exposed to the irony and the challenge it ignores. We who live in the technologico-Benthamite age can hardly miss a force the episode – that is, the chapter – has for our time; for the whole book forms an exquisitely nerved context, and Dickens’s analysis is radical. ‘The individual life is tragic, but there is social hope’: ‘society’ as invoked in Snow’s representative cliché-wisdom is a nothing, and it is essentially the New Statesman’s, and, not only Mr Harold Wilson’s, but that of politicians, statesmen, social scientists and leader-writers in general. To those troubled by the vanishing of what humanity more and more desperately needs if it is not to be deprived of all that makes it human, the ‘society’ of organization, social science, ‘welfare’, equality and statistics is as empty a nothing as the ‘Society’ of manner and exclusiveness.
Dickens’s evocation of death, time and eternity and the non-human universe certainly plays a part in his critical irony, but he has no more bent than Blake towards conceiving life or mankind reductively. His exposure of unrealities is a vindication of human creativity, and an insistence that such a vindication, real and achieved, can (as Daniel Doyce is there to testify) have no hubris in it. Little Dorrit confronts the technologico-Benthamite world with a conception of man and society to which it is utterly blank, the blankness being a manifestation of its desperate sickness. I have offered my grounds for saying this in my discussion of Dickens’s affinity with Blake. To insist that the psyche, the individual life, is both of its nature creative and in its individuality inherently social is to insist that all human creativity is, in one way or another, collaborative, and that a cultural tradition is a collaboratively sustained reality in the way exemplified by a living language – by the language of Shakespeare, of Blake and of Dickens (to adduce three highly individual and potently creative writers). Dickens insists to this effect both implicitly and consciously, and, having the genius that created the Dickensian novel, more manifestly than Blake does.
To make the last point, of course, is to recognize that Dickens and Blake, significant as the affinity is, are also very different. Those who object to the way in which I have emphasized the affinity may point to the radical difference in the fact that there is no Swedenborg and no Boehme in Dickens’s case. That fact certainly constitutes a difference; but it is not radical in the sense that it makes the recognition of an affinity absurd. Blake’s interest in Swedenborg and Boehme, and, in general, in the ‘sources’ that for devotees and researchers constitute the ‘perennial philosophy’, is relatively accidental; his protest against ‘Locke and Newton’ in terms of insight into the human psyche is essential. He owed more to Shakespeare than to the ‘perennial philosophy’, and those voluminous works of research and systematization do very little for the understanding of his importance as the great enemy of spiritual philistinism. Dickens is in the same sense as Blake a vindicator of the spirit – that is, of life. The creativity he insists on as an aspect of disinterestedness is inseparable from the ‘identity’s’ implicitly recognized responsibility to something that (not ‘belonging to itself’) it doesn’t, and can’t, possess.
Such formulations as these by themselves are merely wordy formulations; but nothing could be more convincing than the art they point to. Dickens’s communication is, in its clear validity, compelling and unanswerable. In its political bearing it represents all that can be properly asked of an artist as such – and what it contributes is basic and indispensable: to comment that Dickens had no political philosophy and no practical advice to give reformers and politicians is gratuitous, obtuse and ungrateful. But it is in the same way true that to dismiss his claim to be recognized as a vindicator of the spirit, such as we sorely need, with the remark that he gives no sign of being concerned – or equipped – to answer the probing questions that theologically religious critics are moved to put, is beside the point, and unintelligent. The great artist presents the indispensable testimony of experience, perception and intuition, he being in respect of these an adept. The difference between Dickens and Blake is not that Blake is more spiritual
; rather, it can with a measure of truth be said to be that Blake’s genius – which certainly suffered for lack of that essential kind of collaboration which Dickens’s relations with his public gave him – led him to spend a vast deal of his life and effort wrestling with ultimate questions that inevitably defeated him. (That, presumably, is what Lawrence meant when he said that ‘Blake was one of those ghastly obscene knowers’ – the implication being that, tainted with Urizenic malady, he failed to respect the force of his own insistence on essential ‘wonder’.) The evidence of defeat is failure in his major creative enterprises – failure implicitly recognized by Blake himself as he makes attempt after attempt, aspiring to a possession of ‘answers’ that is unattainable.
It is the prophetic books that give Blake his standing as a great addict of the specifically religious quest; but actually, for all the grist he affords the research-mills and the symbol-specialists, his concern for the spirit is of the same order as Dickens’s – he is, whatever the differences in emphasis and accent, religious in the same sense. The characters of the myths, in their confusing, equivocal and changing relations, are faculties, potentialities and aspects of the human psyche. But ‘human’ – the word becomes challenging in an un-Dickensian way when we consider the cosmic note of Blake’s insistence on creativity and of his defiance in general of Newton and Locke. The emphasis, all the same, rests on ‘human’ to such effect that theologizing students of Blake28 (who quite properly invoke too his aphorisms and prose commentaries) discuss whether or not, or how far, he should be pronounced heretical.
That kind of doubt has never been raised about Dickens; the placing criticism, making him a lesser creative writer than the greatest, has been that he is a Philistine – like Mr Meagles; to be pronounced merely conventional, and, in his genial worldly way, not much concerned. I hope, nevertheless, that I have justified my contention that the psychological insight (if ‘psychological’ is the word) so clearly determining the organization of Little Dorrit, with the entailed perceptions, intuitions and evaluative criteria that make ‘psychology’ a word one hesitates to use, is Blakean. And the criticism to be dismissed by way of completing the case is of the order of that which remarks Dickens’s failure to have a political theory or programme – it is not a creative writer’s business to be a theologian or a philosopher. Dickens communicates a profound insight into human nature, the human situation and human need; we have no right to ask anything else of a great artist.
In spite of the essential affinity I have been emphasizing, the sense of the human situation conveyed so potently in the Alpine chapter is distinctively Dickens’s and not Blake’s. Nor, though clearly post-Romantic, is it Words-worthian. The evocation of the Alps is associated, significantly, with the vision of the mortuary and its long-frozen dead; and the effect – not merely in relation to the touring party within the convent – is one, profoundly characteristic of the great Dickens, of solemn anti-hubristic realism. It is a realism, one must add, strongly anti-Gowan, enforcing, as it does, the dependence of the human world on the collaborative creativity that generates it, and sustains it continually as a living and authoritative reality.
I need say no more about the differences. The point of establishing affinities between two great writers is that they are great writers, and therefore in essential ways very different. The importance of the affinity depends on that – I mean, the peculiar importance for us now. With Blake and Dickens I associate Lawrence, so that we have a line running into the twentieth century. And when I accept the description of Dickens as ‘the greatest of the romantic novelists’,29 it is with the proviso that, in the complex Romantic movement, Blake in particular is the poet I take it to be invoking. For it is he pre-eminently who represents what I have in mind in saying that the Romantic movement added something – that is, enriched the human heritage in ways not as a rule given clear or full recognition even in sympathetic uses of the adjective.
The general failure to recognize Dickens’s greatness is a failure to perceive the force of the truth I point to here. Something of indubitable high value the Romantic movement brought to the human heritage was a distinctive sense of responsibility towards life. Lawrence implicitly invokes this truth in the comment with which he dismisses Eliot’s ‘classicism’: ‘This classiosity is bunkum, still more cowardice.’ Eliot’s classicism is anti-romanticism – explicitly; when he identifies the ‘romantic’ it is always in characteristics that enforce the pejorative senses of the world.
The kind of vital strength that makes Dickens a romantic novelist and relates him to Blake is what Eliot rules out from the creative process and the ‘mind of the artist’ in his account of ‘impersonality’, which has for essential purpose to deny that art expresses, or in any way involves, a responsibility towards life. That kind of denial, in Eliot and his nineteenth-century prompters, is a new thing, and its appearance – it being a reaction (and incoherent) – is an index of the new consciousness of responsibility against which it reacts. The century of the American and the French Revolutions, of the opening Industrial Revolution, and of the inevitable reaction against ‘Locke and Newton’, produced changes, challenges and creative incitements enough to make the emergence of a new sense of human responsibility comprehensible, and to explain a notable development of language. Writers in the English tradition, responding to the development, had the immeasurable advantage of being able to draw – as both Blake and Dickens did – on Shakespeare.
1. “And now, Mr Clennam, perhaps I may ask you, whether you have come to a decision where to go next?”
“Indeed no, I am such a waif and stray everywhere, that I am liable to be drifted where any current may set.”
“It’s extraordinary to me – if you’ll excuse my freedom in saying so – that you don’t go straight to London”, said Mr Meagles, in the same tone of a confidential adviser.
“Perhaps I shall.”
“Ay! But I mean with a will.”
“I have no will. That is to say”, he coloured a little, “next to none that I can put in action now.”’
2. In The Wound and the Bow.
3. The opening phrase of the book is ‘Thirty years ago’, and chapter VI begins: ‘Thirty years ago there stood, a few doors short of the church of Saint George, in the borough of Southwark, on the left-hand side of the way going southward, the Marshalsea Prison.’ Nevertheless, it is England of the time of writing that Dickens plainly offers to examine. The ‘anachronism’ doesn’t in the least qualify the felicity of his use of the Marshalsea; rather, it serves to emphasize the essential nature of his ‘social criticism’.
4. The Imagination of Charles Dickens, pages 40–41.
5. See the essay, ‘What Maisie Knew’, in Anna Karenina and Other Essays.
6. ‘The novel is the highest example of subtle inter-relatedness that man has discovered.’ – D. H. Lawrence, Phoenix (‘Morality and the Novel’), page 528.
7. Introduction to The Image of Childhood by Peter Coveney (Peregrine Books), page 19.
8. Part the Second, chapter XXX.
9. Part the Second, chapter XXXI.
10. The suggestion of life become mechanism is used pervasively and subtly in Little Dorrit. Here, for instance, with immediate relevance to Mrs Clennam’s case, is the opening of chapter XXIX, Book the First:
‘The house in the city preserved its heavy dullness through all these transactions, and the invalid within it turned the same unvarying round of life. Morning, noon, and night, morning, noon, and night, each recurring with its accompanying monotony, always the same reluctant return of the same sequences of machinery, like a dragging piece of clockwork.
‘The wheeled chair had its associated remembrances and reveries, one may suppose, as every place that is made the station of a human being has. Pictures of demolished streets and altered houses as they formerly were when the occupant of the chair was familiar with them; images of people as they used to be, with little or no allowance for the lapse of time since they were seen; o
f these there must have been many in the long routine of gloomy days. To stop the clock of busy existence at the hour when we were personally sequestered from it; to suppose mankind stricken motionless, when we were brought to a standstill; to be unable to measure the changes beyond our view by any larger standard than the shrunken one of our own uniform and contracted existence; is the infirmity of many invalids, and the mental unhealthiness of almost all recluses.
‘What scenes and actors the stern woman most reviewed, as she sat from season to season in her one dark room, none knew but herself. Mr Flintwinch, with his wry presence brought to bear upon her daily life like some eccentric mechanical force, would perhaps have screwed it out of her, if there had been less resistance in her; but she was too strong for him.’
The potent doubleness of suggestion represented by the co-presence and combined action of ‘dragging piece of clockwork’ in the first paragraph and ‘stop the clock of busy existence’ in the second will have been noted. The ‘symbolic’ value of Mrs Clennam and the Clennam house has the kind of indeterminateness that makes the Marshalsea pervade the whole novel.
11. ‘“As well might it be charged upon me that the stings of an awakened conscience drove her mad, and that it was the will of the Disposer of all things that she should live so, many years. I devoted myself to reclaim the otherwise predestined and lost boy; to give him the reputation of an honest origin; to bring him up in fear and trembling, and in a life of practical contrition for the sins that were heavy on his head before his entrance into this condemned world.’” Part the Second, chapter XXX.
12. See here.
13. Book the Second, chapter XXI.
14. The implicit, significantly sympathetic, valuation conveyed to us of the young monk who urbanely and firmly presides is unmistakable.