From
Louis Cazamian, A History of English
Literature ("The Idealistic Reaction"):
Dickens and the social novel.—
(a). DICKENS. There is not any injustice to Dickens (1) in going straight to the central feeling which gives life to his work; and that feeling is social. Thorough it he is linked with a whole group of writers, and has a place in a great movement of the time.
No novelist before Dickens had treated the lower middle classes on such broad lines or in so frank a way. He studies them not as a detached, superior kind of observer, but as one of their own level; a symphathy, an immediate community of impressions, and, as it were, an instinctive fraternity, thus impregnate his study. Be the tone that of pathos or of humour, the mediocre lives on which he focuses his and our attention come, as if naturally, to acquire the dignity of art. Such is the permanent foundation of his realism. But below it, in the inner realms of consciousness, we feel the quivering image, the anguish of soul-debasing poverty. The unforgettable experince of his early youth—that humiliating phase of his life—becomes thus one of the decisive elements in the formation of his personality. Even when those hardships had been left behind, Dickens could never forget them. It was this dim memory, at the secret core of his very life-success, that continued to sustain the energy of his effort to secure his material independence at all risks. It helped to intensify as well the multiple suggestions of active charity which made Dickens an apostle, and turned his work into a gospel of humanitarianism.
Considered from this point of view, Dickens has his place in the idealistic reaction [to 19th-century industrial capitalism]. His influence combined itself with that of Carlyle, whose authority as a teacher he accepted or felt. But his most important significance is not that he shared in the philantropical crusade, that he showed up abuses, or prepared those fits of moral compunction from which reforms have sprung. Despite the practical benefits which did accrue from such a task, it cannot be said that Dickens was always happily inspired in this direction (2); indeed his art suffered from the bitter or strained mood which usually goes with a thesis of denunciation. Above all, he has stimulated the national sensibility which was slowly wasting away in the dry atmosphere of a utilitarian age; he has re-established balance and a more wholesome order in the proportionate values of the motives of life. This psychological action is brought to its most precise and most effectual pitch in his impassioned attack on the frame of mind which supports the individualistic theory of the economists. And here the criticism of the novelist succeeds in shaking the moral foundations of a doctrine. Dickens has contributed to the salutary weakening of dogmatic egoism. On this point, his teaching comes into line with that of Carlyle and Ruskin; he takes up his stand with the prophets of sentiment against the harder advocates of rationalism. In other respects, his temperament holds him aloof from their mystic exaltation. He retains a firm hold on reality; and never loses the sense of the average conditions which all useful activities must fulfil. An ardent believer in progress, moderate in his views, and of an optimistic turn of mind, he lives and thinks in complete accord with the middle-class opinions of his day.
And this middle class for Dickens is that of London, of the ancient cities, and the agricultural districts of the south. He knows nothing about the feverish existence of the working classes in the midlands and in the north, or if he does, his knowledge is very imperfect. The problems he touches upon in the course of his novels do not concern the industrial crowds which had recently developed, but rather a class of long standing, with settled and traditional characteristics. Instead of bringing us into direct contact with the epoch of machinery, and the new world, he leads us back towards the past. While his intentions are anything but reactionary, his instictive preferences tend in this direction. The customs and habits he describes most readily savour somewhat of the archaic; only rarely does he venture beyond the field of observation which he had viewed in his youth. The joviality, the cordiality he depicts or teaches are those of a society that is still patriarchal, and that has been just perceptibly altered, but not invaded and upset by modern life. Railways will never be anything else than a sensational wonder for Dickens; it is by the jingling of the stage-coach harness that his imagination is wakened into spontaneous play.
Just as the background in his novels dates from 1825 or 1830, and underneath the symptoms of a changing age tends to link up with the eighteenth century, so his inner nature, attuned to the spirit of an animated, picturesque, and familiar life, finds itself in harmony with a fairly average and a permanent type of the English temperament. Dickens appealed to the very heart of England, and she recognized herself in his pages because he offered her a picture of herself which she loved to seee; he showed her an England at her best. In a nation of very mixed tendencies—like every other nation in this respect—he singles out the features of genial humanity and organizes them into a whole; the author himself assumes, and often gives to his characters, an expression of sympathy, the smile of humour, and the cheeriness of a kind heart. This composite portrait, in which not only Mr. Pickwick but many others have their shares, has the value of a synthetic image; the moral preferences of Dickens enter into every one of its lineaments. These preferences comprise, with a warm expansiveness of heart, a liking for the peculiarities of character, and almost a taste for eccentric oddities; a realism both psychological and descriptive, without system or rigour, which springs from a lively sense of buoyant curiosity, full of an instinctive trust of life. Thus it was that the very great success of Dickens's work had the efficacy of a deep influence; that his novels told in favour of solidarity, against the egoistic spirit of the age; and that his popularity, which waned for a time after his death, has now again come into its own, and no limit can be set to its duration.
Dickens wrote rapidly. His strenuous energy was not always a substitute for careful art. His faults in taste and in style, the failings of his intuitive verve, are obvious; his literary individuality lacks polish. He sacrifices balance for the sake of intense effects; his expression obeys monotonous habits; he repeats himself to excess. His pathos is cheap or exaggerated; his imagination in its continual effort to emphasizee the character of things tends rather to distort them; his vision, fond of agitated outlines, is apt to lose the very sense of repose. There is working, at the very core of his genius, a persistent spirit of Romanticism, which subordinates the actual truth, like the soberness, of every feature to emotional or picturesque values; his realism is stirred by a feverish force of hallucination. And throughout the whole of his work the effusion and the expression of self disturb or contradict the relative objectivity, without which there could be no novel of real life. At every turn in his stories we come upon the favourable or unfavourable opinions of the author—a kind of sentimental commentary on his own work; and these instances of bias, intensified by polemical preferences and arguments, too often bore or annoy the reader.
These blemishes, which the contemporaries of Dickens found easy to tolerate, while the succeeding generation censured them severely, are to-day seen in a more mellow perspective as connected with the sovereign gifts of an inspired artist. As a creator, Dickens is prodigious. The picture he has painted of the social world is one of the richest in the range of literature. His perception of things and of character is remarkable for its direct keenness and fresh vigour while not unlimited in scope, it is, nevertheless, very wide; coloured as it is by the writer's personality, it possesses the quality of an incomparable liveliness. There is nothing scientific about it, nor does it seek to be so. It takes from reality only what interests it; and as the need which it obeys are those of emotion and humour, the real is organized into a show of varied interest, always intense in effect, and of a tone either dramatic of facetious. Into this world no one can penetrate unless he has bowed to the artist's will; but such is the power of his charm that our critical faculty is disarmed. Few are the readers wholly proof against the spell.
At the first glance our eye is caught by the swarming host of human figures. Over the vast fresco of his work, Dickens has thrown them in plenty; they give to every part the pulsation of life itself. Still, their quality is far from equal. The writer has not created them thorugh one and the same intuition of their original beings; he has not felt them all grow upon him with one and the same imperiousness. Their features may have been suggested from the outside by a caprice of the imagination, by a preconceived feeling, or by the demands of the plot; they may represent superficial or deductive intentions; instead of being nourished from the deeper personality of the novelist, they may be, as it were, engrafted upon more exterior eleemnts—mere desires for antithesis or effect. Then it is that, being less directly connected with the very substance of their maker, they they more colosely resemble one or other of his feature, and less closely resemble life. They bear the stamp of his caprice, of a bent in his mind, of some partiality in his outlook; and being devoid of any lineaments proper to themselves which might have played the part of an addition or a corrective, they are nothing but that impoverished expression of their creator's personality. There is in the work of Dickens a whole range of artificial creatures, arbitrarily drawn by his somewhat crude dramatic sense, by his hasty aversions, by his taste for drollery which often approaches caricature. And so it happens that his personages have no other interest but what they may owe to satire, melodrama, or farce.
But into the satire, pathos, or farce many of his heroes infuse the superior virtue of an irresistible vitality. These bear a no less recognizable imprint of their origin; a Pickwick, a Sam Weller, a Jingle, a Micawber, a Peggotty, a Dick Swiveller, a marchioness, quite as much as a David Copperfield, are members of one family, whose common rather is easily divined; they all have something of his readily compassionate humanity, and some gleam of his humour. Nevertheless, they are themselves, and develop according to their own principles. So extreme is their diversity that they exemplify in every respect the essential individuality of human beings. But they all have an irrefutability, a witchcraft to them; no one thinks of discurssing them; they come forth, and we accept them; they possess the solidity, the volume of three-dimensional figures; the personality which supports them has transferrred itself entirely into them, has shaped them out according to the mysterious instinct of all its powers. This creative process, identical with that which one can find in the masterpieces of the stage, is carried thorugh with admirable abundance and variety. Yet here again we find many grades. The best of the personages are not usually those whom Dickens has studied most deliberately and consciously. it is not often that his traitors, heroes, or heroines have quite as much flavour, as much vivaciousness or irresistible truth, as the less prominent characters which he has dashed off with a freer hand. In the episodical parts of his work his spontaenous verve very often joins an unforgettable vigour to the literal accuracy of the outlines. And it is here, perhaps, that his masterly skill is seen at its best.
What is true of the characters is also true of the action. The most elaborately worked-out plots, in Dickens, are not the most satisfactory. Where the thesis is stressed, as in the historical and in the purely social novels (Barnaby Rudge, A Tale of Two Cities, Hard Times), we feel that too rigid an intention is at work; and that effort towards a concentration on a single purpose makes the whole book somwhat strained. Dickens does not possess the gift of compact logical or artistic writing. The type of anrrative which best suits his inventive genius savours very much of the old picaresque model; his favourite theme is that of life, a life which lasts, which renews itself, and which is born, as it were, of itself. In the opening chapters of Pickwick the connecting thread is of the most slender; later it gains strength, without allowing the reader to forget the purely comic purpose with which the work began; and a plot revolving round the biography of a central character (as in Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield) imparts a supple unity to the best novels. In his later work Dickens endeavoured to brace up this rather lax construction; Great Expectations is a novel of a strong and sober texture, which taes a place apart from all the rest.
The profusion of his scenic settings answers to the abundance of his personages. The backgrounds are painted with an ample brush, and the lavishness of details breathers a kind of exhilaration. Description, with Dickens, is more than a means; very often it is an end in itslef. It contributes to the general effect, but with such varied and powerful resources at its command that it subordinates the other elements of the narrative to itself. Thus the novel tends to become all evocative and imagination, the instrument of realism, carries the search for intense truth right to the domain of purely lyrical vision. The writer's senses are quick and keen; nature, the aspects of concrete life, the picturesqueness of things, eagerly absorbed, are transferred to his work in facile patches, not so much highly coloured as vibrating, astir with a nervous quiver of each contour. The material universe appears as made up of broken lines, pronounced gestures, and rapid motions. Supremely suggestive, this art has its limitation in a certain instability, a kind of flickering exaggeration. The rhythm in the succession of images, with Dickens, often shows some slight morbidness.
In his calmer and less feverish spells of work, this gift of infusing with life all that appeals to the senses has the happiest results. He calls up before our eyes scene after scene of a truth made striking, and which yet our feeling of normal life is willing to accept: so accurately is the individual character of things thrown into relief, and so much realistic flavour is mixed up with the lecquence, the moving poetry, or the fanciful drollery, which are the main objevct and indeed the soul of the picture.
The reason is that the language which has to express both those emotions and those images is naturally rife with them. Dickens is a great writer by virtue of the spontaneity of his verve, and this with a minimum of art. His vocabulary has superabundant wealth; it wells up naturally and easily; all the inherent genius of the English race for concrete perception goes to nourish it. It carries with it, and turns to use, the contents of other veins of speech—learned words, technical terms; but the main inexhaustible stream is drawn from the fund of a racy, national, in no way particularized experience. The refining process of culture is less perceptible here than in the works of many other writers. Dickens, like Carlyle, has his touches of vulgarity—hardly perceptible, at once forgotten under the spell of his delicately generous heart. The highest quality of his style is its movement: a movement which is at times strained and difficult to follow, but, in its uninterrupted onward flow, carries on the narration or dialogue without any fear of stagnating inertia. In certain respects the conversations in Dickens's novels are unequalled; the most familiar tones, those of arteless comedy or of expressive self-revelation, have in the mouths of his characters a frankness, and appropriateness reaching to perfection. On the other hand, when the situation tends to be artificial, and the verve less spontaneous, an unreal note is immediately perceptible in the dialogue. For the latter has no value in itself; Dickens does not seek to be objective by sistem and rule; those among his personages who are replete with life have a voice of their own, just as they have an individual physiognomy; the others speak in a somewhat artificial tone, which sounds like a thinly veiled echo of the author's own voice.
No analysis can grasp the essential originality of such a work; its power of persuasion, which sweeps away our reserves, makes us forgive all the faults of too insistent a method, of a sentimental search for pathos, of an excessive striving after comic effects. Each of these weaknesses is compensated by merits of greater importance. Everything considered, it is due to his talent of sympathy, to his sense of the pitiful tragedy of daily life, and to a rich vein of inventive comedy, that Dickens redeems all his blemishes, and keeps his place in the front rank. The Christmas Carol is a pretty good example both of his faults and of his charm; few have read it without feeling at times annoyed, and much more often won over to the writer's will.
This art has a deep human quality. As its chief instruments are tears and laughter, and above all the poignancy and flavour of their fusion, Dickens is a prominent figure in the lineage of humorists. His humour, that is to say, the temperament of his reaction to the alternate aspects of life, is rich because it is formed of intense elements, his sensibility being keenly alive to the moving significance as well as to the odd nature of things. But this alone would not constitute humour, if it did not contain a principle of self-control, the faculty to dominate and to mix, according to the preferences of an intuitive art, the succesive compelementary impulses of his being. As a humorist, Dickens is amenable to discipline, to a psychological duality, one side of his mind watching the other. It is due to the presence of this salutary element that his art, threatened in other respects with a too definite Romanticism, acquires restraint, dignity, and the complexity of manifold planes, which, otherwise, it might have lacked.
Among the English novelists, Dickens is neither the most consummate artist, nor the finest psychologist, nor the most accomplished realist, nor the most seductive of tale writers; but he is probably the most national, the most typical, and the greatest of them all.
In his own sphere there is none in his time who can approach him. The novel of social inspiration, however, attracts the talents of original writers: from 1840 to 1850 this kind engrosses most of the vitality of English fiction.
(b). Disraeli, Mrs. Gaskell, Kingsley, the Brontës.— (...).
Notes
(1). Charles Dickens, born at Portsmouth in 1812, the son of a small naval functionary, spent his early years in Kent and received an incomplete education; in London, where his father had been imprisoned for debts, he was employed in a blacking warehouse. After this period of struggle he passed some time in a private school, and went into a solicitor's office, then worked for various newspapers in the capacity of Parliamentary reporter or provincial correspondent. In 1833 he began his pen pictures of life with Sketches by Boz (published in volume form, 1836). The demand of a publisher for the text of a humorous collection of stories, to which illustrations were to be supplied, resulted in the series of The Pickwick Papers (published 1836-7). Their success was tremendous and placed him in the front rank of writers. He then published in monthly instalments Oliver Twist (1837-8), Nicholas Nickleby (1838-9), The Old Curiosity Shop, Barnaby Rudge (1840-41). A voyage to the United States supplied him with American Notes (1842), and also inspired his Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-4). In 1843-8 appeared the Christmas Books (A Christmas Carol, etc.); then Dombey and Son (1847-8). David Copperfield (1849-50), Bleak House (1852-3), Hard Times (1854), Little Dorrit (1857-8), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Great Expectations (1860-1), Our Mutual Friend (1864). He died in June 1870, leaving the incomplete novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870). He had given many public readings in England and in America (1858-68); edited periodicals (Household Words, All the Year Round); written for the stage; published Pictures from Italy (146), A Child's History of England (1852-4), etc. Works, Gadshill ed., 1897, etc.; Bibliographical ed., 1902; Imperial ed., 2903, etc. Letters, 3 vols., 1880-1. See the critical biographies by Forster (1872-4); Ward (English Men of Letters), 1882; Marzials (Great Writers), 1887; P. Fitzgerald, 1905; Chesterton, 1906; Langton, 1894; Gissing (Charles Dickens, a Critical Study), 1898; Cazamian (Roman social en Angleterre), 1903; Munro (Dickens et Daudet), 1908; Barlow (Genius of Dickens), 1909; W. Dibelius (Charles Dickens), Leipzig, 1922; Delattre (Les Cent Chefs-d'œuvre étrangers), idem (Dickens et la France), 1927.
(2). He denounced the new Poor Law and the workhouse system; the rigours of the penal code as of the penitentiary system; the slowness of justice; the neglect of children; the carelessnesss and cruelty of aa great number of private-school masters; the harsh laws for the protection of game; the bad state of sanitation in the poorer quarters of cities; the parallel excesses of the workers' unions and of the egoism of employers; the economic doctrine of laissez-faire and the social indifference which had been set up as a principle, etc.
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