Dickens the Novelist

by F. R. Leavis

  This surely gives us something to think about. It is not lessened but made clearer by the remark I notice Gorky recorded that Tolstoy made to him in his old age, that ‘On the whole Dickens was a sentimental, loquacious and not very clever writer, but he knew how to construct a novel a no one else did’ (Reminiscences of Tolstoy by Maxim Gorky). Tolstoy was evidently not a blind worshipper of Dickens, he saw his faults and weaknesses just as Henry James did, but to Tolstoy these seemed negligible (and ‘clever’ may well convey a contempt for novelistic arts as such) – negligible compared with what Dickens had to offer him as a great genius whose insights and preoccupations inspired his own and who was a master of the art of composition, for this is what he must have meant by constructing a novel. And as we now, unlike Henry James, see that Tolstoy himself was the creator of miracles of construction and meaningfu complexity, a master of the art of the novel whose opinion of a novelist’s achievement must be respected, we must take it that Tolstoy’s consistently high valuation of David Copperfield must mean that Dickens’s intentions and achievements there, in some fundamental way (below the superficial level of the social, linguistic, economic, religious and historical differences in the two novelists’ habitats), were perceived by Tolstoy to have an immediate relevance to his own creative problems, in helping him to formulate what he, through Dickens’s eyes, saw as the essential difficulties of living that pressed on him.6 Now if Dickens in Copperfield were merely providing the kind of entertaining fiction his contemporaries, as we’ve seen, saw it as being, indeed, if Dickens were merely (or at all) the kind of novelist assumed by H. House7 or were Garis’s Dickens (the compulsively theatrical and factitious entertainer) or Dabney’s victim of the Victorian relation between Love and Property, then he could not have been of use to Tolstoy at all, still less held by Tolstoy for over half a century in the highest esteem. Nor if Edmund Wilson’s view of his novel was just: ‘Copperfield is not one of Dickens’s deepest books; it is something in the nature of a holiday’ (The Wound and the Bow).

  Yet what a novelist thinks of another novelist is best deduced not from what he says critically but from what he says creatively, in the use he makes of the other’s art, and it is in War and Peace and Anna Karenina that we must look for the proofs of what David Copperfield meant to Tolstoy.

  Tolstoy, who, as we’ve seen, actually translated his pre-adult experiences into the forms of David Copperfield’s in writing his own autobiography, must have therefore felt the power and essential truth of its representative selection of experience as a child’s, boy’s and youth’s in 19th-century society, or in the parts of that common to Dickens’s England and Tolstoy’s Russia. Forster, who was by no means so stupid as he often seems to be in his criticism of Dickens’s novels, was shrewd enough to note that one of the reasons for the great popularity of Copperfield was that ‘it can hardly have had a reader, man or lad, who did not discover that he was something of a Copperfield himself’, thus bearing witness to its relevance for Englishmen of that age. The parts of Tolstoy’s first major fiction, War and Peace, which he wrote nearly twenty years after first reading Copperfield, that struck me as so interestingly like parts of Copperfield that I started looking for extra-fictional evidence of Tolstoy’s interest in this novel, with what astonishing results and confirmation I have described – these parts, though not integrated into War and Peace nor really prepared and accounted for there, show that Tolstoy had grasped the importance of Dickens’s theme in Copperfield and the nature of Dickens’s use of symbolic action and dialogue in isolating for examination psychological truths of radical importance to the young man of his own time even, it appears, in Russia too. Before I give my account of what I take to be Dickens’s theme and the nature and technical means of his presentation of it, I had better distinguish the parts of War and Peace I have in mind. To begin with, consider the married life of Prince Andrew which Tolstoy chose to open the novel with so abruptly, though we know he took immense trouble with this and that Prince Andrew went through numerous changes of character and appearance before becoming the protagonist he is. The stress this episode gets seems out of proportion to its relevance to the plot of the novel, though after studying its origin in Copperfield I think we can understand why for Tolstoy it had this importance.

  Tolstoy’s curtain rises on a drawing-room in the highest society where Lisa, beautiful, gay and childlike, but already married long enough to be visibly pregnant, is the centre of admiration, engaged on an empty-headed flirtatious conversation with the gentlemen. Her husband alone is unresponsive to her charm, treating her with a cold and insulting politeness that we soon see covers the exasperation of a clever and sensitive man who finds he has fallen in love with and married a silly trivial creature; she is however a loving child, who has enough feeling to sense that her relation with her husband has gone wrong and to complain that his present indifference (to her unaccountable) is cruel. He then tells his friend Pierre that he has nothing to accuse his wife of except that he is disappointed with marriage, even though he had chosen as wife a girl who is the type approved by his society. He has decided to solve his matrimonial difficulties by leaving his wife to bear their child at his father’s country home and going off to the war, in the likelihood of being killed. He takes her there and his sister Mary, a tender-hearted and spiritually-minded girl, tries to make the best of what she sees as a wrong to poor little Lisa, by persuading her brother to look at his wife in a more compassionate light:

  ‘She was so tired that she has fallen asleep on the sofa in my room. Oh, Andrew! What a treasure of a wife you have,’ said she, seating herself on the sofa opposite her brother. ‘She is quite a child: such a dear, merry child. I have grown so fond of her!’

  Prince Andrew was silent, but the princess noticed the ironical and contemptuous look that showed itself on his face.

  ‘One should be indulgent to little weaknesses; who is without them, Andrew? Don’t forget that she was educated and brought up in society. Besides, her position now is not a rosy one. We should enter into every one’s situation. Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner. Think what it means to her, poor thing, after what she has been used to, to be parted from her husband and to remain alone in the country, in her condition! It is very hard.’

  Prince Andrew smiled as he looked at his sister, as we smile at those we think we thoroughly understand.

  As his sister tells him, ‘You are good in every way, Andrew, but there is a kind of intellectual pride in you, and that is a great sin’.

  She tries again:

  ‘As I was saying to you, Andrew, be kind and generous as you always were. Don’t judge Lisa harshly,’ she began. ‘She is so sweet, so kind, and her position now is a very trying one.’

  ‘I do not think I have blamed my wife to you, Masha, or complained of her. Why do you say all this to me?’

  Red patches appeared on Princess Mary’s face and she was silent, as if she felt guilty …

  ‘Know this, Masha: that there is nothing I can reproach my wife with; I have not reproached and never shall reproach her, and I cannot reproach myself with anything in regard to her … But if you want to know the truth, if you want to know whether I am happy? No! Whether she is? No! But why this is so, I don’t know.’

  But his father, the eccentric Prince Nicholas, says to him, by way of showing his sympathy:

  ‘It’s a bad look-out, eh?’

  ‘What is, father?’

  ‘The wife!’ said the old prince, shortly and significantly.

  ‘I don’t understand!’ said Prince Andrew.

  ‘Yes, it can’t be helped, lad,’ said the prince. ‘They’re all alike; one can’t unmarry. Don’t be afraid! I’ll tell no one, but you know it yourself.’

  The son sighed, thus admitting that his father had understood him.

  Neither father nor son seems to see any other attitude to Lisa as possible, but the son is to learn more about himself when, seriously wounded on the battlefield, he has some kind of mystical exp
erience that softens what his sister has called his ‘intellectual pride’. He now realizes ‘the unimportance of everything I understand and the greatness of something incomprehensible but most important’, so that he returns able to feel sorry for his wife as well as himself, and contrite towards her. We return in advance of him to the household where false news of Andrew’s death has been received just as Lisa is expecting the birth, but though when he comes home at last he is anxious to show her he has had a change of heart towards her (‘“My darling!” he said – a word he had never used to her before. “God is merciful …”’) she is too far gone in labour ever to recognize him before she dies.

  She lay dead in the same position he had seen her in five minutes before, and despite the fixity of the eyes and the pallor of the cheeks, the same expression was on her charming, childlike face. ‘I love you all, and never did any one any harm; and what have you done to me?’ – said her lovely pathetic dead face … And there in the coffin was the same face, though with closed eyes. ‘Ah, what have you done to me?’ it still seemed to say, and Prince Andrew felt that something gave way in his soul; that he was guilty of a sin he could neither remedy nor forget. He could not weep.

  Later he puts up a white marble statue of an angel over his wife’s tomb and the angel’s short upper lip seems raised in the childlike smile that characterized his wife; in consequence he feels the angel’s expression is one of mild reproach like that he saw on her dying and then her dead face: ‘Oh, why have you done this to me?’ Of course this expresses his sense of guilt towards her, now inexpugnable.

  Yet in spite of the brilliant and moving delineation of a typical situation, which is of course that of David and Dora in Copperfield translated into Russian terms, with Princess Mary as Agnes, it has no before or after in War and Peace; it merely fixes a subject that Tolstoy, it seems to me, had been struck with in making the acquaintance of a Dickens masterpiece. It has no apparent bearing on Andrew’s subsequent second love for Natasha, though I suppose it may be seen as a trailer for the many-stranded subject of love and marriage and the achievement of happiness that determines the ‘Peace’ section of the novel and which is also the subject-matter and theme of David Copperfield. But it inevitably raises questions in the reader’s mind that Tolstoy has not provided for, such as: How comes it that so intelligent and sophisticated a man as Andrew should accept a Lisa, who is merely the incarnation of a frivolous society’s ideal, as suitable to pass his life with, since he despises the drawing-room world that is her only existence? Neither his father nor his sister both of whom he loves and respects, has any difficulty in seeing what Lisa is. We can’t on Tolstoy’s showing accept Andrew’s marriage as plausible,8 though the detailing of his disenchantment and unhappiness is; and the indications of Andrew’s moral growth and the creation in him of a sense of guilt, though minimal, are remarkable imaginative feats, proofs of Tolstoy’s genius for the novel. We can’t but wonder whether, in these circumstances if Lisa had survived, Andrew’s remorse would have withstood the trials of her social habits and her conversation for long and whether his new-found spirituality would have been able to survive prolonged contact with her triviality and egotism. While we are bound to feel that Tolstoy’s handling of Dickens’s subject is wholly serious and so really painful, we also perceive, I hope, that Tolstoy has not such an unquestionable advantage over Dickens as critics generally assume (e.g. ‘Dickens was not a Tolstoy: it was quite beyond his range to show in fiction a great man’s struggles towards new moral forms’ – H. House, The Dickens World). There is something to be said, surely, for Dickens’s lighter hand which with humour relieving, and at the same time heightening, the dilemma, allows shades of feeling and complexities of meaning and subtleties of attitude that have no equivalent in the tragic affair of Prince Andrew’s marriage, where the situation is quite barely stated instead of, as in Copperfield, comprehended in its whole social and psychological context and implications. For Dickens does not leave us rebellious because of unanswered or rather unanswerable questions, like Tolstoy in his rendering of the same theme, questions which we can’t help positing. We don’t need to know that Dickens wrote during the composition of Copperfield: ‘I feel the story to its minutest point.’ This is evident from the start, not only in the imaginative understanding of how a child feels9 and thinks and acquires ideas – for instance, in David’s confused feelings about his unknown father outside in his grave shown in his immediate fear, on being told he has a new father, that the dead man has come out of it, or his wondering whether the sundial misses the sun – and of the next stage when he has left behind the infant’s egocentric universe and become self-conscious in his awareness of the community he is part of, so that he inevitably imagines how he appears to others in his (genuine) grief for his mother’s death and how it affects his status.10 No, it is most evident in the construction which required Dickens, as he had realized, to start before David’s birth with establishing the nature of his parents’ relation to each other in a typical Victorian marriage, and where the presence of Miss Trotwood is necessary not, as it is now fashionable to assert, as the bad fairy at the christening, but in order that she may provide the astringent comment of an unromantic adult wisdom on those aspects of the Copperfield parents’ marriage which need such exposure, since they are to form the unborn child’s attitudes in important matters.

  II

  The masterly construction of Copperfield is the more surprising when one reflects that its only predecessor as an integrally conceived novel was Dombey, and that that broke down, changing direction and mode, with the death of little Paul, losing its previous steady focus on the theme. Copperfield is only a year later but what an advance it shows in planning, complexity of conception and consistency from the first chapter right through to the schematic ending! (leaving out the last chapter, which provides a pantomime transformation scene – a concession to the reading-public which Dickens never again makes. There are no happy endings after Copperfield).11

  Unlike Tolstoy in War and Peace Dickens has pondered his theme so as to provide an answer for the question raised by the why of Prince Andrew’s marriage, and which Tolstoy avoids by opening with it as a fait accompli. David is not a Prince Andrew who should have known better. He is an innocent, by the circumstances of his childhood and upbringing, simply passive in being imprinted with the age’s ‘best’ ideals of love, marriage, conduct of life and what is desirable in a woman. He is deliberately chosen to be representative, in order to examine current ideas; we should note that he is otherwise colourless, and impossible to visualize physically in any respect – seeing how gifted Dickens is at communicating personal characteristics and how naturally this comes to him, only concentration on this conception of his protagonist could have stopped Dickens from providing David with a full, vivid individuality (the same is true of Pip in Great Expectations, for the same reason). It follows that David’s relation to Dickens is nothing like what it has generally been alleged to be.12 I have already quoted Forster’s witness to the universality of Copperfield in his age, and the passage in his life of Dickens that ends thus should have been enough to warn critics off confusing a novel written in autobiographical form with an autobiography or, as Mr Cockshut calls it, a fake autobiography. Forster wrote:

  ‘Too much has been assumed, from those revelations [of facts of Dickens’s experience] of a full identity of Dickens with his hero, and of a supposed intention that his own character as well as parts of his career should be expressed in the narrative. It is right to warn the reader as to this … it would be the greatest mistake to imagine anything like a complete identity of the fictitious novelist with the real one, beyond the Hungerford scenes; or to suppose that the youth, who then received his first harsh schooling in life, came out of it as little harmed or hardened as David did … The character of the hero of the novel finds indeed his right place in the story he is supposed to tell, rather by unlikeness than by likeness to Dickens, even where intentional resemblances might seem
to be prominent.