by F. R. Leavis
But the best way of illustrating the variety of Bleak House and its progress towards a finer art is by juxtaposing the old and the new prose techniques which exist in it side by side, as here:
Into a beastly scrap of ground which a Turk would reject as a savage abomination, and a Caffre would shudder at, they bring our dear brother here departed, to receive Christian burial.
With houses looking on, on every side, save where a reeking little tunnel of a court gives access to the iron gate – with every villainy of life in action close on death, and every poisonous element of death in action close on life – here, they lower our dear brother down a foot or two: here, sow him in corruption, to be raised in corruption: an avenging ghost at many a sick bedside: a shameful testimony to future ages, how civilization and barbarism walked this boastful island together.
Come night, come darkness, for you cannot come too soon, or stay too long, by such a place as this! Come straggling lights into the windows of the ugly houses; and you who do iniquity therein, do it at least with this dread scene shut out! Come, flame of gas, burning so sullenly above the iron gate, on which the poisoned air deposits its witch-ointment slimy to the touch! It is well that you should call to every passer-by, ‘Look here!’
‘He was put there,’ says Jo, holding to the bars and looking in.
‘Where? O, what a scene of horrors!’
‘There!’ says Jo, pointing. ‘Over yinder. Among them piles of bones, and close to that there kitchen winder! They put him wery nigh the top. They was obliged to stamp upon it to git it in. I could unkiver it for you with my broom, if the gate was open. That’s why they locks it, I s’pose,’ giving it a shake. ‘It’s always locked. Look at the rat!’ cries Jo, excited. ‘Hi! Look! There he goes! Into the ground.’
The servant sinks into a corner – into a corner of that hideous archway, with its deadly stains contaminating her dress; and putting out her two hands, and passionately telling him to keep away from her, for he is loathsome to her, so remains for some moments. Jo stands staring, and is still staring when she recovers herself.
‘Is this place of abomination, consecrated ground?’
‘I don’t know nothink of consequential ground,’ says Jo, still staring.
‘Is it blessed?’
‘WHICH?’ says Jo, in the last degree amazed.
‘Is it blessed?’
‘I’m blest if I know,’ says Jo, staring more than ever; ‘but I shouldn’t think it warn’t. Blest?’ repeats Jo, something troubled in his mind. ‘It an’t done it much good if it is. Blest? I should think it was t’othered myself. But I don’t know nothink!’
It will be seen at once that the dialogue between the disguised Lady Dedlock and Jo at the gate of the public burial-ground for paupers makes the laboured irony of the previous description of the funeral unnecessary, since the dialogue effects, by purely novelistic means without intrusive authorial comment, what the rhetorical passage tries to do, but does it much more effectively and economically (besides avoiding an adverse reaction from any who may object to being preached at – though it is true that the Victorians were avid listeners to and purchasers of sermons). Dickens in the course of writing this novel must have come to realize that it is more satisfactory for the novelist to act out rather than to tell, however long he may have held this view in theory, as we know he did. As we can see from the second of my extracts, Dickens could perfectly well dissolve what he wanted to communicate into dialogue and action without any ‘telling’, but he seems unable to trust to that alone, or else, as in the first of my extracts, he cannot control altogether his indignation at some monstrous feature of the life of his time. We may hazard that the reason for the form the first extract takes is the unfortunate influence of Carlyle’s excitable prose on him (as can be seen even more clearly in Tale of Two Cities, where the inspiration is Carlyle’s History of the French Revolution and the only interest the novel has is Dickens’s case-history of Dr Manette); Carlyle’s ideas irresistibly led to Dickens’s employing his tricks of prose rhetoric too. The sad thing is that Dickens without Carlyle, free to create from his own powerful and much more sensitive and lively imagination, is so much better a writer. There is nothing so telling in the earlier passage as the horror achieved by the casual statement: ‘They was obliged to stamp on it to git it in. I could unkiver it for you with my broom, if the gate was open.’ It is Jo’s taking such things for granted – the rat is the only feature of the case that interests him, but not even the rat is shocking to him – that make the horrors really sickening, and this is finally intensified by our realization that the impact of the situation is not only on us but on Lady Dedlock, who is bound to the dead man – ‘it’ – by her former passionate love and by having borne his child, and has proved her abiding concern for him by having had Jo show her all the places connected with his last days, of which this burial-ground is the climax. We note the sense of its all happening in our presence by its being written in the present tense and by Jo’s ‘giving it (the gate) a shake’, and his staring at her unable to understand why she is upset at what is, for him, an everyday matter of course. Even the dreadful irony secured in the first extract by deploying the phrases from the Christian burial-service and showing that they here have a literal truth, is surpassed by the irony in the dialogue that questions its being consecrated ground. The characteristic use in this novel of the Dickensian pun that I have noted is here seen in the play on ‘blessed’: ‘Is it blessed?’ ‘I’m blest if I know’ which underlines Jo’s unblessed state and takes us without a jolt into the bitter humour of ‘It an’t done it much good if it is. Blest? I should think it t’othered myself.’ There is no need for Dickens here to accuse his readers explicitly of tolerating a society which throws the bodies of the poor into such a mockery of consecrated ground and has no more sense of responsibility than to bury corpses under kitchen windows, and we have here intimated the additional irony of a so-called Christian country allowing the children of the poor to be brought up in Jo’s condition of spiritual darkness.
The interest of the first extract is the way it moves in and out of automatic writing, tending towards blank verse21 (Dickens’s greatest weakness and always associated with his vague reaching for what Shakespeare would have done in his place). Thus we get:
Come night, come darkness, for you cannot come too soon
Or stay too long, by such a place as this! …
And you who do iniquity therein,
Do it at least with this dread scene shut out!
Come flame of gas …
and at this point Dickens ceases to write blank verse but instead becomes Shakespearean in a real sense because the gas-jet recalls him to an actual scene where he must have remembered it ‘burning so sullenly’ because of the ‘poisoned air’, and that the metal of the gate felt slimy from the horrible deposits – fumes from the decaying bodies and therefore ‘witch-ointment’ since it was with human grease and extracts from corpses that witches made their ointments. And he sees that the arresting light is a signal to every passerby to stop and witness this outrage, thus calling ‘Look here!.’ The real poetry in Dickens’s prose is always in some detail of a concrete experience which has lodged in and therefore touched off his imagination.
And Bleak House is full of this poetry. Braque said that the quality he valued above all else in art was what he called ‘poésie’, a mysterious quality which an artist achieves ‘when he transcends his talent and exceeds himself’ and which each artist ‘can discover for himself only through his intuitions’. It is in Bleak House, as in Dombey and Son, that we see Dickens taking a great leap forward and consistently transcending his talent, to use Braque’s fine phrase. In Bleak House we are constantly being surprised by signs of this. Krook is described like someone in a Wordsworth poem: ‘His throat, chin and eyebrows were so frosted with white hairs, so gnarled with veins and puckered skin, that he looked from his breast upwards like some old root in a fall of snow.’ Esther watches Charley from Bel
l Yard run back to her work ‘and melt into the city’s strife and sound, like a dewdrop in an ocean’. One could make an anthology. But I would dwell most on the extraordinary feat of showing with such variety and imaginative power Skimpole’s attitudes to everything and every one as wholly aesthetic, without being monotonous or predictable. I have already quoted him on the orphans (on both Jo and ‘the little Coavinses’) and on his logical refusal to feel he should feel gratitude. Dickens doesn’t take the easy line of making Skimpole stupid or gross – no, he is surprisingly intelligent, if to be merely quick, clever, observant and witty is; it’s only feeling that he lacks, though feeling for the Arts and Nature is his stock-in-trade (what he would call sensibility). Of his opposite and adversary Boythorn, the man of principles: ‘“Nature forgot to shade him off a little, I think?” observed Mr Skimpole. “A little too boisterous, like the sea? A little too vehement – like a bull, who has made up his mind to consider every colour scarlet? But I grant a sledge-hammering sort of merit in him!”’ And on the angry Man from Shropshire:
He said, Well, it was really very pleasant to see how things lazily adapted themselves to purposes. Here was this Mr Gridley, a man of robust will, and surprising energy – intellectually speaking, a sort of inharmonious blacksmith – and he could easily imagine that there Gridley was, years ago, wandering about in life for something to expend his superfluous combativeness upon – a sort of Young Love among the thorns – when the Court of Chancery came in his way, and accommodated him with the exact thing he wanted. There they were, matched, ever afterwards! Otherwise he might have been a great general, blowing up all sorts of towns, or he might have been a great politician, dealing in all sorts of parliamentary rhetoric; but, as it was, he and the Court of Chancery had fallen upon each other in the pleasantest way, and nobody was much the worse, and Gridley was, so to speak, from that hour provided for.
On Jo:
‘It seems to me that it would be wiser, as well as in a certain kind of way more respectable, if he showed some misdirected energy that got him into prison. There would be more of an adventurous spirit in it, and consequently more of a certain sort of poetry. I don’t see why our young friend, in his degree, should not seek to invest himself with such poetry as is open to him … and I don’t know but what I should be more interested in our young friend, as an illustration of such a case, than merely as a poor vagabond – which anyone can be.’
What Dickens succeeds in demonstrating is the inhumanity of the aesthetic attitude to life, though Skimpole is allowed all the playfulness, paradoxes and fancifulness that disguise this. Skimpole’s callousness and dialectic are more remarkable than the looking-glass logic of Mr and Mrs Micawber, even. For diverting as Skimpole is, Dickens makes us recognize each time that Skimpole lacks something – that the aesthete’s selfishness is more than the ordinary self-centred man’s, it is a systematic refusal to be involved as a human being, except sentimentally which commits him to nothing and is therefore self-indulgent. Skimpole is really one of Dickens’s monsters and quite the finest – what is Pecksniff’s hypocrisy or Quilp’s malice in comparison, for they are coarse and repetitive whereas Skimpole has inexhaustible resources of sophistry? He is the link between Disraeli’s dandies and the fin-de-siècle aesthetes, and I have often wondered whether Oscar Wilde plagiarized him.
Clough, one of the most intelligent contemporary critics of Victorianism, reviewing ‘Recent English Poetry’, which included Arnold’s first two volumes, complained that whereas such poetry might be claimed to have ‘great literary value’ it was merely academic so that poetry had ceased to matter as a force in the life of his time. Why, he asked, did people prefer Bleak House, as they plainly did, he said: ‘Is it, that to be widely popular, to gain the ear of multitudes, to shake the hearts of men, poetry should deal more than at present it usually does, with general wants, ordinary feelings, the obvious rather than the rare facts of human nature?’ The novelist, Clough argues, deals now with ‘the actual, palpable things with which our everday life is concerned’ and to emulate the novelist poetry ‘must be in all points tempted as we are; exclude nothing, least of all guilt and distress, from its wide fraternization’. ‘The modern novel’, he says, giving as examples Bleak House and Vanity Fair, ‘is preferred to the modern poem, because we do here feel an attempt to include these phenomena which, if we forget on Sunday, we must remember on Monday … The novelist does try to build us a real house to live in; and this common builder, with no notion of orders, is more to our purpose than the student of ancient art who proposes to lodge us under an Ionic portico.’ ‘The true and lawful haunts of the poetic powers’, he says, are ‘no more upon Pindus or Parnassus’ but ‘in the blank and desolate streets, and upon the solitary bridges of the midnight city, where Guilt is, and wild Temptation, and the dire compulsion of what has once been done … there walks the discrowned Apollo, with unstrung lyre.’
That it is Bleak House and Dickens that Clough has in mind is clear from the last sentence. Clough shows himself, like Dickens, refusing to be a Skimpole in his refusal to accept the role of Romantic poet in the new conditions of man’s life in his age and in insisting that the poet, as the novelist has chosen to do, must live in the everyday world and not only ‘include these phenomena’ but see his function as bringing order into it and meaning. And it is very much to Clough’s credit, ‘himself a poet’ and the friend of Mathew Arnold, that he was able to see that the true and best Victorian poetry was written by the novelist, that is, that the novel had in his time superseded the poem as the vehicle of art-speech. In this review Clough was also strongly rebutting Arnold’s Classical-don’s prescription for modern poetry, as described in Arnold’s preface to his Poems of 1853; Arnold himself never realized that the predominance of the novelist was now a fact, and smugly assigned Little Dorrit (and by implication all of Dickens) to the Temple of Philistia.
It has been my object to show that Bleak House disproves both Lewes’s complaint, that ‘Dickens’s sensations never pass into ideas’ and a modern reaction against those Dickens appreciators who have confined themselves to pointing out that Dickens worked through ideas and symbols, a reaction seen in Mr Garis’s charge that Dickens’s ideas are executed in clumsy melodrama or are crudely theatrical performances either mainly or fatally. While the mature Dickens, from Dombey onwards that is, investigates and constates the life of his time through an intelligent apprehension of its social, moral and psychological nature, it is strictly as a novelist, not a philosopher, not a didactic moralist; nor as a mere performer (entertainer even) – to be which implies some degree of deception. Nor, though Dickens’s best novels are schematic, a novelist of the kind academics like to discuss diagrammatically; the systematic world of Thomas Mann’s novels, for instance, is peopled by characters who have minimal characterization of expression, gesture, mode of feeling and apprehension, who talk and argue but hardly ever act, boring shadows – compared to these Dickens’s characters enjoy a rich life of idiom and emotion though still, as in Mann’s novels, each plays a part in a complex whole and stands in relation to a total theme. Moreover each mature Dickens novel is a unique whole and it is an error to suppose – as is sometimes alleged – that any character from one of those could have appeared in a different novel from the one in which it functions – for one thing, the stylization differs, and each novel has its own timbre. No one well read in the non-fictional as well as the fictional literature of the early and mid-nineteenth century can question the truth of Dickens’s understanding of the nature of the age he lived in, particularly in its tendency to produce children and adults of an exceptional kind and in the extraordinary psychological traits, due to its special pressures, they present. Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (published in 1851 with a final volume in 1862) confirms many of Dickens’s insights,22 but a more interesting kind of confirmation is to be found in the biographies of the later nineteenth century, the lives of the children of those formed by the earlier Dickens phase; these c
onfirm the remarkable insight into the deeper truths of life that Dickens, like Lawrence, saw as the material of the novelist.
