Dickens the Novelist

by F. R. Leavis

  Dickens couldn’t have put it in just those terms, but the way in which his vision of the Horse-riders insists on their gracious vitality implies that reaction.

  Here an objection may be anticipated – as a way of making a point. Coketown, like Gradgrind and Bounderby, is real enough; but it can’t be contended that the Horse-riding is real in the same sense. There would have been some athletic skill and perhaps some bodily grace among the people of a Victorian travelling circus, but surely so much squalor, grossness and vulgarity that we must find Dickens’s symbolism sentimentally false? And ‘there was a remarkable gentleness and childishness about these people, a special inaptitude for any kind of sharp practice’ – that, surely, is going ludicrously too far?

  If Dickens, intent on an emotional effect, or drunk with moral enthusiasm, had been deceiving himself (it couldn’t have been innocently) about the nature of the actuality, he would then indeed have been guilty of sentimental falsity, and the adverse criticism would have held. But the Horse-riding presents no such case. The virtues and qualities that Dickens prizes do indeed exist, and it is necessary for his critique of Utilitarianism and industrialism, and for (what is the same thing) his creative purpose, to evoke them vividly. The book can’t, in my judgement, be fairly charged with giving a misleading representation of human nature. And it would plainly not be intelligent criticism to suggest that anyone could be misled about the nature of circuses by Hard Times. The critical question is merely one of tact: was it well-judged of Dickens to try to do that – which had to be done somehow – with a travelling circus?

  Or, rather, the question is: by what means has he succeeded? For the success is complete. It is conditioned partly by the fact that, from the opening chapters, we have been tuned for the reception of a highly conventional art – though it is a tuning that has no narrowly limiting effect. To describe at all cogently the means by which this responsiveness is set up would take a good deal of ‘practical criticism’ analysis – analysis that would reveal an extraordinary flexibility in the art of Hard Times. This can be seen very obviously in the dialogue. Some passages might come from an ordinary novel. Others have the ironic pointedness of the school-room scene in so insistent a form that we might be reading a work as stylized as Jonsonian comedy: Gradgrind’s final exchange with Bitzer (quoted below) is a supreme instance. Others again are ‘literary’, like the conversation between Gradgrind and Louisa on her flight home for refuge from Mr James Harthouse’s attentions.

  To the question how the reconciling is done – there is much more diversity in Hard Times than these references to dialogue suggest – the answer can be given by pointing to the astonishing and irresistible richness of life that characterizes the book everywhere. It meets us everywhere, unstrained and natural, in the prose. Out of such prose a great variety of presentations can arise congenially with equal vividness. There they are, unquestionably ‘real’. It goes back to an extraordinary energy of perception and registration in Dickens. ‘When people say that Dickens exaggerates’, says Santayana, ‘it seems to me that they can have no eyes and no ears. They probably only have notions of what things and people are; they accept them conventionally, at their diplomatic value.’ Settling down as we read to an implicit recognition of this truth, we don’t readily and confidently apply any criterion we suppose ourselves to hold for distinguishing varieties of relation between what Dickens gives us and a normal ‘real’. His flexibility is that of a richly poetic art of the world. He doesn’t write ‘poetic prose’; he writes with a poetic force of evocation, registering with the responsiveness of a genius of verbal expression what he so sharply sees and feels. In fact, by texture, imaginative mode, symbolic method, and the resulting concentration, Hard Times affects us as belonging with formally poetic works.

  There is, however, more to be said about the success that attends Dickens’s symbolic intention in the Horse-riding; there is an essential quality of his genius to be emphasized. There is no Hamlet in him, and he is quite unlike T. S. Eliot.

  The red-eyed scavengers are creeping

  From Kentish Town and Golders Green

  – there is nothing of that in Dickens’s reaction to life. He observes with gusto the humanness of humanity as exhibited in the urban (and suburban) scene. When he sees, as he sees so readily, the common manifestations of human kindness, and the essential virtues, asserting themselves in the midst of ugliness, squalor and banality, his warmly sympathetic response has no disgust to overcome. There is no suggestion, for instance, of recoil – or of distance-keeping – from the game-eyed, brandy-soaked, flabby-surfaced Mr Sleary, who is successfully made to figure for us a humane, anti-Utilitarian positive. This is not sentimentality in Dickens, but genius, and a genius that should be found peculiarly worth attention in an age when, as D. H. Lawrence (with, as I remember, Wyndham Lewis immediately in view) says, ‘My God! they stink’ tends to be an insuperable and final reaction.

  Sentimentality, as everyone knows, is to be found in Dickens’s œuvre. We have it in Hard Times (though not to any seriously damaging effect) in Stephen Blackpool, the good, victimized working-man, whose perfect patience under infliction we are expected to find supremely edifying and irresistibly touching as the agonies are piled on for his martyrdom. But Sissy Jupe is another matter. A general description of her part in the fable might suggest the worst, but actually she has nothing in common with Little Nell: she shares in the strength of the Horse-riding. She is wholly convincing in the function Dickens assigns to her. The working of her influence in the Utilitarian home is conveyed with a fine tact, and we do really feel her as a growing potency. Dickens can even, with sufficient success, give her the stage for a victorious tête-à-tête with the well-bred and languid elegant, Mr James Harthouse, in which she tells him that his duty is to leave Coketown and cease troubling Louisa with his attentions:

  She was not afraid of him, or in any way disconcerted; she seemed to have her mind entirely preoccupied with the occasion of her visit, and to have substituted that consideration for herself.

  The victory of disinterestedness is convincing enough as one reads.

  At the opening of the book Sissy establishes the essential distinction between Gradgrind and Bounderby. Gradgrind, by taking her home, however ungraciously, shows himself capable of humane feeling, however unacknowledged. We are reminded, in the previous school-room scene, of the Jonsonian affinities of Dickens’s art, and Bounderby turns out to be consistently a Jonsonian character in the sense that he is incapable of change. He remains the blustering egotist and braggart, and responds in character to the collapse of his marriage:

  ‘I’ll give you to understand, in reply to that, that there unquestionably is an incompatibility of the first magnitude – to be summed up in this – that your daughter don’t properly know her husband’s merits, and is not impressed with such a sense as would become her, by George! of the honour of his alliance. That’s plain speaking, I hope.’

  He remains Jonsonianly consistent in his last testament and death. But Gradgrind, in the nature of the fable, has to experience the confutation of his philosophy, and to be capable of the change involved in admitting that life has proved him wrong. (Dickens’s art in Hard Times differs from Ben Jonson’s not in being inconsistent, but in being so very much more flexible and inclusive – a point that seemed to be worth making because the relation between Dickens and Jonson has been stressed of late, and I have known unfair conclusions to be drawn from the comparison, notably in respect of Hard Times.)

  The confutation of Utilitarianism by life is conducted with great subtlety. That the conditions for it are there in Mr Gradgrind he betrays by his initial kindness, ungenial enough, but properly rebuked by Bounderby, to Sissy. ‘Mr Gradgrind’, we are told, ‘though hard enough, was by no means so rough a man as Mr Bounderby. His character was not unkind, all things considered; it might have been very kind indeed if only he had made some mistake in the arithmetic that balanced it years ago.’ The inadequacy of the calculus is
starkly exposed when he brings it to bear on the problem of marriage in the consummate scene with his eldest daughter:

  He waited, as if he would have been glad that she said something. But she said never a word.

  ‘Louisa, my dear, you are the subject of a proposal of marriage that has been made to me.’

  Again he waited, and again she answered not one word. This so far surprised him as to induce him gently to repeat, ‘A proposal of marriage, my dear.’ To which she returned, without any visible emotion whatever:

  ‘I hear you, father. I am attending, I assure you.’

  ‘Well!’ said Mr Gradgrind, breaking into a smile, after being for the moment at a loss, ‘you are even more dispassionate than I expected, Louisa. Or, perhaps, you are not unprepared for the announcement I have it in charge to make?’

  ‘I cannot say that, father, until I hear it. Prepared or unprepared, I wish to hear it all from you. I wish to hear you state it to me, father.’

  Strange to relate, Mr Gradgrind was not so collected at this moment as his daughter was. He took a paper knife in his hand, turned it over, laid it down, took it up again, and even then had to look along the blade of it, considering how to go on.

  ‘What you say, my dear Louisa, is perfectly reasonable. I have undertaken, then, to let you know that – in short, that Mr Bounderby…’

  His embarrassment – by his own avowal – is caused by the perfect rationality with which she receives his overture. He is still more disconcerted when, with a completely dispassionate matter-of-fact-ness that does credit to his régime, she gives him the opportunity to state in plain terms precisely what marriage should mean for the young Houyhnhnm:

  Silence between them. The deadly statistical clock very hollow. The distant smoke very black and heavy.

  ‘Father,’ said Louisa, ‘do you think I love Mr Bounderby?’

  Mr Gradgrind was extremely discomfited by this unexpected question. ‘Well, my child,’ he returned, ‘I – really – cannot take upon myself to say.’

  ‘Father,’ pursued Louisa in exactly the same voice as before, ‘do you ask me to love Mr Bounderby?’

  ‘My dear Louisa, no. I ask nothing.’

  ‘Father,’ she still pursued, ‘does Mr Bounderby ask me to love him?’

  ‘Really, my dear,’ said Mr Gradgrind, ‘it is difficult to answer your question –’

  ‘Difficult to answer it, Yes or No, father?’

  ‘Certainly, my dear. Because’ – here was something to demonstate, and to set him up again – ‘because the reply depends so materially, Louisa, on the sense in which we use the expression. Now, Mr Bounderby does not do you the injustice, and does not do himself the injustice, of pretending to anything fanciful, fantastic, or (I am using synonymous terms) sentimental. Mr Bounderby would have seen you grow up under his eye to very little purpose, if he could so far forget what is due to your good sense, not to say to his, as to address you from such ground. Therefore, perhaps, the expression itself – I merely suggest this to you, my dear – may be a little misplaced.’

  ‘What would you advise me to use in its stead, father?’

  ‘Why, my dear Louisa,’ said Mr Gradgrind, completely recovered by this time. ‘I would advise you (since you ask me) to consider the question, as you have been accustomed to consider every other question, simply as one of tangible Fact. The ignorant and the giddy may embarrass such subjects with irrelevant fancies, and other absurdities that have no existence, properly viewed – really no existence – but it is no compliment to say that you know better. Now, what are the Facts of this case? You are, we will say in round numbers, twenty years of age; Mr Bounderby is, we will say in round numbers, fifty. There is some disparity in your respective years, but …’

  – And at this point Mr Gradgrind seizes the chance for a happy escape into statistics. But Louisa brings him firmly back:

  ‘What do you recommend, father?’ asked Louisa, her reserved composure not in the least affected by these gratifying results, ‘that I should substitute for the term I used just now? For the misplaced expression?’

  ‘Louisa,’ returned her father, ‘it appears to me that nothing can be plainer. Confining yourself rigidly to Fact, the question of Fact you state to yourself is: Does Mr Bounderby ask me to marry him? Yes, he does. The sole remaining question then is: Shall I marry him? I think nothing can be plainer than that.’

  ‘Shall I marry him?’ repeated Louisa with great deliberation.

  ‘Precisely.’

  It is a triumph of ironic art. No logical analysis could dispose of the philosophy of fact and calculus with such neat finality. As the issues are reduced to algebraic formulation they are patently emptied of all real meaning. The instinct-free rationality of the emotionless Houyhnhnm is a void. Louisa proceeds to try and make him understand that she is a living creature and therefore no Houyhnhnm, but in vain (‘to see it, he must have overleaped at a bound the artificial barriers he had for many years been erecting between himself and all those subtle essences of humanity which will elude the utmost cunning of algebra, until the last trumpet ever to be sounded will blow even algebra to wreck’).

  Removing her eyes from him, she sat so long looking silently towards the town, that he said at length: ‘Are you consulting the chimneys of the Coketown works, Louisa?’

  ‘There seems to be nothing there but languid and monotonous smoke. Yet, when the night comes, Fire bursts out, father!’ she answered, turning quickly.

  ‘Of course I know that, Louisa. I do not see the application of the remark.’ To do him justice, he did not at all.

  She passed it away with a slight motion of her hand, and concentrating her attention upon him again, said, ‘Father, I have often thought that life is very short.’ – This was so distinctly one of his subjects that he interposed:

  ‘It is short, no doubt, my dear. Still, the average duration of human life is proved to have increased of late years. The calculations of various life assurance and annuity offices, among other figures which cannot go wrong, have established the fact.’

  ‘I speak of my own life, father.’

  ‘Oh, indeed! Still,’ said Mr Gradgrind, ‘I need not point out to you, Louisa, that it is governed by the laws which govern lives in the aggregate.’

  ‘While it lasts, I would wish to do the little I can, and the little I am fit for. What does it matter?’

  Mr Gradgrind seemed rather at a loss to understand the last four words; replying, ‘How, matter? What matter, my dear?’

  ‘Mr Bounderby,’ she went on in a steady, straight way, without regarding this, ‘asks me to marry him. The question I have to ask myself is, shall I marry him? That is so, father, is it not? You have told me so, father. Have you not?’

  ‘Certainly, my dear?’

  ‘Let it be so.’

  The psychology of Louisa’s development and of her brother Tom’s is sound. Having no outlet for her emotional life except in her love for her brother, she lives for him, and marries Bounderby – under pressure from Tom – for Tom’s sake (‘What does it matter?’). Thus, by the constrictions and starvations of the Gradgrind régime, are natural affection and capacity for disinterested devotion turned to ill. As for Tom, the régime has made of him a bored and sullen whelp, and ‘he was becoming that not unprecedented triumph of calculation which is usually at work on number one’ – the Utilitarian philosophy has done that for him. He declares that when he goes to live with Bounderby as having a post in the bank, ‘he’ll have his revenge’. – ‘I mean, I’ll enjoy myself a little, and go about and see something and hear something. I’ll recompense myself for the way in which I’ve been brought up.’ His descent into debt and bank-robbery is natural. And it is natural that Louisa, having sacrificed herself for this unrepaying object of affection, should be found not altogether unresponsive when Mr James Harthouse, having sized up the situation, pursues his opportunity with well-bred and calculating tact. His apologia for genteel cynicism is a shrewd thrust at the Gradgrind p
hilosophy:

  ‘The only difference between us and the professors of virtue or benevolence, or philanthropy – never mind the name – is, that we know it is all meaningless, and say so; while they know it equally, and will never say so.’

  Why should she be shocked or warned by the reiteration? It was not so unlike her father’s principles, and her early training, that it need startle her.

  When, fleeing from temptation, she arrives back at her father’s house, tells him her plight, and, crying, ‘All I know is, your philosophy and your teaching will not save me’, collapses, he sees ‘the pride of his heart and the triumph of his system lying an insensible heap at his feet’. The fallacy now calamitously demonstrated can be seen focused in that ‘pride’, which brings together in an illusory oneness the pride of his system and his love for his child. What that love is Gradgrind now knows, and he knows that it matters to him more than the system, which is thus confuted (the educational failure as such being a lesser matter). There is nothing sentimental here; the demonstration is impressive, because we are convinced of the love, and because Gradgrind has been made to exist for us as a man who has ‘meant to do right’: