by F. R. Leavis
He said it earnestly, and, to do him justice, he had. In gauging fathomless deeps with his little mean excise rod, and in staggering over the universe with his rusty stiff-legged compasses, he had meant to do great things. Within the limits of his short tether he had tumbled about, annihilating the flowers of existence with greater singleness of purpose than many of the blatant personages whose company he kept.
The demonstration still to come, that of which the other ‘triumph of his system’, Tom, is the centre, is sardonic comedy, imagined with great intensity and done with the sure touch of genius. There is the pregnant scene in which Mr Gradgrind, in the deserted ring of a third-rate travelling circus, has to recognize his son in a comic negro servant; and has to recognize that his son owes his escape from Justice to a peculiarly disinterested gratitude – to the opportunity given him to assume such a disguise by the non-Utilitarian Mr Sleary, grateful for Sissy’s sake:
In a preposterous coat, like a beadle’s, with cuffs and flaps exaggerated to an unspeakable extent; in an immense waistcoat, knee breeches, buckled shoes, and a mad cocked-hat; with nothing fitting him and everything of coarse material, moth-eaten, and full of holes; with seams in his black face, where fear and heat had started through the greasy composition daubed all over it; anything so grimly, detestably, ridiculously shameful as the whelp in his comic livery, Mr Gradgrind never could by any other means have believed in, weighable and measurable fact though it was. And one of his model children had come to this!
At first the whelp would not draw any nearer but persisted in remaining up there by himself. Yielding at length, if any concession so sullenly made can be called yielding, to the entreaties of Sissy – for Louisa he disowned altogether – he came down, bench by bench, until he stood in the sawdust, on the verge of the circle, as far as possible, within its limits, from where his father sat.
‘How was this done?’ asked the father.
‘How was what done?’ moodily answered the son.
‘This robbery,’ said the father, raising his voice upon the word.
‘I forced the safe myself overnight, and shut it up ajar before I went away. I had had the key that was found long before. I dropped it that morning, that it might be supposed to have been used. I didn’t take the money all at once, I pretended to put my balance away every night, but I didn’t. Now you know all about it.’
‘If a thunderbolt had fallen on me,’ said the father, ‘it would have shocked me less than this!’
‘I don’t see why,’ grumbled the son. ‘So many people are employed in situations of trust; so many people, out of so many, will be dishonest. I have heard you talk, a hundred times, of its being a law. How can I help laws? You have comforted others with such things, father. Comfort yourself!’
The father buried his face in his hands, and the son stood in his disgraceful grotesqueness, biting straw: his hands, with the black partly worn away inside, looking like the hands of a monkey. The evening was fast closing in; and, from time to time, he turned the whites of his eyes restlessly and impatiently towards his father. They were the only parts of his face that showed any life or expression, the pigment upon it was so thick.
Something of the rich complexity of Dickens’s art may be seen in this passage. No simple formula can take account of the various elements in the whole effect, a sardonictragic in which satire consorts with pathos. The excerpt itself suggests the justification for saying that Hard Times is a poetic work. It suggests that the genius of the writer may fairly be described as that of a poetic dramatist, and that, in our preconceptions about ‘the novel’, we may miss, within the field of fictional prose, possibilities of concentration and flexibility in the interpretation of life such as we associate with Shakespearean drama.
The note, as we have it above in Tom’s retort, of ironic-satiric discomfiture of the Utilitarian philosopher by the rebound of his formulae upon himself is developed in the ensuing scene with Bitzer, the truly successful pupil, the real triumph of the system. He arrives to intercept Tom’s flight:
Bitzer, still holding the paralysed culprit by the collar, stood in the Ring, blinking at his old patron through the darkness of the twilight.
‘Bitzer,’ said Mr Gradgrind, broken down and miserably submissive to him, ‘have you a heart?’
‘The circulation, sir,’ returned Bitzer, smiling at the oddity of the question, ‘couldn’t be carried on without one. No man, sir, acquainted with the facts established by Harvey relating to the circulation of the blood, can doubt that I have a heart.’
‘Is it accessible,’ cried Mr Gradgrind, ‘to any compassionate influence?’
‘It is accessible to Reason, sir,’ returned the excellent young man. ‘And to nothing else.’
They stood looking at each other; Mr Gradgrind’s face as white as the pursuer’s.
‘What motive – even what motive in reason – can you have for preventing the escape of this wretched youth,’ said Mr Gradgrind, ‘and crushing his miserable father? See his sister here. Pity us!’
‘Sir,’ returned Bitzer in a very business-like and logical manner, ‘since you ask me what motive I have in reason for taking young Mr Tom back to Coketown, it is only reasonable to let you know … I am going to take young Mr Tom back to Coketown, in order to deliver him over to Mr Bounderby. Sir, I have no doubt whatever that Mr Bounderby will then promote me to young Mr Tom’s situation. And I wish to have this situation, sir, for it will be a rise to me and will do me good.’
‘If this is solely a question of self-interest with you –’ Mr Gradgrind began.
‘I beg your pardon for interrupting you, sir,’ returned Bitzer, ‘but I am sure you know that the whole social system is a question of self-interest. What you must always appeal to is a person’s self-interest. It’s your only hold. We are so constituted. I was brought up in that catechism when I was very young, sir, as you are aware.’
‘What sum of money,’ said Mr Gradgrind, ‘will you set against your expected promotion?’
‘Thank you, sir,’ returned Bitzer, ‘for hinting at the proposal; but I will not set any sum against it. Knowing that your clear head would propose that alternative, I have gone over the calculations in my mind; and I find that to compound a felony, even on very high terms indeed, would not be as safe and good for me as my improved prospects in the Bank.’
‘Bitzer,’ said Mr Gradgrind, stretching out his hands as though he would have said, See how miserable I am! ‘Bitzer, I have but one chance left to soften you. You were many years at my school. If, in remembrance of the pains bestowed upon you there, you can persuade yourself in any degree to disregard your present interest and release my son, I entreat and pray you to give him the benefit of that remembrance.’
‘I really wonder, sir,’ rejoined the old pupil in an argumentative manner, ‘to find you taking a position so untenable. My schooling was paid for; it was a bargain; and when I came away, the bargain ended.’
It was a fundamental principle of the Gradgrind philosophy, that everything was to be paid for. Nobody was ever on any account to give anybody anything, or render anybody help without purchase. Gratitude was to be abolished, and the virtues springing from it were not to be. Every inch of the existence of mankind, from birth to death, was to be a bargain across the counter. And if we didn’t get to Heaven that way, it was not a politico-economical place, and we had no business there.
‘I don’t deny,’ added Bitzer, ‘that my schooling was cheap. But that comes right, sir. I was made in the cheapest market, and have to dispose of myself in the dearest.’
Tom’s escape is contrived, successfully in every sense, by means belonging to Dickensian high-fantastic comedy. And there follows the solemn moral of the whole fable, put with the rightness of genius into Mr Sleary’s asthmatic mouth. He, agent of the artist’s marvellous tact, acquits himself of it characteristically:
‘Thquire, you don’t need to be told that dogth ith wonderful animalth.’
‘Their instinct,’ said
Mr Gradgrind, ‘is surprising.’
‘Whatever you call it – and I’m bletht if I know what to call it’ – said Sleary, ‘it ith athtonithing. The way in which a dog’ll find you – the dithtanthe he’ll come!’
‘His scent,’ said Mr Gradgrind, ‘being so fine.’
‘I’m bletht if I know what to call it,’ repeated Sleary, shaking his head, ‘but I have had dogth find me, Thquire …’
– And Mr Sleary proceeds to explain that Sissy’s truant father is certainly dead because his performing dog, who would never have deserted him living, has come back to the Horse-riding:
‘he wath lame, and pretty well blind. He went to our children, one after another, ath if he wath a theeking for a child he knowed; and then he come to me, and throwed hithelf up behind, and thtood on hith two fore-legth, weak ath he wath, and then he wagged hith tail and died. Thquire that dog wath Merrylegth.’
The whole passage has to be read as it stands in the text (Book the Third, chapter VIII). Reading it there we have to stand off and reflect at a distance to recognize the potentialities that might have been realized elsewhere as Dickensian sentimentality. There is nothing sentimental in the actual effect. The profoundly serious intention is in control, the touch sure, and the structure that ensures the poise unassertively complex. Here is the formal moral:
‘Tho, whether her father bathely detherted her; or whether he broke hith own heart alone, rather than pull her down along with him; never will be known now, Thquire, till – no, not till we know how the dogth findth uth out!’
‘She keeps the bottle that he sent her for, to this hour; and she will believe in his affection to the last moment of her life,’ said Mr Gradgrind.
‘It theemth to prethent two thingth to a perthon, don’t it, Thquire?’ said Mr Sleary, musing as he looked down into the depths of his brandy-and-water: ‘one, that there ith a love in the world, not all Thelf-interetht after all, but thomething very different; t’other, that it hath a way of ith own of calculating or not calculating, whith thomehow or another ith at leatht ath hard to give a name to, ath the wayth of the dogth ith!’
Mr Gradgrind looked out of the window, and made no reply. Mr Sleary emptied his glass and recalled the ladies.
It will be seen that the effect (I repeat, the whole passage must be read), apparently so simple and easily right, depends upon a subtle interplay of diverse elements, a multiplicity in unison of timbre and tone. Dickens, we know, was a popular entertainer, but Flaubert never wrote anything approaching this in subtlety of achieved art. Dickens, of course, has a vitality that we can’t look for in Flaubert. Shakespeare was a popular entertainer, we reflect – not too extravagantly, we can surely tell ourselves, as we ponder passages of this characteristic quality in their relation, a closely organized one, to the poetic whole.
Criticism, of course, has its points to make against Hard Times. It can be said of Stephen Blackpool, not only that he is too good and qualifies too consistently for the martyr’s halo, but that he invites an adaptation of the objection brought, from the negro point of view, against Uncle Tom, which was to the effect that he was a white man’s good nigger. And certainly it doesn’t need a working-class bias to produce the comment that when Dickens comes to the Trade Unions his understanding of the world he offers to deal with betrays a marked limitation. There were undoubtedly professional agitators, and Trade Union solidarity was undoubtedly often asserted at the expense of the individual’s rights, but it is a score against a work so insistently typical in intention that it should give the representative role to the agitator, Slackbridge, and make Trade Unionism nothing better than the pardonable error of the misguided and oppressed, and, as such, an agent in the martyrdom of the good working man. (But to be fair we must remember the conversation between Bitzer and Mrs Sparsit:
‘It is much to be regretted,’ said Mrs Sparsit, making her nose more Roman and her eyebrows more Coriolanian in the strength of her severity, ‘that the united masters allow of any such class combination.’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ said Bitzer.
‘Being united themselves, they ought one and all to set their faces against employing any man who is united with any other man,’ said Mrs Sparsit.
‘They have done that, ma’am,’ returned Bitzer; ‘but it rather fell through, ma’am.’
‘I do not pretend to understand these things,’ said Mrs Sparsit with dignity. ‘… I only know that those people must be conquered, and that it’s high time it was done, once and for all.’
Just as Dickens has no glimpse of the part to be played by Trade Unionism in bettering the conditions he deplores, so, though he sees there are many places of worship in Coketown, of various kinds of ugliness, he has no notion of the part played by the chapel in the life of nineteenth-century industrial England. The kind of self-respecting steadiness and conscientious restraint that he represents in Stephen did certainly exist on a large scale among the working-classes, and this is an important historical fact. But there would have been no such fact if those chapels described by Dickens had had no more relation to the life of Coketown than he shows them to have.
Again, his attitude to Trade Unionism is not the only expression of a lack of political understanding. Parliament for him is merely the ‘national dust-yard’, where the ‘national dustmen’ entertain one another ‘with a great many noisy little fights among themselves’, and appoint commissions which fill blue-books with dreary facts and futile statistics – of a kind that helps Gradgrind to ‘prove that the Good Samaritan was a bad economist’.
Yet Dickens’s understanding of Victorian civilization is adequate for his purpose; the justice and penetration of his criticism are unaffected. And his moral perception works in alliance with a clear insight into the English social structure. Mr James Harthouse is necessary for the plot; but he too has his representative function. He has come to Coketown as a prospective parliamentary candidate, for ‘the Gradgrind party wanted assistance in cutting the throats of the Graces’, and they ‘liked fine gentlemen; they pretended that they did not, but they did’. And so the alliance between the old ruling class and the ‘hard’ men figures duly in the fable. This economy is typical. There is Mrs Sparsit, for instance, who might seem to be there merely for the plot. But her ‘husband was a Powler’, a fact she reverts to as often as Bounderby to his mythical birth in a ditch; and the two complementary opposites, when Mr James Harthouse, who in his languid assurance of class-superiority doesn’t need to boast, is added, form a trio that suggests the whole system of British snobbery.
But the packed richness of Hard Times is almost incredibly varied, and not all the quoting I have indulged in suggests it adequately. The final stress may fall on Dickens’s command of word, phrase, rhythm and image: in ease and range there is surely no greater master of English except Shakespeare. This comes back to saying that Dickens is a great poet: his endless resource in felicitously varied expression is an extraordinary responsiveness to life. His senses are charged with emotional energy, and his intelligence plays and flashes in the quickest and sharpest perception. That is, his mastery of ‘style’ is of the only kind that matters – which is not to say that he hasn’t a conscious interest in what can be done with words; many of his felicities could plainly not have come if there had not been, in the background, a habit of such interest. Take this, for instance:
He had reached the neutral ground upon the outskirts of the town, which was neither town nor country, but either spoiled …’
But he is no more a stylist than Shakespeare; and his mastery of expression is most fairly suggested by stressing, not his descriptive evocations (there are some magnificent ones in Hard Times – the varied décor of the action is made vividly present, you can feel the velvety dust trodden by Mrs Sparsit in her stealth, and feel the imminent storm), but his strictly dramatic felicities. Perhaps, however, ‘strictly’ is not altogether a good pointer, since Dickens is a master of his chosen art, and his mastery shows itself in the way in which he moves bet
ween less direct forms of the dramatic and the direct rendering of speech. Here is Mrs Gradgrind dying (a cipher in the Gradgrind system, the poor creature has never really been alive):
Her feeble voice sounded so far away in her bundle of shawls, and the sound of another voice addressing her seemed to take such a long time in getting down to her ears, that she might have been lying at the bottom of a well. The poor lady was nearer Truth than she had ever been: which had much to do with it.
On being told that Mr Bounderby was there, she replied, at cross purposes, that she had never called him by that name since he had married Louisa; and that pending her choice of an objectionable name, she had called him J; and that she could not at present depart from that regulation, not being yet provided with a permanent substitute. Louisa had sat by her for some minutes, and had spoken to her often, before she arrived at a clear understanding who it was. She then seemed to come to it all at once.
‘Well, my dear,’ said Mrs Gradgrind, ‘and I hope you are going on satisfactorily to yourself. It was all your father’s doing. He set his heart upon it. And he ought to know.’
‘I want to hear of you, mother; not of myself.’
‘You want to hear of me, my dear? That’s something new, I am sure, when anybody wants to hear of me. Not at all well, Louisa. Very faint and giddy.’
‘Are you in pain, dear mother?’
‘I think there’s a pain somewhere in the room,’ said Mrs Gradgrind, ‘but I couldn’t positively say that I have got it.’
