Dickens the Novelist

by F. R. Leavis

  No one would call Henry Gowan mad, but it is not for nothing that Miss Wade, in her compte rendu of herself, records that he was the first person who understood her, and that he understood her at once. He knew at a glance what her resentful pride meant, because his own pride was of a kind that could express itself only in resentment, his resentment being not less destructive, but more subtly so, than hers. His pleasure is to disconcert, and he uses his gentlemanly aplomb and his skill, which is constantly in practice, to that end. An extended example of the trait and of the gratuitousness of its manifestation is his part in the conversation at the supper-table of the Great Saint Bernard convent14 (Book the Second, chapter I). This incidental descriptive sentence sufficiently characterizes it: ‘There was enough of mocking inconsistency at the bottom of this speech to make it rather discordant, though the manner was refined and the person well-favoured, and though the depreciatory part of it was so skilfully thrown off, as to be very difficult for those not perfectly acquainted with the English language to understand, or, even understanding, to take offence at: so simple and dispassionate was its tone.’ But if he hadn’t known that the peculiar offensiveness would be felt for what it was, there would have been no point in the adroitness. Nevertheless, the inconsistency was not calculated; it expresses something in his basic condition.

  We are told of this formidably proud man that he has ‘no belief in anyone, because he had no belief in himself’. His insistent consciousness of superiority is an underlying consciousness of nullity; the stultifying contradiction, sensed if not recognized, makes him sinister in his all-round destructiveness; he feels that if he doesn’t assert, as something that doesn’t need asserting, his intrinsic superiority – the ‘reality’ of which is the recognition it gets – he is nothing. His case is given in Blandois’ formula: ‘He is more than an artist; he is well-connected.’ His Barnacle kin have earned his resentment by not jobbing him into a well-salaried sinecure (the claim on the country that is a Barnacle’s right), and he has had, defiantly, to fall back on ‘being an artist’. He treats them, when they come up for mention, in his destructively equivocal way, but nevertheless cherishes with challenging intensity – born a Frenchman he would have been an addicted duellist – the superiority which is nothing but a matter of being ‘one of them’ (‘one of us’, of course, in direct speech).

  Brought a commission to paint Mr William Dorrit’s portrait, he insults Blandois, the insultable kept-friend who brings it; ‘for he resented patronage almost as much as he resented the want of it’. Next day, he pays a call on the gentleman.

  Mr Dorrit then mentioned his proposal. ‘Sir,’ said Gowan, laughing, after receiving it gracefully enough, ‘I am new to the trade, and not expert in its mysteries. I believe I ought to look at you in various lights, tell you you are a capital subject, and consider when I shall be sufficiently disengaged to devote myself with the necessary enthusiasm to the fine picture I mean to make of you. I assure you,’ and he laughed again, ‘I feel quite a traitor in the camp of those dear, gifted, noble fellows, my brother artists, by not doing the hocus-pocus better. But I have not been brought up to it, and it’s too late to learn it. Now, the fact is, I am a very bad painter, but not much worse than the generality. If you are going to throw away a hundred guineas or so, I am as poor as a poor relation of great people usually is, and I shall be very much obliged to you, if you’ll throw your money away upon me. I’ll do the best I can for the money; and if the best should be bad, why even then, you may probably have a bad picture with a small name to it, instead of a bad picture with a large name to it.’

  This tone, though not what he had expected, on the whole suited Mr Dorrit remarkably well. It showed that the gentleman, highly connected, and not a mere workman, would be under an obligation to him.

  The mocking inconsistency that imposes itself as ironic poise is an aggressively dominating mode of Mrs General’s ‘surface’, with its proscription of ‘wonder’, ‘opinions’ (i.e. convictions), and reality. Gowan practises this mode, the implicit intention and force of which are destructive, because, knowing deep down that he doesn’t know what, if anything, is real in himself, he is determined to eliminate all possible tests of reality: the reality of the self he prefers not to recognize for what it is had better, for others (and himself too), remain a brilliant and disconcerting equivocation. His essential nihilism, profoundly personal, and at the same time highly significant for Dickens’s ‘social criticism’, has a poignant manifestation in the upshot, for the Meagleses, of the sacrifice of their Pet.

  By this time, Mr Gowan had made up his mind that it would be agreeable to him not to know the Meagleses … he mentioned to Mr Meagles that personally they did not appear to him to get on together, and that he thought it would be a good thing if – politely, without any scene, or anything of that sort – they agreed that they were the best fellows in the world, but were best apart. Poor Mr Meagles, who was already sensible that he did not advance his daughter’s happiness by being constantly slighted in her presence, said, ‘Good, Henry! You are my Pet’s husband; you have displaced me, in the course of nature: if you wish it, good!’ This arrangement involved the contingent advantage, which perhaps Henry Gowan had not foreseen, that both Mr and Mrs Meagles were more liberal than before to their daughter, when their communication was only with her and her young child; and that his high spirit found itself better provided with money, without being under the degrading necessity of knowing whence it came.15

  If it is necessary to drive home the point that ‘essential nihilism’ is not a rhetorical emphasis but a cool judicial constatation, a passage offers itself from the exchange (Book the First, chapter XXVI) in which Gowan tells Clennam: ‘You are genuine also’.

  ‘By Jove, he is the finest creature?’ said Gowan. ‘So fresh, so green, trusts in such wonderful things!’

  Here was one of the many little rough points that had a tendency to grate on Clennam’s hearing. He put it aside by merely repeating that he had a high regard for Mr Doyce.

  ‘He is charming! To see him mooning along to that time of life, laying down nothing by the way and picking up nothing by the way, is delightful! It warms a man. So unspoilt, so simple, such a good soul! Upon my life, Mr Clennam, one feels desperately worldly and wicked in comparison with such an innocent creature. I speak for myself, let me add, without including you. You are genuine also.’

  ‘Thank you for the compliment,’ said Clennam: ill at ease; ‘you are too, I hope?’

  ‘So so,’ rejoined the other. ‘To be candid with you, tolerably. I am not a great impostor. Buy one of my pictures, and I assure you, in confidence, that it is not worth the money. Buy one of another man’s – any great professor who beats me hollow – and the chances are that the more you give him, the more he’ll impose upon you. They all do it.’

  ‘All painters?’

  ‘Painters, writers, patriots, all the rest who have stands in the market. Give almost any man I know ten pounds, and he’ll impose upon you to a corresponding extent; a thousand pounds – to a corresponding extent; ten thousand – to a corresponding extent. So great the success, so great the imposition. But what a capital world it is!’ cried Gowan, with warm enthusiasm. ‘What a jolly, excellent, lovable world it is!’

  ‘I had rather thought,’ said Clennam, ‘that the principle you mention was chiefly acted on by –’

  ‘By the Barnacles?’ interrupted Gowan, laughing.

  ‘By the political gentlemen who condescend to keep the Circumlocution Office.’

  ‘Ah! Don’t be hard upon the Barnacles,’ said Gowan, laughing afresh, ‘they are darling fellows! Even poor little Clarence, the born idiot of the family is the most agreeable and the most endearing blockhead! And by Jupiter, with a kind of cleverness in him too, that would astonish you!’

  ‘It would. Very much,’ said Clennam, drily.

  ‘And after all,’ cried Gowan, with that characteristic balancing of his which reduced everything in the wide world to the sa
me light weight, ‘though I can’t deny that the Circumlocution Office may ultimately shipwreck everybody and everything, still, that will probably not be in our time – and it’s a school for gentlemen.’

  We see here, neatly exemplified in these juxtaposed passages, how Dickens’s analysis, presented in what is so distinctively a novelist’s art, becomes ‘social criticism’; or, to put it another way, how inseparable, in his art, the two are. William Dorrit, we note, not for the first time, but, as we read the episode of the portrait commission, with sharpened realization of what is involved, sacrifices life and reality to nullities – does it blindly, and with an unction of righteousness, in his set will to vindicate his dignity, his gentlemanly status, his ‘position’. He does it, we comment now, in what is at bottom essentially Gowan’s way; his resentments have the same significance as Gowan’s, and he is as incapable of happiness. And he is committed to supporting, with all the power of influence and suggestion he may have, the civilization, the world of privilege, and the cultural ethos that breed the Gowans, the Mrs Generals, the Chief Butlers and Mr Merdle. The difference is that William Dorrit has (it is largely a further indebtedness to Amy) a claim on our sympathy, and we see him in any case as a victim; whereas Gowan, strongly individualized as a formidable person and a militant parasite (his partnership with the bully Blandois defines a trait of his own), consciously means to be the disconcerter and destroyer. His highly articulate utterances make that plain, and make plain also, in a less conscious way, his representative significance, so that, as a dramatic character among the others, he gives something like explicit formulation – he certainly prompts explicitness in us – to the spirit he represents. Thus he plays a major part in relation to Dickens’s design to make a packed Dickensian novel a critique of English civilization.

  It is obvious that he has a contrasting opposite in Little Dorrit, who, in the Marshalsea, is the centre, the test, and the generator of reality. Nevertheless, she isn’t the full answer to Gowan’s challenge – for it’s as a challenge, provoking and enforcing Dickens’s full positive answer, that Gowan has his presence in the book (which he pervades, as Little Dorrit herself, Mrs Clennam and the Marshalsea do). It is not for nothing that the arch-nihilist is made to present himself as an artist, and that the characteristic Gowan demonstrations (I may call them) that I have just adduced make his hatred of the real artist and of art, his implicit denial that art has any importance in civilization, overt and explicit. Here again we have the affinity between Dickens and Blake – unmistakably a natural and essential affinity. Dickens lays the same kind of emphasis on the creative nature of life as Blake does, and insists in the same way that there is a continuity from the inescapable creativeness of perception to the disciplined imaginative creativeness of the skilled artist, and that where art doesn’t thrive or enjoy the intelligent esteem due to it the civilization is sick. Little Dorrit, whom I have called a contrasting opposite to Gowan the nihilist, is not only not an artist; she hasn’t the makings of an artist in her. It is in being – being what she is – that she is creative.

  Like the other key characters, she stands in a relation of contrast to more than one of the dramatis personae; but her antithesis above all is Mrs Clennam, whose value-significance is more complex and more comprehensive than Gowan’s. (We have by now, I suggest, these words noted down as bearing on the theme of ‘criteria’: reality, courage, disinterestedness, truth, spontaneity, creativeness – life.) When we compare Little Dorrit, as we naturally do, with Sissy Jupe, we see the significance of Sissy’s relation to the Horse-riding. Little Dorrit’s goodness and disinterestedness go with a modesty that is withdrawingness, and it is wonderful how Dickens conveys this without presenting them as anything but positive – creative with the essential creativity of life. Their effect on Clennam (a part of whose role it is to be virtually the reader’s immediate presence in the book) is given in the nosegay he finds by his tea-cup on waking from a fevered doze, he lying ill in the Marshalsea, the prison of this world (Book the Second, chapter XXIV). He has had an insistent dream-sense of a garden:

  – a garden of flowers, with a damp warm wind gently stirring their scents. It required such a painful effort to lift his head for the purpose of inquiring into anything, that the impression appeared to have become quite an old and importunate one when he looked round. Beside the tea-cup on his table he saw, then, a blooming nosegay: a wonderful handful of the choicest and most lovely flowers.

  Nothing had ever appeared so beautiful in his sight. He took them up and inhaled their fragrances, and he lifted them to his hot head, and he put them down and opened his parched hands to them, as cold hands are opened to receive the cheering of a fire.16

  IV

  But in Little Dorrit herself the disinterestedness of life – disinterested, and so implicitly creative, in being not ego-bound and not slave to a mechanism – hasn’t that overt relation with the developed creativity of art which Dickens so clearly intended in Sissy. Where, then, in the book have we the clear recognition-challenging emphasis on the creative nature of life (the large word I may now, perhaps, give the right focal force to by adding, ‘the spontaneous, the disinterested, the ego-free, the reality-creating’)? Is there any better answer than to point to Henry Gowan, the poised and drifting waster of the Best Families who, being unprovided for by his Barnacle kin, is ‘being an artist’17 – to point to him as evoking by negation Dickens’s positive conception of the artist and of art? Yes, there is Daniel Doyce. It is eloquent both of the impersonality of Dickens when creatively engaged and of the unconventional first-handness and fullness of his conception of art that, in his greatest work, he should have conveyed most explicitly his proud consciousness of the creative function by making its special representative an inventor. Dickens, we know – if we take it on the authority of Lord Snow (both a bicultural sage and a novelist), was a ‘natural Luddite’. Nevertheless, the significance of Doyce is plain and undeniable. Dickens, in fact, insists on it; Doyce’s distinctive function is to be it. Even when we consider his part in the plot, of which we might be tempted for a moment to say that an inventor as such wasn’t necessary to it, we see that what he essentially does, by being the person Dickens made him, is to bring the becalmed and debilitated Clennam into touch with strong and intransigent creativity.

  Talking with him (Part the First, chapter XVI), Clennam is struck by the force of that disinterestedness in him which is the reverse of indifference, being commitment and resolution and undeflectable courage, though not at all of the order of ego-assertive will, but its antithesis. When, having heard of the obstructing Circumlocution Office, Clennam suggests that it’s a pity Doyce ever entered into so hopeless a battle and had better give it up, Doyce, ‘shaking his head with a thoughtful smile’, replies that ‘a man can’t do it’:

  ‘You hold your life on the condition that to the last you shall struggle hard for it.18 Every man holds a discovery on the same terms.’

  ‘This is to say,’ said Arthur, with a growing admiration of his quiet companion, ‘you are not finally discouraged even now?’

  ‘I have no right to be, if I am,’ returned the other. ‘The thing is as true as ever it was.’

  It is the quiet unassertive impersonality of his conviction that especially impresses Clennam. Of the effect on him of Doyce’s manner on a later occasion we are told:

  He had the power, often to be found in union with such a character, of explaining what he himself perceived, and meant, with the direct force and distinctness with which it struck his own mind. His manner of demonstration was so orderly and neat and simple, that it was not easy to mistake him. There was something almost ludicrous in the complete irreconcilability of a vague conventional notion that he must be a visionary man, with the precise, sagacious travelling of his eye and thumb over the plans, their patient stoppages at particular points, their careful returns to other points whence little channels of explanation had to be traced up, and his steady manner of making everything good and everyt
hing sound, at each important stage, before taking his hearer on a line’s-breadth further. His dismissal of himself from his description was hardly less remarkable. He never said, I discovered this adaptation or invented that combination; but showed the whole thing as if the Divine artificer had made it, and he had happened to find it. So modest he was about it, such a pleasant touch of respect was mingled with his quiet admiration of it, and so calmly convinced he was that it was established on irrefragable laws.

  Dickens himself was neither an inventor nor a scientist, but he understood that kind of conviction from the inside: he was a great artist, and familiar with the compelling impersonal authority of the real (and not the less for knowing so well that there is no grasp of the real that is not creative). It is not for nothing that Doyce is the severest critic of Henry Gowan, and that the first criticism recorded of that gentleman is what Doyce says in reply to Clennam’s questioning:

  ‘An artist, I infer from what he says?’

  ‘A sort of one,’ said Daniel Doyce in a surly tone.

  ‘What sort of one?’ asked Clennam, with a smile.

  ‘Why, he has sauntered into the Arts at a leisurely Pall Mall pace,’ said Doyce, ‘and I doubt if they care to be taken so easily.’

  On Doyce, that judgment invites implicit recognition from us which is stated (Part the Second, chapter XXV) about Physician: ‘where he was, something real was’. With intrinsic fitness he, with Clennam, becomes patron and employer of Cavalletto, the light-hearted, warmhearted and spontaneous little Italian who surprises Bleeding Heart Yard by his ability to sit down and be happy, though poor. We note that Doyce, Clennam, Pancks and Bleeding Heart Yard are all drawn to him.