Читать книгу Charles Dickens - Social Reformer - William Walter Crotch - Страница 6

There are people to-day who hold that it is a misuse of terms to describe Dickens as a Social Reformer. That he concerned himself with social questions they freely admit; they deny that he was a democrat or that he ever attained to a theory of reform. George Gissing was, probably more than any one, responsible for the promulgation of this view, inasmuch as from the high vantage ground of his generous appreciation of the novelist, he subjected Dickens's political philosophy to the searching criticism of Collectivist economy.

Not infrequently it is possible to hear men, whose admiration of Dickens as a storyteller is entirely genuine, declaim against his attitude to social problems; avow that he retarded the permanent alleviation of social evils by reconciling the middle classes to the idea of temporary reform; that his scheme of life took no account of economic truths; that he believed all would be well if workmen were honest, sober, industrious, and employers sympathetic, just and benevolent. The Cheeryble Brothers are alleged to be the embodiment of his views as to the proper relationships between Capital and Labour; the self-made man and his worldly success are said to represent the ideal which Dickens heartily approved. The whole of these charges concentrated, usually resolve themselves into the assertion that Dickens was a middle-class Radical whose attitude to the poor was one of pity rather than of understanding. This is a much mistaken view. It is based upon a fundamental error which has vitiated all conclusions. The assumption is that the term " social reform " is inelastic and arbitrary; that to merit the description of " social reformer " a person must have an objective system of economics to propound, must have made a precise science of the remedies for social ills, and be possessed of an exact grasp of industrial physiology. A doctrine at once so narrow and dogmatic as that would exclude from the category of reformers some of the greatest and most illustrious names in humanitarian literature. Shelley, Byron, Hugo, Coleridge, Browning, Wordsworth, Whitman, Swinburne, all those valiant soldiers in the Army of Freedom, would be ruled out with one stroke of the pen. For none of these understood the precise economic defects which made miseries possible, nor did they understand by what means society would evolve from the chaos in which it was weltering, the cosmic order under which alone it is possible for the liberty and happiness of all to be preserved. These men, on the contrary, were inspired only by indignation against oppression, by impulsive pity for human suffering, by a belief in " a stream of tendency, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness," by aspirations towards a happy and serene ordering of human affairs of which the mass of men scarce dream, " by the fire of greater passions whose speech and deeds seem madness to the steady world."

It was their instinctive sympathy for the fundamental principles of justice out of which reform grows, rather than their actual schemes of social melioration, which made them reformers. If this is true of the poetic band, it is singularly true of Dickens. His, like theirs, was the faith which did not argue, it was all-sufficient to have profound belief and unswerving convictions. He saw that all men were equal in their relations to the common feelings and duties of the race; that in suffering, in love, in the visions and longings of youth and age, there was an eternal equality, and like all the great poets, his work in this realm has drawn men and women of every class and rank into closer sympathy with each other, and placed them hand in hand on a common ground of humanity. To him, mere distinctions of class were simply abhorrent. He had a supreme contempt for pride of birth or station. A titled nobility carried with it not a title to privilege, but an obligation of service, and in book after book we have the same stinging reproof of class insolence and pride, when, as he mostly put it, and, it must be added, mostly found, it was unaccompanied by personal worth. It was the melodious enunciation of such views as these which gave the great poets their claim to the distinctive titles of " pioneers " and " reformers " and on these grounds neither the one nor the other can be denied to Dickens.

Moreover, as Mr. J. A. Hobson very pertinently points out, if we use the term " social reform " in the broad sense to describe those larger changes in the working of society which aim directly at some general improvement of human life as distinguished from such work of reform as attacks narrower and more specific defects, we shall find that men come to this work by widely different paths. Often it is the personal experience of some concrete evil that first awakens a sense of social wrong and a desire for redress: reform energy once generated is fed by a natural flow from various neighbouring channels of activity, the stream broadening as it goes, until the man whose early activity was stimulated by the desire to break down some little barrier which dams the stream in his back garden, finds himself breasting the tide of some oceanic movement. On the other hand, there are men who come to social reform work out of simple impulse and emotion arising out of a detailed knowledge of the facts of life as a thing apart from economics or a science of government. And that was so in the case of Dickens. All his work was'' the outcome of accurate analytic observation and close scrutiny; his excursions into the regions of social j. problems were due to the fact that he found his heart aflame for social justice, and the passion of revolt against tyranny and oppression stirred within him. "

It is true that Dickens had but the most elementary knowledge of political economy as such. Indeed, he appears to have shared the old and not too accurate idea that political economy was a dry-as-dust hobby, in which sociologists and other uninviting people constantly speculate. What is, however, equally certain is, that in the reference he did make to it, he vowed emphatically that he shared Ruskin's view that no scheme of life, no political organization of industry, was or would be complete which did not provide that all labour should only be pursued under conditions which would allow human qualities full play and which would promote the whole round of human happiness. Ruskin's full, final conception of political economy as a science of human welfare, we are told, included within its scope not merely the processes by which men gain a livelihood, but all human efforts and satisfactions. It was, in short, the famous Spencerian dogma, that the essential question to all of us is how to live, not in the material sense merely, but in the widest sense, or as the philosopher put it himself, " the general problem which comprehends every special problem is the right ruling of conduct in all directions, under all circumstances." And that, consciously or unconsciously, is the general moral to be drawn from all the theories of human relationship which Dickens scattered throughout his books.

His emotions and impulses led him to insist that industry ought not to be regarded as the whole of life, nor a thing apart from life. The organization of labour must neither involve the suppression of the personal human qualities of either employer or employed, nor must any commercial concern be conducted on such a basis, that the man, as a worker, was considered quite apart from his position as man, the human. Dickens's criticism of the teachings of the economists was sentimental rather than scientific, although regarded by himself as practical, but he poured out the vials of his wrath none the less effectively upon the school who have their representatives in Mr. Gradgrind: " 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 it was not a politico-economical place, and we had no business there." Here in inimitable satire is his repudiation of the theory of the mercantile economists that " the whole social system is a matter of self-interests," and that " man as an industrious animal, a getter and spender of money, is a separate thing from man as a friend, a lover, a father, a citizen."

This, it seems to me, is the most effective reply to the critics who urge that the relationships of the Cheeryble Brothers to Tim Linkinwater and Nicholas Nickleby, represented Dickens's ideal of masters and men. It is true that the Cheeryble Brothers stood for a moral theory with the novelist. It is not that the labour problem could be disposed of by benevolence or unselfishness on the part of employers so much as the recognition that the best labour is only performed by men when they are happiest. Examine story after story, and there emerges the same idea. Master and man prospered where the relationship between them was such as to bring the affection of both into full play. Gratitude, forbearance, kindness, sympathy, on the part of the master, has its counterpart in the devotion and increased fidelity of the workman to his work. That was Dickens's theory; that is the theory which the critics affect to despise, because it leaves untouched the larger question of such an organization of society as shall give these very desirable virtues full play, and shall render unemployment and poverty impossible. Yet, if it is examined minutely, it will be seen that in this very theory the soundest, and indeed the only true political economy had expression. Men may grope blindly in the dark, and yet stumble across truth, if they do but follow courageously the promptings of the human heart towards fraternity. In our day we are sifting the inhumanities from political economy. We are realizing that it is an unnatural divorce — that of separating the highest attributes of our humanity from the science of human well-being. And Dickens, with nothing but his intuitive sympathies, stumbled across the very fact which Ruskin made the basis of his scheme of industrial physiology, namely, that the motive power of man's labour is man's soul.

" The largest quantity of work will not be done for pay or under pressure. It will be done only when the motive force, that is to say, the will or spirit of the creature, is brought up to its greatest strength by its own proper fuel, namely, by the affections." In short, the whole lesson of the Cheeryble Brothers is a splendid pleading for the abolition of merely personal profit as the object, end, or motive of industry. Profit is only justified for the social service it can render; the wealth which the Cheerybles derived was devoted to the ends which made for happiness. That, surely, is sound social reform teaching; at least it is that advocacy of social order which Ruskin crystallized in one pregnant phrase when he said, " The final outcome and consummation of all wealth is in the producing, as many as possible, full-breathed, bright-eyed, and happy-hearted human beings."

It was Dickens's general humanitarian revolt against the aristocratic tyranny of his time which induced the critics to speak of him as merely the advocate of the poor, who pleaded with the middle classes to bestow some charity on the less fortunate. Of course he was more than that. He possessed the democratic instinct for popular equality, and held firmly his faith in the people. " My moral creed — which is a very wide and comprehensive one, and includes all sects and parties — is very easily summed up," he said in a speech in 1842. " I have faith, and I wish to diffuse faith in the existence — yes, of beautiful things, even in those conditions of society who are so degenerate, degraded, and forlorn, that at first sight it would seem as though they could not be described, but by a strange and terrible reversal of Scripture, ' God said, let there be light, and there was none.' I take it that we are born, and that we hold our sympathies, hopes, and energies in trust for the many and not for the few. That we cannot hold in too strong a light of disgust and contempt before the view of others, all meanness, falsehood, cruelty, and oppression of every grade and kind. Above that, nothing is high because it is in a high place; and that nothing is low because it is in a low one." Here the note struck is obviously one of the most intensely democratic. Only when our energies and our strength, our gifts and our abilities, are used for " the many," are we faithful custodians. The treasures of life are only justified when they are shared by the mass and not by a privileged class.

Later, in the same speech indeed, he emphasized the sin of selfishness, and the futility, as well as the wickedness, of imagining that it is possible for men to have happiness in isolation from their fellows. We are members one of another, and individual progress is impossible apart from some measure of general progress; at least without some earnest interest in the promotion of such general progress, we lack the essential element in our own individual culture. What William Morris so often tried to teach us, namely, that class art must necessarily be base and vulgar, and that only that art which arises naturally out of the free and joyous life of " the many " can be true and beautiful, all else wearing the chain and stamp of the commercialism upon which it rests, Dickens himself held to be sovereign truth. There is neither life, nor joy, nor art possible in selfish isolation; these can only come as the product of the common life of the nation. They must not be denied the many and given to the few; they can only come as a reward for a faithful share in the common round. When Dickens taught that he foreshadowed the idea which is coming so largely to dominate our social thinking to-day, and one which is based upon the soundest and most incontrovertibly democratic principles. Nor was this proclamation of the rights of " the many " an isolated one. Again and again one comes across references to the same thought differently expressed.

At one time Dickens urges that our primary duty is to help in the uplifting of " the community at large "; at another is bespeaking " your enlightened care for the happiness of the many "; at another quoting favourite strophes from Tennyson's Palace of Art and Lady Clara Vere de Vere, in which the same lesson is taught. Always the message is the same — the inalienable right of all men to equality of opportunity for social service and self-development. It cannot be said, either, that this view of his democratic leanings is weakened by that confession of political faith which he made at a great gathering in Birmingham in 1869: " I will now discharge my conscience of my political creed, which is contained in two articles, and has no reference to any party or persons. My faith in the people governing is, on the whole, infinitesimal; my faith in the people governed is, on the whole, illimitable." George Gissing, it is true, used to affect to believe that this phrase, which had bewildered many newspapers, was a further proof that Dickens " was never a democrat; in his heart of hearts he always held that to be governed was the people's good." This seems to be strangely inconsequent finding, for Dickens himself pointed out a few months later that the charge of ambiguity was not justified, and certainly on that occasion he used expressions which prove the precise antithesis of Gissing's contention. His faith in those who were governing the people was small; his faith in the great mass of the people who were governed was boundless. The declaration was not that it was " good to be governed " in the narrow sense in which the word is used, but that he had the profoundest belief that in spite of the yoke of class government, the people, the great mass of toiling, sinning, erring people, would yet work out their own salvation.

This is no mere sympathetic interpretation of Dickens's views, for in order to make his meaning quite clear and free from all other dispute he uses Buckle's words: " They may talk as they will about reforms which Government has introduced, and improvements to be expected from legislation, but whoever will take a wider and more commanding view of human affairs will soon discover that such hopes are chimerical. They will learn that law-givers are nearly always the obstructers of society instead of its helpers, and that in the extremely few cases where their measures have turned out well their success has been owing to the fact that, contrary to their usual custom, they have implicitly obeyed the spirit of their time, and have been — as they always should be — the mere servants of the people, to whose wishes they are bound to give a public and legal sanction." Dickens approved these words specifically (Birmingham, January 6th, 1870). He believed not as Gissing would have us to think he did, that " the vast majority of men are unfit to form sound views on what is best for them," and that " though the voice of the people must be heard, it cannot always be allowed to rule," but that the people should be represented by themselves; that Parliament should give expression to the views of the many, should exist to redress their grievances, promote their well-being and happiness, and make laws for their greater prosperity.

And here Dickens disagreed with Ruskin, as many of us think, rightly so, for whereas the latter believed that social progress would come through a hereditary aristocracy, the other, out of large observation and actual experience of the poor, believed that the patronage which it would inflict would cripple and enslave, and that the only hope of social conditions being made healthy rested with the people themselves.

The only ground the critics have for their contempt of Dickens's middle-class leanings is that he was largely a mediator in our social life. Whilst he was the unflinching champion of the poor, whilst he exposed evils with an undaunted courage and suffered continually abuse for his pains, he yet believed that progress would be won more by general concensus of faith and desire, than by class uprising; he advocated nothing merely for the sake of gratifying the restless pruriency of innovation. For this reason his stories seem to bear the design of reconciling the upper and the middle classes (more especially the latter) to the inevitability of change and reform. He taught them that social change did not mean national disaster; that they could have complete faith and assurance in the sturdy common sense of the British people. He stood for steady and prudent advance, not only because he believed that in progress and in improvement in the conditions of the poor lay the real safety and security of other classes. The danger which existed in the neglect of public evils he recognized always. Like Matthew Arnold, he had a fine sense of scorn for

" The barren optimistic sophistries

Of comfortable moles,"

and in A Tale of Two Cities he constantly insists that the French Revolution was evoked not because the principles of human brotherhood and industrial emancipation were waiting to be applied to a bold and ill-fated social experiment, but because oppression had stalked abroad, corruption had eaten out the hearts of nobles and of kings, and indifference — stolid, immovable indifference to the needs of the poor — prevailed in the national life. For him this great internecine struggle possessed no tinseled splendours.

Just as the insular nationalism of Tennyson had caused him to jeer at " the red fool fury of the Seine," and the middle-class and timorous Arnold to utter that piercing poetic jibe, " France famed in all great arts: in none supreme," so Dickens, whilst exciting our sympathy for the revolutionists, realized but imperfectly all the Revolution has meant for us, and the sheer gain which has come to England, for example, as a result of that singularly tragic, swift, and audacious act in which the people of France engaged. He did not see that certain ideas of liberty were forged in the memorable heat of that bloody time, which we, as a nation, have since approved. All he did see clearly was that France's mistake must be avoided; that by patient and gradual reform we should obviate extreme or raw haste and excesses in political discontent. To him the schemes of social betterment were " too great for haste, too high for rivalry." In so far as this is a fault, it is so only because it is the excess of a great virtue. He was fearful lest the waves of democracy, through dashing too high and relentlessly upon the bulwarks of privilege, should recede the further for the effort. He believed that by the steadier flow would the ground be permanently gained. But he had faith in the final issue all the same. " In my sphere of action I have tried to understand the heavy social grievances of our time, and to help to set them right." That was no idle boast, but the one outstanding feature of his work was that in all his declarations of human equality he went to the very roots of social problems, and impressed the divine stamp upon the uppermost claims of democracy. " I have found even in evil things that soul of goodness which the Creator has put in them. Throughout my life I have been anxious to show that virtue may be found in the by-ways of the world, that it is not incompatible with poverty and even with rags."

Therein was he true to the traditions of the great reforming literary band, which had revolted against the narrow metropolitanism and aristocratic banalities of Pope.

Thomson had struck the first democratic note in " The Seasons " by reprehending the prevailing callousness to the sufferings of the poor. Crabbe had derided the proud pretensions of the arrogantly rich. Goldsmith had uttered his protest against the lordly theft of the people's common land, and warned the nation that " a bold peasantry, their country's pride, when once destroyed can never be supplied." Gray had chastised the insolence of those who disdained " the short and simple annals of the poor." Johnson had hurled forth with stinging emphasis his description of the miseries of the people of London and launched his satirical inquiry: " Has Heaven reserved in pity to the poor no pathless waste or undiscovered shore? " Blake in perfectly beauteous lyric song had revealed his own passionate pity for the oppressed. The great Northern ploughman-poet Burns had foretold the coming of human equality in simple verse which has since become an axiom of common speech. Coleridge, under the influence of that now forgotten poet William Lisle Bowes, had already heralded the time when " Liberty, the soul of life shall reign, shall throb in every pulse, shall flow thro' every vein." Whitman had told us " that amid the measureless grossness and the slag, enclosed and safe within its central heart, nestles the seed-perfection." Tennyson had declared that he had found ploughmen and shepherds, veritable " sons of God and kings of men in utter nobleness of mind." Carlyle was uttering his fierce diatribes against mistaken nobility. Ruskin was preaching a new doctrine of brotherhood in service. Robert Browning was writing poetry which " shows a heart blood-tinctured of a veined humanity." Lowell was penning his matchless songs of freedom, declaring that " the slave, where'er he cowers feels the soul within him climb." Mrs. Browning was plucking up " social fictions bloody rooted," and averring that " first and last are equal, saint and corpse and little child." And so one might proceed. Democracy was being deified in literature and art. The long-neglected were invited to claim their inheritance. The nobility of humble men was being taught, and Dickens came to the teaching with an enthusiastic regard for its truth. He endeavoured, by the might of his energies, as Professor Wilson (Christopher North) well said, "to transmute what was base into what is as precious as beaten gold." " I believe," said Dickens, " that Virtue shows quite as well in rags and patches as she does in purple and fine linen. I believe that she and every beautiful object in external nature claims some sympathy in the breast of the poorest man who breaks his scanty loaf of daily bread. I believe that she goes bare-footed as well as shod. I believe that she dwells rather oftener in alleys and by-ways than she does in courts and palaces." Here, again, his words ring true, when tested at the heart of social reform, for it is no question of present fitness which determines ultimately social and political changes. Fitness is only found in the exercise of disputed privileges. It is faith, that in all humanity there is the same nature, from which the realized fitness of the privileged class has been evoked, which is the prophecy that the same opportunity will produce the same fitness in all.

So that whilst Dickens was not the exponent of any particular theory of general constructive reform, whilst his teaching was limited to emphasizing the necessity for better sanitation and housing and education and denouncing the evils of landlordism, the poor law, the prison system, gambling, usury, war, slavery, child-labour, sweating, and other particular social defects, he yet became the prose-prophet of the cause of social reform itself, and the firm upholder of that which alone is the assurance of its ultimate success, namely, our equality in the primary and fundamental instincts of faith and love and duty. Only from such an equality can just political and social institutions rise and take shape.