I have heard that in some debating clubs there is a rule that the
members may discuss anything except religion and politics. I cannot
imagine what they do discuss; but it is quite evident that they have
ruled out the only two subjects which are either important or amusing.
The thing is a part of a certain modern tendency to avoid things because
they lead to warmth; whereas, obviously, we ought, even in a social
sense, to seek those things specially. The warmth of the discussion is
as much a part of hospitality as the warmth of the fire. And it is
singularly suggestive that in English literature the two things have
died together. The very people who would blame Dickens for his
sentimental hospitality are the very people who would also blame him for
his narrow political conviction. The very people who would mock him for
his narrow radicalism are those who would mock him for his broad
fireside. Real conviction and real charity are much nearer than people
suppose. Dickens was capable of loving all men; but he refused to love
all opinions. The modern humanitarian can love all opinions, but he
cannot love all men; he seems, sometimes, in the ecstasy of his
humanitarianism, even to hate them all. He can love all opinions,
including the opinion that men are unlovable.
In feeling Dickens as a lover we must never forget him as a fighter, and
a fighter for a creed; but indeed there is no other kind of fighter. The
geniality which he spread over all his creations was geniality spread
from one centre, from one flaming peak. He was willing to excuse Mr.
Micawber for being extravagant; but Dickens and Dickens's doctrine were
strictly to decide how far he was to be excused. He was willing to like
Mr. Twemlow in spite of his snobbishness, but Dickens and Dickens's
doctrine were alone to be judges of how far he was snobbish. There was
never a more didactic writer: hence there was never one more amusing. He
had no mean modern notion of keeping the moral doubtful. He would have
regarded this as a mere piece of slovenliness, like leaving the last
page illegible.
Everywhere in Dickens's work these angles of his absolute opinion stood
up out of the confusion of his general kindness, just as sharp and
splintered peaks stand up out of the soft confusion of the forests.
Dickens is always generous, he is generally kind-hearted, he is often
sentimental, he is sometimes intolerably maudlin; but you never know
when you will not come upon one of the convictions of Dickens; and when
you do come upon it you do know it. It is as hard and as high as any
precipice or peak of the mountains. The highest and hardest of these
peaks is _Hard Times_.
It is here more than anywhere else that the sternness of Dickens emerges
as separate from his softness; it is here, most obviously, so to speak,
that his bones stick out. There are indeed many other books of his which
are written better and written in a sadder tone. _Great Expectations_ is
melancholy in a sense; but it is doubtful of everything, even of its
own melancholy. _The Tale of Two Cities_ is a great tragedy, but it is
still a sentimental tragedy. It is a great drama, but it is still a
melodrama. But this tale of _Hard Times_ is in some way harsher than all
these. For it is the expression of a righteous indignation which cannot
condescend to humour and which cannot even condescend to pathos. Twenty
times we have taken Dickens's hand and it has been sometimes hot with
revelry and sometimes weak with weariness; but this time we start a
little, for it is inhumanly cold; and then we realise that we have
touched his gauntlet of steel.
One cannot express the real value of this book without being irrelevant.
It is true that one cannot express the real value of anything without
being irrelevant. If we take a thing frivolously we can take it
separately, but the moment we take a thing seriously, if it were only an
old umbrella, it is obvious that that umbrella opens above us into the
immensity of the whole universe. But there are rather particular reasons
why the value of the book called _Hard Times_ should be referred back to
great historic and theoretic matters with which it may appear
superficially to have little or nothing to do. The chief reason can
perhaps be stated thus--that English politics had for more than a
hundred years been getting into more and more of a hopeless tangle (a
tangle which, of course, has since become even worse) and that Dickens
did in some extraordinary way see what was wrong, even if he did not see
what was right.
The Liberalism which Dickens and nearly all of his contemporaries
professed had begun in the American and the French Revolutions. Almost
all modern English criticism upon those revolutions has been vitiated
by the assumption that those revolutions burst upon a world which was
unprepared for their ideas--a world ignorant of the possibility of such
ideas. Somewhat the same mistake is made by those who suggest that
Christianity was adopted by a world incapable of criticising it; whereas
obviously it was adopted by a world that was tired of criticising
everything. The vital mistake that is made about the French Revolution
is merely this--that everyone talks about it as the introduction of a
new idea. It was not the introduction of a new idea; there are no new
ideas. Or if there are new ideas, they would not cause the least
irritation if they were introduced into political society; because the
world having never got used to them there would be no mass of men ready
to fight for them at a moment's notice. That which was irritating about
the French Revolution was this--that it was not the introduction of a
new ideal, but the practical fulfilment of an old one. From the time of
the first fairy tales men had always believed ideally in equality; they
had always thought that something ought to be done, if anything could be
done, to redress the balance between Cinderella and the ugly sisters.
The irritating thing about the French was not that they said this ought
to be done; everybody said that. The irritating thing about the French
was that they did it. They proposed to carry out into a positive scheme
what had been the vision of humanity; and humanity was naturally
annoyed. The kings of Europe did not make war upon the Revolution
because it was a blasphemy, but because it was a copy-book maxim which
had been just too accurately copied. It was a platitude which they had
always held in theory unexpectedly put into practice. The tyrants did
not hate democracy because it was a paradox; they hated it because it
was a truism which seemed in some danger of coming true.
Now it happens to be hugely important to have this right view of the
Revolution in considering its political effects upon England. For the
English, being a deeply and indeed excessively romantic people, could
never be quite content with this quality of cold and bald obviousness
about the republican formula. The republican formula was merely
this--that the State must consist of its citizens ruling equally,
however unequally they may do anything else. In their capacity of
members of the State they are all equally interested in its
preservation. But the English soon began to be romantically restless
about this eternal truism; they were perpetually trying to turn it into
something else, into something more picturesque--progress perhaps, or
anarchy. At last they turned it into the highly exciting and highly
unsound system of politics, which was known as the Manchester School,
and which was expressed with a sort of logical flightiness, more
excusable in literature, by Mr. Herbert Spencer. Of course Danton or
Washington or any of the original republicans would have thought these
people were mad. They would never have admitted for a moment that the
State must not interfere with commerce or competition; they would merely
have insisted that if the State did interfere, it must really be the
State--that is, the whole people. But the distance between the common
sense of Danton and the mere ecstasy of Herbert Spencer marks the
English way of colouring and altering the revolutionary idea. The
English people as a body went blind, as the saying is, for interpreting
democracy entirely in terms of liberty. They said in substance that if
they had more and more liberty it did not matter whether they had any
equality or any fraternity. But this was violating the sacred trinity of
true politics; they confounded the persons and they divided the
substance.
Now the really odd thing about England in the nineteenth century is
this--that there was one Englishman who happened to keep his head. The
men who lost their heads lost highly scientific and philosophical heads;
they were great cosmic systematisers like Spencer, great social
philosophers like Bentham, great practical politicians like Bright,
great political economists like Mill. The man who kept his head kept a
head full of fantastic nonsense; he was a writer of rowdy farces, a
demagogue of fiction, a man without education in any serious sense
whatever, a man whose whole business was to turn ordinary cockneys into
extraordinary caricatures. Yet when all these other children of the
revolution went wrong he, by a mystical something in his bones, went
right. He knew nothing of the Revolution; yet he struck the note of it.
He returned to the original sentimental commonplace upon which it is
forever founded, as the Church is founded on a rock. In an England gone
mad about a minor theory he reasserted the original idea--the idea that
no one in the State must be too weak to influence the State.
This man was Dickens. He did this work much more genuinely than it was
done by Carlyle or Ruskin; for they were simply Tories making out a
romantic case for the return of Toryism. But Dickens was a real Liberal
demanding the return of real Liberalism. Dickens was there to remind
people that England had rubbed out two words of the revolutionary motto,
had left only Liberty and destroyed Equality and Fraternity. In this
book, _Hard Times_, he specially champions equality. In all his books he
champions fraternity.
The atmosphere of this book and what it stands for can be very
adequately conveyed in the note on the book by Lord Macaulay, who may
stand as a very good example of the spirit of England in those years of
eager emancipation and expanding wealth--the years in which Liberalism
was turned from an omnipotent truth to a weak scientific system.
Macaulay's private comment on _Hard Times_ runs, "One or two passages of
exquisite pathos and the rest sullen Socialism." That is not an unfair
and certainly not a specially hostile criticism, but it exactly shows
how the book struck those people who were mad on political liberty and
dead about everything else. Macaulay mistook for a new formula called
Socialism what was, in truth, only the old formula called political
democracy. He and his Whigs had so thoroughly mauled and modified the
original idea of Rousseau or Jefferson that when they saw it again they
positively thought that it was something quite new and eccentric. But
the truth was that Dickens was not a Socialist, but an unspoilt Liberal;
he was not sullen; nay, rather, he had remained strangely hopeful. They
called him a sullen Socialist only to disguise their astonishment at
finding still loose about the London streets a happy republican.
Dickens is the one living link between the old kindness and the new,
between the good will of the past and the good works of the future. He
links May Day with Bank Holiday, and he does it almost alone. All the
men around him, great and good as they were, were in comparison
puritanical, and never so puritanical as when they were also atheistic.
He is a sort of solitary pipe down which pours to the twentieth century
the original river of Merry England. And although this _Hard Times_ is,
as its name implies, the hardest of his works, although there is less in
it perhaps than in any of the others of the _abandon_ and the buffoonery
of Dickens, this only emphasises the more clearly the fact that he stood
almost alone for a more humane and hilarious view of democracy. None of
his great and much more highly-educated contemporaries could help him in
this. Carlyle was as gloomy on the one side as Herbert Spencer on the
other. He protested against the commercial oppression simply and solely
because it was not only an oppression but a depression. And this protest
of his was made specially in the case of the book before us. It may be
bitter, but it was a protest against bitterness. It may be dark, but it
is the darkness of the subject and not of the author. He is by his own
account dealing with hard times, but not with a hard eternity, not with
a hard philosophy of the universe. Nevertheless, this is the one place
in his work where he does not make us remember human happiness by
example as well as by precept. This is, as I have said, not the saddest,
but certainly the harshest of his stories. It is perhaps the only place
where Dickens, in defending happiness, for a moment forgets to be
happy.
He describes Bounderby and Gradgrind with a degree of grimness and
sombre hatred very different from the half affectionate derision which
he directed against the old tyrants or humbugs of the earlier nineteenth
century--the pompous Dedlock or the fatuous Nupkins, the grotesque
Bumble or the inane Tigg. In those old books his very abuse was
benignant; in _Hard Times_ even his sympathy is hard. And the reason is
again to be found in the political facts of the century. Dickens could
be half genial with the older generation of oppressors because it was a
dying generation. It was evident, or at least it seemed evident then,
that Nupkins could not go on much longer making up the law of England to
suit himself; that Sir Leicester Dedlock could not go on much longer
being kind to his tenants as if they were dogs and cats. And some of
these evils the nineteenth century did really eliminate or improve. For
the first half of the century Dickens and all his friends were justified
in feeling that the chains were falling from mankind. At any rate, the
chains did fall from Mr. Rouncewell the Iron-master. And when they fell
from him he picked them up and put them upon the poor.
[Illustration: Charles Dickens, 1858
From a black and white drawing by Baughiet.]