Charles Dickens - Social Reformer. William Walter Crotch
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