had taken
The universal sorrow of mankind."
He had the supreme gift of fruitful sympathy, but his work was more than the outcome of it. From story after story there issued brilliant flashes of lurid realism; vivid pictures of the poverty he himself had known and the misery he had himself endured. And because of those early experiences of bitterness he was able to render luminous large tracts of human existence, which to the mass of the middle and upper classes of his time lay hidden under the very weight and ugliness of their collective evils. As George Gissing observed, he loved to play the advocate and the friend to those with whom nature and man have dealt most cruelly. Upon a Smike (Nicholas Nickleby) or a Maggy (Little Dorrit), and, he might have added, Poor Jo (Bleak House), he lavished his tenderness, simply because they were hapless creatures from whom even ordinarily kind people would turn with involuntary dislike. " Maggy is a starved and diseased idiot, a very child of the London gutter, moping and mowing to signify her pleasures or her pains. Dickens gives her, for protector, the brave and large-hearted child of the Marshalsea, whose own sufferings have taught her to be compassionate to those who suffer still more. Maggy is to be rescued from filth and cold and hunger; is to be made as happy as her nature will allow. It is nobly done, and undoubtedly an example of more value to the world than any glorification of triumphant intellect." Precisely, and it is so because Dickens, having suffered even as Little Dorrit suffered, felt the glow of ineradicable compassion for all who were weak and oppressed. Little Dorrit and Maggy are creatures who come straight out of the days of his own boyish tragedy.
What a contrast was this childhood of his to that of his great admirer and contemporary, John Ruskin! The one — the latter — was, we are told, encompassed in boyhood by all the luxuries of a middle-class home, where wealth was visibly swelling, enjoying the best books, the choicest art, the most interesting travels, picked teachers, and the constant care of devoted parents. The other — ah, what a record it was! — a delicate child buffeted about in the hurly-burly of sternest facts and realities, down in the very morass of industry; a child-slave neglected and forlorn; craving for sympathy and understanding which never came, snatching his recreation from arduous labour by playing on cinder-heaps or coal-barges with little waifs from the slums, or wandering, solitary and friendless, about the great busy streets, stinting and scheming to make ends meet; unprovided with literature save the books he could surreptitiously borrow; stealing off to Covent Garden to compare it with the description in a book he had read; his earliest years filled with the sense of neglect and dominated by the sordid conflict with debt and hunger and want.
Ruskin declares that in his home life, with its pervading attributes of peace, obedience, faith, truth, honesty, and perfect exactitude of conduct, there was nothing to love and nothing to endure. In Dickens's case there was, in very truth, little to love, but much to endure, and yet out of it there arose complete felicity and illimitable affection. There was no " enervating calm " about the early home life of Dickens; and yet perhaps there is no writer of the English language who has more persistently and continuously and effectively taught the gospel of the sacredness of home life and the divinity which hedges itself about domestic affection and peace. Scene after scene of happy firesides of homes where love dwells, where the humblest and most prosaic acts are exalted to virtues, where there is instinctive sympathy and electric affection, where the father is honoured, the mother revered, where common daily service is the consecration of humble lives; all these things flood the memory. Take, for instance, the Cratchit family in A Christmas Carol, or Dot and John Peerybingle and Bertha and Caleb Plummer in The Cricket on the Hearth, or the doctor's family in the Battle of Life, or Joe and Pip in Great Expectations, or Barnaby and his mother in Barnaby Rudge, or Mr. Jarndyce, Ada, and Esther Summerson in Bleak House. In every one of these cases we see how much Dickens loved the homely fireside, how intense was his affection for the domestic circle.
But it was the home life of the poor which Dickens most adored. In every humble family he depicts, there were virtues of unselfishness and love which stir the blood. Read that scene where the boy Kit, having come to the end of his first quarter in employment, resolves to give his mother " a whirl of entertainments," and note with what real glee and downright enjoyment the author enters into the humble delights of these poor folk. " Let me linger in this place," he says (the scene is from the Old Curiosity Shop), " to remark that if ever household affections and loves are graceful things, they are graceful in the poor. The ties that bind the wealthy and the proud to home may be forged on earth, but those which link the poor man to his humble hearth are of the truer metal, and bear the stamp of Heaven. The man of high descent may love the halls and lands of his inheritance as a part of himself — as trophies of his birth and power; his associations with them are associations of pride and wealth and triumph; the poor man's attachment to the tenement he holds which strangers have held before and may to-morrow occupy again has a worthier root, stuck deep in a purer soil. His household gods are of flesh and blood with no alloy of silver, gold, or precious stone; he has no property but in the affections of his own heart; and when they endear bare floors and walls, despite of rags and toil and scanty fare, that man has his love of home from God, and his rude hut becomes solemn place."
Here we have the germs of his passion for housing reform, to which we shall later refer.
It is easy, however, to see that this piece of moralizing is no mere sop thrown to appease popular sentiment, but the real conviction of his life. As a child he knew what " bare floors and walls " were; he experienced in his own career " rags and toil and scanty fare," and yet he knew the love of home. It was not " class feeling " that betrayed him into that outburst, as some of the critics would have us believe; it was stern economic circumstance and bitter personal experience. In this matter of laughing firesides, as in so many other things, Dickens was the exponent of homely emotions. All that we in our drab lives look forward to with glistening eyes he embodied in his characters. He made concrete figures of our ideals and clothed the astral spirits of our dreams with the flesh and frailties of our common humanity.
And this was part of his unconscious reform work. His teachings were always more ethical than political. The very need of the poor was the excuse for their ignorance; their lack of opportunities in life, and the fact that they were incapable of knowing better, in itself demanded consideration for them at the hands of the educated and informed. His reform work was the outcome of emotion; he gave it an emotional character, awakening through his stories just the spirit which makes plain and easy the way to reform, and, as Herbert Spencer has told us, it is only by repeatedly awakening the appropriate emotions that character can be changed. " Mere ideas received by the intellect, meeting no response from within, are quite inoperative upon conduct." Dickens saw this. He very rarely appealed or sought to appeal to the highly specialized intellect, which deals in precise refinements; his mission was rather to touch the heart and stimulate a robust common sense. He believed, in quite other than the old narrow theological sense, that the heart would prompt the mind to right ideas of social relationship between man and man. Let it not be thought, however, that Dickens was one merely to promulgate views. He did not stop there, as we shall presently see. He believed that ideas should be converted into acts, and he enunciated those ideas in the plainest and most practicable terms possible. He held, with Carlyle, that " conviction, were it ever so excellent, is worthless till it convert itself into conduct," and the conduct he sought to inspire, whilst addressed to the reason of man, never omitted the very tangible element of conscience or soul. All this, I think, was directly traceable to his intuitive sympathies and instincts. He believed in the Spencerian philosophy that each man in whom dissatisfaction is aroused by institutions which have survived from a less civilized past, or whose sympathies make certain evils repugnant to him, must regard those feelings as units in the aggregate of forces by which progress is brought about. It may have been insufficient, but he held it to be a desirable thing to help to create an atmosphere in which progress could flourish; he regarded his feelings of love for the poor as units in this army for human freedom, and he did expend those feelings in appropriate deeds. For the moment it is enough for us to know that those feelings which prompted the demands that social sores should be healed, were the direct and obvious outcome of his early environment and experience.
