CHAPTER II. THE INSTINCTS OF REFORM
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,
