If Dickens had been merely a comic writer, the chances are that no one would now remember his name....What people always demand of a popular novelist is that he shall write the same book over and over again, forgetting that a man who would write the same book twice could not even write it once. Any writer who is not utterly lifeless moves upon a kind of parabola, and the downward curve is implied in the upper one. Joyce has to start with the frigid competence of Dubliners and end with the dream-language of Finnegan's Wake, but Ulysses and Portrait of the Artist are part of the trajectory. The thing that drove Dickens forward into a form of art for which he was not really suited, and at the same time caused us to remember him, was simply the fact that he was a moralist, the consciousness of ‘having something to say’. He is always preaching a sermon, and that is the final secret of his inventiveness. For you can only create if you can care. Types like Squeers and Micawber could not have been produced by a hack writer looking for something to be funny about. A joke worth laughing at always has an idea behind it, and usually a subversive idea. Dickens is able to go on being funny because he is in revolt against authority, and authority is always there to be laughed at. There is always room for one more custard pie.
[Dickens's] radicalism is of the vaguest kind, and yet one always knows that it is there. That is the difference between being a moralist and a politician. He has no constructive suggestions, not even a clear grasp of the nature of the society he is attacking, only an emotional perception that something is wrong, all he can finally say is, ‘Behave decently’, which, as I suggested earlier, is not necessarily so shallow as it sounds. Most revolutionaries are potential Tories, because they imagine that everything can be put right by altering the shape of society; once that change is effected, as it sometimes is, they see no need for any other. Dickens has not this kind of mental coarseness. The vagueness of his discontent is the mark of its permanence. What he is out against is not this or that institution, but, as Chesterton put it, ‘an expression on the human face.’ Orwell (1939) "Charles Dickens"
One of the great joys of reading Orwell's Essays, is to encounter his engagement with fellow writers (Mailer, Swift, Kipling, even Wodehouse, etc.). For, one of Orwell's great gifts is to articulate the political horizon, as it were, of the literary persona behind others' books in a sympathetic and critical fashion even though he may well disagree intensely.* Orwell simultaneously connects this persona to an image of the historical context of the author (e.g. in explaining why Kiping's outlook is pre-Fascist, "Kipling belongs very definitely to the period 1885-1902"), the history of English literature as seen by Orwell, and the then present political-literary context. Dickens then comes to stand for a permanent possibility, an exemplar, of a certain kind of (literary) social critic: the moralist. This moralist is characterized early in the essay,
every attack Dickens makes upon society he is always pointing to a change of spirit rather than a change of structure. It is hopeless to try and pin him down to any definite remedy, still more to any political doctrine. His approach is always along the moral plane...Useless to change institutions without a ‘change of heart’ — that, essentially, is what he is always saying.
If that were all, he might be no more than a cheer-up writer, a reactionary humbug. A ‘change of heart’ is in fact the alibi of people who do not wish to endanger the status quo. But Dickens is not a humbug, except in minor matters, and the strongest single impression one carries away from his books is that of a hatred of tyranny.
A lot of professional, political philosophers are moralists in Dickens's sense, without the comedy or vividness. That is, they would like the existing institutions to live up to the ideals inherent in them and wider social norms.** Unlike Dickens, they often seem happy to coerce others into living up to these ideals. In fact, once you have been alerted to this -- and I forgot who first got me to notice it -- liberal philosophers (my friends) endlessly prattle on about legitimacy, which is just another way of saying coercion is justified. But, as Orwell points out, Dickens is superior to my friends because (i) Dickens embraces a substantive ideal of the good, "radiant idleness," and (ii) he understands that the underlying problem with the status quo is something fundamental:
There is no clear sign that he wants the existing order to be overthrown, or that he believes it would make very much difference if it were overthrown. For in reality his target is not so much society as ‘human nature’.
On (i) Orwell does not need Leni Riefenstahl to remind him of the significance and pull of aesthetic visions (he uses Blake's poetry to make the point).+ What he recognizes, however, is that the liberal-moralist, too, requires it. And this points to the major void of much liberal reflection: because so much of it is formal and not substantive, it is incapable of presenting, let alone endorsing, a common aesthetic good and this puts liberals on the defensive when her ideals need to be mobilized.
On (ii) Orwell is no friend of Dickens's ideal; he reminds the reader that the vision of such idleness is grounded in "£500 a year," that is propertied-rentier income and, so, founded on the coercion needed to protect and stabilize property. But Orwell's more fundamental critique of this vision is its lack of "intellectual curiosity," including its lack of interest in machines, which, Orwell hopes, will create a progressive future if properly embedded in systematic change. (Some other time I'll return to Orwell's engagement with Swift on this very point.) But this (as it were) bright future has to accommodate itself to enduring human need and longing.
Now, Orwell, writes from the perspective of "shrinking world. The ‘democratic vistas’ have ended in barbed wire." (This from, "Inside the Whale" the 1940 essay on Mailer's Tropic of Cancer.) That is, liberalism's first great retreat. Regular readers know, I think that we are now experiencing the second great retreat. The retreat may not be halted by casting about for an aesthetic ideal worth having, but I wonder if it is a possibility.
*There is also something reductive about Orwell's exercise; he has little room for an ambiguous persona.
**It is a small step from here to the method of reflective equilibrium.
+Recall my post on President Trumps' fondness for aesthetic spectacle.
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