  COMMUNITY. While the opinions of Dickens on the subject of community may not seem very advanced to some of the most progressive men and women of the present, they were much ahead of his own time, and they are beyond the practice of our time. I have had my share of sorrows—more than the common lot, perhaps, but I have borne them ill. I have broken where I should have bent; and have mused and brooded, when my spirit should have mixed with all God’s great creation. The men who learn endurance are they who call the whole world brother. I have turned from the world, and I pay the penalty. Thus spoke Mr. Haredale to Edward Chester, in Barnaby Rudge. No one who has lived since the time of Dickens could write a more striking statement of the responsibility of every man for his brother, and of the terrific consequences of neglect of the duties of brotherhood both to him who is neglected and to him who neglects, than Dickens wrote in Dombey and Son. There is no phase of sociology that has stepped beyond the position taken by Dickens in the following selection: Was Mr. Dombey’s master vice, that ruled him so inexorably, an unnatural characteristic? It might be worth while, sometimes to inquire what Nature is, and how men work to change her, and whether, in the enforced distortions so produced, it is not natural to be unnatural. Coop any son or daughter of our mighty mother within narrow range, and bind the prisoner to one idea, and foster it by servile worship of it on the part of the few timid or Alas! are there so few things in the world about us most unnatural, and yet most natural in being so! Hear the magistrate or judge admonish the unnatural outcast of society; unnatural in brutal habits, unnatural in want of decency, unnatural in losing and confounding all distinctions between good and evil; unnatural in ignorance, in vice, in recklessness, in contumacy, in mind, in looks, in everything. But follow the good clergyman or doctor, who, with his life imperilled at every breath he draws, goes down into their dens, lying within the echoes of our carriage wheels and daily tread upon the pavement stones. Look round upon the world of odious sights—millions of immortal creatures have no other world on earth—at the lightest mention of which humanity revolts, and dainty delicacy living in the next street, stops her ears, and lisps, “I don’t believe it!” Breathe the polluted air, foul with every impurity that is poisonous to health and life; and have every sense conferred upon our race for its delight and happiness, offended, sickened, and disgusted, and made a channel by which misery and death alone can enter. Vainly attempt to think of any simple plant, or flower, or wholesome weed that, set in this fetid bed, could have its natural growth or put its little leaves off to the sun as God designed it. And then, calling up some ghastly child, with stunted form and wicked face, hold forth on its unnatural sinfulness, and lament its being so early far away from heaven—but think a little of its having been conceived, and born and bred, in hell! Those who study the physical sciences, and bring them to bear upon the health of man, tell us that if the noxious particles that rise from vitiated air were palpable to the sight, we should see them lowering in a dense black cloud above such haunts, and rolling slowly on to corrupt the better portions of a town. But if the moral pestilence that rises with them, and in the eternal laws of outraged nature, is inseparable from them, could be made discernible too, how terrible the revelation! Then should we see depravity, impiety, drunkenness, theft, murder, and a long train of nameless sins against the natural affections and repulsions of mankind, overhanging the devoted spots, Oh, for a good spirit who would take the housetops off, with a more potent and benignant hand than the lame demon in the tale, and show a Christian people what dark shapes issue from amidst their homes, to swell the retinue of the destroying angel as he moves forth among them! For only one night’s view of the pale phantoms rising from the scenes of our too long neglect; and from the thick and sullen air where vice and fever propagate together, raining the tremendous and social retributions which are ever pouring down, and ever coming thicker! Bright and blessed the morning that should rise on such a night; for men, delayed no more by stumbling-blocks of their own making, which are but specks of dust upon the path between them and eternity, would then apply themselves, like creatures of one common origin, owing one duty to the father of one family, and tending to one common end to make the world a better place! Not the less bright and blessed would that day be for rousing some who never have looked out upon the world of human life around them to a knowledge of their own relation to it, and for making them acquainted with a perversion of Nature in their own contracted sympathies and estimates; as great and yet as natural in its development when once begun as the lowest degradation known. This selection is worth rereading. The most advanced thinkers will understand it best. “Weak indulgence has ruined me. Indulgence in remembrance and indulgence in forgetfulness. My natural grief for my child’s mother turned to disease; my natural love for my child turned to disease. I have infected everything I touched. I have brought misery on what I dearly love, I know—You know! I thought it possible that I could truly love one creature in the world, and not love the rest; I thought it possible that I could truly mourn for one creature gone out of the world, and not have some part in the grief of all who mourned. Thus the lessons of my life have been perverted! I have preyed on my own morbid coward heart, and it has preyed on me. Sordid in my grief, sordid in my love, sordid in my miserable escape from the darker side of both, oh, see the ruin I am, and hate me, shun me!” In Tom Tiddler’s Ground Dickens attacks the ideal that there may be merit in seclusion. Mr. Traveller visits the hermit who had become famous, and who was so vain on account of his dirt and simplicity of living, and he tells him some plain truths regarding himself and the duty of man to his fellow-men. “Now,” said he, “that a man—even behind bars, in a blanket and a skewer—should tell me that he can see from day to day any orders or conditions of men, women, or children, who can by any possibility teach him that it is anything but the miserablist drivelling for a human creature to quarrel with his social nature—not to go so far as to say, to renounce his common human decency, for that is an extreme case, or who can teach him that he can in “You think yourself profoundly wise,” said the Hermit. “Bah,” returned Mr. Traveller, “there is little wisdom in knowing that every man must be up and doing, and that all mankind are made dependent on one another. “It is a moral impossibility,” continued Mr. Traveller, “that any son or daughter of Adam can stand on this ground that I put my foot on, or on any ground that mortal treads, and gainsay the healthy tenure on which we hold our existence.” “Which is,” sneered the Hermit, “according to you——” “Which is,” returned the Traveller, “according to Eternal Providence, that we must arise and wash our faces and do our gregarious work and act and react on each other, leaving only the idiot and the palsied to sit blinking in the corner.” Dickens saves Little Emily from her great sorrow, and lifts the load of “shame” from her heart by giving her the opportunity of helping to care for others. But theer was some poor folks aboard as had illness among ’em, and she took care of them; and theer was the children in our company, and she took care of them; and so she got to be busy, and to be doing good, and that helped her. And in the same great book he ridicules the misuse of the sacred word “society” by applying it to the sham and mockery of all that should be truly helpful and ennobling in the social intercourse of mankind. Or perhaps this is the Desert of Sahara! for, though Julia has a stately house, and mighty company, and sumptuous dinners every day, I see no green growth near her; nothing that can ever come to fruit or flower. What Julia calls “society,” I see among it Mr. Jack Maldon, from his Patent Place, sneering at the hand that gave it to him, and speaking to me of the Doctor, as “so charmingly antique.” When he spoke of Little Dorrit as “inspired” he proceeded to say: She was inspired to be something which was not what the rest were, and to be that something, different and laborious, for the sake of the rest. Inspired? Yes. Shall we speak of the inspiration of a poet or a priest, and not of the heart impelled by love and self-devotion to the lowliest work in the lowliest way of life! Dickens had reached the great conception that the duty of every individual is to add something by his life to the general good. That we should not leave the world as we found it; that our work is not done well if we spend our lives in digging among the richest treasures of the past and revealing them unselfishly to our fellow-men, but that each should make some existing thing or condition better, or reveal some new thought or principle, or plan, or process, so that humanity may climb more easily and more certainly from the mists and shadows to the higher glory of the clearer light. Mr. Doyce had made an invention, but had met with almost insuperable difficulties in getting it before the people. “It is much to be regretted,” said Clennam, “that you ever turned your thoughts that way, Mr. Doyce.” “True, sir, true, to a certain extent. But what is a man to do? If he has the misfortune to strike out something serviceable to the nation, he must follow where it leads him.” “Hadn’t he better let it go?” asked Clennam. “He can’t do it,” said Doyce, shaking his head, with a thoughtful smile. “It’s not put into his head to be buried. It’s put into his head to be made useful. You hold your life on the condition that to the last you shall struggle hard for it. Every man holds a discovery on the same terms.” “That is to say,” said Arthur, with a growing admiration “I have no right to be, if I am,” returned the other. “The thing is as true as it ever was.” Throughout his writings Dickens vigorously condemns the class distinctions that separate mankind into sections, and thus destroy the bond of unity and brotherhood that should exist between them. Miss Monflathers, in Old Curiosity Shop, drew the line very definitely between genteel children and the children of the poor. Mr. Dombey pompously consented to have the children of the poor educated, because “it is necessary that the inferior classes should continue to be taught to know their position.” Fancy using education to prevent the unity of men, when its highest function should be the revelation of community and the qualification of individuals for the functions of brotherhood. In David Copperfield the pathetic side of the evil of class distinctions is shown by the appeals of Mr. Peggotty to Mrs. Steerforth that she would consent to her son’s marriage with Little Emily, and her indignant refusal to allow her son to do so. In Bleak House Sir Leicester Dedlock was amazed at the audacity of Mr. Rouncewell’s democratic ideas, and his mind was filled with gloomy forebodings of the evil that such principles as those held by Mr. Rouncewell would work in the social organization as planned and fixed by the Dedlock class. These were his thoughts: From the village school of Chesney Wold, intact as it is this minute, to the whole framework of society; from the whole framework of society, to the aforesaid framework receiving tremendous cracks in consequence of people (ironmasters, lead mistresses, and what not) not minding their catechism, and getting out of the station unto which they are called—necessarily and forever, according to Sir Leicester’s rapid logic, the first station in which they happen to find themselves; and from that, to their educating other people out of their stations, and so obliterating the landmarks, and opening the flood gates, and all the rest of it; this is the swift progress of the Dedlock mind. The large class of readers, startled by these facts, will exclaim with one voice, “How very preposterous!” On my deferentially inquiring why, they will answer, “These things are above their station.” In reply to that objection, I would beg to ask what their station is. It is their station to work. And they do work. They labour in these mills, upon an average, twelve hours a day, which is unquestionably work. And pretty tight work too. Perhaps it is above their station to indulge in such amusements on any terms. Are we quite sure that we in England have not formed our ideas of the “station” of working people from accustoming ourselves to the contemplation of that class as they are, and not as they might be? I think that if we examine our own feelings, we shall find that the pianos, and the circulating libraries, and even the Lowell Offering, startle us with their novelty, and not by their bearing upon any abstract question of right or wrong. For myself, I know no station in which, the occupation of to-day cheerfully done and the occupation of to-morrow cheerfully looked to, any one of these pursuits is not most humanizing and laudable. I know no station which is rendered more endurable to the person in it, or more safe to the person out of it, by having ignorance for its associate. I know no station which has a right to monopolize the means of mutual instruction, improvement, and rational entertainment; or which has ever continued to be a station very long, after seeking to do so. Walter Wilding planned an ideal relationship between employer and employed in No Thoroughfare. He advertised for a housekeeper so that he “might sit daily at the head of the table at which the people in my employment eat together, and may eat of the same roast and boiled, and drink of the same beer, and one and all form a kind of family.” He planned, too, to train his employees to sing “Handel, Mozart, Haydn, Kent, Purcell, Doctor Arne, Greene, Mendelssohn, to make music a part of the bond He touched the true chord of community when Joey Ladle used the word “they.” Joey asked, when Mr. Wilding unfolded his plan: “Is all to live in the house, Young Master Wilding? The two other cellarmen, the three porters, the two ’prentices, and the odd men?” “Yes. I hope we shall all be a united family, Joey.” “Ah!” said Joey. “I hope they may be.” “They? Rather say we, Joey.” Not many employers have reached the ideals of Dickens yet. |
|
