“Finished Bleak House!” my journal exults with wonder and regret. Wonder that I made it through the enormity – three hundred seventy-seven thousand words (a year and a half of missives!); fifty-six memorable characters; forty-four hours of being read to (about as long as it would take me to turn its pages). The wonder is that reserved for the loftiest art – Michelangelo’s, Bach’s, Shakespeare’s – that a mere person – like me! – could create such a thing (o, we’re a giddying race at best). Regret that this visit, my third and likely last, was done, so I must bid farewell, as if by the grave of a beloved.
I recall our time together: the long slow summer, the antics of Dickens’ comic concoctions competing with puppy Henry to delight, the spikes of dread and darkness, the relentless goodness of this author contrasted with the rancorous desolation of our national moment. Did Dickens overdraw the goodness of his good characters? No doubt – and bless him for it. For he was composing a morality tale, meant to seize us as if by an eagle’s talons and dangle us above the fearful range of human possibilities; to make us better by example. Words for Dickens, as he matured, were less for diversion than submersion – into the range of human outcomes: who we sadly are and might gloriously be.
Of the literary titans, Dickens may be the most condescended to. Shakespeare, Milton, Jane Austen, Tolstoy, Proust are approached with eyes abased, whether or not they’re read. Dickens we chuck on the chin – as humorous, lovable, too jolly to wound. And he was jolly – frantic always to amuse – an actor ever eying his audience – but dismissible never. When his poignant characters die, it is Society that killed them, in which we are complicit. As his devils and rascals torment their victims, so in our ways do we.
The novel, when Dickens wrote, was barely three centuries removed from its origins in morality plays, sermons in disguise, meant to herd their hearers into godlier behavior. Devils were devils and angels angels, make no mistake. Literacy turned popular entertainment into literature, which grew more erudite and complex as readers’ tastes matured. Henry James, the generation after Dickens, while daunted by his forbears’ imaginative might, sniffed at their form, decrying their vast fictions as “large loose baggy monsters.”
Henry James wrote to perfect literary form, Dickens to improve human behavior, very different goals.
Two centuries later, we decry morality in art. Who dare preach to us who are so knowing! Angels or devils, fiddlesticks! We’re all just crummy humans, ridiculous, grotesque. If we behave angelically, it’s for our own selfish purposes – Freud proved that! If we’re vile and villainous, well, that’s just human nature, why not elect a monster President!
The moral purpose of Bleak House – fierce and urgent – is to depict goodness in action by dramatizing what happens when avidity and indifference prevail. It shows us decent lives destroyed and souls snuffed by greed and snobbery. It’s both hair-raising and heartening: for while corpses strew the stage, a few good souls survive to carry forth hope like a guttering candle in the dark.
What does it mean today to be “good”? Do we believe in goodness anymore? When and why did the star fall from the sky, which should guide our course?
I write to find my way through murky modernity. Dickens entertains prodigiously – we shudder, cringe, gasp, laugh aloud – but also provides, at his scintillating best, an inspiriting and infallible moral guide. He reiterates in countless variations, “Don’t give up on humanity – don’t!”
I am trying not to.