brees, I'm happy to see you sticking around here, even if it's just in the "Vote Republican- You're stupid, and we're not" camp. On your (presumably) more serious moral revolution front, you might find this bit of Orwell thought provoking.
It seems that in 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, and his attitude is sufficiently summed up in that remark about Strong's school being as different from Creakle's "as good is from evil." Two things can be very much alike and yet abysmally different. Heaven and Hell are in the same place. 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. I said earlier that Dickens is not in the accepted sense a revolutionary writer. But it is not at all certain that a merely moral criticism of society may not be just as "revolutionary" - and revolution, after all, means turning things upside down-as the politico-economic criticism which is fashionable at this moment Blake was not a politician, but there is more understanding of the nature of capitalist society in a poem like "I wander through each charter'd street" than in three-quarters of Socialist literature. Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing. There is always a new tyrant waiting to take over from the old, generally not quite so bad, but still a tyrant. Consequently two viewpoints are always tenable. The one, how can you improve human nature until you have changed the system? The other, what is the we of changing the system before you have improved human nature? They appeal to different individuals, and they probably show a tendency to alternate in point of time.
The moralist and the revolutionary are constantly undermining one another. Marx exploded a hundred tons of dynamite beneath the moralist position, and we arc 81111 living in the echo of that tremendous crash But already, somewhere or other, the sappers are at work and fresh dynamite is being tamped in place to blow Marx at the moon. Then Marx, or somebody like him, will come back with yet more dynamite, and so the process continues, to an end we cannot yet foresee. The central problem-how to prevent power from being abused-remains unsolved. Dickens, who had not the vision to See that private property is an obstructive nuisance, had the vision to see that. "If men would behave decently the world would be decent" is not such a platitude as it sounds.
From A Collection of Essays, "Charles Dickens", P. 64-65. Can't say much about Dickens myself, all I ever read was "Tale of Two Cities. "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" seems as timeless as ever here. Orwell is always good, though. |
