In his 1856 essay on Dickens, the French historian, philosopher and critic Hippolyte Taine contrasts the English novelist with Balzac:
“When you finish Old Goriot, your heart is broken by the tortures of that agony; but the surprising invention, the accumulation of facts, the abundance of general ideas, the force of analysis, transport you into the world of science, and your pained sympathy is calmed by the spectacle of this physiology of the heart. Dickens never calms our sensibility”.
Facts, general ideas, analysis, physiology, science … For Taine, Balzac’s artistic project could be meaningfully described as scientific, in a way that Dickens’s, and that of English novelists and historians of that generation, could not be. And, for all that we are no longer at ease considering the novel as sub-branch of science, Taine’s categorization is in fact an acute designation of what separates Dickens from his great French contemporaries, who were in the grip of that wildly ambitious post-Revolutionary rationalist project that, for Dickens, was little more than Mr Gradgrind’s repulsive cult of “facts”.
The project of the four titans of the 19th-century French novel—Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert (a friend of Taine’s) and Zola—can indeed be meaningfully described as “scientific”, a label which would have been acceptable to the authors themselves, particularly Zola. Their writing was scientific in as much as they sought to set out how the inner laws of character, and the external laws of society, determined the personalities and fates of men and women. Madame Bovary, perhaps the most revered work of this French canon, can be read as just such a clinical study of its stupid and shallow heroine’s overpowering by her own inner workings and by the workings of the stupid, shallow world in which she is caught.
Madame Bovary can be read as just such a clinical study of its stupid and shallow heroine’s overpowering by her own inner workings and by the workings of the stupid, shallow world in which she is caught.
I do not of course mean (and neither did Taine) that Flaubert et al. wrote with the bloodless dreariness of a biologist describing her cell cultures. Rather, these authors were tragedians—inspirers of sorrow and pity—but the engine of their tragedy was no longer the gods or blind fate, but rather those inner and external forces which they believed science was making ever better known. The classic French novel is what Jean Cocteau called Greek tragedy itself, a machine infernale: the tale of a character led by inexorable powers on a descent into hell. Tragedy, as with the Greeks or Racine, then arises not just from that descent itself, but from the exquisite agonies of the tragic hero or heroine’s consciousness of what is happening to them, and what they are unable to stop.
But Dickens was not a tragedian: his sensibility was, in his comic mode, picaresque, and in his graver and more sentimental registers, melodramatic. This was indeed the inheritance of Sterne, Fielding, and Austen, although Dickens brought to it a new, burning intensity. Still the picaresque hero is not ground down by an infernal machine: he is an adventurer, whose taste for adventure, and whose amusement at man’s folly, the world is never able to extinguish. And melodrama arises not from the inexorable, but from the unpredictable, chaotic clash of events and personalities.
Dickens was the master of melodrama, and melodrama arises not from the inexorable, but from the unpredictable, chaotic clash of events and personalities.
What the scientific novelist seeks to study in his human subjects is change: how the forces under observation transform his characters, generally to their ruin. But Dickens, as Taine observes, is not much interested in making his characters change: most of them are stable, be they kind or wicked, sublime or ridiculous (or both). Little Dorrit can be corrupted neither by her sordid childhood in debtor’s prison, nor by her sudden wealth: that is indeed the whole point of the book. Admittedly, Dickens did write, in A Christmas Carol, one of English literature’s most famous tales of a man’s transformation, but this is a Christian fable of a repentance brought on by angelic visitations, quite the opposite of any bending of a character’s arc to the purported laws of psychology or sociology.
These varied approaches to change explain why Dickens’s plots are both engrossing, as one reads them, and instantly forgettable, while those of the French novelists are the opposite. Every Dickens novel is a page-turner, whereas the serious French novel is always something of a chore. A Dickens plot has the thrill of fairy-tale or a comic book: characters are constantly thrust into new perils and plunged into new mysteries, and, because we love and hate these characters, we long to know how they will fare. But in the end, we remember the characters, not the plots, because the plots’ main purpose is to reveal more fully the nature of the characters, not to change that nature. In contrast, the French novel’s plot, because it is the workings of that inexorable machine, is not thrilling, but that plot is always essential, since what happens to the characters is precisely what makes them who they are. One can read a Dickens novel three or four times and still retain only the haziest recollection of the story. But it is of course impossible to read Madame Bovary and forget Emma’s joyless marriage, sordid affairs, and grotesque suicide.
In a Dickens plot, the character is thrust into new perils and mysteries, but remains the same; in the French novel, what happens to the characters is precisely what makes them who they are.
We may however note, in this regard, that Taine wrote his essay before Dickens had published Great Expectations (1861), his one novel where the core plot is in fact memorable, and the central character’s inner transformation, under the workings of that plot, is the book’s great theme. Pip is changed by the fortune thrust upon him, and the corruption involved in that change is shown up by the revelation of that fortune’s true source. Dickens denies Pip the untarnished purity of Little Dorrit, let alone the unflappable—and boring—gallantry of Nicholas Nickleby and his ilk. Pip is, as a result, Dickens’s most interesting hero, and for many readers, Great Expectations is his greatest book.
For many readers, but not for all—there are even those who hold that Dickens never surpassed The Pickwick Papers, his first novel, in essence purely comic and picaresque. For Dickens’s universe of stable characters is not to be seen, except at its weakest, as a lie or a mere childish fantasy. The world is no less as Dickens and his English peers saw it than it is as the French scientific novelists did. After all, the latter’s grand scientific project has hardly succeeded: those great inner and outer laws governing character and decision, always on the verge of being finally revealed, remain ever elusive. And there really are Little Dorrits, and Pickwicks, and indeed Fagans and Murdstones: men and women whose virtue and vice, whose cruelty and eccentricity, are beyond explanation, and delightfully or infuriatingly constant, for all that the world throws at them. Indeed, we are all this way—there is more to all of us than can be explained.
There is of course no question here of choosing between English and the French novelists, just as it would be absurdly false to maintain that Dickens (who so hated corrupt institutions and was so fascinated by obsession) was blind to social forces or inner compulsions, or that the French authors had no intimation that there lurk mysteries in the heart beyond what can be explained by the machine infernale. There is likewise no choosing between Enlightenment and Romanticism, or between the rationalist fervor and libertinage of the French Revolution and the stolid propriety and hypocrisy of Victorian England. Taine himself, for all his adherence to Revolutionary science and rationalism, knew Dickens’s genius had to be accepted on its own terms, not improved upon by scientific tampering. But Dickens in turn is unimaginable without Balzac. All of these forces, ideas and visions were inextricable, for all their clashes—the nineteenth century novels of England, France, and in due course Russia, channelled all of them: that is their specific greatness.
