Dickens never forgot that Homo was Ludensand needed Kunst and recreatie.
Good natural entertainment was very high on his list of priorities - but that
was a Dickens who could hardly have imagined the mechanical vulgarities of Dallas
nor have believed that such a thing could really be popular 'kunst', popular
entertainment. It might have made him want to put Kunst back with Wetenschappen.
At all events, to put Kunst with Recreatie is to forget half the story.
Kunst, Fiction, Art, is for delight and instruction, it was said a long time
ago. Delight and Instruction - and not merely delight, not merely recreation
and not merely instruction. And the universities must never allow the delight
and instruction of works of art to be overwhelmed or sidetracked in "de weten
schap", - certainly not in a wetenschap that measures, tabulates, and defines -
as if what matters in art can be extracted by measuring, tabulating and defining.
And yet this is being done. I don't have to tell the Dickens Fellowship how
Dickens would have fulminated against such a wilful distortion of human interests
against reducing the study of art to mechanical analysis and intellectual
theorising. And if we are really to study, to do justice to, a work of art, to
a novel, we must listen to the artist, to the novelist on his art. We don't
have to believe all he says, but we do have to remember what he says; I mean
what he says about his profession. And Dickens had a great belief in his
profession, and very little in de wetenschap' or in theorizing.
He was a great entertainer, and a great novelist. And his being a great
novelist means his having a great capacity for persuading us as to the nature
of the human animal and the nature of his group activitiesand these things
are vital for us - but they are not things that we can usefully measure. If
we want to measure anything in Dickens, then we must put aside what we value
in him - and this, none of us here will want to do.
Hard Times is Dickens's answer to the Utilitarian Philosophy, to what
he called the hard fact men, to the measurers, tabulators and definers of his
day, and ours. It is a book that was not popular when it appeared; has been
nevertheless highly praised (largely by academics) in the 20th century; and is
now here dismissed by one Dingle Foot, in the introduction to the New Oxford
Illustrated Dickens (1955; a standard edition) as "almost certainly the least
t
read of Dickens's novels". (Quite untrue - but why does he say that?).
Well, Dingle Foot, I suggest, is little more than a measurer, tabulator
and definer himself - of a political variety and so he doesn't like the book.
He is looking for philosophical or political answers, and he is looking for
a new blue-print for a society of the future. He seems to be wanting Dickens
to be a theoretical socialist. "After all", he writes, "the moral of Hard Times
is pronounced by Mr. Sleary: 'Don't be croth with uth poor vagabondth. People
mutht be amuthed.
