Voorjaar 2009 no.66
The Dutch Dickensian Volume XXIX 22
is to recommend culture as the
great help out of our present diffi
culties; culture being a pursuit of
our total perfection by means of
getting to knowon all matters
which most concern us, the best
that has been thought and said in
the world, and, though this knowl
edge, turning a stream of fresh
and free thought upon our stock of
notions and habits, which we now
follow staunchly but mechanically,
vainly imagining that there is a
virtue in following them staunchly
which makes up for the mischief of following
them mechanically.
In a central essay in Culture and Anarchy,
"Hebraism and Hellenism," an essay we shall
look at more closely in a few minutes, Arnold
offers the Hebraic and Hellenic cultures as
dominant forces in western culture. Riah's
stealing off, like the ghost of a departed
past," suggest that Arnold's Hebraism is not
what Dickens believes is needed at this time in
England. But what is it Dickens looks to, at
this point in his career, to redeem Lizzie and
England's future from a nineteenth-century
culture that values a false and meretricious
society controlled by Veneerings, Tippenses
and Podsnaps, That drives its Betty Higdens
to seek death in the wilds rather than be cared
for by its social institutions, and that sets
money above love in its relationships?
When Eugene had first seen Lizzie, she was
framed by the "little window": "the lonely girl
with the dark eyes sat by the fire":
Matthew Arnold
1822 - 1888)
(171; bk. 1, ch. 13)
This description is almost a set
piece for a Pre-Raphaelite painting,
something we might call
("Imagination Fuelling Beauty,"
knowing as we do that Lizzie's deep
est imaginative visions are prompt
ed by her rapt stare into the red-hot
coals "in the hollow down by the
flare." Eugene sees Lizzie in this ini
tial encounter, framed by the win
dow, as one might see a beautiful
painting, and, he later confesses, is
"haunted" by her beauty (736; bk. 4, ch. 6).
This scene is disturbed by Lizzie's starting up
and calling out to her father, whom she
believes she hears calling out to her as he is, in
fact, fighting for his life. Lizzie imagines she
hears her father calling for her in his desper
ate situation. She apparently possesses the
artistic capacity to perceive events beyond her
limited time/space dimension. We see a
dimension of this capacity also in her reading
Charley's future in the hollow down by the
flare and in her seeing Bella's heart as "well
worth winning, and well won" (565). Lizzie
has the kind of imaginative capacity that
David Copperfield demonstrates when he sees
She had no other light than the light of the
fire. The unkindled lamp stood on the table.
She sat on the ground, looking at the brazier,
with her face leaning on her hand. There was
a kind of film or flicker on her face, which at
first he took to be fitful firelight; but on sec
ond look, he saw that she was weeping. A sad
and solitary spectacle, as shown him by the
rising and falling of the fire.
A deep rich piece of colour, with the brown
flush of her cheek and the shining lustre of
her hair, though sad and solitary, weeping by
the rising and the falling of the fire.
