Isolated, they cease to mean anything, perhaps to exist. Even the classical writers surrounded their abstract and algebraical personages with at least the abstract and algebraical implication of the human realities, in relation to which virtues and vices are significant. Thanks to Dickens’s pathologically deliberate unawareness, Nell’s virtues are marooned, as it were, in the midst of a boundless waste of unreality; isolated, they fade and die. Even her sufferings and death lack significance because of this isolation. Dickens’s unawareness was the death of death itself. Unawareness, according to the ethics of Buddhism, is one of the deadly sins. The stupid are wicked. (Incidentally, the cleverest men can, sometimes and in certain circumstances, reveal themselves as profoundly—criminally—stupid. You can be an acute logician and at the same time an emotional cretin.) Damned in the realm of conduct, the unaware are also damned aesthetically. Their art is bad; instead of creating, they murder.
Art, as I have said, is also philosophy, is also science. Other things being equal, the work of art which in its own way ‘says’ more about the universe will be better than the work of art which says less. (The ‘other things’ which have to be equal are the forms of beauty, in terms of which the artist must express his philosophic and scientific truths.) Why is The Rosary a less admirable novel than The Brothers Karamazov? Because the amount of experience of all kinds understood, ‘felt into,’ as the Germans would say, and artistically re-created by Mrs Barclay is small in comparison with that which Dostoevsky feelingly comprehended and knew so consummately well how to re-create in terms of the novelist’s art. Dostoevsky covers all Mrs Barclay’s ground and a vast area beside.
The pathetic parts of The Old Curiosity Shop are as poor in understood and artistically re-created experience as The Rosary—indeed, I think they are even poorer. At the same time they are vulgar (which The Rosary, that genuine masterpiece of the servants’ hall, is not). They are vulgar, because their poverty is a pretentious poverty, because their disease (for the quality of Dickens’s sentimentality is truly pathological) professes to be the most radiant health; because they protest their unintelligence, their lack of understanding with a vehemence of florid utterance that is not only shocking, but ludicrous.
The end
