The three articles on Sunday of which I speak are almost the last
expression of an articulate sort in English literature of the ancient
and existing morality of the English people. It is always asserted that
Puritanism came in with the seventeenth century and thoroughly soaked
and absorbed the English. We are now, it is constantly said, an
incurably Puritanic people. Personally, I have my doubts about this. I
shall not refuse to admit to the Puritans that they conquered and
crushed the English people; but I do not think that they ever
transformed it. My doubt is chiefly derived from three historical
facts. First, that England was never so richly and recognisably English
as in the Shakespearian age before the Puritan had appeared. Second,
that ever since he did appear there has been a long unbroken line of
brilliant and typical Englishmen who belonged to the Shakespearian and
not the Puritanic tradition; Dryden, Johnson, Wilkes, Fox, Nelson, were
hardly Puritans. And third, that the real rise of a new, cold, and
illiberal morality in these matters seems to me to have occurred in the
time of Queen Victoria, and not of Queen Elizabeth. All things
considered, it is likely that future historians will say that the
Puritans first really triumphed in the twentieth century, and that
Dickens was the last cry of Merry England.
And about these additional, miscellaneous, and even inferior works of
Dickens there is, moreover, another use and fascination which all
Dickensians will understand; which, after a manner, is not for the
profane. All who love Dickens have a strange sense that he is really
inexhaustible. It is this fantastic infinity that divides him even from
the strongest and healthiest romantic artists of a later day--from
Stevenson, for example. I have read _Treasure Island_ twenty times;
nevertheless I know it. But I do not really feel as if I knew all
_Pickwick_; I have not so much read it twenty times as read in it a
million times; and it almost seemed as if I always read something new.
We of the true faith look at each other and understand; yes, our master
was a magician. I believe the books are alive; I believe that leaves
still grow in them, as leaves grow on the trees. I believe that this
fairy library flourishes and increases like a fairy forest: but the
world is listening to us, and we will put our hand upon our mouth.