The compiler has placed in this list only one of Dickens' books for a
somewhat different reason from that which has influenced him in other
cases. All Dickens' novels have a unique value, and such an equal
value, that almost any one of them, chosen at random, can serve as an
example of the rest.
Those who still are not prohibited, by temperamental difficulty or by
some modern fashion, from enjoying the peculiar atmosphere of this
astonishing person's work, will be found reverting to him constantly
and indiscriminately. "Great Expectations" is perhaps, as a more
"artistic" book than the rest, the most fitted of them all to entice
towards a more sympathetic understanding of his mood, those who are
held from reading him by some more or less accidental reason. The most
characteristic thing about this great genius is the power he possesses
of breathing palpable life into what is often called the inanimate.
Like Hans Andersen, the writer of fairy-stories, and, in a measure,
like all children, Dickens endows with fantastic spirituality the most
apparently dead things in our ordinary environment.
His imagination plays superb tricks with such objects and things,
touching the most dilapidated of them with a magic such as the genius
of a great poet uses, when dealing with nature--only the "nature" of
Dickens is made of less lovely matters than leaves and flowers.
The wild exaggerations of Dickens--his reckless contempt for realistic
possibility--need not hinder us from enjoying, apart from his
revelling humor and his too facile sentiment, those inspired outbursts
of inevitable truth, wherein the inmost identity of his queer people
stands revealed to us. His world may be a world of goblins and
fairies, but there cross it sometimes figures of an arresting appeal
and human voices of divine imagination.