DICKENS

If Christendom should lose everything that is now in the melting-pot,

human life would still remain amiable and quite adequately human. I

draw this comforting assurance from the pages of Dickens. Who could

not be happy in his world? Yet there is nothing essential to it which

the most destructive revolution would be able to destroy. People

would still be as different, as absurd, and as charming as are his

characters; the springs of kindness and folly in their lives would

not be dried up. Indeed, there is much in Dickens which communism, if

it came, would only emphasize and render universal. Those schools,

those poorhouses, those prisons, with those surviving shreds of family

life in them, show us what in the coming age (with some sanitary

improvements) would be the nursery and home of everybody. Everybody

would be a waif, like Oliver Twist, like Smike, like Pip, and like

David Copperfield; and amongst the agents and underlings of social

government, to whom all these waifs would be entrusted, there would

surely be a goodly sprinkling of Pecksniffs, Squeers's, and Fangs;

whilst the Fagins would be everywhere commissioners of the people.

Nor would there fail to be, in high places and in low, the occasional

sparkle of some Pickwick or Cheeryble Brothers or Sam Weller or

Mark Tapley; and the voluble Flora Finchings would be everywhere in

evidence, and the strong-minded Betsey Trotwoods in office. There

would also be, among the inefficient, many a Dora and Agnes and

Little Emily--with her charm but without her tragedy, since this is

one of the things which the promised social reform would happily

render impossible; I mean, by removing all the disgrace of it. The

only element in the world of Dickens which would become obsolete

would be the setting, the atmosphere of material instrumentalities

and arrangements, as travelling by coach is obsolete; but travelling

by rail, by motor, or by airship will emotionally be much the same

thing. It is worth noting how such instrumentalities, which absorb

modern life, are admired and enjoyed by Dickens, as they were by Homer.

The poets ought not to be afraid of them; they exercise the mind

congenially, and can be played with joyfully. Consider the black ships

and the chariots of Homer, the coaches and river-boats of Dickens,

and the aeroplanes of to-day; to what would an unspoiled young mind

turn with more interest? Dickens tells us little of English sports,

but he shares the sporting nature of the Englishman, to whom the whole

material world is a playing--field, the scene giving ample scope to his

love of action, legality, and pleasant achievement. His art is to sport

according to the rules of the game, and to do things for the sake of

doing them, rather than for any ulterior motive.

It is remarkable, in spite of his ardent simplicity and openness of

heart, how insensible Dickens was to the greater themes of the human

imagination--religion, science, politics, art. He was a waif himself,

and utterly disinherited. For example, the terrible heritage of

contentious religions which fills the world seems not to exist for him.

In this matter he was like a sensitive child, with a most religious

disposition, but no religious ideas. Perhaps, properly speaking, he

had no _ideas_ on any subject; what he had was a vast sympathetic

participation in the daily life of mankind; and what he saw of ancient

institutions made him hate them, as needless sources of oppression,

misery, selfishness, and rancour. His one political passion was

philanthropy, genuine but felt only on its negative, reforming side;

of positive utopias or enthusiasms we hear nothing. The political

background of Christendom is only, so to speak, an old faded back-drop

for his stage; a castle, a frigate, a gallows, and a large female

angel with white wings standing above an orphan by an open grave--a

decoration which has to serve for all the melodramas in his theatre,

intellectually so provincial and poor. Common life as it is lived was

varied and lovable enough for Dickens, if only the pests and cruelties

could be removed from it. Suffering wounded him, but not vulgarity;

whatever pleased his senses and whatever shocked them filled his mind

alike with romantic wonder, with the endless delight of observation.

Vulgarity--and what can we relish, if we recoil at vulgarity?--was

innocent and amusing; in fact, for the humorist, it was the spice of

life. There was more piety in being human than in being pious. In

reviving Christmas, Dickens transformed it from the celebration of a

metaphysical mystery into a feast of overflowing simple kindness and

good cheer; the church bells were still there--in the orchestra; and

the angels of Bethlehem were still there--painted on the back-curtain.

Churches, in his novels, are vague, desolate places where one has

ghastly experiences, and where only the pew-opener is human; and such

religious and political conflicts as he depicts in _Barnaby Rudge_

and in _A Tale of Two Cities_ are street brawls and prison scenes and

conspiracies in taverns, without any indication of the contrasts in

mind or interests between the opposed parties. Nor had Dickens any

lively sense for fine art, classical tradition, science, or even the

manners and feelings of the upper classes in his own time and country:

in his novels we may almost say there is no army, no navy, no church,

no sport, no distant travel, no daring adventure, no feeling for the

watery wastes and the motley nations of the planet, and--luckily, with

his notion of them--no lords and ladies. Even love of the traditional

sort is hardly in Dickens's sphere--I mean the soldierly passion

in which a rather rakish gallantry was sobered by devotion, and

loyalty rested on pride. In Dickens love is sentimental or benevolent

or merry or sneaking or canine; in his last book he was going to

describe a love that was passionate and criminal; but love for him

was never chivalrous, never poetical. What he paints most tragically

is a quasi-paternal devotion in the old to the young, the love of Mr.

Peggotty for Little Emily, or of Solomon Gills for Walter Gay, A series

of shabby little adventures, such as might absorb the interest of an

average youth, were romantic enough for Dickens.

I say he was disinherited, but he inherited the most terrible

negations. Religion lay on him like the weight of the atmosphere,

sixteen pounds to the square inch, yet never noticed nor mentioned. He

lived and wrote in the shadow of the most awful prohibitions. Hearts

petrified by legality and falsified by worldliness offered, indeed,

a good subject for a novelist, and Dickens availed himself of it to

the extent of always contrasting natural goodness and happiness with

whatever is morose; but his morose people were wicked, not virtuous

in their own way; so that the protest of his temperament against

his environment never took a radical form nor went back to first

principles. He needed to feel, in his writing, that he was carrying

the sympathies of every man with him. In him conscience was single,

and he could not conceive how it could ever be divided in other men.

He denounced scandals without exposing shams, and conformed willingly

and scrupulously to the proprieties. Lady Dedlock's secret, for

instance, he treats as if it were the sin of Adam, remote, mysterious,

inexpiable. Mrs. Dombey is not allowed to deceive her husband except by

pretending to deceive him. The seduction of Little Emily is left out

altogether, with the whole character of Steerforth, the development of

which would have been so important in the moral experience of David

Copperfield himself. But it is not public prejudice alone that plays

the censor over Dickens's art; his own kindness and even weakness

of heart act sometimes as marplots. The character of Miss Mowcher,

for example, so brilliantly introduced, was evidently intended to

be shady, and to play a very important part in the story; but its

original in real life, which was recognized, had to be conciliated,

and the sequel was omitted and patched up with an apology--itself

admirable--for the poor dwarf. Such a sacrifice does honour to

Dickens's heart; but artists should meditate on their works in time,

and it is easy to remove any too great likeness in a portrait by a

few touches making it more consistent than real people are apt to be;

and in this case, if the little creature had been really guilty, how

much more subtle and tragic her apology for herself might have been,

like that of the bastard Edmund in _King Lear_! So, too, in _Dombey

and Son_, Dickens could not bear to let Walter Gay turn out badly,

as he had been meant to do, and to break his uncle's heart as well

as the heroine's; he was accordingly transformed into a stage hero

miraculously saved from shipwreck, and Florence was not allowed to

reward the admirable Toots, as she should have done, with her trembling

hand. But Dickens was no free artist; he had more genius than taste, a

warm fancy not aided by a thorough understanding of complex characters.

He worked under pressure, for money and applause, and often had to

cheapen in execution what his inspiration had so vividly conceived.

What, then, is there left, if Dickens has all these limitations? In

our romantic disgust we might be tempted to say, Nothing. But in fact

almost everything is left, almost everything that counts in the daily

life of mankind, or that by its presence or absence can determine

whether life shall be worth living or not; because a simple good life

is worth-living, and an elaborate bad life is not. There remains in the

first place eating and drinking; relished not bestially, but humanly,

jovially, as the sane and exhilarating basis for everything else. This

is a sound English beginning; but the immediate sequel, as the England

of that day presented it to Dickens, is no less delightful. There is

the ruddy glow of the hearth; the sparkle of glasses and brasses and

well-scrubbed pewter; the savoury fumes of the hot punch, after the

tingle of the wintry air; the coaching-scenes, the motley figures and

absurd incidents of travel; the changing sights and joys of the road.

And then, to balance this, the traffic of ports and cities, the hubbub

of crowded streets, the luxury of shop-windows and of palaces not to

be entered; the procession of the passers-by, shabby or ludicrously

genteel; the dingy look and musty smell of their lodgings; the

labyrinth of back-alleys, courts, and mews, with their crying children,

and scolding old women, and listless, half-drunken loiterers. These

sights, like fables, have a sort of moral in them to which Dickens was

very sensitive; the important airs of nobodies on great occasions,

the sadness and preoccupation of the great as they hasten by in their

mourning or on their pressing affairs; the sadly comic characters of

the tavern; the diligence of shopkeepers, like squirrels turning in

their cages; the children peeping out everywhere like grass in an

untrodden street; the charm of humble things, the nobleness of humble

people, the horror of crime, the ghastliness of vice, the deft hand and

shining face of virtue passing through the midst of it all; and finally

a fresh wind of indifference and change blowing across our troubles and

clearing the most lurid sky.

I do not know whether it was Christian charity or naturalistic insight,

or a mixture of both (for they are closely akin) that attracted Dickens

particularly to the deformed, the half-witted, the abandoned, or those

impeded or misunderstood by virtue of some singular inner consecration.

The visible moral of these things, when brutal prejudice does not

blind us to it, comes very near to true philosophy; one turn of the

screw, one flash of reflection, and we have understood nature and human

morality and the relation between them.

In his love of roads and wayfarers, of river-ports and wharves and the

idle or sinister figures that lounge about them, Dickens was like Walt

Whitman; and I think a second Dickens may any day appear in America,

when it is possible in that land of hurry to reach the same degree of

saturation, the same unquestioning pleasure in the familiar facts.

The spirit of Dickens would be better able to do justice to America

than was that of Walt Whitman; because America, although it may seem

nothing but a noisy nebula to the impressionist, is not a nebula but

a concourse of very distinct individual bodies, natural and social,

each with its definite interests and story. Walt Whitman had a sort of

transcendental philosophy which swallowed the universe whole, supposing

there was a universal spirit in things identical with the absolute

spirit that observed them; but Dickens was innocent of any such

clap-trap, and remained a true spirit in his own person. Kindly and

clear-sighted, but self-identical and unequivocally human, he glided

through the slums like one of his own little heroes, uncontaminated

by their squalor and confusion, courageous and firm in his clear

allegiances amid the flux of things, a pale angel at the Carnival,

his heart aflame, his voice always flute-like in its tenderness and

warning. This is the true relation of spirit to existence, not the

other which confuses them; for this earth (I cannot speak for the

universe at large) has no spirit of its own, but brings forth spirits

only at certain points, in the hearts and brains of frail living

creatures, who like insects flit through it, buzzing and gathering

what sweets they can; and it is the spaces they traverse in this

career, charged with their own moral burden, that they can report on or

describe, not things rolling on to infinity in their vain tides. To be

hypnotized by that flood would be a heathen idolatry. Accordingly Walt

Whitman, in his comprehensive democratic vistas, could never see the

trees for the wood, and remained incapable, for all his diffuse love

of the human herd, of ever painting a character or telling a story;

the very things in which Dickens was a master. It is this life of the

individual, as it may be lived in a given nation, that determines the

whole value of that nation to the poet, to the moralist, and to the

judicious historian. But for the excellence of the typical single life,

no nation deserves to be remembered more than the sands of the sea; and

America will not be a success, if every American is a failure.

Dickens entered the theatre of this world by the stage door; the shabby

little adventures of the actors in their private capacity replace for

him the mock tragedies which they enact before a dreaming public.

Mediocrity of circumstances and mediocrity of soul for ever return to

the centre of his stage; a more wretched or a grander existence is

sometimes broached, but the pendulum soon swings back, and we return,

with the relief with which we put on our slippers after the most

romantic excursion, to a golden mediocrity--to mutton and beer, and to

love and babies in a suburban villa with one frowsy maid. Dickens is

the poet of those acres of yellow brick streets which the traveller

sees from the railway viaducts as he approaches London; they need a

poet, and they deserve one, since a complete human life may very well

be lived there. Their little excitements and sorrows, their hopes and

humours are like those of the Wooden Midshipman in _Dombey and Son_;

but the sea is not far off, and the sky--Dickens never forgets it--is

above all those brief troubles. He had a sentiment in the presence

of this vast flatness of human fates, in spite of their individual

pungency, which I think might well be the dominant sentiment of mankind

in the future; a sense of happy freedom in littleness, an open-eyed

reverence and religion without words. This universal human anonymity

is like a sea, an infinitive democratic desert, chock-full and yet

the very image of emptiness, with nothing in it for the mind, except,

as the Moslems say, the presence of Allah. Awe is the counterpart

of humility--and this is perhaps religion enough. The atom in the

universal vortex ought to be humble; he ought to see that, materially,

he doesn't much matter, and that morally his loves are merely his own,

without authority over the universe. He can admit without obloquy that

he is what he is; and he can rejoice in his own being, and in that of

all other things in so far as he can share it sympathetically. The

apportionment of existence and of fortune is in Other Hands; his own

portion is contentment, vision, love, and laughter.

Having humility, that most liberating of sentiments, having a true

vision of human existence and joy in that vision, Dickens had in a

superlative degree the gift of humour, of mimicry, of unrestrained

farce. He was the perfect comedian. When people say Dickens

exaggerates, it seems to me they can have no eyes and no ears. They

probably have only _notions_ of what things and people are; they accept

them conventionally, at their diplomatic value. Their minds run on

in the region of discourse, where there are masks only and no faces,

ideas and no facts; they have little sense for those living grimaces

that play from moment to moment upon the countenance of the world. The

world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the

mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be. But as it

nevertheless intends all the time to be something different and highly

dignified, at the next moment it corrects and checks and tries to cover

up the absurd thing it was; so that a conventional world, a world of

masks, is superimposed on the reality, and passes in every sphere of

human interest for the reality itself. Humour is the perception of

this illusion, the fact allowed to pierce here and there through the

convention, whilst the convention continues to be maintained, as if we

had not observed its absurdity. Pure comedy is more radical, cruder,

in a certain sense less human; because comedy throws the convention

over altogether, revels for a moment in the fact, and brutally says to

the notions of mankind, as if it slapped them in the face, There, take

that! That's what you really are I At this the polite world pretends

to laugh, not tolerantly as it does at humour, but a little angrily.

It does not like to see itself by chance in the glass, without having

had time to compose its features for demure self-contemplation. "What

a bad mirror," it exclaims; "it must be concave or convex; for surely

I never looked like that. Mere caricature, farce, and horse play.

Dickens exaggerates; _I_ never was so sentimental as that; _I_ never

saw anything so dreadful; _I_ don't believe there were ever any people

like Quilp, or Squeers, or Serjeant Buzfuz." But the polite world is

lying; there _are_ such people; we are such people ourselves in our

true moments, in our veritable impulses; but we are careful to stifle

and to hide those moments from ourselves and from the world; to purse

and pucker ourselves into the mask of our conventional personality;

and so simpering, we profess that it is very coarse and inartistic

of Dickens to undo our life's work for us in an instant, and remind

us of what we are. And as to other people, though we may allow that

considered superficially they are often absurd, we do not wish to dwell

on their eccentricities, nor to mimic them. On the contrary, it is

good manners to look away quickly, to suppress a smile, and to say to

ourselves that the ludicrous figure in the street is not at all comic,

but a dull ordinary Christian, and that it is foolish to give any

importance to the fact that its hat has blown off, that it has slipped

on an orange-peel and unintentionally sat on the pavement, that it

has a pimple on its nose, that its one tooth projects over its lower

lip, that it is angry with things in general, and that it is looking

everywhere for the penny which it holds tightly in its hand. That may

fairly represent the moral condition of most of us at most times; but

we do not want to think of it; we do not want to see; we gloss the

fact over; we console ourselves before we are grieved, and reassert

our composure before we have laughed. We are afraid, ashamed, anxious

to be spared. What displeases us in Dickens is that he does not spare

us; he mimics things to the full; he dilates and exhausts and repeats;

he wallows. He is too intent on the passing experience to look over

his shoulder, and consider whether we have not already understood, and

had enough. He is not thinking of us; he is obeying the impulse of the

passion, the person, or the story he is enacting. This faculty, which

renders him a consummate comedian, is just what alienated from him a

later generation in which people of taste were aesthetes and virtuous

people were higher snobs; they wanted a mincing art, and he gave them

copious improvization, they wanted analysis and development, and he

gave them absolute comedy. I must confess, though the fault is mine

and not his, that sometimes his absoluteness is too much for me. When

I come to the death of Little Nell, or to What the Waves were always

Saying, or even to the incorrigible perversities of the pretty Dora,

I skip. I can't take my liquor neat in such draughts, and my inner

man says to Dickens, Please don't. But then I am a coward in so many

ways! There are so many things in this world that I skip, as I skip

the undiluted Dickens! When I reach Dover on a rough day, I wait there

until the Channel is smoother; am I not travelling for pleasure? But

my prudence does not blind me to the admirable virtue of the sailors

that cross in all weathers, nor even to the automatic determination of

the sea-sick ladies, who might so easily have followed my example, if

they were not the slaves of their railway tickets and of their labelled

luggage. They are loyal to their tour, and I to my philosophy. Yet as

wrapped in my great-coat and sure of a good dinner, I pace the windy

pier and soliloquize, I feel the superiority of the bluff tar, glad of

breeze, stretching a firm arm to the unsteady passenger, and watching

with a masterful thrill of emotion the home cliffs receding and the

foreign coasts ahead. It is only courage (which Dickens had without

knowing it) and universal kindness (which he knew he had) that are

requisite to nerve us for a true vision of this world. And as some of

us are cowards about crossing the Channel, and others about "crossing

the bar," so almost everybody is a coward about his own humanity. We do

not consent to be absurd, though absurd we are. We have no fundamental

humility. We do not wish the moments of our lives to be caught by a

quick eye in their grotesque initiative, and to be pilloried in this

way before our own eyes. For that reason we don't like Dickens, and

don't like comedy, and don't like the truth. Dickens could don the

comic mask with innocent courage; he could wear it with a grace, ease,

and irresistible vivacity seldom given to men. We must go back for

anything like it to the very greatest comic poets, to Shakespeare or to

Aristophanes. Who else, for instance, could have penned this:

"It was all Mrs. Bumble. She _would_ do it," urged Mr.

Bumble; first looking found to ascertain that his partner

had left the room.

"That is no excuse," replied Air. Brownlow. "You were

present on the occasion of the destruction of these

trinkets, and indeed are the more guilty of the two, in

the eye of the law; for the law supposes that your wife

acts under your direction."

"If the law supposes that," said Mr. Bumble, squeezing

his hat emphatically in both hands, "the law is a ass,

a idiot. If that's the eye of the law, the law is a

bachelor; and the worst I wish the law is, that his eye

may be opened by experience--by experience."

Laying great stress on the repetition of these two words,

Mr. Bumble fixed his hat on very tight, and putting his

hands in his pockets, followed his helpmate downstairs.

This is high comedy; the irresistible, absurd, intense dream of the

old fool, personifying the law in order to convince and to punish

it. I can understand that this sort of thing should not be common in

English literature, nor much relished; because pure comedy is scornful,

merciless, devastating, holding no door open to anything beyond.

Cultivated English feeling winces at this brutality, although the

common people love it in clowns and in puppet shows; and I think they

are right. Dickens, who surely was tender enough, had so irresistible

a comic genius that it carried him beyond the gentle humour which most

Englishmen possess to the absolute grotesque reality. Squeers, for

instance, when he sips the wretched dilution which he has prepared for

his starved and shivering little pupils, smacks his lips and cries:

"Here's richness!" It is savage comedy; humour would come in if we

understood (what Dickens does not tell us) that the little creatures

were duly impressed and thought the thin liquid truly delicious. I

suspect that English sensibility prefers the humour and wit of Hamlet

to the pure comedy of Falstaff; and that even in Aristophanes it seeks

consolation in the lyrical poetry for the flaying of human life in

the comedy itself. Tastes are free; but we should not deny that in

merciless and rollicking comedy life is caught in the act. The most

grotesque creatures of Dickens are not exaggerations or mockeries of

something other than themselves; they arise because nature generates

them, like toadstools; they exist because they can't help it, as we

all do. The fact that these perfectly self-justified beings are absurd

appears only by comparison, and from outside; circumstances, or the

expectations of other people, make them ridiculous and force them to

contradict themselves; but in nature it is no crime to be exceptional.

Often, but for the savagery of the average man, it would not even be

a misfortune. The sleepy fat boy in _Pickwick_ looks foolish; but

in himself he is no more foolish, nor less solidly self-justified,

than a pumpkin lying on the ground. Toots seems ridiculous; and we

laugh heartily at his incoherence, his beautiful waistcoats, and his

extreme modesty; but when did anybody more obviously grow into what

he is because he couldn't grow otherwise? So with Mr. Pickwick, and

Sam Weller, and Mrs. Gamp, and Micawber, and all the rest of this

wonderful gallery; they are ridiculous only by accident, and in a

context in which they never intended to appear. If Oedipus and Lear and

Cleopatra do not seem ridiculous, it is only because tragic reflection

has taken them out of the context in which, in real life, they would

have figured. If we saw them as facts, and not as emanations of a

poet's dream, we should laugh at them till doomsday; what grotesque

presumption, what silly whims, what mad contradiction of the simplest

realities! Yet we should not laugh at them without feeling how real

their griefs were; as real and terrible as the griefs of children and

of dreams. But facts, however serious inwardly, are always absurd

outwardly; and the just critic of life sees both truths at once, as

Cervantes did in _Don Quixote_. A pompous idealist who does not see the

ridiculous in _all_ things is the dupe of his sympathy and abstraction;

and a clown, who does not see that these ridiculous creatures are

living quite in earnest, is the dupe of his egotism. Dickens saw the

absurdity, and understood the life; I think he was a good philosopher.

It is usual to compare Dickens with Thackeray, which is like comparing

the grape with the gooseberry; there are obvious points of resemblance,

and the gooseberry has some superior qualities of its own; but you

can't make red wine of it. The wine of Dickens is of the richest,

the purest, the sweetest, the most fortifying to the blood; there is

distilled in it, with the perfection of comedy, the perfection of

morals. I do not mean, of course, that Dickens appreciated all the

values that human life has or might have; that is beyond any man.

Even the greatest philosophers, such as Aristotle, have not always

much imagination to conceive forms of happiness or folly other than

those which their age or their temperament reveals to them; their

insight runs only to discovering the _principle_ of happiness, that

it is spontaneous life of any sort harmonized with circumstances. The

sympathies and imagination of Dickens, vivid in their sphere, were

no less limited in range; and of course it was not his business to

find philosophic formulas; nevertheless I call his the perfection of

morals for two reasons: that he put the distinction between good and

evil in the right place, and that he felt this distinction intensely.

A moralist might have excellent judgement, he might see what sort of

life is spontaneous in a given being and how far it may be harmonized

with circumstances, yet his heart might remain cold, he might not

suffer nor rejoice with the suffering or joy he foresaw. Humanitarians

like Bentham and Mill, who talked about the greatest happiness of the

greatest number, might conceivably be moral prigs in their own persons,

and they might have been chilled to the bone in their theoretic love

of mankind, if they had had the wit to imagine in what, as a matter of

fact, the majority would place their happiness. Even if their theory

had been correct (which I think it was in intention, though not in

statement) they would then not have been perfect moralists, because

their maxims would not have expressed their hearts. In expressing their

hearts, they ought to have embraced one of those forms of "idealism"

by which men fortify themselves in their bitter passions or in their

helpless commitments; for they do not wish mankind to be happy in

its own way, but in theirs. Dickens was not one of those moralists

who summon every man to do himself the greatest violence so that he

may not offend them, nor defeat their ideals. Love of the good of

others is something that shines in every page of Dickens with a truly

celestial splendour. How entirely limpid is his sympathy with life--a

sympathy uncontaminated by dogma or pedantry or snobbery or bias of

any kind! How generous is this keen, light spirit, how pure this open

heart! And yet, in spite of this extreme sensibility, not the least

wobbling; no deviation from a just severity of judgement, from an

uncompromising distinction between white and black. And this happens

as it ought to happen; sympathy is not checked by a flatly contrary

prejudice or commandment, by some categorical imperative irrelevant to

human nature; the check, like the cheer, comes by tracing the course

of spontaneous impulse amid circumstances that inexorably lead it to

success or to failure. There is a bed to this stream, freely as the

water may flow; when it comes to this precipice it must leap, when

it runs over these pebbles it must sing, and when it spreads into

that marsh it must become livid and malarial. The very sympathy with

human impulse quickens in Dickens the sense of danger; his very joy

in joy makes him stem to what kills it. How admirably drawn are his

surly villains! No rhetorical vilification of them, as in a sermon; no

exaggeration of their qualms or fears; rather a sense of how obvious

and human all their courses seem from their own point of view; and

yet no sentimental apology for them, no romantic worship of rebels in

their madness or crime. The pity of it, the waste of it all, are seen

not by a second vision but by the same original vision which revealed

the lure and the drift of the passion. Vice is a monster here of such

sorry mien, that the longer we see it the more we deplore it; that

other sort of vice which Pope found so seductive was perhaps only some

innocent impulse artificially suppressed, and called a vice because it

broke out inconveniently and displeased the company. True vice is human

nature strangled by the suicide of attempting the impossible. Those

so self-justified villains of Dickens never elude their fates. Bill

Sikes is not let off, neither is Nancy; the oddly benevolent Magwitch

does not escape from the net, nor does the unfortunate young Richard

Carstone, victim of the Circumlocution Office. The horror and ugliness

of their fall are rendered with the hand of a master; we see here, as

in the world, that in spite of the romanticists it is not virtue to

rush enthusiastically along any road. I think Dickens is one of the

best friends mankind has ever had. He has held the mirror up to nature,

and of its reflected fragments has composed a fresh world, where the

men and women differ from real people only in that they live in a

literary medium, so that all ages and places may know them. And they

are worth knowing, just as one's neighbours are, for their picturesque

characters and their pathetic fates. Their names should be in every

child's mouth; they ought to be adopted members of every household.

Their stories cause the merriest and the sweetest chimes to ring in the

fancy, without confusing our moral judgement or alienating our interest

from the motley commonplaces of daily life. In every English-speaking

home, in the four quarters of the globe, parents and children will

do well to read Dickens aloud of a winter's evening; they will love

winter, and one another, and God the better for it. What a wreath that

will be of ever-fresh holly, thick with bright berries, to hang to this

poet's memory--the very crown he would have chosen!

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