DICKENS (I)
I
If anything on this planet be great, great things have happened in Westminster Hall: which is open for anyone, turning aside from London’s traffic, to wander in and admire. Some property in the oak of its roof forbids the spider to spin there, and now that architects have defeated the worm in beam and rafter it stands gaunt and clean as when William Rufus built it: and I dare to say that no four walls and a roof have ever enclosed such a succession of historical memories as do these, as no pavement—not even that lost one of the Roman Forum—has been comparably trodden by the feet of grave men moving towards grave decisions, grand events.
The somewhat cold interior lays its chill on the imagination. A romantic mind can, like the spider, spin its cobwebs far more easily in the neighbouring Abbey, over the actual dust to which great men come—
But in the Abbey is finis rerum, and our contemplation there the common contemplation of mortality which, smoothing out place along with titles, degrees and even deeds, levels the pyramids with the low mounds of a country churchyard and writes the same moral over Socrates as over our Unknown Soldier—Vale, vale, nos te in ordine quo natura permittet sequamur. In Westminster Hall (I am stressing this with a purpose) we walk heirs of events in actual play, shaping our destiny as citizens of no mean country: in this covered rood of ground have been compacted from time to time in set conflict the high passions by which men are exalted to make history. Here a king has been brought to trial, heard and condemned to die; under these rafters have pleaded in turn Bacon, Algernon Sidney, Burke, Sheridan. Here the destinies of India were, after conflict, decided for two centuries. Through that great door broke the shout, taken up, reverberated by gun after gun down the river, announcing the acquittal of the Seven Bishops.
II
So, if this tragic comedy we call life be worth anything more than a bitter smile: if patriotism mean anything to you, and strong opposite wills out of whose conflict come great issues in victory or defeat, the arrest, the temporary emptiness of Westminster Hall—a sense of what it has seen and yet in process of time may see—will lay a deeper solemnity on you than all the honoured dust in the Abbey.
But, as men’s minds are freakish, let me tell you of a solitary figure I see in Westminster Hall more vividly even than the ghosts of Charles I and Warren Hastings bayed around by their accusers: the face and figure of a youth, not yet twenty-two, who has just bought a copy of the Magazine containing his first appearance in print as an author. “I walked down to Westminster Hall,” he has recorded, “and turned into it for half an hour, because my eyes were so dimmed with joy and pride that they could not bear the street and were not fit to be seen there.”
Now the paper which opened the fount of these boyish tears (here, if you will, is bathos) was entitled A Dinner at Poplar Walk. You may find it to-day under another title, “Mr. Minns and his Cousin” among Sketches by Boz: reading it, you may pronounce it no great shakes; and anyhow you may ask why anyone’s imagination should select this slight figure, to single it out among the crowd of ghosts. Well, to this I might make simple and sufficient answer, saying that the figure of unbefriended youth, with its promise, a new-comer alone in the market-place, has ever been one of the most poignant in life, and, because in life, therefore in literature. Dickens himself, who had been this figure and remembered all too well the emotion that choked its heart, has left us a wonderful portrait-gallery of these lads. But indeed our literature—every literature, all legend, for that matter—teems with them: with these youngest brothers of the fairy-tales, these Oedipus’s, Jasons, these Dick Whittingtons, Sindbads, Aladdins, Japhets in search of their Fathers; this Shakespeare holding horses for a groat, that David comely from the sheepfold with the basket of loaves and cheeses. You remember De Quincey and the stony waste of Oxford Street? or the forlorn and invalid boy in Charles Lamb’s paper on The Old Margate Hoy who “when we asked him whether he had any friends where he was going,” replied, “he had no friends.” Solitariness is ever the appeal of such a figure; an unbefriendedness that “makes friends,” searching straight to our common charity: this and the attraction of youth, knocking—so to speak—on the house-door of our own lost or locked-away ambitions. “Is there anybody there?” says this Traveller, and he, unlike the older one (who is oneself), gets an answer. The mid-Victorian Dr. Smiles saw him as an embryonic Lord Mayor dazed amid the traffic on London Bridge but clutching at his one half-crown for fear of pick-pockets. I myself met him once in a crowded third-class railway carriage. He was fifteen and bound for the sea: and when we came in sight of it he pushed past our knees to the carriage window and broke into a high tuneless chant, all oblivious of us. Challenge was in it and a sob of desire at sight of his predestined mistress and adversary. For the sea is great, but the heart in any given boy may be greater: and
III
But I am a Professor, and ought to have begun by assuring you that this figure in Westminster Hall has a real historical interest in connexion with your studies “on the subject of English Literature.”
Well, then, it has. The date of the apparition is New Year’s Day, 1834, and by New Year’s Day, 1838, Charles Dickens was not only the most popular of living authors, but in a fair way to become that which he remained until the end in 1870—a great National Institution.
I use no exaggerated term. Our fathers of the nineteenth century had a way (and perhaps not altogether a bad way) of considering their great writers as national institutions; Carlyle was one, Ruskin another. It was a part of their stout individualism, nowadays derided. And it was, if you will consider, in the depths of its soul [say, if you will, its Manchester Soul] a high-polite retort upon such a sworn enemy as Ruskin. “Curse us, Sir: but we and no Government make you a demigod.” You will never understand your fathers, Gentlemen, until you understand their proud distrust of Government save by consent. Take a favourite term of theirs—say “The Liberty of the Press.” By that they meant liberty from interference by Government. We, using that term to-day, should mean nothing of the sort. We should mean “liberty from control by capitalists.”
I interrogate my youthful memories and am confident that, in a modest country household these men—Carlyle, Ruskin—were, with decent reverence, though critically, read for prophets. Tennyson, too, and Browning had their sacred niches; and Darwin and Huxley, and Buckle, who perished young attempting a History of Civilisation in Europe: John Stuart Mill, also, and Kingsley, Maurice, George Eliot, and Thackeray. These names leap to memory as names of household gods. A few weeks ago, rummaging over some family papers I came upon the following entry:
1848, June 20. I received a visit from Mr. Alfred Tennyson, the Poet. He came into Cornwall along the North Coast, and from about Camelford crossed over to Fowey, where I called on him on the 19th. He came to Polperre in a boat, with Mr. Peach and others; and after viewing our scenery in all directions and taking tea at our house, they all rowed back to Fowey late in the evening. I find him well-informed and communicative. I believe a good Greek scholar with some knowledge of Hebrew. His personal appearance is not prepossessing; having a slouch in his gait and rather slovenly in his dress tho’ his clothes were new and good. He confesses to this. He admired the wildness of our scenery, deprecated the breaking in of improvements, as they are termed. He enquired after traditions, especially of the great Arthur: his object in visiting the County being to collect materials for a poem on that Chief. But he almost doubted his existence. He show’d me a MS. sketch of a history of the Hero: but it was prolix and modern.
You see, hinted in this extract from a journal, how our ancestors, in 1848 and the years roundabout, and in remote parts of England, welcomed these great men as gods: albeit critically, being themselves stout fellows. But above all these, from the publication of Pickwick—or, to be precise, of its fifth number, in which (as Beatrice would say) “there was a star danced” and under it Sam Weller was born—down to June 14, 1870, and the funeral in Westminster Abbey, Dickens stood exalted, in a rank apart. Nay, when he had been laid in the grave upon which, left and right, face the monuments of Chaucer, Shakespeare and Dryden, and for days after the grave was closed, the stream of unbidden mourners went by. “All day long,” wrote Dean Stanley on the 17th, “there was a constant pressure on the spot, and many flowers were strewn on it by unknown hands, many tears shed from unknown eyes.”
Without commenting on it for the moment, I want you to realise this exaltation of Dickens in the popular mind, his countrymen’s and countrywomen’s intimate, passionate pride in him; in the first place because it is an historical fact, and a fact (I think) singular in our literary history; but also because, as a phenomenon itself unique—unique, at any rate, in its magnitude—it reacted singularly upon the man and his work, and you must allow for this if you would thoroughly understand either.
IV
To begin with, you must get it out of your minds that it resembled any popularity known to us, in our day: the deserved popularity of Mr. Kipling, for example. You must also (of this generation I may be asking a hard thing, but it is necessary) get it out of your minds that Dickens was, in any sense at all, a cheap artist playing to the gallery. He was a writer of imperfect, or hazardous, literary education: but he was also a man of iron will and an artist of the fiercest literary conscience. Let me enforce this by quoting two critics whom you will respect. “The faults of Dickens,” says William Ernest Henley,
were many and grave. He wrote some nonsense; he sinned repeatedly against taste; he could be both noisy and vulgar; he was apt to be a caricaturist where he should have been a painter; he was often mawkish and often extravagant; and he was sometimes more inept than a great writer has ever been. But his work, whether good or bad, has in full measure the quality of sincerity. He meant what he did; and he meant it with his whole heart. He looked upon himself as representative and national—as indeed he was; he regarded his work as a universal possession; and he determined to do nothing that for lack of pains should prove unworthy of his function. If he sinned, it was unadvisedly and unconsciously; if he failed it was because he knew no better. You feel that as you read....
He had enchanted the public without an effort: he was the best beloved of modern writers almost from the outset of his career. But he had in him at least as much of the French artist as of the middle-class Englishman; and if all his life he never ceased from self-education, but went unswervingly in pursuit of culture, it was out of love for his art and because his conscience as an artist would not let him do otherwise.
Now let me add this testimony from Mr. G. K. Chesterton:
Dickens stands first as a defiant monument of what happens when a great literary genius has a literary taste akin to that of the community. For the kinship was deep and spiritual. Dickens was not like our ordinary demagogues and journalists. Dickens did not write what the people wanted. Dickens wanted what the people wanted.... Dickens never talked down to the people. He talked up to the people. He approached the people like a deity and poured out his riches and his blood. He had not merely produced something they could understand, but he took it seriously, and toiled and agonised to produce it. They were not only enjoying one of the best writers, they were enjoying the best he could do. His raging and sleepless nights, his wild walks in the darkness, his note-books crowded, his nerves in rags, all this extraordinary output was but a fit sacrifice to the ordinary man.
“The good, the gentle, high-gifted, ever-friendly, noble Dickens,” wrote Carlyle of him, on hearing the news of his death,—“every inch of him an honest man.” “What a face it is to meet,” had said Leigh Hunt, years before; and Mrs. Carlyle, “It was as if made of steel.”
V
I shall endeavour to appraise with you, by and by, the true worth of this amazing popularity. For the moment I merely ask you to consider the fact and the further fact that Dickens took it with the seriousness it deserved and endeavoured more and more to make himself adequate to it. He had—as how could he help having?—an enormous consciousness of the power he wielded: a consciousness which in action too often displayed itself as an irritable conscientiousness. For instance, Pickwick is a landmark in our literature: its originality can no more be disputed than the originality (say) of the Divina Commedia. “I thought of Pickwick”—is his classical phrase. He thought of Pickwick—and Pickwick was. But just because the ill-fated illustrator, Seymour—who shot himself before the great novel had found its stride—was acclaimed by some as its inventor, Dickens must needs charge into the lists with the hottest, angriest, most superfluous, denials. Even so, later on, when he finds it intolerable to go on living with his wife, the world is, somehow or other, made acquainted with this distressing domestic affair as though by a papal encyclical. Or, even so, when he chooses (in Bleak House) to destroy an alcoholised old man by “spontaneous combustion”—quite unnecessarily—a solemn preface has to be written to explain that such an end is scientifically possible. This same conscientiousness made him (and here our young novelist of to-day will start to blaspheme) extremely scrupulous about scandalising his public—I use the term in its literal sense of laying a stumbling-block, a cause of offence. For example, while engaged upon Dombey and Son, he has an idea (and a very good idea too, though he abandoned it) that instead of keeping young Walter the unspoilt boyish lover that he is, he will portray the lad as gradually yielding to moral declension, through hope deferred—a theme which, as you will remember, he afterwards handled in Bleak House: and he seriously writes thus about it to his friend Forster:
About the boy, who appears in the last chapter of the first number—I think it would be a good thing to disappoint all the expectations that chapter seems to raise of his happy connection with the story and the heroine, and to show him gradually and naturally trailing away, from that love of adventure and boyish light-heartedness, into negligence, idleness, dissipation, dishonesty and ruin. To show, in short, that common, every day, miserable declension of which we know so much in our ordinary life: to exhibit something of the philosophy of it, in great temptations and an easy nature; and to show how the good turns into the bad, by degrees. If I kept some notion of Florence always at the bottom of it, I think it might be made very powerful and very useful. What do you think? Do you think it may be done without making people angry?
George Gissing—in a critical study of Dickens which cries out for reprinting—imagines a young writer of the ’nineties (as we may imagine a young writer of to-day) coming on that and crying out upon it.
What! a great writer, with a great idea, to stay his hand until he has made grave enquiry whether Messrs. Mudie’s subscribers will approve it or not! The mere suggestion is infuriating.... Look at Flaubert, for example. Can you imagine him in such a sorry plight? Why, nothing would have pleased him better than to know he was outraging public sentiment! In fact, it is only when one does so that one’s work has a chance of being good.
All which, adds Gissing, may be true enough in relation to the speaker. As regards Dickens, it is irrelevant. And Gissing speaks the simple truth; “that he owed it to his hundreds of thousands of readers to teach them a new habit of judgment Dickens did not see or begin to see.” But that it lay upon him to deal with his public scrupulously he felt in the very marrow of his bones. Let me give you two instances:
When editing Household Words he receives from a raw contributor a MS. impossible as sent, in which he detects merit. “I have had a story,” he writes to Forster, “to hack and hew into some form this morning, which has taken me four hours of close attention.” “Four hours of Dickens’ time,” comments Gissing, “in the year 1856, devoted to such a matter as this!—where any ordinary editor, or rather his assistant, would have contented himself with a few blottings and insertions, sure that ‘the great big stupid heart of the public,’ as Thackeray called it, would be no better pleased, toil how one might.”
For my second instance. The next year, 1857, was Mutiny Year, and closed upon an England raging mad over the story of Cawnpore. Dickens and Wilkie Collins, on a tour together in the north of England, had contrived a Christmas Number for Household Words, announced and entitled The Perils of Certain English Prisoners, and their Treasures in Women, Children, Silver and Jewels. The public expected a red-hot account of the Nana Sahib, the treacherous embarkation, the awful voyage down the Ganges. It was all there, to the man’s hand, with illimitable applause for his mere inviting. But it might inflame—and, inflaming, hurt—the nation’s temper, and therefore he would have none of it: he, Dickens, the great literary Commoner; lord over millions of English and to them, and to right influence on them, bounden. Therefore the public got something more profitable than it craved for: it got a romantic story empty of racial or propagandist hatred; a simple narrative of peril and adventure on a river in South America.
VI
But now let us see what a light this conscious popularity throws upon two important events in Dickens’ career: his visit to the United States in 1842, and his invention, the next year, of the “Christmas Book.”
Dickens went over to America as a great personage: securely, but neither immodestly nor overweeningly conscious of it. He went over also as a great and genuine early-Victorian radical; something better than any politician; an unbribed and unbribable writer, immensely potent, with a pen already dedicated to war against social abuses. He landed at Boston, fully expecting to see Liberty in realisation under the star-spangled banner. He found Colonel Diver and Mr. Jefferson Brick, Mr. La Fayette Kettle and the Honourable Elijah Pogram. He found, of course, a fervent and generous hospitality that sprang, in Forster’s words, “from feelings honourable both to giver and receiver,” and was bestowed sincerely, if with a touch of bravado and challenge—“We of the New World want to show you, by extending the kind of homage that the Old World reserves for kings and conquerors, to a young man with nothing to distinguish him but his heart and his genius, what it is we think in these parts worthier of honour than birth or wealth, a title or a sword.” These are Forster’s words again, and they do well enough. The hospitality included no doubt a good deal of the ridiculous: food for innocent caricature of the kind provided in the great Pogram levee where the two Literary Ladies are presented to the Honourable Elijah by the Mother of the Modern Gracchi.
“To be presented to a Pogram,” said Miss Codger, “by a Hominy, indeed a thrilling moment is it in its impressiveness on what we call our feelings. But why we call them so, and why impressed they are, or if impressed they are at all, or if at all we are, or if there really is, oh gasping one! a Pogram or a Hominy, or any active principle to which we give those titles is a topic, Spirit searching, light-abandoned, much too vast to enter on, at this unlooked-for Crisis.” “Mind and Matter,” said the lady in the wig, “glide swift into the vortex of immensity. Howls the sublime, and softly sleeps the calm Ideal, in the whispering chambers of Imagination. To hear it, sweet it is. But then outlaughs the stern philosopher, and saith to the Grotesque, ‘What ho! arrest for me that agency! Go bring it here! And so the vision fadeth.’”
I will not take oath that I have not heard faint echoes of that sort of talk at literary gatherings within a mile or so of this very spot. But if it be not to some extent endemic in America even to-day, then all I can say is that certain American authors (Mrs. Edith Wharton for one) have misrepresented it far more cruelly than ever did Charles Dickens, or certainly than I, with no knowledge at all, have any wish to do.
But what brought Dickens up with a round turn was his discovery (as he believed) that in this land of freedom no man was free to speak his thought.
“I believe,” he wrote to Forster on Feb. 24th, “there is no country on the face of the earth where there is less freedom of opinion on any subject in reference to which there is a broad difference of opinion than in this.... There!—I write the words with reluctance, disappointment and sorrow: but I believe it from the bottom of my soul.”
He did believe it, and it shocked him inexpressibly. “Very well,” it may be answered; “but there were obligations. A man should not publicly criticise a country in which he is an honoured guest.” Yes, but he had gone out to the States with intent to discuss the question of copyright, or rather of literary piracy, in which American law and practice were so flagrantly immoral that he had never a doubt of getting both rectified by a little heart-to-heart talk (as we call it now) with some of their public men and lawgivers. Dickens was always a good man of business. As the most widely-read of British authors, and therefore the chief of sufferers, he could speak authoritatively on behalf of his poorer brethren. He went, and received on a grand scale that shock which on a far modester scale many of us have experienced in our time, with the sort of embarrassment one feels (let us say) in sitting down to Bridge with a very delightful person whose code in the matter of revoking is rather notoriously “off colour.” Let me illustrate this by the remark of a just man at Washington in the debate preceding the latest copyright enactment. A member of Congress had pleaded for the children of the backwoods—these potential Abraham Lincolns devouring education by the light of pine-knot fires—how desirable that these little Sons of Liberty should be able to purchase their books (as he put it) “free of authorial expenses!” “Hear, hear!” retorted my just man. “And the negroes of the South too—so fond of chicken free of farmer-ial expenses!”—A great saying!
And yet Dickens was wrong: in my opinion wrong as an English Gentleman, being America’s Guest. On the balance I hold that he should have thought what he thought and, thinking it, have shortened his visit and come silently away.
Well, Dickens discussed the matter with Washington Irving, Prescott, Hoffman, Bryant, Dana and others, and found that while every writer in America was agreed upon the atrocious state of the law, not a man of them dared to speak out. The suggestion that an American could be found with temerity enough to hint that his country was possibly wrong struck the boldest dumb. “Then,” said Dickens, “I shall speak out”: and he did. “I wish you could have seen,” he writes home, “the faces that I saw, down both sides of the table at Hartford, when I began to talk about Scott.” [Remember, please, this is my interjection, Gentlemen, that, on a small portion of his dues, on a 10 per cent. (say) of his plundered sales, the great Sir Walter Scott would have died in calm of mind and just prosperity.] “I wish you could have heard how I gave it out. My blood so boiled as I thought of the monstrous injustice that I felt as if I were twelve feet high when I thrust it down their throats.”
The violence of the reaction upon Dickens you can of course study in American Notes and Martin Chuzzlewit. But the real import of these two books and the violence of resentment they raised, we shall not understand without realising that Dickens went over, was feasted: was disappointed, then outraged, and spoke his mind, from first to last as a representative of the democracy of this country, always conscious of a great, if undefined, responsibility and, under disappointment, resolute to be brave, at whatever cost of favour.
VII
The same grand consciousness seems to me to have been the true inspiration of his “Christmas Books.” For a private confession, I dislike them: I find them—A Christmas Carol, The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life, The Haunted Man—grossly sentimental and as grossly overcharged with violent conversions to the “Christmas Spirit.” For a further confession I greatly prefer several of his later Christmas Stories in Household Words and All the Year Round—The Wreck of the “Golden Mary” for instance, or Dr. Marigold’s Prescriptions or The Holly-Tree Inn—to this classic five which are still separated in the collected editions under the title of “Christmas Books.” He himself confessed, in a general preface of less than a dozen lines, his inability to work out character in the limits he assigned himself—a hundred pages or so. “My chief purpose,” he says of A Christmas Carol, “was, in a whimsical kind of masque which the good humour of the season justified, to awaken some loving and forbearing thoughts, never out of season in a Christian land.” But he took it as a mission, and quite seriously. Christmas to England had always meant, and should mean, a festival of neighbourly goodwill and robust hospitality. Listen to the old Carols:
Or
Or
These out of a score or more verses I might quote from Poor Robin’s Almanack and the like. But take Campion’s more aristocratic Muse:
Carry this again down to Frederick Tennyson’s The Holy Tide:
“An Englishman’s house is his Castle,” said an immortal farmer at a Fat Stock Dinner. “The storms may assail it and the winds whistle round it, but the King himself cannot do so.” Dickens saw always the Englishman’s house as his castle, fortified and provisioned against the discharge of snow and sleet: always most amply provisioned! Witness his picture of Christmas at Manor Farm, Dingley Dell—Old Wardle with his friends, neighbours, poor relations, and his farm-labourers too, all sitting down together to a colossal supper “and a mighty bowl of wassail something smaller than an ordinary washhouse copper, in which the hot apples were hissing and bubbling with a rich look and jolly sound that were perfectly irresistible.”
Old Wardle, in fact, is in the direct line of succession to Chaucer’s Frankeleyne—
Dickens, I repeat to you, was always, in the straight line of Chaucer, Ben Jonson, Dryden, Fielding, a preacher of man’s dignity in his full appetite; and quite consciously, as a national genius, he preached the doctrine of Christmas to his nation.
VIII
But you will say perhaps “Granted his amazing popularity—granted, too, his right to assume on it—was it really deserved?” To this question I oppose for the moment my opinion that, were I asked to choose out of the story of English Literature a short list of the most fecund authors, I should start with Chaucer, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Donne, Dryden, Pope, Samuel Johnson, Burke, Gibbon, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Carlyle, Dickens, Browning. If compelled to reduce the list to three, choosing the three most lavishly endowed by God with imagination for their fellows’ good, I almost think that among all God’s plenty I should choose, as pre-eminent stars, Shakespeare, Burke and Dickens. Milton, of course, will stand apart always, a solitary star: and Chaucer for his amazing invention, less even for what he did than for that he did it at all; Keats for infinity of promise; and to exclude Scott seems almost an outrage on human kindness. Yet if it come to the mere wonder-work of genius—the creation of men and women, on a page of paper, who are actually more real to us than our daily acquaintances, as companionable in a crowd as even our best selected friends, as individual as the most eccentric we know, yet as universal as humanity itself, I do not see what English writer we can choose to put second to Shakespeare save Charles Dickens. I am talking of sheer creative power, as I am thinking of Tasso’s proud saying that, next to God himself, no one but the poet deserves the name of Creator. You feel of Dickens as of Shakespeare that anything may happen: because it is not with them as with other authors: it is not they who speak. Falstaff or Hamlet or Sam Weller or Mr. Micawber: it is the god speaking:
Ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα.
They are as harps upon which the large wind plays: and as that is illimitable there is no limit to their utterances. It was so with Charles Dickens from the Sam Weller of his lost youth down to the last when, in pain and under the shadow of death, he invented the Billickin.
In another lecture I propose to show you (if I can) that Dickens’ characters belong to a world of his own, rather than to this one. But if he also created that world of his own, so much the grander creator he!—As if he made men and women walk and talk in it, compelling us to walk with them, and listen, and, above all, open our lungs and laugh, suffer within the tremendous illusion, so much is he the more potent magician! I also feel, in reading Shakespeare, or Dickens—I would add Burke—as I feel with no fourth that I am dealing with a scope of genius quite incalculable; that while it keeps me proud to belong to their race and nation and to inherit their speech, it equally keeps me diffident because, at any turn of the page may occur some plenary surprise altogether beyond my power or scope of guessing. With these three writers, as with no fourth, I have the sensation of a certain faintness of enjoyment, of surrender, to be borne along as on vast wings. Yet of Dickens, as of Shakespeare, the worst work can be incredibly bad. Sorrier stuff could scarcely be written, could scarcely conceivably have ever been written, than the whole part of Speed in The Two Gentlemen of Verona unless it be the first chapter of Martin Chuzzlewit. Yet in Martin Chuzzlewit you get Mrs. Gamp: and I ask you, How much the poorer should we not all be, lacking Mrs. Gamp?
I grant you that he has not yet passed—as he has not yet had time to pass—the great test of a classical writer; which is that, surviving the day’s popularity and its conditions, his work goes on meaning more, under quite different conditions, to succeeding ages; the great test which Shakespeare has passed more than once or twice, remaining to-day, though quite differently, even more significant than he was to his contemporaries. I grant—as in another lecture I shall be at pains to show—that Dickens’ plots were usually incredible, often monstrous. But he invented a world: he peopled it with men and women for our joy: and my confidence in the diuturnity of his fame rests even on more than this—on the experience that, test this genius by whatever standard a critic may, he has by and by to throw down his measure and admit that, while Dickens was always a learner, out of his prodigality he could have at any moment knocked the critic over by creating a new world with new and delectable lasting characters to take it in charge.