of unmitigated foolishness!
He was able to give to the Simple Simons of this life that
Rabelaisian touch of magnanimous understanding which makes
even the leanest wits among us glow. He went through the world
with strange timidities and no daring stride. He loitered in its
by-alleys. He drifted through its Bazaars. He sat with the crowd in its
Circuses. He lingered outside its churches. He ate his "pot of honey"
among its graves. And as he went his way, irritable and freakish,
wayward and arbitrary, he came, by chance, upon just those
side-lights and intimations, those rumours and whispers, those figures
traced on sand and dust and water, which, more than all the Law and
the Prophets, draw near to the unuttered word.

DICKENS

It is absurd, of course, to think that it is necessary to "hold a brief"
for Dickens. But sometimes, when one comes across charming and
exquisite people who "cannot read him," one is tempted to give
one's personal appreciation that kind of form.

Dickens is one of the great artists of the world, and he is so, in spite
of the fact that in certain spheres, in the sphere of Sex, for instance,
or the sphere of Philosophy, he is such a hopeless conventionalist. It
is because we are at this hour so preoccupied with Sex, in our desire
to readjust the conventions of Society and Morality towards it, that a
great artist, who simply leaves it out altogether, or treats it with a
mixture of the conventionality of the preacher and the worst
foolishness of the crowd, is an artist whose appeal is seriously
handicapped.

Yet, given this "lacuna," this amazing "gap" in his work, a
deprivation much more serious than his want of "philosophy,"
Dickens is a writer of colossal genius, whose originality and vision
puts all our modern "literateurs" to shame. One feels this directly
one opens any volume of his. Only a great creative genius could so
dominate, for instance, his mere "illustrators," as to mesmerize them
completely into his manner. And certainly his illustrators are
_drugged_ with the Dickens atmosphere. Those hideous-lovely
persons, whose legs and arms are so thin that it is impossible to
suppose they ever removed their clothes; do they not strut and leer
and ogle and grin and stagger and weep, in the very style of their
author?

Remembering my "brief" and the sort of jury, among my friends, I
have to persuade, I am not inclined in this sketch to launch out into
panegyrics upon Mr. Micawber and M