eral Confession.

The world of Dickens' fantastic creations is all the nearer to the truth
of our life because it is so arbitrary and "impossible." He seems to
go backwards and forwards with a torch, throwing knobs, jags,
wrinkles, corrugations, protuberancies, cavities, horns, and snouts
into terrifying illumination. But we are like that! That is what we
actually are. That is how the Pillar of Fire sees us. Then, again, are
we to limit our interest, as these modern writers do, to the beautiful
people or the interesting people or the gross, emphatic
people. Dickens is never more childlike than when he draws us,
wonderingly and confidingly, to the stark knees of a Mrs. Pipchin,
or when he drives us away, in unaccountable panic-terror, from the
rattling jet-beads of a Miss Murdstone.

Think of the vast, queer, dim-lighted world wherein live and move
all those funny, dusty, attenuated, heart-breaking figures, of such as
wear the form of women--and yet may never know "love"! It is
wonderful--when you think of it--how much of absorbing interest is
left in life, when you have eliminated "sex," suppressed
"psychology," and left philosophy out! Then appear all those queer
attractions and repulsions which are purely superficial, and even
material, and yet which are so dominant. Mother of God! How
unnecessary to bring in Fairies and Blue Birds, when the solemnity
of some little seamstress and her sorceress hands, and the quaint
knotting of her poor wisp of hair, would be enough to keep a child
staring and dreaming for hours upon hours!

Life in a great city is like life in an enchanted forest. One never
knows what hideous ogre or what exquisite hamadryad one may
encounter. And the little ways of all one's scrabbling and burrowing
and chuckling and nodding and winking house-mates! To go
through the world expecting adventures is to find them sooner or
later. But one need only cross one's threshold to find one adventure--the
adventure of a new, unknown fellow-creature, full of suspicion,
full of cloudy malice, full of secretive dreams, and yet ready to
respond--poor devil--to a certain kind of signal!

Long reading of Dickens' books, like long living with children, gives
one a wholesome dread of cynicism and flippancy. Children's games
are more serious than young men's love-affairs, and they must be
treated so. It is not exactly that life is to be "taken seriously." It is
to be taken for what it is--an extraordinary Pantomime.