no people upon it, and the wind alone sobbing there;
with blind eyes and wrinkled forehead; a pool by the edge of a wide
marsh-land--like the marsh-land in "Great Expectations"--with I
know not what reflected in it, and waiting, always waiting, for
something that does not come; a low, bent, knotted pine-tree, over
which the ravens fly, one by one, shrieking; these are the things that
to some people--to children, for instance--remain in the mind when
all else of their country journey is forgotten.

There is no one but Dickens who has a style that can drag these
things into light. His style shrieks sometimes like a ghoul tugging at
the roots of a mandrake. At other times it wails like a lost soul. At
other times it mutters, and whimpers, and pipes in its throat, like an
old man blinking at the moon. At other times it roars and thunders
like ten thousand drunken devils. At other times it breaks into
wistful, tender, little-girl sobs--and catches the rhythm of poetry--as
in the death of Nell. Sometimes a character in Dickens will say
something so humorously pregnant, so directly from what we hear in
street and tavern, that art itself "gives up," and applauds, speechless.

After all, it is meet and right that there should be one great author,
undistracted by psychology--unseduced by eroticism. There remain
a few quite important things to deal with, when these are removed!
Birth, for instance--the mystery of birth--and the mystery of death.
One never forgets death in reading Dickens. He has a thought, a pity,
for those things that once were men and women, lying, with their six
feet of earth upon them, in our English Churchyards, so horribly still,
while the mask of their sorrow yields to the yet more terrible grin of
our mortality's last jest.

And to the last he is--like all children--the lover of Players. Every
poor dog of Public Entertainer, from the Barrel-Organ man to him
who pulls the ropes for Punch and Judy, has his unqualified
devotion. The modern Stage may see strange revolutions, some of
them by no means suitable to children--but we need not be alarmed.
There will always remain the larger Stage, the stage of man's own
Exits and Entrances; and there, at any rate, while Dickens is their
"Manager," Pierrot may weep and dance, and Pierrette dance and
weep, knowing that they will not be long without their audience, or
long without their applause!

He was a vulgar writer. Why not? England would not be England--and