ughtfully, 'many people, not exactly professional people,
but tradesmen, have had the same idea. The excellent citizen from whom I
ordered this beer inclines strongly to that opinion.'"

This philosophical freedom from all resentment, this strange love of
truth which seems actually to come through carelessness, is a very real
piece of spiritual observation. Even among liars there are two classes,
one immeasurably better than another. The honest liar is the man who
tells the truth about his old lies; who says on Wednesday, "I told a
magnificent lie on Monday." He keeps the truth in circulation; no one
version of things stagnates in him and becomes an evil secret. He does
not have to live with old lies; a horrible domesticity. Mr. Swiveller
may mislead the waiter about whether he has the money to pay; but he
does not mislead his friend, and he does not mislead himself on the
point. He is quite as well aware as any one can be of the accumulating
falsity of the position of a gentleman who by his various debts has
closed up all the streets into the Strand except one, and who is going
to close that to-night with a pair of gloves. He shuts up the street
with a pair of gloves, but he does not shut up his mind with a secret.
The traffic of truth is still kept open through his soul.

It is exactly in these absurd characters, then, that we can find a mass
of psychological and ethical suggestion. This cannot be found in the
serious characters except indeed in some of the later experiments: there
is a little of such psychological and ethical suggestion in figures like
Gridley, like Jasper, like Bradley Headstone. But in these earlier books
at least, such as _The Old Curiosity Shop_, the grave or moral figures
throw no light upon morals. I should maintain this generalisation even
in the presence of that apparent exception _The Christmas Carol_ with
its trio of didactic ghosts. Charity is certainly splendid, at once a
luxury and a necessity; but Dickens is not most effective when he is
preaching charity seriously; he is most effective when he is preaching
it uproariously; when he is preaching it by means of massive
personalities and vivid scenes. One might say that he is best not when
he is preaching his human love, but when he is practising it. In his
grave pages he tells us to love men; but in his wild pages he creates
men whom we can love. By his solemnity he commands us to love our
neighbours. By his caricature he makes us love th