k" and that
he is "a snob." Now Kit is really a very fresh and manly picture of a
boy, firm, sane, chivalrous, reasonable, full of those three great Roman
virtues which Mr. Belloc has so often celebrated, _virtus_ and
_verecundia_ and _pietas_. He is a sympathetic but still a
straightforward study of the best type of that most respectable of all
human classes, the respectable poor. All this is true; all that Dickens
utters in praise of Kit is true; nevertheless the awful words of
Chuckster remain written on the eternal skies. Kit is meek and Kit is a
snob. His natural dignity does include and is partly marred by that
instinctive subservience to the employing class which has been the
comfortable weakness of the whole English democracy, which has prevented
their making any revolution for the last two hundred years. Kit would
not serve any wicked man for money, but he would serve any moderately
good man and the money would give a certain dignity and decisiveness to
the goodness. All this is the English popular evil which goes along with
the English popular virtues of geniality, of homeliness, tolerance and
strong humour, hope and an enormous appetite for a hand-to-mouth
happiness. The scene in which Kit takes his family to the theatre is a
monument of the massive qualities of old English enjoyment. If what we
want is Merry England, our antiquarians ought not to revive the Maypole
or the Morris Dancers; they ought to revive Astley's and Sadler's Wells
and the old solemn Circus and the old stupid Pantomime, and all the
sawdust and all the oranges. Of all this strength and joy in the poor,
Kit is a splendid and final symbol. But amid all his masculine and
English virtue, he has this weak touch of meekness, or acceptance of the
powers that be. It is a sound touch; it is a real truth about Kit. But
Dickens did not know it. Mr. Chuckster did.

Dickens's stories taken as a whole have more artistic unity than appears
at the first glance. It is the immediate impulse of a modern critic to
dismiss them as mere disorderly scrap-books with very brilliant scraps.
But this is not quite so true as it looks. In one of Dickens's novels
there is generally no particular unity of construction; but there is
often a considerable unity of sentiment and atmosphere. Things are
irrelevant, but not somehow inappropriate. The whole book is written
carelessly; but the whole book is generally written in one mood. To take
a rude parallel from the other a