Americans the possibility of their having done wrong. I wish you could
have seen the faces that I saw down both sides of the table at Hartford
when I began to talk about Scott. I wish you could have heard how I gave
it out. My blood so boiled when I thought of the monstrous injustice
that I felt as if I were twelve feet high when I thrust it down their
throats." Dickens knew no history, but he had all history behind him in
feeling that a pure democracy does tend, when it goes wrong, to be too
traditional and absolute. The truth is indeed a singular example of the
unfair attack upon democracy in our own time. Everybody can repeat the
platitude that the mob can be the greatest of all tyrants. But few
realise or remember the corresponding truth which goes along with
it--that the mob is the only permanent and unassailable high priest.
Democracy drives its traditions too hard; but democracy is the only
thing that keeps any traditions. An aristocracy must always be going
after some new thing. The severity of democracy is far more of a virtue
than its liberty. The decorum of a democracy is far more of a danger
than its lawlessness. Dickens discovered this in his great quarrels
about the copyright, when a whole nation acted on a small point of
opinion as if it were going to lynch him. But, fortunately for the
purpose of this argument, there is no need to go back to the forties for
such a case. Another great literary man has of late visited America; and
it is possible that Maxim Gorky may be in a position to state how far
democracy is likely to err on the side of mere liberty and laxity. He
may have found, like Dickens, some freedom of manners; he did not find
much freedom of morals.

Along with such American criticism should really go his very
characteristic summary of the question of the Red Indian. It marks the
combination between the mental narrowness and the moral justice of the
old Liberal. Dickens can see nothing in the Red Indian except that he is
barbaric, retrograde, bellicose, uncleanly, and superstitious--in short,
that he is not a member of the special civilisation of Birmingham or
Brighton. It is curious to note the contrast between the cheery, nay
Cockney, contempt with which Dickens speaks of the American Indian and
that chivalrous and pathetic essay in which Washington Irving celebrates
the virtues of the vanishing race. Between Washington Irving and his
friend Charles Dickens there was always indeed this ironi