hard
the Second was a philosophical symbol; but all good criticism must
necessarily see him so. It may be a reasonable question whether the
artist should be allegorical. There can be no doubt among sane men that
the critic should be allegorical. Spenser may have lost by being less
realistic than Fielding. But any good criticism of _Tom Jones_ must be
as mystical as the _Faery Queen_. Hence it is unavoidable in speaking of
a fine book like _Great Expectations_ that we should give even to its
unpretentious and realistic figures a certain massive mysticism. Pip is
Pip, but he is also the well-meaning snob. And this is even more true of
those two great figures in the tale which stand for the English
democracy. For, indeed, the first and last word upon the English
democracy is said in Joe Gargery and Trabb's boy. The actual English
populace, as distinct from the French populace or the Scotch or Irish
populace, may be said to lie between those two types. The first is the
poor man who does not assert himself at all, and the second is the poor
man who asserts himself entirely with the weapon of sarcasm. The only
way in which the English now ever rise in revolution is under the symbol
and leadership of Trabb's boy. What pikes and shillelahs were to the
Irish populace, what guns and barricades were to the French populace,
that chaff is to the English populace. It is their weapon, the use of
which they really understand. It is the one way in which they can make a
rich man feel uncomfortable, and they use it very justifiably for all it
is worth. If they do not cut off the heads of tyrants at least they
sometimes do their best to make the tyrants lose their heads. The gutter
boys of the great towns carry the art of personal criticism to so rich
and delicate a degree that some well-dressed persons when they walk past
a file of them feel as if they were walking past a row of omniscient
critics or judges with a power of life and death. Here and there only is
some ordinary human custom, some natural human pleasure suppressed in
deference to the fastidiousness of the rich. But all the rich tremble
before the fastidiousness of the poor.

Of the other type of democracy it is far more difficult to speak. It is
always hard to speak of good things or good people, for in satisfying
the soul they take away a certain spur to speech. Dickens was often
called a sentimentalist. In one sense he sometimes was a sentimentalist.
But if sentimentalism b