us kind of satire than can be found in these early
and explosive parodies. Still, there is a quality common to both, and
that quality is the whole of Dickens. It is a quality difficult to
define--hence the whole difficulty of criticising Dickens. Perhaps it
can be best stated in two separate statements or as two separate
symptoms. The first is the mere fact that the reader rushes to read it.
The second is the mere fact that the writer rushed to write it.

This beginning, which is like a burst of the old exuberant Dickens, is,
of course, the Veneering dinner-party. In its own way it is as good as
anything that Dickens ever did. There is the old faculty of managing a
crowd, of making character clash with character, that had made Dickens
not only the democrat but even the demagogue of fiction. For if it is
hard to manage a mob, it is hardest of all to manage a swell mob. The
particular kind of chaos that is created by the hospitality of a rich
upstart has perhaps never been so accurately and outrageously described.
Every touch about the thing is true; to this day any one can test it if
he goes to a dinner of this particular kind. How admirable, for
instance, is the description of the way in which all the guests ignored
the host; how the host and hostess peered and gaped for some stray
attention as if they had been a pair of poor relations. Again, how well,
as a matter of social colour, the distinctions between the type and
tone of the guests are made even in the matter of this unguestlike
insolence. How well Dickens distinguishes the ill-bred indifference of
Podsnap from the well-bred indifference of Mortimer Lightwood and Eugene
Wrayburn. How well he distinguishes the bad manners of the merchant from
the equally typical bad manners of the gentleman. Above all, how well he
catches the character of the creature who is really the master of all
these: the impenetrable male servant. Nowhere in literature is the truth
about servants better told. For that truth is simply this: that the
secret of aristocracy is hidden even from aristocrats. Servants,
butlers, footmen, are the high priests who have the real dispensation;
and even gentlemen are afraid of them. Dickens was never more right than
when he made the new people, the Veneerings, employ a butler who
despised not only them but all their guests and acquaintances. The
admirable person called the Analytical Chemist shows his perfection
particularly in the fact that he regards al