ner.

He says that Dickens was so great in "fun" (humour he does not concede
to him anywhere) that Fielding and Smollett are small in comparison, but
that this would only have been a passing amusement for the world if he
had not been "gifted with an imagination of marvellous vividness, and an
emotional sympathetic nature capable of furnishing that imagination with
elements of universal power." To people who think that words should
carry some meaning it might seem, that, if only a man could be "gifted"
with all this, nothing more need be said. With marvellous imagination,
and a nature to endow it with elements of universal power, what secrets
of creative art could possibly be closed to him? But this is reckoning
without your philosophical critic. The vividness of Dickens's
imagination M. Taine found to be simply monomaniacal, and his follower
finds it to be merely hallucinative. Not the less he heaps upon it
epithet after epithet. He talks of its irradiating splendour; calls it
glorious as well as imperial and marvellous; and, to make us quite sure
he is not with these fine phrases puffing-off an inferior article, he
interposes that such imagination is "common to all great writers."
Luckily for great writers in general, however, their creations are of
the old, immortal, commonplace sort; whereas Dickens in his creative
processes, according to this philosophy of criticism, is tied up hard
and fast within hallucinative limits.

"He was," we are told, "a seer of visions." Amid silence and darkness,
we are assured, he heard voices and saw objects; of which the revived
impressions to him had the vividness of sensations, and the images his
mind created in explanation of them had the coercive force of
realities;[261] so that what he brought into existence in this way, no
matter how fantastic and unreal, was (whatever this may mean)
universally intelligible. "His types established themselves in the
public mind like personal experiences. Their falsity was unnoticed in
the blaze of their illumination. Every humbug seemed a Pecksniff, every
jovial improvident a Micawber, every stinted serving-wench a
Marchioness." The critic, indeed, saw through it all, but he gave his
warnings in vain. "In vain critical reflection showed these figures to
be merely masks; not characters, but personified characteristics;
caricatures and distortions of human nature. The vividness of their
presentation triumphed over reflection; their creator managed