rasts, east wind and Christmas jollity,
hunger, misery, and hot punch"--"so that even critical spectators who
complained that these broadly painted pictures were artistic daubs could
not wholly resist their effective suggestiveness." Since Trinculo and
Caliban were under one cloak, there has surely been no such delicate
monster with two voices. "His forward voice, now, is to speak well of
his friend; his backward voice is to utter foul speeches and to
detract." One other of the foul speeches I may not overlook, since it
contains what is alleged to be a personal revelation of Dickens made to
the critic himself.

"When one thinks of Micawber always presenting himself in the same
situation, moved with the same springs and uttering the same sounds,
always confident of something turning up, always crushed and rebounding,
always making punch--and his wife always declaring she will never part
from him, always referring to his talents and her family--when one
thinks of the 'catchwords' personified as characters, one is reminded of
the frogs whose brains have been taken out for physiological purposes,
and whose actions henceforth want the distinctive peculiarity of organic
action, that of fluctuating spontaneity." Such was that sheer inability
of Dickens, indeed, to comprehend this complexity of the organism, that
it quite accounted, in the view of this philosopher, for all his
unnaturalness, for the whole of his fantastic people, and for the
strained dialogues of which his books are made up, painfully resembling
in their incongruity "the absurd and eager expositions which insane
patients pour into the listener's ear when detailing their wrongs, or
their schemes. Dickens once declared to me," Mr. Lewes continues, "that
every word said by his characters was distinctly _heard_ by him; I was
at first not a little puzzled to account for the fact that he could hear
language so utterly unlike the language of real feeling, and not be
aware of its preposterousness; but the surprise vanished when I thought
of the phenomena of hallucination." Wonderful sagacity! to unravel
easily such a bewildering "puzzle"! And so to the close. Between the
uncultivated whom Dickens moved, and the cultivated he failed to move;
between the power that so worked in delft as to stir the universal
heart, and the commonness that could not meddle with porcelain or aspire
to any noble clay; the pitiful see-saw is continued up to the final
sentence, where, in the