etters_, ii. 169) in writing of her children. "They like
to talk to me . . . above all about the productions of Dickens, the
never-to-be-exhausted fun of _Pickwick_, and the capital new strokes of
_Martin Chuzzlewit_. This last work contains, besides all the fun, some
very marked and available morals. I scarce know any book in which the
evil and odiousness of selfishness are more forcibly brought out, or in
a greater variety of exhibitions. In the midst of the merry quotations,
or at least on any fair opportunity, I draw the boys' attention to these
points."

[265] All the remarks in my text had been some time in type when Lord
Lytton sent me what follows, from one of his father's manuscript (and
unpublished) note-books. Substantially it agrees with what I have said;
and such unconscious testimony of a brother novelist of so high a rank,
careful in the study of his art, is of special value. "The greatest
masters of the novel of modern manners have generally availed themselves
of Humour for the illustration of manners; and have, with a deep and
true, but perhaps unconscious, knowledge of art, pushed the humour
almost to the verge of caricature. For, as the serious ideal requires a
certain exaggeration in the proportions of the natural, so also does the
ludicrous. Thus Aristophanes, in painting the humours of his time,
resorts to the most poetical extravagance of machinery, and calls the
Clouds in aid of his ridicule of philosophy, or summons Frogs and Gods
to unite in his satire on Euripides. The Don Quixote of Cervantes never
lived, nor, despite the vulgar belief, ever could have lived, in Spain;
but the art of the portrait is in the admirable exaltation of the
humorous by means of the exaggerated. With more or less qualification,
the same may be said of Parson Adams, of Sir Roger de Coverley, and even
of the Vicar of Wakefield. . . . It follows therefore that art and
correctness are far from identical, and that the one is sometimes proved
by the disdain of the other. For the ideal, whether humorous or serious,
does not consist in the imitation but in the exaltation of nature. And
we must accordingly enquire of art, not how far it resembles what we
have seen, so much as how far it embodies what we can imagine."

[266] I cannot refuse myself the satisfaction of quoting, from the best
criticism of Dickens I have seen since his death, remarks very pertinent
to what is said in my text. "Dickens possessed an imagination
uns