don Magazine_. He
taught himself to speak French and Italian, but he could have read
little in any language. His ideas were those of the inchoate and insular
liberalism of the 'thirties. His unique force in literature he was to
owe to no supreme artistic or intellectual quality, but almost entirely
to his inordinate gift of observation, his sympathy with the humble, his
power over the emotions and his incomparable endowment of unalloyed
human fun. To contemporaries he was not so much a man as an
institution, at the very mention of whose name faces were puckered with
grins or wreathed in smiles. To many his work was a revelation, the
revelation of a new world and one far better than their own. And his
influence went further than this in the direction of revolution or
revival. It gave what were then universally referred to as "the lower
orders" a new sense of self-respect, a new feeling of citizenship. Like
the defiance of another Luther, or the Declaration of a new
Independence, it emitted a fresh ray of hope across the firmament. He
did for the whole English-speaking race what Burns had done for
Scotland--he gave it a new conceit of itself. He knew what a people
wanted and he told what he knew. He could do this better than anybody
else because his mind was theirs. He shared many of their "great useless
virtues," among which generosity ranks before justice, and sympathy
before truth, even though, true to his middle-class vein, he exalts
piety, chastity and honesty in a manner somewhat alien to the mind of
the low-bred man. This is what makes Dickens such a demigod and his
public success such a marvel, and this also is why any exclusively
literary criticism of his work is bound to be so inadequate. It should
also help us to make the necessary allowances for the man. Dickens, even
the Dickens of legend that we know, is far from perfect. The Dickens of
reality to which Time may furnish a nearer approximation is far less
perfect. But when we consider the corroding influence of adulation, and
the intoxication of unbridled success, we cannot but wonder at the
relatively high level of moderation and self-control that Dickens almost
invariably observed. Mr G. K. Chesterton remarks suggestively that
Dickens had all his life the faults of the little boy who is kept up too
late at night. He is overwrought by happiness to the verge of
exasperation, and yet as a matter of fact he does keep on the right side
of the breaking point. The