telligence.
Bunyan, Blake, Hogarth and Turner (these four apart and above all the
English Classics), Goethe, Shelley, Schopenhaur, Wagner, Ibsen, Morris,
Tolstoy, and Nietzsche are among the writers whose peculiar sense of
the world I recognize as more or less akin to my own. Mark the word
peculiar. I read Dickens and Shakespear without shame or stint;
but their pregnant observations and demonstrations of life are not
co-ordinated into any philosophy or religion: on the contrary, Dickens's
sentimental assumptions are violently contradicted by his observations;
and Shakespear's pessimism is only his wounded humanity. Both have the
specific genius of the fictionist and the common sympathies of human
feeling and thought in pre-eminent degree. They are often saner and
shrewder than the philosophers just as Sancho-Panza was often saner and
shrewder than Don Quixote. They clear away vast masses of oppressive
gravity by their sense of the ridiculous, which is at bottom a
combination of sound moral judgment with lighthearted good humor. But
they are concerned with the diversities of the world instead of with its
unities: they are so irreligious that they exploit popular religion for
professional purposes without delicacy or scruple (for example, Sydney
Carton and the ghost in Hamlet!): they are anarchical, and cannot
balance their exposures of Angelo and Dogberry, Sir Leicester Dedlock
and Mr Tite Barnacle, with any portrait of a prophet or a worthy leader:
they have no constructive ideas: they regard those who have them as
dangerous fanatics: in all their fictions there is no leading thought or
inspiration for which any man could conceivably risk the spoiling of
his hat in a shower, much less his life. Both are alike forced to borrow
motives for the more strenuous actions of their personages from
the common stockpot of melodramatic plots; so that Hamlet has to
be stimulated by the prejudices of a policeman and Macbeth by the
cupidities of a bushranger. Dickens, without the excuse of having to
manufacture motives for Hamlets and Macbeths, superfluously punt his
crew down the stream of his monthly parts by mechanical devices which I
leave you to describe, my own memory being quite baffled by the simplest
question as to Monks in Oliver Twist, or the long lost parentage of
Smike, or the relations between the Dorrit and Clennam families so
inopportunely discovered by Monsieur Rigaud Blandois. The truth is, the
world was to Shakespea