rist-like, with a message and gospel of hope.
Thackeray must have had Charles Dickens in his mind when he wrote: "The
humourous writer professes to awaken and direct your love, your pity,
your kindness--your scorn for untruth, pretension, imposture--your
tenderness for the weak, the poor, the oppressed, the unhappy."
Charles Dickens, of all writers of our age, assuredly did this in every
work of his pen, for thirty-three years of incessant production. It is
his great title to honour; and a novelist can desire no higher title
than this.

There is another quality in which Charles Dickens is supreme--in
purity. Here is a writer who is realistic, if ever any writer was, in
the sense of having closely observed the lowest strata of city life,
who has drawn the most miserable outcasts, the most abandoned men and
women in the dregs of society, who has invented many dreadful scenes of
passion, lust, seduction, and debauchery; and yet in forty works and
more you will not find a page which a mother need withhold from her
grown daughter. As Thackeray wrote of his friend:--"I am grateful for
the innocent laughter and the sweet and unsullied page which the author
of _David Copperfield_ gives to my children." We need not formulate
any dogma or rule on such a topic, nor is it essential that all books
should be written _virginibus puerisque_; but it is certain that every
word of Charles Dickens was so written, even when he set himself (as he
sometimes did) to describe animal natures and the vilest of their sex.
Dickens is a realist in that he probes the gloomiest recesses and faces
the most disheartening problems of life: he is an idealist in that he
never presents us the common or the vile with mere commonplace or
repulsiveness, and without some ray of humane and genial charm to which
ordinary eyes are blind. Dickens, then, was above all things a
humourist, an inexhaustible humourist, to whom the humblest forms of
daily life wore a certain sunny air of genial mirth; but the question
remains if he was a humourist of the highest order: was he a poet, a
creator of abiding imaginative types? Old Johnson's definition of
humour as "grotesque imagery," and "grotesque" as meaning some
distortion in figure, may not be adequate as a description of humour,
but it well describes the essential feature of Charles Dickens. His
infallible instrument is caricature--which strictly means an
"overload," as Johnson says, "an exaggerated resemblance.