eenth century worthies.

It is now generally acknowledged that Dickens is not a temporary
phenomenon in Victorian letters, but a very solid major fact in
the native literature, too large a creative force to be
circumscribed by a generation. Looked back upon across the gap
of time, he looms up all the more impressively because the years
have removed the clutter about the base of the statue. The
temporary loss of critical regard (a loss affecting his hold on
the general reading public little, if any) has given way to an
almost violent critical reaction in his favor. We are widening
the esthetic canvas to admit of the test of life, and are coming
to realize that, obsessed for a time by the attraction of that
lower truth which makes so much of external realities, realism
lost sight of the larger demands of art which include selection,
adaptation, and that enlargement of effect marking the
distinction between art and so-called reality. No critic is now
timid about saying a good word for the author of "Pickwick" and
"Copperfield." A few years ago it was otherwise. Present-day
critics such as Henley, Lang, and Chesterton have assured the
luke-warm that there is room in English literature for both
Thackeray and Dickens.

That Dickens began to write fiction as a very young journalist
was in some ways in his favor; in other ways, to the detriment
of his work. It meant an early start on a career of over thirty
years. It meant writing under pressure with the spontaneity and
reality which usually result. It also meant the bold grappling
with the technique of a great art, learning to make novels by
making them. Again, one truly inspired to fiction is lucky to
have a novitiate in youth. So far the advantages.

On the other hand, the faults due to inexperience, lack of
education, uncertainty of aim, haste and carelessness and other
foes of perfection, will probably be in evidence when a writer
who has scarcely attained to man's estate essays fiction.
Dickens' early work has thus the merits and demerits of his
personal history. A popular and able parliamentary reporter,
with sympathetic knowledge of London and the smaller towns where
his duties took him, possessed of a marvelous memory which
photographed for him the boyish impressions of places like
Chatham and Rochester, he began with sketches of that life
interspersed with more fanciful tales which drew upon his
imagination and at times passed the melodramatic border-line.
When