as artist in so changing the features
of life as to increase our pleasure? That is the nub of the
whole matter. The artist of fiction should not aim at exact
photography, for it is impossible; no fiction-maker since time
began has placed on the printed pages half the irrelevance and
foolishness or one-fifth the filth which are in life itself.
Reasons of art and ethics forbid. The aim, therefore, should
rather be at an effect of life through selection and re-shaping.
And I believe Dickens is true to this requirement. We hear less
now than formerly of his crazy exaggerations: we are beginning
to realize that perhaps he saw types that were there, which we
would overlook if they were under our very eyes: we feel the
wisdom of Chesterton's remarks that Dickens' characters will
live forever because they never lived at all! We suffered from
the myopia of realism. Zola desired above all things to tell the
truth by representing humanity as porcine, since he saw it that
way: he failed in his own purpose, because decency checked him:
his art is not photographic (according to his proud boast) but
has an almost Japanese convention of restraint in its
suppression of facts. Had Sarah Gamp been allowed by Dickens to
speak as she would speak in life, she would have been
unspeakably repugnant, never cherished as a permanently
laughable, even lovable figure of fiction. Dickens was a master
of omissions as well as of those enlargments which made him
carry over the foot lights. Mrs. Gamp is a monumental study of
the coarse woman rogue: her creator makes us hate the sin and
tolerate the sinner. Nor is that other masterly portrait of the
woman rascal--Thackeray's Becky Sharp--an example of strict
photography; she is great in seeming true, but she is not life.

So much, then, for the charge of caricature: it is all a matter
of degree. It all depends upon the definition of art, and upon
the effect made upon the world by the characters themselves. If
they live in loving memory, they must, in the large sense, be
true. Thus we come back to the previous statement: Dickens'
people live--are known by their words and in their ways all over
the civilized world. No collection of mere grotesques could ever
bring this to pass. Prick any typical creation of Dickens and it
runs blood, not sawdust. And just in proportion as we travel,
observe broadly and form the habit of a more penetrating and
sympathetic study of mankind, shall we believe in these
eman