Both these
men had wide experience and a careful training in form and proportion
before they attempted to write seriously. They were educated in art and
life and letters. The education of Dickens, on the other hand, was only
begun with "Pickwick," which knew neither method nor proportion; and he
who reads "Barnaby Rudge" for the flavour of Dickens finds a new and
good perspective and proportion, and even self-restraint. Artistically,
it is the best of all Dickens's novels. For that reason it lacks that
flavour which we find in the earlier books. I could not get such
thorough enjoyment from it as from "Nicholas Nickleby." In it Dickens
sacrificed too much to his self-restraint, and there is no moment in it
that gives us the joy of the discovery of Mr. and Mrs. Vincent Crummles
or of 'Tilda Price.

Anthony Trollope, in his "Autobiography," which ought to be a textbook
in all those practical classes of literature that work to turn out
self-supporting authors, tells us that the most important part of a
novel is the plot. This may be true, but the inefficiency of the plot in
the works of Charles Dickens may easily be shown in an attempt to
summarize any of them, except "The Mystery of Edwin Drood."

Still, when all is said for Dickens, one cannot even in old age begin to
read him over and over again, as one can read Thackeray. But who reads
an American book over and over again? Hawthorne never wearies the elect,
and one may go back to Henry James, in order to discover whether one
thinks that he means the same thing in 1922 one thought he meant in
1912. But who makes it a practice in middle age to read any novel of
Mrs. Wharton's or Mrs. Deland's or Mr. Marion Crawford's or Mr. Booth
Tarkington's at least once a year? There are thousands of persons who
find leisure to love Miss Austen, that hardiest of hardy perennials;
and during the war, when life in the daytime became a nightmare, there
was a large group of persons who read Trollope from end to end! This is
almost incredible; but it is true. And I must confess that if I do not
read Miss Austen's novels once every year, preferably cozily in the
winter, or "Cranford," or parts of Froissart--whose chronicle takes the
bad taste of Mark Twain's "Joan of Arc" from my memory--I feel as if I
had had an ill-spent year. It makes me seem as slothful as if I omitted
a daily passage from "The Following of Christ" or, at least, a weekly
chapter from the Epistles of St. Paul!

George