or the shade of Thackeray
in Old Kensington. But let us have no antiquarianism about Dickens, for
Dickens is not an antiquity. Dickens looks not backward, but forward;
he might look at our modern mobs with satire, or with fury, but he
would love to look at them. He might lash our democracy, but it would
be because, like a democrat, he asked much from it. We will not have all
his books bound up under the title of 'The Old Curiosity Shop.' Rather
we will have them all bound up under the title of 'Great Expectations.'
Wherever humanity is he would have us face it and make something of it,
swallow it with a holy cannibalism, and assimilate it with the digestion
of a giant. We must take these trippers as he would have taken them, and
tear out of them their tragedy and their farce. Do you remember now what
the angel said at the sepulchre? 'Why seek ye the living among the dead?
He is not here; he is risen.'"

With that we came out suddenly on the wide stretch of the sands, which
were black with the knobs and masses of our laughing and quite desperate
democracy. And the sunset, which was now in its final glory, flung far
over all of them a red flush and glitter like the gigantic firelight
of Dickens. In that strange evening light every figure looked at once
grotesque and attractive, as if he had a story to tell. I heard a little
girl (who was being throttled by another little girl) say by way of
self-vindication, "My sister-in-law 'as got four rings aside her weddin'
ring!"

I stood and listened for more, but my friend went away.

XIV. In Topsy-Turvy Land

Last week, in an idle metaphor, I took the tumbling of trees and the
secret energy of the wind as typical of the visible world moving under
the violence of the invisible. I took this metaphor merely because I
happened to be writing the article in a wood. Nevertheless, now that I
return to Fleet Street (which seems to me, I confess, much better and
more poetical than all the wild woods in the world), I am strangely
haunted by this accidental comparison. The people's figures seem a
forest and their soul a wind. All the human personalities which speak or
signal to me seem to have this fantastic character of the fringe of the
forest against the sky. That man that talks to me, what is he but an
articulate tree? That driver of a van who waves his hands wildly at me
to tell me to get out of the way, what is he but a bunch of branches
stirred and swayed by a spiritual wind