tened to with solemn pleasure almost as a
living voice--rang its remorseless toll, for her, so young, so
beautiful, so good. Decrepit age, and vigorous life, and blooming
youth, and helpless infancy, poured forth--on crutches, in the pride
of strength and health, in the full blush of promise, in the mere dawn
of life--to gather round her tomb. Old men were there, whose eyes were
dim and senses failing--grandmothers, who might have died ten years
ago, and still been old,--the deaf, the blind, the lame, the palsied,
the living dead in many shapes and forms, to see the closing of that
earthly grave. What was the death it would shut in, to that which
still could crawl and creep above it?" Such is the tone throughout,
and one feels inclined to ask whether it is quite the appropriate tone
in which to speak of the funeral of a child in a country churchyard?
All this pomp of rhetoric seems to me--shall I say it?--as much out of
place as if Nell had been buried like some great soldier or minister
of state--with a hearse, all sable velvet and nodding plumes, drawn by
a long train of sable steeds, and a final discharge of artillery over
the grave. The verbal honours paid here to the deceased are really not
much less incongruous and out of keeping. Surely in such a subject,
above all others, the pathos of simplicity would have been most
effective.

There are some, indeed, who deny to Dickens the gift of pathos
altogether. Such persons acknowledge, for the most part a little
unwillingly, that he was a master of humour of the broader, more
obvious kind. But they assert that all his sentiment is mawkish and
overstrained, and that his efforts to compel our tears are so obvious
as to defeat their own purpose. Now it will be clear, from what I
have said about Little Nell, that I am capable of appreciating the
force of any criticism of this kind; nay, that I go so far as to
acknowledge that Dickens occasionally lays himself open to it. But go
one inch beyond this I cannot. Of course we may, if we like, take up a
position of pure stoicism, and deny pathos altogether, in life as in
art. We may regard all human affairs but as a mere struggle for
existence, and say that might makes right, and that the weak is only
treated according to his deserts when he goes to the wall. We may hold
that neither sorrow nor suffering call for any meed of sympathy. Such
is mainly the attitude which the French novelist adopts towards the
world of his creation.