by the river bank sweltering in blood, and tended by her, and
they are married and live happy ever afterwards.

Now the amazing part of this story is, that Dickens' sympathies
throughout are with Wrayburn. How this comes to be so I confess I do
not know. To me Wrayburn's conduct appears to be heartless, cruel,
unmanly, and the use of his superior social position against the
schoolmaster to be like a foul blow, and quite unworthy of a
gentleman. Schoolmasters ought not to beat people about the head,
decidedly. But if Wrayburn's thoughts took a right course during
convalescence, I think he may have reflected that he deserved his
beating, and also that the woman whose affection he had won was a
great deal too good for him.

Dickens' misplaced sympathy in this particular story has, I repeat,
always struck me with amazement. Usually his sympathies are so
entirely right. Nothing is more common than to hear the accusation of
vulgarity made against his books. A certain class of people seem to
think, most mistakenly, that because he so often wrote about vulgar
people, uneducated people, people in the lower ranks of society,
therefore his writing was vulgar, nay more, he himself vulgar too.
Such an opinion can only be based on a strange confusion between
subject and treatment. There is scarcely any subject not tainted by
impurity, that cannot be treated with entire refinement. Washington
Irving wrote to Dickens, most justly, of "that exquisite tact that
enabled him to carry his reader through the veriest dens of vice and
villainy without a breath to shock the ear or a stain to sully the
robe of the most shrinking delicacy;" and added: "It is a rare gift to
be able to paint low life without being low, and to be comic without
the least taint of vulgarity." This is well said; and if we look for
the main secret of the inherent refinement of Dickens' books, we shall
find it, I think, in this: that he never intentionally paltered with
right and wrong. He would make allowance for evil, would take pleasure
in showing that there were streaks of lingering good in its blackness,
would treat it kindly, gently, humanly. But it always stood for evil,
and nothing else. He made no attempt by cunning jugglery to change its
seeming. He had no sneaking affection for it. And therefore, I say
again, his attachment to Eugene Wrayburn has always struck me with
surprise. As regards Dickens' own refinement, I cannot perhaps do
better than quote the wor