with all his many
moral merits, there was much that was stagey about Dickens. But this
explanation alone is altogether inadequate and unworthy. There was in
Dickens this other kind of energy, horrible, uncanny, barbaric, capable
in another age of coarseness, greedy for the emblems of established
ugliness, the coffin, the gibbet, the bones, the bloody knife. Dickens
liked these things and he was all the more of a man for liking them;
especially he was all the more of a boy. We can all recall with pleasure
the fact that Miss Petowker (afterwards Mrs. Lillyvick) was in the habit
of reciting a poem called "The Blood Drinker's Burial." I cannot express
my regret that the words of this poem are not given; for Dickens would
have been quite as capable of writing "The Blood Drinker's Burial" as
Miss Petowker was of reciting it. This strain existed in Dickens
alongside of his happy laughter; both were allied to the same robust
romance. Here as elsewhere Dickens is close to all the permanent human
things. He is close to religion, which has never allowed the thousand
devils on its churches to stop the dancing of its bells. He is allied to
the people, to the real poor, who love nothing so much as to take a
cheerful glass and to talk about funerals. The extremes of his gloom and
gaiety are the mark of religion and democracy; they mark him off from
the moderate happiness of philosophers, and from that stoicism which is
the virtue and the creed of aristocrats. There is nothing odd in the
fact that the same man who conceived the humane hospitalities of
Pickwick should also have imagined the inhuman laughter of Fagin's den.
They are both genuine and they are both exaggerated. And the whole human
tradition has tied up together in a strange knot these strands of
festivity and fear. It is over the cups of Christmas Eve that men have
always competed in telling ghost stories.

This first element was present in Dickens, and it is very powerfully
present in _Oliver Twist_. It had not been present with sufficient
consistency or continuity in _Pickwick_ to make it remain on the
reader's memory at all, for the tale of "Gabriel Grubb" is grotesque
rather than horrible, and the two gloomy stories of the "Madman" and the
"Queer Client" are so utterly irrelevant to the tale, that even if the
reader remember them he probably does not remember that they occur in
_Pickwick_. Critics have complained of Shakespeare and others for
putting comic episodes in