peasants of the French Revolution came before the Kings and
Parliaments of Europe. That is to say, he comes, indeed, with gloomy
experiences, but he comes with a happy philosophy. He knows that there
are wrongs of man to be reviled; but he believes also that there are
rights of man to be demanded. It has often been remarked as a singular
fact that the French poor, who stand in historic tradition as typical
of all the desperate men who have dragged down tyranny, were, as a
matter of fact, by no means worse off than the poor of many other
European countries before the Revolution. The truth is that the French
were tragic because they were better off. The others had known the
sorrowful experiences; but they alone had known the splendid expectation
and the original claims. It was just here that Dickens was so true a
child of them and of that happy theory so bitterly applied. They were
the one oppressed people that simply asked for justice; they were the
one Parish Boy who innocently asked for more.

OLD CURIOSITY SHOP

Nothing is important except the fate of the soul; and literature is only
redeemed from an utter triviality, surpassing that of naughts and
crosses, by the fact that it describes not the world around us or the
things on the retina of the eye or the enormous irrelevancy of
encyclopaedias, but some condition to which the human spirit can come.
All good writers express the state of their souls, even (as occurs in
some cases of very good writers) if it is a state of damnation. The
first thing that has to be realised about Dickens is this ultimate
spiritual condition of the man, which lay behind all his creations. This
Dickens state of mind is difficult to pick out in words as are all
elementary states of mind; they cannot be described, not because they
are too subtle for words, but because they are too simple for words.
Perhaps the nearest approach to a statement of it would be this: that
Dickens expresses an eager anticipation of everything that will happen
in the motley affairs of men; he looks at the quiet crowd waiting for it
to be picturesque and to play the fool; he expects everything; he is
torn with a happy hunger. Thackeray is always looking back to yesterday;
Dickens is always looking forward to to-morrow. Both are profoundly
humorous, for there is a humour of the morning and a humour of the
evening; but the first guesses at what it will get, at all the
grotesqueness and variety which a day may b