l, and should all--arrive too late. All the good
fairies and all the kind magicians, all the just kings and all the
gallant princes, with chariots and flying dragons and armies and navies
go after one little child who had strayed into a wood, and find her
dead. That is the conception which Dickens's artistic instinct was
really aiming at when he finally condemned Little Nell to death, after
keeping her, so to speak, so long with the rope round her neck. The
death of Little Nell is open certainly to the particular denial which
its enemies make about it. The death of Little Nell is not pathetic. It
is perhaps tragic; it is in reality ironic. Here is a very good case of
the injustice to Dickens on his purely literary side. It is not that I
say that Dickens achieved what he designed; it is that the critics will
not see what the design was. They go on talking of the death of Little
Nell as if it were a mere example of maudlin description like the death
of Little Paul. As a fact it is not described at all; so it cannot be
objectionable. It is not the death of Little Nell, but the life of
Little Nell, that I object to.

In this, in the actual picture of her personality, if you can call it a
personality, Dickens did fall into some of his facile vices. The real
objection to much of his pathos belongs really to another part of his
character. It is connected with his vanity, his voracity for all kinds
of praise, his restive experimentalism and even perhaps his envy. He
strained himself to achieve pathos. His humour was inspiration; but his
pathos was ambition. His laughter was lonely; he would have laughed on a
desert island. But his grief was gregarious. He liked to move great
masses of men, to melt them into tenderness, to play on the people as a
great pianist plays on them; to make them mad or sad. His pathos was to
him a way of showing his power; and for that reason it was really
powerless. He could not help making people laugh; but he tried to make
them cry. We come in this novel, as we often do come in his novels, upon
hard lumps of unreality, upon a phrase that suddenly sickens. That is
always due to his conscious despotism over the delicate feelings; that
is always due to his love of fame as distinct from his love of fun. But
it is not true that all Dickens's pathos is like this; it is not even
true that all the passages about Little Nell are like this; there are
two strands almost everywhere and they can be differentiated