liament, but a Cabinet
Minister; the times when the very soul and spirit of Fledgeby carried
war into Africa. Dickens can be criticised as a contemporary of Bernard
Shaw or Anatole France or C. F. G. Masterman. In talking of him one need
no longer talk merely of the Manchester School or Puseyism or the Charge
of the Light Brigade; his name comes to the tongue when we are talking
of Christian Socialists or Mr. Roosevelt or County Council Steam Boats
or Guilds of Play. He can be considered under new lights, some larger
and some meaner than his own; and it is a very rough effort so to
consider him which is the excuse of these pages. Of the essays in this
book I desire to say as little as possible; I will discuss any other
subject in preference with a readiness which reaches to avidity. But I
may very curtly apply the explanation used above to the cases of two or
three of them. Thus in the article on _David Copperfield_ I have done
far less than justice to that fine book considered in its relation to
eternal literature; but I have dwelt at some length upon a particular
element in it which has grown enormous in England after Dickens's death.
Thus again, in introducing the _Sketches by Boz_ I have felt chiefly
that I am introducing them to a new generation insufficiently in
sympathy with such palpable and unsophisticated fun. A Board School
education, evolved since Dickens's day, has given to our people a queer
and inadequate sort of refinement, one which prevents them from enjoying
the raw jests of the _Sketches by Boz_, but leaves them easily open to
that slight but poisonous sentimentalism which I note amid all the
merits of David Copperfield. In the same way I shall speak of _Little
Dorrit_, with reference to a school of pessimistic fiction which did not
exist when it was written, of _Hard Times_ in the light of the most
modern crises of economics, and of _The Child's History of England_ in
the light of the most matured authority of history. In short, these
criticisms are an intrinsically ephemeral comment from one generation
upon work that will delight many more. Dickens was a very great man, and
there are many ways of testing and stating the fact. But one permissible
way is to say this, that he was an ignorant man, ill-read in the past,
and often confused about the present. Yet he remains great and true, and
even essentially reliable, if we suppose him to have known not only all
that went before his lifetime, but also all