a Sim Tappertit revolution. It was
vulgar, it was overdone, it was absurd, but it was alive. Dickens was
vulgar, was absurd, overdid everything, but he was alive. The
aristocrats were perfectly correct, but quite dead; dead long before
they were guillotined. The classics and critics who lamented that
Dickens was no gentleman were quite right, but quite dead. The
revolution thought itself rational; but so did Sim Tappertit. It was
really a huge revolt of romanticism against a reason which had grown
sick even of itself. Sim Tappertit rose against Mr. Chester; and, thank
God! he put his foot upon his neck.

[Illustration: Charles Dickens, 1842
From a bust by H. Dexter, executed during Dickens's first visit to
America.]

AMERICAN NOTES

_American Notes_ was written soon after Dickens had returned from his
first visit to America. That visit had, of course, been a great epoch in
his life; but how much of an epoch men did not truly realise until, some
time after, in the middle of a quiet story about Salisbury and a
ridiculous architect, his feelings flamed out and flared up to the stars
in _Martin Chuzzlewit_. The _American Notes_ are, however, interesting,
because in them he betrays his feelings when he does not know that he is
betraying them. Dickens's first visit to America was, from his own point
of view, and at the beginning, a happy and festive experiment. It is
very characteristic of him that he went among the Americans, enjoyed
them, even admired them, and then had a quarrel with them. Nothing was
ever so unmistakable as his good-will, except his ill-will; and they
were never far apart. And this was not, as some bloodless moderns have
sneeringly insinuated, a mere repetition of the proximity between the
benevolent stage and the quarrelsome stage of drink. It was a piece of
pure optimism; he believed so readily that men were going to be good to
him that an injury to him was something more than an injury: it was a
shock. What was the exact nature of the American shock must, however, be
more carefully stated.

The famous quarrel between Dickens and America, which finds its most
elaborate expression in _American Notes_, though its most brilliant
expression in _Martin Chuzzlewit_, is an incident about which a great
deal remains to be said. But the thing which most specially remains to
be said is this. This old Anglo-American quarrel was much more
fundamentally friendly than most Anglo-American alliances.