cal comedy of
inversion. It is amusing that the Englishman should have been the
pushing and even pert modernist, and the American the stately
antiquarian and lover of lost causes. But while a man of more mellow
sympathies may well dislike Dickens's dislike of savages, and even
disdain his disdain, he ought to sharply remind himself of the admirable
ethical fairness and equity which meet with that restricted outlook. In
the very act of describing Red Indians as devils who, like so much dirt,
it would pay us to sweep away, he pauses to deny emphatically that we
have any right to sweep them away. We have no right to wrong the man, he
means to say, even if he himself be a kind of wrong. Here we strike the
ringing iron of the old conscience and sense of honour which marked the
best men of his party and of his epoch. This rigid and even reluctant
justice towers, at any rate, far above modern views of savages, above
the sentimentalism of the mere humanitarian and the far weaker
sentimentalism that pleads for brutality and a race war. Dickens was at
least more of a man than the brutalitarian who claims to wrong people
because they are nasty, or the humanitarian who cannot be just to them
without pretending that they are nice.

PICTURES FROM ITALY

The _Pictures from Italy_ are excellent in themselves and excellent as a
foil to the _American Notes_. Here we have none of that air of giving a
decision like a judge or sending in a report like an inspector; here we
have only glimpses, light and even fantastic glimpses, of a world that
is really alien to Dickens. It is so alien that he can almost entirely
enjoy it. For no man can entirely enjoy that which he loves; contentment
is always unpatriotic. The difference can indeed be put with approximate
perfection in one phrase. In Italy he was on a holiday; in America he
was on a tour. But indeed Dickens himself has quite sufficiently
conveyed the difference in the two phrases that he did actually use for
the titles of the two books. Dickens often told unconscious truths,
especially in small matters. The _American Notes_ really are notes, like
the notes of a student or a professional witness. The _Pictures from
Italy_ are only pictures from Italy, like the miscellaneous pictures
that all tourists bring from Italy.

To take another and perhaps closer figure of speech, almost all
Dickens's works such as these may best be regarded as private letters
addressed to the public. His p