describable and unaccountable memory of mortality and decay, of
dreariness in the rooms and even of tastelessness in the banquet. So any
one who has enjoyed the stories of Dickens as they should be enjoyed has
a nameless feeling that this one story is sad and almost sodden. Dickens
himself had this feeling, though his breezy vanity forbade him to
express it in so many words. In spite of Pecksniff, in spite of Mrs.
Gamp, in spite of the yet greater Bailey, the story went lumberingly and
even lifelessly; he found the sales falling off; he fancied his
popularity waning, and by a sudden impulse most inartistic and yet most
artistic, he dragged in the episode of Martin's visit to America, which
is the blazing jewel and the sudden redemption of the book. He wrote it
at an uneasy and unhappy period of his life; when he had ceased
wandering in America, but could not cease wandering altogether; when he
had lost his original routine of work which was violent but regular, and
had not yet settled down to the full enjoyment of his success and his
later years. He poured into this book genius that might make the
mountains laugh, invention that juggled with the stars. But the book was
sad; and he knew it.

The just reason for this is really interesting. Yet it is one that is
not easy to state without guarding one's self on the one side or the
other against great misunderstandings; and these stipulations or
preliminary allowances must in such a case as this of necessity be made
first. Dickens was among other things a satirist, a pure satirist. I
have never been able to understand why this title is always specially
and sacredly reserved for Thackeray. Thackeray was a novelist; in the
strict and narrow sense at any rate, Thackeray was a far greater
novelist than Dickens. But Dickens certainly was the satirist. The
essence of satire is that it perceives some absurdity inherent in the
logic of some position, and that it draws that absurdity out and
isolates it, so that all can see it. Thus for instance when Dickens
says, "Lord Coodle would go out; Sir Thomas Doodle wouldn't come in; and
there being no people to speak of in England except Coodle and Doodle
the country has been without a Government"; when Dickens says this he
suddenly pounces on and plucks out the one inherent absurdity in the
English party system which is hidden behind all its paraphernalia of
Parliaments and Statutes, elections and ballot papers. When all the
dignity and al