ur time. God forbid that any one
(especially any Dickensian) should dilute or discourage the great
efforts towards social improvement. But I wish that social reformers
would more often remember that they are imposing their rules not on dots
and numbers, but on Bob Sawyer and Tim Linkinwater, on Mrs. Lirriper and
Dr. Marigold. I wish Mr. Sidney Webb would shut his eyes until he _sees_
Sam Weller.

A great many circumstances have led to the neglect in literature of
these exuberant types which do actually exist in the ruder classes of
society. Perhaps the principal cause is that since Dickens's time the
study of the poor has ceased to be an art and become a sort of sham
science. Dickens took the poor individually: all modern writing tends to
take them collectively. It is said that the modern realist produces a
photograph rather than a picture. But this is an inadequate objection.
The real trouble with the realist is not that he produces a photograph,
but that he produces a composite photograph. It is like all composite
photographs, blurred; like all composite photographs, hideous; and like
all composite photographs, unlike anything or anybody. The new
sociological novels, which attempt to describe the abstract type of the
working-classes, sin in practice against the first canon of literature,
true when all others are subject to exception. Literature must always be
a pointing out of what is interesting in life; but these books are
duller than the life they represent. Even supposing that Dickens did
exaggerate the degree to which one man differs from another--that was at
least an exaggeration upon the side of literature; it was better than a
mere attempt to reduce what is actually vivid and unmistakable to what
is in comparison colourless or unnoticeable. Even the creditable and
necessary efforts of our time in certain matters of social reform have
discouraged the old distinctive Dickens treatment. People are so anxious
to do something for the poor man that they have a sort of subconscious
desire to think that there is only one kind of man to do it for. Thus
while the old accounts were sometimes too steep and crazy, the new
became too sweeping and flat. People write about the problem of drink,
for instance, as if it were one problem. Dickens could have told them
that there is the abyss between heaven and hell between the incongruous
excesses of Mr. Pickwick and the fatalistic soaking of Mr. Wickfield. He
could have shown tha