ther place that Dickens must
have loved Pecksniff. Mr. Noyes thinks it clear that Dickens hated
Pecksniff. I cannot believe it. Hatred does indeed linger round its
object as much as love; but not in that way. Dickens is always making
Pecksniff say things which have a wild poetical truth about them. Hatred
allows no such outbursts of original innocence. But however that may be
the broad fact remains--Dickens may or may not have loved Pecksniff
comically, but he did not love him seriously; he did not respect him as
he certainly respected Sam Weller. The same of course is true of Mrs.
Gamp. To any one who appreciates her unctuous and sumptuous conversation
it is difficult indeed not to feel that it would be almost better to be
killed by Mrs. Gamp than to be saved by a better nurse. But the fact
remains. In this book Dickens has not allowed us to love the most absurd
people seriously, and absurd people ought to be loved seriously.
Pecksniff has to be amusing all the time; the instant he ceases to be
laughable he becomes detestable. Pickwick can take his ease at his inn;
he can be leisurely, he can be spacious; he can fall into moods of
gravity and even of dulness; he is not bound to be always funny or to
forfeit the reader's concern, for he is a good man, and therefore even
his dulness is beautiful, just as is the dulness of the animal. We can
leave Pickwick a little while by the fire to think; for the thoughts of
Pickwick, even if they were to go slowly, would be full of all the
things that all men care for--old friends and old inns and memory and
the goodness of God. But we dare not leave Pecksniff alone for a moment.
We dare not leave him thinking by the fire, for the thoughts of
Pecksniff would be too frightful.

CHRISTMAS BOOKS

The mystery of Christmas is in a manner identical with the mystery of
Dickens. If ever we adequately explain the one we may adequately explain
the other. And indeed, in the treatment of the two, the chronological or
historical order must in some degree be remembered. Before we come to
the question of what Dickens did for Christmas we must consider the
question of what Christmas did for Dickens. How did it happen that this
bustling, nineteenth-century man, full of the almost cock-sure
common-sense of the utilitarian and liberal epoch, came to associate his
name chiefly in literary history with the perpetuation of a half pagan
and half Catholic festival which he would certainly have call