s not that he was careless; rather it was that he was too
conscientious. It was not that he had the irresponsibility of genius;
rather it was that he had the irritating responsibility of genius; he
wanted everybody to see things as he saw them. But in spite of all this
he certainly ran two great popular periodicals--_Household Words_ and
_All the Year Round_--with enormous popular success. And he certainly so
far succeeded in throwing himself into the communism of journalism, into
the nameless brotherhood of a big paper, that many earnest Dickensians
are still engaged in picking out pieces of Dickens from the anonymous
pages of _Household Words_ and _All the Year Round_, and those parts
which have been already beyond question picked out and proved are often
fragmentary. The genuine writing of Dickens breaks off at a certain
point, and the writing of some one else begins. But when the writing of
Dickens breaks off, I fancy that we know it.

The singular thing is that some of the best work that Dickens ever did,
better than the work in his best novels, can be found in these slight
and composite scraps of journalism. For instance, the solemn and
self-satisfied account of the duty and dignity of a waiter given in the
opening chapter of _Somebody's Luggage_ is quite as full and fine as
anything done anywhere by its author in the same vein of sumptuous
satire. It is as good as the account which Mr. Bumble gives of out-door
relief, which, "properly understood, is the parochial safeguard. The
great thing is to give the paupers what they don't want, and then they
never come again." It is as good as Mr. Podsnap's description of the
British Constitution, which was bestowed on him by Providence. None of
these celebrated passages is more obviously Dickens at his best than
this, the admirable description of "the true principles of waitering,"
or the account of how the waiter's father came back to his mother in
broad daylight, "in itself an act of madness on the part of a waiter,"
and how he expired repeating continually "two and six is three and four
is nine." That waiter's explanatory soliloquy might easily have opened
an excellent novel, as _Martin Chuzzlewit_ is opened by the clever
nonsense about the genealogy of the Chuzzlewits, or as _Bleak House_ is
opened by a satiric account of the damp, dim life of a law court. Yet
Dickens practically abandoned the scheme of _Somebody's Luggage_; he
only wrote two sketches out of those obvio