usly intended. He may almost
be said to have only written a brilliant introduction to another man's
book.

Yet it is exactly in such broken outbreaks that his greatness appears.
If a man has flung away bad ideas he has shown his sense, but if he has
flung away good ideas he has shown his genius. He has proved that he
actually has that over-pressure of pure creativeness which we see in
nature itself, "that of a hundred seeds, she often brings but one to
bear." Dickens had to be Malthusian about his spiritual children.
Critics have called Keats and others who died young "the great
Might-have-beens of literary history." Dickens certainly was not merely
a great Might-have-been. Dickens, to say the least of him, was a great
Was. Yet this fails fully to express the richness of his talent; for
the truth is that he was a great Was and also a great Might-have-been.
He said what he had to say, and yet not all he had to say. Wild
pictures, possible stories, tantalising and attractive trains of
thought, perspectives of adventure, crowded so continually upon his mind
that at the end there was a vast mass of them left over, ideas that he
literally had not the opportunity to develop, tales that he literally
had not the time to tell. This is shown clearly in his private notes and
letters, which are full of schemes singularly striking and suggestive,
schemes which he never carried out. It is indicated even more clearly by
these _Christmas Stories_, collected out of the chaotic opulence of
_Household Words_ and _All the Year Round_. He wrote short stories
actually because he had not time to write long stories. He often put
into the short story a deep and branching idea which would have done
very well for a long story; many of his long stories, so to speak, broke
off short. This is where he differs from most who are called the
Might-have-beens of literature. Marlowe and Chatterton failed because of
their weakness. Dickens failed because of his force.

Examine for example this case of the waiter in _Somebody's Luggage_.
Dickens obviously knew enough about that waiter to have made him a
running spring of joy throughout a whole novel; as the beadle is in
_Oliver Twist_, or the undertaker in _Martin Chuzzlewit_. Every touch of
him tingles with truth, from the vague gallantry with which he asks,
"Would'st thou know, fair reader (if of the adorable female sex)" to the
official severity with which he takes the chambermaid down, "as many
pegs a