was conceivable even to himself only on the assumption that he
was a mere spectator of life. Poor Skimpole only asked to be kept out
of the business of this world, and Dickens ought to have kept him out of
the business of _Bleak House_. By the end of the tale he has brought
Skimpole to doing acts of mere low villainy. This altogether spoils the
ironical daintiness of the original notion. Skimpole was meant to end
with a note of interrogation. As it is, he ends with a big, black,
unmistakable blot. Speaking purely artistically, we may say that this is
as great a collapse or vulgarisation as if Richard Carstone had turned
into a common blackguard and wife-beater, or Caddy Jellyby into a comic
and illiterate landlady. Upon the whole it may, I think, be said that
the character of Skimpole is rather a piece of brilliant moralising than
of pure observation or creation. Dickens had a singularly just mind. He
was wild in his caricatures, but very sane in his impressions. Many of
his books were devoted, and this book is partly devoted, to a
denunciation of aristocracy--of the idle class that lives easily upon
the toil of nations. But he was fairer than many modern revolutionists,
and he insisted on satirising also those who prey on society not in the
name of rank or law, but in the name of intellect and beauty. Sir
Leicester Dedlock and Mr. Harold Skimpole are alike in accepting with a
royal unconsciousness the anomaly and evil of their position. But the
idleness and insolence of the aristocrat is human and humble compared to
the idleness and insolence of the artist.

With the exception of a few fine freaks, such as Turveydrop and
Chadband, all the figures in this book are touched more delicately, even
more faintly, than is common with Dickens. But if the figures are
touched more faintly, it is partly because they are figures in a
fog--the fog of Chancery. Dickens meant that twilight to be oppressive;
for it was the symbol of oppression. Deliberately he did not dispel the
darkness at the end of this book, as he does dispel it at the end of
most of his books. Pickwick gets out of the Fleet Prison; Carstone never
gets out of Chancery but by death. This tyranny, Dickens said, shall not
be lifted by the light subterfuge of a fiction. This tyranny shall never
be lifted till all Englishmen lift it together.

CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND

There are works of great authors manifestly inferior to their typical
work which are yet