tle Copperfield living in a land of
giants. It is at once Gargantuan in its fancy and grossly vivid in its
facts; like Gulliver in the land of Brobdingnag when he describes
mountainous hands and faces filling the sky, bristles as big as hedges,
or moles as big as molehills. To him parents and guardians are not
Olympians (as in Mr. Kenneth Grahame's clever book), mysterious and
dignified, dwelling upon a cloudy hill. Rather they are all the more
visible for being large. They come all the closer because they are
colossal. Their queer features and weaknesses stand out large in a sort
of gigantic domesticity, like the hairs and freckles of a
Brobdingnagian. We feel the sombre Murdstone coming upon the house like
a tall storm striding through the sky. We watch every pucker of
Peggotty's peasant face in its moods of flinty prejudice or whimsical
hesitation. We look up and feel that Aunt Betsey in her garden gloves
was really terrible--especially her garden gloves. But one cannot avoid
the impression that as the boy grows larger these figures grow smaller,
and are not perhaps so completely satisfactory.

CHRISTMAS BOOKS

And there is doubtless a certain poetic unity and irony in gathering
together three or four of the crudest and most cocksure of the modern
theorists, with their shrill voices and metallic virtues, under the
fulness and the sonorous sanity of Christian bells. But the figures
satirised in _The Chimes_ cross each other's path and spoil each other
in some degree. The main purpose of the book was a protest against that
impudent and hard-hearted utilitarianism which arranges the people only
in rows of men or even in rows of figures. It is a flaming denunciation
of that strange mathematical morality which was twisted often unfairly
out of Bentham and Mill: a morality by which each citizen must regard
himself as a fraction, and a very vulgar fraction. Though the particular
form of this insolent patronage has changed, this revolt and rebuke is
still of value, and may be wholesome for those who are teaching the poor
to be provident. Doubtless it is a good idea to be provident, in the
sense that Providence is provident, but that should mean being kind, and
certainly not merely being cold.

_The Cricket on the Hearth_, though popular, I think, with many sections
of the great army of Dickensians, cannot be spoken of in any such
abstract or serious terms. It is a brief domestic glimpse; it is an
interior. It must be re