ralism
was turned from an omnipotent truth to a weak scientific system.
Macaulay's private comment on _Hard Times_ runs, "One or two passages of
exquisite pathos and the rest sullen Socialism." That is not an unfair
and certainly not a specially hostile criticism, but it exactly shows
how the book struck those people who were mad on political liberty and
dead about everything else. Macaulay mistook for a new formula called
Socialism what was, in truth, only the old formula called political
democracy. He and his Whigs had so thoroughly mauled and modified the
original idea of Rousseau or Jefferson that when they saw it again they
positively thought that it was something quite new and eccentric. But
the truth was that Dickens was not a Socialist, but an unspoilt Liberal;
he was not sullen; nay, rather, he had remained strangely hopeful. They
called him a sullen Socialist only to disguise their astonishment at
finding still loose about the London streets a happy republican.

Dickens is the one living link between the old kindness and the new,
between the good will of the past and the good works of the future. He
links May Day with Bank Holiday, and he does it almost alone. All the
men around him, great and good as they were, were in comparison
puritanical, and never so puritanical as when they were also atheistic.
He is a sort of solitary pipe down which pours to the twentieth century
the original river of Merry England. And although this _Hard Times_ is,
as its name implies, the hardest of his works, although there is less in
it perhaps than in any of the others of the _abandon_ and the buffoonery
of Dickens, this only emphasises the more clearly the fact that he stood
almost alone for a more humane and hilarious view of democracy. None of
his great and much more highly-educated contemporaries could help him in
this. Carlyle was as gloomy on the one side as Herbert Spencer on the
other. He protested against the commercial oppression simply and solely
because it was not only an oppression but a depression. And this protest
of his was made specially in the case of the book before us. It may be
bitter, but it was a protest against bitterness. It may be dark, but it
is the darkness of the subject and not of the author. He is by his own
account dealing with hard times, but not with a hard eternity, not with
a hard philosophy of the universe. Nevertheless, this is the one place
in his work where he does not make us remember huma