tances are the
financial ruin and long imprisonment of Edward Dorrit; the soul is
Edward Dorrit himself. Let it be granted that the circumstances are
exceptional and oppressive, are denounced as exceptional and oppressive,
are finally exploded and overthrown; still, they are circumstances. Let
it be granted that the soul is that of a man perhaps weak in any case
and retaining many merits to the last, still it is a soul. Let it be
granted, above all, that the admission that such spiritual tragedies do
occur does not decrease by so much as an iota our faith in the validity
of any spiritual struggle. For example, Stevenson has made a study of
the breakdown of a good man's character under a burden for which he is
not to blame, in the tragedy of Henry Durie in _The Master of
Ballantrae_. Yet he has added, in the mouth of Mackellar, the exact
common sense and good theology of the matter, saying "It matters not a
jot; for he that is to pass judgment upon the records of our life is the
same that formed us in frailty." Let us concede then all this, and the
fact remains that the study of the slow demoralisation of a man through
mere misfortune was not a study congenial to Dickens, not in accordance
with his original inspiration, not connected in any manner with the
special thing that he had to say. In a word, the thing is not quite a
part of himself; and he was not quite himself when he did it.

He was still quite a young man; his depression did not come from age.
In fact, as far as I know, mere depression never does come from mere
age. Age can pass into a beautiful reverie. Age can pass into a sort of
beautiful idiocy. But I do not think that the actual decline and close
of our ordinary vitality brings with it any particular heaviness of the
spirits. The spirits of the old do not as a rule seem to become more and
more ponderous until they sink into the earth. Rather the spirits of the
old seem to grow lighter and lighter until they float away like
thistledown. Wherever there is the definite phenomenon called
depression, it commonly means that something else has been closer to us
than so normal a thing as death. There has been disease, bodily or
mental, or there has been sin, or there has been some struggle or
effort, breaking past the ordinary boundaries of human custom. In the
case of Dickens there had been two things that are not of the routine of
a wholesome human life; there had been the quarrel with his wife, and
there had