is gloom is the gloom of London, not the
gloom of Paris.

[Illustration: Charles Dickens, Circa 1860
Photograph by J. & C. Watkins.]

GREAT EXPECTATIONS

_Great Expectations_, which was written in the afternoon of Dickens's
life and fame, has a quality of serene irony and even sadness, which
puts it quite alone among his other works. At no time could Dickens
possibly be called cynical, he had too much vitality; but relatively to
the other books this book is cynical; but it has the soft and gentle
cynicism of old age, not the hard cynicism of youth. To be a young cynic
is to be a young brute; but Dickens, who had been so perfectly romantic
and sentimental in his youth, could afford to admit this touch of doubt
into the mixed experience of his middle age. At no time could any books
by Dickens have been called Thackerayan. Both of the two men were too
great for that. But relatively to the other Dickensian productions this
book may be called Thackerayan. It is a study in human weakness and the
slow human surrender. It describes how easily a free lad of fresh and
decent instincts can be made to care more for rank and pride and the
degrees of our stratified society than for old affection and for honour.
It is an extra chapter to _The Book of Snobs_.

The best way of stating the change which this book marks in Dickens can
be put in one phrase. In this book for the first time the hero
disappears. The hero had descended to Dickens by a long line which
begins with the gods, nay, perhaps if one may say so, which begins with
God. First comes Deity and then the image of Deity; first comes the god
and then the demi-god, the Hercules who labours and conquers before he
receives his heavenly crown. That idea, with continual mystery and
modification, has continued behind all romantic tales; the demi-god
became the hero of paganism; the hero of paganism became the
knight-errant of Christianity; the knight-errant who wandered and was
foiled before he triumphed became the hero of the later prose romance,
the romance in which the hero had to fight a duel with the villain but
always survived, in which the hero drove desperate horses through the
night in order to rescue the heroine, but always rescued her.

This heroic modern hero, this demi-god in a top-hat, may be said to
reach his supreme moment and typical example about the time when Dickens
was writing that thundering and thrilling and highly unlikely scene in
_Nicholas