rush and energy in a character which was the supreme and
quite indescribable greatness of Dickens. He conquered by rushes; he
attacked in masses; he carried things at the spear point in a charge of
spears; he was the Rupert of Fiction. The thing about any figure of
Dickens, about Sam Weller or Dick Swiveller, or Micawber, or Bagstock,
or Trabb's boy,--the thing about each one of these persons is that he
cannot be exhausted. A Dickens character hits you first on the nose and
then in the waistcoat, and then in the eye and then in the waistcoat
again, with the blinding rapidity of some battering engine. The scene in
which Trabb's boy continually overtakes Pip in order to reel and stagger
as at a first encounter is a thing quite within the real competence of
such a character; it might have been suggested by Thackeray, or George
Eliot, or any realist. But the point with Dickens is that there is a
rush in the boy's rushings; the writer and the reader rush with him.
They start with him, they stare with him, they stagger with him, they
share an inexpressible vitality in the air which emanates from this
violent and capering satirist. Trabb's boy is among other things a boy;
he has a physical rapture in hurling himself like a boomerang and in
bouncing to the sky like a ball. It is just exactly in describing this
quality that Dickens is Dickens and that no one else comes near him. No
one feels in his bones that Felix Holt was strong as he feels in his
bones that little Quilp was strong. No one can feel that even Rawdon
Crawley's splendid smack across the face of Lord Steyne is quite so
living and life-giving as the "kick after kick" which old Mr. Weller
dealt the dancing and quivering Stiggins as he drove him towards the
trough. This quality, whether expressed intellectually or physically,
is the profoundly popular and eternal quality in Dickens; it is the
thing that no one else could do. This quality is the quality which has
always given its continuous power and poetry to the common people
everywhere. It is life; it is the joy of life felt by those who have
nothing else but life. It is the thing that all aristocrats have always
hated and dreaded in the people. And it is the thing which poor Pip
really hates and dreads in Trabb's boy.

A great man of letters or any great artist is symbolic without knowing
it. The things he describes are types because they are truths.
Shakespeare may, or may not, have ever put it to himself that Ric