ays began with a
fact even when he was most fanciful; and even when he drew the long bow
he was careful to hit the white.

This riotous realism of Dickens has its disadvantage--a disadvantage
that comes out more clearly in these casual sketches than in his
constructed romances. One grave defect in his greatness is that he was
altogether too indifferent to theories. On large matters he went right
by the very largeness of his mind; but in small matters he suffered from
the lack of any logical test and ready reckoner. Hence his comment upon
the details of civilisation or reform are sometimes apt to be jerky and
jarring, and even grossly inconsistent. So long as a thing was heroic
enough to admire, Dickens admired it; whenever it was absurd enough to
laugh at he laughed at it: so far he was on sure ground. But about all
the small human projects that lie between the extremes of the sublime
and the ridiculous, his criticism was apt to have an accidental quality.
As Matthew Arnold said of the remarks of the Young Man from the Country
about the perambulator, they are felt not to be at the heart of the
situation. On a great many occasions the Uncommercial Traveller seems,
like other hasty travellers, to be criticising elements and institutions
which he has quite inadequately understood; and once or twice the
Uncommercial Traveller might almost as well be a Commercial Traveller
for all he knows of the countryside.

An instance of what I mean may be found in the amusing article about the
nightmares of the nursery. Superficially read it might almost be taken
to mean that Dickens disapproved of ghost stories--disapproved of that
old and genial horror which nurses can hardly supply fast enough for the
children who want it. Dickens, one would have thought, should have been
the last man in the world to object to horrible stories, having himself
written some of the most horrible that exist in the world. The author of
the Madman's Manuscript, of the disease of Monk and the death of Krook,
cannot be considered fastidious in the matter of revolting realism or of
revolting mysticism. If artistic horror is to be kept from the young, it
is at least as necessary to keep little boys from reading _Pickwick_ or
_Bleak House_ as to refrain from telling them the story of Captain
Murderer or the terrible tale of Chips. If there was something appalling
in the rhyme of Chips and pips and ships, it was nothing compared to
that infernal refrain of "Mud