stains, bloodstains" which Dickens himself,
in one of his highest moments of hellish art, put into _Oliver Twist_.

I take this one instance of the excellent article called "Nurse's
Stories" because it is quite typical of all the rest. Dickens (accused
of superficiality by those who cannot grasp that there is foam upon deep
seas) was really deep about human beings; that is, he was original and
creative about them. But about ideas he did tend to be a little
superficial. He judged them by whether they hit him, and not by what
they were trying to hit. Thus in this book the great wizard of the
Christmas ghosts seems almost the enemy of ghost stories; thus the
almost melodramatic moralist who created Ralph Nickleby and Jonas
Chuzzlewit cannot see the point in original sin; thus the great
denouncer of official oppression in England may be found far too
indulgent to the basest aspects of the modern police. His theories were
less important than his creations, because he was a man of genius. But
he himself thought his theories the more important, because he was a
man.

SKETCHES BY BOZ

The greatest mystery about almost any great writer is why he was ever
allowed to write at all. The first efforts of eminent men are always
imitations; and very often they are bad imitations. The only question is
whether the publisher had (as his name would seem to imply) some
subconscious connection or sympathy with the public, and thus felt
instinctively the presence of something that might ultimately tell; or
whether the choice was merely a matter of chance and one Dickens was
chosen and another Dickens left. The fact is almost unquestionable: most
authors made their reputation by bad books and afterwards supported it
by good ones. This is in some degree true even in the case of Dickens.
The public continued to call him "Boz" long after the public had
forgotten the _Sketches by Boz_. Numberless writers of the time speak of
"Boz" as having written _Martin Chuzzlewit_ and "Boz" as having written
_David Copperfield_. Yet if they had gone back to the original book
signed "Boz" they might even have felt that it was vulgar and flippant.
This is indeed the chief tragedy of publishers: that they may easily
refuse at the same moment the wrong manuscript and the right man. It is
easy to see of Dickens now that he was the right man; but a man might
have been very well excused if he had not realised that the _Sketches_
was the right book. Dickens