tured intelligence. It is well to be able
to realise that contact with the Dickens world is almost like a physical
contact; it is like stepping suddenly into the hot smells of a
greenhouse, or into the bleak smell of the sea. We know that we are
there. Let any one read, for instance, one of the foolish but amusing
farces in Dickens's first volume. Let him read, for instance, such a
story as that of _Horatio Sparkins_ or that of _The Tuggses at
Ramsgate_. He will not find very much of that verbal felicity or
fantastic irony that Dickens afterwards developed; the incidents are
upon the plain lines of the stock comedy of the day: sharpers who entrap
simpletons, spinsters who angle for husbands, youths who try to look
Byronic and only look foolish. Yet there is something in these stories
which there is not in the ordinary stock comedies of that day: an
indefinable flavour of emphasis and richness, a hint as of infinity of
fun. Doubtless, for instance, a million comic writers of that epoch had
made game of the dark, romantic young man who pretended to abysses of
philosophy and despair. And it is not easy to say exactly why we feel
that the few metaphysical remarks of Mr. Horatio Sparkins are in some
way really much funnier than any of those old stock jokes. It is in a
certain quality of deep enjoyment in the writer as well as the reader;
as if the few words written had been dipped in dark nonsense and were,
as it were, reeking with derision. "Because if Effect be the result of
Cause and Cause be the Precursor of Effect," said Mr. Horatio Sparkins,
"I apprehend that you are wrong." Nobody can get at the real secret of
sentences like that; sentences which were afterwards strewed with
reckless liberality over the conversation of Dick Swiveller or Mr.
Mantalini, Sim Tappertit or Mr. Pecksniff. Though the joke seems most
superficial one has only to read it a certain number of times to see
that it is most subtle. The joke does not lie in Mr. Sparkins merely
using long words, any more than the joke lies merely in Mr. Swiveller
drinking, or in Mr. Mantalini deceiving his wife. It is something in
the arrangement of the words; something in a last inspired turn of
absurdity given to a sentence. In spite of everything Horatio Sparkins
is funny. We cannot tell why he is funny. When we know why he is funny
we shall know why Dickens is great.

Standing as we do here upon the threshold, as it were, of the work of
Dickens, it may be well per