my feelings
in words as innocent and literal as those of a rustic or a child.

This eternal output of divine derision has never been so truly typified
as by the character of Sam; he is a grotesque fountain which gushes the
living waters for ever. Dickens is accused of exaggeration and he is
often guilty of exaggeration; but here he does not exaggerate: he merely
symbolises and sublimates like any other great artist. Sam Weller does
not exaggerate the wit of the London street arab one atom more than
Colonel Newcome, let us say, exaggerates the stateliness of an ordinary
soldier and gentleman, or than Mr. Collins exaggerates the fatuity of a
certain kind of country clergyman. And this breath from the boisterous
brotherhood of the poor lent a special seriousness and smell of reality
to the whole story. The unconscious follies of Winkle and Tupman are
blown away like leaves before the solid and conscious folly of Sam
Weller. Moreover, the relations between Pickwick and his servant Sam are
in some ways new and valuable in literature. Many comic writers had
described the clever rascal and his ridiculous dupe; but here, in a
fresh and very human atmosphere, we have a clever servant who was not a
rascal and a dupe who was not ridiculous. Sam Weller stands in some ways
for a cheerful knowledge of the world; Mr. Pickwick stands for a still
more cheerful ignorance of the world. And Dickens responded to a
profound human sentiment (the sentiment that has made saints and the
sanctity of children) when he made the gentler and less-travelled
type--the type which moderates and controls. Knowledge and innocence are
both excellent things, and they are both very funny. But it is right
that knowledge should be the servant and innocence the master.

The sincerity of this study of Sam Weller has produced one particular
effect in the book which I wonder that critics of Dickens have never
noticed or discussed. Because it has no Dickens "pathos," certain parts
of it are truly pathetic. Dickens, realising rightly that the whole tone
of the book was fun, felt that he ought to keep out of it any great
experiments in sadness and keep within limits those that he put in. He
used this restraint in order not to spoil the humour; but (if he had
known himself better) he might well have used it in order not to spoil
the pathos. This is the one book in which Dickens was, as it were,
forced to trample down his tender feelings; and for that very reason it
is