the one book where all the tenderness there is is quite
unquestionably true. An admirable example of what I mean may be found in
the scene in which Sam Weller goes down to see his bereaved father after
the death of his step-mother. The most loyal admirer of Dickens can
hardly prevent himself from giving a slight shudder when he thinks of
what Dickens might have made of that scene in some of his more expansive
and maudlin moments. For all I know old Mrs. Weller might have asked
what the wild waves were saying; and for all I know old Mr. Weller might
have told her. As it is, Dickens, being forced to keep the tale taut and
humorous, gives a picture of humble respect and decency which is manly,
dignified, and really sad. There is no attempt made by these simple and
honest men, the father and son, to pretend that the dead woman was
anything greatly other than she was; their respect is for death, and for
the human weakness and mystery which it must finally cover. Old Tony
Weller does not tell his shrewish wife that she is already a
white-winged angel; he speaks to her with an admirable good nature and
good sense:

"'Susan,' I says, 'you've been a wery good vife to me altogether:
keep a good heart, my dear, and you'll live to see me punch that
'ere Stiggins's 'ead yet.' She smiled at this, Samivel ... but she
died arter all."

That is perhaps the first and the last time that Dickens ever touched
the extreme dignity of pathos. He is restraining his compassion, and
afterwards he let it go. Now laughter is a thing that can be let go;
laughter has in it a quality of liberty. But sorrow has in it by its
very nature a quality of confinement; pathos by its very nature fights
with itself. Humour is expansive; it bursts outwards; the fact is
attested by the common expression, "holding one's sides." But sorrow is
not expansive; and it was afterwards the mistake of Dickens that he
tried to make it expansive. It is the one great weakness of Dickens as a
great writer, that he did try to make that sudden sadness, that abrupt
pity, which we call pathos, a thing quite obvious, infectious, public,
as if it were journalism or the measles. It is pleasant to think that in
this supreme masterpiece, done in the dawn of his career, there is not
even this faint fleck upon the sun of his just splendour. Pickwick will
always be remembered as the great example of everything that made
Dickens great; of the solemn conviviality of gre