t
may be an airy, philosophical, and disinterested lust; it may be, so to
speak, a virgin lust; but it is lust, because it is wholly
self-indulgent and invites no attack. On the other hand, fighting for a
thing without loving it is not even fighting; it can only be called a
kind of horse-play that is occasionally fatal. Wherever human nature is
human and unspoilt by any special sophistry, there exists this natural
kinship between war and wooing, and that natural kinship is called
romance. It comes upon a man especially in the great hour of youth; and
every man who has ever been young at all has felt, if only for a moment,
this ultimate and poetic paradox. He knows that loving the world is the
same thing as fighting the world. It was at the very moment when he
offered to like everybody he also offered to hit everybody. To almost
every man that can be called a man this especial moment of the romantic
culmination has come. In the first resort the man wished to live a
romance. In the second resort, in the last and worst resort, he was
content to write one.

Now there is a certain moment when this element enters independently
into the life of Dickens. There is a particular time when we can see him
suddenly realise that he wants to write a romance and nothing else. In
reading his letters, in appreciating his character, this point emerges
clearly enough. He was full of the afterglow of his marriage; he was
still young and psychologically ignorant; above all, he was now, really
for the first time, sure that he was going to be at least some kind of
success. There is, I repeat, a certain point at which one feels that
Dickens will either begin to write romances or go off on something
different altogether. This crucial point in his life is marked by
_Nicholas Nickleby_.

It must be remembered that before this issue of _Nicholas Nickleby_ his
work, successful as it was, had not been such as to dedicate him
seriously or irrevocably to the writing of novels. He had already
written three books; and at least two of them are classed among the
novels under his name. But if we look at the actual origin and formation
of these books we see that they came from another source and were really
designed upon another plan. The three books were, of course, the
_Sketches by Boz_, _the Pickwick Papers_, and _Oliver Twist_. It is, I
suppose, sufficiently well understood that the _Sketches by Boz_ are, as
their name implies, only sketches. But surely