tent in his domesticity. But who can honestly say he does
not hope Mrs. Wilfer is still talking like Mrs. Wilfer--especially if it
is only in a book? This is the artistic greatness of Dickens, before and
after which there is really nothing to be said. He had the power of
creating people, both possible and impossible, who were simply precious
and priceless people; and anything subtler added to that truth really
only weakens it.

The mention of Mrs. Wilfer (whom the heart is loth to leave) reminds one
of the only elementary ethical truth that is essential in the study of
Dickens. That is that he had broad or universal sympathies in a sense
totally unknown to the social reformers who wallow in such phrases.
Dickens (unlike the social reformers) really did sympathise with every
sort of victim of every sort of tyrant. He did truly pray for _all_ who
are desolate and oppressed. If you try to tie him to any cause narrower
than that Prayer Book definition, you will find you have shut out half
his best work. If, in your sympathy for Mrs. Quilp, you call Dickens the
champion of downtrodden woman, you will suddenly remember Mr. Wilfer,
and find yourself unable to deny the existence of downtrodden man. If in
your sympathy for Mr. Rouncewell you call Dickens the champion of a
manly middle-class Liberalism against Chesney Wold, you will suddenly
remember Stephen Blackpool--and find yourself unable to deny that Mr.
Rouncewell might be a pretty insupportable cock on his own dung-hill. If
in your sympathy for Stephen Blackpool you call Dickens a Socialist (as
does Mr. Pugh), and think of him as merely heralding the great
Collectivist revolt against Victorian Individualism and Capitalism,
which seemed so clearly to be the crisis at the end of this epoch--you
will suddenly remember the agreeable young Barnacle at the
Circumlocution Office: and you will be unable, for very shame, to
assert that Dickens would have trusted the poor to a State Department.
Dickens did not merely believe in the brotherhood of men in the weak
modern way; he was the brotherhood of men, and knew it was a brotherhood
in sin as well as in aspiration. And he was not only larger than the old
factions he satirised; he was larger than any of our great social
schools that have gone forward since he died.

The seemingly quaint custom of comparing Dickens and Thackeray existed
in their own time, and no one will dismiss it with entire disdain who
remembers that the Victori