, the Renaissance
poisoning), then it will be the tendency of the mass of men to miss that
too. The point might be put in many ways; you may say if you will that
the poor are always at the tail of the procession, and that whether they
are morally worse or better depends on whether humanity as a whole is
proceeding towards heaven or hell. When humanity is going to hell, the
poor are always nearest to heaven.

Dickens was a mob--and a mob in revolt; he fought by the light of
nature; he had not a theory, but a thirst. If any one chooses to offer
the cheap sarcasm that his thirst was largely a thirst for milk-punch, I
am content to reply with complete gravity and entire contempt that in a
sense this is perfectly true. His thirst was for things as humble, as
human, as laughable as that daily bread for which we cry to God. He had
no particular plan of reform; or, when he had, it was startlingly petty
and parochial compared with the deep, confused clamour of comradeship
and insurrection that fills all his narrative. It would not be gravely
unjust to him to compare him to his own heroine, Arabella Allen, who
"didn't know what she did like," but who (when confronted with Mr. Bob
Sawyer) "did know what she didn't like." Dickens did know what he didn't
like. He didn't like the Unrivalled Happiness which Mr. Roebuck praised;
the economic laws that were working so faultlessly in Fever Alley; the
wealth that was accumulating so rapidly in Bleeding Heart Yard. But,
above all, he didn't like the _mean_ side of the Manchester philosophy:
the preaching of an impossible thrift and an intolerable temperance. He
hated the implication that because a man was a miser in Latin he must
also be a miser in English. And this meanness of the Utilitarians had
gone very far--infecting many finer minds who had fought the
Utilitarians. In the _Edinburgh Review_, a thing like Malthus could be
championed by a man like Macaulay.

The twin root facts of the revolution called Dickens are these: first,
that he attacked the cold Victorian compromise; second, that he
attacked it without knowing he was doing it--certainly without knowing
that other people were doing it. He was attacking something which we
will call Mr. Gradgrind. He was utterly unaware (in any essential sense)
that any one else had attacked Mr. Gradgrind. All the other attacks had
come from positions of learning or cultured eccentricity of which he was
entirely ignorant, and to which, therefore