ll Dickens a
man who tasted, that is, a man who really felt. In spite of all the
silly talk about his vulgarity, he really had, in the strict and
serious sense, good taste. All real good taste is gusto--the power of
appreciating the presence--or the absence--of a particular and positive
pleasure. He had no learning; he was not misled by the label on the
bottle--for that is what learning largely meant in his time. He opened
his mouth and shut his eyes and saw what the Age of Reason would give
him. And, having tasted it, he spat it out.

I am constrained to consider Dickens here among the fighters; though I
ought (on the pure principles of Art) to be considering him in the
chapter which I have allotted to the story-tellers. But we should get
the whole Victorian perspective wrong, in my opinion at least, if we did
not see that Dickens was primarily the most successful of all the
onslaughts on the solid scientific school; because he did not attack
from the standpoint of extraordinary faith, like Newman; or the
standpoint of extraordinary inspiration, like Carlyle; or the standpoint
of extraordinary detachment or serenity, like Arnold; but from the
standpoint of quite ordinary and quite hearty dislike. To give but one
instance more, Matthew Arnold, trying to carry into England constructive
educational schemes which he could see spread like a clear railway map
all over the Continent, was much badgered about what he really thought
was _wrong_ with English middle-class education. Despairing of
explaining to the English middle class the idea of high and central
public instruction, as distinct from coarse and hole-and-corner private
instruction, he invoked the aid of Dickens. He said the English
middle-class school was the sort of school where Mr. Creakle sat, with
his buttered toast and his cane. Now Dickens had probably never seen any
other kind of school--certainly he had never understood the systematic
State Schools in which Arnold had learnt his lesson. But he saw the cane
and the buttered toast, and he _knew_ that it was all wrong. In this
sense, Dickens, the great romanticist, is truly the great realist also.
For he had no abstractions: he had nothing except realities out of which
to make a romance.

With Dickens, then, re-arises that reality with which I began and which
(curtly, but I think not falsely) I have called Cobbett. In dealing with
fiction as such, I shall have occasion to say wherein Dickens is weaker
and str