personal and detestable ingratitude and
treachery. If you say that he cannot draw a gentleman, you are told that
you are a parrot and a snob, who repeats what other snobs have told you;
that gentlemen are not worth drawing; that he _can_ draw them; and so
forth. If you suggest that he is fantastic, it is reproachfully asked if
poetry is not fantastic, and if you do not like poetry? If you intimate
small affection for Little Nell and Little Paul, you are a brute; if you
hint that his social crusades were often quite irrational, and sometimes
at least as mischievous as they were beneficial, you are a parasite of
aristocracy and a foe of "the people." If you take exception to his
repetitions, his mannerisms, his tedious catch-processes of various
kinds, you are a "stop-watch critic" and worthy of all the generous
wrath of the exemplary and Reverend Mr. Yorick. And yet all these
assertions, objections, descriptions, are arch-true: and they can be
made by persons who know Dickens and enjoy Dickens a thousand times
better--who admire him in a manner a thousand times more really
complimentary--than the folk who simply cry "Great is Dickens" and will
listen to nothing but their own sweet voices.

The real, the great, the unique merit of Dickens is that he brought to
the service of the novel an imagination which, though it was never
poetic, was plastic in almost the highest degree: and that he
communicated to the results of it a kind of existence which, though
distinctly different from that of actual life, has a reality of its own,
and possesses the distinguishing mark of genius, so that if it does not
exactly force belief in itself, it forces suspension of disbelief. To
have done this is not only to have accomplished a wonderful artistic
triumph, but to confer an immense benefit on the human race. But in
doing it Dickens exhibits various foibles, prejudices, and disabilities:
though it is quite open to any one to maintain that these rather
assisted the flow of his imagination than hindered it. He began very
young; he had curiously little literature; his knowledge of life,
extraordinarily alert and acute, was very one-sided, and the organs by
which he attained it seem absolutely to shut themselves and refuse
communion with certain orders of society and classes of human creatures.
The wealth of fantastic imagery which he used to such purpose not
infrequently stimulated him to a disorderly profusion of grotesque; he
was congenital