sed by the death of Charles Dickens" (_The Times_). In
his will he enjoined his friends to erect no monument in his honour, and
directed his name and dates only to be inscribed on his tomb, adding
this proud provision, "I rest my claim to the remembrance of my country
on my published works."

Dickens had no artistic ideals worth speaking about. The sympathy of his
readers was the one thing he cared about and, like Cobbett, he went
straight for it through the avenue of the emotions. In personality,
intensity and range of creative genius he can hardly be said to have any
modern rival. His creations live, move and have their being about us
constantly, like those of Homer, Virgil, Chaucer, Rabelais, Cervantes,
Shakespeare, Bunyan, Moliere and Sir Walter Scott. As to the books
themselves, the backgrounds on which these mighty figures are projected,
they are manifestly too vast, too chaotic and too unequal ever to become
classics. Like most of the novels constructed upon the unreformed model
of Smollett and Fielding, those of Dickens are enormous stock-pots into
which the author casts every kind of autobiographical experience,
emotion, pleasantry, anecdote, adage or apophthegm. The fusion is
necessarily very incomplete and the hotch-potch is bound to fall to
pieces with time. Dickens's plots, it must be admitted, are strangely
unintelligible, the repetitions and stylistic decorations of his work
exceed all bounds, the form is unmanageable and insignificant. The
diffuseness of the English novel, in short, and its extravagant
didacticism cannot fail to be most prejudicial to its perpetuation. In
these circumstances there is very little fiction that will stand
concentration and condensation so well as that of Dickens.

For these reasons among others our interest in Dickens's novels as
integers has diminished and is diminishing. But, on the other hand, our
interest and pride in him as a man and as a representative author of his
age and nation has been steadily augmented and is still mounting. Much
of the old criticism of his work, that it was not up to a sufficiently
high level of art, scholarship or gentility, that as an author he is
given to caricature, redundancy and a shameless subservience to popular
caprice, must now be discarded as irrelevant.

As regards formal excellence it is plain that Dickens labours under the
double disadvantage of writing in the least disciplined of all literary
genres in the most lawless literary