llow and half-educated minds, with paltry
ambitions, utter ignorance of history and philosophy, shrinking
instinctively from all strenuous thought and resenting every attack upon
the placid optimism in which it delighted to wrap itself. It had no
perception of the doubts and difficulties which beset loftier minds, or
any consciousness of the great drama of history in which our generation
is only playing its part for the passing hour. Whatever lay beyond its
narrow horizon was ignored, or, if accidentally mentioned, treated with
ignorant contempt. This was the spirit which revealed itself in the
paeans raised over the Exhibition of 1851, accepted by the popular voice
of the day as the inauguration of a millennium of peace and free trade.
But all its manifestations were marked by the same narrowness. The class
had once found a voice for its religious sentiments in Puritanism, with
stern conceptions of duty and of a divine order of the universe. But in
its present mood it could see the Puritan leaders represented by a
wretched Stiggins--a pothouse Tartufe just capable of imposing upon the
friends of Mrs. Gamp. Its own religion was that kind of vapid
philanthropic sentiment which calls itself undenominational; a creed of
maudlin benevolence from which all the deeper and sterner elements of
religious belief have been carefully purged away, and which really
corresponds to the moods which Mr Pickwick stimulated by indulgence in
milk-punch. When it came face to face with death, and sin, and
suffering, it made them mere occasions for displays of sentimentalism,
disgusting because such trifling with the most awful subjects shows a
hopeless shallowness of nature. Dickens's indulgence in deathbeds meant
an effeminate delight in the 'luxury of grief,' revolting in proportion
to the solemnity of the topic. This was only another side of the levity
with which he treated serious political and social problems. The
attitude of mind represented is that of the ordinary newspaper
correspondent, who imagines that a letter to the 'Times' is the ultimate
remedy for all the evils to which flesh is heir. Dickens's early novels,
said Fitzjames, represented an avatar of 'chaff'; and gave with
unsurpassable vivacity the genuine fun of a thoroughbred cockney
typified by Sam Weller. Sam Weller is delightful in his place; but he is
simply impertinent when he fancies that his shrewd mother wit entitles
him to speak with authority upon great questions of c