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The days are sad, it is the Holy tide; The Winter morn is short, the Night is long; So let the lifeless Hours be glorified With deathless thoughts and echo'd in sweet song: And through the sunset of this purple cup They will resume the roses of their prime, And the old Dead will hear us and wake up, Pass with dim smiles and make our hearts sublime.

"An Englishman's house is his Castle," said an immortal farmer at a Fat Stock Dinner. "The storms may assail it and the winds whistle round it, but the King himself cannot do so." Dickens saw always the Englishman's house as his castle, fortified and provisioned against the discharge of snow and sleet: always most amply provisioned! Witness his picture of Christmas at Manor Farm, Dingley Dell--Old Wardle with his friends, neighbours, poor relations, and his farm-labourers too, all sitting down together to a colossal supper "and a mighty bowl of wassail something smaller than an ordinary washhouse copper, in which the hot apples were hissing and bubbling with a rich look and jolly sound that were perfectly irresistible."

Old Wardle, in fact, is in the direct line of succession to Chaucer's Frankeleyne--

Withoute bake mete was never his hous, Of fish and flesh, and that so plenteous, It snewed in his hous of mete and drink.

Dickens, I repeat to you, was always, in the straight line of Chaucer, Ben Jonson, Dryden, Fielding, a preacher of man's dignity in his full appetite; and quite consciously, as a national genius, he preached the doctrine of Christmas to his nation.

But you will say perhaps "Granted his amazing popularity--granted, too, his right to assume on it--was it really deserved?" To this question I oppose for the moment my opinion that, were I asked to choose out of the story of English Literature a short list of the most fecund authors, I should start with Chaucer, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Donne, Dryden, Pope, Samuel Johnson, Burke, Gibbon, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Carlyle, Dickens, Browning. If compelled to reduce the list to three, choosing the three most lavishly endowed by God with imagination for their fellows' good, I almost think that among all God's plenty I should choose, as pre-eminent stars, Shakespeare, Burke and Dickens. Milton, of course, will stand apart always, a solitary star: and Chaucer for his amazing invention, less even for what he did than for that he did it at all; Keats for infinity of promise; and to exclude Scott seems almost an outrage on human kindness. Yet if it come to the mere wonder-work of genius--the creation of men and women, on a page of paper, who are actually more real to us than our daily acquaintances, as companionable in a crowd as even our best selected friends, as individual as the most eccentric we know, yet as universal as humanity itself, I do not see what English writer we can choose to put second to Shakespeare save Charles Dickens. I am talking of sheer creative power, as I am thinking of Tasso's proud saying that, next to God himself, no one but the poet deserves the name of Creator. You feel of Dickens as of Shakespeare that anything may happen: because it is not with them as with other authors: it is not they who speak. Falstaff or Hamlet or Sam Weller or Mr. Micawber: it is the god speaking:

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They are as harps upon which the large wind plays: and as that is illimitable there is no limit to their utterances. It was so with Charles Dickens from the Sam Weller of his lost youth down to the last when, in pain and under the shadow of death, he invented the Billickin.

DICKENS

No, no, poor suffering heart, no change endeavour, Choose to sustain the smart, rather than leave her; My ravish'd eyes behold such charms about her, I can die with her, but not live without her One tender sigh of her, to see me languish, Will more than pay the price of my past anguish; Beware, O cruel fair, how you smile on me, 'Twas a kind look of yours that has undone me.

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"pacing with long stride the asphodel meadow" where, let us say, Samuel Johnson walks, and Handel, and Hugo, nor are they abashed to salute the very greatest--Dante, Michelangelo, Shakespeare.

Heartily know-- When half-gods go, The gods arrive.

And you may be thinking--I don't doubt, a number will be thinking--that in a discourse on Dickens, I am putting the claim altogether too high. I can feel your minds working, I think--working to some such tune as this "Dickens and Virgil, now--Dickens and Dante--Oh, heaven alive!"

You cannot say that I have shirked it--can you?

Well now, fair and softly! If I had said "Dickens and Shakespeare," it would have given you no such shock: and if I had said "Shakespeare and Dante," or "Dickens and Moli?re," it would have given you no shock at all. I am insisting, you understand, that the first test of greatness in an imaginative writer is his power to create: and I propose to begin with that which, if there should by any chance happen to be a fool in this apparently representative gathering, he will infallibly despise for the easiest thing in the world, the creation of a fool. I beg to reassure him and, so far as I can, restore his self-respect. It is about the hardest thing in the world, to create a fool and laugh at him. It is a human, nay, even a Godlike function to laugh. Listen, before we go further, to these stanzas on divine laughter:

Nay, 'tis a Godlike function; laugh thy fill! Mirth comes to thee unsought: Mirth sweeps before it like a flood the mill Of languaged logic: thought Hath not its source so high; The will Must let it by: For, though the heavens are still, God sits upon His hill And sees the shadows fly: And if He laughs at fools, why should He not? "Yet hath the fool a laugh"--Yea, of a sort; God careth for the fools; The chemic tools Of laughter He hath given them, and some toys Of sense, as 'twere a small retort Wherein they may collect the joys Of natural giggling, as becomes their state: The fool is not inhuman, making sport For such as would not gladly be without That old familiar noise: Since, though he laugh not, he can cachinnate-- This also is of God, we may not doubt.

Why, it might be an extract from the Geddes Report--or so much of it as deals with Education!

And now to Slender, bidden in by sweet Anne Page to her father's dinner-table:

In times for ever fled Arthur pray excuse me Doyce and Clennam infinitely more correct and though unquestionably distant still 'tis distance lends enchantment to the view, at least I don't mean that and if I did I suppose it would depend considerably on the nature of the view, but I'm running on again and you put it all out of my head.

She glanced at him tenderly and resumed:

In times for ever fled I was going to say it would have sounded strange indeed for Arthur Clennam--Doyce and Clennam naturally quite different--to make apologies for coming here at any time, but that is past and what is past can never be recalled except in his own case as poor Mr. F. said when in spirits Cucumber and therefore never ate it.... Papa is sitting prosingly, breaking his new laid egg over the City article, exactly like the Woodpecker Tapping, and need never know that you are here....

Mr. F's Aunt who had eaten her pie with great solemnity ... and who had been elaborating some grievous scheme of injury in her mind, took the present opportunity of addressing the following sibyllic apostrophe to the relict of her late nephew: "Bring him for'ard, and I'll chuck him out o' winder!"

"A man looking at a hippopotamus may sometimes be tempted to regard the hippopotamus as an enormous mistake: but he is also bound to confess that a fortunate inferiority prevents him personally from making such a mistake."

Here we get to it. I have instanced his fools only, and but a select two or three of these for a test: but you may take, if you will, shrewd men, miserly men, ruffians, doctors, proctors, prisoners, schoolmasters, coachmen, licensed victuallers, teetotallers, thieves, monthly nurses--whatever the choice be, Dickens will shake them out of his sleeve to populate a world for us. For, like Balzac, he has a world of his own and can at call dispense to us of its abundance.

What sort of a world is it out of which Dickens so enriches ours?

Well, to begin with, it is a crowded world, a world that in his imagination positively teems with folk going, coming, hurrying: of innumerable streets where you may knock in at any chance door to find the house in accumulated misery, poverty, woe, or else in a disorder of sausages and squalling children, with a henpecked husband at one end of the table, a bowl of punch in the middle, and at the other end a mortuary woman whose business in life is to make a burden of life to all who live near her and would have her cheerful. The henpecked husband dispensing the punch is, likely as not, a city clerk contriving a double debt to pay, a slave during office hours, bound to a usurious master: a sort of fairy--a Puck, a Mr. Wemmick, as soon as he sheds his office-coat and makes for somewhere in the uncertain gaslight of the suburbs, "following darkness like a dream."

Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples ... and Waterloo Bridge, Hood's dark arch of tragedy; and London Bridge, hymned of old by Dunbar. Dickens' bridge is the old Iron one by Hungerford, and under it the Thames runs down to ghastly flats, convict-haunted, below Woolwich.

Shakespeare knew his London, his Eastcheap, its taverns. But when you think of Shakespeare you think rather of rural England, of Avon, of Arden, of native wood-notes wild. I hold it doubtful that Falstaff on his death-bed babbled o' green fields: but I will take oath that when he got down to Gloucestershire he smelt the air like a colt or a boy out of school. And Justice Shallow is there--always there!

You get little or none of that solemn, sweet rusticity in Dickens: nor of the rush of England in spring with slow country-folk watching it:

But they, and a host of Dickens' characters, are very devils for post-chaises.

I have often transcribed for the printer, from my shorthand notes, important public speeches in which the strictest accuracy was required, and a mistake in which would have been, to a young man, severely compromising, writing on the palm of my hand, by the light of a dark lantern, in a post-chaise and four galloping through a wild country, and through the dead of night, at the then surprising rate of fifteen miles an hour.... Returning home from exciting political meetings in the country to the waiting press in London, I do verily believe I have been upset in almost every description of vehicle known in this country. I have been, in my time, belated in miry by-roads, forty or fifty miles from London, in a wheel-less carriage, with exhausted horses and drunken post-boys, and have got back in time for publication....

But this world of Dickens, you may object, was an unreal world, a phantasmagoric world. Well, I hope to discuss that--or rather the inference from it--in my next lecture, which shall deal, in Aristotelian order, with his plots first and his characters next. But, for the moment, if you will, Yes: his world was like nothing on earth: yes, it is liker to Turner's sunset to which the critic objected "he never saw a sunset like that," and was answered, "Ah, but don't you wish you could?" Yes, for Dickens made his world--as the proud parent said of his son's fiddle--"he made it, sir, entirely out of his own head!"

"Night is generally my time for walking" "although I am an old man."

The chief use, then, in man, of that he knows, Is his painstaking for the good of all: Not fleshly weeping for our own-made woes, Not laughing from a melancholy gall, Not hating from a soul that overflows With bitterness, breath'd out from inward thrall: But sweetly rather to ease, loose, or bind, As need requires, this frail, fall'n humankind.

DICKENS

saw them bringing from a distance something covered ... upon a board, between four men, and saw that others drove some dogs away that sniffed upon the road, and soaked his blood up, with a train of ashes.

In truth, as I see it--and foresee it as a paradox, to be defended--Dickens was at once, like Shakespeare in the main, careless of his plots, and, unlike Shakespeare, over-anxious about them. I shall stress this second point, which stabs to the truth beneath the paradox, by and by.

"Come here, Sir," said Mr. Pickwick, trying to look stern, with four large tears running down his waistcoat. "Take that, Sir."

Take what? In the ordinary acceptation of such language, it should have been a blow. As the world runs, it ought to have been a sound hearty cuff: for Mr. Pickwick had been duped, deceived, and wronged by the destitute outcast who was now wholly in his power. Must we tell the truth? It was something from Mr. Pickwick's waistcoat pocket which chinked as it was given into Job's hand....

as a dish Fit for the gods

I have said, in a previous lecture, that Dickens, from first to last, strove to make himself a better artist; quoting to you a sentence of Henley's, which I repeat here because you have almost certainly forgotten it:

He had in him at least as much of the French artist as of the middle-class Englishman; and if in all his life, he never ceased from self-education, but went unswervingly in the pursuit of culture, it was out of love for his art and because his conscience as an artist would not let him do otherwise.

I am become a name; For always roaming with a hungry heart Much have I seen and known; cities of men And manners, climates, councils, governments, Myself not least, but honour'd of them all; And drunk delight of battle with my peers, Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy. I am a part of all that I have met; Yet all experience is an arch wherethro' Gleams that untravell'd world, whose margin fades For ever and for ever when I move. How dull it is to pause, to make an end, To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use! As tho' to breathe were life. Life piled on life Were all too little, and of one to me Little remains: but every hour is saved From that eternal silence, something more, A bringer of new things--

For to admire an' for to see, For to be'old this world so wide-- It never done no good to me, But I can't drop it if I tried

but every hour is saved From that eternal silence, something more, A bringer of new things.

And the desire for that--as I am sure you know--operates with no less force of prompting in the spiritual world than in the world of commerce and sea-travel. It carried Shakespeare at the last to that Ariel's isle which no commentator has ever been able yet to locate; and it brought him home at the very last

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