pleased to call Life, but because he is a splendid, or, if we will, exaggerated, example of what Life could be if we were content to trust it. They are, strictly, creations; and we hold them in memory not because they are a mere mimicry of the smaller side of us, but because they remind us of all the splendor and wonder and laughter that resides behind the small show that we present to the outer world. They do not portray us to ourselves: they reveal us to ourselves. For Art is the Great Revelation.

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When Dickens, therefore, created Bumble, he did more than merely ridicule or shatter a system. To ridicule or to shatter a system is, relatively, a small achievement. It truly is a remarkable fact about Dickens that he did succeed in bringing about reform in several matters that urgently needed reform. That is to say, he succeeded in having a system that had worn itself into decay supplanted by another system that was as yet new. But reform, like most matters political, is in itself worth no more than the paper its enactment is printed upon. ens may have succeeded in dismissing the Circumlocution Office by the power - of his laughter; but the new office that took its place would soon become another Circumlocution Office. He may have succeeded in abolishing the coarse brutality of Mr. Squeers; but there is many a schoolboy to-day who, were the choice given him, would considerably prefer the course brutality of Squeers to the refined and solicitous cruelty under which it is his lot to suffer. While Man remains the same, one system, however word-perfect, is as valueless as another, however word-imperfect. And the fact that Dickens succeeded in effecting certain substitutions of systems is no tribute to his Art, but rather only a testimony to his amazing and almost unexampled popularity. But when he created Bumble he did more

than shatter a system. He illustrated what is the essential weakness of all systems. Bumble stands up as the eternal type of what it is in human nature to become under the joint influence of power and importance: a fact that we admit in the daily habit of our speech; for the word "Bumbledom" is our continual attestation of the truth of the vision of Dickens. On him depends, not alone the execution of the system that Dickens scourged with his bitter laughter, but the execution of all other systems whatsoever. Bumble is at one time a Creation and a Revelation.

In this way Bumble may stand as a sign and ensample to us of his creator's work. 'He, and a score of others even truer to the heart of life than he, are almost nearer to us, and therefore more real to us, than we are to ourselves. It is because they are so near to us that we are apt to lose a distinct sense of their outline and proportion. And we are won by them accordingly. It is for this reason that so many have stumbled at the works of Dickens. They have regarded them as Novels; and in the Novel they have grown accustomed to compilation rather than to creation, to portraiture and depicture rather than to revelation and illumination. The Novel, as an Artform, has been notably complaisant; and it is for this very reason that it is a perplexed question as to how truly the Novel is a durable Art-form. Matter that, in the severe and searching discipline of Poetry, would not for a moment be suffered an entrance, passes without let or hindrance into the Novel, and is even accounted an adornment to it. But the adornment is the chief weakness that attends the Novel in its attempt to pass muster in the austere ranks of Art; what was thought to be a gain is found to be a loss; that which we have called, in a phrase that we have been careful not to expound,

"fidelity to life," has been the very thing that has obviated the necessity for that creation on which all Art depends; and the result is that the Novel has always been the thing of an age, and not the thing of all time. The Iliad, the Divina Commedia, Shakespeare's Tragedies, Paradise Lost, Prometheus Unbound-all these are as young as the day on which they were written. But Fielding and Smollett, even Thackeray and George Eliot, belong to their own time, and can only be approached through the age in which they were written. One is, in the true significance of the word, creation; and the other is that compilation that is often miscalled creation; and therefore one wears divine youth on its brow; whereas the other is like a stage-piece in a foreign tongue, that cannot truly be known till the foreign tongue be mastered.

Now this is the peculiar praise of Dickens: that, with all his shortcomings (of which he had not a few), he, with Cervantes, Rabelais, and Bunyan, has lifted prose into this divine youth, this eternal significance, that has been thought the special prerogative of Poetry. Even in the face of their achievement it is hard to conceive of prose as other than journeyman toil, a perishable medium: without that achievement it would be in a poor way indeed. So much is this the case that it is no strange thing to hear such a character as Sam Weller being spoken of as "a poetic creation." And so, in a manner of speaking, he is. It matters little that he rose out of a Victorian hostelry, as Pantagruel out of sixteenth-century France, Sancho Panza out of post-Romantic Spain, and Christian out of Puritan England. It is not what they rose out of, but what they rose into. They rose, each of them, out of a particular age, even bearing its particular brand and currency; but they rose into a perpetual significance that we call Poetry.

So we arrive at another of the faults that Criticism has discovered in Dickens' work. It is complained of him that he lacks skill of craftsmanship, and that his books are structureless; that, having begun, as begin they must, they continue without order and conclude without reason: so that even those who have undertaken his defence have been compelled to concede the criticism, and to ask in return why they should ever end.

The criticism, as criticism, is well placed; but, in the manner of criticism, it has endeavored to judge the works of Dickens by laws other than the laws of their own being. Those who have advanced it have considered his books as Novels. That is to say, since the Novel is as yet without adequate definition, certain standards have been raised, that prevail in their utmost rigor only with a small portion of the whole field of prose literature, and an attempt has been made to make them the rallying centre of a vast division of it. Thomas Hardy is the supreme example of the craftsman who has introduced into prose literature somewhat of the technique, in a necessarily loosened form, of the Drama (or, in Architecture, since he was once an architect, of the classic arch, which is much the same thing); and the result has been truly astonishing. Yet who would think of judging Rabelais, or Cervantes, or Bunyan for that matter, by a law so alien?

Thus it was no mere chance, but something of a divine instinct, that led Dickens to write his first book in the form of Pickwick Papers. It is unnecessary to go into a discussion of all that preceded the writing of the book. It is enough to say that Dickens would have satisfied the demands of his publishers equally well had the "Papers" been shaped and disciplined into an outline as orderly and as shapely as the best. But his instinct

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impelled him otherwise; and the result is that we do not think of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club as we think of The Return of the Native, but rather as we think of The Adventures of Don Quixote de la Mancha, or The Inestimable Life of the Great Gargantua. does it avail to throw up the word Novel in defence or in attack. There are those who say that Cervantes is the father of the modern Novel, even as there are those who say that Pickwick Papers is no Novel. The truth is that the Novel, according to the protestations of some of its own exponents, is not so much a definite Art-form as a hotch-pot. It would be fair to say that the Novel is always novel.

Pickwick Papers is therefore almost something of a talisman in Dickens' work. Where he becomes most "Pickwickian" there he becomes most himself, and his inspiration is most sure; and when he has least of the peculiar quality that marks those Papers, even though it lead to a result so fine as Great Expectations, one feels that, with all its strength, it lacks the peculiar and perpetual significance that gave eternal youth to Pickwick. There may be more strength in the latter half of his work: there may be less of pathos in it and more of maturity and circumspection: but the truth remains that the full magic of the first has become dimmed in the second. This may best be seen when some similar quality marks both an early and a later work. For instance, both Nicholas Nickleby and A Tale of Two Cities are melodramatic; but the glitter of the first is a magical glitter, whereas the glitter of the second is sometimes perilously near like tinsel. And this, despite the fact that A Tale of Two Cities is more reserved in strength, and therefore more instant in its appeal, than anything Dickens ever did.

In all the earlier portion of his work this strange quality, this quality of

perpetuity, of poetic achievement, prevails in its fullest power. We do not remember Barnaby Rudge because of its historical, or unhistorical, attempt to recount the matter of the Gordon Riots, or Oliver Twist because of its attempt to shatter a Poor-Law system, any more than we remember Gargantua or Pantagruel because of their endeavor to burlesque certain forgotten ecclesiastical abuses, or Don Quixote because its author (who of all men most lived a life of romantic adventure) sought to make romantic adventure perish for ever in the soft fire of his laughter. None of these stand with their feet planted on the revolutions of Time, for Time to bear past us and away. They are all, by a subtly transmuting touch, lifted into the air, to float there eternally while Time hastes steadily on beneath them.

Yet, although, as book succeeds book, the breath of change is seen passing over the first inspiration, although what one may call the poetic quality of Pickwick is seen to be becoming more and more spent until in Dombey and Son its colors are false and its ring is unreal, yet it is not till one comes to David Copperfield that one finds a change in full operation. There it is actively at work; and for an obvious reason. For in David Copperfield Dickens had made up his mind fully to unloose the autobiographic instinct that resides in every man. He had, in fact, determined to make the story of David Copperfield the tale of himself; so much so that he was pleased beyond measure when it was pointed out to him that the initials of David Copperfield's name were the inverted initials of his And consequently his creative faculty had to move within a limited scope. He was harnessed to circumstances; with all the restrictions that that meant. Either inadvertently, not knowing that it meant a cleavage from his past way of work, or deliberately,

own.

as the result of Criticism, with its cry of impossible characters, he set himself the task of compilation instead of creation; and having once put his hand to the work the habit grew on him, till, in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, the book he died at work on, he came to lean wholly on skill and secrecy of plot, so removing himself to the utmost extreme from Piokwick Papers.

In this very book David Copperfield, however, his instinct may be seen in revolt from the work of compilation he set himself. It is always so, more or less, to the end of his work; but here it is most marked. For, as the story opens and proceeds, David Copperfield's personality begins to be built up and to expand. It is the intention of the book that this should be so; it is, in fact, the prime cause and purpose of the book; but such an intention, limited by fact and the circumstance of relation, is clearly the very thing most calculated to extinguish the subtle poetic creation that went to make Pickwick Papers so eternally fresh and rare. But the old instinct asserts itself; with the result that David Copperfield, as a book, grows in interest as it proceedsand grows in a peculiar way. vid, instead of becoming more and more important and personal, becomes less and less so; till at last he becomes no more than was Nicholas Nickleby, a name-centre around which, in varying clusters, the real personages gather. As he declines the others burgeon and swell: Micawber becomes more truly himself, Traddles takes his true proportions; Uriah becomes powerful instead of merely monotonous; Dora comes into being-and punch is drunk, as punch was drunk in Pickwick. It is these things, and these people, that lift the book into evergreen memory; not the mere narration of the life of David Copperfield, who matters little enough, although his history purLIVING AGE. VOL. LIV. 2842

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ports to be the dim autobiography of Dickens himself.

But such things and such people demand, clearly, their own adequate atmosphere to move in. It is this that has at all times been the most stubborn difficulty in the path of poetic creation. Characters that are compilations of ourselves, no more than imitations of that life of ours that we present to the outward view (which passes with the passing of the outward view), can live and move in scenes that are copied from daily habit. But it has always been the problem with the creator to create with his characters, with his people who are ourselves and more than ourselves, being revelations of ourselves, so adequate a scenery for them to move in that there shall be no shock to the contemplation. Among the poets pure and true, Shakespeare, for example, pitched his scenery at some remote distance of time or place: in Venice, where Othello could find a freer play for his tremendous personality without striking against some incongruity of scene, or in ancient Britain, where Lear could shake the earth. With Homer and the Greek Dramatists the necessary elevation was given by the thought of War and the ritual of religious ceremony. Among those who wrote in prose, Bunyan created а whole new world; Cervantes transmuted the Spanish landscape into a new strange earth; and in our own day Thomas Hardy has fashioned a new individual province for himself, which he has named Wessex, and where the very towns have been given new names in order to lift them away from us.

Dickens' answer to this problem is particularly interesting; and nowhere is it better illustrated than in the subtle change that so slowly passes over David Copperfield. The nature of it can be discovered by first turning to one of the earlier novels, such as Oliver Twist, or to such a phantasy as A

Christmas Carol. In both of these the scenery are the streets of London; yet though the streets are given their habitual names, by which they can be identified, they are changed and altered; something has so transmuted them that we scarcely think of them as streets of London at all. It is not sufficient to say that the times have changed; and that therefore what seems to us a transmutation might have been but a faithful portrayal. There is no reader of A Christmas Carol or Oliver Twist, but must come to the conclusion that there never at any time was such a house as that in which Scrooge lived, or such streets as those through which he walked, or Fagin or Bill Sikes walked. The internal emotion is sufficient to indicate this. But, apart from such internal evidence, there is external evidence; for Thackeray's streets have nothing of that wildness or that remoteness from commonplace reality. Nor is it possible to say that the dream-phantasy of the Carol is responsible for one, as the overdrawn, melodramatic nightmare horror of Oliver Twist is responsible for the other. There is the same strangeness, the same wild and fantastic remoteness, about the scenery of Nicholas Nickleby and The Old Curiosity Shop. And the result is that the London Dickens has drawn has no relevance to the London that now is or ever was, save in an identity of street plan; so that those who talk of seeking out "Dickens' London" are, in a manner of speaking, in search for something that can never be found.

In David Copperfield-in, that is to say, the book that brought about the change in his way of work—this peculiar significance of atmosphere is an interesting study. For it has been seen that a change passes over the book as it develops itself. The first decision to write a simple straightforward narrative, compilation rather than

creation, never really leaves the book, influencing it to its conclusion; but the older inspiration, that made Pickwick so truly a book by itself, asserts itself as the narrative proceeds, tranfiguring it. Now side by side with this change in characterization the scenic atmosphere begins to change also. It is a thing difficult to define, for it is a thing that one either feels or does not feel. The scenery at first is as sharp and as definite as the green that Betsy Trotwood guarded with such zeal. It becomes dimmer and more fantastic as the book grows older,

Certainly whatever be the result in David Copperfield itself, the result in the sequence of Dickens' books, before and after Copperfield, is clear. It has already been illustrated, in another connection, by comparing the first and last of the books, Pickwick Papers and Edwin Drood. But it may even be illustrated by taking the two books immediately before and after Copperfield; Dombey and Son and Bleak House: in spite of the fact that the latter of these is better than the former, because the change is seen coming in the former, whereas it has already arrived in the latter. Dombey and Son is, admittedly, a failure among Dickens' work; Bleak House is admittedly a success.. Yet it is true that in the first we may divine the poetic creation at work, however much it may have failed of success; whereas in the latter we miss its peculiarly transmuting power, and are therefore constrained to admit that the success is of a different order, and of a lower order. The first is a failure, but a high failure; the latter is a success, but a lower success. And David Copperfield stands as a landmark between two periods-not only a landmark, indeed, but actually one of the causes of the change.

This is not to say that that which gave, not only such distinction, but such significance, to Dickens' first pe