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had a genius for coming up to the scratch, wherever and whatever it was, and proving himself an ugly customer. He was certain to knock the wind out of common-sense, and render that unlucky adversary deaf to the call of time. And he had it in charge from high authority to bring about the great public office millennium when commissioners should reign on earth.

"Very well,' said this gentleman briskly, smiling and folding his arms. 'That's a horse. Now let me ask you, girls and boys, would you paper a room with representations of horses?'

"After a pause, one half the children cried in chorus, 'Yes, sir.' Upon which the other half, seeing in the gentleman's face that 'Yes' was wrong, cried out in chorus 'No, sir'-as the custom is in these examinations.

"Of course, no. Why wouldn't you?' "A pause. One corpulent slow boy, with a wheezy manner of breathing, ventured the answer-Because he wouldn't paper a room at all, but would paint it.

"You must paper it,' said the gentleman rather warmly.

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You must paper it,' said Thomas Gradgrind, whether you like it or not. Don't tell us you wouldn't paper it. What do you mean, boy?'

"I'll explain to you, then,' said the gentleman, after another and a dismal pause, 'why you wouldn't paper a room with representations of horses. Do you ever see horses walking up and down the sides of rooms in reality-in fact? Do you?'

"Yes, sir,' from one half, 'No, sir,' from the other.

"Of course, No,' said the gentleman, with an indignant look at the wrong half. Why, then, you are not to see anywhere what you don't see in fact; you are not to have any where what you don't have in fact. What is called taste is only another name for fact.' "Thomas Gradgrind nodded his approba

"And that is why you would put tables and chairs upon them, and have people walking over them with heavy boots?'

It wouldn't hurt them, sir. They would be the pictures of what was very pretty and pleasant, and I would fancy

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Ay, ay, ay! but you mustn't fancy!' cried the gentleman, quite elated by her coming so happily to his point. That's it. You are never to fancy.'

"You are not, Cecilia Jupe,' Thomas Gradgrind solemnly repeated, 'to do anything of the kind.'

"You are to be in all things regulated and governed,' said the gentleman, 'by fact. We hope to have before long a board of fact, composed of commissioners of fact, who will force the people to be a people of fact, and of nothing but fact. You must discard the word fancy altogether. You have nothing to do with it. You are not to have in any object of use or ornament what would be a contradiction in fact. You don't walk upon flowers in fact, and you cannot be allowed to walk upon flowers in carpets. You don't find that foreign birds and butterflies come and perch upon your crockery; you cannot be permitted to paint foreign birds and butterflies upon your crockery. You never meet with quadrupeds going up and down walls; you must not have quadrupeds represented upon walls. You must use,' said the gentleman, for all these purposes, combinations and modifications (in primary colors) of mathematical figures which are susceptible of proof and demonstration. This is the new discovery. This is fact. This is taste.""

This passage is in Mr. Dickens's best manner, and is undoubtedly very clever and entertaining. It is not at all true; although, as a mere question of probability, the speech of the school inspector is much more in place than Miss Monflathers' tirade. But an attentive reader would be very differently influenced by "This is a new principle, a discovery, a the two scenes; he would be more great discovery,' said the gentleman. Now, struck with the exaggeration of the lat I'll try you again. Suppose you were going ter than with that of the former. Grantto carpet a room. Would you use a carpeting an imaginative treatment, there is having a representation of flowers upon it?

tion.

"There being a general conviction by this time that No, sir,' was always the right answer to this gentleman, the chorus of No was very strong. Only a few feeble stragglers said Yes; among them Sissy Jupe.

"Girl No. 20,' said the gentleman, smiling in the calm strength of knowledge. Sissy blushed and stood up.

"So you would carpet your room with representations of flowers, would you?' said the gentleman. Why would you ?'

"If you please, sir, I am very fond of flowers,' returned the girl.

no particular reason why Miss Monflathers should not talk nonsense and misrepresent the teaching of a certain school, for the simple reason that her remarks are wholly unconnected with the purpose of the story into which they are dovetailed. But Hard Times professes to be a treatise on education, and it is essential that the system to which, in its moral, it supplies the antidote, should be impartially set out. If Mr. Dickens's fancy had not run away with

him, he would never have commenced what is, after all, a very serious and admirable work by striking a note which everybody knows to be false.

It is the tendency of an active imagination to mistake thoughts for objects. The ideas which it presents are clothed with so much circumstance, and have such a real existence within the mind, that it seems superfluous to inquire whether they do or do not correspond with anything without it. This confusion is very observable in Mr. Dickens, but nowhere more than in his mode of describing Nature. His language takes us quite back to the old poetic days of Dryads and rivergods:

"The intelligible forms of ancient poets, The fair humanities of old religion, The power, the beauty, and the majesty That had their haunt in dale or piny mountain,

Or forest by slow stream, or pebbly brook," live again in his pages: the trees, the leaves, and the streams of his pictures are endowed with a distinct personality; they act, think, and suffer; and it is in the description of the imaginary relations which subsist between themin the transference to them of the writer's own thoughts and emotions, that his landscape painting essentially consists. Its aim is not so much to delineate the scene of action, as to excité in the reader a state of mind in harmony with the action itself. For example:

"It was pretty late in the autumn of the year when the declining sun, struggling through the mists which had obscured it all day, looked brightly down upon a little Wiltshire village, within an easy journey of the fair old town of Salisbury. Like a sudden flash of memory or spirit kindling up the mind of an old man, it shed a glory on the scene in which its youth and freshness seemed to live again. The wet grass sparkled in the light; the scanty patches of verdure in the hedgeswhere a few green twigs yet stood together bravely, resisting to the last the tyranny of nipping winds and early frosts took heart and brightened up; the stream, which had been dull and sullen all day, broke out into a cheerful smile; the birds began to chirp and twitter on the naked boughs, as though the hopeful creatures half believed that winter had gone by, and that spring had come already. The vane upon the tapering spire of the old church glistened from its lofty station in sympathy with the general gladness, and NEW SERIES-VOL. I., No. 1.

from the ivy-shaded window such glearns of light shone back upon the glowing sky, that it seemed as if the quiet buildings were the hoarding-place of twenty summers, and all their ruddiness and warmth were stored within."

Sir Walter Scott would have given us a map of the country, with the heights and bearings of all the mountains; we get from Mr. Dickens a rhapsody on the beauty of the scene, with a few disjointed sketches of some of the principal objects. But these sketches are elaborate and minute often to a fault. Almost immediately following the passage just quoted, is a description of a churchtower. Not one of the infinite variety of shades and tints the form of no single stone, has escaped the watchful eye of the artist. He concentrates his whole attention on it; he sees each the minutest detail, and for the moment he sees nothing else. The style is exactly that of Mr. Hunt. The leaders of the pre-Raphaelite school are, like Mr. Dickens, men of great imaginative power, and with a fine instinct. They protest against the conventionalism of art, as he protests against the conventionalism of society, with the same view of showing that beauty and worth are universal, and may be found everywhere, if only we have eyes to see them. But though all things may be beautiful, all things are not equally so, and their grades and relations have been somewhat lost sight of. The realism of certain artists recoils with horror from the loose, suggestive way in which fore-grounds are often treated; so the daisies and dandelions, and the ears of corn and blades of grass, are painted with as much care as if each were a separate centre of interest, the focus of a distinct picture. And the result is, that we get a gallery of photographs, but no landscape.

Just so with Mr. Dickens. His genesis of character, like his description of Nature, is exactly what might be expected in a writer of his peculiar endowments. It is imaginative, brilliant, effective; but it is altogether wanting in analytical depth, and has, at least, an air of half truth about it. He rarely shows us any of the more delicate springs of action. There is too much consistency for life, and too much violent contrast for art. The gradations, the shading, the second

ary lights are wanting. It always re-f
minds one of Martin's pictures, in which
the world is tumbling about in the pres-
ence of a mixed assembly of demons
and angels.
He paints his scenes mi-
nutely. He conceives his characters
strongly. But he works at them as if
each, like the alligator, were itself an
epic self-contained. They stare at you
out of his canvas with an oppressive in-
dividuality like the generals in the pic-
ture of the Waterloo banquet. But
there is neither harmony of conception
nor unity of design.

In Martin Chuzzlewit, for example, the writer's design was, we are told, to exhibit selfishness in various forms, and to trace out its consequences. To this end several very selfish people are described: Martin Chuzzlewit the elder and Martin Chuzzlewit the younger; Antony Chuzzlewit and his son Jonas. The incidents are carefully arranged, so as to give the vice in question plenty of room in which to display itself. Each of the leading personages is set off by a contrast; old Martin is attended by his niece Mary, young Martin by Mark Tapley, Antony Chuzzlewit by Chuffey, and Jonas is relieved by his wife. We need not stay to inquire how far the novelist has succeeded in doing what was proposed, for we can scarcely imagine anything more certain to give a distorted view of life and character than the fact of his success. The most selfish men are not all selfish. Even when they are inclined to be so, events are constantly compelling them to act with reference to others. Here we have a number of self-seeking people brought together with exceptional means of studying their own ease and convenience, and with a self-denying friend always at hand to bring out their idiosyncrasies as strongly as possible. On the whole Martin Chuzzlewit, considered as a treatise on moral philosophy, rather overshoots its mark. Mr. Dickens makes in it exactly the same mistake as was committed by Major Pawkins. He gives an unnecessary stimulus to his own vigor.*

*"We are an elastic country," said the Rowdy Journal.

We are a young lion," said Mr. Jefferson Brick.

"We have revivifying and vigorous principles

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The principle of describing men under the influence of a leading habit or passion is carried out into the subordinate traits of character. Some very ordinary and superficial peculiarity is seized and kept constantly before us. At one time it is the repetition of a phrase; at another, it is some trick of manner or of gesture. No one objects to the fat boy going to sleep, to Barkis being willing, to Traddle drawing skeletons, to Carker showing his teeth, to Mark Tapley being jolly, to Dick Swiveller quoting scraps of songs

occasionally. But we are treated to this as if for the most part we were capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb show and noise. On the stage the artifice is common and allowable; the novelist, however, has opportunities of developing character which are denied to the playwright. The impression left by this posture-making is, that the men and women we meet are acting their parts, and not acting them particularly well either. To represent Daniel Quilp eating hard-boiled eggs, shells and all, drinking boiling spirits and tea without winking, and biting his spoon and fork till they bend, is mere burlesque.

The want of analytical power with which we are disposed to charge Mr. Dickens is in certain directions compensated by his extraordinary delicacy of observation. Outward peculiarities

the details of manner, speech, and ap-
pearance, are at best but an imperfect
index of character. But they are al-
ways worth something, and there are
cases in which they tell us all that we
care about, or indeed, are able to know.*
The moral and intellectual peculiarities
of animals, for example, are sufficiently

within ourselves," observed the Major. "Shall
we drink a bitter afore dinner, Colonel?"
sight into Doctor Blimber's character than the
Pages of analysis would not give us more in-
following short description of his manner of
walking: "The doctor's walk was stately, and
calculated to impress the juvenile mind with
solemn feelings. It was a sort of march. But
when the doctor put out his right foot, he gravely
turned upon his axis with a semicircular sweep
towards the left; and when he put out his left
foot, he turned in the same manner towards the
right. So that he seemed, at every stride he
took, to look about him as though he were saying,
Can anybody have the goodness to indicate any
subject, in any direction, on which I am unin-
formed? I rather think not."-Dombey and
Son, vol. i. p. 160.

described, when we are told how they look and behave. Mad, half-witted, weak, and simple people, again, are adequately represented by their obvious and external qualities; for, as regards the former class, inasmuch as we cannot rely on inferences from the ordinary laws of mind, there is nothing but manner to look to; and as regards the latter class there is a tolerably constant relation betwen what they think and what they say and do. In noting these surface attri butes, Mr. Dickens has shown an exquisite tact. Accordingly in his sketches of animal life, in his description of madness, and in the working out of such characters as Tom Pinch, Dora Spenlow, Esther Summerson, Toots, Smike, and Joe Gargery he is perfectly satisfactory. Mr. Sleary's reflections on the instinct of dogs are alone sufficient to prove how accurately their habits must have been observed. Very excellent, too, is Mr. Garland's pony, Whisker, and the performing dogs in the Old Curiosity Shop. But the best thing of the kind is, without doubt, the raven in Barnaby Rudge.

"Halloa!' cried a hoarse voice in his ear. 'Halloa! halloa! halloa! Bow wow wow, what's the matter here? Hal-loa!"

"The speaker who made the locksmith start, as if he had seen some supernatural agent was a large raven, who had perched upon the top of the easy-chair, unseen by him and Edward, and listened with a polite attention and a most extraordinary appearance of comprehending every word, to all they had said up to this point; turning his head from one to the other, as if his office were to judge

between them and it were of the very last importance that he should not lose a word.

"Look at him,' said Varden, divided be

tween admiration of the bird and a kind of

fear of him. Was there ever such a knowing imp as that? Oh, he's a dreadful fel

low !'

"The raven with his head very much on one

side, and his bright eye shining like a diamond, preserved a thoughtful silence for a few sec onds, and then replied in a voice so hoarse and distant, that it seemed to come through his thick feathers, rather than out of his mouth. "Halloa! halloa! halloa! What's the matter here? Keep up your spirits. Never say die. Bow wow wow. I'm a devil, I'm a devil, I'm a devil. Hurrah!' And then, as if exulting in his infernal character, he began

to whistle.

* Hard Times, p. 344.

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"Call him!' echoed Barnaby, but who can make him come? He calls me, and makes me go where he will. He goes on before, and I follow. Ha! ha! ha!'

. . I make him come!

"On second thoughts, the bird appeared disof the ground, and a few side-long looks at posed to come of itself. After a short survey he fluttered to the floor, and went to Barnaby the ceiling, and at everybody present in turn, -not in a hop, or walk, or run, but in a pace like that of a very particular gentleman with exceedingly tight boots on, trying to walk fast over loose pebbles. Then stepping into his extended hand, and condescending to be held out at arm's length, he gave vent to a succession of sounds, not unlike the drawing of some eight or ten dozen of long corks, and again asserted his brimstone birth and parentage with great distinctness." *

For the same reason Mr. Dickens describes children singularly well. But he always appears anxious to make too much of them, giving them a promi nence in the story which throws an air of unreality over it. Prodigies like Paul Dombey, or girls with the sagacity and heroism of Eleanor Trench, are not children at all; they are formed characters who talk philosophy and happen accidentally to be small and young. But Pip, and David Copperfield (when he is not too conscious in his simplicity), and Sissy Jupe, and little Jacob, are what they profess to be, and are created and carried out with unusual skill. Oliver

Twist is merely a lay figure, like one of those in Mrs. Jarley's Waxworks, who are so well described as "standing more or less unsteadily upon their legs, with their eyes very wide open, and their nostrils very much inflated, and the muscles of their legs and arms very much developed, and all their countenances expressing great surprise." Up to a certain point Paul Dombey himself is natural and delightful. Abstraction made of what the waves were always sayingthere is a duet about these waves of which it is impossible to think without a shudder-his thoughts are such as might well occur to a child under peculiar circumstances. The episode of Doctor

* Barnaby Rudge, vol. i. pp. 54, 5.

the feelings for my money, though he mayn't look it."

"Stay a minute,' said Short. A man of the name of Jerry-you know Jerry, Thomas?' "Oh, don't talk to me of Jerrys,' replied Mr. Codlin. 'How can I care a pinch of snuff for Jerrys, when I think of that 'ere darling child? "Codlin's my friend," she says, "dear, good, kind Codlin, as is always a devisin' pleas

"but I cotton to Codlin." Once,' said that gentleman reflectively, she called me Father Codlin. I thought I should have bust!'"*

Blimber's Academy-the solemn politeness, pretension, and weariness of that establishment-is nearly as good as anything in the whole of these volumes. No one can help remembering the "round of bread, genteelly served on a plate and napkin, and with a silver fork lying crosswise on the top of it," which was to serve for dinner to the disgracedures for me! I don't object to Short," she says, Briggs-nor the butler "who gave quite a winey flavor to the table beer; he poured it out so superbly;" nor even the fact that Dr. Blimber's young gentlemen did not "break up," but oozed away semi-annually to their own homes. It is by the finish of these lighter touches that Mr. Dickens has won the high position he occupies. His minor characters are generally good. Mr. Littimer, for example, is only a sketch-but it is a sketch which leaves a far more vivid impression behind than the comparatively labored portrait of Steerforth. So with Mr. Vincent Crummles, young Bailey, Mrs. Skewton, Captain Cuttle, and Mr. Buckett-they are among the happiest things in his books. As an illustration of selfishness, we far prefer the few pages in the Old Curiosity Shop, which describe Messrs. Short and Codlin, to the heavy melodramatic business in Martin Chuzzlewit. It is more natural, more humorous, and, we think, more true. The cautious surliness of Codlin in the first instance, when he is not clear what to make of his fellow travellers; his awkward attempts to ingratiate himself when he suspects money may be made out of them; and the characteristic manner in which he finally takes credit for everything that he had not done, when he is clear that money is to be made, contrast admirably with the simple good-nature of his partner Short:

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"You said!' returned Mr. Codlin. 'Did I always say that that 'ere blessed child was the most interesting I ever see? Did I always say I loved her, and doated on her? Pretty creetur, I think I hear her now. "Codlin's my friend," she says with a tear of gratitude a tricklin' down her little eye; "Codlin's my friend," she says, "not Short. Short's very well," she says; "I've no quarrel with Short; he means kind, I dare say; but Codlin," she says, “has

But when Mr. Dickens writes on principle, with an object before him, and, above all, when he tries to enlist our sympathy or dislike, he signally fails. We search in vain throughout these sixteen novels for any one man or woman whom we really admire, really fear, or whom we should at all desire to imitate. If the figures in a tailor's shop were to become suddenly animated they would be exceedingly like Mr. Dickens's heroes. Compare Rochester, or Louis Moore, or the Professor, with John Westlock, Nicholas Nickleby, or Walter Gay. While no one reads Miss Brontë's works without a marked feeling one way or other for the principal actors, there is a very general impression that if Mr. Dickens's young men could be got rid of altogether his novels would be greatly improved. They have an admirable choice of words, and express the most unexceptionable opinions in the most correct language, but there is a premature goodness and an odious prosy morality about them which are quite insufferable. Those little angularities by which character is distinguished are nearly altogether wanting. Nicholas Nickleby, Frank Cheeryble, and John Westlock are each represented under the influence of a strong passion; but they might be shaken up in a bag with Madeleine Bray, Kate Nickleby, and Ruth Pinch, and it would make very little difference either to themselves or the story how the couples were taken out. Whereas Shirley would be quite another book if Rochester had to be substituted for Louis Moore. The reason of this is that Mr. Dickens has trusted not to his observation, but to his imagination, and he has exercised his imagination on a subject of which he has no special knowledge. There is just one ex

*Old Curiosity Shop, vol. i. pp. 292, 3.

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