AMERICAN CRITICISM OF CHARLES DICKENS.

Mr. Dickens has a marvellous control over the springs which move to laughter and to tears. The art of playing upon the feelings has been the study of his life, and he has brought it to as high a degree of perfection perhaps as any writer of the century. He has also a wonderful power of characterisation. Perhaps no writer in the whole range of English literature, other than Shakspeare, can compare with him in the vividness with which he brings the features and traits of his characters to the comprehension of the reader. His gallery of portraits is extensive and varied. We all know them—their names are synonyms in our literature of the characteristics which they represent—Pickwick, Weller, Micawber, Squeers, Fagin, Captain Cuttle, Uriah Heep, Pecksniff, Mark Tapley, Scrooge, Boffin, Mr. Venus, &c. Yet no one can accord to Mr. Dickens the highest position as a novelist. He is by instinct and by art a caricaturist ; and the definition of caricature as "the exaggeration of a characteristic," which is one of the most admirable definitions in the language, describes completely the sole peculiarity of Mr. Dickens's works. This is his forte. He brings before us no real men and women, such as we see in our daily walks in life, or such as come down to us in the pages of history. He give us embodied specialities, people far outside the average of humanity—people forming mere eddies in the current of human life. They are funny, they are entertaining, they are striking ; but they are unnatural, and in a literary and artistic sense they are monstrous. He lives in a world of abortions. The disjecta membra of human nature—the aged, crippled, misshapen, eccentric, morbid, mean and depraved —find their types in his pages. He draws his characters reeking from the slums of society, from the lanes, the docks, the marshes, the workhouses, the poor-houses, the infamous private schools, the lonesome tumble-down dwellings, the hospitals and the prisons. He is happiest in unhappy characters. But as we do not go to poor-houses and hospitals for our conceptions of human nature in its normal condition, so we do not go to the pages of Charles Dickens for our true conceptions of true men and women. Mr, Dickens has no noble heroines in his books. His women are base, ridiculous, or frivolous, or else possess a sort of laborious goodness that gives no adequate idea of a brave, wise, and beautiful Christian womanhood. Compare him with Walter Scott or Mrs. Stowe, even, it is like comparing a hospital ward with a scene of home comfort and love, or an alley in St. Giles's with flowering meadows and the scenery of stately mountains. Much of Mr. Dickens's morbid state of mind would seem to be due to his having taken up early in life some of the hard, materialistic, sceptical philosophy so rife among the lower orders of the English people, whence he sprang. Of all forms of infidelity, that developed among a stolid, overburdened working class is the most selfish, mean, and God-forsaken. There may be something noble in the sceptical speculations of the German mind, something æsthetic and daring in those of the French, something realistic and practical in those of the Americans, but the scepticism of England is robbed of all the graces of learning, poetry, or humanity—it is hopeless, infamous, devilish. In the pages of Charles Dickens it naturally flowers into those morbid, diseased, and brutal characterisations in which he abounds,and which are only relieved by a sense of humor and pathos which tickles the fancy and stirs a shallow sentiment, while the conscience is deadened and the heart corrupted. He refers to religion only to ridicule it; his death-bed scenes are sentimental rather than Christian ; his ideas of the missionary work, as expressed through Mr. Weller, is sending " moral pocket-ankerchiefs" and "flannel veskits to the young niggers abroad." His conception of the Christian ministry is illustrated in Stiggius and Chadband ; and Mr. Weller is made to remark, " If I'd my vay, Samivel, I'd just stick some o' those here lazy shepherds behind a heavy wheelbarrow, and run 'em up and down a fourteen-inch wide plank all day. That 'ud shake tke nonsense out of 'em, if anything vould." His Christ, who is mentioned with exceeding rarity, and then very slightly, may be conceived to be a kind of etherealised Harold Skimpole. — Northern Monthly.

 The Mercury (Hobart 6/6/1868),