CHARLES DICKENS.

 "The Novelist of Democracy."

IN the sixty-odd years that have passed since Dickens died, nothing has occurred to shake his position as the most popular of English novelists (says Professor Harold Laski, Professor of Political Science in the University of London, in an article in "The Hindu").

 Other men may have seen life more profoundly. There may be justice in the criticism that he was better as observer than as philosopher, and that he succeeds in humour while he largely fails in tragedy. But he created living people who haunt us once we meet them; and nothing less than genius of the first order could have established him as the acknowledged friend of half the world. . . .

 No doubt he rather felt truths than saw them; his insights are supreme flashes of intuitive perception rather than the symmetrical product of ordered analysis. There is rarely a logical pattern, a unified philosophy in his work. He is the man in the street raised to the power of genius. But he is the man in the street with that special and ultimate wisdom which, as Voltaire said, is so much greater than the technical wisdom of all the specialists in knowledge.

 Dickens's characters may lack that reticence in the expression of emotion which characterises the governing class of Great Britain. But it was not a class in which his own interest was profound. He was, in the full sense of the word, democratic. The people he loved, those, too, in whose delineation he was most successful, were the common people; and it is not the least example of his marvellous power accurately to observe character that he grasped at once the essential truth that, with ordinary men and women, language serves for the expression of emotion and not its concealment.

 A Great Social Reformer.

 THERE was a great social reformer in Dickens. The famous claim of Shelley that poets are the legislators of the world is one in which the novelist, also, has a right to share. He saw with clarity and indignation some of the great evils of his day; and the emphasis with which he depicted them had no small share in compelling Governments to give attention to their relief.

 Imprisonment for debt, the indefensible delays of Chancery, the follies of the old Civil Service, the sheer cruelty of the Poor Law system, what the factories really meant in the first generation of the industrial revolution —these he made so clear that men were shamed into dealing with them.

 It is, I think, especially significant that right down to our own time no other novelist has held so long or so firmly the enthusiastic attention of the working class. He knew their inner life as only a man of genius could know it; and he could write of it so that the struggle and effort was transferred from the particular to the universal plane. How great a feat that is no one can realise who does not remember how rarely it has been accomplished. Thackeray, George Eliot, Kingsley, Trollope—not one of them succeeded in dealing with normal working men and women in their ordinary lives with the immediate truth which Dickens achieved.

 His Comic Genius. 

WE speak of his comic genius. But that was not merely the power to evoke the sudden gust of laughter. It was the insight into the essential comedy of life, the delineation of its substance upon a scale so magistral that one is overwhelmed by the power displayed.

 Does fiction show a comic figure more immense and awe-inspiring from Cervantes to our own time, than Mrs. Nickleby? Has the heart of London ever been set out more uniquely or more completely than in Sam Weller? Have the tragic limitations of the practical man ever been so remorsely exposed as in Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. Bounderby? Or the futility of the official who loves to strut in his little pompous authority than in the Barnacle Family? Has British self complacency ever been so remarkably incarnate as in Mr. Pecksniff?

 All of them, no doubt, are comic figures; but they are comic only in that ultimate sense which makes it akin to the tragedy of the world.

 He accepts the great miracle of life, the phenomenon or sudden conversion; Scrooge is for him the proof that the wicked may be transformed overnight. He is traditional, too, in his optimism, his love of the happy ending, his difficulty in rejecting the view that faith, if it be intense enough, can move mountains. 

The Christmas Spirit.

 IF one had asked Dickens what chief reform he wanted, I think he would have replied that he wished for nothing so much as the prolongation of the Christmas spirit into the other days of the year.

 At bottom, his teaching is the old teaching that the truest sources of happiness are within ourselves. The meek, the generous, the simple-minded, with him are always destined to inherit the earth. It is, alas! untrue; and it is not a gospel for the sophisticated critic, but it explains well enough why Dickens gave such infinite happiness to his readers. For, in the last analysis, all his novels are magnificent fairy tales, in which the heroes and the heroines are not princes and princesses, but ordinary men and women who win their reward.

 Little Dorrit, Mr. Pickwick, Kate Nickleby, Tom Traddles, Mr. Micawber, are the men and women we know. They have to struggle; they meet difficulties; they conquer them. And in their joy over conquest we find our own Utopia. To combine realism with the dream, as he combined them, is one of the rarest imaginative feats in literature.

Queenslander Illustrated Weekly (Brisbane, Qld.), March 1933, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article23267006