“Too steep:”—the slang expresses that defect of an ardent genius, carried above itself, and out of the air we breathe, both in its grotesque and in its gloomy imaginations. To force the note, to press fantasy too hard, to deepen the gloom with black over the indigo, that was the failing which proved you mortal. To take an instance in little: when Pip went to Mr. Pumblechook’s, the boy thought the seedsman “a very happy man to have so many little drawers in his shop.” The reflection is thoroughly boyish; but then you add, “I wondered whether the flower-seeds and bulbs ever wanted of a fine day to break out of those jails and bloom.” That is not boyish at all; that is the hard-driven, jaded literary fancy at work.
“So we arraign her; but she,” the Genius of Charles Dickens, how brilliant, how kindly, how beneficent she is! dwelling by a fountain of laughter imperishable; though there is something of an alien salt in the neighbouring fountain of tears. How poor the world of fancy would be, how “dispeopled of her dreams,” if, in some ruin of the social system, the books of Dickens were lost; and if The Dodger, and Charley Bates, and Mr. Crinkle, and Miss Squeers and Sam Weller, and Mrs. Gamp, and Dick Swiveller were to perish, or to vanish with Menander’s men and women! We cannot think of our world without them; and, children of dreams as they are, they seem more essential than great statesmen, artists, soldiers, who have actually worn flesh and blood, ribbons and orders, gowns and uniforms. May we not almost welcome “Free Education”? for every Englishman who can read, unless he be an Ass, is a reader the more for you.
P.S.—Alas, how strangely are we tempered, and how strong is the national bias! I have been saying things of you that I would not hear an enemy say. When I read, in the criticism of an American novelist, about your “hysterical emotionality” (for he writes in American), and your “waste of verbiage,” I am almost tempted to deny that our Dickens has a single fault, to deem you impeccable!
III. _To Pierre de Ronsard_ (PRINCE OF POETS)
MASTER AND PRINCE OF POETS,—As we know what choice thou madest of a sepulchre (a choice how ill fulfilled by the jealousy of Fate), so we know well the manner of thy chosen immortality. In the Plains Elysian, among the heroes and the ladies of old song, there was thy Love with thee to enjoy her paradise in an eternal spring.