the application of a plain rule of right and wrong to all circumstances to which it was applied. It is not that they wrongly enforce the fixed principle that life should be saved; it is that they take a fire-engine to a shipwreck and a life-boat to a house on fire. The business of a good man in Dickens's time was to bring justice up to date. The business of a good man in Dunstan's time was to toil to ensure the survival of any justice at all.
It seems to me that if all the works of Dickens were lost we might do very well with the "Pickwick Papers" and "Nicholas Nickleby." To these, one is tempted to add "Our Mutual Friend."
When I was young enough to assist at meetings of Literary Societies, where papers on Dickens were read, I was invariably informed that "Charles Dickens could not paint a lady or a gentleman." There was no reason given for this censure. It was presumed that the authors of the papers meant an English lady or gentleman. Nobody, to my knowledge, ever defined what an English gentleman or lady was. When one considers that for a long period an English gentleman's status was determined by the fact that he owned land, had not even a remote connection with "trade" or that he was instructed at Eton or Harrow, in Oxford or Cambridge, the more modern definition would have been very different from what the English of the olden time would have called a gentleman. Even now, when a levelling education has rather blurred the surface marks of class in England, it might be difficult for an American to define what was meant by this criticism of Dickens. It seems to me that no one could define exactly what was meant. The convention that makes the poet in Pennsylvania write as if the banks of the Wissahickon were peopled by thrushes, or orchestrated by the mavis, or the soaring lark, causes him often to borrow words from the English vocabulary of England without analyzing their exact meaning. There can be no doubt that Don Quixote was a gentleman but not exactly in the English conventional sense. And, if he was a gentleman, why are not Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller gentlemen? An interesting thesis might be written on the application of Cardinal Newman's definition of a gentleman to both Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller. Why not?