INTRODUCTION

IN considering Dickens, as we almost always must consider him, as a man of startling originality, we may possibly miss the forces from which he drew even his original energy. It is not well for man to be alone. We, in the modern world, are ready enough to admit that when it is applied to some problem of monasticism or of an ecstatic life. But we will not admit that our modern claim to absolute originality is really a claim to absolute unsociability; a claim to absolute loneliness. The anarchist is at least as much alone as the ascetic. And the men of very violent vigour in literature, the men such as Dickens, have generally displayed a large sociability towards the society of literature, always expressed in the happy pursuit of pre-existent themes, sometimes expressed, as in the cases of Molière or Sterne, in downright plagiarism. For even theft is a confession of our dependence on society. In Dickens, however, this element of the original foundations on which he worked is quite especially difficult to determine. This is partly due to the fact that for the present reading public he is practically the only one of his long line that is read at all. He sums up Smollett and Goldsmith, but he also destroys them. This one giant, being closest to us, cuts off from our view even the giants that begat him. But much more is this difficulty due to the fact that Dickens mixed up with the old material, materials so subtly modern, so made of the French Revolution, that the whole is transformed. If we want the best example of this, the best example is “Oliver Twist."

Relatively to the other works of Dickens "Oliver Twist is not of great value, but it is of great importance. Some parts of it are so crude and of so clumsy a melodrama, that one is almost tempted to say that Dickens would have been greater without it. But even if he had been greater without it he would still have been incomplete without it. With the exception of some gorgeous passages, both of humour and horror, the interest of the book lies not so much in its revelation of Dickens' literary genius as in its revelation of those

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