Page:The Dial (Volume 74).djvu/29

Dickens is the highest poetic expression of English tradition between the heroic century of Napoleon, the glorious past, and imperalism, the dream of its future. If he has simply given us something extraordinary instead of the mighty works for which his genius had fitted him, this was not caused by England, not by the race itself, but by the unpropitious moment: the Victorian period of England. Shakespeare also marks the highest possibility, the poetic fulfilment of an English era. But this was Elizabethan England, young, vigorously active, sensuously fresh; England was warm and throbbing with excess vitality, and was getting its first grip on the imperium mundi. Shakespeare was the child of a century distinguished for its activity, its will, its energy. New horizons had arisen, promising territories had been acquired in America, the hereditary enemy had been overwhelmed. The torch of the Renaissance was being carried into the northern mist from Italy; a God, a religion, had been displaced that the world might be filled again with new living values. Shakespeare was the incarnation of heroic England; Dickens was merely the symbol of bourgeois England. He was the logical subject of the mild, motherly, insignificant old Queen Victoria; he was the citizen of a prudish, comfortable, well-ordered commonwealth lacking in dash and passion. His impulse was lessened by the sluggishness of an age which was never avid, but content to digest at its leisure. It was at most a light wind that played in the sails of his ship, never driving it from the English coast out into the dangerous beauty of the unknown, into the uncharted infinite. Essentially prudent, he has always remained in the vicinity of the domestic, the usual, and the time-honoured. Shakespeare is the boldness of the England of appetites, Dickens is the prudence of England when its appetites have been appeased. He was born in 1812. Just as he was opening his eyes to look at the world it grew dark; the great flame which threatened to consume the rickety structure of European states went out. At Waterloo the Garde goes to pieces under the blows of the English infantry; England is saved, and can watch her enemy perish on a distant island, without crown or authority. Dickens did not participate in these experiences. He does not see the world-flame, the brilliant fire, which swayed back and forth across Europe; he must grope his way through the joy of England. The youth finds no more heroes; the time for heroes is past. To be sure, a few men in England refuse to believe it, and wish to restore by the power of