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hypocritical morals of comfort and satiety. It so happens that there is an extraordinary poetic power behind his works, and that his glittering, golden humour stands out above the general mediocrity of his emotions; otherwise he would have a meaning solely for his own specific world, and would touch us as little as the thousands of novels which are always being deftly turned out across the Channel. It is only when one hates from the depths of his being the hypocrisy and the confined vision of Victorian culture that one can fully measure the astounding genius of a man who could turn this tritest of prosaic life into poetry, who could take this repulsive world with its smug complacency and make us feel it as interesting or almost lovable.

Dickens himself never fought against this England. But deep within—down in the unconscious—the artist in him was always struggling with the Englishman. At the start he stepped out strong and sure, but gradually the soft, half-yielding, half-resisting sand of his times tired him, and he tended more and more to walk in the old broad footprints of tradition. Dickens was the victim of his times; and his fate always reminds one of Gulliver's adventures among the Lilliputians. While the giant sleeps the dwarfs bind him down with thousands of tiny threads, and they will not release him until he capitulates and swears never to break the laws of the land. In the same way English tradition bound Dickens fast during the sleep of his security; with his successes they held him to the English soil, pushed him into fame, and at the same time bound his hands. After a childhood of prolonged dreariness he had become a stenographer in Parliament and had once attempted to write little sketches; he did this, it is true, more from a desire to augment his income than from any spontaneous creative impulse. His first effort was successful; a paper accepted it. Then a publisher asked him for satiric comments on a club, serving more or less as a text to accompany cartoons of the English gentry. Dickens undertook the commission. And it succeeded, succeeded beyond all expectations. The first numbers of the Pickwick Club made an unparalleled appeal. Within two months Boz was an author of national importance. Fame acted as an incentive; Pickwick was turned into a novel. The success was repeated. The subtle nets, the hidden bonds, of his national reputation became gradually stronger. Applause drove him from one work to another, and drove him always further in the direction of contemporary tastes. And these myriad nets, intricate-