Chapter VII

But this world of Dickens, you may object, was an unreal world, a phantasmagoric world. Well, I hope to discuss that--or rather the inference from it--in my next lecture, which shall deal, in Aristotelian order, with his plots first and his characters next. But, for the moment, if you will, Yes: his world was like nothing on earth: yes, it is liker to Turner’s sunset to which the critic objected “he never saw a sunset like that,” and was answered, “Ah, but don’t you wish you could?” Yes, for Dickens made his world--as the proud parent said of his son’s fiddle--“he made it, sir, entirely out of his own head!”

“Night is generally my time for walking” (thus begins Master Humphrey, in _The Old Curiosity Shop_) “although I am an old man.”

So in that crowded phantasmagoric city of London, which is in his mind, Dickens walks by night--not like Asmodeus, lifting the roofs and peering into scandals: but like the good Caliph of his favourite _Arabian Nights_, intent to learn the life of the poor and oppressed, and as a monarch to see justice done them: a man patterning his work on the great lines of Fulke Greville, sometime of Jesus College, in this town; with which let me conclude to-day:

The chief use, then, in man, of that he knows,
Is his painstaking for the good of all:
Not fleshly weeping for our own-made woes,
Not laughing from a melancholy gall,
Not hating from a soul that overflows
With bitterness, breath’d out from inward thrall:
But sweetly rather to ease, loose, or bind,
As need requires, this frail, fall’n humankind.

DICKENS (III)