LINES ON RE-READING "BLEAK HOUSE."
There was a time when, posing as a purist,
I thought it fine to criticise and crab
CHARLES DICKENS as a crude caricaturist,
Who laid his colours on too thick and slab,
Who was a sort of sentimental tourist
And made life lurid when it should be drab;
In short I branded as a brilliant dauber
The man who gave us Pecksniff and Micawber.
True, there are blots—like spots upon the sun—
And genius, lavish of imagination,
In sheer profusion always has outrun
The bounds of strict artistic concentration;
But when detraction's worst is said and done,
How much remains for fervent admiration,
How much that never palls or wounds or sickens
(Unlike some moderns) in great generous DICKENS!
And in Bleak House, the culminating story
That marks the zenith of his swift career,
All the great qualities that won him glory,
As writer and reformer too, appear:
Righteous resentment of abuses hoary,
Of pomp and cant, self-centred, insincere;
And burning sympathy that glows unchecked
For those who sit in darkness and neglect.
Who, if his heart be not of steel or stone,
Can read unmoved of Charley or of Jo;
Of dear Miss Flite, who, though her wits be flown,
Has kept a soul as pure as driven snow;
Of the fierce "man from Shropshire" overthrown
By Law's delays; of Caddy's inky woe;
Or of the alternating fits and fluster
That harass the unhappy slavey, Guster?
And there are scores of characters so vivid
They make us friends or enemies for life:
Hortense, half-tamed she-wolf, with envy livid;
The patient Snagsby and his shrewish wife;
The amorous Guppy, who poor Esther chivvied;
Tempestuous Boythorn, revelling in strife;
Skimpole, the honey-tongued artistic cadger;
And that tremendous woman, Mrs. Badger.
No wonder then that, when we seek awhile
Relief and respite from War's strident chorus,
Few books more swiftly charm us to a smile,
Few books more truly hearten and restore us
Than his, whose art was potent to beguile
Thousands of weary souls who came before us—
No wonder, when the Huns, who ban our fiction,
Were fain to free him from their malediction.
"WHAT PEOPLE SAY.
"One of the collectors for the —— Hospital Sunday fund seems to have got more than either he or the committee desired.
"On approaching a house he was received by a dog which persisted in leaving its compliments on one of his legs.
"Happily the injury, though treated by a chemist, was not serious."—Provincial Paper.
People ought not to say these things about chemists.
"ESCAPED GERMAN FLYING MEN.
"One of the men is Lieut. Josef Flink. He has a gunshot wound in the palm of the left hand. The second is Orbum Alexander von Schutz, with side-whispers. Both speak very little English."—Southern Echo.
But VON SCHUTZ's sotto-voce rendering of the "Hymn of Hate" is immense.