“An Englishman’s house is his Castle,” said an immortal farmer at a Fat Stock Dinner. “The storms may assail it and the winds whistle round it, but the King himself cannot do so.” Dickens saw always the Englishman’s house as his castle, fortified and provisioned against the discharge of snow and sleet: always most amply provisioned! Witness his picture of Christmas at Manor Farm, Dingley Dell—Old Wardle with his friends, neighbours, poor relations, and his farm-labourers too, all sitting down together to a colossal supper “and a mighty bowl of wassail something smaller than an ordinary washhouse copper, in which the hot apples were hissing and bubbling with a rich look and jolly sound that were perfectly irresistible.”
Old Wardle, in fact, is in the direct line of succession to Chaucer’s Frankeleyne—
Withoute bake mete was never his hous,
Of fish and flesh, and that so plenteous,
It snewed in his hous of mete and drink.
Dickens, I repeat to you, was always, in the straight line of Chaucer, Ben Jonson, Dryden, Fielding, a preacher of man’s dignity in his full appetite; and quite consciously, as a national genius, he preached the doctrine of Christmas to his nation.
VIII
But you will say perhaps “Granted his amazing popularity—granted, too, his right to assume on it—was it really deserved?” To this question I oppose for the moment my opinion that, were I asked to choose out of the story of English Literature a short list of the most fecund authors, I should start with Chaucer, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Donne, Dryden, Pope, Samuel Johnson, Burke, Gibbon, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Carlyle, Dickens, Browning. If compelled to reduce the list to three, choosing the three most lavishly endowed by God with imagination for their fellows’ good, I almost think that among all God’s plenty I should choose, as pre-eminent stars, Shakespeare, Burke and Dickens. Milton, of course, will stand apart always, a solitary star: and Chaucer for his amazing invention, less even for what he did than for that he did it at all; Keats for infinity of promise; and to exclude Scott seems almost an outrage on human kindness. Yet if it come to the mere wonder-work of genius—the creation of men and women, on a page of paper, who are actually more real to us than our daily acquaintances, as companionable in a crowd as even our best selected friends, as individual as the most eccentric we know, yet as universal as humanity itself, I do not see what English writer we can choose to put second to Shakespeare save Charles Dickens. I am talking of sheer creative power, as I am thinking of Tasso’s proud saying that, next to God himself, no one but the poet deserves the name of Creator. You feel of Dickens as of Shakespeare that anything may happen: because it is not with them as with other authors: it is not they who speak. Falstaff or Hamlet or Sam Weller or Mr. Micawber: it is the god speaking:
Ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα.
They are as harps upon which the large wind plays: and as that is illimitable there is no limit to their utterances. It was so with Charles Dickens from the Sam Weller of his lost youth down to the last when, in pain and under the shadow of death, he invented the Billickin.