"7. The loss consequent on the conversion of paper money into gold (with gold at the present ruling premium) is allowed for in the calculation. It counts seven dollars to the pound."
[261] I hope my readers will find themselves able to understand that, as well as this which follows: "What seems preposterous, impossible to us, seemed to him simple fact of observation. When he imagined a street, a house, a room, a figure, he saw it not in the vague schematic way of ordinary imagination, but in the sharp definition of actual perception, all the salient details obtruding themselves on his attention. He, seeing it thus vividly, made us also see it; and believing in its reality however fantastic, he communicated something of his belief to us. He presented it in such relief that we ceased to think of it as a picture. So definite and insistent was the image, that even while knowing it was false we could not help, for a moment, being affected, as it were, by his hallucination."
[262] "Though," John Ballantyne told Lockhart, "he often turned himself on his pillow with a groan of torment, he usually continued the sentence in the same breath. But when dialogue of peculiar animation was in progress, spirit seemed to triumph altogether over matter—he arose from his couch and walked up and down the room, raising and lowering his voice, and as it were acting the parts." Lockhart, vi. 67-8. The statement of James Ballantyne is at p. 89 of the same volume. The original incidents on which Scott had founded the tale he remembered, but "not a single character woven by the romancer, not one of the many scenes and points of humour, nor anything with which he was connected as the writer of the work."
[263] "Do you know Master Humphrey's Clock! I admire Nell in the Old Curiosity Shop exceedingly. The whole thing is a good deal borrowed from Wilhelm Meister. But little Nell is a far purer, lovelier, more English conception than Mignon, treasonable as the saying would seem to some. No doubt it was suggested by Mignon."—Sara Coleridge to Aubrey de Vere (Memoirs and Letters, ii. 269-70). Expressing no opinion on this comparison, I may state it as within my knowledge that the book referred to was not then known to Dickens.
[264] The distinction I then pointed out was remarked by Sara Coleridge (Memoirs and Letters, ii. 169) in writing of her children. "They like to talk to me . . . above all about the productions of Dickens, the never-to-be-exhausted fun of Pickwick, and the capital new strokes of Martin Chuzzlewit. This last work contains, besides all the fun, some very marked and available morals. I scarce know any book in which the evil and odiousness of selfishness are more forcibly brought out, or in a greater variety of exhibitions. In the midst of the merry quotations, or at least on any fair opportunity, I draw the boys' attention to these points."
[265] All the remarks in my text had been some time in type when Lord Lytton sent me what follows, from one of his father's manuscript (and unpublished) note-books. Substantially it agrees with what I have said; and such unconscious testimony of a brother novelist of so high a rank, careful in the study of his art, is of special value. "The greatest masters of the novel of modern manners have generally availed themselves of Humour for the illustration of manners; and have, with a deep and true, but perhaps unconscious, knowledge of art, pushed the humour almost to the verge of caricature. For, as the serious ideal requires a certain exaggeration in the proportions of the natural, so also does the ludicrous. Thus Aristophanes, in painting the humours of his time, resorts to the most poetical extravagance of machinery, and calls the Clouds in aid of his ridicule of philosophy, or summons Frogs and Gods to unite in his satire on Euripides. The Don Quixote of Cervantes never lived, nor, despite the vulgar belief, ever could have lived, in Spain; but the art of the portrait is in the admirable exaltation of the humorous by means of the exaggerated. With more or less qualification, the same may be said of Parson Adams, of Sir Roger de Coverley, and even of the Vicar of Wakefield. . . . It follows therefore that art and correctness are far from identical, and that the one is sometimes proved by the disdain of the other. For the ideal, whether humorous or serious, does not consist in the imitation but in the exaltation of nature. And we must accordingly enquire of art, not how far it resembles what we have seen, so much as how far it embodies what we can imagine."
[266] I cannot refuse myself the satisfaction of quoting, from the best criticism of Dickens I have seen since his death, remarks very pertinent to what is said in my text. "Dickens possessed an imagination unsurpassed, not only in vividness, but in swiftness. I have intentionally avoided all needless comparisons of his works with those of other writers of his time, some of whom have gone before him to their rest, while others survive to gladden the darkness and relieve the monotony of our daily life. But in the power of his imagination—of this I am convinced—he surpassed them, one and all. That imagination could call up at will those associations which, could we but summon them in their full number, would bind together the human family, and make that expression no longer a name, but a living reality. . . . Such associations sympathy alone can warm into life, and imagination alone can at times discern. The great humourist reveals them to every one of us; and his genius is indeed an inspiration from no human source, in that it enables him to render this service to the brotherhood of mankind. But more than this. So marvellously has this earth become the inheritance of mankind, that there is not a thing upon it, animate or inanimate, with which, or with the likeness of which, man's mind has not come into contact; . . . with which human feelings, aspirations, thoughts, have not acquired an endless variety of single or subtle associations. . . . These also, which we imperfectly divine or carelessly pass by, the imagination of genius distinctly reveals to us, and powerfully impresses upon us. When they appeal directly to the emotions of the heart, it is the power of Pathos which has awakened them; and when the suddenness, the unexpectedness, the apparent oddity of the one by the side of the other, strike the mind with irresistible force, it is the equally divine gift of Humour which has touched the spring of laughter by the side of the spring of tears."—Charles Dickens. A Lecture by Professor Ward. Delivered in Manchester, 30th November, 1870.
[267] The opening of this letter (25th of August 1859), referring to a conviction for murder, afterwards reversed by a Home Office pardon against the continued and steadily expressed opinion of the judge who tried the case, is much too characteristic of the writer to be lost. "I cannot easily tell you how much interested I am by what you tell me of our brave and excellent friend. . . . I have often had more than half a mind to write and thank that upright judge. I declare to heaven that I believe such a service one of the greatest that a man of intellect and courage can render to society. . . . Of course I have been driving the girls out of their wits here, by incessantly proclaiming that there needed no medical evidence either way, and that the case was plain without it. . . . Lastly of course (though a merciful man—because a merciful man, I mean), I would hang any Home Secretary, Whig, Tory, Radical, or otherwise, who should step in between so black a scoundrel and the gallows. . . . I am reminded of Tennyson by thinking that King Arthur would have made short work of the amiable man! How fine the Idylls are! Lord! what a blessed thing it is to read a man who really can write. I thought nothing could be finer than the first poem, till I came to the third; but when I had read the last, it seemed to me to be absolutely unapproachable." Other literary likings rose and fell with him, but he never faltered in his allegiance to Tennyson.
[268] Mr. Grant White, whose edition of Shakespeare has been received with much respect in England.
[269] A dear friend now gone, used laughingly to relate what outcry there used to be, on the night of the week when a number was due, for "that Pip nonsense!" and what roars of laughter followed, though at first it was entirely put aside as not on any account to have time wasted over it.