Henry Van Dyke

“ Ah, master of the good enchantment, you have given us hours of ease and joy, and we thank you for them. But there is a greater gift than that. You have made us more willing to go cheerfully and comradely along the strange, crowded, winding way of human life, because you have deepened our faith that there is something of the divine on earth, and something of the human in heaven. ”

“ Things that have seldom or never happened, occur inevitably. The preposterous becomes the necessary, the wildly improbable is the one thing that must come to pass. Mr. Dombey is converted, Mr. Krook is removed by spontaneous combustion, Mr. Micawber performs amazing feats as an amateur detective, Sam Weller gets married, the immortally absurd epitaphs of Young John Chivery and Mrs. Sapsea are engraved upon monuments more lasting than brass.
The fact is, Dickens himself was bewitched by the spell of his own imagination. ”

“ Being himself a part of the things that are seen, he must "paint the thing as he sees it" if he wishes to win the approval of "the god of things as they are."
Now the artistic value of Dickens's way of seeing things lay in its fitness to the purpose which he had in mind and heart,—a really great purpose, namely, to enhance the interest of life by good enchantment, to save people from the plague of dulness and the curse of indifference by showing them that the world is full of the stuff for hearty laughter and deep sympathy. ”

“ Does it make any great difference what kind of clothes he wore, or how many blunders of taste and tact he made, even tragic blunders like his inability to refrain from telling the world all about his domestic unhappiness,—does all this count for much when we look back upon the wonders which bis imagination wrought in fiction and upon the generous fruits which his heart brought forth in life?
No, it is easy to endure small weaknesses when you can feel beneath them the presence of great and vital power. Faults are forgiven readily in one who has the genius of loving much. ”

“ He does not care for the incongruities, the modifications, the fine shadings which soften and confuse the philosophic and reflective view of life. He wants to write his "story" sharply, picturesquely, with "snap" and plenty of local color; and he does it, in his happiest hours, with all the verve and skill of a star reporter for the Morning Journal of the Enchanted City.
In this graphic and emphatic quality the art of Dickens in fiction resembles the art of Hogarth in painting. But Dickens, like Hogarth, was much more than a reporter. ”

“ Yet even here Dickens could not reasonably be blamed for observing them, for being amused by them, or for letting them enrich his general sense of the immense, incalculable, and fantastic humor of the world. Taste, which is simply another name for the gusto of life, has a comic side; and a man who is keenly sensitive to everything cannot be expected to be blind to the funny things that happen among his family and friends. ”

“ Imagination rears thy towers and Fancy populates thy streets, yet art thou a city that hath foundations; a dwelling eternal though unseen. Ever building, changing, never falling, thy walls are open-gated day and night. ”

“ Naturally, Dickens puts more emphasis upon the contrast between his characters than upon the contrast within them. The internal inconsistencies and struggles, the slow processes of growth and change which are the delight of the psychological novelist do not especially interest him. He sees things black or white, not gray. The objects that attract him most, and on which he lavishes his art, do not belong to the average, but to the extraordinary. Dickens is not a commonplace merchant. ”

“ Now this unconventionality of art, which disregards ranks and titles, even those of its own making, and finds the beautiful and the absurd, the grotesque and the picturesque, the noble and the base, not according to the programme but according to the fact, is precisely the essence of good enchantment. ”

“ Fourth, those that are easy to read and easy to remember: the novels in which stories worth telling are well-told, and characters worth observing are vividly painted, and life is interpreted to the imagination in enduring forms of literary art. These are the best-sellers which do not go out of print—everybody's books.
In this fourth class healthy-minded people and unprejudiced critics put the novels of Charles Dickens. For millions of readers they have fulfilled what Dr. Johnson called the purpose of good books, to teach us to enjoy life or help us to endure it. ”

“ And the fountain of youth is in thy gardens, the treasure of the humble in thy store-houses. Hope is thy door-keeper, and Faith thy warden, and Love thy Lord. In thee the lost may take shelter and find himself by forgetting himself. ”

“ They are all as easy to identify as the wooden image in front of a tobacconist's shop. Others are embodiments of a single passion or quality: Pecksniff of unctuous hypocrisy, Micawber of joyous improvidence, Mr. Toots of dumb sentimentalism, Little Dorrit of the motherly instinct in a girl, Joe Gargery of the motherly instinct in a man, Mark Tapley of resolute and strenuous optimism. If these persons do anything out of harmony with their head-lines, Dickens does not tell of it. ”

“ The fat streak of comfort in his childish years, when his proud father used to stand the tiny lad on a table to sing comic songs for an applauding audience of relatives, could not spoil him. The lean streak of misery when the improvident family sprawled in poverty, with its head in a debtors' prison, while the bright, delicate, hungry boy roamed the streets, or drudged in a dirty blacking-factory, could not starve him. ”

“ You are in no danger of laughing at the heroine, or sympathizing with the funny man, as you are tempted to do in some modern plays. Dickens knows too much to leave his audience in perplexity. He even gives to some of his personages set phrases, like the musical motifs of the various characters in the operas of Wagner, by which you may easily identify them. Mr. Micawber is forever "waiting for something to turn up." Mr. Toots always reminds us that "it's of no consequence." ”

“ Has even the great Pickwick a charm to compare with the unique, immortal Sam Weller?
Do not imagine that Dickens was unconscious of this disarrangement of rôles, or that it was an evidence of failure on his part. He knew perfectly well what he was doing. Great authors always do. They cannot help it, and they do not care. ”

“ The one of his books that is notably fine in structure and approximately faultless in technique—"A Tale of Two Cities"—is so unlike his other novels that it stands in a class by itself, as an example of what he could have done if he had chosen to follow that line. In a way it is his most perfect piece of work. But it is not his most characteristic piece of work, and therefore I think it has less value for us than some of his other books in which his peculiar, distinctive, unrivalled powers are more fully shown.
After all, art must not only interpret the world but also reveal the artist. ”

“ I take it that we are born, and that we hold our sympathies, hopes, and energies in trust for the Many and not the Few. That we cannot hold in too strong a light of disgust and contempt, before our own view and that of others, all meanness, falsehood, cruelty, and oppression of every grade and kind. ”

“ Chesterton defends Dickens for his attack upon the practice of book-stealing which grew out of the absence of an International Copyright Law. He says that it was only the new, raw sensibility of the Americans that was hurt by these speeches. "Dickens was not in the least desirous of being thought too 'high-souled' to want his wages.... He asked for his money in a valiant and ringing voice, like a man asking for his honour." And this, Mr. Chesterton leaves us to infer, is what any bold Englishman, as distinguished from a timidly refined American, would do. ”

“ He is trying to extract the essential flavor of places and people so that you can taste it in a drop.
We find in his style an accumulation of details all bearing on a certain point; nothing that serves his purpose is overlooked; everything that is likely to distract the attention or obscure his aim is disregarded. ”

“ He takes long walks in the heart of London, attends police courts, goes behind the scenes of theatres, rides in omnibuses, visits prisons and work-houses. You think he is seeking realism. Quite wrong. He is seeking a sense of reality which shall make realism look like thirty cents. He is not trying to put up canned goods which shall seem more or less like fresh vegetables. ”

“ He was vivid, florid, inexhaustible, and untamed. There was material in the little man for a hundred of his own immortal caricatures. The self-portrait that he has drawn in "David Copperfield" is too smooth, like a retouched photograph. ”

“ The same personal quality may be noted in his ardor as a reformer. No writer of fiction has ever done more to better the world than Charles Dickens. But he did not do it by setting forth programmes of legislation and theories of government. ”

“ Mantalini, and a mischievous, wooden-legged kobold like Silas Wegg, take stronger hold upon us than the Harry Maylies and Rose Flemings, the John Harmons and Bella Wilfers, for whose ultimate matrimonial felicity the business of the plot is conducted. Even the more notable heroes often pale a little by comparison with their attendants. ”

“ He makes the figure stand out, always recognizable, but not always really understood. Many of his people are simply admirable incarnations of their particular trades or professions: Mould the undertaker, old Weller the coachman, Tulkinghorn the lawyer, Elijah Pogram the political demagogue, Blimber the school-master, Stiggins the religious ranter, Betsey Prig the day-nurse, Cap'n Cuttle the retired skipper. ”