in his favor.  We are widening the esthetic canvas to admit of the test of life, and are coming to realize that, obsessed for a time by the attraction of that lower truth which makes so much of external realities, realism lost sight of the larger demands of art which include selection, adaptation, and that enlargement of effect marking the distinction between art and so-called reality.  No critic is now timid about saying a good word for the author of “Pickwick” and “Copperfield.”  A few years ago it was otherwise.  Present-day critics such as Henley, Lang, and Chesterton have assured the luke-warm that there is room in English literature for both Thackeray and Dickens.

That Dickens began to write fiction as a very young journalist was in some ways in his favor; in other ways, to the detriment of his work.  It meant an early start on a career of over thirty years.  It meant writing under pressure with the spontaneity and reality which usually result.  It also meant the bold grappling with the technique of a great art, learning to make novels by making them.  Again, one truly inspired to fiction is lucky to have a novitiate in youth.  So far the advantages.

On the other hand, the faults due to inexperience, lack of education, uncertainty of aim, haste and carelessness and other foes of perfection, will probably be in evidence when a writer who has scarcely attained to man’s estate essays fiction.  Dickens’ early work has thus the merits and demerits of his personal history.  A popular and able parliamentary reporter, with sympathetic knowledge of London and the smaller towns where his duties took him, possessed of a marvelous memory which photographed for him the boyish impressions of places like Chatham and Rochester, he began with sketches of that life interspersed with more fanciful tales which drew upon his imagination and at times passed the melodramatic border-line.  When these collected pieces were published under the familiar title “Sketches by Boz,” it is not too much to say that the Dickens of the “Pickwick Papers” (which was to appear next year) was revealed.  Certainly, the main qualities of a great master of the Comic were in these pages; so, in truth, was the master of both tears and smiles.  But not at full-length:  the writer had not yet found his occasion;—­the man needs the occasion, even as it awaits the man.  And so, hard upon the Boz book, followed, as it were by an accident, the world-famous “Adventures of Mr. Pickwick.”  By accident, I say, because the promising young author was asked to furnish the letter-press for a series of comic sporting pictures by the noted artist, Seymour; whereupon—­doubtless to the astonishment of all concerned, the pictures became quite secondary to the reading matter and the Wellers soon set all England talking and laughing over their inimitable sayings.  Here in a loosely connected series of sketches the main unity of which was the personality of Mr. Pickwick and his club, its method that of the episodic adventure story of “Gil Blas” lineage, its purpose frankly to amuse at all costs, a new creative power in English literature gave the world over three hundred characters in some sixty odd scenes:  intensely English, intensely human, and still, after the lapse of three quarters of a century, keenly enjoyable.