crutches, in the pride of strength and health, in the full blush of promise, in the mere dawn of life—­to gather round her tomb.  Old men were there, whose eyes were dim and senses failing—­grandmothers, who might have died ten years ago, and still been old,—­the deaf, the blind, the lame, the palsied, the living dead in many shapes and forms, to see the closing of that earthly grave.  What was the death it would shut in, to that which still could crawl and creep above it?” Such is the tone throughout, and one feels inclined to ask whether it is quite the appropriate tone in which to speak of the funeral of a child in a country churchyard?  All this pomp of rhetoric seems to me—­shall I say it?—­as much out of place as if Nell had been buried like some great soldier or minister of state—­with a hearse, all sable velvet and nodding plumes, drawn by a long train of sable steeds, and a final discharge of artillery over the grave.  The verbal honours paid here to the deceased are really not much less incongruous and out of keeping.  Surely in such a subject, above all others, the pathos of simplicity would have been most effective.

There are some, indeed, who deny to Dickens the gift of pathos altogether.  Such persons acknowledge, for the most part a little unwillingly, that he was a master of humour of the broader, more obvious kind.  But they assert that all his sentiment is mawkish and overstrained, and that his efforts to compel our tears are so obvious as to defeat their own purpose.  Now it will be clear, from what I have said about Little Nell, that I am capable of appreciating the force of any criticism of this kind; nay, that I go so far as to acknowledge that Dickens occasionally lays himself open to it.  But go one inch beyond this I cannot.  Of course we may, if we like, take up a position of pure stoicism, and deny pathos altogether, in life as in art.  We may regard all human affairs but as a mere struggle for existence, and say that might makes right, and that the weak is only treated according to his deserts when he goes to the wall.  We may hold that neither sorrow nor suffering call for any meed of sympathy.  Such is mainly the attitude which the French novelist adopts towards the world of his creation.[16] But once admit that feeling is legitimate; once allow that tears are due to those who have been crushed and left bleeding by this great world of ours as it crashes blundering on its way; once grant that the writer’s art can properly embrace what Shakespeare calls “the pity of it,” the sorrows inwoven in all our human relationships; once acknowledge all this, and then I affirm, most confidently, that Dickens, working at his best, was one of the greatest masters of pathos who ever lived.  I can myself see scarce a strained discordant note in the account of the short life and early death of Paul Dombey, and none in the description of the death of Paul Dombey’s mother, or in the story of Tiny Tim, or in the record of David Copperfield’s childhood and boyhood.  I consider the passage in “American Notes” describing the traits of gentle kindliness among the emigrants as being nobly, pathetically eloquent.  Did space allow, I could support my position by quotations and example to any extent.  And my conclusion is that, though he failed with Little Nell, yet he succeeded elsewhere, and superbly.