THE IMMORTAL DICKENS
The Immortal Dickens. By George Gissing. (Cecil Palmer. se. net.) SELDOM has a writer received more apt critical attention than Charles Dickens at the hands of George Gissing. Theirs was a marriage of true minds, and it is with groat joy that we welcome the new supplement to Gissing's masterly mono- graph of 1898. These essays, till now hidden as prefaces to the unsuccessful " Rochester " edition, and three of them never before printed, add by their detailed consideration of individual novels to the cross-sections of the earlier study. We are reminded once more of the London of Dickens, of his moral fervour and the social reforms achieved by his magnifi- cent sugared pills. We revel in the significant progress of his work from journalist to something near poet, and these essays are more than usually fruitful, for they are the observations of a man for and Dickens was first a perspective-glass of London and afterwards a master in the craft of fiction. We read, therefore, what is in the best sense an expert study, never sentimental though dealing with sentimentality, never un- balanced though often enthusiastic, and keeping an eye con- tinually on the significance rather than the multitude of Dickens's cosmos of character. Gissing was a student of demo- cracy, and he points out the importance in the history of .thought of Dickens's mystical recreation of the commonplace, he underlines the humour and the satire, and the picturesque suggestiveness with which he created a new London, his lack of romantic passion, his indebtedness to the old masters of English fiction, and above all his likeness to Shakespeare, that earlier ghost of Gadshill, and Cervantes, creator of a diviner Pickwick. Shakespeare's clowns and Dickens's land- ladiei form the chOrus of their several worlds, and Dickens's genius lies in his appeal to the desire of mankind to become acquainted with its own self in more and less revealed dis- guises. Dickens the • eternal showman sends his clowns leaping through the hoops of character and comedy with their undying cry," Here we are again !" The reprinting of these essays is a valuable contribution to Dickens literature.
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