DICKENS 93 



luminous exponent as he. When, if indeed ever, the 

 Pickwick Papers cease to amuse, they will still afford 

 by far the most valuable evidence that could possibly 

 exist as to the ways and thoughts, the social life and 

 the conditions of travel, that immediately preceded 

 the railway era. Superficial critics may hold that the 

 most humorous book of the century is but a succession 

 of scenes, with little real sequence and no plot ; they 

 may also say that Mr. Pickwick, Messrs. Tupman, 

 Snodgrass, Winkle, and the rest of that glorious 

 company, were " idiots," but for genuine fun and 

 frolic that book is still pre-eminent, and none of the 

 " new humorists," with their theories and criticisms 

 of the " old humour," have approached within a 

 continent or so of it. Not that Dickens' methods 

 were irreproachable. It was his pleasure in all his 

 books to give his characters allusive names by which 

 you were supposed to recognise their attributes at once. 

 It is thus upon the stage, in pantomime or farce, that 

 the clown's painted grin and the low^-comedian's 

 ill-fitting clothes, red hair, and redder nose, proclaim 

 their qualities before a word is spoken, and when 

 Dickens calls a pompous fraud " Pecksniff," a vulgar 

 Cockney clerk " Guppy," or a shifty, irresponsible, 

 resourceful person " Swiveller," we know at once, 

 before we read any further, pretty much what their 

 characters will be like. This, of course, is not art ; it 

 is an entirely indefeasible attempt to claim your 

 sympathies or excite your aversions at the outset, 

 independently of the greater or less success with 

 which the author portrays their habits afterwards. 

 We must, however, do Dickens the justice both to 

 allow that he needed no such adventitious aids to the 

 understanding of his characters, and to recognise that 

 this kind of nomenclature was not i^eculiarly his own, 

 but very largely the literary fashion of his time. 



The pranks of Falstaff and Prince Hal, whose doings 

 were to be " argument for a week, laughter for a month, 

 and a good jest for ever," are commemorated, in a 



