The daily morning journal and courier., 1903-12-12
DICKENS.
Andrew Lang on the Novelist and One
 of His Critics.

and then he was even an initator, of Wordsworth He meant, probably, that he was not an injudicious and exclusive admirer who swore by all of Words worth, and by nothing else. We may appreciate Burns, without being "com- mon Burnsites," who often know little of the works of their idol, and whose loyalty, like that of Squire Western, mainly confines itself to drinking lealths and abusing the saner critics of the beloved object.
 MT. Lord, writing on Dickens in the Nineteenth Century. certainly proves himself no common or even uncommon Dickensite, and though he professes to love that great genius, he "dissembles his love-" almost to the proverbia1 ex- tent of kicking him downstairs. "His prose style is as bad as can be-" On reflection, MT. Lord may easily call to mind living authors, popular authors, whose prose style is much worse than that of Dickens and is bad with high, uniform and sustained effort from cov- CT to cover.
 Surely this cannot be said Of Dickens, whose style is only bad in gold and vermillion, in occasional patches of pur pie and tirades of blank verse. The narrative, and much of the dialogue, are, think, in a very commendable style, and certainly the grammar never startIes us, as occasionally in Thack- cray, nor amuses by it's sportsmanlike insouciance, as in Scott. What is the matter. for example, with the style in the opening chapters of Great Expect ations?'' ...-
 When Dickens ''rose with his sub 5ect" he did, Of course, often rise much above any terrestrial topic; in short, fin our friends style there are fowery components.'' "Howls the sublime" and neither Longinus nor Burke rec commended the sublime howl, or the au- thor to become intoxicated with his own verbosity. Like other men more apt than he to aay attention to style, Dickens had his hours of excitement and indation; like other men. from Carlyle to MT. Pater, he had his pet mannerisms, but it is wild work to .'grant that his prose style is as bad as possible. .+...
 Next, let 1t be granted that This sen- timental passages are nauseating.' We must allow for changes in taste as re- gards sentiment. Now men enjoy that of sterne, now that of Dickens, now that of Senancour. We are by way of being very stoical; we were not so in 1S40-'70, and the tide of time may go back again. Dickens "did not under stand women" Who does understand women? I think that to understand women" is almost unmanly, to under stand and express them as many of the gynaecologists of modern fiction do may be scientific q doubt iD, but is decid- edly nauseating. We cannot general ize. Some men can understand some women, and vice versa. If Scott un- derstood women he was much too man. ly Ito give this woman away" In MT. Hewlett's "Queen Quair" (which ap- pears in the Pail Mall Magazine) he understands Queen Mary, but does so, I think, rather too elaborately. Peep ing Tom of Coventry no doubt under. stood Godiva for moment better than the rest of the townsmen, but I confess that I do not enjoy the results of such extremely close observation, which brought his doom on Cflastelard. Her majesty. as Father Holt said of Charles T., may be allowed now and then to be 4sprivate in the tree" and invisible to loyal eyes @
 Perhaps MT. Stevenson to some ex- tent understood women. but his aston ishing picture of the girl falling in love E In .'Weir of Hermiston" makes one rather admire than desire this meas ure of insight. If all this be true, if this be the right understanding of wo- mans love, one would rather not peer too closely into it, and Dickens did not. But certainly, save for his shrews, and Mrs. Camps, and feather headed Doras, and Mrs. Nicklebys, Dickens was not a master in his portraits of women, that is, of marriageab1e young women, the stuff of heroines. He has no Rosa- Iinds or Beatrices, or Beatrix Esmonds, or Diana Vernons. That his melodra- ma too often makes us yawn" is true for me, but clearly was not true for the readers of his own age. Probably, at the present moment, he is not popu- lar and that much is to his credit" says MT. Lord, in the spirit of Phocion. It is not much, if true, to the credit of the populace. Dickens sells very we'll, but with the modern populaee of the circulating library only contemporaries are, or can be, in the very first rank of popularity. Homer says the same thing about the popularity of new poets in his own age, but he disproved his own rule. The nice new little poets, Moschus or Bion, or Theocritus or Ru- finus, never interfered with the popu- 1arity of Homer Fielding is probably the greatest English novelist, but MT. Guy Boothby is far more popular than Fielding, and so is Dickens.
 MT. Lord thinks that the vogue of Dickens, at home and abroad, is due to This abounding love of his kind" I think 1t is due first to his humor, and then, for people who like pathos and melodrama, to his melodrama and his pathos He has abundance of really good lnelodrama, and we are not all superior persons. He has passages of unstrained pathos, as in the childhood of Copperfeld, and even his strained pathos made men weep who were cer- tainly in no respect worse men than we. Our taste differs, and MT. Lord and Tprefer our own taste; but there is no certain standard, except the usage of the best authors. They do not, and never did extract pathos from dozens of deathbeds, yet, even to-day, thou sands weep quite comfortably with Mr. Ian Maclaren. If with him, why not