as artist in so changing the features of life as to increase our pleasure?  That is the nub of the whole matter.  The artist of fiction should not aim at exact photography, for it is impossible; no fiction-maker since time began has placed on the printed pages half the irrelevance and foolishness or one-fifth the filth which are in life itself.  Reasons of art and ethics forbid.  The aim, therefore, should rather be at an effect of life through selection and re-shaping.  And I believe Dickens is true to this requirement.  We hear less now than formerly of his crazy exaggerations:  we are beginning to realize that perhaps he saw types that were there, which we would overlook if they were under our very eyes:  we feel the wisdom of Chesterton’s remarks that Dickens’ characters will live forever because they never lived at all!  We suffered from the myopia of realism.  Zola desired above all things to tell the truth by representing humanity as porcine, since he saw it that way:  he failed in his own purpose, because decency checked him:  his art is not photographic (according to his proud boast) but has an almost Japanese convention of restraint in its suppression of facts.  Had Sarah Gamp been allowed by Dickens to speak as she would speak in life, she would have been unspeakably repugnant, never cherished as a permanently laughable, even lovable figure of fiction.  Dickens was a master of omissions as well as of those enlargments which made him carry over the foot lights.  Mrs. Gamp is a monumental study of the coarse woman rogue:  her creator makes us hate the sin and tolerate the sinner.  Nor is that other masterly portrait of the woman rascal—­Thackeray’s Becky Sharp—­an example of strict photography; she is great in seeming true, but she is not life.

So much, then, for the charge of caricature:  it is all a matter of degree.  It all depends upon the definition of art, and upon the effect made upon the world by the characters themselves.  If they live in loving memory, they must, in the large sense, be true.  Thus we come back to the previous statement:  Dickens’ people live—­are known by their words and in their ways all over the civilized world.  No collection of mere grotesques could ever bring this to pass.  Prick any typical creation of Dickens and it runs blood, not sawdust.  And just in proportion as we travel, observe broadly and form the habit of a more penetrating and sympathetic study of mankind, shall we believe in these emanations of genius.  Occasionally, under the urge and surplusage of his comic force, he went too far and made a Quilp:  but the vast majority even of his drolls are as credible as they are dear.