It has a power very typical of the author and one of the reasons for Dickens’ hold upon his audience.  It is a power also exhibited markedly in such other fictions as “Dombey and Son,” “Martin Chuzzlewit” and “Bleak House.”  I refer to the impression conveyed by such stories that life is a vast, tumultuous, vari-colored play of counter-motives and counter-characters, full of chance, surprise, change and bitter sweet:  a thing of mystery, terror, pity and joy.  It has its masks of respectability, its frauds of place, its beauty blossoming in the mud, its high and low of luck, its infinite possibilities betwixt heaven and hell.  The effect of this upon the sensitive reader is to enlarge his sympathetic feeling for humanity:  life becomes a big, awful, dear phantasmagoria in such hands.  It seems not like a flat surface, but a thing of length, breadth, height and depth, which it has been a privilege to enter.  Dickens’ fine gift—­aside from that of character creation—­is found in this ability to convey an impression of puissant life.  He himself had this feeling and he got it into his books:  he had, in a happier sense, the joy of life of Ibsen, the life force of Nietzsche.  From only a few of the world’s great writers does one receive this sense of life, the many-sided spectacle; Cervantes, Hugo, Tolstoy, Sienkiewicz, it is men like they that do this for us.

Another side of Dickens’ literary activity is shown in his Christmas stories, which it may be truly said are as well beloved as anything he gave the world in the Novel form.  This is assuredly so of the “Christmas Carol,” “The Chimes” and “The Cricket on the Hearth.”  This last is on a par with the other two in view of its double life in a book and on the boards of the theater.  The fragrance of Home, of the homely kindness and tenderness of the human heart, is in them, especially in the Carol, which is the best tale of its kind in the tongue and likely to remain so.  It permanently altered the feeling of the race for Christmas.  Irving preceded him in the use of the Christmas motive, but Dickens made it forever his own.  By a master’s magic evocation, the great festival shines brighter, beckons more lovingly than it did of old.  Thackeray felt this when he declared that such a story was “a public benefit.”  Such literature lies aside from our main pursuit, that of the Novel, but is mentioned because it is the best example possible, the most direct, simple expression of that essential kindness, that practical Christianity which is at the bottom of Dickens’ influence.  It is bonhomie and something more.  It is not Dickens the reformer, as we get him when he satirizes Dotheboys hall, or the Circumlocution Office or the Chancery Court:  but Dickens as Mr. Greatheart, one with all that is good, tender, sweet and true.  Tiny Tim’s thousand-times quoted saying is the quintessence, the motto for it all and the writer speaks in and through the lad when he says:  “God bless us, every one.”  When an author gets that honest unction into his work, and also has the gift of observation and can report what he sees, he is likely to contribute to the literature of his land.  With a sneer of the cultivated intellect, we may call it elementary:  but to the heart, such a view of life is royally right.