This thought of Dickens’ moral obligation in his work and his instinctive attitude towards his audience, leads to one more point:  a main reason for this Victorian novelist’s strong hold on the affections of mankind is to be found in the warm personal relation he establishes with the reader.  The relationship implies obligation on the part of the author, a vital bond between the two, a recognition of a steady, not a chance, association.  There goes with it, too, an assumption that the author believes in and cares much for his characters, and asks the reader for the same faith.  This personal relation of author to reader and of both to the imagined characters, has gone out of fashion in fiction-making:  in this respect, Dickens (and most of his contemporaries) seem now old-fashioned.  The present realist creed would keep the novelist away and out of sight both of his fictive creations and his audience; it being his business to pull the strings to make his puppets dance—­up to heaven or down to hell, whatever does it matter to the scientist-novelist?  Tolstoy’s novel “Resurrection” is as a subject much more disagreeable than Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary”; but it is beautiful where the other is horrible, because it palpitates with a Christ-like sympathy for an erring woman, while the French author cares not a button whether his character is lost or not.  The healthy-minded public (which can be trusted in heart, if not in head) will instinctively choose that treatment of life in a piece of fiction which shows the author kindly cooperative with fate and brotherly in his position towards his host of readers.  That is the reason Dickens holds his own and is extremely likely to gain in the future, while spectacular reputations based on all the virtues save love, continue to die the death.  What M. Anatole France once said of Zola, applies to the whole school of the aloof and unloving:  “There is in man an infinite need of loving which renders him divine.  M. Zola does not know it....  The holiness of tears is at the bottom of all religions.  Misfortune would suffice to render man august to man.  M. Zola does not know it.”

Charles Dickens does know these truths and they get into his work and that work, therefore, gets not so much into the minds as into the souls of his fellow-man.  When we recite the sayings which identify his classic creations:  when we express ourselves in a Pickwickian sense, wait for something to turn up with Mr. Micawber, drop into poetry with Silas Wegg, move on with little Joe, feel ‘umble after the manner of Uriah Heap, are willin’ with Barkis, make a note of, in company with Captain Cuttle, or conclude with Mr. Weller, Senior, that it is the part of wisdom to beware of “widders,” we may observe that what binds us to this motley crowd of creatures is not their grotesquerie but their common humanity, their likeness to ourselves, the mighty flood-tide of tolerant human sympathy on which they are floated into the safe haven of our hearts.  With delightful understanding,