Neither from Smollett, however, nor from Hook, nor from Hunt, nor from anybody else did Dickens take what makes him Dickens.  His idiosyncrasy, already mentioned, is so marked that everybody acknowledges its presence:  but its exact character and nature are matter not so much of debate (though they are that also in the highest degree) as matter of more or less questing, often of a rather blind-man’s-buff kind.  There is probably no author of whom really critical estimates are so rare.  He has given so much pleasure to so many people—­perhaps there are none to whom he has given more pleasure than to some of those who have criticised him most closely—­that to mention any faults in him is upbraided as a sort of personal and detestable ingratitude and treachery.  If you say that he cannot draw a gentleman, you are told that you are a parrot and a snob, who repeats what other snobs have told you; that gentlemen are not worth drawing; that he can draw them; and so forth.  If you suggest that he is fantastic, it is reproachfully asked if poetry is not fantastic, and if you do not like poetry?  If you intimate small affection for Little Nell and Little Paul, you are a brute; if you hint that his social crusades were often quite irrational, and sometimes at least as mischievous as they were beneficial, you are a parasite of aristocracy and a foe of “the people.”  If you take exception to his repetitions, his mannerisms, his tedious catch-processes of various kinds, you are a “stop-watch critic” and worthy of all the generous wrath of the exemplary and Reverend Mr. Yorick.  And yet all these assertions, objections, descriptions, are arch-true:  and they can be made by persons who know Dickens and enjoy Dickens a thousand times better—­who admire him in a manner a thousand times more really complimentary—­than the folk who simply cry “Great is Dickens” and will listen to nothing but their own sweet voices.

The real, the great, the unique merit of Dickens is that he brought to the service of the novel an imagination which, though it was never poetic, was plastic in almost the highest degree:  and that he communicated to the results of it a kind of existence which, though distinctly different from that of actual life, has a reality of its own, and possesses the distinguishing mark of genius, so that if it does not exactly force belief in itself, it forces suspension of disbelief.  To have done this is not only to have accomplished a wonderful artistic triumph, but to confer an immense benefit on the human race.  But in doing it Dickens exhibits various foibles, prejudices, and disabilities:  though it is quite open to any one to maintain that these rather assisted the flow of his imagination than hindered it.  He began very young; he had curiously little literature; his knowledge of life, extraordinarily alert and acute, was very one-sided, and the organs by which he attained it seem absolutely to shut themselves and refuse communion with certain