an unaccommodating grasp.”  We are made at once to see “the square wall of a forehead which had his eyebrows for its base, while his eyes found commodious cellarage in the two dark caves overshadowed by the wall.”  Having taken all this in at a glance, there is nothing more to be done in the development of the character of Mr. Gradgrind.  He takes his place among the obvious facts of existence.  But in so much as we were bound to find him out sometime, shall we quarrel with Dickens because we were enabled to do so in the first chapter?

Nor do the obvious exaggerations of Dickens arising from the exuberance of his fancy interfere with the sense of reality.  A truth is not less true because it is in large print.  We recognize creatures who are prodigiously like ourselves, and we laugh at the difference in scale.  Did not all Lilliput laugh over the discovery of Gulliver?  How they rambled over the vast expanse of countenance, recognizing each feature—­lips, cheek, nose, chin, brow.  “How very odd,” they would say to themselves, “and how very like!”

It is to the wholesome obviousness of Dickens that we owe the atmosphere of good cheer that surrounds his characters.  No writer has pictured more scenes of squalid misery, and yet we are not depressed.  There is bad weather enough, but we are not “under the weather.”  There are characters created to be hated.  It is a pleasure to hate them.  As to the others, whenever their trials and tribulations abate for an instant, they relapse into a state of unabashed contentment.

This is unusual in literature, for most literary men are saddest when they write.  The fact is that happiness is much more easy to experience than to describe, as any one may learn in trying to describe a good time he has had.  One good time is very much like another good time.  Moreover, we are shy, and dislike to express our enthusiasm.  We wouldn’t for the world have any one know what simple creatures we are and how little it takes to make us happy.  So we talk critically about a great many things we do not care very much about, and complain of the absence of many things which we do not really miss.  We feel badly about not being invited to a party which we don’t want to go to.

We are like a horse that has been trained to be a “high-stepper.”  By prancing over imaginary difficulties and shying at imaginary dangers he gives an impression of mettlesomeness which is foreign to his native disposition.

The story-teller is on the lookout for these eager attitudes.  He cannot afford to let his characters be too happy.  There is a literary value in misery that he cannot afford to lose.

That “the course of true love never did run smooth” is an assertion of story-tellers rather than of ordinary lovers.  The fact is that nothing is so easy as falling in love and staying there.  It is a very common experience, so common that it attracts little attention.  The course of true love usually runs so smoothly that there is nothing that causes remark.  It is not an occasion of gossip.  Two good-tempered and healthy persons are obviously made for each other.  They know it, and everybody else knows it, and they keep on knowing it, and act, as Joe Gargery would say, “similar, according.”