This in itself is a great title to honour; it is his main work, his noblest title.  His sphere was wide, but not at all general; it was strictly limited to the range of his own indefatigable observations.  He hardly ever drew a character or painted a scene, even of the most subordinate kind, which he had not studied from the life with minute care, and whenever he did for a moment wander out of his limits, he made an egregious failure.  But this task of his, to cast the sunshine of pathos and of genial mirth over the humblest, dullest, and most uninviting of our fellow-creatures, was a great social mission to which his whole genius was devoted.  No waif and stray was so repulsive, no drudge was so mean, no criminal was so atrocious, but what Charles Dickens could feel for him some ray of sympathy, or extract some pathetic mirth out of his abject state.  And Dickens does not look on the mean and the vile as do Balzac and Zola, that is, from without, like the detective or the surgeon.  He sees things more or less from their point of view:  he feels with the Marchioness:  he himself as a child was once a Smike:  he cannot help liking the fun of the Artful Dodger:  he has been a good friend to Barkis:  he likes Traddles:  he loves Joe:  poor Nancy ends her vile life in heroism:  and even his brute of a dog worships Bill Sikes.

Here lies the secret of his power over such countless millions of readers.  He not only paints a vast range of ordinary humanity and suffering or wearied humanity, but he speaks for it and lives in it himself, and throws a halo of imagination over it, and brings home to the great mass of average readers a new sense of sympathy and gaiety.  This humane kinship with the vulgar and the common, this magic which strikes poetry out of the dust of the streets, and discovers traces of beauty and joy in the most monotonous of lives, is, in the true and best sense of the term, Christ-like, with a message and gospel of hope.  Thackeray must have had Charles Dickens in his mind when he wrote:  “The humourous writer professes to awaken and direct your love, your pity, your kindness—­your scorn for untruth, pretension, imposture—­your tenderness for the weak, the poor, the oppressed, the unhappy.”  Charles Dickens, of all writers of our age, assuredly did this in every work of his pen, for thirty-three years of incessant production.  It is his great title to honour; and a novelist can desire no higher title than this.

There is another quality in which Charles Dickens is supreme—­in purity.  Here is a writer who is realistic, if ever any writer was, in the sense of having closely observed the lowest strata of city life, who has drawn the most miserable outcasts, the most abandoned men and women in the dregs of society, who has invented many dreadful scenes of passion, lust, seduction, and debauchery; and yet in forty works and more you will not find a page which a mother need withhold from her grown daughter.  As Thackeray