him. In _The Chimes_, conceived in quite his casual and charitable
season, with the _Christmas Carol_ and the _Cricket on the Hearth_, he
hit hard at the economists. Ruskin, in the same fashion, would have told
him that the worst thing about the economists was that they were not
economists: that they missed many essential things even in economics.
But Dickens did not know whether they were economists or not: he only
knew that they wanted hitting. Thus, to take a last case out of many,
Dickens travelled in a French railway train, and noticed that this
eccentric nation provided him with wine that he could drink and
sandwiches he could eat, and manners he could tolerate. And remembering
the ghastly sawdust-eating waiting-rooms of the North English railways,
he wrote that rich chapter in _Mugby Junction_. Matthew Arnold could
have told him that this was but a part of the general thinning down of
European civilisation in these islands at the edge of it; that for two
or three thousand years the Latin society has learnt how to drink wine,
and how not to drink too much of it. Dickens did not in the least
understand the Latin society: but he did understand the wine. If (to
prolong an idle but not entirely false metaphor) we have called Carlyle
a man who saw and Arnold a man who knew, we might truly call Dickens a
man who tasted, that is, a man who really felt. In spite of all the
silly talk about his vulgarity, he really had, in the strict and
serious sense, good taste. All real good taste is gusto--the power of
appreciating the presence--or the absence--of a particular and positive
pleasure. He had no learning; he was not misled by the label on the
bottle--for that is what learning largely meant in his time. He opened
his mouth and shut his eyes and saw what the Age of Reason would give
him. And, having tasted it, he spat it out.

I am constrained to consider Dickens here among the fighters; though I
ought (on the pure principles of Art) to be considering him in the