Tolstoy, and Nietzsche are among the writers whose peculiar sense of
the world I recognize as more or less akin to my own. Mark the word
peculiar. I read Dickens and Shakespear without shame or stint;
but their pregnant observations and demonstrations of life are not
co-ordinated into any philosophy or religion: on the contrary, Dickens's
sentimental assumptions are violently contradicted by his observations;
and Shakespear's pessimism is only his wounded humanity. Both have the
specific genius of the fictionist and the common sympathies of human
feeling and thought in pre-eminent degree. They are often saner and
shrewder than the philosophers just as Sancho-Panza was often saner and
shrewder than Don Quixote. They clear away vast masses of oppressive
gravity by their sense of the ridiculous, which is at bottom a
combination of sound moral judgment with lighthearted good humor. But
they are concerned with the diversities of the world instead of with its
unities: they are so irreligious that they exploit popular religion for
professional purposes without delicacy or scruple (for example, Sydney
Carton and the ghost in Hamlet!): they are anarchical, and cannot
balance their exposures of Angelo and Dogberry, Sir Leicester Dedlock
and Mr Tite Barnacle, with any portrait of a prophet or a worthy leader:
they have no constructive ideas: they regard those who have them as
dangerous fanatics: in all their fictions there is no leading thought or
inspiration for which any man could conceivably risk the spoiling of
his hat in a shower, much less his life. Both are alike forced to borrow
motives for the more strenuous actions of their personages from
the common stockpot of melodramatic plots; so that Hamlet has to
be stimulated by the prejudices of a policeman and Macbeth by the
cupidities of a bushranger. Dickens, without the excuse of having to
manufacture motives for Hamlets and Macbeths, superfluously punt his
crew down the stream of his monthly parts by mechanical devices which I
leave you to describe, my own memory being quite baffled by the simplest