OTHER DICKENS
121
or temperament a common accessibility to the gregarious London
life and the resounding public occasion. This does not keep some
of them from enjoying a high degree of intimacy with Dickens.
Forster and Collins obviously share his confidences and know his
opinions on most subjects. It is not in them, however, to
be
to
Dickens what, say, Schiller was to Goethe, or George Sand to Flau–
bert, or Hawthorne to Melville. Evidently it is not in Dickens to
require friends and correspondents of this stature, and the absence
of them is doubtless felt as a loss to his letters considered as literary
documents. He is often discriminating in what he says about works
of literature, including his own works. But he is best in his power–
ful feeling for the general responsibilities and privileges of the liter–
ary profession. He is untempted by those further reaches of thought
which, for many writers, make the exchange of letters with their
peers an adventure and a necessity.
The power of thought displayed in his letters
is
of another
kind. It stems from his concentration upon the world of actual
experience, above all the world of social experience. The imposition
of a new industrial order on a feudal order of long standing throws
that world into confusion, fear and misery; and Dickens's mind is
constantly harassed and exercised by the spectacle. But he takes
thought of the abuses only with the intention of taking action
against them. The
habit
of reform, which afflicts others of his time
and will afflict even a Shaw, is absent from Dickens's temperament.
In his letters he denounces the abuses rather less often than we
should expect of so famous a champion of the unfortunate. He is
too busy with his actual attempts at reform to devote much passion
to their manifestations and causes.
It
is during his first tour of the
United States, where he is not only greatly disappointed but-as a
foreigner----relatively helpless to do anything, that he
is
most fiercely
and consistently the social critic. Even in America, however, the
essential concern of his criticism
is
clear. It
is
directed chiefly
against the failures of intelligence and feeling in individuals.
Whether he
is
criticizing the new practice of solitary confinement
in
prisons, or the tendency to conformity among writers, or the
national love of boasting and snooping, Dickens usually comes
down to the problem of personality. And although his name has
