I have been told that it would have greatly surprised Dickens to be
informed that he "went down the broad road of the Revolution."
Of course it would. Criticism does not exist to say about authors
the things that they knew themselves. It exists to say the things
about them which they did not know themselves. If a critic says
that the "Iliad" has a pagan rather than a Christian pity, or that it
is full of pictures made by one epithet, of course he does not mean
that Homer could have said that. If Homer could have said that
the critic would leave Homer to say it. The function of criticism,
if it has a legitimate function at all, can only be one function--that
of dealing with the subconscious part of the author's mind which
only the critic can express, and not with the conscious part of the
author's mind, which the author himself can express. Either criti-
cism is no good at all (a very defensible position) or else criticism
means saying about an author the very things that would have
made him jump out of his boots.

Doubtless the name in this case "Great Expectations" is an
empty coincidence; and indeed it is not in the books of the later
Dickens period (the period of "Great Expectations"), that we
should look for the best examples of this sanguine and expectant
spirit which is the essential of the man's genius. There are plenty
of good examples of it especially in the earlier works. But even in
the earlier works there is no example of it more striking or more
satisfactory than "The Old Curiosity Shop." It is particularly
noticeable in the fact that its opening and original framework
express the idea of a random experience, a thing come across in
the street; a single face in the crowd, followed until it tells its
story. Master Humphrey the Hunchback, who was fond of
wandering about London in the dead of night, is of course for
practical purposes merely Dickens himself, who was fond of
wandering about London in the dead of night. Little Nell is
merely a poor child seen in the street and tracked to her tiny
home, half in idleness and half in pity. Dickens is wandering with
his note-book, or perhaps rather with his sketch-book. Though
the thing ends in a novel it begins in a sketch; it begins as one of
the "Sketches by Boz." There is something unconsciously artistic
in the very clumsiness of this opening. Master Humphrey starts
to keep a scrap-book of all his adventures, and he finds that he
can fill the whole scrap-book with the sequels and developments of
one adventure; he goes out to notice everybody and he finds
himself busily and variedly occupied only in watching somebody.
In this there is a very profound truth about the true excitement
and inexhaustible poetry of life. The truth is not so much that

-viii-