| His pictures are hardly handsome, and he, like
everybody else, is less handsome than his pictures. That fashion he has
of brushing his hair and goatee so resolutely forward gives him a comical
Scotch-terrier look about the face,which is rather heightened than otherwise
by his portentous dignity and gravity. But that queer old head took on a
sort of beauty, bye and bye, and a fascinating interest, as I thought of
the wonderful mechanism within it, the complex but exquisitely adjusted
machinery that could create men and women, and put the breath of life into
them and alter all their ways and actions, elevate them, degrade them, murder
them, marry them, conduct them through good and evil, through joy and sorrow,
on their long march from the cradle to the grave, and never lose its godship
over them, never make a mistake! I almost imagined I could see the wheels
and pulleys work. This was Dickens--Dickens. There was no question about
that, and yet it was not right easy to realize it. Somehow this puissant
god seemed to be only a man, after all. How the great do tumble from their
high pedestals when we see them in common human flesh, and know that they
eat pork and cabbage and act like other men. - Letter to the San Francisco Alta California, February 5, 1868 |
 |
I must fain confess that with the years I have lost much of my youthful admiration
for Dickens. In saying so, it seems a little as if one were wilfully heretic;
but the truth must prevail. I don't know where it is exactly, but I cannot laugh
and cry with him as I was wont. I seem to see all the machinery of the business
too clearly, the effort is too patent. The true and lasting genius of humour
does not drag you thus to boxes labelled 'pathos,' 'humour,' and show you all
the mechanism of the inimitable puppets that are going to perform. How I used
to laugh at Simon Tapperwit, and the Wellers, and a host more! But I can't do
it now somehow; and time, it seems to me, is the true test of humour. It must
be antiseptic.
- interview in Sydney (Australia) Morning Herald, September 17, 1895,
pp. 5-6.
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