![]() ![]() ![]() A thing that is absorbed as early as that does not come up against any critical judgement. Many children begin to know his characters by sight before they can even read, for on the whole Dickens was lucky in his illustrators. Probably there are copies of one or two of his books lying about in an actual majority of English homes. And with Dickens the same forces of association are at work. What one enjoys is not so much the poems themselves as the memories they call up. For instance, nearly everyone feels a sneaking affection for the patriotic poems that he learned by heart as a child, "Ye Mariners of England", the "Charge of the Light Brigade" and so forth. At the time this causes rebellion and vomiting, but it may have different after-effects in later life. He happens to be one of those "great authors' who are ladled down everyone's throat in childhood. In Dickens's case the complicating factor is his familiarity. As a rule, an æsthetic preference is either something inexplicable or it is so corrupted by non-æsthetic motives as to make one wonder whether the whole of literary criticism is not a huge network of humbug. That kind of question is never easy to answer. ![]()
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