without at least tying a man on to it for the sake of safety. But while this first truth may be evident, the second truth which is the complement of it may easily be forgotten. On the one hand there was no man who could so much enjoy mere intellectual satire apart from humanity as Dickens. On the other hand there was no man who, with another and more turbulent part of his nature, demanded humanity, and demanded its supremacy over intellect, more than Dickens. To put it shortly: there never was a man so much fitted for saying that everything was wrong; and there never was a man who was so desirous of saying that everything was right. Thus, when he met men with whom he violently disagreed, he described them as devils or lunatics; he could not bear to describe them as men. If they could not think with him on essentials he could not stand the idea that they were human souls; he cast them out; he forgot them; and if he could not forget them he caricatured them. He was too emotional to regard them as anything but enemies, if they were not friends. He was too humane not to hate them. Charles Lamb said with his inimitable sleek pungency that he could read all the books there were; he excluded books that cbviously were not books, as cookery books, chessboards bound so as to look like books, and all the works of modern historians and philosophers. One might say in much the same style that Dickens loved all the men in the world; that is he loved all the men whom he was able to recognise as men; the rest he turned into griffins and chimeras without any serious semblance to humanity. Even in his Even in his books he never hates a human being. If he wishes to hate him he adopts the simple expedient of making an inhuman being. Now of these two strands almost the whole of Dickens is made up; they are not only different strands, they are even

antagonistic strands. I mean that the whole of Dickens is made up of the strand of satire and the strand of sentimentalism; and the strand of satire is quite unnecessarily merciless and hostile, and the strand of sentimentalism is quite unnecessarily humanitarian and even maudlin. On the proper interweaving of these two things depends the great part of Dickens's success in a novel. And by the consideration of them we can probably best arrive at the solution of the particular emotional enigma of the novel called Martin Chuzzlewit.

Martin Chuzzlewit is, I think, vaguely unsatisfactory to the reader, vaguely sad and heavy even to the reader who loves Dickens, because in Martin Chuzzlewit more than anywhere else in Dickens's works, more even than in Oliver Twist, there is a predominance of the harsh and hostile sort of humor over the hilarious and the humane. It is absurd to lay down any such little rules for the testing of literature. But this may be broadly said and yet with confidence: that Dickens is always at his best when he is laughing at the people whom he really admires. He is at his most humorous in writing of Mr. Pickwick, who represents passive virtue. He is at his most humorous in writing of Mr. Sam Weller, who represents active virtue. He is never so funny as when he is speaking of people in whom fun itself is a virtue, like the poor people in the Fleet or the Marshalsea. And in the stories that had immediately preceded Martin Chuzzlewit he had consistently concerned himself in the majority of cases with the study of such genial and honorable eccentrics; if they are lunatics they are amiable lunatics. In the last important novel before Martin Chuzzlewit, Barnaby Rudge, the hero himself is an amiable lunatic. In the novel before that, The Old Curiosity Shop, the two comic figures, Dick Swiveller and the Mar

chioness, are not only the most really entertaining, but also the most really sympathetic characters in the book. Before that came Oliver Twist (which is, I have said, an exception), and before that Pickwick, where the hero is, as Mr. Weller says, "an angel in gaiters." Hitherto, then, on the whole, the central Dickens character had been the man who gave to the poor many things, gold and wine and feasting and good advice; but among other things gave them a good laugh at himself. The jolly old English merchant of the Pickwick type was popular on both counts. People liked to see him throw his money in the gutter. They also liked to see him throw himself there occasionally. In both acts they recognized a common quality of virtue.

Now I think it is certainly the disadvantage of Martin Chuzzlewit that none of its absurd characters are thus sympathetic. There are in the book two celebrated characters who are both especially exuberant and amusing even for Dickens, and who are both especially heartless and abominable even for Dickens-I mean of course Mr. Pecksniff on the one hand and Mrs. Gamp on the other. The humor of both of them is gigantesque. Nobody will ever forget the first time he read the words "Now I should be very glad to see Mrs. Todgers's idea of a wooden leg." It is like remembering first love: there is still some sort of ancient sweetness and sting. I am afraid that, in spite of many criticisms to the contrary, I am still unable to take Mr. Pecksniff's hypocrisy seriously. He does not seem to me so much a hypocrite as a rhetorician; he reminds me of Serjeant Buzfuz. A very capable critic, Mr. Noyes, said I was wrong when I suggested in another place that Dickens must have loved Pecksniff. Mr. Noyes thinks it clear that Dickens hated Pecksniff. I cannot believe it. Hatred does indeed linger

round its object as much as love; but not in that way. Dickens is always making Pecksniff say things which have a wild poetical truth about them. Hatred allows no such outbursts of original innocence. But however that may be the broad fact remains-Dickens may or may not have loved Pecksniff comically, but he did not love him seriously; he did not respect him as he certainly respected Sam Weller. The same of course is true of Mrs. Gamp. To any one who appreciates her unctuous and sumptuous conversation it is difficult indeed not to feel that it would be almost better to be killed by Mrs. Gamp than to be saved by a better nurse. But the fact remains. In this book Dickens has not allowed us to love the most absurd people seriously, and absurd people ought to be loved seriously. Pecksniff has to be amusing all the time; the instant he ceases to be laughable he becomes detestable. Pickwick can take his ease at his inn; he can be leisurely, he can be spacious; he can fall into moods of gravity and even of dulness; he is not bound to be always funny or to forfeit the reader's concern, for he is a good man, and therefore even his dulness is beautiful, just as is the dulness of the animal. We can leave Pickwick a little while by the fire to think; for the thoughts of Pickwick, even if they were to go slowly, would be full of all the things that all men care for

old friends and old inns and memory and the goodness of God. But we dare not leave Pecksniff alone for a moment. We dare not leave him thinking by the fire, for the thoughts of Pecksniff would be too frightful.

LORD DUNSANY (1878- >

SHELLS

When the aeroplanes are home and the sunset has flared away, and it is cold, and

night comes down over France, you notice the guns more than you do by day, or else they are actually more active then, I do not know which it is.

It is then as though a herd of giants, things of enormous height, came out from lairs in the earth and began to play with the hills. It is as though they picked up the tops of the hills in their hands and then let them drop rather slowly. It is exactly like hills falling. You see the flashes all along the sky, and then that lumping thump as though the top of the hill had been let drop, not all in one piece, but crumbled a little as it would drop from your hands if you were three hundred feet high and were fooling about in the night, spoiling what it had taken so long to make. That is heavy stuff bursting, a little way off.

If you are anywhere near a shell that is bursting, you can hear in it a curious metallic ring. That applies to the shells of either side, provided that you are near enough, though usually of course it is the hostile shell and not your own that you are nearest to, and so one distinguishes them. It is curious, after such a colossal event as this explosion must be in the life of a bar of steel, that anything should remain at all of the old bell-like voice of the metal, but it appears to, if you listen attentively; it is perhaps its last remonstrance before leaving its shape and going back to rust in the earth again for ages.

Another of the voices of the night is the whine the shell makes in coming; it is not unlike the cry the hyena utters as soon as it's dark in Africa: "How nice a traveler would taste," the hyena seems to say, and "I want dead White Man." It is the rising note of the shell as it comes nearer, and its dying away when it has gone over, that make it reminiscent of the hyena's method of diction. If it is not going over then it has something quite different to say. It begins the same as

the other, it comes up, talking of the back areas with the same long whine as the other. I have heard old hands say "That one is going well over." "Whee-oo," says the shell; but just where the "oo" should be long drawn out and turn into the hyena's final syllable, it says something quite different. "Zarp," it says. That is bad. Those are the shells that are looking for you.

And then of course there is the whizzbang coming from close, along his flat trajectory: he has little to say, but comes like a sudden wind, and all that he has to do is done and over at once.

And then there is the gas shell, who goes over gurgling gluttonously, probably in big herds, putting down a barrage. It is the liquid inside that gurgles before it is turned to gas by the mild explosion; that is the explanation of it; yet that does not prevent one picturing a tribe of cannibals who have winded some nice juicy men and are smacking their chops and dribbling in anticipation.

And a wonderful thing to see, even in those wonderful nights, is our thermite bursting over the heads of the Germans. The shell breaks into a shower of golden rain; one cannot judge easily at night how high from the ground it breaks, but about as high as the tops of trees seen at a hundred yards. It spreads out evenly all round and rains down slowly; it is a bad shower to be out in, and for a long time after it has fallen, the sodden grass of winter, and the mud and old bones beneath it, burn quietly in a circle. On such a night as this, and in such showers, the flying pigs will go over, which take two men to carry each of them; they go over and root right down to the German dugout, where the German has come in out of the golden rain, and they fling it all up in the air.

These are such nights as Scheherazade with all her versatility never dreamed of;

or if such nightmares came she certainly never told of them, or her august master, the Sultan, light of the age, would have had her at once beheaded; and his people Iwould have deemed that he did well. It has been reserved for a modern autocrat to dream such a nightmare, driven to it perhaps by the tales of a white-whiskered Scheherazade, the Lord of the Kiel Canal; and being an autocrat he has made the nightmare a reality for the world. But the nightmare is stronger than its master, and grows mightier every night; and the All-Highest War Lord, learns that there are powers in Hell that are easily summoned by the rulers of earth, but that go not easily home.

A FAMOUS MAN

Last winter a famous figure walked in Behagnies. Soldiers came to see him from their billets all down the Arras road, from Ervillers and from Sapigny, and from the ghosts of villages back from the road, places that once were villages but are only names now. They would walk three or four iniles, those who could not get lorries, for his was one of those names that all men know, not such a name as a soldier or poet may win, but a name that all men know. They used to go there at evening.

Four miles away on the left as you went from Ervillers, the guns mumbled over the hills, low hills over which the Verys from the trenches put up their heads and peered around,-greeny, yellowy heads that turned the sky sickly, and the clouds lit up and went gray again all the night long. As you got near to Behagnies you lost sight of the Verys, but the guns mumbled on. A silly little train used to run on one's left, which used to whistle loudly, as though it asked to be shelled, but I never saw a shell coming its way; perhaps it knew that the German gunners could not calculate how slow it

went. It crossed the road as you got down to Behagnies.

You passed the graves of two or three German soldiers with their names on white wooden crosses,-men killed in 1914; and then a little cemetery of a French cavalry regiment, where a big cross stood in the middle with a wreath and a tricolor badge, and the names of the men. And then one saw trees. That was always a wonder, whether one saw their dark shapes in the evening, or whether one saw them by day, and knew from the look of their leaves whether autumn had come yet, or gone. In winter at evening one just saw the black bulk of them, but that was no less marvellous than seeing them green in summer; trees by the side of the Arras-Bapaume road, trees in middesert in the awful region of Somme. There were not many of them, just a cluster, fewer than the date palms in an oasis in Sahara, but an oasis is an oasis wherever you find it, and a few trees make it. There are little places here and there, few enough as the Arabs know, that the Sahara's deadly sand has never been able to devastate; and there are places even in the Somme that German malice, obeying the Kaiser as the sand of Sahara obeys the accursed sirocco, has not been able to destroy quite to the uttermost. That little cluster of trees at Behagnies is one of these; Divisional Headquarters used to shelter beneath them; and near them was a statue on a lawn which probably stood by the windows of some fine house, though there is no trace of the house but the lawn and that statue now.

And over the way on the left a little further on, just past the officers' club, a large hall stood where one saw that famous figure, whom officers and men alike would come far to see.

The hall would hold perhaps four or five hundred seats in front of a stage fitted up very simply with red, white and

blue cloths, but fitted up by some one that understood the job; and at the back of that stage on those winter evenings walked on his flat and world-renowned feet the figure of Charlie Chaplin.

When aeroplanes came over bombing, the dynamos used to stop for they supplied light to other places besides the cinema, and the shade of Charlie Chaplin would fade away. But the men would wait till the aeroplanes had gone and that famous figure came waddling back to the screen. There he amused tired men newly come from the trenches, there he brought laughter to most of the twelve days that they had out of the line.

He is gone from Behagnies now. He did not march in the retreat a little apart from the troops, with head bent forward and hand thrust in jacket, a flat-footed Napoleon: yet he is gone; for no one would have left behind for the enemy so precious a thing as a Charlie Chaplin film. He is gone but he will return. He will come with his cane one day along that Arras road to the old hut in Behagnies; and men dressed in brown will welcome him there again.

He will pass beyond it through those desolate plains, and over the hills beyond them, beyond Bapaume. Far hamlets to the east will know his antics.

And one day surely, in old familiar garb, without court dress, without removing his hat, armed with that flexible cane, he will walk over the faces of the Prussian Guard and, picking up the Kaiser by the collar, with infinite nonchalance in finger and thumb, will place him neatly in a prone position and solemnly sit on his chest.

look better than before, but it looks what it is. Not sudden April showers are meant, sparkling and revivifying, but a drizzle, thin and eternal, as if the rain were no more than the shadow cast by a sky as unchanging as poverty. When real night comes, then the street lamps dissolve ochreous hollows in the murk. It was such a day as that; it was not night, for the street lamps were not alight. There was no sound. The rain was as noiseless as the passage of time. Two other wayfarers were in the street with me. One had no right there, nor anywhere, and knew it, slinking along with his head and tail held low, trailing a length of string through the puddles. The other, too, seemed lost. He was idling as if one street was the same as another, and on that day there was rain in all. He came towards me, with his hands in his pockets and his coat collar up. He turned on me briskly, with a sudden decision, when he drew level. Water dripped from the peak of his cap, and his clothes were heavy and dark with it. He spoke. "Mister, could ye give me a hand up? I've made a mess of it." His cheerful and rather insolent assurance faltered for a moment. He then mumbled: "I've been on the booze y'understand." But there was still something in his tone which suggested that any good man might have done the same thing.

It is not easy to be even sententious with the sinful when an open confession robs us of our moral prerogative, so I only told him that it seemed likely booze had something to do with it. His age could have been forty; but it was not easy to judge, for the bridge of his nose was a livid depression. Some accident had pushed in his face under the eyes, giving him the battered aspect of ancient sin. His sinister appearance would have frightened any timid lady if he had stopped her in such a street, on such a