“Bleak House”

There was a time when, posing as a purist, I thought it fine to criticize and crab CHARLES DICKENS as a crude caricaturist, Who laid his colours on too thick and slab, Who lacked the temper of a judge or jurist And made life lurid when it should be drab; In short I branded as a brilliant dauber The man who gave us Pecksniff and Micawber.

True, there are blots—like spots upon the sun— And genius, lavish of imagination, In sheer profusion always has outrun The bounds of strict artistic concentration; But when detraction’s worst is said and done, How much remains for fervent admiration, How much that never palls or wounds or sickens (Unlike some moderns) in great generous DICKENS!

And in Bleak House, the culminating story That marks the zenith of his swift career, The sovereign qualities that won him glory, As writer and reformer, all appear: Righteous resentment of abuses hoary, Of pomp and cant, self-centred, insincere; And burning sympathy that glows unchecked For those who sit in darkness and neglect.

Who, if his heart be not of steel or stone, Can read unmoved of Charley or of Jo; Of dear Miss Flite, who, though her wits be flown, Has kept a soul as pure as driven snow; Of the fierce “man from Shropshire” overthrown By Law’s delays; of Caddy’s inky woe; Or of the alternating fits and fluster That harass the unhappy slavey, Guster?

And there are scores of characters so vivid They make us friends or enemies for life: Hortense, half-tamed she-wolf, with envy livid; The patient Snagsby and his shrewish wife; The amorous Guppy, who poor Esther chivvied; Tempestuous Boythorn, revelling in strife; Skimpole, the honey-tongued artistic cadger; And that tremendous woman, Mrs. Badger.

No wonder then that, when we seek awhile Relief and respite from War’s strident chorus, Few books more swiftly charm us to a smile, Few books more truly hearten and restore us Than his, whose art was potent to beguile Thousands of weary souls who came before us— No wonder, when the Huns, who ban our fiction, Were fain to free him from their malediction.