This is not only
because his tales are indeed as crowded and populous as towns: for truly
it was not so much that Dickens appeared as that a hundred Dickens
characters appeared. It is also because he was the sort of man who has
the impersonal impetus of a mob: what Poe meant when he truly said that
popular rumour, if really spontaneous, was like the intuition of the
individual man of genius. Those who speak scornfully of the ignorance of
the mob do not err as to the fact itself; their error is in not seeing
that just as a crowd is comparatively ignorant, so a crowd is
comparatively innocent. It will have the old and human faults; but it is
not likely to specialise in the special faults of that particular
society: because the effort of the strong and successful in all ages is
to keep the poor out of society. If the higher castes have developed
some special moral beauty or grace, as they occasionally do (for
instance, mediaeval chivalry), it is likely enough, of course, that the
mass of men will miss it. But if they have developed some perversion or
over-emphasis, as they much more often do (for instance, the Renaissance
poisoning), then it will be the tendency of the mass of men to miss that
too.
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