Page:Moral Obligation to be Intelligent.djvu/158

 Our affection convinces us rightly that whatever the literary critic may pronounce upon David Copperfield or Old Curiosity Shop or Our Mutual Friend, the emotions which those books stirred in us were noble. The fact is that Dickens uses the miraculous in both ways at once, as an interpretation and as an account of life. With him the same incident serves to state an ideal and to chronicle a fact. If only his facts had been correct, he would have illustrated the perfect formula of art. As it is, we fall in love with his ideals; and we learn better than to believe his picture of life. He accounted for experience, and explained it, by the simple magic of goodness. Before a good man, the problems of this world melt away. There is a wide difference between this goodness and the old chivalric magic of being right. If one is right, at least one is in unconscious