Page:Works of Charles Dickens, ed. Lang - Volume 18.djvu/15

Rh Hawthorne might have replied that the psychological part of The Haunted Man is very much underdone. "The child out of nature altogether," Dickens says of Pearl, that charmed fantasy. But the Haunted one is "out of nature" also. Fantasy is a perilous field, and psychology was not the forte of Dickens. To lose our memories of wrong done to us would not, it may be argued, destroy sympathy with grief; and Mr. and Mrs. Tetterby, under the ghostly influence, do not lose memory of wrong, but suddenly become conscious of it, even where it did not really exist. Thus the allegory fails, but the virtues and humours of the Tetterbys remain eternally delightful. For all his moral Christmas ghosts, and his interest in the ghostly, Dickens never, I think, wrote a good ghost story au naturel. He brought in the fantastically grotesque: he had not the success in this province, because he had not the seriousness, of De Foe, Scott, and Bulwer Lytton. He could not but bow to the philosophy of Scrooge and indigestion. The Haunted Man was his last Christmas book; in his Christmas numbers he was aided by other hands. ANDREW LANG.