GREAT EXPECTATIONS.
The compiler has placed in this list only one of Dickens' books for a
somewhat different reason from that which has influenced him in other
cases. All Dickens' novels have a unique value, and such an equal
value, that almost any one of them, chosen at random, can serve as an
example of the rest.
Those who still are not prohibited, by temperamental difficulty or by
some modern fashion, from enjoying the peculiar atmosphere of this
astonishing person's work, will be found reverting to him constantly
and indiscriminately. "Great Expectations" is perhaps, as a more
"artistic" book than the rest, the most fitted of them all to entice
towards a more sympathetic understanding of his mood, those who are
held from reading him by some more or less accidental reason. The most
characteristic thing about this great genius is the power he possesses
of breathing palpable life into what is often called the inanimate.
Like Hans Andersen, the writer of fairy-stories, and, in a measure,
like all children, Dickens endows with fantastic spirituality the most
apparently dead things in our ordinary environment.
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