ism. The very blood is affected and given a set rhythm; the most secret and remote parts of the individual are penetrated, even to the artistic where the separate entity is usually most pronounced. For as an artist also the Englishman is more racially-minded than the German or the Frenchman. For this reason every artist in England, every authentic poet, has struggled with his English inheritance; but even the most desperate and violent hatred has not succeeded in suppressing the tradition. Its subtle roots extend too deeply into the spiritual soil. To cut away the English is to disrupt the entire organism and make it bleed to death of its wound. A few aristocrats, filled with yearnings to become citizens of the world, have made the attempt: Byron, Shelley, Oscar Wilde wished to annihilate the peculiarly English part of themselves, because they detested the inevitable English smugness. But they merely shattered their own lives. The English tradition is the most powerful, the most victorious in the world, but it is also the most inimical to art. It is the most inimical because it is so insidious in its appeal; it is not barren nor chilling, not unsociable nor inhospitable; it lures with the warm fire of its hearth and with its mild comfort. But it functions to the detriment of the free artistic impulse, confining it within moral boundaries, within set limitations. The English tradition is that of a modest dwelling with stuffy air, protected against the dangerous storms of life, cheerful, friendly, and sociable, a genuine home warmed by the fires of Philistine contentment; but it is a prison for those whose home is the world and whose deepest pleasure consists in a nomadically free and adventurous coursing across the unbounded. Dickens made himself at home in the English tradition; he set up housekeeping within its four walls. The sphere he was born into suited him perfectly; and during his entire life he never once overstepped the artistic, moral, or aesthetic limitations of his country. He was not a revolutionary. His art compromised with his blood until blood was the determining factor. Everything that Dickens has done rests securely on the foundation of a hundred-year tradition in England, and never deflects from it more than a hair's breadth; still, he raises the structure to unexpected heights by his charming architectonics. His works are the unconscious will of his nation transmitted into art; and when we point out the intensity, the peculiar advantages, and the lost opportunities of his creations, we are always dealing simultaneously with England.
