Note 182 — Chapter II

It is curious that with as strong a view in the opposite direction, and with an equally mistaken exaltation, above the writer's ordinary level, of a book which on the whole was undoubtedly below it, Mr. Taine speaks of Hard Times as that one of Dickens's romances which is a summary of all the rest: exalting instinct above reason, and the intuitions of the heart above practical knowledge; attacking all education based on statistic figures and facts; heaping sorrow and ridicule on the practical mercantile people; fighting against the pride, hardness, and selfishness of the merchant and noble; cursing the manufacturing towns for imprisoning bodies in smoke and mud, and souls in falsehood and factitiousness;—while it contrasts, with that satire of social oppression, lofty eulogy of the oppressed; and searches out poor workmen, jugglers, foundlings, and circus people, for types of good sense, sweetness of disposition, generosity, delicacy, and courage, to perpetual confusion of the pretended knowledge, pretended happiness, pretended virtue, of the rich and powerful who trample upon them! This is a fair specimen of the exaggerations with which exaggeration is rebuked, in Mr. Taine's and much similar criticism.