It is a profitable experience for one who read Dickens forty years ago to try to read him now. Last winter I forced myself through the “Tale of Two Cities.” It was a sheer dead pull from start to finish. It all seemed so insincere, such a transparent make-believe, a mere piece of acting. My sympathies were hardly once touched. I was not insensible to the marvelous genius displayed in the story, but it left me cold and unmoved. A feeling of unreality haunted me on every page. The fault may have been my own. I give myself reluctantly to a novel, yet I love to be entirely mastered by one. But my poor success with this one, of course, makes me think that Dickens’s hold upon the future is not at all secure. A man of wonderful talents, but of no deep seriousness; a matchless mimic through and through, and nothing else. But I am proud to add that my boy, a youth of eighteen, reads his books with great enthusiasm. Natural, irrepressible humor is always welcome; but the humor of the grotesque, the exaggerated, the distorted, is like a fashion in dress: it has its day. How surely we tire of the loud, the too pronounced, the merely peculiar, whether it be in carpets and wall-papers, or in books and art! The common, the average, the universal, quickened with a new spirit, imbued with a vernal freshness--that is the stuff of enduring works. One often wonders what is the secret of the vitality of such a book as Dana’s “Two Years before the Mast.” Each succeeding generation reads it with the same pleasure. I can myself re-read it every ten or a dozen years. Parkman’s “Oregon Trail” has much of the same perennial charm as has Franklin’s autobiography. How far perfect seriousness and good faith carry in literature! Why should they not count for just as much here as in life? They count in anything. The least bit of acting and pretense, and the words ring false. The effort of the writer of books like “Two Years before the Mast” is always entirely serious and truthful; his eye is single; he has no vanities to display before the reader. Compare this book with such a record as Stevenson’s “Inland Voyage” or his “Travels with a Donkey.” Here the effort is mainly literary, and we get the stimulus of words rather than of things; we are one remove more from reality. General Grant’s “Memoirs,” I think, are likely to last, because of their deep seriousness and good faith. The effort here is not a literary one, but a real one. The writer is not occupied with his manner, but with his matter. Had Grant had any literary vanity or ambition, is it at all probable that his narrative would cleave to us as it does? The near presence of death would probably cure any man of his vanity, if he had any; but Grant never had any.