Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 2. On His Own and Others’ Poetry
Section 2. On Poets and Poetry
Philosophers, Intellectuals, Novelists and Musicians

Dickens and Balzac [2]

Charles Dickens says, that is, makes a character speak (seriously): “My eyes stood staring above his head”!

Dickens is the most slipshod of all English writers — his English style is not worth a cuss. This sentence is the proof. The character’s “eyes stood above somebody else’s head staring” no doubt at their own position in astonishment at his English.

His merit lies in his stories and characters (some of them) not in his language which is bad. The same may be said of Balzac who is the greatest of French novelists but the worst of French writers.

13 June 1938