A History of English Literature

many of the characters suggest at the outset. Indeed Dickens has been
rightly designated a grotesque novelist--the greatest of all grotesque
novelists. Similarly his pathos is often exaggerated until it passes into
mawkish sentimentality, so that his humbly-bred heroines, for example, are
made to act and talk with all the poise and certainty which can really
spring only from wide experience and broad education. Dickens' zeal for
reform, also, sometimes outruns his judgment or knowledge and leads him to
assault evils that had actually been abolished long before he wrote.
No other English author has approached Dickens in the number of characters
whom he has created; his twenty novels present literally thousands of
persons, almost all thoroughly human, except for the limitations that we
have already noted. Their range is of course very great, though it never
extends successfully into the 'upper' social classes. For Dickens was
violently prejudiced against the nobility and against all persons of high
social standing, and when he attempted to introduce them created only
pitifully wooden automatons. For the actual English gentleman we must pass
by his Sir Leicester Dedlocks and his Mr. Veneerings to novelists of a very
different viewpoint, such as Thackeray and Meredith.
Dickens' inexhaustible fertility in characters and scenes is a main cause
of the rather extravagant lack of unity which is another conspicuous
feature of his books. He usually made a good preliminary general plan and
proceeded on the whole with firm movement and strong suspense. But he
always introduces many characters and sub-actions not necessary to the main
story, and develops them quite beyond their real artistic importance. Not
without influence here was the necessity of filling a specified number of
serial instalments, each of a definite number of pages, and each requiring
a striking situation at the end. Moreover, Dickens often follows the
eighteenth-century picaresque habit of tracing the histories of his heroes
from birth to marriage. In most respects, however, Dickens' art improved as
he proceeded. The love element, it should be noted, as what we have already
said implies, plays a smaller part than usual among the various aspects of
life which his books present.
Not least striking among Dickens' traits is his power of description. His
observation is very quick and keen, though not fine; his sense for the
characteristic features, whether of scenes in Nature or of human
personality and appearance, is unerring; and he has never had a superior in
picturing and conveying the atmosphere both of interiors and of all kinds
of scenes of human life. London, where most of his novels are wholly or
chiefly located, has in him its chief and most comprehensive portrayer.
Worthy of special praise, lastly, is the moral soundness of all Dickens'
work, praise which is not seriously affected by present-day sneers at his
'middle-class' and 'mid-Victorian' point of view. Dickens' books, however,
like his character, are destitute of the deeper spiritual quality, of
poetic and philosophic idealism. His stories are all admirable
demonstrations of the power and beauty of the nobler practical virtues, of
kindness, courage, humility, and all the other forms of unselfishness; but
for the underlying mysteries of life and the higher meanings of art his
positive and self-formed mind had very little feeling. From first to last
he speaks authentically for the common heart of humanity, but he is not one
of the rarer spirits, like Spenser or George Eliot or Meredith, who
transport us into the realm of the less tangible realities. All his
limitations, indeed, have become more conspicuous as time has passed; and
critical judgment has already definitely excluded him from the select ranks
of the truly greatest authors.