V
I perceive, Gentlemen, that in my hurry I have let slip a great part of the secret, and so will add but this in hasty summary, catching up, before retreat, my cloak of advocatus diaboli:
(1) In the first place, Dickens’ world was not a world of ideas at all, but a city “full of folk.” Compared with the world as Carlyle saw it, or Clough, or Martineau, or Newman, or Arnold, it is void of ideas, if not entirely unintellectual.
(2) Moreover, and secondly, it is a vivid hurrying world; but the characters in it—until you come to Pip, say, in Great Expectations—are all quite curiously static; and, as the exception proves the rule, I am not afraid to back this assertion against Martin Chuzzlewit, for example, in which young Martin is, of set purpose, to be converted out of the family selfishness. Things happen to Mr. Pecksniff, to Little Nell, to Mr. Micawber, to Mr. Dombey, to Bradley Headstone and Eugene Wraybourne, to Sally Brass and her brother: but, as the rule, these things do not happen within them, as such things happen in the soul of any protagonist in a novel by Tolstoy or Dostoievsky, or as they are intended and traced as happening (say) in Romola. Dombey’s conversion is a mere stage-trick; and, for Micawber’s apotheosis as a prosperous colonist, let him believe it who will.