VI
None the less, and to the end, Dickens the artist is hag-ridden by this business of “plot,” which for him meant “stage-plot.” It hampers him in book after book, as its silly exigencies perpetually get in the way of the reader’s pleasure, even of the reader’s understanding. His genius did not lie that way, any more than did Shakespeare’s. I put in this comparison, for it can never be untimely for a Professor of English Literature to get in a word to damn the school-books which present Shakespeare to you as chasing along his shelves for some Italian novel to provide him with a new plot. Oh, believe me, Gentlemen—after The Comedy of Errors and that sort of thing, Shakespeare never bothered any more about his plots or whence he took them. It is very right indeed for a young author to sweat his soul over “plot” structure. But, through practice, there comes a time—suddenly, it may be, but as sure in his development as puberty in his physical growth—when lo! he has a hundred plots to his hand, if heaven would but grant him time to treat them. I often wonder why men blame the elder Dumas so severely, accepting the allegation that he employed hirelings—viciously termed by the critic his “ghosts” or his “devils.” Why, if you have an imagination teeming, like Dumas’, with stories to make men happier—why, knowing how short is life and that you cannot, on this side of the grave, tell one-fifth of these with your own pen—why go to that grave leaving the world, through that scruple, so much imaginatively the poorer? Only the thing should be done frankly, openly, of course.