(Childe Harold, III. 6.)
Or again:
The mind can make
Substance, and people planets of its own
With beings brighter than have been, and give
A breath to forms which can outlive all flesh....
(The Dream, st. 1.)
Note you particularly, if you will, the words “planets of its own....” We talk too often, perhaps (I have talked in this fashion myself unheedingly), as if these men had been makers of picture-galleries, lining their walls with lively characters, brilliant portraits. But in truth neither Chaucer’s Prologue nor Shakespeare’s succession of women, neither Redgauntlet nor David Copperfield, is a gallery of characters; but a planet rather, with its own atmosphere which the characters breathe; in which as proper inhabitants they move easily and have their natural being: while for us all great literature is a catholic hostelry, in which we seat ourselves at the board with Falstaff, Dugald Dalgetty, Sam Weller, the Wife of Bath, Mrs. Gamp and Mrs. Quickly, and wonder how soon Don Quixote, My Uncle Toby, or The Three Musketeers will knock in to share the good meat and the wine.
II
So, between a discussion of Dickens’ plots—which we examined a fortnight ago and found wanting—at once stagey and ill-knit and, at that, repetitive, poor in invention; and of his characters, which teemed from his brain in a procession closed only by their author’s death, so inexhaustibly various and withal so individual, vivid and distinct, that the critic can scarcely help telling himself, “Here, and only here, must lie the secret of the man’s genius”; I shall interpose to-day a few words upon this world of Dickens, with its atmosphere.