Nor do they deal in words and looks
Found only in the story-books.
No! For these beings use their brains,
Have pulse and vigor in their veins;
They move, they act; they take and give
E’en as the master wills; they live—
Live to the limit of their scope,
Their anger, pleasure, terror, hope.
His stories are never puppet-plays and they never have the concentrated color which the theater demands. Nor was this because he was not a constant playgoer, enjoying the drama in all its manifestations. Altho he had no close intimacy with actor-folk, such as Dickens had with Macready and later with Fechter, he was for years meeting at the weekly Punch dinners, Douglas Jerrold, Mark Lemon and Tom Taylor, all of them playwrights by profession.
Nor were his novels influenced in any marked degree by the dramatists, since it was not the plays of Cervantes and Fielding and Balzac that attracted him but their richer and more varied works of fiction. On the other hand, the novels of Dickens reveal the impress made upon him by the melodramas and by the farces which had a fleeting vogue in his early manhood; he relished the boldly melodramatic and he revelled in the broadly farcical. More especially was Dickens under the domination of Ben Jonson, whose plays were still occasionally seen on the stage when Dickens was young and impressionable. It might almost be said that Dickens transferred the method of the comedy-of-humors from the play to the novel; and it is significant that when he made his first appearance as an amateur actor it was to assume the superbly caricatural character of Captain Bobadil. It is perhaps because of Dickens’ theatricality that he exerted a deep and wide influence upon the British playwrights from 1840 to 1870, whereas it was not until Robertson began in 1865 to deal more simply with life than the immediately preceding playwrights of Great Britain, that any of the English writers of comedy allowed himself to profit by Thackeray’s less highly colored portrayals of men and manners.