Chapter II

Dickens was a great _novelist_--as I should contend, the greatest of English novelists--and certainly among the greatest of all the greatest European novelists. His failing was that he did not quite trust his genius for the novel, but was persuaded that it could be bettered by learning from the drama--from the bad drama of his time. But I want you to see, Gentlemen, how honourable was the artist’s endeavour; how creditable, if mistaken, to the man. He was a born _improvisatore_. _Pickwick_, under your eyes, takes a shape--conceives it, finds it--as the story goes on. Then shape he must struggle for; the idea of “shape” has, against his genius, taken hold on him. So _Pickwick_ is not finished before he begins a new story, never thinking to repeat, by similar methods, _Pickwick’s_ overwhelming success. No, the responsibility of that success weighs on him; but it is a responsibility to improve. The weakness of _Pickwick_, undertaken as a series of mock-sporting episodes, lies in its desultoriness. This time we will have a well-knit plot. And so we get _Oliver Twist_ and _Nicholas Nickleby_, each with any amount of plot, but of plot in the last degree stagey; so stagey, indeed, that in _Nickleby_ the critic gasps at the complacency of an author who, having created that “nurseling of immortality” Mr. Vincent Crummles, together with a world and the atmosphere of that world in which Crummles breathes and moves and has his being, can work the strings of the puppet with so fine a finger, detect its absurdities with so sure an instinct and reveal them with so riotous a joy; yet misses to see that he himself is committing absurdities just as preposterous, enormities of the very same category, on page after page. The story of Lord Frederick Verisopht and Sir Mulberry Hawke, for example, is right Crummles from beginning to end. Crummles could have composed it in his sleep,--and to say this, mind you, is to convey in the very censure an implicit compliment--or, shall I use a more modest word and say implicit homage? Crummles could have written a great part of _Nickleby_: but Crummles could only have written it after Dickens had made him. I seem to hear the two arguing it out in some _Dialogue of the Dead_.

_Auctor._ “My dear Crummles, however _did_ you contrive to be what
you are?”

_Crummles._ “Why, don’t you see, Mr. Dickens? You created me in
your image.” (_sotto voce_) “And, he doesn’t know it, poor great
fellow, but it seems to me I’ve been pretty smart in returning the
compliment.”