Chapter VII

I just raise that question. It applies to Dumas and (I think) to most great novelists. But it applies less to Dickens than to most--than to Trollope for instance. And in this very inapplicability lies a secret of Dickens’ weakness which I am to suggest.

His plots are not merely stagey, melodramatic. Carefully examined, they are seen to repeat themselves, under a wealth of disguise, with an almost singular poverty of invention. Let us take one most favourite trick of his--the trick of “the masked battery” as I shall call it: the discomfiture of the villain by the betrayal of his supposed confederate. The characters are artfully assembled for the bad man’s triumph. Of a sudden the confederate rounds on him, gives him away before the audience--usually in a long story, at the end of which the baffled schemer creeps away, usually again to destroy himself. We get this _coup_ as early as in _Oliver Twist_ where Monks blurts out his story. It is repeated in _Nickleby_ when Ralph Nickleby is confronted with the man “Snawley” and by Squeers. In the next novel, _Martin Chuzzlewit_, we get a double dose; Jonas “given away” by an accomplice; Pecksniff explosively denounced by Old Chuzzlewit after a long course of watchful dissimulation. This idea of a long and careful dissimulation so catches hold of Dickens that he goes on to rope into its service in subsequent stories two men who, on his own showing of them, are about the very last two in the world capable of carrying through a strategy so patient--Mr. Micawber in _David Copperfield_ and Mr. Boffin in _Our Mutual Friend_. As a portrait, Mr. Boffin ranks pretty high even in Dickens’ gallery, while Micawber ranks with the very best of his best. But who will assert that either of them could have found it in his nature to behave as the plot compels them to behave? To continue--by just the same trick Quilp gets his exposure in _The Old Curiosity Shop_, Harewood forces the revelation in _Barnaby Rudge_, Lady Dedlock is hunted down in _Bleak House_. The more the peripeteia--the reversal of fortune--disguises itself, the more it is the same thing.