Chapter V

I perceive, Gentlemen, that in my hurry I have let slip a great part of the secret, and so will add but this in hasty summary, catching up, before retreat, my cloak of _advocatus diaboli_:

(1) In the first place, Dickens’ world was not a world of ideas at all, but a city “full of folk.” Compared with the world as Carlyle saw it, or Clough, or Martineau, or Newman, or Arnold, it is void of ideas, if not entirely unintellectual.

(2) Moreover, and secondly, it is a vivid hurrying world; but the characters in it--until you come to Pip, say, in _Great Expectations_--are all quite curiously static; and, as the exception proves the rule, I am not afraid to back this assertion against _Martin Chuzzlewit_, for example, in which young Martin is, of set purpose, to be converted out of the family selfishness. Things happen to Mr. Pecksniff, to Little Nell, to Mr. Micawber, to Mr. Dombey, to Bradley Headstone and Eugene Wraybourne, to Sally Brass and her brother: but, _as the rule_, these things do not happen _within them_, as such things happen in the soul of any protagonist in a novel by Tolstoy or Dostoievsky, or as they are intended and traced as happening (say) in _Romola_. Dombey’s conversion is a mere stage-trick; and, for Micawber’s apotheosis as a prosperous colonist, let him believe it who will.

VI

Further--and to conclude on this point--over and beyond its infertility of thought, Dickens’ is a world in which technical or professional skill never comes into play to promote anything on earth. We have spoken of his clergy. His innumerous lawyers, from the Lord Chancellor to Messrs. Dodson and Fogg (assisted by his own personal experience in the Law’s service), draw their money for exculpating the guilty or slowly killing the righteous through hope deferred:

The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office--

Equally with lawyers (readers of epitaphs and of _David Copperfield_ will take the allusion) “physicians are in vain.” It would be interesting [I do not suggest it as a subject of research for a Ph.D. degree] to count the number of births in Dickens’ novels and discover an _accoucheur_ who did not contrive to lose either the mother or the child, or both.