an artist in the construction and the evolution of a story. But his development was his own work, and it is a fact that should redound eternally to his honour that he began in newspaper English, and by the production of an imitation of the novela picaresca--a string of adventures as broken and disconnected as the adventures of Lazarillo de Tormes or Peregrine Pickle, and went on to become an exemplar. A man self-made and self-taught, if he knew anything at all about the art for art theory-which is doubtful-he may well have held it cheap enough. But he practised Millet's dogma-Dans l'art il faut sa peau-as resolutely as Millet himself, and that, too, under conditions that might have proved utterly demoralising had he been less robust and less sincere. He began as a serious novelist with Ralph Nickleby and Lord Frederick Verisopht; he went on to produce such masterpieces as Jonas Chuzzlewit and Doubledick, and Eugene Wrayburn and the immortal Mrs. Gamp, and Fagin and Sikes and Sydney Carton, and many another. The advance is one from positive weakness to positive strength, from ignorance to knowledge, from incapacity to mastery, from

6

VIEWS AND REVIEWS

the manufacture of lay figures to the creation of human beings.

His Results.

H

IS faults were many and He grave. wrote some nonsense; he sinned repeatedly against taste; he could be both noisy and vulgar; he was apt to be a caricaturist where he should have been a painter; he was often mawkish and often. extravagant; and he was sometimes more inept than a great writer has ever been. But his work, whether bad or good, has in full measure the quality of sincerity. He meant what he did; and he meant it with his whole heart. He looked upon himself as representative and national-as indeed he was; he regarded his work as a universal possession; and he determined to do nothing that for lack of pains should prove unworthy of his function. If he sinned it was unadvisedly and unconsciously; if he failed it was because he knew no better. You feel that as you read. The freshness and fun of Pickwick-a comic middle-class epic, so to speak-seem mainly due to high spirits; and perhaps that immortal book should be described as a first improvisation by a young

man of genius not yet sure of either expression or ambition and with only vague and momentary ideas about the duties and necessities of art. But from Pickwick onwards to Edwin Drood the effort after improvement is manifest. What are Dombey and Dorrit themselves but the failures of a great and serious artist? In truth the man's genius did but ripen with years and labour; he spent his life in developing from a popular writer into an artist. He extemporised Pickwick, it may be, but into Copperfield and Chuzzlewit and the Tale of Two Cities and Our Mutual Friend he put his whole might, working at them with a passion of determination not exceeded by Balzac himself. He had enchanted the public without an effort; he was the bestbeloved of modern writers almost from the outset of his career. But he had in him at least as much of the French artist as of the middle-class Englishman; and if all his life he never ceased from self-education but went unswervingly in pursuit of culture, it was out of love for his art and because his conscience as an artist would not let him do otherwise. We have been told so often to train ourselves by studying the practice

of workmen like Gautier and Hugo and imitating the virtues of work like Hernani and Quatre-Vingt-Treize and l'Education Sentimentale-we have heard so much of the aesthetic impeccability of Young France and the section of Young England that affects its qualities and reproduces its fashions-that it is hard to refrain from asking if, when all is said, we should not do well to look for models nearer home? if in place of such moulds of form as Mademoiselle de Maupin we might not take to considering stuff like Rizpah and Our Mutual Friend?

A ve atque
Vale.

Y

ES, he had many and grave faults. But so had Sir Walter and the good Dumas; so, to be candid, had Shakespeare himself Shakespeare the king of poets. To myself he is always the man of his unrivalled and enchanting letters-is always an incarnation of generous and abounding gaiety, a type of beneficent earnestness, a great expression of intellectual vigour and emotional vivacity. I love to remember that I came into the world contemporaneously with some of his bravest work, and to reflect that even

as he was the inspiration of my boyhood so is he a delight of my middle age. I love to think that while English literature endures he will be remembered as one that loved his fellow-men, and did more to make them happy and amiable than any other writer of his time.