the end of each is most excellently told.

George Meredith said that the most difficult thing to write in fiction was dialogue.  But there is surely one thing at least as difficult—a thing so rarely well done that a mere reader might think it to be more difficult than dialogue; and that is the telling what happened.  Something of the fatal languor and preoccupation that persist beneath all the violence of our stage—our national undramatic character—is perceptible in the narrative of our literature.  The things the usual modern author says are proportionately more energetically produced than those he tells.  But Dickens, being simple and dramatic and capable of one thing at a time, and that thing whole, tells us what happened with a perfect speed which has neither hurry nor delays.  Those who saw him act found him a fine actor, and this we might know by reading the murder in Oliver Twist, the murder in Martin Chuzzlewit, the coming of the train upon Carker, the long moment of recognition when Pip sees his guest, the convict, reveal himself in his chambers at night.  The swift spirit, the hammering blow of his narrative, drive the great storm in David Copperfield through the poorest part of the book—Steerforth’s story.  There is surely no greater gale to be read of than this: from the first words, “‘Don’t you think that,’ I said to the coachman, ‘a very remarkable sky?’” to the end of a magnificent chapter.  “Flying clouds tossed up into most remarkable heaps, suggesting greater heights in the clouds than there were depths below them. . . There had been a wind all day; and it was rising then with an extraordinary great sound . . . Long before we saw the sea, its spray was on our lips . . . The water was out over the flat country, and every sheet and puddle lashed its banks, and had its stress of little breakers.  When we came within sight of the sea, the waves on the horizon, caught at intervals above the boiling abyss, were like glimpses of another shore, with towers and buildings. . . The people came to their doors all aslant, and with streaming hair.”  David dreams of a cannonade, when at last he “fell—off a tower and down a precipice—into the depths of sleep.”  In the morning, “the wind might have lulled a little, though not more sensibly than if the cannonading I had dreamed of had been diminished by the silencing of half a dozen guns out of hundreds.”  “It went from me with a shock, like a ball from a rifle,” says David in another place, after the visit of a delirious impulse; here is the volley of departure, the shock of passion vanishing more perceptibly than it came.

The tempest in David Copperfield combines Dickens’s dramatic tragedy of narrative with his wonderful sense of sea and land.  But here are landscapes in quietness: “There has been rain this afternoon, and a wintry shudder goes among the little pools in the cracked, uneven flag-stones. . . Some of the leaves, in a timid rush, seek sanctuary within the low-arched cathedral door; but two men coming out resist them, and cast them out with their feet:”  The autumn leaves fall thick, “but never fast, for they come circling down with a dead lightness.”  Again, “Now the woods settle into great masses as if they were one profound tree.”  And yet again, “I held my mother in my embrace, and she held me in hers; and among the still woods in the silence of the summer day there seemed to be nothing but our two troubled minds that was not at peace.”  Yet, with a thousand great felicities of diction, Dickens had no body of style.

Dickens, having the single and simple heart of a moralist, had also the simple eyes of a free intelligence, and the light heart.  He gave his senses their way, and well did they serve him.  Thus his eyes—and no more modern man in anxious search of “impressions” was ever so simple and so masterly: “Mr. Vholes gauntly stalked to the fire, and warmed his funereal gloves.”  “‘I thank you,’ said Mr. Vholes, putting out his long black sleeve, to check the ringing of the bell, ‘not any.’”  Mr. and Mrs. Tope “are daintily sticking sprigs of holly into the carvings and sconces of the cathedral stalls, as if they were sticking them into the button-holes of the Dean & Chapter.”  The two young Eurasians, brother and sister, “had a certain air upon them of hunter and huntress; yet withal a certain air of being the objects of the chase rather than the followers.”  This phrase lacks elegance—and Dickens is not often inelegant, as those who do not read him may be surprised to learn—but the impression is admirable; so is that which follows: “An indefinable kind of pause coming and going on their whole expression, both of face and form.”  Here is pure, mere impression again: “Miss Murdstone, who was busy at her writing-desk, gave me her cold finger-nails.”  Lady Tippins’s hand is “rich in knuckles.”  And here is vision with great dignity: “All beyond his figure was a vast dark curtain, in solemn movement towards one quarter of the heavens.”

With that singleness of sight—and his whole body was full of the light of it—he had also the single hearing; the scene is in the Court of Chancery on a London November day: “Leaving this address ringing in the rafters of the roof, the very little counsel drops, and the fog knows him no more.”  “Mr. Vholes emerged into the silence he could scarcely be said to have broken, so stifled was his tone.”  “Within the grill-gate of the chancel, up the steps surmounted loomingly by the fast-darkening organ, white robes could be dimly seen, and one feeble voice, rising and falling in a cracked monotonous mutter, could at intervals be faintly heard . . . until the organ and the choir burst forth and drowned it in a sea of music.  Then the sea fell, and the dying voice made another feeble effort; and then the sea rose high and beat its life out, and lashed the roof, and surged among the arches, and pierced the heights of the great tower; and then the sea was dry and all was still.”  And this is how a listener overheard men talking in the cathedral hollows: “The word ‘confidence,’ shattered by the echoes, but still capable of being pieced together, is uttered.”

Wit, humour, derision—to each of these words we assign by custom a part in the comedy of literature; and (again) those who do not read Dickens—perhaps even those who read him a little—may acclaim him as a humourist and not know him as a wit.  But that writer is a wit, whatever his humour, who tells us of a member of the Tite Barnacle family who had held a sinecure office against all protest, that “he died with his drawn salary in his hand.”  But let it be granted that Dickens the humourist is foremost and most precious.  For we might well spare the phrase of wit just quoted rather than the one describing Traddles (whose hair stood up), as one who looked “as though he had seen a cheerful ghost.”  Or rather than this:-

He was so wooden a man that he seemed to have taken his wooden leg naturally, and rather suggested to the fanciful observer that he might be expected—if his development received no untimely check—to be completely set up with a pair of wooden legs in about six months.

Or rather than the incident of the butcher and the beef-steak.  He gently presses it, in a cabbage leaf, into Tom Pinch’s pocket.  “‘For meat,’ he said with some emotion, ‘must be humoured, not drove.’”

A generation, between his own and the present, thought Dickens to be vulgar; if the cause of that judgement was that he wrote about people in shops, the cause is discredited now that shops are the scenes of the novelist’s research.  “High life” and most wretched life have now given place to the little shop and its parlour, during a year or two.  But Dr. Brown, the author of Rab and His Friends, thought that