Boffin's antic disposition. But how true and how whole a heart it was
that urged these unlucky conclusions! How shall we venture to complain?
The hand that made its Pecksniff in pure wit, has it not the right to
belabour him in earnest--albeit a kind of earnest that disappoints us?
And Mr. Dombey is Dickens's own Dombey, and he must do what he will with
that finely wrought figure of pride. But there is a little irony in the
fact that Dickens leaves more than one villain to his orderly fate for
whom we care little either way; it is nothing to us, whom Carker never
convinced, that the train should catch him, nor that the man with the
moustache and the nose, who did but weary us, should be crushed by the
falling house. Here the end holds good in art, but the art was not good
from the first. But then, again, neither does Bill Sikes experience a
change of heart, nor Jonas Chuzzlewit; and 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.
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