" That his plots are always highly elaborated is the fruit of this
preliminary disciplined exercise of thought. The method is familiar to
many novelists now; Dickens was the first to put it into practice. In
the second place he made a new departure by his frankly admitted
didacticism and by the skill with which in all but two or three of his
books--_Bleak House_, perhaps, and _Little Dorrit_--he squared his
purpose with his art. Lastly he made the discovery which has made him
immortal. In him for the first time the English novel produced an
author who dug down into the masses of the people for his subjects;
apprehended them in all their inexhaustible character and humour and
pathos, and reproduced them with a lively and loving artistic skill.
Dickens has, of course, serious faults. In particular, readers
emancipated by lapse of time from the enslavement of the first
enthusiasm, have quarrelled with the mawkishness and sentimentality of
his pathos, and with the exaggeration of his studies of character. It
has been said of him, as it has of Thackeray, that he could not draw a
"good woman" and that Agnes Copperfield, like Amelia Sedley, is a very
doll-like type of person. To critics of this kind it may be retorted
that though "good" and "bad" are categories relevant to melodrama, they
apply very ill to serious fiction, and that indeed to the characters of
any of the novelists--the Brontes, Mrs.
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