You begin a new acquaintanceship
with perhaps not very charitable prepossessions; these later a deeper
and better knowledge removes, and where you have before seen an
idiosyncrasy you come to love a character. It is ingenious and it helps
to explain Mrs. Nickleby, the Pecksniff daughters, and many another.
Whether it is true or not (and it does not explain the faultiness of
such pictures as Carker and his kind) there can be no doubt that this
trick in Dickens of beginning with a salient impression and working
outward to a fuller conception of character is part at least of the
reason of his enormous hold upon his readers. No man leads you into the
mazes of his invention so easily and with such a persuasive hand.
The great novelists who were writing contemporarily with him--the
Brontes, Mrs. Gaskell, George Eliot--it is impossible to deal with
here, except to say that the last is indisputably, because of her
inability to fuse completely art and ethics, inferior to Mrs. Gaskell or
to either of the Bronte sisters. Nor of the later Victorians who added
fresh variety to the national style can the greatest, Meredith, be more
than mentioned for the exquisiteness of his comic spirit and the brave
gallery of English men and women he has given us in what is, perhaps,
fundamentally the most English thing in fiction since Fielding wrote.
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