Bleak House is a very good case; the highly
coloured climax in that book is approached with great skill and
caution, all in his most masterly style. A broad stream of diversified
life moves slowly in a certain direction, so deliberately at first
that its scope, its spread, is much more evident than its movement.
The book is a big survey of a quantity of odd and amusing people, and
it is only by degrees that the discursive method is abandoned and the
narrative brought to a point. Presently we are in the thick of the
story, hurrying to the catastrophe, without having noticed at all, it
may be, that our novel of manners has turned into a romantic drama,
with a mysterious crime to crown it. Dickens manages it far more
artfully than Balzac, because his imagination is not, like Balzac's,
divided against itself. The world which he peopled with Skimpole and
Guppy and the Bayham Badgers was a world that could easily include
Lady Dedlock, for though she is perhaps of the theatre, they are
certainly not of the common earth. They and she alike are at the same
angle to literal fact, they diverging one way, she another; they
accordingly make a kind of reality which can assimilate her romance.
Dickens was saved from trying to write two books at once by the fact
that one completely satisfied him. It expressed the exciting, amazing,
exhilarating world he lived in himself, with its consistent
transmutation of all values, and he knew no other.
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