This
and so much more they do that it may seem like insulting them even to
think for a moment of their subordination to the general design, which
is indeed a great deal less interesting than they. But Dickens's
method is sound and good, and not the less so because he used it for
comparatively trivial purposes. It is strange that he should have
known how to invent such a scene, and then have found no better drama
to enact on it--strange and always stranger, with every re-reading.
That does not affect his handling of a subject, which is all that I
deal with here.
The life which he creates and distributes right and left, in such a book
as Bleak House, before bending to his story--this I call his picture,
for picture it is in effect, not dramatic action. It exhibits the world
in which Lady Dedlock is to meditate murder, the fog of the suit in
Chancery out of which the intrigue of the book is to emerge. It is the
summary of a situation, with its elements spreading widely and touching
many lives; it gathers them in and gives an impression of them all. It
is pictorial as a whole, and quite as much so as any of Thackeray's
broad visions. But I have noted before how inevitably Dickens's
picture, unlike Thackeray's, is presented in the _form_ of scenic
action, and here is a case in point. All this impression of life,
stretching from the fog-bound law courts to the marshes of Chesney Wold,
from Krook and Miss Flite to Sir Leicester and Volumnia, is rendered as
incident, as a succession of particular occasions--never, or very
seldom, as general and far-seeing narrative, after Thackeray's manner.
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