In thus translating his
picture into action Dickens chose the most exigent way, but it was
always the right way for him. He was curiously incapable in the other;
when occasionally he tries his hand at picture-making, in Thackeray's
manner--attempting to summarize an impression of social life among the
Veneerings, of official life among the Barnacles--his touch is wild
indeed. Away from a definite episode in an hour prescribed he is
seldom at ease.
But though the actual presentation is thus dramatic, his books are in
fact examples of the pictured scene that opens and spreads very
gradually, in order to make a valid world for a drama that could not
be precipitated forthwith, a drama that would be naked romance if it
stood by itself. Stevenson happened upon this point, with regard to
Dickens, in devising the same method for a story of his own, The
Wrecker, a book in which he too proposed to insinuate an abrupt and
violent intrigue into credible, continuous life. He, of course, knew
precisely what he was doing--where Dickens followed, as I suppose, an
uncritical instinct; the purpose of The Wrecker is clearly written
upon it, and very ingeniously carried out. But I doubt whether
Stevenson himself noticed that in all his work, or nearly, he was
using an artifice of the same kind. He spoke of his habitual
inclination towards the story told in the first person as though it
were a chance preference, and he may not have perceived how logically
it followed from the subjects that mostly attracted him.
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