190 ARTISTS AND AUTHORS not one survives who can remember it, then these books will become a precious storehouse for the study and the recovery of part, and that a large part, of its life and manners. Again, it is the essential quality of genius to create the type. In this Dickens has been more successful than any other novelist, ancient or modern. With him every leading character stands for his class. Squeers is the representative of the school-master, then too common, ignorant, brutal, and grasping ; Winkle is the Cockney sportsman ; it is impossible to think of red tape without naming Mr. Tite Barnacle ; and so on through all the books. If he sometimes too plainly labels his characters with their qualities and defects, it is a fault caused by his own clearness of conception and of execution. It is another note of genius to suffer every character to work out its own fate without weakness or pity, and though Dickens deals seldom with the greater tragedies of the world in his domestic dramas, necessity pursues his characters as grimly and certainly as in real life. The villain Quilp and his tool make us forget, in the amusement which they cause, their own baseness. But their creator is not deceived. He makes them bring their own ruin upon their heads. To be true, not only to the outward presentment and speech and thought of a character, but also to the laws which surround him, and to the consequences of his actions, is a rare thing indeed with those who practise the art of fiction. Further, in this art there are permissible certain exaggerations, as upon the stage. There is exaggeration of feature, ex- aggeration of talk, exaggeration in action. There are degrees of exaggeration, by which one passes through tragedy, comedy, farce, and burlesque ; but in all there must be an exaggeration. Dickens was master of exaggeration if he sometimes carried it too far, he produced farce, but never burlesque As for selection, which is perhaps the most important point after exaggeration, it came to him by instinct ; he knew from the very outset how to select. It is by selec- tion that the novelist maintains the interest of his story and develops his char- acters. There are countless things that are said and done in the progress of the history which have little interest and small bearing on the things which have to be told ; and it is the first mark of the bad novelist that he does not know how to suppress irrelevant scenes. In the constructive branch of his art Dickens continually advanced. His earlier stories seem, like the " Pickwick Papers," to be made up of scenes. ' Nicholas Nickleby " is a long series of scenes brilliantly drawn, in which new characters are always appearing and playing their discon- nected part and disappearing. But as he grew older his conceptions of the story itself grew clearer, and his arrangement more artistic. It is, however, in descrip- tion that Dickens proved himself so great a master. He laid his hand by in- stinct upon the salient and characteristic features, and he never failed in finding the right the only words fit for their illustration. In description he is never conventional, always real, and yet he allows himself, here as in his scenes of character and dialogue, a certain exaggeration which produces the happiest effects. In the hands of his imitators it becomes grotesque and intolerable. As to his great and splendid gallery of portraits, it is difficult to speak briefly.
