Old
Curiosity Shop_. It is particularly noticeable in the fact that its
opening and original framework express the idea of a random experience,
a thing come across in the street; a single face in the crowd, followed
until it tells its story. Though the thing ends in a novel it begins in
a sketch; it begins as one of the _Sketches by Boz_. There is something
unconsciously artistic in the very clumsiness of this opening. Master
Humphrey starts to keep a scrap-book of all his adventures, and he finds
that he can fill the whole scrap-book with the sequels and developments
of one adventure; he goes out to notice everybody and he finds himself
busily and variedly occupied only in watching somebody. In this there is
a very profound truth about the true excitement and inexhaustible poetry
of life. The truth is not so much that eternity is full of souls as that
one soul can fill eternity. In strict art there is something quite lame
and lumbering about the way in which the benevolent old story-teller
starts to tell many stories and then drops away altogether, while one of
his stories takes his place. But in a larger art, his collision with
Little Nell and his complete eclipse by her personality and narrative
have a real significance. They suggest the random richness of such
meetings, and their uncalculated results. It makes the whole book a sort
of splendid accident.

It is not true, as is commonly said, that the Dickens pathos as pathos
is bad. It is not true, as is still more commonly said, that the whole
business about Little Nell is bad. The case is more complex than that.
Yet complex as it is it admits of one sufficiently clear distinction.
Those who have written about the death of Little Nell, have generally
noticed the crudities of the character itself; the little girl's
unnatural and staring innocence, her constrained and awkward piety. But
they have nearly all of them entirely failed to notice that there is in
the death of Little Nell one quite definite and really artistic idea. It
is not an artistic idea that a little child should die rhetorically on
the stage like Paul Dombey; and Little Nell does not die rhetorically
upon the stage like Paul Dombey. But it is an artistic idea that all the
good powers and personalities in the story should set out in pursuit of
one insignificant child, to repair an injustice to her, should track her
from town to town over England with all the resources of wealth,
intelligence, and trave