as the
sincere and the deliberate. There is a great difference between Dickens
thinking about the tears of his characters and Dickens thinking about
the tears of his audience.

When all this is allowed, however, and the exaggerated contempt for the
Dickens pathos is properly corrected, the broad fact remains: that to
pass from the solemn characters in this book to the comic characters in
this book, is to be like some Ulysses who should pass suddenly from the
land of shadows to the mountain of the gods. Little Nell has her own
position in careful and reasonable criticism: even that wobbling old
ass, her grandfather, has his position in it; perhaps even the
dissipated Fred (whom long acquaintance with Mr. Dick Swiveller has not
made any less dismal in his dissipation) has a place in it also. But
when we come to Swiveller and Sampson Brass and Quilp and Mrs. Jarley,
then Fred and Nell and the grandfather simply do not exist. There are no
such people in the story. The real hero and heroine of _The Old
Curiosity Shop_ are of course Dick Swiveller and the Marchioness. It is
significant in a sense that these two sane, strong, living, and lovable
human beings are the only two, or almost the only two, people in the
story who do not run after Little Nell. They have something better to do
than to go on that shadowy chase after that cheerless phantom. They have
to build up between them a true romance; perhaps the one true romance in
the whole of Dickens. Dick Swiveller really has all the half-heroic
characteristics which make a man respected by a woman and which are the
male contribution to virtue. He is brave, magnanimous, sincere about
himself, amusing, absurdly hopeful; above all, he is both strong and
weak. On the other hand the Marchioness really has all the
characteristics, the entirely heroic characteristics which make a woman
respected by a man. She is female: that is, she is at once incurably
candid and incurably loyal, she is full of terrible common-sense, she
expects little pleasure for herself and yet she can enjoy bursts of it;
above all, she is physically timid and yet she can face anything. All
this solid rocky romanticism is really implied in the speech and action
of these two characters and can be felt behind them all the time.
Because they are the two most absurd people in the book they are also
the most vivid, human, and imaginable. There are two really fine love
affairs in Dickens; and I almost think only two. O