. He wishes to have as little as possible in the novel that
does not really assist it as a novel. Previously he had asked with the
assistance of what incidents could his hero wander farther and farther
from the pathway. Now he has really begun to ask with the assistance of
what incidents his hero can get nearer and nearer to the goal.

The change made Dickens a greater novelist. I am not sure that it made
him a greater man. One good character by Dickens requires all eternity
to stretch its legs in; and the characters in his later books are always
being tripped up by some tiresome nonsense about the story. For
instance, in _Dombey and Son_, Mrs. Skewton is really very funny. But
nobody with a love of the real smell of Dickens would compare her for a
moment, for instance, with Mrs. Nickleby. And the reason of Mrs.
Skewton's inferiority is simply this, that she has something to do in
the plot; she has to entrap or assist to entrap Mr. Dombey into marrying
Edith. Mrs. Nickleby, on the other hand, has nothing at all to do in the
story, except to get in everybody's way. The consequence is that we
complain not of her for getting in everyone's way, but of everyone for
getting in hers. What are suns and stars, what are times and seasons,
what is the mere universe, that it should presume to interrupt Mrs.
Nickleby? Mrs. Skewton (though supposed, of course, to be a much viler
sort of woman) has something of the same quality of splendid and
startling irrelevancy. In her also there is the same feeling of wild
threads hung from world to world like the webs of gigantic spiders; of
things connected that seem to have no connection save by this one
adventurous filament of frail and daring folly. Nothing could be better
than Mrs. Skewton when she finds herself, after convolutions of speech,
somehow on the subject of Henry VIII., and pauses to mention with
approval "his dear little peepy eyes and his benevolent chin." Nothing
could be better than her attempt at Mahomedan resignation when she feels
almost inclined to say "that there is no What's-his-name but Thingummy,
and What-you-may-call-it is his prophet!" But she has not so much time
as Mrs. Nickleby to say these good things; also she has not sufficient
human virtue to say them constantly. She is always intent upon her
worldly plans, among other things upon the worldly plan of assisting
Charles Dickens to get a story finished. She is always "advancing her
shrivelled ear" to listen to wh