d faced the
possibility of going on till his dying day lending money to Mr. Wilkins
Micawber. We should have thought more of David Copperfield (and also of
Charles Dickens) if he had not looked upon the marriage with Dora merely
as a flirtation, an episode which he survived and ought to survive. And
yet the truth is that there is nowhere in fiction where we feel so
keenly the primary human instinct and principle that a marriage is a
marriage and irrevocable, that such things do leave a wound and also a
bond as in this case of David's short connection with his silly little
wife. When all is said and done, when Dickens has done his best and his
worst, when he has sentimentalised for pages and tried to tie up
everything in the pink tape of optimism, the fact, in the psychology of
the reader, still remains. The reader does still feel that David's
marriage to Dora was a real marriage; and that his marriage to Agnes was
nothing, a middle-aged compromise, a taking of the second best, a sort
of spiritualised and sublimated marriage of convenience. For all the
readers of Dickens Dora is thoroughly avenged. The modern world (intent
on anarchy in everything, even in Government) refuses to perceive the
permanent element of tragic constancy which inheres in all passion, and
which is the origin of marriage. Marriage rests upon the fact that you
cannot have your cake and eat it; that you cannot lose your heart and
have it. But, as I have said, there is perhaps no place in literature
where we feel more vividly the sense of this monogamous instinct in man
than in David Copperfield. A man is monogamous even if he is only
monogamous for a month; love is eternal even if it is only eternal for a
month. It always leaves behind it the sense of something broken and
betrayed.

But I have mentioned Dora in this connection only because she
illustrates the same fact which Micawber illustrates; the fact that
there is at the end of this book too much tendency to bless people and
get rid of them. Micawber is a nuisance. Dickens the despot condemns him
to exile. Dora is a nuisance. Dickens the despot condemns her to death.
But it is the whole business of Dickens in the world to express the fact
that such people are the spice and interest of life. It is the whole
point of Dickens that there is nobody more worth living with than a
strong, splendid, entertaining, immortal nuisance. Micawber interrupts
practical life; but what is practical life that it sh