wards the earlier Dickens manner. I have
remarked that _Little Dorrit_ was a reversion to the form of the first
books, but not to their spirit; _Our Mutual Friend_ is a reversion to
the spirit as well as the form. Compare, for instance, the public
figures that make a background in each book. Mr. Merdle is a commercial
man having no great connection with the plot; similarly Mr. Podsnap is a
commercial man having no great connection with the plot. This is
altogether in the spirit of the earlier books; the whole point of an
early Dickens novel was to have as many people as possible entirely
unconnected with the plot. But exactly because both studies are
irrelevant, the contrast between them can be more clearly perceived.
Dickens goes out of his way to describe Merdle; and it is a gloomy
description. But Dickens goes out of his way to describe Podsnap, and it
is a happy and hilarious description. It recalls the days when he hunted
great game; when he went out of his way to entrap such adorable monsters
as Mr. Pecksniff or Mr. Vincent Crummles. With these wild beings we
never bother about the cause of their coming. Such guests in a story
may be uninvited, but they are never _de trop_. They earn their night's
lodging in any tale by being so uproariously amusing; like little Tommy
Tucker in the legend, they sing for their supper. This is really the
marked truth about _Our Mutual Friend_, as a stage in the singular
latter career of Dickens. It is like the leaping up and flaming of a
slowly dying fire. The best things in the book are in the old best
manner of the author. They have that great Dickens quality of being
something which is pure farce and yet which is not superficial; an
unfathomable farce--a farce that goes down to the roots of the universe.
The highest compliment that can ever be paid to the humour of Dickens is
paid when some lady says, with the sudden sincerity of her sex, that it
is "too silly." The phrase is really a perfectly sound and acute
criticism. Humour does consist in being too silly, in passing the
borderland, in breaking through the floor of sense and falling into some
starry abyss of nonsense far below our ordinary human life. This "too
silly" quality is really present in _Our Mutual Friend_. It is present
in _Our Mutual Friend_ just as it is present in _Pickwick_, or _Martin
Chuzzlewit_; just as it is not present in _Little Dorrit_ or in _Hard
Times_. Many tests might be employed. One is the pleasure i