much amused by the light hearts that go all the way, by the Dodger
and Crummles and Mrs. Gamp, to care much for what Ralph, and Monk, and
Jonas Chuzzlewit are plotting. It may not be that the plot is so
confused, but that we are too much diverted to care for the plot, for the
incredible machinations of Uriah Heap, to choose another example. Mr.
Micawber cleared these up; but it is Mr. Micawber that hinders us from
heeding them.

This, at least, is a not unfriendly explanation. Yet I cannot but
believe that, though Dickens took great pains with his plots, he was not
a great plotter. He was not, any more than Thackeray, a story-teller
first and foremost. We can hold in our minds every thread of Mr. Wilkie
Collins' web, or of M. Fortune du Boisgobey's, or of M. Gaboriau's--all
great weavers of intrigues. But Dickens goes about darkening his
intrigue, giving it an extra knot, an extra twist, hinting here,
ominously laughing there, till we get mystified and bored, and give
ourselves up to the fun of the humours, indifferent to the destinies of
villains and victims. Look at "Edwin Drood." A constant war about the
plot rages in the magazines. I believe, for one, that Edwin Drood was
resuscitated; but it gives me no pleasure. He was too uninteresting.
Dickens's hints, nods, mutterings, forebodings, do not at all impress one
like that deepening and darkening of the awful omens in "The Bride of
Lammermoor." Here Scott--unconsciously, no doubt--used the very manner
of Homer in the Odyssey, and nowhere was his genius more Homeric. That
was romance.

The "Tale of Two Cities" is a great test of the faith--that is in
Dickensites. Of all his works it is the favourite with the wrong sort!
Ladies prefer it. Many people can read it who cannot otherwise read
Dickens at all. This in itself proves that it is not a good example of
Dickens, that it is not central, that it is an outlying province which he
conquered. It is not a favourite of mine. The humour of the humorous
characters rings false--for example, the fun of the resurrection-man with
the wife who "flops." But Sidney Carton has drawn many tears down cheeks
not accustomed to what Mr. B. in "Pamela" calls "pearly fugitives."

It sometimes strikes one that certain weaknesses in our great novelists,
in Thackeray as well as Dickens, were caused by their method of
publication. The green and yellow leaves flourished on the trees for two
whole years. Who (except Alexand