ower in the evocation of human beings, whom we
affectionately remember, whose words are treasured, whose fates
are followed with a sort of sense of personal responsibility. If
the creation of differentiated types of humanity who persist in
living in the imagination be the cardinal gift of the fiction
writer, then this one is easily the leading novelist of the
race. Putting aside for the moment the question of his
caricaturing tendency, one fact confronts us, hardly to be
explained away: we can close our eyes and see Micawber, Mrs.
Gamp, Pegotty, Dick Swiveller, the Artful Dodger, Joe Gargery,
Tootles, Captain Cutter, and a hundred more, and their sayings,
quaint and dear, are like household companions. And this is true
in equal measure of no other story-maker who has used English
speech--it may be doubted if it is true to like degree of
Shakspere himself.

In the quick-following stories, "Oliver Twist" and "Nicholas
Nickleby," the author passed from episode and comic
characterization to what were in some sort Novels: the fiction
of organism, growth and climax.

His wealth of character creation was continued and even
broadened. But there was more here: an attempt to play the game
of Novel-making. It may be granted that when Dickens wrote these
early books (as a young man in the twenties), he had not yet
mastered many of the difficulties of the art of fiction. There
is loose construction in both: the melodrama of "Oliver Twist"
blends but imperfectly with the serious and sentimental part of
the narrative, which is less attractive. So, too, in "Nickleby,"
there is an effect at times of thin ice where the plot is
secondary to the episodic scenes and characters by the way. Yet
in both Novels there is a story and a good one: we get the
spectacle of genius learning its lesson,--experimenting in a
form. And as those other early books, differing totally from
each other too, "Old Curiosity Shop," and "Barnaby Rudge," were
produced, and in turn were succeeded by a series of great novels
representing the writer's young prime,--I mean "Martin
Chuzzlewit," "Dombey and Son" and "David Copperfield,"--it was
plain that the hand of Dickens was becoming subdued to the
element it worked in. Not only was there a good fable, as
before, but it was managed with increasing mastery, while the
general adumbration of life gained in solidity, truth and rich
human quality. In brief, by the time "Copperfield," the story
most often referred to a