write seriously. He developed into an artist in words
as he developed into an artist in the construction and the evolution of a
story. But his development was his own work, and it is a fact that
should redound eternally to his honour that he began in newspaper
English, and by the production of an imitation of the _novela
picaresca_--a string of adventures as broken and disconnected as the
adventures of Lazarillo de Tormes or Peregrine Pickle, and went on to
become an exemplar. A man self-made and self-taught, if he knew anything
at all about the 'art for art' theory--which is doubtful--he may well
have held it cheap enough. But he practised Millet's dogma--_Dans l'art
il faut sa peau_--as resolutely as Millet himself, and that, too, under
conditions that might have proved utterly demoralising had he been less
robust and less sincere. He began as a serious novelist with Ralph
Nickleby and Lord Frederick Verisopht; he went on to produce such
masterpieces as Jonas Chuzzlewit and Doubledick, and Eugene Wrayburn and
the immortal Mrs. Gamp, and Fagin and Sikes and Sydney Carton, and many
another. The advance is one from positive weakness to positive strength,
from ignorance to knowledge, from incapacity to mastery, from the
manufacture of lay figures to the creation of human beings.

His Results.

His faults were many and grave. He wrote some nonsense; he sinned
repeatedly against taste; he could be both noisy and vulgar; he was apt
to be a caricaturist where he should have been a painter; he was often
mawkish and often extravagant; and he was sometimes more inept than a
great writer has ever been. But his work, whether bad or good, has in
full measure the quality of sincerity. He meant what he did: and he
meant it with his whole heart. He looked upon himself as representative
and national--as indeed he was; he regarded his work as a universal
possession; and he determined to do nothing that for lack of pains should
prove unworthy of his function. If he sinned it was unadvisedly and
unconsciously; if he failed it was because he knew no better. You feel
that as you read. The freshness and fun of _Pickwick_--a comic middle-
class epic, so to speak--seem mainly due to high spirits; and perhaps
that immortal book should be described as a first improvisation by a
young man of genius not yet sure of either expression or ambition and
with only vague and momentary ideas about the duties and necessities of
art. Bu