d be commended. But then plot was never his strong
point. Later in life, and acting, as I have always surmised, under the
influence of his friend, Mr. Wilkie Collins, he endeavoured to
construct ingenious stories that turned on mysterious disappearances,
and the substitution of one person for another, and murders real or
suspected. All this was, to my mind, a mistake. Dickens had no real
gift for the manufacture of these ingenious pieces of mechanism. He
did not even many times succeed in disposing the events and
marshalling the characters in his narratives so as to work, by
seemingly unforced and natural means, to a final situation and climax.
Too often, in order to hold his story together and make it move
forward at all, he was compelled to make his personages pursue a line
of conduct preposterous and improbable, and even antagonistic to their
nature. Take this very book. Old Martin Chuzzlewit is a man who has
been accustomed, all through a long life, to have his own way, and to
take it with a high hand. Yet he so far sets aside, during a course of
months, every habit of his life, as to simulate the weakest
subservience to Pecksniff--and that not for the purpose of unmasking
Pecksniff, who wanted no unmasking, but only in order to disappoint
him. Is it believable that old Martin should have thought Pecksniff
worth so much trouble, personal inconvenience, and humiliation? Or
take again Mr. Boffin in "Our Mutual Friend." Mr. Boffin is a simple,
guileless, open-hearted, open-handed old man. Yet, in order to prove
to Miss Bella Wilfer that it is not well to be mercenary, he, again,
goes through a long course of dissimulation, and does some admirable
comic business in the character of a miser. I say it boldly, I do not
believe Mr. Boffin possessed that amount of histrionic talent. Plots
requiring to be worked out by such means are ill-constructed plots;
or, to put it in another way, a man who had any gift for the
construction of plots would never have had recourse to such means. Nor
would he, I think, have adopted, as Dickens did habitually and for all
his stories, a mode of publication so destructive of unity of effect,
as the publication in monthly or weekly parts. How could the reader
see as a whole that which was presented to him at intervals of time
more or less distant? How, and this is of infinitely greater
importance, how could the writer produce it as a whole? For Dickens,
it must be remembered, never finished a bo