rlesque; but in all
there must be an exaggeration. Dickens was master of exaggeration--if
he sometimes carried it too far, he produced farce, but never
burlesque. As for selection, which is perhaps the most important point
after exaggeration, it came to him by instinct; he knew from the very
outset how to select. It is by selection that the novelist maintains
the interest of his story and develops his characters. There are
countless things that are said and done in the progress of the history
which have little interest and small bearing on the things which have
to be told; and it is the first mark of the bad novelist that he does
not know how to suppress irrelevant scenes. In the constructive branch
of his art Dickens continually advanced. His earlier stories seem,
like the "Pickwick Papers," to be made up of scenes. "Nicholas
Nickleby" is a long series of scenes brilliantly drawn, in which new
characters are always appearing and playing their disconnected part
and disappearing. But as he grew older his conceptions of the story
itself grew clearer, and his arrangement more artistic. It is,
however, in description that Dickens proved himself so great a master.
He laid his hand by instinct upon the salient and characteristic
features, and he never failed in finding the right--the only--words
fit for their illustration. In description he is never conventional,
always real, and yet he allows himself, here as in his scenes of
character and dialogue, a certain exaggeration which produces the
happiest effects. In the hands of his imitators it becomes grotesque
and intolerable.

As to his great and splendid gallery of portraits, it is difficult to
speak briefly. The whole of London life--the life of the streets, of
the city, of the middle class--seems at first sight depicted in this
gallery. Here are merchant, shopkeeper and clerk, lawyer and client,
money-lender and victim, dressmaker, actor--one knows not what. Yet
there are great omissions. The scholar, the divine, the statesman, the
country gentleman, are absent, partly because Dickens had no knowledge
of them, and partly because he forbore to hold them up to the ridicule
which he loved to pour over his characters. His methods imposed upon
him certain limitations; he aimed at commanding his reader's attention
by compelling laughter and tears, but especially laughter. He who can
command neither the one nor the other is no true artist in fiction.
But in his laughter and in h