ABSTRACT
Mr Dickens has now been so long before the public, and his name is associated with so many triumphs, some of which were achieved before the present generation of young men and women was born, that he has already obtained the position of a classic, and we judge him by the standard of names consecrated by time. He has exhibited a degree of productiveness rarely seen except in combination with a marked and melancholy falling off from the freshness and power of early manhood. The collected editions of his works now spread over many volumes; the characters he has invented would almost people a town; and we might well excuse an author who has done so much, if we found in him some slackening of the creative force which has been at work for such a length of time. But Mr Dickens stands in need of no allowance on the score of having out-written himself. His fancy, his pathos, his humour, his wonderful powers of observation, his picturesqueness, and his versatility, are as remarkable now as they were twenty years ago. In some respects, they are seen to still greater advantage. The energy of youth yet remains, but it is united with the deeper insight of maturer years. Not that we mean to say Mr Dickens has outgrown his faults. They are as obvious as ever—sometimes even trying our patiencerather hard. A certain extravagance in particular scenes and persons—a tendency to caricature and grotesqueness—and a something here and there which savours of the melodramatic, as if the author had been considering how the thing would ‘tell’ on the stage—are to be found in Our Mutual Friend, as in all this great novelist’s productions. But when a writer of genius has fully settled his style, and maintained it through a course of many years—when his mind has passed beyond the period of pliability and growth, and can only deepen without essentially changing—it is the merest vanity on the part of a critic to dwell at any great length on general faults of manner. There they are, and there they will remain, say what we will. The tender rind wherein they were cut in youth has become hard bark long since, and the incisions are fixed for ever. To rail at them is simple waste of time, besides implying a great deal of ingratitude on the part of the railer. We shall therefore make but brief allusion here to the characters of Wegg and Venus, who appear to us in the highest degree unnatural—the one being a mere phantasm, and the other a nonentity—and shall pass on to a consideration of the more solid parts of the book, in which Mr Dickens’s old mastery over human nature is once more made splendidly apparent.
