rce--the fact of its being a tale of winter and of a very wintry
winter. There is much about comfort in the story; yet the comfort is
never enervating: it is saved from that by a tingle of something bitter
and bracing in the weather. Lastly, the story exemplifies throughout the
power of the third principle--the kinship between gaiety and the
grotesque. Everybody is happy because nobody is dignified. We have a
feeling somehow that Scrooge looked even uglier when he was kind than he
had looked when he was cruel. The turkey that Scrooge bought was so fat,
says Dickens, that it could never have stood upright. That top-heavy and
monstrous bird is a good symbol of the top-heavy happiness of the
stories.

It is less profitable to criticise the other two tales in detail because
they represent variations on the theme in two directions; and variations
that were not, upon the whole, improvements. _The Chimes_ is a monument
of Dickens's honourable quality of pugnacity. He could not admire
anything, even peace, without wanting to be warlike about it. That was
all as it should be.

DOMBEY AND SON

In Dickens's literary life _Dombey and Son_ represents a break so
important as to necessitate our casting back to a summary and a
generalisation. In order fully to understand what this break is, we must
say something of the previous character of Dickens's novels, and even
something of the general character of novels in themselves. How
essential this is we shall see shortly.

It must first be remembered that the novel is the most typical of modern
forms. It is typical of modern forms especially in this, that it is
essentially formless. All the ancient modes or structures of literature
were definite and severe. Any one composing them had to abide by their
rules; they were what their name implied. Thus a tragedy might be a bad
tragedy, but it was always a tragedy. Thus an epic might be a bad epic,
but it was always an epic. Now in the sense in which there is such a
thing as an epic, in that sense there is no such thing as a novel. We
call any long fictitious narrative in prose a novel, just as we call any
short piece of prose without any narrative an essay. Both these forms
are really quite formless, and both of them are really quite new. The
difference between a good epic by Mr. John Milton and a bad epic by Mr.
John Smith was simply the difference between the same thing done well
and the same thing done badly. But it was not (for