nd
that the first impulse is a landscape, the atmosphere of some special
countryside. In another novel he will find that the first impulse is the
last chapter. Or it may be a thrust with sword or dagger, it may be a
theology, it may be a song. Somewhere embedded in every ordinary book
are the five or six words for which really all the rest will be written.
Some of our enterprising editors who set their readers to hunt for
banknotes and missing ladies might start a competition for finding those
words in every novel. But whether or no this is possible, there is no
doubt that the principle in question is of great importance in the case
of Dickens, and especially in the case of _Dombey and Son_.

In all the Dickens novels can be seen, so to speak, the original thing
that they were before they were novels. The same may be observed, for
the matter of that, in the great novels of most of the great modern
novelists. For example, Sir Walter Scott wrote poetical romances before
he wrote prose romances. Hence it follows that, with all their much
greater merit, his novels may still be described as poetical romances in
prose. While adding a new and powerful element of popular humours and
observation, Scott still retains a certain purely poetical right--a
right to make his heroes and outlaws and great kings speak at the great
moments with a rhetoric so rhythmical that it partakes of the nature of
song, the same quite metrical rhetoric which is used in the metrical
speeches of Marmion or Roderick Dhu. In the same way, although _Don
Quixote_ is a modern novel in its irony and subtlety, we can see that it
comes from the old long romances of chivalry. In the same way, although
_Clarissa_ is a modern novel in its intimacy and actuality, we can see
that it comes from the old polite letter-writing and polite essays of
the period of the _Spectator_. Any one can see that Scott formed in _The
Lay of the Last Minstrel_ the style that he applied again and again
afterwards, like the reappearances of a star taking leave of the stage.
All his other romances were positively last appearances of the
positively last Minstrel. Any one can see that Thackeray formed in
fragmentary satires like _The Book of Snobs_ or _The Yellowplush Papers_
the style, the rather fragmentary style, in which he was to write
_Vanity Fair_. In most modern cases, in short (until very lately, at any
rate), the novel is an enormous outgrowth from something that was not a
novel.