moral
is worked out. The didactic in Dickens's earlier novels derived its
strength from being merely incidental to interest of a higher and more
permanent kind, and not in a small degree from the playful sportiveness
and fancy that lighted up its graver illustrations. Here it is of
sterner stuff, too little relieved, and all-pervading. The fog so
marvellously painted in the opening chapter has hardly cleared away when
there arises, in _Jarndyce_ v. _Jarndyce_, as bad an atmosphere to
breathe in; and thenceforward to the end, clinging round the people of
the story as they come or go, in dreary mist or in heavy cloud, it is
rarely absent. Dickens has himself described his purpose to have been to
dwell on the romantic side of familiar things. But it is the romance of
discontent and misery, with a very restless dissatisfied moral, and is
too much brought about by agencies disagreeable and sordid. The Guppys,
Weevles, Snagsbys, Chadbands, Krooks, and Smallweeds, even the Kenges,
Vholeses, and Tulkinghorns, are much too real to be pleasant; and the
necessity becomes urgent for the reliefs and contrasts of a finer
humanity. These last are not wanting; yet it must be said that we hardly
escape, even with them, into the old freedom and freshness of the
author's imaginative worlds, and that the too conscious unconsciousness
of Esther flings something of a shade on the radiant goodness of John
Jarndyce himself. Nevertheless there are very fine delineations in the
story. The crazed little Chancery lunatic, Miss Flite; the loud-voiced
tender-souled Chancery victim, Gridley; the poor good-hearted youth
Richard, broken up in life and character by the suspense of the Chancery
suit on whose success he is to "begin the world," believing himself to
be saving money when he is stopped from squandering it, and thinking
that having saved it he is entitled to fling it away; trooper George,
with the Bagnets and their household, where the most ludicrous points
are more forcible for the pathetic touches underlying them; the Jellyby
interior, and its philanthropic strong-minded mistress, placid and
smiling amid a household muddle outmuddling Chancery itself; the model
of deportment, Turveydrop the elder, whose relations to the young
people, whom he so superbly patronizes by being dependent on them for
everything, touch delightfully some subtle points of truth; the
inscrutable Tulkinghorn, and the immortal Bucket; all these, and
especially the last