universally applicable. To expound
or discuss his creations, to lay them psychologically bare, to analyse
their organisms, to subject to minute demonstration their fibrous and
other tissues, was not at all Dickens's way. His genius was his fellow
feeling with his race; his mere personality was never the bound or limit
to his perceptions, however strongly sometimes it might colour them; he
never stopped to dissect or anatomize his own work; but no man could
better adjust the outward and visible oddities in a delineation to its
inner and unchangeable veracities. The rough estimates we form of
character, if we have any truth of perception, are on the whole correct:
but men touch and interfere with one another by the contact of their
extremes, and it may very often become necessarily the main business of
a novelist to display the salient points, the sharp angles, or the
prominences merely.

The pathetic parts of _Bleak House_ do not live largely in remembrance,
but the deaths of Richard and of Gridley, the wandering fancies of Miss
Flite, and the extremely touching way in which the gentleman-nature of
the pompous old baronet, Dedlock, asserts itself under suffering, belong
to a high order of writing. There is another most affecting example,
taking the lead of the rest, in the poor street-sweeper Jo; which has
made perhaps as deep an impression as anything in Dickens. "We have been
reading _Bleak House_ aloud," the good Dean Ramsay wrote to me very
shortly before his death. "Surely it is one of his most powerful and
successful! What a triumph is Jo! Uncultured nature is _there_ indeed;
the intimations of true heart-feeling, the glimmerings of higher
feeling, all are there; but everything still consistent and in harmony.
Wonderful is the genius that can show all this, yet keep it only and
really part of the character itself, low or common as it may be, and use
no morbid or fictitious colouring. To my mind, nothing in the field of
fiction is to be found in English literature surpassing the death of
Jo!" What occurs at and after the inquest is as worth remembering. Jo's
evidence is rejected because he cannot exactly say what will be done to
him after he is dead if he should tell a lie;[167] but he manages to say
afterwards very exactly what the deceased while he lived did to him.
That one cold winter night, when he was shivering in a doorway near his
crossing, a man turned to look at him, and came back, and, having
questioned h