several parts; hardly a form of matter without a living quality; no
silent thing without its voice. Fondling and exaggerating thus what is
occasional in the subject of his criticism, into what he has evidently
at last persuaded himself is a fixed and universal practice with
Dickens, M. Taine proceeds to explain the exuberance by comparing such
imagination in its vividness to that of a monomaniac. He fails
altogether to apprehend that property in Humour which involves the
feeling of subtlest and most affecting analogies, and from which is
drawn the rare insight into sympathies between the nature of things and
their attributes or opposites, in which Dickens's fancy revelled with
such delight. Taking the famous lines which express the lunatic, the
lover, and the poet as "of Imagination all compact," in a sense that
would have startled not a little the great poet who wrote them, M. Taine
places on the same level of creative fancy the phantoms of the lunatic
and the personages of the artist. He exhibits Dickens as from time to
time, in the several stages of his successive works of fiction, given up
to one idea, possessed by it, seeing nothing else, treating it in a
hundred forms, exaggerating it, and so dazzling and overpowering his
readers with it that escape is impossible. This he maintains to be
equally the effect as Mr. Mell the usher plays the flute, as Tom Pinch
enjoys or exposes his Pecksniff, as the guard blows his bugle while Tom
rides to London, as Ruth Pinch crosses Fountain Court or makes the
beefsteak pudding, as Jonas Chuzzlewit commits and returns from the
murder, and as the storm which is Steerforth's death-knell beats on the
Yarmouth shore. To the same kind of power he attributes the
extraordinary clearness with which the commonest objects in all his
books, the most ordinary interiors, any old house, a parlour, a boat, a
school, fifty things that in the ordinary tale-teller would pass
unmarked, are made vividly present and indelible; are brought out with a
strength of relief, precision, and force, unapproached in any other
writer of prose fiction; with everything minute yet nothing cold, "with
all the passion and the patience of the painters of his country." And
while excitement in the reader is thus maintained to an extent
incompatible with a natural style or simple narrative, M. Taine yet
thinks he has discovered, in this very power of awakening a feverish
sensibility and moving laughter or tears at the comm