s subjects;
apprehended them in all their inexhaustible character and humour and
pathos, and reproduced them with a lively and loving artistic skill.

Dickens has, of course, serious faults. In particular, readers
emancipated by lapse of time from the enslavement of the first
enthusiasm, have quarrelled with the mawkishness and sentimentality of
his pathos, and with the exaggeration of his studies of character. It
has been said of him, as it has of Thackeray, that he could not draw a
"good woman" and that Agnes Copperfield, like Amelia Sedley, is a very
doll-like type of person. To critics of this kind it may be retorted
that though "good" and "bad" are categories relevant to melodrama, they
apply very ill to serious fiction, and that indeed to the characters of
any of the novelists--the Brontes, Mrs. Gaskell or the like--who lay
bare character with fullness and intimacy, they could not well be
applied at all. The faultiness of them in Dickens is less than in
Thackeray, for in Dickens they are only incident to the scheme, which
lies in the hero (his heroes are excellent) and in the grotesque
characters, whereas in his rival they are in the theme itself. For his
pathos, not even his warmest admirer could perhaps offer a satisfactory
case. The charge of exaggeration however is another matter. To the
person who complains that he has never met Dick Swiveller or Micawber or
Mrs. Gamp the answer is simply Turner's to the sceptical critic of his
sunset, "Don't you wish you could?" To the other, who objects more
plausibly to Dickens's habit of attaching to each of his characters some
label which is either so much flaunted all through that you cannot see
the character at all or else mysteriously and unaccountably disappears
when the story begins to grip the author, Dickens has himself offered an
amusing and convincing defence. In the preface to _Pickwick_ he answers
those who criticised the novel on the ground that Pickwick began by
being purely ludicrous and developed into a serious and sympathetic
individuality, by pointing to the analogous process which commonly takes
place in actual human relationships. You begin a new acquaintanceship
with perhaps not very charitable prepossessions; these later a deeper
and better knowledge removes, and where you have before seen an
idiosyncrasy you come to love a character. It is ingenious and it helps
to explain Mrs. Nickleby, the Pecksniff daughters, and many another.
Whether it is true