fter unending digressions
the author might die himself before his heroine was fairly out of the
arms of the nurse.

To declare how Dickens might have presented the same theme is not
difficult. The tragedy would sink to tortuous melodrama, and there would
be much mystery-mongering, with a careful covering up of dark secrets to
be revealed only at an opportune moment. The large simplicity of the
theme would be frittered away, and every opportunity for deliberate
pathos would be insisted upon. Probably Juliet would die in blank verse,
disguised as prose. But Mercutio, altho he would certainly cease to be a
gentleman, would be a most amusing personality whose whimsical behavior
would seem highly laughable; and the nurse might become another Mrs.
Gamp, with a host of peculiarities realized with riotous humor. And it
is possible also to make a guess at the treatment which would have been
accorded to the pitiful tale if Thackeray had undertaken it. The tragedy
would have softened into a tragi-comedy with a happy ending probably,
the loving couple being reprieved somehow in the final chapters just
before the kindly author put his puppets away, after preaching a last
gentle sermon on the vanity of life. The background would be the British
society of the middle of the nineteenth century; and some Lady Kew,
delightfully clever and selfishly arrogant, might be the chief of one
clan, and some Lord Steyne, bitter and masterful, might head the rival
house. And not improbably the narrator would be Mr. Arthur Pendennis
himself.

Perhaps Mr. and Mrs. March might constitute the chorus, if Mr. Howells
were to lay the scene here in New York, bringing one family from the
West, endowed somehow with a certain elemental largeness of mold, and
importing the other from that New England which could be held
responsible for the sensitiveness of their self-torturing consciences.
There would be no blinking of the minor selfishnesses of humanity; and
neither hero nor heroine would stand forth flawless. Their failures
would be very human; and the author would withhold all comment, leaving
the veracity of the portrayal to speak for itself. There would be
unrolled before the reader the broad panorama of the cosmopolitan
metropolis, infinitely variegated, often harsh in color, but forever
fascinating in the intensity of its vitality. The modern tragedy with
its catastrophe internal rather than external, would be laid before us
in a narrative containing e