rue to nature: not merely
true to a selected feature, but to the natural form as a whole.
Falstaff, in his wildest humour, speaks and acts as such a man really
might speak and act. He has no catch-phrase on which he harps, as if
he were a talking-machine wound up to emit a dozen sounds. Parson
Adams speaks and acts as such a being might do in nature. The comic
characters of Goldsmith, Scott, or Thackeray do not outrun and defy
nature, nor does their drollery depend on any special and abnormal
feature, much less on any stock phrase which they use as a label. The
illustrations of Cruikshank and Phiz are delightfully droll, and often
caricatures of a high order. But being caricatures, they overload and
exaggerate nature, and indeed are always, in one sense, impossible in
nature. The grins, the grimaces, the contortions, the dwarfs, the
idiots, the monstrosities of these wonderful sketches could not be
found in human beings constructed on any known anatomy. And Dickens's
own characters have the same element of unnatural distortion. It is
possible that these familiar caricatures have even done harm to his
reputation. His creations are of a higher order of art and are more
distinctly spontaneous and original. But the grotesque sketches with
which he almost uniformly presented his books accentuate the element of
caricature on which he relied; and often add an unnatural extravagance
beyond that extravagance which was the essence of his own method.

The consequence is that everything in Dickens is "in the excess," as
Aristotle would say, and not "in the mean." Whether it is Tony Weller,
or "the Shepherd," or the Fat Boy, Hugh or the Raven, Toots or
Traddles, Micawber or Skimpole, Gamp or Mantalini--all are overloaded
in the sense that they exceed nature, and are more or less extravagant.
They are wonderful and delightful caricatures, but they are impossible
in fact. The similes are hyperbolic; the names are grotesque; the
incidents partake of harlequinade, and the speeches of roaring farce.
It is often wildly droll, but it is rather the drollery of the stage
than of the book. The characters are never possible in fact; they are
not, and are not meant to be, nature; they are always and everywhere
comic distortions of nature. Goldsmith's Dr. Primrose tells us that he
chose his wife for the same qualities for which she chose her wedding
gown. That is humour, but it is also pure, literal, exact truth to
nature. David