th his reality; there is an open gap between the wonderful
pictures of the town in Illusions Perdues and the theatrical drama of
the old convict which they introduce. Yet his method was a right one,
though it was perverse of Balzac to be occupied at all with such
devices, when he might have rejected his falsity altogether. In
another man's work, where there is never this sharp distinction
between true and false, where both are merged into something different
from either--in Dickens's work--the method I refer to is much more
successfully followed; and there, in any of Dickens's later books, we
find the clearest example of it.

I have already been reminded of Stevenson's word upon this matter;
Stevenson noted how Dickens's way of dealing with his romantic
intrigues was to lead gradually into them, through well-populated
scenes of character and humour; so that his world is actual, its air
familiar, by the time that his plot begins to thicken. He gives
himself an ample margin in which to make the impression of the kind of
truth he needs, before beginning to concentrate upon the fabulous
action of the climax. Bleak House is a very good case; the highly
coloured climax in that book is approached with great skill and
caution, all in his most masterly style. A broad stream of diversified
life moves slowly in a certain direction, so deliberately at first
that its scope, its spread, is much more evident than its movement.
The book is a big survey of a quantity of odd and amusing people, and
it is only by degrees that the discursive method is abandoned and the
narrative brought to a point. Presently we are in the thick of the
story, hurrying to the catastrophe, without having noticed at all, it
may be, that our novel of manners has turned into a romantic drama,
with a mysterious crime to crown it. Dickens manages it far more
artfully than Balzac, because his imagination is not, like Balzac's,
divided against itself. The world which he peopled with Skimpole and
Guppy and the Bayham Badgers was a world that could easily include
Lady Dedlock, for though she is perhaps of the theatre, they are
certainly not of the common earth. They and she alike are at the same
angle to literal fact, they diverging one way, she another; they
accordingly make a kind of reality which can assimilate her romance.
Dickens was saved from trying to write two books at once by the fact
that one completely satisfied him. It expressed the exciting, amazing,
ex