hilarating world he lived in himself, with its consistent
transmutation of all values, and he knew no other.

The method which he finally worked out for himself was exactly what he
required. There might be much to say of it, for it is by no means
simple, but I am only concerned with one or two points in it. The
chief characteristic I take to be this careful introduction of violent
drama into a scene already prepared to vouch for it--a scene so alive
that it compels belief, so queer that almost anything might happen
there naturally. The effect which Dickens gets from the picture in his
novels, as opposed to the action, is used as a sort of attestation of
the action; and it surely fulfils its mission very strikingly in the
best of his work--the best from this point of view--Bleak House,
Dombey and Son, Our Mutual Friend. His incurable love of labyrinthine
mystification, when it really ran away with him, certainly defeated
all precautions; not even old Dorrit's Marshalsea, not even Flora and
Mr. F.'s Aunt, can do anything to carry off the story of the Clennams.
But so long as he was content with a fairly straightforward romance,
all went well; the magnificent life that he projected was prepared to
receive and to speed it. Blimber and Mrs. Pipchin and Miss Tox, the
Podsnaps and Twemlow and the Veneerings, all contribute out of their
overflow of energy to the force of a drama--a drama in which they may
take no specific part, but which depends on them for the furnishing of
an appropriate scene, a favouring background, a world attuned. This
and so much more they do that it may seem like insulting them even to
think for a moment of their subordination to the general design, which
is indeed a great deal less interesting than they. But Dickens's
method is sound and good, and not the less so because he used it for
comparatively trivial purposes. It is strange that he should have
known how to invent such a scene, and then have found no better drama
to enact on it--strange and always stranger, with every re-reading.
That does not affect his handling of a subject, which is all that I
deal with here.

The life which he creates and distributes right and left, in such a book
as Bleak House, before bending to his story--this I call his picture,
for picture it is in effect, not dramatic action. It exhibits the world
in which Lady Dedlock is to meditate murder, the fog of the suit in
Chancery out of which the intrigue of the book is to em