erge. It is the
summary of a situation, with its elements spreading widely and touching
many lives; it gathers them in and gives an impression of them all. It
is pictorial as a whole, and quite as much so as any of Thackeray's
broad visions. But I have noted before how inevitably Dickens's
picture, unlike Thackeray's, is presented in the _form_ of scenic
action, and here is a case in point. All this impression of life,
stretching from the fog-bound law courts to the marshes of Chesney Wold,
from Krook and Miss Flite to Sir Leicester and Volumnia, is rendered as
incident, as a succession of particular occasions--never, or very
seldom, as general and far-seeing narrative, after Thackeray's manner.
Dickens continually holds to the immediate scene, even when his object
is undramatic; he is always readier to work in action and dialogue than
to describe at large; he is happier in placing a character there before
us, as the man or woman talked and behaved in a certain hour, on a
certain spot, than in reflecting a long impression of their manner of
living. In Thackeray's hands the life of Miss Flite, for instance, would
have become a legend, recalled and lingered over, illustrated by passing
glimpses of her ways and oddities. With Dickens she is always a little
human being who figures upon a scene, in a group, a visible creature
acting her small part; she is always dramatic.

And Dickens, using this method everywhere, even in such a case as
hers--even where his purpose, that is to say, is pictorial, to give
the sense of a various and vivacious background--is forced to
crystallize and formulate his characters very sharply, if they are to
make their effect; it is why he is so often reduced to the expedient
of labelling his people with a trick or a phrase, which they have to
bring with them every time they appear. Their opportunities are
strictly limited; the author does not help them out by glancing freely
into their lives and sketching them broadly. Flite, Snagsby, Chadband
and the rest of them--whatever they are, they must be all of it within
narrow bounds, within the few scenes that can be allotted to them; and
if one of them fails now and then it is not surprising, the wonder is
that most of them succeed so brilliantly. In thus translating his
picture into action Dickens chose the most exigent way, but it was
always the right way for him. He was curiously incapable in the other;
when occasionally he tries his hand at picture-