Charles Dickens : a Critical Study. By George Gissing. (Blackie
and Son.)—What Mr. Swinburne justly calls the " matchless genius" of Dickens is criticised with knowledge and discrimina- tion in this little volume, which belongs to the " Victorian Era Series." The somewhat finical taste of our time is apt to look slightingly on the art, or want of art, displayed by this great novelist. His mannerisms, his exaggeration, his love of stage effect, and his incoherent plots too often outweigh both with critic and reader the transcendent qualities that give a unique position to Dickens in our imaginative literature. Mr. Gissing's study of the novelist is a generous eulogy. He deplores his love
of melodrama ; he admits that as a story-teller, if humour be subtracted, he would never have gained popularity ; he grants "the sin, most gross, most palpable, which Dickens everywhere commits in his abuse of ' coincidence ; " but he considers that faults like these are insignificant when weighed against his knowledge of life and his supreme gift as a humourist. Mr. Gissing protests against the notion that Dickens' is simply a caricaturist. " It seems to me," he writes, " that in all his very best work he pursues an ideal widely apart from that of caricature in any sense His finest humour, his most successful satire, belongs to a different order of art. To be con- vinced of this one need but think of the multiplicity of detail, all exquisitely finished, which goes to make his best-known por- traits." The author considers that to call Pecksniff or Uriah Heep caricatures would be an abuse of language, and yet they are rather the products of an imagination always fertile and sometimes grotesque, than the lifelike characters wo meet with in Fielding and Scott. Dickens was a great admirer of Ban Jenson, and, like that famous dramatist, delighted, as Mr. Gissing acknowledges, in extravagant humours.
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