The plot of “Great Expectations” is also noticeable as indicating, better than any of his previous stories, the individuality of Dickens’s genius.  Everybody must have discerned in the action of his mind two diverging tendencies, which, in this novel, are harmonized.  He possesses a singularly wide, clear, and minute power of accurate observation, both of things and of persons; but his observation, keen and true to actualities as it independently is, is not a dominant faculty, and is opposed or controlled by the strong tendency of his disposition to pathetic or humorous idealization.  Perhaps in “The Old Curiosity Shop” these qualities are best seen in their struggle and divergence, and the result is a magnificent juxtaposition of romantic tenderness, melodramatic improbabilities, and broad farce.  The humorous characterization is joyously exaggerated into caricature,—­the serious characterization into romantic unreality, Richard Swiveller and Little Nell refuse to combine.  There is abundant evidence of genius both in the humorous and the pathetic parts, but the artistic impression is one of anarchy rather than unity.

In “Great Expectations,” on the contrary, Dickens seems to have attained the mastery of powers which formerly more or less mastered him.  He has fairly discovered that he cannot, like Thackeray, narrate a story as if he were a mere looker-on, a mere “knowing” observer of what he describes and represents; and he has therefore taken observation simply as the basis of his plot and his characterization.  As we read “Vanity Fair” and “The Newcomes,” we are impressed with the actuality of the persons and incidents.  There is an absence both of directing ideas and disturbing idealizations.  Everything drifts to its end, as in real life.  In “Great Expectations” there is shown a power of external observation finer and deeper even than Thackeray’s; and yet, owing to the presence of other qualities, the general impression is not one of objective reality.  The author palpably uses his observations as materials for his creative faculties to work upon; he does not record, but invents; and he produces something which is natural only under conditions prescribed by his own mind.  He shapes, disposes, penetrates, colors, and contrives everything, and the whole action, is a series of events which could have occurred only in his own brain, and which it is difficult to conceive of as actually “happening.”  And yet in none of his other works does he evince a shrewder insight into real life, and a clearer perception and knowledge of what is called “the world.”  The book is, indeed, an artistic creation, and not a mere succession of humorous and pathetic scenes, and demonstrates that Dickens is now in the prime, and not in the decline of his great powers.