of any of the novelists—­the Brontes, Mrs. Gaskell or the like—­who lay bare character with fullness and intimacy, they could not well be applied at all.  The faultiness of them in Dickens is less than in Thackeray, for in Dickens they are only incident to the scheme, which lies in the hero (his heroes are excellent) and in the grotesque characters, whereas in his rival they are in the theme itself.  For his pathos, not even his warmest admirer could perhaps offer a satisfactory case.  The charge of exaggeration however is another matter.  To the person who complains that he has never met Dick Swiveller or Micawber or Mrs. Gamp the answer is simply Turner’s to the sceptical critic of his sunset, “Don’t you wish you could?” To the other, who objects more plausibly to Dickens’s habit of attaching to each of his characters some label which is either so much flaunted all through that you cannot see the character at all or else mysteriously and unaccountably disappears when the story begins to grip the author, Dickens has himself offered an amusing and convincing defence.  In the preface to Pickwick he answers those who criticised the novel on the ground that Pickwick began by being purely ludicrous and developed into a serious and sympathetic individuality, by pointing to the analogous process which commonly takes place in actual human relationships.  You begin a new acquaintanceship with perhaps not very charitable prepossessions; these later a deeper and better knowledge removes, and where you have before seen an idiosyncrasy you come to love a character.  It is ingenious and it helps to explain Mrs. Nickleby, the Pecksniff daughters, and many another.  Whether it is true or not (and it does not explain the faultiness of such pictures as Carker and his kind) there can be no doubt that this trick in Dickens of beginning with a salient impression and working outward to a fuller conception of character is part at least of the reason of his enormous hold upon his readers.  No man leads you into the mazes of his invention so easily and with such a persuasive hand.

The great novelists who were writing contemporarily with him—­the Brontes, Mrs. Gaskell, George Eliot—­it is impossible to deal with here, except to say that the last is indisputably, because of her inability to fuse completely art and ethics, inferior to Mrs. Gaskell or to either of the Bronte sisters.  Nor of the later Victorians who added fresh variety to the national style can the greatest, Meredith, be more than mentioned for the exquisiteness of his comic spirit and the brave gallery of English men and women he has given us in what is, perhaps, fundamentally the most English thing in fiction since Fielding wrote.  For our purpose Mr. Hardy, though he is a less brilliant artist, is more to the point.  His novels brought into England the contemporary pessimism of Schopenhaur and the Russians, and found a home for it among the English peasantry.  Convinced that in the upper classes character could be studied and