George Meredith said that the most difficult thing to write in fiction was dialogue.  But there is surely one thing at least as difficult—­a thing so rarely well done that a mere reader might think it to be more difficult than dialogue; and that is the telling what happened.  Something of the fatal languor and preoccupation that persist beneath all the violence of our stage—­our national undramatic character—­is perceptible in the narrative of our literature.  The things the usual modern author says are proportionately more energetically produced than those he tells.  But Dickens, being simple and dramatic and capable of one thing at a time, and that thing whole, tells us what happened with a perfect speed which has neither hurry nor delays.  Those who saw him act found him a fine actor, and this we might know by reading the murder in Oliver Twist, the murder in Martin Chuzzlewit, the coming of the train upon Carker, the long moment of recognition when Pip sees his guest, the convict, reveal himself in his chambers at night.  The swift spirit, the hammering blow of his narrative, drive the great storm in David Copperfield through the poorest part of the book—­Steerforth’s story.  There is surely no greater gale to be read of than this:  from the first words, “‘Don’t you think that,’ I said to the coachman, ’a very remarkable sky?’” to the end of a magnificent chapter.  “Flying clouds tossed up into most remarkable heaps, suggesting greater heights in the clouds than there were depths below them. . .  There had been a wind all day; and it was rising then with an extraordinary great sound . . .  Long before we saw the sea, its spray was on our lips . . .  The water was out over the flat country, and every sheet and puddle lashed its banks, and had its stress of little breakers.  When we came within sight of the sea, the waves on the horizon, caught at intervals above the boiling abyss, were like glimpses of another shore, with towers and buildings. . .  The people came to their doors all aslant, and with streaming hair.”  David dreams of a cannonade, when at last he “fell—­off a tower and down a precipice—­into the depths of sleep.”  In the morning, “the wind might have lulled a little, though not more sensibly than if the cannonading I had dreamed of had been diminished by the silencing of half a dozen guns out of hundreds.”  “It went from me with a shock, like a ball from a rifle,” says David in another place, after the visit of a delirious impulse; here is the volley of departure, the shock of passion vanishing more perceptibly than it came.