That he showed inequality as he wrought at the many books which filled the years between “Pickwick” and the unfinished “Mystery of Edwin Drood,” may also be granted.  Also may it be confessed that within the bounds of one book there are the extremes of good and bad.  It is peculiar to Dickens that often in the very novel we perchance feel called upon to condemn most, occurs a scene or character as memorably great as anything he left the world.  Thus, we may regard “Old Curiosity Shop,” once so beloved, as a failure when viewed as a whole; and yet find Dick Swiveller and the Marchioness at their immortal game as unforgettable as Mrs. Battle engaged in the same pleasant employment.  Nor because other parts of “Little Dorrit” seem thin and artificial, would we forego the description of the debtor’s prison.  And our belief that the presentation of the labor-capital problem in “Hard Times” is hasty and shallow, does not prevent a recognition of the opening sketch of the circus troop as displaying its author at his happiest of humorous observation.  There are thus always redeeming things in the stories of this most unequal man of genius.  Seven books there are, novels in form, which are indubitable masterpieces:  “Martin Chuzzlewit,” “Dombey and Son,” “David Copperfield,” “Bleak House,” “A Tale of Two Cities,” “Great Expectations” and “Our Mutual Friend.”  These, were all the others withdrawn, would give ample evidence of creative power:  they have the largeness, variety and inventive verve which only are to be found in the major novelists.  Has indeed the same number of equal weight and quality been given forth by any other English writer?

Another proof that the power of Dickens was not dependent exclusively upon the comic, is his production of “A Tale of Two Cities.”  It is sometimes referred to as uncharacteristic because it lacks almost entirely his usual gallery of comics:  but it is triumphantly a success in a different field.  The author says he wished for the nonce to make a straight adventure tale with characters secondary.  He did it in a manner which has always made the romance a favorite, and compels us to include this dramatic study of the French Revolution among the choicest of his creations.  Its period and scene have never—­save by Carlyle—­been so brilliantly illuminated.  Dickens was brooding on this story at a time when, wretchedly unhappy, he was approaching the crisis of a separation from his wife:  the fact may help to explain its failure to draw on that seemingly inexhaustible fountain of bubbling fun so familiar in his work.  But even subtract humor and Dickens exhibits the master-hand in a fiction markedly of another than his wonted kind.  This Novel—­or romance, as it should properly be called—­reminds us of a quality in Dickens which has been spoken of in the way of derogation:  his theatrical tendency.  When one declares an author to be dramatic, a compliment is intended.  But when he is called theatric, censure is implied.  Dickens, always possessed of a strong sense of the dramatic and using it to immense advantage, now and again goes further and becomes theatric:  that is, he suggests the manipulating of effects with artifice and the intention of providing sensational and scenic results at the expense of proportion and truth.  A word on this is advisable.