inconvenience, and humiliation?  Or take again Mr. Boffin in “Our Mutual Friend.”  Mr. Boffin is a simple, guileless, open-hearted, open-handed old man.  Yet, in order to prove to Miss Bella Wilfer that it is not well to be mercenary, he, again, goes through a long course of dissimulation, and does some admirable comic business in the character of a miser.  I say it boldly, I do not believe Mr. Boffin possessed that amount of histrionic talent.  Plots requiring to be worked out by such means are ill-constructed plots; or, to put it in another way, a man who had any gift for the construction of plots would never have had recourse to such means.  Nor would he, I think, have adopted, as Dickens did habitually and for all his stories, a mode of publication so destructive of unity of effect, as the publication in monthly or weekly parts.  How could the reader see as a whole that which was presented to him at intervals of time more or less distant?  How, and this is of infinitely greater importance, how could the writer produce it as a whole?  For Dickens, it must be remembered, never finished a book before the commencement of publication.  At first he scarcely did more than complete each monthly instalment as required; and though afterwards he was generally some little way in advance, yet always he wrote by parts, having the interest of each separate part in his mind, as well as the general interest of the whole novel.  Thus, however desirable in the development of the story, he dared not risk a comparatively tame and uneventful number.  Moreover, any portion once issued was unalterable and irrevocable.  If, as sometimes happened, any modification seemed desirable as the book progressed, there was no possibility of changing anything in the chapters already in the hands of the public, and so making them harmonize better with the new.

But of course, with all this, the question still remains how far Dickens’ comparative failure as a constructor of plots really detracts from his fame and standing as a novelist.  To my mind, I confess, not very much.  Plot I regard as the least essential element in the novelist’s art.  A novel can take the very highest rank without it.  There is not any plot to speak of in Lesage’s “Gil Blas,” and just as little in Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair,” and only a very bad one in Goldsmith’s “Vicar of Wakefield.”  Coleridge admired the plot of “Tom Jones,” but though one naturally hesitates to differ from a critic of such superb mastery and power, I confess I have never been struck by that plot, any more than by the plots, such as they are, in “Joseph Andrews,” or in Smollett’s works.  Nor, if I can judge of other people’s memories by my own, is it by the mechanism of the story, or by the intrigue, however admirably woven and unravelled, that one remembers a work of fiction.  These may exercise an intense passing interest of curiosity, especially during a first perusal.  But afterwards they fade from the mind, while the characters, if highly vitalized