DICKENS'S "BLEAK HOUSE.”

"I BELIEVE I have never had so many readers," says Mr. Dickens in the preface to Bleak House, "as in this book." We have no doubt that he has the pleasantest evidence of the truth of this conviction in the balance-sheet of his publishingaccount; and, without any more accurate knowledge of the statistics of his circulation than the indications furnished by limited personal observation, we should not be surprised to find that Punch and the Times newspaper were his only rivals in this respect. Whatever such a fact may not prove, it does prove incontestably that Mr. Dickens has a greater power of amusing the book-buying public of England than any other living writer; and moreover establishes, what we should scarcely have thought probable, that his power of amusing is not weakened now that the novelty of his style has passed away, nor his public

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wearied by the repetition of effects in which truth of nature and sobriety of thought are largely sacrificed to mannerism and point. Author and public react upon each other; and it is no wonder that a writer, who finds that his peculiar genius and his method of exhibiting it secure him an extensive and sustained popularity, should be deaf to the remonstrances of critics when they warn him of defects that his public does not care for, or urge him to a change of method which might very probably thin his audience for the immediate present, and substitute the quiet approval of the judicious for the noisy and profitable applause of crowded pit and gallery. Intellectual habits, too, become strengthened by use, and a period comes in the life of a man of genius when it is hopeless to expect from him growth of faculty or correction of faults.

Bleak House is, even more than any decessors, chargeable with not absolute want of construction.

of its pre

simply faults, but A novelist may

invent an extravagant or an uninteresting plot—may fail to balance his masses, to distribute his light and shade-may prevent his story from marching, by episode and discursion: but Mr. Dickens discards plot, while he persists in adopting a form for his thoughts to which plot is essential, and where the

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absence of a coherent story is fatal to continuous interest. In Bleak House, the series of incidents which form the outward life of the actors and talkers has no close and necessary connexion; nor have they that higher interest that attaches to circumstances which powerfully aid in modifying and developing the original elements of human character. great Chancery suit of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, which serves to introduce a crowd of persons as suitors, lawyers, law-writers, law-stationers, and general spectators of Chancery business, has positively not the smallest influence on the character of any one person concerned; nor has it any interest of itself. Mr. Richard Carstone is not made reckless and unsteady by his interest in the great suit, but simply expends his recklessness and unsteadiness on it, as he would on something else if it were non-existent. This great suit is lugged in by the head and shoulders, and kept prominently before the reader, solely to give Mr. Dickens the opportunity of indulging in stale and commonplace satire upon the length and expense of Chancery proceedings, and exercises absolutely no influence on the characters and destinies of any one person concerned in it. The centre of the arch has nothing to do in keeping the arch together. The series of incidents which answers

to what in an ordinary novel is called plot, is that connected with the relationship of the heroine (again analogically speaking) to her mother. Lady Dedlock, who when first introduced to the reader is a stately lady of the supremest fashion, has before her marriage with Sir Leicester Dedlock given birth to an illegitimate child, whom she supposes to have died in its birth, but who, under the name of Esther Summerson, was brought up in obscurity. The truth becomes known to her Ladyship, and is ferreted out by the family solicitor, Mr. Tulkinghorn; a person of eminently respectable standing, but incomprehensible motives, who tortures Lady Dedlock with mysterious hints, and afterwards direct menaces of disclosing her shame to her husband; at which stage of the proceedings he is shot in his chambers. The reader is so artfully tempted to suspect Lady Dedlock of the deed, that all but the simplest will at once conclude that a theatrical surprise is meditated; and accordingly, the real culprit turns out to be Lady Dedlock's French maid, whom Mr. Tulkinghorn had used in discovering the secret, and afterwards treated with harshness and contumely, that roused her malignant temper to a murderous revenge. The secret, however, is not buried with Mr. Tulkinghorn; and, maddened by fear of discovery and open shame, Lady

Dedlock flies from her home, and dies of exhaustion at the entrance of a wretched City churchyard, where her lover was buried, and where she is found by her daughter and a detective policeman who had been sent in quest of her. Literally, we have here given the whole of what can by any stretch of the term be called the main plot of Bleak House. And not only is this story both meagre and melodramatic, and disagreeably reminiscent of that vilest of modern books Reynolds's Mysteries of London, but it is so unskilfully managed that the daughter is in no way influenced either in character or destiny by her mother's history; and the mother, her husband, the prying solicitor, the French maid, and the whole Dedlock set, might be eliminated from the book without damage to the great Chancery suit, or perceptible effect upon the remaining characters. We should then have less crowd, and no story; and the book might be called "Bleak House, or the Odd Folks that have to do with a long Chancery Suit." This would give an exact notion of the contents of a collection of portraits embracing suitors, solicitors, law-writers, law-stationers, money-lenders, law-clerks, articled and not-articled, with their chance friends and visitors, and various members of their respective families. Even then, a comprehensive etcætera would