Pickwick's affair with the lady with yellow curl-papers being a mild
example. Though "Tom Jones" has a plot so excellent, no plot is
needed here, and no consecutive story is required. Detached
experiences, vagrants of every rank that come and go, as in real
life, are all the material of the artist. With such materials
Dickens was exactly suited; he was at home on high-road and lane,
street and field-path, in inns and yeomen's warm hospitable houses.
Never a humour escaped him, and he had such a wealth of fun and high
spirits in these glad days as never any other possessed before. He
was not in the least a bookish man, not in any degree a scholar; but
Nature taught him, and while he wrote with Nature for his teacher,
with men and women for his matter, with diversion for his aim, he
was unsurpassable--nay, he was unapproachable.
He could not rest here; he was, after all, a child of an age that
grew sad, and earnest, and thoughtful. He saw abuses round him--
injustice, and oppression, and cruelty. He had a heart to which
those things were not only abhorrent, but, as it were, maddening.
He knew how great an influence he wielded, and who can blame him for
using it in any cause he thought good? Very possibly he might have
been a greater artist if he had been less of a man, if he had been
quite disinterested, and had never written "with a purpose." That
is common, and even rather obsolete critical talk.
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