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PARTISAN REVIEW
variety, his work unites almost all of the ingredients to be found in
each of these men, so that it is harder to sum up Dickens in a phrase
or two than almost any other writer except Shakespeare or Dante.
His quality is easily felt, but eludes statement, so that it seems com–
paratively simple to make some true and basic announcement about
Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, or Proust. These three are generally considered
"greater writers," but are they better novelists? Do they fuse their
meanings, their intentions, their "axe to grind" into a single art form
-or do they find the confines of the novel too cramping for the
largeness of the thing they have to say, and impatiently brush aside
the pretext of fiction in order to communicate directly?
Tolstoy shares Dickens' moral fervor, and his underlying themes
are perhaps as serious, but even
his
supreme
War and Peace
is want–
ing in a kind of weight because of his optimistic ignorance of evil,
and
his
refusal to use material that might sound "invented." Dostoev–
sky, of course, knew as much about sin and the irrational and every
conceivable blackness as Dickens, and was often the wildest of come–
dians, but his immense and stormy vision seems to break out of
control, and a Western reader, finding himself swept away on the
back of the apocalyptic beast into the night, is likely to wish he
might be set down on his own feet again, and find his bearings with
the help of
his
own horn-rimmed spectacles. Yet Dickens has far
more in common with Dostoevsky than with Proust, who, for
all
the
sharpness of
his
scalpels, anatomizes a comparatively narrow segment
of experience.
And yet Dickens, although he shares the quality of
excessiveness
which marks the Russians and the Frenchman as great artists, does
not produce in the modern mind the same impression of a great
immediate experience. Perhaps the secret lies
in
the word "imme–
diate." We rarely put ourselves in the place of Dickens' characters
and feel directly with them. We see them from without, and the
romance of Florence Dombey touches us
personally
no more than
the lovers in "The Eve of St. Agnes." We become Little Nell, in our
own visceral being, no more than we become Rapunzel; and we
suffer the pangs of Lady Dedlock with the same remote pain that
the torments of Brunetto Latini communicate from the page of
Dante. Who weeps for Peggotty's niece as they weep for Anna Karen–
ina? In short, we are not forced into direct emotional participation,
