But Dickens, being simple and dramatic and capable of one thing at a time, and that thing whole, tells us what happened with a perfect speed which has neither hurry nor delays. Those who saw him act found him a fine actor, and this we might know by reading the murder in Oliver Twist, the murder in Martin Chuzzlewit, the coming of the train upon Carker, the long moment of recognition when Pip sees his guest, the convict, reveal himself in his chambers at night. The swift spirit, the hammering blow of his narrative, drive the great storm in David Copperfield through the poorest part of the book--Steerforth's story. There is surely no greater gale to be read of than this: from the first words, "'Don't you think that,' I said to the coachman, 'a very remarkable sky?'" to the end of a magnificent chapter. "Flying clouds tossed up into most remarkable heaps, suggesting greater heights in the clouds than there were depths below them. . . There had been a wind all day; and it was rising then with an extraordinary great sound . . . Long before we saw the sea, its spray was on our lips . . . The water was out over the flat country, and every sheet and puddle lashed its banks, and had its stress of little breakers. When we came within sight of the sea, the waves on the horizon, caught at intervals above the boiling abyss, were like glimpses of another shore, with towers and buildings. . . The people came to their doors all aslant, and with streaming hair." David dreams of a cannonade, when at last he "fell--off a tower and down a precipice--into the depths of sleep."In the morning, "the wind might have lulled a little, though not more sensibly than if the cannonading I had dreamed of had been diminished by the silencing of half a dozen guns out of hundreds.""It went from me with a shock, like a ball from a rifle," says David in another place, after the visit of a delirious impulse; here is the volley of departure, the shock of passion vanishing more perceptibly than it came.
The tempest in David Copperfield combines Dickens's dramatic tragedy of narrative with his wonderful sense of sea and land. But here are landscapes in quietness: "There has been rain this afternoon, and a wintry shudder goes among the little pools in the cracked, uneven flag-stones. . . Some of the leaves, in a timid rush, seek sanctuary within the low-arched cathedral door; but two men coming out resist them, and cast them out with their feet:" The autumn leaves fall thick, "but never fast, for they come circling down with a dead lightness." Again, "Now the woods settle into great masses as if they were one profound tree." And yet again, "I held my mother in my embrace, and she held me in hers; and among the still woods in the silence of the summer day there seemed to be nothing but our two troubled minds that was not at peace." Yet, with a thousand great felicities of diction, Dickens had no BODY of style.
Dickens, having the single and simple heart of a moralist, had also the simple eyes of a free intelligence, and the light heart. He gave his senses their way, and well did they serve him. Thus his eyes--and no more modern man in anxious search of "impressions" was ever so simple and so masterly: "Mr. Vholes gauntly stalked to the fire, and warmed his funereal gloves." "'I thank you,' said Mr.
