The Sun.
London, England, 1853-08-22 00:00:00

LITERATURE.

Bleak House. No. XVIII. By Charles Dickens.
Not without something like regret do we find
ourselves arrived at the penultimate number of
Bleak House—conscious that another instalment
(the double number concluding the serial) will
bring to a close the chequered incidents of a story
told half as a simple narrative, half as a yet simpler
autobiography. Our regrets in this matter are the
more sincere, because of late Bleak House has by
its ripened excellence proved in many respects
worthy of its incomparable author's reputation.
Throughout our perusal of the opening chapters of
the tale we must confess to a feeling of rather
poignant disappointment. There was such bewil-
dering confusion in the scheme of the fiction, there
was such a distressful sense of uncertainty in a
work changing at doubtful intervals from the first
to the third person, there was such vagueness in
the characters at first introduced, and those charac-
ters, moreover, made such really mysterious and
unexpected appearances on the scene—that with
all our admiration for the genius of Mr. Dickens
(perhaps we should rather say because of the
genuineness and fervour of that admiration), the
chief feeling excited in our mind by the tale was,
as we have observed, a feeling of disappointment.
To this moment we have not the slightest notion
whence came so suddenly in the streets of London
the hero and heroine, Ada and Richard. Even now
we don't know anything at all, good, bad, orindif-
ferent, about their antecedents. We can't conjec-
ture from what points of the compass the two lovers
were brought abruptly together. Their parents areas
though they had never existed. Their childhood,
like a dream within a dream, is wholly unima-
ginable. Again, up to this instant, John Jarndyce
is the merest sketch of a character, without a trait

bywh , ich he could be recognised, if we except his
reiterated allusion to the east wind. And assuredly
if John Jarndyce is nothing more substantial than
. .

the merest sketch, the same may be said of that
most silent and vapoury of walking gentlemen,
Allan Woodcourt. Another source of disappoint-
ment to us in " Bleak House" is connected with
the wonderful Lawrence Boythorn, who, after pro-
mising so gloriously on his sudden " burst" into the
narrative, wrecked our hopes in his regard by an
equally sudden disappearance. Likewise to a cer-
tain extent has it been with dear little Charlie, who
has dwindled from the precocious orphan of poor
" Coavinses" into the obscure and for the most part
dumb and invisible handmaiden of Esther Summer-
son. Krook and his diabolical cat glanced for a
brief while from the fiction like the veriest night-
mare, and then made a hideous exit in the glare of
spontaneous combustion. Nemo, without uttering
a syllable, crawled about for a short time in rags to
die of opium in a garret, and then to moulder away
in a nameless pit in one of our city graveyards.
Jo shouldered his broom for an instant, and
then " moved on" in a like direction. Gridley
raved about his wrongs during a hurried interval,
and then expired in a make-shift bed in the corner
of a shooting gallery. Meanwhile, we have had
hasty glimpses into the hall at Chesney Wold,
where solemn footsteps sound along the ghost's
walk at twilight, and where Rosa shows her pretty
face at the lattice, and where the honest old house-
keeper, Mrs. Rouncewell, smooths down her laven-
der silk while sitting in the storeroom, musing over
the fortunes of one son, the " Iron Man," and over
the misfortunes of another, the scapegrace. We
have peeped into Mr. Skimpole's apartments in the
Polygon, where he condescends to a noontide break-
fast upon a dish of nectarines. We have entered
the littered house of Mrs. Jellyby, where Caddy
has been in a " state of ink," and Peepy has
twisted himself into a laocosn among the area rail-
ings. We have penetrated the back parlour 'of the
Bagnets, where the "mixture" has been placed
convenient to the elbow of the old girl's husband,
by the hands of that same beneficent old girl her-
self, the worthy mother of Quebec, Malta, and
Young Woolwith—the colour-sergeant of the Non-
pareil Battalion. We have watched the fair Judy
in assiduous attendance upon grandfather and
grandmother Smallweed : and have witnessed the
devotion of Phil Squod to that stalwart Mr. George,
his benefactor : and have remarked the fits in-
dulged in, off and on, by the faithful Guster in that
little underground kitchen of the tenement of Mr.
Snagsby the.law-stationer. Sometimes our attention
has been called away from the main plot by the hol-
low piety of Mr. Chadband, and sometimes again
by the shallow philanthropy of Mrs. Pardiggle.
If we have wandered up to London, it has been
now in the direction of the gorgeous town house of
the Dedlocks, and now into the squalid haunts of
Tom-all-alone's. An attendant sprite in the per-
son of Mr. Bucket, the detective, has waived a
wand of magic over the scene through an occa-
sional " under current" of forefinger. He has car-
ried us with him along the trail left by the mur-
derer of the old man of the name of Tulkinghorn.
He has fixed upon Mademoiselle Hortense, the
discarded lady's-maid, the brand of midnight as-
sassination. Throughout all these shifting scenes,
and changing persons, and varying incidents, it
was impossible not to have a discomforting sense
of their pervading confusedness—and yet gradually
there has grown out of all this chaos of pre-
paration a surprising harmony in the un-
ravelling of the tangled skein of the romance,
out of all these regrets connected with the scheme
of the narrative there has latterly sprung up a
very marvellous fascination. N otwithstanding,
therefore, the undoubted shortcomings of the ear-
lier moiety of the fiction as a work of art—it must
be acknowledged by us that we recognise in the
closing instalments of " Bleak House" much that
is entitled to our warmest admiration. The num-
ber here before us, that for August, may be
regarded without extravagance as one of the most
remarkable of the many remarkable literary per-
formances of Boz. It lures us on from the first
sentence to the last with an attraction wholly irre-
sistible. It carries us breathlessly through all
that impetuous chase after the missing Lady Ded-
leck, keeping perpetually before us the miraculous
shrewdness of Mr. Bucket and the dazed solicitude
of Esther Summerson. It interrupts the account
of their singular journey down into the country to
the cottage of the brickmakers, and then suddenly
back again to the crowded streets of the metropolis
—by taking us into several of the sumptuous cham-
bers of the town-house of the proud but generous,
the forsaken and (literally) paralysed, Sir Leicester.
We see him apparently dying on his couch, sur-
rounded by a cluster of faithful attendants, by bluff
Mr. George, by kindly Mrs. Rouncewell, by the
inane Volumnia, with her rouge and her sympathy.
Then, by a sudden change, we are once more upon
the road with Mr. Bucket and his companion—this
time, too, actually upon the trail of the fugi-
tive. We scarcely remember' any imaginary
incident more ingenious than the abrupt de-
tection by Mr. Bucket of the clue which
ultimately guides them through the mazes of the
labyrinth—the exchange of clothes between Jenny
and Lady Dedlock. Certainly we cannot call to
recollection any fictitious scene more exquisitely
moving in its pathos than that which takes place
in the stone-kitchen of Mr. Snagsby, the law-
stationer. It is marked in every syllable with the
touch of the masterhand. If read aloud it infal-

libly commands les larmes dans la mix. Under
any circumstances it secures our sympathy, rivets
our regard, and extorts our admiration. Suppos-
ing even that Mr. Dickens had never written any-
thing comparable in merit to these chapters, lead-
ing us up to the dead body of that lady-mother
lying stark in draggled rags at daybreak on the
steps of the city graveyard—that description alone
would have been sufficient to stamp his reputation
as a novelist, proving by the pathos of the humorist
the Genius at once of our Tears and of our
Laughter.