IN THE DICKENSIAN PORTRAIT .sx GALLERY .sx IN a portrait gallery one finds a person portrayed in one incident or attitude , and in that alone he goes down to posterity .sx Franz Hals's Laughing Cavalier will never grow solemn ; he will never grow sad .sx He was a real person , not an imaginary one , and had a thousand expressions , gestures , poses , which were natural to himself , and by which he was known to his friends .sx He may even have been capable at times of a devastating frown , but he will never frown again in this world ; he will never do anything but laugh on canvas in the Wallace Collection , and , in reproduction , in the Brown Collection , in the Jones Collection , in the Robinson Collection , and in thousands of other private collections all through the generations .sx Dickens has innumerable sketches , that show only one attitude or one expression , but are as characteristic of both the subject and the artist as his most elaborate work .sx But here the parallel between the portraiture of the brush and that of the pen ceases to hold .sx The Laughing Cavalier is a complete portrait ; the pen-sketch of one incident is after all a sketch only .sx Indeed it is more like one of those fragmentary studies , of some selected portion or aspect of the subject , which enter into the painter's method of building up his conception of the ultimate portrait .sx A very sketchy example deals with that discerning and generous patron of the stage , Mr. Curdle , who lamented to Nicholas Nickleby the decline of the drama , and then in answer to Nicholas's mischievous question as to what he meant by the dramatic unities , he .sx coughed and considered .sx " The unities , sir , " he said , " are a completeness a kind of a universal dovetailedness with regard to place and time a sort of a general oneness , if I may be allowed to use so strong an expression .sx I take those to be the dramatic unities , so far as I have been enabled to bestow attention upon them , and I have read much upon the subject , and thought much .sx I find , running through the performances of this child , " said Mr. Curdle , turning to the phenomenon , " a unity of feeling , a breadth , a light and shade , a warmth of colouring , a tone , a harmony , a glow , an artistical development of original conceptions , which I look for , in vain , among older performers .sx I don't know whether I make myself understood ?sx " " Perfectly , " replied Nicholas .sx " Just so , " said Mr. Curdle , pulling up his neckcloth .sx " That is my definition of the unities of the drama .sx " With which illuminating statement of his views , in phrases which seem hauntingly familiar through chance meetings in much more recent dramatic and literary criticism , Mr. Curdle ended by booking two four-shilling seats for the bespeak night , and paying for them with three half-crowns , on a pretext of want of change .sx There have been magistrates portrayed by many writers , but , apart from the immortality of Mr. Justice Shallow himself , nobody remembers any magistrate in fiction so well as everybody remembers Mr. Nupkins of Ipswich .sx He figures in not more than three scenes indeed chiefly in one only yet the mention of his name instantly recalls the coaching of him by his clerk Mr. Jinks , his bullying of the constables , his hasty sentencing of everybody , his equally hasty reversing of all his own sentences , and the account in his own thrilling words , of how he .sx rushed into a prize-ring on the fourth of May last , attended by only sixty special constables ; and , at the hazard of falling a sacrifice to the angry passions of an infuriated multitude , prohibited a pugilistic contest between the Middlesex Dumpling and the Suffolk Bantam .sx Of Mr. Raddle , the henpecked husband of Bob Sawyer's landlady , we hear the voice only on three occasions , on the chief of which we hear it somewhat indistinctly , at the small hours , when his wife calls to him to come and turn out Bob Sawyer's party , who had become too noisy " You ought to be ashamed of yourselves , " said the voice of Mr. Raddle , which appeared to proceed from beneath some distant bedclothes .sx " Ashamed of themselves !sx " said Mrs. Raddle .sx " Why don't you go down and knock 'em every one down stairs ?sx You would if you was a man .sx " " I should if I was a dozen men , my dear , " replied Mr. Raddle pacifically , " but they've the advantage of me in numbers , my dear .sx " " Ugh , you coward !sx " replied Mrs. Raddle , with supreme contempt .sx " And so Mr. Raddle escaped the solecism of forcibly expelling a party which included the immortal Pickwick .sx Dickens is fond of drawing his portraits in pairs or duplicates , like an artist entrusted with a commission for a portrait and a replica .sx There are the Cheeryble Brothers ; there are Pyke and Pluck ; there are Boots and Brewer at Veneering's table , and the " two stuffed Buffers " , as he calls them , at the same place , and there are the two poor relations at Dingley Dell .sx But , in addition , many of his other portraits pair themselves in one's mind a personage in one of his books .sx displays a strong resemblance to one in another , though never so strong but that each is a perfectly distinct and original character .sx Rogue Riderhood is in some respects very similar to Jerry Cruncher .sx Both Riderhood and Jerry Cruncher have , in addition to an ostensible daily calling , a second and mysterious occupation , which will not bear the light .sx The one steals dead bodies ; the other robs dead bodies .sx Jerry is continually proclaiming that he is " an honest tradesman " ; Riderhood continually announces himself to be " a man as gets his living by the sweat of his brow " .sx Jerry has a wife whom he conceives to be thwarting his labours in honest tradesmanship by her " flopping" , as he calls her kneeling to intercede on his behalf .sx Rogue Riderhood has a daughter whose ` Poll-parroting " seems to him to endanger the living he perspires so profusely to earn .sx Pecksniff and Chadband are two unctuous humbugs with a good deal of similarity , but the Pecksniff is the richer piece of portraiture .sx Chadband has the tendency to declamation supposed to be appropriate to his clerical character , and too much of his long-drawn-out word-spinning might conceivably have bored his hearers , though the transcript of it from Dickens's shorthand notes could never bore the readers .sx The parallel between old Wardle , in Pickwick Papers , and Lawrence Boythorn , in Bleak House , will have struck a good many readers .sx Wardle is the first rough sketch ; Boythorn is the finished drawing .sx Boythorn is Wardle over again , with a heightening of his distinctive qualities , which we may presumably attribute to the Landor element in the later portrait .sx He is more noisy , more excitable , more irascible ; he is equally generous , impulsive , and kindhearted .sx He may have been founded on Landor ; he is certainly fashioned in material quarried from the same rock as Wardle .sx Pickwick's eulogium on Wardle might be applied with equal fitness to Boythorn " a noble person ; a kind , excellent , independent-spirited , fine-hearted , hospitable man " .sx David Copperfield's Agnes Wickfield and Martin Chuzzlewit's Mary Graham are rather like allegorical figures painted on some decorative panel , with a pensive smile and an upward cast of their eyes .sx I am sure these were light blue , and Mary Graham's were the lighter of the two or rather of the four .sx Mr. and Mrs. Boffin are a sort of reincarnation , in humbler guise , of Papa and Mama Meagles , but Bella Wilfer , though not without occasional wilfulness , is a very different kind of adopted child from Tattycoram .sx In analysing Dickens's method of portraiture , it is a very significant point to notice that he does not , as a rule , make his really great , or Pickwickian-sense , characters fall in love with each other .sx In some cases he invents lay-figures to serve as spouses for them , and he attempts in quite a perfunctory way to give interest to these lay-figures by attributing to some of them heroisms of a kind appropriate to the circulating-library fiction or the suburban-theatre melodrama of his day .sx Walter Gay is a good , kindly lad , but nothing can make him much more than a shadow , though he comes home from such hairbreadth escapes among perils of shipwreck in far-off seas to marry Florence Dombey Florence , for whom Tom Pinch himself would not have been too good , could he only have got out of his compartment into hers .sx It is not to poverty of invention on the author's part that we owe the similarity of Allan Woodcourt's foreign-shipwreck experiences , but to the fact that Esther Summerson ought to have married John Jarndyce after all , and Dickens had no heart in his labour to make Woodcourt seem real .sx Hence those foreign-shipwreck experiences are hastily summed up in one single paragraph which clearly does not interest the author , any more than it convinces the reader .sx Yet we are asked to believe it was all so vivid to Esther that it confirmed and deepened her love for that excellent but colourless young doctor till , as she tells us , she could have gone on her knees to bless him .sx So , dear reader , could not you or I. .sx John Westlock and Ruth Pinch are a fairly well-matched pair , though they are not quite front-rank Dickensian characters .sx John Rokesmith and Bella Wilfer are a thoroughly satisfactory couple , though they , too , are not in the grand manner of the chief Dickensian creations .sx Mr. and Mrs. Micawber are a bright example of two of the genuine Pickwickian-sense giant race married , and not unequally yoked , but the great qualities of each drawing-out and setting-off those of the other .sx Eugene Wrayburn really does make a misalliance when he marries Lizzie Hexam not because of her deficiency in blue blood , but because she has not enough blood of any kind .sx She is very good , patient , unselfish , but very uninteresting , and not very distinctively Dickensian , while he has some delightful unmistakably Pickwickian-sense traits about him .sx The plain respectable Bradley Headstone ( of course , minus his taste for homicide !sx ) would have been quite good enough for her , and little Miss Peecher was sufficiently Pickwickian-sense in her quality to be too good for him .sx Dick Swiveller and the Marchioness are a couple of real Pickwickian-sense characters , who may be set up alongside of Mr. and Mrs. Micawber as mutually suited and mutually illustrative ; but if the Marchioness , who found orange-peel-and-water so like wine , " if you make believe very " , had not married Dick , she might have gone into the Martin Chuzzlewit compartment , and married young Bailey Junior , that precocious lad-of-all-work at Todgers's , afterwards page at the Anglo-Bengalee Offices , who , at some thirteen years of age , insisted on being shaved by Poll Sweedlepipe , and imaginatively professed to find the results " reether redder than I could wish " .sx This opens up interesting thoughts of what weddings Dickens readers might have arranged , could they only have got leave to assort the characters of the Dickensian Portrait Gallery irrespective of which books they belong to .sx Job Trotter , reformed as he is at the end of his career in Pickwick , but still with his interest in what Sam calls " the vater-cart " , might have replaced " the old 'un " in the affections of that " lone lorn creetur " , Missis Gummidge .sx But she , as David learned from Mr. Peggotty , herself became the victim of a Dickensian sudden and complete reform , and her unmurmuring cheerfulness would have been so sad a disappointment to Job that he might have felt constrained to seek a divorce on the ground of incompatibility of temper !sx Susan Nipper , with her firmness , her grasp of a situation , her " Nipperisms " , a feature similar to , but not so good as , Sam's " Wellerisms " , her affection for her mistress , not less than his for Mr. Pickwick Susan was the real wife for Sam Weller , if bride he must have , rather than the pleasant but prosaic and unconvincing Mary .sx Whom would the reader choose as a wife for Mr. Pickwick if he could conceive of any lady sufficiently Pickwickian in character being found to solace that great man's undeclining years ?sx What would one say to Betsy Trotwood , whose goodness of heart , as great as Pickwick's own , is slightly disguised under a certain surface sternness that would be a foil to his geniality ?sx