"Sometimes"  (if  I  may  again  use  my  own  words),  **as  in  T/ie  Heart  of
Midlothian,  he  dawdles  over  unimportant  matters  after  the  main  interest
has  come  to  a  close  ;  but  more  often  he  is  guilty,  as  Lady  Louisa  Stuart
put  it,  of  '  huddling  up  a  conclusion  anyhow,  and  so  kicking  the  book
out  of  his  way.'"  Ivatihoe  tiXi^X  Kenilworth  have  exceptionally  effective
catastrophes,  but  "any  tyro  in  criticism  could  pick  holes  in  the  dtlnoug-
ments  of  the  Antiquary  or  Woodstock.''^  Dickens's  conclusions  are
commonly  marred  by  his  desire  to  get  all  his  characters  together  into  a
series  of  grand  final  scenes  in  which  rewards  and  punishments  may  be
distributed  according  to  the  strict  demands  of  poetic  justice ;  and  to
achieve  this  he  is  obliged  to  have  recourse  to  means  that  are  too  patently
forced  and  artificial  to  be  in  the  least  convincing.  The  contrast  between
the  well-rounded  and  completely  explanatory  d,!nouements  of  most  of  our
older  novelists  and  the  abrupt  endings,  which  are  often  no  endings  at  all,
so  popular  in  much  of  our  later  fiction  opens  up  an  interesting  line  of
study  in  the  changes  which  have  come  over  the  art  of  fiction  since  the
days  of  the  Victorian  masters.  The  logic  of  the  catastrophe  will  be  dealt
with  in  our  chapter  on  the  drama.
