“Though, no doubt, in these matters, when Lovelace is tired of Clarissa (or the contrary), it is best for both parties to break at once, * * * yet our self-love, or our pity, or our sense of decency, does not like that sudden bankruptcy. Before we announce to the world that our firm of Lovelace and Co. can’t meet its engagements, we try to make compromises; we have mournful meetings of partners; we delay the putting up of the shutters, and the dreary announcement of the failure. It must come: but we pawn our jewels to keep things going a little longer.” Dickens is included with this “didactic” trio, not so much because he belongs with them as because he does not belong with the others. He cannot be classed as a negative example, but his positive contributions are relatively small. His artistic superiority to Thackeray in this respect comes, however, not from a greater knowledge of artistry, and even less from greater care for it, but through the happy accident of a vivid, dramatic temperament. He refrains from much moralizing not, we are sure, because he loves moralizing less but because he loves people and actions more. His overwhelming interest in these, his affection and respect for the doings and sayings of his characters, is too intense to allow of their being interrupted by anything. He is thus something of an artist unaware. He does not work out his own salvation by taking thought or by deliberating over ways and means; but through a fortunate preoccupation, an absorbing engagement with the concrete, he almost unconsciously dispenses with the abstract, or expresses it in terms of the specific. It is true also that he segregates a good deal of his reflection in his Prefaces; but it crops up too often in the course of the narrative to be disregarded. One of the first showings occurs in connection with Mr. Bumble’s relinquishment of the beadle’s costume together with that office, and his pensive cogitations thereupon.[131] “There are some promotions in life, which, independent of the more substantial rewards they offer, acquire peculiar value and dignity from the coats and waistcoats connected with them. A field-marshal has his uniform; a bishop his silk apron; a counsellor his silk gown; a beadle his cocked hat. Strip the bishop of his apron, or the beadle of his hat and lace; what are they? Men. Mere men. Dignity, and even holiness too, sometimes, are more questions of coat and waistcoat than some people imagine.” In his next novel, Dickens has a word for those “who pamper their compassion and need high stimulants to rouse it,” and indicates the cause of hysterical zeal on the one hand or dull indifference on the other, equally misplaced:[132]