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CHARLES DICKENS' BEST STORIES (669 pp.)-Edited by Morton Dauwen Zabel -Hanover House...
Mere Mannerisms. Half a dozen variations on this theme help to dispel any notion of Dickens as irrepressibly comic. Other "best stories" of Editor Zabel's choosing include second-rate ghost thrillers and third-rate detective stories. At novel length, Dickens could create memorable caricatures, e.g., Mr. Micawber, Uriah Heep, Madame Defarge. In the short stories, his characters are mere mannerisms. In the novels, Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller produce idiosyncratic dialogue; in the short stories there is only an endless chatty...
...full, as he put it, of "the baleful spirit of the cosmopolite-that uncomfortable consequence of seeing many lands and feeling at home in none." The virtue of that defect, as James saw it, was tolerance. Compared to Twain's polemic, The Art of Travel, Critic Morton Dauwen Zabel's splendidly edited sampling of James's travel pieces on England, France, Italy and the U.S., is sunny-tempered and severely self-controlled...
...fire-has lost much of its appeal. There are some high jinks, but today's students go steady, marry early, refuse to worship the football hero, mostly leave the cheering of teams to the alumni. "Such irrational actions as riots are too much of a risk," says William Zabel, president of Princeton's debating society. "Anything you do out of the ordinary brings ridicule...
...Struggle of Truth. But the quality that distinguishes Conrad's best writing from that of artists equally resourceful is his exhaustive and passionate honesty. As Zabel says, "He corrected the failure of his contemporaries to become morally implicated in what they were doing." Zabel's critical introduction to this book is a striking recognition of the fact that in Conrad's case it is hard to separate the art of fiction from the struggle to tell the truth; all Conrad's narratives in their way exemplify his own obedience to Stein's famous injunction...