Pickwick, they did not become impartial: they simply changed
sides, and became friends and apologists where they had formerly
been mockers.

In Lever's story there is a real change of attitude. There is no
relenting towards Potts: he never gains our affections like Don
Quixote and Pickwick: he has not even the infatuate courage of
Tappertit. But we dare not laugh at him, because, somehow, we
recognize ourselves in Potts. We may, some of us, have enough
nerve, enough muscle, enough luck, enough tact or skill or
address or knowledge to carry things off better than he did; to
impose on the people who saw through him; to fascinate Katinka
(who cut Potts so ruthlessly at the end of the story); but for
all that, we know that Potts plays an enormous part in ourselves
and in the world, and that the social problem is not a problem of
story-book heroes of the older pattern, but a problem of Pottses,
and of how to make men of them. To fall back on my old phrase, we
have the feeling--one that Alnaschar, Pistol, Parolles, and
Tappertit never gave us--that Potts is a piece of really
scientific natural history as distinguished from comic story
telling. His author is not throwing a stone at a creature of
another and inferior order, but making a confession, with the
effect that the stone hits everybody full in the conscience and
causes their self-esteem to smart very sorely. Hence the failure
of Lever's book to please the readers of Household Words. That
pain in the self-esteem nowadays causes critics to raise a cry of
Ibsenism. I therefore assure them that the sensation first came
to me from Lever and may have come to him from Beyle, or at least
out of the Stendhalian atmosphere. I exclude the hypothesis of
complete originality on Lever's part, because a man can no more