Hearts of Controversy | Page 6

vision, of Tennyson's genius.
Emerson knew that the poet speaks adequately then only when he
speaks "a little wildly, or with the flower of the mind." Tennyson, the
clearest- headed of poets, is our wild poet; wild, notwithstanding that
little foppery we know of in him--that walking delicately, like Agag;
wild, notwithstanding the work, the ease, the neatness, the finish;
notwithstanding the assertion of manliness which, in asserting,
somewhat misses that mark; a wilder poet than the rough, than the
sensual, than the defiant, than the accuser, than the denouncer. Wild
flowers are his--great poet--wild winds, wild lights, wild heart, wild
eyes!

DICKENS AS A MAN OF LETTERS
It was said for many years, until the reversal that now befalls the
sayings of many years had happened to this also, that Thackeray was
the unkind satirist and Dickens the kind humourist. The truth seems to
be that Dickens imagined more evil people than did Thackeray, but that
he had an eager faith in good ones. Nothing places him so entirely out
of date as his trust in human sanctity, his love of it, his hope for it, his
leap at it. He saw it in a woman's face first met, and drew it to himself
in a man's hand first grasped. He looked keenly for it. And if he
associated minor degrees of goodness with any kind of folly or mental
ineptitude, he did not so relate sanctity; though he gave it, for
companion, ignorance; and joined the two, in Joe Gargery, most
tenderly. We might paraphrase, in regard to these two great authors, Dr.
Johnson's famous sentence: "Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has
no joys." Dickens has many scoundrels, but Thackeray has no saints.
Helen Pendennis is not holy, for she is unjust and cruel; Amelia is not
holy, for she is an egoist in love; Lady Castlewood is not holy, for she
too is cruel; and even Lady Jane is not holy, for she is jealous; nor is
Colonel Newcome holy, for he is haughty; nor Dobbin, for he turns
with a taunt upon a plain sister; nor Esmond, for he squanders his best
years in love for a material beauty; and these are the best of his good

people. And readers have been taught to praise the work of him who
makes none perfect; one does not meet perfect people in trains or at
dinner, and this seemed good cause that the novelist should be praised
for his moderation; it seemed to imitate the usual measure and
moderation of nature.
But Charles Dickens closed with a divine purpose divinely different.
He consented to the counsels of perfection. And thus he made Joe
Gargery, not a man one might easily find in a forge; and Esther
Summerson, not a girl one may easily meet at a dance; and Little Dorrit,
who does not come to do a day's sewing; not that the man and the
women are inconceivable, but that they are unfortunately improbable.
They are creatures created through a creating mind that worked its six
days for the love of good, and never rested until the seventh, the final
Sabbath. But granting that they are the counterpart, the heavenly side,
of caricature, this is not to condemn them. Since when has caricature
ceased to be an art good for man--an honest game between him and
nature? It is a tenable opinion that frank caricature is a better incident
of art than the mere exaggeration which is the more modern practice.
The words mean the same thing in their origin--an overloading. But, as
we now generally delimit the words, they differ. Caricature, when it has
the grotesque inspiration, makes for laughter, and when it has the
celestial, makes for admiration; in either case there is a good
understanding between the author and the reader, or between the
draughtsman and the spectator. We need not, for example, suppose that
Ibsen sat in a room surrounded by a repeating pattern of his hair and
whiskers on the wallpaper, but it makes us most exceedingly mirthful
and joyous to see him thus seated in Mr. Max Beerbohm's drawing; and
perhaps no girl ever went through life without harbouring a thought of
self, but it is very good for us all to know that such a girl was thought
of by Dickens, that he loved his thought, and that she is ultimately to be
traced, through Dickens, to God.
But exaggeration establishes no good understanding between the reader
and the author. It is a solemn appeal to our credulity, and we are right
to resent it. It is the violence of a weakling hand--the worst manner of
violence. Exaggeration is conspicuous in the newer poetry, and is so far,

therefore, successful, conspicuousness being its aim. But it was also the
vice of