Hearts of Controversy | Page 7

Swinburne, and was the bad example he set to the generation
that thought his tunings to be the finest "music." For instance, in an
early poem he intends to tell us how a man who loved a woman
welcomed the sentence that condemned him to drown with her, bound,
his impassioned breast against hers, abhorring. He might have
convinced us of that welcome by one phrase of the profound exactitude
of genius. But he makes his man cry out for the greatest bliss and the
greatest imaginable glory to be bestowed upon the judge who
pronounces the sentence. And this is merely exaggeration. One takes
pleasure in rebuking the false ecstasy by a word thus prim and prosaic.
The poet intended to impose upon us, and he fails; we "withdraw our
attention," as Dr. Johnson did when the conversation became foolish. In
truth we do more, for we resent exaggeration if we care for our English
language. For exaggeration writes relaxed, and not elastic, words and
verses; and it is possible that the language suffers something, at least
temporarily--during the life of a couple of generations, let us say--from
the loss of elasticity and rebound brought about by such strain.
Moreover, exaggeration has always to outdo itself progressively. There
should have been a Durdles to tell this Swinburne that the habit of
exaggerating, like that of boasting, "grows upon you."
It may be added that later poetry shows us an instance of exaggeration
in the work of that major poet, Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie. His
violence and vehemence, his extremity, are generally signs not of
weakness but of power; and yet once he reaches a breaking-point that
power should never know. This is where his Judith holds herself to be
so smirched and degraded by the proffer of a reverent love (she being
devoted to one only, a dead man who had her heart) that thenceforth no
bar is left to her entire self-sacrifice to the loathed enemy Holofernes.
To this, too, the prim rebuke is the just one, a word for the mouth of
governesses: "My dear, you exaggerate."
It may be briefly said that exaggeration takes for granted some degree
of imbecility in the reader, whereas caricature takes for granted a high
degree of intelligence. Dickens appeals to our intelligence in all his
caricature, whether heavenly, as in Joe Gargery, or impish, as in Mrs.

Micawber. The word "caricature" that is used a thousand times to
reproach him is the word that does him singular honour.
If I may define my own devotion to Dickens, it may be stated as chiefly,
though not wholly, admiration of his humour, his dramatic tragedy, and
his watchfulness over inanimate things and landscape. Passages of his
books that are ranged otherwise than under those characters often leave
me out of the range of their appeal or else definitely offend me. And
this is not for the customary reason--that Dickens could not draw a
gentleman, that Dickens could not draw a lady. It matters little whether
he could or not. But as a fact he did draw a gentleman, and drew him
excellently well, in Cousin Feenix, as Mr. Chesterton has decided. The
question of the lady we may waive; if it is difficult to prove a negative,
it is difficult also to present one; and to the making, or producing, or
liberating, or detaching, or exalting, of the character of a lady there
enter many negatives; and Dickens was an obvious and a positive man.
Esther Summerson is a lady, but she is so much besides that her
ladyhood does not detach itself from her sainthood and her angelhood,
so as to be conspicuous--if, indeed, conspicuousness may be properly
predicated of the quality of a lady. It is a conventional saying that
sainthood and angelhood include the quality of a lady, but that saying is
not true; a lady has a great number of negatives all her own, and also
some things positive that are not at all included in goodness. However
this may be--and it is not important--Dickens, the genial Dickens,
makes savage sport of women. Such a company of envious dames and
damsels cannot be found among the persons of the satirist Thackeray.
Kate Nickleby's beauty brings upon her at first sight the enmity of her
workshop companions; in the innocent pages of "Pickwick" the aunt is
jealous of the niece, and the niece retorts by wounding the vanity of the
aunt as keenly as she may; and so forth through early books and late.
He takes for granted that the women, old and young, who are not his
heroines, wage this war within the sex, being disappointed by defect of
nature and fortune. Dickens is master of wit, humour, and derision; and
it must be confessed that his derision is abundant,