Hearts of Controversy | Page 8

and is cast upon an
artificially exposed and helpless people; that is, he, a man, derides the
women who miss what a man declared to be their "whole existence."

The advice which M. Rodin received in his youth from
Constant--"Learn to see the other side; never look at forms only in
extent; learn to see them always in relief"--is the contrary of the
counsel proper for a reader of Dickens. That counsel should be, "Do not
insist upon seeing the immortal figures of comedy 'in the round.' You
are to be satisfied with their face value, the face of two dimensions. It is
not necessary that you should seize Mr. Pecksniff from beyond, and
grasp the whole man and his destinies." The hypocrite is a figure
dreadful and tragic, a shape of horror; and Mr. Pecksniff is a hypocrite,
and a bright image of heart- easing comedy. For comic fiction cannot
exist without some such paradox. Without it, where would our laugh be
in response to the generous genius which gives us Mr. Pecksniff's
parenthesis to the mention of sirens ("Pagan, I regret to say"); and the
scene in which Mr. Pecksniff, after a stormy domestic scene within,
goes as it were accidentally to the door to admit the rich kinsman he
wishes to propitiate? "Then Mr. Pecksniff, gently warbling a rustic
stave, put on his garden hat, seized a spade, and opened the street door,
as if he thought he had, from his vineyard, heard a modest rap, but was
not quite certain." The visitor had thundered at the door while outcries
of family strife had been rising in the house. "'It is an ancient pursuit,
gardening. Primitive, my dear sir; for, if I am not mistaken, Adam was
the first of the calling. My Eve, I grieve to say, is no more, sir; but' (and
here he pointed to his spade, and shook his head, as if he were not
cheerful without an effort) 'but I do a little bit of Adam still.' He had by
this time got them into the best parlour, where the portrait by Spiller
and the bust by Spoker were." And again, Mr. Pecksniff, hospitable at
the supper table: "'This,' he said, in allusion to the party, not the wine,
'is a Mingling that repays one for much disappointment and vexation.
Let us be merry.' Here he took a captain's biscuit. 'It is a poor heart that
never rejoices; and our hearts are not poor. No!' With such stimulants
to merriment did he beguile the time and do the honours of the table."
Moreover it is a mournful thing and an inexplicable, that a man should
be as mad as Mr. Dick. None the less is it a happy thing for any reader
to watch Mr. Dick while David explains his difficulty to Traddles. Mr.
Dick was to be employed in copying, but King Charles the First could
not be kept out of the manuscripts; "Mr. Dick in the meantime looking
very deferentially and seriously at Traddles, and sucking his thumb."

And the amours of the gentleman in gaiters who threw the
vegetable-marrows over the garden wall. Mr. F.'s aunt, again! And
Augustus Moddle, our own Moddle, whom a great French critic most
justly and accurately brooded over. "Augustus, the gloomy maniac,"
says Taine, "makes us shudder." A good medical diagnosis. Long live
the logical French intellect!
Truly, Humour talks in his own language, nay, his own dialect, whereas
Passion and Pity speak the universal tongue.
It is strange--it seems to me deplorable--that Dickens himself was not
content to leave his wonderful hypocrite--one who should stand
imperishable in comedy--in the two dimensions of his own admirable
art. After he had enjoyed his own Pecksniff, tasting him with the
"strenuous tongue" of Keats's voluptuary bursting "joy's grapes against
his palate fine," Dickens most unfairly gives himself the other and
incompatible joy of grasping his Pecksniff in the third dimension,
seizes him "in the round," horsewhips him out of all keeping, and
finally kicks him out of a splendid art of fiction into a sorry art of
"poetical justice," a Pecksniff not only defeated but undone.
And yet Dickens's retribution upon sinners is a less fault than his
reforming them. It is truly an act denoting excessive simplicity of mind
in him. He never veritably allows his responsibility as a man to lapse.
Men ought to be good, or else to become good, and he does violence to
his own excellent art, and yields it up to his sense of morality. Ah, can
we measure by years the time between that day and this? Is the
fastidious, the impartial, the non-moral novelist only the grandchild,
and not the remote posterity, of Dickens, who would not leave Scrooge
to his egoism, or Gradgrind to his facts, or Mercy