Hearts of Controversy | Page 9

Pecksniff to her
absurdity, or Dombey to his pride? Nay, who makes Micawber finally
to prosper? Truly, the most unpardonable thing Dickens did in those
deplorable last chapters of his was the prosperity of Mr. Micawber. "Of
a son, in difficulties"--the perfect Micawber nature is respected as to his
origin, and then perverted as to his end. It is a pity that Mr. Peggotty
ever came back to England with such tidings. And our last glimpse of
the emigrants had been made joyous by the sight of the young

Micawbers on the eve of emigration; "every child had its own wooden
spoon attached to its body by a strong line," in preparation for Colonial
life. And then Dickens must needs go behind the gay scenes, and tell us
that the long and untiring delight of the book was over. Mr. Micawber,
in the Colonies, was never again to make punch with lemons, in a crisis
of his fortunes, and "resume his peeling with a desperate air"; nor to
observe the expression of his friends' faces during Mrs. Micawber's
masterly exposition of the financial situation or of the possibilities of
the coal trade; nor to eat walnuts out of a paper bag what time the die
was cast and all was over. Alas! nothing was over until Mr. Micawber's
pecuniary liabilities were over, and the perfect comedy turned into
dulness, the joyous impossibility of a figure of immortal fun into cold
improbability.
There are several such late or last chapters that one would gladly cut
away: that of Mercy Pecksniff's pathos, for example; that of Mr.
Dombey's installation in his daughter's home; that which undeceives us
as to Mr. Boffin's antic disposition. But how true and how whole a
heart it was that urged these unlucky conclusions! How shall we
venture to complain? The hand that made its Pecksniff in pure wit, has
it not the right to belabour him in earnest--albeit a kind of earnest that
disappoints us? And Mr. Dombey is Dickens's own Dombey, and he
must do what he will with that finely wrought figure of pride. But there
is a little irony in the fact that Dickens leaves more than one villain to
his orderly fate for whom we care little either way; it is nothing to us,
whom Carker never convinced, that the train should catch him, nor that
the man with the moustache and the nose, who did but weary us, should
be crushed by the falling house. Here the end holds good in art, but the
art was not good from the first. But then, again, neither does Bill Sikes
experience a change of heart, nor Jonas Chuzzlewit; and the end of
each is most excellently told.
George Meredith said that the most difficult thing to write in fiction
was dialogue. But there is surely one thing at least as difficult--a thing
so rarely well done that a mere reader might think it to be more difficult
than dialogue; and that is the telling what happened. Something of the
fatal languor and preoccupation that persist beneath all the violence of

our stage--our national undramatic character--is perceptible in the
narrative of our literature. The things the usual modern author says are
proportionately more energetically produced than those he tells. But
Dickens, being simple and dramatic and capable of one thing at a time,
and that thing whole, tells us what happened with a perfect speed which
has neither hurry nor delays. Those who saw him act found him a fine
actor, and this we might know by reading the murder in Oliver Twist,
the murder in Martin Chuzzlewit, the coming of the train upon Carker,
the long moment of recognition when Pip sees his guest, the convict,
reveal himself in his chambers at night. The swift spirit, the hammering
blow of his narrative, drive the great storm in David Copperfield
through the poorest part of the book--Steerforth's story. There is surely
no greater gale to be read of than this: from the first words, "'Don't you
think that,' I said to the coachman, 'a very remarkable sky?'" to the end
of a magnificent chapter. "Flying clouds tossed up into most
remarkable heaps, suggesting greater heights in the clouds than there
were depths below them. . . There had been a wind all day; and it was
rising then with an extraordinary great sound . . . Long before we saw
the sea, its spray was on our lips . . . The water was out over the flat
country, and every sheet and puddle lashed its banks, and had its stress
of little breakers. When we came within sight of the sea, the waves on
the horizon, caught at intervals above the boiling abyss, were like
glimpses of another shore, with towers and buildings. . . The