Hearts of Controversy

								

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, 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