Hearts of Controversy

								

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