Hearts of Controversy

								

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 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