Hearts of Controversy

								

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
people came to their doors all aslant, and with streaming hair."  David
dreams of a cannonade, when at last he "fell--off a tower and down a
precipice--into the depths of sleep."  In the morning, "the wind might