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.
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