It is strange--it seems to me deplorable--that Dickens himself was not
content to leave his wonderful hypocrite--one who should stand
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.
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