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.  That counsel should be, “Do not insist upon seeing the immortal 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 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 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