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In this connection, or rather in connection with the other case of Froude, it is worth while to take another figure from Dickens's history, which illustrates the other and better side of the facile and popular method. Sheer ignorance of the environment made him wrong about Dunstan.
The hero is a colossal hypocrite, hopelessly exaggerated. If one finds Dickens's characters to be caricatures, what shall be said of this collection? This is the very apotheosis of the unctuous gasbag, from whose mouth, eternally ajar, pours a viscous stream of religious and moral exhortation.
The Baronet's cousin in Dickens's novel, who, perplexed by the failure of the police to discover the murderer of the baronet's solicitor, said "Far better hang wrong fellow than no fellow," was not only expressing a very common sentiment, but trembling on the brink of the rarer Salvationist opinion that it is much better to hang the wrong fellow: that, in fact, the wrong fellow is the right fellow to hang.
Petted Little Em'ly with her pathetic tragedy is handled with deep sympathy and true artistic delicacy. Peggotty and Mrs. Steerforth are admirably drawn and contrasted. Mrs. Gummidge's thoughtful care of Peggotty exhibits Dickens's fine perception of the self-sacrificing spirit among the very poor. Uriah Heep remains the type of the humble sycophant, and Mr.
There was one pale young face to which I whispered Dickens's attention, and he stood over it with a look of sympathizing interest not to be easily forgotten. There was much ghastly comicality mingled with the horror in several of the places we visited on those two nights. We were standing in a room half filled with people of both sexes, whom the police accompanying us knew to be thieves.
I can laugh as heartily as anybody at Dickens's "scolds" and female bullies; none the less however am I ready in all seriousness to reckon the shrew as an evil influence, as bad as some of the most subtle and malevolent scourges inflicted by physical nature.
Martin Chuzzlewit is, I think, vaguely unsatisfactory to the reader, vaguely sad and heavy even to the reader who loves Dickens, because in Martin Chuzzlewit more than anywhere else in Dickens's works, more even than in Oliver Twist, there is a predominance of the harsh and hostile sort of humour over the hilarious and the humane.
There is something mysteriously associated with happiness not only in the corpulence of Falstaff and the corpulence of Tony Weller, but even in the red nose of Bardolph or the red nose of Mr. Stiggins. A thing of beauty is an inspiration for ever a matter of meditation for ever. It is rather a thing of ugliness that is strictly a joy for ever. All Dickens's books are Christmas books.
Their galling yoke would not have been borne from reign to reign, and through century after century, even by such seeming reconcilables as constituted the bulk of the French populace during the ante-Revolutionary period, if they had all been like the wicked St. Evrémonde of Mr. Dickens's tragic story.
The 'comic writers' for him were exponents of the petty and vulgar ideals of the lower middle classes of the day. The world of Dickens's novels was a portrait of the class for which Dickens wrote.
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