ABSTRACT
… The more we study Falstaff, Gulliver, and Sancho Panza, the more we perceive the art of the artist and thinker, but the closer we look at Mr Dickens’s characters, the more we detect the trickery of an artificer. The more we analyse Mr Dickens, the more we perceive that his humour runs into riotous extravagance, whilst his pathos degenerates into sentimentality. His characters, in fact, are a bundle of deformities. And he appears, too, to value them because they are deformed, as some minds value a crooked sixpence more than a sound coin. He has made the fatal mistake against which Goethe warned the artist. Everything with him is not supra naturam, but extra naturam.1 His whole art, as we shall presently show, is founded upon false principles. When we put down a work of his, we are tempted to ask, Quid hinc abest nisi res et veritas?2 And if this criticism may be pronounced upon his masterpieces, what can be said of his later works? Our answer must be found in our remarks upon Our Mutual Friend. As it is impossible for us here to analyse the whole work, we must content ourselves with a chapter. To do this in most cases would be as absurd as to exhibit a man’s tooth as a specimen of his eloquence. But Mr Dickens does not suffer by the process. He is seen to the best advantage in detached pieces. And we shall take the chapter on Podsnappery, both because it has been so much praised by Mr Dickens’s admirers, and because, too, we think it is most characteristic of his mind. A more suitable character then Podsnap could not have fallen into Mr Dickens’s hands. We fully sympathize with him in his hatred of Podsnappery….And Podsnap, if well conceived and well carried out, might have been the pendant to Pecksniff. But when we open the chapter, we find it an explosion of dulness. A number of automatons are moving about, who are all, so to speak, tattooed with various characteristics. There is the great automaton Podsnap, who is tattooed with a flourish of the right arm and a flush of the face, and the minor automaton Mr Lammle, who is tattooed with ginger eyebrows. Dancers are called ‘bathers,’ and one of them is distinguished by his ambling. In fact Mr Dickens here seems to regard his characters as Du Fresne says the English did their dogs, quanto deformiores eo meliores æstimant.1 The conversation is still more wonderful. Mr 484Dickens here alternates between melodrama and burlesque. If he is not upon stilts, he goes upon crutches. For instance, take the following—
Said Mr Podsnap to Mrs Podsnap, ‘Georgiana is almost eighteen.’
Said Mrs Podsnap to Mr Podsnap, assenting, ‘Almost eighteen.’
Said Mr Podsnap then to Mrs Podsnap, ‘Really I think we should have some people on Georgiana’s birthday.’
Said Mrs Podsnap then to Mr Podsnap, ‘which will enable us to clear off all those people who are due.’
