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.