as, however much concession in reserve, being satisfied, by his
observation of England, that it is to the people for whom Dickens wrote
his deficiencies in art are mainly due. The taste of his nation had
prohibited him from representing character in a grand style. The English
require too much morality and religion for genuine art. They made him
treat love, not as holy and sublime in itself, but as subordinate to
marriage; forced him to uphold society and the laws, against nature and
enthusiasm; and compelled him to display, in painting such a seduction
as in _Copperfield_, not the progress, ardour, and intoxication of
passion, but only the misery, remorse, and despair. The result of such
surface religion and morality, combined with the trading spirit, M.
Taine continues, leads to so many national forms of hypocrisy, and of
greed as well as worship for money, as to justify this great writer of
the nation in his frequent choice of those vices for illustration in his
tales. But his defect of method again comes into play. He does not deal
with vices in the manner of a physiologist, feeling a sort of love for
them, and delighting in their finer traits as if they were virtues. He
gets angry over them. (I do not interrupt M. Taine, but surely, to take
one instance illustrative of many, Dickens's enjoyment in dealing with
Pecksniff is as manifest as that he never ceases all the time to make
him very hateful.) He cannot, like Balzac, leave morality out of
account, and treat a passion, however loathsome, as that great
tale-teller did, from the only safe ground of belief, that it is a
force, and that force of whatever kind is good. It is essential to an
artist of that superior grade, M. Taine holds, no matter how vile his
subject, to show its education and temptations, the form of brain or
habits of mind that have reinforced the natural tendency, to deduce it
from its cause, to place its circumstances around it, and to develop its
effects to their extremes. In handling such and such a capital miser,
hypocrite, debauchee, or what not, he should never trouble himself about
the evil consequences of the vices. He should be too much of a
philosopher and artist to remember that he is a respectable citizen. But
this is what Dickens never forgets, and he renounces all beauties
requiring so corrupt a soil. M. Taine's conclusion upon the whole
nevertheless is, that though those triumphs of art which become the
property of all the earth have n