His imagination plays superb tricks with such objects and things,
touching the most dilapidated of them with a magic such as the genius
of a great poet uses, when dealing with nature--only the "nature" of
Dickens is made of less lovely matters than leaves and flowers.
The wild exaggerations of Dickens--his reckless contempt for realistic
possibility--need not hinder us from enjoying, apart from his
revelling humor and his too facile sentiment, those inspired outbursts
of inevitable truth, wherein the inmost identity of his queer people
stands revealed to us. His world may be a world of goblins and
fairies, but there cross it sometimes figures of an arresting appeal
and human voices of divine imagination.
61. JANE AUSTEN. PRIDE AND PREJUDICE.
Jane Austen's delicate and ironic art will remain unassailable through
all changes of taste and varieties of opinion. What she really
possesses--what might be called the clue to her inimitable secret--is
nothing less than the power of giving expression to that undying
ironic detachment, touched with a fine malice but full of tender
understanding, which all women, to some degree or other, share, and
which all men, to some degree or other, suffer from; in other words,
the terrible and beautiful insight of the maternal instinct.
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