One's heart hardens: the
object is too manifest, the trick is too easy. Conceive a child of
Dombey's age remarking, with his latest breath, "Tell them that the
picture on the stairs at school is not Divine enough!" That is not
the delirium of infancy, that is art-criticism: it is the Athenaeum
on Mr. Holman Hunt. It is not true to nature; it is not good in
art: it is the kind of thing that appears in Sunday-school books
about the virtuous little boy who died. There is more true pathos
in many a page of "Huckleberry Finn." Yet this is what Jeffrey
gushed over. "There has been nothing like the actual dying of that
sweet Paul." So much can age enfeeble the intellect, that he who
had known Scott, and yet nibbled at his fame, descended to admiring
the feeblest of false sentiment. As for Little Nell, who also has
caused floods of tears to be shed, her case is sufficiently
illustrated by the picture in the first edition ("Master Humphrey's
Clock,", 1840, p. 210):
"'When I die
Put near me something that has loved the light,
And had the sky above it always.' Those
Were her words."
"Dear, gentle, patient, noble Nell was dead!"
The pathos is about as good as the prose, and THAT is blank verse.
Are the words in the former quotation in the least like anything
that a little girl would say? A German sentimentalist might have
said them; Obermann might have murmured them in his weaker moments.
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