Dickens does with
his "Golden Dustman." But it is a failure, nevertheless; and it must
become a serious question in aesthetics how far the spellbound reader may
be tortured with an interest which the power awakening it is not
adequate to gratify. Is it generous, is it just in a novelist, to lift
us up to a pitch of tragic frenzy, and then drop us down into the last
scene of a comic opera? We refuse to be comforted by the fact that the
novelist does not, perhaps, consciously mock our expectation.
Let us take the moral of "Griffith Gaunt,"--so poignant and effective
for the most part,--and see how lamentably it suffers from the defective
art of the _denouement_. In brief: up to the end of Mrs. Gaunt's trial
we are presented with a terrible image of the evils that jealousy,
anger, and lies bring upon their guilty and innocent victims. Griffith
Gaunt is made to suffer--as men in life suffer--a dreadful remorse and
anguish for the crimes he has committed and the falsehoods to which they
have committed him. A man with a heart at first tender and true becomes
a son of perdition, utterly incapable of tenderness and
truth,--consciously held away from them by ever-cumulative force. The
spectacle is not new,--it is old as sin itself; but it is here revealed
with the freshest and most authentic power, and with a repelling
efficacy which we have seldom seen equalled in literature.
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