He sometimes looked back on children, and saw them through the eyes of
their elders. Dickens saw men and women as they appear to children.
This comparison suggests a certain lack of sympathy or lack of
understanding in those who are quick to see hypocrisy in others. In
Dickens lack of sympathy was a fair revenge; moreover, his hypocrites
amused him so much that he did not wish to understand them. What a loss
it would have been to the world if he had explained them away! But it is
difficult, I think, to see a hypocrite in a man whose intimacy you have
cultivated, whose mind you have entered into, as Shakespeare entered
into the mind of his creatures. Hypocrisy, in its ordinary forms, is a
superficial thing--a skin disease, not a cancer. It is not easy, at
best, to bring the outward and inward relations of the soul into perfect
harmony; a hypocrite is one who too readily consents to their
separation. The English, for I am ready now to return to my point, are a
people of a divided mind, slow to drive anything through on principle,
very ready to find reason in compromise.
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