her but the grace of sympathy; but when she condoled with the woman, and her own tears fell, she wanted no beauty. I say condoled, but her only words were 'Jenny! Jenny!' All the rest was in the tone in which she said them. ... I think the best side of such people is almost hidden from us. What the poor are to the poor is little known, excepting to themselves and God."

But in his carefully prepared scenes of pathos Dickens is too self-conscious to write like this.

In judging the place of Dickens, as we look back upon his work from the beginning of the twentieth century, we feel that in all essential respects he belongs to the tradition settled and founded by Fielding and Smollett. He has much that we shall not find in either, but he does not differ from them in essentials. Dickens knew his Smollett from beginning to end, and educated David Copperfield upon him; but he has a "sensibility," as the eighteenth century would have called it, which is altogether wanting in the author of Roderick Random. Yet in style, manner, and diffusive method of conducting a story, Dickens followed in the way of the novels he had read till he knew them by heart. In his later books he began to learn something from the age in which he lived; he groups his incidents and

arranges his narrative with greater care and a finer sense of proportion.

The unique qualities of his humour and characterisation, combined with the charm and vigour of his personality, gave to Dickens an extraordinary and far-reaching influence while he was yet alive. He had followers and disciples who copied or took hints from him- Sala, Wilkie Collins, Bret Harte, and Alphonse Daudet; but after his death the tide of critical favour turned against him, and it was discovered that he had many faults and shortcomings. The time has passed when Dickens is likely to be either a direct influence or a belittled and discredited figure in literary history. His place is assured and not to be taken from him again; for, though we see the force of the stereotyped accusations of exaggeration and burlesque, he has ceased to be a polemical figure, and we can see also the good as well as the bad. The refusal to take Dickens seriously, as a man who saw and interpreted life clearly and originally, is as obsolete and antiquated as Dr. Johnson's disparagement of Milton.

THE NOVELS OF DICKENS.

Sketches by Boz, 1836; Pickwick Papers, 1837; Oliver Twist, 1838; Nicholas Nickleby, 1839; The Old Curiosity Shop, 1840; Barnaby Rudge, 1841; Martin Chuzzlewit,

1843; Dombey and Son, 1846; David Copperfield, 1849; Bleak House, 1852; Hard Times, 1854; Little Dorrit, 1855; A Tale of Two Cities, 1859; The Uncommercial Traveller, 1861; Great Expectations, 1861; Our Mutual Friend, 1864; The Mystery of Edwin Drood, 1870 (unfinished).

And besides these there are-Master Humphrey's Clock, the Christmas Books, American Notes, Pictures from Italy, A Child's History of England, short stories, and reprinted pieces.

CHAPTER XII

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY (1811-63).

CONTEMPORARY popularity is rarely the mother of enduring fame, and the two are hardly ever interchangeable quantities. The popularity of Dickens in his lifetime was immense and phenomenal, but after his death the disintegration of critical judgment set in, and to admire his work was a mark of bondage to an obsolete phase of taste. Thackeray never won the popularity which his friend and fellow-writer reached so easily; the sale of his monthly numbers fell far below that of Dickens; and though with Vanity Fair he became a force in literature to be counted with, even at his death the comparative judgment the future would bring forth might have seemed doubtful. Perhaps nothing in the story of literary criticism is more interesting. than the gradual emergence of Thackeray's great fame in the two or three decades which followed his death. His faults as an artist are not those of Dickens, and he redeems them by a realism, reserve, and dislike of emphasis in his transcript of life which presents an absolute contrast to the

italics and exclamation marks of his fellownovelist.

"A beautiful vein of genius lay struggling about in him," said Carlyle of Thackeray, with an aptness which does not always belong to his comments upon his contemporaries. Thackeray was a shy and diffident man, reserved and very sensitive, and we feel that never, either on paper or to his friends, did he wholly reveal himself; he was garrulous and wrote diffusively, he constantly made personal intrusions into his books, he is the most charming of friends and guides through the narrative, but something is kept back from us, and to the last page there is still an unknown element in the personality of the man who has talked so much about himself and of his books. Dickens showed what he was, and the least percipient could divine what his opinion would be on any given subject, what his mental attitude was to life in general. But Thackeray was a riddle; he was alternately accused of cynicism and sentimentalism at one time he was unfeeling and represented life as worse than it was at another he was inclined to hope too much in human nature. And why not? Every man who both thinks and feels will have his alternations of hope and depression, tender-heartedness and stoical contempt. And, though Thackeray mixed with