of humanity. But
they were tired humanitarians; tired with doing nothing. Figures like
that of Mr. Chester, therefore, fail somewhat to give the true sense of
something hopeless and helpless which led men to despair of the upper
class. He has a boyish pleasure in play-acting; he has an interest in
life; being a villain is his hobby. But the true man of that type had
found all hobbies fail him. He had wearied of himself as he had wearied
of a hundred women. He was graceful and could not even admire himself in
the glass. He was witty and could not even laugh at his own jokes.
Dickens could never understand tedium.

There is no mark more strange and perhaps sinister of the interesting
and not very sane condition of our modern literature, than the fact that
tedium has been admirably described in it. Our best modern writers are
never so exciting as they are about dulness. Mr. Rudyard Kipling is
never so powerful as when he is painting yawning deserts, aching
silences, sleepless nights, or infernal isolation. The excitement in one
of the stories of Mr. Henry James becomes tense, thrilling, and almost
intolerable in all the half hours during which nothing whatever is said
or done. We are entering again into the mind, into the real mind of
Foulon and Mr. Chester. We begin to understand the deep despair of those
tyrants whom our fathers pulled down. But Dickens could never have
understood that despair; it was not in his soul. And it is an
interesting coincidence that here, in this book of _Barnaby Rudge_,
there is a character meant to be wholly grotesque, who, nevertheless,
expresses much of that element in Dickens which prevented him from being
a true interpreter of the tired and sceptical aristocrat.

Sim Tappertit is a fool, but a perfectly honourable fool. It requires
some sincerity to pose. Posing means that one has not dried up in
oneself all the youthful and innocent vanities with the slow paralysis
of mere pride. Posing means that one is still fresh enough to enjoy the
good opinion of one's fellows. On the other hand, the true cynic has not
enough truth in him to attempt affectation; he has never even seen the
truth, far less tried to imitate it. Now we might very well take the
type of Mr. Chester on the one hand, and of Sim Tappertit on the other,
as marking the issue, the conflict, and the victory which really ushered
in the nineteenth century. Dickens was very like Sim Tappertit. The
Liberal Revolution was very like