be that world from the inside. This is true. In
Dickens's time there was such a thing as the English people, and Dickens
belonged to it. Because there is no such thing as an English people now,
almost all literary men drift towards what is called Society; almost all
literary men either are gentlemen or pretend to be. Hence, as I say,
when we talk of describing a gentleman, we always mean describing a
gentleman from the point of view of one who either belongs to, or is
interested in perpetuating, that type. Dickens did not describe
gentlemen in the way that gentlemen describe gentlemen. He described
them in the way in which he described waiters, or railway guards, or men
drawing with chalk on the pavement. He described them, in short (and
this we may freely concede), from the outside, as he described any other
oddity or special trade. But when it comes to saying that he did not
describe them well, then that is quite another matter, and that I should
emphatically deny. The things that are really odd about the English
upper class he saw with startling promptitude and penetration, and if
the English upper class does not see these odd things in itself, it is
not because they are not there, but because we are all blind to our own
oddities; it is for the same reason that tramps do not feel dirty, or
that niggers do not feel black. I have often heard a dear old English
oligarch say that Dickens could not describe a gentleman, while every
note of his own voice and turn of his own hand recalled Sir Leicester
Dedlock. I have often been told by some old buck that Dickens could not
describe a gentleman, and been told so in the shaky voice and with all
the vague allusiveness of Cousin Feenix.

Cousin Feenix has really many of the main points of the class that
governs England. Take, for an instance, his hazy notion that he is in a
world where everybody knows everybody; whenever he mentions a man, it is
a man "with whom my friend Dombey is no doubt acquainted." That pierces
to the very helpless soul of aristocracy. Take again the stupendous
gravity with which he leads up to a joke. That is the very soul of the
House of Commons and the Cabinet, of the high-class English politics,
where a joke is always enjoyed solemnly. Take his insistence upon the
technique of Parliament, his regrets for the time when the rules of
debate were perhaps better observed than they are now. Take that
wonderful mixture in him (which is the real human virtue of