artist; but he had one great mood,
because he was a great artist. Any real difference therefore from the
general drift, or rather (I apologise to Dickens) the general drive of
his creation is very important. This is the one place in his work in
which he does, I will not say feel like Thackeray, far less think like
Thackeray, less still write like Thackeray, but this is the one of his
works in which he understands Thackeray. He puts himself in some sense
in the same place; he considers mankind at somewhat the same angle as
mankind is considered in one of the sociable and sarcastic novels of
Thackeray. When he deals with Pip he sets out not to show his strength
like the strength of Hercules, but to show his weakness like the
weakness of Pendennis. When he sets out to describe Pip's great
expectation he does not set out, as in a fairytale, with the idea that
these great expectations will be fulfilled; he sets out from the first
with the idea that these great expectations will be disappointing. We
might very well, as I have remarked elsewhere, apply to all Dickens's
books the title _Great Expectations_. All his books are full of an airy
and yet ardent expectation of everything; of the next person who shall
happen to speak, of the next chimney that shall happen to smoke, of the
next event, of the next ecstasy; of the next fulfilment of any eager
human fancy. All his books might be called _Great Expectations_. But the
only book to which he gave the name of _Great Expectations_ was the only
book in which the expectation was never realised. It was so with the
whole of that splendid and unconscious generation to which he belonged.
The whole glory of that old English middle class was that it was
unconscious; its excellence was entirely in that, that it was the
culture of the nation, and that it did not know it. If Dickens had ever
known that he was optimistic, he would have ceased to be happy.

It is necessary to make this first point clear: that in _Great
Expectations_ Dickens was really trying to be a quiet, a detached, and
even a cynical observer of human life. Dickens was trying to be
Thackeray. And the final and startling triumph of Dickens is this: that
even to this moderate and modern story, he gives an incomparable energy
which is not moderate and which is not modern. He is trying to be
reasonable; but in spite of himself he is inspired. He is trying to be
detailed, but in spite of himself he is gigantic. Compared to the r