est
of Dickens this is Thackeray; but compared to the whole of Thackeray we
can only say in supreme praise of it that it is Dickens.

Take, for example, the one question of snobbishness. Dickens has
achieved admirably the description of the doubts and vanities of the
wretched Pip as he walks down the street in his new gentlemanly clothes,
the clothes of which he is so proud and so ashamed. Nothing could be so
exquisitely human, nothing especially could be so exquisitely masculine
as that combination of self-love and self-assertion and even insolence
with a naked and helpless sensibility to the slightest breath of
ridicule. Pip thinks himself better than every one else, and yet anybody
can snub him; that is the everlasting male, and perhaps the everlasting
gentleman. Dickens has described perfectly this quivering and
defenceless dignity. Dickens has described perfectly how ill-armed it is
against the coarse humour of real humanity--the real humanity which
Dickens loved, but which idealists and philanthropists do not love, the
humanity of cabmen and costermongers and men singing in a third-class
carriage; the humanity of Trabb's boy. In describing Pip's weakness
Dickens is as true and as delicate as Thackeray. But Thackeray might
have been easily as true and as delicate as Dickens. This quick and
quiet eye for the tremors of mankind is a thing which Dickens possessed,
but which others possessed also. George Eliot or Thackeray could have
described the weakness of Pip. Exactly what George Eliot and Thackeray
could not have described was the vigour of Trabb's boy. There would have
been admirable humour and observation in their accounts of that
intolerable urchin. Thackeray would have given us little light touches
of Trabb's boy, absolutely true to the quality and colour of the humour,
just as in his novels of the eighteenth century, the glimpses of Steele
or Bolingbroke or Doctor Johnson are exactly and perfectly true to the
colour and quality of their humour. George Eliot in her earlier books
would have given us shrewd authentic scraps of the real dialect of
Trabb's boy, just as she gave us shrewd and authentic scraps of the real
talk in a Midland country town. In her later books she would have given
us highly rationalistic explanations of Trabb's boy; which we should not
have read. But exactly what they could never have given, and exactly
what Dickens does give, is the _bounce_ of Trabb's boy. It is the real
unconquerable