very far back; he
borrows a little, though not much, historical and romantic interest in
the Waterloo part; the catastrophe of the Becky-Steyne business, though
by no means outside of the probable contents of any day's newspaper, is
slightly exceptional. But on the whole the problem of "reality, the
whole reality, and nothing but reality" is faced and grasped and
solved--with, of course, the addition to the "nothing but" of "except
art."

He had struck his path and he kept to it: even when, as in _Esmond_
(1852) and _The Virginians_ (1858-1859) actually, and in _Denis Duval_
prospectively, he blended the historical with the domestic variety.
_Pendennis_ (1849-1850) imports nothing out of the most ordinary
experience; _The Newcomes_ (1854-1855) very little; _Philip_ (1861-1862)
only its pantomime conclusion; while the two completely historical tales
are in nothing more remarkable than in the way in which their remoter
and more unfamiliar main subject, and their occasional excursions from
everyday life, are subdued to the scheme of the realist novel in the
best sense of the term--the novel rebuilt and refashioned on the lines
of Fielding, but with modern manners, relying on variety and life, and
relying on these only.

There is thus something of similarity (though with attendant
differences, of the most important kind) between the joint position of
Dickens and Thackeray towards the world of the novel, and the joint
position of Scott and Miss Austen. They _overlap_ more than their great
forerunners of the preceding generation. Both wrote historical novels:
it is indeed Thackeray's unique distinction that he was equally master
of the historical novel and of the novel of pure modern society, almost
uneventful. In parts of some of his later books, especially _Little
Dorrit_, _Great Expectations_, and _Our Mutual Friend_, Dickens at
least tried to exchange his picaresque-fantastic cloudland for actual
ordinary modern life. But on the whole the method of Thackeray was the
method of the novel, though shot with a strong romantic spirit, and the
method of Dickens the method of the romance applied, for the most part,
to material which could hardly be called romantic. Both, therefore, in a
manner, recalled the forces of fiction from the rather straggling and
particularist courses which it had been pursuing for the last quarter of
a century.

In fact, even in the two mighty men of genius whom we have just been
discussing, there m