d enjoy them very keenly and thoroughly. If you added the minorities
of the time, such as that very clever Miss Robinson (I think her name
was Emma) who wrote _Whitefriars_ and other historical romances in the
forties; such as Charles Macfarlane, who died, like Colonel Newcome, a
poor brother of the Charterhouse after writing capital things like _The
Dutch in the Medway_ and _The Camp of Refuge_--if, I say, you gave him
these things and he was a good man, but lazy, like Gray, I think he
would vote for a continuance of his life of novels and sofas without
sighing for anything further. But undoubtedly it might be contended that
something further was needed: and it came. This was verisimilitude--the
holding of the true mirror to actual society.

This verisimilitude, it should be observed, is not only difficult to
attain: it seems not to be easy even to recognise. I have seen it said
that the reason which makes it "hopeless for many people even to try to
get through _Pickwick_" (their state itself must be "hopeless" enough,
and it is to be hoped there are not "many" of them) is that it
"describes states of society unimaginable to many people of to-day."
Again, these many people must be somewhat unimaginative. But that is not
the point of the matter. The point is that Dickens depicts no "state of
society" that ever existed, except in the _Dickensium Sidus_. What he
gives is full of intensely real touches which help to create its charm.
But it is difficult to say that there is even a single person in it who
is real as a whole, in the sense of having possibly existed in this
world: and the larger whole of the book generally is pure fantasy--as
much so as one of the author's own favourite goblin-dream stories.

With Thackeray the case is exactly the opposite. It is a testimony no
doubt to Dickens's real power--though perhaps not to his readers'
perspicacity--that he made them believe that he intended a "state of
society" when, whether he intended it or not, he certainly has not given
it. But Thackeray intended it and gave it. His is a "state of society"
always--whether in late seventeenth century, early or late eighteenth,
early or middle nineteenth--which existed or might have existed; his
persons are persons who lived or might have lived. And it is the
discovery of this art of creation by him and its parallel diffusion
among his contemporaries that I am endeavouring to make clear here.
Fielding, Scott to some extent, Miss Aus