Both writers are realistic: but Dickens writes realism in
order to make the incredible credible. Thackeray writes it in order to
make us recognise an old friend. Whether we shall be pleased to meet the
old friend is quite another matter: I think we should be better pleased
to meet Miss Trotwood, and find, as David Copperfield did, a new friend,
a new world. But we recognise Major Pendennis even when we avoid him.
Henceforth Thackeray can count on our seeing him from his wig to his
well-blacked boots whenever he chooses to say "Major Pendennis paid a
call." Dickens, on the other hand, had to keep up an incessant
excitement about his characters; and no man on earth but he could have
kept it up.
It may be said, in approximate summary, that Thackeray is the novelist
of memory--of our memories as well as his own. Dickens seems to expect
all his characters, like amusing strangers arriving at lunch: as if they
gave him not only pleasure, but surprise. But Thackeray is everybody's
past--is everybody's youth. Forgotten friends flit about the passages of
dreamy colleges and unremembered clubs; we hear fragments of unfinished
conversations, we see faces without names for an instant, fixed for ever
in some trivial grimace: we smell the strong smell of social cliques
now quite incongruous to us; and there stir in all the little rooms at
once the hundred ghosts of oneself.
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