Thackeray is a writer who occupies a curious and very interesting position. Devoid of the noble and romantic sympathies of Scott, and corrupted to the basic fibres of his being by Early Victorian snobbishness, he is yet—none can deny it—a powerful creator of living people and an accomplished and graceful stylist.
Without philosophy, without faith, without moral courage, the uneasy slave of conventional morality, and with a hopeless vein of sheer worldly philistinism in his book, Thackeray is yet able, by a certain unconquerable insight into the motives and impulses of mediocre people, and by a certain weight and mass of creative force, to give a convincing reality to his pictures of life, which is almost devastating in its sneering and sentimental accuracy.
The most winning and attractive thing about him is his devotion to the eighteenth century; a century whose manners he is able to depict in his large and gracious way without being disturbed by the pressure of that contemporary vulgarity which finds a too lively response in something bourgeois and snobbish in his own nature.
Dealing with the eighteenth century he escapes not only from his age but from himself.
60. CHARLES DICKENS. GREAT EXPECTATIONS.
The compiler has placed in this list only one of Dickens' books for a somewhat different reason from that which has influenced him in other cases. All Dickens' novels have a unique value, and such an equal value, that almost any one of them, chosen at random, can serve as an example of the rest.
Those who still are not prohibited, by temperamental difficulty or by some modern fashion, from enjoying the peculiar atmosphere of this astonishing person's work, will be found reverting to him constantly and indiscriminately. "Great Expectations" is perhaps, as a more "artistic" book than the rest, the most fitted of them all to entice towards a more sympathetic understanding of his mood, those who are held from reading him by some more or less accidental reason. The most characteristic thing about this great genius is the power he possesses of breathing palpable life into what is often called the inanimate. Like Hans Andersen, the writer of fairy-stories, and, in a measure, like all children, Dickens endows with fantastic spirituality the most apparently dead things in our ordinary environment.
His imagination plays superb tricks with such objects and things, touching the most dilapidated of them with a magic such as the genius of a great poet uses, when dealing with nature—only the "nature" of Dickens is made of less lovely matters than leaves and flowers.
The wild exaggerations of Dickens—his reckless contempt for realistic possibility—need not hinder us from enjoying, apart from his revelling humor and his too facile sentiment, those inspired outbursts of inevitable truth, wherein the inmost identity of his queer people stands revealed to us. His world may be a world of goblins and fairies, but there cross it sometimes figures of an arresting appeal and human voices of divine imagination.