eed absurd; but
it is fair to say that in comparison with Dickens he felt himself a man
of the world. Nevertheless, that world of which he was a man is coming
to an end before our eyes; its aristocracy has grown corrupt, its middle
class insecure, and things that he never thought of are walking about
the drawing-rooms of both. Thackeray has described for ever the
Anglo-Indian Colonel; but what on earth would he have done with an
Australian Colonel? What can it matter whether Dickens's clerks talked
cockney now that half the duchesses talk American? What would Thackeray
have made of an age in which a man in the position of Lord Kew may
actually be the born brother of Mr. Moss of Wardour Street? Nor does
this apply merely to Thackeray, but to all those Victorians who prided
themselves on the realism or sobriety of their descriptions; it applies
to Anthony Trollope and, as much as any one, to George Eliot. For we
have not only survived that present which Thackeray described: we have
even survived that future to which George Eliot looked forward. It is no
longer adequate to say that Dickens did not understand that old world of
gentility, of parliamentary politeness and the balance of the
constitution. That world is rapidly ceasing to understand itself. It is
vain to repeat the complaint of the old Quarterly Reviewers, that
Dickens had not enjoyed a university education. What would the old
Quarterly Reviewers themselves have thought of the Rhodes Scholarships?
It is useless to repeat the old tag that Dickens could not describe a
gentleman. A gentleman in our time has become something quite
indescribable.

Now the interesting fact is this: That Dickens, whom so many considered
to be at the best a vulgar enthusiast, saw the coming change in our
society much more soberly and scientifically than did his better
educated and more pretentious contemporaries. I give but one example out
of many. Thackeray was a good Victorian radical, who seems to have gone
to his grave quite contented with the early Victorian radical
theory--the theory which Macaulay preached with unparalleled luminosity
and completeness; the theory that true progress goes on so steadily
through human history, that while reaction is indefensible, revolution
is unnecessary. Thackeray seems to have been quite content to think that
the world would grow more and more liberal in the limited sense; that
Free Trade would get freer; that ballot boxes would grow more and mor