e
secret; that at last (as some satirist of Liberalism puts it) every man
would have two votes instead of one. There is no trace in Thackeray of
the slightest consciousness that progress could ever change its
direction. There is in Dickens. The whole of _Hard Times_ is the
expression of just such a realisation. It is not true to say that
Dickens was a Socialist, but it is not absurd to say so. And it would
be simply absurd to say it of any of the great Individualist novelists
of the Victorian time. Dickens saw far enough ahead to know that the
time was coming when the people would be imploring the State to save
them from mere freedom, as from some frightful foreign oppressor. He
felt the society changing; and Thackeray never did.

As talking about Socialism and Individualism is one of the greatest
bores ever endured among men, I will take another instance to illustrate
my meaning, even though the instance be a queer and even a delicate one.
Even if the reader does not agree with my deduction, I ask his attention
to the fact itself, which I think a curiosity of literature. In the last
important work of Dickens, that excellent book _Our Mutual Friend_,
there is an odd thing about which I cannot make up my mind; I do not
know whether it is unconscious observation or fiendish irony. But it is
this. In _Our Mutual Friend_ is an old patriarch named Aaron, who is a
saintly Jew made to do the dirty work of an abominable Christian usurer.
In an artistic sense I think the patriarch Aaron as much of a humbug as
the patriarch Casby. In a moral sense there is no doubt at all that
Dickens introduced the Jew with a philanthropic idea of doing justice to
Judaism, which he was told he had affronted by the great gargoyle of
Fagin. If this was his motive, it was morally a most worthy one. But it
is certainly unfortunate for the Hebrew cause that the bad Jew should be
so very much more convincing than the good one. Old Aaron is not an
exaggeration of Jewish virtues; he is simply not Jewish, because he is
not human. There is nothing about him that in any way suggests the
nobler sort of Jew, such a man as Spinoza or Mr. Zangwill. He is simply
a public apology, and like most public apologies, he is very stiff and
not very convincing.

So far so good. Now we come to the funny part. To describe the high
visionary and mystic Jew like Spinoza or Zangwill is a great and
delicate task in which even Dickens might have failed. But most of us
know s