he imagines two little clerks commenting
erroneously on the appearance of Lady Kew or Sir Brian Newcome in the
Park, and says: "How should Jones and Brown, who are not, _vous
comprenez, du monde_, understand these mysteries?" But I think Thackeray
knew quite as little about Jones and Brown as they knew about Newcome
and Kew; his world was _le monde_. Hence he seemed to take it for
granted that the Victorian compromise would last; while Dickens (who
knew his Jones and Brown) had already guessed that it would not.
Thackeray did not realise that the Victorian platform was a moving
platform. To take but one instance, he was a Radical like Dickens; all
really representative Victorians, except perhaps Tennyson, were
Radicals. But he seems to have thought of all reform as simple and
straightforward and all of a piece; as if Catholic Emancipation, the New
Poor Law, Free Trade and the Factory Acts and Popular Education were all
parts of one almost self-evident evolution of enlightenment. Dickens,
being in touch with the democracy, had already discovered that the
country had come to a dark place of divided ways and divided counsels.
In _Hard Times_ he realised Democracy at war with Radicalism; and
became, with so incompatible an ally as Ruskin, not indeed a Socialist,
but certainly an anti-Individualist. In _Our Mutual Friend_ he felt the
strength of the new rich, and knew they had begun to transform the
aristocracy, instead of the aristocracy transforming them. He knew that
Veneering had carried off Twemlow in triumph. He very nearly knew what
we all know to-day: that, so far from it being possible to plod along
the progressive road with more votes and more Free Trade, England must
either sharply become very much more democratic or as rapidly become
very much less so.

There gathers round these two great novelists a considerable group of
good novelists, who more or less mirror their mid-Victorian mood. Wilkie
Collins may be said to be in this way a lesser Dickens and Anthony
Trollope a lesser Thackeray. Wilkie Collins is chiefly typical of his
time in this respect: that while his moral and religious conceptions
were as mechanical as his carefully constructed fictitious conspiracies,
he nevertheless informed the latter with a sort of involuntary mysticism
which dealt wholly with the darker side of the soul. For this was one
of the most peculiar of the problems of the Victorian mind. The idea of
the supernatural was perhaps at as