after the manner of Uriah Heap, are willin'
with Barkis, make a note of, in company with Captain Cuttle, or
conclude with Mr. Weller, Senior, that it is the part of wisdom
to beware of "widders," we may observe that what binds us to
this motley crowd of creatures is not their grotesquerie but
their common humanity, their likeness to ourselves, the mighty
flood-tide of tolerant human sympathy on which they are floated
into the safe haven of our hearts. With delightful
understanding, Charles Dudley Warner writes: "After all, there
is something about a boy I like." Dickens, using the phrasing
for a wider application, might have said: "After all, there is
something about men and women I like!" It was thus no accident
that he elected to write of the lower middle classes; choosing
to depict the misery of the poor, their unfair treatment in
institutions; to depict also the unease of criminals, the
crushed state of all underlings--whether the child in education
or that grown-up evil child, the malefactor in prison. He was a
spokesman of the people, a democratic pleader for justice and
sympathy. He drew the proletariat preferably, not because he was
a proletariat but because he was a brother-man and the fact had
been overlooked. He drew thousands of these suppressed humans,
and they were of varied types and fortunes: but he loved them as
though they were one, and made the world love them too: and love
their maker. The deep significance of Dickens, perhaps his
deepest, is in the social note that swells loud and insistent
through his fiction. He was a pioneer in the democratic sympathy
which was to become so marked feature in the Novel in the late
nineteenth century: and which, as we have already seen, is from
the first a distinctive trait of the modern fiction, one of the
explanations of its existence.

CHAPTER IX

THACKERAY

The habit of those who appraise the relative worth of Dickens
and Thackeray to fall into hostile camps, swearing by one, and
at the other, has its amusing side but is to be deprecated as
irrational. Why should it be necessary to miss appreciation of
the creator of "Vanity Fair" because one happens to like "David
Copperfield"? Surely, our literary tastes or standards should be
broad enough to admit into pleasurable companionship both those
great early Victorian novelists.

Yet, on second thought, there would appear to be some reason for
the fact that ardent lovers of Thackeray are rarely devot