Without his humor
and his pathos he would still stand far above all others of his day;
with these qualities, which make every story he ever wrote throb with
genuine human feeling, he stands in a class by himself.
Many literary critics have spent much labor in comparing Dickens with
Thackeray, but there seems to me no basis for such comparison. One was
a great caricaturist who wrote for the common people and brought tears
or laughter at will from the kitchen maid as freely as from the
great lady; from the little child with no knowledge of the world as
readily as from the mature reader who has known wrong, sorrow and
suffering. The other was the supreme literary artist of modern times,
a gentleman by instinct and training, who wrote for a limited class of
readers, and who could not, because of nature and temperament, touch
at will the springs of laughter and tears as Dickens did. Dickens has
created a score of characters that are household words to one that
Thackeray has given us.
[Illustration: CHARLES DICKENS AT THE AGE OF TWENTY-SEVEN--FROM
THE PORTRAIT BY DANIEL MACLISE, R.A.]
Both were men of the rarest genius, English to the core, but each
expressed his genius in his own way, and the way of Dickens touched a
thousand hearts where Thackeray touched but one. Personally, Thackeray
appeals to me far more than Dickens does, but it is foolish to permit
one's own fancies to blind or warp his critical judgments.
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