The one is an artist,
the other a caricaturist; the one pathetic, the other sentimental.
Nothing is more instructive than the difference between the
illustrations of their respective works. Thackeray's figures are such as
we meet about the streets, while the artists who draw for Dickens
invariably fall into the exceptionally grotesque. Thackeray's style is
perfect, that of Dickens often painfully mannered. Nor is the contrast
less remarkable in the quality of character which each selects.
Thackeray looks at life from the club-house window, Dickens from the
reporter's box in the police-court. Dickens is certainly one of the
greatest comic writers that ever lived, and has perhaps created more
types of oddity than any other. His faculty of observation is
marvellous, his variety inexhaustible. Thackeray's round of character is
very limited; he repeated himself continually, and, as we think, had
pretty well emptied his stock of invention. But his characters are
masterpieces, always governed by those average motives, and acted upon
by those average sentiments, which all men have in common. They never
act like heroes and heroines, but like men and women.
Thackeray's style is beyond praise,--so easy, so limpid, showing
everywhere by unobtrusive allusions how rich he was in modern culture,
it has the highest charm of gentlemanly conversation.
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