But that is not the point of the matter.  The point is that Dickens depicts no “state of society” that ever existed, except in the Dickensium Sidus.  What he gives is full of intensely real touches which help to create its charm.  But it is difficult to say that there is even a single person in it who is real as a whole, in the sense of having possibly existed in this world:  and the larger whole of the book generally is pure fantasy—­as much so as one of the author’s own favourite goblin-dream stories.

With Thackeray the case is exactly the opposite.  It is a testimony no doubt to Dickens’s real power—­though perhaps not to his readers’ perspicacity—­that he made them believe that he intended a “state of society” when, whether he intended it or not, he certainly has not given it.  But Thackeray intended it and gave it.  His is a “state of society” always—­whether in late seventeenth century, early or late eighteenth, early or middle nineteenth—­which existed or might have existed; his persons are persons who lived or might have lived.  And it is the discovery of this art of creation by him and its parallel diffusion among his contemporaries that I am endeavouring to make clear here.  Fielding, Scott to some extent, Miss Austen had had it.  Dickens, till Great Expectations at least, never achieved and I believe never attempted it.  Bulwer, having failed in it for twenty years, struck it at last about this time, and so did, even before him, Mrs. Marsh, and perhaps others, falteringly and incompletely.  But as a general gift—­a characteristic—­it never distinguished novelists till after the middle of the century.

It is, I think, impossible to find a better meeting and overlapping place of the old and the new novel, than that very remarkable book Emilia Wyndham, which has been already more than once referred to.  It was written in 1845 and appeared next year—­the year of Vanity Fair.  But the author was twenty years older than Thackeray, though she survived him by nearly a dozen; she had not begun early; and she was fifty-five when she wrote Emilia.  The not unnatural consequence is that there is a great deal of inconsistency in the general texture of the book:  and that any clever cub, in the ’prentice stage of reviewing, could make columns of fun out of it.  The general theme is age-old, being not different from the themes of most other novels in that respect.  A half-idiotic spendthrift (he ends as very nearly an actual idiot) not merely wastes his own property but practically embezzles that of his wife and daughter; the wife dies and the daughter is left alone with an extravagant establishment, a father practically non compos, not a penny in her pocket after she has paid his doctor, and a selfish baronet-uncle who will do less than nothing to help her.  She has loved half unconsciously, and been half consciously loved by, a soldier cousin or quasi-cousin:  but he is in the Peninsular War.