his world as an accurate observer saw it; he could not be dishonest.' Those who knew him knew well how much the opposite of a cynic he was; and Shirley Brooks expressed their feelings in Punch' when he wrote the memorial verses which begin :

'He was a cynic! By his life all wrought

Of generous acts, mild words, and gentle ways;
His heart wide open to all kindly thought,

His hand so quick to give, his tongue to praise!'

And did any real cynic ever love his children? These Introductions show how Thackeray loved his, and how he was loved in return. No claims or pleasures of the world were ever allowed to keep him apart from his two girls. When he and they were unavoidably separated, he was a constant and affectionate correspondent; when all were at home together, they were his chosen companions; and his engagement to dine with them so many nights a week took precedence of all others, however distinguished.

It is inevitable that the Introductions should deal rather with the man than with the writer. They are avowedly biographical, and Lady Ritchie would naturally decline the part of her father's critic. But, after all, the man is remembered for the writer's sake. And besides, 'caret vate sacro.' He desired not to have and has not had a biographer. We shall never know him as we know Johnson or Scott. He will therefore stand or fall by his own writings. What place is he likely permanently to occupy in the roll of English writers? What part did he play in that brilliant development of the novel which, as we were saying just now, was such a striking feature of the century in which he lived?

Flaubert, in one of his letters to George Sand, makes a very interesting remark about English novelists. He has been reading' Pickwick,' and he says of it, 'il y a des parties superbes, mais quelle composition défectueuse! Tous les écrivains anglais en sont là; Walter Scott excepté, ils manquent de plan.' He probably had never heard of Jane Austen; and, of course, his remark does not apply to the work of the last forty or fifty years. But even to-day, looking broadly at the English novel, it is still true, in spite of Scott and Miss Austen and George Eliot and

Of

Hardy, that it is singularly loose in construction. that weakness Thackeray is almost the worst example. No doubt the detestable method of writing novels for magazines in parts, so that the whole story is never before the author for revision, is largely responsible for the incoherence of the plots of Dickens and Thackeray. The first parts are printed and then the novelist begins to see the story moving in a new direction, or, as Thackeray so often says, the characters insist on going their own way, and it turns out to be not at all the way mapped out for them by the author in the first chapters, before they themselves got warm with life and knew what they wanted; and the result is that mist of confusion and inconsistency which hangs over nearly all the stories both of Dickens and Thackeray. No one could write out a skeleton of the plot of 'Pickwick' or 'Pendennis'; they are all flesh and no bones, and their progress is as elastic and uncertain of direction as those of a boneless body would be. Dickens's good things, in particular, are always isolated and unrelated atoms, not parts of an organised body. Weller and Winkle and Micawber and Mrs. Gamp are perfect in themselves; they come full-armed from their creator's brain and owe nothing to those about them, who equally owe nothing to them. What a contrast to Jeanie Deans, or Maggie Tulliver, or Madame Bovary, or Bathsheba Everdene! Thackeray's people belong far more to his stories than those of Dickens; but still he is open in his degree to the same criticism. When we think of 'Vanity Fair' we remember Becky and Miss Crawley and certain scenes and places-Sir Pitt on his knees, Rawdon Crawley's discovery of Steyne and Becky, and so forth; we don't think of the story as a whole, and the other persons in it. Where there is a real plot it is impossible to think of one character alone; to recall Bathsheba is at once to recall Oak, and Boldwood, and Troy.

Part of the explanation of this is that both Dickens and Thackeray reverted to the old epic tendencies of the novel as against the stricter influence of the drama that had been lately brought to bear on its development. 'Pickwick' and 'Barry Lyndon' and that' novel without a hero' Vanity Fair' are all, like the Odyssey and 'Orlando Furioso' and 'Don Quixote' and 'Gil Blas 'and 'Tom

Jones,' the loosely-connected adventures of a wandering 'hero,' who, in the course of his goings about the world shows us a great deal of the life and manners of his day So large and discursive an 'action' does not generally admit the intensity of the drama. It is almost inevitably too external to do so. And so Dickens never, except in 'A Tale of Two Cities,' got near the drama; everywhere else--perhaps even there-what he approaches is not drama but only melodrama, which it is to be remembered is what results when, in the words of a living critic, ‘a dramatist attempts tragedy with characters over whom he has no philosophic superiority, or with a situation which is to him nothing but a series of startling events. Both of these unfavourable conditions are always present in Dickens, but not, it is true, in Thackeray, who maintained more than enough superiority over his characters, and was always too intellectually middle-aged to be anything but bored by mere startling events. What then, in his case, is the explanation of the fact, which I think will hardly be denied, that he seldom or never leaves on us the intensity of impression which belongs to the experience of having been through a great action where a great issue was at stake? We do get that impression from The Bride of Lammermoor' and 'The Heart of Midlothian,' and 'Villette' and 'Adam Bede,' and The Return of the Native'; why do we not get it from 'The Newcomes' or 'Vanity Fair?

On the whole I am afraid it is because Thackeray's books are too much written from the point of view of the man of the world. No one knows quite so little of the real meaning of life as the man who habitually watches it from club windows; no one's view of it so entirely stops short at the things on the surface. And though Thackeray was much more than a club man, it is that part of himself which chiefly devised his stories. The people who crowd his stage could not possibly have anything to do with great actions or great issues. Nobody can imagine Major Pendennis or Barnes Newcome loving or dying; the most either could attain to would not go further than having his marriage arranged, or his decease announced in the Times.' The fountains of great life which spring from the heart are dried up in them. Whatever soul they may have once had has as entirely

disappeared under a continual overlaying of worldliness as the souls of Mr Bernard Shaw's people have disappeared under a continuous course of dialectics in which nobody is himself moved or expects to move anybody else. Emotion, in fact, is out of the range of those whose occupation is to play with the intellectual or sensual counters of life, not with life itself. And great emotion is the necessary atmosphere of great action. The fact, then, that Thackeray's characters consist so very largely of people of the Hon. Mr Deuceace' type is fatal to the claim of his novels to convey to us the greater emotions. There is a certain monotony of littleness in his work. One grows weary of the perpetual repetition of the intrigues and meanness and emptiness of the world in which nearly all his characters live. He seems to take pleasure in introducing irrelevant personages who play no real part in his story, but apparently come in merely to be shown at their business of dining and gambling and match-hunting, which the necessary one-sidedness of the satirist supposes to be the business of all persons who are well-to-do in this world.

The fact is that the determination to have done with shams, which was as strong in Thackeray as in Carlyle, really led him to a new sort of sham. Because many persons made a pretence of being actuated by fine motives when they were, in fact, looking out for themselves, Thackeray chose to assume that men of the world never in any case thought of anything but themselves; which is a sham or delusion as much as the other, the truth, of course, being that very few people, whether in the world of fashion or any other world, act either on entirely selfish or entirely unselfish grounds. I expect Miss Crawley and Becky had at least a grain or two of real kindliness mixed into their desire to get the most out of each other; and there was probably some motherly love mixed with the astute generalship of Mrs Bute. But it was neither Thackeray's business nor his temperament to see that. When he saw goodness he saw it very good indeed, and not very strong, very wise, or very interesting. His intelligence always inclined to paint the world black; and any white patches that were forced into the picture came not from his imagination but from his heart. The remorseless realism of the satirist found nothing on the

æsthetic side of him to check it. His heart overflowed very easily into genuine tears that for the moment washed the analysing sceptic and cynic away; but nothing else did, certainly not his imagination. It is curious to see how entirely unmoved, to speak frankly how stupid he showed himself both at Athens and at Rome. And so he always treats history from the point of view of the prose realist who means at all costs to get rid of the heroic, and bring forward the mean or ridiculous side that may generally be found by him who looks for it in the greatest events.

His method is seen in its most brilliant shape in the 'Second Funeral of Napoleon'; it is that of a man who, as its opening paragraphs show, quite deliberately chose the part of the Argus-eyed valet who has seen all heroes naked; and one may be the exact reverse of a Napoleonworshipper without liking it, indeed without being able to avoid feeling strongly that, even in that case, it is the Devil's method of writing history. I am not speaking of morals. The spirit that denied in Thackeray never denied goodness; what it denied was greatness in history. greatness in art, greatness in life. There are plenty of good figures in the novels, and I, for my part, do not at all find them so insipid as they have often been called; but no one will pretend that Dobbin, or Colonel Newcome, or Warrington can have greatness thrust upon them even by the blindest affection. Thackeray is the first instance in English of the everlasting nemesis of realism: it gets so close to its object that the only things it can see are small things. We laugh at his people or weep with them; we love them or hate them; but we never, or almost never, admire them.

Yet he wrote the most brilliant English novel, in some ways the greatest, of the nineteenth century! And, though it is a real defect in a novelist to leave out, as he did, so many of the biggest things in human life, he might yet fairly reply that those who can give the whole of life are very few, so that art is forced to these narrowing choices and partial views. At any rate, if he did not make his people admirable, he made them astonishingly alive. He had the merits of his defects. If realism like his, in its eagerness to strip off trappings, is apt to strip off a great deal else as well,