on censuring man,
has brought to the aid of satire a sustained common sense, a great
knowledge of the heart, consummate cleverness, powerful reasoning, a
treasure of meditated hatred, and has persecuted vice with all the
weapons of reflection. By this contrast the one completes the other;
and we may form an exact idea of English taste, by placing the
portrait of William Makepeace Thackeray by the side of that of
Charles Dickens.

No wonder if in England a novelist writes satires. A gloomy and
reflective man is impelled to it by his character; he is still further
impelled by the surrounding manners. He is not permitted to
contemplate passions as poetic powers; he is bidden to appreciate them
as moral qualities. His pictures become sentences; he is a counselor
rather than an observer, a judge rather than an artist. We see by what
machinery Thackeray has changed novel into satire....

Who is he; and what is the value of this literature of which he is one
of the princes? At bottom, like every literature, it is a definition
of man; and to judge it, we must compare it with man. We can do so
now; we have just studied a mind, Thackeray himself; we have
considered his faculties, their connections, results, their different
degrees; we have before our eyes a model of human nature. We have a
right to judge of the copy by the model, and to control the definition
which his novels lay down by the definition which his character
furnishes.

The two definitions are contrary, and his portrait is a criticism on
his talent. We have seen that in him the same faculties produce the
beautiful and the ugly, force and weakness, success and failure; that
moral reflection, after having provided him with every satirical
power, debases him in art; that, after having spread over his
contemporary novels a tone of vulgarity and falseness, it raises his
historical novel to the level of the finest productions; that the same
constitution of mind teaches him the sarcastic and violent, as well as
the modulated and simple style, the bitterness and harshness of hate
with the effusion and delicacy of love. The evil and the good, the
beautiful and the ugly, the repulsive and the agreeable, are in him
then but remoter effects, of slight importance, born of changing
circumstances, acquired and fortuitous qualities, not essential and
primitive, different forms which different streams present in the same
current.

So it is with other men. Doubtless moral qual