riodicals; but he desired
to do something larger, something greater, something, perhaps, less
ephemeral. For though _Barry Lyndon_ and others have not proved to be
ephemeral, it was thus that he regarded them. In this spirit he went to
work and wrote _Vanity Fair_.

It may be as well to speak first of the faults which were attributed to
it. It was said that the good people were all fools, and that the clever
people were all knaves. When the critics,--the talking critics as well
as the writing critics,--began to discuss _Vanity Fair_, there had
already grown up a feeling as to Thackeray as an author--that he was one
who had taken up the business of castigating the vices of the world.
Scott had dealt with the heroics, whether displayed in his Flora
MacIvors or Meg Merrilieses, in his Ivanhoes or Ochiltrees. Miss
Edgeworth had been moral; Miss Austen conventional; Bulwer had been
poetical and sentimental; Marryat and Lever had been funny and
pugnacious, always with a dash of gallantry, displaying funny naval and
funny military life; and Dickens had already become great in painting
the virtues of the lower orders. But by all these some kind of virtue
had been sung, though it might be only the virtue of riding a horse or
fighting a duel. Even Eugene Aram and Jack Sheppard, with whom Thackeray
found so much fault, were intended to be fine fellows, though they broke
into houses and committed murders. The primary object of all those
writers was to create an interest by exciting sympathy. To enhance our
sympathy personages were introduced who were very vile indeed,--as
Bucklaw, in the guise of a lover, to heighten our feelings for
Ravenswood and Lucy; as Wild, as a thief-taker, to make us more anxious
for the saving of Jack; as Ralph Nickleby, to pile up the pity for his
niece Kate. But each of these novelists might have appropriately begun
with an _Arma virumque cano_. The song was to be of something
godlike,--even with a Peter Simple. With Thackeray it had been
altogether different. Alas, alas! the meanness of human wishes; the
poorness of human results! That had been his tone. There can be no doubt
that the heroic had appeared contemptible to him, as being untrue. The
girl who had deceived her papa and mamma seemed more probable to him
than she who perished under the willow-tree from sheer love,--as given
in the last chapter. Why sing songs that are false? Why tell of Lucy
Ashtons and Kate Nicklebys, when pretty girls, let th