ay that all three books are delightfully authentic
studies of upper-class society in England as Thackeray knew it:
the social range is comparatively restricted, for even the
rascals are shabby-genteel. But the exposure of human nature
(which depends upon keen observation within a prescribed
boundary) is wide and deep: a story-teller can penetrate just as
far into the arcana of the human spirit if he confine himself to
a class as if he surveyed all mankind. But mental limitations
result: the point of view is that of the gentleman-class: the
ideas of the personal relation to one's self, one's fellow men
and one's Maker are those natural to a person of that station.
The charming poem which the author set as Finis to "Dr. Birch
and His Young Friends," with its concluding lines, is an
unconscious expression of the form in which he conceived human
duty. The "And so, please God, a gentleman," was the cardinal
clause in his creed and all his work proves it. It is wiser to
be thankful that a man of genius was at hand to voice the view,
than to cavil at its narrow outook. In literature, in-look is
quite as important. Thackeray drew what he felt and saw, and
like Jane Austen, is to be understood within his limitations.
Nor did he ever forget that, because pleasure-giving was the
object of his art, it was his duty so to present life as to make
it somehow attractive, worth while. The point is worth urging,
for not a little nonsense has been written concerning the
absolute veracity of Thackeray's pictures: as if he sacrificed
all pleasurableness to the modern Moloch, truth. Neither he nor
any other great novelist reproduces Life verbatim et literatim.
Trollope, in his somewhat unsatisfactory biography of his fellow
fictionist, very rightly puts his finger on a certain scene in
"Vanity Fair" in which Sir Pitt Crawley figures, which departs
widely from reality. The traditional comparison between the two
novelists, which represents Dickens as ever caricaturing,
Thackeray as the photographer, is coming to be recognized as
foolish.

It is all merely a question of degree, as has been said. It
being the artist's business to show a few of the symbols of life
out of the vast amount of raw material offered, he differs in
the main from his brother artist in the symbols he selects. No
one of them presents everything--if he did, he were no artist.
Thackeray approaches nearer than Dickens, it is true, to the
average appearances of life; but is