itics (he once stood for Parliament) were a
little childish. It was his, in short, not so much to argue as to
observe, to feel, to laugh with no unkindness but with infinite
comprehension, to enjoy, to suffer. Of all the innumerable cants that
ever were canted, the cant about Thackeray's "cynicism" was the silliest
and the most erroneous. He knew the weakness of man, and laughed at it
as the wise knows and laughs, "knowing also," as the poet says, "that he
himself must die." But he did not even despise this weakness, much less
is he harsh to it. On the contrary, he is milder not only than Swift,
but even than Addison or Miss Austen, and he is never wroth with human
nature save when it is not only weak but base.

All these good gifts and others, such as incomparable power of
presenting scene and personage to the necessary extent and with telling
detail, appear in his novels, with the addition of a greater gift than
any of them--the gift most indispensable of all others to the
novelist--the gift of creating and immortalising character. Of mere
story, of mere plot, Thackeray was not a great master; and he has made
himself appear a less great master than he was by his fancy for
interlarding his narratives with long addresses to the reader, and by
his other fancy for extending them over very great spaces of time. The
unities are no doubt in fiction, if not in drama, something of a
caricature; but it is seldom possible to neglect them to the extent of
years and decades without paying the penalty; and Thackeray is not of
those who have evaded payment. But in the creation of living character
he stands simply alone among novelists: above even Fielding, though his
characters may have something less of massiveness; much above Scott,
whose consummate successes are accompanied by not a few failures; and
out of sight of almost every one else except Miss Austen, whose world is
different, and, as a world, somewhat less of flesh and blood. In _Vanity
Fair_ he is still in this respect not quite at his acme; and the
magnificent character of Becky Sharp (the attempt to rival whom by her
almost exact contemporary, Valerie Marneffe, is a singular critical
error), supported as it is by the lesser successes of Jos and Rawdon, of
George Osborne and Lord Steyne, does not find itself, save now and then,
especially in the crowning scene of the scandal in Curzon Street,
completely parted or completely put in scene. And so at the other end of
the li