everybody with a particle of self-respect to have that
income? Is it possible that any one who has it not can have either wit
or sentiment, humour or understanding? Thackeray writes _of_ gentlemen
_for_ gentlemen; therefore he is alone among artists; therefore he is
'the greatest novelist of his age.' That is the faith of the true
believer: that the state of mind of him that reveres less wisely than
thoroughly, and would rather be damned with Thackeray than saved with any
one else.

His Critics.

The position of them that wear their rue with a difference, and do not
agree that all literature is contained in _The Book of Snobs_ and _Vanity
Fair_, is more easily defended. They like and admire their Thackeray in
many ways, but they think him rather a writer of genius who was innately
and irredeemably a Philistine than a supreme artist or a great man. To
them there is something artificial in the man and something insincere in
the artist: something which makes it seem natural that his best work
should smack of the literary _tour de force_, and that he should never
have appeared to such advantage as when, in _Esmond_ and in _Barry
Lyndon_, he was writing up to a standard and upon a model not wholly of
his own contrivance. They admit his claim to eminence as an adventurer
in 'the discovery of the Ugly'; but they contend that even there he did
his work more shrewishly and more pettily than he might; and in this
connection they go so far as to reflect that a snob is not only 'one who
meanly admires mean things,' as his own definition declares, but one who
meanly detests mean things as well. They agree with Walter Bagehot that
to be perpetually haunted by the plush behind your chair is hardly a sign
of lofty literary and moral genius; and they consider him narrow and
vulgar in his view of humanity, limited in his outlook upon life,
inclined to be envious, inclined to be tedious and pedantic, prone to
repetitions, and apt in bidding for applause to appeal to the baser
qualities of his readers and to catch their sympathy by making them feel
themselves spitefully superior to their fellow-men. They look at his
favourite heroines--at Laura and Ethel and Amelia; and they can but think
him stupid who could ever have believed them interesting or admirable or
attractive or true. They listen while he regrets it is impossible for
him to attempt the picture of a man; and, with Barry Lyndon in their
mind's eye and the knowledg