e that Casanova and Andrew Bowes suggested no
more than that, they wonder if the impossibility was not a piece of luck
for him. They hear him heaping contumely upon the murders and
adulteries, the excesses in emotion, that pleased the men of 1830 as they
had pleased the Elizabethans before them; and they see him turning with
terror and loathing from these--which after all are effects of vigorous
passion--to busy himself with the elaborate and careful narrative of how
Barnes Newcome beat his wife, and Mrs. Mackenzie scolded Colonel Newcome
to death, and old Twysden bragged and cringed himself into good society
and an interest in the life and well-being of a little cad like Captain
Woolcomb; and it is not amazing if they think his morality more dubious
in some ways than the morality he is so firmly fixed to ridicule and to
condemn. They reflect that he sees in Beatrix no more than the makings
of a Bernstein; and they are puzzled, when they come to mark the contrast
between the two portraitures and the difference between the part assigned
to Mrs. Esmond and the part assigned to the Baroness, to decide if he
were short-sighted or ungenerous, if he were inapprehensive or only
cruel. They weary easily of his dogged and unremitting pursuit of the
merely conventional man and the merely conventional woman; they cannot
always bring themselves to be interested in the cupboard drama, the tea-
cup tragedies and cheque-book and bandbox comedies, which he regards as
the stuff of human action and the web of human life; and from their
theory of existence they positively refuse to eliminate the heroic
qualities of romance and mystery and passion, which are--as they have
only to open their newspapers to see--essentials of human achievement and
integral elements of human character. They hold that his books contain
some of the finest stuff in fiction: as, for instance, Rawdon Crawley's
discovery of his wife and Lord Steyne, and Henry Esmond's return from the
wars, and those immortal chapters in which the Colonel and Frank
Castlewood pursue and run down their kinswoman and the Prince. But they
hold, too, that their influence is dubious, and that few have risen from
them one bit the better or one jot the happier.

Which is Right?

Genius apart, Thackeray's morality is that of a highly respectable
British cynic; his intelligence is largely one of trifles; he is wise
over trivial and trumpery things. He delights in reminding us--wit