THE question is still hotly debated whether Thackeray's genius is actually of the first order. To answer that question without the weight of authority would be absurd. Indeed it seems certain that only Time can settle it. The most cogent reasoning cannot establish a classic; that is only to be effected by an irresistible tendency of the world's thought. But it may be possible to mark the meaning of those who would deny him and those who claim for him the first place, and to discriminate in his work between the ephemeral part of it and that which retains a living interest for us, the conditions of whose life are already far removed from those under which he wrote.

Perhaps the most vital, and certainly the most striking, difference in the various estimates of Thackeray lies in the attribution or denial of the philosophic note to his thought. Some critics describe him as pre-eminently the philosopher among novelists; others accuse him of notorious superficiality, and will not allow him to have been a thinker of any kind. Can there be any common ground of fact supporting views so diametrically opposed?

No doubt the critics who describe Thackeray as a philosopher are chiefly, if not wholly, occupied with the idea of his reflection upon life. He was "driving at practice" in all he wrote. He never wrote (not even a child's fairy-story) for the mere pleasure the mere pleasure of story-telling. His attention was constantly engaged by the moral aspect of things. And this would quite fairly establish a claim for Thackeray to be regarded as a writer

of philosophical quality, in spite of his aversion to the transcendental way of viewing things and his indifference to study, if it could be shown that he treated such subjects in a broad and noble manner. He would be a philosopher, not of the schools but of the world, gaining infinitely more in effectiveness than he lost in precision and subtlety.

Those, however, who do not admire him, object not only that he was no student, no metaphysician, a known abhorrer of the transcendental, but that he was quite incapable of rising to the conception of an idea, strictly bound down to the concrete; not the great concrete facts and forces which mould or break the world, but little, petty artificialities which exactly give his measure.

Thackeray's ultimate position is involved in the judgment which will be formed on his criticism, his direct criticism, of life. He has left work, his highest from a purely literary point of view-where the criticism, though it is far from being unimportant, is indirect. Still ESMOND, in spite of its superior construction, in spite of the greater pleasure which it offers to the reader, will never be taken to represent Thackeray as he is represented by VANITY FAIR, by PENDENNIS and THE NEWCOMES. These books are less pleasant because they actually do represent Thackeray more completely than ESMOND represents him. Thackeray at his strongest produces as much pain as pleasure, because he is what Matthew Arnold would have called a dissolvent; the destructive

element predominates in his criticism.

Criticism which is wholly destructive is satire, and to this in the earlier part of his career Thackeray gave himself up entirely. When he proIceeded from THE BOOK OF SNOBS to VANITY FAIR he was forced to enlarge his method. You cannot manufacture a world out of mere dissolvents, and Thackeray, starting from a merely satirical intention, was soon forced to go beyond satire and to introduce a principle of order derived from his own consciousness. He had till this time spent all his energy in proclaiming laws, the breaking of which was death; he had now to produce a gospel of his own by which men might live. It is not inevitably just to make the test of a man's work his positive conclusions. A man may be an excellent dissolvent, and quite powerless when he tries to be anything more; still it is not fair to conclude that because he can make nothing he had no right to unmake, or that he went destroying recklessly, or in the direction. wrong

Thackeray, however, would have to shrink so much in his pretensions if he were to be regarded as only a destructive force, that in sheer fairness it is necessary to take his work as a whole, and consider his satire as clearing the ground for a definite system which he had to build. Taken by itself, his satire is not difficult to estimate. That it had tact without depth seems easily proved by its obvious and speedy results. The saeva indignatio, the savage scorn which goes down to the very fundamental vices of human nature, makes very little impression, because it aims at an overthrow little short of universal, and is too dangerous not to excite the instinct of self-preservation to the sharpest resistance. It is in matters not of vital importance that one can be easily

effective. The obsolete can be removed before the hurtful, the superfluous before the absurd. Thackeray levelled his aim, for the most part, at mere empty husks and shells of prejudice, which had already ceased to have any significant contents for good or evil. In reading the BOOK OF SNOBS or the WAYSIDE SKETCHES, or most of his miscellaneous work, one is struck by the number of small, definite abuses which have perished since he attacked them. Very probably it was not he who killed them: he may only have expressed a general and victorious tendency; but it is noteworthy how keen and accurate his feeling was for the general tendency.

Immediate success of this kind is subject to heavy penalties. As new generations succeed, whose evils are of quite a different kind, they look with bare toleration on those who have won the battles of the past. Thackeray will have scanty gratitude for the changes which he brought about in contemporary manners, the meannesses which he sneered down, the follies which he laughed away. It is only where he was concerned with principles, with everlasting springs of action, that he will continue to have more than a historic interest. It is his weakness, his conspicuous weakness, that he is too pre-occupied with accidents, with mere matters of detail, to the neglect of principles. Still he does, at times, deal with his subject in a broad, human fashion, and he does this more often than perhaps he gets credit for.

Where he is bound to submit to us a somewhat extended view of life, as in most of his novels, it becomes plain that he has a genuine seriousness of purpose beyond the scope of the successful satirist. He is not confined, as sometimes he seems to be, to the regions where the question of hiring plate for a dinner-party becomes a

part of ethics; he is the most trenchant adversary of the materialisation of the English aristocracy and middle classes in the early years of the Victorian era. But he is much more than that. He has penetrated deeply into some of the eternal characters of human nature.

Thackeray's method and Thackeray's view of life were based on an instinct of revolt against the view of life and the method of describing it, which aims at its glorification at the expense of truth; which appeals, not to a sense of reality, but to unintelligent curiosity and to a vanity that finds a gratification in seeing human nature outrageously flattered; the method and the views which at that time had Bulwer Lytton for their most popular exponent. As he had attacked affectation and insincerity in slight affairs of etiquette and conduct, he attacked insincerity and affectation here too. He went on to examine the relations of human life, to try men's actions and motives, at first only with the object of showing how grossly they were being misrepresented, but soon with a much more serious design. The passion for truth entered into him, the desire to discover and show it in its severity without the dazzling, many-coloured hues which imagination casts upon it. He felt that the pompous and tinsel disguise which his contemporaries loved was scarcely falser than the beauty lent by the fancy of poets or the enthusiasm of ardent souls to a very commonplace and prosaic world. Either fantasy, or convention, or fondness for tawdry ornament had perpetually interfered with accurate representation. the prophet and apostle of realism, and his realism,-very real and very intense for all its decent restraint and well-bred utterance-was a spiritual realism. He explored the dark places of the soul, and described passions

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and crimes while they slept, still only germinant and potential, in the heart and the intellect. It was thus that he could introduce his realism unreproved, a concealed innovator, and for this purpose the men and women whom he knew best, the men and women of the upper classes, were the most appropriate material.

But it is in his treatment of virtue, in contact with characters for whom he has an esteem, that Thackeray's analysis is most searching and most edifying. In VANITY FAIR, what his first audience felt most vividly was his exposure of the depraved constitution of society; the sketches of that noble profligate, the Marquis of Steyne, of Becky, that successful adventuress, of that distinguished soldier, General Tufto. It was the most scathing satire on a hopelessly materialised aristocracy, and as such it had its immediate effect. But what to-day retains any power of edification, of more than amusement, or has anything more than a historic interest, is the penetration into the weaknesses of the human heart at its best and purest, the flaws of parental love, of wifely affection, the selfishness incident to the joy of childhood, the inseparable limitations of generosity and friendship. Amelia and Dobbin and the old Sedleys and Helen Pendennis seem dull personages to many readers; they have not that quality which we call dramatic, the quality which appeals to the senses and the powers of the intellect most nearly allied to them. But how edifying! how instructive ! how they open the secret workings of the heart!

Thackeray does not write as a cynic, but as a lover of sober truth, else his subtle analysis would have no value but its cleverness, his power of edification would be gone. He has not an indictment framed against the human race as he had against the

society of his time; but he conceived of the dignity of man in another than the current fashion. He did not believe that human nature was the better for being invested with false attributes, that man was any nobler for being looked at through coloured glasses. He was prepared to grant that love is a beautiful thing, but he did not think it a blasphemous discovery that love seldom comes in the sudden, victorious manner which was universally held to be proper to it, but is heralded by false alarms, preceded by pretenders who usurp its name, and often dashed and tarnished by cold, prudential considerations. A mother's affection is even more beautiful, but it can be, for all that, unwise, irrational, unjust. Children are the world's delight, the especial favourites of heaven, yet experience teaches us that they can be selfish, callous to kindness, exacting, untruthful.

What is the end of this curious considering? It has for its end the discovery of something true, stable, unassailable, something in human nature to rest upon with conviction. Thackeray could not rest upon a transfigured humanity; he was too clearsighted, and of too solid a temperament to assent to an imaginative re-construction of the world. He laboured with his unceasing rigid realism to strip off the delusive externals which were so satisfactory to most of his fellows, that he might be able to rest at last, assured that he was not placing his confidence in a painted virtue.

His natural bent was to seek the satisfaction of his nature less in the intellectual than in the moral and emotional. He had no fondness for abstract thinking, and was not in sympathy with what was being achieved in that direction in his own time. He distrusted thought which elevated above the sphere of

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action, seeing clearly that lofty thinking often went with very ignoble deeds. His life had been such, it may safely be said that his temperament, in any case, was such, that he could not live in imagination, protected against the jars and pains of life. Religion would have been his natural refuge, and he felt himself alternately drawn to it by instinct and repelled by the clear vision which told him that it was not the right harbour for such a mind as his.

The unrest produced by this alternate attraction and repulsion deepened his natural melancholy. It gave him a feeling of being at war with his better self, and he has expressed something of his agitation in the picture which he gives of Arthur Pendennis's attitude, Pendennis being to a considerable degree a revelation of his own mind.

To what does this easy and sceptical life lead a man?

Friend Arthur was a Sadducee, and the Baptist might be in the wilderness shouting to the poor, who were listening with all their might and faith to the preacher's awful accents and denunciations of wrath or woe or salvation; and our friend the Sadducee would turn his sleek mule with a shrug and a smile from the crowd, and go home to the shade of his terrace, and muse over preacher and audience, and turn to his roll of Plato, or his pleasant Greek song-book babbling of honey and Hybla, and nymphs and fountains and love. To what, we say, does this scepticism lead? It leads a man to a shameful loneliness and selfishness, so to speak-the more shameful because it is so good-humoured and conscienceless and serene. Conscience ! What is conscience? Why accept remorse? What is public or private faith Mythuses alike enveloped in enormous tradition. If, seeing and acknowledging the lies of the world, Arthur, as see them you can with only too fatal a clearness, you submit to them without any protest further than a laugh; if, plunged yourself in easy sensuality, you allow the whole wretched world to pass groaning by you unmoved: if the fight for the truth is taking place, and all men of honour are on the ground armed on the one side or the other, and

you alone are to lie on your balcony and smoke your pipe out of the noise and the danger, you had better have died, or never have been at all, than such a sensual coward.

The case is brutally overstated, and Thackeray must have been conscious that it was so. This was only a momentary outburst. Still, he felt a continual uneasiness at having to stand aloof from all the causes into which other men could throw their entire souls. He regretted that he could not fight for a half-truth as if it were the whole, and blamed himself for his inability. Religion, too, only expressed half the truth of man's life for him. What then remained to which he could attach himself? There remained a certain fundamental goodness in man in which he could believe and which he regarded as the clue to conduct. Not to pitch one's standard too high, not to live out of the world in a sphere of abstract thought or imagination or mysticism, not to put one's trust in lofty qualities, which have their rise perhaps only in imagination or ignorance, to the neglect of plain, hard matters of fact and duty, but to recognise, believe in, and cultivate the virtues of humility and kindnessthat was the secret which Thackeray believed would carry one safely through the world. He did not flatter himself that it was a newly-discovered secret, or promising to bear very wide results, or even capable of affording a vividly triumphant issue to those who practised it, but he believed that it was true when tested, and safe when put into effect.

It is in those novels which reflect most directly on life that one naturally looks to find Thackeray, but it is in one devoted to dramatic presentment

that the crown and proof of his system is to be found. The discovery and the application of it is elsewhere, in the novels which will be held to represent Thackeray most precisely, VANITY FAIR, PENDENNIS, THE NEWCOMES; but it is Henry Esmond who is introduced to us as actually holding Thackeray's secret. Esmond is endowed with all the accomplishments of a man, and holds them so lightly that they seem to make no difference to him. He moves in the society of the greatest men of a great age, and all he finds worth recording is that Dr. Swift was insolent and St. John a drunkard. He is more clear-sighted than any man of his time, and he attempts to give his country a bad king, in defiance of his principles and to the ruin of his hopes. Yet he is the best man Thackeray has given us; perhaps the best man we have known. And the springs of his goodness are that he is humble before what he can understand of goodness, and true to the motions of his heart in gratitude and affection.

Perhaps Thackeray's analysis was more important than his results. Perhaps his secret was neither new nor very effectual. But he first taught men to know their hearts, where they had only seen their actions. He held the mirror up to nature in a way that was very surprising to it, and while his caricatures of society have lost their first interest, his delineation of the motions of the heart can never

lose its significance. Indeed it may yet take on a new and surprising significance as literature strays farther and farther from the path which he indicated for it, into the labyrinth of mental pathology.