perfect honour, but has some trait that tends to make him or her either
laughable or tedious. It is not so with the supreme masters of the
human heart. And the world does not condone this, and it is right in
not condoning it.

But to say this, is not to condemn Thackeray as a cynic. With these
many scenes of exquisite tenderness and pathos, with men and women of
such loving hearts and devoted spirits, with the profusion of gay,
kindly, childlike love of innocent fun, that we find all through
Thackeray's work, he does not belong to the order of the Jonathan
Swifts, the Balzacs, the Zolas, the gruesome anatomists of human vice
and meanness. On the other hand he does not belong to the order of the
Shakespeares, Goethes, and Scotts, to whom human virtue and dignity
always remain in the end the supreme forces of human life. Thackeray,
with a fine and sympathetic soul, had a creative imagination that was
far stronger on the darker and fouler sides of life than it was on the
brighter and pure side of life. He saw the bright and pure side: he
loved it, he felt with it, he made us love it. But his artistic genius
worked with more free and consummate zest when he painted the dark and
the foul. His creative imagination fell short of the true equipoise,
of that just vision of _chiaroscuro_, which we find in the greatest
masters of the human heart. This limitation of his genius has been
visited upon Thackeray with a heavy hand. And such as it is, he must
bear it.

The place of Thackeray in English literature will always be determined
by his _Vanity Fair_: which will be read, we may confidently predict,
as long as _Tom Jones_, _Clarissa_, _Tristram Shandy_, _The Antiquary_,
and _Pickwick_. But all the best of his pieces, even the smaller _jeux
d'esprit_, may be read with delight again and again by young and old.