Of the merits incontestable, first and foremost may be mentioned the color and motion of Life which spread like an atmosphere over this fiction.  By his inimitable idiom, his knowledge of the polite world, and his equal knowledge of the average human being irrespective of class or condition, Thackeray was able to make his chronicle appear the very truth.  Moreover, for a second great merit, he was able, quite without meretricious appeals, to make that truth interesting.  You follow the fortunes of the folk in a typical Thackeray novel as you would follow a similar group in actual life.  They interest because they are real—­or seem to be, which, for the purposes of art, is the same thing.  To read is not so much to look from an outside place at a fictive representation of existence as to be participant in such a piece of life—­to feel as if you were living the story.  Only masters accomplish this, and it is, it may be added, the specialty of modern masters.

For another shining merit:  much of wisdom assimilated by the author in the course of his days is given forth with pungent power and in piquant garb in the pages of these books:  the reader relishes the happy statements of an experience profounder than his own, yet tallying in essentials:  Thackeray’s remarks seem to gather up into final shape the scattered oracles of the years.  Gratitude goes out to an author who can thus condense and refine one’s own inarticulate conclusions.  The mental palate is tickled by this, while the taste is titillated by the grace and fitness of the style.

Yet in connection with this quality is a habit which already makes Thackeray seem of an older time—­a trifle archaic in technique.  I refer to the intrusion of the author into the story in first-personal comment and criticism.  This is tabooed by the present-day realist canons.  It weakens the illusion, say the artists of our own day, this entrance of an actual personality upon the stage of the imagined scene.  Thackeray is guilty of this lovable sin to a greater degree than is Dickens, and it may be added here that, while the latter has so often been called preacher in contrast with Thackeray the artist, as a matter of fact, Thackeray moralizes in the fashion described fully as much:  the difference being that he does it with lighter touch and with less strenuosity and obvious seriousness:  is more consistently amusing in the act of instruction.

Thackeray again has less story to tell than his greatest contemporary and never gained a sure hand in construction, with the possible exception of his one success in plot, “Henry Esmond.”  Nothing is more apparent than the loose texture of “Vanity Fair,” where two stories centering in the antithetic women, Becky and Amelia, are held together chronicle fashion, not in the nexus of an organism of close weave.  But this very looseness, where there is such superlative power of characterization with plenty of invention in incident, adds to the verisimilitude