all pleasurableness to the modern Moloch, truth.  Neither he nor any other great novelist reproduces Life verbatim et literatim.  Trollope, in his somewhat unsatisfactory biography of his fellow fictionist, very rightly puts his finger on a certain scene in “Vanity Fair” in which Sir Pitt Crawley figures, which departs widely from reality.  The traditional comparison between the two novelists, which represents Dickens as ever caricaturing, Thackeray as the photographer, is coming to be recognized as foolish.

It is all merely a question of degree, as has been said.  It being the artist’s business to show a few of the symbols of life out of the vast amount of raw material offered, he differs in the main from his brother artist in the symbols he selects.  No one of them presents everything—­if he did, he were no artist.  Thackeray approaches nearer than Dickens, it is true, to the average appearances of life; but is no more a literal copyist than the creator of Mrs. Gamp.  He was rather one of art’s most capable exemplars in the arduous employment of seeming-true.

It must be added that his technique was more careless than an artist of anything like his caliber would have permitted himself to-day.  The audience was less critical:  not only has the art of fiction been evolved into a finer finish, but gradually the court of judgment made up of a select reading public, has come to decide with much more of professional knowledge.  Thus, technique in fiction is expected and given.  So much of gain there has been, in spite of all the vulgarization of taste which has followed in the wake of cheap magazines and newspapers.  In “Vanity Fair,” for example, there are blemishes which a careful revision would never have suffered to remain:  the same is true of most of Thackeray’s books.  Like Dickens, Thackeray was exposed to all the danger of the Twenty Parts method of publication.  He began his stories without seeing the end; in one of them he is humorously plaintive over the trouble of making this manner of fiction.  While “Vanity Fair” is, of course, written in the impersonal third person, at least one passage is put into the mouth of a character in the book:  an extraordinary slip for such a novelist.

But peccadilloes such as these, which it is well to realize in view of the absurd claims to artistic impeccability for Thackeray made by rash admirers, melt away into nothing when one recalls Rawdon Crawley’s horsewhipping of the Marquis; George Osborn’s departure for battle, Colonel Newcome’s death, or the incomparable scene where Lady Castlewood welcomes home the wandering Esmond; that “rapture of reconciliation”!  It is by such things that great novelists live, and it may be doubted if their errors are ever counted against them, if only they can create in this fashion.