In speaking of Thackeray’s unskilful construction the reference is to architectonics; in the power of particular scenes it is hard to name his superior.  He has both the pictorial and the dramatic sense.  The care with which “Esmond” was planned and executed suggests too that, had he taken his art more seriously and given needed time to each of the great books, he might have become one of the masters in that prime excellence of the craft, the excellence of proportion, progress and climax.  He never quite brought himself to adopt the regular modern method of scenario.  “Philip,” his last full length fiction, may be cited as proof.

Yet it may be that he would have given increased attention to construction had he lived a long life.  It is worth noting that when the unfinished “Denis Duval” dropt from a hand made inert by death, the general plan, wherefrom an idea of its architecture could be got, was among his effects.

To say a word now of Thackeray’s style.  There is practical unanimity of opinion as to this.  Thackeray had the effect of writing like a cultivated gentleman not self-consciously making literature.  He was tolerant of colloquial concessions that never lapsed into vulgarity; even his slips and slovenlinesses are those of the well-bred.  To pass from him back to Richardson is to realize how stiffly correct is the latter.  Thackeray has flexibility, music, vernacular felicity and a deceptive ease.  He had, too, the flashing strokes, the inspirational sallies which characterize the style of writers like Lamb, Stevenson and Meredith.  Fitness, balance, breeding and harmony are his chief qualities.  To say that he never sinned or nodded would be to deny that he was human.  He cut his cloth to fit the desired garment and is a modern English master of prose designed to reproduce the habit and accent of the polite society of his age.  In his hortatory asides and didactic moralizings with their thees and thous and yeas, he is still the fine essayist, like Fielding in his eighteenth century prefatory exordiums.  And here is undoubtedly one of his strongest appeals to the world of readers, whether or no it makes him less perfect a fictionist.  The diction of a Thackeray is one of the honorable national assets of his race.

Thackeray’s men and women talk as they might be expected to talk in life; each in his own idiom, class and idiosyncrasy.  And in the descriptions which furnish atmosphere, in which his creatures may live and breathe and have their being, the hand of the artist of words is equally revealed.  Both for dialogue and narration the gift is valid, at times superb.  It would be going too far to say that if Thackeray had exercised the care in revision bestowed by later reputable authors, his style might not have been improved:  beyond question it would have been, in the narrow sense.  But the correction of trifling mistakes is one thing, a change in pattern another.  The retouching, although satisfying grammar here and there, might have dimmed the vernacular value of his speech.