In all literature that lives there is mingled like pollen an indefinable element of the author’s personality.  In Thackeray’s “Lectures on English Humorists” this subtle quality is particularly apparent.  Elusive, delicate, alluring—­it is the actinic ray that imparts vitality.

When wit plays skittles with dulness, dulness gets revenge by taking wit at his word.  Vast numbers of people taking Thackeray at his word consider him a bitter pessimist.

He even disconcerted bright little Charlotte Bronte, who went down to London to see him, and then wrote back to Haworth that “the great man talked steadily with never a smile.  I could not tell when to laugh and when to cry, for I did not know what was fun and what fact.”

But finally the author of “Jane Eyre” found the combination, and she saw that beneath the brusk exterior of that bulky form there was a woman’s tender sympathy.

Thackeray has told us what he thought of the author of “Jane Eyre,” and the author of “Jane Eyre” has told us what she thought of the author of “Vanity Fair.”  One was big and whimsical, the other was little and sincere, but both were alike in this:  their hearts were wrung at the sight of suffering, and both had tears for the erring, the groping, and the oppressed.

A Frenchman can not comprehend a joke that is not accompanied by grimace and gesticulation; and so M. Taine chases Thackeray through sixty solid pages, berating him for what he is pleased to term “bottled hate.”

Taine is a cynic who charges Thackeray with cynicism, all in the choicest of biting phrase.  It is a beautiful example of sinners calling the righteous to repentance—­a thing that is often done, but seldom with artistic finish.

The fun is too deep for Monsieur, or mayhap the brand is not the yellow label to which his palate is accustomed, so he spews it all.  Yet Taine’s criticism is charming reading, although he is only hot after an aniseed trail of his own dragging.  But the chase is a deal more exciting than most men would lead, were there real live game to capture.

If pushed, I might suggest several points in this man’s make-up where God could have bettered His work.  But accepting Thackeray as we find him, we see a singer whose cage Fate had overhung with black until he had caught the tune.  The “Ballad of Boullabaisse” shows a tender side of his spirit that he often sought to conceal.  His heart vibrated to all finer thrills of mercy; and his love for all created things was so delicately strung that he would, in childish shame, sometimes issue a growl to drown its rising, tearful tones.

In the character of Becky Sharp, he has marshaled some of his own weak points and then lashed them with scorn.  He looked into the mirror and seeing a potential snob he straightway inveighed against snobbery.  The punishment does not always fit the crime—­it is excess.  But I still contest that where his ridicule is most severe, it is Thackeray’s own back that is bared to the knout.