of a want of seriousness.  Even The Great Hoggarty Diamond (1841-1842) was apparently cut short by request, and still lay open to an unjust, but not quite inexcusable, question on this same point of “seriousness.”  In all there was, or might seem to be, a queer and to some readers an unsatisfactory blend of what they had not learnt to call “realism” with what they were quite likely to think fooling.  During these years Thackeray was emphatically of the class of writers of whom people “do not know what to make.”  And it is a true saying of English people—­though perhaps not so pre-eminently true of them as some would have it—­that “not to know what to make” of a thing or a person is sufficient reason for them to distrust, dislike, and “wash their hands of” it or him.

[22] For this reason, and for the variety of kind of his later novels a little more individual notice must be given to them than in the case of Dickens, but still only a little, and nothing like detailed criticism.

Some would have it that Barry Lyndon (1843) marks the close of this period of indecision and the beginning of that of maturity.  The commoner and perhaps the juster opinion is that this position belongs to Vanity Fair (1846-1848).  At any rate, after that book there could be no doubt about the fact of the greatness of its writer, though it may be doubted whether even now the quality of this greatness is correctly and generally recognised.  It is this—­that at last the novel of real life on the great scale has been discovered.  Even yet a remnant of shyness hangs on the artist.  He puts his scene a little though not very far back; he borrows a little, though not much, historical and romantic interest in the Waterloo part; the catastrophe of the Becky-Steyne business, though by no means outside of the probable contents of any day’s newspaper, is slightly exceptional.  But on the whole the problem of “reality, the whole reality, and nothing but reality” is faced and grasped and solved—­with, of course, the addition to the “nothing but” of “except art.”

He had struck his path and he kept to it:  even when, as in Esmond (1852) and The Virginians (1858-1859) actually, and in Denis Duval prospectively, he blended the historical with the domestic variety. Pendennis (1849-1850) imports nothing out of the most ordinary experience; The Newcomes (1854-1855) very little; Philip (1861-1862) only its pantomime conclusion; while the two completely historical tales are in nothing more remarkable than in the way in which their remoter and more unfamiliar main subject, and their occasional excursions from everyday life, are subdued to the scheme of the realist novel in the best sense of the term—­the novel rebuilt and refashioned on the lines of Fielding, but with modern manners, relying on variety and life, and relying on these only.