But in Thackeray’s novels is evident the difficulty of establishing any generally accepted standard of realism.  If this quality consists in representing a character as speaking and acting just as we should expect such a character to speak and act, Thackeray succeeded as perhaps no novelist, except Fielding, had done before him.  Becky Sharp, Sir Pitt Crawley, Pendennis, Clive Newcome, all use such words as the reader would expect from them.  Their actions are the natural results of the trains of thought into which the author has given us an insight.  When the old reprobate, Lord Steyne, discovers that Becky Sharp had appropriated to herself the money which he had given her to restore poor Miss Briggs’ stolen property, he is not indignant at the deception.  The admiration of the noble rogue is only increased for the woman who has shown herself to be possessed of a more astute roguery than his own:—­

“What an accomplished little devil it is!” thought he.  “What a splendid actress and manager!  She had almost got a second supply out of me the other day with her coaxing ways.  She beats all the women I have ever seen in the course of all my well-spent life!  They are babies compared to her.  I am a green-horn myself and a fool in her hands—­an old fool.  She is unsurpassable in lies.”  His lordship’s admiration for Becky rose immeasurably at this proof of her cleverness.  Getting the money was nothing—­but getting double the sum she wanted and paying nobody—­it was a magnificent stroke.

In his delineation of character, in the perfect naturalness with which all his personages act out their respective parts, no novelist is more realistic than Thackeray.  But realism has a broader application.  A novelist who takes every-day life for his subject has not only to give the stamp of nature to all his scenes and individuals, but he must so write, that at the end of his book the reader will have the impression that real life, with its due apportionment of good and evil, of happiness and grief, has been placed before him.  Some readers will receive that impression from Thackeray’s novels; but they will be those who think that the evil and the unhappiness predominate.  So thought the author himself.  But the world in general think differently, and agree to look upon Thackeray as a satirist.

As such, he ranks in English literature second only to Swift.  To the great Dean, man was a lump of deformity and disease.  He saw in humanity little besides its vice, and painted his species in colors under which few men have been willing to recognize a portrait.  Thackeray’s genial disposition naturally made him far less bitter than Swift.  He neither saw nor portrayed the monstrous vice which excited the hatred of the satirist of the eighteenth century.  To Thackeray, men were weak rather than bad, selfish rather than vicious.  George Osborne braves the consequences of marrying poor Amelia Sedley, and yet prefers his own pleasure to that of his wife.  Rawdon Crawley is ignorant, rude, and unprincipled, but yet is loving and faithful to Rebecca.  Weakness, pettiness, self-deception were the main objects of Thackeray’s satire.  Where are the absurdities of youthful woman-worship held up to such derision as in Pendennis’ love for Miss Costigan!