enius must be builded on the foundations of his character. Where that
genius deals with the mingled stuff of human life--sorrow, desire, love,
hatred, kindness, meanness--then the foundation of character is
especially important. People are sometimes glad that we know so little
of Shakespeare the man; yet who can doubt that a true revelation of his
character would be not less worthy, noble and charming than the general
effect of his poems? In him, it is certain, we should always find an
example of nobility, of generosity, of charity and kindness and
self-forgetfulness. Indeed, we find these qualities, as a rule, in the
biographies of the great sympathetic poets and men of genius of the pen--I
do not say in the lives of rebels of genius, "meteoric poets" like Byron.
The same basis, the same foundations of rectitude, of honour, of
goodness, of melancholy, and of mirth, underlie the art of Moliere, of
Scott, of Fielding, and as his correspondence shows, of Thackeray.

It seems probable that a complete biography of Thackeray will never be
written. It was his wish to live in his works alone: that wish his
descendants respect; and we must probably regard the Letters to Mr. and
Mrs. Brookfield as the last private and authentic record of the man which
will be given, at least to this generation. In these Letters all
sympathetic readers will find the man they have long known from his
writings--the man with a heart so tender that the world often drove him
back into a bitterness of opposition, into an assumed hardness and
defensive cynicism. There are readers so unluckily constituted that they
can see nothing in Thackeray but this bitterness, this cruel sense of
meanness and power of analysing shabby emotions, sneaking vanities,
contemptible ambitions. All of us must often feel with regret that he
allowed himself to be made too unhappy by the spectacle of failings so
common in the world he knew best, that he dwelt on them too long and
lashed them too complacently. One hopes never to read "Lovel the
Widower" again, and one gladly skips some of the speeches of the Old
Campaigner in "The Newcomes." They are terrible, but not more terrible
than life. Yet it is hard to understand how Mr. Ruskin, for example, can
let such scenes and characters hide from his view the kindness,
gentleness, and pity of Thackeray's nature. The Letters must open all
eyes that are not wilfully closed, and should at last overcome every
prejudice.

I