rton
contends against other critics), so in the case of Thackeray that which
some critics have held to be a weakness--I mean his 'irrelevancy'--is
for our critic a strength. It was a strength, because it was 'a very
delicate and even cunning literary approach.' It is the perfect art of
Thackeray to get the right situation, not by an assumption of it, but by
so approaching it that there is no way out, which is arriving at the
situation by the fairest means possible.

'No other novelist ever carried to such perfection as Thackeray the art
of saying a thing without saying it. Thus he may say that a man drinks
too much, yet it may be false to say that he drinks.' What he did was
not to say that a man had arrived at such and such a state, but rather
that things must change. If, as Chesterton says, Miss Smith finds
marriage the reverse of the honeymoon, Thackeray does not say that the
marriage is a failure, but that joy cannot last for ever; that if there
are roses there are also thorns. It is an admirable method, far better
than saying a thing straight out. It is better to tell a man who is a
cad that there is such a thing as being a gentleman, than to tell him he
is a cad.

In his later life Thackeray was inclined to imitate himself. It is, I
think, that the human brain is prone to move in circles. In the case of
Thackeray, as our critic points out, in later days he used his rambling
style, and, as was to be expected, he rather lost himself. 'He did not
merely get into a parenthesis, he never got out of it,' which is to say
that as Thackeray got older he inherited the tendencies of old age.

I have said earlier in this chapter that the charge against Thackeray of
cynicism was one that was founded on a false premise. The charge that
his irrelevancy was a weakness is based on another false but popular
premise, that the direct method is always the best. It is usually the
worst. It is the worst in warfare, it is the worst in literature, but it
is possibly the best in literary criticism.

Thackeray had another quality that has laid him open to adverse
criticism; that is, his 'perpetual reference to the remote past.' This
repeated reference to the past may be a matter of conceit, or it may be
that the influence of the past is genuinely felt. The reason that, as
Chesterton points out, Thackeray referred so much to the remote past,
was that he wished it to be known that 'there was nothing new under the
sun'; not even, as our cr