make him ridiculous? Why
is he so shamefully ugly, so shy, so awkward? Why was he the son of a
grocer? Thackeray in so depicting him was determined to run counter to
the recognised taste of novel readers. And then again there was the
feeling of another great fault. Let there be the virtuous in a novel and
let there be the vicious, the dignified and the undignified, the sublime
and the ridiculous,--only let the virtuous, the dignified, and the
sublime be in the ascendant. Edith Bellenden, and Lord Evandale, and
Morton himself would be too stilted, were they not enlivened by Mause,
and Cuddie, and Poundtext. But here, in this novel, the vicious and the
absurd have been made to be of more importance than the good and the
noble. Becky Sharp and Rawdon Crawley are the real heroine and hero of
the story. It is with them that the reader is called upon to interest
himself. It is of them that he will think when he is reading the book.
It is by them that he will judge the book when he has read it. There was
no doubt a feeling with the public that though satire may be very well
in its place, it should not be made the backbone of a work so long and
so important as this. A short story such as _Catherine_ or _Barry
Lyndon_ might be pronounced to have been called for by the iniquities of
an outside world; but this seemed to the readers to have been addressed
almost to themselves. Now men and women like to be painted as Titian
would paint them, or Raffaelle,--not as Rembrandt, or even Rubens.

Whether the ideal or the real is the best form of a novel may be
questioned, but there can be no doubt that as there are novelists who
cannot descend from the bright heaven of the imagination to walk with
their feet upon the earth, so there are others to whom it is not given
to soar among clouds. The reader must please himself, and make his
selection if he cannot enjoy both. There are many who are carried into a
heaven of pathos by the woes of a Master of Ravenswood, who fail
altogether to be touched by the enduring constancy of a Dobbin. There
are others,--and I will not say but they may enjoy the keenest delight
which literature can give,--who cannot employ their minds on fiction
unless it be conveyed in poetry. With Thackeray it was essential that
the representations made by him should be, to his own thinking,
lifelike. A Dobbin seemed to him to be such a one as might probably be
met with in the world, whereas to his thinking a Ravenswood was s