no more a literal copyist
than the creator of Mrs. Gamp. He was rather one of art's most
capable exemplars in the arduous employment of seeming-true.

It must be added that his technique was more careless than an
artist of anything like his caliber would have permitted himself
to-day. The audience was less critical: not only has the art of
fiction been evolved into a finer finish, but gradually the
court of judgment made up of a select reading public, has come
to decide with much more of professional knowledge. Thus,
technique in fiction is expected and given. So much of gain
there has been, in spite of all the vulgarization of taste which
has followed in the wake of cheap magazines and newspapers. In
"Vanity Fair," for example, there are blemishes which a careful
revision would never have suffered to remain: the same is true
of most of Thackeray's books. Like Dickens, Thackeray was
exposed to all the danger of the Twenty Parts method of
publication. He began his stories without seeing the end; in one
of them he is humorously plaintive over the trouble of making
this manner of fiction. While "Vanity Fair" is, of course,
written in the impersonal third person, at least one passage is
put into the mouth of a character in the book: an extraordinary
slip for such a novelist.

But peccadilloes such as these, which it is well to realize in
view of the absurd claims to artistic impeccability for
Thackeray made by rash admirers, melt away into nothing when one
recalls Rawdon Crawley's horsewhipping of the Marquis; George
Osborn's departure for battle, Colonel Newcome's death, or the
incomparable scene where Lady Castlewood welcomes home the
wandering Esmond; that "rapture of reconciliation"! It is by
such things that great novelists live, and it may be doubted if
their errors are ever counted against them, if only they can
create in this fashion.

In speaking of Thackeray's unskilful construction the reference
is to architectonics; in the power of particular scenes it is
hard to name his superior. He has both the pictorial and the
dramatic sense. The care with which "Esmond" was planned and
executed suggests too that, had he taken his art more seriously
and given needed time to each of the great books, he might have
become one of the masters in that prime excellence of the craft,
the excellence of proportion, progress and climax. He never
quite brought himself to adopt the regular modern method of
scenario. "Philip," hi