Lady Kew; or else they have some weakness, silliness, or narrowness
which prevents us from at once loving and respecting them. Amelia is
rather a poor thing and decidedly silly; we do not really admire Laura
Pendennis; the Little Sister is somewhat colourless; Ethel Newcome runs
great risk of being a spoilt beauty; and about Lady Castlewood, with
all her love and devotion, there hangs a certain sinister and unnatural
taint, which the world cannot forgive, and perhaps ought not to
forgive. The sum of all this is, that in all these twenty-six volumes
and hundreds of men and women portrayed, there is not one man or one
woman having at once a noble character, perfect generosity, powerful
mind, and loveable nature; not one man or one woman of tender heart and
perfect honour, but has some trait that tends to make him or her either
laughable or tedious. It is not so with the supreme masters of the
human heart. And the world does not condone this, and it is right in
not condoning it.
But to say this, is not to condemn Thackeray as a cynic. With these
many scenes of exquisite tenderness and pathos, with men and women of
such loving hearts and devoted spirits, with the profusion of gay,
kindly, childlike love of innocent fun, that we find all through
Thackeray's work, he does not belong to the order of the Jonathan
Swifts, the Balzacs, the Zolas, the gruesome anatomists of human vice
and meanness. On the other hand he does not belong to the order of the
Shakespeares, Goethes, and Scotts, to whom human virtue and dignity
always remain in the end the supreme forces of human life. Thackeray,
with a fine and sympathetic soul, had a creative imagination that was
far stronger on the darker and fouler sides of life than it was on the
brighter and pure side of life. He saw the bright and pure side: he
loved it, he felt with it, he made us love it. But his artistic genius
worked with more free and consummate zest when he painted the dark and
the foul. His creative imagination fell short of the true equipoise,
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