strong and even humble curiosity which does really know something about foreign nations, but along with it that strange tendency to put the true thing the wrong way round, to seize on the unimportant side of the matter first. It is just as if a foreign critic of England, instead of knowing nothing at all about us, as is usually the case—were to grasp the fact that the most luxurious English people went fox-hunting, and then explain it by saying that these Sybarites had one weird hatred, a venomous hatred of foxes. Such a man would have got the facts right and the truth wrong; and such is our constant national condition with regard to foreign ideas. But there is an even more curious example of it than this, and that is the fact that even in our own discussions, and in the matter of the great reputations of our own country, we

THACKERAY
AT THE
AGE OF THREE,
with his
Father and Mother,
Mr. and Mrs.
Richmond Thackeray From a
water-colour sketch
done in India by
Chinnery in 1814, now
in the possession of
Mrs. Richmond Ritchie (Reproduced from the
Biographical Edition of
Thackeray’s Works,
by kind permission of
Messrs.
Smith, Elder & Co.)

exhibit this same singular tendency to catch hold of truth only by the tail or the hind leg. Our judgments—that is, our current and conventional judgments—on our great men of genius have a singular disposition to begin in enormous letters with the unimportant defect, and miss in comparison the great merit out of which that defect

THACKERAY AMONG THE FRASERIANS

Drawn by Daniel Maclise, 1835

arises. Thus, for instance, Englishmen have wearied themselves with asserting that Dickens was vulgar and could not describe a gentleman. Dickens could not describe a gentleman, but he was never vulgar except when he attempted that snobbish and unworthy enterprise. Most men do become vulgar when they describe those who are called vulgar people; and it is precisely here that Dickens was never vulgar there is no trace of vulgarity about Silas Wegg or Dick Swiveller. The supreme function of Dickens in the universe was to point out that robust and humorous common life is not vulgar, cannot in its nature be vulgar, and the only thing that his countryman can see about him is that he could not describe a member of the upper classes. We might as well say that Michael Angelo never really painted a chartered accountant. Here again our sincere people have got to the wrong end of the telescope. But of all these examples there is none more perfect and more amusing than the fashion which called Thackeray a cynic. He was a cynic, if the critics will, in the same sense that Leonardo da Vinci was a chemist or Mr. Chamberlain a horticulturalist. But the cynic in him was not merely subordinate to his other characteristics; it was the mere product—nay, the by-product of them. His cynicism was a minor result, a thing left over by his triumphant tendency to sentiment.