Thackeray is a writer who occupies a curious and very interesting
position. Devoid of the noble and romantic sympathies of Scott, and
corrupted to the basic fibres of his being by Early Victorian
snobbishness, he is yet--none can deny it--a powerful creator of
living people and an accomplished and graceful stylist.
Without philosophy, without faith, without moral courage, the uneasy
slave of conventional morality, and with a hopeless vein of sheer
worldly philistinism in his book, Thackeray is yet able, by a certain
unconquerable insight into the motives and impulses of mediocre
people, and by a certain weight and mass of creative force, to give a
convincing reality to his pictures of life, which is almost
devastating in its sneering and sentimental accuracy.
The most winning and attractive thing about him is his devotion to the
eighteenth century; a century whose manners he is able to depict in
his large and gracious way without being disturbed by the pressure of
that contemporary vulgarity which finds a too lively response in
something bourgeois and snobbish in his own nature.
Dealing with the eighteenth century he escapes not only from his age
but from himself.