In the
words of Miss Bronte, "he was the first social regenerator of the day, the
very master of that working corps who would restore to rectitude the
warped system of things." But this was his chief and glorious strength: in
the truest sense, he was a satirist and a humorist, but not a novelist; he
could not create character. His dramatic persons do not speak for
themselves; he tells us what they are and do. His mission seems to have
been to arraign and demolish evil rather than to applaud good, and thus he
enlists our sinless anger as crusaders rather than our sympathy as
philanthropists. In Dickens we are sometimes disposed to skip a little, in
our ardor, to follow the plot and find the denouement. In Thackeray we
read every word, for it is the philosophy we want; the plot and personages
are secondary, as indeed he considered them; for he often tells us, in the
time of greatest depression of his hero, that it will all come out right
at the end,--that Philip will marry Charlotte, and have a good income,
while the poor soul is wrestling with the _res augusta domi_.
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