No one can tell, either, where out of all this emerges that quality of writing called style. Manner of expression is not a separable shell in which the stuff is contained like a kernel. The manner is in the substance. Yet there is a charm of words felt for itself which seems to lie above and around the thing conveyed. In other books Thackeray loses his plot, and sometimes apparently forgets his characters, and yet he carries the reader on by virtue of saying things compellingly and invitingly. When, as in “Esmond,” the order of action is so satisfying and the people are so interesting to watch and be with, and in addition every page is a delight to the ear, then literary excellence is complete. [Illustration: THACKERAY] Here, united in one book, are the elements of fiction--plot, character, description and style. And from these elements, however blended, there results a total value, the measure of a book’s importance in relation to the other things in life. This value is essentially moral, not so much because literature is under peculiar obligations to preach and teach morality as because it is part of life and the fundamental things in life are moral in the large sense of the word. It is as impossible to think of a fiction which shall be neither moral nor immoral as to think of an act which shall be, in the modern meaningless word, unmoral. Even a very slight fiction, like a trivial act, weighs on one side or the other. All the best of our novelists have been fully conscious of their ethical obligations to their readers. Having thought deeply enough about life to write about it, they could not have failed to think deeply about their professional responsibility, their part in life. I am going to quote at length a passage from Anthony Trollope’s “Life of Thackeray” in the series of biographies known as _English Men of Letters_. The young reader can find no better book about the novel than this account of one great novelist by another. In spite of a current idea that shop-talk is not interesting, a thoughtful craftsman talking about his work is likely to be at his best. Moreover, Trollope’s judgments on the moral obligation of the novelist are especially worthy of confidence, for he is no heavy-handed preacher, no metaphysical critic, but a broad-minded humorist, an affectionate student of human nature, a cheerful workman who regarded his own books in a modest businesslike way.