Another modern criticism of Thackeray is that he is always interrupting his story with reflections. This fault, if it is a fault, is at its worst in “The Newcomes,” from which a whole volume of essays might be gathered. The art of fiction is a progressive art and we have learned a great deal from the objective method of masters like Turgenev, Flaubert, and Maupassant. I am free to confess, that, while I still enjoy many of the passages in which the novelist appears as chorus and showman, I do find myself more impatient of them than I used to be. I find myself skipping a good deal. I wonder if this is also your experience. I am not sure, however, but there are signs of a reaction against the slender, episodic, short-story kind of fiction, and a return to the old-fashioned, biographical novel. Mr. Brownell discusses this point and says that “when Thackeray is reproached with ‘bad art’ for intruding upon his scene, the reproach is chiefly the recommendation of a different technique. And each man’s technique is his own.” The question, he acutely observes, is whether Thackeray’s subjectivity destroys illusion or deepens it. He thinks that the latter is true. I will not argue the point further than to say that, whether clumsy or not, Thackeray’s method is a thoroughly English method and has its roots in the history of English fiction. He is not alone in it. George Eliot, Hawthorne, and Trollope and many others practise it; and he learned it from his master, Fielding. Fifty years ago it was quite common to describe Thackeray as a cynic, a charge from which Shirley Brooks defended him in the well-known verses contributed to “Punch” after the great novelist’s death. Strange that such a mistake should ever have been made about one whose kindness is as manifest in his books as in his life: “a big, fierce, weeping man,” as Carlyle grotesquely describes him: a writer in whom we find to-day even an excess of sentiment and a persistent geniality which sometimes irritates. But the source of the misapprehension is not far to seek. His satiric and disenchanting eye saw, with merciless clairvoyance, the disfigurements of human nature, and dwelt upon them perhaps unduly. He saw How very weak the very wise, How very small the very great are.