In that village there was a social equality which, if not absolute, was as nearly so as can ever be in a competitive civilization; and I could have suffered no slight in the general esteem for giving up a profession and going back to a trade; if I was despised at all it was because I had thrown away the chance of material advancement; I dare say some people thought I was a fool to do that.  No one, indeed, could have imagined the rapture it was to do it, or what a load rolled from my shoulders when I dropped the law from them.  Perhaps Sinbad or Christian could have conceived of my ecstatic relief; yet so far as the popular vision reached I was not returning to literature, but to the printing business, and I myself felt the difference.  My reading had given me criterions different from those of the simple life of our village, and I did not flatter myself that my calling would have been thought one of great social dignity in the world where I hoped some day to make my living.  My convictions were all democratic, but at heart I am afraid I was a snob, and was unworthy of the honest work which I ought to have felt it an honor to do; this, whatever we falsely pretend to the contrary, is the frame of every one who aspires beyond the work of his hands.  I do not know how it had become mine, except through my reading, and I think it was through the devotion I then had for a certain author that I came to a knowledge not of good and evil so much as of common and superfine.

XX.  THACKERAY

It was of the organ-builder that I had Thackeray’s books first.  He knew their literary quality, and their rank in the literary, world; but I believe he was surprised at the passion I instantly conceived for them.  He could not understand it; he deplored it almost as a moral defect in me; though he honored it as a proof of my critical taste.  In a certain measure he was right.

What flatters the worldly pride in a young man is what fascinates him with Thackeray.  With his air of looking down on the highest, and confidentially inviting you to be of his company in the seat of the scorner he is irresistible; his very confession that he is a snob, too, is balm and solace to the reader who secretly admires the splendors he affects to despise.  His sentimentality is also dear to the heart of youth, and the boy who is dazzled by his satire is melted by his easy pathos.  Then, if the boy has read a good many other books, he is taken with that abundance of literary turn and allusion in Thackeray; there is hardly a sentence but reminds him that he is in the society of a great literary swell, who has read everything, and can mock or burlesque life right and left from the literature always at his command.  At the same time he feels his mastery, and is abjectly grateful to him in his own simple love of the good for his patronage of the unassuming virtues.  It is so pleasing to one’s ’vanity, and so safe, to be of the master’s side when he assails those vices and foibles which are inherent in the system of things, and which one can contemn with vast applause so long as one does not attempt to undo the conditions they spring from.