Thackeray is known in English literature as an essayist as well as a novelist.  His English Humorists and The Four Georges are among the finest essays of the nineteenth century.  In the former especially, Thackeray shows not only a wide knowledge but an extraordinary understanding of his subject.  Apparently this nineteenth-century writer knows Addison, Fielding, Swift, Smollett, and other great writers of the past century almost as intimately as one knows his nearest friend; and he gives us the fine flavor of their humor in a way which no other writer, save perhaps Larnb, has ever rivaled.[240] The Four Georges is in a vein of delicate satire, and presents a rather unflattering picture of four of England’s rulers and of the courts in which they moved.  Both these works are remarkable for their exquisite style, their gentle humor, their keen literary criticisms, and for the intimate knowledge and sympathy which makes the’ people of a past age live once more in the written pages.

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS.  In treating of Thackeray’s view of life, as reflected in his novels, critics vary greatly, and the following summary must be taken not as a positive judgment but only as an attempt to express the general impression of his works on an uncritical reader.  He is first of a realist, who paints life as he sees it.  As he says himself, “I have no brains above my eyes; I describe what I see.”.  His pictures of certain types, notably the weak and vicious elements of society, are accurate and true to life, but they seem to play too large a part in his books, and have perhaps too greatly influenced his general judgment of humanity.  An excessive sensibility, or the capacity for fine feelings and emotions, is a marked characteristic of Thackeray, as it is of Dickens and Carlyle.  He is easily offended, as they are, by the shams of society; but he cannot find an outlet, as Dickens does, in laughter and tears, and he is too gentle to follow Carlyle in violent denunciations and prophecies.  He turns to satire,—­influenced, doubtless, by eighteenth-century literature which he knew so well, and in which satire played too large a part.[241] His satire is never personal, like Pope’s, or brutal, like Swift’s, and is tempered by kindness and humor; but it is used too freely, and generally lays too much emphasis on faults and foibles to be considered a true picture of any large class of English society.

Besides being a realist and satirist, Thackeray is essentially a moralist, like Addison, aiming definitely in all his work at producing a moral impression.  So much does he revere goodness, and so determined is he that his Pendennis or his Becky Sharp shall be judged at their true value, that he is not content, like Shakespeare, to be simply an artist, to tell an artistic tale and let it speak its own message; he must explain and emphasize the moral significance of his work.  There is no need to consult our own conscience over the actions of Thackeray’s characters; the beauty of virtue and the ugliness of vice are evident on every page.