Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/122

 He pursued it with the most searching subtlety ever devoted to a definite aim in all his books. The villain of all his stories is the hypocrite.

I suppose a critic of the strict æsthetic camp would say that Thackeray loved truth because he was an artist. Mr. Brownell, for whom there is neither beauty nor goodness without truth, appears to say that he was an artist because he loved truth and had a fresh vision of it; and that seems to my own sense less like standing the facts on their heads. Keeping the facts right side up does not hinder Mr. Brownell from perceiving the mere æsthetic usefulness of truth as "artistic material":

If one bears in mind Mr. Brownell's almost unqualified admiration for Thackeray's truth of substance and for his effortless ease and simplicity of style, and if one also recalls the other features of his ideal man of letters, it will be evident that his