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Title: A Consideration of Thackeray
Author: Saintsbury, George Edward Bateman (1845-1933)
Date of first publication: 1931
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   New York: Russell & Russell, 1968
Date first posted: 7 March 2009
Date last updated: 7 March 2009
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #274

This ebook was produced by:
Jon Ingram, Don Perry, Christine P. Travers (HTML version)
& the Online Distributed Proofreaders Europe
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A CONSIDERATION OF
THACKERAY

_By_ GEORGE SAINTSBURY




_PREFACE_


_The text following is composed of the Introductions to the Oxford
Edition of Thackeray (1908) with a very few corrections which Time and
Chance have made desirable._

_As for the Introductions, biographical matter--except in so far as it
is mainly connected with individual works--will be mainly found in the
first; general critical matter in the first and last. But an attempt
was made to connect all--biographically and critically--chapter-fashion,
so that the series should not be merely a string of separate essays but
a continuous story. Thackeray's many-sidedness is so great that there
can hardly be too many such studies of him. In the present case the
study had at least one justification--it was of an author who had been,
for nearly forty years, more frequently in the hands, and more
constantly in the head and heart of the student, than any other in
prose and almost than any other in rhyme. I did not neglect those who
have written on him already--I owe them much, and I hope that I have
not drawn on them too unceremoniously; but I endeavoured to draw
chiefly on Thackeray himself._

G. S.




_CONTENTS_


     I. _BIOGRAPHY--THE YELLOWPLUSH PAPERS, &c._           1

    II. _THE PARIS SKETCH BOOK, AND ART CRITICISMS_       36

   III. _CATHERINE--A SHABBY GENTEEL STORY--THE
          SECOND FUNERAL OF NAPOLEON--MISCELLANIES,
          1840-1_                                         50

    IV. _THE HOGGARTY DIAMOND, &c._                       66

     V. _THE IRISH SKETCH BOOK--CONTRIBUTIONS TO
          THE 'FOREIGN QUARTERLY REVIEW', 1841-4_         80

    VI. _BARRY LYNDON, AND MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS,
          1843-7_                                         93

   VII. _BALLADS, AND CONTRIBUTIONS TO 'PUNCH'_          107

  VIII. _MISCELLANEOUS CONTRIBUTIONS TO 'PUNCH'_         122

    IX. _A LEGEND OF THE RHINE--CORNHILL TO CAIRO--THE
          BOOK OF SNOBS_                                 135

     X. _CHRISTMAS BOOKS--REBECCA AND ROWENA--LATER
          MINOR PAPERS_                                  150

    XI. _VANITY FAIR_                                    164

   XII. _PENDENNIS_                                      177

  XIII. _ESMOND--THE ENGLISH HUMOURISTS--THE
          FOUR GEORGES_                                  192

   XIV. _THE NEWCOMES_                                   208

    XV. _THE VIRGINIANS_                                 221

   XVI. _PHILIP_                                         236

  XVII. _THE WOLVES AND THE LAMB--LOVEL THE
          WIDOWER--DENIS DUVAL--THE ROUNDABOUT PAPERS_   250




A CONSIDERATION OF
THACKERAY




I

BIOGRAPHY--THE YELLOWPLUSH
PAPERS, &c.


William Makepeace Thackeray was born on July 18, 1811. His birthplace
was Calcutta, where his father, Richmond Thackeray (of a Yorkshire
family which had been long connected with Cambridge and India), was a
civil servant in high position. His mother, Anne Becher, was a beauty
and quite young, while his father was but just thirty, when Thackeray
was born. He died when the boy was five years old, and next year (in
1817) William Makepeace, like all Indian children of those days, was
sent home to be taken care of, in his case by an aunt. His mother did
not accompany him; and in the following year married, as her second
husband, Major Carmichael-Smyth. But Thackeray was no deserted orphan,
and Mrs. Smyth was no unnatural mother. It is an accepted fact that
Helen Pendennis owes not a little to her; and though the Major proved
in some respects a 'sair step-father' to the boy, it was only because
he shared the weaknesses as well as the virtues of Colonel Newcome.
There were no children of the second marriage, and Thackeray, his
mother (who actually survived him), and his step-father (who lived
nearly as long as he did), appear to have been always on the most
affectionate terms.

When the Smyths returned from India in 1821, the Major becoming
superintendent at Addiscombe, Thackeray went to divers preparatory
schools, which he does not seem to have enjoyed. In 1822 he was
transferred to Charterhouse, where he stayed till 1828, had his nose
broken by George Stovin Venables (afterwards a famous Parliamentary
barrister and _Saturday_ reviewer), made divers friends, began the
practice of comic drawing and novel-writing, but seems to have been
made more unhappy than--from _Pendennis_--one would imagine, by the
pedagogic objurgations of Dr. Russell, the head master. His holidays
were latterly spent at the original of 'Fairoaks'--that is to say,
Larkbeare, a Devonshire house a mile or so from Ottery (Clavering) St.
Mary, and within easy reach of Sidmouth (Baymouth) and Exeter
(Chatteris). He was entered at Trinity College, Cambridge, and went up
in February, 1829; but his stay was short, for he took no degree, and
went down at the end of Easter term, 1830, ostensibly on the excuse
that 'the studies would be of no use to him'. He seems to have spent
more money than he should, which is not unexampled; but he contributed
to the _Snob_ (the most certain and notable contribution being his
famous mock prize poem on _Timbuctoo_) and its successor, the
_Gownsman,_ and he spoke a little at the Union. Also he made, directly
or indirectly (for some of those to be named he did not know _at_
Cambridge), a memorable circle of friends--Brookfield, FitzGerald,
J. H. Kemble, Kinglake, Milnes, and, above all, Tennyson.

He was hardly older when he left Cambridge than many men are now when
they go up, and he was in the perilous position of possessing a
considerable fortune--it is said some 20,000. In less than four
years--by February, 1834--this was all or nearly all gone, nobody
seems to know exactly how, though there are partial indications in his
works. It is known on indisputable authority that the Deuceace-Dawkins
episode in the _Yellowplush Papers_ is from life, and that he himself
was Dawkins; but the sum was 1,500, not 5,000. He is said, on less
certain but fair testimony, to have 'given' or 'paid' Maginn 500 for
some probably illusory literary service that 'Captain Shandon' was to
render. He certainly, like Pendennis, ran into debt at Cambridge; but
as even Pen in three whole years attained to but 700, his creator can
hardly have piled up more in half the time. He admits that he lost
200 (which seems very little) on the first year of the _National
Standard_, a paper which he bought in 1833, and as it went on rather
longer he probably lost more; but if any one will add these various
sums together, he will find that they represent but a very small
fraction of 20,000. Indeed, a variant of tradition puts his
inheritance at '500 a year', which will at very low interest
represent a much smaller original sum. Still, the 'Bundelcund Bank'
seems to have reproduced another unfortunate reality. Major
Carmichael-Smyth appears to have resembled his great antitype in
nothing more than in his tendency to speculate with his own and other
people's money; and it would probably be found that the firm of
'Brough and Hoff', the 'Diddlesex Junction', and other sardonic
comicalities had, like Rummun Loll's bubble, their representatives on
the actual earth. At any rate, by the date mentioned, his money was to
be earned.

He had, as it happened, already hit on the right way to earn it,
though he was to be long before he was well set in that way, and was
to make serious mistakes in it. The way was that of 'Our Own
Correspondent', as Warrington puts it to Pendennis--in other words,
literature and journalism--with at first a strong bent towards actual
'Foreign Correspondence'. He always had a great liking for foreign
travel, and had spent part of his only Cambridge long vacation in
Paris. After he had left the University for good, he set out for
Germany, in the latter part of 1830, and made a long residence at
Weimar, where he saw Goethe, and dabbled a good deal in art and
letters. The visit was fertile in after-results. For the moment,
however, he fell in with his family's wish--that he should read for
the Bar--returned to England in 1831, and took chambers in the Temple
by the autumn of that year.

But Thackeray could never have been a lawyer, and in a year or two
(the dates do not seem to be quite certain) he gave up the attempt. He
was an associate of Charles Buller, assisting him in his Liskeard
election during the Reform campaign, and he made the acquaintance,
'good, but expensive,' of Maginn. In pursuance of the generally fatal
idea that a journalist should be his own 'proprietor', he bought from
F. W. N. ('Alphabet') Bayley, a typical pressman of his time, the
above-mentioned _National Standard_ in January, 1833, and went to Paris
as its correspondent. When it failed, he made up his mind to continue
in Paris and study art. He had drawn--as Mr. Pendennis spoke
French--'from his youth up', and somewhat in the same way, though much
better. He did not cut himself off from his family; for though his
mother and step-father, having left Devonshire, were now living in
London, his aunt on his father's, and his grandmother on the mother's
side were living in Paris.

Nor while studying art did he give up literature. As early as the
beginning of 1835 he appears in Maclise's famous group of convivial
_Fraserians_, though no contribution of his to the magazine before
that time, save a version of Branger, is positively known.[1] Next
year he made his well-known and authentic application to Dickens to
illustrate _Pickwick_, and brought out the curious collections of
satire-sketches on the ballet called _Flore et Zphyr_. For a moment
there appeared to be a chance of his being what his French friends
would have called _cas_. His enterprising step-father joined some
more distinguished Radicals in buying (on the encouragement of the
lowering of the newspaper stamp duty) a paper called the _Public
Ledger_, rechristened it (with some humour) the _Constitutional_, and
got Thackeray appointed Paris correspondent at eight guineas a week.
On this salary--in round numbers 400 a year--he married a young
Irish lady, Miss Isabella Shawe, on August 20, 1836. But the
_Constitutional_ had no more luck than the _National Standard_, and
failed after little more than six months' run. The loss was heavy--in
Thackeray's own case his whole fixed income, in Major Smyth's probably
capital as well. The Major went to Paris, changing places with
Thackeray, who came to London, established himself in Great Coram
Street (a street long since gone to seed, but then a sufficiently well
reputed abode for professional men), and wrote hard and widely. A
casual piece of evidence in Fitzpatrick's _Life of Lever_ shows that
even later, and by those who already appreciated his powers, he was
thought to 'hack' them too much; but he had as yet no backbone of
regular employment on daily or weekly papers, such as is invaluable
and almost essential to the journalist. He did some work for _The
Times_, including a 'young' but good review of Carlyle's _French
Revolution_, which the author received as authors too often do. And he
now became--whatever his relations with it had been earlier--a pillar
of _Fraser_, contributing reviews of art and letters very largely, as
well as some far more important things--ranging from _The Yellowplush
Correspondence_ of 1838 through _Catherine_ (next year and 1840), _The
Hoggarty Diamond_ (1841), and the 'Fitzboodle' varieties (1842-3), up
to _Barry Lyndon_ (1844).

    [Footnote 1: As for 'Elizabeth Brownrigge', _v. inf_.]

But hard, precarious, and not too well paid work was not his only
misfortune. His wife and he appear to have been perfectly happy
together as far as they were allowed to be, and a reference to her in
_The Ballad of Bouillabaisse_ is one of the most pathetic things that
we have from one of the greatest English masters of pathos. They had
three daughters, the first and third of whom lived, while the second
died an infant. It was subsequently to the birth of the third (May,
1840), and it may be supposed in consequence of it, that Mrs.
Thackeray developed symptoms of mental disorder, which, after some
vicissitudes, settled into complete though quiet derangement about two
years later. She lived for half a century, surviving her husband
nearly thirty years: but she never recovered, and his home was, for
the time, completely broken up.

The old superstition, however, about luck in love and other things did
not wholly discredit itself. _Punch_ was started in 1841, and a year
later Thackeray became, first an occasional, and then a regular
contributor, both with letterpress and sketches. These contributions
include some of his worst and some of his best work--even _The Book of
Snobs_ containing both. The papers, however, of which this is composed
were not begun till 1846, nor published together till the end of the
next year.

But meanwhile Thackeray had already put on record collections of his
earlier work. In 1840, besides a separate reprint of the _Westminster
Review_ essay on Cruikshank, appeared _The Paris Sketch Book_; in 1841
_Comic Tales and Sketches_ (representing especially the trio Titmarsh,
Gahagan, Yellowplush), and _The Second Funeral of Napoleon_. A journey
to Ireland, which he made in 1842, was recorded in _The Irish Sketch
Book_ next year; while a longer one to the East in 1844 received a
similar chronicle in _From Cornhill to Cairo_ two years later.

For three years (1843-6) he had no fixed abode--at least, house. But
in the last-mentioned year he once more established himself, with his
daughters, and at first with his own grandmother, at 13 Young Street,
Kensington, a house with a double 'waistcoat', or bow-windowed front,
which became known as his to all dwellers round Kensington Gardens in
the early fifties. Here he finished _Vanity Fair_, which had been
begun, it is said, five years earlier, but dropped; and here, at last,
luck came to him. As far as mere immediate popularity went, it was not
brought so much by the great novel itself as by the _Snob Papers_,
which were running contemporaneously, and by the delightful Christmas
book of _Mrs. Perkins's Ball_--the first of a series with which he met
the current taste for these things. Indeed, it is said that, by an
irony of quite his own kind, it was the _Ball_ which really made his
position. He took care, however, to maintain it, and but two or three
months passed between the last monthly number of _Vanity Fair_ in the
summer, and the first of _Pendennis_ in the autumn, of 1848. He had
always been socially given, and was a man of many friends: so that he
was neither specially bored nor 'turned in the head' by lionizing. In
this same year he, was called to the Bar, and may have looked for some
appointment. He expresses himself in more than one place (though with
something of his usual inconsistency) on the contrast between English
habits and those of other countries in this matter. But no 'place with
a pinsion' came to him, and it may be permitted to his very greatest
admirers to think that this was really best, both for him and for the
'place' (unless it had been a complete sinecure), as well as for
literature. For he was not very methodical; he was, though a hard, an
irregular and intermittent worker; he was somewhat crotchety, and he
was very nervous and sensitive. As a police magistrate especially--the
position usually mentioned--he would probably have worried himself
into a fever in a fortnight, and half his decisions would have had to
be, in some way or other, reversed.

Despite his gigantic frame, he was never a strong man, and
_Pendennis_, as its dedication and, in fact, its text records, was
interrupted by a very serious illness late in 1849. Indeed, this has
been thought to have been the beginning of the end, though others date
the final inroad on his constitution from his attack of Roman fever in
the winter of 1853-4. Physical weakness, however ('all things are
double, one against another'), was tempered by pecuniary prosperity,
and he was able, and probably not sorry, to give up regular
contribution to _Punch_.

Among the profitable fashions for literary men of the first half of
the century was lecturing. It had been already justified, by more than
profit, in divers cases, from Coleridge to Carlyle; but it found an
additional justification in Thackeray's _English Humourists_, a course
of six, which was first delivered in the early summer of 1851. Still,
for 'details' (as Anthony Trollope, with humour worthy of his editor,
has styled the pecuniary part of the matter), America has always been
the Eldorado of the lecturer: and next year he sought it with this
cargo, having in the interval written and published _Esmond_--to some,
perhaps, his very greatest book. He spent the winter and early spring
of 1852-3 in the States--Southern as well as Northern--with excellent
results both in 'details', and in friendships, and in new atmosphere
and materials. Later in 1853, he went to Switzerland, conceived _The
Newcomes_ 'in a wood near Berne', published it in numbers from the
autumn of the year to the summer of 1855, and made 4,000 by it. The
Christmas visit of 1853 to Rome had resulted (compensation again!),
besides the fit of fever above referred to, in _The Rose and the
Ring_--another 'furthest' of his in one direction. It was published in
1854, during which year he moved from Young Street to Onslow Square.
After finishing _The Newcomes_ he once more went to the United States,
taking with him, as lectures, _The Four Georges_, which were
subsequently given at home, and therefore not published till they
appeared in the _Cornhill_ during 1860, and as a volume next year.
When he returned to England in the spring of 1856 'there was no
[longer any] mistake about [this] fellow', to adopt one of his phrases
which sticks fastest in the minds of his lovers.

But a master of irony always exhibits it in his own person, and it was
_after_ Thackeray had depicted Colonel Newcome's Parliamentary
adventure that he actually imitated it. The reminiscences of personal
experience in his work are unmistakable, though they may be, and have
been, exaggerated. Here was an anticipation of it. He stood for
Oxford, with a very Colonel Newcome-like programme, in the summer of
1857, and was but narrowly beaten by Mr. Cardwell. Then he settled to
_The Virginians_, and covered the usual two years with its appearances
in numbers. When it was half-way through there occurred an incident
which has had rather disproportionate attention in accounts of
Thackeray's life, but which, for that very reason, cannot be entirely
neglected. The late Mr. Edmund Yates, in his character of pioneer (or
rather reviver) of personal journalism, wrote in 1858 an account of
Thackeray which its subject keenly resented. Both were members of the
Garrick Club, before which Thackeray brought the matter, with the
result that Yates had to leave it. Unfortunately, Dickens, who had
previously been on friendly terms with Thackeray, and had presided at
a dinner given to him when he left for America the second time, was a
friend of Yates's, acted as a sort of second to him, and so brought
about an estrangement which only ceased just before Thackeray's death.
He had better not have meddled with the matter, for Yates was quite
inexcusable. But Thackeray's own conduct was not wholly wise. It is
fair to say that Yates, in his _Autobiography_, made some amends,
especially by telling a delightful and characteristic story of
Thackeray. They were, it seems, before the rupture, walking together,
and saw two tubs of oysters marked one shilling and fifteen-pence
respectively. '_How_ they must hate the others!'[2] said Thackeray,
pointing clearly to the twelvepenny group.

    [Footnote 2: Yates says 'each other', which is inept.]

His days, after the conclusion of _The Virginians_, towards the end of
1859, were few; but they were far from evil. At the beginning of the
next year the _Cornhill Magazine_ appeared under his editorship, and
at once attained enormous success. He only edited it for rather more
than two years, heartily disliking that employment or vocation; but he
contributed steadily till the day of his death. The novels thus
contributed--at least, the first two, _Lovel the Widower_ and
_Philip_, for the third and unfinished _Denis Duval_ promised
greatly--did not _raise_ his reputation, though no one else could have
written them; but the _Roundabout Papers_ were once more, and for the
last time, the consummate and unique work of a unique and consummate
genius. Once more he changed abodes, building himself a Queen Anne
house at the bottom of Kensington Palace Gardens. It was finished
early in 1862: but Death did not 'come in at the window', as the grim
proverb has it, till the end of the next year. On the morning of
Christmas Eve, 1863, he was found dead from effusion on the brain. He
was buried, not in Westminster Abbey, but in Kensal Green Cemetery. A
'monumental bust', however, represents him among his peers.

Any remarks that may seem desirable about the higher and more general
traits of his character, personal and literary, will probably be
better kept for the last chapter; but a few of the lighter may be
given here. Although Thackeray seems to have had no fancy for any kind
of sport, he was particularly fond of riding, and even when he was
pretty badly off succeeded in proving to his own satisfaction, and
(inasmuch as the proofs which exist in his letters are characteristic
and diverting) to ours, that it was the truest economy to keep a
horse. He was also one of those men--not by any means always, and
certainly not in his case, examples of selfish extravagance--who are
miserable without a manservant: and here also his epistolary
self-justifications are extremely amusing. This was one of his numerous
links with the eighteenth century, when no gentleman--even of the most
modest means or in the most disastrous circumstances--seems to have
been able to dispense with a 'follower'. He liked to live well, and
here, again, and in greater measure, the liking is justified in its
literary expression. His 'gormandizing' papers are among the very best
of his second-best things; and, indeed, he and Walker of _The
Original_ (who was, perhaps, to some extent his teacher) may be said
to have revolutionized the theory of English dinners--not by any
means in the silly direction of merely Frenchifying them. His opinions
on wine were singularly just and accomplished. There are, it is to be
hoped, more persons than one who never drank a glass of '58 claret
('while it was day') without remembering how he asked, 'Boirai-je de
ton vin,  comte?' feeling perhaps, in himself that the answer must
be negative. Probably he had enough, and more than enough, of
card-playing in his Dawkins period--indeed, there is almost an
expression to that effect in _Mr. Brown's Letters_; at any rate, he
certainly did not, like at least one younger novelist, lay down the pen
only to take up the pack. Nor does he seem to have been always an
excessive, though he certainly was a pretty constant, smoker.

But to what, in the heated imaginations of domestic persons during his
time, were the horrid head-quarters of smoking and card-playing--to
clubs--he was as strongly attached as (_mutatis mutandis_ in the
acceptation of the word) his beloved eighteenth-century men were. That
this was partly due to the heavy fate which for some five years
embittered his home or made him practically homeless is more than
probable; but it cannot well have been wholly so. He does not seem,
like some men, to have hated being alone--quite the contrary; but his
fits of solitude alternated with fits of gregariousness.[3] His
fondness for travel has been noticed, and it was probably due to much
the same combination of nature and circumstances as his liking for
society. For a good many years Brighton seems to have been a kind of
occasional home to him, and he was never long happy out of Paris.

    [Footnote 3: It was, however, gregariousness of a peculiar
    kind; he seems to have liked to be 'solitary in company' at
    his clubs. And though a great diner-out, and a most frequent
    and hospitable entertainer, he was never a great talker in
    public.]

All these variations of scene and taste and circumstance reflect
themselves in his work after a fashion to which we shall have to draw
very frequent attention, for in it consists one of the main elements
of his idiosyncrasy. Even in the earliest work Cambridge, London,
Paris, travel, ill-luck (self-invited and other), press-work, and many
other things have left their mark. The Cambridge colour may be mainly,
but not wholly, left till we reach _Pendennis_, and the Paris touches
postponed likewise, though merely to the next chapter. But much of
this earliest work shows, if not exactly by the actual dates of
composition, the _youngest_ Thackeray of literature--a prematurely
liberated undergraduate, or a novice-Templar, haunting the rooms of
his Cambridge friends in town as he had, and more than he had, in
Cambridge itself, exploring London and its suburbs. For some time,
indeed, he seems to have actually continued that kind of undergraduate
life in which 'walking and talking' are the main ingredients, and very
healthy ones too, even though the talking (not undiversified by
'Haunts' and 'Back-kitchens' and other relaxations of Mr. Pendennis
and Mr. Newcome and Mr. Firmin) may interfere considerably with
obedience to the doctrine of the ancients as to 'early to bed and
early to rise'.

In those days, when even the nearer suburbs of London retained
something of the village about them, and the further ones much--when,
too, there were no soul-destroying motors or cycles or even
railways--country walks were quite common with Londoners. And the very
parks themselves almost gave room for them. When we read of Thackeray
and Paget spending half the day in Kensington Gardens and 'lunching at
the Black Lion', we must think of a very different state of things from
that of to-day. Even twenty years later--in the early fifties, from
which the present writer's acquaintance with the Gardens dates--they
were as different as possible from the trim, bepathed, bedizened, and
bedevilled Gardens as I last saw them. Except the Broad Walk and those
by the railings, there were very few paths at all. Along the north
side, by the Bayswater Road, and opposite the Black Lion itself, were
the magnificent Scotch firs that Matthew Arnold has celebrated. Along
the west, looking to Palace Gardens, was a great open gravel-pit
surrounded with a 'yew-wood black as night', which must have given
many a boy-reader of Tennyson the scene for _Oriana_. To the east, by
the Serpentine, was a curious little ranger's cottage or farmstead in
miniature, surrounded by piles of cut wood, in which you could very
well hide a heroine or engineer a murder if necessary. The rangers and
park-keepers never interfered with mild picnics, but I doubt whether
they would have permitted a tramp of the villainous modern kind to
enter the gates. Indeed, except in and close to the Broad and Flower
Walks, the place was very little frequented, and you might lounge and
dream and wander for hours without being unpleasantly reminded of your
fellow-creatures. And if this was so in 1851--the Exhibition of that
year, though not actually in the Gardens, did something towards their
vulgarization, but not much at first--how much more must it have been
so in 1831? It may have been in these walks, which were favourite
things with all the set (compare Brookfield's with Lord Lyttelton),
that Thackeray first felt the attractions of Kensington, that singular
place which, like Oxford and the West Country, contrives somehow or
other to make those who were once free of it its slaves in a manner
for ever. But this, if not quite an irrelevance, is something of a
digression.

One characteristic of this 'Cambridge-in-London' atmosphere is very
prominent in all his earlier work, and, in fact, continues, though
much mellowed and matured, to the end. There have, naturally enough,
been no greater nurseries of the wilder and more extravagant humour
which is specially English than the two great Universities, but it has
'migrated' from the one to the other rather curiously. In the
generation before Thackeray--the generation of Wilson, De Quincey,
Hook, Barham--Oxford had had nearly the monopoly of it; and without
hanging up unnecessary gloves it may be suggested that 'the native has
returned' since. But whether it was owing to the beginning of the
Tractarian absorption in another direction or not, this most excellent
difference, one may regretfully but frankly admit, appears to have
been more observable at 'the other shop' about 1830. Brookfield was
saturated with it; it took quaint, restrained, elfish form in
FitzGerald; even those who only knew Mr. Venables in his later days,
if they had the gift, could perceive plenty of it behind and beneath
his apparently rather saturnine dignity. The most esoteric and (again
to those who have the gift) delectable, though probably to others most
infuriating, exposition of it, is that _Library of Useless Knowledge_
by Athanasius Gasker (otherwise E. W. Clarke) of which FitzGerald
observed to the late Sir Frederick Pollock: 'Perhaps only you and I
_and Thackeray_ understand it.' Let us hope that comprehension is not
quite so limited now. But it is fair to warn aspirants that there are
probably still many more people in the world against this Athanasius
than for him. Out of all this atmosphere--or rather, this fermenting
mixture--of irony and punning, of parody and _charge_, came the things
that are dealt with in this chapter--things a little unformed and
unlicked at first--indeed, at the actual first more or less
schoolboyish--but with infinite possibilities of strength and 'race'
in them, and certain with time and good-luck to develop into
marvellous accomplishment.

This characteristic lent itself well enough--perhaps even too well--to
the fancy for parody and imitation which most clever boys have, and
which Thackeray had already displayed at school. It also lent
itself--again with a dangerous complaisance--to some literary
peculiarities, though luckily not to all, of the forms and styles of the
day. At the period when he started--the years about 1830--the two kings
which were to dominate nineteenth-century literature, the newspaper and
the novel, had really ascended the throne of their Brentford. But they
were not acknowledged monarchs, and neither of them, _at the moment_,
was in a particularly healthy condition. Of the two great authors of
the new romance and novel, Miss Austen was dead, and though Scott was
alive, the wand was dropping from his hands, and the kind was falling
into those of second-rate practitioners. The higher newspaper of the
review and magazine order had, with the _Edinburgh_, the _Quarterly,
Blackwood_, and the _London_, not merely opened, as it were, a new
profession to men of letters, but had served as usher, or
_accoucheur_, to a great deal of work, sometimes of the highest merit.
It had, however, as a rule, two great defects, sometimes separate,
sometimes combined. On the one hand, there was the love of
pseudo-Rhadamanthine, 'high sniffing' arrogance, which laid down the
law, _ex cathedra_, on all subjects: on the other, that of extravagant
horseplay and high jinks. While, unluckily, the practitioners of both
styles, but especially of the second, abused personalities
disgracefully, Thackeray had too much humour--and that humour was too
early developed--for him to be much tempted in the direction of the
pedagogic-oracular; but this very gift inclined him to the other
pitfall, and though he never (or very seldom) becomes absolutely
engulfed in this, he is, in his early work, constantly slipping in and
struggling out again. In particular there was (derived from the famous
eighteenth-century periodicals to some extent, but exaggerated, and in
fact caricatured by men like Wilson and Maginn) a fancy for
constructing a kind of half-imaginary, half real framework of
editorial and contributorial personality, the most famous example of
which is the machinery of the _Noctes Ambrosianae_, while the last
remaining (one greatly modulated and attenuated) is the _eidolon_ of
'Mr. Punch'. In the early days of the latter, when Thackeray
contributed, there was much more of it there; and in the still
earlier, when he was already a regular 'Fraserian', there was very
much more in 'Regina'. This _prosopopoeia_ has become rather tiresome
now; while the personalities on Lardner,[4] Bulwer, and others, though
sometimes extremely amusing, are by no means always so, and are often
in more than doubtful taste. And everywhere both the witticisms and
the criticisms are singularly _uncertain_. The most excellent jests
serve as plums in more or less dubious pudding; the soundest
observations on art and literature alternate with opinions which, from
prejudice or ignorance as to their subjects, are mere rubbish.

    [Footnote 4: These are repeated in the curious _History of
    Dionysius Diddler_, not published till after Thackeray's
    death, but apparently designed in 1838-9, and therefore
    given here. I do not remember any explanation of his dislike
    to Lardner.]

In the other department of tale-telling there is very much less mere
imitation, save in the form of direct parody, and the vital signs are
more unmistakable. But here also there is great immaturity. Even in
such an extremely early thing as _The Devil's Wager_ there is no small
faculty of tale-_telling_; but, on the other hand, even much later,
there is less of the faculty of making the story interesting. For a
long time, too, the author, partly led by his natural ironical bent,
and partly, perhaps, exacerbated by his pecuniary ill-luck, his
domestic misfortune, and the inadequate success of his work, refused
too much to 'come out of the shadow', and brought down upon himself
the rather foolish accusation of 'cynicism' (whereon much more later)
in dwelling, to all appearance by predilection, on folly, knavery, and
positive crime. Yet in this department, as in the other, he showed,
almost from the first and in ever-increasing measure and with less
alloy, qualities of the very rarest kind. The most unmistakable--or
what ought to have been the most unmistakable--of these was the
omnipresence of a peculiar humour, or wit and humour mingled, unlike
that of any previous writer as a whole, but bearing most resemblance
to Fielding and Shakespeare--a humour casual, unpremeditated, or at
least never laboriously led up to, _parenthetic_ as one may almost
call it--rising, like bubbles in sparkling wine, independently of the
substance of the narrative or discussion, but giving life to it. The
second, more slowly developed, and perhaps hidden from careless or
obtuse observers by the caricature and the dialect of such things as
_The Yellowplush Papers_, was an especially remarkable command of
character, sometimes revealed by only a very few strokes, but those of
such a vivifying character as we must once more go to Shakespeare to
equal. The third was a quite marvellous style. It is only recently
that it has become accepted or acceptable to praise Thackeray's style,
though there are some persons who have never made any mistake about
it, while there are still obstinate dissenters. Indeed, it was very
usual to regard him as a careless and rather slovenly writer who
stumbled over 'and which' and similar stones of offence. This he
certainly sometimes did, and was not impeccable from other points of
view of the composition-books; but it matters little or nothing. His
style proper--visible quite early, indeed almost at once--may again
owe something to Fielding, but it is in its essence almost wholly
original. It is more like the result of thinking aloud than the style
of any other writer. But it is also more than this. The writer thinks
for himself _and_ for 'the other fellow'--for an imaginary
interlocutor who makes objections, spies the ludicrous side of what
has been said, and so forth. Thus, the body of his critical and
miscellaneous writings, and the framework of his novels, consists of a
sort of fused dialogue or conversation, lighted up constantly by the
humour and wit above mentioned, and vignetting the character-sketches,
the descriptions, and the rest. This sort of thing could not be
perfected at once, but it may be discovered in pieces which he wrote
when he was not more than six-and-twenty, such as _The Professor_.

In the very earliest preserved examples it would be unreasonable to
expect it: and, with the exception of _Timbuctoo_, the pieces
reprinted from the _Snob_, the _Gownsman_, and even from the _National
Standard_ (the best things in which he saved for _The Paris Sketch
Book_), are only curiosities. _Timbuctoo_ itself is rather more,
because of the singular felicity of its burlesque of the manner of the
eighteenth-century heroic couplet. But the 'Ramsbottom' compositions,
with their malapropisms resuggested from Hook, are not very
exhilarating. Even three years later, the _National Standard_
contributions are not much further advanced. The drawings have already
a good deal of the curious irregular Thackerayan charm, and the verses
much of his future ease, though little either of the humour or the
pathos that were to accompany it. But the Thackeray of only a very few
years later would certainly not have failed to see--_did_, we may feel
certain, not fail to see--that in the reference to the paper's former
owner--'We have got free of the Old Bailey and changed the
Governor'--the goodness of the jest is scarcely sufficient to cover the
badness of the manners. Still, there is interest in the Montgomery
review. That _infelix Robertus_ seems to have been an expert, if not in
producing good work himself, yet in extracting it from others to his
own despite. It is still 'young'; but, as in another case, to which we
shall come later, any editor who knew his business, had it been sent
to him, would have jumped at it. In particular, the trick of reversing
the last quotation, with its practical justification, is quite
Thackerayan, and almost a stroke of genius. So, too, the 'Foreign
Correspondence', being couched in burlesque and hardly at all
political, is positively better than that some years later in the
_Constitutional (v. infra)_. Nor perhaps should the so-called
'Originals' (really adaptations from Hoffmann, Uhland, and others)
wholly escape mention, though they are hardly worth giving here,
because they are valuable early proofs of that Heinesque combination,
of romance with satire of romance, in which Thackeray is Heine's only
rival, and in consequence of which the strangest mistakes have been
made about both, by critics as well as by the public. While, lastly,
the _tude sur Mirabeau_ article on Victor Hugo is the first example
of Thackeray's curious fashion of criticism--one-sided, hasty,
altogether unduly conditioned by prejudice and 'nervous impression',
but still admirably acute in its grasp of the absurd, curiously fresh
and vivid, justified (in a half-inexplicable fashion) of its very
injustice. It is because of this germinal value that these _Standard_
articles deserve to be given, as some other later things do not: and
even in their case selection would have to be exercised, not in order
to conceal defects, but simply in order to give only a fair sample of
tentative--fair both to author and to reader.

Between the decease of the _National Standard_ early in 1834 and the
beginning of Thackeray's miscellaneous literary activity in the autumn
of 1837, there is rather a dearth of authenticated work of his, except
the _Constitutional_ articles, on which we shall speak further.
Indeed, save that he spent most of his time in Paris, and frequented
the studios there, we know little or nothing of him between the first
date just mentioned and his marriage three years later. And save the
imitation of 'Le Roi d'Yvetot' in 1834 (on which again _v. infra_)
nothing certainly stands to his name in the bibliographies until the
curious skit on the ballet (wholly pictorial except for brief
underlinings) of _Flore et Zphyr_ in 1836, signed 'Thophile
Wagstaff'--a pseudonym, like others, to be resumed and slightly varied
later. The main point of this is the satire on the elderly male
dancer, a personage of the time on whom Thackeray was always severe;
but Flore herself does not escape, and the whole, though by no means
an artistic masterpiece, is a really important 'document'. With other
things of the same kind it has proved rather a touchstone for critics.
That he, an enthusiastic theatre-goer almost throughout his life,
should not only here, but elsewhere, mercilessly satirize theatrical
sham and convention, would seem to be incomprehensible, and rather
horrible to some; while even greater surprise and indignation seems to
have been aroused by his very similar attitude to things French in
general. We are not infrequently told that this attitude is a proof of
his hopeless John Bullishness; of his 'early Victorian' shortcomings;
of his sentiment, his moral heresies, and so forth. It is impossible
not to smile at this. No doubt there are some folk who cannot see the
faults and absurdities of things and persons for which and for whom
they, notwithstanding, have a strong fancy. But, fortunately, there
are others who can, and the ability is rather commoner, perhaps, among
Englishmen of wits than in other nations. Thackeray had it in almost
the highest degree, though he was not always equally provided with the
complementary and even higher faculty of seeing the merits of the
things he did _not_ like. And it may be said, with no desire to
provoke, but with unruffled calm and maintaining a strong sympathy
with the extravagances of _mil-huit-cent-trente_, that most of the
absurdities which he detected and exposed in Frenchmen and French
literature _were_ absurdities, _are_ so, and will be so whenever they
recur 'a hundred years hence' or a thousand. That he took the moral
line too strongly, from the _National Standard_ critique on Ptrus
Borel and others onward, is perhaps true; but have we not more
recently had at least equally flagrant examples of taking the
non-moral line--not, perhaps, excused by quite so much talent (we need
not call it as yet genius) as his?[5]

    [Footnote 5: It is difficult, when one reads impatient
    complaints of Thackeray's 'sermons', not to think of the
    pleasant American story of the negro preacher who declined
    to preach upon chicken-stealing (much prevalent in the
    neighbourhood) because it would 'cast a cold on de
    congregation'. These complainants seem to have felt a
    similar 'cold'--to be of 'the congregation'.]

When this period--if not exactly of halcyon ease, at any rate of
little history and not little happiness--came to an end, in
consequence, first, of the responsibilities of his marriage and then
of the downfall of the _Constitutional_, Thackeray, like other people,
had to knock at various literary doors, and did not always find them
at once or continuously open to him. In 1837, and at intervals later,
he did a certain amount of work for _The Times_, and several of his
reviews were recently identified and reprinted. Of most of them there
is little to say; indeed, the paste-and-scissors habit which he had
acquired on the _Constitutional_ itself, and which, curiously enough,
has always been not unpopular with newspaper editors, is obvious in
them. The 'Carlyle' and the 'Southey', however, deserve a little
comment. Carlyle was not effusively grateful to the 'Cornish giant',
as he called him--the perpetual epithet being perhaps specially
connected with knowledge of his Liskeard expedition with Buller. But
this review of the _French Revolution_ is a remarkable one for a young
man, and not the less important that Thackeray really knew France when
survivors of the Revolutionary times were fairly plentiful. Much is
again quotation, and Carlyle was probably (author-fashion) annoyed by
Thackeray's 'playing down' at the beginning to the popular complaints
of uncouthness of style, &c. But this is really only a crafty
concession and conciliation, and the total estimate is surprisingly
near the truth--things, times, and persons considered. He may have
thought of it a dozen years later when he imagined a grave historian's
feelings at being knocked off in one of Pen's reviews; but he need not
have been ashamed of it. Nor is the brief review of Southey
(who has proved one of the most difficult of all writers for
critics--especially critics Radical, as Thackeray then was--to deal
justly with) unworthy of the same commendations.

Still, for reasons which will be better exposed later, Thackeray could
never have been an ideal reviewer; and for political articles--about
the only other kind of work that _The Times_ could have offered
him--he had no aptitude at all. A much more suitable place for him was
the miscellaneous review-magazine which had established itself in virtue
of the brilliant success of _Blackwood_. With 'Maga' herself, though
he was later intimate with Mr. John Blackwood and many 'Ebonites',
Thackeray never established literary relations--whether for political
reasons or not I do not know. But _Fraser_, which was at first almost
an 'overflow' _Blackwood_, with Maginn and Lockhart among its pillars,
must have been opened to him, by his costly friendship with Maginn
himself, almost from the first; and it is certain that from 1837
onwards it was almost his chief refuge and resort when he had 'copy'
to deposit, until _Punch_ took its place--and, indeed, for some
considerable time after he had taken Mr. Punch's shilling. Confident
assertions have been made that the ironic and Bulwer-parodying story
of _Elizabeth Brownrigge_, which appeared as early as 1832 in the
magazine, was his; and a certain number of other articles during the
next five years have been less confidently attributed to him. To this
point we must devote a little attention.

With respect to _Elizabeth Brownrigge_, particularly careful
examination, both of external and internal evidence, is no doubt
necessary. That Mr. R. H. Shepherd attributed it to Thackeray need not
trouble us much; for Mr. Shepherd, a bibliographer of unwearied and
undiscourageable industry, and an editor (as in Blake's case) of
rather unduly undervalued accuracy, never, that I know of, showed any
great power as a literary critic, and his opinion, bibliographically,
is balanced by that of Mr. C. P. Johnson--in that respect at least his
equal. But Dr. John Brown, who knew Thackeray intimately, seems to
have thought the thing his, and Mr. Swinburne, whose opinions on
literature are never negligible, is said to have followed on the same
side. Outside opinion, and the excessively weak point that two and a
half years later Thackeray figures, on no other positive account save
a scrap of verse, among the Fraserians', there appears to be no
evidence in favour of his authorship.

The piece has been called 'ghastly' and 'gruesome', but this is an
exaggeration. The facts were so, doubtless; but the handling of them
is much less ghastly and gruesome than that of the end of _Catherine_,
so that this is neither for nor against. It is a parody of, and an
attack upon, the author of _Eugene Aram_; but plenty of people besides
Thackeray parodied and attacked Bulwer, and this is neither against
nor for. We are driven, therefore, to the consideration of the piece
itself, and of Thackeray's known work up to or about its date.

Putting these most carefully together, with the assistance of a not
inconsiderable knowledge of the magazine work of the time, especially
in _Blackwood_ and _Fraser_, I can only say that, while I certainly
shall never be so rash as to say that Thackeray did not write it, I
can see not the slightest evidence that he did. The general style is
certainly unlike his at any time; and it is much more sober and
correct than anything that he wrote for long afterwards. Not till we
come to _Barry Lyndon_ is there such abstinence from 'kicks over the
traces', from verbal horseplay of any kind. It is--or seems to
me--the work of a much older hand than the Thackeray of twenty-one. It
might be Maginn himself; it might even be Lockhart; I do not think it
could be Thackeray. If it was--and I hold that pure criticism can
sometimes say, 'This _must_ be So-and-so's,' but never 'This _cannot_
be'--then it is one of the instances--not, I admit, unknown--of a man
doing something quite out of his ordinary line, and quite
irreconcilable with the ordinary laws of development. I should not be
in the least chagrined if some old _Fraser_ ledger turned up (as such
things have done) and proved it to be his. I should not be very much
surprised. But, meanwhile, I do not see how it can safely be
attributed to him. The other guessed-at articles in _Fraser_ are of
much less importance, and for the most part they seem to me to have
been fixed upon, rather because of some fancied connexion in subject
with Thackeray's other work, or with places and persons actually
connected with him, than for any real resemblance in style. The
undoubtedly genuine translation from Branger was corrected and
collected later, and the first actual _Fraser_ article to be
chronicled here is the remarkable _Half-crown's Worth of Cheap
Knowledge,_ in which the subject is more than the form, though there
are some distinctively Thackerayan touches. Not till after this did he
give _Fraser_ a creation--Mr. Charles James Yellowplush.

But before the _Half-crown's Worth_, and in _Bentley's Miscellany_,
not in _Fraser_, there came something of value, which has had little
attention from most of Thackeray's commentators. _The Professor_ was
to all appearance the first of his original and characteristic
contributions to prose fiction. For, though it is attributed in the
reprint of 1886, where it first took rank with the collected works,
only to the _Comic Tales and Sketches_ of 1841, it actually appeared
in _Bentley's Miscellany_ for 1837. The class to which it belongs--a
reversion to the old prose _fabliau_ or satirical tale of real
life--had grown up slowly in England, but had recently received a very
great stimulus from the popularity of Theodore Hook. Few people read
poor 'Mr. Wagg' now, but without reading him it is practically
impossible to estimate rightly either how much Thackeray and Dickens
owed to him, or how immensely they improved upon him. And this estimate,
as far as Thackeray is concerned, wants further comparative study of
persons from Leigh Hunt to Douglas Jerrold before his unique greatness
can be clearly perceived. The subject of _The Professor_ is 'low' (it is
curious how one perceives the survival of that immemorial objection in
the most advanced disciples of realism and naturalism when they talk
of Thackeray), and the attitude to it is burlesque-grotesque. A dull
person may lose himself in the maze before discovering (what he does
not in the least need to discover) whether the main object is pure
farce or satire of Byronism and Bulwerism. But there is a quite
extraordinary 'keeping' in the thing: the writer never lets any of his
horses--sentiment, satire, grotesque-burlesque--break pace or kick
over the traces; he speeds, but never hurries, to the event; the whole
is smooth and round. I forget who edited the _Miscellany_ in those
days, but if he had known his business he would have said, 'More!
more! and as much more as ever you can write!' Evidently he did not,
and Mr. Yellowplush entered the service of another establishment.

It may be asked--I have no doubt that it has been asked
frequently--why Thackeray so often adopted the plan of burlesque
attitude, including misspelling, for these early attempts. The example
of Swift--there is nothing of importance and hardly anything at all
earlier, except a few dramatic instances, chiefly in dialect--and of
Smollett is only a very partial answer, nor is the 'Ramsbottom'
practice much more sufficient, though it adds a little. I believe
myself that there is a much better and subtler explanation. He was
evidently disgusted from the first--his schoolboy parodies of
'L.E.L.', &c., show it--with the 'high-falutin' lingo and tone of much
early Romantic poetry and fiction. He was evidently straining after
the pure domestic novel, relying on no unusual incident and discarding
all factitious style, which only Miss Austen had ventured as regards
incident, and which even Miss Austen had not wholly ventured as
regards style. But he was not as yet sufficiently advanced to dare
this without some aid of mask and domino. Burlesque of fact supplied
the domino, and contortions of orthography and lexicography supplied
the mask.

Moreover, it is of the first interest and importance to notice how, in
spite of this motley, and sometimes almost through its means, his
general style is already distinguished by that unforced adequacy and
nature which are its greatest glory. To take the three chief of his
own immediate, or almost immediate, contemporaries in prose fiction
for comparison, how curiously contrasted is the fantastic,
accumulative manner of Dickens, heaping simile on simile, suggestion
on suggestion, turning sentence into paragraph, and paragraph into
page of phantasmagoric commentary or imagination! And the gaudy
writing of Bulwer, though more ostentatiously shunned and satirized,
is not more strikingly absent than the laborious epigrams and
'sentences' (as ancient criticism called them) of Disraeli--the
patched-on afterthoughts which the reader is expected to cherish as
fine things. Of what the French call _apparat_--a word which includes
our 'apparatus', our preparation', and a good deal besides--there is
nothing in Thackeray; and yet his simple phrases have the subtlest
suggestion and appropriateness even in their motleyest motley and
their wildest burlesque. At the very beginning of this, when Mr.
Yellowplush's ma 'wrapped his buth in a mistry', the two misspellings
automatically gibbet a silly stock phrase, do their duty and pass on.

The fact of the double existence of Mr. Yellowplush, and of his near
but not exact, homonym, Mr. de la Pluche, is one of the best
illustrations of the importance of observing Thackerayan chronology,
and of the inconvenience of not observing it. The two gentlemen are,
as has been said, nearly of the same name, quite of the same class,
and addicted to the same peculiar '_au_thography'. But they are quite
different _persons_, and it is a pity to lose the opportunity of
remarking, in their respective cases, the extraordinary creative power
of their creator in the great English art of character,
individualized, not typified. With the not unamiable husband of Mary
Hann we shall deal when we come to him; but the orphan of Miss
Montmorency is our present business. He is a very much shrewder person
than his seven or eight years' younger brother (whose blood-relations,
by the way, appear to have been quite respectable), and his shrewdness
takes most of the meaning of that by no means unambiguous term. From
beginning to end he is, as he modestly acknowledges to Mr. Altamont,
'tolerably downy'--a very distinct and capable critic of life. In
fact, if his next master's unfortunate victim, 'pore Dawkins', is
Thackeray himself in his weaker moments, much more is Charles James
the stronger Thackeray himself in a somewhat immature and crude
state--'too savage', as he said himself, too extravagant in various
ways, unchastened in taste, degraded in condition, but with
observation almost fully developed, and with power of satiric
expression developed almost more fully still, not merely in spite, but
by the help, of the burlesque dialect. If, once more, anybody who
reads this will compare the smaller novels and tales of Theodore Hook
with the histories of Mr. Altamont and Mr. Deuceace, he will be
struck, as Lockhart was, by the astounding difference in genus and
genius. If anybody will compare Mr. Yellowplush's critical efforts
with _their_ chief forerunners--certain parts of the _Noctes
Ambrosianae_, and Wilson's other writings, together with those of
Maginn--though the gap is not so great, the difference will be found
almost as striking. Extravagant as is the motley--more _apparently_
extravagant than in either of the others--the wit and wisdom beneath
it far exceed theirs in truth and force.

With regard to the contents of the _Correspondence_, it is easy enough
to understand Thackeray's motive for suppressing _Fashnable Fax_ and
the _Letter to 'Oliver Yorke'_, which keys the rest of the matter on
to it, as well as some reasons for separating narrative and critical
parts. But the _Fax_ are amusing enough in themselves, and the piece
has long taken its place among acknowledged work; while the _Letter_
is even better, and really necessary as a tie. For the rest, no
'signpost' is needful to direct the reader to its thick-coming fancies
and its wealth of natural incident and phrase. Those who cannot be
content without tragedy and a certain amount of 'grime' will, of course,
prefer the later history of Mr. Deuceace; and the Earl of Crabs is
certainly great. But the battle of kite and crow over the body of the
luckless Dawkins, and _Mr. Yellowplush's Ajew_--one of the most
perfect things in the broader burlesque, not without the finest traits
of satire under the breadth--are perhaps the _apices_ of the whole. If
_Major Gahagan_, to which we next come, is the 'maddest' burlesque
(as, I think, Mr. Whibley has observed), _Yellowplush_ is the most
Puckish and the most inexhaustibly diverting. Take away the critical
part of it and you mutilate the individuality. Mr. Yellowplush is
never, as Mr. James de la Pluche is, an authentic flunkey. He is
'criticism of life'--criticism of life and letters below stairs, in
motley of speech as well as in many-coloured coat and breeches. He is
very far from being the whole Thackeray; but there is something of the
whole Thackeray diffused through him, and it shows best when the
papers are taken in the order of their composition.

The invincible Major (whose _Tremendous Adventures_ originally, in
their magazine appearances, bore the milder titles, _Some Passages in
the Life, Historical Recollections_, and _Historical Reminiscences_ of
Major G.) had been a floating and phantasmagoric eidolon in
Thackeray's mind for some time--a fact to which there is reference in
the opening paragraph. Years before, in the _National Standard,_ there
had been the 'annygoat' of 'Father' Gahagan; only a twelvemonth
earlier 'Goliah Gahagan' himself, without his commission and orders,
and showing nothing of his autobiographical peculiarities, had signed
the record of the wickedness of Roderick Ferdinand, thirty-eighth
Count of Dandolo, and the cruel fate of Adeliza Grampus. Nay, much
later, in the long uncollected _Wagstaff Papers_, 'General Sir Goliah
Gahagan' reappears with a new wife (for though virtuous he is terribly
polygamic), with a more polished and less extravagant style, but with
undiminished vivacity and veracity of his own peculiar kind.

One says 'vivacity and veracity' jestingly; yet there is an
astonishing amount of sober truth in the phrase. In all Thackeray's
better burlesque (and he rarely did anything better than the
tremendous Major and the simpering flunkey who, in the frontispiece of
their collection, accompany poor little Mr. M. A. Titmarsh to the
'brink of Immortality') there is a characteristic which it possesses,
if not quite to itself, at any rate in common only with a few examples
of the greatest kind in prose. It carries 'suspension of disbelief'
with it like a fairy-tale. You know, of course, all the time, not
merely that the Tremendous Adventures never happened, but (which is
not quite the case with Mr. Yellowplush's) that they never could have
happened. But this doesn't matter. They are quite real _ex hypothesi_;
they carry the atmosphere of their own universe with them, and they
blandly permeate and intoxicate you with it, as if it were so much
laughing-gas--as indeed it is.

Perhaps there is something less of this mysterious reality in _The
Fatal Boots_. The reason is not that Bob Stubbs is a detestable little
brute: he is not much more detestable than Barnes Newcome, and not at
all more than the later--not the earlier--Barry Lyndon, whom indeed he
much resembles. Nor is it the poetic justice--poetic justice will no
more 'bite' than allegory will, unless people are afraid of it. But
the victim of Mr. Stiffelkind's revenge is not quite humanly possible.
His mother might very probably be as infatuated with him as she is
represented--that is common enough; his sister not impossibly. But why
should beauties and heiresses have fallen in love with a hideous,
cowardly, awkward, bad-blooded, not affluent little cad? It is no
answer to say that such things do occur in life; for fiction is more
philosophical than life, and more bound to observe system. Nor is Mr.
Stubb's own conduct quite intelligible, for he is too much of a fool
to be quite as shrewd as Thackeray sometimes makes him, and vice
versa. The book is full of good things, of course, and the
illustrations endear it to some, no doubt. But it will not quite
_wash_.

On the other hand, the delicious trifle of _The Bedford Row
Conspiracy_ may be warranted not to shrink however often you wash it,
and in whatever critical water. It is a borrowed--and quite openly
borrowed--trifle. It is 'transposed' with an amount of ingenuity quite
miraculous from the _Pied d'Argile_ of Charles de Bernard--an author
whom official French criticism rather belittles, and whom those who
cannot judge for themselves accordingly belittle likewise, but who may
be quite confidently styled one of the very best of French novelists
of the second class. Thackeray had a great fancy for Charles de
Bernard, who, like himself, was both a wit and a gentleman, and who
had humour of a kind very uncommon in Frenchmen. I do not know
anything quite resembling this pair of stories as an example of the
'transposition' referred to.

In all these works or worklets--_Yellowplush_ and _Gahagan_, the
_Boots_ and the _Conspiracy_, as well as in the _Professor_--Thackeray
had entered his proper kingdom--that of the novel--though he had made
no extensive conquests in it, and had confined his incursion mostly to
the comic or even the farcical provinces and departments. The
_Character Sketches_,[6] the last pieces to be considered in this
first chapter, are not nominally or ostensibly tales: but they are
more or less elaborate studies for tales, and the results of the
observation and experiment which they show had been partly, and were
to be more fully, embodied in actual fiction. 'Captain Rook' is Mr.
Deuceace, and 'Mr. Pigeon' is Mr. Dawkins, who has abandoned the
harmless solace of the flute for the much more dangerous blandishments
of 'Maria'. The Captain's earlier university career is quite familiar
to readers of the later Thackeray, and not to such readers only. Lady
Fanny Flummery is more or less _crible_ in most of the novels and
tales, though Thackeray was afterwards one of the few faithful friends
of poor Lady Blessington--princess of the Lady Fanny tribe. _The
Artists_ is devoted to a subject of which he was unceasingly fond, and
which will have to be treated more fully. And let it be observed
that in these _Sketches_ the style, as a rule, with a few
dialogue-exceptions, is perfectly serious, without misspelling or
mountebankery of any kind--a style nearly as composed and full-dress as
any that Thackeray ever attained or attempted; that there is almost his
full knowledge of the world and of men even in the earliest; that in the
history of Captain Rook and Mr. Pigeon, Thackeray has not merely
depicted and satirized his own calamity and folly, as he did in
_Yellowplush_, but has generalized it out of all mere personality.

    [Footnote 6: The second and third (1841) are somewhat later
    than the first, and than anything else in this chapter. But
    Thackeray himself joined them together, and they shall not
    be put asunder here.]

In short, in all the matter of this volume he is 'making himself': in
some he is already made.

But during these years he tried one way in which he never did anything
good. Those who have paid a little attention, by accident or purpose,
to the bibliography of Thackeray may look for something to be said
here concerning his _Constitutional_ work--the letters of 'Our Own
Correspondent' from Paris during the short life of that paper. The
exclusion of any detailed survey is the result of mature deliberation,
and can be supported by many reasons. In the first place, the articles
are of the kind which among all the ephemera of journalism is the most
ephemeral--summaries and comments dealing with political matters from
week to week and day to day. To make them even intelligible to any but
special students of the time, they would need annotation. But there is
much more than this. They are not good; they are hardly even as good
as those from the _National Standard_, which have been given here on
the ground of their earliness. Everywhere else Thackeray improved
immensely: here he did not. The greater part of the matter is mere
translated paste-and-scissors work; the comments show neither grasp,
nor political acuteness, nor power of putting the writer's own views
forcibly and pungently. In fact, anybody who is familiar with _Philip_
can see that Thackeray, not with the sham humility of the fool, but
with the ironic humility of the wise man, had himself apprized the
value of his political work perfectly well. It would be an unjust
justice in hanging out afresh these _chanes de l'esclavage_ (his own
name for them in the case of George Esmond Warrington), which the
wearer wore gallantly and unflinchingly while it was necessary, but
which have neither interest nor beauty of their own, and which he
himself did not choose to expose to public gaze as his. In everything
else of the time there is either intrinsic goodness, or interest of
promise, or interest at least of experiment. There is nothing of any
of these kinds in the _Constitutional_ letters, and so I do not
discuss them.




II

THE PARIS SKETCH BOOK, AND ART CRITICISMS


Due warning has been given in the Preface, that though the main
principle of arrangement would be chronological, a merely rigid
consistency would not be allowed to prevail in this respect. In these
earlier chapters especially, though each is planned to present a more
advanced stage than the one preceding, the structure must, necessarily
and otherwise, be clinker-built'--overlapping, that is to say, in such
a sense that some work in each will be earlier than some in its
forerunner. Necessarily, for it would be preposterous to disturb
Thackeray's own arrangement of much early work, and some almost of his
very earliest, in _The Paris Sketch Book_. Otherwise than
necessarily--in order (for reasons to be presently set forth) to get
together the rather frequent expressions of the author's criticism in
Art-matters which key on to much of the _Sketch Book_. I had at first
preferred as an alternative the grouping of the Parisian matter such
as the _Second Funeral of Napoleon_ and the other Parisian _Corsair_
and _Britannia_ articles together; but on the whole the present
arrangement seemed more convenient.

The interest of _The Paris Sketch Book_, as Thackeray's first advance
in force, and by way of a real book, on the public, can hardly be
exaggerated. And it has other claims--its variety of subject, the
unity given to that variety by the presence (to use Nestor Roqueplan's
ingenious term) of the element of 'Parisine' throughout, and the known
and lifelong attraction which that element had for the author. It is
impossible, however, that any reader with even a slight tincture of
criticism in him, if not fully acquainted with the circumstances of
the case, should not be a little puzzled by it. I remember being very
decidedly so myself. A more 'accidented' book, as the language with
which it has so much to do would put it--a book with more curious and
startling ups and downs of goodness, there hardly exists in
literature: and there are not many which present such a positive
jumble of subjects, atmospheres, tempers, attitudes, styles. The
Dedication, eccentric as its substance may seem, is in Thackeray's
most individual and nearly in his very best manner. He could hardly
have improved on it in the days of the 'Roundabouts' themselves. The
introductory 'Invasion of France' though only one of the
essay-sketches which had been more and more practised from Leigh Hunt
to 'Boz', is an excellent specimen of them, with not a little
idiosyncrasy. Its successor, the history of the delusion and downfall
of Pogson, is of the best early Thackeray--a wonderfully fresh
variation on the companion tragedies of Mr. Dawkins and Mr. Pigeon.
Quite different, but as good or better still, is the long letter on
the Ftes of July. It is dated July 3, 1839, but most, if not all of
it, might have been written in 1859 as far as the manner goes.

And so with others. But with yet others it is different, and with some
of these one wonders a little why they were ever written; with some
why they were not written better. When their _provenance_ is known and
sufficiently considered, this wonder vanishes. In the first place
their actual composition covered no small space of time. One article,
and by no means the worst--the already more than once glanced at
'Devil's Wager'--represents almost the earliest period of Thackeray's
work, having been contributed to the _National Standard_ nearly seven
years before the collection appeared. Most, though not most of the
best, were collected from various newspapers and magazines to which
they had been contributed 'at the hazard of the pen'--some of the best
having gone to the American _Corsair_, edited by N. P. Willis. It may
be remembered that Philip contributed to an American magazine and did
not get paid for his contributions, and it is certain that Thackeray
does not later exhibit any great affection for the author of
_Hurrygraphs_ and _Dashes at Life. Fraser_, the _New Monthly_, and
other periodicals were also drawn upon. The book was in fact a pure
miscellany--even the 'Paris' of its title is a very loose and
questionable bond of union.

It need have been none the worse for this. The _Roundabout Papers_
themselves are the very miscellany of all miscellanies: and they are
inferior in their own way to hardly anything in literature. But by
their time, Thackeray had attained the faculty of surrounding
everything he treated with the amber of style--of making everything
interesting and everything original. Here he had not. Much of the
matter is quite openly translated or adapted from Charles de Bernard
and others. More is curiously 'retold': sometimes for reasons not now
very apparent--as in the case of the histories of 'Cartouche',
'Poinsinet', 'Mary Ancel, 'Beatrice Merger'. Only special amateurs in
crime-mysteries can now get up the slightest concern in the Peytel
matter--even though the particular case interested Balzac (on the
opposite side) as well as Thackeray. It is, however, pretty certain,
to some who have read what both these great novelists and critics of
life have to say, that Thackeray was right and Balzac wrong. 'Napoleon
and his System' is almost entirely one with the other political
articles contributed to the _Constitutional_, though it will give
readers rather a favourable notion of Thackeray's political style. In
particular it is saved by his correct and salutary affirmation of the
undying dislike of France for England. But much of it is translation,
and the rest not over brilliant comment. 'The Painter's Bargain' and
'The Devil's Wager' itself are romantic-grotesque stories of a
Hoffmannish kind, and still more, perhaps, resembling prose Ingoldsby
Legends, very good reading, but not consummate. 'A Gambler's Death' is
much more in the author's own special way, and has some most vivid and
characteristic touches; but he would have done it much better only a
very little later. Of the various criticisms on Art and Letters it
would not be true to say this, for they are very much what his
criticism of _contemporary_ art and letters always was--a queer
impulsive mixture of shrewdness and prejudice, of knowledge and
ignorance. Altogether a singular _olla podrida_ or _pot-pourri_; but
with the relish of the one, the fragrance of the other, only partially
achieved.

Yet if one reads this unequal collection carefully, and remembers what
other things the readers of 1840 had to read, it seems strange that
more of them should not have detected and enjoyed (to use a later
phrase of its author's about a character whom he never identified with
himself), 'the sense, the satire, and' if not exactly 'the
scholarship', the literary savour of it, so different from anything
elsewhere offered them. In that opening descriptive sketch--a thing
already hackneyed--what a curious freshness and variety there is! what
vividness and at the same time what quaint originality! above all,
what a unique abstinence from thumping the same note in order to force
people to attend to it; from splashing and blobbing the same line by
way of emphasis! The boat, the quay, the coast, the harbour, the
hotel--most writers (and some very famous ones) would have given you a
paragraph at least, if not a page, to each. Thackeray touches each off
in two or three strokes, quite suggestive enough to alert 'uptakers'.
The personages are extremely numerous; each one of them is made as
alive as he need be, and much more alive than almost anybody else
could make him; but, in the same way, with the least expense of line
and colour. They rise, do their part in the procession and panorama,
and pass: they are not dragged back with clumsy and absurd bobbings up
and down of the curtain to beg for applause. How complete, again, is
the story of that second Dawkins, Pogson, not quite so innocent as his
more luckless predecessor in one way, equally so in another, favoured
by fortune and Mr. Titmarsh (who himself was _haud ignarus mali_) very
much more. There is stuff in it for a far longer story: but Thackeray
neither compresses it unduly, nor spins it out; neither squeezes it
down, nor lets it run over. It is just 'good measure'--the best; and
he gives to you of his abundance freely.

Even in the more miscellaneous articles, miscellaneous in both senses,
as just explained, and belonging less to their author's proper
vocation, the same and other proofs of genius exist. There is hardly
anywhere else such a piece of interpretation--of showman's work, with
an artist of the first class for the showman--as the passages on
Robert Macaire in 'Caricatures and Lithography'. In this same paper,
read the admirable and consummate remarks--Thackeray in a nutshell--on
Smollett's sketch of literature in the reign of George II. It was
historically wrong to call Mrs. Lennox a figment': figments do not eat
magnificent apple-pies, as Johnson made this lady do at the all-night
sitting recorded by Hawkins. But it was critically and creatively
right.

In 'Meditations at Versailles' we come across one of those papers
which give handles both to the attackers and to the defenders.
Undoubtedly the former have something to say, as they have in
reference to all Thackeray's polemic against 'snobs', of which this is
in reality an early specimen--a 'first state', as it were, of _The
Book of Snobs_ itself. Undoubtedly the famous 'Historical Study' of
'Rex--Ludovicus--Ludovicus Rex' is unfair--and goes perilously near,
as unfair satire inevitably does, to being ignoble. Ludovicus could
not help being 'bald and paunchy' when he was old: many most estimable
people undergo these inevitable outrages of time--and there is
excellent testimony to the fact that he was a really handsome cavalier
when he was young. The satirist himself has to admit that in his
unlucky old age the 'Magnificent' king was really magnanimous as well.
There are plenty of things to be said against him, but Thackeray has
not said the right things. He has made the same mistake (but, as being
more of a novice, more clumsily) that he made in _The Four Georges_ a
decade and a half later: and he has not equally redeemed it. But the
adaptation of the 'Prophecy of Cazotte' (Thackeray has evidently said
'Cagliostro' by mistake) has a scornful melancholy magic of style that
atones for much, and the whole article is full of wonderful broken
lights of phrase and portraiture.

On the whole, perhaps, the critical parts of the _Sketch Book_ are
those which have drawn the heaviest fire: and as nearly the whole of
the rest of the volume will be occupied with critical matter, it is
necessary to say something about this part of Thackeray's work.
Indeed, as far as his art-criticism goes, we shall hardly have, save
for glances, to return to it. The literary criticism will occupy us
often; and we may deal with it first here.

Of course it is no use arguing with those who say 'Here are great
writers and great books--Hugo, Heine, Dumas, George Sand, this and
that work of theirs--and Thackeray dares to make fun of them or
condemn them!' But even this, manifestly absurd as it is, is not quite
so strange as the objection, which I think I have seen, that the
French consider _Kean_ a very clever if not a very great play, and yet
Thackeray makes fun of it. To which, of course, it can only be replied
that if all Europe thought _Kean_ a fine play, and only one person
perceived the absurdities that Thackeray points out, all Europe would
be wrong and the one person right. For these are absurdities,
sometimes in themselves, sometimes as exhibiting ignorance of his
subject, which the author had no business to commit if he took that
subject at all.

But there is another class of objections which do not answer and upset
themselves quite so definitely; and which were referred to in the
first chapter. Thackeray, it is said, is hopelessly John Bullish; he
insists on applying English ideas to French ways and work, and the
result is inadequacy and unfairness. Now this is not an objection
which can be met by simple negation. Undoubtedly if a man says, as in
the famous instance, that it is very silly of the French infantry to
wear blue uniforms, he says a very silly thing. But it may be at least
questioned whether Thackeray does do this--whether he is not entitled
to urge that the indictments he brings against French books are
brought under codes and before courts where no nation can plead lack
of jurisdiction. One may not wholly admit this plea; one may think
that he takes the moral line too much. But, after all, does any one,
however much he may admire the men of 1830, deny that they talked a
good deal of nonsense, and unhealthy nonsense too? The present writer
has borne the Romantic banner as high and as steadily as he could for
a good many years; but _he_ could not deny this.

No; the faults of Thackeray's literary criticism--which we may touch
again and again till we reach _The English Humourists_, the best
example of it with some of the most striking illustrations of its
faults themselves--are not by any means due to too rigid Anglicism,
for he sees English faults quite as clearly as French. They do not
even lie in a too great adherence to the 'moral heresy' or to orthodox
standards of any kind: for no one ever was less of a Pharisee than he
was, and his standpoint was, to say the least, not uncompromisingly
ecclesiastical. They were due rather to the absence of fixed codes and
creeds than to the presence of them; to a curious impulsiveness and
inconsistency which has something to do with the unequalled truth to
nature and the wonderful fresh variety of his style and thought, but
which is not exactly suitable to the pure critical _ethos_.

Of his art-criticism, the present writer speaks with more diffidence,
having had no technical education in that matter, but only a great
love of it for a great many years, and a steady endeavour not to 'like
grossly', but to feel, as far as possible, _why_ he likes. It is
impossible, of course, not to see at once that Thackeray himself had
this education; that whereas in literature he was an almost peerless
creator but at the same time almost an untaught or self-taught one, he
was in Art, though curiously hampered in his creation, by no means an
amateur, but, if not a master, an apprentice who had duly and far from
negligently served his time. Exactly why his execution was so hampered
it is not easy to understand; at least no expert has ever succeeded in
explaining it to my inexpertness. One is driven to the rather obvious
supposition that his fingers simply would not do what his brain told
them to do, and what his eyes told him they ought to have done. He
never made the slightest mistake about his own performances: indeed I
think that somewhere in the wandering isles of his letters there is a
sentence not unlike that which I have just written. And there is the
very amplest evidence, in the pages that follow, that he knew
technical faults and merits quite well and, what is more, was
perfectly well acquainted with the technical means by which they were
produced and avoided. Nay more, he has, I think, the very great credit
of being the first person who distinctly pointed out, in _The Paris
Sketch Book_ itself, and in that same remarkable article on
'Caricatures and Lithography', not merely the much greater practice of
Art in France, and the much greater rewards for it, not merely the
more general enjoyment of it and the like, but the radical difference
between the French and the English attitude to it. 'For abstract art',
he says, 'we have no appreciation,' thereby not merely laying down but
almost originating the very objection which 'warm young men' now urge
against himself.

Nor did he fail to practise what he preached, to a very large extent.
Nothing could be better, from any point of view, than his criticism of
the dismal French Classical school of the Empire in his first article,
'The French School of Painting'. His remarks on its Romantic rival are
perfectly sane, and those (here not extensive) on Delacroix and
Delaroche respectively have quite the root of the matter in them,
while he can appreciate the middle style of Ingres. But then we come
to the flaw. 'The absurd humbug called Christian or Catholic art'
draws down a philippic from Thackeray. It is true that this early
(chiefly German) pre-Raphaelitism was rather weak--that it was not
till years after this, and in England, that masterpieces were produced
in it. But one sees at once that this is not the ground of Thackeray's
objection. He has seen nothing like it before; he does not like the
'Catholic' suggestion in it. He ridicules the gold-leaf haloes just as
'Zeluco' Moore's famous character ridicules the blue uniforms. It is
'absurd': it is 'silly'. I have sometimes thought that there are no
two words in the whole vocabulary of criticism which a critic should
use with more gingerly and self-suspicious reluctance than those two
words 'silly' and 'absurd'. They too often mean simply this, 'I
dislike the thing; but I can't tell you why, and I won't inquire.' Now
this attitude is absolutely fatal to criticism; it is at once the
critic's besetting and his unpardonable sin. I do not think that, till
quite late days, Thackeray can be cleared of it.

If this drawback is visible in his comments on French Art it is
certainly more visible still when he comes to English; and we must
admit that Dr. John Brown set something like a _pretium affectionis_
on this criticism when he called Thackeray 'one of the best of art
critics'. He is so, when he happens himself to have an affection for
his subject, not quite so otherwise; and I fear that we must demand
something more from a 'best' critic. Moreover, his very affection
often induces him to overpraise. Nothing can be better than the
famous, or should be famous, paragraph on 'The Fighting Tmraire'; it
is worthy of the picture itself. But how, in an adjacent article, did
he come to salute Mulready as 'King' of British Art? He seems
constantly to be going to do more justice to Etty than has been done
by almost any one to that most remarkable failure of a Titian or a
Rubens; yet he is as constantly 'put off' from doing it, not because
of the failure, but because Etty seems to him to have forgotten a
sufficient provision of fig-leaves. That the artists were angry with
him (as we know from FitzGerald and could have known without any
information whatsoever), matters very little. But, perhaps, in no case
does that apparatus of forced high jinks which was referred to in the
opening Introduction, interfere so much as here. One may not in the
least sympathize with Edgar Poe's indignation at the 'devilled
kidneys' in _Charles O'Malley_. Devilled kidneys are good; so is
toasted cheese; so are beer, porter, gin and water, brandy and water,
and other such things--in their proper places, and supplied neither in
excess nor in defect. In these very papers Thackeray's fancy of a
complete _menu_ of the Fatted Calf is quite admissible and amusing.
But it is very difficult to feel a proper exhilaration over Mr.
Titmarsh's indulgences at various public-houses, and the manner in
which the trusting caterers are indemnified by Mr. Oliver Yorke. They
are not 'in a concatenation accordingly'; we feel that they were put
in to suit a passing fashion, and that they have nothing in common
with the admirable 'gormandizing' articles to which we shall come
later.

We go, here, much beyond the stage of Thackeray's actual production to
which we confined ourselves in the preceding chapter and shall confine
ourselves in the next, and even the next after that. For here the
liberty is justified, first, by the fact that all the work really
belongs to the earlier stage, though some of it was written quite
towards the end of that stage, and secondly by the solidarity of
subject, and even to a great extent of manner, though towards the
latest the mere 'high jinks' business fortunately drops out. A great
deal of the criticism is admirable, and a great deal more of it very
noticeable. It is on the whole the very best example that we have in
English of the kind of art-criticism which Diderot introduced in his
_Salons_; though there the technical knowledge was less at first-hand
than Thackeray's. The point, however, in both cases is that the pure
technical judgement, and what artists disdainfully call the 'literary'
point of view, are inextricably blended.

The result of this blend is shown at its best, at least at its most
sustained, in the famous _Essay on Cruikshank_ which, if not quite a
'first early' is early enough. Gratitude for old childish enjoyment,
and that hearty goodwill which was one of Thackeray's rarest and most
amiable moral qualifications as a man of genius, may pitch the tone a
very little too high. For, inexhaustible as was Cruikshank's artistic
imagination, and marvellous as was his technical command of method and
effect, one cannot quite forget that, in a very large proportion,
perhaps the majority, of cases his figures are not human creatures at
all, but arabesques and grotesques of humanity. Still, nobody, with
the actual examples given in the paper, is likely to forget this: and
the great, the rare, the astonishingly bountiful merits of the master
are brought out in a way which it would be difficult to better. On one
side of modern art-criticism we should no doubt get more 'studio
jargon'; more allusion at first or second-hand to the actual processes
of the draughtsman and the engraver; while on another (or perhaps the
same) we should get more tricks of style, more attempts at arabesque,
if not grotesque, with the pen. But we should hardly get such a happy
example of the blend of technical knowledge and hearty unconnoisseured
liking on the one hand, or of that of technical knowledge and literary
appreciation on the other. And as much may be said of the best
passages in almost every article.

Yet one must recur to the 'allowance'--to the admissions. Although not
to such a great extent as in the case of the purely literary
criticism--his greater technical knowledge in a matter where
technicalities are not merely sports of opinion, saved him to some
extent--there is no doubt that Thackeray does show, in these very
art-criticisms, the uncertainty and undependableness that makes it
impossible generally to put him in the first rank as a critic, though
few people have left finer isolated examples of criticism. This
uncertainty of touch is due of course to a large number of individual
causes, in the separate instances; rarely to mere ignorance; not
seldom to a neglect to equate and compare the pieces of his knowledge;
often to the moral excess; sometimes to casual outbursts of political,
social, or even personal feeling; but always, I think, in greater or
lesser part to that peculiar impulsiveness in which Thackeray stands
alone among the greatest prose men of letters. To regret this
impulsiveness would itself be hopelessly uncritical; for it is beyond
all doubt the source, in part if not in whole, of that extraordinary
freshness and naturalness which we shall never be tired of noticing in
him. But of course it has its dangers, even in creative work; and for
the critic it is perhaps the very greatest danger of all. Even for
him, it is an inspiring and driving power; a critic who has not some
impulsiveness makes very dry and insipid work of it. But it requires
brake and throttle-valve to be in the best order and kept constantly
at work; and this is what Thackeray, at any rate till late in his
life, could not, or would not do.

Add the excessive discursiveness to which this impulsiveness
leads--which is indeed only the same thing in another form--and the
defects of this criticism are sufficiently confessed. But the
discursiveness also has its charms: and without it, as without the
other, Thackeray would not be Thackeray.




III

CATHERINE--A SHABBY GENTEEL STORY--THE
SECOND FUNERAL OF NAPOLEON--MISCELLANIES,
1840-1


The matter (or most of it) indicated above has communities of interest
in more respects than one. In the first place it is very mainly
occupied with attempts in the author's real vocation, that of a writer
of prose fiction: and in the second place most of it was composed
under the influence of the great affliction of his life--the gradual
breaking-down of his wife's mental health. This trouble was of long
duration, and it was of a somewhat peculiar character--of a character
likely to influence, most specially, the production of literary work.
It was not one of the common cases of a sudden and more or less
violent alienation, requiring complete seclusion and professional
treatment. It came on after the birth of their third child in 1840;
but it was not declared absolutely hopeless for two or even three
years after that; and it was not till the third year, or in fact the
fourth (1843), that the house in Coram Street was given up. During
this time Thackeray did everything for her that personal care could
effect. He took her to Ireland; he took her to Paris; he took her to
German baths. When it was thought necessary that she should be under
direct medical surveillance before the final separation, he lived in
the neighbourhood and saw her constantly. Now all this necessarily
involved not a little expenditure: and, as has been previously said,
all his private means had disappeared long ago. While perhaps only
those who have tried it know what a serious tale of scattered articles
at five, and ten, and even twenty guineas each[7] it takes to build up
a respectable income, even with no extra calls on it.

    [Footnote 7: We know that for _The Times_ article on
    Fielding he received only five guineas: from a later saying
    about his lectures it would seem that five-and-twenty was
    more than he ever received from _Fraser_, even for long
    articles of nearly his best kind and time.]

From another point of view the wind was partly tempered to him, partly
blowing at its sharpest. To some writers the constant moving about,
and the absence of the accustomed study, books, &c., would have been a
most serious trial, if not an insurmountable difficulty: but Thackeray
was not of them. Whether from idiosyncrasy, from a habit acquired in
his more Bohemian days, or from some other cause, he seems always to
have preferred writing, as an Irishman might say, 'somewhere else'. He
would, when there was nothing to induce him to do so but his own
fancy, leave home to write at the club, the club to write at Brighton,
Brighton to write at Paris. On the other hand, few men were more
influenced by their affections: and the positive testimony which he
has left as to the writing of the _Shabby Genteel Story_, which comes
into this chapter, and the _Hoggarty Diamond_, which comes into the
next, no doubt applies to almost everything from the _Shabby Genteel
Story_ itself to _The Irish Sketch Book_.

_Catherine_, however, with which we open, was finished before, though
not long before, this period of gloom, during which it is improbable
that it would have been begun, and during which also it would probably
have been irksome to the author to finish it. It is a very odd
book--the oddest in all Thackeray's work, and the most difficult to
'place' satisfactorily. It was highly prized by a few good judges at
the time, but not generally liked: and there have been few
thoroughgoing partisans of it since. For myself I prefer it to _Barry
Lyndon_, though it is more immature: but I have never been able
exactly to understand the precise point of view from which it was
written. Indeed, the author (who very seldom went wrong about his own
work when he came to look at it completed and in perspective) frankly
informed his mother that it was 'a mistake all through'. 'It was,' he
says, with still greater accuracy, 'a disgusting subject, but not made
disgusting enough.' However, this does not quite exhaust the
difficulty. 'Disgusting enough' _for what_? It could hardly have been
made more disgusting (in fact a good deal of repulsive detail was
actually removed in the reprint) without becoming a mere study of
horror and grime in itself and for its own sake--the sort of thing
which he had long ago fulminated against in the tales of Ptrus Borel.
But this was certainly not his object. On the other hand, if the
object was what it holds itself out to be--the satire by parody of
books like _Jack Sheppard_, with something more than a glance backward
at _Eugene Aram_, and something of a glance sideways at _Oliver
Twist_, then one may question, first, whether it is not a little too
disgusting as it is, and secondly, whether in any true sense it 'gets
at' any of the originals. It is neither melodramatic enough, nor
romantic enough, nor sentimental enough to do this: nor does it
caricature any of these features sufficiently. On the other hand, as a
piece of _Jonathan Wild_ irony, though quite admirable in parts, it is
not sustained enough: the author either cannot or will not keep on the
grimace and gesture of the half-Mephistophelian, half-angelic mentor;
and is constantly telling a plain tale, by no means disagreeable
except for the unusual sordidness of the characters. In fact we have
another admission from him, which might also be anticipated by a
tolerably keen critic, that he had 'a sneaking kindness' for his
heroine. We know he has, and so have we: and therefore we are not
pleased when poor Mrs. Cat comes to such an extremely painful end. In
short the author never knows quite what hare he is hunting: and the
reader is perpetually puzzled and vexed at the way in which the dogs
change scent and course.

Resist this puzzlement, however--or better still, recognize the fact
once for all, in virtue of and in duty to your critical faculties, and
then let it 'lie on the table'--make up your mind not to an orderly
_menu_ of three courses and a dessert, but to picnic and pot-luck--and
you will find that you get this, and a good deal more. In the first
place, _Catherine_ is Thackeray's first considerable and substantial
_story_. Most of the things he had done in this kind had been slight
sketches; the _Yellowplush Papers_ were only connected by the
personage (a very minor one) of their narrator: while the great, the
really gigantic, Goliah, though entire and perfect in his delightful
self, had merely a bundle of yarns to give us. _Catherine_ is a
complete novel; there is beginning, middle, and end; not yet perfect
but very well advanced character, sustained in different cases and
personages throughout the book; good conversation and description; as
well as no small manifestation of the author's peculiar fashion of
showmanship; still more of his idiosyncrasy of style; and not a little
of his predilection for a special subject and period--the manners,
customs, speech, and folk of the eighteenth century. No wonder Carlyle
thought it 'wonderful': for it begins with one of the vivid, slightly
garrulous, half-historical, half-picturesque settings which he had
done more than anybody else to teach Thackeray, but which Thackeray
had, almost before Carlyle taught him, struck out and adjusted to his
own idiosyncrasy. And this is well followed up. The opening chapters
of _Catherine_, despite the company to which we are introduced, are
absolutely of the best novel-romance kind--as good as Scott or
Fielding, with a very remarkable _difference_. The difference is that
which, in the middle of the sixteenth century, Alfonso Garcia
Matamoros, most wonderful of forgotten pedants, anticipated M. de
Buffon by laying down as _habitus orationis a cujusque hominis natura
fluens_. 'The habit of the expression flowed from the nature' of
Thackeray: it was the special 'cut of _his_ jib'. To define it is as
impossible as not to recognize it; to describe it or part of it piece
by piece is not difficult; to exemplify it would take more space than
here can be given, and would be both dull and unnecessary when the
pieces themselves are to hand. There is a curious saturation with
history and literature which betrays itself, not in digression or
padding, but by constant allusion and suggestion; a light, current,
apparently facile, sketching of scene and character which suddenly
plunges (as a great phrase of Walt Whitman's has it) to 'the accepted
hells beneath', but recovers itself at once and goes placidly on;
above all, a shower of original and memorable phrases, never paraded,
never dwelt upon too long, but more absolutely startling in its unique
felicity than the most laboured conceits of mere phrasemongers.

It is of course true that before long, the want of thorough
_digestion_ in the scheme begins to betray itself; and the rather
worse than picaresque degradation of the characters begins to be
irksome. 'A hero' (under which term a heroine may be included) 'ought
to be good,' said the neo-classics--foolishly, no doubt. But somehow
_Catherine_ shows us a not quite so foolish side in the saying. 'A
hero ought to be successful'; foolish again, but once more with a
certain justification from this singular story. Moreover,
Thackeray--partly following the picaresque tradition; partly perhaps
half weary of his task; partly under the generous delusion which makes
the neophyte of genius give too much--has overloaded his story with
incident in proportion to its length, and has made leaps and bounds of
omission which, possible in a chronicle-drama, are dangerous in a
novel. There is stuff here enough for a three-volume novel and the
actual story is a short one-volume tale. Ensign Macshane is admirable,
but somehow he seems to belong to another story. The triumph of
'Captain Wood', alias Corporal Brock, at Court, &c., though not
absolutely impossible, is one of the fatal 'improbable possibilities':
and Thackeray, though he is quite right in his doctrine that a villain
is not a villain pure and simple, somehow makes Captain Wood too much
of two gentlemen at once--or rather two blackguards--one a quite
tolerable rascal and the other an atrocious ruffian. Galgenstein, the
best sustained character throughout, has little individuality: and it
must be a very singular taste that can enjoy Tom Billings in any way.
While as for 'Cat' herself, she is, like her history, that most
dangerous thing, a failure of a masterpiece. And so it happens that
though the excellences of the thing are plentifully provided up to the
very close, ghastly as it is, the faulty disposition of these
excellences and the company in which they find themselves make the
book almost impossible to _enjoy._ 'There are too many cinders in this
mashed potato', as an acute though unprofessional critic once put
it--not of _Catherine_ indeed, but in terms thoroughly applicable
thereto.[8]

    [Footnote 8: No account of _Catherine_ would be complete
    without some reference to the curious and unlucky fact that
    soon afterwards appeared a _second_ Catherine Hayes (b.
    1825), an Irish lady of unblemished reputation and a singer
    of considerable repute, actually known later to Thackeray
    himself. She seems to have taken the matter quite sensibly;
    but the Irish papers raised an absurd fuss, perhaps partly
    due to Ensign Macshane, though he is a very good fellow for
    a rascal. But the disturbance and its ultra-farcical and
    almost inconceivable further result belong to the
    _Pendennis_ time.]

The current of thought which produced _Catherine_ is unmistakable in
the article _Going to See a Man Hanged_, which appeared a little later
in the year and before the breakdown of Mrs. Thackeray's health; but
here the ironic handling is purposely made to pass into that indignant
sentiment which is so often its next door neighbour in Thackeray
Street. The anti-capital-punishment fad was one of the special
crochets of mid-century Liberalism, and he kept to it for some time:
but in his later and wiser days admitted that he was wrong. The leader
of the party on the occasion was the late Lord Houghton.

The favourite English contrast of the tragic and the farcical appears
well enough in _Cox's Diary_, which, under the infinitely inferior
title of _Barber Cox and the Cutting of his Comb_, appeared in
Cruikshank's _Comic Almanac_ for 1840, before the completion of
_Catherine_, though after the appearance of most of it, and months
before the beginning of disaster. It ranks, naturally and in more than
place of appearance, with _The Fatal Boots_. Both are intimately and
specifically connected with their illustrations: and both are
deliberate extravaganzas. But the _Diary_ seems to me to be not merely
far the pleasanter, but also much the better of the two. Grant the
_oncle d'Amrique_ and the missing will (and if you will _not_ grant
these things what becomes of half the novels and half the dramas in
the world?) and there remains no great improbability in any incident
or character--only a permissible farce-distortion. No very original
figures are wanted to work the puppet show, and none appear: while
most of them, if not all, in Thackeray's own favourite metaphor 'go
back to their box' to be used again. But the whole goes trippingly
off: the dialogue is mostly admirable; the dinner and ball to the
nobility (no new thing of course) is very light and good; and as for
the billiard chapter (appropriately assigned to the month of April) it
could not be better:--'these dabels is goot' indeed! I have sometimes
thought that the piece has an added interest as being probably not
unlike what was wanted of Dickens when he was asked to carry on
Seymour's idea of the book that he called _Pickwick_; while it no
doubt owes something to the great Mr. Jorrocks, who had appeared a
very little earlier. Nobody, of course, would dream of putting it in
competition or comparison with Thackeray's best work, or even his
second best. But still it shows how he could give idiosyncrasy and
'turn' to things almost quite in common form, how perennial and
perdurable his humour was. You might get parallels in story for almost
every chapter of _Cox_ from Theodore Hook. You might read them,
_once_. I have read _Cox's Diary_ at least a score of times.

_A Shabby Genteel Story_, unlike _Catherine_, was written, as
Thackeray himself says in the pathetic note prefixed to it when it
appeared in the _Miscellanies_, at the 'sad period of his life'; it
was indeed actually interrupted by his misfortunes and never finished.
For _Philip_, which, since its composition twenty years later, has
usually had the _Story_ prefixed to it as at once _lever de rideau_
and Introduction, is in no sense the finish of this, but only a sort
of long distant sequel, almost less really connected than _The
Virginians_ is with _Esmond_. Except for the _saudades_--the
remembrances of things old and sad and sweet--there was very little
reason why Thackeray should have made such connexion as there is at
all: and he has taken liberties unusual even with him in the process.
George Brandon (or George Brand Firmin) and Mr. Tufton Hunt are
transferred from Oxford to Cambridge (a migration at which no member
of the former University will raise one note of protest), and the
process by which Brandon 'went out in medicine' will give considerable
thread to untwist, chronologically and otherwise, to any literal and
painstaking commentator: not to mention that from having been, though
a _rou_, a rather exceptionally good scholar, he becomes a mere
quoter of the Latin grammar. One cannot say that Caroline would _not_
have developed into the Little Sister: but there is no essential
community between them, as there is between Beatrix Esmond and the
Baroness Bernstein. For this and other reasons it seems unnecessary to
apologize for separating the _Story_ once more from its afterthought,
and putting it in its proper place.

It is not much wonder that it remained unfinished. It was actually
during its composition that the author first noticed the symptoms of
his wife's malady. It does not seem to have been liked, for, referring
to it in prosperous _Cornhill_ days to his mother, he speaks of his
straits for money, and of the publisher having 'refused him 15'
apparently on this very account. Yet it is on the whole
extraordinarily good. Among that peculiar class of creations which may
almost be called romantic farce--and as you have romantic tragedy and
romantic comedy, why not?--Andrea Fitch deserves one of the very
highest places. He is hardly even exaggerated; there is no occasion to
suspend disbelief about him; he is simply a well-natured, not
ungifted, but weak-brained British snob, who is sincerely aping a
French _buveur d'eau_, and has all his good points and none of his bad
ones. This is the way in which 'Missafis' played his little part;
there is no doubt of it: there is nothing to say but 'Pass! artist
with the romantic properties: and all's well!'

Perhaps there is a very little more exaggeration in his amorous
Marianne, but not much: and the same may be said, with even more
emphasis on the 'not much', of the Gann family (barring Caroline for
the moment) and their domestic, and their friends from the infatuated
Swigsby downwards, and almost everybody. Of Caroline herself it may
perhaps be hinted that we see rather too little to judge how much of a
success she would have been. The Little Sister gives us little help:
we ought to have seen the Caroline of the sham honeymoon and the not
sham desertion more fully than in the mere retrospect. Certainly there
is no fault in her here, nor is there in Cinqbars or Hunt, though they
are more of types than Thackeray usually allows himself to draw. The
most questionable figure is beyond all doubt the hero Brandon: and
here once more we may trace the remains of the novitiate. It was
always necessary (I do not say that it was a merit) for Thackeray
either to like or to dislike his principal characters. He had not been
able to make up his mind whether he liked or disliked 'Cat', and so he
could never quite bring her off. He had nearly made up his mind that
he disliked Brandon (there is no doubt that he did by the time that he
resuscitated him as Dr. Firmin), but he had not quite: and once more
there is wavering in the touch. The story is such a torso that from
some points of view it is unfair to judge it at all. But for those who
are not shocked by its 'shabby gentility' (of which more later), it
ought always to have very considerable charm. It is not the least of
the innumerable _bienfaits de la lune_ to her children that she
inspired 'Pallid horb!' and the context thereof.

Even more closely connected with the disaster, though not actually cut
short by it, was the article on Fielding, which accordingly I put
next. It was written (he told Mrs. Brookfield) at Margate, the scene
of _A Shabby Genteel Story_, the author, after his odd fashion,
walking out every day to a 'little bowling-green with an arbour',
writing there, and coming back to wonder what was the matter with his
wife. He speaks of it elsewhere, apparently, to his mother, as 'nearly
a week's work' (showing that he cannot have been long absent on each
occasion), and he naturally did not consider five guineas a lavish
payment. Indeed, it represents about a guinea a thousand words, which
(though better than Southey's 'ten shillings for a morning's work' in
_his_ novitiate fifty years earlier) is not precisely munificent.

The article must be read with interest because it is the most
considerable purely literary study of a single author that Thackeray
had yet done; because that author is _the_ author of all others whom
he most resembles, and to whom he is most indebted; and because it is
a distinct anticipation of _The English Humourists._ But it cannot be
called a very good article: and it is impossible not to think that the
circumstances explain some of its special lacks of goodness.
Thackeray, it has been said, was always an unequal and incalculable
critic, and a certain desultoriness was of the essence of his writing.
But he generally manages to convey a curious unity in diversity into
his compositions--a unity which is here quite wanting. Though by no
means pinched for room, he not only does not cover his subject but
does not attempt to cover it, and deals with hardly anything but the
plays and _Amelia_, his attention to which is itself a sign. For we
know that the later 'Amelia' of _Vanity Fair_, while she got her name
from Fielding, got at least part of her nature from poor Mrs.
Thackeray herself. The disproportionate amount of space devoted to
Fielding's morality is, of course, in character with Thackeray's
criticism generally: and the not disproportionate but rather exclusive
stress on Fielding's tenderness likewise. But the first has a quite
evident special connexion with the Jack Sheppard and Dick Turpin
business, which had recently been filling his mind, as the second has
with his actual trouble. One bold but perfectly true saying may be
quoted, because of his constant generosity both to Cruikshank and to
Dickens. 'Fielding's men and Hogarth's are Dickens's and Cruikshank's
drawn with ten times more skill and force.' _And it was so_.

After Mrs. Thackeray's illness declared itself, the whole family were,
for a certain time, more established in Paris than anywhere else--the
children with their grandparents, Thackeray himself either with his
wife, or, when she was moved to a _maison de sant_, in lodgings near
her. It was natural, therefore, that much of the production of the end
of 1840 and the greater part of 1841 should have more or less
reference to the French capital, and this is the case with nearly the
whole remaining matter of this chapter, _The Second Funeral of
Napoleon_, the _Corsair_ paper, two of the _Britannia_ articles (the
third, 'Reading a Poem', connects itself rather with the 'Yellowplush'
series, but is inferior), and the memorable _Memorials of
Gormandizing_.

Although almost any one of the more considerable pieces which
Thackeray produced during his nearly ten years of struggle would have
done for a text, there was reason in the selection of _The Second
Funeral_ for reprint in the _Cornhill Magazine_ three years after his
death, unusual as such a proceeding would have been in any case. For
Thackeray himself had never reprinted it: and though it did not miss
the admiration of some good wits at the time of its appearance (with
the admirable _Chronicle of the Drum_ affixed), it was quite a failure
in point of sale. Very few of the royalties--sevenpence halfpenny out
of half-a-crown--on which both he himself and FitzGerald
characteristically dwelt in letters, ever found their way into his
pocket. It was, moreover, the first substantial text (though murmurs
of the kind had been heard before) for that parrot chorus of 'Cynic!'
which has never entirely ceased, though it has of late years become
_amoebean_--the other parrots answering with 'Sentimentalist!' Of this
curious duet-contest of silliness one can only say 'et _vitul_ tu
dignus et hic', which is appropriate enough, though _ansere_ would be
better still if it would only scan. We shall have to do with it often.
But the present occasion was certainly exemplary of that peculiar
combination of cant and folly which is specially English and which
Thackeray was born to scourge: as well as of the other combination of
folly not exactly with cant, but with _blague_, which is as specially
French, and to which he was the equally predestined boatswain's mate.
There were certainly sincere and ardent admirers of Napoleon in France
then, but the government and the official people generally would (to
use the old story), if a hatchment had been put up to him with
_Resurgam_, have taken good care to have it changed into _Requiescat
in pace_: while all the business of Joinville's homecoming was in the
lowest vein of Bobadilian swagger and theatrical sham. But the English
objection to Thackeray's treatment of this, though not so ignoble, was
sillier. We had fought Napoleon fairly, and though, after one
magnanimous attempt, it had been found impossible to treat him with
absolute generosity after he was beaten, we had not, except in the
view of very sentimental people, treated him unfairly then. We had, in
the actual business of the 'translation', behaved with a correctness
which neither Lancelot not Amadis could surpass. Further, Napoleon,
though of marvellous genius in war and politics, had no other good
quality that the most amiable and resourceful recording angel could
manage to discover in, or extemporaneously add to, the list of human
virtues. Yet Thackeray is not hard on him; he is never rude to him;
except slightly touching on his creation of a sham aristocracy he
hardly says anything unfavourable of him. It is the 'Vanity of
Vanities',--the humbug in part, the hollowness in all but whole, of
the performance--that he touches with a satire, now light, now grave,
but never heavy, an irony thrown up by humour of gayer kind that is
irresistible and unsurpassable. He had never perhaps done a faultless
thing before: he did one here. The alternations but never discords of
mood and tone; the admirable descriptions, of the peculiar Thackerayan
kind, using utmost economy of words to produce the fullest largeness
of effect; the manners-and character-painting; the absolute
idiosyncrasy of style--all these are marvellous. They had nobody among
rising English men of letters in that winter of 1840-1 who had
done--there were not more than three or four other men living who were
to do--anything so perfect in any style as this is in its own.

The other articles must be passed over briefly, though not one is
negligible, and all (save perhaps 'Reading a Poem') are admirable. The
additional Paris Sketches from the _Corsair_ and the _Britannia_ are
better than the _average_ of _The Sketch Book_> itself. 'Men and
Coats'[9] (not unsuggested perhaps by _Sartor_ and by Diderot) is very
pleasant. But _Memorials of Gormandizing_ rises to a higher strain. It
appears to have been intended to form part of a book, '_Dinner
Reminiscences, or The Young Gormandizer's Guide_' which was actually
advertised in _The Second Funeral_, but which never appeared: though
there are some 'condolences and vails' for it in other articles which
will come later. The 'Memorials' as they stand could not be better.
The only blot on them--the drinking of Sauterne after Beaune--appears
to have been due to Gustavus, not to Michael Angelo; the actual bills
and menus will be priceless for posterity: and the whole article is
itself a 'made dish', as the honest simple old English phrase goes, of
the most superlative quality.

    [Footnote 9: This was a very little later in composition
    than some pieces to be mentioned in the next chapter. But it
    combines and contrasts with its companion in _Fraser_ very
    happily.]

In fact, from this volume (let us remember, though we postpone, _The
Chronicle of the Drum_, and that 'Dear Lucy' appeared in the
'Memorials') it is evident to any competent judgement what an
amazingly accomplished and versatile genius England had in the
Thackeray who was but just thirty years old. The accomplishment is in
parts still a little behind the variety and the quality, but only a
little: and in parts again it is almost if not quite up to them. The
best of _Catherine_; the best of _A Shabby Genteel Story_; the best of
_Cox's Diary_; all _The Second Funeral_; the handful of lighter
articles; the verse--where else shall we find a twelve or eighteen
months' work of such volume, such vigour, such variety?




IV

THE HOGGARTY DIAMOND, ETC.


_The Great Hoggarty Diamond_, like most of the work dealt with in the
previous chapter, belongs to the period when the shadow was most over
Thackeray: and perhaps in a way it helped, all guiltlessly, to make
that shadow darker. It was actually refused by _Blackwood_--one of the
rare instances of utter and unaccountable mistake on the part of the
usually keen-sighted conductors of that periodical. Although received
and published by _Fraser_, it does not seem to have been liked by the
public (a justification, some may say, of the _Blackwood_ refusal),
and it is said that the author was asked to cut it short. This is not
at all improbable, for the latter part is certainly huddled up: and
not a few things in it would have borne, and actually invited,
expansion in Thackeray's best manner. Nay, its ill-luck seems not to
have entirely abandoned it yet: for the preface of the 'Biographical
Edition' volume in which it occurs says little or nothing about it,
and one careful commentator on Thackeray has pronounced it 'dull'.

Its author, on the other hand, thought it the best thing he had
written before _Vanity Fair_, and as usual he was right, even if, as
in the case of _A Shabby Genteel Story_, he might have been in danger
of a 'pathetic fallacy'. For, as he also says himself, his heart was
very soft when he was writing it, with thoughts that, on Lord
Chesterfield's maxim, might have made it hard.[10] Not merely his
wife's actual illness, but the loss of their second child a year or
two earlier, as well as the pressure of want of money, have left their
marks on it: there are not a few tears in the ink with which it is
written. Yet these tears have made the record in no way thin or pale
or washy; in fact the present writer's judgement of it was formed when
he had little or no knowledge of the circumstances of its composition.
If it is not so _perfect_ as _The Second Funeral_, it must be
remembered that it is creation and not merely criticism: if it has
less power than parts of _Catherine_, it is far less unequal; if it
has not the wilder humour of _Yellowplush_ and _Gahagan_, it tries
more difficult strings and does not fail in the trial. And that
extraordinary fullness and variety of living presentation which was to
be--which was already--Thackeray's great and almost unique attribute
appears here marvellously to those who have eyes. The story is but a
little one still--still only, as it were, a one-decker beside the
regulation three. But in the crew of the average three-decker itself,
during the three generations or thereabouts during which that noble
craft swept the seas, men thought themselves lucky if they found one
or two, extremely lucky if they found half a dozen, really live
characters, neither hopelessly wooden nor merely replicas of something
antecedent. Everybody in _The Great Hoggarty Diamond_ is alive from
forecastle to cabin. The captain (to clench and drop the metaphor) is
not the best of all, but that can hardly be helped. A hero who is also
the narrator takes upon himself almost impossible difficulties: it is
well if he gets out of them no worse than does Samuel Titmarsh. Mrs.
Titmarsh, though she is hardly the heroine, and though of course the
contemners of Amelia and Helen cannot be expected to admire her, plays
her part well enough. The pathos of it and of the whole need not annoy
any sensible person: it is not dashed and brewed to mawkishness in the
fashion of some writers, and it certainly sets off the comic and
satiric parts legitimately enough. The richness and variety of these
and of the characters that work them out are quite astonishing; Lady
Drum of herself would almost carry the thing off. If you take her as a
mere _menteuse_, half the fun is lost. It is quite clear that she did
know something about the Hoggarties, though she romanced it up with a
mere tissue of fiction. And all the other 'noble' characters, Lady
Fanny and Lady Jane, Tiptoff and Preston (though the latter is slight
and almost conventional), fit very well. On the other hand, the
contrast of the Roundhands, Gus Hoskins, and the rest, supplies the
foil in Thackeray's own special way, and they again clamour for
comparison with such originals as they had in Hook and others.

    [Footnote 10: _Le mal moral endurcit le coeur autant que le
    mal physique l'attendrit_.]

But the author has not contented himself with a mere contrast of
almost promiscuous manner-sketches. He has knit it all with another
study of 'diddling', not now mere gambling, but commercial fraud of
the kind which, never unknown, was becoming commoner than ever in
consequence of the mania for companies. And all the studies here, from
that extremely human swindler Mr. Brough downwards, are again
admirable. Compare, for instance, the advance in Captain Fizgig on
Captain Tagrag in _Cox's Diary_. They are very close, but the later
figure is far less of a caricature, and, little as he has to do, more
finished and 'signed'. As for Mrs. Hoggarty, the gallery of
Thackeray's intolerable female creations--aunts, mothers-in-law, and
so forth--a chamber of horrors in a fashion, but of most attractive
and irresistible horrors to those who do not suffer from them in the
flesh--a gallery effecting purgation by pity and terror like
few--could most certainly not spare her. And over all there is the
perpetual soft 'snowing of meat and drink' in the shape of delectable
and memorable phrase and situation. From the rosolio and the history
of the miniature onward the situations are inexhaustible and the
language always more than matches the situations, while never drumming
them in and bawling for attention to them. It was the absence of this
latter practice, I suppose, which made people so slow to recognize
Thackeray; they had not sharpness of eye or fineness of ear enough to
detect, and therefore they did not enjoy, the constant _doubleness_ of
speech and suggestion and allusion. Even for those who are more
fortunate or better trained the supply is so plentiful and so
unostentatious that there is no getting to an end of it. You may read
Thackeray fifty times and find something fresh at the fiftieth. But
with a certain class of readers the enjoyment never begins: and it is
not surprising that they feel themselves defrauded. The adventures of
a mere clerk in a swindling company, who is himself not even a
swindler! 'Go to,' they say, 'this is milk and water!'

At the same time it would be distinctly uncritical not to recognize
that there were some excuses for the readers of 1840 and thereabouts.
In the first place, say what we may, there is no doubt that the two
generations since (taking the usual intervals of thirty years at 1870
and 1900), nay, that even readers a decade later, had a great and
illegitimate advantage--that of looking back at this early work
through the later and greater. It is certainly easier to detect the
virtues of Yellowplush and Titmarsh after they have been emphasized,
isolated, magnified in _Vanity Fair_ and _Pendennis_ than to
anticipate _Pendennis_ and _Vanity Fair_ from _Miss Shum's Husband_
and _The Hoggarty Diamond_. Not only were the actual qualities lesser
in themselves for the most part, and more mixed with defects; but they
were presented in a manner perhaps not wilfully but inevitably suited
to disgust or at any rate not to attract the public. Yet these readers
cannot be wholly acquitted, and they undoubtedly represented an
ebb-tide in appreciation. They were ill-served by their professional
Mentors--general English criticism in the second quarter of the
century is, with some great exceptions, far inferior to that of the
first and third. Nor did they do much for themselves. They had left
Tennyson to 'ripen his wine', as the French say, for ten long years,
without caring in the least whether he ripened it or not. They had
turned an obstinately deaf ear to Browning. They mostly still thought
Carlyle a crackbrained jargonist. They had welcomed Dickens, much less
for his real genius than because everybody, from pit to gallery, could
see that he was 'funny', and because he both harrowed and edified the
gallery in the way they liked. Thackeray, on the other hand, was a
puzzle: and the age, which was at least honest, was not one of those
which feel that it is creditable to like puzzles. It did not care
whether this was creditable or not: it knew that it did not like them.

Yet he went on undauntedly accumulating his proofs for the Order of
the Spirit. That he would have done so without the pressure of
necessity there is, perhaps, little reason to believe. He must in any
case have drawn--it seems to have been as necessary for him to draw as
to breathe; and he must have furnished some of these drawings with the
quaint letterpress which we know so well. He might, for his own or
others' amusement, have expanded these things now and then into pieces
like _The Rose and the Ring_. He was a great letter-writer as it was:
when it becomes possible to collect all his extant letters they will
form no mean body in bulk and an extraordinary one in merit. But as an
independent gentleman or a place-holder, he would probably have
rivalled Horace Walpole in epistolary quantity. Otherwise we should
probably have lost him--a fact which may be pointed out but certainly
need not be moralled on.

Some little pieces which followed _The Hoggarty Diamond_, and one or
two that slightly preceded it, are mostly trifles. _Rolandseck_ and
_Little Spitz_ owe their origin no doubt to Thackeray's older Weimar
experiences, refreshed by those of his recent visits to German baths
in hopes of benefit to his wife. The better _Sultan Stork_ is a fresh
plume in the mighty helmet of the invincible Major Gahagan. _Dickens
in France_ partly does the justice which Thackeray always liked to do
to his successful rival, partly takes up that old theme of the 'Kean'
article in the _Sketch Book_--the extraordinary fancy of the French
for travestying English life, and taking the travesty quite seriously.
The _compte rendu_ of the play and its intervals is quite admirable:
and if the 'thonging' of Jules Janin which follows, itself treats the
matter with rather too much seriousness, there was some excuse for it.
'Honest Janin' (for Thackeray in his usual way became reconciled to
him directly he knew him) is not the only French critic--nor the only
French critic of the name of Jules--who has criticized English
literature without being able to read it: and the practice is
certainly not one to be encouraged.

But these things are little more than, in the excellent Carlylean
phrase, 'honest journeywork in default of better'. Thackeray did not
himself reprint any of them, though no doubt many poor people would
have been glad to do so had they been theirs: and I at least should
have been sorry not to possess _Sultan Stork_ and _Dickens in France_.
With _The Fitz-Boodle Papers_ and _Men's Wives_ it is different. These
he took care to reprint (not quite completely, but nearly so) in the
_Miscellanies_ of 1857; they contain some of his best and most
characteristic work; and it may be thought surprising that he did not
publish them separately very much earlier. But he had probably been
disgusted by the comparative failure of _The Paris Sketch Book_, the
_Comic Sketches_, and _The Second Funeral_: it is to be observed that
_The Hoggarty Diamond_ itself never appeared as a book till eight
years after its magazine date and when _Vanity Fair_ had turned the
tide. As for these groups themselves, they are both due ostensibly to
the new _eidolon_ George Fitz-Boodle: and 'Confessions',
'Professions', and _Men's Wives_ are in fact mere sub-titles. Nor is
it quite superfluous to point out that the new _nom de guerre_ and the
personage attached to it have a certain connexion with reality.
Thackeray does not want to confine himself to burlesque of any kind
such as Yellowplush and Gahagan could appropriately father. He is
flying at higher game than the lower middle-class society, for which
the Titmarshes were suitable till Michael Angelo left his Paris and
London Bohemianism and established himself at Mrs. Clapperclaw's
lodgings. Fitz-Boodle is of the clubs clubby, as Thackeray, not merely
or mainly of his own choice, had been forced to be now for years.
There is never so much of Thackeray in him as there is in Titmarsh the
greater: but he has Thackerayan touches. Indeed, the people who go
wrong in trying to identify certain of Thackeray's characters stock
and block with real persons, might take a lesson from these various
_eidola_. They always have something Thackerayan; they never by any
chance contain anything like the whole Thackeray. As he dealt with
himself so did he with others.

Yet I am much mistaken if, in these Fitz-Boodle Papers, there is not
something of a Thackeray more developed, more 'grown-up' than any that
we have yet seen. In all that has gone before, even in _The Hoggarty
Diamond_, even in _The Second Funeral_, there has been a certain
youthfulness. The writer enters into his characters and their life
with marvellous completeness and accuracy, but he does not yet quite
dominate them. Here he begins to do so, and even in a way to dominate
life itself, in that singular fashion which was to distinguish him
later, and in which only Tourgunieff among still later novelists
approaches him. To a certain extent this may of course be set down to
the advance of years: for nothing in these two groups is earlier (as
far as appearance goes) than the end of 1842, and some things in them
are as late as the end of 1843. Nor was the Greek comic poet quite
right when he said that 'number of years brings nothing but old age
itself'. Still, eighteen months, merely as eighteen months, is not
much. It is impossible not to assign some influence to the sorrow and
to the hardship through which he had passed, among the influences
which made him know the earthly as well as the heavenly powers better.
He has not, of course, deserted the comic, even the farcical: but
farce and comedy are shot and shadowed throughout with a deeper tissue
and atmosphere of 'criticism of life'. At first Fitz-Boodle is almost
a conventional 'plunger': and his contempt of 'littery gents' and
awkward exception of 'Oliver Yorke' form part of that rather clumsy
_prosopopoeia_ or _eidolopoeia_ which has been more than once referred
to. Even the 'Professions', though full of clever things, and in the
'gormandizing' case almost of the best class, may be dismissed if any
one likes (though I should not like) as merely very excellent fooling.

But the 'Confessions' are much more. When he republished the group,
Thackeray left out 'Minna Lwe', perhaps because of too close a
personal touch (for there certainly does seem to be something of the
kind), perhaps because he thought it over-farcical. But it was rightly
restored, forty years ago, for more than completeness' sake, inasmuch
as Dorothea and Ottilia need that Ebrew Jewess to set off themselves
and the tale of George Fitz-Boodle's misfortunes in love. Compare
these things with the five or six years earlier _Professor_, good as
that is, and the advance will be seen at once. Here, too, as for
obvious and numerous reasons was fitting, does that 'Heinesque'
character which has also been noticed come out more powerfully than
ever--the cynical sentimentalism, the satiric romance, which seems to
puzzle some folk so hopelessly in these two masters and which is so
delectable in its amaritude to others. Nor should we miss one of those
quaint infusions, if not of actual experience of actual conditions and
surroundings, which go for so much in Thackeray--the episode of the
polyonymous Mr. Blake and the Mediterranean heath and Connemara.
Thackeray had just been in Connemara when it was written: and, though
only a German commentator will take the rest of the anecdote as
autobiographical, it knits the old times of travel and of many other
things to the new with that magic touch of association which only such
knittings possess.

Another point, though of a different nature, must be noticed, because
of its great curiosity. When the late Dr. Garnett republished
Shelley's long lost _Victor and Cazire_ I observed at once the
extraordinary resemblance between the contrasted 'Willow-songs' of
'Ottilia' and one of the poems thus disinterred. Dr. Garnett, when I
told him of it, acknowledged the resemblance, but thought it
impossible that Thackeray could have seen the poem. I cannot in the
least see the impossibility. We know that at Cambridge he was much
interested in Shelley, when Shelley had only been dead less than ten
years. There must have been copies of the book about: for we are told
that something like a hundred escaped destruction, and that at least
two reviews of it appeared. Why should not Thackeray have seen one, or
seen the piece copied somewhere? As not everybody who has a Shelley
certainly possesses _Victor and Cazire_, it may be as well to print
the piece. As will be seen, there is no question of plagiarism
whatsoever, but only of reminiscent parody. The likeness of rhythm and
spirit is unmistakable.

    Fierce roars the midnight storm
      O'er the wild mountain,
    Dark clouds the night deform,
      Swift rolls the fountain--

    See o'er yon rocky height
      Dim mists are flying--
    See, by the moon's pale light,
      Poor Laura's dying.

    Shame and remorse shall howl
      By her false pillow--
    Fiercer than storms that roll
      O'er the white billow;

    No hand her eyes to close,
      When life is flying,
    But she will find repose,
      For Laura's dying!

    Then will I seek my love,
      Then will I cheer her.
    Then my esteem will prove,
      When no friend is near her.

    On her grave I will lie
      When life is parted,
    On her grave I will die,
      For the false-hearted.

Dr. Garnett, though he had not noticed the 'Ottilia' song, thought
this piece might be the plagiarism from 'Monk' Lewis which actually
caused the withdrawal of the book. It is more Delia Cruscan than
Lewisian, I should say; while everybody will, of course, notice the
resemblance of the whole group to Fitz-Eustace's song in _Marmion_.

_Men's Wives_ are more unequal: and it is not, I think, difficult to
discover the reason. The first, 'Mr. and Mrs. Frank Berry,' is a
mixture of some of Thackeray's most favourite motives, handled in
nearly his happiest manner. The 'Slaughter House' reminiscences--still
a little revengeful, but far from wholly so--and the fight are beyond
praise: the dinner, the partial revolt of Frank, and his submission to
his Angelica are not unworthy of their overture. And the whole has the
right and harmonious tone which can hardly be given except by a man
who is applying universal knowledge of humanity to a part of humanity
which he knows _intus et in cute_.

But in the much longer and more important Ravenswing' this is not
quite the case. It also is full of good things:--the ejaculation of
Mr. Hooker Walker that the eyes of his beloved are as 'big as
b-b-billiard balls, by Jove!' and the return from Richmond are only the
chief among a hundred touches admirable in phrase and situation. But
without sharing in the least the objection to 'lowness' one cannot but
remark, not wholly with satisfaction, that the author has dropped back
to his shady, his 'shabby genteel' surroundings, and that in doing so
he has rather forgotten his present mouthpiece. Was George Fitz-Boodle
exactly the sort of man to know all about 'The Bootjack' and the loves
and quarrels of tradesmen? He might have known the Ravenswing as a
_diva_; he might have heard a great deal of gossip about her; but this
intimate chroniclership is not endowed with verisimilitude. The
character-interest, too, of the piece is rather too much in the sense
of a theatrical 'character-part'. Nobody is other than human: it was
as impossible by this time for anybody of Thackeray's making not to
live as for a coat of Mr. Woolsey's not to fit. But the humanity is
more typical than individual: more conventional and superficial than
deep and ingrained; more French than English. And the result is that,
though Morgiana is a good creature, one feels that her adventures are
perhaps rather unduly prolonged, and does not care to see her through
them quite as much as usual. In hardly any case, I think, often as I
have read everything of Thackeray's, can I take up a piece of his,
small or great, without reading it through. I have read 'The
Ravenswing' through more than once or half a dozen times; but I have
also _not_ read it through sometimes. A scene amuses; but you can lay
it down.

Now I believe the explanation of this to be furnished by the actual
postcript, which declared that the body of the piece was 'written a
long time since'. Without internal evidence it would of course be
extremely innocent to take this as evidence: but it happens to confirm
the internal evidence and be confirmed by it remarkably. 'The
Ravenswing' bears all the appearance of a piece written at least as
early as _A Shabby Genteel Story_ in the main, but doctored with some
more modern touches--the passage about 'Members deceased' in Clubs is
only one of a dozen--and put by the author under the cloak of
Fitz-Boodle when it had been proved that the magazine public did not
dislike the cut of that jib.

On the other hand 'Dennis Haggarty's Wife' is certified as not much
earlier than the date of its appearance by evidence of two different
kinds. On the face of it it could not have been written before
Thackeray's Irish tour of 1842--the description of the Irish part is
too fresh and vivid. But the manner of it would give bail for its
maturity if there were no such circumstantial corroboration. It is, of
course, not long--a trifle some would call it. But where has even
Thackeray exhibited better that dreadful irony of fate of which his
delineation is always so much more effective than the plasterings with
gloom and grime in which our later pessimists have indulged? He never
did a maturer thing: though he has dashed the strokes with something
of passion. Indeed, none of his numerous pictures of connexions by
marriage has a more vivid quality--goes more 'to the blood', as the
good old phrase went, than this. If we had that story which has never
yet been told but which he says[11] he told to the lady at dinner
between the entrees and the roast', we should know all about it; but
as it is we can only guess.

    [Footnote 11: In the _Roundabout_ on 'Two Children in Black'.]

As to the fourth, 'The ----'s Wife' (which he did not himself reprint,
though it was reprinted in America during his lifetime, and which has
only recently been added to his works in England), it does not seem to
me at all unworthy of its company. It has the German stamp which is on
so much of the Fitz-Boodle division: it is effectively told: and
Angelica Diabolica has already something of Beatrix in her. Probably
he thought that there was too much romance in it and not quite enough:
while on the other hand there was not enough satire of romance.
Perhaps he had--I do not know--gone closer to some German or French
original than he cared to do in a piece not burlesqued. But though the
thing is no wonder, it is quite good enough to resume its original
place in the quartette, which it indeed completes rather artistically.
For 'Mr. and Mrs. Frank Berry' is comedy with the mildest tragic
touch, and some farce to compensate for this; 'The Ravenswing' is
ungenteel comedy, farcical too; 'Dennis Haggarty' is pure tragedy with
only the permissible lighter overture; and 'The ----'s Wife' comes in
well to these with its romantic tragedy only blended with a satiric
grimness. Altogether Mr. George Fitz-Boodle served his creator well:
and one is rather sorry that that creator's pencil was less busy with
him than his pen. For some reason, or none, there is hardly any part
of Thackeray's writings so destitute of light from 'the author's own
candles' as that written under Fitz-Boodle's name: and unless I am
deceived we do not even know what he was like in the flesh.




V

THE IRISH SKETCH BOOK--CONTRIBUTIONS
TO THE 'FOREIGN QUARTERLY REVIEW, 1842-4


The extraordinary versatility which has been noted as characterizing
Thackeray's decade of probation is illustrated once more in _The Irish
Sketch Book_. Nor need we pause to inquire whether this versatility
was the restlessness of unsuccessful tentative, the unquiet
persistence which tries all doors before it finds one that gives
access to the whole house. The two volumes differed from any of their
predecessors in more ways than one. They gave much more extensive
handling to a single subject than he had before attempted. They were
much the most serious: for though there is plenty of Thackeray's
lightest touch there is no mere burlesque. Indeed, the resemblance of
_The Paris Sketch Book_ and _The Irish Sketch Book_ is merely verbal
and titular. For the first time, and necessarily, the author was bound
to unity of subject in a work of very considerable substance.

The tour which provided this subject occupied the summer and autumn of
1842: and the record of it was published next year. By the time that
it was begun, Mrs. Thackeray's case, if not quite pronounced hopeless,
was nearly so, and Thackeray's mind must have been settling towards
that hardest of all makings-up.

    Ut quod vides perisse perditum ducas.

Even without the confirmatory letters which have recently been
published, it was always easy to perceive in the book the alternation
of depression, attempt to bid dull care begone, and approaching
cicatrization--to some extent--of the wound. But these are not too
prominent: and they should not be made so artificially in reading it.

Neither need any one be over careful or troubled about its political
colour. It is said, though with some discrepancies of detail, and as
far as I know, not by any one who professes to have seen the document,
that Thackeray wrote, either for the first or the second edition, a
preface strongly condemning English government in Ireland, which was
suppressed at the publisher's desire. And Sir Leslie Stephen expressed
the opinion that Thackeray, had he lived, would have been a Home
Ruler. Sir Leslie did not personally know his future father-in-law. It
is quite likely that the preface was written, and of the tenor
mentioned. But what Thackeray wrote on politics was never of the
smallest importance. He had not 'the political head': if he had been
even wiser than he was he would have said like Mr. Midshipman Easy of
things ecclesiastical, 'Well! I don't understand these things'. And
his opinion, on whatever side of politics it might have been given,
could have been nothing but a curiosity. What is certain is that Irish
'patriotism' was not inclined to take the book as a manifesto on its
side; that there was no political party so often under the lash of
Thackeray's sharpest satire as these same Irish patriots; and that the
lesson of the book certainly has not seemed to all readers to spell
what Sir Leslie thought it spelt. Indeed, a person not unacquainted
with the subject once recommended to all who would understand the
Irish question three books--Spenser's _State of Ireland_, Wolfe Tone's
_Autobiography_, and _The Irish Sketch Book_.

But the importance, for us, of the different constructions put upon it
is that there is not really in it _any_ political colour so
strongly daubed that it interferes with the harmonious composition of
the thing from the artistic point of view, or with the comfortable
reading of it from the humbler point of pastime. From both it seems to
me a very remarkable thing: and there is hardly a book of Thackeray's
that I have read oftener. As has been suggested above, that necessary
unity of subject--or at least of canvas--is a very great gain for him.
No one, speaking critically at all, could say that he was by nature
overprovided with a tendency towards the architectonic: in fact, this
was notoriously his weakest point, if it be not slightly absurd to
apply the term weakness to a source of the greatest possible strength.
Without his _tangential_ quality, the greatest and most delectable
part of Thackeray would not and could not exist. But he had not merely
an excuse for the display of it now: he had a positive call. It was
his business to survey Ireland in zigzag from Dublin to Bantry and
from Waterford to the Giant's Causeway; his duty to take the
miscellany of sport and business, scenery and manners, high and low,
rich and poor, as the stuffing of his book. The only danger was that
he should not be content with the variety of his subject and should
indulge too much in arabesque and grotesque of treatment. He might
have been tempted to do this earlier: but he saved himself completely
from doing it here. No opportunity for really comic handling, within
limits, is lost, but none is forcibly made; and none is 'improved' out
of keeping and decorum. It is curious, and it shows what a master he
was, that he who has undoubtedly worked the burlesque capacities of
Irish character to almost their utmost elsewhere, is quite sober and
faithful in his record of them here: and that the light comedy is as
successful as the merely farcical. From the astonishing fertility of
the Dublin schools in prizemen to the innocent pride of the gentleman
from 'Tchume' in his infallible judgement of the weight of a quarter
of mutton it is all reported in 'the grave and chaste manner'. He does
not 'Theodore Hook it' or 'Dickens it' even with matter so tempting as
that of the behaviour of the college cook at Glengariff. That, on the
other hand, there are some of those 'serious' or 'obvious' outbursts
of his which make some of his critics so angry cannot be denied. He
will flare out at capital punishment, having elsewhere in the book
shown how absolutely necessary it is; he will (shocking to relate!)
commiserate a widow who has a ne'er-do-well son; he will use
exceedingly violent and inconvenient language about convents and Roman
Catholicism generally. In fact, he will be the Thackeray whom we
know--the Thackeray who is Thackeray--and not somebody else. Now we
cannot do without Thackeray: with the somebody else it is but too
probable that we could, and should be happy to, do.

The idiosyncrasy of the book thus consists in a blended and double
unity--that of subject and that of handling. It is at once a panorama
of Ireland and a _poly_, if not quite a _pan-_orama of Thackeray. It
is a book of travels and one of the best: but it is also a kind of
novel, or at least biography, with its author for hero. We have a view
of Irish places and manners in 1842, if not as extensive, at any rate
almost as varied as that of Little Billee during his respite at the
masthead. But we are also personally conducted over Thackerayania in
that year and 1843: and the two experiences, while not in the least
clashing, support and supplement each other marvellously.

Of course this particular application of literature was not absolutely
new: nothing ever is. Not to make a History of Literature out of a
commentary of this kind, it exists before Montaigne and in Montaigne
eminently after a fashion; it is evident enough in Addison; Sterne
adapts it to this very purpose of travel-writing. It had been obvious
to those who could see, in the earlier Thackeray, almost from the very
first. But in himself, hitherto, there had been veils and disguises of
burlesque and grotesque as well as adaptations and adulterations to
suit the various personages assumed--Yellowplush, Gahagan, the
Titmarshes, Fitz-Boodle. And in his predecessors just mentioned, and
others (with the exception of Fielding, who has much less of the
personal element), there had been more or less _pose_, and much more
than less determination (at least in Montaigne and Sterne) to make the
delineation of themselves the first consideration, the subject the
second. It is in this last point that Thackeray differs from all other
writers. If any one thinks that there is in him any pose--any
deliberate self-showmanship, let that person know once for all that he
has utterly failed to comprehend his author. The subjects of most, in
fact of all, other egotistic writers are, as it were, apropos of
themselves; secondary; mere stalking-horses or arquebuss-rests, or
spring-boards. Thackeray's egotism is always apropos of his subject;
subsidiary to it, caused by it. He can, whenever it is necessary, lay
it aside altogether, as Montaigne and Sterne never can. Of the two
absolute summits of his work and of prose fiction--the homecoming of
Rawdon Crawley in _Vanity Fair_, and the mock duel which really closes
_Esmond_--the first contains absolutely nothing of his personality,
and the second so little, that only the most punctilious criticism
need acknowledge it. Thackeray would probably have behaved as the
Marquis of Esmond behaved in the situation: but that is all.

Here, of course, the conditions are different from those of a novel:
but not so very different. The Thackerayan camera has to accept its
scenes, personages, conversations, incidents, from the outside: they
are not invented inside it. But none the less it gives its own
peculiar presentation--its 'Thackeray-type'--of each word, and thing,
and place, and person. A mere catalogue of the gallery would be out of
place here, fondly as one thinks of its individual pictures. The
wonderful sketch of the Kingstown-Dublin road--so vivid and so free
from exaggeration and repetition--with the characteristic self-satire
on it; the Feast of the Lobster; the coach-drive through the
South-Eastern counties--but the catalogue is insinuating itself already.
And the excursions--such as that remarkable one into Irish chapbooks
which had no little effect on Thackeray's future writing--are more than
worthy of the main journey. I used, by the way, to think that
Thackeray must have invented the apparently burlesque verse of the
_Battle of Aughrim_, which is much like his own actual burlesques. But
I found out that it was genuine, though I have mislaid the author's
highly respectable name.

Besides the connexion, not merely with 'Dennis Haggarty's Wife' (see
last chapter), but with _Barry Lyndon_ (see next) and other things, as
well as with his almost assured homelessness, _The Irish Sketch Book_
has other interesting links with Thackeray's biography. The tour, as
planned originally, was to have been taken in FitzGerald's company:
and letters to him in its earlier part at least have been published.
But the close of the journey, the second visit to Dublin, in which he
saw much of Lever, and enjoyed 'wax candles and some of the best wine
in Europe' in such hospitable profusion, was the occasion of one of
the few outside accounts of him that we have for this earlier
period--the reminiscences contributed to Fitzpatrick's _Life of Lever_
by a certain 'Major D.' This excellent officer seems to have behaved to
Thackeray with the usual kindness of his country, and to have admired
him; but to have been rather puzzled and suspicious; to have feared
that the guest was trying to make fun of Ireland and things Irish; to
have thought him censorious and acid. We know well enough, from even
more authentic sources, that Thackeray's temper at the time was pretty
variable--and no wonder. But Lever himself seems to have made no
mistake about him. The most interesting part of the information
derived from this source is the opinion, generally it would seem
entertained in Dublin circles, that Thackeray was a sort of 'Swiss of
literature'--hiring himself out to any periodical that would pay him.
Although this was scarcely the case, we know, again, that he had had
to 'stand in the market' from dire necessity. But the fact is, that
the prejudice against miscellaneous literary work for pay was still
strong and deep. More than thirty years later than this, and more than
a dozen after Thackeray's own death, an excellent lady expressed her
disgust and astonishment that persons educated at Oxford and reckoned
among gentlemen should write 'for penny papers'. Stamps and paper
duties were in the way of penny papers in 1842: but there can be no
doubt that the cost _ne faisait rien  l'affaire_.

Thackeray's dedications were always graceful, but the actual one of
this book, to Lever, as originally written, was even prettier than
that which appears, though a little more controversial. And the book
had the good fortune not merely to be godfathered by 'Harry
Lorrequer,' but to be the subject of a letter of compliments from
'Boz'. The 'pink covers' to which Thackeray made characteristic
reference, and the 'green' for once rallied round the future 'yellow'.

Of the articles from the _Foreign Quarterly Review_ which follow _The
Irish Sketch Book_, in 'The Oxford Thackeray', only _one_, 'Dumas on
the Rhine', had already been printed (and that only by Mr. Lewis
Melville) with Thackeray's Works. But all the others, and some which I
did not think worth giving, appeared in a volume entitled _The New
Sketch Book_ (London, 1906), having been unearthed from the _Foreign
Quarterly Review_ by Mr. Robert S. Garnett. There is, so far as I
know, no direct external evidence of their authorship. But there is
some, and that not weak, of an indirect kind, such as the fact that
the _Review_ had just passed into the hands of Chapman and Hall,
Thackeray's publishers for the Sketch Book at the time when those
articles began to appear, and that he definitely mentions in a letter
to FitzGerald his having read Hugo's _Le Rhin_, adding that he was
actually writing about it. This is pretty strong, though after all not
decisive: for just after a book appears a considerable number of
gentlemen of the press are usually reading it, and writing about it,
and making references to it in letters to their friends.

One is driven, therefore, to internal evidence: and it is by this
that I have been guided both as to admission to and exclusion from
the Thackeray canon. About this article on _Le Rhin_, and about the
last of the group, that on Michiel's _L'Angleterre,_ there can be no
doubt whatever. They are as certainly Thackeray's as if he had
included them in the Miscellanies of 1857. The Michiels article in
particular connects itself with passages in the acknowledged works
from _The Paris Sketch Book_ to _Philip_. That the book was an
impudent _supercherie_ is of course certain: and it is possible,
though not necessary, that the author never was in England at all.
But the curious thing is that Michiels was by no means a mere
gutter-journalist. Not only does he seem to have had the best of it
in an encounter with Arsne Houssaye for buccaneering on a great
history of Flemish and Dutch Painting which he wrote: but he did
some other fairly solid work in art and letters, and edited what is
still, I think, the only modern edition of that interesting Pliade,
pluralist, plagiarist, and victim of Malherbe, Desportes. On this
occasion, however, he seems to have been tempted of the devil that
so frequently besets French writers on England. I remember a very
amusing article, I think in _Household Words_, summarizing some
further efforts of the same imaginative kind in reference to the
Exhibition of 1851, where (I think again) M. Edmond Texier was the
chief performer on the long bow. 'The German in England' is also
fairly well 'signed.' The abstract of _The Mysteries of Paris_ is
either by Thackeray or by some one who has caught his style
thoroughly--thing at this time unlikely for any one even to try to
do. 'French Romancers on England' and 'New Accounts of Paris' are
exceedingly probable. These, therefore, with 'Dumas on the Rhine'
and another to be mentioned presently, are given.

On the other hand, Mr. Garnett has printed five other articles, of
which four at least seem to me either not Thackeray's or Thackeray
very much 'edited', cut about and padded with alien matter. The
doubtful one is that on Herwegh: those on Dumas' _Crimes Clbres_, on
Gutzkow's _Letters from Paris_, 'Balzac on the Paris Newspapers', and
'English History and Character on the French Stage', are, to me, more
than doubtful. Several of these of course read, _from their titles_,
very much as if they might be Thackeray's: but this, it must be
remembered, is an additional reason for care in considering them. And
the result of that consideration has been, in my case, unfavourable.
The 'Celebrated Crimes', though we know that Thackeray did read the
book, is absolutely unlike his style in almost every way. And there
are hardly any quotations: whereas there was nothing that he liked
better than to quote, translate, and (it must be admitted) in some
cases ingeniously travesty. The Gutzkow article is also very unlike
him, or like nothing of his but the political papers in the
_Constitutional_, and not _very_ like them. The Balzac piece and the
general one on 'English Character' are less certainly impossible: but
I am not satisfied with them. The Herwegh essay seems worth excepting
from the doom on the chance chiefly of the translations being his.

There is some special interest in these pieces because of their date.
In part slightly earlier than the Irish tour, in part contemporary
with the writing of _The Irish Sketch Book_, and only in very small
part later than 1843, they represent much of Thackeray's energy as
_homme de peine_ in that year and 1842. With _The Fitz-Boodle Papers_,
and the more miscellaneous contributions to _Punch_ and _Fraser_ which
will follow, they present an extraordinary combination of quantity and
quality for a couple of twelvemonths and less. Of course many
journalists and novelists in regular work could beat the quantity
easily: but perhaps not quite so the quality. It also happens that
there is, on the whole, in these reviews, a much greater unity of
subject than in most of Thackeray's batches of miscellaneous articles:
for the series, though not purely literary, is very mainly so.

It shows the author, from this point of view, at an interesting stage.
He has not got rid wholly--he never, as has been said, got rid wholly,
though he did so to a much greater extent--of the inequality and
flightiness of his literary judgements. He is not yet reconciled to
Dumas--indeed Dumas had not yet written the great romances that were
to atone for so much. He still feels the absurdities in Victor Hugo
first and most; but, then, in the same way, the marvellous second
crop, which began with the _Chtiments_, and did not cease with the
_Lgende_, was yet far in the future: and _Le Rhin_, full of beauties,
is also full of absurdities and worse. It is evident, as Mr. Garnett
has rightly pointed out, that he has already conceived that one-sided
view of Swift, about which we shall have something to say when we come
to its full development in _The English Humourists_. He lets his
little crotchets about 'rails being better than swords' and the like
interfere somewhat with his criticisms. And of course those who choose
to do so may say that he is still too uncompromisingly English in his
standpoint.

On the other hand, the acuteness is here in even greater measure than
ever, and the expression in measure now and then as great at least as
we have ever yet seen, though there are undoubted traces of
collar-work'. The amazing grandiosity of Hugo, and the more amazing
seriousness with which his admirers received it, are a commonplace
now:--not the stanchest defenders of the poet who possess the
slightest tincture of humour or of common sense dream of denying them.
But they were not quite such commonplaces then: and Thackeray exposes
them with admirable humour and even with considerable leniency. The
wonderful Hugonian catalogues of names--so effective in poetry, so
superfluous in prose--are capitally treated. And the critic is
perfectly sensible of his author's merits. The great description of a
storm which occurs early in _Le Rhin_ is given in the original
language, with a single critical remark which, in its different way,
is worthy of it. 'We have not ventured to translate the above noble
description into English, for it would be a shame, we fancy, to alter
a single word in it; so complete does it seem to be. _It bursts into
the narrative and is over in a page, like the event it describes_.'
There have been critics (and not bad ones either) who, if they had
been lucky enough to conceive the parallel given in those sixteen
words, would have cockered and cosseted them, have watered them down
and rolled them out, into sixteen sentences.

The work therefore is honestly and well done; it is even done better
than similar work has been done before. And yet one feels that it is
not the work that the writer was born to do. He does it too
conscientiously to make the subjects of his articles mere 'pegs';
indeed the theory of the _Foreign Quarterly_, I believe, was more or
less opposed to that common practice. Almost all of those which are
given here would have supplied him with such pegs: and he does
sometimes hang a tiny digression, in his own vein, upon them. But for
the most part he sticks to the business which is not his business, and
struggles manfully through the book. The best _review_, beyond all
question, is the _reintement_ of M. Michiels, who most thoroughly
deserved it: the next best perhaps is the Herwegh article, which is
even a little un-Thackerayan in its direct grip of the matter. It
suggests that if it is his (and there are some things both in the
verse and in the prose which do not look like anybody else's) he would
have made a better reviewer of German generally than of French.

And so these pieces, though as yet not to be admitted to more than a
sort of provincial franchise, do, when used with proper care, add
something to our general knowledge of Thackeray, and in more than a
very few passages to our enjoyment of him. That is the reason of their
discussion here: but it is not necessary to say anything more about
them, except to acknowledge with all due thanks Mr. Garnett's labour
as pioneer in their recovery.




VI

BARRY LYNDON, AND MISCELLANEOUS
PAPERS, 1843-7


_The Luck of Barry Lyndon_, as it was at first called, is itself a
most curious instance of _heur et malheur_. Its author wrote it
against the grain: and its production was spread over a long period,
beginning soon after the conclusion of that Irish tour which, of
course, suggested it, and extending into the Eastern one, where it had
happier companions and a larger air. It did not please during its
appearance in _Fraser_: and though the author reprinted it as a whole
(with some omissions), it was not till a dozen years later, and then
not by itself, but among the _Miscellanies_. Now, there is no book of
his which it is so safe to praise. The praiser, indeed, is completely
'on velvet': for stanch Thackerayans will not gainsay him because it
is Thackeray's, nor will the adversary, because he thinks it freer
from Thackeray's faults than any other of his books, less sentimental,
less English, more profitably provided with gloom and grime.

It may possibly be owing to natural perversity; but I confess that I
like _Barry Lyndon_ less than any other book of Thackeray's, less even
than _Catherine_, which is much inferior in art, and very much less
than _Philip_, which may be said to be inferior in art likewise. That
I like _Catherine_ better should I think relieve me from the mere
charge of preferring 'rose-pink and sky-blue'. Moreover, I happen to
think Thackeray's great exemplar, _Jonathan Wild_, one of the capital
books of literature, and almost faultless except for its one virtuous
character: consequently, I am at least not to be ruled out of court as
a confessed and incorrigible sentimentalist. So I may perhaps claim
permission to say why, _among Thackeray's books_ (which is an
always-to-be-remembered proviso), I am not specially fond _of Barry
Lyndon_.

Among anybody else's, though I should have exactly the same faults to
find with it, I should consider them, no doubt, at least compensated
by its merits. Parts of it are equal to almost anything that even he
ever did. The opening Irish chapters are quite admirable; they show
his marvellous powers of improving experience capitally; and it is
most curious to compare them with contemporary work by actual Irish
novelists, though they probably owe something in the literary way to
Maginn's short Irish stories. The campaign of the two Chevaliers--de
Balibari _et d'industrie_--is again super-excellent. In fact, if this
had stood alone as a Fitz-Boodle paper (the great George was, it
seems, supposed to have had to do with _Barry Lyndon_) it would have
been classable as A 1 for many a hundred years. Lady Lyndon's first
husband and the elder Chevalier de Balibari--but especially the
former--are creations of the author's best; no other living man could
have drawn, with such few and such powerful strokes, a character, if
only a minor character, so complete and so original as Sir Charles.
Her Ladyship, though not quite so good as she would have been a
few years later, is still excellent. Of the seasonings of
eighteenth-century manners and so on the same may be said; while
everywhere and all over the book there is abundance of the incomparable
Thackerayan incident, situation, phrase, insinuation, suggestion,
aside--as well as direct narrative and exposition. I do not myself care
very much for the tragical History of the Princess of X.: but it is
beyond all question a finely told story of its kind. Barry's mother
should not be forgotten, of course: nor the ingenuity (which however seems
to me a trifle overdone) of Barry's own glosses on his later rascalities.
To conclude this part of the matter, it may be more than
conceded--cheerfully and vigorously asserted--that the general style
shows to the very full that advance in dignity, success without trick,
flexibility, general artistic achievement, which has been noted in the
Fitz-Boodle Papers. All these things a good critic should never have
had at the time, and at all times should never have, the slightest
difficulty in recognizing. And yet----!

To begin the devil's advocate part, Thackeray does not seem to me
either to have conceived clearly, or to have maintained steadily, his
own attitude towards the story. There can be no doubt--in fact it is
agreed--that he took _Jonathan Wild_ in no slavish sense as a model.
But in doing this he hampered himself enormously by making it an
autobiography. You _can_ make a man represent himself as a scoundrel
or a fool or both:--the authors of the _Satyre Menippe_ had done it,
Butler had done it, Thackeray himself has done it here with great
success in parts. But it is a frightful strain: and it is a great
question whether it can possibly be done on a very large scale without
'incompossibility'. Whether the actual Barry of the story _sibi
constat_ is a point upon which, I suppose, opinions may differ. As,
according to the celebrated dictum, fine healthy Eton boys will grow
into frivolous members of Parliament--or did so grow at one time--so
the far from ungenerous scape-grace of the early chapters, and the not
altogether hateful _picaro_ of the middle, _might_ grow into the
unmitigated and even cowardly scoundrel of the end. _Facilis
descensus_ and many other tags will warrant it. But has not Thackeray
forgotten that he is Barry rather too often? Fielding is never 'out':
he keeps his cue of sardonic showman infallibly and impartially
towards every puppet on the stage--the great Jonathan, the divine
Letitia, Mr. Bagshot, Miss Straddle, everybody. He never confuses
himself with them: and you never confuse them with him. I do not find
this always to be the case with Thackeray here. The History of the
Princess is not, of course, a case in point--that is merely an 'inset'
tale, according to the well-recognized eighteenth-century fashion. But
was Mr. Barry Lyndon, either as Redmond Barry, as the Chevalier, or in
his glory, exactly the person to moralize on the Seven Year's War, as
he or his creator does in chapter iv? I have no objection to
moralizing if 'de morals is goot'. Thackeray's sermons never bore me
when they are his, or Mr. Pendennis's, or those of anybody
_congruous_. But that Barry should preach me I own surprises me.

There is, moreover, another point in which the autobiographical
scheme, not necessarily of course, but as a matter of fact and by
likelihood beforehand, had hampered and clogged the narrative and
exposition. We get too many things recounted and too few acted, with
the effect of something like the _rents_ in conventional French
tragedy. Barry's experiences with Dr. Johnson, for instance, would
have made a famous scene of the same kind as those actually furnished
by the Doctor in _The Virginians_, where the scheme is also in a way
autobiographical, but more loosely managed and less concentrated on
the display of a single character.

In short, to make a clean breast of it, _Barry Lyndon_ fails--to
me--in interest: it does not carry me along with it in either of the two
ways in which a story can perform that office. That I am really very
indifferent on the point of what happens to the characters (except the
two above mentioned) is not in itself fatal. I do not care in the
least whether Jonathan Wild escapes or does not escape the gallows
which he so richly deserves: nor what becomes of the divine Letitia.
But then I take the very keenest interest in the way in which the
fortunes of these two very disagreeable persons are recounted by their
most agreeable historian. Thackeray generally gives me both sources of
interest and almost always the latter; here he does not. Very likely
it is my fault. But I perceive no evidence that he himself took much
delight in the book or 'got it with a nobler gust'. That he told his
daughter _she_ would not like it is no evidence on this head, because
he doubtless only meant that it was 'unpleasant' in subject. But he
seems to have been constantly putting it off, and to have worked at
it, not merely in his usual fits-and-starts manner and disliking the
work as work, but generally 'against the grain'.[12] Still it has had
plenty of worthy admiration, and it can very well do without my
liking. That it could not have been written by any one but a
consummate genius I am quite sure; but I think that genius did better
work elsewhere.

    [Footnote 12: He appears to have read a great deal for it: and
    had perhaps not digested his reading as well as he did
    later. It will be observed that his omissions are almost
    always improvements: but they might have gone further.]

The miscellaneous articles which Thackeray wrote for _Fraser_ and
other periodicals (with the exception of _Punch_) during the middle
and later forties, may conveniently be dealt with here, leaving the
very few which he produced subsequently for a niche at the end of a
still later chapter. They are extremely various in subject: but they
all display, more or less, that ripening or fully ripened power, the
development of which we have been watching. On the other hand, they
are almost all _articles de commande_:--the free spirit is hurried
through a torment and difficulty of not wholly divine obligation.
In some of them, such as _Grant in Paris_, there is a touch of the
earlier and confessed 'savagery' which we could spare. Who was Grant,
and what was his father's house, that he should be broken on such a
wheel as this? In others, as in no small part of the _Punch_
miscellanies, which were contemporaneous with them, and which will be
given together, there is a certain triviality. The things do not
really 'blemish his composure' as the cold spite of Octavius has it of
Antony, but they cannot be said exactly to add to its distinction.
Others again are free from any blemish, or from all but insignificant
blemishes. And the whole batch once more illustrates that magnificent
_variety_ of Thackeray's genius which had hardly been anticipated by
any one else. Something in the total reminds us of Hazlitt, whom he
has praised so splendidly in the curious review of Home's _New Spirit
of the Age_--the _gusto_, the variety itself, the strange and rare
mixture of relish for the things of the street and the things of the
study. No one perhaps was ever so literary as Thackeray while being so
little bookish merely, no one could so share the interests of men of
the world while transcending them. And as this is the last of such
batches (till we come to the supreme _Roundabouts_) that we shall have
together, it may not be improper to say something about a good many of
these essays and sketches, which make a bundle only inferior to the
_Roundabouts_ themselves, though their author left most of them to
take their original chance.

Only one of this batch, I think, was, until the supplementary
collection of 1886, united to the standard body of Thackeray's Works;
and that was _Little Travels_. The 1886 collection[13] itself gave most
of the rest, but not all: and the recovery of the remainder is due to
the exertions of various inquirers from Mr. Shepherd to Mr. Melville.
Among the latter division are most of the works of a new eidolon,
Lancelot Wagstaff, almost (outside _Punch_) the last of many. The
Wagstaffs 'had it by kind': they are of a house as ancient in this
service as the _Tatler_: they came over literally with Richard
Conqueror, who, established this dispensation in England. 'Theophile'
Wagstaff had fathered or godfathered _Flore et Zphyr_ years before:
and Lancelot no doubt stood to him as Samuel Titmarsh did to Michael
Angelo. Except Titmarsh himself all these agreeable persons appear to
have died early, and we may henceforward almost neglect them. In
Arthur's bosom they no doubt forgather with the Bickerstaff clan
itself, and Jedediah Cleishbotham, and Captain Clutterbuck, and a
great deal of other good company.

    [Footnote 13: I refer to it as such because it appeared in
    that year as _one_ volume. In the larger 'Library' edition
    it formed _two_, the first of which is dated 1885.]

The two little _Pictorial Times_ reviews on Macaulay and Disraeli seem
to be worth noticing, because they are probably samples of a much
larger body of work of the kind and because of the interest of their
subjects. Thackeray had earlier first joined in and then protested
against the rather inept though natural laughter at Macaulay's famous
'Windsor Castle' letter, and he was always a little disposed to rally
his great senior at Trinity. One of the most amusing things in his
letters is his description of Macaulay's horror at the suggestion that
he and Thackeray should be 'changed over' in introductions to a
lion-hunting American lady. But his admiration for the historian was as
generous and as genuine as it was for most of the great men of letters
of his time: and it is here heartily expressed. Nor need any one
quarrel with the political touch given to it: for everybody may, and
should, back his own side. It is not, however, to be so generally laid
down that everybody may _black_ the other side: and it is to be feared
that there is a little political rancour in the _Coningsby_ notice.
Certainly, though there is extremely high praise in it, it is not
likely, if Disraeli knew the authorship, to have been without its
influence on the famous but not particularly damaging sketch of 'St.
Barbe' in _Endymion_. But it must be remembered that nobody, on his
own or any side, took Mr. Disraeli seriously for years after this: and
that his eccentricities (in more than one sense of the word) were
recent and flagrant.

Two larger things of different kinds, which follow the Macaulay piece
in time of composition, require no extrinsic considerations to
recommend them. _Jrme Paturot_ is a delightful book in itself, and
those who cannot enjoy it are deeply to be commiserated. For it is
perhaps the best of a curious class of books--M. Laboulaye's _Paris en
Amrique_ is another, but less good--where the letters of knowledge
suddenly and for but once transform themselves into letters of power.
But Thackeray has made a rehash of it which is even better than the
original. As for _Bluebeard's Ghost_, it is absolutely the most
delectable example--next to 'The Notch in the Axe', and with a
noteworthy difference from that--of its author's unequalled faculty of
satiric transformation of story on the smaller scale. _Rebecca and
Rowena_ is of course more considerable in bulk and less uniformly
satiric in appeal: 'The Notch' itself is more good-natured. But as a
middle passage from the roaring burlesque of the Yellowplush and
Gahagan stage toward these later and more thoroughly mellowed
examples, _Bluebeard's Ghost_ cannot be surpassed. A little broad
farce remains, but not more than enlivens and brightens the thing: and
perhaps nowhere earlier is 'my Amontillado manner' better reached than
in some of the rest. The touch about the bits of string collected by
the lamented Bluebeard, and Sister Anne's remark, 'Dolly Coddlins is
the matter', as she goes down the middle in Sir Roger de Coverley, are
things unforgettable.

Something has been said already of _Grant in Paris_ which is put in
the mouth of Mr. George Fitz-Boodle in his most 'haw-haw' mood. There
is plenty of amusement--of a kind--in it. And it is fair to say that
Mr. James Grant, who seems to have been for some reason a special
_bte noire_ to _Fraser_, was a sufficiently absurd and irritating
specimen of a certain kind of journalist. The only book of his that I
ever read (he must be carefully distinguished from his namesake and
contemporary the respectable author of _The Romance of War_ and scores
of other red-and yellow-backed volumes of our youth), his _History of
the Newspaper Press_, published nearly thirty years later than this
and long after Thackeray's death, was a sorry performance enough; and
Thackeray's own quotations show that this Paris thing was worse.
Still, he was hardly worth so much powder and shot, and perhaps the
particular powder and shot were sometimes such as Thackeray had better
not have used. I cannot help thinking that something of the sort was
in his own mind when he wrote the remarkable _Box of Novels_ review
which follows, and which actually opens with a _mea culpa_ for past
savagery. It is one of the best of all his papers of the kind, but it
is also one of the most characteristic: and that being so it is very
far from being without faults. There was no particular reason for
anti-militarist protests in the circumstances, though, by the way, the
fashion in which these are made is very difficult to reconcile with
Thackeray's alleged Home Rule proclivities. But the faults are very
few and the merits are great. In particular the hearty, ungrudging,
yet not undiscriminating praise given to his two great forerunners in
popularity, Lever and Dickens, does one good to read: and in regard to
the latter occurs one of the great examples of the unmatchable
Thackerayan phrase--so effortless and simple apparently, so perfect in
its simplicity. 'It [_The Christmas Carol_] is the work of the master
of all the English humourists now alive--_the young man who came and
took his place calmly at the head of the whole tribe, and who has kept
it_.'

I remember, when I first read most of these pieces on their
resurrection in 1886, being divided between admiration of the
magnificent panegyric of Hazlitt, which opens the review of Home's
_New Spirit of the Age_, and wonder whether the attitude to the book
(which I had not then read) was just or unjust. It happened, further,
that I never filled in the gap till the other day, when Home's book
was reprinted--having a kindness for the author of _Orion_ and rather
imagining that it would not be increased by familiarity. It certainly
is not. How much exactly of the faults of the _New Spirit_ is due to
Richard 'Hengist' himself is uncertain: for his parts and those of his
collaborators are not, I believe, certainly marked off, and one of
them--Miss Barrett, soon to be Mrs. Browning, was, for a woman of
genius, capable of almost any silliness. Whether the oracular
platitude direct of the early Victorians be more or less ridiculous
than the epigrammatic platitude reversed of the early Edwardians, may
be an interesting question for debating societies: it is sufficient
that either of them is enough to amuse a man, if he is in a good
temper, for a time, to irritate him, if he is in a bad one, for the
same time, and thereafter, in both cases, to bore him to extinction.
Anything more hopelessly inept than the denunciation (to which
Thackeray refers but not by name) of the _Ingoldsby Legends_ in this
book I do not myself know, except some contemporary exploits which it
is not lawful to mention. And the praise is almost as inept as the
blame--that of Dickens being one of the very clumsiest and most
extravagant panegyrics ever-written. At the same time Thackeray--as we
have seen and shall see that, just at this time, he was unusually
prone to do--'takes the great axe to it' rather disproportionately:
and it would be no great loss but for the Hazlitt passage, which is a
gem. Too many men are ungenerous to their contemporaries; but want of
generosity to immediate predecessors is unfortunately rather the rule
than the exception. In both respects Thackeray is blameless.

_Little Travels_ varies the collection with a kind of sketch wherein
Thackeray was not seldom at his very best: and there is some of that
best in the piece. But the papers composing it are to some extent
marred by the curious and, for him, most unusual touch of something
like bad humour, which has just been mentioned. One cannot say whether
this was due to the fact that, as we know from a letter which has been
published, he was not only writing _Barry Lyndon_ abroad, against the
grain, and without the documents he wanted, but trying to achieve a
_Life of Talleyrand_, which never got into being, but which would
certainly have been a great curiosity if it had. If this batch of
sketches of the travel in which he usually so much delighted be
compared, not merely with the sunset serenity of the _Roundabout_
'Notes on a Week's Holiday', but with the extremely early overture to
_The Paris Sketch Book_, and that (a few years later than _Little
Travels_) to _The Kickleburys on the Rhine_, the difference of mood
will appear remarkably. He grumbles at the voyage and his
fellow-voyagers; he grumbles at that most harmless and attractive
'second-growth Paris', Brussels; he grumbles, not without reason but not
quite in the right way, at the absence of pretty faces; he grumbles at
almost everything. The criticisms on Rubens are 'knowledgeable', and
they are not wholly unjust; but he does not, as he does elsewhere,
apportion the justice as distributively as he should. There may have
been special reasons:--we know in the odd fragmentary way in which we
do know things about him, that he had difficulties in getting payment
for some of his work, difficulties about recovering some of the old
Indian wreckage. Probably he was getting weary of the pillar-to-post
charing and choring which had been his literary fate for some years
now. It was indeed lucky that the Eastern trip came when it did: for
though he worked hard on it and did not give up the hack-work when he
came back, it 'changed him', as Brighton and Paris, Southampton (where
he often was in these years) and Chaudefontaine could not do.

The 'Wagstaff' group, with one exception, are not of the first order,
though '_The_ Partie Fine' is capital in its way, and the _Chest of
Cigars_ interesting from the already noted resurrection of Gahagan the
delectable in that state of old age which Macbeth recognized as the
proper one, but not his--loved, honoured, with troops of friends. The
'N. P. Willis' review has not only the circumstantial interest of
Macvey Napier's preliminary inquiries about _a_ Mr. Thackeray' (one of
the sweetest little ironies of the History of Literature) but much of
its own. It is surprising that Napier let in what he did; for many a
_perruque_--thick-skulled, ambrosial--must have been shaken over it:
it would be delightful to have what he left out. The minor reviews
help the general estimate of Thackeray's character as a reviewer; and
his inclusion of _Mrs Perkins's Ball_ in the last is a humorous and
not indecent audacity. But the two most interesting of our last half
score of items are additions to the gormandizing' series:--one of
them, _Greenwich-Whitebait_, belonging to the Wagstaff sketches, the
other, _Barmecide Banquets_. a _Fraser_ review. The first,
interestingly connecting itself with one of the 'Spec' papers in
_Punch_, is a _locus classicus_, celebrating in literature an
agreeable form of festivity which, long out of fashion, is now, they
say, dead. Without disrespect to The Ship (where the present writer
has eaten many whitebait) it was never really merry in Greenwich after
they shut up The Trafalgar, which had a much better view of the river
and was older-fashioned. Some years after this, Thackeray saw, from
the windows of one of these hostelries, the _Great Eastern_ lying in
the stream. I wonder if he had been there earlier, during the actual
launch, and heard the queer _scroop_, as she ground from time to time
a little farther down the launching ways, urged gingerly and sideways
by hydraulic rams, lest she should rush end-on to Greenwich itself,
and overleap it and the county of Kent, and plunge into the Channel?
One had not been entered in Thackeray then: but it was something to be
entered in Greenwich-Whitebait itself.

_Barmecide Banquets_ is a more serious composition: and as such is
transferred from the somewhat intangible and shadowy Lancelot to
George Fitz-Boodle, himself the discoverer of the Profession of
Gormandizing. I do not know whether this work of Joseph Bregion and
Anne Miller is actually rare, but I have sought it diligently in
second-hand book-catalogues for twenty years without finding, and
cookery-books are notoriously perishable. It holds a particularly
interesting position as coinciding with and taking note of the actual
transition from the times of vast Gargantuan 'courses' of incongruous
viands huddled on the table together, and followed up by fresh mobs of
food, on the one hand, and mere 'joint and pudding' on the other, to
that of no food on the table and of a comparatively limited number of
dishes. The authors seem to have been better on general principles
than on the composition of particular _menus_ (Thackeray has some
delicate and wise criticism on this point), but undoubtedly beneficent
in intention and 'sound upon the goose'. Their critic is good in both
ways. His plea for the mahogany (even then alas! disappearing) and his
argument against blocking the centre of the table; his apology for
champagne (all the more creditable that we know he rightly preferred
the bumper of burgundy or of bordeaux) and for 'a good drink' after
dinner; how admirable they all are! And how much surprised he would
have been to hear--no, not surprised; he was too wise to be surprised
at anything--that, sixty years later, champagne would fetch more than
double the price of first-growth claret of the same age, and a good
vintage in each case!

And so farewell to this interesting group of miscellaneous essays. It
is practically the last of the kind; for Thackeray soon after gave all
his miscellaneous work to _Punch_, and then stopped it altogether.
Before we come to the novels a few scattered articles of 1848-63,
written rather on occasion and 'to oblige' than for his own purposes,
shall be noticed collectively; and the wonderful series of the
_Roundabouts_ will crown the whole edifice. But with those here shown
the day of odd jobs is practically over for him. Other times, other
odd-jobs-men.




VII

BALLADS, AND CONTRIBUTIONS TO 'PUNCH'


It has sometimes been held that in no single volume of Thackeray's
works can his literary quality be better and more completely discerned
than in that which contains his work in verse. Here, as elsewhere, he
never made the smallest mistake of over-valuation in respect of his
performances; here, almost more than elsewhere, he did, not
hypocritically but honestly, undervalue them. The very title which he
chose for them generally is an evidence of this: for, though 'ballad'
is not out of place for the very highest creations of poetry, it also
has, and had still more in his time, a belittling sense--a connotation
of 'street'-ballad and the like. Most of the things are avowedly
burlesque: some of them are almost (though of course intentionally)
doggerel.

Yet neither side of the great combination--'thinking in jest: feeling
in earnest'--is ever far away: and the shield turns, or, without
turning, shows its other side through, with a magical rapidity and
illumination. Perhaps he only once worked the process of his poetry
out 'in a popular style that the _reader_ could well understand'. This
is in the 'Willow Song' already once discussed, where, having executed
a quite serious and rather beautiful pastiche of Shelley or of Lewis,
he proceeds to parody the parody and make the tragedy farcical for the
benefit of the meanest apprehension. But the double development, or
rather the inconceivably rapid gyration of mood, in the single picture
of subject, is always going on from the _Chronicle of the Drum_ to
_Vanitas Vanitatum_. The Vanity itself is the centre: but the poetry,
as it spins round, builds out of its gyres a picture as varicoloured
and gracefully outlined as the spray column of a fountain. For poetry
it is, though he would not call it so: poetry not seldom more poetical
than you shall find in whole volumes of the demurer and more orthodox
Muse--poetry in form and in fact, in thought and colour and sound
alike. A certain command of metrical form seems to have been born with
Thackeray. This command was a curious heritage of the generation which
came after the great Romantic period, and profited by the breaking up
of the domination of the couplet. It has been pointed out how masterly
is his command of that couplet itself, only slightly burlesqued, in
_Timbuctoo_: while he seems to have almost literally lisped in
the looser measures which verse-writers of the most diverse
genius--Coleridge and Southey, Moore and Monk Lewis, Scott and
Shelley--had made familiar. A Life rather than the Works would be the
proper place for printing these trifles in full--the ingenious experiment
in double and triple rhymes which begins 'In the romantic little town of
Highbury, My father kept a circulatin' Library', with the subsequent
rhyme of 'Waterloo' and 'immortal who', and the even cleverer one of
'Drogheda' and 'embroider'; the 'Cabbages' parody on 'L.E.L's'
'Violets'; the Penenden Heath piece with its excellent pairing of
'canonical' and 'chronicle'.[14] These are not extraordinary things of
course: but they testify at least to the possession of a quick wit, a
true ear, and a faculty of doing what is wanted with the pen
distinctly superior to that which he could exercise with the pencil.
None of them, or of those later and actually published things of which
we gave samples in the first volume, is much above 'crambo' level; but
they supplied practice. Soon, too, he took to translation, or at least
rather free adaptation, and, as has been seen, his first certain
contribution to _Fraser_, altered afterwards for _The Paris Sketch
Book_, was of this kind. This version of _Le Roi d'Yvetot_, which is
given with the variations of the later form, appeared in an 'omnibus'
article--one of the series of '_Fraser_ Papers' which then came
frequently, but not every month. The prose framework of this was
probably Maginn's, while the inset verses and translations might be
his or anybody's. It will be observed that when Thackeray reprinted it
in _The Sketch Book_ he altered it largely: in fact he was always a
considerable alterer, and a complete edition of the Works with various
readings would be a not uninteresting though a very laborious task. In
this first instance he changed the arrangement from common measure to
fourteeners (compare Browning's similar variation in _Cristina_). The
phrase is sometimes altered for the better, sometimes not; indeed the
idea occurs--and it certainly would not be unlike him--that, not
having a copy of _Fraser_ at hand, he wrote out the _Sketch Book_
version from memory. In either form it runs a little more easily than
the directly translated _King of Yvetot_ which accompanied the second.
Of the other three Branger versions _Jolly Jack_ is, I think, the
least good: while the only perfectly serious piece _O Virgin Blest_ is
very good indeed and (except that the final point is lost) miles above
the French as poetry. There is one loose rhyme in it, but Thackeray
was always given to licence in this way. It is curious to think of him
as a hymn-writer, though _Pendennis_ seems clearly to indicate that as
a boy he felt the influence of _The Christian Year_, which came out
when he was sixteen, and is said to have been partly composed at or
near 'Baymouth'. At any rate, the enormous and astoundingly unequal
corpus of English hymnology contains 'many worse, better few' than
this.

    [Footnote 14: In a letter to his mother from Cambridge,
    Thackeray says that he shall put in the _Snob_, altering
    them a good deal, some verses called 'Genevieve'. He does
    _not_ say that they were his own, but it has been taken for
    granted: so they may be given in a note here, though I
    confess that neither the verse nor the satire strikes me as
    very brilliant.

    TO GENEVIEVE

    A DISINTERESTED EPISTLE

    Say do I seek, my Genevieve!
      Thy charms alone to win?
    Oh no! for thou art fifty-five,
      And uglier than sin!

    Or do I love the flowing verse
      Upon thy syren tongue?
    Oh no! those strains of thine are worse
      Than ever screech-owl sung.

    Since then I thus refuse my love
      For songs or charms to give,
    What could my tardy passion move?
      Thy money, Genevieve!

      LITERARY SNOB.]

His first considerable piece of verse--in fact the longest single
piece that he ever wrote (unless _Ariadne in Naxos_ was longer)--was
not a translation; but it was certainly an imitation. The _Ingoldsby
Legends_, though not yet collected, had been appearing for some time
with great and just popularity, and _The Legend of St. Sophia_,
originally called 'The Great Cossack Epic of Demetrius Rigmarolovicz',
which appeared in _Fraser_ for December, 1839, is neither more nor
less than an Ingoldsby pastiche. It is much the best of such
imitations, but with the originals in possession one does not quite
see the necessity for it. The later Branger versions were of 1840;
the next year saw two of his _opuscula majora_ in rhyme, the return to
Brentford in the _Testament_ of its monarch, and the admirable
_Chronicle of the Drum_. It is not the least amusing of literary
anecdotes that George Cruikshank, for whom _The King of Brentford's
Testament_ was written on regular literary commission, estimated it,
and paid for it, at the rate of one guinea. Perhaps he thought that
the omission to rhyme in the odd lines was a mark of carelessness and
to be 'considered in the bill'. There is a story, I believe authentic,
of a London publisher and editor who, in the days of the popularity of
rondeaux, triolets and ballades, insisted on deducting for the
refrains. The thing is curiously perfect with a very minimum of
apparatus: the sober sarcastic 'underhum' of the verse being achieved
by sheer mastery of style and rhythm exactly suiting the drift. But in
range and scale it of course comes short of the _Chronicle_--one of
the very greatest things in serio-comic verse-literature, no matter
what the age or what the language. It is curious that _here_
Thackeray's anti-militarism, while giving the motive of the piece, is
so kept in hand by his art that it never becomes obtrusive, and almost
offensive, as it does in prose. In fact, the piece is a signal example
of the truth that treatment, not subject or sentiment, is the secret
of art itself. He is much more lavish of rhyme here than in the
_Testament_ but cavalierly lavish still, giving or withholding it as
it suits him, and with an effect which, though it would not have
pleased Dr. Johnson, may please us very much. The fashion in which he
has assimilated in his anapaestic metre the lighter and more rapid as
well as the slower and more solemn rub-a-dub of the drum itself is
really _prestigious_ (the adjective was English in the seventeenth
century), and the choice of the contrasted stanza for the conclusion
could not be bettered. The vividness of the satirical-historical
panorama, the ironical-natural tone of the whole, the felicity of
occasional phrases, and the solemn beauty of the sudden turn at the
end--these are things that cannot easily be paralleled. Thackeray may
owe suggestions to Praed here and elsewhere, but they are mere
suggestions of the vaguest kind, and he always makes them his own.
Years passed before these two masterpieces were reinforced, first in
1847 by _The Mahogany Tree_, then in 1849 by _The Ballad of
Bouillabaisse_, and more than a decade after these before what I
should class as the supreme and characteristic quintet of Thackeray's
verse[15] was concluded with _Vanitas Vanitatum_ in the heyday of the
_Cornhill_ triumph. To dwell in detail on any were impertinent. They
all illustrated in different ways what it was not quite so impertinent
to point out in their forerunners, the extraordinary conjugation of
spirit and form, which never lose touch of each other as they float
and flit between the Houses of Mirth, and (if not exactly of Mourning
yet) of Melancholy. Poet Laureate, Historiographer-Royal, and Jester
at once to the Goddess Melancholia--that is Thackeray's real station
and title as a verseman, and indeed as a man of letters.

    [Footnote 15: If any one likes to add _The Age of Wisdom_ and
    the _Cane-bottomed Chair_ or _Piscator and Piscatrix_ to
    make the quintet a septet--a Pleiad--I agree heartily.]

He does not forget his office in the minor pieces, but Melancholy
often lends him to her sister Mirth altogether for a time. It is not
mere surplusage to give as has been usual, separately and together as
well as with their original settings, the various inset verse pieces
which adorn almost all the major and many of the minor prose works.
They are wanted in the earlier collocation to complete the
presentation of the individual work; they are wanted in the later to
complete that of Thackeray as a poet. All alike supply something like
a microcosm of his moods. The two most considerable divisions or
segments of them, _Lyra Hibernica_ and the _Ballads of Policeman X_,
employ once more the old devices of eccentric spelling--and for
obvious reasons. Even as poetry (with all respect to Wordsworth) in
its serious modes naturally seeks an ornater and more beautified
diction than that of ordinary life, so does it, in these other
attitudes of burlesque, affect extravagantly travestied lingo. It must
be quite clear to all calmly critical minds that _The Battle of
Limerick_ and _Jacob Omnium's Hoss_ at once necessitate and justify
their respective dialects. Their form is 'inevitable' enough to please
'W. W.' himself: their spirit is a Hamadryad which would cease to be
without her shrine. And so with many others which we must not, though
fain, specify.

But on the other hand these grotesque shroudings and sheathings are
even less necessary to their writer in verse than in prose. There is
nothing of them in the great quintet above discussed; there is nothing
of them in _Piscator and Piscatrix_, a charming thing, nothing in _The
Age of Wisdom_, a fine and terrible one, nothing in the graceful
_May-Day Ode_ and the admirable _King Canute_, nothing in many others.
Jargon was easy to Thackeray and he could do wonders with it; but it
was not in the very slightest degree indispensable, though it not only
did its own duty supremely, but threw up, as nothing else could, the
art of the pieces written without it.

On the whole he used his poetical faculty, as he used his pictorial,
mainly though not wholly to _illustrate_ his prose work. But though he
used it less he was far surer with it, and it was of a far higher
quality than his actual illustrations. Indeed, in one sense, there are
no degrees in poetry, though there may be many mansions in the poetic
house. Parnassus is allotted very much on the principles of the
Paradise of Dante--divisibly and indivisibly. Thackeray chose often to
dwell in the lower courts and perhaps never to ascend to what are
commonly considered the highest. But always--in his mere tags and
scraps of verse-jest, as well as in such things as that marvellous
serious doggerel[16] which cannot be given here but which has 'tears in
its voice' almost as magical as those of the _Bouillabaisse_ itself--

    'Tis one o'clock: the boy from _Punch_ is waiting in the
    passage here,

--always, he is a poet.

    [Footnote 16: See _Letters of W. M. Thackeray_ (London, 1887),
    pp. 25, 26.]

In time, in miscellaneous character, and in actual community of
origin, Thackeray's prose contributions to _Punch_ have an
overwhelming claim to be preferred as the immediate sequels to his
verse. It is to be assumed that, in consequence of Mr. Spielmann's
divulgation, we can identify the whole of them--which is certainly not
the case in regard to those furnished to _The Times_, to _Fraser_, and
to other periodicals: while there are reasons for believing that it is
the case with regard to a rather small fraction of his contributions
to the _Morning Chronicle_ and some others still. No one of these
_Punch_ papers is very early; he was thirty--the age when you may
become a bishop--when he wrote the first; and there is therefore
neither the excuse nor the attraction of the novitiate for withholding
or for giving any of them. Furthermore, they undoubtedly contain some
of his best and most characteristic work. But he himself reprinted but
a part of them; and though much was added by the fresh sifting
(conducted by persons unusually well qualified in every respect) of
forty years ago, a good deal was even then rejected. Nor is it
difficult to understand the reasons of the rejection, which will not
soon lose their weight. I do not think that it will be impertinent to
set forth a short examination of them here.

They must have been mainly two:--the character of the periodical
itself, at the time more particularly, and the relation to it of the
writer.

Putting mere customary cubbishness and platitude apart--the banal
determination to think that things are 'going off', and the banal
dislike of continued prosperity--everybody thinks well of Mr. Punch.
No other comic periodical has ever existed for so long a time with so
high a record of continuous achievement with pen and pencil. But
_Punch_ was started at a time when, as has been previously pointed out
in these chapters, journalism was not exactly at its zenith; and when
one looks over the list of the team thoughts will occur. Except
Thackeray himself and Leech (Doyle and Sir John Tenniel did not join
till ten years later), there is hardly one of them who can be said, in
an admirably eloquent phrase of the slang of yesterday, to be
'quite--' in the way of genius. Mark Lemon appears to have been a good
man of business, and therefore in some respects a good editor--though
he certainly was not so when he let Thackeray's _May-Day Ode_ go to
_The Times_--but he could at no time be called a great man of letters.
A proportion (varying no doubt in the case of different persons) of
the works of Douglas Jerrold, outside the _Caudle_ papers, creates
mere amazement when one turns to it. The brothers Mayhew _se sauvent
de planche en planche_ (when the plates are Cruikshank's), to take
refuge only in the compilation of _London Labour and the London Poor_,
a thing historically not valueless. Tom Taylor does not any longer
exist. Gilbert  Beckett the elder is an awful example of the
professional-amateur 'funny man': I do not think anything would induce
me to read the _Comic History of Rome_ again. Percival Leigh is a
name; but not as Ulysses was and is. Moreover, the politics of the
paper, never quite impartial, did not at that time even pretend to the
comparative impartiality of a general _fronde_ which it has since
usually aimed at, and sometimes achieved. They were, if not
uncompromisingly Radical, acridly partisan on the 'popular' side; and
so dangerously likely to put fire to those of Thackeray's culverins
which were loaded with powder of that sort. Some of the things which
he wrote about the Duke of Wellington for instance, I am quite certain
that he would never have reprinted, even very shortly after they were
written.

But there is something else. It is rather odd that no one has--after a
century of voluminous newspaper writing and in the present thoughtful
times--written a work on the 'Ethics of the Regular Contributor'. They
are curious and complicated: nobody perhaps knows them except one who
has both contributed and edited, or helped to edit, very considerably.
The 'regular', if he is a gentleman or an honest man of any kind,
never 'scamps' his work; and if he is a prudent one he has a much
greater interest in not doing so than a casual, because he stands to
lose much more. But it is almost impossible that the regularity should
not blunt his edge somewhat; and it is not his fault that at the given
moment when his work is required he has had no time or means to strop
it fresh again. These things are so obvious that newspapers have
repeatedly tried to do without regular contributors or with very
few--of course finding, for equally obvious reasons, that this is
impossible.

Now I am not sure that this _lues contributoria_ or 'regular
contributor's disease' did not sometimes attack Thackeray in his
_Punch_ days.

For these reasons, while everything that he himself reprinted has been
connot easy: for, as always with him, there are some of the best
things in the worst; but it seemed to me that it had to be done. A
decision had also to be arrived at as to the classification of the
matter. Pure chronological arrangement is here impossible, for it
would, for instance, muddle up _The Book of Snobs_ with all manner of
contemporary _entrefilets_ and minor articles. The best plan seemed to
be (I can only apologize to those who do not like it) to keep _The
Book of Snobs_ itself for separate presentation in full in the next
chapter but one, but to deal here with some of the more substantive
contributions, such as the _Little Dinner at Timmins's_, and to devote
the next chapter to the remainder, arranged chronologically as far as
may be consistent with leaving connected works and series undisturbed.

Thackeray's _coup d'essai_ in _Punch_, the _Legend of
Jawbrahim-Heraudee_, might, if merely from the fact that it _is_ the
first, have been resuscitated rather earlier than it was. The sham
Orientalism was, of course, no new thing: it had been done with admirable
impertinence in Canning's 'Bauba-Dare-Adul-Foolah' and less admirably
elsewhere and oft. And it can be easily overdone--not all Thackeray's
own uses of it are worth reprinting. But this is amusing enough. John
Abraham Heraud, who died not so very many years ago--actually as a
Poor Brother of the Charterhouse--was a journalist and man of letters
at one time in good practice, and a Fraserian. But he was also one of
those curious producers of unreadable epic whose line never fails for
long, and of whom his contemporary but elder, Edwin Atherstone, was
the most stupendous and terrible representative in the nineteenth
century. 'Jawbrahim' is by no means ill-naturedly laughed at, and he
distinctly scores off Poof-Allee-Shaw: while some more eminent
brethren do not escape. I never had the courage to investigate the
genuineness of the quotations; and it is hardly necessary for any one
to do so. But the graduated memory of the tyrant, of Roolee-Poolee,
and of Samboo Beg is quite ingenious. Of course the thing is a trifle;
but one could endure much trifling if it were all of this kind.

The more ambitious but still largely farcical _Miss Tickletoby's
Lectures on English History_ were not the first of Thackeray's
productions to be cut short 'by request'; and though they too are
amusing--in parts decidedly so--and would be memorable as the first
vehicle or frame of the admirable 'King Canute' poem, their kind is
not a good kind. It has been noted often how odd it is that both
Dickens and Thackeray should have attempted this curious and hopeless
task of making history into a party pamphlet and burlesquing it at the
same time. But Thackeray had at least the wit and the grace to do the
burlesque intentionally, and to draw no such inimitably unintentional
self-caricature as Dickens did when he protested that he did not know
what he should do if his offspring got hold of 'any Conservative or
High Church notions'.

I have known persons of very far from negligible judgement who were
very fond of _The Next French Revolution_, but I cannot say that I
quite share their enthusiasm. Thackeray's intimate knowledge of things
French (or at least Parisian) and his not altogether unreasonable
anti-Orleanism enliven and inspirit it no doubt; and the manifestoes
are often capital. But part of it seems to me rather dead; and part of
the rest, including the 'Jenkins' matter, rather deadly-lively. This
latter part keys on to a certain number of smaller articles in which
_Punch_ carried on a sort of guerrilla with the _Morning Post_, and
which have seemed to me in very few cases worthy of reproduction.
Thackeray did not think any of them worthy of his own _Miscellanies_
ten years later nor did (I presume) Sir Leslie Stephen when he
reprinted the 'further skimming' of 1886. And I think they were both
right. Indeed it may be observed that Thackeray himself never
reprinted the _Revolution_; but as it has been part of the 'Works' for
nearly forty years it must of course stand.

Very different language must be used about two other pieces. _A Little
Dinner at Timmins's_ has always and justly held a high place among its
author's smaller but not smallest things. 'A leg of beef is not a
company dish' is as certain a signature as the crossed spectacles
themselves, and more inimitable. Of the De la Pluche series (which
appeared at intervals till as late as 1850, but which belongs chiefly
to 1845-6) something has been said by anticipation as to its connexion
and contrast with the _Yellowplush Papers_. Looked at by itself one
would suppose that it must delight everybody who is not a fanatic of
orthography and high seriousness. The author was now all but fully
estated in his powers; and he used them lavishly here. The misspelling
itself is at its most perfect--never, as it sometimes is earlier,
overdone and always an all but inseparable accompaniment to the style
and thought. The character-drawing, the story-telling, the variety, are
all worthy of the most serious work of art, and nowhere has Thackeray
been more prodigal of his most accomplished verse.

Mr. De la Pluche, as previously remarked, is a much _softer_ person
than Mr. Yellowplush. But he lends himself--and his queer lingo lends
itself still more--with facility to the same business of satirizing
various aspects of life under cap and bells. The Railway mania could
not but suggest such satire to Thackeray even if he had not been (as
it seems pretty clear that he was) bitten by it to a certain degree;
but Jeames was too useful a person to be treated on the principle
which Diderot's impudent victimizer summarized in the phrase _On suce
l'orange; on en jette l'corce_. The gauge question is railway still,
but railway from quite a different point of view; and even those who
regret the broad gauge in itself extremely (there certainly has never
been such comfortable travelling since) may acknowledge the nuisance
which it, however guiltlessly on its own part, occasioned. But the
later and minor papers are not out of place, though it is very
interesting to note how much less savage as a literary and dramatic
critic James is than Charles James was. The 'organ is mellered' as the
other great manipulator of metropolitan dialect has it--though not in
the same circumstances. It was an excellent organ both in its harsher
and its softer tones; but it has here done its work. Only in mere
passages and episodes where the circumstances demanded it, was it to
be heard again. But its latest sounds, which I take to be the
utterances of Mr. Ridley, senior, in _Philip_, are still delectable.
'Prob'bly 'av 'ad misfortunes: which many 'av 'ad them' the mild
butler said of the Reverend Tufton Hunt. Thackeray had had misfortunes
which (some of them at least) were nearly over; and it had been partly
owing to these misfortunes that he had taken the motley. He could
leave it off now or soon--only to resume it for special purposes and
for the sake of old, not all unhappy days.




VIII

MISCELLANEOUS CONTRIBUTIONS TO 'PUNCH'

The contributions to _Punch_ already dealt with were all--even
'Jeames', which is the most loosely connected of them--more or less
integers, though they might be printed in instalments; and they were
therefore classed together. Side by side with them, but running
farther, is another series of groups which are now to be given in
their chronological order, while a selected crowd of purely individual
and occasional articles will follow. The _Book of Snobs_, from its
magnitude, is reserved for the next chapter. It will be understood
that these three chapters--VI, VII, and VIII--run to a certain extent
side by side, and present _mainly_ the work of 1844-9.

Of the groups which open the present batch the 'Fat Contributor' is
the most miscellaneous, in part at least the earliest, and the most
representative of moods and manners earlier still. Indeed Thackeray
seems to have kept this particular _eidolon_ of himself as a sort of
safety-valve or safety-mouthpiece for his moods of the more
extravagant farce. And while it is exceedingly curious to read the
Eastern parts side by side with _Cornhill to Cairo_, which actually
deals with the same scenes and incidents, it is more curious still to
remember that, at practically the same time, the grim irony of _Barry
Lyndon_ was forging towards its close, and the delightful light comedy
of _Mrs. Perkins's Ball_ was being born in the author's mind and
taking shape from his fingers. The 'F. C.' begins with a touch of that
ill temper, perhaps actually produced by the cause assigned (too many
dinners) which we noted in contemporary work such as _Little Travels_;
but it soon wears off. The discovery of 'Dolores' forty years ago was
a joy which has not staled. 'Punch at the Pyramids,' it is true, was
probably better to read at its first appearance than forty or sixty
years later: yet how many equally good things had 1845 or 1885 to
offer? And the later Brighton papers are among the best of Thackeray's
frequent and grateful fees to 'Doctor Brighton'. In particular the
'Brighton Night Entertainment' is one of the Thackeray 'Particulars'.
Many people have done more or less burlesque summaries of theatrical
performances; it seems somehow to have been irresistible from the
earliest days of the modern theatre. Dickens (to come to Thackeray's
own contemporaries) did them nobly; but not quite with the
extraordinary _quality_ of these others. Nobody in fact could confer
this quality unless, like Thackeray, he was suspended between the
opposite magnets of romance and satire. But, as has been said, the
stout victim of Dolores and his own diaphragm was more frequently
attracted to the farcical.

There are some, perhaps many, who would call the _Prize Novels_ farce
too; but here a good deal depends on definition. The series was
originally planned to include Dickens and himself. But Mr. Punch
refused to admit Dickens: in which that sage probably did not
unwisely, for Dickens was very vulnerable in this way, and, though
less fiery than Thackeray, was very much less placable. It would have
been amusing, perhaps intensely so; but we can easily guess what it
would have been like, and so it is the less loss. That of himself,
good or bad, would at any rate have been a very great curiosity. For
Thackeray, at least in narrative, has never been successfully parodied
or indeed imitated at all. If anybody could have done it, he could;
for these particular 'Novels' are admittedly by far the best of their
often tried kind. It was, however, as Sir Rowland Hill said to his
enemy Yates of another matter, 'rather a dangerous accomplishment',
and it certainly secured him the posthumous enmity of Mr. Disraeli.
Lever's good nature was proof against 'Phil Fogarty', though in a
sense this might be said to be a more damaging performance than
'Codlingsby'. For this latter, though it might be a little more
galling to vanity, did not 'touch the ark' by threatening the sale,
while 'Phil Fogarty' certainly reminded the public rather too broadly
that Lever's military novels, delightful as they are, do rather run in
a mould. For my own part, _dulcia refrigeria_ as these are, I should
put them below 'George de Barnwell' and 'Crinoline'. The former is
'really too good'--as a famous champagne shipper, now deceased, is
said to have observed half mournfully to a customer who was tasting
appreciatively, 'The public really ought not to have it'. It is quite
astounding how fresh it remains, while most things of the kind wither
and stale with the originals that they satirize. And there are few
tales half-told for the completion of which I would give more than for
that of the history of Jools who sat upon the counter of the Misses
Mordeky in company with the choicest sprigs of English nobility, and
enjoyed with them 'the flagrant and arheumatic Qby'. My own impression
is that here the subject was too great even for the author; that
_nobody_ could have finished 'Crinoline' to sample.

The other three collections, _Sketches and Travels in London, Mr.
Brown's Letters_ and the _Proser_ papers of Dr. Solomon 'Pacifico'
(that remarkable _civis Britannicus_ having his name borrowed for no
obvious reason except that it was much in people's mouths at the
time), for the most part discard the wilder trappings of vanity as far
as farcical incidents or farcical handling are concerned. Their
mouthpieces--'Mr. Spec,' 'Mr. Brown,' 'Dr. Pacifico' himself--are more
undisguised disguises of the author than he had ever assumed before;
and while the subjects of the first and third are absolutely
miscellaneous (there is more unity in the second) all are really
modern equivalents of the old Queen Anne essay in the less didactic
and more general kind. Their average level is very high: indeed except
the _Roundabouts_ there is no part of Thackeray's miscellaneous work
that shows him better. The Introduction to the Travels takes the
liberty of being mainly introductory; 'A Club in an Uproar' is not a
masterpiece; and 'A Roundabout Ride' is perhaps as exemplary an
example of that 'regular contributor' work of which we have spoken, as
could be found. It is not bad; it is not uninteresting; it is even a
kind of document for the historian of London manners and topography.
But it is quite obvious 'copy'; copy such as any newspaper might be
glad enough to get, but which would pretty surely never have come into
existence except on the laws of demand and supply. On the other hand
'The Curate's Walk', 'A Dinner in the City', and 'A Night's Pleasure'
are wonderful things. They go from strength to strength. I have seen
the 'Walk' (it is accepted that Frank Whitestock was William
Brookfield) called 'dull'--a verdict which can only be said to
illustrate Thackeray's own dictum that 'with us there is no
appreciation of art in the abstract'. I suppose it is dull because it
deals with little children and missions, and halfpenny-worths of fresh
bread, and Faith and Hope and Charity and 'that old-fashioned sort of
thing'. All I can say is that if there is anything better done from
Balzac to Maupassant, or from Dickens to Mr. Kipling, I do not know
that thing. The art makes the subject interesting no matter whether it
is interesting beforehand or not. And that is the business of Art.

The other two pieces deal with less perilous subjects and call to
their aid large accompaniments of Thackeray's most amusing verse. I do
not know that they are better; but their attractions have more volume
and variety. The speeches and the dismembered snatches of song in the
'Dinner'; the 'Cave of Harmony' and its actual ditties in 'A Night's
Pleasure'; the rather libellous but extraordinarily vivid picture
of'Bardolphof Brasenose': these have always been considered capital
stories (as old Mrs. Wardle says), and great part of them has the
additional and permanent attraction of preserving vanished manners and
customs to frame character that never can vanish. Nor should a word of
notice be omitted in regard to the curious, late, and rather isolated
'Waiting at the Station'. Though isolated as I have called it, it is
not in the least out of keeping; and it is one of the most genuine of
Thackeray's curious 'soliloquy pieces'. This at any rate is not
'copy'. 'Child's [_sic_] Parties' is full of agreeable Thackerayisms;
but it is a pity that he did not live to know the authentic fact of a
child declining to have a party _unless_ there were champagne.

_Mr. Brown's Letters to his Nephew_ begin to criticize life, if not
more steadily, rather more as a whole, and in a more definitely
serious fashion. To some extent they take up the subject of 'Club
Snobs' from the _Book_ of that name, and extend the consideration
beyond mere snobbery. In the same way the author returns to other
favourite themes of his--dress, dinners, marriage. The whole is a very
perfect example of the 'middle' Thackeray--almost if not quite passing
into the achieved one. Of clubs, at the time when they had been got
into pretty thorough order, and before they had been multiplied and
vulgarized, Thackeray is of course _the_ historian in the higher
sense. Yates, in his desperate efforts at self-excuse, asserted that
the author of the _Snob Papers_ and _Mr. Brown's Letters_ had himself
been too personal and had, sometimes by his pen and sometimes by his
pencil, identified this member of the 'Garrick' or that of the
'Reform' with his awful examples. There was of course no real parallel
between this (had it been the case) and an elaborate and very
unfavourable commentatory portrait _by name_ of a public character who
was also a personal acquaintance. But it may be admitted (all the more
readily since he admitted it himself) that Thackeray sometimes sailed
a little too near the wind in this respect. He has left amusingly
eager apologies on the subject in his letters to Mrs. Brookfield. But
in no sense did he commit the unpardonable sin of dragging a person in
_by name_, for insult or unfavourable mention, in respect of matters
only known or to be known by private acquaintance.

Mr. Brown, too, is a good _persona_. In his character of intelligent
fogy (it was a little early for Thackeray to assume it, for he had not
yet reached even his own Age of Wisdom) he requires none of the antic
dispositions of his predecessors from Yellowplush to Fitz-Boodle; and
he can criticize shrewdly and unpedantically, but directly and home.
Some of the untoward fashions which he satirizes have passed, and come
back again, and passed once more, to come back and pass till the Day
of Judgement: for your fashion is your true Flying Dutchman or
Wandering Jew, with rigging and build, with words and speech, a little
altered from time to time. But the _badauds_ who indulged in them have
not passed; and will not. On the more general laws of taste which
govern his decisions he is sound as always--as sound now, in the days
when it would certainly not pay clubs to stand even rudimentary free
lunches to their members, as in those when this hospitable habit was
customary. Once more, the passing figures, like Silenus and Nudgit,
are more alive than the heroes and heroines of most elaborate novels
or plays: once more, the 'gormandizing' wisdom is of the highest
class. The notice of 'Sir Morgan O'Doherty' (the name of one of
Maginn's early aliases, and the book an interesting picture of manners
bygone even in Thackeray's days) and the dinner at the widow's are
among the brightest of Thackeray's minor gems.

There is no very obvious reason why the Essays collected under the
title of _The Proser_ and assigned to Dr. Solomon 'Pacifico' should
not have been composed by Mr. Brown himself; but Thackeray had got so
into the habit of changing his parts that he probably could not help
it. And it has almost always been an idea with editors of newspapers
that you should not keep up the same series too long. Except the
greater Titmarsh--almost

    First made and latest left of [all these] knights,

in fact admittedly Thackeray's alter ego--they did their work and
passed. The lesser Titmarsh and the Wagstaffs, Thophile and Lancelot;
Gahagan the Invincible; the brace of Plushes that stand behind the
Thackerayan chariot; Mr. Snob, Mr. Spec, Mr. Fitz-Boodle, Mr. Brown;
shadows they are and shadows they depart, Dr. Solomon himself not
quite bringing up the rear, for there were others down to 'Our own
Bashi-Bozouk'. Only Titmarsh remained; indeed Titmarsh and Thackeray
were by this time inseparable: 'soul might divide from body but not
they One from another.' _The Proser_ is by no means too prosy and he
is very fairly Solomonic: though not always peacemaking. He does not,
for instance, seem to have forgiven 'Mrs. Trotter Walker'. This
curious paper--the personal quality of which is quite unmistakable,
though as usual it must not be exaggerated or tied down too much to
detail--is one of the most characteristic instances of that intense
_intimacy_ which there always was between Thackeray's life and his
writings. It is no doubt also an instance of the equally intense and
somewhat excessive sensitiveness which, though it need not quite
necessarily accompany such intimacy, very generally does. He is quite
aware that it is excessive--he always is; it is that actual
self-consciousness, and the self-ridicule resulting from it, which
attract some people so much to him, and which evidently annoy others so
much. I do not believe that men are really annoyed, as they say they are,
by his 'drawing the moral' as he actually does here and often elsewhere.
That is only a blind to disguise the sting of the _de te fabula_.
After all, the 'Moralitas', the _envoi_, the 'conclusion of the
matter'--is an excellent old thing and was popular in days which, to
put it mildly, were not so very much less wide awake than ours. But it
_is_ unpleasant, perhaps, to some people to have the weaknesses of
which they are conscious rubbed into them by somebody who is quite
conscious of them likewise in his own case; who shams no stoicism, but
who can laugh at himself and so at others likewise. If he would do it
in a way that would make us think 'Oh! I could do that better', it
might be a relief, but only the very stupidest can think that. If he
would pretend to be superior to it all--that would be a relief, for it
would be a sort of invitation to us to share his superiority. There is
in fact nothing to do but to pretend that the correction is really too
obvious--a pretension which, in the slang that has grown up since his
day, is 'really too thin'. It is not wonderful that Thackeray is
intolerable to some folk.

Others may find him not much less delectable here than elsewhere. It
may be said that his 'Fogy' papers are exaltations of tail-lessness or
denunciations of sour grapes; but as the stage comes to all who live
long enough, it is not quite superfluous to be prepared for it--or to
have it comfortably furnished and agreeably decorated for us.
'On a good-looking young lady' is less in his usual manner,
though it contains one of his characteristic name fantasias
(Erminia-Victorina-_Boa_-Chinchilla), but is a remarkable example of his
pervading spirit. It may be a little too patronizing to his
subjects--but he has made that up elsewhere (in the famous
anticlimax--'and oh! my dear, what a fool you are!') by excess in the
other direction. After all, Elissa and Perissa are more natural than
Medina. The 'Interesting French Exile' should be read in connexion with
'Crinoline' on his good-natured side, and with the remarkable review
of Michiel's which we mentioned among the _Foreign Quarterly_
doubtfuls on the more serious. And the companion 'American Traveller'
at last 'tells his fact' to the egregious N. P. Willis, whom either
Thackeray himself or Macvey Napier had let off pretty easily in the
_Edinburgh_, two or three years earlier. Lastly 'The Press and the
Public' exhibits him in quite a different light. It is probably the
last thing ever written on that still vext Bermoothe--the question of
signed and unsigned articles. It is the work of a man who had had
plentiful experience of both; and who _at last_ could be sure that his
name would give solid pecuniary value to any trifle that he chose to
write, while for years he had received inadequate pay for a great deal
of unsigned work that we more or less know and probably a great deal
more that we do not. Yet he declares unhesitatingly against the
signing system; and he supports his opinion by arguments as sound as
arguments can well be--arguments thoroughly borne out by the
experience of the last fifty or sixty years, during which signing has
become more and more common. It was one of the latest of his
semi-serious contributions to _Punch_, appearing in August, 1850; and
though he certainly sent in a score or so of articles in 1851 and a
very few later, it may almost be said to have coincided with his own
farewell to unsigned writing. A large proportion of these _Punch_
articles are mere scraps and _entrefilets_, sometimes evidently put in
to introduce a drawing, sometimes without even that excuse. One or two
pieces I feel absolutely certain that Thackeray himself never would
have reprinted; others do seem to me worth reprinting from any point
of view; many because they were mere 'balaam' as the then still
existing word went--padding of various kinds on ephemeral subjects.
Nearly all the early bickering with 'Jenkins' to which I have referred
above may well be left unreprinted; much of the rather tasteless and
overdone _fronde_ against the Prince Consort (who in his earlier years
certainly sometimes failed in tact but never so much as his assailants
in taste) and a very great deal of the angry babel on Irish politics,
Papal Aggression, Puseyism and other matters whereon God's great gift
of speech was abused about the middle of the nineteenth century. In
fairness, and as touching on that attitude to Ireland which concerns
parts of his real literary work, I printed two O'Connell articles
which illustrate the inconsistency or at least the variation of
Thackeray's position. And it seemed to me that it might interest not a
few readers to have the 'Bashi-Bozouk' papers, which were about his
last contributions and which, by an odd coincidence, 'turned full
East' as had _Jawbrahim-Heraudee_, the first, though on a more serious
occasion and with more than literary cause.

There is not perhaps a very great deal of the absolutely first class
in this part of the collection; we could not, for reasons already
exposed, expect that there should be. All of it is second, some third
or fourth 'skimming'--in fact, when the bulk and the goodness of the
series which have preceded it are considered, it is not a little
remarkable that it should be as good as it is. The Paris articles are
nearly as good as ever--the touch of the _Pav de Paris_ never failed
to revive our author. There is the force which comes from a subject
being 'lived and felt' in _The Great Squattleborough Soire_, though I
have always wished that Thackeray had dealt more fully with another
grievance of men of letters--the way in which large numbers of persons
seem to think that they are establishments at which you 'may inquire
within upon everything' without previous acquaintance, substantial
pretext, or the degrading preliminary or sequel of an honorarium.
_Hobson's Choice_ is good 'second-growth' Thackeray; and
_The Lion-Huntress of Belgravia_ very nearly, if not quite, first: while
I myself have always been very fond of _The Sights of London_ and _A
strange man just discovered in Germany_, and _M. Gobemouche_ is all
right. The _Ingleez Family_ gives a sort of foretaste of _The
Newcomes_ and _Our Own Bashi-Bozouk_ more than an aftertaste of
Gahagan. In the series of _Authors' Miseries_ and similar things the
letterpress is merely auxiliary though it is often amusing. But on the
whole the selection will doubtless, even more than some things which
have come before it, give occasion--not merely to the captious and
petulant--to feel a certain relief at the thought that the author is
going to settle to things more worthy of him--that the gad-fly of this
perpetual demand for trifles is to be taken away.

Yet it may be permitted, in taking leave of at least the mass of these
_articles de commande_, to remind the reader that there is another
side of the matter: and that the ordinary complaints and lamentings
over waste of genius and the like are somewhat hasty. In the
first place it is a great question whether to a genius like
Thackeray's--intense and individual, but impulsive, _primesautier_,
irregular--a very considerable period of experiment is not absolutely
necessary. In the second, it must be remembered that the peculiar
discipline of miscellaneous journalism brings or should bring with it a
certain knowledge of life as well as literature which is of the first
importance. The journalist has many temptations, no doubt, and he
sometimes succumbs to them: but at least he is kept (if he is not a
mere homeworker) from that exclusive contact with books which is
dangerous to weak brethren. He may breathe foul air; but even foul air
is less deadly than an exhausted receiver. He may do clumsy work: but
his work has at least to stand the rough test of achieving its
appointed end whatever that end may be, instead of being put in a
museum under a glass case to be admired, to be neglected, but to come
into no positive action. For the novelist or dramatist at least such a
preparation cannot but be of the greatest value: for the critic it is
almost indispensable. Thackeray was not exactly born to be a critic,
but we shall find that his criticism greatly improved with practice;
he was not born to be a dramatist at all. But he was born to be a
novelist, and in all his long apprenticeship and journeymanship he was
perfecting himself for his achievements to come in practice of
literature and in experience of life. Now the danger which was coming
on in his time and has come on further since was that literature (or
rather _literariness_, which is a different thing) should encroach on
life and substitute itself therefor. At the present day a great deal
of what is called and taken for knowledge of life is quite
spurious--the result of 'the printed book', the citizenship and franchise
not of the _civitas Dei_ or even _Diaboli_, but of the city of Balzac,
Ibsen, Tolstoy, Mr. Meredith, or somebody else. But Thackeray, in these
fifteen years or so of preparation, had been pretty steadily and
sometimes pretty uncomfortably in outside contact with the actual,
while inside he had perfected his own vision and faculty. We may still
not meet the completed results of this for a volume or two: but we
shall see far less of the minor rubs of the time of fagging.




IX

A LEGEND OF THE RHINE--CORNHILL TO CAIRO--THE BOOK OF SNOBS


The very delightful _Legend of the Rhine_ was one of the first-fruits
of Thackeray's repentance as to Dumas. It is true that _Othon
l'Archer_, which Dumas certainly (see the end of the piece) did 'take
from somebody else' (whether from Gottfried Kinkel I know not), is not
indeed one of those greater works in which, about this time, the noble
Alexander began to desert the theatre for literature. But it is a sign
and token: and Thackeray burlesques it with that quaint mixture of
sympathy and satire which makes these things so especially savoury. It
appeared in George Cruikshank's _Table Book_, and the editor
illustrated it in his own way--which was not exactly Thackeray's. The
illustrations are vigorous and, in the Cruikshankian style,
delectable: the river and its banks, and the oars, and the rocks, and
the boat in the cut where Otto takes the water, could not be better.
But there are the usual faces like gargoyles: Otto's countenance is
that of an unusually hideous person about forty, and the Princess
Helen, at the other end of the tale, is a plain female of perhaps the
same age. This cannot be helped, and, in fact, the story needs no
illustrations; while some of those that it has--such as the duel of
Ludwig and Gottfried and the breaking up of the unhallowed
wedding-party--are beyond price. But, once more, it does not want them.
It goes through with itself in the most admirable manner. 'Mistress
MacWhirter'--who may have been suggested by the actual and most
estimable Miss Emma Robinson, author, about this time, of divers
Dumasian romances of no small merit--ought to have written several
more herself. In the last words of the last chapter there had to be
something of apology; there is no need of any here. Perhaps you must
love Romance itself very much before you can be thoroughly enchanted
with this parody of it, but whatever be the reason, there is hardly a
book of Thackeray's that I find more invariably refreshing. Once again
one notes that rarest combination of extravagance with moderation
which distinguishes him in company with Swift and Fielding. He
himself, little fond of Swift as he was, has expressed perfectly the
admiration due to Swift's accomplishment in this way. But in the
lighter vein, the touch where the repentant hermit, after his ungodly
indulgence in watching the duel, springs down the edge of the rock
'uttering a hasty _matin_', is as good as anything in Swift. Not one
humourist in a hundred but would have been ill at ease lest everybody
should not see the point of the absurdity, and have gone back to it or
emphasized it somehow by some fashion of finger-post or _nota bene_.
Not so Thackeray.

On another point something should be said here, though we may have to
return to it in connexion with the still more striking case of
_Rebecca and Rowena_. It was all very well for the author, with that
ironic humility which has been noticed, to class together various
things as 'Burlesques' merely. But the list grew until, in the
collected editions published after his death, the 'Prize Novels',
Yellowplush and Gahagan, this present _Legend_ and _Rebecca and
Rowena, Cox's Diary_ and _The Fatal Boots_, are more or less cemented
together. That there is burlesque in them all is true: but otherwise
the likeness is hardly closer than that between Macedon and Monmouth
or between Thucydides and Tennyson. The 'Prize Novels' are, of course,
burlesque pure and simple, ludicrous though sufficiently good-natured
parody of more or less serious things in particular. At the other end,
_Rebecca and Rowena_, as we shall see, retains, in its final form,
little of actual burlesque except separable touches. This _Legend_
has, of course, much more; it is a fantastic parody of serious modern
followings of ancient romance. But there is nothing in it in the least
offensive or even antagonistic to Romance itself. It stands, if not so
glaringly and almost indignantly as _Rebecca and Rowena_, yet
definitely enough, in contradistinction to the loathsome vulgarizings
of romance--the attempts to sully and degrade it by ignoble
modernizing and rationalizing--which we have seen since, and which are
perhaps the most disgusting things in later literature. This kind of
Yahoo business had begun in or near Thackeray's time. There is, as I
have already pointed out, nothing of it in Barham, who was nearly as
sound as Thackeray himself on the point, and has revealed his true
sentiments in 'As I lay a thynkynge', and not a few other places. But
I seem to remember a singularly offensive paper in _All the Year
Round_, when Dickens was still alive, on some of the first issues of
the 'Early English Text Society' in the sixties: and the kind of brute
instinct to befoul and trample and tear is evident earlier in Robert
Brough, and some of the lower Bohemians of the forties and fifties. In
fact, one has regretfully to say that Mr. Punch, in his early days,
did not invariably keep his acute-eared and sharp-hoofed satyrs from
dancing where and how they should not. But it was impossible for
Thackeray to commit this unpardonable offence, and he must be a very
silly and weak-kneed devotee of Romance who finds relish of _A Legend
of the Rhine_ incompatible with relish, aye and reverence, for
everything that is best of the kind from the _Morte d'Arthur_ to _The
Well at the World's End_. Not only is everything good-natured--I do
not think the Canon Schidnischmidt (who died in the same year) could
have had any difficulty in forgiving Thackeray on his death-bed if he
knew of this mention of him--but, which is not quite the same thing,
everything is in good taste. Nor shall we find many places where the
priceless Thackerayan logic is more beautifully exemplified. 'A person
who can offer oysters all the year round can live to no good purpose.'
A mood of peaceful adoration is the only one in which to receive such
a sentence as that. And how many people could have left the
description of Bertha's person, and the description of Wolfgang's
supper, so perfectly natural and so perfectly distinct, without a
false step in either case in the direction of the other handling, and
yet so as to preserve the keeping between both?

It is, however, necessary to remember that there are some persons (not
utterly to be despised, though they may be deeply commiserated) to
whom even the slightest mixture of burlesque is a thing disagreeable
and suspect; while there are yet others who, while neither disliking
it, nor being shocked at it, think it in some undefined way
inferior--not, as Aristotle says, 'to be taken seriously'. They have to
be considered in speaking of such a thing as the _Legend_: they
fortunately drop out of sight as we come to _From Cornhill to Cairo_.
I have said before that the Eastern tour of which this very charming
and almost perfect thing is a record, appears to me to have been in
some senses the turning-point--a turning-point not passive and
mechanical, but metaphysically active--in Thackeray's life. The
character of the record itself, as part of his work, can not only be
discerned but actually to some extent accounted for, in a fashion very
unusually _not_ futile. It was by no means his only occupation during
the tour. He was at the same time sending, pretty regularly, the 'Fat
Contributor's' articles to _Punch_, and finishing _Barry Lyndon_,
while latterly he was sketching the delightful Christmas book of _Mrs.
Perkins's Ball_. The 'Fat Contributor' provided him with a separate
outlet for the most farcical incidents and aspects of the voyage, and
gave him his own compensation for melancholy in high jinks; _Barry_
with an equally copious one for the grimmer outpourings of his
satire.[17] Thus the coarser and, if not baser (for there was nothing
base in him), the less precious elements were (according to the old
metaphor from smelting) skimmed off the silver of his style and
thought, which was left to reflect his own nature. The style had never
before reached such polished argent as in, for instance, the Telmessus
passage: the thought had rarely united force and grace more happily.
He could not, indeed, repress his old grudge at the classics (who
nevertheless helped him as they have helped many a man, regardless of
his ingratitude) at Athens; nor his crude theology and theodicy at
Jerusalem. But there are very few such lapses in the book, and they
can scarcely be said to be obtrusive.

    [Footnote 17: 'The _mincing_ pages of _Barry Linden_' [_sic_]
    as I saw them happily described the other day.]

These voyages to the East, after the pattern set by Chateaubriand,
were in increasing favour during the first half of the nineteenth
century, and the facilities of access given by steam at once fostered
and hackneyed them towards the latter part of it. Thackeray has given
a humorous list of the chief rivals to 'my own little book' elsewhere
in _Our Street_. The special merit of the same 'little book' consists
in the extraordinary variety of its appeals, and the way in which it
'goes trippingly off' with all of them. If it has not the brassy and
insistent cleverness of _Ethen_, its real wit is far greater; if it
is less enthusiastic than _The Crescent and the Cross_ (a book
strangely missing in the innumerable reprints of a century which has,
at least, the wisdom to prefer _rchauffs_ of good to fresh dishes of
doubtful food), that quality also is not wanting, though the shadow of
Vanity is behind it, as was inevitable in the Preacher's own country.
It produces the true and right panoramic and almost phantasmagoric
effect of its class in travel-books. It does not instruct much or
pretend to instruct at all; in fact, the writer's attitude of
ignorance is evidently and not ineffectively exaggerated. But the
vividness, without the least attempt at 'word-painting', of its
description makes one really think that there may be something in the
combined exercise of pen and pencil. Among a thousand or a myriad
voyages and travels, I remember nothing like the lifelikeness of the
run down the coasts of Spain and Portugal from Vigo to Cadiz.
Gibraltar is spoilt a little by the tiresome anti-military obsession,
as Athens is by that against 'classics'; but Constantinople, Smyrna,
that simply magnificent Ionian passage referred to above, other things
not a few--how good they all are and how strangely free from staleness
even now! For the 'infinite variety' has its effect here as elsewhere,
and is always the attraction and the salvation of Thackeray's work.
The subject hardly matters, though here it happens to be of great
interest. It is the writing that does it.

It was perhaps part of the good luck attending this journey that it
should not be _all_ good luck--that there should be a little _placebo_
to Nemesis attending it. There was, of course, not the slightest real
harm in Thackeray's accepting a free passage from or through a friend,
and celebrating the journey in a very modestly-paid-for book. There
seems to have been no connexion between the two facts except his own
pleasure and profit, no stipulation or expectation of any kind on the
part of the 'P. & O.' directors. He was not accepting, as perfectly
honourable men of letters have since accepted, a regular commission;
still less was he (as some persons of good repute have apparently
found it satisfactory to themselves to be) a sort of 'paid guest' to
millionaire or magnate of some kind, a 'led-chronicler' of land-travel
or sea-faring. But the age was still not altogether discreditably
punctilious about the status of the man of letters: and there
undoubtedly was a kind of handle for real or pretended disapproval of
the proceeding. Some, we are told, of his own friends expressed
themselves rather strongly about it, and it was probably this which
made him take up, as he did, an article in _Tait's Magazine_ on the
subject.

I do not remember whether the untiring industry of bibliographers has
succeeded in rummaging out the authorship of this article which,
though not good-natured, is rather ingenious, and reminds one that De
Quincey used at one time to write a good deal in _Tail_. But Thackeray
thought it was worth answering. He was rather prone to neglect that
golden maxim of Bacon's, _Qui replicat multiplicat_, and his impulsive
sensitiveness probably prevented him from adopting that other counsel
of the wise, 'Write your reply as stingingly as you possibly can; keep
it a night, and put it in the fire next day'. In this particular
instance, apparently, he did not think that he had done quite so well
to be angry as in the case of 'Thunder and Small Beer', for he never
himself reprinted the article 'Titmarsh _v_. Tait' in connexion with
the Eastern Sketch Book. If it had not been regularly housed for many
years in the standard editions of his works I do not think I should
have given it at all. But as it has been thus adopted, I think it may
come here better than elsewhere: and it may take its place as a
footnote,[18] not being long. It is probable that, as so often happens,
the very possibility of his conduct being misrepresented had never
occurred to Thackeray: and that his irritation was all the greater.
Otherwise he could hardly have failed to see that the comparison of
the hired minstrel, though mischievous and uncivil, was by no means
destitute of that malicious appropriateness which constitutes a
certain kind of wit. Nor was he by any means one of those people who
can never see a joke against themselves. But the unexpectedness of
this, as I take it, or the coincidence with private disapproval, seems
to have had in this case the same effect as the 'unclubbableness' of
Yates's conduct much later, and the owlish lecturing of Phillips
midway between the two. Even in the _Roundabouts_ this touchiness
reappears, and it was no doubt an inseparable characteristic. In fact,
it was almost a necessary consequence of the intense nature and
impulse which have been so often assigned to him. Affectation of any
kind was impossible in his case, and after all stoicism is only a kind
of affectation.

    [Footnote 18: It runs as follows:

    TITMARSH _v_. TAIT

    [_Punch_, March 14, 1846.]

    MY DEAR _Mr. Punch_,

    You are acknowledged to be the censor of the age, and the
    father and protector of the Press; in which character allow
    one of your warmest admirers to appeal to you for redress
    and protection. One of those good-natured friends, of whom
    every literary man can boast, has been criticizing a late
    work of mine in _Tait's Magazine_. What his opinion may be
    is neither here nor there. Every man has a right to his own;
    and whether the critic complains of want of purpose, or says
    (with great acuteness and ingenuity) that the book might
    have been much better, is not at all to the point. Against
    criticism of this nature no writer can cavil. It is
    cheerfully accepted by your subscriber.

    But there is a passage in the _Tait_ criticism which,
    although it may be actuated by the profoundest benevolence,
    a gentleman may be pardoned for protesting against politely.
    It is as follows:

    'In the circumstance of a steamer being launched on a first
    voyage to Margate, or were it but to Greenwich, there is
    always an invited party, a band of music, a couple of
    _Times_ and _Chronicle_ reporters, also champagne and
    bottled porter, with cakes and jellies for the ladies.
    _Even_ on the Firth of Forth or Clyde' (this 'even' is very
    _naf_ and fine), 'or the rivers Severn or Shannon, the same
    auspicious event is celebrated by the presence of a piper or
    blind fiddler, carried cost free, and permitted, on coming
    home, to send round his hat. On something like the same
    principle, the Peninsular and Oriental Company were so
    fortunate as to crimp Mr. Titmarsh.... We hope they have
    voted him a yachting service of plate, of at least five
    hundred ounces.'

    This latter suggestion I complain of as being _too_
    friendly. Why should the critic insist on a collection? Who
    asked the gentleman for plack or bawbee? However, this again
    is a private matter.

    It is that comparison of the blind fiddler who '_sends round
    his hat_', that ought to be devoted to the indignation of
    the press of these kingdoms. Your constant reader has never
    played on the English--or on the Scotch fiddle.

    He leaves the sending round of hats to professors of the
    Caledonian Cremona. He was not 'crimped' by the Peninsular
    and Oriental Company, nor called upon to fiddle for their
    amusement, nor rewarded with silver spoons by that excellent
    Company. A gentleman who takes a vacant seat in a friend's
    carriage is not supposed to receive a degrading obligation,
    or called upon to pay for his ride by extra joking,
    facetiousness, &c.; nor surely is the person who so gives
    you the use of his carriage required to present you also
    with a guinea or to pay your tavern bill. The critic, in
    fact, has shown uncommon keenness in observing the manners
    of his national violinist; but must know more of them than
    of the customs of English gentlemen.

    [Illustration]

    If the critic himself is a man of letters and fiddles
    professionally, why should he abuse his Stradivarius? If he
    is some disguised nobleman of lofty birth, superb breeding,
    and vast wealth, who only fiddles for pleasure, he should
    spare those gentlefolks in whose company he condescends to
    perform. But I don't believe he's a noble amateur--I think
    he must be a professional man of letters. It is only
    literary men nowadays who commit this suicidal sort of
    impertinence; who sneak through the world ashamed of their
    calling, and show their independence by befouling the trade
    by which they live.

    That you will rebuke, amend, or (if need be) utterly smash
    all such is, my dear _Mr. Punch_, the humble prayer of

    Your constant reader and fellow-labourer,

    MICHAEL ANGELO TITMARSH.

    BLUE POSTS, March 10, 1846.]

The _Tait_ reviewer seems to have thought badly, not merely of the
ethics but of the literary quality of _From Cornhill to Cairo_,
wherein not many good judges have agreed with him. With regard to the
_Book of Snobs_, there has been a much greater dissonance of what
should be competent opinion. That, from the first, it should have
excited much smothered or open anger, and not a little distrust and
fear, is natural enough--was, in fact, inevitable; and this had its
recompense in the undoubted accession to Thackeray's reputation which
it brought about as soon as he was known to be the author. If not
admired he was henceforth at least redoubted, and people began to
accept him as a formidable satirist before they accepted him as a
delightful tale-teller. But this does not exactly bear upon the direct
literary merits of the collection. These have always been the subject
of a good deal of difference of opinion, while of late years
anti-Thackerayans have taken it as one of their favourite grounds of
attack. I think I have actually seen it described as 'abominable' by a
person who certainly was neither fool nor Philistine, neither Radical
nor 'raff'. Its decriers base themselves, not unfrequently on an
alleged declaration of the author's to Motley, years later, that he
himself 'hated the book, and could not read a word of it'--a
declaration which, even if it had his own endorsement, after all
proves very little, especially from a man of moods like Thackeray. On
the other hand, think what we may of it in whole or in part, there is
no doubt that at least one of the titles which are indissolubly his,
for better for worse, is 'Author of the _Book of Snobs_'. And it may,
therefore, be not so much desirable as necessary to make some slight
critical examination of it as it is--a process which will enable us
incidentally to show, much better than desultory fisticuffs with its
detractors, what it is not.

About one thing there should not be much controversy between
reasonable opponents in any case: and that is its astonishing
inequality. The Goldmore-Gray episode of 'Snobs and Marriage' is an
unsurpassable thing in its own light kind; and much of the chronicle
of the visit to 'The Evergreens' is on the same level. On the other
hand, some of the numbers are so questionable in taste and literary
merit that Thackeray himself omitted them, though for a good many
years past they have been readmitted by his representatives. Owing to
the great length of the series, to its extremely desultory character,
and to its author's usual want of system, positive contradictions are
by no means wanting. At one time he, for instance, finds fault with
people for giving finer dinners than they habitually eat themselves,
and at another expressly declares in favour of the practice. That a
great deal of it, including almost all that he afterwards left out, is
political, means in his case (as has been often said) that it is
worthless and rather worse. For the greatest curse of politics is
incoherence and absence of principle, and I suppose that neither Tory
nor Radical would dream of claiming Thackeray as a consistent walker
on either side. Whether there is an actual breach of decorum in the
direction of personality is an undecided point. Yates's security on
the affirmative side is exceedingly Bardolphian, and though few of
Thackeray's originals of eighty years since can be alive to-day, his
personages are very much alive in club and college, at kirk and
market, on platform and in Parliament, at this very moment.

But, to go higher, what are we to say of the attitude and theory of
the book as a whole? Thackeray was far too intuitive and
quintessential a critic of life not to anticipate the certain charge
of snobbishness in snob-hunting, and far too much of a humourist not
to admit it--in a sense. As a matter of fact, the broom which sweeps
away uncleannesses will have some difficulty in keeping itself clean,
and it probably will be in some danger of sweeping away things that
are not unclean at all. There is no doubt that the hunter here has
indulged too indiscriminately in the pleasures of the chase--that his
definition of 'admiring mean things meanly' will not hold at all, and
that in not a few cases the things are not mean. There is nothing
snobbish--there may sometimes be something absurd--in liveries and
uniforms; and as to his famous instance of the gun loaded by a keeper
and handed through an equerry to a prince, one may bet ten Newmans to
a Kingsley, using the terms in their logical currency only, that it
will not survive five minutes' unsparing dialectic. That the book is
full of faults of tact and taste must be admitted, and for my own part
I have always, since I read that it was at first attributed to Douglas
Jerrold, been inclined to attribute Thackeray's distaste for it to
that fact. It is improbable that he would have liked his son's coat to
be taken for the garment of an offspring of Jerrold. And he may have
recognized the fact that, from some points of view, the coats were a
little too much of a colour.

On the other hand, though I should be very far from attributing, as I
did in another case, the dislike of all those who dislike this _Book_
to a sense of _de te fabula_, I think there is nothing uncharitable or
offensive in suggesting that the very success of Thackeray's crusade
is in part the reason of their objections to it. He made snobbishness
such an odious thing that it has become a point of honour to resent
even the far-off suggestion of the possibility of its existence. That
the crusade was wanted I fear nobody can doubt, however little he may
think our times superior to our fathers': and that the evil was to a
great extent only 'driven in' I fear no clear-sighted person can deny.
There has for some time been room and verge for a _New Book of Snobs_
which would exhibit some piquant variations. But this, taken rightly,
is to the credit of the old one. And that old one has many other
things to its credit of a more concrete and less disputable nature. I
have specified what seem to me its _apices_. The dinner in Bittlestone
Street appears to me flawless--the suspicion of a flaw can lurk only
in the mind of a stern denouncer of practical jokes even of the most
innocent kind, or of a sterner moralist who may suggest that Gray got
his parliamentary business on false pretences. Such persons do exist,
but we need hardly reason of them. Their virtue is doubtless its own
reward.

The satire on the Pinto family and their circle is more mixed and
dangerous, but the greater part of it is again perfect. There may be
an overdose of burlesque in the opening papers for some tastes, though
they must be very difficult ones not to be appeased by the blank
verse--blank verse _is_ argument in such a case and place. And is
there any one who can resist: 'The most good-natured of women pardoned
the error; and the butler removed the bird'? If such there be, no
doubt he will not enjoy the history of the De Mogynses. I shall give
anybody leave to remind Thackeray when he calls the Oxford title of
'servitor' 'very pretty and gentleman-like', that it is only snobbery
which has attached any stigma to 'servant' and its fellows. And I own
that I myself, greatly as I revere him, should rather have liked to
examine him for half an hour or so on his knowledge of the 'brutal
un-Christian blundering feudal system'. But with a very little patience
and shuffling of the cards (especially omitting what the author wished
to be omitted) we find plenty of trumps. For my part I do not in the
least care whether Mr. Papworthy and Captain Shindy 'took off' any
member of the Garrick or the Reform too closely or not. They are not
_named_, and the actual names serve as indicators to two of the most
precious of one's mental acquaintances. I would not be without the
excellent Poppins's answer, when Mr. Papworthy demanded a
specification of the club claret in pints, for a whole bookcase of the
most respectable and improving literature. And I have _seen_ Captain
Shindy (long after Thackeray's death, and after he had first taken up
another profession and then given that up and gone into Parliament)
abusing a club waiter in his own inimitable style. It is well known
that Thackeray's characters have this uncanny knack of turning up
alive. _He_, as it was once observed, need not be afraid of the
Mahommedan penalty on artists, that they will have to vivify their
creations at the Day of Judgement or it will be the worse for them.

Those, then, who want high purpose and such things in a book ought to
excuse the _Book of Snobs_ for its sins (which are certainly not few),
because it really did endeavour to quest and chain a loathsome beast,
and to some not little extent did succeed in doing so, though the
beast, after the manner of its kind, has broken loose again. Those who
are not troubled with such lofty literary morals, but want to _enjoy_,
ought to enjoy. There is certainly plenty of enjoyment for them, and
they can leave what is not enjoyable alone.




X

CHRISTMAS BOOKS--REBECCA AND ROWENA--LATER MINOR PAPERS


Of the 'Christmas Books' proper, there has perhaps been less
difference of general public opinion during the whole time of their
existence, which is long--a full '_eighty_ years since' in the case of
the first--than in regard to any other division of their author's
works. That _Mrs. Perkins's Ball_, even more than _Vanity Fair_ or the
_Book of Snobs_, gave Thackeray popularity is one of the best known
remarks upon him: and probably has at least as much truth about it as
most such sayings. The egregious Mr. Phillips was very nearly alone in
his disapproval of _The Kickleburys on the Rhine_, which was bought
greedily for a book of its goodness: though of course the sale was
nothing in comparison with that boasted, then and now, by mere
rubbish. As for _The Rose and the Ring_, you must either be totally
insensible or congenitally hostile to its whole kind of appeal if you
do not feel it. _Our Street_ and _Dr. Birch_ have perhaps had fewer
partisans: but there are still not a few who regard them as inferior,
bulk and scope considered, to hardly anything that their author did.
The 'Christmas-Book' fashion must of course be taken into account as
far as their original balance-sheet goes, but this would have
militated rather against than for the continuance of vogue. Thackeray,
however, had been wise enough not to make them Christmas Books _only_,
or even mainly. Dances of the cheerful Perkins kind were indeed
usually given in the winter of old time; school naturally suggests
Christmas holidays; and _The Rose and the Ring_ was written to supply
the want of Twelfth-night 'characters'. But _Our Street_ can only
suggest Christmas rent, Christmas bills, and perhaps 'waits': and no
imagination, however fertile in resource, can suggest a real connexion
between Christmas and the Rhine, except perhaps that Rhine salmon is
then mainly available for persons who will have things at the wrong
time. Thackeray had no superfine and superficial contempt of Christmas
customs--the _Roundabouts_ show that. But he was, be it repeated, too
wise to _afficher_ his title excessively.

On the other hand no kind of book, given its usual fashions of
appearance, could better suit his ambidexterity with pen and pencil.
In a sense _Cox's Diary_ and _The Fatal Boots_ are Christmas
Books--indeed in more senses than one, for they actually appeared at the
time: but here the illustrations were not his as they are in the
Christmas Books proper. Nothing could better suit him: and nothing has
better suited him. He altered his dealings slightly, from the pure
succession of scenes, sometimes wholly dramatic, of the _Ball_ to the
continuous romance of _The Rose and the Ring_: while in _The
Kickleburys_ the pictures are perhaps more separable from the text
than in any other. But even there the connexion is fairly close: while
the accepted licence of 'cawicachaw' exactly suits his style. He has
not indeed overcome, to any great extent, that singular inability of
his to draw a really pretty face which he has confessed immortally in
'Peg of Limavaddy'. Miss Joy is tolerable, and Miss Martin not ugly:
but the beautiful Emma Trotter rather suggests that Lord Methuselah's
taste was not much better than his morals. Naughty Mrs. Stafford
Molyneux in _Our Street_ is good-looking, but then she is in profile
and not difficult: while Anne Raby and Rosa Birch are no more than
comely, as is Fanny Kicklebury. Rosalba is charming as a
child--Thackeray could always draw pretty children--but when she grew up
one does not fear that, as an inhabitant of Paflagonia, one would be in
danger of incurring the ban of that clause in the law of High Treason
which forbids falling in love with the King's wife. On the other hand
the men, and the women where beauty is not needful, can be thoroughly
recommended to the most fastidious friend: and the quaint dumpy figure
of Mr. Titmarsh pervades the whole like an atmosphere--in his likeness
and his unlikeness to his original and creator suggesting the unique
mixture of intimacy and aloofness as regards his characters, which is
that original's secret.

The summary judgements of book-catalogue and other second- or
tenth-hand criticism dub _Mrs. Perkins's Ball_ as 'the first and best'
of the books. 'First' is indisputable: 'best' very disputable indeed. For
each is best in its way, and if one could get a common denominator for
things so different, I think _The Rose and the Ring_ would show the
highest mark above the line. But the _Ball_ is certainly charming; and
there is more 'architectonic' than Thackeray is usually credited with
in the beginning and ending of the story, not with Jove, but with The
Mulligan. And the rapidity and variety of the cartoon succession, with
the laconic sufficiency of the letterpress, at once rivet the
attention of the reader and make comment rather absurd. Perhaps not
everybody nowadays knows that the thing owed a little in suggestion to
the 'Physiologies' which had appeared some years before in Paris and
were being copied by Albert Smith and others in English. But the debt
is small: and Thackeray, as always, centuples it with his own
invention. And he has kept the shadows out completely, except in the
last paragraph where indeed they were well enough in place: for when
the skeleton is not at the feast it generally turns up just after.
With regard to The Mulligan himself--greatest, though so slightly
drawn, of all Thackeray's great Irishmen save the father of Emily
Fotheringay--his relations to the actual world seem to have been
curiously different from those of his compatriot. Costigan is said to
have come alive (rather uncannily) _after_ his presentation in the
book, but quite unconsciously on his own part. The personality of The
Mulligan is said to have been, if not exactly claimed by, identified
with several existing human beings--and resented by some of them. The
favourite has, I believe, been that famous and eccentric but very
popular fire-eater and patriot The O'Gorman Mahon who, more than ten
years Thackeray's senior, survived him for nearly thirty, had almost
as much of Gahagan as of Mulligan about him, and was long afterwards
better known than ever as an Irish M.P.--on the Home Rule side, but
(as always) much of a free lance there.

_Our Street_ was written when Thackeray had established himself in a
neighbourhood very much the prey of the alterations which he
describes. Young Street itself had few of the characteristics of the
ci-devant Waddilove, actually Pocklington, thoroughfare. But the exact
processes had begun in many places all round Kensington Gardens from
Knightsbridge to Craven Hill: and they can hardly be said to have
ceased yet, though it is terracotta rather than stucco that is now the
devouring material. The humours of the book are naturally somewhat
more complicated than those of the single _Ball_, and require more
letterpress to work them out. Much greater assistance moreover is
given towards working out that interesting but rather puzzling
'Autobiography of Mr. Titmarsh' which I really wonder that no one has
written. Let it only be hoped that the episode or catastrophe of
suicide, at which Lady Ritchie darkly hints as having once been in
contemplation, was not a result of one of the disappointments recorded
in these Christmas Books. But there is the comforting reflection that
Mr. Titmarsh was so constantly being disappointed that he could not
have committed suicide on all the occasions, and therefore probably
did not on any.

His house-companions--the thievish landlady and the acid if not
exactly sour old maid--are rather more of stock characters than is
usual with Thackeray: but he lived so much and so long in lodgings
that he was probably speaking with feeling. Clarence Bulbul has strong
resemblances to the late Lord Houghton, though only in good-natured
caricature. Thackeray did few things more remarkable than the plate of
'Some of Our Gentlemen', a wonderful group of character heads and
figures--better than 'from the life', but 'from the life' also, fully
in the right artistic sense. It may be feared that Captain Bragg of
the _Ram Chunder_ is from the life too; as (in one sense) everything
in the piece is. But it is in a quieter vein than most of its
companions, and has I believe been one of the least popular. Most
commentators say very little about it: though it is full of
delectation for right readers and, in its direct connexion with its
successor, has a rather peculiar interest.

For _Dr. Birch and his Young Friends_ is, in general scheme, a sort of
episode of _Our Street_, which semi-metropolitan locality Mr. Titmarsh
is induced to desert for a time by one of his futile attacks of
heart-disease. In fact Thackeray, with the proverbial but by no means
universal carelessness of rich givers, threw away upon this trifle the
scantling of a very respectable novel of his own, and still more of
the Trollopian, kind. The business-like author of _Framley Parsonage_
(not that there is the slightest intention here to sneer at him) would
have made three good volumes out of the society of Rodwell Regis and
the Birch family, and the Davison-Raby romance and the Reverend Mr.
Prince (a character susceptible of very great development), and the
parenthetic tragedy of the heir to the Marquisate of Steyne. But
Thackeray used it all up as the merest paper and string for wrapping
and tying together a certain amount of his caustic melancholy and a
much larger one of his favourite studies of school-life. Though there
is nothing in the least surprising--to any one who can construe in
human nature even as well as Mr. Titmarsh could construe in
Ovid--there is something curious in his dealings with schools and
schoolboys. On the one side we have his tirades against the school
system, and his well-attested discomfort during his own experience
thereof: on the other his constant, extraordinarily natural, and one
would say distinctly loving sketches of school life. Of course there
is _haec olim meminisse juvabit_ and other tags to explain what hardly
wants explaining. But the fact remains that his own letters, such
explosions as that in the Eastern Sketch-Book, and divers other
things, do contrast rather humorously with the pictures of
'Greyfriars' in nearly all the novels from _Vanity Fair_ to _Philip_,
and with the sketches of Archbishop Wigsby's resuscitated College
here.

Putting this aside, the book is certainly not the least amusing of the
group. Among the cuts--appropriate word to the alarming frontispiece
of Jack Birch in panoply--there is hardly a weak one: and whether by
accident or not, they are more carefully finished off and furnished
with accessories than most of their designer's work. He has nearly got
hold of the elusive beauty in one of the demure damsels (next to the
ugly little one) who are entering church under the unhallowed gaze of
Dr. Birch's young friends: and most of the boys are admirable. So are
the situations, from that supreme one, dealt with by pen and pencil
alike, where Mr. Tipper finds his nephews 'at their studies',
downwards. Just as Thackeray could always draw prettier children than
'grown-ups', so he could impart truer and more various expression to
boys than to men. The difference between the two sneaks, Lurcher and
Bullock, is quite delectable. Also all these things are fitted with
suitable letterpress in a wonderful way. Gavarni, they say, used to
keep in his studio rows of stones with their faces turned to the wall,
though he had actually drawn on them, because, as he said, they had
not yet 'spoken to him'. There was never, I think, any of this
unmannerly refusal to speak to each other and their master on the part
of Thackeray's pen and pencil. The latter had not quite such
perfection of expression as the former: but they always spoke in
unison.

The piece is distinguished from its fellows by its curious and
affecting epilogue in verse--which, I suppose, seems mawkish to
Catiline the blood-drinker, who invariably uses gunpowder for salt,
and thinks an allusion to Prayer-book or Bible quite sickening. Its
exact reason has not, I think, been explained: for the death of
Charles Buller which is referred to in it had taken place six years
earlier, though about Christmas time. It is perhaps the most
unaffectedly and unmixedly 'serious' of all Thackeray's
work--certainly of all his verse: there is not a quirk or a gibe in it.
In fact it was probably written after the serious illness which
interrupted _Pendennis_, and when (as the Brookfield letters show),
though the peril was passed, the saint was not by any means bilked of
his due. I cannot help drawing attention to the effect produced here
by the shortening (with no previous parallel) of the last line

    To men of gentle will.

_The Kickleburys on the Rhine_ is inseparably associated with that
_Essay on Thunder and Small Beer_ which, ever since its own second
appearance less than a month after the first, has always accompanied
it. I have already, in connexion with the not wholly dissimilar
alliance of _From Cornhill to Cairo_ and 'Titmarsh v. Tait', hinted a
doubt whether Thackeray did altogether well to be angry. It may be
doubted whether anybody ever does well to be angry in this particular
way. The great line of a rather unequal poet

    Mais le plus sage en rit, sachant qu'il doit mourir

remains the last word on the subject: and certainly Thackeray was the
last man to deny it--in the abstract. In fact he might have written
the very line just quoted. But the person who is always _le plus sage_
is not quite human, and Thackeray was very human indeed. Moreover,
there was a curious compound of absolute stupidity and apparent
malevolence in the critique which provoked the essay. It would seem
that Samuel Phillips, to whom _The Times_ review has always been
attributed, was _not_ a malevolent person. But he was rather a stupid
one--LL.D. of Gttingen as he was, and reviewer in chief to 'the
Jupiter' as he was likewise--and he illustrates the curious
mid-century degradation of English criticism from which Matthew Arnold and
the _Saturday Review_ in their different ways rescued it. Moreover, it
was the time of that equally curious and rather unhealthy 'Jupiter'
attitude which, though Thackeray never took notice of it as a whole,
his disciple Trollope has exposed so admirably in the 'Barsetshire'
chronicles. In order to show this attitude, people of distinction 'had
to be _took_ down': and apparently Thackeray was selected for the
particular taking. Very probably the selection was that of Phillips's
employers: but the blundering fustian of the article must have been
his own, and therefore he may in a sense have the credit of the
admirable retort which he provoked. Perhaps he was actually stupid
enough not to see the excellences of the book. One of them, the record
of the duel with 'the horrid contrebanquists' even _he_ saw.

There were plenty more for him to see if he had had the eyes: for the
fact is that none of the group is more pleasantly and unerringly hit
off. It is, if not 'small beer', small wine compared to some of its
author's work; but it is a passing good creature. In the
_Contrebanque_ episode, in that delightful one of Lady Kicklebury's
forcing herself on the society of the Princesse de Mogador, and indeed
in the general sketches of scene and personage, it is something more
than a 'little wine'--it is certainly never less. Phillips, a very
unlucky man during the first part of his short life, was a lucky one
later. He died long before Thackeray; let us hope that he had altered
his opinion of _The Kickleburys on the Rhine._ He certainly will have
to do so before he gets out of Purgatory.

As for _The Rose and the Ring_ it is extremely difficult to be equal
to that occasion. There is really nothing to do but once more to echo
the famous combination of orthodox theology and unerring aesthetics
about strawberries, and to say that it would undoubtedly be in the
power of Heaven to create a better book of the kind, but that Heaven
has never yet been pleased to do so. The charm of the drawings, the
astonishing felicity of the poetical page-headings (the rhythm of
which suggests Milton come again and endowed with a gift of humour, a
stupendous and terrible idea), the unity and convincingness of the
story, and above all the more than Ariostian heroi-comedy of the
treatment--simply defy eulogy. If you see them at all you see them for
yourself, and as no one else can see them for you. The worst of it is
that it suggests an impious presumption--even greater than that of the
man suggested by Thackeray himself who wanted 'a flounder with two
backs'. One wants _more_ 'Fairy Blackstick'[19]--a whole _Cabinet des
Fes_ of her performances, and more about herself. For she is not only
a fairy but a person, a Morgana-Urganda-Abunde become more human and
diviner at once. One desires, like the more romantic auditors of _The
Princess_, a _serious_ Fairy Blackstick--one who should have lovers
and everything suitable about her.

    [Footnote 19: I know, of course, that she is elsewhere
    most worthily and rightfully represented in literature,
    but not quite as I mean.]

But this, as has been said, is exorbitant and sinful; and the thing is
quite delightful enough as it is. I have always thought Valoroso
rather hardly treated; there was something good in Valoroso, as there
was even in his prototype Claudius, and it must be remembered that,
while there is here no suspicion of fratricide, the laws of succession
as between brother and brother or father and son were, in those early
times and uncertain longitudes, very uncertain themselves. But still
there had to be 'a Nemesis' as Trollope would say: and there it is. It
does not seem to have been shared by the Queen (whose name by the way
is never given), though she was very nearly as guilty. Otherwise
everything goes as it should: and it is difficult to decide between
the personages. I think Hedzoff is my own favourite, though the
unfortunate Bulbo himself has very great merits. I am afraid the
staunchest of legitimists cannot exactly poohpooh the satire on his
party; and to question the propriety of the probation of Giglio were
flagitious. But next to the page-headings the scattered gems of
Thackerayan phrase are perhaps the great feature of the piece. From
the statement--so _simplex munditiis_--that 'blank verse is not
argument' to that final and unanswerable question of Padella, 'If you
ride a fairy horse and wear fairy armour, what on earth is the use of
my hitting you?' it is unique and sublime.

_Rebecca and Rowena_ was not, strictly speaking, a 'Christmas Book',
but it has what may be called Christmas-book qualities, and it has
been dignified of old by what may be called special honorary
membership of the Christmas-book body in the later editions published
by its author's representatives; though earlier it went with the
burlesques. As was hinted before in speaking of _A Legend of the
Rhine_, it has much less of the burlesque than of the romantic quality
in it: and like _The Rose and the Ring_ itself, is much more a
specimen of romance with burlesque-affectionate touches than anything
else; while it is not in the very least a satire on romance itself.

In its original _Fraser_ form--which is very little known, and the
omitted and altered portions of which will probably be a surprise to
many fairly diligent students of Thackeray--it had much more of the
burlesque in it. And the attitude to Dumas, though improved from that
of the early miscellanies and reviews, is nearer to this than to the
perfect appreciation of the _Roundabouts_. How wise Thackeray was in
dropping the 'Arthur' scene few people can need to be told: for it is
out of keeping both with the lighter burlesque (it would have done
well enough with the _Catherine_ vein) and with the only partially
mock-romantic sequel. As the piece first stood indeed (and this is one
main reason for giving it in that habit), it was one of the Januses in
the Thackeray Pantheon--looking before and after and evidencing the
cruder and the less crude states of his development. As it stands in
the later form it is one of his most mature and exquisite things--full
of inset jewels of verse (the 'Canute' piece revived with singular
appropriateness, and others of the first water added) and of casual
flashes of happy phrase and thought. It must be a strangely 'heavy'
soul (to borrow one of Dryden's pregnant epithets) which cannot adjust
itself as well to the lighter touches of Athelstane's schoolboy slang
and the 'stones, kettles, bootjacks, chest of drawers, crockery,
umbrellas, Congreve rockets, and bombshells' discharged by the
garrison of Chalus, as to the rather terribly true jests of Wamba's
satire and the romance of Ivanhoe and Rebecca themselves. Perhaps
Thackeray was a little hard on Rowena. It is curious that he was never
quite just to ladies with fair hair--Becky, Blanche, Rowena herself,
Lady Maria, are instances that occur at once. There are not much more
than possibilities of priggishness and prudishness in her as she
appears in Scott, though she certainly had been spoilt horribly by
Cedric. But it was necessary for the story that she should not be here
one of those women, who, as Aristotle graciously allows, 'are good
_sometimes_'. And the whole is what it so lovingly laughs at.[20]

    [Footnote 20: Doyle is, of course, and as usual, beyond
    praise or pay here. But 'do look' (as Lamb says) at the
    expression of the lion on Richard's helmet!]

The few scraps and oddments which Thackeray wrote for publication in
the last decade, and a little more, of his life are now to be dealt
with in chronological order. The chapters to come will be occupied by
substantive work. Like many men who have written much 'for the papers'
he was not greatly given to writing _to_ them, and 'kept himself from
beans' (in this new but, to those who possess understanding, easily
understandable sense) when better sustenance was at hand. But there
are some remarkable things in this batch, and in commenting on them
the chronological order need not be observed rigidly. The most
important is perhaps _Charity and Humour_, which he delivered several
times but always with reference to the first word of the title, though
he sometimes varied that title itself. The first occasion was in
America for a charitable society; the second and third in England, for
the benefit of the families, in the first case, of Angus Reach, in the
second, of Douglas Jerrold. It was on the last occasion that he, as
one of the best-known anecdotes about him tells, adjusted the opening
words (which a lecturer often if not generally adds to something not
quite novel) to his own circumstances by an allusion to the 'High
Street of a certain ancient city', to wit, Oxford, where he had just
stood for Parliament and been defeated. The lecture is a sort of coda
to _The English Humourists_, but there is much else in it and it can
stand very well by itself. _Mr. Thackeray in the United States_ is one
of his latest appearances as a Fraserian and has some of the old local
colour, though _Fraser_ was getting--not exactly staid but--the
reverse of high-jinky. The paper on _Weimar and Goethe_ was written
for and to George Henry Lewes as a contribution to his well-known
_Life of Goethe_: and the Preface to the American edition of his own
minor works is one of the most sensible of all dealings with a rather
burning subject. It contains some interesting remarks on his own early
work, remarks the spirit of which the Oxford edition endeavours to
carry out. But there can now be no reason for passing over the two
'Yellowplush' satires on Bulwer, even if they had not long taken up
their abode with their fellows under authority. The Animosities (to
use Wilson's great words)--and the _animosi infantes_ who felt
them--are long dead; there is Humanity in the pieces enough to make them
live for ever.

But he had less and less need and less and less liking for things of
this kind. The actually last I think--in the time of the _Roundabouts_
and very nearly a 'Roundabout' in itself--was the piece entitled _A
Leaf out of a Sketch Book_, contributed to Adelaide Anne Procter's
_Victoria Regia_. It is, as the Schwellenberg in one of her rare moods
of amiability observed of Fanny Burney, 'most _agribble_', and it
suggests (with _The Orphan of Pimlico_ and numerous other recovered
things, some of which also appear here) an odd reflection. If
Thackeray had taken all his sketches: all those that have been fished
out since; all those that he left in the drawers at Larkbeare and the
desks in the Temple; all the products of that divinely fertile and
only humanly faulty pencil-pen--and had given them letterpress like
this--what a book it would have been! But it was right that it should
not exist: for had it existed, in the dozens and scores of volumes
that it would have filled, the result might have been, to many
respectable persons, fatal. 'What', to vary Mr. Weller, 'ud have
become of the _other_ undertakers' of works of pastime then? As it is,
there is some room for some of them.




XI

VANITY FAIR


In this and the following chapters we have no longer to arrange, and
comment upon, a mosaic of productions smaller and larger, better or
worse, but heterogeneous, except as pervaded by the spirit of their
author. Nor have we to contemplate any longer the spectacle of that
good man struggling with adversity--a spectacle which may be
legitimately attractive to gods, but which has very little legitimate
attraction for fellow men. Each chapter will now consider either, as
in the case of most, a single and substantial masterpiece, or, as in
one or two, a group of pieces the worst of which could not have been
written except by a master. And although _Vanity Fair_, the first of
them, did not immediately receive the welcome it deserved--though it
needed (or is said to have needed) a friendly shove from Hayward to
clear it of the launching-ways, a sisterly haul from the 'little tug'
_Mrs. Perkins's Ball_ to get it out of the shallows--yet before long
it had its share at last of triumph and of gale.

There are some odd chronological coincidences about it. Not only was
Thackeray just at 'the middle of the career of our life' when the
first number appeared on New Year's Day, 1847, but, still more
curiously, he had reached almost the exact centre of his own much
shorter career of literature. Between the _Snob_ and _Vanity Fair_
almost exactly the same space of years passed as between _Vanity Fair_
and the last _Roundabout_ or chapter of _Denis Duval_. His experiences
were to be happier in the second period than in the first. The gods
showed themselves at last _not_ helpless in the fight with stupidity.
But that fight never entirely ceased: and it was waged pretty sharply
(and for some time, as has been noticed, even dubiously) in reference
to _Vanity Fair_ itself.

Stupidity was still not entirely without excuse, though certainly
without justification. There is perhaps no book of Thackeray's which
gains more than _Vanity Fair_, in respect of intelligent enjoyment, by
being read in its proper chronological order. The later books gain in
this way because there is a certain chronological order in
their actual _matter_--if you read, for the first time, the
_Esmond-Virginians_ pair, or the _Pendennis-Newcomes-Philip_ trio, out of
order, you lose a good deal of appreciation of plot and character, and
may even, at times, be somewhat puzzled materially. But in manner,
though there is some development, there is little real difference
between _Pendennis_ and _Denis Duval_. The author is in almost every
sense of the phrase 'at home'--he has conquered his own house and is
living at ease in it. With _Vanity Fair_ this is not quite the
case--reasons and details may be given presently.

But the advances and advantages in respect of all his former work are
immense and unmistakable. In the first place he has at last given
himself--or has been given--proper scope and scale. In the second, he
has at last discarded the conditioning limitations which (one hardly
knows whether by choice or chance or compulsion) have affected his
earlier work. The suspicious reader is no longer approached with a
'mere burlesque' as in _Yellowplush_ and _Gahagan_ and so many of
their successors; with enigmatic transformations of the historical
novel like _Catherine_ and _Barry Lyndon_; with apparently wilful
preference of more or less 'low' life as in the _Shabby Genteel Story_
and _The Hoggarty Diamond_. Misspelling and other devices of the kind,
if they do not disappear, are 'put in their proper place'. And instead
of all this miscellaneous and incomplete work which, instinct with
genius as much if not all of it was, presented itself with all the
disadvantages of ephemeral and apparently hand-to-mouth circumstance,
people had put before them almost exactly the Aristotelian
prescription--a work 'serious, entire, and of a certain magnitude',
dealing, if not with their own time and society, with a time and
society which were hardly of yesterday to many of them--telling a
connected and dramatically arranged story--vivid in manners and
character--with incident moreover both of the lighter and the graver
kind--distinguished too from the merely usual novel to the
requirements of which it had so far condescended, by a coherent
satiric purpose, of the fulfilment of which the author had already
given proofs of being a master. 'The brew may have been too bitter'
(as he said afterwards in his own way) for some: but none could call
it mawkish, or merely sour, or merely 'small'. As for construction,
_Vanity Fair_ is nearly the best of all its author's works--in fact it
is almost the only one in which any attention is paid to construction
at all. In scheme, as apart from details, it is difficult to remember
any other author, except perhaps Defoe, who, having written so long
and so much, suddenly made such a new and such an ambitious 'entry' in
literary competition, and not merely in the particular department of
novel-writing.

In that department, however, the novelty, if not so absolute as that
of _Robinson Crusoe_, was of a higher strain. A succession of great
novelists from Richardson onwards had been endeavouring to bring the
novel proper--the prose fiction which depends upon ordinary life and
character only--into complete being. Fielding had very nearly done it:
but what was ordinary life in his time had ceased to be ordinary. Miss
Austen had quite done it: but she had deliberately restricted her
plan. In the thirty years between her death and the appearance of
_Vanity Fair_ attempts at it had multiplied enormously in number: but
the magnificent success of Scott in another line had drawn off the
main body of attention and attempt--to no great profit. The really
distinguished novels since Scott had been sports of eccentric talent
like Peacock's; specialist studies like Marryat's; medleys of genius
and failure of genius like Bulwer's and Disraeli's; brilliant but
fantastic, and not poetically fantastic, non-descripts like the work
of Dickens.

After, or rather amid all this chase of rather wandering fires, there
came forward once more, 'the proper study of mankind', unerringly
conducted as such, but also serving as occasion for consummate work in
art. The old, old contrast of substance and shadow is almost the only
one for Thackeray's figures and those of his immediate predecessors
and contemporaries. In comparison (though by no means always
positively) they walk and act while the others flit and gesticulate;
they speak with the voice [Greek: meropon anthropon] while the others
squeak and gibber; they live and move and have being while the others
dance the dance of puppets and execute the manoeuvres of _ombres
chinoises_. It is almost impossible to estimate the solidity and
reality of Thackeray's characters in the stage he had now reached,
except by careful observation of chronology. As always--because a
writer of this kind is rather the first articulate prophet of a new
revelation than its monopolist--something of the same quality was soon
diffused. But he was the first prophet: and to this day he is the
greatest.

The book indeed is not faultless. It is said to have been begun as
early as 1841, but it was interrupted, probably, by the trouble of his
wife's illness. The interruption may have something to do with a
certain drag at one place of the story: but it is pretty certain that
Thackeray had not, five years earlier, attained to the art and craft
he possessed in 1846. Of the spirit in which he wrote it we have a
frank and informing confession to his mother. 'Don't you see how
odious all the people are in the book with the exception of
Dobbin?... What I want is to make a set of people without God in the
world (only that is a cant phrase).' Now this confession--as probably
most confessions are unintentionally as well as intentionally--is a
self-accusation. No set of people--probably no person, though certainly
there are some who give us pause--is wholly 'odious'. You can't 'leave
out the sunshine'--fortunately--without making your world untrue. And
_Vanity Fair_ is (without any contradiction to what has been said
above) a little untrue in places. Even Dobbin and Briggs (whom he
elsewhere adds to this exception) are only allowed not to be odious at
the price of being more than a little idiotic. Moreover Thackeray here
fell into a mistake which only Shakespeare has avoided wholly--but
which Fielding, who fell into it sometimes as in the case of Blifil,
has avoided in that of Jonathan Wild and others. He took sides against
his characters--and especially against Becky. Whether Becky really
poisoned Jos (as is suggested more than once and almost affirmed in
the grim and dreadful picture of her as 'Clytemnestra again', which is
one of his best compositions in line) is not certain: and his
explanatory letter to the Duke of Devonshire is rather against it.[21]
One's impression is that Becky knew tricks a good deal better than
that, and less dangerous. But putting this aside, he is certainly not
fair on Becky--he does not even try to be fair as he did, later, on
Barnes Newcome. Becky is very great, but she is ill-treated: the
potter has made the pot too clearly to dishonour. Yet how great she
is! Compare her with Valrie Marneffe, her sister certainly in a
sense, her mother perhaps--and her true greatness will be seen.
Valrie is not, and never could have been, anything but a courtesan of
the worst but not the most distinguished kind--Becky has in her the
makings not only, as she pathetically observes, of a quite respectable
person--but of all manner of persons, bad and good. _Mulier est--nihil
muliebre ab illa alienum est_: though her cruel creator has chosen to
show her only, or mainly, in unpleasant relations. Even he has made
one fond of her in certain situations--in her partial victory over the
green chili, in her breaking-down after the failure with Jos and the
too late offer of Sir Pitt, in her general way of being _bonne
diablesse_, and even _bonne princesse_, so far as she has the chance.
If Sultan Mourad after all his impalings, &c., was saved by the
_corch_ pig which he moved into the shade, may not the communication
of George Osborne's letter to Amelia and the making of two fools
happy, outweigh some at least of Becky's little weaknesses? Say she
did it partly from vanity: perhaps the Sultan saved himself partly
from whim. Anyhow she is great and of the greatest--except her other
sister Beatrix, there is no woman so great in English literature out
of Shakespeare. And her creator _is_ hard on her.

    [Footnote 21: One story is that somebody once asked him the
    question, and received after an interval the natural answer,
    given with a laugh and a puff of smoke, 'I don't know'.]

Whether he is also hard on Amelia is less easy to say. Amelia is a
fool by the law of her nature: and a fool is capable of anything. But
Dobbin need not have been made such a fool as he is. Parson Adams is
as simple: but _he_ is not a fool at all. It is evident that at this
time Thackeray had not finally got rid of the habit of _charge_--of
exaggeration and caricature--which he had cherished so long. It
appears least in Rawdon Crawley who, if not respectable, is
_verisimilar_ from beginning to end--perfectly marvellous piece of
verisimilitude, neither rouged nor blackened. Of the famous studies,
or supposed studies, of real life in public or private characters one
must say a little more. Of late the tendency has been rather to
exaggerate their coincidence with their originals. One of the first
published stories on the subject--and the first that the present
writer ever read--a story adopted by Lady Ritchie--is Kingsley's in
_Yeast_ (published 1849). It asserts that Thackeray (who is not
mentioned by name) being reproached with having made 'the baronet'
(Sir Pitt Crawley) unnatural, laughed and said that he was 'almost the
only exact portrait in the whole book'. (The original is sometimes
said to have been Lord Rolle, the owner of Stevenstone and Bicton in
Devonshire, of whose eccentricities Thackeray may have heard in his
Larkbeare days.[22]) It will be observed that the limitation has an
important bearing on the much more common identifications of Lord
Steyne with Lord Hertford, of Wenham with Croker, &c., though no doubt
there was a certain indebtedness, as in the case of Wagg to Theodore
Hook. The model of Dobbin referred to is given as Archdeacon Allen,
Thackeray's schoolfellow, while he himself assigned portions of Amelia
to his mother, his wife, and Mrs. Brookfield. The foolishest parts
certainly did not belong to the third lady: let us hope they did not
to the two others. But it is well to say at once, in reference both to
this and to all the other books, that it is a great mistake to lay too
much stress on these things. Sir Leslie Stephen has already given a
caution on the subject: but it needs emphasizing, for the writer has
read a German monograph on Thackeray in which almost the entire
biography is laboriously, and with the utmost seriousness, built up
out of the details of his novels. Now not merely is this unwarranted
and unwarrantable, but it involves a complete and disastrous
misapprehension of Thackeray's art and genius.[23] Only perhaps in his
very earliest period and in his immature work is he guilty--if even
there--of this 'lowest imitation',--this mere carrying off of whole
figures from the pageant of life, and botching them into the tapestry
of literature. That a very large number of his traits, incidents,
individual details are taken from, or suggested by, actuality, there
need be no doubt--it is in fact the secret and reason of his
unsurpassed truth to life itself. But these things are all passed
through the alembic or the loom of art--redistilled or rewoven into
original and independent composition. The mere fact--if in any case it
be a fact--that this or that point in the behaviour or history of a
personage may have, as the children say, 'really happened' will
suffice to suggest, in intelligent minds, a strong suspicion that the
next did _not_ happen. There are, let it be laid down, two classes of
books that can be brought under this category. There are the books
which depend for their interest on the fact that their characters
_have been_ live men and women; and those which depend for it on the
fact that they _are_ live men and women. Thackeray's books belong to
the second.

    [Footnote 22: Becky herself appears to have had a prosperous
    prototype. Lady Ritchie saw her once alive, fascinating,
    and, as one would expect, apparently not in the least angry
    with the author of her second being.]

    [Footnote 23: He, who knew his _Spectator_ by heart, must
    have read, and might have taken for motto, Addison's
    faulty character ... I take care to dash it with such
    particular circumstances as may prevent all ill-natured
    applications.' Only he would have known very well, as
    doubtless did Addison, that you cannot 'prevent' them. You
    can only make them unjustifiable.]

Those other vivifying arts of his which have been many times sketched
in general, appear to the full in _Vanity Fair_. Thackeray does not
'set' his scenes and situations with the minute touches of detail as
to furniture and the like, which Dickens borrowed from Smollett and
from Scott, and made more specially his province. But he has a setting
of his own which places things and persons quite firmly in the
reader's conception: and he employs it here from the Academy for young
ladies in Chiswick Mall to his final (or almost final) scenes at
Pumpernickel. It is, however, perhaps not in actual description of any
kind that his life-giving and individualizing touch most fully
consists. It is in queer nondescript devices--though 'device' is a bad
word for things that come so naturally--tricks of names, humorous or
fantastic asides--indescribable confidences as it were between himself
and his reader, which establish intimate relations. In particular his
extraordinary 'science of names' has rightly attracted attention. Take
for instance the quaint whimsy (arising probably from the old slang of
'quite the _cheese_) of the catalogue of Becky's guests 'the Duchess
Dowager of Stilton, Due de la Gruyre, Marchioness of Cheshire,
Marchese Alessandro Strachino, Comte de Brie, Baron Schapsuger and
[most whimsical of all] Chevalier _Tosti_'. And it is very important
to notice that this is not done in burlesque fashion--even to the
extent in which he himself would have done it earlier. There is no
head-over-heels--no tongue-in-cheek even. The passage--or rather the
clause--forms part of a perfectly serious paragraph; the author takes
not the slightest trouble to draw attention to it; in fact he glides
off into more quietly humorous nomenclature of the same kind, leaving
this also unadvertised--unheralded by so much as a 'hem' or a wink to
invite admiration. Moreover these names (compare the grimmer list of
the Marquis of Steyne's titles) are in no respect grotesque or
impossible. 'Baron Pitchley and Grillsby' Why not? Why not 'Pitchley'
if 'Pytchley'? Why not 'Grillsby' if 'Grimsby'?

It is with these subtle condiments of humour and suggestion that the
author seasons his whole book. Whether it has, or has not, 'the best
story' as he himself thought, he was quite right as to the excellence
of the title. In the steady maintenance of the point of view of that
title--so admirably defined and described in the Preface--its greatest
merit as a book, from the severe old critical standpoint, perhaps
consists. Its greatest claim to admiration, with some at least, is in
the lavish and masterly presentation of character--too uniformly
sombre-tinted it may be, but faultlessly drawn--from the triumph of
Becky downwards. But its greatest attraction of all is in the constant
procession-pageant of scenes and incidents which serve to bring out
these characters, and in the wonderful dexterity and variety of
presentation and style--one or two only of the devices of which have
just been pointed out. From the older review-point, perhaps, one
objection, and not a light or easily removed one, may be brought
against a certain stagnation in the narrative between Waterloo and
Becky's last stage of triumph and fall. The author does not quite take
the gap flying (as his business would have allowed him to do), nor
does he fill it sufficiently: and though Becky's career is of the
highest interest, its stages are neither very probably nor at all
fully made out: while the sordid sufferings of the Sedleys and the
dreary prosperity of the Osbornes are rather too like the class of
situations which Mr. Arnold stigmatized, in a famous passage, at the
expense of his own work. But even here the _manner_ is great. So also
the Devil's Advocate may say, with some truth, that in the opening or
ante-Waterloo part, which occupies half the book, the action somewhat
drags, and that, though the Amelia and Becky stories are ingeniously
enough intertwisted, the transitions from one to the other, and even
some of the scenes themselves, do not 'go off trippingly' as Captain
Clutterbuck says. Still, once more, the manner saves everything: and
so it does in the latest division of the book which succeeds the
discovery of Becky's misdoings.

But there is another part where, though the manner is more triumphant
than ever, the matter partakes the triumph and is fully worthy of its
less unequal partner. From the beginning of chapter xliv, when Sir
Pitt _fils_ comes to stay in Curzon Street, to the great catastrophe
itself, the artist is thoroughly inspired, the rider has settled to
the race, and is getting every possible effort out of the horse. Not
merely is it all good, but there is in it that steady _crescendo_ of
expectation and satisfaction which only occurs at the supreme moments
of life and of literature. The catastrophe itself is simply beyond
praise--it is one of the greatest things in English: but it is
perfectly led up to. For, as in other uncertain and accidental
matrimonies, when matter and manner do go thoroughly together, then
all is indeed well. In these hundred pages--they come to about that in
closely printed editions--there is not a line, not a phrase that is
weak or wrong. There is nothing like them anywhere--one may know one's
Balzac pretty well and look in vain for their equal in him, while
anywhere else it is simply vain even to look. The variety, the
intensity, the cool equal command, are not only unmatched, they are
unmatchable in novel-literature: and the circumstances preclude their
being matched in any other. Most novelists stray into fields where
they are strangers, and get hedged or ditched: some keep to known but
limited ground and are monotonous. Thackeray here is [Greek: kydei
gaion]. He cannot go wrong. The very Sedley-Osborne scenes throw up
what is now the main plot--the 'splendour and misery' of Becky--like
the Porter scene in _Macbeth_ or the Fool and Edgar in _Lear_. The
visit to Queen's Crawley; the irruption of Becky into the 'highest
circles'; her double management of Sir Pitt and Lord Steyne; the
charade; the plot; its defeat by Lady Jane's innocent agency; the
great catastrophe itself; the almost greater negotiations about the
duel; the comic justice of the Coventry Island appointment--all these
with minor things hardly less wonderful in their way, do the part of
the matter. And the manner plays up in unfailing provision of style
and atmosphere, of satire, and pathos, and humour, and 'criticism of
life'.

Not that one would attempt to belittle a hundred things before--the
departure from Minerva House;[24] Becky's residence with the Sedleys
and the minor catastrophes (warnings too unheeded) of the curry and
the Vauxhall punch; the mighty combat of Figs and Cuff; the
introduction of Becky to Sir Pitt and the half chance, half
machination, which leads to her union with Rawdon; the plots for Miss
Crawley's inheritance; parts (though they are not so thoroughly
_concocted_) of the Osborne and Sedley business; the Waterloo scenes.
And the Hundred Pages are not ill followed. The restoration of
Jos--too little satisfied with his felicity--to English society; the
great opening of chapter lxi which some new and more intelligent
Drelincourt will some day insert in a cento-book on Death; the
Pumpernickel scenes--others might be mentioned. But the magnificence of
the Hundred Pages rather puts out these lesser lights.

    [Footnote 24: Anthony Trollope surely made an amazing blunder
    when he objected to Becky's return of the 'Dixonary' as
    unnatural. She would not have done it later: as she was then
    it is one of the most 'inevitable' touches in all fiction.]

_Vanity Fair_ then, is not perhaps Thackeray's best book: but it can
hardly be denied that it contains his best long passage. And this is
almost a book in itself in quantity as well as in quality, for you
might print it so as to fill, and fill handsomely, one of the usual
French volumes in yellow paper covers. When he had finished it, he had
not finished his work or taken possession of all his property: but he
had lodged his 'proofs', his titles, his diploma-piece--once for all.




XII

PENDENNIS


After _Vanity Fair_ Thackeray must have felt like Prometheus Unbound.
There were still vultures; _they_ do not abandon the _cor
luctificabile_ of man at any time, and in his case we see them at work
through the medium of the letters to Mrs. Brookfield, which are
plentiful at this date. But the great and master vulture--the gnawing
sense of insufficient recognition of genius--had fled, as his
assistants, the cramps and chains of inability to get that genius into
free play, had fallen away, burst and broken. Thackeray was never a
man to possess his soul wholly in peace; but from this time he, at
least, possessed his powers in plenitude, and was recognized as
possessing them.

This 'calmed and calming _mens adepta_'--a great phrase of Fulke
Greville's which can hardly be quoted too often, especially as it is
absolutely unhackneyed--displays itself to the full in _Pendennis_.
The book has been considerably and variously abused by nearly all who
do not like Thackeray, and even by some who do. This mainly takes the
very uncritical form of abuse of Mr. Arthur Pendennis himself, who,
they say, is something of a prig and something of a nincompoop. In
particular, they get into a most 'igstrawrinary' rage (as Yellowplush
says of his master) with Arthur because he does not actually seduce
Fanny. Their torments on this supposition are only equalled by Helen's
when she supposed that he _did_. When they think of the 'frankness'
with which a French novelist would have treated this situation, they
hardly know whether to weep or to testify. On the opposite side to
these amusing persons are some others not much stronger in the head,
though a little more decent, who insist that Warrington is the real
hero, that you are not expected to think Pen heroic, and so on.

Brushing aside 'all this foolish people', tenderly or not tenderly at
all, as the case may be, one finds a curious unanimity among qualified
and well-affected judges that _Pendennis_ is, perhaps, the most
_delightful_ of Thackeray's novels. It certainly does not owe this
delight to artful construction, and nobody knew this better than the
author. He has (with _his_ frankness, which is of a different kind
from that of the French novelist) told us how such plot as there was
had been altered at the very last: and the piece is full of his usual
'loose ends'. It is true that one wonders how it ever got finished at
all. Not to mention the nearly fatal illness which came upon him in
its course, it seems to have been written in a manner almost
impossible to understand. The references to it in the Brookfield
letters, which tell us more about it than we know about any other
novel, are the merest Sibylline leaves--you cannot piece them into any
coherent account. One is told by several authorities that he received
the story of it _after_ it was begun, from one of Horace Smith's
daughters. What is 'the story' of _Pendennis_? To Mrs. Brookfield he
himself writes as if he had written it in some sense or other twice
over--as if parts some way on had been written before any of it
appeared, and other comparatively early parts were scarcely ready when
the time for publication came. No real explanation of this imbroglio
is to be found in the Biographical edition, and probably there is
none.

Nor need any be wanted, unless it be by the fanatics of rule and by
the hungry _coprophagi_ who look up and are not fed. The book is a
long one, but from first to last it is prodigal of delights, and the
person who wants his delights explained deserves to become a one-eyed
calender, and _not_ thereafter to meet with anybody as agreeable as
Zobeide and her sisters. Perhaps, indeed, it would be difficult to
find another, not merely among its author's books, but among anybody
else's, which contains such a 'God's plenty', as Dryden says of
Chaucer. The beneficent influence which has been referred to at the
beginning of this chapter seems to have set all sources of interest
and attraction flowing, and to have tinged them all with sweetness and
light. The old half-revengeful and more than half-grudging estimate of
school-life has mellowed and sweetened itself. If his University
career was none of the most successful, Mr. Pendennis would certainly
not have said, as Mr. Thackeray had said, that _haec studia_, were of
no use to him. The club element has churned and foamed itself into an
elderly but wonderfully attractive Venus of the other sex--Major
Pendennis. The remnant of self-distrust which threw the action of
_Vanity Fair_ back for half a generation has vanished entirely, and
the society is practically contemporary. Almost every kind of life
comes in, and the parts in these kinds are played by almost every sort
of character. Much more trouble is taken with scene and setting. There
is hardly anything in _Vanity Fair_ (except the grim arch between the
two staircases) which gives us the _dcor_ as a hundred things do in
_Pendennis_, from Fairoaks and the country about it to Shepherd's Inn.
If, as has been admitted, the texture of the story is very loose--if
it is a chronicle-play rather than a drama of the Unities--there is
the consolation (very much more than a compensation for some folk)
that the scenes of which it is combined or strung together never flag
or drag for one moment. In exactly how many tableaux _Pendennis_ is
arranged I should be very sorry to say--the number, I should think,
must be not so close to seven as to seventy and seven. But I know that
there is not one that is not, to me, interesting, and that I never
feel (though I must have read it literally scores of times) the
slightest shock or jar in the transition from one to another.

The fact is that you cannot do so, if Fate has made you in the least
'gleg at the uptak'. The old tableau has not lost its hold before the
new fixes it; you have no time to be hypercritical. The admirable
opening--one of the best, liveliest, and most original that I can
think of in any novel--introduces one of those explanation-retrospects
which are sometimes dangerous, but which certainly do no harm here.
And the abrupt leaving of school (again one of the most vivid of
things) enlivens the narrative once more till it has to settle down
for a moment, and only a moment, into history, and so brings you round
to the subject of the Major's sudden journey and the Fotheringay
episode. Then you have fourteen chapters of such stuff as it will be
hard to beat from any novel before or after--of such stuff as even
great novelists might have been thankful to work up into a whole book.
But Thackeray leaves it with perfect nonchalance, and passes on to his
University act--a shorter one, but even more marvellous. How he has
'caught the blossom of the flying terms' most people have seen--'those
who were there, and those who were not'. But, once more, he makes no
stay. I suppose some readers, if they do not exactly skip, hurry from
this to the London initiation; but if they do so, they make a most
woful mistake. Not only do the chapters from XXII to XXVII give us the
blessed Blanche (for she is blessed, though, perhaps, her benediction
was given her with a Black Paternoster), but it shows us the new
manipulation of social reality as nothing had yet done. On the
initiation itself--the dubbing of the knight of press-industry--almost
everybody comes together again. The delinquent Yates has left a frank
and glowing account of the effect it had upon him: and it is difficult
to imagine any one but the dullest of insensibles or the silliest of
cheap paradoxers who can fail, or pretend to fail, to see its force,
freshness, and fixed artistic value.

The book is now half over, and I suppose persons of the temper which
was once attributed to a child at the Zoological Gardens--who 'always
look at the next beast'--may think that it goes off. But it does not.
The success with _Walter Lorraine_ and the throwing together of
Blanche and Foker ought to do pretty well, and even those who cannot
forgive Fanny's escape might, one would think, be pacified by the
fresh introduction (through the Shepherd's Inn scenes) of Costigan.
Nor is the German visit dull, while the most implacable
anti-sentimentalists might surely be at least half placated by the
death and removal of their enemy, Helen. Perhaps, however, it may be
admitted that just about this period--which is, indeed, just about the
beginning of 'the straight'--the pace is a little slower than usual.
It recovers itself, however, for the 'run in' with that admirable
scene between Morgan and his master, the scarcely less admirable one
where Arthur breaks his uncle's plot, and that, even better than
either, with Blanche in pursuance, thereof. Nor is the close in any
way objectionable, though closes in novels, as in life, are rarely
quite satisfactory unless they are tragic. In fact, it is _not_ a
close, and does not pretend to be, as, indeed, it need not in this
chronicle sort of work. The author simply cuts you off your most
bountiful pennyworth, and keeps the rest for the next time--which next
time in this case was happily no longer in coming than the beginning
of _The Newcomes_. Indeed, _Esmond_ itself is an Irish kind of sequel,
for is not its hero an ancestor of George Warrington's? It would be
possible, and, indeed, very easy, to guess without rashness at the
reason of Thackeray's fancy for the curious intercommunication which
he established between the _personae_ of almost all his work, and
which made him even bring _Vanity Fair_, though by slight and casual
connecting-links, into the family. But it is unnecessary. It is enough
to have indicated the unfailing interest which is provided in this
central meeting-place of the various stories. We must pay a little
more attention to the characters by which it is worked out.

The extraordinary wealth of these is scarcely matter of argument,
though the disappointed controversialist may, and generally does,
endeavour to recover himself by attacking the principals. Pen, they
say, besides his uppishness and pertness, and that unpardonable
absence of sin as regards Fanny, is 'essentially unheroic'--a
statement, by the way, which I think Thackeray would have most
cordially accepted. Warrington is rather spoken of than made to speak
himself. Helen is not only mawkish, but a she-Pharisee. Laura, with
touches of mawkishness, too, loses her last chance of even sentimental
attraction by being in a way unfaithful to Warrington, and marrying a
man whom she nearly half despises, and hardly more than half loves.
Perhaps there is a certain amount of truth in all this, though Heaven
help the man who 'sins his mercies' by objecting to have women like
Helen and Laura about him! But is it not all beside the point? I
should not myself in the least mind carrying the controversy out into
the open field, and (as Athelstan would say) 'giving it over the face
and eyes' to the stupid old 'great, uncommon, and beautiful'
conception of heroes and heroines in inventive fiction. These may
be--I think they are--necessary in poetry; they are not necessary in
prose. But put this aside. Pen, Warrington, Laura, Helen, are, and do,
are not, and do not, this, that, and the other. Well, and is not
'this, that, and the other' exactly what human beings are, and are
not, do not, and do? Will anybody lay hand on waistcoat, and say that
any one of the four is not _alive_? If he does, I think we may disable
his judgement of life. It is true that Laura and Warrington might have
been more worked out--Laura is a little more in the subsequent
books--but the author did not choose to do it, and it is his business,
not ours. I doubt whether Helen is in the least improbable. You may say
that you do not care for her kind, but that is not your business. As
Victor Hugo pointed out long ago, in her time though not in reference
to her, she is perfect _in her kind_, and that is enough. As for Pen,
the author's comments on him in the Brookfield letters only fill in
what he has said of him in the book, and what every intelligent reader
ought to have realized from that book itself. Pen, if anybody in
modern fiction, is _l'homme sensuel moyen_--a little cleverer in some
ways, and a little better in others, than the average gentleman of the
upper middle class who has received a liberal education and has been
thrown into decent society, but not much. Thackeray gave him enough of
himself to make him individual, but, as Addison (once more) puts it,
dashed the mixture with a great deal that was not himself at all: and,
having made him, he put him through the paces that he wished to show.
He did not want to make him a pattern; he did not want to make him an
awful example; he was to live the average life, undergo the average
fates, experiences, temptations, luck, and ill-luck. Perhaps it may be
said that these fates, &c., were more the subject of the book than
Pen's own attitude to them or his dealings with them. I do not know
why it should not be so.

Nor do I know why we should not turn to the other characters, who are
hardly minor in some cases. Take Blanche--all but a heroine--and Major
Pendennis--all but a hero--free, too, both of them, from any nasty
bread-and-butterish virtue or scruples, as human as you can wish.
Blanche, it seems, for whom I have not a sneaking, but a distinct and
open, affection, was almost more of a real person than any one else in
the gallery--a 'Miss G.' apparently, who openly (and very sensibly)
claimed the identity, and had it allowed in a Brookfield letter to the
extent of 'She says she is Blanche, _and I think she is_.' Blanche is
extremely nice--one would not, I think, marry her, except in
polygamous and cloistral countries, but that is about all that can be
said against her. As for the Major, praise is superfluous. The Major,
who had respect for all important institutions, included Shakespeare;
but oh! how Shakespeare would have delighted in the Major! Then there
is Foker. It is almost a pity that the enjoyment of this most
excellent personage has been meddled with by the anecdotes about Mr.
Andrew Arcedeckne. That there was a person of that name who was a
schoolfellow of Thackeray's, and who had some of the externals of
Foker's character, appears certain. That he called Thackeray 'Thack'
is a legend; and there is nothing either shocking, or surprising, or
amusing, or particularly interesting about it. School or college
intimacy authorizes these things, though one knows what to think of
persons who adopt them without the title to do so. It appears also
that he suggested to 'Thack' that he should have a piano for his
lectures, and that this was a rather brilliant revenge for Foker. I
fear I must say that all this seems to me very trivial, and more than
a little silly. The students of Mr. Arcedeckne's career have made it
abundantly evident that he had nothing (except, perhaps, the
insinuation that as a schoolboy he was not sufficiently fond of
soap-and-water--'which many is not') to complain of in Foker. One may add
that they have suggested at least that Foker has something to complain
of in being identified with Mr. Arcedeckne; for Master Harry, except
in the matter of the early soap-and-water, has a distinctly _beau
rle_. If he is not represented as very learned, or as having the
manners of a Chesterfield, he _is_ represented as being a thoroughly
good fellow, shrewd, good-natured, with the feelings, if not the
flourishes, of a gentleman. He is left with an ample fortune, and
without Blanche as a wife--the one capacity in which one would, as it
has been suggested, perhaps not desire that ingenious and agreeable
young lady. Surely this is not exactly bad treatment!

Unluckily, there is no room for dwelling on the individual members of
this most 'starry' company. Costigan and his daughter once more unite
almost all suffrages--certainly all that are worth canvassing. As for
'the General', he is a nineteenth-century Falstaff--without the
brains, of course; but then a nineteenth-century Falstaff with brains
would be almost impossible. The divine Emily, on the other hand, is
one of Thackeray's 'terrible' characters--so absolutely human, so
blameless in all important aspects, so 'coted and signed', as it might
seem, to be loved, and yet so hopeless and impossible as love's
object. And who but Thackeray would have thrown in (as a kind of
_remarque_) the satellite figure of Bows--a whole novel-centre in
himself? And Captain-Chevalier Strong, and Mirobolant, and the
Claverings themselves (Sir Francis, a mere super, has once more 'star'
quality), and Altamont, and the minor Oxbridge and Fleet Street
figures, and the publisher's dinner, and the ball at our old scene,
Gaunt House, and Vauxhall, and the Derby, and a hundred things and
persons more?

But there is a third point which, amid all this wealth of scene and
character, must be noted as a fresh attraction for _Pendennis_, and
which, to some at least, is not inferior to either of the others,
while perhaps, here as elsewhere, it helps to constitute the perennial
attraction of these books. Of scenes and incidents you may, they say,
weary. I doubt it, but I think it possible. The play of character may
become so familiar that the enjoyment of it is, at least, palled; but
there is in _phrase_--in certain peculiar collocations of the written
word--a charm like that of Cleopatra. It never wearies, because it is
never quite the same. Imbedded as it is to a certain extent in its
context, you may miss it wholly on one re-reading, and so it comes to
you all the fresher at the next. Even if this does not happen, it has,
if it is of the first water, a quality at once of the opal and of the
diamond which is absolutely infinite and inexhaustible. Thackeray had
always had correspondences with this Golconda, and a very few
instances of his traffic with it have been cited. But now and from
this time forward the gems seem to have dropped at pleasure from mouth
and pen. Not a page--hardly a paragraph--is without them in
_Pendennis_, and sometimes they are curious. Matthew Arnold, as we
shall have to notice later, did not think Thackeray a great writer,
yet Mr. Arnold's finest poem by far, the second _Isolation_, is simply
an extension of a phrase in an early chapter of _Pendennis_: 'You and
I are but a pair of infinite isolations with some fellow-islands more
or less near to us.' It is true that both may have been suggested by
'Jacopo Ortis', but the exact coincidence of phrase and the nearness
in date of _Pendennis_ (1849, Mr. Arnold's _Poems_ 1852) are
suggestive, and there are thousands of others unborrowed and
unborrowable. 'The evening was a great triumph for him: it ended. All
triumphs and all evenings end.' That is what some people at the
present day, I believe, call 'the obvious'. Pity that, in their own
walks abroad, they seem to meet anything similar so seldom!

Independently of its extraordinary wealth of internal attraction, the
external circumstances of _Pendennis_ have unusual interest. As has
been more than once observed, its composition entwines itself with
that of the Brookfield letters after a fashion not paralleled, as far
as published correspondence goes, in regard to any of the other books.
It was in consequence of an allusion to the murderess, Catherine
Hayes, in _Pendennis_ that the ultra-farcical incident occurred which
has been glanced at in a note to _Catherine_ itself. A muscular son of
Erin actually took lodgings in Young Street (with intent to avenge his
wronged countrywoman _par voie de fait_) till Thackeray, tired of the
nuisance and the absurdity, bearded the adventurer in his
lurking-place, and succeeded in convincing him that there was no offence
meant. The Cambridge and Temple reminiscences are unmistakable in
general, though, as has been pointed out, they may easily be
overforced in particular. Nor has any of the novels so definitely and
elaborately described a _country_ as this. But a careful student
of this country will derive from the study some salutary warnings
(which he may utilize in regard to matters other than topographical)
as to Thackeray's manner of incorporating the real and the imaginary.
That 'Chatteris' is Exeter, 'Clavering St. Mary' Ottery of the same
invocation, and Baymouth' Sidmouth, not only is said with regularity,
but may be said with perfect confidence. So, further, the 'Brawl' is
the Otter, and so on. One need not be disturbed by doubts in walking
or driving along the very roads that Rebecca and the Butcher Boy and
poor Smirke's pony travelled. It is no wonder that Rebecca had enough
of it on one occasion, for it is over a dozen miles from Baymouth to
Chatteris, even without the detour by Clavering, and the ups and downs
are not a few. But when it is said that Fairoaks is Larkbeare, not a
few provisos have to be added. Fairoaks is spoken of as close to
Clavering--almost, in fact, in it. It has a lodge-gate on the London
road, and some of the few fields attached to it run down to the Brawl,
on the other side of which is Clavering Park. In fact, one images
Clavering, Clavering Park, and Fairoaks as all close together, with
the Brawl, so to speak, in common. Now, as a matter of fact, Larkbeare
is some mile and a half from Ottery, and not near the Brawl at all,
but in another valley--that of the Tale Water, a small tributary of
the larger stream. And though there is a greater country seat (that of
the Kennaways at Escot) pretty close to it, that also has nothing to
do with the Otter.[25] Of course, this is absolutely unimportant from
one point of view, but from another it is most important. It shows how
Thackeray, like all the greatest artists, took hints, but did not
brook dictation, from his sitters and his scenes; how at any time you
may find yourself sliding off solid fact into pure fiction; how, in
fact, you are dealing with an artist and not with a reporter.

    [Footnote 25: In an essay Thackeray gives the real names of
    'Fair _Mile_' and 'Escot'.]

One more point, and we may have done, though the astonishing abundance
of the book would lend itself to endless scholiastry. Thackeray is
often accused--and it is not always easy to clear him from the
charge--of careless preparation of his books. In regard to _Pendennis_
in particular, we have his fullest confessions on the subject, and his
illness would by itself have made them almost unnecessary; but if he
was a careless 'putter forth', he was often a very shrewd reviser, and
most certainly no indolent one. Hardly any alteration of more value
has ever been made in a novel than the omission of a long passage
about the Clavering gossip as to Mrs. Pendennis and Smirke. Still
earlier, a short one about the ancestral portraits and Helen's
attitude to them, though a lesser, is perhaps a more delicate instance
of Thackeray's revising powers. This attitude is inconsistent with
that of determined admiration of her husband's wisdom which is
constantly attributed to her elsewhere--and he saw it, and it _went_.
But the best instance of all comes later. Most people who have read
_Pendennis_ remember the Cambridge dinner (not unlike some that young
Mr. Thackeray, as we know, used to give there) at which the Major
takes the measure of Bloundell-Bloundell. They will find that in the
earlier issues this scene takes a different form--the ex-cornet and
actual undergraduate 'cheeking' the Major, hinting that he is an old
fogey, and so forth. Now this, though it explains still further the
Major's breakfast judgement, deprives him of nearly all merit and
character in respect of it, and, what is more, is out of keeping; for
it is certain that _at this time_, whatever may be the case in the
_Newcomes_ period, or even at the latter end of the present book, the
Major is not in the least decadent or _pass_. He still 'lives in the
fust society both at 'ome and foring'. He still 'rides with Lord John
and the noble Whycount at the 'edd of Foring Affairs', and is
'consulted by the Marquis of Steyne in everythink'. It was therefore a
mistake to make him overcrowed by a youthful bounder and plunger like
Bloundell--and Thackeray corrected it. He did not immediately hit on
the convenient hybrid 'Oxbridge', and left inconsistencies in the
first version, correcting them later. And his care was so minute that
he sometimes--and, indeed, pretty often--changed things like
'amusements and occupations' to 'occupations and amusements', in which
case the principle above referred to was applied in the Oxford
edition, and we gave the later and settled version in the text without
loading the Appendix with the earlier. But where, as at p. 219, the
stages of thought--'Dillon' (cf. 'Napper') and 'Dilley' Tandy--may
interest the reader, the signpost to them was kept.

Other minor mistakes, of the kind more easily perceived by meticulous
dullness, he perhaps did not correct, nor was it in the least
necessary that he should do so. We do not want novels to be Dutch
Paradises, with Euphrates and Gihon running at exactly the same angles
in corresponding corners, and Behemoth vignetted on the right in
precise balance of Leviathan on the left. We want the 'God's plenty',
and we have it here. In fact, as one thinks over the book--over casual
but priceless things like the watching of the lovers from the Dean's
garden, or the delivery--non-delivery, rather--of the challenge by Mr.
Garbetts; like the little scene between Colonel Altamont, the
footman, and the constable, or the unfortunate afternoon tea at
Fairoaks[26]--it seems idle and impertinent to say anything about such a
book. It makes no difficulties about itself; it is not problematic; its
gold requires no smelting. There is really no need to do much more than
Warrington did with Pen's first review-parcel--which most assuredly
contained nothing a hundredth part as good. Throw it to the lucky
recipient with a 'Catch it!'--and he is foolish if he does anything
that day but read.

    [Footnote 26: I do not know whether anybody has noticed a
    curious coincidence between this and a scene in Miss
    Austen's unfinished, and indeed hardly begun, _The Watsons_.
    Neither writer could by any possibility have seen the
    other's work, for Thackeray had been dead just about as many
    years when _The Watsons_ was first published as he was old
    when Miss Austen died. But the coincidence in two such
    artists is curious, nor is it the only foreshadowing of
    'snobography' in the lady. It may be just permissible to
    draw attention to the way in which the 'science of names' is
    shown at once by the selection of the real but, in reality,
    perfectly unrelated _Chatter_ is and _Claver_ing for two
    country centres of gossip. A few readers may even pardon the
    reminder that 'Chatteris' is an actual place near
    _Cambridge_; and 'Clavering' a name famous in _Indian_
    history.]




XIII

ESMOND--THE ENGLISH HUMOURISTS--THE FOUR GEORGES


We know exceedingly little of the genesis and progress of _Esmond_.
'It did not seem to be a part of our lives as _Pendennis_ was,' says
Lady Ritchie, though she wrote part of it to dictation. She 'only
heard _Esmond_ spoken of very rarely'. Perhaps its state was not the
less gracious. The Milton girls found _Paradise Lost_ a very
considerable part of their lives--and were not the happier.

But its parallels are respectable. The greatest things have a way of
coming 'all so still' into the world. We wrangle--that is, those of us
who are not content simply not to know--about the composition of
Homer, the purpose of the _Divina Commedia_, the probable plan of the
_Canterbury Tales_, the _Ur-Hamlet_. Nobody put preliminary
advertisements in the papers, you see, about these things: there was a
discreditable neglect of the first requirements of the public. So it
is with _Esmond_. There is, I thought, a reference to it in the
Brookfield letters; but in several searches I cannot find it. To his
mother he speaks of the book as 'grand and melancholy', and to Lady
Stanley as of 'cut-throat melancholy'. It is said to have been sold
for a thousand pounds--the same sum that Master Shallow lent Falstaff
on probably inferior security. Those who knew thought well of
it--which is not wholly surprising.

It is still, perhaps, in possession of a success rather of esteem than
of affection. A company of young men and maidens to whom it was not
long ago submitted pronounced it (with one or two exceptions) inferior
as a work of humour. The hitting of little Harry in the eye with a
potato was, they admitted, humorous, but hardly anything else. As
representing another generation and another point of view, the
faithful Dr. John Brown did not wholly like it--Esmond's marriage with
Rachel, after his love for Beatrix, being apparently 'the fly in the
ointment' to him. Even the author could only plead 'there's a deal of
pains in it that goes for nothing', as he says in one of his rare
published references to the subject: but he was wrong. Undoubtedly the
mere taking of pains will not do; but that is when they are taken in
not the right manner, by not the right person, on not the right
subject. Here everything was right, and accordingly it 'went for'
everything. A greater novel than _Esmond_ I do not know; and I do not
know many greater books. It may be 'melancholy', and none the worse
for that: it _is_ 'grand'.

For though there may not be much humour of the potato-throwing sort in
_Esmond_, it will, perhaps, be found that in no book of Thackeray's,
or of any one else's, is that deeper and higher humour which takes all
life for its province--which is the humour of humanity--more
absolutely pervading. And it may be found likewise, at least by some,
that in no book is there to be found such a constant intertwist of the
passion which, in all humanity's higher representatives, goes with
humour hand in hand--a loving yet a mutually critical pair. Of the
extraordinarily difficult form of autobiography I do not know such
another masterly presentment; nor is it very difficult to recognize
the means by which this mastery is attained, though Heaven knows
it is not easy to understand the skill with which they are
applied. The success is, in fact, the result of that curious
'doubleness'--amounting, in fact, here to something like
_triplicity_--which distinguishes Thackeray's attitude and handling.
Thus Henry Esmond, who is on the whole, I should say, the most like him
of all his characters (though of course 'romanced' a little), is himself
and 'the other fellow', and also, as it were, human criticism of both. At
times we have a tolerably unsophisticated account of his actions, or it
may be even his thoughts; at another his thoughts and actions as they
present themselves, or might present themselves, to another mind: and
yet at other times a reasoned view of them, as it were that of an
impartial historian. The mixed form of narrative and mono-drama lends
itself to this as nothing else could: and so does the author's
well-known, much discussed, and sometimes heartily abused habit of
_parabasis_ or soliloquy to the audience. Of this nothing has yet been
directly said, and anything that is said would have to be repeated as
to every novel: so that we may as well keep it for the last or a late
example, _The Virginians_ or _Philip_. But its efficacy in this
peculiar kind of double or treble handling is almost indisputable,
even by those who may dispute its legitimacy as a constantly applied
method.

One result, however, it has, as regards the hero-spokesman, which is
curious. I believe thoroughly in Henry Esmond--he is to me one of the
most real of illustrious Henrys as well of Thackeray's characters--but
his reality is of a rather different kind from that of most of his
fellows. It is somewhat more abstract, more typical, more generalized
than the reality of English heroes usually is. He is not in the least
shadowy or allegoric: but still he is somehow 'Esmondity' as well as
Esmond--_the_ melancholy rather than _a_ melancholy, clear-sighted,
aloof-minded man. His heart and his head act to each other as their
governing powers, passion and humour, have been sketched as acting
above. He is a man never likely to be very successful, famous, or
fortunate in the world; not what is generally called a happy man; yet
enjoying constant glows and glimmers of a cloudy happiness which he
would hardly exchange for any other light. The late Professor
Masson--himself no posture-monger or man of megrims, but one of genial
temper and steady sense--described Thackeray as 'a man apart'; and so is
the Marquis of Esmond. Yet Thackeray was a very real man; and so is the
Marquis too.

The element of abstraction disappears, or rather retires into the
background, when we pass to Beatrix. She also has the _Ewigweibliche_
in her--as much of it as any, or almost any, of Shakespeare's women,
and therefor more than anybody else's. But she is very much more than
a type--she is Beatrix Esmond in flesh and blood, and damask and
diamond, born 'for the destruction of mankind' and fortunately for the
delight of them, or some of them, as well. Beatrix is beyond eulogy.
'Cease! cease to sing her praise!' is really the only motto, though
perhaps something more may be said when we come to the terrible
pendant which only Thackeray has had the courage and the skill to
draw, with truth and without a disgusting result. If she had died when
_Esmond_ closes I doubt whether, in the Wood of Fair Ladies, even
Cleopatra would have dared to summon her to her side, lest the
comparison should not be favourable enough to herself, and the throne
have to be shared.

But, as usual with Thackeray, you must not look to the hero and
heroine too exclusively, even when there is such a heroine as this.
For is there not here another heroine--cause of the dubieties of the
_Doctor Fidelis_ as above cited? As to that it may perhaps be pointed
out to the extreme sentimentalists that, after all, Harry had been in
love with the mother, as well as with the daughter, all along. If they
consider this an aggravation, it cannot be helped: but, except from
the extreme point of view of Miss Marianne Dashwood in her earlier
stage, it ought rather to be considered a palliative. And if they say
further that the thing is made worse still by the fact that Harry was
himself Rachel's _second_ love, and that she did not exactly wait to
be a widow before she fell in love with him; why, there is, again,
nothing for it but to confess that it is very shocking--and
excessively human. Indeed, the fact is that Rachel is as human as
Beatrix, though in a different way. You may not only _love_ her less,
but--in a different sense of contrast from that of the Roman
poet--_like_ her a little less. But you cannot, if you have any
knowledge of human nature, call her unnatural. And really I do not
know that the third lady of the family, Isabel Marchioness of Esmond,
though there is less written about her, is not as real and almost as
wonderful as the other two. She is not so fairly treated, however,
poor thing! for we have her Bernstein period without her Beatrix one.

As for my Lords Castlewood--Thomas, and Francis _pre et fils_--their
creator has not taken so much trouble with them; but they are never
'out'. The least of a piece, I think, is Rachel's too fortunate or too
unfortunate husband. The people who regard Ibsen's great triumph in
the _Doll's House_ as consisting in the conduct of the husband as to
the incriminating documents, ought to admire Thackeray's management of
the temporary loss of Rachel's beauty. They are certainly both touches
of the baser side of human nature ingeniously worked in. But the
question is, What, in this wonderful book, is _not_ ingeniously worked
in--character or incident, description or speech?

If the champions of 'Unity' were wise, they would take _Esmond_ as a
battle-horse, for it is certain that, great as are its parts, the
whole is greater than almost any one of them--which is certainly not
the case with _Pendennis_. And it is further certain that, of these
parts, the personages of the hero and the heroine stand out
commandingly, which is certainly not the case with _Pendennis_, again.
The unity, however, is of a peculiar kind, and differs from the
ordinary non-classical 'Unity of Interest' which Thackeray almost
invariably exhibits. It is rather a Unity of _Temper_, which is also
present (as the all-pervading motto _Vanitas Vanitatum_ almost
necessitates) in all the books, but here reaches a transcendence not
elsewhere attained. The brooding spirit of _Ecclesiastes_ here covers,
as it were, with the shadow of one of its wings, the joys and sorrows,
the failures and successes of a private family and their friends, with
the other fates of England and Europe; the fortunes of Marlborough and
of Swift on their way from dictatorship, in each case, to dotage and
death; the big wars and the notable literary triumphs as well as the
hopeless passions or acquiescent losses. It is thus an instance--and
the greatest--of that revival of the historical novel which was taking
place, and in which the novel of Scott[27]--simpler, though not so very
simple as is sometimes thought--is being dashed with a far heavier
dose of the novel-element as opposed to the romance, yet without
abandonment of the romance-quality proper. Of these novel-romance
scenes, as they may be called, the famous mock-duel at the end is of
course the greatest. But that where the Duke of Hamilton has to
acknowledge the Marquis of Esmond, and where Beatrix gives the kiss of
Beatrix, is almost as great: and there are many others. It is possible
that this very transcendence accounts to some extent for the somewhat
lukewarm admiration which it has received. The usual devotee of the
novel of analysis dislikes the historic, and has taught himself to
consider it childish; the common lover of romance (not the better
kind) feels himself hampered by the character-study, as mile de
Girardin's subscribers felt themselves hampered by Gautier's style.
All the happier those who can make the best of both dispensations!

    [Footnote 27: The influence of Scott on Thackeray is
    undoubted and freely confessed. But I cannot fall in with
    'certain persons of distinction' in making _Esmond_ very
    specially indebted to _Woodstock. Woodstock_ is a very great
    book in itself and amazing when one knows its circumstances:
    but it is, even for Scott, very specially and exclusively
    _objective_. _Esmond_ is subjective also in the highest
    degree.]

Nothing, however, has yet been said of one of the most salient
characteristics of _Esmond_--one, perhaps, which has had as much to do
with the love of its lovers, and the qualified esteem of those who do
not quite love it, as anything else. This is, of course, the attempt,
certainly a very audacious one, at once to give the very form and
pressure of the time of the story--sometimes in actual diction--and
yet to suffuse it with a modern thought and colour which most
certainly were _not_ of the time. The boldness and the peril of this
attempt are both quite indisputable; and the peril itself is, in a
way, double. There is the malcontent who will say 'This may be all
very fine: but I don't like it. It bothers and teases me. I do not
want to be talked to in the language of Addison and Steele'. And there
will be the possibly less ingenuous but more obtrusive malcontent who
will say that it ought never to have been done, or that it is not, as
it is, done well. With the first, who probably exists 'in squadrons
and gross bands', argument is, of course, impossible. He may be taught
better if he is caught young, but that is all: and certainly the last
thing that any honest lover of literature would wish would be to make
him say that he likes a thing when he does not. That may be left to
those who preach and follow the fashions of the moment. Nor, perhaps,
is there very much to do with those who say that the double attempt is
not successful--except to disable their judgement. But as for the
doctrine that this attempt _deserves_ to fail, and must fail--that it
is wrong in itself--there one may take up the cudgels with some
confidence.

So far from there being anything illegitimate in this attempt to bring
one period before the eyes of another in its habit as it lived, and
speaking as it spoke, but to allow those eyes themselves to move as
they move and see as they see--it is merely the triumph and the
justification of the whole method of prose fiction in general, and of
the historical novel in particular. For that historical novel is
itself the result of the growth of the historic sense acting upon the
demand for fiction. So long as people made no attempt to understand
things and thoughts different from those around and within them; so
long as, like the men of the Middle Ages, they blandly threw
everything into their own image, or, like those of the Renaissance to
some extent and the Augustan period still more, regarded other ages at
worst with contempt, and at best with indulgence as childish, the
historical novel could not come into being, and did not. It only
became possible when history began to be seriously studied as
something more than a chronicle of external events. When it had thus
been made possible, it was a perfectly legitimate experiment to carry
the process still further; not merely to discuss or moralize, but to
represent the period as it was, without forfeiting the privilege of
regarding it from a point of view which it had not itself reached. The
process of Thackeray is really only an unfolding, and carrying further
into application, of the method of Shakespeare. Partly his date,
partly his genius, partly his dramatic necessities, obliged
Shakespeare to combine his treatment--to make his godlike Romans at
once Roman and Elizabethan, and men of all time, and men of no time at
all. Thackeray, with the conveniences of the novel and the demands of
his audience, _dichotomizes_ the presentation while observing a
certain unity in the fictitious person, now of Henry Esmond, now of
William Makepeace Thackeray himself. If anybody does not like the
result, there is nothing to be said. But there are those who regard it
as one of the furthest explorations that we yet possess of human
genius--one of the most extraordinary achievements of that higher
imagination which Coleridge liked to call _esenoplastic_.[28] That a
man should have the faculty of reproducing contemporary or general
life is wonderful; that he should have the faculty of reproducing past
life is wonderful still more. But that he should thus revive the past
and preserve the present--command and provide at once theatre and
company, audience and performance--this is the highest wizardry of
all. And this, as it seems to me, is what Thackeray had attempted, and
more, what he has done, in the _History of Henry Esmond_.[29]

    [Footnote 28: This form, which he used elsewhere than in the
    _Biographia Literaria_, is better than _esemplastic_ which
    he employed there.]

    [Footnote 29: The justice or accuracy of his individual
    presentments and even of his general view of the time is
    quite another matter. We may touch on part of it presently.
    But the real point is that the whole is of a piece at least
    _in potentia_: that it gives a world that might have
    existed.]

He could not have done it without the 'pains' to which he refers in
the saying quoted above; but these pains, as usual, bore fruit more
than once. The two main after-crops were _The English Humourists_[30]
and _The Four Georges_. Exactly _how_ early Thackeray's attention was
drawn to the eighteenth century it would, in the necessarily
incomplete state of our biographical information about him, be very
difficult to say. We have pointed out that the connexion was pretty
well established as early as _Catherine_. But it was evidently founded
upon that peculiar congeniality, freshened and enlivened with a proper
dose of difference, which is the most certain source and the purest
maintainer of love in life and literature.

    [Footnote 30: The lectures on the _Humourists_ were, of
    course, delivered before _Esmond_ was published; but, in
    another sense, they are only after-crops or by-products.]

At the same time, the two sets of lectures are differentiated from the
novel not so much by their form--for Thackeray as a lecturer had very
little that smacked of the platform, and as a novelist he had a great
deal that smacked of the satiric conversation-scene--as by their
purport. _Esmond_, though partly critical, is mainly and in
far the greater part creative. The Lectures, though partly
creative--_resurrective_, at any rate--are professedly and
substantially critical. Now, a good deal has been said already of
Thackeray's qualities and defects as a critic: and it has been pointed
out that, in consequence of his peculiar impulsiveness, his strong
likes and dislikes, his satiric-romantic temperament, and perhaps
certain deficiencies in all-round literary and historical learning,
his critical light was apt to be rather uncertain, and his critical
deductions by no means things from which there should be no appeal.
But _The English Humourists_ is by far the most important 'place' for
this criticism in the literary department; and _The Four Georges_
(with _The Book of Snobs_ to some extent supplementing it) is the
chief place for his criticism of society, personality, and the like.
Moreover, both have been, and are, violently attacked by those who do
not like him. So that, for more reasons than one or two, both works
deserve faithful critical handling themselves.

It is always best to disperse Maleger and his myrmidons before
exploring the beauties of the House of Alma: so we may take the
objections to the _Humourists_ first. They are chiefly concerned with
the handling of Swift and (in a less degree) of Sterne. Now, it is
quite certain that we have here, in the first case at any rate, to
confess, though by no means to avoid. It is an instance of that
excessive 'taking sides' with or against his characters which has been
noticed, and will be noticed, again and again. Nor is the reason of
this in the least difficult to perceive. It is very doubtful whether
Thackeray's own estimate of average humanity was much higher than
Swift's: nor is it quite certain that the affection which Swift
professed and (from more than one instance) seems to have really felt
for Dick, Tom, and Harry, in particular, as opposed to mankind at
large, was very much less sincere than Thackeray's own for
individuals. But the temperament of the one deepened and aggravated
his general understanding of mankind into a furious misanthropy; while
the temperament of the other softened _his_ into a general pardon. In
the same way, Swift's very love and friendship were dangerous and
harsh-faced, while Thackeray's were sunny and caressing. But there can
be very little doubt that Thackeray himself, when the 'Shadow of
Vanity' was heaviest on him, felt the danger of actual misanthropy,
and thus revolted from its victim with a kind of terror; while his
nature could not help feeling a similar revulsion from Swift's harsh
ways. That to all this revulsion he gives undue force of expression
need not be denied: but then, it must be remembered that he does not
allow it to affect his _literary_ judgement. I do not believe that any
one now living has a greater admiration for Swift than I have: and I
know no estimate of his genius anywhere more adequate than
Thackeray's. As for Sterne, I do not intend to say much. If you will
thrust your personality into your literature, as Sterne constantly
does, you must take the chances of your personality as well as of your
literature. You practically expose both to the judgement of the
public. And if anybody chooses to take up the cudgels for Sterne's
personality I shall hand them over to him and take no part on one side
or another in that bout. To his _genius_, once more, I do not think
Thackeray at all unjust.

The fact is, however, that as is usual with persons of genius, but
even more than as usual, the defects and the qualities are so
intimately connected that you cannot have one without the other--you
must pay the price of the other for the one. All I can say is that
such another _live_ piece of English criticism of English literature
as this I do not know anywhere. What is alive is very seldom perfect:
to get perfection you must go to epitaphs. But, once more, though I
could pick plenty of small holes in the details of the actual critical
dicta, I know no picture of the division of literature here concerned
from which a fairly intelligent person will derive a better impression
of the facts than from this. Addison may be a little depressed, and
Steele a little exalted: but it is necessary to remember that by
Macaulay, whose estimate then practically held the field, Steele had
been most unduly depressed and Addison rather unduly exalted. You may
go about among our critics on the brightest day with the largest
lantern and find nothing more brilliant itself than the 'Congreve'
article, where the spice of injustice will, again, deceive nobody but
a fool. The vividness of the 'Addison and Steele' presentation is
miraculous. He redresses Johnson on Prior as he had redressed Macaulay
on Steele; and he is not unjust, as we might have feared that he would
be, to Pope. 'Hogarth, Smollett, and Fielding' is another miracle of
appreciation: and I should like to ask the objectors to
'sentimentality' by what other means than an intense _sympathy_ (from
which it is impossible to exclude something that may be called
sentimental) such a study as that of Goldsmith could have been
produced? Now Goldsmith is one of the most difficult persons in the
whole range of literature to treat, from the motley of his merits and
his weaknesses. Yet Thackeray has achieved the adventure here. In
short, throughout the book, he is invaluable as a critic, if not
impeccable in criticism. His faults, and the causes of them, are
obvious, separable, negligible: his merits (the chief of them, as
usual, the constant shower of happy and illuminative phrase) as rare
in quality as they are abundant in quantity.

The lectures on _The English Humourists_ must have been composed very
much _pari passu_ with _Esmond_; they were being delivered while it
was being finished, and it was published just as the author was
setting off to re-deliver them in America. _The Four Georges_ were not
regularly taken in hand till some years later, when _The Newcomes_ was
finished or finishing, and when fresh material was wanted for the
second American trip. But there exists a very remarkable _scenario_ of
them--as it may be almost called--a full decade older, in the shape of
a _satura_ of verse and prose contributed to _Punch_ on October 11,
1845. All things considered, it gives the lines which are followed in
the later lectures with remarkable precision: and it is not at all
improbable that Thackeray actually, though not of necessity
consciously, took it for head-notes.

No book of his has been so violently attacked both at the time of its
appearance and since. Nor--for, as the reader must have seen long ago,
the present writer, though proud to be called a Thackerayan stalwart,
is not a Thackerayan 'know-nothing', a 'Thackeray-right-or-wrong'
man--is there any that exposes itself more to attack. From the
strictly literary side, indeed, it has the advantage of _The Book of
Snobs_: for it is nowhere unequal, and exhibits its author's unmatched
power of historical-artistic imagination or reconstruction in almost
the highest degree possible. But in other respects it certainly does
show the omission 'to erect a sconce on Drumsnab'. There was (it has
already been hinted at in connexion with the Eastern Journey) a
curious innocence about Thackeray. It may be that, like the Hind,

    He feared no danger for he knew no sin;

but the absence of fear with him implied an apparent ignoring of
danger, which is a danger in itself. Nobody who has even passed
Responsions in the study of his literary and moral character will
suspect him for one moment of having pandered to American prejudice by
prating to it, as a tit-bit and _primeur_, scandal about this or that
King George. But it was quite evident from the first, and ought to
have been evident to the author long beforehand, that the enemy
_might_ think, and _would_ say so. In fact, putting considerations of
mere expediency aside, I think myself that he had much better not have
done it. As for the justice of the general verdict, it is no doubt
affected throughout by Thackeray's political incapacity, whatever side
he might have taken, and by that quaint theoretical republicanism,
with a good deal of pure Toryism mixed, which he attributes to some of
his characters, and no doubt, in a kind of rather confused speculative
way, held himself. He certainly puts George III's ability too low, and
as certainly he indulges in the case of George IV in one of these
curious outbursts--a _Hetze_ of unreasoning, frantic, 'stop-thief!'
and 'mad-dog!' persecution--to which he was liable. 'Gorgius' may not
have been a hero or a proper moral man: he was certainly 'a most
expensive _Herr_', and by no means a pattern husband. But recent and
by no means Pharisaical expositions have exhibited his wife as almost
infinitely _not_ better than she should be; the allegations of
treachery to private friends are, on the whole, Not Proven: if he
deserted the Whigs, it was no more than some of these very Whigs very
shortly afterwards did to their country: he played the difficult part
of Regent and the not very easy one of King by no means ill; he was,
by common and even reluctant consent, an extremely pleasant host and
companion; and he liked Jane Austen's novels. There have been a good
many princes--and a good many demagogues too--of whom as much good
could not be said.

Admitting excess in these details, and 'inconvenience' in the
circumstances of the original representation, there remains, as it
seems to me, a more than sufficient balance to credit. That
social-historic sense, accompanied with literary power of bodying forth
its results, which we noticed as early as the opening _of Catherine_ has,
in the seventeen years' interval, fully and marvellously matured
itself. The picture is not a mere mob of details: it is an orderly
pageant of artistically composed material. It is possible; it is
life-like; the only question (and that is rather a minor one) is, 'Is it
true?'

Minor, I say, because the artistic value would remain if the
historical were impaired. But I do not think it is. I shall bow to the
authority of persons better acquainted with the eighteenth century
than I am: but if some decades of familiarity with essayists and
novelists and diarists and letter-writers may give one a scanty _locus
standi_, I shall certainly give my testimony in favour of 'Thackeray's
Extract'. The true essence of the life that exhibits itself in fiction
from _Pamela_ and _Joseph Andrews_ down to _Pompey the Little_ and the
_Spiritual Quixote_; in essay from the _Tatler_ to the _Mirror_; in
Lord Chesterfield and Lady Mary and Horace Walpole; in Pope and Young
and Green and Churchill and Cowper, in Boswell and Wraxall, in Mrs.
Delany and Madame d'Arblay, seems to me to deserve warrant of excise
and guarantee of analysis as it lies in these four little flaskets.

And, as has been done before, let me finish with an almost silent
indication of the wonderful variety of this group also. In one sense
the subject of its constituents is the same. Yet in another it is
treated with the widest and most infinite difference. Any one of the
three treatments would be a masterpiece of single achievement; while
the first of the three is, as it seems to me, _the_ masterpiece of its
entire class.




XIV

THE NEWCOMES


For the sensible and rational lover of contrasts, that between the
circumstances of _Esmond_ and those of its successor has some
attraction. As was pointed out in the last volume, we know almost
nothing of the origin, conduct, or surroundings of the greatest of
historical novels; not only its 'buth' but all the rest is 'wrapped in
mistry'. It did not come out in numbers, but was the only one of the
fleet to make its first appearance as a fully launched 'three-decker'.
It had no illustrations, and except that it was written, so to speak,
'on the spot,' i.e. in Young Street, close to part of its own scene in
Kensington Square, we know hardly anything about it. About _The
Newcomes_, on the other hand, we have, if not so much external light
as is thrown upon _Pendennis_ by the Brookfield letters, much more
internal. The author himself has told us when, where, and how it was
that the general idea of the story struck him; and his daughter has
told us a great deal more. It was written in many places, abroad and
at home: in the latter case mainly in the new house at Onslow Square,
a more commodious but also more commonplace residence than the Young
Street one. It appeared once more in numbers, like _Vanity Fair_ and
_Pendennis_; and, like _Pendennis_, was interrupted by an illness--the
Roman fever--which perhaps was the first reading of the bill of
attainder on Thackeray's life. Moreover, it is once more full of
personal touches. Clive mainly resembles Thackeray, as far as one can
make out, in his love for drawing, in his limited success therein, and
perhaps in some of his later hardships and misfortunes; but he too is
at 'Grey Friars', the later and more filial equivalent of
'Slaughterhouse'. Colonel Newcome is an admitted free study of various
relations and connexions--Major Carmichael Smyth first of all, Sir
Richmond Shakespear and others. The author, while disclaiming any such
faculty of drawing North, as he had shown in reference to
West-Britons, told Professor Masson that he had taken James Binnie
directly from the life. In his own uncanny way he anticipated reality in
the election scenes. There is possibly not a little of it in Rosey; and
there is, to a terrible though unproven certainty, a great deal in the
Campaigner. The Colonel's end enchanted and enchants everybody who is
susceptible to the sentimental, and appears to have disarmed most of
the anti-sentimentalists by the intensity of its humanity. Nobody is
bothered here by antique language or manners.

The consequence has been that, so far as I can estimate, and admitting
that positive statements of preference may not be at hand, _The
Newcomes_ has probably been Thackeray's most popular book on the
whole. I feel pretty confident that, if a succession of plebiscites
could be taken for the successive generations of his readers, this
would be established statistically. I am sure that it would be the
result of striking a balance (if, again, such a thing could be done)
between unpopular and popular, critical and uncritical, opinion. There
is something to please everybody, and little to displease any one.
Even the irreconcilables on the matter of Arthur and Fanny should be
appeased by the relations of Mrs. Delacy and Barnes.

And assuredly no partisan of _The Newcomes_ will find advocacy
difficult. Once more we have the abounding wealth and ease--the
_copia_--of _Pendennis_ without that certain disorderliness which has
been admitted in the case of the elder masterpiece. That the
catastrophe--in fact that the general tone is sadder can hardly be
regarded as against it--the moderately unhappy ending has never been
seriously unpopular, and here there are 'condolences and vails'
enough. In a certain sense, too, the story is not merely more definite
and coherent than that of _Pendennis_, but it is of a higher
strain--the strands are not only more deftly twisted, but they are more
various and of choicer quality. If there are no such unique
presentations of special sides of life as those of the Oxbridge and
Fleet Street parts of _Pendennis_, life itself at large is treated
much more fully, freely, and variously. The higher society which had
been partly anticipated in _Vanity Fair_, wholly so in _Esmond_, and
slightly touched in _Pendennis_, is here grappled with and subdued to
the purposes of art in the most fearless and triumphant fashion. It is
infinitely more real in handling than Balzac's, and superior in
artistic powers to any one else's attempts in the same kind. The mere
variety, subordinated as it is to a fairly general scheme, is a
wonderful thing, as is the way in which the great length of the book
permits itself absolutely no _longueurs_ of episode or padding. Above
all, perhaps, there is no book in which Thackeray has attained to such
a Shakespearian pitch of pure tragi-comedy: that is to say, not tragedy
with a happy ending, not comedy turned to tragic conclusions, but both
blended and contrasted, grave and gay mixed, in the special English
fashion of dramatic presentation. _Vanity Fair_ had had the mixture,
but there the Shadow is always brooding. And one cares so little for
Amelia or for Dobbin, that their 'bringing it off' at last (especially
as Dobbin has his eyes partly opened) is not a very great solatium at
the end. _Pendennis_ has but one really tragic passage--the death of
Helen--and that is not much. In _Esmond_ there are numerous lighter
touches, but on the whole 'there is a Nemesis'; the piece, in fact, is
half Greek in its evolution of the natural consequences of a saturnine
temperament and destiny in the individual, and of great qualities and
charming ones going to wreck and ruin in the House. But in _The
Newcomes_ grave and gay are welded, 'rainbowed' together in real
English fashion. The career, triumph, and fall of the Colonel; the
unsmooth course of the loves of Clive and Ethel; the tragedy of Lady
Clara; other things besides; are arranged with extraordinary skill for
the keeping up of the interest, which is also subserved by the revival
and inclusion of the story of old friends from _Pendennis_ itself. The
glimpses of the married life of Arthur and Laura, the end of the
Major, even the passing appearance of Dobbin, and the very admirable
figure of Sir George Tufto, not from _Pendennis_ but from _Vanity
Fair_, should add to the attraction for most people, though I believe
there are some martinets who regard them as impertinent. Let these see
to their principles, and we will see to our pastime. Revolutions and
discoveries are provided in the most lavish manner. It would be indeed
interesting to feel the bumps of any one who found _The Newcomes_
'dull'.

As always with Thackeray, however, though perhaps to an extent below
the average, it is not so much to the general run of the story as to
the several, if not exactly separate, tableaux of which it is
composed, and still more to the characters by which it and those are
worked out, that the reader owes his enjoyment and his admiration.
Here, again, no book is quite so rich as _The Newcomes_. What other
novelist is there, in any literature, who has projected on his scene
such a family as 'the Newcomes' themselves? The Colonel and Sir Brian
and Hobson in one generation, Clive and Barnes in the next, are not
indeed connected with each other in the elaborately ostentatious
fashion of Zola, or even of Dickens; but they have a subtle and
impalpable kinship which is really far truer to nature, and a far
greater triumph of art, than the preposterous heredity of the
Rougon-Macquarts and the caricatured typicalness of the Dedlocks. And
the same is the case with the nobler branch of the connexion--Lord Kew
and his brother (for the sketch of George Barnes, slight as it is, is
masterly), Lady Ann, Ethel (for she is much more of a Barnes than of a
Newcome, except for the touch of the Colonel in her), and above all
Her Unserene Magnificence Lady Kew herself, with her further
ramification into the fatal house of the Gaunts. The way in which all
these kindreds, from the extremes of the Honeymans and the old
pensioner at Newcome to Lady Kew and the Pulleyns, are mapped and
reliefed out--with no cumbrous genealogical insistence, but in such
fashion that the reader feels as if, on the humbler or less humble
side, he too were of the company, and all the persons and their
affairs were naturally known to him--is simply marvellous. The way in
which every one of them is made actual is more marvellous still.
Observe, for instance, the three brothers, Thomas, Brian, and Hobson,
sketched with decreasing minuteness from one to the other, and yet all
alive, and each 'finally settled' for artistic purposes. Observe the
way in which the sisters-in-law, Lady Ann and Mrs. Newcome, are
contrasted, not in the clumsy way of constant holding up side by side
which the ordinary novelist would have adopted--for they are seldom
brought into actual company, and I think never made to hold
conversation of any length. And then come to individuals.

The Colonel himself, Clive and Ethel, I shall postpone for a purpose;
and not much more need be said of the younger Newcome brothers and
their wives, except to give the heartiest applause to the latter. But
not in such comparative silence can we pass over Barnes.

Barnes is not only one of the most artistically splendid and
delightful, but also one of the most critically instructive, of
Thackeray's characters. There is no doubt that Thackeray disliked him;
indeed, the human race at large appears (and quite properly) to have
been similarly affected towards the second baronet of the house of
Newcome. But he knew he disliked him, and he struggled vigorously not
to let the dislike interfere with the justice of the presentment. This
virtue has been to a great extent rewarded in kind, because in
consequence of it _we_ can dislike Barnes to our hearts' content while
enjoying him, and without feeling any qualms of partisanship such as
are aroused in the cases of Becky and of Blanche. The true, the
genuine, the unsophisticated pleasures of the gallery are ours when he
has the claret thrown in his face; when he is in terror of Jack
Belsize and the thundering big stick; when Sir George Tufto (vice Sir
Thomas de Boots exchanged) requests to know why the dash he sends for
_him_, dash him, and suggests A 22; when Highgate strikes him down;
when the 'Poetry of the Affections' is interrupted by the introduction
of the supposititious infants. And at the same time we have the most
refined delights of the stalls when he enunciates that great maxim
about the impossibility of mending broken glass; when he 'does the
civil' to (and at the same time acquires valuable information about)
Rummun Loll; when he appears at breakfast; when he conducts that
little negotiation about his sister's hand, and 'lies _at home_' for
the good of his family with an aplomb really deserving that success
which it is not in the power of mortals to command; when he is for
once unfeigned and natural in his unfathomable surprise that the
Prince de Montcontour should keep his principality--and its latent
power--in abeyance. Very rarely--so rarely that out of Shakespeare it
is difficult to think of another place--is this double rapture
vouchsafed to us; and even Shakespeare, being a poet and having to
deal with simpler and higher conditions, had not the opportunity of
giving it quite in the same way. Fielding (who is often to be joined
with Shakespeare and Thackeray as no one else, not even Cervantes, is)
most distinctly failed to give it in Blifil. For Blifil is not
_interesting_ and Barnes is, while Jonathan Wild does not quite come
in.

Something of the same magic in the same conditions is enjoyed with
Lady Kew, though the grandmother is as much higher in nature as in
rank than her grandson, and with her we can positively sympathize. She
has to fail, but she manages after all to do a good deal of harm, and
she is always 'great'. Thackeray has even, though gingerly, and
perhaps not more than half consciously, brought out something between
her and Ethel of the terrible parallel-parable of Age and Youth which
he was to bring out later between Beatrix I and Beatrix II. When one
thinks what a character she is; what infinity of delicately drawn life
there is in her without any of the clumsy by-work and interleaved
process of the more modern character-novelist; how in this vast book
she, who is enough to give life and individuality to a whole novel,
merely fills a part--an important one certainly, but only a part--one
stands once more astonished at Thackeray's immoderation--at the
prodigality of his givings. Such a scene, such a conversation, as that
between Lady Kew, her two grandsons, and their mother during Kew's
convalescence--if well and duly ravelled out and woven in--would make
a volume for any one of our moderns, and one would wonder where he got
it. Yet this is but one--is not perhaps the absolutely best--of half a
hundred in which she appears from the time when she is instructed in
the meaning of 'brick' and 'trump' to her death at Lady Pallgrave's,
when she thinks her triumph is sure--the death itself killing the
triumph, indirectly but inevitably, with her.

There may, however, be some who think long till we come to the
inestimable Paul de Florac himself. It is quite certain that, if
Thackeray had never drawn another character, he would have put in his
proofs for the degree of Genius by this alone. And I do not think it
much more contestable that Florac is unique. There is certainly no one
who can touch him as a sketch of a foreigner in the enormous range of
the English novel. I am as certain that there is no one in the equally
enormous range of the French novel who can come within leagues of him
as a picture of an Englishman. And though I do not pretend to know as
much about the novels of other literatures, even German, as I do about
French and English, I do not believe that in any of them there is a
picture of a native of a country other than the author's own which can
compare with him. Of course French--and, for the matter of that,
English--critics may say that the comic features are, if not
caricatured, thrown up. But then it is impossible that with a sitter
foreign to the artist, and an artist foreign to the sitter, they
should not be. The wisest and most philosophical of us may endeavour
to check and allow for, but only the dullest and most unimaginative of
us ever fail to feel, the absurdity of the human being who, with the
same number of eyes, hands, &c., as we ourselves possess, followeth
not us in ways and manners and speech. Florac, no doubt, is not
Florac's Florac, or his mother's, or any of his countrymen's or
countrywomen's Florac. But, on the other hand, he is not John Bull's
Florac merely. He is the eternal Florac--the idea of Florac--presented
through the best English glasses with all possible and no forced
allowances and compensations. Moreover (to come down, like Benedick,
from altitudes), he is the very best of good fellows and of good
company. Thackeray has said hard things of the French: some people
would have it that he has said unjust things of them. But if any
Frenchman feels otherwise than complimented by this figure of
Thackeray's gallery, why then it is to be feared that international
jealousy has not been entirely in the wrong when it fastened to the
French character a kind of vanity which is not Thackeray's Vanity at
all, though it has connexions therewith.

But in this way there is no end. Pages would not suffice to do justice
to the Honeymans and the Sherricks and to that Commodore of all Red
Rovers whom Thackeray has thrown in after his own fashion. James
Binnie (one very particularly regrets the loss of James's fortune
after his death, though not so much as his deprivation of cheroots in
his life by his odious sister's tyranny) chiefly makes one think of
that sister herself and of the quite extraordinary power with which
she is drawn. Nobody but Thackeray could have evolved the worse side
of her character so naturally, so inevitably, so unobtrusively. Her
detestableness grips upon you exactly as it would in life, and with
the same absence of warning. And the folk at the studios, and the
company at the 'Haunt', and the Marquis of Farintosh's toad-eaters
(the Marquis himself is not quite of Thackeray's greatest triumphs,
perhaps), and Madame la Duchesse (she would certainly have owed one a
grudge for leaving her so long unnoticed), and Victor Cabasse de
Castillonnes (whom she might have got to execute it), and the pale and
gracious shadow of Lonore de Florac with her matchless and not
overdone appearance at the catastrophe, and Kew and Highgate--better
figures, I think, as well as better fellows, than Farintosh--and the
reappearance of the Pendennis people--all these and many more crowd
the memory. And, as always with Thackeray, they combine themselves
into the most amazing number of scenes--complete in themselves, and
yet furthering the story--leaves of the folding panorama which opens
itself out as that story proceeds. There are eighty chapter headings;
it is hardly rash to say that there are eight times eighty of these
separate and yet not separate situations, conversations, sudden
presentments of real though fictitious life. And yet, once more, there
is the ambient ether of phrase--surrounding, uniting, pervading
all:--enough of itself to give the book hold, if it had neither
character nor incident; certain to enhance the incident and the
character that it has.

It may be observed--the observation taking something of the form of an
objection--that little or nothing has yet been said of the three chief
characters--Clive, Ethel, and the Colonel. It is true; and the
reservation is due to a cause easily to be anticipated--that the
writer has never been able to bring himself into a perfectly
homogeneous and decided frame of mind about them. To take the lady
first, I think I like her a good deal more than I used to do many
years ago, and more, even, than I did comparatively recently. But I
have never thought her, and I do not think her now, either positively
charming or definitely 'brought off'. I must be excused for repeating,
yet once more, that it was usually necessary for Thackeray either to
like or to dislike his characters in order to be quite successful with
them, unless they were more or less 'supers', where liking and
disliking did not come in. I know that he meant to like Ethel, and
that he thought he ought to like her; but I am not so sure that he
thoroughly did. And so he has left her a little 'betwixt and between'.
Sometimes, when she appears with the green sale-ticket in her dress,
when she goes to Brighton, in the confession-sacrifice scene at Madame
de Florae's, once or twice at other times, she is all right. Elsewhere
I am not so sure of her. For anybody else, '_Pass_!' but for
Thackeray, '_Query_?' She, more than all the Amelias and Helens and
Lauras, makes me feel how really nice it was of Beatrix to be naughty.
She may have lost herself: but we have gained her. Ethel seems to me
never to find herself, and therefore nobody can have found her--not
even Clive.

As for that young gentleman, one is obliged to him for being the
centre of so much good society and the occasion of so much good talk
and writing. But somehow, I not only do not take very much interest in
him, but I have even no very clear idea of him. He seems to have been
good-looking, amiable after a fashion, rather _gauche_, fairly clever
with his hands, not much good with his head. These elements will make
up a very possible person: but he is not, to me, here quite made up. I
see Pendennis perfectly; I see Philip pretty well. I don't quite see
Clive. But I feel sure that if Ethel regarded him (as she seems to
have done) with sufficient affection, she must have mingled with it a
certain amount of contempt. They say the mixture is not uncommon.

The best criticism on the Colonel himself is contained in what is also
one of the best anecdotes of Thackeray. It is that when Mrs. Bray
(George Eliot's friend and his hostess at the time) asked him the
usual question one morning as to his having had a good night, he
replied, 'How could I, with Colonel Newcome making such a fool of
himself?' Whereto she, 'Butwhydid you let him?' And he, 'Oh! it was in
him to do it. He must.' This is equally Balzacian and believable,
though I doubt whether another saying in the context--that he 'made
his women either without character or bad, because that was as he knew
them', is equally exact. It looks as if the card was passed to him,
and he did not explicitly reject it. But as for the Colonel, no doubt
it _was_ 'in his nature': and the only question is whether it is a
blot on that nature or not. The answer must depend very much upon
individual taste and fancy. There are some tastes and fancies to which
it is rather hard to forgive a man who makes a fool of himself
_without knowing it_. The very reason why it is perfectly easy to
forgive men for making fools of themselves about women is that, unless
they are the merest oafs, they always _do_ know it. Now Colonel
Newcome was not a mere oaf, but it must be owned that in the matter of
the Bundelcund Bank, and perhaps not in that only, he deserved the
criticisms of that very odious person, but very capable critic, his
nephew. His beginnings and his end are of course admirable, the latter
admirable beyond expression. Except Lear's, there is no death to
surpass it in literature, for Cleopatra's is a triumph rather than a
tragedy, and the great atonement in Othello's transcends mere pathos.

But when you have a book which ends with a scene like this, which
begins with a scene like that in the Cave of Harmony, are you not in
the presence of a novelist who has indeed 'fulfilled all numbers' in
giving two such polar masterpieces? Yet the fact is that the globe
between them is full of things almost as good in their different ways.
Once more (it is permissible to say it once at least in respect of
each of these achievements), there are the two unfailing provisions of
Abundance and Life. _The Newcomes_ is scarcely even a microcosm; it is
almost the world itself, hardly reduced, as an ordinary member of 'a
most respectable family' sees it, and hears it, and experiences it. To
a sufficiently intelligent reader the scenes and the personages grow
and body themselves out, as he reads them, to life-size at least. And
for this very reason there is less to be said about them, unless one
could spin out the saying after the fashion of Tennyson's spell-book,
where each square inch of text had an atlas of margin filled with
spider-written comment. Thus said they, and thus did they, at the
times, on the occasions, in the circumstances: there can be no doubt
of it. Only one thing may be added--that perhaps in no book is
Thackeray's peculiar fashion of'address to the reader' more happily
managed. The abundance of incident, character, and conversation
possibly carries this off better than is the case in books where the
story is less skilfully managed, or, at any rate, rather less
abundantly provided. Those who dislike it in itself, who are worried
by it and cannot believe it to be justified by the Rules, or who are
in other ways under what Mr. Toobad calls the temporary supremacy of
the Devil, may not be more reconciled to it here than elsewhere. Those
who are, as some excellent and happy persons are, always ready for it,
may even ask for 'more'. But those who regard it critically as a
method like another, capable of application with more and with less
felicity, should surely be agreed in regarding this as one of the
occasions where its application is uninterruptedly felicitous, from
the Fable before the beginning to the disposition of the characters
after the end.




XV

THE VIRGINIANS


It would be idle to deny that, in leaving _The Newcomes_, we leave the
'Quadrilateral'--the great and practically impregnable central
stronghold of Thackeray's work. People may, of course, take exception
to this or that real or supposed defect of _Vanity Fair, Pendennis,
Esmond_, and _The Newcomes_ itself. They may urge the excessive
pessimism and the sometimes languid flow of story in the first, the
desultory character of the second, the somewhat artificial and
complicated appeal of the third, while we have ourselves admitted
spots in the sun of the fourth. They may, in a fashion not quite
critically preposterous, though it may seem to us mistaken, object to
the entire system of the novelist's procedure, to his loose order, to
his constant 'ten minutes for' the discourse, which is not to them
'refreshment', and so forth. Nay, they may, if they have frankness and
boldness enough, take the ground, not so uncritical as it is sometimes
held to be, that whether the things be good or bad, they are not good
_to them_--that they don't like them heartily. But I cannot conceive
any one, save a very idle paradoxer of the mixed race of quack and
crank, which is not unknown, or a man hopelessly deficient in literary
judgement, denying that these four books constitute an extraordinary
literary achievement, or that, whether they entitle the author to
stand among the very first two or three of prose fiction or not, they
establish him in the first division of that department to all time. If
there is to be found such a denier, and if one could not rank him in
either of the two classes just defined, it would be necessary to
constitute a sort of species by itself for him, and suppose him to be
congenitally insensible to one particular kind of literary
perfection--colour-blind to one streak of the spectrum, and in fact to
more than one.

But with most of the books to which we are now coming it is different:
and _The Virginians_ is the first as well as the most considerable[31]
of the works which lie outside the impregnable zone. I have not the
slightest doubt as to the place being tenable against any foes: but it
requires some fighting to maintain it. To the mere parrot-cry about
sequels not much attention need be paid. That is a rule (if it is a
rule at all) with so many exceptions that one may simply regard it as
a dead-letter. The _Odyssey_ is not a failure. I do not think that
_Paradise Regained_ is a failure, _qua_ 'sequel' at least. _Vingt Ans
Aprs_ is most certainly not a failure: and if Dumas could only have
prevailed on himself to cut out some of the quite unnecessary parts of
_Le Vicomte de Bragelonne_ it would have been almost less of a failure
still. The worst that can critically be said of sequels, _as such_, is
that in the cases where their forerunners are good they heighten their
own standard of comparison--handicap themselves as naturally as a good
racehorse is handicapped artificially. But that's not much.

    [Footnote 31: It is, owing to the system of publication,
    almost exactly the same length as _Pendennis_ and _The
    Newcomes_, and with them makes up the three longest of
    Thackeray's books.]

Nor is the other parrot-cry about 'writing out' much more--especially
in the case of writers who come, as Thackeray came, rather late to
perfection. There is not much sign of being written-out in the Dryden
of the _Fables_ or the Tennyson of the _Ballads_--each about his
seventieth year, or a quarter of a century older than Thackeray. And
if it be said that these were poets (though there is another popular
idea that poetry and youth cease together), look at Scott and
Smollett. The former, until he set himself to fight a hopeless combat
of romance with the triplebodied giant of ill-health, misfortune, and
crushing over-work, showed, at an age much beyond Thackeray's, no such
sign in _Quentin Durward_ or in _Redgauntlet_; while Smollett, a hard
worker, a harder liver, and an older man by five years than the author
of _The Virginians_, did his very best work in fiction, and his last,
with _Humphry Clinker_.

No; these are no _verae causae_: but one must remember that they were
causes sure to be alleged sooner or later, and that they were alleged
here. And the book might seem to be vulnerable on less general and
question-begging grounds. No attempt has been made to conceal the fact
that the scheme of _Esmond_, which _The Virginians_ directly
continues, is an artificial one, though to the present writer the art
seems quite triumphant over the artifice. It follows necessarily that
the difficulties of continuation, whatever they are in ordinary cases,
must be considerably aggravated; and that those who did not like, or
only half-liked, the first book would be even less likely to like the
second. Moreover, the advance of time complicated the difficulty,
again automatically. The time of Queen Anne, though itself a very
great advance in modernity even upon the time of Charles the Second,
is still separated from us by very distinct manners of phrase and
otherwise. You cannot read a page of Addison without remembering the
gulf: though it may be a _tour de force_ to talk as if you were on the
other side of it, when the _tour_ is once mastered there is no further
difficulty. And you have, in the problem of combining the points of
view of the times of Anne and of Victoria, the advantage, if you know
how to avail yourself of it, that you can 'change rapiers', use modern
dialect when you intend to be definitely modern, and not when you do
not. But the third quarter of the eighteenth century is much more
treacherous. Even at its beginning, and before its beginning, you will
find--say in Horace Walpole--fragments and even blocks of diction that
are perfectly modern. About the latter part of it or a little
later--say in Fanny Burney--you will find things more modern still. Yet
dress, habits, politics, other things, were still, as it were, of
another world from ours. In applying the plan to such a time you have
to walk on moving sands; to lay hold of supports which give no steady
handle; to speak in dialect which is changing every day.

Nor does this consideration exhaust the apparently weak places. In no
book of Thackeray's is that neglect of constructive unity, which has
been freely admitted, and which is to some people,[32] it would seem,
an unpardonable sin, so prominent. If the sight of the two swords in
Prescott's study really gave him his original idea for the book he
allowed it to be almost entirely displaced. For, though George and
Harry do actually serve on the Loyalist and the rebellious side
respectively, it is only in a sort of appendix to the book; nothing
really turns on it; and there are not even any separate scenes of a
touching, thrilling, or amusing nature connected with the fact.
_Pendennis_ may in a way be even more of a succession as distinguished
from a development; and _Philip_ may come to an end with a more
accidental and promiscuous Realms-of-Bliss transformation-scene; but
these have both, in another way, the unity of the single hero. _The
Virginians_ is practically two books, the hero of the first of which
is Harry, with a few, though not unimportant, appearances of George;
while the hero of the second is George, with a few, and very
unimportant, appearances of Harry. Nor need one, however little one
may care for abstract and preceptist Unities, or however much one may
admit that, in the particular instance, Thackeray does not violate his
almost inviolable sense of congruity and of life, refuse a certain
sympathy to those who slightly resent, or at any rate feel chagrined
at, the utter dethronement of the younger brother. No doubt his early
brilliancy had been accidental and factitious, nor is he ever
represented as being much of a genius, while he is evidently from the
first the destined prey of any woman from whom Fortune or his friends
will not be so kind as to rescue him. But the Fortunate Youth, and
what is more, the generous youth, and the fine gentleman, tied to the
apron-string of Fanny Mountain, and sinking not merely into a rebel
but into a kind of half-loutish country farmer--without form, and void
of breeding--may be permitted to go a little against the grain, to be
'not in accordance with the feelings of the commons of Bradwardine'.
As he was really not wanted any more he might have been made a
respectable victim at St. Cast or somewhere else, and so spared his
later degradations. They are not indeed unnatural; but they are
unnecessary.

    [Footnote 32: Others, it is to be feared, are apt to regard
    the ingenious tesselations of plot rather as my Lord Verulam
    regarded those of the 'artificial bedding-out' in gardens of
    his time. 'They be but toys; you may see as good sights many
    times in tarts.']

Lastly--for if the list of admissions were to go on much longer it
might be thought that the place was going to be wholly betrayed to the
enemy--it may perhaps be allowed that in no book of Thackeray's is the
digressive and address-to-the-reader habit so freely indulged. It
would perhaps have been better if he had cut out the Garbage and
Grub-street ebullition into which he was led by the coincidence of the
Yates affair; and I am by no means so sure that he would not have done
so if he had lived a few years longer.[33] At any rate, the objectors
to the system have a right, if they like, to point out that it gives
dangerous temptation to a writer to afford himself such indulgence.

    [Footnote 33: See note at end of this chapter.]

But enough of this, and more than enough; for a great deal of it
derives whatever validity it possesses from a source which really
ought to be sealed to a good critic, at any rate until he has formed
his judgement without recourse to it. The proper question to ask
oneself--it is true that it requires both some wits and a good deal of
critical practice to secure even the possibility of an answer--is
'What should I have thought of this book supposing that I did not know
the author, or even supposing that it was the first book that author
had ever published?' If any one will do me the honour of glacing back
over the last page or two, he will see that the objections are all
mainly, if not wholly, _comparative_, and in some cases almost
certainly, in others most probably, would not arise in readers who
were not more or less familiar with the author's work already. Let us
for a moment (certainly not otherwise) abolish _Esmond_; let all the
work we have seen perish _ex hypothesi_. Let us consider _The
Virginians_ in itself and by itself. One of its own greatest and most
shining virtues we shall indeed lose in part; but we can return to
that. The others, or most of them, we shall see in a fashion which
will put a fresh edge on our appreciation of the work generally, and
purge the eyesight dulled by use.

It would depend, probably, on individual temperament and education
whether a reader, approaching _The Virginians_ under the supposed
conditions, would be most struck by the reproduction of past scenes,
manners, and language, or by the breath of the life of all time which
meets him at once. That scene of the ship entering Bristol, and the
captain, and the merchant part-owner, and the heir-apparent (or rather
presumptive)--is there anything like it out of Thackeray in its
combination of the two appeals? There is no pedantry in the
antiquarianism, but there is an astonishing verisimilitude. The fact
is that, owing partly to circumstances glanced at but much more to
others not yet mentioned, the middle of the eighteenth century is
about the first time when the materials for complete resurrection are
at hand. Everything on the other side of the Restoration is on the
other side of a great gulf--a gulf the existence of which is not very
easy to explain, but quite impossible to mistake. Mr. Froude, in one
of the finest passages of English prose, expressed the sense of such a
gulf as regards the Middle Ages; but neither he nor any one else has
really bridged it as regards periods far more recent. Neither his
brilliant rhetoric and his acute if sometimes hasty historic sense,
with all the assistance of Elizabethan literature for the sixteenth
century, nor the art-neglecting and matter-preparing labour of Mr.
Gardiner for the rest, with an even greater literary assistance from
letters there, have made the men from 1500 to 1650 absolutely real to
us. If I meet any one who tells me that he really understands even
Charles or Cromwell I shall politely congratulate him aloud on his
cleverness and good fortune--and devoutly congratulate myself in
silence that I am not under any similar delusion. I may be enabled, by
sympathy in the one case, by repulsion in the other, to form no bad
conjectural estimate--but that is all.

The later seventeenth century becomes much easier, and the first half
of the eighteenth easier still: but at first there is a great
deficiency of the lighter literature to give us atmosphere, scene,
colour. Even for the Queen Anne men we want more easy private letters,
more diaries and memoirs, above all, more (it would be almost accurate
to say _some_) novels. All this begins to be provided plentifully as
the eighteenth century draws towards its middle: and of all of it
Thackeray has made consummate use. One hesitates between the
Castlewood, Tunbridge, and London scenes--or rather acts--of Harry's
Prodigal's Progress for liveliness, for convincingness, for delight.
And if the later divisions of the book are less lively in one sense
they certainly are not in another. One sometimes feels in a pleasant
quandary as to whether Fielding imitated Thackeray or Thackeray
Fielding.

But the correctness and freshness of the _dcor_ sink into
insignificance beside the truth to life, the vigour, the felicity of
the characters in front, among, sometimes behind, the scenes
themselves. It has been hinted that George Esmond Warrington perhaps
has not fair play. He is kept very long out of the scene in person;
his early recounted appearances are dashed by Thackeray's whimsical
determination to make a saint, sage, and hero at once of George
Washington; and the long _rcit_ of his Indian adventures in the
middle, though perfectly suitable to eighteenth-century habits, has
been less agreeable to nineteenth-and twentieth-century tastes. The
same wilfulness is, perhaps, shown in the abundance of touches likely
to make him unpopular; and perhaps to enjoy him thoroughly you must
compare him with his grandfather Henry and his grandson George
Warrington the younger: a trio worth contemplating, and a wonderful
example of Thackeray's power over life in different times. But he is a
very desirable young man in a novel, though there might have been
drawbacks to him in the flesh. He strikes me as possessing more of the
_serious_ characteristics of Thackeray himself than almost any other
personage in the book (except his grandfather aforesaid). Perhaps,
indeed, he possesses a little too much, so that the artist has lost
freedom and completeness in taking too much from one sitter only, and
that a sitter whom no artist ever thoroughly realizes, while his
greater modernity deprives him of one of the advantages of Henry
Esmond. But still he is great.

Of the minor characters--and they are only minor for Thackeray--it may
be said more confidently than ever that no one reading of them for the
first time would be likely to stint his admiration. The standard is
set at once by the passing sketch of the Bristol merchant above
referred to; and it is maintained till the last. Gumbo, and still more
Sampson, can hardly be called minor characters: they are too
constantly with us, and they are too finely worked out. As for Gumbo,
his re-transference from Harry to George--a symbolical one--is one of
the rather harsh exertions of the right of primogeniture which we have
noted. It is to be observed that Thackeray, like Marryat, obviously
had a considerable partiality for the 'images of God cut out in
ebony'; and that in this as in other things he was much of his beloved
eighteenth century. For there seems to have been no dislike of 'the
Nigger' in England until the fuss and fiddle-faddle of the
Abolitionists created a reaction in personal disfavour, corresponding
to the political favour which they worried the nation into giving. But
Sampson has higher claims. Whether Thackeray deliberately set him
against Parson Adams I do not very clearly make out: but there is no
doubt that he is in the first place a most careful study of the
English eighteenth-century cleric of the looser kind, transformed
subsequently into a live man and a free work of art. The contrast with
Honeyman on one side and Tom Tusher on the other is one which our
supposed reader-for-the-first-time would miss--but which would strike
him very forcibly later. All middling novelists, and some great ones,
are wont to run characters in moulds: but this is generally rather a
fault than a virtue. It is Thackeray's almost unique merit that while
he keeps the class, he utterly discards the mould, and turns out
individuals of the most undeniable individuality. The Castlewoods and
the Lamberts and the other Warringtons all share this individualizing
faculty: but for some reason or other Thackeray has stinted his
exhibition of it in the case of that fair invader Lydia. She is
individually, in separate points, quite _true_: and as the American
girl was then little known and indeed not fully developed, it shows
the master's extraordinary realizing genius that in two short visits
to the country he should have attained to such a power of recreation.
But as a whole she wants the last projection to be as thoroughly real
as, for instance, poor Lady Maria is. In particular it must be thought
somewhat of a _rifiuto_ on Thackeray's part that he gives us no
details of the scene in which, aided, it is true, by Time and Age, she
conquered the unconquerable Beatrix.

But in the last sentence we have come to a reserved point and figure,
the greatness of which, though it might not wholly escape our
imaginary novice, could not be wholly revealed to him till
he had read _Esmond_. The greatest achievement of art in
_The Virginians_--one of the greatest achievements of art in prose
fiction--is the completion of the character of Miss Esmond by the
delineation of the Baroness Bernstein. That it is the most delightful,
as well as the greatest, can only be said with a certain reserve. It is
the most delightful to those who can really and at once enjoy art for
art's sake and nature for nature's sake: and it is one of its great
points that, even for others, Thackeray has kept it from being ever
disgusting. The immeasurable scene in which stupid Harry does _not_
recognize the portrait sets the treatment throughout. For my own part
I set this scene beside the _Esmond_ mock-duel, and the Steyne-Becky
_claircissement_, though I dare say I am in a minority. At any rate,
the presentation is complete. I suppose that, artistically, one ought
not even to desiderate the _middle_ stage--the sinking of Beatrix,
_not_ Beata, through her rivalry with Miss Oglethorpe (I speak in a
Thackerayan sense, and apologize to my friend Andrew Lang and to the
lady), and through that with Lady Suffolk, her declension upon Tom
Tusher (who, remember, had been a far-off worshipper of old), and her
very dubious ascension to Baronesshood by the aid of the ambiguous
Bernstein. I doubt whether even Thackeray could have done this
successfully--whether any art could do in a few strokes what Nature
with _mille carinae_, ploughing wrinkles bodily and moral, takes
thirty or forty years to effect. But it was difficult enough to give
us the beginning and the end: and he has done it.

Hardly less skilful, though less delightful in many ways, is the
extraordinarily skilful representation--this time not, indeed, a later
stage of the same person--of Beatrix's half-sister, Madam Esmond
Warrington. The one is not less of a very woman than the other: but
the way in which she has blended her mother's faults of affectionate
jealousy and virtuous injustice with a little of the bad blood of the
Esmonds (there was no 'bad blood' in poor Lady Castlewood), and few,
but the less engaging, of their good qualities, is masterly. And
indeed who, or what, is not?

The vividness of the pictures of life, which, again, do not yield to
Fielding's, has been noted. It ought to be visible intrinsically to
all, whether they are acquainted with eighteenth-century life and
literature or not; and it is hardly enhanced as nature, though it is
very much so as art, by knowledge of that literature and that life. In
the way of more deliberate and _tour de force_ following, the letter
assigned to Horace Walpole is, to my thinking, the superior, not
merely of the sham _Spectator_ in _Esmond_, but of most other things
of the kind. You may go from it to the sixteen volumes of 'Horry's'
correspondence, or from them to it without finding a note false or
forced; though it is certainly a _pastiche_ of the original at his
very best. And in like manner the introduction of the realities or
quasi-realities of the story is unerring and, out of Scott, unmatched,
while it is more elaborate than Sir Walter's. In particular the
Johnson passages have a verisimilitude which is almost diabolical. The
author seems to have the uncanny advantages of his own creation in
_The Notch in the Axe_, and to have been the person that he
personates. Now, this is where almost everybody breaks down. It is, in
fact, the Loadstone Rock of the sea of the Historical Novel: you
cannot help being drawn to it, and it almost always wrecks you. Even
Dumas chiefly escapes it by refusing it--by neglecting, with the
audacity of genius, to assimilate or reproduce the real at all save by
direct, though unacknowledged, quotation. I know that d'Artagnan's
adventures are in many cases, if not real, all but contemporary
fiction; but I don't think that Madame de Svign's actual
acquaintance talked at all like his very delightful representative. I
have been in love with La Reine Margot ever since I was a schoolboy;
but I doubt whether the girl who spoke Latin with the ambassadors, and
the middle-aged lady who carried dried lovers' hearts about in her
many-pocketed farthingale, was really much like the Alexandrine one.
But here the Johnson _is_ Johnson--the very same Johnson who is in
Boswell and in Mrs. Thrale, and in Miss Burney, and in his own
writings.

Yet, after all, I am not sure that the greatest charm of the
book--except the _Mart Beatrix_, as the _Chanson_-writers would have put
it--is not to be found in the much-abused and not absolutely impeccant
_parabases_ or digression-addresses. They may be rather
excessive[34]--clear-sighted and candid critic may admit that it was
almost time to break them off from their parasitic attachment to the
novel, and let them take independent form as 'Roundabouts'. But they
are so agreeable! I cannot be very angry even with the Tom Garbage
outbreak; for, after all, Tom, who during the past half-century, has
been

    Blest with issue of a large increase,

is the very vermin of the literary fauna, and deserves neither law nor
grace. I am not sure that the three pages torn out of Sir George
Warrington's notebook are quite legitimate or artistic; but certainly
I would not part with their context as it stands. Yet perhaps Sir
George, when he gets the narration finally into his own hands, does a
little threaten us with the sensations of gloom which he so frankly
admits as having been experienced occasionally by his guests in
Norfolk. Perhaps too, though it was following the order of life, it
was a slight mistake to set these 'skull things in order grim' at the
end of a book. The run-in--there is ample authority both profane and
sacred for the comparison--should be accomplished at a somewhat
livelier pace. But at least it finishes, undoubtedly by intentional
correspondence with _Esmond_, in a very lively scene at Castlewood
itself.

    [Footnote 34: See note at end of this chapter.]

Yet the practice of 'lying-to in order to discourse the ship's
company' is abundantly justified earlier, and indeed throughout. The
most perfect justification is in the noble panegyric on Bordeaux wine
contained in chapter xxxi--the magnificence and truth of which may
indeed be maintained 'in the face of all the pumps that ever spouted'.
But there are others which are its equals in goodness and its
superiors in length. From the first departure from Castlewood for
Tunbridge to the breakdown of Harry's success in Vanity Fair they are
numerous and brilliant. Has anybody in this age of infinite
reprinting, extracting, and what not, ever taken the best of these
parabases, not merely from _The Virginians_ but from all the novels,
and set them together, not as 'Beauties of Thackeray', but as 'Essays
on Men and Manners and Things in General'? It so happens that, not so
long ago, I was looking through again most of the more celebrated of
such things in English literature from Bacon to the nineteenth
century. I do not think that many would equal them. With such things
as _hors-d'oeuvre_ and side-dishes, with the solid interest of
life-story and manners-painting for centre, with the 'various vine' of
character flowing unstintedly for us, and an endless dessert of phrase
and style, how shall we quarrel with such a banquet as this?

    NOTE

    When I originally wrote the words to which attention has
    been drawn above, I had no idea of the extent to which a
    full collation of the text, in part and volume form, would
    confirm them, by showing that Thackeray _actually_ discarded
    not a few passages of this kind. One or two of the discards
    may have been necessitated by the dropping of initial
    letters, &c. (it may be fancy, but I think Thackeray, always
    charming in these things, has never been more charming in
    them than here).




XVI

PHILIP


It has been admitted by the most partial, and yet certainly not the
least competent of judges, that the last of Thackeray's major novels
had not the success it deserved. Whether it is easier to deserve or to
command success is a problem which has often presented itself,
seriously or otherwise, since Mr. Addison made an antithesis of the
two in the _style noble_. But whether Thackeray deserved success or
not, it is quite certain that he did not, in this particular book,
take in every respect, or even in most respects, the way to command
it. Many things in it are of his absolutely best: it has a sort of
_bonus_ of autobiographic interest--not intruded, but generously
offered for those who like to take or leave--which is not equalled by
any of the books except _Pendennis_. It is full of delightful scene,
character, incident, talk. But still the warrior has gone into battle
with his armour rather carelessly laced and braced; the builder has
not looked in all cases to the tempering of his mortar.

The faults which have to be admitted in _Philip_ are not limited to
the fact that it is not very _consquioutive_, as the American said to
Baudelaire about Poe; for this it shares with others, and with
_Pendennis_ in particular. Nor does the story, such as it is, break
into two in the middle like that of _The Virginians_, or like the
decasyllables of the Pope school. It is true that _Philip_ avails
itself of the 'chronicle' licence to the uttermost. The author spins
the life of Mr. Philip Firmin, barrister-at-law, till he is tired, or
thinks we are, and then with a decidedly amusing but absolutely
'promiscuous' _coup de_ _thtre_, applies the shears. But this is
not--to some of us--at all fatal; nor are the long gaps in the
chronicle itself (Shakespeare allows himself ten years between two
scenes of _Antony and Cleopatra_), nor the failure to join some of the
ends together, nor the very doubtful, but for that reason very
Thackerayan chronology. If, for instance, Mr. Firmin actually was an
admirer of Mr. Anthony Trollope about 1840 or even later, he must have
been very much more of a wizard than he has any appearance of being.
This, again, is mere 'sea-coast of Bohemia', and troubles no sensible
man. Even if it did, he would be very far from a sensible man if he
did not allow his trouble to be swept away by the abundance of good
things. I believe some people resent--even more than in _The
Newcomes_--the reappearance of Pendennis and Laura. But for my part,
without any extraordinary feeling of friendship for the gentleman or
any designs on his conjugal happiness as regards the lady, I am ready
to meet both until the end of time in the blessed Wood of Good Novels,
and hold them excellent company. The fault, if fault it be, lies
elsewhere, deeper set and more widely spread.

It has, I think, been said already that Thackeray was always inclined
to take the importance of having a hero and a heroine, or at least one
of them, rather too lightly. But he had hitherto, in his major novels
at least, contrived to provide some _succedaneum_ for them when they
were lacking in interest, and not seldom to practice an ingenious
system of _escamotage_ on them, and keep them in the background to
look in when wanted. Here he does just the contrary. No one of his
heroes, with the single and most dangerously contrasted exception of
Henry Esmond, is so constantly kept before us as Philip is. He is
always with us--as no doubt he ought to be, according to the title.
But the worst of it is that we take little pleasure in his company,
except on rare occasions, such as that on which he projects Ringwood
Twysden into the fountain and the lamps. Even when at other times he
is tolerable, it is too often because we like his scenes, his friends,
his circumstances--because we have sunned ourselves at Boulogne; and
have been prepared to make such escorts as Mr. Pendennis's unnecessary
after nightfall; and have earned the easy yet precarious penny by
short or long day's work at the press; and have consumed Larose
(though the vineyard has rather gone off of late years, the first
growth had, at its best, very little advantage over the 'Lady of
Clarets') in _mousseline_ beakers of capacious construction.
Personally, it would require much 'comradeship of college', as Florae
puts it, much loyal gratitude for his father's early tips and dinners,
much generous compassion for later misfortunes--even to tolerate Mr.
Philip Firmin.

That he is unnatural is quite false. Thackeray, be it once more said,
could not by this time, if he could at any time, draw anybody who was
not natural. One has known Philips--better, worse, or pretty nearly
identical in their Philippitude--and if one had not, one could see
that he has all the vital marks. But then there are many persons who
are alive and whom one does not want at all; and, unluckily, one does
not want Philip, at least so much of him, so constantly. He has to be
taken to get the good things of the book, but one resents him all the
more for that, or at least feels him as much a burden as the
'paving-stones and rocking-horses' which his near contemporary, Mr.
Bertie Stanhope in _Barchester Towers_, had to take as part consideration
of his bill. He is not a scoundrel; one rather wishes he were. He is not
merely passively uninteresting and good. He is not--or not
often--amusing in his blunders. He is sometimes almost a lout and
sometimes almost a fool. His creator himself expresses an ingenuous
wonder that Philip was not kicked; and it may be feared, to the dishonour
of mankind, that the fact that he was not was chiefly due to the other
fact that he was big and strong. All this Thackeray knew perfectly
well; and I suppose he would have said as he did of Colonel Newcome,
'It was in him to do it'. To which one can only reply, 'But it would
have been so much kinder of you to let him do it in some other
universe!'

Nor is Mrs. Firmin sufficient to make up for the defects of her
husband. Charlotte Baynes is a nice and natural girl, and Charlotte
Firmin a natural and by no means nasty woman. Even her cruelty to the
Little Sister is perfectly probable; in fact, rather inevitable. The
love-agonies of chapter xxv and its successors will be contemned only
by the contemptible. But she is elsewhere something of a nonentity,
and again her creator knows this fact and confesses it with a
nonchalance which, though it increases one's respect for him (if that
were possible), is from another point of view exasperating rather than
disarming. One remembers some words of his own in reference to a
dinner of superior artistic qualities. 'Dear Sir, _do_ ask us again.'
Certainly there is no temptation in putting down _Philip_ to say,
'Dear Sir, do _not_ ask us again'. But one is perhaps tempted to be
very bold, and to say, 'Dear Sir, do ask us again, and give us only as
good a dinner as this; but please ask some people to meet us different
from Philip and Charlotte'. To which he would probably have replied,
almost in his own words again, and as folk might say often in real
life--that these people _had_ to be asked, that they asked themselves,
and he could not refuse them any more than if they had been Costigan
or Beatrix, to take the opposite poles of their own opposites.

For, after all, the dinner _is_ an admirable one, and such as only
Thackeray could provide. I have said elsewhere, in reference to the
_Shabby Genteel Story_ itself, that I do not think _Philip_ gains very
much from close juxtaposition with its unquestioned 'Introduction'.
The main, if not the only circumstance of importance--the irregular
marriage--could have been intimated in any of a dozen different ways,
familiar to the least skilled novelist. 'Missafis' is, alas,
gone--gone from the consolations of his Hart and the molestation of his
Marianne, with his good deed to Caroline following and safeguarding
him--not, one imagines, unaccompanied by other good deeds of the same
kind. That polished corner of the temple, the Rev. Tufton Hunt, had
made very slight appearance earlier. Mr.-Dr. Brandon-Firmin, and the
earlier and later Carolines, are separated not merely from each other
but from their earlier selves, not only by the years of change, and
suffering, and guilt on one side, but, I think, by something a little
more gulf-like--a difference of conception and attitude to them on the
part of their maker. In particular, it has been said before, that Dr.
Firmin might have been provided with more remainders of his old
scholarship than tags from the grammar and Horace. Nobody else of
importance reappears except old Gann.

But the later novel requires no 'send-off' of interest from its
long-ago and fragmentary study. Perhaps it does not start very
happily--clings and sticks a little to the launching-ways, and indulges
rather too much in digressions and zig-zags. In fact the only sign of
real weariness that I can see in Thackeray's latest novel-work is that
his beginnings, formerly so brilliant, are a little apt to hang fire, not
of course, in details. The actual opening scene is of the best: and in
the very first sheet I could point out, if it were not impertinent,
half a dozen or a dozen of those wonderful phrases and clauses which,
as it were, _sting_ you with literary delight. And with the
introduction of the Twysdens, and specially Talbot, we know that once
more 'there is no mistake about _our_ fellow'. There are relapses, but
the further introduction of Woolcomb and the reappearance of Hunt wake
things up; and the negotiations about the bigamy raise the interest
further still. Lord Ringwood is admirable: and there is the true
Thackeray in the fact that he is not in the least Lord Steyne vamped
up again. But it is not till Philip is jilted and ruined that the full
zest of the book begins. If Charlotte Baynes be a little
bread-and-buttery, the Baynes family, as a whole, though it may have
consumed much of those commodities, is very far from having a flavour of
them. And the touch of the 'pavement of Paris', even the sight of the
French coast, has its inevitable effect on Thackeray. From the landing
at Boulogne to the marriage--which is not very much less than half the
book--there is no cessation of general interest, and a profusion of
special scenes and character-pieces. If the rest falls back a little,
what shall we say? The fact is that, laugh as people may at ending
with marriage-bells, Fate and metaphysical aid too frequently are slow
to help the rash artist who will not take these as a signal to close
his book. It may be as easy to show that this is absurd as the
scientific people find it to show that the sun cannot possibly put out
a fire, or a poker inclined to that fire wake it up. Let us accept all
the demonstrations with becoming respect. But let us, if we are wise,
finish the novel, and adjust the screen, and put up the poker, all the
same and _securi_.

Of course there are still plenty of condolences. I like the
Transformation Scene itself very much. I can stand (it is true that
the trial is quite different from Philip's) the Mugfords very gladly.
The great act of unjust justice executed by the Little Sister on the
Bearer of the Bow-string is one of the best things in novelry. But
still the haunting fact remains that, except as Christians, we have no
particular affection for our neighbour Philip--that indeed, except as
Christians, we find it rather difficult to forgive him for his
chuckleheadedness, his _outrecuidance_, his blundering, blustering
blue-bottle omnipresence and obtrusiveness. The present writer is not
ashamed to confess that he reads _Philip_ as often as any of the
books--that his objections as a critic do not interfere in the least
with his enjoyment as a reader. But that is probably an unnatural
state of things, begotten of long practice in separating personal
likes from artistic appreciation. As a critic, though he certainly
will not throw _Philip_ to the wolves, he is bound to say that it is
not the prettiest nor the best behaved of the children of its family.

One may go even further and question whether its defects, though
blemishes on the particular work of art, are exactly blemishes on the
artistry of the worker in general. They appear to me rather to be
results of two legitimate but unfortunate experiments--the acceptance
of the extreme doctrine that any real life will make a novel, and the
attempt to adjust presentation of reality to the changes of time and
manners.

I have acknowledged that Philip and Charlotte are quite real
persons--that they exist, and behave themselves as they ought to do in
accordance with the laws of their existence. But, in this one
instance, Thackeray's experiments in the true realism may be thought
to have brought him near that false realism of which we have since
seen and are still seeing so much. It is true that, in the novel, to
secure the highest artistic effect, and at the same time the greatest
satisfaction to the reader, the characters must be real, and their
actions must be probable in themselves, or made so. But it is not true
that this is sufficient. They must be made in some way or other
_agreeable_; and if they are made disagreeable they will not and ought
not to succeed. Nor let the misguided anti-sentimentalist think that
he has got a handle, and ejaculate, 'Oh, yes! you _do_ want nothing
but rose-pink and sky-blue'. Once more the handle has escaped him.
Becky Sharp is not exactly a study in these two much-abused tints: yet
she is in the highest degree agreeable. Barnes Newcome can scarcely be
said to be drawn in them: yet, much as one would like personally to
kick him, he is, in his presentment, not disagreeable at all. So, to
take a different writer and a different class of subject, Miss Bates
in the flesh would suggest murder or suicide: Miss Bates in _Emma_ is
a joy for ever. But Philip--Charlotte is rather null than anything
else, she does not hinder, if she does not help--is not agreeable in
any way. One does not grudge him his windfall; for, after all, he has
a boorish and loutish sort of goodness and good-fellowship about him;
he has no bad blood, though horribly bad manners; and he has been both
very unlucky and not a little ill-treated. But one takes no interest
in him; does not even passively enjoy his company; does not want to
see him again. With the vast majority of Thackeray's characters you
want to see them again very much.

I ventured some years ago to hint that there may be subsidiary causes
for his ill-success. Thackeray is in this respect inferior to
Shakespeare--that he either cannot, or does not choose to, leave his
characters with the universal humanity which is of no special age at
all; though he ransoms this to some extent by his unmatched faculty of
giving them the character of their own age. Now, at the time he wrote
_Philip_ a change, slight but actual, was passing over the ways and
language of society. He really need not have troubled about this; for
Philip is, after all, though slightly younger, of the same generation
as Arthur Pendennis and Clive Newcome; that is to say, of Thackeray's
own. But with his oddly mixed indifference to chronology and sense of
actuality he has striven to give the newer _nuance_ to Philip, to make
him a young man not of the late 'thirties but of the early 'sixties.
And I think the effect is rather one of 'confusion of kinds'. But this
may be a fancy; and, at any rate, it is needless to attempt to work it
out here.

The wiser mind, without going back on the admissions of defect that
have been made, will prefer to go back to the counter-allegations of
excellence. There is really in _Philip_ no lack whatever of the old
plenty: in the central block, which has been marked off above, it is
even more plentiful than ever. No stronger proof of Thackeray's
extraordinary power as a novelist could be given than the way in which
the vicissitudes of the contest for Charlotte's hand (an inoffensive
but, as has been said, not ravishingly desirable little hand), and the
fluctuating chances of her blundering good fellow of a lover seize on
the reader in spite of himself. Madame de Smolensk by herself would
save a novel. The vicissitudes of that famous evening where duels are
averted are quite consummate: and the _bolgia_ of mothers-in-law would
be incomplete without Mrs. Baynes. I am not sure that I would not
consent to read a hundred more of the dull hundreds that I used to
review years ago, if I were promised in only one page of one of them
such a thing as the youthful Baynes's comment on the _orgeat_: 'I say,
Mother! what's this beastly thing?' or that mother's summary of Mrs.
Boldero's crimes: 'Prommy, pas payy.' This is the true manna; this is
what you can recommend to a friend, and, whether he enjoys it or not,
enjoy yourself.

As one looks back on the half-dozen novels now complete (for _Lovel
the Widower_ is of a different class, and _Denis Duval_ is a
fragment), it may be permissible to make a few general remarks on
their quality to lighten the final chapter, which will necessarily
contain a still more general survey. Their merits have, I hope, been
set forth not unfairly as the inadequacy of the setter could perform
it, and I am sure that their demerits have been honestly allowed for.
But the merits themselves deserve grouping in this summary under two
heads, after a fashion which will, I think, give some support to the
very high general view of Thackeray's position as a novelist and a man
of letters which has been taken throughout. The first of these heads
is that _abundance_ which has been constantly glanced at, and
sometimes insisted on, in an interim fashion. I have even known it, by
honest persons who were not fools, confessed as a reason why they do
not quite like him. He 'puts too much in', they say: they cannot
swallow and digest him quickly enough to suit their taste. All honour
to them for their frankness which, it may be suspected, might be
imitated by other objectors with advantage. But there are yet others
who receive this abundance differently. To them, whether it be of what
some call small things like the jets of wit and humour referred to at
the close of the last paragraph, or of things subordinate, but in a
more or less real sense substantive in incident, scene, and character,
that 'God's plenty', which we have cited before, is still the only
satisfactory phrase for Thackeray. Although there are few writers
whose general attitude or 'humour' is more constant, there are, I
think, still fewer who, in the common phrase, repeat themselves so
seldom. In some very great novelists, and in almost all novelists of
the second class, character, incident, thought, and phrase seem to be
turned out _ la douzaine_, as the French satirical description had it
as long ago as Rabelais. Now, this is never the case with Thackeray.
Even his most colourless characters, as they are sometimes thought,
have their own colour. Charlotte is not like Laura, and Laura is
certainly not like Amelia; nor in the ascending scale have Philip,
Clive, and Arthur anything real in common, except their
schoolfellowship and the fact that each of them went through some of
Thackeray's own experiences. Of his greater and lesser creations of
more strongly coloured character this is even truer. Becky, Blanche,
and Beatrix are all coquettes, all false, all rather under the
malediction of Eve than under the benediction of Mary; but they are as
different persons--as different girls--as they could possibly be.
Mulligan and Costigan are both comic Irishmen; but there is as little
of the mere 'Teague' about either as, again, is possible. Attention
has just been invited to the fact that Lord Ringwood and Lord Steyne
are not in the least cut off the same piece of 'wicked nobleman'
cloth. The very footmen have their diversities; and when you remember
that Paul de Florae and Madame de Smolensk are both friendly
caricatures of French character, the more abysmal is the wonder at the
difference and the independence of handling in the two cases.

Perhaps, although it is less uncommon, the inexhaustible abundance of
still slighter traits and phrases is more wonderful still; and, at any
rate to some readers, is even a greater source of the unfailing
enjoyment which they find in Thackeray. It is sometimes laid down that
the more trouble the artist takes the more lasting will be the delight
he provides. It is a worthy sentiment; and, with certain provisos and
considerations, a true one. But in the cases where it is true the
delight in question is rather a recognition of the art itself than a
pure unsophisticated joy in its result. Thackeray, though by no means
a mere _improvisatore_, appears to have been a writer who did not, _as
a rule_, labour particular scenes and phrases. That he could not
dictate when the _awen_--the inspiration--came upon him seems of
itself decisive on this point. But the fount of humour and quaint
inventiveness was so perennial with him that he simply could not help
pouring out its water without hesitation, without distillation,
literally as water from the rock. Like that water it sometimes runs
over and away almost before you can catch and drink it; though the
metaphor is in this happy respect faulty, that it does _not_ run away.
I do not know how many times I have read these novels--if I were to
venture at anything like the true number, readers would probably be
unpolite enough not to believe me. Yet I never find any staleness and
I do not even yet fail to find things actually new--things I have not
noticed, or have not fully noticed, before.

But the other head is the greater, and that is the astonishing and
unfailing life and nature which is diffused through these novels.
There is only one thing more astonishing, and that is that some folk
should miss it. Few businesses can be so likely to bring the mind into
the state of not being astonished at anything as the study and
practice of criticism. It is half a lifetime since I was pretty well
broken to this by the discovery that some people thought _Religious
Musings_ Coleridge's finest poem. But one is never _quite_ broken to
these things; and I own that a more astonishing judgement still is
that Thackeray is 'artificial', the judgement being, moreover, passed
not as a final condemnation, but, on the contrary, as a prelude to
praise, that 'artificial as he is', &c. Of course the point of view
from which this judgement is delivered is obvious enough. Thackeray,
in his later books, at any rate, deals mainly with ladies and
gentlemen; ladies and gentlemen are artificial; therefore, &c. And as
the premisses are hopelessly inadequate it is unnecessary to discuss
the conclusion.

But it is not unnecessary to lay down the opposite of that conclusion
politely but peremptorily. By the time at which Thackeray wrote great
part of _Vanity Fair_, and the whole of its successors, it was
impossible for him to draw, in words, a character out of nature or
unfurnished with life. He is in this respect almost unique; certainly,
I think, unique among novelists. It may be that there are classes or
types which he does not attempt; there might be some argument on that
point, but it is unnecessary. In no class and in no individual from
peer to policemen that he attempts does he fail. You may not think his
good heroines good, in the sense that you think them uninteresting,
and to that there is nothing to say; if you think Helen or Laura or
Amelia or Charlotte unnatural, I think your judgement must be politely
disabled. I have admitted that I do not enjoy Philip as a person, but
I not only admit, I positively assert, that Philip is not merely
possible, but actual; that he might turn up any day, as Costigan did.
In temperament, in action, in speech, Thackeray simply cannot set his
puppets to dance to unnatural tunes; they will go right, because their
nature is nature.

FitzGerald--whose intense personal affections by no means made him a
partial or undiscriminating critic, as is well known in the case not
merely of Tennyson but of Thackeray himself--called this lifelikeness,
this verisimilitude, this _naturaleza_, 'terrible'; and it has its
terrible side--one far more really soul-shaking than all the gloom and
grime of the later Realists. But it probably struck the
author-translator of _Omar Khayyam_ in this way because it was almost
wholly _new_. It had existed in Fielding, but the old-fashioned externals
cloaked and masked it there. It really does exist in Miss Austen,
though it is there studiously anodyned and palliated by the choice of
situation and the provision of atmosphere. It is in Scott, but may be
said almost to take trouble, if not exactly to conceal itself, to
shift attention to something else: to be the life of Romance, not of
Novels proper. Otherwise it is nowhere in the novel before Thackeray.
The attempt at it has been common since--of the measure of success
with which that attempt has met it is quite unnecessary to speak
here. But what is fitting to say and to repeat here is that
Thackeray attempted it, and that Thackeray achieved it. Life and
Abundance--these are the two things that are to be found in him, to be
found in him everywhere; and to be found out of him, in the same degree
and to the same extent, nowhere, as I believe, in the English or in any
novel.




XVII

THE WOLVES AND THE LAMB--LOVEL THE WIDOWER--DENIS DUVAL--THE ROUNDABOUT
PAPERS


The subjects[35] of our last chapter are of unusual though varying
interest, and of excellence more various almost than their interest
itself.

    [Footnote 35: _Denis Duval_, though a posthumous work and
    left unfinished, is taken before the _Roundabout Papers_ for
    two reasons: first because it completes, and naturally goes
    with, the Novel-series to which _Lovel the Widower_ also
    belongs; but secondly, and still more, because it _is_
    unfinished and cannot (even in the part that we have) be
    considered to represent Thackeray's final judgement and
    intentions, as these are represented by the last
    'Roundabout' which he sent to press. _The Wolves and the
    Lamb_, though earlier even than _The Newcomes_ as a whole,
    necessarily shows the way to _Lovel_, the connexion being
    much closer than that of the _Shabby Genteel Story_ and
    _Philip_.]

_The Wolves and the Lamb_ is a curious comparative study. I suppose
that, as the knowing ones say so, it is 'not a _play_'; yet, speaking
as a babe and suckling in that matter, I should say it was much more
like the plays of later days than those of its own. But no doubt it is
still rather a novel thrown into dialogue than an actual drama. And it
has distinct advantages over its _remaniement_. Julia is certainly
rather more human than Elizabeth: though the objection taken by some
to Elizabeth herself, that she is almost engaged to three people at
once, and marries a fourth, will not hold for a moment. There is ample
warrant for _that_. Touchit, less ambitious, is certainly more
satisfactory than Batchelor: and if Bedford is pruned to some
advantage in the novel, his presentation in the play has the interest
of connecting more closely with his great elder brethren the Plushes
or Pluches. Undoubtedly, however, the double presentation has a
peculiar interest of its own: and it is a great advantage to be able
to set it before the reader.

_Lovel the Widower_ itself has, I think, very few thoroughgoing
partisans, except such as simply point to the things in it which,
being Thackeray's, are indispensable. They exist, and in fair measure:
but there is certainly not much to be said for it as a whole
performance by such a performer. It was probably knocked together in
some haste to supply a necessary contribution to the newly designed
_Cornhill Magazine_: and, on a not unthrifty variation of the
well-known French proverb, he made his arrow out of wood that had been
wasted. Although some good plays have been made out of novels, the
contrary process has seldom succeeded: and indeed it is not very
common for complete rehandlings of any kind to be great successes.
Thackeray, who had handicapped himself rather heavily in the play,
more than doubled the handicap in the novel. His hero (who, though the
names are changed, had first appeared in _The Kickleburys on the
Rhine_) is very much the same in both, but his amiable nincompoopery
is better suited to the stage than to the page. His heroine has great
capabilities, but is insufficiently developed--which is rather hard on
her. If Bessy had had the scope of Becky, Blanche, and Beatrix, she
might have completed the rubber not unworthily.

But perhaps Thackeray's greatest mistake (though one sees the
temptation to it, and it has engulfed others) is the transformation he
effected of the personage of Captain Touchit into that of Mr.
Batchelor. The onlooker in _The Wolves and the Lamb_ naturally does
not tell the story--seeing that it is not a story but a drama; and he
has merely to act his own part in it. Moreover he is--if not a hero or
the player of a specially _beau rle_--at any rate a personage who has
to support none that is essentially not _beau_. To Mr. Batchelor
Thackeray--probably not least because he put a certain portion of
himself into him, and more, perhaps, than the mere succumbing to the
temptation of buying a paper--has been whimsically unkind. He is
represented as an elderly and vacillating philanderer; as something
very like a coward; as something very much more like a fogy, with a
tendency to twaddle greater than his forerunner by many years, Dr.
Solomon 'Pacifico' (who boldly assumed the title), had ever shown. In
fact, though in a different way, he doubles the attempt in _Philip_ to
keep constantly in front a figure which is not acceptable.

In parts, however, his creator can never go wrong; and he does not
here. If the principals 'leave to desire', the supporters are
inimitable and inestimable. Who but Thackeray could have created, or
would have set to work in one almost trifling book, such a
_triumfeminate_ as Lady Baker, Mrs. Bonnington, and Mrs. Prior?
Clarence Baker (as indeed they all are more or less) is of an old
Thackeray house: but he is absolutely individual and differentiated
from his elders. When Lady Kicklebury changed her title, and had a
second son, she certainly did not improve matters. _This_ little
wretch would never have walked a hundred miles, or drunk a hundred
pints of strong beer, in as many hours. But he is a perfectly live
little wretch for all that. Bedford the Butler is, as has been said,
an improvement on his original in the _Wolves_; and, as always, the
scattered gems of trait and phrase are inexhaustible. One is indeed
bound to differ with Thackeray as to the virtues of second sleep--lie
as long as you like, awake or half-awake, 'cooking yourself for the
day', as some famous physician is said to have said: but don't go to
sleep again after it is light. This, however, is controversial and not
literary. The sketch of the lieutenant of the Bom-Retiro Caadores;
the scene with the Master of Boniface; the semi-dramatized
conversation in the schoolroom; the admirable utilization of Cecilia's
harp, which is almost a _dramatis persona;_ the apostrophe (referred
to in the first of these chapters) to the comet of Fifty-eight; and
the conclusion where the Harp asserts itself, are all, in the familiar
words, 'good enough for anything' and too good for almost anything but
something of Thackeray's. If the adversary insists on the last word,
and says that they are too good for the something itself--why, there
is nothing to do with a person who will have the last word but to let
him have it.

It has been usual, even with no extreme admirers of Thackeray, to
compound for dispraise of _Lovel the Widower_ and _Philip_ by
expressing the highest anticipations of what _Denis Duval_ might have
been, and all but the highest approbation of that part of it which
exists. Nor is this by any means to be set down to mere _respect
humain_, or to the natural, laudable, and almost irresistible interest
of a tale half-told in such circumstances. In many ways its advent was
to be welcomed, and its death ere prime to be lamented. In the first
place, it would have given--has actually given--scope for yet further
utilizing of that marvellous acquaintanceship with the tones and
manners of the eighteenth century; and would thus have helped to
complete _Esmond_ and _The Virginians_, still leaving room for another
to fill the space between 1715 and 1755. Moreover, as has been more
fully revealed later, but as appears to some extent in the book
itself, and in the valuable 'Notes' on the book which Mr. Greenwood
published in the _Cornhill Magazine_ after the author's death, there
would have been something in it from that private stock of experience
and reminiscence on which Thackeray knew how to draw so effectively.
But it does not want 'considerations' of this kind to validate its
claims. Denis is a person already, and a very vivid person for an
autobiographer and biographer of others; with a promise of tone and
attitude quite different from the melancholy moralizing of Henry
Esmond and of his grandson, the half-impersonal or only now and then
personal detachedness of Mr. Pendennis as a narrator, and the more
than Montaignesque self-abasement of Mr. Batchelor. The escapades and
the plots of the early scenes are capital: one scene, where Denny's
pistol foils the rascal Weston, is almost of the best.

Still, there is not quite enough of it to criticize with great
positiveness: and I have sometimes thought that it might, if
continued, have shown a defect which certainly is apparent in the
fragment, but which also might have been got over--a certain too great
proneness to _rcit_--to telling us what has happened instead of
showing it to us in the happening. This, if it had appeared, would
have been no necessary sign of senility or of decadence. Master as he
was both of action and conversation, Thackeray had always been under a
slight temptation to this less excellent way. There is something of it
even in _Catherine_; much in _Barry Lyndon_; not a little even in
_Vanity Fair_; and it would have been nothing strange had it recurred.
But it is right, in the case of a mere fragment like this, to dwell
mainly on its promise: and beyond all doubt or controversy the promise
of _Denis Duval_ is very considerable. One especially desiderates the
sea scenes. Thackeray, it is not superfluous to observe, was a staunch
and wise admirer of Marryat: and he had hardly his equal for 'getting
up a brief in the right novel way, and avoiding the dangers of that
process to which Reade and Zola succumbed too often.

And so we come to the last, the real last, of Thackeray's books--to an
end which certainly crowns the work. The Essay, if not exactly an
English invention--it is indeed an invention of that _magister artis
ingenique largitor_, Nobody--is to a great extent an English
development. Putting aside its classical forerunners, if Bacon
borrowed from Montaigne in its first modern flight, Marivaux was a
direct follower of Addison in starting the second. Indeed, for the
last three hundred years, the volume of English essay-writing has been
greater than that of any other nation, and the proportion of that
volume which has been of the highest quality has been larger still.
Especially since Cowley, more than anybody else, refashioned the
following of Montaigne himself; and since Dryden initiated a kind of
literary essay which nobody--not even Corneille--had exactly hit
before him; still more since Steele and Addison bettered his
instruction in the literary and Defoe's in the business-like way, the
thing has been ours. The long succession of English attempt and
achievement in it would require a small literary history to do it
justice. But it is not impertinent to say that the praise of giving
the last special turn to the Essay is due, more than to any one else,
to Leigh Hunt. As Keats took hints from this unequal writer in verse,
so did Lamb and Hazlitt in prose: and from these three came all the
essayists and all the Essays of the English nineteenth century. Among
these essayists I do not know a greater than Thackeray: among the
collections of these essays I do not know one so great as the
_Roundabout Papers_. Nay, with a little less quintessence, it has far
greater range and variety than _Elia_ itself; with less _diable au
corps_, and far less critical power, it is in the same qualities
superior to any _collection_ of Hazlitt's.

Some direct remarks, and more hints, have been scattered through
earlier chapters as to the way in which these papers are, as it were,
the Rome of their author's country, to which all its roads lead, and
which represents its capital and chief achievement. That he was unable
to compose a long work is not true: the single word _Esmond_ disproves
that sufficiently and at once. But that he had a greater tendency and
aptitude towards work, small in individual bulk and fable, but
interconnected by thought, manner, and handling, is true. To me the
_Roundabout Papers_ are almost as much a whole, a microcosm, as many
celebrated books of great writers composed nominally on a single
theme: but of course they are individual wholes as well. And their
individuality and, so to speak, 'promiscuousness' prevented that
appearance of the desultory which, though it far exceeds the reality,
is charged against his larger single works. There is no doubt that
though the old argument of Dryden (and of Tirso de Molina before him),
'Why should the soul of man be more sluggish than his senses?' is a
notable and a sound one, the common run of readers do experience a
certain discomfort at quick and unexpected changes of theme, subject,
attitude. It took three centuries to reconcile critics to the English
tragi-comedy, and I doubt whether all of them are reconciled yet.
There is no more unpopular figure of Rhetoric than parenthesis.

But quick changes and many-faceted presentations of thought had always
been natural to Thackeray; and now at last he was at liberty to
indulge them as he liked, and yet under the control of his own
judgement. I have never doubted that, whether his editorship of the
_Cornhill_ was on the whole successful or not, it practically gave us
the _Roundabout Papers_ in their perfection. For he was indocile to
others' correction: and yet he was far too conscientious to take
advantage of his position to ride hobbies, cut capers, or merely pass
off inferior work to save himself trouble. There are some people who
always ought to be their own editors, and some who never ought to be:
and, curiously enough, the first are by no means always good editors
of others, nor the second bad ones.

It is not uninteresting to turn for a moment to the originals of all
such things--the periodical Essays of the eighteenth century, and to
note how (no doubt quite unconsciously) good points of the conception
are retained and developed, and bad ones evaded and eliminated, in the
_Roundabouts_. In reading the originals, from the _Tatler_ to that at
first sight impossible _Looker-On_ (which does actually contain some
not unamusing parodies of the then contemporary mannerisms of Gibbon,
Boswell, and Mrs. Radcliffe), one perceives that all the writers
(again, whether consciously or not) were distracted between two sets
of desires, one affecting handling, the other subject. They wanted to
infuse a personal tone--to bring things under a more or less uniform
survey: and yet they were half-afraid and half-ashamed to be boldly
personal. Therefore they excogitated phantoms who exhibit
different degrees of cleverness--from 'Mr. Spectator', the most
shadowy and therefore the best of all, through his predecessor
Bickerstaff, the rag-and-sawdust personages of the _Guardian_, that
leather-and-prunella man of fashion Mr. Adam FitzAdam, and the rest, down
to the aged Mr. Simon Olive-Branch and his more aged mother. They wanted
variety of subject, and did not know how to attain it except by clumsy
machinery of clubs, perpetual inserted stories without detail or
character enough to be really interesting, and the like. Hardly one of
them, except Cumberland, whose egotism was not vigorous enough, and
Shaftesbury (who stood outside of, and indeed anticipated, the
periodical development) dared to throw a strong personal element into
their work. But 'Sir Fretful' was too much of a peevish and pedantic
weakling: 'My Lord' was too much of a coxcomb in manner, and (to do
him justice, more pleasant though not more just) too full of serious
purpose in fact, to make a good essayist. Even when the trammels of
the _Spectator_ tradition had been thrown off, hardly anybody
succeeded in combining the two things--variety of actual subject and
strong personality and individuality of handling--which make the charm
of the Essay. Even Steele, even Addison, even Goldsmith sacrifice too
much of the latter.

Thackeray did not. 'His own sauce' is everywhere, or rather his own
array of sauces--for it is very little that he takes out of the same
bottle of ready-made condiment. But it is applied to an infinite range
of material, never forced either in the direction of connexion or in
the direction of desultoriness. It is fresh and of the day, without
being merely of the day; capable of serving as an indicator, in the
future, of manners and customs, of ways and speech, yet incapable of
becoming out of fashion except to those to whom fashion is everything.
When one looks at the various headings, it might appear as if some one
of unusual genius had planned them all beforehand for a miscellany:
just as the gentleman sat up all night to write his impromptu, but
probably with much more success. Yet we know that it never was
Thackeray's way to plan anything much beforehand: and that these
things came to him, one after another, with little premeditation in
the individual cases, and none in any general scheme. The titles of
course are not always--in fact are rather seldom--indicative: the
greatest lesson that Montaigne taught his family was perhaps this very
apparent disrespect to titles. Sometimes they may deliberately
'conceal thought'. It is the actual contents which exhibit this
uniformity in diversity and profusion in unity itself.

The variety of kind is almost as remarkable as that of individual
matter. 'The Notch in the Axe' is at once a reversion to the old
favourite line of burlesque story, and a great advance in it. 'The
Notch' may be as burlesque as you like: and it is not unamusing to
notice that, though Thackeray was long past any contempt of
Bulwer-Lytton, it was still the author of _A Strange Story_ who gave him
his objective, just as the author of _The Captain_ had done twenty years
and more earlier. But it is much more than burlesque. Like the
celebrated sonnet which was well worth an epic, it is well worth a
book in three volumes. 'Here's richness!' you may say with justice. In
fact Mr. Pinto, whatever his exact earthly title may have been, is a
paladin and peer of Novel-land.

No subject recurs more frequently in the _Roundabouts_, and none is
more happily treated, than that travel which, as has been often
noticed, scarcely ever failed to inspire Thackeray. They start with
it: and if, in all the travel-writing of the last two centuries or
thereabouts, there are two better pages in 'the middle style' than
those that give the description of Chur, this critic does not know
them. 'Two Children in Black' recur to it; it makes a delightful scene
(if only one of _home_ travel) in 'Tunbridge Toys'--a picture never to
be forgotten as one stands at the end of the Pantiles, and looks up to
Mount Ephraim across whatever objects may be in the way. Than 'Notes
of a Week's Holiday' it is difficult even to imagine anything
better--the unforced plenty, the unpremeditated art, the dream-reality of
the panorama. You have it again at a greater distance of place and time
in 'A Mississippi Bubble': and it forms at least part of the motive of
'Dessein's'. Perhaps nothing had, in the simple old phrase, done
Thackeray so much good as travel; he certainly takes care not to be
ungrateful and not to monopolize the benefit.

Partly mingled with these, partly separate from them, are the touches
of autobiography which, having formed not the least attractive parts
of the novels, recur here. In fact few of the papers are without them.
'De Juventute,' for instance, proclaims the fact, and 'Tunbridge Toys'
(already mentioned) very soon makes no secret of it. But it is in
almost all, from first to last, and supplies not their least charming
parts. Even when, as seems to have been the case with the Sayers and
Heenan fight, his presence in the flesh was a thing devised by the
enemy (though certainly it would have been no discredit to him), this
touch comes after a fashion. And I can very well remember the
'gorilla' photograph of him--it was a trick of the time in the first
popularity of Du Chaillu's book--being brought by a schoolfellow to
amuse us. Indeed, long enough ago as these papers may seem to have
been written, their links with the actual present day are numerous.
The 'wee solemn High-lander' at the royal wedding is the present
German ex-Emperor; and the survivor of that mysterious business in
Northumberland Street died but a few years ago.

One very remarkable feature of this crop of 'the last of life for
which the first was made' is to be found in the large number of
passages which it contains directly consisting of, or indirectly
conveying, literary criticism. We have seen that in earlier days this
was Thackeray's very weakest point (except politics which here hardly
figure at all); that, with occasional _aperus_ of surprising
acuteness and truth, he was at the mercy of all sorts of gusts, not
exactly of caprice, but of irrelevant and extraneous influence. Here
the 'calmed and calming _mens adepta_' remedies all this in the most
satisfactory fashion.[36] The papers almost open with a magnificent
apologia or palinode--extended and strengthened afterwards, and all
the better that it cunningly avoids any reference to the older
offences--to Dumas. This passes into praise of others, and especially
of his old foe Bulwer's 'The Haunted and the Haunters', which
certainly may be said to be one of the best ghost-stories in the
world. 'Nil nisi bonum' follows with special reference to Washington
Irving, but spreading itself more widely. The delectable 'On Two
Children in Black' opens with praise of Montaigne and Howell. Half
(and the larger half) of 'The Last Sketch' is devoted to Charlotte
Bront. 'On Ribbons' is almost wholly occupied with literature, and
the tracing of the initials is amusing (there are one or two about
which I am still not wholly certain). Some of the papers which follow
deal rather with journalism than with literature; and rather with
journalists than with journalism. But 'De Juventute' is full of the
subject, and even the 'Week's Holiday' admits it; while 'A Joke from
the late Thomas Hood' naturally could not keep it out. The very 'Notch
on the Axe' contains as well as implies it, and 'De Finibus' is
_auto_-critical 'in the best sense of the term'--_not_ as the
ingenious testimonial-writer said when he wished to be decently
unintelligible. 'On a Peal of Bells,' one of the most delightful of
the whole, is nothing else; and it enters into 'Dessein's' and 'On
Alexandrines'.

    [Footnote 36: There is also another point which may be worth
    notice. In _The English Humourists_ he had been irresistibly
    tempted, dealing as he was with whole-figure presentation,
    to 'make up' those figures as he did the personages of his
    novels. These 'makes-up'--the Fielding is a capital
    example--are wonderfully life-like and possible, but not
    completely and historically exact. Here, in casual glances,
    there was no such temptation, and the _aperu_ could be left
    alone.]

And in all this comment there is perceptible, not a mere acceptance of
what had previously been rejected or questioned, because the critic's
powers of discrimination are blunted and his interests cloyed, but a
true mellowing of perception and a determination to hold fast to that
which is good. Generous Thackeray had always been, even in the partly
haphazard judgements of his youth, and the galls and jars of his yet
unsuccessful early middle age. But his generosity never took, and it
did not take now, the somewhat indiscriminate form of toleration and
even eulogy, to which Scott at all times, and Goethe latterly, were
rather prone. You will not find Thackeray praising rubbish anywhere,
and in these _Roundabouts_ least of all. But you will find him no
longer inclined to harp and carp on trifles; and not in the least
ready to be blown away by some gust of doctrine (or ignorance) in
regard of his subjects. In fact, these _Roundabout Papers_ exhibit
their author in a state only to be described by one of the stock
adjectives of criticism, and one which has been even more abused than
most of these hardly treated vocables. They are thoroughly _ripe_. It
is not exactly that the good wine has been kept till now, for there
was plenty of it before--but that there is nothing but the best wine.
The abundance of matter and the perfection of handling match each
other constantly: and over all and above all and through all there is
perpetual suffusion of that unforced and inimitable style and phrase
which makes subject almost indifferent and constitutes treatment of
itself. Over all too there rules the true _Phantasus_--the principle
of that part or side of the poetic quality which belongs equally to
poetry and to prose, which Thackeray shows in both, and which goes
hand in hand with his unerring truth to nature and reality.

'Fantastic' has a good many senses in English, and they differ from
each other pretty widely. There is the fantastic which is simply not
real; and the fantastic which is reality sublimated, or at least
adorned and partly transformed by that higher Fancy which need not be
distinguished from Imagination. The first, though it need not
necessarily be so, is very frequently prosaic only; the second can
hardly be other than poetic. And it is this fantasy (though one would,
in consequence of the ambiguity just referred to, hardly call him
'fantastic') that was always with Thackeray. There was a good deal in
him, though it found no affected or apparently obscure expression, of
the quality which, whether fully recognizing it or not, Johnson, when
he borrowed the term from Dryden, called 'metaphysical' in the
seventeenth-century writers. His subject, his handling of it, his very
phrase, always suggested something else to him--and is often, if not
always, made to suggest something else to the reader. Perhaps this is
the reason or one of the reasons why he has never been really popular.
You can obtain no credit for profundity by admiring him: he looks so
like a simple matter-of-fact John Bull. You cannot, on the other hand,
really enjoy him without possessing some not inconsiderable
familiarity with literature, the old liberal education and
associations, a pretty wide range of sympathies, and a sufficiently
alert intelligence which is not disconcerted and 'put off' by being
required to glance after his zig-zags of associated suggestion.[37]
Nowhere, perhaps, are these qualities of his shown better than in the
_Roundabout Papers_; but they are shown in a form which, in a way,
prepares the reader for something of the kind, and therefore they are
less likely to puzzle or annoy than in the novels, where they are less
expected, or the early works, where they are more mixed and less
consummate. If a person, having by happy or unhappy accident read no
Thackeray, wished to decide at once whether he should like him or not,
I should recommend the _Roundabouts_; and if the result was
favourable, then I should send him to the beginning of the Oxford
edition.

    [Footnote 37: It has been hinted above that this is probably
    a cause of dislike more common than usually admitted.
    Thackeray's expression looks very simple, but it has almost
    infinite depths in it; the expression of some writers looks
    fascinatingly complex, and has very little depth at all.]

I was reproached, more or less mildly, for not saying more about
Thackeray's _drawings_ in these chapters, on their first appearance.
The reason was given in the second--that I cannot here boast of any
technical knowledge of the matter. But I do not think that many people
can have taken greater delight in them than I take. In the earliest
examples the want of teaching is visible even to me. The _Snob_
drawings and even those in the _National Standard_ are of the curious
'blocky' kind that we know in Hood, whose work very likely did
influence Thackeray. Then the effect of the Paris _atelier_ begins to
show itself, though always with the limitations noticed in the remarks
above referred to. These appear least of course in designedly
grotesque sketches of outline only: a letter-_croquis_ of the artist,
who has slipped on a slide and is regarding the universe with the
countenance natural to such an occasion, was once offered in a
catalogue for eighteen guineas for which I would willingly give
eighty--if I had them to give. Very many, too, of the small
initial-drawings appear to me almost faultless--and the _humour_ of the
pencil is almost equal to that of the pen. It is when he attempts regular
figure-compositions of some size and elaboration that the _numb_
seems, and then not always, to come on his fingers. The actual drawing
is not seldom 'out'; the composition itself is liable to be wooden and
inappropriate; the faces lack not merely fashion-plate comeliness, but
(what is much worse) individual and vivid expression. The numerous
passages, both in his books and in his letters, where he expresses his
full sense of this, have also been referred to. Yet it must be a
rather peculiar taste which feels any satisfaction when the pencil is
handed over to Millais or Walker. With Doyle or Leech it might be
different. But the fact is that Thackeray's 'letterpress' (a word
which always pleases me) does not really want illustration--it has (in
his own words misused) 'its own candles' with it: and his drawings do
not want letterpress--they speak for themselves. Yet in that speech
there is something--not absolutely necessary for comprehension of the
text, but still always in harmony with it, and adding immensely to the
pleasure of the reader and to his comprehension of the writer. Prose,
verse, and pictures--no one of the three could be spared
from what the Greeks called the [Greek: hermaeneia]--rather
insufficiently translated by some 'style'--the self-expression and
self-interpretation of Thackeray.

       *       *       *       *       *

No survey of the work of a great writer on the present scale--
especially no survey of work so shot and mottled with personal colour
as Thackeray's--would be complete without some remarks, fuller and
rather wider-ranging than those in the first of these chapters, on his
personality. I never knew him--I am not aware that I ever even saw
him, though I was much in and about Kensington from 1850 to his death.
But I have since known many people who did know him; and for the last
thirty years the infallible searchlight of private letters, published
by this person and that, has been more and more freely turned upon
him. Now this is even of more value than the later spoken testimony of
third parties.

It is well known that this last was not invariably favourable to
Thackeray. Those who loved him loved him very much. But his
daughter--and if, as Miss Rosetta says, 'There is no friend like a
sister,' there certainly appears to be, despite the experience of Servius
Tullius and Lear, no such loyal defender as a daughter--herself says,
'I suppose some people disliked my father'. They certainly did; and
what is more, not a few of those who actually liked him, seem to have
done so with grudging and 'by allowance'. It has even been said to a
'_w_ash neophyte' who expressed sorrow that he had _not_ known the
object of his admiration, 'You are much better off as you are', or
words to that effect. The 'rubs' seem to have been taken in various
places. The 'bitterness' of which Mr. John Blackwood speaks in an
excellent testimony after Thackeray's death, seems to have been one
great occasion. His contemporaries (except intimate friends of more
than usual wit, like Mr. Venables) do not seem to have detected the
'sentimentalism' which has been a later reproach. But even they appear
to have been sometimes offended by his 'infatuations' (as they called
them) for particular persons, and by his (as it seems to me)
delightful interest in wine and dinners and harmless pleasures of
various kinds. The fools of a certain type thought him not sober and
serious enough--too fond of puns and misspellings and high jinks in
life and literature. The fools of another were offended by his
occasional severities of speech and outbreaks of temper. In fact, as
he never suffered any kind of fool gladly, so neither did any kind of
fool suffer him without a certain discomfort. Now, most of us contain
something of some kind of fool.

Yet he has given a very sufficient key to his character in all his
work, at least from the _Hoggarty Diamond_ onwards, while his letters
not merely supply the key, but open the lock, and display, with hardly
its most secret drawers excepted, the whole cabinet. To expound
Thackeray fully would be to write a _New Anatomy of Melancholy_. The
causes of his melancholia were, no doubt, to some extent external. He
was an instance of the not very uncommon combination of great capacity
for work with a most profound loathing of compulsory work; and, partly
by his own faults and follies, but much more, it would seem, by the
faults and follies of others, he was at the very outset deprived of
the income which would have made it possible for him to work or not,
as he pleased. This was very likely our gain; but he would have been
less than human if he had thought it his. He had singular ill-luck in
his first attempts at making literature a profession--the branches
broke under him, and the steps crumbled, as they do in a bad dream. He
attained domestic happiness, only to lose it by a worse stroke than
that of Death itself. For years even after this, he had not only the
trial--how trying to an intensely nervous nature those who do not
understand can never be made to understand--of picking up a livelihood
from day to day, from hand to mouth, by bits and scraps and orts--but
two great aggravations of this trial. He must have known that he was
not doing himself full justice; he must have known that others were
not doing him even the justice that he deserved. He was one of the
greatest men of letters in Europe--with Tennyson and Carlyle he made
up the trinity of greatest men of letters in England. And in 1845--on
the eve of _Vanity Fair_, and after half a dozen things which, however
imperfectly accomplished, were works of genius, if ever such works
were--Macvey Napier, an official steward and inspector of literature,
made quite sincere, polite, and respectable inquiries as to who Mr.
Thackeray was? When he did achieve, he must have felt to the full
Johnson's famous sentence to Chesterfield. It was late; he was alone;
and he was weary. Nor, though nobody was ever further from Wertherism
or Byronism or any other of the numerous cosmopolitan and polyglot
synonyms for 'pose', does he ever seem to have recovered, save in fits
and glimpses, the 'joy of living'. Though the last three or four years
of his life, at least, were certainly passed in something like a Land
of Beulah, he never seems to have clung to life, or shrunk from death,
in the very slightest degree. Except in the case of actual saints and
martyrs, and of sufferers from some great bodily or mental agony, I
never remember reading about any one so little 'loath to depart' as
Thackeray.

This could not come from, though it might be encouraged by, merely
external causes of the kind mentioned--and it certainly did not.
That Thackeray was, by nature, one of Aristotle's [Greek: sphodra
melagcholikoi] there can be not the slightest doubt. The obviously
autobiographical passages in _Pendennis_ and _The Virginians_ would
be enough, if the whole context of the _Works_ were not more than
enough. And the conviction is driven home by all sorts of curious
by-evidence. It is the sense of _proximus ardet_--the terror of the
misanthropy into which melancholy so easily slips--which makes him
such a hanging judge to Swift. The celebrated 'cynicism' is the
harder, and the equally celebrated 'sentimentality' the more melting
mood of this melancholy.[38] The puns and the cacographies, the
little gastronomical diversions, and the Sittings to Brighton and
Paris, are its palliatives and its allopathic drugs. And in the
higher ranges of humour it supplies exactly that tendency to 'feel
in earnest while thinking in jest' which is perhaps the only
approach to a satisfactory definition of humour itself and which is
due to a friend and house-inmate of his own, Miss Anne Evans, who
had the living embodiment of it often before her.

    [Footnote 38: It is probably not worth while to say any more
    about these two silly 'tickets'. If, when the literary cant
    of the day on the whole turns to sentimentalism, a man is
    accused of being a cynic, and if, when it turns to
    anti-sentimentalism, he is accused of being a sentimentalist,
    it is pretty certain that _omne tulit punctum_.]

It is not mere paradox to say that this temperament is less difficult
to live constantly with (though it may be that too if it lives with
the wrong people) than to live with, or to meet, occasionally. For it
is essentially a temperament of moods; and the Goddess of Chance
cannot be trusted always or often to adjust these moods to other
people's at the particular time. But assuredly it is not necessarily,
or even probably, an unloving, and it should not be an unloved one. To
Thackeray's good qualities almost every page of his works--certainly
nine hundred and ninety-nine pages out of a thousand--will bear
witness; and the witness is confirmed externally. 'Kind' is the
adjective most frequently used of him by those who knew him best. His
generosity is unquestionable; and there is absolutely no trace of 'bad
blood' in him, though he certainly did, at a bad time of journalism,
acquire some of its bad habits, and was long before he got rid of
them. His utterances on religion (at least ecclesiastical religion)
and politics are something rather trying, not because of their
purport, but because of a certain irresponsible and amateurish
character about them which makes one wish that, knowing so little
about these matters, he had held his tongue.[39] When you have,
comparatively late in life, to borrow a Bible from the Carlyles in
order to read (apparently for the first time) the Books of Joshua and
Judges, it would surely be wise to let your opinions on theodicy
mature a little.

    [Footnote 39: 'It is very well known that religion and
    politics are perfectly understood by everybody; as they
    require neither study nor experience', says Chesterfield
    with admirable gravity--availing himself, it is true, of an
    earlier utterance of Swift's, but pointing and polishing
    it.]

But contrasts are of the essence of the melancholious temperament, and
occasional irreverences--mostly ignorances likewise--of expression do
not interfere with the fact of the immense reverence which was the
citadel of Thackeray's mind, and the vantage-ground of his outlook on
life. For here there was no ignorance, but, on the contrary, an
astonishing and miraculous knowledge. And such reverence, with such
knowledge, saves at once satire from being mere snarl or mere sniggle,
and sentiment from being mere sentimentality. When they put some of
our modern analysts above him, it makes me think of a story told in
somebody's _Memoirs_--of an amateur in mechanics who used to carry
some half-finished brass-work in his pocket, and take it out to file
at odd moments, thereby setting his friends' teeth not a little on
edge. Thackeray does not do this; he only gives you the perfectly
finished and infallible watch. When they say, 'Oh! but Balzac?' the
answer is quite easy. Balzac's men and women are what Frenchmen and
Frenchwomen would or would not like to be, or what they think they
ought or ought not to be; Thackeray's men and women are what
Englishmen and Englishwomen are. Nor is there any mere insularity; for
exceedingly cool admirers of his--or rather scarcely admirers of his
at all--have admitted that if there is a perfect sketch of a
'foreigner' anywhere in the whole literature of Europe, that sketch is
Paul de Florac. In fact, there is something uncanny in his perfect
mastery of humanity.

The two most famous of the unfavourable judgements[40] passed on him
by men who may count as his peers in the wide sense, are Carlyle's,
that he was 'not a strong soul', and Matthew Arnold's, that he was not
a great writer. They require somewhat different treatment. The first
cannot be met with a simple contradiction. Carlyle's judgements,
splenetic and one-sided as they often are, seldom or never can be so
met. In a certain sense Thackeray was no more a strong man than the
Sage of Chelsea himself--it may be even less. There was nothing still
or stoical about him. But perhaps we are rather in need of a moral
Longinus to point out that strength is not mere solidity or stolidity,
not mere absence of weakness. And the concomitant allowance 'big,
fierce, weeping', is remarkable, for it at least excludes littleness,
and cowardice, and Voltairean snigger. Moreover, it has to be
remembered that this character was written ten years before
Thackeray's death; and when, though his fame was made, his fortune,
such as it was to be, was still only beginning. Yet the chief demurrer
to this judgement must always be that already advanced. Is mere
absence of emotion, not merely a good thing, but _the_ good thing? If
it be, we must no doubt rule Thackeray out of the strengths of
England. He will find himself in the company, for instance, of Swift,
of Johnson, of Burke, of Nelson, not to mention his critic. It is just
possible to imagine worse company.

    [Footnote 40: Of the accusation of another distinguished but
    exceedingly uncritical contemporary--that Thackeray is a
    'meat-fly' who settled on and disgusts us with life--it can
    hardly be necessary to take serious notice. But I think I
    have seen a variant and probably a derivative of this
    complaint, which is even more curious if less
    extravagant--that the author of _Vanity Fair_ 'makes us
    discontented with ourselves'. Now one had thought that to do
    this was to confer about the highest benefit possible. At any
    rate the person who wishes to be self-satisfied may be left to
    his desires, which are extremely likely to be granted, in
    spite of the teasing teeth of any troublesome Titmarsh.]

As to the other complaint of his not being a great writer, I think we
may, without any disrespect to its author, pass it by somewhat
summarily. Mr. Arnold was in many ways different from Thackeray--in
none, perhaps, more different than in his attitude to contemporaries,
which was nearly always grudging, though I do not believe that this
was due to any want of generosity. It is almost enough first to ask on
what canon of greatness Thackeray is disqualified, and when the canon
is produced to disqualify it at once as an inevitable consequence of
its operation. It hardly matters whether we take 'writer' in its more
limited sense as concerning 'style' or in its wider as extending to
invention or choice of subject and to application of treatment. If
fertility that is inexhaustible and variety that is infinite; if
phrase that is at once utterly personal to the user and utterly
suitable to the subject--if these things, and many others which have
been pointed out, will not make a great writer, why, perhaps Thackeray
is not one. But in that case one is driven to borrow from Miss
Carolina Wilhelmina Amelia Skeggs, and ask where a great writer is to
be found?

I remember having, some thirty years ago, delight of battle for at
least an hour by, and not far from, Kensington clock, on the subject
of Thackeray, with the late Mr. Henley. At last, apropos of exactly
what I have forgotten, I happened to say, 'And this, you see, is
because he was such a gentleman'. 'No', said Henley, 'it is because he
was such a genius.' 'Well', I said, 'my dear Henley, suppose we put
it, that it is because he was such a genius who was also such a
gentleman.' So we laughed and shook hands and parted. And really I am
inclined to think that these words were, and are, 'the conclusion of
the whole matter' about Thackeray.



[End of _A Consideration of Thackeray_ by George Saintsbury]
