His Worshippers.
It is odd to note how opinions differ as to the greatness of Thackeray
and the value of his books. Some regard him as the greatest novelist of
his age and country and as one of the greatest of any country and any
age. These hold him to be not less sound a moralist than excellent as a
writer, not less magnificently creative than usefully and delightfully
cynical, not less powerful and complete a painter of manners than
infallible as a social philosopher and incomparable as a lecturer on the
human heart. They accept Amelia Sedley for a very woman; they believe in
Colonel Newcome--'by _Don Quixote_ out of _Little Nell_'--as in something
venerable and heroic; they regard William Dobbin and 'Stunning'
Warrington as finished and subtle portraitures; they think Becky Sharp an
improvement upon Mme. Marneffe and Wenham better work than Rigby; they
are in love with Laura Bell, and refuse to see either cruelty or
caricature in their poet's presentment of Alcide de Mirobolant.
Thackeray's fun, Thackeray's wisdom, Thackeray's knowledge of men and
women, Thackeray's morality, Thackeray's view of life, 'his wit and
humour, his pathos, and his umbrella,' are all articles of belief with
them. Of Dickens they will not hear; Balzac they incline to despise; if
they make any comparison between Thackeray and Fielding, or Thackeray and
Richardson, or Thackeray and Sir Walter, or Thackeray and Disraeli, it is
to the disadvantage of Disraeli and Scott and Richardson and Fielding.
All these were well enough in their way and day; but they are not to be
classed with Thackeray. It is said, no doubt, that Thackeray could
neither make stories nor tell them; but he liked stories for all that,
and by the hour could babble charmingly of _Ivanhoe_ and the
_Mousquetaires_. It is possible that he was afraid of passion, and had
no manner of interest in crime. But then, how hard he bore upon snobs,
and how vigorously he lashed the smaller vices and the meaner faults! It
may be beyond dispute that he was seldom good at romance, and saw most
things--art and nature included--rather prosaically and ill-naturedly, as
he might see them who has been for many years a failure, and is naturally
a little resentful of other men's successes; but then, how brilliant are
his studies of club humanity and club manners! how thoroughly he
understands the feelings of them that go down into the West in broughams!
If he writes by preference for people with a thousand a year, is it not
the duty of everybody with a particle of self-respect to have that
income? Is it possible that any one who has it not can have either wit
or sentiment, humour or understanding? Thackeray writes _of_ gentlemen
_for_ gentlemen; therefore he is alone among artists; therefore he is
'the greatest novelist of his age.' That is the faith of the true
believer: that the state of mind of him that reveres less wisely than
thoroughly, and would rather be damned with Thackeray than saved with any
one else.
His Critics.
The position of them that wear their rue with a difference, and do not
agree that all literature is contained in _The Book of Snobs_ and _Vanity
Fair_, is more easily defended. They like and admire their Thackeray in
many ways, but they think him rather a writer of genius who was innately
and irredeemably a Philistine than a supreme artist or a great man. To
them there is something artificial in the man and something insincere in
the artist: something which makes it seem natural that his best work
should smack of the literary _tour de force_, and that he should never
have appeared to such advantage as when, in _Esmond_ and in _Barry
Lyndon_, he was writing up to a standard and upon a model not wholly of
his own contrivance. They admit his claim to eminence as an adventurer
in 'the discovery of the Ugly'; but they contend that even there he did
his work more shrewishly and more pettily than he might; and in this
connection they go so far as to reflect that a snob is not only 'one who
meanly admires mean things,' as his own definition declares, but one who
meanly detests mean things as well. They agree with Walter Bagehot that
to be perpetually haunted by the plush behind your chair is hardly a sign
of lofty literary and moral genius; and they consider him narrow and
vulgar in his view of humanity, limited in his outlook upon life,
inclined to be envious, inclined to be tedious and pedantic, prone to
repetitions, and apt in bidding for applause to appeal to the baser
qualities of his readers and to catch their sympathy by making them feel
themselves spitefully superior to their fellow-men. They look at his
favourite heroines--at Laura and Ethel and Amelia; and they can but think
him stupid who could ever have believed them interesting or admirable or
attractive or true. They listen while he regrets it is impossible for
him to attempt the picture of a man; and, with Barry Lyndon in their
mind's eye and the knowledge that Casanova and Andrew Bowes suggested no
more than that, they wonder if the impossibility was not a piece of luck
for him. They hear him heaping contumely upon the murders and
adulteries, the excesses in emotion, that pleased the men of 1830 as they
had pleased the Elizabethans before them; and they see him turning with
terror and loathing from these--which after all are effects of vigorous
passion--to busy himself with the elaborate and careful narrative of how
Barnes Newcome beat his wife, and Mrs. Mackenzie scolded Colonel Newcome
to death, and old Twysden bragged and cringed himself into good society
and an interest in the life and well-being of a little cad like Captain
Woolcomb; and it is not amazing if they think his morality more dubious
in some ways than the morality he is so firmly fixed to ridicule and to
condemn. They reflect that he sees in Beatrix no more than the makings
of a Bernstein; and they are puzzled, when they come to mark the contrast
between the two portraitures and the difference between the part assigned
to Mrs. Esmond and the part assigned to the Baroness, to decide if he
were short-sighted or ungenerous, if he were inapprehensive or only
cruel. They weary easily of his dogged and unremitting pursuit of the
merely conventional man and the merely conventional woman; they cannot
always bring themselves to be interested in the cupboard drama, the tea-
cup tragedies and cheque-book and bandbox comedies, which he regards as
the stuff of human action and the web of human life; and from their
theory of existence they positively refuse to eliminate the heroic
qualities of romance and mystery and passion, which are--as they have
only to open their newspapers to see--essentials of human achievement and
integral elements of human character. They hold that his books contain
some of the finest stuff in fiction: as, for instance, Rawdon Crawley's
discovery of his wife and Lord Steyne, and Henry Esmond's return from the
wars, and those immortal chapters in which the Colonel and Frank
Castlewood pursue and run down their kinswoman and the Prince. But they
hold, too, that their influence is dubious, and that few have risen from
them one bit the better or one jot the happier.
Which is Right?
Genius apart, Thackeray's morality is that of a highly respectable
British cynic; his intelligence is largely one of trifles; he is wise
over trivial and trumpery things. He delights in reminding us--with an
air!--that everybody is a humbug; that we are all rank snobs; that to
misuse your aspirates is to be ridiculous and incapable of real merit;
that Miss Blank has just slipped out to post a letter to Captain Jones;
that Miss Dash wears false teeth and a wig; that General Tufto is almost
as tightly laced as the beautiful Miss Hopper; that there's a bum-bailiff
in the kitchen at Number Thirteen; that the dinner we ate t'other day at
Timmins's is still to pay; that all is vanity; that there's a skeleton in
every house; that passion, enthusiasm, excess of any sort, is unwise,
abominable, a little absurd; and so forth. And side by side with these
assurances are admirable sketches of character and still more admirable
sketches of habit and of manners--are the Pontos and Costigan, Gandish
and Talbot Twysden and the unsurpassable Major, Sir Pitt and Brand
Firmin, the heroic De la Pluche and the engaging Farintosh and the
versatile Honeyman, a crowd of vivid and diverting portraitures besides;
but they are not different--in kind at least--from the reflections
suggested by the story of their several careers and the development of
their several individualities. Esmond apart, there is scarce a man or a
woman in Thackeray whom it is possible to love unreservedly or thoroughly
respect. That gives the measure of the man, and determines the quality
of his influence. He was the average clubman _plus_ genius and a style.
And, if there is any truth in the theory that it is the function of art
not to degrade but to ennoble--not to dishearten but to encourage--not to
deal with things ugly and paltry and mean but with great things and
beautiful and lofty--then, it is argued, his example is one to depreciate
and to condemn.
His Style.
Thus the two sects: the sect of them that are with Thackeray and the sect
of them that are against him. Where both agree is in the fact of
Thackeray's pre-eminence as a writer of English and the master of one of
the finest prose styles in literature. His manner is the perfection of
conversational writing. Graceful yet vigorous; adorably artificial yet
incomparably sound; touched with modishness yet informed with
distinction; easily and happily rhythmical yet full of colour and quick
with malice and with meaning; instinct with urbanity and instinct with
charm--it is a type of high-bred English, a climax of literary art. He
may not have been a great man but assuredly he was a great writer; he may
have been a faulty novelist but assuredly he was a rare artist in words.
Setting aside Cardinal Newman's, the style he wrote is certainly less
open to criticism than that of any other modern Englishman. He was
neither super-eloquent like Mr. Ruskin nor a Germanised Jeremy like
Carlyle; he was not marmoreally emphatic as Landor was, nor was he
slovenly and inexpressive as was the great Sir Walter; he neither dallied
with antithesis like Macaulay nor rioted in verbal vulgarisms with
Dickens; he abstained from technology and what may be called
Lord-Burleighism as carefully as George Eliot indulged in them, and he
avoided conceits as sedulously as Mr. George Meredith goes out of his way
to hunt for them. He is a better writer than any one of these, in that
he is always a master of speech and of himself, and that he is always
careful yet natural and choice yet seemingly spontaneous. He wrote as a
very prince among talkers, and he interfused and interpenetrated English
with the elegant and cultured fashion of the men of Queen Anne and with
something of the warmth, the glow, the personal and romantic ambition,
peculiar to the century of Byron and Keats, of Landor and Dickens, of
Ruskin and Tennyson and Carlyle. Unlike his only rival, he had learnt
his art before he began to practise it. Of the early work of the greater
artist a good half is that of a man in the throes of education: the
ideas, the thoughts, the passion, the poetry, the humour, are of the
best, but the expression is self-conscious, strained, ignorant. Thackeray
had no such blemish. He wrote dispassionately, and he was a born writer.
In him there is no hesitation, no fumbling, no uncertainty. The style of
_Barry Lyndon_ is better and stronger and more virile than the style of
_Philip_; and unlike the other man's, whose latest writing is his best,
their author's evolution was towards decay.
His Mission.
He is so superior a person that to catch him tripping is a peculiar
pleasure. It is a satisfaction apart, for instance, to reflect that he
has (it must be owned) a certain gentility of mind. Like the M.P. in
_Martin Chuzzlewit_, he represents the Gentlemanly Interest. That is his
mission in literature, and he fulfils it thoroughly. He appears
sometimes as Mr. Yellowplush, sometimes as Mr. Fitzboodle, sometimes as
Michael Angelo Titmarsh, but always in the Gentlemanly Interest. In his
youth (as ever) he is found applauding the well-bred Charles de Bernard,
and remarking of Balzac and Dumas that the one is 'not fit for the
_salon_,' and the other 'about as genteel as a courier.' Balzac and
Dumas are only men of genius and great artists: the real thing is to be
'genteel' and write--as _Gerfeuil_ (_sic_) is written--'in a gentleman-
like style.' A few pages further on in the same pronouncement (a review
of _Jerome Paturot_), I find him quoting with entire approval Reybaud's
sketch of 'a great character, in whom the _habitue_ of Paris will perhaps
recognise a certain likeness to a certain celebrity of the present day,
by name Monsieur Hector Berlioz, the musician and critic.' The
description is too long to quote. It sparkles with all the _fadaises_ of
anti-Berliozian criticism, and the point is that the hero, after
conducting at a private party (which Berlioz never did) his own 'hymn of
the creation that has been lost since the days of the deluge,' 'called
for his cloak and his clogs, and walked home, where he wrote a critique
for the newspapers of the music which he had composed and directed.' In
the Gentlemanly Interest Mr. Titmarsh translates this sorry little libel
with the utmost innocence of approval. It is _The Paris Sketch-Book_
over again. That Monsieur Hector Berlioz may possibly have known
something of his trade and been withal as honest a man and artist as
himself seems never to have occurred to him. He knows nothing of
Monsieur Hector except that he is a 'hairy romantic,' and that whatever
he wrote it was not _Batti_, _batti_; but that nothing is enough.
'Whether this little picture is a likeness or not,' he is ingenuous
enough to add, 'who shall say?' But,--and here speaks the bold but
superior Briton--'it is a good caricature of a race in France, where
geniuses _poussent_ as they do nowhere else; where poets are prophets,
where romances have revelations.' As he goes on to qualify _Jerome
Paturot_ as a 'masterpiece,' and as 'three volumes of satire in which
there is not a particle of bad blood,' it seems fair to conclude that in
the Gentlemanly Interest all is considered fair, and that to accuse a man
of writing criticisms on his own works is to be 'witty and entertaining,'
and likewise 'careless, familiar, and sparkling' to the genteelest
purpose possible in this genteelest of all possible worlds.