The shock which was felt in this country at the sudden death of
Thackeray was a new proof, if any were wanting, that London is still our
social and literary capital. Not even the loss of Irving called forth so
universal and strong an expression of sorrow. And yet it had been the
fashion to call Thackeray a cynic. We must take leave to doubt whether
Diogenes himself, much less any of his disciples, would have been so
tenderly regretted. We think there was something more in all this than
mere sentiment at the startling extinction of a great genius. There was
a universal feeling that we had lost something even rarer and better,--a
true man.
Thackeray was not a cynic, for the simple reason that he was a humorist,
and could not have been one if he would. Your true cynic is a sceptic
also; he is distrustful by nature, his laugh is a bark of selfish
suspicion, and he scorns man, not because he has fallen below himself,
but because he can rise no higher. But humor of the truest quality
always rests on a foundation of belief in something better than it sees,
and its laugh is a sad one at the awkward contrast between man as he is
and man as he might be, between the real snob and the ideal image of his
Creator. Swift is our true English cynic, with his corrosive sarcasm;
the satire of Thackeray is the recoil of an exquisite sensibility from
the harsh touch of life. With all his seeming levity, Thackeray used to
say, with the warmest sincerity, that Carlyle was his master and
teacher. He had not merely a smiling contempt, but a deadly hatred, of
all manner of _shams_, an equally intense love for every kind of
manliness, and for gentlemanliness as its highest type. He had an eye
for pretension as fatally detective as an acid for an alkali; wherever
it fell, so clear and seemingly harmless, the weak spot was sure to
betray itself. He called himself a disciple of Carlyle, but would have
been the first to laugh at the absurdity of making any comparison
between the playful heat-lightnings of his own satire and that lurid
light, as of the Divine wrath over the burning cities of the plain, that
flares out on us from the profoundest humor of modern times. Beside that
_ingenium perfervidum_ of the Scottish seer, he was but a Pall-Mall
Jeremiah after all.
It is curious to see how often Nature, original and profuse as she is,
repeats herself; how often, instead of sending one complete mind like
Shakespeare, she sends two who are the complements of each
other,--Fielding and Richardson, Goethe and Schiller, Balzac and George
Sand, and now again Thackeray and Dickens. We are not fond of
comparative criticism, we mean of that kind which brings forward the
merit of one man as if it depreciated the different merit of another,
nor of supercilious criticism, which measures every talent by some ideal
standard of possible excellence, and, if it fall short, can find nothing
to admire. A thing is either good in itself or good for nothing. Yet
there is such a thing as a contrast of differences between two eminent
intellects by which we may perhaps arrive at a clearer perception of
what is characteristic in each. It is almost impossible, indeed, to
avoid some sort of parallel _à la_ Plutarch between Thackeray and
Dickens. We do not intend to make out which is the greater, for they may
be equally great, though utterly unlike, but merely to touch on a few
striking points. Thackeray, in his more elaborate works, always paints
character, and Dickens single peculiarities. Thackeray's personages are
all men, those of Dickens personified oddities. The one is an artist,
the other a caricaturist; the one pathetic, the other sentimental.
Nothing is more instructive than the difference between the
illustrations of their respective works. Thackeray's figures are such as
we meet about the streets, while the artists who draw for Dickens
invariably fall into the exceptionally grotesque. Thackeray's style is
perfect, that of Dickens often painfully mannered. Nor is the contrast
less remarkable in the quality of character which each selects.
Thackeray looks at life from the club-house window, Dickens from the
reporter's box in the police-court. Dickens is certainly one of the
greatest comic writers that ever lived, and has perhaps created more
types of oddity than any other. His faculty of observation is
marvellous, his variety inexhaustible. Thackeray's round of character is
very limited; he repeated himself continually, and, as we think, had
pretty well emptied his stock of invention. But his characters are
masterpieces, always governed by those average motives, and acted upon
by those average sentiments, which all men have in common. They never
act like heroes and heroines, but like men and women.
Thackeray's style is beyond praise,--so easy, so limpid, showing
everywhere by unobtrusive allusions how rich he was in modern culture,
it has the highest charm of gentlemanly conversation. And it was natural
to him,--his early works ("The Great Hoggarty Diamond," for example)
being as perfect, as low in tone, as the latest. He was in all respects
the most finished example we have of what is called a man of the world.
In the pardonable eulogies which were uttered in the fresh grief at his
loss there was a tendency to set him too high. He was even ranked above
Fielding,--a position which no one would have been so eager in
disclaiming as himself. No, let us leave the old fames on their
pedestals. Fielding is the greatest creative artist who has written in
English since Shakespeare. Of a broader and deeper nature, of a larger
brain than Thackeray, his theme is Man, as that of the latter is
Society. The Englishman with whom Thackeray had most in common was
Richard Steele, as these "Roundabout Papers" show plainly enough. He
admired Fielding, but he loved Steele.