Dec. 10, 1891. Sterne and Thackeray.
It is told by those who write scraps of Thackeray's biography that a
youth once ventured to speak disrespectfully of Scott in his presence.
"You and I, sir," said the great man, cutting him short, "should lift
our hats at the mention of that great name."
An admirable rebuke!--if only Thackeray had remembered it when he sat
down to write those famous Lectures on the English Humorists, or at
least before he stood up in Willis's Rooms to inform a polite audience
concerning his great predecessors. Concerning their work? No.
Concerning their genius? No. Concerning the debt owed to them by
mankind? Not a bit of it. Concerning their _lives_, ladies and
gentlemen; and whether their lives were pure and respectable and free
from scandal and such as men ought to have led whose works you would
like your sons and daughters to handle. Mr. Frank T. Marzials,
Thackeray's latest biographer, finds the matter of these Lectures
"excellent":--
"One feels in the reading that Thackeray is a peer among his
peers--a sort of elder brother,[A] kindly, appreciative and
tolerant--as he discourses of Addison, Steele, Swift, Pope,
Sterne, Fielding, Goldsmith. I know of no greater contrast in
criticism--a contrast, be it said, not to the advantage of the
French critic--than Thackeray's treatment of Pope and that of M.
Taine. What allowance the Englishman makes for the physical ills
that beset the 'gallant little cripple'; with what a gentle hand
he touches the painful places in that poor twisted body! M.
Taine, irritated apparently that Pope will not fit into his
conception of English literature, exhibits the same deformities
almost savagely."
I am sorry that I cannot read this kindliness, this appreciation, this
tolerance, into the Lectures--into those, for instance, of Sterne and
Fielding: that the simile of the "elder brother" carries different
suggestions for Mr. Marzials and for me: and that the lecturer's
attitude is to me less suggestive of a peer among his peers than of a
tall "bobby"--a volunteer constable--determined to warn his polite
hearers what sort of men these were whose books they had hitherto read
unsuspectingly.
And even so--even though the lives and actions of men who lived too
early to know Victorian decency must be held up to shock a crowd in
Willis's Rooms, yet it had been but common generosity to tell the
whole truth. Then the story of Fielding's _Voyage to Lisbon_ might
have touched the heart to sympathy even for the purely fictitious low
comedian whom Thackeray presented: and Sterne's latest letters might
have infused so much pity into the polite audience that they, like his
own Recording Angel, might have blotted out his faults with a tear.
But that was not Thackeray's way. Charlotte Brontë found "a finished
taste and ease" in the Lectures, a "something high bred." Motley
describes their style as "hovering," and their method as "the
perfection of lecturing to high-bred audiences." Mr. Marzials quotes
this expression "hovering" as admirably descriptive. It is. By
judicious selection, by innuendo, here a pitying aposiopesis, there an
indignant outburst, the charges are heaped up. Swift was a toady at
heart, and used Stella vilely for the sake of that hussy Vanessa.
Congreve had captivating manners--of course he had, the dog! And we
all know what that meant in those days. Dick Steele drank and failed
to pay his creditors. Sterne--now really I know what Club life is,
ladies and gentlemen, and I might tell you a thing or two if I would:
but really, speaking as a gentleman before a polite audience, I warn
you against Sterne.
I do not suppose for a moment that Thackeray consciously defamed these
men. The weaknesses, the pettinesses of humanity interested him, and
he treated them with gusto, even as he spares us nothing of that
horrible scene between Mrs. Mackenzie and Colonel Newcome. And of
course poor Sterne was the easiest victim. The fellow was so full of
his confounded sentiments. You ring a choice few of these on the
counter and prove them base metal. You assume that the rest of the bag
is of equal value. You "go one better" than Sir Peter Teazle and damn
all sentiment, and lo! the fellow is no better than a smirking jester,
whose antics you can expose till men and women, who had foolishly
laughed and wept as he moved them, turn from him, loathing him as a
swindler. So it is that although _Tristram Shandy_ continues one of
the most popular classics in the language, nobody dares to confess his
debt to Sterne except in discreet terms of apology.
But the fellow wrote the book. You can't deny _that_, though
Thackeray may tempt you to forget it. (What proportion does my Uncle
Toby hold in that amiable Lecture?) The truth is that the elemental
simplicity of Captain Shandy and Corporal Trim did not appeal to the
author of _The Book of Snobs_ in the same degree as the pettiness of
the man Sterne appealed to him: and his business in Willis's Rooms was
to talk, not of Captain Shandy, but of the man Sterne, to whom his
hearers were to feel themselves superior as members of society. I
submit that this was not a worthy task for a man of letters who was
also a man of genius. I submit that it was an inversion of the true
critical method to wreck Sterne's _Sentimental Journey_ at the outset
by picking Sterne's life to pieces, holding up the shreds and warning
the reader that any nobility apparent in his book will be nothing
better than a sham. Sterne is scarcely arrived at Calais and in
conversation with the Monk before you are cautioned how you listen to
the impostor. "Watch now," says the critic; "he'll be at his tricks in
a moment. Hey, _paillasse_! There!--didn't I tell you?" And yet I am
as sure that the opening pages of the _Sentimental Journey_ are full
of genuine feeling as I am that if Jonathan Swift had entered the room
while the Lecture upon him was going forward, he would have eaten
William Makepeace Goliath, white waistcoat and all.
Frenchmen, who either are less awed than we by lecturers in white
waistcoats, or understand the methods of criticism somewhat better,
cherish the _Sentimental Journey_ (in spite of its indifferent French)
and believe in the genius that created it. But the Briton reads it
with shyness, and the British critic speaks of Sterne with bated
breath, since Thackeray told it in Gath that Sterne was a bad man, and
the daughters of Philistia triumphed.
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