The grand old name of gentleman
Defamed by every charlatan,
And soil’d with all ignoble use.
In the big New Oxford Dictionary there is more than a pageful of
definitions of the word, and almost every English essayist has tried a
shot at it. One thing is sure, its old hereditary use as a title of rank
or property is going out, or already gone. “John Jones, Gent.,” is a
vanishing form of address. More and more the word is coming to connote
something in character and conduct. Inheritance may enter into it, and
the sense of honour has a great part in it, and its outward and visible
sign is an unassuming fitness of behaviour in the various circumstances
of life. But its indispensable essence is reality; its native speech,
sincerity; and its controlling spirit, good-will.
Let us content ourselves with a description instead of a definition.
A gentleman is a real man who deals honestly, bravely, frankly, and
considerately with all sorts and conditions of other real men.
This is Thackeray’s very mark and quality. We can feel it all through his
life and works. Everything real in the world he recognized and accepted,
even though he might not always like it. But the unreal people and
things—the pretenders, the hypocrites, the shams, and the frauds (whether
pious or impious)—he detested and scoffed away. Reality was his quest
and his passion. He followed it with unfailing interest, penetration,
and good temper. He found it, at least in humankind, always mixed and
complicated, never altogether good nor altogether bad, no hero without a
fault, and no villain without a germ of virtue. Life is really made that
way. The true realist is not the materialist, the five-sense naturalist,
but the man who takes into account the human soul and God as ultimate
realities.
Thackeray’s personal life had nothing that was remarkable and much that
was admirable. It was simply the background of his genius. He was a
child of the upper-middle class in England—if you know just what that
means. He went to the Charterhouse School in London (which he afterward
immortalized as Greyfriars in _The Newcomes_), and illustrated his
passion for reality by getting his nose broken in a fight, which gave
his face a permanent Socratic cast. At Cambridge University he seems to
have written much and studied little, but that little to good purpose. He
inherited a modest fortune, which he spent, not in riotous living, but in
travel, art study in Paris, and in the most risky of all extravagances,
the starting of new periodicals. When this failed and his money was gone,
he lived in London as a hack-writer.
His young wife was taken from him by that saddest of all
bereavements—the loss of her mind. It became necessary to place her in a
private sanitarium, where she outlived her husband by thirty years. To
her, and to the two little daughters whom she left him, Thackeray was
faithful and devoted. He never complained, never flinched into an easy
way of escape from his burden. He bent his back to it, and, in spite of
natural indolence, he worked hard and was cheerful.
He made a host of friends and kept them, as Stevenson puts it, “without
capitulation.” Of course, this grim condition implies some frictions and
some dislikes, and from these Thackeray was not exempt. The satire which
was his first mode in writing was too direct and pungent to be relished
by those who had any streak of self-humbug in their make-up. But, so far
as I know, he had only one serious literary quarrel—that unhappy dispute
with Mr. Edmund Yates, in which Dickens, with the best intentions in the
world, became, unfortunately, somewhat involved. Thackeray might perhaps
have been more generous and forgiving—he could have afforded that luxury.
But he could not have been more honest and frank, more real, than he
was. Being very angry, and for a just cause, he said so in plain words.
Presently the tempest passed away. When Thackeray died in 1863, Dickens
wrote:
“No one can be surer than I of the greatness and goodness of his heart.”
The first period of his life as a man of letters was given almost
entirely to satirical and fragmentary writing, under various _noms de
guerre_. Hence, he remained for a long time in comparative poverty and
obscurity, from which he stepped into fame and prosperity with the
publication of his first large novel, _Vanity Fair_, in 1847-48. It was
like turning the corner of Grub Street and coming into Glory Avenue.
Henceforth the way was open, though not easy. The succession of his
big, welcome novels was slow, steady, unbroken. Each one brought him
thousands of new readers, and the old ones were _semper fideles_, even
when they professed a preference for the earlier over the later volumes.
His lecture tours in Great Britain and the United States were eminently
successful—more so, I think, than those of Charles Dickens. They may have
brought in less money, but more of what old William Caxton, the prince
of printers, called “good fame and renommee.” The last of his completed
books, and one of his most delightful, was _Roundabout Papers_—a volume
of essays that has no superior in English for a light, firm, friendly
touch upon the realities of life. His last story begun was _Denis Duval_,
and on this he was working when he laid down his pen on Christmas Eve,
1863, and fell asleep for the last time.
It was Edmund Yates who wrote of him then:
“Thackeray was dead; and the purest English prose writer of the
nineteenth century and the novelist with a greater knowledge of the human
heart, as it really is, than any other—with the exception perhaps of
Shakespeare and Balzac—was suddenly struck down in the midst of us.”
_The human heart as it really is_—there’s the point! That is what
Thackeray sought to know, to understand, to reveal, and—no! not to
explain, nor to judge and sentence—for that, as he well knew, was far
beyond him or any of us—but his desire was to _show_ the real heart
of man, in its various complexities and perplexities, working its
way through the divers realities and unrealities in which we are all
entangled.
The acute French critic, Edmond Scherer, distinguished and divided
between George Eliot as “a novelist of character,” and Thackeray as “a
novelist of manners.” The epithet will pass only if we take the word in
the sense of William of Wykeham’s motto, “Manners makyth man.”
For, as surely as there is something in the outward demeanour which
unveils and discloses the person within, even so surely is there
something in behaviour, the habitual mode of speech and conduct, which
moulds the man using it. A false behaviour weaves a texture of lies into
the warp of his nature. A true behaviour weakens the hold of his own
self-delusions, and so helps him to know what he really is—which is good
for him and for others.
It was in this sense that Thackeray was interested in manners, and
depicted them in his books. Go with him to a ball, and you arrive at the
hour of unmasking; to a club, and you are aware of the thoughts under
the conversation; to a play, and you pass behind the footlights and the
paint; to a death-bed, and—well, do you remember the death of Helen in
_Pendennis_? and of the Colonel in _The Newcomes_? Foolish critics speak
of these last two passages as “scenes.” Scenes! By Heaven! no, they are
realities. We can feel those pure souls passing.
Let us follow this clew of the passion for reality through the three
phases of Thackeray’s work.
I
At first he is the indefatigable satirist, rejoicing in the assault.
Youth is almost always inclined that way—far more swift and sweeping in
judgment, more severe in condemnation, than maturity or age. Thackeray
writes much that is merely amusing, full of high spirits and pure fun, in
his first period. But his main business is to expose false pretensions,
false methods, false principles in literature and life; to show up the
fakers, to ridicule the humbugs, to convict the crooks of every rank and
degree.
Here, for example, is a popular fashion of books with criminals and
burglars for heroes and heroines, portrayed in the glamour of romance.
Very well, our satirist, assuming the name of “Ikey Solomons, Esq.,”
will take a real criminal, a murderess, and show us the manner of life
she leads with her associates. So we have _Catherine_. Here is another
fashion of weaving a fiction about a _chevalier d’industrie_, a bold,
adventurous, conscienceless fellow who pursues his own pleasure with a
swagger, and makes a brave show hide a mean and selfish heart. Very well,
a fellow of this kidney shall tell his own story and show himself in his
habit as he lives, and as he dies in prison. So we have _The Memoirs of
Barry Lyndon, Esq._ Here are innumerable fashions of folly and falsehood
current not only in high society, but also in the region of respectable
mediocrity, and in the “world below-stairs.” Very well, our satirist,
under the name of “Jeames Yellowplush,” or “M. Angelo Titmarsh,” or
“Fitz-Boodle,” will show them up for us. So we have various bundles of
short stories, and skits, and sketches of travel, some of them bubbling
over with fun, some of them, like _Dennis Haggarty’s Wife_, touched with
quiet pathos.
The culmination of this satiric period is _The Book of Snobs_, which
appeared serially in the London _Punch_, 1845-46. In order to understand
the quality and meaning of Thackeray’s satire—an element which stayed
with him all through his writing, though it was later subdued to its
proper place—we must take the necessary pains to know just what he meant
by a “snob.”
A snob is an unreal person who tries to pass himself off for a real
person; a pretender who meanly admires and imitates mean things; an
ape of gentility. He is a specific variety of the great genus “Sham.”
Carlyle, the other notable English satirist of the nineteenth century,
attacked the whole genus with heavy artillery. Thackeray, with his light
cavalry of ridicule, assailed the species.
All snobs are shams, but not all shams are snobs. The specific qualities
of the snob are developed only in countries where there are social
classes and distinctions, but no insuperable barriers between them. Thus
in native India with its immutable caste, or in Central Africa with its
general barbarism, I fancy it must be difficult to discover snobbism.
(Yet I have seen traces of it even among dogs and cats.) But in a country
like England or the United States of America, where society is arranged
in different stories, with staircases between, snobbism is frequent and
flourishing.
_The snob is the man who tries to sneak up-stairs. He is the
surreptitious climber, the person who is ashamed to pass for what he is._
Has he been at an expensive college? He goes home and snubs his old
friends with allusions to the distinguished society he has been keeping.
Is he entertaining fashionable strangers? He gives them elaborate and
costly fare at the most aurivorous hotel, but at home his wife and
daughters may starve. He talks about books that he has never read, and
pretends to like music that sends him to sleep. At his worst, he says his
prayers on the street-corners and reviles his neighbour for sins which he
himself cherishes in secret.
That is the snob: the particular species of sham whom Thackeray pursues
and satirizes through all his disguises and metamorphoses. He does it
unsparingly, yet never—or at least hardly ever—savagely. There is always
a strain of good humour in it, and often a touch of fellow-feeling for
the man himself, camouflaged under his affectations. It may not be worth
while—this kind of work. All satire is perishable. It has no more of the
immortal in it than the unreality which it aims to destroy. But some
shams die hard. And while they live and propagate, the arrows which hit
them fairly are not out of date.
Stevenson makes a curious misjudgment of this part of Thackeray’s work,
when he says in his essay on “Some Gentlemen in Fiction”:
“Personally [Thackeray] scarce appeals to us as the ideal gentleman;
if there were nothing else, perpetual nosing after snobbery at least
suggests the snob.”
Most true, beloved R. L. S., but did you forget that this is precisely
what Thackeray himself says? He tells us not to be too quick or absolute
in our judgments; to acknowledge that we have some faults and failings
of our own; to remember that other people have sometimes hinted at a
vein, a trace, a vestige of snobbery in ourselves. Search for truth and
speak it; but, above all, no arrogance—_faut pas monter sur ses grands
chevaux_. Have you ever read the end of the lecture on “Charity and
Humour”?
“The author ... has been described by _The London Times_ newspaper as a
writer of considerable parts, but a dreary misanthrope, who sees no good
anywhere, who sees the sky above him green, I think, instead of blue, and
only miserable sinners around him. _So we are, as is every writer and
reader I have heard of; so was every being who ever trod this earth, save
One._ I cannot help telling the truth as I view it, and describing what
I see. To describe it otherwise than it seems to me would be falsehood
in that calling in which it has pleased Heaven to place me; treason to
that conscience which says that men are weak; that truth must be told;
that faults must be owned; that pardon must be prayed for; and that Love
reigns supreme over all.”