where most men hardly feel them. Many people have—it is not difficult
to have—some vague sensitive perception of what is passing in the minds
of the guests, of the ideas of such as sit at meat; but who remembers
that there are also nervous apprehensions, also a latent mental life
among those who ‘stand and wait’—among the floating figures which pass
and carve? But there was no impression to which Mr. Thackeray was more
constantly alive, or which he was more apt in his writings to express. He
observes:
‘Between me and those fellow-creatures of mine who are sitting
in the room below, how strange and wonderful is the partition!
We meet at every hour of the daylight, and are indebted to
each other for a hundred offices of duty and comfort of life;
and we live together for years, and don’t know each other.
John’s voice to me is quite different from John’s voice when
it addresses his mates below. If I met Hannah in the street
with a bonnet on, I doubt whether I should know her. And all
these good people, with whom I may live for years and years,
have cares, interests, dear friends and relatives, mayhap
schemes, passions, longing hopes, tragedies of their own, from
which a carpet and a few planks and beams utterly separate me.
When we were at the sea-side, and poor Ellen used to look so
pale, and run after the postman’s bell, and seize a letter in
a great scrawling hand, and read it, and cry in a corner, how
should we know that the poor little thing’s heart was breaking?
She fetched the water, and she smoothed the ribbons, and she
laid out the dresses, and brought the early cup of tea in the
morning, just as if she had had no cares to keep her awake.
Henry (who lived out of the house) was the servant of a friend
of mine who lived in chambers. There was a dinner one day,
and Henry waited all through the dinner. The champagne was
properly iced, the dinner was excellently served; every guest
was attended to; the dinner disappeared; the dessert was set;
the claret was in perfect order, carefully decanted, and more
ready. And then Henry said, “If you please, sir, may I go
home?” He had received word that his house was on fire; and,
having seen through his dinner, he wished to go and look after
his children and little sticks of furniture. Why, such a man’s
livery is a uniform of honour. The crest on his button is a
badge of bravery.’
Nothing in itself could be more admirable than this instinctive sympathy
with humble persons; not many things are rarer than this nervous
apprehension of what humble persons think. Nevertheless it cannot, we
think, be effectually denied that it coloured Mr. Thackeray’s writings
and the more superficial part of his character—that part which was most
obvious in common and current society—with very considerable defects. The
pervading idea of the ‘Snob Papers’ is too frequent, too recurring, too
often insisted on, even in his highest writings; there was a slight shade
of similar feeling even in his occasional society, and though it was
certainly unworthy of him, it was exceedingly natural that it should be
so, with such a mind as his and in a society such as ours.
There are three methods in which a society may be constituted. There
is the equal system, which, with more or less of variation, prevails
in France and in the United States. The social presumption in these
countries always is that every one is on a level with every one else.
In America, the porter at the station, the shopman at the counter,
the boots at the hotel, when neither a Negro nor an Irishman, is your
equal. In France _égalité_ is a political first principle. The whole
of Louis Napoleon’s _régime_ depends upon it: remove that feeling, and
the whole fabric of the Empire will pass away. We once heard a great
French statesman illustrate this. He was giving a dinner to the clergy
of his neighbourhood, and was observing that he had now no longer the
power to help or hurt them, when an eager _curé_ said, with simple-minded
joy, ‘_Oui, monsieur, maintenant personne ne peut rien, ni le comte,
ni le prolétaire_.’ The democratic priest so rejoiced at the universal
levelling which had passed over his nation, that he could not help
boasting of it when silence would have been much better manners. We are
not now able—we have no room and no inclination—to discuss the advantages
of democratic society; but we think in England we may venture to assume
that it is neither the best nor the highest form which a society can
adopt, and that it is certainly fatal to that development of individual
originality and greatness by which the past progress of the human race
has been achieved, and from which alone, it would seem, all future
progress is to be anticipated. If it be said that people are all alike,
that the world is a plain with no natural valleys and no natural hills,
the picturesqueness of existence is destroyed, and, what is worse, the
instinctive emulation by which the dweller in the valley is stimulated to
climb the hill is annihilated and becomes impossible.
On the other hand, there is the opposite system, which prevails in the
East,—the system of irremovable inequalities, of hedged-in castes,
which no one can enter but by birth, and from which no born member can
issue forth. This system likewise, in this age and country, needs no
attack, for it has no defenders. Every one is ready to admit that it
cramps originality, by defining our work irrespective of our qualities
and before we were born; that it retards progress, by restraining
the wholesome competition between class and class, and the wholesome
migration from class to class, which are the best and strongest
instruments of social improvement.
And if both these systems be condemned as undesirable and prejudicial,
there is no third system except that which we have—the system of
_removable inequalities_, where many people are inferior to and
worse off than others, but in which each may _in theory_ hope to be
on a level with the highest below the throne, and in which each may
reasonably, and without sanguine impracticability, hope to gain one
step in social elevation, to be at last on a level with those who at
first were just above them. But, from the mere description of such a
society, it is evident that, taking man as he is, with the faults which
we know he has, and the tendencies which he invariably displays, some
poison of ‘snobbishness’ is inevitable. Let us define it as the habit
of ‘pretending to be higher in the social scale than you really are.’
Everybody will admit that such pretension is a fault and a vice, yet
every observant man of the world would also admit that, considering
what other misdemeanours men commit, this offence is not inconceivably
heinous; and that, if people never did any thing worse, they might be
let off with a far less punitive judgment than in the actual state of
human conduct would be just or conceivable. How are we to hope men will
pass their lives in putting their best foot foremost, and yet will never
boast that their better foot is farther advanced and more perfect than in
fact it is? Is boasting to be made a capital crime? Given social ambition
as a propensity of human nature; given a state of society like ours,
in which there are prizes which every man may seek, degradations which
every one may erase, inequalities which every one may remove,—it is idle
to suppose that there will not be all sorts of striving to cease to be
last and to begin to be first, and it is equally idle to imagine that all
such strivings will be of the highest kind. This effort will be, like
all the efforts of our mixed and imperfect human nature, partly good and
partly bad, with much that is excellent and beneficial in it, and much
also which is debasing and pernicious. The bad striving after unpossessed
distinction is snobbishness, which from the mere definition cannot be
defended, but which may be excused as a natural frailty in an emulous
man who is not distinguished, who hopes to be distinguished, and who
perceives that a valuable means of gaining distinction is a judicious,
though false pretension that it has already been obtained.
Mr. Thackeray, as we think, committed two errors in this matter. He
lacerates ‘snobs’ in his books as if they had committed an unpardonable
outrage and inexpiable crime. That man, he says, is anxious ‘to know
lords; and he pretends to know more of lords than he really does know.
What a villain! what a disgrace to our common nature; what an irreparable
reproach to human reason!’ Not at all; it is a fault which satirists
should laugh at, and which moralists condemn and disapprove, but which
yet does not destroy the whole vital excellence of him who possesses
it,—which may leave him a good citizen, a pleasant husband, a warm
friend; ‘a fellow,’ as the undergraduate said, ‘_up_ in his _morals_.’
In transient society it is possible, we think, that Mr. Thackeray thought
too much of social inequalities. They belonged to that common, plain,
perceptible world which filled his mind, and which left him at times, and
at casual moments, no room for a purely intellectual and just estimate of
men as they really are in themselves, and apart from social perfection
or defect. He could gauge a man’s reality as well as any observer, and
far better than most: his attainments were great, his perception of men
instinctive, his knowledge of casual matters enormous; but he had a
greater difficulty than other men in relying only upon his own judgment.
‘What the footman—what Mr. Yellowplush Jeames would think and say,’ could
not but occur to his mind, and would modify, not his settled judgment,
but his transient and casual opinion of the poet or philosopher. By the
constitution of his mind he thought much of social distinctions; and yet
he was in his writings too severe on those who, in cruder and baser ways,
showed that they also were thinking much.
Those who perceive that this irritable sensibility was the basis of
Thackeray’s artistic character, that it gave him his materials, his
implanted knowledge of things and men, and gave him also that keen
and precise style which hit in description the nice edges of all
objects,—those who trace these great qualities back to their real source
in a somewhat painful organisation, must have been vexed or amused,
according to their temperament, at the common criticism which associates
him with Fielding. Fielding’s essence was the very reverse; it was a
bold spirit of bounding happiness. No just observer could talk to Mr.
Thackeray, or look at him, without seeing that he had deeply felt many
sorrows—perhaps that he was a man _likely_ to feel sorrows—that he was
of an anxious temperament. Fielding was a reckless enjoyer. He saw the
world—wealth and glory, the best dinner and the worst dinner, the gilded
_salon_ and the low sponging-house—and he saw that they were good. Down
every line of his characteristic writings there runs this elemental
energy of keen delight. There is no trace of such a thing in Thackeray.
A musing fancifulness is far more characteristic of him than a joyful
energy.
Sterne had all this sensibility also, but—and this is the cardinal
discrepancy—it did not make him irritable. He was not hurried away, like
Fielding, by buoyant delight; he stayed and mused on painful scenes.
But they did not make him angry. He was not irritated at the ‘foolish
fat scullion.’ He did not vex himself because of the vulgar. He did not
amass petty details to prove that tenth-rate people were ever striving to
be ninth-rate people. He had no tendency to rub the bloom off life. He
accepted pretty-looking things, even the French aristocracy, and he owes
his immortality to his making them prettier than they are. Thackeray was
pained by things, and exaggerated their imperfections; Sterne brooded
over things with joy or sorrow, and he idealised their sentiment—their
pathetic or joyful characteristics. This is why the old lady said, ‘Mr.
Thackeray was an uncomfortable writer,’—and an uncomfortable writer he is.
Nor had Sterne a trace of Mr. Thackeray’s peculiar and characteristic
scepticism. He accepted simply the pains and pleasures, the sorrows and
the joys of the world; he was not perplexed by them, nor did he seek to
explain them, or account for them. There is a tinge—a mitigated, but
perceptible tinge—of Swift’s philosophy in Thackeray. ‘Why is all this?
Surely this is very strange? Am I right in sympathising with such stupid
feelings, such petty sensations? Why are these things? Am I not a fool
to care about or think of them? The world is dark, and the great curtain
hides from us all.’ This is not a steady or an habitual feeling, but it
is never quite absent for many pages. It was inevitable, perhaps, that in
a sceptical and inquisitive age like this, some vestiges of puzzle and
perplexity should pass into the writings of our great sentimentalist. He
would not have fairly represented the moods of his time if he omitted
that pervading one.
We had a little more to say of these great men, but our limits are
exhausted, and we must pause. Of Thackeray it is too early to speak at
length. A certain distance is needful for a just criticism. The present
generation have learned too much from him to be able to judge him
rightly. We do not know the merit of those great pictures which have sunk
into our minds, and which have coloured our thoughts, which are become
habitual memories. In the books we know best, as in the people we know
best, small points, sometimes minor merits, sometimes small faults, have
an undue prominence. When the young critics of this year have gray hairs,
their children will tell them what is the judgment of posterity upon Mr.
Thackeray.
_THE WAVERLEY NOVELS._[9]
(1858.)
It is not commonly on the generation which was contemporary with the
production of great works of art that they exercise their most magical
influence. Nor is it on the distant people whom we call posterity.
Contemporaries bring to new books formed minds and stiffened creeds;
posterity, if it regard them at all, looks at them as old subjects,
worn-out topics, and hears a disputation on their merits with languid
impartiality, like aged judges in a court of appeal. Even standard
authors exercise but slender influence on the susceptible minds of a
rising generation; they are become ‘papa’s books;’ the walls of the
library are adorned with their regular volumes; but no hand touches them.
Their fame is itself half an obstacle to their popularity; a delicate
fancy shrinks from employing so great a celebrity as the companion of an
idle hour. The generation which is really most influenced by a work of
genius is commonly that which is still young when the first controversy
respecting its merits arises; with the eagerness of youth they read and
re-read; their vanity is not unwilling to adjudicate: in the process
their imagination is formed; the creations of the author range themselves
in the memory; they become part of the substance of the very mind. The
works of Sir Walter Scott can hardly be said to have gone through this
exact process. Their immediate popularity was unbounded. No one—a few
most captious critics apart—ever questioned their peculiar power. Still
they are subject to a transition, which is in principle the same. At the
time of their publication mature contemporaries read them with delight.
Superficial the reading of grown men in some sort must be; it is only
once in a lifetime that we can know the passionate reading of youth;
men soon lose its eager learning power. But from peculiarities in their
structure, which we shall try to indicate, the novels of Scott suffered
less than almost any book of equal excellence from this inevitable
superficiality of perusal. Their plain, and, so to say, cheerful merits
suit the occupied man of genial middle life. Their appreciation was to
an unusual degree coincident with their popularity. The next generation,
hearing the praises of their fathers in their earliest reading time,
seized with avidity on the volumes; and there is much in very many of
them which is admirably fitted for the delight of boyhood. A third
generation has now risen into at least the commencement of literary
life, which is quite removed from the unbounded enthusiasm with which
the Scotch novels were originally received, and does not always share
the still more eager partiality of those who, in the opening of their
minds, first received the tradition of their excellence. New books have
arisen to compete with these; new interests distract us from them. The
time, therefore, is not perhaps unfavourable for a slight criticism of
these celebrated fictions; and their continual republication, without any
criticism for many years, seems almost to demand it.
There are two kinds of fiction which, though in common literature they
may run very much into one another, are yet in reality distinguishable
and separate. One of these, which we may call the _ubiquitous_, aims
at describing the whole of human life in all its spheres, in all its
aspects, with all its varied interests, aims, and objects. It searches
through the whole life of man; his practical pursuits, his speculative
attempts, his romantic youth, and his domestic age. It gives an entire
picture of all these; or if there be any lineaments which it forbears to
depict, they are only such as the inevitable repression of a regulated
society excludes from the admitted province of literary art. Of this
kind are the novels of Cervantes and Le Sage, and, to a certain extent,
of Smollett or Fielding. In our own time, Mr. Dickens is an author whom
nature intended to write to a certain extent with this aim. He should
have given us _not_ disjointed novels, with a vague attempt at a romantic
plot, but sketches of diversified scenes, and the obvious life of varied
mankind. The literary fates, however, if such beings there are, allotted
otherwise. By a very terrible example of the way in which in this world
great interests are postponed to little ones, the genius of authors is
habitually sacrificed to the tastes of readers. In this age, the great
readers of fiction are young people. The ‘addiction’ of these is to
romance; and accordingly a kind of novel has become so familiar to us as
almost to engross the name, which deals solely with the passion of love;
and if it uses other parts of human life for the occasions of its art,
it does so only cursorily and occasionally, and with a view of throwing
into a stronger or more delicate light those sentimental parts of earthly
affairs which are the special objects of delineation. All prolonged
delineation of other parts of human life is considered ‘dry,’ stupid, and
distracts the mind of the youthful generation from the ‘fantasies’ which
peculiarly charm it. Mr. Olmstead has a story of some deputation of the
Indians, at which the American orator harangued the barbarian audience
about the ‘great spirit,’ and ‘the land of their fathers,’ in the style
of Mr. Cooper’s novels; during a moment’s pause in the great stream, an
old Indian asked the deputation, ‘Why does your chief speak thus to us?
We did not wish great instruction or fine words; we desire brandy and
tobacco.’ No critic in a time of competition will speak uncourteously
of any reader of either sex; but it is indisputable that the old kind
of novel, full of ‘great instruction’ and varied pictures, does not
afford to some young gentlemen and some young ladies either the peculiar
stimulus or the peculiar solace which they desire.
The Waverley Novels were published at a time when the causes that thus
limit the sphere of fiction were coming into operation, but when they had
not yet become so omnipotent as they are now. Accordingly, these novels
everywhere bear marks of a state of transition. They are not devoted with
anything like the present exclusiveness to the sentimental part of human
life. They describe great events, singular characters, strange accidents,
strange states of society; they dwell with a peculiar interest—and as if
for their own sake—on antiquarian details relating to a past society.
Singular customs, social practices, even political institutions which
existed once in Scotland, and even elsewhere, during the middle ages, are
explained with a careful minuteness. At the same time the sentimental
element assumes a great deal of prominence. The book is in fact, as well
as in theory, a narrative of the feelings and fortunes of the hero and
heroine. An attempt more or less successful has been made to insert an
interesting love-story in each novel. Sir Walter was quite aware that the
best delineation of the oddest characters, or the most quaint societies,
or the strangest incidents, would not in general satisfy his readers. He
has invariably attempted an account of youthful, sometimes of decidedly
juvenile, feelings and actions. The difference between Sir Walter’s
novels and the specially romantic fictions of the present day is, that
in the former the love-story is always, or nearly always, connected with
some great event, or the fortunes of some great historical character, or
the peculiar movements and incidents of some strange state of society;
and that the author did not suppose or expect that his readers would
be so absorbed in the sentimental aspect of human life as to be unable
or unwilling to be interested in, or to attend to, any other. There is
always a _locus in quo_, if the expression may be pardoned, in the
Waverley Novels. The hero and heroine walk among the trees of the forest
according to rule, but we are expected to take an interest in the forest
as well as in them.
No novel, therefore, of Sir Walter Scott’s can be considered to come
exactly within the class which we have called the ubiquitous. None of
them in any material degree attempts to deal with human affairs in all
their spheres—to delineate as a whole the life of man. The canvas has a
large background, in some cases too large either for artistic effect or
the common reader’s interest; but there are always real boundaries—Sir
Walter had no _thesis_ to maintain. Scarcely any writer will set himself
to delineate the whole of human life, unless he has a doctrine concerning
human life to put forth and inculcate. The effort is _doctrinaire_.
Scott’s imagination was strictly conservative. He could understand (with
a few exceptions) any considerable movement of human life and action,
and could always describe with easy freshness everything which he did
understand; but he was not obliged by stress of fanaticism to maintain
a dogma concerning them, or to show their peculiar relation to the
general sphere of life. He described vigorously and boldly the peculiar
scene and society which in every novel he had selected as the theatre of
romantic action. Partly from their fidelity to nature, and partly from a
consistency in the artist’s mode of representation, these pictures group
themselves from the several novels in the imagination, and an habitual
reader comes to think of and understand what is meant by ‘Scott’s world;’
but the writer had no such distinct object before him. No one novel was
designed to be a delineation of the world as Scott viewed it. We have
vivid and fragmentary histories; it is for the slow critic of after-times
to piece together their teaching.
From this intermediate position of the Waverley Novels, or at any rate
in exact accordance with its requirements, is the special characteristic
for which they are most remarkable. We may call this in a brief phrase
their _romantic sense_; and perhaps we cannot better illustrate it than
by a quotation from the novel to which the series owes its most usual
name. It occurs in the description of the Court ball which Charles Edward
is described as giving at Holyrood House the night before his march
southward on his strange adventure. The striking interest of the scene
before him, and the peculiar position of his own sentimental career, are
described as influencing the mind of the hero.