The novel of manners in England multiplies, and for this there are
several reasons: first, it is born there, and every plant thrives well
in its own soil; secondly, it is a natural outlet: there is no music
in England as in Germany, or conversation as in France; and men who
must think and feel find in it a means of feeling and thinking. On the
other hand, women take part in it with eagerness; amidst the
stagnation of gallantry and the coldness of religion, it gives scope
for imagination and dreams. Finally, by its minute details and
practical counsels, it opens up a career to the precise and moral
mind. The critic thus is, as it were, swamped in this copiousness; he
must select in order to grasp the whole, and confine himself to a few
in order to embrace all.
[Footnote 7: From Book V, Chapter II of "The History of English
Literature." Translated by H. van Laun.]
In this crowd two men have appeared of superior talent, original and
contrasted, popular on the same grounds, ministers to the same cause,
moralists in comedy and drama, defenders of natural sentiments against
social institutions; who, by the precision of their pictures, the
depth of their observations, the succession and bitterness of their
attacks, have renewed, with other views and in another style, the old
combative spirit of Swift and Fielding.
One, more ardent, more expansive, wholly given up to rapture, an
impassioned painter of crude and dazzling pictures, a lyric
prose-writer, omnipotent in laughter and tears, plunged into fantastic
invention, painful sensibility, vehement buffoonery; and by the
boldness of his style, the excess of his emotions, the grotesque
familiarity of his caricatures, he has displayed all the forces and
weaknesses of an artist, all the audacities, all the successes, and
all the oddities of the imagination.
The other, more contained, better informed and stronger, a lover of
moral dissertations, a counselor of the public, a sort of lay
preacher, less bent on defending the poor, more bent on censuring man,
has brought to the aid of satire a sustained common sense, a great
knowledge of the heart, consummate cleverness, powerful reasoning, a
treasure of meditated hatred, and has persecuted vice with all the
weapons of reflection. By this contrast the one completes the other;
and we may form an exact idea of English taste, by placing the
portrait of William Makepeace Thackeray by the side of that of
Charles Dickens.
No wonder if in England a novelist writes satires. A gloomy and
reflective man is impelled to it by his character; he is still further
impelled by the surrounding manners. He is not permitted to
contemplate passions as poetic powers; he is bidden to appreciate them
as moral qualities. His pictures become sentences; he is a counselor
rather than an observer, a judge rather than an artist. We see by what
machinery Thackeray has changed novel into satire....
Who is he; and what is the value of this literature of which he is one
of the princes? At bottom, like every literature, it is a definition
of man; and to judge it, we must compare it with man. We can do so
now; we have just studied a mind, Thackeray himself; we have
considered his faculties, their connections, results, their different
degrees; we have before our eyes a model of human nature. We have a
right to judge of the copy by the model, and to control the definition
which his novels lay down by the definition which his character
furnishes.
The two definitions are contrary, and his portrait is a criticism on
his talent. We have seen that in him the same faculties produce the
beautiful and the ugly, force and weakness, success and failure; that
moral reflection, after having provided him with every satirical
power, debases him in art; that, after having spread over his
contemporary novels a tone of vulgarity and falseness, it raises his
historical novel to the level of the finest productions; that the same
constitution of mind teaches him the sarcastic and violent, as well as
the modulated and simple style, the bitterness and harshness of hate
with the effusion and delicacy of love. The evil and the good, the
beautiful and the ugly, the repulsive and the agreeable, are in him
then but remoter effects, of slight importance, born of changing
circumstances, acquired and fortuitous qualities, not essential and
primitive, different forms which different streams present in the same
current.
So it is with other men. Doubtless moral qualities are of the first
rank; they are the motive power of civilization, and constitute the
nobleness of the individual; society exists by them alone, and by them
alone man is great. But if they are the finest fruit of the human
plant, they are not its root; they give us our value, but do not
constitute our elements. Neither the vices nor the virtues of man are
his nature; to praise or to blame him is not to know him; approbation
or disapprobation does not define him; the names of good or bad tell
us nothing of what he is. Put the robber Cartouche in an Italian court
of the fifteenth century; he would be a great statesman. Transport
this nobleman, stingy and narrow-minded, into a shop; he will be an
exemplary tradesman. This public man, of inflexible probity, is in his
drawing-room an intolerable coxcomb. This father of a family, so
humane, is an idiotic politician. Change a virtue in its
circumstances, and it becomes a vice; change a vice in its
circumstances, and it becomes a virtue. Regard the same quality from
two sides; on one it is a fault, on the other a merit. The essential
man is found concealed far below these moral badges; they only point
out the useful or noxious effect of our inner constitution: they do
not reveal our inner constitution. They are safety or advertising
lights attached to our names, to warn the passer-by to avoid or
approach us; they are not the explanatory chart of our being.
Our true essence consists in the causes of our good or bad qualities,
and these causes are discovered in the temperament, the species and
degree of imagination, the amount and velocity of attention, the
magnitude and direction of primitive passions. A character is a force,
like gravity, or steam, capable, as it may happen, of pernicious or
profitable effects, and which must be defined otherwise than by the
amount of the weight it can lift or the havoc it can cause. It is
therefore to ignore man, to reduce him, as Thackeray and English
literature generally do, to an aggregate of virtues and vices; it is
to lose sight in him of all but the exterior and social side; it is to
neglect the inner and natural element. We will find the same fault in
English criticism, always moral, never psychological, bent on exactly
measuring the degree of human honesty, ignorant of the mechanism of
our sentiments and faculties; we will find the same fault in English
religion, which is but an emotion or a discipline; in their
philosophy, destitute of metaphysics; and if we ascend to the source,
according to the rule which derives vices from virtues, and virtues
from vices, we will see all these weaknesses derived from their native
energy, their practical education, and that kind of severe and
religious poetic instinct which has in time past made them Protestant
and Puritan.