AFTER all that has been written about Thackeray, it would be flat for
me to present here another estimate of his work, or try to settle the
relative value of his books. In this paper I shall endeavor only two
things: first, to enquire what changes, in our way of looking at him,
have come about in the half century since his death. Secondly, to give
my own personal experience as a reader of Thackeray, in the hope that it
may represent, in some degree, the experience of others.
What is left of Thackeray in this hundredth year since his birth? and
how much of him has been eaten away by destructive criticism—or rather
by time, that far more corrosive acid, whose silent operation criticism
does but record? As the nineteenth century recedes, four names in the
English fiction of that century stand out ever more clearly, as the
great names: Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot. I know what
may be said—what has been said—for others: Jane Austen and the Brontë
sisters, Charles Reade, Trollope, Meredith, Stevenson, Hardy. I believe
that these will endure, but will endure as writers of a secondary
importance. Others are already fading: Bulwer is all gone, and Kingsley
is going fast.
The order in which I have named the four great novelists is usually, I
think, the order in which the reader comes to them. It is also the order
of their publication. For although Thackeray was a year older than
Dickens, his first novels were later in date, and he was much later in
securing his public. But the chronological reason is not the real reason
why we read them in that order. It is because of their different appeal.
Scott was a romancer, Dickens a humorist, Thackeray a satirist, and
George Eliot a moralist. Each was much more than that; but that was what
they were, reduced to the lowest term. Romance, humor, satire, and moral
philosophy respectively were their starting point, their strongest
impelling force, and their besetting sin. Whenever they fell below
themselves, Walter Scott lapsed into sheer romantic unreality, Dickens
into extravagant caricature, Thackeray into burlesque, George Eliot into
psychology and ethical reflection.
I wonder whether your experience here is the same as mine. By the time
that I was fourteen, as nearly as I can remember, I had read all the
Waverley novels. Then I got hold of Dickens, and for two or three years
I lived in Dickens’s world, though perhaps he and Scott somewhat
overlapped at the edge—I cannot quite remember. I was sixteen when
Thackeray died, and I heard my elders mourning over the loss. “Dear old
Thackeray is gone,” they told each other, and proceeded to reread all
his books, with infinite laughter. So I picked up “Vanity Fair” and
tried to enjoy it. But fresh from Scott’s picturesque page and Dickens’s
sympathetic extravagances, how dull, insipid, repellent, disgusting were
George Osborne, and fat Joseph Sedley, and Amelia and Becky! What
sillies they were and how trivial their doings! “It’s just about a lot
of old girls,” I said to my uncle, who laughed in a provokingly superior
manner and replied, “My boy, those old girls are life.” I will confess
that even to this day, something of that shock of disillusion, that
first cold plunge into “Vanity Fair,” hangs about the book. I understand
what Mr. Howells means when he calls it “the poorest of Thackeray’s
novels—crude, heavy-handed, caricatured.” I ought to have begun, as he
did, with “Pendennis,” of which he writes, “I am still not sure but it
is the author’s greatest book.” I don’t know about that, but I know that
it is the novel of Thackeray’s that I have read most often and like the
best, better than “Henry Esmond” or “Vanity Fair”: just as I prefer “The
Mill on the Floss” to “Adam Bede,” and “The House of the Seven Gables”
to “The Scarlet Letter” (as Hawthorne did himself, by the way); or as I
agree with Dickens that “Bleak House” was his best novel, though the
public never thought so. We may concede to the critics that, objectively
considered, and by all the rules of judgment, this or that work is its
author’s masterpiece and we _ought_ to like it best—only we don’t. We
have our private preferences which we cannot explain and do not seek to
defend. As for “Esmond,” my comparative indifference to it is only, I
suppose, a part of my dislike of the _genre_. I know the grounds on
which the historical novel is recommended, and I know how intimately
Thackeray’s imagination was at home in the eighteenth century.
Historically that is what he stands for: he was a Queen Anne man—like
Austin Dobson: he passed over the great romantic generation altogether
and joined on to Fielding and Goldsmith and their predecessors. Still no
man knows the past as he does the present. I will take Thackeray’s
report of the London of his day; but I do not care very much about his
reproduction of the London of 1745. Let me whisper to you that since
early youth I have not been able to take much pleasure in the Waverley
novels, except those parts of them in which the author presents Scotch
life and character as he knew them.
I think it was not till I was seventeen or eighteen, and a freshman in
college, that I really got hold of Thackeray; but when once I had done
so, the result was to drive Dickens out of my mind, as one nail drives
out another. I never could go back to him after that. His sentiment
seemed tawdry, his humor, buffoonery. Hung side by side, the one picture
killed the other. “Dickens knows,” said Thackeray, “that my books are a
protest against him: that, if the one set are true, the other must be
false.” There is a species of ingratitude, of disloyalty, in thus
turning one’s back upon an old favorite who has furnished one so intense
a pleasure and has had so large a share in one’s education. But it is
the cruel condition of all growth.
The heavens that now draw him with sweetness untold,
Once found, for new heavens he spurneth the old.
But when I advanced to George Eliot, as I did a year or two later, I did
not find that her fiction and Thackeray’s destroyed each other. I have
continued to reread them both ever since and with undiminished
satisfaction. And yet it was, in some sense, an advance. I would not say
that George Eliot was a greater novelist than Thackeray, nor even so
great. But her message is more gravely intellectual: the psychology of
her characters more deeply studied: the problems of life and mind more
thoughtfully confronted. Thought, indeed, thought in itself and apart
from the story, which is only a chosen illustration of a thesis, seems
her principal concern. Thackeray is always concrete, never speculative
or abstract. The mimetic instinct was strong in him, but weak in his
great contemporary, to the damage and the final ruin of her art. His
method was observation, hers analysis. Mr. Brownell says that
Thackeray’s characters are “delineated rather than dissected.” There is
little analysis, indeed hardly any literary criticism in his “English
Humorists”: only personal impressions. He deals with the men, not with
the books. The same is true of his art criticisms. He is concerned with
the sentiment of the picture, seldom with its technique, or even with
its imaginative or expressional power.
In saying that Dickens was essentially a humorist and Thackeray a
satirist, I do not mean, of course, that the terms are mutually
exclusive. Thackeray was a great humorist as well as a satirist, but
Dickens was hardly a satirist at all. I know that Mr. Chesterton says he
was, but I cannot believe it. He cites “Martin Chuzzlewit.” Is “Martin
Chuzzlewit” a satire on the Americans? It is a caricature—a very gross
caricature—a piece of _bouffe_. But it lacks the true likeness which is
the sting of satire. Dickens and Thackeray had, in common, a quick sense
of the ridiculous, but they employed it differently. Dickens was a
humorist almost in the Ben Jonsonian sense: his field was the odd, the
eccentric, the grotesque—sometimes the monstrous; his books, and
especially his later books, are full of queer people, frequently as
incredible as Jonson’s _dramatis personae_. In other words, he was a
caricaturist. Mr. Howells says that Thackeray was a caricaturist, but I
do not think he was so except incidentally; while Dickens was constantly
so. When satire identifies itself with its object, it takes the form of
parody. Thackeray was a parodist, a travesty writer, an artist in
burlesque. What is the difference between caricature and parody? I take
it to be this, that caricature is the ludicrous _exaggeration_ of
character for purely comic effect, while parody is its ludicrous
_imitation_ for the purpose of mockery. Now there is plenty of invention
in Dickens, but little imitation. He began with broad
_facetiae_—“Sketches by Boz” and the “Pickwick Papers”; while Thackeray
began with travesty and kept up the habit more or less all his life. At
the Charterhouse he spent his time in drawing burlesque representations
of Shakespeare, and composing parodies on L. E. L. and other lady poets.
At Cambridge he wrote a mock-heroic “Timbuctoo,” the subject for the
prize poem of the year—a prize which Tennyson captured. Later he wrote
those capital travesties, “Rebecca and Rowena” and “Novels by Eminent
Hands.” In “Fitzboodle’s Confessions” he wrote a sentimental ballad,
“The Willow Tree,” and straightway a parody of the same. You remember
Lady Jane Sheepshanks who composed those lines comparing her youth to
A violet shrinking meanly
Where blow the March winds[3] keenly—
A timid fawn on wildwood lawn
Where oak-boughs rustle greenly.
I cannot describe the gleeful astonishment with which I discovered that
Thackeray was even aware of our own excellent Mrs. Sigourney, whose
house in Hartford I once inhabited (_et nos in Arcadia_). The passage is
in “Blue-Beard’s Ghost.” “As Mrs. Sigourney sweetly sings:—
“‘O the heart is a soft and delicate thing,
O the heart is a lute with a thrilling string,
A spirit that floats on a gossamer’s wing.’
Such was Fatima’s heart.” Do not try to find these lines in Mrs.
Sigourney’s complete poems: they are not there. Thackeray’s humor always
had this satirical edge to it. Look at any engraving of the bust by
Deville (the replica of which is in the National Portrait Gallery),
which was taken when its subject was fourteen years old. There is a
quizzical look about the mouth, prophetic and unmistakable. That boy is
a tease: I would not like to be his little sister. And this boyish sense
of fun never deserted the mature Thackeray. I like to turn sometimes
from his big novels, to those delightful “Roundabout Papers” and the
like where he gives a free rein to his frolic: “Memorials of
Gormandizing,” the “Ballads of Policeman X,” “Mrs. Perkins’ Ball,” where
the Mulligan of Ballymulligan, disdaining the waltz step of the Saxon,
whoops around the room with his terrified partner in one of the dances
of his own green land. Or that paper which describes how the author took
the children to the zoölogical gardens, and how
First he saw the white bear, then he saw the black,
Then he saw the camel with a hump upon his back.
_Chorus of Children_:
Then he saw the camel with the HUMP upon his back.
Of course in all comic art there is a touch of caricature, i.e., of
exaggeration. The Rev. Charles Honeyman in “The Newcomes,” e.g., has
been denounced as a caricature. But compare him with any of Dickens’s
clerical characters, such as Stiggins or Chadband, and say which is the
fine art and which the coarse. And this brings me to the first of those
particulars in which we do not view Thackeray quite as his
contemporaries viewed him. In his own time he was regarded as the
greatest of English realists. “I have no head above my eyes,” he said.
“I describe what I see.” It is thus that Anthony Trollope regarded him,
whose life of Thackeray was published in 1879. And of his dialogue, in
special, Trollope writes, “The ear is never wounded by a tone that is
false.” It is not quite the same to-day. Zola and the _roman
naturaliste_ of the French and Russian novelists have accustomed us to
forms of realism so much more drastic that Thackeray’s realism seems, by
comparison, reticent and partial. Not that he tells falsehoods, but that
he does not and will not tell the whole truth. He was quite conscious,
himself, of the limits which convention and propriety imposed upon him
and he submitted to them willingly. “Since the author of ‘Tom Jones’ was
buried,” he wrote, “no writer of fiction has been permitted to depict,
to his utmost power, a Man.” Thackeray’s latest biographer, Mr. Whibley,
notes in him certain early Victorian prejudices. He wanted to hang a
curtain over Etty’s nudities. Goethe’s “Wahlverwandtschaften”
scandalized him. He found the drama of Victor Hugo and Dumas “profoundly
immoral and absurd”; and had no use for Balzac, his own closest parallel
in French fiction. Mr. G. B. Shaw, the blasphemer of Shakespeare, speaks
of Thackeray’s “enslaved mind,” yet admits that he tells the truth in
spite of himself. “He exhausts all his feeble pathos in trying to make
you sorry for the death of Col. Newcome, imploring you to regard him as
a noble-hearted gentleman, instead of an insufferable old fool . . . but
he gives you the facts about him faithfully.” But the denial of
Thackeray’s realism goes farther than this and attacks in some instances
the truthfulness of his character portrayal. Thus Mr. Whibley, who
acknowledges, in general, that Thackeray was “a true naturalist,” finds
that the personages in several of his novels are “drawn in varying
planes.” Charles Honeyman and Fred Bayham, e.g., are frank caricatures;
Helen and Laura Pendennis, and “Stunning” Warrington are somewhat
unreal; Colonel Newcome is overdrawn—“the travesty of a man”; and even
Beatrix Esmond, whom Mr. Brownell pronounces her creator’s masterpiece,
is a “picturesque apparition rather than a real woman.” And finally
comes Mr. Howells and affirms that Thackeray is no realist but a
caricaturist: Jane Austen and Trollope are the true realists.
Well, let it be granted that Thackeray is imperfectly realistic. I am
not concerned to defend him. Nor shall I enter into this wearisome
discussion of what realism is or is not, further than to say that I
don’t believe the thing exists; that is, I don’t believe that
photographic fiction—the “mirror up to nature” fiction—exists or can
exist. A mirror reflects, a photograph reproduces its object without
selection or rejection. Does any artist do this? Try to write the
history of one day: everything—literally everything—that you have
done, said, thought: and everything that you have seen done, or heard
said during twenty-four hours. That would be realism, but, suppose it
possible, what kind of reading would it make? The artist must select,
reject, combine, and he does it differently from every other artist: he
mixes his personality with his art, colors his art with it. The point of
view from which he works is personal to himself: satire is a point of
view, humor is a point of view, so is religion, so is morality, so is
optimism or pessimism, or any philosophy, temper, or mood. In speaking
of the great Russians Mr. Howells praises their “transparency of style,
unclouded by any mist of the personality which we mistakenly value in
style, and which ought no more to be there than the artist’s personality
should be in a portrait.” This seems to me true; though it was said long
ago, the style is the man. Yet if this transparency, this impersonality
is measurably attainable in the style, it is not so in the substance of
the novel. If an impersonal report of life is the ideal of naturalistic
or realistic fiction—and I don’t say it is—then it is an impossible
ideal. People are saying now that Zola is a romantic writer. Why?
Because, however well documented, his facts are _selected_ to make a
particular impression. I suppose the reason why Thackeray’s work seemed
so much more realistic to his generation than it does to ours was that
his particular point of view was that of the satirist, and his satire
was largely directed to the exposure of cant, humbug, affectation, and
other forms of unreality. Disillusion was his trade. He had no heroes,
and he saw all things in their unheroic and unromantic aspect. You all
know his famous caricature of Ludovicus Rex inside and outside of his
court clothes: a most majestic, bewigged and beruffled _grand monarque_:
and then a spindle-shanked, pot-bellied, bald little man—a good
illustration for a chapter in “Sartor Resartus.” The ship in which
Thackeray was sent home from India, a boy of six, touched at St. Helena
and he saw Napoleon. He always remembered him as a little fat man in a
suit of white duck and a palm-leaf hat.
Thackeray detested pose and strut and sham heroics. He called Byron “a
big sulky dandy.” “Lord Byron,” he said, “wrote more cant . . . than any
poet I know of. Think of the ‘peasant girls with dark blue eyes’ of the
Rhine—the brown-faced, flat-nosed, thick-lipped, dirty wenches! Think
of ‘filling high a cup of Samian wine’: . . . Byron himself always drank
gin.” The captain in “The White Squall” does not pace the deck like a
dark-browed corsair, but calls, “George, some brandy and water!”
And this reminds me of Thackeray’s poetry. Of course one who held this
attitude toward the romantic and the heroic could not be a poet in the
usual sense. Poetry holds the quintessential truth, but, as Bacon says,
it “subdues the shows of things to the desires of the mind”; while
realism clings to the shows of things, and satire disenchants, ravels
the magic web which the imagination weaves. Heine was both satirist and
poet, but he was each by turns, and he had the touch of ideality which
Thackeray lacked. Yet Thackeray wrote poetry and good poetry of a sort.
But it has beauty purely of sentiment, never of the imagination that
transcends the fact. Take the famous lines with which this same “White
Squall” closes:
And when, its force expended,
The harmless storm was ended,
And as the sunrise splendid
Came blushing o’er the sea;
I thought, as day was breaking,
My little girls were waking
And smiling and making
A prayer at home for me.
And such is the quality of all his best things in verse—“The Mahogany
Tree,” “The Ballad of Bouillebaisse,” “The End of the Play”; a mixture
of humor and pensiveness, homely fact and sincere feeling.
Another modern criticism of Thackeray is that he is always interrupting
his story with reflections. This fault, if it is a fault, is at its
worst in “The Newcomes,” from which a whole volume of essays might be
gathered. The art of fiction is a progressive art and we have learned a
great deal from the objective method of masters like Turgenev, Flaubert,
and Maupassant. I am free to confess, that, while I still enjoy many of
the passages in which the novelist appears as chorus and showman, I do
find myself more impatient of them than I used to be. I find myself
skipping a good deal. I wonder if this is also your experience. I am not
sure, however, but there are signs of a reaction against the slender,
episodic, short-story kind of fiction, and a return to the
old-fashioned, biographical novel. Mr. Brownell discusses this point and
says that “when Thackeray is reproached with ‘bad art’ for intruding
upon his scene, the reproach is chiefly the recommendation of a
different technique. And each man’s technique is his own.” The question,
he acutely observes, is whether Thackeray’s subjectivity destroys
illusion or deepens it. He thinks that the latter is true. I will not
argue the point further than to say that, whether clumsy or not,
Thackeray’s method is a thoroughly English method and has its roots in
the history of English fiction. He is not alone in it. George Eliot,
Hawthorne, and Trollope and many others practise it; and he learned it
from his master, Fielding.
Fifty years ago it was quite common to describe Thackeray as a cynic, a
charge from which Shirley Brooks defended him in the well-known verses
contributed to “Punch” after the great novelist’s death. Strange that
such a mistake should ever have been made about one whose kindness is as
manifest in his books as in his life: “a big, fierce, weeping man,” as
Carlyle grotesquely describes him: a writer in whom we find to-day even
an excess of sentiment and a persistent geniality which sometimes
irritates. But the source of the misapprehension is not far to seek. His
satiric and disenchanting eye saw, with merciless clairvoyance, the
disfigurements of human nature, and dwelt upon them perhaps unduly. He
saw
How very weak the very wise,
How very small the very great are.
Moreover, as with many other humorists, with Thomas Hood and Mark Twain
and Abraham Lincoln (who is one of the foremost American humorists), a
deep melancholy underlay his fun. _Vanitas vanitatum_ is the last word
of his philosophy. Evil seemed to him stronger than good and death
better than life. But he was never bitter: his pen was driven by love,
not hate. Swift was the true cynic, the true misanthrope; and
Thackeray’s dislike of him has led him into some injustice in his
chapter on Swift in “The English Humorists.” And therefore I have never
been able to enjoy “The Luck of Barry Lyndon” which has the almost
unanimous praises of the critics. The hard, artificial irony of the
book—maintained, of course, with superb consistency—seems to me
uncharacteristic of its author. It repels and wearies me, as does its
model, “Jonathan Wild.” Swift’s irony I enjoy because it is the natural
expression of his character. With Thackeray it is a mask.
Lastly I come to a point often urged against Thackeray. The favorite
target of his satire was the snob. His lash was always being laid across
flunkeyism, tuft hunting, the “mean admiration of mean things,” such as
wealth, rank, fashion, title, birth. Now, it is said, his constant
obsession with this subject, his acute consciousness of social
distinctions, prove that he is himself one of the class that he is
ridiculing. “Letters four do form his name,” to use a phrase of Dr.
Holmes, who is accused of the same weakness, and, I think, with more
reason. Well, Thackeray owned that he was a snob, and said that we are
all of us snobs in a greater or less degree. Snobbery is the fat weed of
a complex civilization, where grades are unfixed, where some families
are going down and others rising in the world, with the consequent
jealousies, heartburnings, and social struggles. In India, I take it,
where a rigid caste system prevails, there are no snobs. A Brahmin may
refuse to eat with a lower caste man, whose touch is contamination, but
he does not despise him as the gentleman despises the cad, as the man
who eats with a fork despises the man who eats with a knife, or as the
educated Englishman despises the Cockney who drops his h’s, or the
Boston Brahmin the Yankee provincial who says _haöw_, the woman who
_callates_, and the gent who wears _pants_. In feudal ages the lord
might treat the serf like a beast of the field. The modern swell does
not oppress his social inferior: he only calls him a bounder. In
primitive states of society differences in riches, station, power are
accepted quite simply: they do not form ground for envy or contempt. I
used to be puzzled by the conventional epithet applied by Homer to
Eumaeus—“the godlike swineherd”—which is much as though one should
say, nowadays, the godlike garbage collector. But when Pope writes