THACKERAY

It is remarkable that in a century which is far more profusely

supplied with biographies than any preceding age, and at a time when

chronicles of small beer no less than of fine vintages seem to gratify

the rather indiscriminate taste of the British public, no formal life

has ever been produced of Thackeray. That this omission has been due

to his express wish is well understood, and at any rate it may be

cited as a praiseworthy breach of the latter-day custom of publishing

a man's private affairs and correspondence as soon as possible after

his funeral. Nevertheless the generation of those who knew Thackeray,

for whom and among whom he wrote, is now rapidly vanishing; so that it

would have been a kind of national misfortune if posterity had been

left without some authentic record of his personal history, his

earlier experiences, his characteristic sayings and doings, and the

general environment in which he worked.

For the biographical introductions, therefore, which are appended to

each volume of this new edition,[10] we owe gratitude to his daughter,

Mrs. Richmond Ritchie.[11] No more than seven volumes have been

actually published up to this date, but since these include a large

proportion of Thackeray's most important and characteristic work, we

make no apology for anticipating the completion of the series by an

attempt to make a critical examination of the salient points which

distinguish his genius, and mark his place in general literature. Mrs.

Ritchie tells us in a brief prefatory note that although her father's

wishes have prevented her from writing his complete biography she has

at last determined to publish memories which chiefly concern his

books. Her desire has also been 'to mark down some of the truer chords

to which his life was habitually set'; and accordingly we have in

every volume an instalment, too brief and intermittent for such

interesting matter, of the incidents and vicissitudes belonging to

successive stages of his life and work, with glimpses of his mind and

tastes, of the friendships that he made, and the society in which he

moved. The form in which these reminiscences and _reliquiae_ appear has

necessarily disconnected them, since they have been evidently chosen

on the plan of connecting each novel with the circumstances or

particular field of observation which may have suggested the plot, the

scenery, or the characters. One can thus see that Thackeray's mind,

like his sketch-book, was constantly taking down vivid impressions of

people and places, and in some of his notes of travel can be easily

traced the sources whence he took hints for elaborate studies. But

under this arrangement the chronology becomes here and there somewhat

entangled. _Pendennis_, for example, was finished in 1850, but as the

hero's life at Oxbridge is described in the novel, its introduction

takes us back to the period when the writer himself was at Cambridge

in 1829. _Vanity Fair_, again, written in 1845, contains a well-known

episode of Dobbin's school life, and the story carries us more than

once to the Continent; so the introduction gives us recollections of

Charterhouse, where Thackeray went in 1822, and of travels about

Germany in the early thirties. The _Contributions to Punch_, which

form the sixth volume of this series, began in 1842, and lasted ten

years. They provide occasion for many diverting anecdotes, and for

references to his colleagues who founded the fortunes of that most

successful of comic papers; but as on this plan the biographical lines

cross and recross each other it is not easy for the reader to obtain a

connected or comprehensive view of Thackeray's career. Nevertheless as

the system fortunately affords room and reason for giving many fresh

details of his daily life, with some of his letters, or extracts from

them, which are fresh and amusing, we may cheerfully pass over these

petty drawbacks. We are heartily thankful for our admission to a

closer acquaintance with an author who has drawn some immortal

pictures of English society, its manners, prejudices, and

characteristic types, in novels that will always hold the first rank

in our lighter literature.

How his boyhood was passed is tolerably well known already. Returning

home in childhood from India he was put first to a preparatory school,

and afterwards, for nigh seven years, to Charterhouse. At eighteen he

went up to Cambridge, where he spoke in the Union, wrote in university

magazines, criticised Shelley's _Revolt of Islam_, 'a beautiful poem,

though the story is absurd,' and composed a parody on Tennyson's prize

poem, _Timbuctoo_. In 1830 he travelled in Germany, and had his

interview at Weimar with Goethe; and from 1831 we find him settled in

a London pleader's office, reading law with temporary assiduity,

frequenting the theatres and Caves of Harmony, making many literary

acquaintances, taking runs into the country to canvass for Charles

Buller, and trying his 'prentice hand at journalism. His vocation for

literature speedily damped his legal ardour, and drew him out of Mr.

Tapsell's chambers, where he left a desk full of sketches and

caricatures. In May 1832 he wrote: 'This lawyer's preparatory

education is certainly one of the most cold-blooded, prejudicial

pieces of invention that ever a man was slave to;' and he longs for

fresh air and fresh butter. By August he had fled to Paris, where he

read French, worked at a painter's _atelier_, and took seriously to

the work of a newspaper correspondent. On the romantic school, which

was just then at its height, he makes the following remark, which

betrays the antipathy to artificial and theatrical tendencies in

literature that always provoked his satire:

'In the time of Voltaire the heroes of poetry and drama were fine

gentlemen; in the days of Victor Hugo they bluster about in velvet

and mustachios and gold chains, but they seem in nowise more

poetical than their rigid predecessors.'

He had little taste, in fact, for mediaevalism in any shape, and 'old

Montaigne' was more to his liking. We are told, also, that he became

absorbed in Cousin's _Philosophy_, noting upon it that 'the excitement

of metaphysics must equal almost that of gambling'; and finding,

perhaps, no great attraction in either. After his marriage in 1836 he

settled down in London, devoting himself thenceforward to literature

as a profession; the _Yellowplush Papers_, published in 1837 by

_Fraser's Magazine_, being his earliest contribution of any length or

significance. In the introductory chapter Mrs. Ritchie says:

'I hardly know--nor, if I knew, should I care to give here--the

names and the details of the events which suggested some of the

_Yellowplush Papers_. The history of Mr. Deuceace was written from

life during a very early period of my father's career. Nor can one

wonder that his views were somewhat grim at that particular time,

and still bore the impress of an experience lately and very dearly

bought.... As a boy he had lost money at cards to some cardsharpers

who scraped acquaintance with him. He never blinked at the truth or

spared himself; but neither did he blind himself to the real

characters of the people in question, when once he had discovered

them. His villains became curious studies in human nature; he

turned them over in his mind, and he caused Deuceace, Barry Lyndon,

and Ikey Solomons, Esq., to pay back some of their ill-gotten

spoils, in an involuntary but very legitimate fashion, when he put

them into print and made them the heroes of those grim early

histories.'

We may infer from this passage that Thackeray's mind acted not only as

a microscope but as a magnifying glass; he had an eye, as one knows,

for characteristic details, and it appears that he could also enlarge

the small fry of scoundrelism into magnificent rascals. There can be

no doubt that he had the image-making faculty of sensitive genius, and

that much of all he saw and felt went to fill up his canvas and fix

his point of view. Writing to his mother, he once said, 'It is the

fashion to say that people are unfortunate who have lost their money.

Dearest mother, we know better than that;' though 'for years and years

he had to face the great question of daily bread.' But while he could

battle stoutly against losses of this kind, he had no mercy on the

rogues who caused them; and his indignation, accentuated by the strain

of married life on a very narrow income, may account in some degree

for the cynical tone, now sombre, now mocking, which so perceptibly

dominates his earlier writings, and pervades all his books, though in

a lesser and more tolerant way, up to the end. Against this shaded

background, however, we may set many kindly figures, and the contrast

is heightened by the humorous joviality which finds vent in his

talent for caricature. To this we owe the full-length portrait of

Major Gahagan, and a whole gallery of other drawings, usually of

Irishmen, which have been the delight of innumerable readers. The

striking alternation between two extremes of character and conduct,

between tragedy and farce, between ridiculous meanness and pathetic

unselfishness, is to be found in all his novels, though in his later

and finer work it is controlled and tempered to more artistic

proportions. But in the productions of his youth the darker tints so

predominate as to disconcert the judgment of a generation which has

become habituated, at the present day, to a less energetic and

uncompromising style of exposing fools and gibbeting knaves. And after

making due allowance for those indescribable differences of taste

which separate us from our fathers in every region of art--and even

admitting, what is by no means sure, that sixty years ago rascality,

snobbery, and humbug were more rampant in society than nowadays--we

are still disposed to regret that a writer whose best work is

superlatively good should have dwelt so persistently in his earlier

stories upon the dreary and ignoble side of English life. From some

passages in them it might be inferred by foreigners that the better

born Englishmen habitually indulged in rudeness toward their social

inferiors, and that English domestics in good houses broke out into

vulgar insolence whenever they could do so with impunity.

Take, for an example, in the scene from _The Great Hoggarty Diamond_,

the behaviour of Mr. Preston, 'one of her Majesty's Secretaries of

State,' to an underbred but good-tempered little city clerk, whom Lady

Drum takes in her carriage for a drive in Hyde Park, and whom she

hints he might ask to dinner. Mr. Preston acts on the hint, but with

savage sarcasm, and Titmarsh, the clerk, accepts in order to plague

the minister for his astounding rudeness:

'"I did not," he says, "intend to dine with the man, but only to

give him a lesson in manners."'

And so, when the carriage drove up to Mr. Preston's door, he says to

him:

'"When you came up and asked who the devil I was, I thought you

might have put the question in a more polite manner, but it wasn't

my business to speak. When, by way of a joke, you invited me to

dinner, I answered in a joke too, and here I am. But don't be

frightened, I'm not agoing to dine with you."...

'"Is that all, sir?" says Mr. Preston, still in a rage. "If you

have done, will you leave the house, or shall my servants turn you

out? Turn out this fellow; do you hear me?"'

Assuming that sixty years ago a Secretary of State was much the same

sort of man that he is to-day, what are we to think of this spirited

colloquy? and what kind of impression will it, and others no less

forcible, produce upon the future student of manners who turns to

light literature as the mirror of contemporary society?

With regard, again, to the _Yellowplush Papers_, is it from

unpardonable fastidiousness, the affectation of an over-refined

literary taste, that we are inclined to question whether they have

been wisely preserved in standard editions of so great a novelist? The

use of ludicrously distorted spelling intensifies the impression of

ignorant vulgarity, and there is a moral lesson in the story of Mr.

Deuceace that atones in some degree for the very low company whom we

meet in it. But the labour of deciphering the ugly words, and the

cheerless atmosphere of sordid vice and servility which they are most

appropriately used to describe, are so unfamiliar to contemporary

novel-readers that we think few will master two hundred pages of this

dialect in the present edition. On the whole, after renewing our old

acquaintance with Mr. Jeames, with Captain Rook and Mr. Pigeon, with

Mr. Stubbs of the Fatal Boots, and others of the same kidney, we doubt

whether these immature character sketches, which all belong to the

author's first and most Hogarthian manner, do not range below the

legitimate boundaries of literature as a fine art, and whether they do

not much rather harm than heighten his permanent reputation when they

are placed on a line with his masterpieces by formal reproduction. It

is impossible to take much interest in personages with an unbroken

record of profligacy and baseness; and we are reminded of the

Aristotelian maxim that pure wickedness is no subject for dramatic

treatment.

Yet we are aware that it may be practically impossible to publish

incomplete editions of a very popular writer; and in the extravagances

of his youth one may discern the promise of much higher things. Very

rapidly, in fact, in the work which comes next, Thackeray rises at

once to a far superior level of artistic performance. We are not

indisposed to endorse the opinion, pronounced more than once by good

judges, that the high-water mark of his peculiar genius was touched by

_Barry Lyndon_, which first exhibits the rare and distinctive

qualities that were completely developed in his later and larger

novels. It may be affirmed, as a general rule, that most of our

eminent writers of fiction have leapt, as Scott did, into the arena

with some work of first-class merit, which has immediately caught

public attention and established their position in literature. Their

fugitive pieces, their crudities and imperfect essays, have been

either judiciously suppressed or consigned to oblivion. They have

followed, one may say, the goodly custom prescribed by the governor

of the Cana marriage feast; they put forth in the beginning their good

wine, and they fall back upon inferior brands only when the public,

having well drunk of the potent vintage, will swallow anything from a

favourite author. We may regret that Thackeray's start as a man of

letters should have furnished an exception to this salutary rule; and

in surveying, after the lapse of many years, his collected works, we

are disposed to observe that no first-class writer has suffered more

from the enduring popularity which has encouraged the republication of

everything that is his, from the finished _chefs-d'oeuvres_ down to

the ephemeral and unripe products of an exuberant youth. He would have

given the world a notable confirmation of the rule that a great author

usually leads off on a high note, if he had opened his munificent

literary entertainment with _Barry Lyndon_. We quote here from Mrs.

Ritchie's introduction:

'My father once said to me when I was a girl, "You needn't read

_Barry Lyndon_; you won't like it." Indeed it is scarcely a book to

_like_, but one to admire and to wonder at for its consummate power

and mastery.... Barry Lyndon tells his own story, so as to enlist

every sympathy against himself, and yet all flows so plausibly, so

glibly, that one can hardly explain how the effect was produced.

From the very first sentence, almost, one receives the impression

of a lawless adventurer, brutal, heartless, with low instincts and

rapid perceptions. Together with his own autobiography, he gives a

picture of the world in which he lives and brags, a picture so

vivid ... that as one reads one almost seems to hear the tread of

remorseless fate sounding through all the din and merriment. Take

those descriptions of the Prussian army during the Seven Years'

War, and of that hand of man which weighs so heavily upon man--what

a haunting page in history!'

These remarks are very justly appreciative, for the book stamps

Thackeray as a fine impressionist, as an artist who skilfully mixes

the colours of reality and imagination into a composition of striking

scenes and the effective portrayal of character. With extraordinary

ability and consistency to the type he works out the gradual evolution

of a wild Irish boy, hot-headed in love and fighting, full of daring

impetuosity and ignorant vanity, into the ruffianly soldier, the

intrepid professional gambler, and finally into the selfish

profligate, who marries a great heiress and sets up as a county

magnate. Instead of the mere unadulterated villainy and meanness which

were impersonated in his previous stories, we have here the complex

strength and weakness of real human nature; we have the whole action

lifted above the platform of city swindlers, insignificant scoundrels,

and needy cardsharpers, up to a stage exhibiting historic personages

and scenes, courts and battlefields; and we breathe freely in the

wider air of immorality on a grand scale. As a sample of spirited

freehand drawing, the sketches of Continental society, 'before that

vulgar Corsican upset the gentry of the world,' are admirable for

their force and originality; and what can be better as a touch of

character than the following defence of his profession by a prince of

gamblers?

'I speak of the good old days of Europe, before the cowardice of

the French aristocracy (in the shameful Revolution, which served

them right) brought ruin on our order.... You call a doctor an

honourable man--a swindling quack, who does not believe in the

nostrums which he prescribes, and takes your guinea for whispering

in your ear that it's a fine morning; and yet, forsooth, a gallant

man who sits him down before the baize and challenges all comers,

his money against theirs, his fortune against theirs, is proscribed

by your modern moral world. It is a conspiracy of the middle

classes against gentlemen; it is only the shopkeeper cant which is

to go down nowadays. I say that play was an institution of

chivalry; it has been wrecked along with other privileges of men of

birth.'

Here we have the romance of the gaming-table; and in the same chapter

Barry Lyndon recounts the evil chance that befell him at cards with

two young students, who had never played before:

'As ill luck would have it, they were tipsy, and against tipsiness

I have often found the best calculations of play fail entirely. A

few officers joined; they played in the most perfectly insane way,

and won always.... And in this ignoble way, in a tavern room thick

with tobacco smoke, across a deal table besmeared with beer and

liquor, and to a parcel of hungry subalterns and beardless

students, three of the most skilful and renowned players in Europe

lost seventeen hundred louis. It was like Charles xii. or Richard

Coeur de Lion falling before a petty fortress and an unknown

hand.'

The picture of gamblers in a grimy tavern, the unconscious humour of

Lyndon's heroic lament, the comparison between the cardsharpers'

discomfiture and the fall of mighty warriors, make up a fine example

of Thackeray's eye for graphic detail, and prove the force and temper

of his incisive irony.

Yet, in spite of its great excellence, the book still labours under

the artistic disadvantage of having a rogue for its hero. Thackeray

was too good an artist to be unconscious of this defect, and in a

footnote to page 215 he defends his choice characteristically. After

admitting that Mr. Lyndon maltreated his lady in every possible way,

bullied her, robbed her to spend the money in gambling and taverns,

kept mistresses in her house, and so on, he argues:

'The world contains scores of such amiable people, and, indeed, it

is because justice has not been done them that we have edited this

autobiography. Had it been that of a mere hero of romance--one of

those heroic youths who figure in the novels of Scott or James,

there would have been no call to introduce the reader to a

personage already so often and so charmingly depicted. Mr. Barry is

not, we repeat, a hero of the common pattern; but let the reader

look round and ask himself, "Do not as many rogues succeed in life

as honest men, more fools than men of talent?" And is it not just

that the lives of this class should be described by the students of

human nature as well as the actions of those fairy-tale princes,

those perfectly impossible heroes,' etc., etc.

One would be almost inclined to infer from this passage that the

author had identified himself so completely with his own creation as

to have become slightly infected with Mr. Barry Lyndon's sophistry;

for it is impossible to maintain seriously that rogues and fools are

no less successful in life than men of honesty and talent. But the

truth is that Thackeray found in a daring rogue a much finer subject

for character-drawing than in the blameless hero, while he was deeply

implicated in the formidable revolt which Carlyle was leading against

the respectabilities of that day.

It is worth notice that in Barry Lyndon's military reminiscences, done

with great vigour and fidelity of detail, we have a very early example

of the realistic as contrasted with the romantic treatment of

campaigns, of life in the bivouac and the barrack. This method, which

has latterly had immense vogue, seems to have been first invented in

France, where Thackeray may have taken the hint from Stendhal; but we

are disposed to believe that he was the first who proclaimed it in

England. As it professes to give the true unvarnished aspect of war it

would certainly have accorded with Thackeray's natural contempt, so

often shown in his writings, for the commonplaces of the military

romancer who revelled in the pomp and circumstance of glorious

battles, the charges, the heroic exploits, the honours, rather than

the horrors, of the fighting business. Moreover, it is not only in

style and treatment but also in sentiment and in certain peculiar

prepossessions, that we can trace in this novel the lines which the

writer followed throughout his narratives, and his favourite

delineations of character. For diplomatists he has always a curious

contempt, and he never misses an opportunity of ridiculing them. 'Mon

Dieu,' says Lyndon, 'what fools they are; what dullards, what

fribbles, what addle-headed coxcombs; this is one of the lies of the

world, this diplomacy'--as if it were not also a most important and

difficult branch of the national services. Abject reverence of great

folk he regarded as the besetting disease of middle-class Englishmen;

and so we find Lyndon remarking, by the way, that Mr. Hunt, Lord

Bullingdon's governor, 'being a college tutor and an Englishman, was

ready to go on his knees to any one who resembled a man of fashion.'

And the kindly cynicism which discoloured Thackeray's ideas about

women, notwithstanding his tender admiration and love for the best of

them, comes out pointedly in old Sir Charles Lyndon's advice to Barry

on the subject of matrimony:

'Get a friend, sir, and that friend a woman, a good household

drudge, who loves you. _That_ is the most precious sort of

friendship, for the expense of it is all on the woman's side. The

man need not contribute anything. If he's a rogue, she'll vow he's

an angel; if he's a brute, she will like him all the better for his

ill-treatment of her. They like it, sir, these women; they are born

to be our greatest comforts and conveniences, our moral boot-jacks,

as it were.'

Barry Lyndon discloses the promise and potency of Thackeray's genius.

In _Vanity Fair_, his next work, it has attained its climax; the

dramatic figures are more finely conceived, the plot is varied and

more skilfully elaborated, the actors more numerous and life-like; and

whereas in his preceding stories he has mainly used the form of a

fictitious memoir, whereby the hero is made to tell his own tale, in

this 'Novel without a Hero' the author proceeds by narration. The tone

is still governed by irony and pathos, wherein Thackeray chiefly

excels; yet the contrasts between weak and strong natures, the

superiority of honesty and the moral sense over craftiness and

unscrupulous cleverness, are now touched off with a lighter and surer

hand. The unmitigated villain and the coarse-tongued hard-hearted

virago have disappeared with other primitive stage properties; the

human comedy is played by men and women of the upper world, with their

virtues and frailties sufficiently set in relief, yet not exaggerated,

for the purposes of the social drama. The book's very title, _Vanity

Fair_, denotes a transition from the scathing satire of his earlier

manner to more indulgent irony, from Swift to Sterne, two authors whom

Thackeray had evidently studied attentively. In his short preface the

author preludes with the gentler note when he invites people of a

lazy, benevolent, or sarcastic mood to step into the puppet show for a

moment and look at the performance.

The book's success, Mrs. Ritchie tells us, was slow; the sale hung

fire. 'One has heard of the journeys which the manuscript made to

various publishers' houses before it could find any one ready to

undertake the venture, and how long its appearance was delayed by

various doubts and hesitations, until it was at last brought out in

its yellow covers by Messrs. Bradbury and Evans on January 1, 1847.'

But when the last numbers were appearing Thackeray wrote that,

'although it does everything but sell, it appears really to increase

my reputation immensely'--as it assuredly did. That a signal success

in literature is nearly always achieved, not by following the beaten

road, but by a bold departure from it, is a principle that could be

abundantly established by examples, and which seems almost a truism

when it is stated. _Vanity Fair_ was decidedly a work of great

freshness and originality; but publishers are circumspect and rarely

adventurous, they distrust novelties and prefer to follow the

prevailing fashion as far as it will go, wherein we may discern one

reason why the accouchement of the first literary child is usually so

laborious.

To criticise at length any single novel of Thackeray's would be far

beyond the scope or purpose of this article. Our object is rather to

illustrate the course and development of his distinctive literary

qualities, the slow effacement of prejudices which never entirely

disappeared, and the rapid expansion of his highest artistic

faculties. To begin with the prejudices. In _Vanity Fair_ he still

makes merciless war upon the poor paltry snob, whom one must suppose

to have infested English society of that day in a very rampant form;

though unless we have had great changes for the better in the last

fifty years, one might suspect exaggeration. And another important

reform of manners must have supervened in the same period if we are to

believe that in these novels the English servant is not unfairly

caricatured. As we know him at the present day, in the class that

lives with gentle-folk, he may be touchy and troublesome, with much

self-assertiveness, but also with much self-respect. He has as many

faults as other people, but among them brutal rudeness is practically

unknown; yet when Rebecca Sharp is driven in Mr. Sedley's carriage to

Sir Pitt Crawley's, having given nothing to the domestics on leaving

the Sedleys, the coachman is ludicrously rude to a poor governess.

'"I shall write to Mr. Sedley, and inform him of your conduct,"

said Miss Sharp to him.

'"Don't," replied that functionary; "I hope you've forgot nothink?

Miss 'Melia's gownds--have you got them--as the lady's maid was to

have 'ad? I hope they'll fit you. Shut the door, Jim, you'll get no

good out of _'er_," continued John, pointing with his thumb towards

Miss Sharp; "a bad lot, I tell you, a bad lot."'

One may conjecture that Thackeray's natural turn for comic burlesque,

which comes out so plainly in his drawings, had become ingrained and

inveterate by early practice, and certainly his immoderate delight in

setting snobs and flunkeys on a pillory became a flaw in the

perfection of his higher composition. It might well produce, among

foreigners at any rate, an unreal impression of the true relations

existing between different classes of English society.

But these are slight blemishes upon the surface of an epoch-making

book, for _Vanity Fair_ inaugurated a new school of novel-writing

in this country, with its combined vigour and subtlety of

character-drawing, and with the marvellous dexterity of its scenes and

dramatic situations. The army and military life in all its phases had

a remarkable attraction for him; in all his larger books one or more

officers are brought prominently upon the foreground of his canvas. He

hits off the strong and weak points of the profession, in war and

peace, with a truth and humour that gave freshness and originality to

the whole subject, and the best of these pictures are in _Vanity

Fair_. There is not one of its leading _militaires_--Dobbin and

Osborne, Crawley and Major O'Dowd--in whom a typical representative of

well-known varieties may not be recognised. His fine picturesque

handiwork, his consistent preference of the real to the romantic, and

his reserve in the use of such tempting materials as the battlefield

affords to the story-teller, are shown in his treatment of the episode

of Waterloo. He is far too good an artist to lay out for us a grand

scene of fierce fighting and carnage; nor does he, like Lever, produce

Wellington and Bonaparte acting or speaking up to the popular

conception of these mighty heroes. He is content to follow his own

personages into that famous field, and to show how perilous

circumstance brings out the force or feebleness of each character,

male and female, whether of the wives left behind at Brussels, or the

soldiers in the fighting line at Waterloo. It is only at the end of

his chapter, after some seriocomic incidents and dialogues exhibiting

the behaviour of the non-combatants--of Jos Sedley, Mrs. O'Dowd, Lady

Bareacres, and the rest--that his narrative rises suddenly to the epic

note in a brief passage full of admirable energy and pathos:

'All our friends took their share and fought like men in the great

field. All day long, whilst the women were praying ten miles away,

the lines of the dauntless English infantry were receiving and

repelling the furious charges of the French horsemen. Guns which

were heard at Brussels were ploughing up their ranks, and comrades

falling, and the resolute survivors closing in. Toward evening the

attack of the French, repeated and resisted so bravely, slackened

in its fury ... they were preparing for a final onset. It came at

last, the columns of the Imperial Guard marched up the hill of St.

Jean.... Unscared by the thunder of the artillery, which hurled

death from the English line, the dark rolling column pressed on and

up the hill. It seemed almost to crest the eminence, when it began

to wave and falter. Then it stopped, still facing the shot. Then at

last the English troops rushed from the post from which no enemy

had been able to dislodge them, and the Guard turned and fled.

'No more firing was heard at Brussels; the pursuit rolled miles

away. Darkness came down on the field and city; and Amelia was

praying for George who was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet

through his heart.'

The military critic might pick holes in this description, and

Thackeray might as well have thrown the English infantry into squares

instead of into line. Yet the passage is instinct with compressed

emotion; and the sudden transition from the general battle to the

single death is a good touch of tragic art.

In _Pendennis_ (1850) we may discern the slowly softening influences

of years that bring the philosophic mind, of a calmer and easier time,

and perhaps also of a different class of readers. Thackeray has now

discovered that, as he says in his preface, 'to describe a real rascal

you must make him too hideous to show;' and that 'Society will not

tolerate the Natural in our Art.' Even the attempt to describe, in

_Pendennis_, one of 'the gentlemen of our age, no better nor worse

than most educated men,' has startled the prudery of the public for

whom he now finds himself writing. 'Many ladies have remonstrated, and

subscribers left me, because, in the course of the story, I described

a young man resisting and affected by temptation.' Here, again, is

another instance of the changes which rules of taste and convention

may undergo in the course of a generation; for surely not even the

straitest middle-class sect would in our day banish _Pendennis_ on the

score of impropriety. Mrs. Ritchie mentions that the author's

descriptions of literary life were criticised on the ground that he

was trying to win favour with the non-literary classes by decrying his

own profession--an absurd accusation which nettled him into replying.

The truth seems to be that Thackeray, who poked fun at the weak sides

of every class and calling, saw no reason why he should leave out his

own; and the men of letters might have been comforted by observing

that he dealt with them much more tenderly than with their natural

enemy the publisher, who has taken philosophically, for all we have

ever heard, the unmerciful caricatures of Bungay and Bacon in

Paternoster Row. Yet it may have been annoying to find such a writer

confidentially whispering to his readers 'that there is no race of

people who talk about books, or perhaps read books, so little as

literary men.'

_Pendennis_ is in Thackeray's best style, as the novelist of manners.

It opens, like _Vanity Fair_, with a short amusing scene that poses,

as the French say, some leading actor in the play, and encourages the

reader to go on. Next follows, as is usual with our author, a short

retrospective account of the people and places among whom the plot is

laid, with a descriptive pedigree of his hero. In his habit of setting

his portraits in a framework of family history (compare the Crawleys,

the Newcomes, the Esmonds) he resembles, though with less prolixity,

Balzac, and he displays much knowledge and observation of English

provincial life. He is, we imagine, the first high-class writer who

brought the Bohemian, possibly an importation from France, into the

English novel; and the contrast between the seedy strolling adventurer

and strait-laced respectability provides him with material for

inexhaustible irony, with much good-natured sympathy for the waifs and

strays. He has always a soft corner in his heart for reckless

hardihood; and every one must be glad that his 'poor friend Colonel

Altamont,' who had been doomed to execution, was respited at the last

moment, as Thackeray tells us in his preface, on the very technical

plea that the author had not sufficient experience of gaol-birds and

the gallows. Merciful good nature toward a daring scamp, who was free

with his money and kind to women, was probably at the bottom of the

condonation. We know from a paper, reproduced (to our thinking

unnecessarily) in one of these volumes, that in 1840 Thackeray went to

see Courvoisier hanged, and was so much upset by the spectacle that he

prayed for the abolition of capital punishment to wipe out its stain

of national blood-guiltiness. It may be noticed, moreover, that his

stern denunciation of crime and folly has by this time settled down

into a philosophic mood that is almost fatalistic, as when he suggests

that 'circumstance only brings out the latent defect or quality, and

does not create it'; that 'our mental changes are, like our grey hairs

and wrinkles, no more than the fulfilment of the plan of mortal growth

and decay,' so that each man is born with the natural seed of fortune

or failure. The voyage of life

'has been prosperous, and you are riding into port, the people

huzzaing and the guns saluting, and the lucky captain bows from the

ship's side, and there is a care under the star on his breast that

nobody knows of; or you are wrecked and lashed, hopeless, to a

solitary spar out at sea; the sinking man and the successful one

are thinking each about home, very likely, and remembering the time

when they were children; alone on the hopeless spar, drowning out

of sight; alone in the midst of the crowd applauding you.'

In such fine passages as these we hear the elegiac strain of the

antique world, wherein remorseless fate held dominion over human

efforts and destiny. Like other great writers who are touched with

humorous melancholy, he falls often into the moralising vein; he stops

his narrative to address his reader with some ironical observation,

after the manner of Fielding, whose leisurely tone of satire is so

audible in the following quotation from _Pendennis_ that he might well

have written it:

'Even his child, his cruel Emily, he would have taken to his heart

and forgiven with tears; and what more can one say of the Christian

charity of a man than that he is actually ready to forgive those

who have done him every kindness, and with whom he is wrong in a

dispute?'

As we have said that _Vanity Fair_ touches the climax of Thackeray's

peculiar genius, so in our judgment _Esmond_ shows the gathered

strength and maturity of his literary power, and has won for him an

eminent place in the distinguished order of historical novelists. We

may say that the art of historical romance was brought to perfection

in our own century, although French writers trace far back into the

eighteenth century, and even further, the method of weaving authentic

events and famous personages into the tissue of a story which turns

upon fictitious adventures in love and war. The elder novelists dealt

largely in extravagant sentiment, in conventional language, and in

marvellous exploits embroidered upon the sober chronicles which served

as the framework of their drama; they were content to set upon stilts

the traditional hero or heroine of former days, whose ideas and

conversation expressed with little disguise the manners, not of the

period to which they belonged, but of the author's own time and of the

society for whom he was writing. These books are, therefore, full of

glaring anachronisms and improbabilities; the knights and dames are

sometimes (as in the _Grand Cyrus_) thinly veiled portraits of

contemporary notabilities, but they are often mere lay figures

representing the prevailing fashions of thought and feeling. The

virtuous hero abounds in judicious reflections; the heroines are

chaste and beauteous damsels--Joan of Arc herself appears in one

romance as an adorable shepherdess--and love-making is conducted after

the model of a Parisian _precieuse_.

It is the opinion of a recent French critic, who has made careful

study of his subject, that the new school was founded by

Chateaubriand, who first, at the last century's end, laid an axe to

the root of all this rhetorical artifice, these frigid and grotesque

incongruities, and filled his romances with local colour, stamping

them with the impress of reality and conformity to nature, by

picturesque reproduction of the landscape, costumes, usages, and

conditions of existence of the time and country in which he might be

unwinding his tale. But Chateaubriand, like Byron (who was of a

similar temperament), never could put himself, to use a French phrase,

into another man's skin; he is to be detected soliloquising and

dispensing noble sentiments under the costume of a Christian martyr or

an American savage, and thus the fidelity of his scene-painting was

still marred by the artificiality of the discourse. It was the

Waverley novel that lifted the historical romance far beyond

Chateaubriand's level, that established it, in England, France, and

Italy on the true principle of creating vivid representations of a

bygone age by a skilful mixture of fact and fiction, and by a correct

and harmonious combination of characters, manners, and environment.

But during the twenty years that intervene between the dates, taken

roughly, of Scott's worst novel and Thackeray's best, the flood tide

of romanticism had risen to its highest point, and had then ebbed very

low, on both sides of the British Channel. And we can see that the

younger writer was no votary of the older school of high-flying

chivalrous romance, with its tournaments, its crusaders, its valiant

warriors, and distressed maidens. His youthful aversion for shams and

conventionalities, his strong propensity toward burlesque and

persiflage, his early life among cities and commonplace folk, seem to

have obscured in some degree his appreciation of even such splendid

compositions as _Ivanhoe_ or _The Talisman_; or, at any rate, his

sense of the ridiculous overpowered his admiration. The result was

that, as Scott had exalted his mediaeval heroes and heroines far above

the level of real life, had revived the legendary age of chivalry and

adventure with all the magnificence of his poetic imagination,

Thackeray had at first set himself, conversely, to strip the trappings

off these fine folk, and to poke his fun at the feudal lords and

ladies by treating them as ordinary middle-class men and women

masquerading in old armour or drapery. He came in as a writer on the

ebb-tide of romanticism, when the reaction showed its popular form in

a curious outburst of the taste for burlesques and parodies on the

stage and in the light reading of the time. Whether the creation of

this taste is to be ascribed to the appearance of two writers with

such genius for wit and fun as Thackeray and Dickens, or whether they

only supplied a natural demand, may be questionable; they undoubtedly

headed the army of Comus, and thereby raised the whole standard of

facetious literature. But the defect of this school was its propensity

to take a hilarious or sardonic view, not only of mediaeval romance,

but of quaint old times generally; and one leading embodiment of this

mocking spirit was _Punch_ founded in 1841. A'Beckett's _Comic History

of England_, which ran through many numbers, seems to this generation

a dreary and deleterious specimen of misplaced farce; though

historically it is not quite such bad work as Dickens's _Child's

History of England_, which he meant to be serious. Among Thackeray's

very numerous contributions to _Punch_ are _Miss Tickletoby's Lectures

on English History_, which might well have been consigned to

oblivion, _Rebecca and Rowena_, and _The Prize Novelists_. The

sarcastic and the sentimental temper must always be hostile to each

other; between romance and ridicule the antipathy is fundamental; and

although one regrets that he ever wrote _Rebecca and Rowena_, the

melodramatic novels of Bulwer-Lytton were fair enough game for the

parodist. However, it is certain that in his earlier writings

Thackeray did much to laugh away the novel of mediaeval chivalry; and

while we think he often carried his irreverent jocosity much too far,

since after all chivalry is better than cockneyism, we may award him

the very high honour of becoming, latterly, one of the founders of a

new and admirable historical school in England.

The eighteenth century was always Thackeray's favourite period; he

liked the rational, unpretentious tone of its best literature, its

practical politics and tolerance, its common sense, and its habit of

keeping very close, in art as in action, to the realities of the world

as we find it. Swift is the most unromantic of any writer that

possessed great imaginative faculty; Defoe was a master of minute

life-like detail, an inimitable imitator of truth; Hogarth's paintings

are like Wesley's or Whitefield's sermons, they are stern, unvarnished

denunciations of vice and profligacy; Fielding was the easy,

large-hearted moralist, who hated above all sins cant and knavery,

loved to banter the parsons, to bring fops and boobies upon his stage,

and to place in contrast the wide difference that then separated

manners in town and in country. Perhaps Thackeray owes more to

Fielding than to any other single literary ancestor; but all these

influences were most congenial to his temperament, and informed his

best work. His instinctive dislike of unreality, exaggeration, and

fanciful ideals would have always prevented him from laying the

situation of his story in some distant age, of which hardly anything

is known accurately, and supplementing his ignorance by giving free

scope to fantastic invention, as was the usage of the humble followers

who tried in vain to conjure with the wand of Scott. He required a

period which he could study, master, and sympathise with, and he found

it in the eighteenth century; though in _Esmond_ the plot, being

founded on Jacobite intrigues and conspiracies, opens with the

Revolution of 1688. He had taken great trouble, as usual, with the

localities, knowing well that you never understand a battle clearly

until you have seen its field.

'"I was pleased to find Blenheim," he wrote to his mother, "was

just exactly the place I had figured to myself, except that the

village is larger; but I fancied I had actually been there, so like

the aspect of it was to what I looked for. I saw the brook which

Harry Esmond crossed, and almost the spot where he fell wounded."'

Mrs. Ritchie quotes this letter as illustrating 'a sort of second

sight as to places which my father used to speak of'; and it certainly

attests his possession of the strong imaginative faculty which puts

together vivid mental pictures.

The first page strikes the note of disenchantment, of escape from the

spell of conventionalism and the shores of romance. Colonel Esmond,

who tells his own tale, wishes the Muse of History to disrobe, to

discard her buskins, and to deliver herself like a woman of the

everyday world.

'I wonder shall History ever pull off her periwig and cease to be

court-ridden? Shall we see something of France and England besides

Versailles and Windsor? I saw Queen Anne tearing down the Park

slopes after her staghounds, in her one-horse chaise--a hot

redfaced woman.... She was neither better bred nor wiser than you

and me, though we knelt to hand her a letter or a washhand basin.

Why shall History go on kneeling to the end of time? I am for

having her rise off her knees, and take her natural posture, not to

be for ever performing cringes and congees like a Court

chamberlain, and shuffling backward out of doors in the presence of

the sovereign. In a word, I would have History familiar rather than

heroic.'

No very deep philosophy in this, we might say, for surely historians

up to Esmond's day had not all been pompous and servile, while

something like dignity is desirable. But here we have Thackeray

speaking through Esmond his own thoughts about history, and

proclaiming the rise of naturalism against the romantic high-heeled

school. And in a much later chapter, where Esmond visits Addison, we

have the true realistic method of Tolstoi and other quite modern

novelists, as compared with the old classic style of describing war.

Addison has been writing a poem on the Blenheim campaign:

'"I admire your art," says Esmond to Addison; "the murder of the

campaign is done to military music, like a battle at the opera, and

the virgins shriek in harmony, as our victorious grenadiers march

into their villages. Do you know what a scene it was? what a

triumph you are celebrating, what scenes of shame and horror were

enacted, over which the commander's genius presided as calm as

though he didn't belong to our sphere? You talk of 'the listening

soldier fixed in sorrow,' the 'leader's grief swayed by generous

pity'; to my belief the leader cared no more for bleating flocks

than he did for infants' cries, and many of our ruffians butchered

one or the other with equal alacrity. You hew out of your polished

verses a stately image of smiling victory; I tell you 'tis an

uncouth, distorted, savage idol, hideous, bloody, and barbarous.

The rites performed before it are shocking to think of. You great

poets should show it as it is, ugly and horrible, not beautiful and

serene."'

When Colonel Esmond has to describe the battles in which he himself

took part, he avoids, as might be supposed, the high romantic style.

But he does not, therefore, fall on the other side, into the mire of

the writers who at the present day conscientiously give us the horrors

of the hospital and all the brutalities of war, which Esmond knows,

but does not choose to set down in his memoir. In his account of the

Blenheim victory there is a skilful touch of the professional soldier,

who records briefly the position of the armies and the tactical

movements; and it lights up with suppressed enthusiasm when he records

the intrepidity of the English regiments in that fierce and famous

struggle. We read of Major-General Wilkes,

'on foot, at the head of the attacking column, marching with his

hat off intrepidly in the face of the enemy, who was pouring in a

tremendous fire from his guns and musketry, to which our people

were instructed not to reply except with pike and bayonet when they

reached the French palisades. To these Wilkes walked intrepidly,

and struck the woodwork with his sword before our people charged

it. He was shot down on the instant, with his colonel, major, and

several officers,'

and the assault was repelled with great slaughter.

In this and other similar passages, you have the historic novelist at

his best; the true facts are selected and arranged so as to form

pictures of soul-stirring action; while their connection with his

story is maintained by giving Esmond himself a very modest and natural

share in the glorious victory:

'And now the conquerors were met by a furious charge of the English

horse under Esmond's general, Lumley, behind whose squadrons the

flying foot took refuge and formed again, while Lumley drove back

the French horse, charging up to the village of Blenheim and the

palisades where Wilkes, and many hundred more gallant Englishmen,

lay in slaughtered heaps. Beyond this moment, and of this famous

victory, Mr. Esmond knows nothing, for a shot brought down his

horse and our young gentleman on it, who fell crushed and stunned

under the animal.'

A lesser artist would have made his hero perform some brilliant

exploit; but Thackeray prefers to sketch the scene as Wouvermans might

have done it. We have not here the incomparable fire and spirit which

Scott throws into the skirmishes at Bothwell Brig and Drumclog; we see

the difference of mind and method; but we can have nothing except

admiration for the rare imaginative faculty which enabled a quiet man

of letters to deal so finely and faithfully, with such reserve and

discrimination, with a subject that might easily have been spoiled by

the noisy clatter and coarse colouring of the inferior artist. His

full length portrait of Marlborough has been too often quoted to be

reproduced here--'impassible before victory, before danger, before

defeat; the splendid calm of his face as he rode along the lines to

battle, or galloped up in the nick of time to a battalion reeling

before the enemy's charge or shot.' Of Swift, Esmond says--'I have

always thought of him and of Marlborough as the two greatest men of

that age ... a lonely fallen Prometheus, groaning as the vultures tear

him'; and with a few such strokes he gives etchings of other

celebrities in letters and politics. One may observe with astonishment

that the youthful Thackeray, who delighted in suburban chronicles, in

mean lives and paltry incidents, has risen by middle age to the rank

of an illustrious painter on the broad canvas of history. The annals

of literature contain few, if any, other examples of so remarkable a

transformation.

It is evident that Thackeray, like Scott, was an industrious collector

of material for his novels from all sources; we may refer, for an

instance, to a scene which will have left a passing impression upon

many readers, where, as the French and English armies are facing each

other on two sides of a little stream in the Low Countries, Prince

Charles Edward rides down to the French bank and exchanges a salute

with Esmond. It falls quite naturally and easily into the narrative,

and reads like a very happy original conception; yet the incident,

which is quite authentic, may be found in the papers obtained in the

last century from the Scottish convent at Paris by Macpherson.

In _The Virginians_, which might have had for its second title _Forty

Years Later_, the chronicle of the Esmond family is continued; with

North America during the French war for the battlefields, Braddock,

Wolfe, and Washington for the military figures, and Esmond's grandsons

as the personages round whom the story's interest centres. It is a

novel of very great merit, skilfully constructed, full of vivacious

writing and delineation of character; and the novelist avails himself

with his usual adroitness of the celebrated incidents of this period

and the salient features of English society in the middle of the last

century. Yet we must reluctantly admit that Thackeray has passed his

climacteric, and that as a work of the historical school this book

cannot claim parity with Esmond. George Warrington was on Braddock's

staff at the fatal rout and massacre on the Ohio; his brother Harry

was with Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham; they witnessed a battle lost

and a battle won, and each saw his commander fall. But George's

recital of his hairbreadth escape lacks the stern simplicity with

which his grandfather told the story of Marlborough's wars; and the

device of his being saved from the Indians by a French officer, who

was his intimate friend, is so ingenious as to be a trifle

commonplace. The author does not sketch in any details or personal

adventures from the great fight under the walls of Quebec; he has

fallen back, at this part of the story, into personal narrative, and

_The Warrington Memoirs_ only describe how the news of Wolfe's victory

and death were acclaimed in London. In the War of Independence, George

Warrington, who takes the British side, records the feelings and

situation of an American Loyalist--a class to whom only Mr. Lecky,

among historians, has done fair justice. There is much acute and

well-informed reflection upon the state of the colonies at this time,

the strong currents of party politics, and the exasperation which

brought about the rebellion; but, on the whole, this part of the

narrative has too much resemblance to real history. It has not enough

of the imaginative and picturesque element to lift it above the

comparatively prosaic level of an interesting memoir, though some good

scenes and situations are obtained by making the two Warrington

brothers take opposite sides. When we learn that, in 1759, the English

Lord Castlewood repaired his shattered fortunes by marrying an

American heiress, we are inclined to suspect that our author has taken

a hint from the fashion of a century later.

In the story of _Esmond_ Thackeray dropped the satirical tone, and

indulged very rarely indeed in the habit of pausing to moralise, as

writer to reader, upon social hypocrisy, servile obsequiousness, and

whited sepulchres generally. In _The Virginians_ he is less attentive

to dramatic propriety; he begins again to turn aside and lecture us,

in the midst of his tale, upon the text of _De te fabula narratur_.

Sir Miles and Lady Warrington are scandalised by their nephew's

extravagance, and refuse all help to the spendthrift.

'How much of this behaviour goes on daily in respectable society,

think you? You can fancy Lord and Lady Macbeth concocting a murder,

and coming together with some little awkwardness, perhaps, when the

transaction was done and over; but my Lord and Lady Skinflint, when

they consult in their bedroom about giving their luckless nephew a

helping hand, and determine to refuse, and go down to family

prayers and meet their children and domestics, and discourse

virtuously before them...?'

And so on, for a page or two, in a tone that some may think almost as

sophistical as the reasoning by which the Skinflints might excuse to

themselves their pharisaical behaviour. Such interpolations are

artistically incorrect, and out of harmony with the proper conception

of a well-wrought work of fiction, in which the moral should be

conveyed through the action and the dialogue, and the meditations

should be left to be done by the reader himself.

We must, therefore, place _The Virginians_ below _Esmond_ in the order

of merit. Nevertheless, these two novels, with _Barry Lyndon_, are

most important and valuable contributions to the English historical

series. Nothing like them had been written before, and nothing equal

has been written after them, with the single exception of _John

Inglesant_. They possess one essential quality that ought to

distinguish all fiction founded on the history of bygone times--they

are, so far as posterity can judge at all, faithful and effective

representations of manners. Now, the inferior practitioner in this

particular school, being prevented by indolence or incapacity from

mastering his period and acquiring insight into its ways of thought

and living, is too often content to cover up his deficiencies by

indenting freely on the theatrical wardrobe and armoury. He deals

largely in the costumes of the day; he supplies himself plentifully

with old-fashioned phrases; he is fond of old furniture; he is

strongest, in fact, upon the external and decorative aspect of the

society to which he introduces us. Most of the romances written in

imitation of Scott had this tendency; and this same feebleness

underlies the superfluous minuteness of detail that may be observed in

the decadent realists of the present day. Nothing of this sort can be

alleged against Thackeray, who works from inward outwardly in his

creations of character, and whose personages are truly historical in

the sense that they move and speak naturally according to the ideas

and circumstances of their age, the dialect and dress being merely

added as appropriate colouring. It is, indeed, a peculiarity of

Thackeray's novels, which distinguishes him alike from the romancer

and the modern naturalist that they contain hardly any description,

that he is never professedly picturesque, that he relies entirely on

passing strokes and effective details given by the way. In Scott we

have superb descriptive pieces of scenery, of storms, of the interiors

of a castle or a Gothic cathedral; and some of the best living

novelists are much given to elaborate landscape painting. But we doubt

whether half a page of deliberately picturesque description can be

found in any of Thackeray's first-class works. He will sometimes

sketch off the inside of a house or the look of a town, but with

natural scenery he does not concern himself; he is, for the most part,

entirely occupied with the analysis of character, or with the

emotional side of life; and he seems constantly to bear in mind the

Aristotelian maxim that life consists in action. His principal

instrument for the exhibition of motive, for the evolution of his

story, for bringing out qualities, is dialogue, which he manages with

great dexterity and effect, giving it point and raciness, and

avoiding the snare--into which recent social novelists have been

falling--of insignificance and prolixity. The method of easy,

sparkling, natural dialogue for developing the plot and distinguishing

the personages is said to have been first transferred from the theatre

to the novel by Walter Scott. At any rate, the use of it on a large

scale, which has since been carried to the verge of abuse, began with

the Waverley novels; where we find abundance of that humorous

vernacular talk in which Shakespeare excelled, though for the romance

Cervantes may be registered as its inventor. In Thackeray's hands

dramatic conversation, as of actors on the stage, becomes of very

prominent importance, not only for the illustration of manners in

society, but also for dressing up the subordinate figures of his

company. He is now no longer the caricaturist of earlier days; he

employs the popular dialect and comic touches with effective

moderation. And he avails himself very freely, in _The Virginians_, of

the privilege which belongs to the historical novelist, who is allowed

to make the reader acquainted with the notabilities of the period not

only for the movement of his drama, but also for a passing glance or

casual introduction, as might happen in any place of public resort or

in a crowded _salon_. Franklin, Johnson, and Richardson, George Selwyn

and Lord Chesterfield, cross the stage and disappear, after a few

remarks of their own or the author's. For military officers, who

figure in all his novels, he has ever a kindly word; and also for

sailors, although it is only in his last (unfinished) novel that he

takes up the navy. For English clergymen, especially for bishops, he

has no indulgence at all; and he seems to be possessed by the

commonplace error of believing that the prevailing types of the

Anglican Church in the eighteenth century were the courtier-bishop

and the humble obsequious chaplain. The typical Irishman of fiction,

with his mixture of recklessness and cunning, warm-hearted and

unveracious, is to be found, we think, in every one of Thackeray's

larger novels, except in _The Virginians_; the Scotsman is rare,

having been considerably used up by Walter Scott and his assiduous

imitators. We may notice (parenthetically) that our own day is

witnessing a marvellous revival of Highlanders and Lowlanders in

fiction, from Jacobite adventures to the pawky wit and humble

incidents of the kailyard.

In _The Newcomes_ we return regretfully to the novel of contemporary

society; wherewith disappears all the light haze of enchantment that

hangs over the revival of distant times, even though they lie no

further behind us than the eighteenth century. Such a change of scene

necessitates and completes the transition from the romantic to the

realistic; for how can a picture of our own environment, which any one

can verify, avoid being more or less photographic? In one sense

it is a continuation of the historic novel, which has only to put

off its archaic or literary costume to appear as a presentation of

social history brought up to date; the method of minute description,

the portrayal of manners, are the same, with the drawback that

the celebrities of the day must be kept off the stage. Any

eighteenth-century personage might figure, with effect, in _The

Virginians_, while Macaulay and Palmerston could hardly have been

sketched off, however briefly and good-naturedly, in _The Newcomes_.

In all essential respects the tone and treatment are unaltered in the

two stories; although the ironical spirit, restrained in the

historical novels by a sense of dramatic consistency, is again among

us having great wrath, as Thackeray surveys the aspect of the London

world around him. The character of Colonel Newcome, his distinguished

gallantry, his spotless honour, his simplicity and credulity, is

drawn with truth and tenderness; and some of the lesser folk are

admirable for their kindliness and unselfishness. But what a society

is this in which the Colonel is landed upon his return from India! He

calls, with his son, at his brother's house in Bryanston Square:

'"It's my father," said Clive to the "menial" who opened the door;

"my aunt will see Colonel Newcome."

'"Missis not at home," said the man. "Missis is gone in the

carriage. Not at this door. Take them things down the area steps,

young man," bawls out the domestic to a pastry-cook's boy ... and

John struggles back, closing the door on the astonished Colonel.'

An astonishment that most Londoners of his time would have assuredly

shared; unless, indeed, the West-end doorstep has gained wonderfully

by the scrubbing of sixty years. On the relations between masters and

servants Thackeray was never more severe than in this book; he is

irritated by the marching in of the household brigade to family

prayers, and he declares that we 'know no more of that race which

inhabits the basement floor, than of the men and brethren of

Timbuctoo, to whom some among us send missionaries'--a monstrous

imputation. He constantly resumes the moralising attitude; and his

pungent persiflage is poured out, as if from an apocalyptic vial, upon

worldliness and fashionable insolence. Sir Barnes Newcome's divorce

from the unhappy Lady Clara furnishes a text for sad and solemn

anathema upon the mercenary marriages in Hanover Square, where 'St.

George of England may behold virgin after virgin offered up to the

devouring monster, Mammon, may see virgin after virgin given away,

just as in the Soldan of Babylon's time, but with never a champion to

come to the rescue.' We would by no means withhold from the modern

satirist of manners the privilege of using forcibly figurative

language or of putting a lash to his whip. Yet if his novels are, as

we have suggested, to be regarded as historical, in the sense of

recording impressions drawn from life for the benefit of posterity,

such passages as those just quoted from Thackeray raise the general

question whether documentary evidence of this kind as to the state of

society at a given period is as valuable and trustworthy as it has

usually been reckoned to be. He has himself declared that 'upon the

morals and national manners, works of satire afford a world of light

that one would in vain look for in regular books of history'--that

_Pickwick_, _Roderick Random_, and _Tom Jones_, 'give us a better idea

of the state and ways of the people than one could gather from any

pompous or authentic histories.' Whether Fielding and Smollett's

contemporaries would have endorsed this opinion is the real question;

for on such a point the judgment of Thackeray, who lived a century

after them, cannot be conclusive. It is probable that to an Englishman

of that day the novels of these two authors appeared to be

extraordinary caricatures of actual society, in town or country.

On the other hand, the story is excellently conducted, and each actor

performs with consummate skill his part or hers; for in none of his

works has Thackeray given higher proof of that dramatic power which

brings out situations, leads on to the _denouement_, and points the

moral of the story, by a skilful manipulation of various incidents and

a remarkably numerous variety of characters. There, is one chapter

(ix. of vol. II.), headed 'Two or Three Acts of a Little Comedy,'

where he carries on the plot entirely by a light and sparkling

dialogue which may be compared to some of A. de Musset's wittiest

_Proverbes_. It is a book that could only have been composed by a

first-class artist in the maturity of his powers; and for that very

reason we must regret that it is steeped in bitterness; while

Thackeray's rooted hostility to mothers-in-law misguides him into the

aesthetic error of admitting a virago to scold frantically almost over

the colonel's death-bed. The unvarying meanness and selfishness of

Mrs. Mackenzie, and of Sir Barnes Newcome, fatigue the reader; for

whereas in the delineation of his amiable and high-principled

characters Thackeray is careful to shade off their bright qualities by

a mixture of natural weakness, these ill-favoured portraits stand out

in the full glare of unredeemed insolence and low cunning.

In his last novel, broken off half-way by his death, Thackeray went

back once more to that eighteenth century, which, as he says in one of

his letters, 'occupied him to the exclusion almost of the nineteenth,'

and to the method of weaving fiction out of historical materials. We

have already remarked upon his practice of opening with a kind of

family history, which explains the antecedent connections,

relationship, and pedigree of the persons who are coming upon the

stage, and marks out the background of his story. In _Denis Duval_ he

carries this preamble through two chapters, and arranges all the

pieces on his board so carefully that an inattentive reader might lose

his way among the preliminary details. One sees with what pleasure he

has studied his favourite period in France and England, and how he

enjoyed constructing, like Defoe, a fictitious autobiography that

reads like a picturesque and genuine memoir of the times. Having thus

laid out his plan, and prepared his _mise en scene_, he begins his

third chapter with an animated entry of his actors, who thenceforward

play their parts in a succession of incidents and adventures, that are

all adjusted and fitted in to the framework of time and place that he

has taken so much pains to design for them. In this manner he touches

upon the great events of contemporary history, like the French War, or

illustrates the state of England by bringing in highwaymen and the

press-gang; while a minute description of localities lends an air of

simplicity to the tale of an old man who has (as he says) an

extraordinarily clear remembrance of his boyhood.

The Notes which appeared in the _Cornhill Magazine_, June 1864, as an

epilogue to the last lines written by Thackeray, when the story

stopped abruptly, throw curious light on the methods of gathering his

material and preparing his work. Just as he visited the Blenheim

battlefield, when he was engaged upon _Esmond_, so he went down to

Romney Marsh, where Denis Duval was born and bred, surveyed Rye and

Winchelsea as if he were drawing plans of those towns, and collected

local traditions of the coast and the country, of the smugglers, the

Huguenot settlements, and the old war time of 1778-82. The _Annual

Register_ and the _Gentleman's Magazine_ furnished him with suggestive

incidents and circumstantial reports which he expanded with admirable

fertility of imagination; so that by combining what he saw with what

he read he could lift the curtain and light up again an obscure corner

of the Kentish coast, and the doings of the queer folk who lived on it

a century before he went there. That he never finished this novel is

much to be lamented, for Denis had just become a midshipman on board

the _Serapis_, and we learn from these 'Notes' that he was to take

part in the great fight which ended in the capture of that ship by

Paul Jones, after the most bloody and desperate duel in the long and

glorious record of the British Navy. Captain Pearson, who commanded

the _Serapis_, reported his defeat to the Admiralty in a letter of

which 'Mr. Thackeray seems to have thought much,' and, indeed, it is

precisely the sort of document--quiet, formal, with a masculine

contempt for adjectives (there is not one in the whole letter)--which

denotes a character after Thackeray's own heart.

'We dropt alongside of each other, head and stern, when, the fluke

of our spare anchor hooking his quarter, we became so close, fore

and aft, that the muzzles of our guns touched each other's sides.'

Here we have the style which Thackeray loved; and 'tis pity that we

have so narrowly missed the picture of a fierce naval battle by an

artist who could describe strenuous action in steady phrase, and who

knew that the hard-fighting commander is usually a cool, resolute,

resourceful man, for whom it is a matter of plain duty to fight his

ship till he is fairly beaten, and to report the result briefly,

whatever it may be, to his superiors. One can observe the mellowing

influence upon Thackeray of the atmosphere of past times and the

afterglow of heroic deeds; for in _Denis Duval_ there is no trace of

the scorching satire which pursues us in _The Newcomes_; nor does he

once pause to moralise, or to enlarge upon the innumerable hypocrisies

of modern society. It is questionable, indeed, whether this fine

fragment binds up well in a volume with the _Roundabout Papers_, which

bring the author back into the light of common day, and to the

trivialities of ordinary society.

It has not been thought necessary, in this biographical edition, to

issue the several volumes in the order of the dates at which they were

written; nor has the attempt been made to preserve some serial

continuity of their style or subject. The arrangement, moreover,

serves to accentuate unnecessarily the undeniable imparity of

Thackeray's different books; for _Punch_ and the _Sketch Books_ are

interposed between _Barry Lyndon_ and _Esmond_; while even the wild

and wicked Lyndon hardly deserved to be handcuffed in the same volume

with Fitzboodle, whom in the body he would have crushed like an

insect. Yet the classification of Thackeray's novels might be easily

made, for _Barry Lyndon_, _Esmond_, _The Virginians_, and _Denis

Duval_ fall together in one homogeneous group, having a strong family

resemblance in tone and treatment, and following generally the

chronological succession of the periods with which they are concerned.

If to Esmond is awarded the precedence that is due to him not by

seniority, but by importance, we have the wars of the eighteenth

century between England and France from Marlborough's campaigns down

to Rodney's great naval victory of 1783, in which Duval was destined

to take part. These works represent Thackeray's very considerable

contribution to the Historic School of English novelists; and we may

count them also a valuable commentary upon English history, for

without doubt every luminous illustration of past times and personages

acts as a powerful stimulant to the national mind, by exciting a

keener interest in the nation's story and a clearer appreciation of

its reality. Chateaubriand has affirmed that Walter Scott's romances

produced a revolution in the art of writing histories, that no greater

master of the art of historical divination has ever lived, and that

his profound insight into the mediaeval world, its names, the true

relation between different classes, its political and social aspects,

originated a new and brilliant historical method which superseded the

dim and limited views of scholarly erudition. For Thackeray we make no

such extensive or extravagant claims; but it may be said that the

dramatic conception of history in his novels and lectures was of

great service to his readers and hearers by the vivid impressions

which they conveyed of the life, character, and feelings of their

forefathers, of their failings, virtues, and memorable achievements.

Some material objections may be taken to the system of teaching by

graphic pictures in Thackeray, as in Carlyle's _French Revolution_,

and in both cases the philosophy leaves much to be desired, for the

writer's own idiosyncrasy colours all his work. Yet when we remember

how few are the readers to whom the accurate Dryasdust, with his

careful research and well attested facts, brings any lasting

enlightenment, we may well believe that very many owe their distinct

ideas of the state of England and its people during the last century

to Thackeray's genius for carefully studied autobiographical fiction.

To the four historical novels mentioned above let us add three novels

of nineteenth-century manners--_Vanity Fair_, _Pendennis_, _The

Newcomes_--and we have seven books (one incomplete) upon which

Thackeray's name and fame survive, and will be handed down to

posterity. The list is by no means long if it be compared with the

outturn of Scott and Bulwer-Lytton, or of his foremost contemporary

Dickens; and Stevenson, who resembles him in the subdued realistic

style of narrating a perilous fight or adventure, has left us a larger

bequest. But they are amply sufficient to build up for him a lasting

monument in English literature; and their very paucity may serve as a

warning against the prevailing sin of copious and indiscriminate

productiveness, by which so many second-rate novelists of the present

day exhaust their powers and drown a respectable reputation in a flood

of writing, which sinks in quality in proportion to the rise in

quantity.

How far the character and personal experiences of an author are

revealed or disguised in his writings is a question which has often

been discussed. Bulwer once endeavoured, in a whimsical essay, to

prove that men of letters are the only people whose characters are

really ascertainable, because you may know them intimately by their

works; but herein he merely touched upon the general truth or truism

that society at large judges every man only by his public

performances, and does not trouble itself at all about anything else.

In the category of those who display in their writings their tastes

and prejudices, their feelings and the special bent of their mind, we

may certainly place Thackeray, who was a moralist and a satirist, very

sensitive to the ills and follies of humanity, and impressionable in

the highest degree. For such a man it was impossible to refrain from

giving his opinions, his praise or his blame, in all that he wrote

upon everything that interested him; and in portraying the society

which surrounded him, he inevitably portrayed himself. He displayed as

much as any writer the general complexion of his intellectual

propensities and sympathies; and we can even trace in him the

existence of some of the minor human frailties which he was most apt

to condemn, an unconscious tendency which is not altogether uncommon.

But he is essentially a high-minded man of letters, acutely sensitive

to absurdities, impatient of meanness, of affectation, and of

ignominious admiration of trivial things; a resolute representative of

the independent literary spirit, with a strong desire to see things as

they are, and with the gift of describing them truthfully. He

repudiated 'the absurd outcry about neglected men of genius'; and in a

letter quoted by Mrs. Ritchie he writes:

'I have been earning my own bread with my own pen for near twenty

years now, and sometimes very hardly too; but in the worst time,

please God, never lost my own respect.'

His delicacy of feeling comes out in a letter from the United States,

where he was lecturing--

'As for writing about this country, about Goshen, about the

friends I have found here, and who are helping me to procure

independence for my children, if I cut jokes upon them, may I

choke on the instant'--

having probably in remembrance, as he wrote, Charles Dickens and the

_American Notes_.

On the other hand, he was not free from the defects of his qualities,

mental and artistic, from the propensity to set points of character in

violent relief, or from the somewhat unfair generalisation which grows

out of the habit of drawing types and distributing colours for

satirical effect.

In regard to his religion, it appears to have been of the

rationalistic eighteenth-century order in which moral ideas are

entirely dominant, to the exclusion of the deeply spiritual modes of

thought; and we may say of him, as of Carlyle, that his philosophy was

more practical than profound. The subjoined quotation is from a letter

to his daughter:

'What is right must always be right, before it was practised as

well as after. And if such and such a commandment delivered by

Moses was wrong, depend upon it, it was not delivered by God, and

the whole question of complete inspiration goes at once. And the

misfortune of dogmatic belief is that, the first principle granted

that the book called the Bible is written under the direct

dictation of God--for instance, that the Catholic Church is under

the direct dictation of God, and solely communicates with Him--that

Quashimaboo is the directly appointed priest of God, and so

forth--pain, cruelty, persecution, separation of dear relatives,

follow as a matter of course.... Smith's truth being established in

Smith's mind as the Divine one, persecution follows as a matter of

course--martyrs have roasted over all Europe, over all God's world,

upon this dogma. To my mind Scripture only means a writing, and

Bible means a book.... Every one of us in every part, book,

circumstance of life, sees a different meaning and moral, and so it

must be about religion. But we can all love each other and say "Our

Father."'

This is true, stout-hearted, individualistic liberty of believing--an

excellent thing and wholesome, though it by no means covers the whole

ground, or meets all difficulties. The logical consequence is a strong

distaste for theology, and no very high opinion of the priesthood,

wherein we may probably find the root of Thackeray's proclivity,

already mentioned, toward unmerited sarcasm upon the clergy. In the

Introduction to _Pendennis_ is a letter written from Spa, in which he

says, 'They have got a Sunday service here in an extinct

gambling-house, and a clerical professor to perform, whom you have to

pay just like any other showman who comes.' It does not seem to have

occurred to Thackeray that the turning of a gambling-house into a

place of prayer is no bad thing of itself, or that you have no more

right to expect your religious services to be done for you in a

foreign land without payment than your newspapers or novels.

But these are blemishes or eccentricities which are only worth notice

in a character of exceptional interest and a writer of great

originality. Thackeray's work had a distinct influence on the light

literature of his generation, and possibly also on its manners, for it

is quite conceivable that one reason why his descriptions of snobbery

and shams appear to us now overdrawn, may be that his trenchant blows

at social idols did materially discredit the worship of them. His

literary style had the usual following of imitators who caught his

superficial form and missed the substance, as, for example, in the

habit which arose of talking with warm-hearted familiarity of great

eighteenth-century men, and parodying their conversation. It was easy

enough to speak of Johnson as 'Grand Old Samuel,' and to hob-nob with

Swift or Sterne, seeing that, like the lion's part in _Pyramus and

Thisbe_, 'you can do it extempore, for it is nothing but roaring.'

Thackeray will always stand in the front rank of the very remarkable

array of novelists who have illustrated the Victorian era; and this

new edition is a fresh proof that his reputation is undiminished, and

will long endure.