Studies in Literature and History

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 reliquiÆ 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 mediÆvalism 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 prÉcieuse.

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 mediÆval 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 mediÆval 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 mediÆval 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 dÉnouement, 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 Æsthetic 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 scÈne, 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 mediÆval 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.

FOOTNOTES:

[10] The Works of William Makepeace Thackeray, with Biographical Introductions by his daughter, Anne Ritchie. In 13 volumes. London, 1898.—Edinburgh Review, October 1898.

[11] Now Lady Ritchie.

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