Its close
relation
to
.
.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v13
Thackeray
later novels : it has more unity and less tendency to digression,
while following his usual plan of a chronicle extending over a con-
siderable period of years. All the groups which compose its
world—the Crawleys, the Sedleys, the Osbornes, lord Steyne and
his led captains, even the O'Dowds—are united under the dazzling
influence of Becky Sharp. She gives the book the cardinal
interest which is wanting in all but one of its successors; and,
even in Esmond, that interest belongs, not to a single character,
but to the mutual relations of a group of persons. From the first
a
chapter it is evident that, if the amiability of the tale is to be the
monopoly of the fortunate and beloved Amelia, the despised and
scornful Becky will supply its dramatic excitement. Their tem-
peraments develop upon inevitable lines. Amelia, with less than
the average amount of intellect and with virtues that are mainly
negative, is the foil to Becky, who, with cleverness and courage as
her only virtues, wins more sympathy than she deserves because
these qualities are conspicuously lacking in Amelia. Her clever-
ness, it is true, defeats its own ends ; but her disasters bring her
courage and resource into play, while Amelia becomes irritable
and capricious under misfortune. Becky plays her game without
a confederate : her husband, so long as he trusts her, is merely
her blind agent. She overdoes her part in her initial experiment
with Jos Sedley. At Queen’s Crawley, her diplomacy again over-
reaches itself, and she snatches at a clandestine marriage with a
younger son, when, by waiting a little, she might have married the
father. After her marriage, she engages out of pure mischief in a
pointless liaison with Amelia's coxcomb of a husband. Her con-
quest of a reluctant society, a feat of generalship achieved by the
exercise of personal attractions and a ready wit, is rendered
useless by her disastrous relations with lord Steyne. So brilliant
has been her career up to this point that we could well be spared
the history of her later wanderings and her final assault upon Jos
Sedley's fortunes, with the dark suspicion which clouds its success.
Her cause, all through, is her own selfish comfort, but the resource-
fulness with which she champions it compels admiration. Those
who are alive to the conventional limitations of Thackeray's world
beside the primitive unrestraint of the world of Balzac's prodigal
imagination contrast her, to her disadvantage, with her contem-
porary, Valérie Marneffe.
The answer to their objections is
Becky's confession that she could have been a good woman with
five thousand a year. In spite of her hereditary drawbacks,
which Steyne coarsely flung in her face in the hour of their joint
## p. 287 (#303) ############################################
IX]
Vanity Fair
287
discomfiture, her ideal is a discreet respectability, and her intrigues
a
are the means to the attainment of an assured position. Madame
Marneffe was entirely free from any such ideal : in her most
prosperous days, there could have been no question of her unfitness
for the saloons of Gaunt house; and the decorous twilight of
Becky's retirement at Cheltenham would have been impossible for
the woman whose last aspiration was à faire le bon Dieu with the
methods that had enchained her mortal lovers. Further, while
Becky fights her own battle and Rawdon Crawley and the watch-
dog Briggs are only pawns in her game, Valérie is a deadly weapon
employed by the diabolical intelligence of Lisbeth Fischer, to whose
part in the story she is always secondary. To admit, however,
that Becky admires and covets the blamelessness of the British
matron is not to give her credit for a possible attainment of dis-
interested virtue. Sincerity is alien to her nature. The only
genuine tears which she is recorded to have shed came from her
disappointment that she had married Rawdon and missed a shorter
cut to fortune; and her only charitable act, the disclosure to
Amelia of George's infidelity, was prompted more by her irritation
at Amelia's obtuseness than by any desire to give the patient
Dobbin the reward of his long devotion.
Vanity Fair is 'a novel without a hero,' and neither the
virtues nor the vices of its characters are of a heroic order.
They are, for the most part, selfish people, bent upon following
their pleasures, if they can afford them, or devoted to the task of
keeping up appearances if they cannot. Money and rank mean
everything to Mr Osborne, with his pompous parade of dull
cynicism, to the elder Sir Pitt, who, from a consciously cynical
point of view, affects to disregard them, to his needy brother and
sister-in-law at the rectory, to his genially malicious sister at
Brighton and to his intolerable son, the would-be statesman and
stupid tyrant of his household. With rank as its only asset, the
house of Bareacres can ruin its creditors with impunity. Lord
Steyne's rank and wealth excuse his vices to a lenient world.
Upon this point, the analyst of snobbery laid almost excessive
emphasis. The spectacle of earthen pots competing in the same
stream with stouter vessels is attractive to the critical onlooker,
and the progress of so finely wrought a masterpiece as Becky,
fatal to objects of less well tempered clay, must be arrested by a
collision to which it can offer no resistance. Against lord Steyne's
invulnerable hardness and selfishness, aided by their external
advantages, Becky cannot hope to compete successfully. It was
## p. 288 (#304) ############################################
288
[CH.
Thackeray
her greatest mistake and misfortune that she could not keep out
of his way. It has become customary to contrast Steyne un-
favourably with Disraeli's more urbane portrait of lord Monmouth
in Coningsby, principally because the same nobleman suggested
both pictures. Beyond this historical identity there is not much
ground for the antithesis. Steyne plays a part in Vanity Fair
which could not have been played by Disraeli's accomplished
patron of the arts and profound man of the world, the connoisseur,
not the slave, of passion. It was necessary to make him some-
thing of a monster, to exaggerate his callous sensuality, to
accentuate his repulsive features and his hoarse 'brava. ' At the
same time, it cost Thackeray some trouble to reconcile the satyr
whose vices meet with poetic justice in the famous scene with
Becky and Rawdon, and the tyrant who bullies his wife and daughter
with a vulgarity more suited to Mr Osborne, with the nobleman
of birth and breeding who played some part in the history of his
time, and, even in the hour of his decay, sat at prince Polonia's
table, “a greater prince than any there. The irony with which his
death is recorded, with the full parade of his honours and titles, is
stinging enough in the vehemence with which it pours scorn upon
greatness without goodness; but it reminds us, also, that Steyne's
position, in the eyes of the world, could hardly have been achieved
without some qualities to compensate for the insolent debauchery
which has been offered hitherto for our exclusive contemplation.
While humour, at its best, is as keenly conscious of the pathos,
as of the ludicrous aspect, of life, the humourist's sense of the
ludicrous, as we have seen in the case of The Great Hoggarty
Diamond, is apt to check his unreserved appreciation of the
pathetic. A betrayed and suffering Clarissa was beyond Thackeray:
the Little Sister of Philip, his nearest approach to this type of
character, has an appreciation of comedy which goes far to com-
pensate her for her misfortunes. Where his virtuous personages
are without a sense of comedy, they are without heroic qualities.
They submit too readily to circumstances : they lay themselves
down willingly to be passed over by the less scrupulous. It may
be suspected that Thackeray originally intended to make Amelia
as consistently lovable as her schoolfellows found her. But, as
the character developed, it resisted all his efforts to conceal the
growing distaste which he felt for its insipidity, and he took no
pains to protect her against the inevitable contrast with Becky.
As a family, the Sedleys, who live easily in the sunshine, offer no
resistance to misfortune; and Amelia, widowed and reduced to a
## p. 289 (#305) ############################################
] IX
Vanity Fair
289
narrow existence, loses her charm. When Thackeray mentions her
with affection, it is with the perfunctory appreciation which the
conscientious person feels it right to pay to deserving characters
with whom he is out of sympathy. No good intentions can
conceal that she is stupid. With regard to her long-suffering
admirer Dobbin, while Thackeray rated his constancy and self-
effacement at their full value, he laid excessive stress upon his
awkwardness and shyness. It is one thing to be reminded that
the unpolished Dobbin is of more sterling worth than the graceful
George Osborne, that he is a gentleman and Osborne is not; but
the contrast is pressed home too hard. The very name Dobbin
is against any exalted exhibition of heroism; and, while it is
honest William's fate to feel too deeply, his outward man is
always getting in the way and affording material for the satire or
impatience of less obtrusive and more superficially accomplished
people. Again, lady Jane Crawley has too much of the silly
simplicity of the animal alluded to in her maiden name. She
rises to the occasion when her brother-in-law needs her help, but
her conduct in that famous scene is strikingly at variance with
her usual passivity, and the transformation which it works upon
the brutalised Rawdon is almost as surprising as one of those
passages in Beaumont and Fletcher or Massinger, where the pure
heroine confounds the ruffian of the piece by an unexpected
assertion of her persuasive influence. When she follows up this
action by daring to defy Sir Pitt, she is less of a ministering angel
and more of a woman; but, even then, her show of temper is
hardly in keeping with the abnormal docility with which she
bears the yoke of her marriage to a fool. Thackeray's suscepti-
bility to the inherent beauty of the common relationships and
duties of daily life is declared in many passages of exquisite prose,
which turn the laughter of one moment into the tears of the next;
but, in dealing with characters which depend for their life upon
their capacity for such sentiment, he was hampered by the un-
comfortable consciousness that it is from similar material that
the cheap effects of sentimental fiction are produced. And the
sentimental reader, feeling this restraint and failing to see the
open dislike of mere sickliness and lachrymosity which causes it,
attributes it to a persistent tendency to underrate goodness, and
dismisses Thackeray as a cynic laughing in his sleeve at qualities
of which this type of critic can appreciate only the unreal shadow.
The objective and impartial nature of Thackeray's character-
drawing must be clear to any reader of Vanity Fair who watches
19
a
E. L. XIII.
CH, IX.
## p. 290 (#306) ############################################
290
[CH.
Thackeray
the effect upon himself of the gradual unrolling of the careers
of its principal personages. They come before us like the casual
acquaintances of ordinary life: we may feel instinctive affinities
or repulsions, but we suspend our judgment till we get to know
them better, with the consciousness that the novelist is in the
same position as ourselves. As he writes, his characters discover
themselves to him: he becomes the interpreter of events which
lie beyond his conscious control. If this is obvious in Vanity
Fair, it is even more obvious in Pendennis, the opening number
of which was published in November 1848. Ostensibly a biography
of Arthur Pendennis, written in the third person by himself, its
interest lies not so much in the hero, whose importance chiefly
depends upon the close resemblance of his early career to Thacke-
ray's own, as in the world of individual types which passes under
his eye. Pendennis is a careless young gentleman, quite satisfied
with himself and the world, running out of one escapade into
another with the assurance that all will come right in the end,
and fully aware that, in the event of bankruptcy of fortune or
reputation, he has the fund of his mother's and cousin's affection
to draw upon.
Thackeray's early Bohemianism and humorous
appreciation of follies of which, doubtless, he had had his own share
tinged the portrait with leniency, but Pendennis is so sure of his
position as a lord of creation that only his talent as a chronicler
preserves our patience with him. Of the persons most intimately
concerned with him, his mother and Laura, perhaps, fill more space
than their individualities actually claim. It is a foregone con-
clusion that, even though the early admiration of the little girl
for her patronising cousin gives way to criticism of the spoiled
darling who takes his mother's love as his unquestioned birthright,
Laura will be ready, eventually, to take him to her heart. She is,
however, natural, not without charm and a faithful portrait of
maidenly propriety without a shadow of prudish insincerity.
By the side of Blanche Amory, that bundle of diverting affectations
mingled with shrewishness and sinister vulgarity, Laura does not.
suffer the eclipse into which Amelia falls by the side of Becky.
Helen, on the other hand, is inconceivably good. Only her British
prejudices, which occasionally provoke her into human annoyance,
save her from a perfection unattainable by human nature. Her
patience, indeed, is not so extraordinarily tolerant as that of
Adeline in La Cousine Bette, whose incurable habit of forgiveness
is almost a vice, nor, in an atmosphere whose moral values are
pitched in a more normal key, has it to face trials so colossal; but it
## p. 291 (#307) ############################################
IX]
Pendennis
291
is so unvarying that her son was almost justified in regarding it as a
fair object for provocation. The wisdom of motherhood is sacrificed
to Helen's saintly forbearance: in a mother less super-human,
resentment might have added its embittering force to affection,
but Helen continues to idolise her son. The society of his sister-
in-law must have been an intolerable strain upon major Pendennis,
the one person who is capable of making the debonair Arthur
thoroughly ashamed of himself—for Laura's efforts are discount-
able in the certainty of her eventual condonation of the prodigal.
The major is the leading portrait of the novel. He is the first
person who appears in it, and, from the time when he intervenes
in his nephew's love affair with Miss Fotheringay, his worldly
wisdom is at hand to provide the wayward Arthur with help from
a more practical, if less innocent, point of view than that of Helen. ·
His philosophy of life, founded upon the contemplation of a
society of which his friend lord Steyne was a chief ornament, is
not exalted; but its cynical expression does not prevent a respect
for less worldly ideals, not without some surprise at those who
prefer them, from intruding into his conduct and conversation.
As ambassador and mentor he displays consummate tact. He
knows his part too well to treat his pupil as a mere child or to show
his apprehensions to the opponents whom he has to disarm by
conciliation and adroit flattery. His prompt recognition of the
shrewd Foker as a man of the world at once enlists the services
of that connoisseur in human nature, whose own philosophy is
doomed to suffer defeat under the killing glances of Blanche
Amory. The attempt of Morgan to blackmail the major,
although, in itself, a somewhat theatrical episode, the object of
which is to help in unravelling the complications of the chief
characters, brings out conclusively the major's ability to fight his
own battles.
Plot is a somewhat negligible quantity in Pendennis, and
the part played by the ruffianly Altamont, Amory, or Armstrong,
in bringing the story to a satisfactory conclusion, is purely con-
ventional. The Clavering household, whose unstable fortunes he
threatens, is our means of communication with the Chevalier
Strong, the most gallant and lovable of Thackeray's adventurers,
and with the Begum, an excellent study in innocently vulgar
amiability; but the debauched and hysterical Sir Francis is too
contemptible to be interesting, and Blanche's poses are too patent
to have been tolerable in real life. Blanche, however, is prolific
in amusement, and Thackeray devoted himself to enlarging upon
19-2
## p. 292 (#308) ############################################
292
Thackeray
[CH.
her traits with that power of ludicrous invention which he exercised
upon the objects that diverted him most. It was at this time that
he was beginning to produce his Christmas Books, and the types
described and drawn by pen and pencil in Mrs Perkins's Ball and
Our Street, with mingled truth and extravagance, are to be
recognised over and over again in his longer works. Without the
fixity of plan with which Balzac created a coherent world in
La Comédie Humaine, Thackeray liked to allow the characters
of one novel to move across the scene of another and to invest
them with the bond of interest in a common society. This was
done casually and without strict attention to accuracy, and, as
time went on, with much less inventive power. The variety and
freshness of Pendennis, however, are remarkable. While it includes
a character so extravagant as the French cook Mirobolant, with
his ideal passion for Blanche and his consecration of his art to her
virginal allurements, it introduces us, also, to the premature sage
Harry Foker, in his flowered dressing-gown, 'neat, but not in the
least gaudy,' to the genial and disreputable Costigan, who was to
rouse colonel Newcome's indignation at a later day, to the forlornly
a
faithful Bows, to captain Shandon, who, modelled upon Thackeray's
knowledge of the versatile Maginn, presided over the inception of
Pendennis's Pall Mall Gazette, and to George Warrington, scholar
and humourist, concealing the tragedy of his life and, somewhat
ineffectually, his noble tenderness and selfishness beneath a gruff
uncouthness of exterior.
The History of Henry Esmond, published in 1852, is connected
with Pendennis by the very slight bond of its hero's relationship
to George Warrington. Thackeray had already displayed his
predilection for history in Barry Lyndon and in the historical
setting of portions of Vanity Fair. In Esmond, he applied his
powers to a drama of the close of the seventeenth and beginning
of the eighteenth century, with a wide knowledge of the social and
literary history of the age. He was guilty of a certain number of
anachronisms; for, while Scott's lordly inattention to chronology
was not acceptable to Thackeray's idea of the historical novel, his
conscientiousness did not carry him to the length of verifying
his references with the painful care of George Eliot. But he had
an advantage over other writers of historical fiction in the fact
that his style adapted itself admirably to the art of telling a tale of
the past in language suited to the supposed time of action. The
love of Esmond for Beatrix, his gradual disillusionment, his recog-
nition of the love that may be his for the asking, are told in
## p. 293 (#309) ############################################
IX]
Esmond
293
language that is no mere attempt to recover the vanished graces
of an archaic literary form, but is Thackeray's own spontaneous
English, always akin to that of his eighteenth-century models, and
wrought by his vivid imagination of the past into conformity with
the style of his chosen period. Esmond, even in using the third
person, has a difficult story to tell; for the situation on which his
narrative is founded is a change of sentiment in a heart as honour-
able as that of Dobbin, and it is further complicated by the fact
that his marriage with lady Castlewood, after his long devotion to
her daughter, is not that retreat upon a sure stronghold which
Pendennis, after his flirtation with Blanche, made to the willing
Laura, but is the true reward of his deserts. Thackeray's com-
plete sympathy with his hero enables Esmond to tell the story
without affectation or egotism: it even surmounted the dangers of
the delicate experiment of making daughter and mother the suc-
cessive objects of the same man's love. His restrained humour,
which allowed him to smile compassionately at Esmond's infatua-
tion for Beatrix, endowed him with the double gift of seeing life
through Esmond's eyes and from his own point of view at the
same time; and, where Esmond must, of necessity, exercise reti-
cence at the risk of being misunderstood, Thackeray's appreciation
of the position suggests those touches and turns of phrase which
reveal the truth. If Esmond was misled by the fen-fire of Beatrix's
attractions, there are few of his readers who, on the first sight
of Beatrix descending the staircase, candle in hand, in all the
splendour of her young beauty, have not fallen under that spell.
And its removal, as he awakens to her heartlessness and mercenary
ambition, is told with a warmth of sentiment, far removed from
sentimentality, which carries the reader with it. This story of
love and self-sacrifice, set in an atmosphere of history which has
its unobtrusive influence upon the plot, is the most perfectly
conceived and carried out of Thackeray's novels. The style, if
more carefully studied than usual, shows no abatement of its
charm. Seldom in English literature has the emotion founded
upon the ties of relationship and friendship in everyday life, and
hard to describe because it is natural and common, been touched
80 skilfully or with such truth to nature as in the gentle gravity
of Henry Esmond; and even the most intransigent sceptic, with
Esmond before him, is forced to confess that its 'cynical' author
had visions of a world of which meanness and pretentiousness were
not the ruling passions.
During the period from 1847 to 1852, Thackeray reached the
2
## p. 294 (#310) ############################################
294
[CH.
Thackeray
height of his fame. Vanity Fair had brought him into sudden
renown, and, from that time, he shared with Dickens the pre-
eminence in contemporary fiction. In 1846, after six years of
living in lodgings, first in Jermyn street and afterwards at
88 St James's street, where most of Vanity Fair was written,
he made a home for himself and his daughters at a house in
Young street, Kensington, from which he moved, in 1853, to
36 Onslow square. Until 1852, he continued to be a frequent
contributor to Punch, and, at this time, his ingenuity in writing
light verse, abounding in quaint rimes and ludicrous conceits,
was freely exercised. If The Ballads of Policeman X are not
poetry, they are, at any rate, some of the most spontaneous
expressions in rime of the humour which can find food for
merriment in the prose of ordinary life ; and Thackeray's more
serious verse, unambitious of the higher achievements of lyric
poetry, embodies a kindly philosophy, fostered by his favourite
Horace, which touches the deeper chords of feeling lightly and
gracefully. From Christmas to Christmas appeared the series
of books beginning in 1847 with Mrs Perkins's Ball, in which
Mr Titmarsh commented, with the aid of his pencil, upon the
eccentricities of his social surroundings. In 1850, the same guile-
less author took his readers abroad in The Kickleburys on the
Rhine and excelled his earlier Legend of the Rhine in Rebecca
and Rowena, to which Richard Doyle supplied the illustrations.
The versatile Michael Angelo himself, however, illustrated the last
and best of Christmas Books, The Rose and the Ring (1855), a
perpetual joy to the 'great and small children’ to whom it was
dedicated. Fresh from the writing of Pendennis, Thackeray, in
1851, succumbed to the temptation of lecturing. His lectures
entitled The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century,
first delivered at Willis's rooms in the summer of that year, and
in America, at the end of 1852 and beginning of 1853, were,
financially, very profitable. As criticism, they can hardly be said
to do justice to the literary side of their subjects: they are simply
Thackeray's impressions of men whom he judged through their
works as he judged the characters of his novels. The simple
rule of life which he laid down with earnest emphasis in the
epilogue to Dr Birch and his Young Friends,
Who misses, or who wins the prize ?
Go, lose and conquer as you can:
But if you fail, or if you rise,
Be each, pray God, a gentleman,
## p. 295 (#311) ############################################
IX]
Lectures
295
is not, however, a safe criterion for the impartial estimate of
literary worth. Thackeray's severe condemnation of Swift is more
than unjust : his disgust with Sterne's indecency and habit of
pose naturally obscures his discernment of the qualities which
made Tristram Shandy an influence far beyond the bounds of
England; while the author of Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones
needs no defence because he shared the habits of his age. The
moralist was too prominent in his second series of lectures,
The Four Georges, delivered in the United States and London
in 1855 and 1856. Thackeray could not fail to be interesting
in his dealings with the eighteenth century. But the memory
of George IV bad not yet passed into the remoteness of history,
and, by training and conviction, Thackeray belonged to the party
which had seen in George the Good, the Magnificent, the Great'
an object for savage detestation ; and, if the loyalty with
l
which Scott bent before his august patron in his lifetime was
extravagant, it was, at any rate, mingled with an appreciation
of his princely tastes and qualities to which Thackeray was
blind.
Meanwhile, The Newcomes had run its serial course from
October 1853 to August 1855, under the ostensible editorship of
Pendennis, domesticated with his Laura and fortified by personal
experience in the task of piloting stormy youth to the sheltered
haven of middle life. The habit of digression is more confirmed
in The Newcomes than in any previous work; but one can hardly
blame the desultoriness which elaborated the sympathetic portrait
of Florac and strayed from the main current of the story to enlarge
• upon the wiles of the duchesse d'Ivry. The manifold happenings
of the novel have their centre in the fortunes of Clive Newcome,
and the device by which these are saved, the discovery of a will
in a book, is mechanical. But Clive himself is much the least
a
interesting member of his family: his excellent instincts, frequent
errors and alternations of mood between gaiety and sulkiness
excite sympathy, but the character is a type of which Thackeray
had written much under other names, and its individual strength
is not enough to obscure the fact that it exists for other purposes
than its own sake. The contrast between the stately Sir Brian
and the agricultural Hobson, the oblique references of Mrs Hobson
in Bryanstone square to lady Ann in Park lane, the impecunious
Honeyman's devices for his own precarious comfort, and the
devotion of his admirable sister to the comfort of others, are
individual traits of a stronger kind than any which Clive possesses.
## p. 296 (#312) ############################################
296
Thackeray
[ch.
The unpleasant Barnes is too much of a monster : his brutality,
amounting to insanity, is somewhat overdrawn to balance the
virtues of the more deserving branch of his family. His maternal
relations, however, his grandmother lady Kew and his cousin the
earl, play a more natural part in the tale. Kew, faults and all, is
honourable and lovable, and lady Kew is the most perfectly drawn
of Thackeray's worldly and cynical old women, sometimes almost
terrible in their disregard of scruple and in the tyranny with
which they alleviate the dreariness of their old age. But, if lady
Kew is intimidating, she is, at all events, a more pleasant object
of contemplation than Clive's vulgar mother-in-law, Mrs Mackenzie,
whose transformation from a scheming but commonplace widow
of some attractions in her better days to the compound of harpy
and fury of her days of adversity makes some of the later chapters
of the book intolerably painful. As for her daughter, the ill-
fated Rosey, perplexed between her mother's violence and Clive's
moodiness, her individuality is that of the light-hearted nonentity
of ordinary life, who needs the stay of a perfect devotion to support
her through the troubles she is incapable of meeting on her
own account.
But the colonel and Ethel are the two portraits on which the
fame of The Newcomes rests. Ethel, if her artistic presentation is
less striking than that of Becky Sharp and Beatrix, redeems
Thackeray from the charge of inability to draw a good woman.
Amelia was inferior and insignificant, Laura was shadowy, Helen
could have been effectual only as an angel and even lady Castle-
wood was better suited to another sphere than a troublesome
world . which tried her temper. Ethel is perfectly adapted to our
planet: she has her caprices and contradictory moods, all the
capacity for making mistakes and inflicting unconscious injury
which belongs to pride and high spirits. The trouble which she
can cause to others is fully atoned for by the unhappiness which
she can inflict on herself; and the period of trial through which she
passes strengthens a nature too true and honourable to be deluded
and spoiled by flattery and by ambition of the mere externals of
Colonel Newcome's character, on the other hand, is free
from the complications which beset Ethel. From the evening
when he rebuked old Costigan at the Cave of Harmony to the last
scene when 'he, whose heart was as that of a little child, had
answered to his name, and stood in the presence of the Master,'
his attitude to the world is perfectly simple. It cannot be said
that he is drawn entirely without blemishes. He had knowledge
## p. 297 (#313) ############################################
IX]
The Newcomes
297
>
of the world, and the trustfulness which survived this knowledge is
sometimes incredible; in his period of financial success, he runs the
risk of being condemned as ostentatious. It was a dangerous experi-
ment to put so guileless a chevalier in the position of a promoter of
a fraudulent company; and it might be argued that his martyrdom
at the hands of Mrs Mackenzie is a cruel expedient adopted to
enhance the effect of a nobly pathetic climax. However this may
.
be, the colonel's simplicity, detestable to Barnes Newcome, mere
quixotism in the eyes of Sir Brian and Hobson, wins the instinctive
respect and love of all who, like Ethel, Martha Honeyman, Florac
and the erratic Frederick Bayham, are capable of generous
emotion. His character responds to those ideals which were the
contemporary theme of the poetry of Tennyson ; it awakened the
enthusiasm, expressed by Burne-Jones, of the young band of poets
and artists who were producing The Oxford and Cambridge
Magazine ; and it endowed English literature with the most life-
like picture of a man governed in all his actions by an absolutely
direct sense of honour and duty, with a complete absence of
self-consciousness.
In July 1857, Thackeray followed colonel Newcome's example
by standing as a liberal candidate for a seat in parliament. The
electors of Oxford rejected him by 67 votes, thereby doing
probably little disservice to politics. His best work in letters had
been done, it is true. His fund of invention was not inexhaustible,
and, in his early journalistic work, he had shown a tendency to
repeat himself, even in his fertile gift of coining appropriate
names for his humorous types. The Virginians, appearing in
serial parts from November 1857 to September 1859, was a
chronicle of the descendants of Henry Esmond, the American
Warringtons to whom Pendennis's friend traced his ancestry.
There is no falling-off in the matter of style. Thackeray wrote
as freely as ever, dropping, with all his accomplished ease, from
narrative into reflective digressions, which, if they interrupt the
story, are, themselves, as lightly broken off in turn. The general
construction, however, is even more careless than usual, and there
are portions of the book in which the situations are so prolonged
that action seems to hang fire altogether. The brothers George
and Harry Warrington are spectators, as their grandfather had
been, of stirring historical events; but the elements of history and
fiction are less successfully blended than in Esmond. Washington
and Wolfe are felt as excrescences upon the story: that one is the
friend and adviser of Madam Warrington and the other the
## p. 298 (#314) ############################################
298
[CH.
Thackeray
intimate of the father of Theo and Hetty Lambert is not enough to
give them an indispensable connection with the chief actors. The
exigencies of the historical setting are so severely felt that the
concluding chapters are little more than an appendix devoted to
the American war of independence. Moreover, while the grand-
sons of colonel Esmond are two very pretty young men, united,
even when outwardly opposed, by a firm bond of sincere affection,
it must be owned that Harry, with some of George's brains, would
have been less of a blockhead, and George, with a compensating
quantity of Harry's insouciance, would escape the imputation of
being something of a prig. Theo and Hetty are charming ex-
amples of a type which Thackeray, devotedly attached to his own
daughters, drew with tender affection. But, without the family of
Castlewood, The Virginians would be a pale and fatigued per-
formance after Esmond and The Newcomes. After Harry, standing
upon the bridge at Castlewood, has seen his cousins return to their
home in their coach-and-six, followed by the chariot that bore the
baroness Bernstein, 'a stout, high-coloured lady, with a very dark
pair of eyes,' and has received their dubious welcome to the house
of his ancestors, the long digression in which the antecedents of
his visit to England are related finds us impatient to know more
of the children of the boy to whom Esmond had unswervingly
resigned his own rightful inheritance. The sins of the fathers
have overtaken the children : lord Castlewood is a polite swindler,
his brother Will is a boor and blackleg, while his sisters have
achieved a notoriety conspicuous even in an age tolerant of
scandal. Nevertheless, the fortunes of this doomed household
awaken interest and pity. Lord Castlewood retains his breeding
and has not wholly renounced acquaintance with the virtues
which he does not practise ; while lady Maria's frustrated attempt
to ensnare her young and susceptible cousin with her autumnal
attractions, and her eventual infatuation for the actor whom she
marries are the theme of a comedy with a strong element of
pathos. But the presiding genius of the house, malignantly open-
eyed to its faults, sardonically resigned to the destiny which she
has chosen of her own freewill, but determined that the grandson
of the man whose love she has rejected shall not be condemned to
share the limbo of vanished fortunes and ruined reputations which
is her own refuge, is baroness Bernstein. At the end of Esmond,
Beatrix had made her choice, and the baroness, after many years,
is still Beatrix, with her beauty gone and ambition defeated,
but with her intelligence sharpened and with an undisguised
## p. 299 (#315) ############################################
IX]
The Virginians and Philip
299
consciousness, quite distinct from remorse, of the relative value
of the lot which she has renounced and the risks which she has
preferred. Her influence is the most powerful factor in deter-
mining the course of events in The Virginians, and, with the
moving scene in which she passes out of life, revealing in her
delirium the hopes and fears which had agitated her at the crisis
of her youth, the real interest of the book is over.
The first number of The Cornhill Magazine, under Thackeray's
editorship, was published in January 1860, containing the first
instalment of Lovel the Widower, a short story closely akin to
Thackeray's early essays in fiction, and the first of Roundabout
Papers, discursive essays in which his genius for embroidering
a fabric of mingled satire and sentiment upon a ground of casual
reminiscence surpassed itself. Thackeray had not the unworldli-
ness of Elia, nor had his style that magical kinship to poetry and
that power of giving new currency to the gold of the past which
place that most lovable of essayists above all rivals ; but the man
of the world who unburdens himself of his wisdom with colloquial
ease, commenting upon the contradictions and humours of every-
day life with a sympathy born of self-knowledge, wins the affection
even of those who are a little afraid of his keen criticism. His
last complete novel, The Adventures of Philip, was contributed in
serial instalments to The Cornhill of 1862. For the subject of this,
he returned to the characters of A Shabby Genteel Story. The
deceived Caroline re-appears as the Little Sister, the hero of the
story is the son of her seducer, whose shiftiness and heartlessness
have not grown less with years, and the Tom Tufthunt who per-
formed the mock marriage of Caroline to Brandon attempts, as
the drunken blackmailer Tufton Hunt, to wreck the peace of the
leading characters. As in The Newcomes, the urbane influence of
Pendennis checks the whirlwind of the hero's passion. No one,
however, who has known Clive Newcome will find much that is
new in Philip Firmin, whose bearishness and tactlessness, however,
are individual outgrowths of a mercurial temperament. The
cousin of the piece, unlike Ethel, is fundamentally heartless and
fickle; and Philip finds his happiness, where Clive missed it, in
the incidental lady of the drama. While his mother-in-law,
Mrs Baynes, is as great a virago as Mrs Mackenzie, he has not
to endure the martyrdom of a poverty-stricken life under the lash
of her tongue; and Charlotte is more nearly related to Theo and
Hetty Lambert than to the inane Rosey. With all these qualifi-
cations, it is impossible to feel that the book contains a new
## p. 300 (#316) ############################################
300
[CH.
Thackeray
a
character : the old pieces are arranged upon the board in a new
formation. The story drags rather slowly through its appointed
length of twelve monthly numbers, and ends with a theatrical
device, the discovery of a will in the lining of a family chariot,
which relieves Philip, as a somewhat similar discovery relieved
Clive, from all financial cares. But, in The Newcomes, this event is
redeemed by the true climax of the book, the colonel's death, and
to this recovery of interest Philip affords no parallel.
Thackeray's last work of fiction, Denis Duval, was left un-
finished at his death. The incomplete story was printed in
The Cornhill during the first half of 1864.
Its close relation to
.
historical events resembles that of Esmond: in this instance, the
chief actors, introduced through the medium of a tragic episode,
as skilfully told as the court drama in Barry Lyndon and in-
trinsically even more piteous, were intended to work out their
fortunes in the French revolution. Denis is his own autobio-
grapher : writing in the evening of his days, he looks back upon
the past with something of Esmond's subdued humour and
pity for the blind striving and wasteful passions that wear
out human life. While Thackeray struck out no new line for
himself in Denis Duval, he showed no sign of the exhaustion of
power which is evident in Philip; and the last work that came
from his hand is vigorous in conception and embodies his matured
view of life with unabated clearness and simplicity.
In his later years, Thackeray began to feel heavily the strain
of the hard and continuous labour with which he paid toll for
fame and comfort. In February 1862, while still occupied with
Philip, he moved into a house in Palace green, Kensington, which
he had rebuilt upon a scale compatible with somewhat luxurious
ideals of living. Here, he proposed to devote himself to what he
intended should be his greatest work, a history of the reign of
queen Anne. But Denis Duval came in the way of his new plan,
and, before Denis Duval was far advanced, its author died
suddenly in the early morning of the Christmas eve of 1863.
Thackeray's life is entirely bound up in his literary work. Its
great catastrophe took place before he had achieved fame and
social success, and, while it affected him deeply, did not check his
appreciation of the fullness and gaiety of existence. To his con-
temporaries, who saw the redoubtable satirist at work in his clubs,
where it was his habit to write daily in the heart of the life which
he described, he appeared a cool man of the world, ready to meet
their advances with an easy and, sometimes, formidable politeness.
## p. 301 (#317) ############################################
IX]
General Characteristics
301
The notorious character-sketch, written by Edmund Yates in 1858,
which brought about the rupture of friendly relations between
Thackeray and Dickens, expressed, with malicious resentment, the
bewilderment provoked by his superficial conversation and the
suspicion with which persons of less alert intelligence regarded
the apparent contradictions in his writings. The misunderstanding
still exists, and in more than one form. There are those, on the
one hand, who complain that Thackeray was heartless and cynical,
because he lacked a cheerful faith in the general excellence of
human nature. Others, who, from a different point of view, seem
to regard a genius for satire as precluding a sincere appreciation
of goodness, condemn his use of sentiment as a mere concession to
contemporary ideas of propriety. It is, indeed, true that his range
of character was limited compared with that of Dickens and
Balzac, and that the sentiments and actions of his people are far
more restrained by the conventions of their age and country.
But, if this be equivalent to the confession that he had less
imagination and invention than his two greatest contemporaries
in fiction, it also implies that he kept more closely than they to
the observation of the life that lay immediately beneath his notice.
His appreciation of the comedy of manners was accurate and
conscientious : he brought to his work an historic faculty which
not only enabled him to vary his operations by re-creating with
astonishing freshness the manners of a past age, but made his
novels, where they dealt with his own times, important landmarks
of fiction in its relation to contemporary manners. Even where
his characters were most akin to himself, he was able to watch
them from a detached and critical point of view, impatient of
extravagance and improbability. Combining sympathy with
criticism, he recognised that the puppets of his stage possessed
a higher value for themselves than for the impartial spectator,
that what is petty and laughable in its relation to life at large is
of serious importance to the individual. No one has seen this
double aspect of life more clearly than Thackeray. Conscious of
his own share in the imperfections of humanity, he was unable to
regard his fellows with an Olympian indifference. He varied
continually between the two points of view, different and yet hard
to distinguish. His sense of human littleness now had the upper
hand, to be succeeded, without a pause, by a revulsion of feeling,
in which the laughing philosopher trembled on the brink of tears.
These apparent contrasts and sudden variations are the per-
plexing quality of his work to the reader who prefers the ludicrous
## p. 302 (#318) ############################################
302
[CH. IX
Thackeray
and pathetic elements of life to be divided into distinct chapters,
or, at any rate, to be isolated in parallel columns. The balance
which Thackeray holds may not always be even: at times, his satire
and irony may seem wanting in sympathy, his pathetic passages
excessive in their demand upon the reader's emotions. But,
when these sides of his art in its relation to human nature are
examined as a whole, it is found that, like their prototypes in life,
they meet so closely that there is no line of demarcation between
them. And this sense of the humour of life, of the proportion in
which its elements are mingled, is conveyed by means of a style,
not, indeed, free from mannerisms and imperfections, but endowed
with a flexibility that responds at a touch to the demands of
gravity and gaiety alike, and with a freedom of flow that brings
the novelist into unstrained communication with his readers.
## p. 303 (#319) ############################################
CHAPTER X
DICKENS
THERE is a point in the consideration of the subject of the
present chapter which, though of the most obvious to uncritical,
as well as to critical, appreciation, is, perhaps, worthy of more atten-
tion in respect of criticism proper than has usually been given to it.
This point is the immense popularity of Dickens, as it is vulgarly
called, or (as it may be put in a form more critically useful) the
immense amount of pleasure which he has given to a number of
people who, from the very vastness of that number, must, neces-
sarily, have included individuals and whole sections of readers
of the most various tastes, powers and qualifications. Except
Shakespeare and Scott, there is, probably, no other English writer
who can match him in this respect. Now, mere popularity,
especially of an ephemeral kind, of course, proves nothing as to
merit; and, though it is never exactly negligible to the critic (for
he must satisfy himself as to its causes), he can scarcely allow it
to affect his judgment. But very long-continued popularity is
in a different case; and popularity which has been attained in the
case of very dissimilar classes and individuals, and, therefore, by
very dissimilar appeals, is in a different case again. These latter
kinds of popularity not only cannot be neglected, but they cannot,
without danger, be slightly recognised by the critic, and, especially,
by the historical critic.
It may be said, perhaps, that Dickens's popularity has not yet
had time, as Shakespeare's has, to vindicate itself by the test of
long continuance and some vicissitudes. More than a century
has, indeed, elapsed since his birth and nearly half a century since
his death : but instances could be produced of reputations which,
after towering for at least as long, have dropped to a much
lower level, if they have not fallen altogether. Complaints,
undoubtedly, are, sometimes, made that his atmosphere is be-
coming difficult to breathe ; and, though the lungs which feel
## p. 304 (#320) ############################################
304
Dickens
[ch.
6
this difficulty are probably rather weak, their complaint must be
registered. But, in regard to the other point, there is no possibility
of rational and well informed doubt. It is probably safe to say
(here making no exception at all and giving him no companions)
that no author in our literary history has been both admired and
enjoyed for such different reasons; by such different tastes and
intellects; by whole classes of readers unlike each other. He is
'made one with Nature,' not, indeed, by a Shakespearean univer-
sality-for there are wide, numerous and, sometimes, unfortunate
gaps in his appeal—but by the great range and diversity of
that appeal. The uncritical lover of the sentimental and the
melodramatic; the frank devotee of mere 'fun’; the people who
simply desire to pass their time by witnessing a lively and
interesting set of scenes and figures ; the respectable yearners
for social and political reform; the not quite so respectable
seekers after scandal and satire on the upper and wealthier and
more accomplished classes : these and a dozen or a hundred
other types all fly to Dickens as to a magnet. And—what is
most remarkable of all and most unparalleled in other cases—the
very critics who find it their duty to object to his faults most
strongly, who think his sentiment too often worse than mawkish,
and his melodrama not seldom more than ridiculous; who rank
his characters too close to 'character parts,' in the lower theatrical
sense; who consider his style too often tawdry; his satire strained,
yet falling short or wide of its object; his politics unpractical and,
sometimes, positively mischievous; his plots either non-existent
or tediously complicated for no real purpose ; who fully admit
the quaint unreality of his realism and the strange 'some-
other-worldliness' of much of his atmosphere—these very persons,
not unfrequently, read him for choice again and again. In fact,
neither the uncritical nor the critical lover of Dickens ever tires of
him, as both often do of some writers whom they have admired.
Some of his books will, of course, in different cases, be read oftener
than others; but, generally, the Dickens quality, mixed and diverse
as it is, never loses its attraction for anyone who has once felt it.
The road to Eatanswill is never hard or hackneyed; the company
of Mrs Gamp never ceases to be as delightful in fiction as it
would be disgusting (especially supposing her to be on duty) in
real life.
It results infallibly from these facts that the quality in
question must, as it has been called, be extraordinarily 'mixed. '
The simpler kinds of genius never attain to this result. They
6
## p. 305 (#321) ############################################
>
x]
Early Life
305
being of a ‘higher' (to use the question-begging but unavoid-
able word) strain, may create a higher satisfaction, and, as we
flatter ourselves, appeal to a higher order of mind; but this, of
itself, means limitation. And it follows that mixed genius of the
Dickens kind requires a corresponding variety of analysis to
understand itself, its causes and its manifestations.
The influence of life on literature, commonly exaggerated,
may be easily exaggerated here; but it counts solidly, if not in
a manifold fashion. Dickens's biography is familiar from one
great storehouse, Forster's Life, and from many smaller mono-
graphs of varying merit, nor does it require full handling here.
Born in the lower, rather than the upper, middle class, and sunk,
by family misfortune, at one time, to the very level poignantly
described in David Copperfield, he acquired, in his interrupted
schooldays, a very limited amount of regular education and never
enjoyed David's subsequent 'advantages. ' But he knew some-
thing of the school groundwork usual at that time, and, on his own
account, developed a keen and most fortunate fondness for the
great classics of English fiction, original or translated—Smollett,
perhaps, most of all, but, also, Fielding; Don Quixote, as well as
The Arabian Nights. After all the sordid but, eventually, genial
experiences which, later, reflect themselves in his books—the
childish schooling which provides some of the most charming
themes of his Christmas stories ; his father's prison in the Mar-
shalsea ; the dismal shabby lodgings at Camden town and in Lant
street and so forth—he got no nearer Copperfield's dignified articled
position in Doctors' Commons than a boy-clerkship in a solicitor's
office and a reportership in the Commons itself. But this last gave
him a sort of hold on the fringe of journalism, if not of literature,
and he soon fastened that hold on the garment itself. More
varied and important reportings ; Sketches by Boz, at first mainly
imitative but, even then, in part, noticeably original, led to the
great chance of Pickwick, which was taken greatly. After the
success of Pickwick, the aspect of his life presented as sharp a
contrast to its earlier phase as the often cited one which is
shown by the two parts of a portrait in a picture-cleaner's windows,
or the advertisements of a certain soap. It was, if not exactly all
,
dark, at any rate all shabby, grimy and obscure before: it was all
bright now, except for certain domestic inconveniences late in his
career. He never had any more money troubles; he never had
any lack of popularity; he worked hard, indeed : but he was
a 'glutton for work' and could choose his time, place and manner
20
6
E. L. XIII.
OH. X.
## p. 306 (#322) ############################################
306
[CH.
Dickens
of doing it after a fashion which deprives work of all, or nearly all,
its worrying effect. He found, in addition to his original and
independent work as novelist, two occupations, that of editor and
that of public reader, both of which were very profitable, while
the former of them gave exercise to his busy and rather autocratic
temper, and the latter furnished an outlet to the histrionic faculty
which was almost as strong in him as the literary. He died, it is
true, in middle age only; but after a full, glorious and, apparently,
on the whole, happy life, not, indeed, without some preliminary
illness, but without suffering from that terrible lingering failure of
faculties which had beset Scott and Southey and Moore in the
generation immediately before him. Fame and fortune after
the very earliest step, and far earlier than in most cases, had,
in almost all respects, been equally kind to him.
Not the least of these respects concerns the exact relations of
his life and his work; though qualifications begin here to be
necessary. The hardships and vicissitudes, the enforced self-
reliance of his youth, confirmed, if they did not originate, the
unflinching, undoubting adventurousness which enabled him to
turn out book after book-most of them utterly unlike anything
that had been seen before, and hardly one of them, even at its
worst, showing that fatal groove-and-mould character which besets
the novelist more than any other literary craftsman. His almost
immediate success, and the power of taking his own line which it
conferred, removed the slightest temptation to follow fashions in
any way. Neither kind of influence could have been better
contrived to nurse that indomitable idiosyncrasy which was his.
At the same time, neither, as it will at once be perceived, was
likely to contribute the counterbalancing gift which idiosyncrasy
requires—the gift of self-discipline and self-criticism. Self-
sufficiency,' unfortunately, has two meanings; and those who, in
early life, have to learn it in the one and better sense are too apt
to display it later in the other and worse. That the qualities of
what the Italians have denominated the selfelpista are not always
wholly amiable or admirable is a truism. Their dangerous side is
not likely to be effaced when the severer struggle is over almost
before the man has reached full manhood, and when, thenceforward,
he is almost as much ‘his own master' as if he were born to
independence and several thousands a year. And these qualities
themselves are well known, especially on the ethical side, though
they have seldom had such an opportunity of developing them-
selves on the aesthetic and literary as they had in Dickens's case.
## p. 307 (#323) ############################################
x]
His Contemporaries
307
Arrogance, 'cocksureness,' doubtful taste, undue indulgence in
'tricks and manners' (one naturally takes his own words to
describe him), a general rebelliousness against criticism and an
irresistible or, at least, unresisted tendency to do it again'
when something has been found objectionable—these things, and
a still more general tendency to exaggerate, to "force the
note,' to keep one's own personality constantly in the fore-
ground', are among necessary consequences of the situation. If
a man of this stamp is, for his own good fortune and the world's,
endowed with a great inventive genius, it would, according to
some critics, be actually possible to forecast, and it certainly
is, according to, perhaps, safer and saner views, not at all
surprising to find, a result of work such as that which Dickens
has actually given. Let us follow the method of these latter
critics and examine the work itself with the least prolix but most
necessary preface as to the historical circumstances in which he
began.
To understand his position thoroughly, it must be remembered
that, when he began to write, Scott had been dead for some years
and Jane Austen for nearly twenty ; that no one had yet seriously
tried to fit on the mantle of the latter in the domain of the domestic
novel; that Scott's had been most unsuccessfully attempted by men
like Ainsworth and James; that new special varieties had been
introduced by Bulwer, Marryat, Lever and others; but that
nothing of absolutely first class quality had been achieved. The
most popular novelist of Dickens's younger manhood was, however,
none of these, but a man who produced work not so good as that
of even the worst of them-Theodore Hook. That Hook's novels,
as well as Leigh Hunt's essays, had immense influence on Sketches
by Boz few critical readers of the three will deny; and that the
habit of the essayist as well as that of the novelist clung to
Dickens, much better things than Sketches-such as The Un-
commercial Traveller and not a few oddments up to the very
close of his career-remain to attest. Both, as well as his earlier
1 Dickens's way of doing this is curious and easy to feel, though not so easy to
analyse. He is not always drawing costune'-portraits of himself, like Byron :
it is difficult to think of one of his characters (for Copperfield is only so in childish
externals and literary success later) who is at all like himself or could have been
meant for himself. He does not meditate himself' before our eyes as, in different
ways, do Fielding and Lamb and Thackeray. And yet, in most of the books (Pickwick
is the great exception and, perhaps, this is not the least of its merits), there is a constant
and, sometimes, an uneasy feeling of the showman behind the curtain. We are not
allowed to forget all about him and to amuse ourselves frankly,' as Émile de
Girardin said to Théophile Gautier, about the other matter of style.
6
202
## p. 308 (#324) ############################################
308
[CH.
Dickens
favourite, Smollett", were his masters in the comparatively little
used art of minute description of 'interiors' and setting. Hook
gave him the tone of caricature and extravaganza: Hunt that
of easy intimate talk.
But he added to these “the true Dickens,' and it is difficult,
even for those who hold, with the greatest tenacity, to the historical
view of literature, to believe that this true Dickens would not have
made its way without any patterns at all, though it may be that
they gave that mysterious start or suggestion which is sometimes,
if not always, necessary. What is certain is that they hindered
almost as much as they helped ; and that some of the faults of the
later and greater books are not unfairly traceable to their influence;
while it was some considerable time before he got free from relapses
into mere bad imitation of them. To appreciate this, it is necessary
to pay more attention to the early Sketches than has sometimes
been given to them. Dickens himself wisely refrained from re-
printing any of them except the Boz division, which, though it is
the earliest, contains, also, by far the best work. But the student,
if not the general reader, must submit himself to the perusal
not merely of these, but of Sketches of Young Gentlemen,
Sketches of Young Couples and The Mudfog Papers, which the
ruthless resurrectionists of literature have unearthed. There is,
indeed, hardly anything that is good in these ; the best of them are
weak copies of papers by Hunt and others of the older generation;
survivals of the old stock character'; newspaper 'Balaam' (as the
cant phrase then went) of the thinnest and dreariest kind. Yet,
some, if not all, of them were written after The Pickwick Papers
and alongside of the greater part of the earlier novels. They-or,
rather, the critical or uncritical spirit which allowed him to write
them-account for the clumsy and soon discarded framework of
Master Humphrey's Clock: and their acceptance of the type by
one who, in his better moods, was one of the most individual and
individualising of writers, never quite effaces itself from his work
to the very end; while, in the Mudfog group, at least, the habit
of exaggerated and overdriven irony (or, rather, attempt at irony)
which, unfortunately, was to increase, is manifest. These things,
though, as has been pointed out, not exactly novice-work, are such
obvious 'slips of the pen’on a large scale that one is almost
1 Attempts have been made to deny the connection, chiefly on the ground that
Dickens was of the order of Abou ben Adhem, and loved his fellow men,' while
Smollett did not. This, if true, could be of little or no literary importance : and,
as a matter of fact, Smollett, though possessed of a savage pen, seems to have had
habits the reverse of uncharitable.
6
:
## p. 309 (#325) ############################################
x]
Sketches
309
ashamed to speak of them seriously. Yet, after all, they form part
of the dossier—the body of documents in the case—which every
honest historical critic and student has to examine.
There is very much better matter in the Boz Sketches
themselves, though their immaturity and inequality are great,
and were frankly acknowledged by the author himself, whose fault
was certainly not excess of modesty. The patterns are even more
obvious; but the vigour and versatility are far greater, and the
addition to the title “illustrative of everyday life and everyday
people’ is justified in a fashion for which Hunt had not strength
enough, which Hook's inveterate tendency to caricature and charge
precluded him from attaining and which the lapse of nearly a
century throws out of comparison with Smollett. The best of them
are real studies for the finished pictures of the novels; and the
author rarely attempts the sentimentalism, the melodrama and
the fine writing which were to be snares for him later. There
are not many things more curious in critical enquiry, of what may
be called the physiological or biological sort, than the way in
which Our Parish' shows the future novelist. It is, to a large
extent, made up of studies of the type kind above described and
not commended; but these are connected, if not by any plot, by a
certain community of characters, and even by some threads of
incident; and, accordingly, things become far more alive and the
shadow of the coming novelist falls on the mere sketch-writer. The
scenes are still Leigh-Huntian in general scheme; but they are drawn
with a precision, a verve and an atmosphere of, at least, plausible
realism which Hunt could not reach. Of the ‘Tales' (so called),
Dickens himself was rather ashamed; and no wonder. None,
perhaps, has the merit of Hook's best short stories, such as Gervase
Skinner; the subjects are, sometimes, thin for the lengths; and
a certain triviality is not deniable, especially in the longer efforts
about boardinghouse society and the like. But the teller can, at
other times, tell; conventions pass, now and then, into vivid touches
of, at least, low life; there is, occasionally, fun which does not
always mean mere horseplay; there is, almost always, the setting
of the scenes adapted to show up whatever incident there may be? .
Still, neither in the larger, earlier and better, nor in the
smaller, later and worse, collection of these Sketches is there
anything of that 'true Dickens' which is a more remarkable
idiosyncrasy than even what Browning meant when he used the
1 The • Parliamentary Sketch,' especially the admirable description of 'Bellamy's'
is, perhaps, the best of all; but this is not a tale.
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310
[CH.
Dickens
>
words. It is, again, a curiosity of historical criticism to note that,
while in Thackeray's nearly contemporary and similarly 'Hookish
attempts, such as The Professor, there are immature, but quite
perceptible, traces of the special quality which was to need seven
years' hard labour and constant failure to mature it, there is in
Dickens's big volume of early sketches hardly anything of the
astonishing 'quiddity' which was to reveal itself at once in The
Pickwick Papers. There are some of the externals ready, there is
something of the framework and machinery—of the plant’; more
than something of the sentiment, opinion and the like; but nothing
whatever of the strange phantasmagoric spirit of life? which was
now, apparently, by a sudden daemonic impulse to be breathed
into what had been hitherto simply puppets. It has been com-
plained, with what justice we may consider later, that Dickens's
folk, at their greatest and best, are not exactly, in the Falstaffian
phrase, 'men [and women) of this world. ' But, up to this time,
they had been trying to be so and had been more or less pale
copies of such. They now become conscious living beings of
a world of their own; varying, of course, in power, gift, appeal,
like creatures of any world, but seldom without flashes of their
peculiar life ; while, at times, and at their best, they are creations
and such creations as had never been seen in literature before and
have never been seen since, whether anything like them has been
seen in this life or not. And it adds to the curiosity that the
actual opening of Pickwick itself promises little or nothing of this.
The club scene and debate with their stock machinery; the parody,
smart enough but rather facile and rather overdone, of parliament
and the like might easily have been a Boz sketch. The second
chapter opens with another parody of Fielding which promises
little more.
But the journey from Goswell street to the
Golden Cross (though this, too, links itself with the red cab'
driver in Boz) is big with quite new suggestions and possibilities;
and even before Jingle elbows himself in, still more when he takes
further root (though he, too, is Hook's debtor to an extent which few
people know) we are in the new world—never (not even in Hard
Times) to be entirely shut out of it until death performs the
ungracious office and leaves Edwin Drood not half told.
Whether Dickens was himself conscious of this sudden and,
as it were, miraculous transformation nowhere (speaking under
correction) appears. But he has, in a way however circular and
1 Producing those droppolai or effluences of humanity happily described by Lewis
Campbell, see, ante, vol. xn. p. 220.
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The Pickwick Papers
311
cryptic, registered the time of its occurrence in the famous phrase
'I thought of Mr Pickwick,' when telling how he brushed aside the
proposals of his publishers for what was, in fact, a stale competition
with the already popular Mr Jorrocks, and substituted his own.
As has been hinted, there are signs of his not having thought of
Mr Pickwick ’ in the full sense quite at once—signs which are not
entirely accounted for by, though they are not inconsistent with, his
equally wellknown apology about the salient absurdities of a
man's character being noticeable first. Probably, Seymour's death
relieved him rather of something like a clog than (as was suggested,
illiberally but inevitably, at the time and denied by him with his
usual over-sensitiveness) of an inconvenient suggestion of the
general idea. At any rate, how it happened we do not and cannot
know; that it happened, we know and ought to be truly thankful
for. There is no book like Pickwick anywhere ; it is almost
(extravagant as the saying may seem) worth while to read the
wretched imitations of it in order to enjoy the zest with which one
comes back to the real, though fantastically real, thing. The
diversity of Dickens's clients is nowhere better illustrated than
in the case of this, his first, and, as some think, his greatest, book.
Those much to be commiserated people, on the other hand, who
do not like it may be said to consist of two classes only-classes
each well worth the consideration of the historical student of
literature. The first, which has existed from the beginning and
must always exist, consists of those who cannot relish pure fun-
fantastic humour which cares nothing for probability, consistency,
chronology (the chronology of Pickwick has long been a favourite
subject for the amazement of the serious and the amusement of
others) and is not in the least afraid of invading those confines
of nonsense which Hazlitt proudly and wisely claimed as the
appanage and province of every true Englishman. For these, of
course, nothing can be done. They may or must be looked at
(whether with humility, respect, contempt, pity or thankfulness
matters little) and passed.
These, however, are a constant body at all times. The other
class varies much more with times and seasons, and is, therefore,
of greater historical interest. It consists of those who feel, not
exactly a critical or rational objection to the author's methods and
results, but a half aesthetic and half intellectual incapacity to
adjust themselves to his means, his atmosphere and what is
sometimes called his milieu. These persons appear (for what
reasons, educational or other, it would be irrelevant to enquire)
## p. 312 (#328) ############################################
312
Dickens
[ch.
to be particularly numerous just now. The combination of near
and far in Dickens; the identity of places, names and so forth,
by the side of the difference of manners, habits and, to some extent,
speech, seems altogether to upset them. They cannot see the
spencer-wearing, punch-drinking, churchgoing world of seventy or
eighty years since. This certainly argues what Dryden, in discussing
a somewhat similar matter, calls a singular 'heaviness of soul'-
a strange inability to transport and adjust. One can only hope-
without being too certain that it will be outgrown, and that these
persons (some of whom, at least, would be not a little offended if they
were assumed not to like Homer or Vergil, Dante or Shakespeare,
because the manners of the times of each were different from ours)
may, at last, consent to allow the characters and the atmosphere of
Dickens to differ from those of today, without declining, in con-
sequence, to have anything to do with them. But, for the time,
they may be nearly as hopeless as the others.
It cannot have taken many people of any competence in
criticism very long to discover where, at least, in a general way,
the secret of this new world of Dickens lies. It lies, of course,
in the combination of the strictest realism of detail with a fairy-
tale unrealism of general atmosphere. The note of one or the
other or both is sometimes forced, and then there is a jar : in the
later books, this is too frequently the case. But, in Pickwick, it
hardly ever occurs; and, therefore, to all happily fit persons, the
'suspension of disbelief' to adopt and shift Coleridge's great dictum
from verse to prose fiction, is, except in the case of some of the
short inset stories, never rudely broken. Never, probably, was there
a great writer who knew, or cared, less about Aristotle than Dickens
did. If he had spoken of the father of criticism, he would probably
have talked-one is not certain that he has not sometimes come
near to talking-some of his worst stuff. But, certainly, when he
did master it (which was often), nobody ever mastered better than
Dickens, in practice, the Aristotelian doctrine of the impossibility
rendered probable or not improbable.
As yet, however, nothing has been said of his conversation,
though something of what has been said above applies to that, too.
Conversation had always been one of the main difficulties of the
novel. The romance, with some striking exceptions, had not
indulged much in it; and the novel, till Dryden and Addison and
Steele and Swift created something of the kind, could find no good
conversational style ready to its hand. Even after them-after
the great eighteenth century groups, after Scott, after Jane
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The Pickwick Papers
313
Austen—there hung on the novel a sort of conventional lingo,
similar to that of the stage and, probably, derived from it, which
was like nothing ever used by man in actual speech-as heavy as
frost, but far from having any depth of life at all. Dickens himself
was very long in getting rid of this, if he ever did ; and some of
the worst examples of it are in the speeches of Nicholas Nickleby
and his sister in a book which was not begun till Pickwick was
nearly finished. But, in Pickwick itself (some of the inset stories
again excepted), this lingo hardly ever appears, being ousted, no
doubt, to some extent, necessarily, by the prevailing grotesque, and
by the fact that a very large part of it is 'in the vulgar tongue’
with the adjective underlined. But, even when neither of these
cathartics of book-made and stage-made lingo was present, the
characters almost invariably talk like human beings.
The mention of the word character brings us to another and
still more important aspect of our 'true Dickens. It has been
said that even the very rudimentary connection of character and
incident which is observable in 'Our Parish’had stimulated, to some
extent, the author's actual novel-writing faculty; the infinitely
more complicated interconnection of the same kind in Pickwick
seems to have stimulated it still more. Story of the more techni-
cal kind there is, no doubt, little; though there is more than has
been sometimes allowed, for the intended exploration of England
provides a sort of beginning, the Bardell imbroglio and its sequels
provide a really distinct middle and Mr Pickwick's retirement
and the marriage of his younger friends give us as much of an end
as most novels contain. But the interest is really in the separate
scenes and not in the connection of them, except in so far as the
same characters reappear. Nay, it is scarcely extravagant to say
that the interest of the scenes is largely due to the fact of the
same characters appearing in them.
Yet, these characters themselves, with the possible exception of
the hero, can hardly be said to be in any way developed by the
different situations. They remain the same; not now exactly
types, though Mr Snodgrass, at least, is not very far from the
poetical young gentleman” who seems actually to have succeeded
him in production. But they are always 'humours,' in the Jon-
sonian sense. Only late in his career, in Hard Times, A Tale of
1 These insets (which gradually disappeared) were, of course, mere legacies from
eighteenth century practice. And this inheritance was by no means always damnosa.
The two tales told by the bagman in Pickwick are among the very best of English
short stories.
2 In Sketches of Young Gentlemen.
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2
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314
[CH.
Dickens
Two Cities, Great Expectations and, perhaps, Our Mutual Friend,
did Dickens attempt anything like a character at least apparently
prepared to stand analysis and to achieve or suffer development.
Even then, he never went far; it was, frankly, not his business.
But, here, in Pickwick once for all, and as no one had done before
him, he displayed the power of imparting, not, indeed, the com-
plexity, variety and depth of life, but a certain—to stoop, for once, to
paradoxical phrase—'external intensity' of it? The characters of
Pickwick are not, perhaps, in any one instance, like anyone that we
have actually met or shall probably meet, but (the insets once more
excluded) they are not puppets. The worst treated in this way is.
the unfortunate Mr Winkle, who is wanted so often for the horse-
play and pantomime business, and is devoted to it so early, that
it seems a little incongruous when a girl like Arabella is made to
reciprocate his affection. Yet, to us, he is not a mere puppet; and,
from the duel scene to that where he manages to get the better
of Dowler, he is alive with the strange Dickensian life, if not with
the quintessence of it.
