No More Learning

His caricature of
Oliver Cromwell in Charles I (1872) must strike anyone who has
seen or read that play not only as ridiculous, but as a sacrifice of
dramatic for theatrical effect; and, to judge from contemporary
criticism, his treatment of John Knox in the unpublished Marie
Stuart (1874) was no better. As a deviser of theatrical scenes and
situations, Wills had power. His taste was thoroughly common-
place, his language trivial or extravagant.
But he could fit
eminent actors with telling parts, and was useful as librettist to
the scene-painter and stage-manager.
Thus, drama grew up to take the place of tragedy. For the
most part, it was melodrama : at first, violent and coarse; later,
somewhat refined, and crystallised into a definite form. The
stage grew more insistent in its demands, and less suitable either
to poetical or to naturalistic drama. Character was sacrificed
to situation, and art to artifice. With the exception of certain
respectable historical plays, and a moderate amount of domestic
drama contributed by Taylor (with or without Charles Reade),
Marston and Phillips, little survives in print that is likely to tempt
anyone to read it except for the purposes of historical study.
The comedy of the period, for the most part, is as remote from
dramatic art and from nature as is the drama. During the first
half of the century, comedy, as distinct from farce, is represented
only by Sheridan Knowles, Douglas Jerrold, Marston, Tom Taylor
and Boucicault. Practically, the only attempt to carry on the
tradition of English high comedy was a work of Boucicault's


## p. 269 (#285) ############################################

VIII]
Douglas Jerrold
269
youth, London Assurance (1841). On the modern stage, this play is
classed among old comedies’; and it has some affinity, as a whole,
with the work of the elder Colman, while portions are obviously
due to Goldsmith and Sheridan. But the coarsening of the types
and forcing of the situations show how far from his models Bouci-
cault's work fell. The comedy of Sheridan Knowles is more
original in type ; but his plots are more confusing than even
Congreve's. Indeed, the plot of The Hunchback (1832), a pom-
pous and heavy play, has never yet been satisfactorily explained.
The Beggar's Daughter of Bethnal Green (1828) looks back to
Elizabethan domestic comedy, with which Knowles was probably
not acquainted. Its story is simpler than those of his other
comedies, and it is written with freshness and skill in dramatic
expression. Douglas Jerrold relies much upon extravagance of
'humour. ' The characters in his comedies are less human beings
than personifications of this or that peculiarity-family pride,
valetudinarianism, or what not; and the misunderstandings and
complications which go to make up his plots are nearly always
flimsy. But he handles his materials with ease, and, now and
then, makes his 'humours' very amusing-Dr Petgoose, for
instance, the domineering doctor in The Catspaw (1850); Miss
Tucker, the spitefully humble companion to the heroine in Time
Works Wonders (1845); best of all, perhaps, the true-blue Briton,
Mr Pallmall, in a clever and amusing comedy, The Prisoner
of War (1842) Pallmall
quarrelled with some French dragoons, because he would insist, that the best
cocoa-nuts grew on Primrose-hill, and that birds of Paradise flew about
St James's.
In defence, he pleads that his motive was patriotism :
They abused the British climate, and I championed my native air. As
a sailor isn't it your duty to die for your country? . . . As a civilian, it is mine
to lie for her. Courage isn't confined to fighting. No, no—whenever a
Frenchman throws me down a lie-for the honour of England, I always
trump it.
Marston was not at his best in comedy. His most successful
attempt was The Favourite of Fortune (1866), which, doubtless,
was amusing when acted, but is pale in the reading. The character
of Mrs Lorrington, the rich and vulgar widow, demands expression
by a comic actress. It is little more than an outline, waiting to
be filled in. A match-making mamma, a young man of fortune,
who hides a Byronic heart and a noble nature under a disguise
of phlegm, are more clearly imagined and expressed; but the


## p. 270 (#286) ############################################

270
Nineteenth-Century Drama [CH.
play, as a whole, is lifeless. The comedy of the time was,
in fact, dependent upon the stage and the actor. In order to
compete with more popular forms of drama, it was obliged to
coarsen its lines, and to avoid all subtlety of character and
development. The political and social history of the period was
not such as to produce the atmosphere in which fine comedy
grows freely. The rich and leisured classes became the butts,
rather than the models, of a swiftly developing democracy; in the
drama of the time, serious and humorous alike, they are nearly
always exhibited in opposition to honest poverty. And the
predominance of the actor helped to make broad and simple
characterisation and theatrical effect more valued than truth
to life or fineness of understanding and expression.
Meanwhile, there was very great activity in another branch
of comic drama, the farce. The lavish playbills of the time always
concluded with a dash of fun, the original object being to relieve
the horror inspired by the violent drama; and the fun chiefly
enjoyed by the new public of theatre-goers was farcical fun. The
demand brought into being an innumerable number of short comic
pieces of broad and bustling humour. Adelphi “screamers' became,
under J. B. Buckstone, as famous as Adelphi dramas. In
In many of
these plays, the imagination of the reader can still supply the
personal drollery of some comic actor and the ceaseless physical
movement which were necessary to their effect. One of the earliest
and best of the farce-writers was John Poole, most famous as
author of Paul Pry (1825). Several actors have found in Paul
Pry a fine field for their talent or their peculiar personality.
From the reader, the play cannot draw a smile, unless his imagina-
tion endow the figure of Paul with the voice and face and
personality of some comic actor whom he has seen. Granted this
effort, the fun of the thing is still fresh ; and so is that of 'Twist
the Cup and Lip (1827) and of Lodgings for Single Gentlemen
(1829). Among the most eminent of other writers of farce were
Pocock and Moncrieff, who both wrote farces for music, Stirling
Coyne, who betrays in farce a genuine sense of fun, and James
Robinson Planché; and no one produced more successful or more
amusing farces than John Maddison Morton, a son of the dramatist
Thomas Morton, and an industrious adapter of plays from the French.
His most famous work, Box and Cox (1847), was founded upon two
French vaudevilles; but it still reads like an original and single
creation. These farces all depend upon some marked and simple
oddity in the chief character, upon complicated misunderstandings


## p. 271 (#287) ############################################

VIII]
T. W. Robertson
271
or broadly ridiculous situations. There is very little comedy in
them ; but their hearty fun is clean and seldom absolutely silly.
Early in the second half of the century, the popularity of farce
waned, to some extent, under the increasing taste for burlesque.
The example had been set chiefly by Planché, a dramatic author
with a wide knowledge of drama, ancient and modern, a lively
sense of humour and a wit that was by no means merely verbal.
Those were days in which the gods and goddesses of Greece
and Rome were more familiar to the public than they are now;
and Planché liked to make them characters in his various and
spirited dramatic work. Mythology and fairy lore were generally
in favour ; Shirley Brooks wrote a burlesque, The Exposition
(1851), in which the Scandinavian gods pay a visit to the great
exhibition. Planché's principal successor in this field was Henry
James Byron, a prolific author of dramatic pieces of many kinds.
To judge from contemporary estimates, Byron's wit consisted
chiefly of puns; and of puns there are plenty in his published
comedies and plays.
During Byron's career, the drama became affected by an in-
fluence which proved to be more important than the positive
achievement of the writer who exercised it, Thomas William
Robertson. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the drama had
become all but wholly stagey. Broad farce, theatrical comedy and
machine-made melodrama, written in doggerel verse or cumbrous
and showy prose, were produced in enormous quantities; but play-
wrights had not yet learned how to make use of the freedom and
the comparative security conferred upon them by the act of 1843.
Most dramatists were still, practically, in the position of writers
retained by this or that theatre, to compose whatever the manager
might demand of them; and the tyranny of the actor was still
paramount. Twenty years separated the passing of the act
.
from the first distinguishable effect of its provisions, which is
to be found in the plays of Robertson Robertson began his
work as dramatic author much as did all the men of his time.
He adapted plays and knocked off trifles of many kinds. A play
called David Garrick, which he made out of a novel of his own
composition, founded upon Mélesville's three-act comedy, Sullivan,
brought him into notice in 1864; but David Garrick belongs wholly
to the drama of the first half of the century. Robertson's proper
achievement begins with Society (1865), which, after being re-
jected by many managers, at last found a home at the Prince of
Wales's theatre. In Society, he made a distinct attempt to introduce


## p. 272 (#288) ############################################

272 Nineteenth-Century Drama [CH.
a
naturalism into the drama. To a modern reader, the tone of the
play does not seem very natural, unless it be contrasted with
the purely theatrical plays that preceded it; but it bears evidence
that the author observed life about him, and endeavoured to
reproduce it. The result is a commonplace of nineteenth-century
drama—a picture of tender and sentimental youth in a setting
of worldliness and cynicism. The plot is bald and crude; and
these qualities, though they have no merit in themselves, at least
distinguish the play from others, which depended entirely upon
the spinning of intrigue. But the dialogue is natural-or, if
unduly smart, as in Robertson's favourite device of antiphonal, or
echoing, speeches, it is not tainted with the display familiar in
the contemporary drama. The characters behave, on the surface,
like people of their day; the atmosphere which the author
endeavours to create is the atmosphere of the life going on out-
side the walls of the theatre. Though, to modern readers, the
psychology of Society and other plays by Robertson may seem
childish, his presentation of manners and his reliance upon nature
rather than upon plot or violence were signs of the emancipation
of the drama from a long tyranny. Thanks, largely, to the manner
in which the play was presented by young actors fully in sympathy
with the author's naturalistic aims, Society achieved a success
which encouraged Robertson to go further along the same path.
Ours was produced in 1866; Caste in 1867; Play in 1868; School
in 1869; and M. P. in 1870. Both Ours and Caste show an advance
on Society in Robertson's peculiar province of manners, though his
plots remain crude and his characterisation elementary. School,
which was partly founded upon the Aschenbrödel of Benedix, is a
very pretty idyll, lacking the quality of ease which is to be found
in Robertson's best work. Play is a feeble piece of work, and
M. P. was written when the author was practically dying.
Robertson's direct influence was not so strong as it might have
been, because, soon after his death, another and an opposed influ-
ence cut clean across it in the taste for the plays of Sardou. The
French literature which Robertson enjoyed was that of Alfred de
Musset and George Sand: the drama of Sardou had reduced
romanticism, for others, to a mechanical trick, and the English public
fell once more a victim to the wholly unnatural 'well-made play. '
This was a return to the drama of the first half of the century;
with the only difference that Sardou was an accomplished crafts-
man, whose work was all but proof against bungling adaptation,
whereas preceding adaptations from French or German and the


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VIII]
W. S. Gilbert
273
few original English plays were almost all the work of bunglers.
It needed a stronger influence than that of Robertson's delicate
and naïve little pieces to arouse in England the demand for
dramatic truth and good sense. Meanwhile, however, the work
of Robertson had its effect upon certain playwrights of his time,
upon Byron, for instance, and upon James Albery, a successful
dramatist, none of whose pieces have been printed. In comedy
and domestic drama alike, Byron showed himself lacking in
originality, in taste and in dignity. His humour, though not coarse,
is mean; his plots are at once complicated and puerile; and his
characterisation is purely theatrical. Nevertheless, he deserves
mention among dramatists of the latter half of the century
because of an undeniable cleverness, and a shrewd ingenuity
in the management of familiar materials, which distinguish such
pieces as Cyril's Success (1868), Our Boys (1876) and Uncle Dick's
Darling (1869); and because, also, of certain flashes of homely
verisimilitude which are due to the influence of Robertson. That
influence having failed to produce any marked effect, there was no
other yet at work. The 'artistic revival of the eighteen-seventies
found expression rather in the mounting of plays and in stage-
decoration than in the quality of the drama produced; and it was
not until the influence of Ibsen, however reviled by its opponents
and misunderstood by its very champions, had percolated into the
theatre that the English drama made any noticeable effort to
burst the chains of outworn tradition and a constricted view of
the province of dramatic art.
One other dramatist demands notice, perhaps the most brilliant
of his century, but almost wholly unrelated, in his mature work, to
the drama of his age. The earlier pieces of William Schwenck
Gilbert were burlesques and other such trifles. In 1870, he began
a second period with The Palace of Truth, a poetical fantasy,
adapted from a story by Madame de Genlis and undoubtedly
influenced by the fairy-work of Planché. This period included
other plays in verse: The Wicked World (1873); Pygmalion and
Galatea (1871); and Broken Hearts (1875). These plays and
others of their kind are all founded upon a single idea, that of
self-revelation by characters who are unaware of it, under the
influence of some magic or some supernatural interference. The
satire is shrewd, but not profound; the young author is apt to
sneer, and he has by no means learned to make the best use of
his curiously logical fancy. That he occasionally degrades high
and beautiful themes is not surprising. To do so had been the
18
E, L. XIII.
CH, VIII.


## p. 274 (#290) ############################################

274
Nineteenth-Century Drama [CH. VIII
regular proceeding in burlesque, and the age almost expected it;
but Gilbert's is not the then usual hearty cockney vulgarity. In
Pygmalion and Galatea, and, still more, in Gretchen (1879), a
perversion of part of the story of Faust, the vulgarity is cynical
and bitter. And, in Gilbert's prose plays, the same spirit may be
found in greater degree. He could be pleasantly sentimental, as
in Sweethearts (1874), without sacrificing his cynicism altogether;
but Engaged (1877), a farcical comedy, compels the reader to
laugh in spite of an exceedingly low conception of human nature.
Gilbert was not at his ease in prose. He writes it pompously and
with an inartistic display, which was inherited, to some extent,
from his predecessors in dramatic writing. His true province was
verse, and especially light verse; and, in the third period of his
activity, he found the perfect medium for his genius in comic opera
of an original kind. In The Bab Ballads, he had already shown
his skill in metre; and, when all is said, an extraordinary skill in
the writing of songs is the most remarkable feature of the comic
operas which began with Trial by Jury in 1875 and ended with
The Grand Duke in 1896. Gilbert was a metrical humourist
of the first water. His lyrical facility and his mastery of metre
raised the poetical quality of comic opera to a position that it had
never reached before and has not reached since. Moreover, the
skill was used in the expression of truly humorous ideas. The
base of Gilbert's humour is a logical and wholly unpoetical use of
fantasy. It carries out absurd ideas, with exact logic, from premiss
to conclusion; or it takes what passes in daily life for a matter of
fact or of right and shows what would happen if this were pushed
to an extreme without regard to contrary influences and con-
siderations. The difference between the shrewd, neat satire and
.
fine workmanship of Gilbert's operas and the vulgar inanities of
the comic opera of his early days was, unfortunately, too wide for
any contact to be established. Gilbert remains alone, a brilliant
and original genius, whom it is obviously hopeless to imitate, and
on whose example no school could be founded.


## p. 275 (#291) ############################################

CHAPTER IX
THACKERAY
OF all English novelists whose fiction has been founded on
a perception of the comedy of life with its alternations of the
ridiculous and the pathetic, none has met with more adverse
criticism than Thackeray. The versatility of his work as novelist,
.
essayist, writer of humorous trifles, rimester and draughtsman
causes some difficulty in forming a coherent judgment upon his
total achievement. At once satirist and sentimentalist, he com-
bined two points of view the relation between which is invisible to
many eyes; and, in both capacities, he worked with a refinement
which does not make for general popularity. In the wide field of
action which his novels cover, in the generous proportions of their
construction and in the great variety of their personages, he bears
a superficial resemblance to his contemporary Dickens; and the
two novelists have become the object of a traditional contrast in
which Dickens's colossal power of fantastic creation and more direct
appeal to popular sentiment, as opposed to Thackeray's minute
observation of everyday peculiarities and more elusive humour, has,
perhaps, gained the vote of the majority. No such competition,
however, is really possible between two writers whose view of life
and artistic methods were, fundamentally, different. The true
criterion of Thackeray's, and of his great contemporary's, work,
upon their own merits is the exactness with which they reproduced
the contradictions and variations of the comedy of which they
were the amused and sympathetic spectators.
The family of Thackeray was of Yorkshire origin, and one of
its branches was settled at Hampsthwaite on the Nidd, seven
miles above Knaresborough, until within a few years of the
novelist's birth. His father, Richmond Thackeray, was grandson
of Thomas Thackeray, headmaster of Harrow and archdeacon of
Surrey, whose youngest son, William Makepeace, had entered the
service of the East India company, and had married Amelia,
18-2


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276
[CH.
Thackeray
daughter of colonel Richmond Webb. Richmond, the second son
of this marriage, entered the same service. He married Anne
Becher, and William Makepeace Thackeray, their only child, was
born at Alipur near Calcutta on 18 July 1811. Richmond
Thackeray, who, at this time, held the office of collector of the
twenty-four Parganas, died in 1815: his widow not long after-
wards married major Carmichael-Smyth, and outlived her famous
son, dying in 1864.
Thackeray, a child of six, was sent to England in 1817.
Among his earliest impressions were a distant sight, at St Helena,
where his boat touched, of Napoleon walking in the garden of
Longwood, and the spectacle of the national mourning for prin-
cess Charlotte on his arrival in England in November. His home
was with relations, chiefly at Hadley, near Barnet, where Peter
Moore, member of parliament for Coventry, husband of one of
his great-aunts, was lord of the manor. He was sent to school
first at Southampton, where he was near Fareham, the home of
another great-aunt, Miss Becher; then, at Walpole house, Chiswick
mall; and, from 1822 to 1828, at Charterhouse. His school-
days were not altogether happy. He loved Walpole house no
better than Becky Sharp loved the seminary of which it became
the prototype ; while his memories of Charterhouse, as it appears
in his writings, were certainly softened and transfigured by the
passage of years. He amused his schoolfellows with his ready
gifts of caricature and parody; but the temperament which
criticises its surroundings with an exceptionally acute sense of
their relative values is not often congenial to the atmosphere
of a public school, and Thackeray had the self-consciousness
and desultory tendency which are its dangerous entail. He left
Charterhouse without distinction, and, before entering Trinity
college, Cambridge, read, for a few months, with his step-father at
Larkbeare in Devon. The neighbouring town of Ottery St Mary,
the native place of Coleridge, the church bells of which ring
melodiously in some lines of Lamb's John Woodvil, became the
Clavering of Pendennis, and Exeter provided the original for the
cathedral city Chatteris, where Arthur Pendennis lost his heart to
Miss Fotheringay.
In February 1829, Thackeray went to Cambridge, and remained
at Trinity college for a year and a half. Pendennis contains
chapters founded upon this part of his life with a characteristic
mixture of fact and fiction. Its story of extravagance and failure
is, of course, overdrawn; but he seems to have done little work and


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IX]
Early Life
277
spent money freely, and he went down in June 1830 without waiting
to take a degree. His talent for riming and parody was exercised
in two ephemeral university papers, The Snob and The Gownsman.
The Snob of 30 April 1829 contained his burlesque upon the subject
set for the chancellor's medal for English verse, Timbuctoo.
Critics who foresaw the genius of Tennyson in the poem which
won the medal could hardly have prophesied eminence for the
author of these facile couplets, which begin happily and are
brought to an end neatly, but, otherwise, are not noticeably above
the ordinary level of clever parody. Although Thackeray's career
at Cambridge was not academically successful, the friendships
which he made among his contemporaries there had a lasting
influence upon him. His special affection
His special affection was reserved for William
Henry Brookfield and Edward FitzGerald; but Tennyson and other
members of one of the goodliest brotherhoods of which the world
holds record remained his life-long friends, and the ideals of life
and conduct to which Tennyson dedicated his verse, fostered
among that ‘band of youthful friends,' came to a maturity hardly
less noble in Esmond and The Newcomes.
After leaving Cambridge, Thackeray spent a year abroad,
living at Weimar from September 1830 to the following summer.
Here, he laid in a stock of impressions of the life of a small
German court upon which he afterwards drew freely. Schiller's
poetry filled him with enthusiasm, and he met Goethe, of whom
he drew two sketches. Pleasant, however, as he found his resi-
dence in Weimar, Paris, where he had joined FitzGerald for a
stolen holiday at Easter 1830, was his first and most enduring
love. In the autumn of 1831, he began to read law in the Middle
Temple ; but, on coming into £500 a year on his twenty-first
birthday, he left London for Paris. His small fortune soon dis-
appeared, partly in a bank failure. He appears to have been
relieved of the rest by a gentlemanlike card-sharper, from whose
society he gained some compensating advantage in material for the
portraits of Deuceace and other members of the same profession.
These misfortunes compelled him to live by his wits. He was
divided, for a time, between his talent for easy and fluent writing
and his love for drawing. In May 1833, he became proprietor of
a weekly paper, The National Standard, and wrote or drew
regularly for it for a few months. The venture, however, was
a failure : after a fitful existence, the paper came to an end in
February 1834. Thackeray had already returned to Paris in the
previous October, with the intention of studying art. His fondness


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278
[CH.
Thackeray
for painting was of use to him in the casual journalism on which
he soon embarked, and, in The Newcomes, he reverted with
affection to this period of his life. But his studies had no serious
outcome. His natural gift of humorous draughtsmanship, however,
was illustrated, in March 1836, by a series of eight caricatures of
ballet-dancers, published under the title Flore et Zéphyr, by
Théophile Wagstaff, the first of many names under which the
future Michael Angelo Titmarsh and Mr Snob disguised himself.
On 20 April of the same year, he married Isabella Shawe at
the British embassy in Paris, apparently on the strength of his
appointment as Paris correspondent to The Constitutional, a new
radical daily, published by a company of which his step-father
was chairman. His letters to this paper, signed T. T. , began in
September 1836 and continued till February 1837. The Con-
stitutional lived little longer, and Thackeray, deprived of his
salary of £400 a year, took up his abode in London at 15 Great
Coram street, and began to write miscellaneous reviews and
stories for the newspapers and magazines.
Before 1837, he had been an occasional contributor to Fraser's
Magazine, and he has been credited with the authorship, as early
as 1832, of a story called Elizabeth Brownrigge, printed in the
August and September numbers for that year, which dealt ironi-
cally with the career of the notorious criminal who
whipp'd two female prentices to death
And hid them in the coal-hole.
There is no conclusive evidence for attributing this performance
to Thackeray, although its tone bears a general likeness to that of
the series of works of fiction which began with The Yellowplush
Correspondence. His criticisms, as a reviewer, if not profound,
were readable. Carlyle thought his review of The French Revo-
lution in The Times of 3 August 1837 'rather like' its author,
'a half-monstrous Cornish giant, kind of painter, Cambridge man,
and Paris newspaper correspondent, who is now writing for his
life in London,' and supposed that it was 'calculated to do the
book good. A book which suited Thackeray's humour better was
a manual of etiquette, My Book, or, The Anatomy of Conduct,
by one John Henry Skelton, which he reviewed in Fraser for
November 1837, writing under the disguise of Charles James
Yellowplush, a footman whose social experience made him an
exigent critic of manners, while his observations were clothed in
an effective garb of judicious mis-spelling. During succeeding
months, Mr Yellowplush regaled his readers with his reminiscences


## p. 279 (#295) ############################################

6
>
IX] The Yellowplush Correspondence 279
of service. The device of mis-spelling was by no means new, and
Yellowplush's methods are too consistently ingenious to bear
comparison with the well-feigned illiteracy of Win. Jenkins’s
spelling in Humphry Clinker ; but, whereas the errors of Win.
Jenkins belong to pure farce, Yellowplush is a chronicler of
tragedy. Eight years later, in Punch, his successor 'Jeames,' the
speculator in railway stock and perjured lover of Mary Ann
Hoggins, was the subject of an episode which is farcical from
beginning to end; but the Yellowplush of The Amours of
Mr Deuceace is the shrewd spectator of a social drama which,
with all its mirth-provoking incidents, derives its motives from the
most selfish and sordid qualities in human nature and culminates
in the misery, appalling even to the callous flunkey, of its one
approximately innocent personage.
The detached point of view
of the narrator and the outward eccentricity of form which he
gives to his story are the artistic foil to its base passions and
enhance the effect of those scenes in which the veil of irony is
dropped for a moment.
Yellowplush bade a temporary ‘ajew' to the world in August
1838, in his original character of literary critic, to which the
household of a reputable baronet was more congenial than the
precarious service of Deuceace and lord Crabs. In this last
paper, he satirised with genial mischief Bulwer's sentimentality
and grandiloquence. He returned to the same theme in 1840,
with a diverting criticism of the flowery language of Bulwer's
play, The Sea-Captain. Meanwhile, Thackeray had adopted a
new disguise. Major Goliah O'Grady Gahagan, a new Münchausen,
began to contribute his Historical Reminiscences of a life of
adventure, adorned with much ingenious distortion of Hindustani
terms, to The New Monthly in November 1838. Gahagan was
succeeded by Ikey Solomons, junior, who lent his name to
Catherine. Solomons, however, unlike Yellowplush and Gahagan,
had no personality of his own. The narrator of Catherine, which
appeared as a serial in Fraser, was Thackeray himself, bent upon
demolishing a pernicious abuse of sentiment, but nervously anxious
to preclude any misunderstanding of his object. His attempt was
to ridicule with solemn sneer' the vice of ennobling crime in
fiction, to which Bulwer's sophistries and Ainsworth's gift for
writing a readable novel had given some popularity. Fielding's
Jonathan Wild the Great supplied a model in which the baseness
of criminal life was exposed in a mock-heroic strain, maintained
with merciless thoroughness. Thackeray failed in the essential


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280
[CH.
Thackeray
quality which such writing demands. His irony is incomplete: it
is overcome by his own indignation with his characters, and is
interrupted by quite unnecessary assurances that he is holding
them up for contempt. Naturally, the reader whose prejudices he
feared to shock sees no point in this vacillation between two
opposite treatments, equally unpalatable, of a revolting subject;
while, to the elect who can relish the severe medicine of Jonathan
Wild, his attempts to sugar his draught to the general taste are in-
artistic and ineffectual. Moreover, in these efforts he invested the
worthless character of Catherine herself with a spurious pathos,
foreign to his intention, but closely allied to that abuse against
which he protested. He was far more successful when, somewhat
earlier, he allowed the complacent Stubbs to relate his own
autobiography in The Fatal Boots ; while the vulnerable point
of the literary apotheosis of burglars and murderers, its want of
humour, which the intermittent moralising of Catherine failed to
touch, was reached several years later with less effort and less
expenditure of pen and paper in George de Barnwell.
In 1840, the failure of Mrs Thackeray's health necessitated her
separation from the society of her husband and their two infant
daughters. This calamity curbed his ironic mood; and it is about
this time that the interplay of satiric wit with the tenderest
pathos which, henceforth, was never absent from his work, begins
to be noticeable. Something of this had already been discover-
able in Yellowplush's instinctive compassion for the deformed
Mrs Deuceace; but her fidelity to her husband was animal,
and she had none of the qualities of Caroline, heroine and
victim of A Shabby Genteel Story, which Thackeray contri-
buted to Fraser in 1840. Long afterwards, Caroline's mature
simplicity of character, enriched with sound common sense,
shone more brightly in The Adventures of Philip. In the
earlier story, she plays a passive rôle amid her unattractive sur-
roundings, the shabbiness of which is enhanced by the intrusion
of the crapulous lord Cinqbars and his Oxford friends. These
devotees of pleasure belong to a class which Thackeray satirised
freely, partly, no doubt, for the benefit of the middle-class reader.
Their foibles, however, although strongly emphasised, are not
caricatured, and George Brandon, the villain of the piece, is not
without his moments of generous sentiment. While Thackeray
was fully alive to the distresses of the virtuous Caroline, his
appreciation of contrast enabled him to draw her drunken father,
her odious mother and step-sisters and the conspirators who


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IX]
Early Fiction
281
wreck her happiness, with gusto and even with sympathy; just
as Yellowplush, while able to pity Mrs Deuceace, was equally able
to admire the guile of her husband. Similarly, in The Great
Hoggarty Diamond, written for Fraser in 1841, the simple
pathos of the struggles and bereavements of Samuel Titmarsh
and his young wife is balanced by the antipathetic portraiture
of Mrs Hoggarty and the swindling Mr Brough. It is not un-
natural that, to enhance the effect of Brough's subtlety, the
honesty of his victims should be so freely underlined that it bears
some relation to credulous stupidity. There is a humour, keenly
apparent to Thackeray's temperament, in the precarious existence
of rascals who live upon intrigue and subterfuge, which is wanting
in the sorrows and trials of more straightforward natures. Of his
personal preference for virtue, there can be no question ; but,
while his virtuous characters are not seldom insipid, his scoundrels,
with few exceptions, are singularly amusing.
The pseudonym of Michael Angelo Titmarsh, which was assumed
by the author of The Great Hoggarty Diamond, and had been
first used in 1840 for The Paris Sketch Book, also appeared, in
1841, on the title-page of Comic Tales and Sketches as the name
of the editor of The Yellowplush Correspondence, Major Gahagan
and other previously published stories. In Fraser of June 1842,
Thackeray took the name George Savage Fitz-Boodle. For the
Confessions of this middle-aged clubman, a younger son without
a fixed profession, he drew freely upon his German experiences,
and autobiography may have been mingled with farce in these
records of misdirected affection. The impressionable Fitz-Boodle
supplemented his reminiscences of German damsels in Men's
Wives, a series of which the longest and most important member
was The Ravenswing. Unequal and hastily written as is this story,
and although its most laughable incident, the evening ride of
Mr Eglantine beside the carriage which took Mrs and Miss Crump
and Mr Woolsey home from Richmond, is, confessedly, not wholly
original, it contains one of Thackeray's most diverting adventurers,
captain Howard (or Hooker) Walker, the promoter of the scheme
for draining the Pontine marshes, while the portrait of the British
composer Sir George Thrum anticipates the best chapters of The
Book of Snobs. In January 1844, Fitz-Boodle, playing the part
of editor, began to supply Fraser with the remarkable auto-
biography called The Luck of Barry Lyndon, Thackeray's most
substantial work of fiction before Vanity Fair. An Irish adven-
turer, Redmond Barry, fallen upon evil days, tells the story of his


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282
[CH.
Thackeray
life, his calf-love for his cousin Nora, his flight from home after
a duel in which he is deluded into believing that he has killed his
man, his career as a soldier of fortune, his meeting with his uncle
the chevalier de Balibari, his desertion from the Prussian army,
his wanderings as a gamester, his flirtation and marriage with the
wealthy lady Lyndon, his miserable married life and his final
defeat at the hands of the woman whom he has beguiled and
ill-treated. Apology forms no part of this record : like Stubbs in
The Fatal Boots, Barry is satisfied with himself and disgusted
with a world in which he has been the sport of chance. Nor does
he leave us altogether disgusted with him : if he is impudent, he
is, at any rate, no coward, and he and his uncle the chevalier are
the most companionable people in a society whose prevailing
passion is cold selfishness. They are genuinely attached to each
other : the old rascal is proud of the young one, and, while Barry
himself richly deserved his fate, it is a relief to know that the
chevalier, at last, was able to devote himself to the practice of
piety in the Minorite convent at Brussels. It is only towards the
close of the book and after the death of his spoiled child, which
provokes a sincere outburst of grief, that Barry altogether forfeits
our sympathy. While he quite convinces us that if any woman
deserved a strait-waistcoat, it was my Lady Lyndon,' his frank
disclosure of his brutality to that vain and selfish woman and her
son leaves him without excuse. If, in Catherine, Thackeray felt
his subject too disagreeable for consistent irony, he felt that
Barry Lyndon was too entertaining a scoundrel to be made
wholly detestable. The revelations of his conduct as a husband,
possibly intended as an antidote to the easy-going narrative of
his earlier career, occur at a point where the story has already
reached its height. The tragedy of the ducal court of X- dis-
plays Thackeray's powers of telling a story with a historical
complexion at their best ; and, after this digression is passed, the
tale of Barry's misdeeds is resumed with less energy and more
prolixity.
The period 1840–4 produced, also, The Paris Sketch Book
(1840), The Irish Sketch Book (1843) and Thackeray's earliest
contributions to Punch. The Paris Sketch Book was a réchauffé
of miscellaneous tales, criticisms and essays with a general bearing
upon French life and manners. Their chief recommendation is
that easy and simple style which Thackeray used without effort,
taking his reader at once into his confidence. Success in con-
versation owes much to diplomatic precaution, and it is possible


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ix] Barry Lyndon and the Sketch Books
IX
283
6
that Thackeray remembered this fact too well. At all events, his
frequent exhibitions of impatience and even disgust at French
characteristics which may irritate or shock the Briton are somewhat
forced. He protests too much, as if to assure his public that a
liking for Paris has not shaken his insular convictions. Personal
prejudice, however, is clearly visible in such articles as The Fêtes
of July and in The Second Funeral of Napoleon, published
separately in 1841. Emotional display roused his sense of the
contrast between sham and reality. Victor Hugo's poetic appeal
to Louis-Philippe on behalf of Barbès struck him merely as a
theatrical flourish of rhetoric: it quite escaped him that the
spirit which dictated it was as natural to a Frenchman as it was
foreign to English ways of thought. George Sand's utopian
visions offended his commonsense, although he admired her
' '
exquisite prose. As a critic of literature, his appreciation was
always limited by considerations which have little bearing upon
purely literary merit, and it is not surprising to find that the
French novelists of manners whom he selected for his approval
were by no means of the first class. We are invited to the perusal
of long extracts from Charles de Bernard, 'without risk of lighting
upon any such horrors as Balzac or Dumas has provided for us. '
It is strange to think that anyone could have preferred these
easily written, but somewhat insipid, passages to the 'horrors' of
Le Père Goriot, Béatrix, Eugénie Grandet, or Le Curé de
Tours, from all of which it would have been possible for Thackeray
to select.
The Irish Sketch Book, a consecutive record of travel in
Ireland, contains much delightful observation of the ways of a
people in whom Thackeray found abundance of material for his
novels, and is full of picturesque and accurate appreciation of
Irish scenery. Thackeray's sense of natural beauty and his skill in
describing what he saw were not mingled with any high poetic
feeling, but are often overlooked in the contemplation of the
human interest which overshadows the other qualities of his
work. His Irishmen-captain Costigan, Redmond Barry and the
Mulligan—are not the most creditable members of their nation.
But, while their weaknesses are enlarged upon to the verge of
caricature, they are treated with considerable sympathy. It
amused Thackeray to be with them: he enjoyed their good-
humour, even where their generosity gratified itself at the expense
of others; and, far from disliking them, as those who miss the
point of his humour are apt to argue, he leaned too readily to the


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284
[CH.
Thackeray
amiable error into which Englishmen habitually fall of regarding
Irishmen as pathetic repositories of unconscious humour. His
observations on the state of the country are tinged with that
patronage which the inhabitant of a land of progress carries into
benighted and backward districts, and Irishmen, witty them-
selves and ready to be the cause of wit in other men, are able to
appreciate them at their true value.
Thackeray began to contribute to Punch in July 1842 with
Miss Tickletoby's Lectures on English History. This dispiriting
beginning was followed by a long succession of contributions, some
trilling and indifferent, others, such as the revival of Yellowplush's
mannerisms in Jeames's Diary (1845) and the parodies of
Mr Punch's Prize Novelists (1847), brimming over with ludicrous
invention. A Legend of the Rhine, written for Cruikshank's
Table Book in 1845, was the first of the mock-heroic medieval
tales which include Barbazure and the inimitable Rebecca and
Rowena. A tour to the east in 1844 was recorded in Notes of a
Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo (1846), a medley, after
the manner of The Irish Sketch Book, of pleasant observation and
criticism of men and countries, with much lively description.
During 1846 and the beginning of 1847, he wrote for Punch the
papers entitled The Snobs of England, by one of themselves,
afterwards published as The Book of Snobs. But, while the Snob
papers were approaching completion, the monthly numbers of
Vanity Fair were beginning to appear from the office of Punch.
On the covers of Vanity Fair, the Titmarsh of the Sketch
Books, the Jeames and Mr Snob of Punch, used his real name.
His Protean changes of pseudonym may have had the effect of
obscuring the reputation which his miscellaneous work deserved,
and it was not until the new novel was well advanced in its serial
course that it arrested popular interest. Much of the mass of
writing which Thackeray had produced during the ten years
which preceded Vanity Fair was purely fugitive : much is even
flat and poor in quality. But he had acquired practice in a style
which, allowing for its impatience of minor correctnesses of phrase
and for some looseness of construction, is the perfection of natural
ease. The history and literature of the eighteenth century exer-
cised a spell over him which lent an attraction to Barry Lyndon
over and above the adventures of the hero. The combination of
character-drawing with narrative and genial comment in The
Book of Snobs traced its ancestry directly to The Spectator : the
familiar tone of these essays, in which the barrier of literary


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IX]
The Book of Snobs
285
a
6
convention is broken down and Mr Snob talks at his ease with an
audience of average education, is that of the eighteenth-century
essayists, smooth and graceful. It would be useless to claim any
eighteenth-century author as definitely the parent of a style which
was Thackeray's birthright: his kinship to the writers of this
period was one of predilection and natural sentiment. In Fielding's
tolerant view of life he found the closest response to his own
feelings, his appreciation of generosity and hatred of meanness.
Just as he fell short, however, of Fielding's pitiless consistency of
irony, so, in his confidences to his readers, he had less of the
assured superiority with which Fielding 'seems to bring his arm-
chair to the proscenium and chat with us in all the lusty ease of
his fine English. Fielding makes himself at home with us with a
condescension which we welcome, treating us to conversation and
criticism which are free from all extremes of passion and senti-
mentality, and judging character upon the broad basis of its
merits without insisting upon casual detail. Mr Snob, on the
other hand, runs the risk of being dismissed as an intruder. He
constitutes himself the critic of a society of which he assumes that
snobbishness, 'the mean admiration of mean things,' is the master
passion. No detail escapes his eye. The hospitality of the Ponto
household is not sacred to him: he dissects with unsparing minute-
ness the pretentiousness which sacrifices comfort to position. The
sherry is marsala, the gin hollands, the groom who acts as footman
has dirty hands and smells of the stable. Not that Mr Snob is
blind to the pathetic aspect of these subterfuges. It is im-
possible, nevertheless, to dwell, however lightly and amusingly,
upon such trifles without a feeling of contempt; and this feeling
is a constant corrective to pathos. While he anatomises snob-
bishness, its characteristic signs delight and feed his humour.
He may assail it with invective or cover its victims with sympathy,
but the pettinesses which he uncloaks and condemns are essential
to his amusement.
In Vanity Fair, the influence of Thackeray's long apprentice-
ship to fiction is felt in the sureness of touch with which he
describes the manners of a large and various group of dramatis
personae and unites the diverse elements of the story. His ability
to reproduce the life of a special period never flags : the scene
never changes into dullness or inactivity ; and long practice in the
anatomy of social eccentricities and familiarity with special types
of character are apparent even in the least important figures of his
stage. The book was planned and written more carefully than his


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286
[CH.
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


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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


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[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


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] 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.


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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


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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
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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.