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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Thackeray, by Anthony Trollope
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Thackeray
+
+
+Author: Anthony Trollope
+
+
+
+Release Date: June 21, 2006  [eBook #18645]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THACKERAY***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier, Lisa Reigel, and the
+Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+(http://www.pgdp.net/)
+
+
+
+Transcriber's note:
+
+   The letter "o" with a macron is rendered [=o] in this text. It
+   only appears in the word "Public[=o]la".
+
+   A detailed transcriber's note will be found at the end of the text.
+
+
+
+
+
+English Men of Letters
+
+Edited by John Morley
+
+THACKERAY
+
+by
+
+ANTHONY TROLLOPE
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+London:
+MacMillan and Co.
+1879.
+The Right of Translation and Reproduction is Reserved.
+Charles Dickens and Evans,
+Crystal Palace Press.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+                                         PAGE
+BIOGRAPHICAL                                1
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+FRASER'S MAGAZINE AND PUNCH                62
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+VANITY FAIR                                90
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+PENDENNIS AND THE NEWCOMES                108
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+ESMOND AND THE VIRGINIANS                 122
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+THACKERAY'S BURLESQUES                    139
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+THACKERAY'S LECTURES                      154
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+THACKERAY'S BALLADS                       168
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+THACKERAY'S STYLE AND MANNER OF WORK      184
+
+
+
+
+THACKERAY
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+BIOGRAPHICAL.
+
+
+In the foregoing volumes of this series of _English Men of Letters_, and
+in other works of a similar nature which have appeared lately as to the
+_Ancient Classics_ and _Foreign Classics_, biography has naturally been,
+if not the leading, at any rate a considerable element. The desire is
+common to all readers to know not only what a great writer has written,
+but also of what nature has been the man who has produced such great
+work. As to all the authors taken in hand before, there has been extant
+some written record of the man's life. Biographical details have been
+more or less known to the world, so that, whether of a Cicero, or of a
+Goethe, or of our own Johnson, there has been a story to tell. Of
+Thackeray no life has been written; and though they who knew him,--and
+possibly many who did not,--are conversant with anecdotes of the man,
+who was one so well known in society as to have created many anecdotes,
+yet there has been no memoir of his life sufficient to supply the wants
+of even so small a work as this purports to be. For this the reason may
+simply be told. Thackeray, not long before his death, had had his taste
+offended by some fulsome biography. Paragraphs, of which the eulogy
+seemed to have been the produce rather of personal love than of inquiry
+or judgment, disgusted him, and he begged of his girls that when he
+should have gone there should nothing of the sort be done with his name.
+
+We can imagine how his mind had worked, how he had declared to himself
+that, as by those loving hands into which his letters, his notes, his
+little details,--his literary remains, as such documents used to be
+called,--might naturally fall, truth of his foibles and of his
+shortcomings could not be told, so should not his praises be written, or
+that flattering portrait be limned which biographers are wont to
+produce. Acting upon these instructions, his daughters,--while there
+were two living, and since that the one surviving,--have carried out the
+order which has appeared to them to be sacred. Such being the case, it
+certainly is not my purpose now to write what may be called a life of
+Thackeray. In this preliminary chapter I will give such incidents and
+anecdotes of his life as will tell the reader perhaps all about him that
+a reader is entitled to ask. I will tell how he became an author, and
+will say how first he worked and struggled, and then how he worked and
+prospered, and became a household word in English literature;--how, in
+this way, he passed through that course of mingled failure and success
+which, though the literary aspirant may suffer, is probably better both
+for the writer and for the writings than unclouded early glory. The
+suffering no doubt is acute, and a touch of melancholy, perhaps of
+indignation, may be given to words which have been written while the
+heart has been too full of its own wrongs; but this is better than the
+continued note of triumph which is still heard in the final voices of
+the spoilt child of literature, even when they are losing their music.
+Then I will tell how Thackeray died, early indeed, but still having done
+a good life's work. Something of his manner, something of his appearance
+I can say, something perhaps of his condition of mind; because for some
+few years he was known to me. But of the continual intercourse of
+himself with the world, and of himself with his own works, I can tell
+little, because no record of his life has been made public.
+
+William Makepeace Thackeray was born at Calcutta, on July 18, 1811. His
+father was Richmond Thackeray, son of W. M. Thackeray of Hadley, near
+Barnet, in Middlesex. A relation of his, of the same name, a Rev. Mr.
+Thackeray, I knew well as rector of Hadley, many years afterwards. Him I
+believe to have been a second cousin of our Thackeray, but I think they
+had never met each other. Another cousin was Provost of Kings at
+Cambridge, fifty years ago, as Cambridge men will remember. Clergymen of
+the family have been numerous in England during the century, and there
+was one, a Rev. Elias Thackeray, whom I also knew in my youth, a
+dignitary, if I remember right, in the diocese of Meath. The Thackerays
+seem to have affected the Church; but such was not at any period of his
+life the bias of our novelist's mind.
+
+His father and grandfather were Indian civil servants. His mother was
+Anne Becher, whose father was also in the Company's service. She married
+early in India, and was only nineteen when her son was born. She was
+left a widow in 1816, with only one child, and was married a few years
+afterwards to Major Henry Carmichael Smyth, with whom Thackeray lived on
+terms of affectionate intercourse till the major died. All who knew
+William Makepeace remember his mother well, a handsome, spare,
+gray-haired lady, whom Thackeray treated with a courtly deference as
+well as constant affection. There was, however, something of discrepancy
+between them as to matters of religion. Mrs. Carmichael Smyth was
+disposed to the somewhat austere observance of the evangelical section
+of the Church. Such, certainly, never became the case with her son.
+There was disagreement on the subject, and probably unhappiness at
+intervals, but never, I think, quarrelling. Thackeray's house was his
+mother's home whenever she pleased it, and the home also of his
+stepfather.
+
+He was brought a child from India, and was sent early to the Charter
+House. Of his life and doings there his friend and schoolfellow George
+Venables writes to me as follows;
+
+     "My recollection of him, though fresh enough, does not furnish
+     much material for biography. He came to school young,--a
+     pretty, gentle, and rather timid boy. I think his experience
+     there was not generally pleasant. Though he had afterwards a
+     scholarlike knowledge of Latin, he did not attain distinction
+     in the school; and I should think that the character of the
+     head-master, Dr. Russell, which was vigorous, unsympathetic,
+     and stern, though not severe, was uncongenial to his own. With
+     the boys who knew him, Thackeray was popular; but he had no
+     skill in games, and, I think, no taste for them.... He was
+     already known by his faculty of making verses, chiefly
+     parodies. I only remember one line of one parody on a poem of
+     L. E. L.'s, about 'Violets, dark blue violets;' Thackeray's
+     version was 'Cabbages, bright green cabbages,' and we thought
+     it very witty. He took part in a scheme, which came to
+     nothing, for a school magazine, and he wrote verses for it, of
+     which I only remember that they were good of their kind. When
+     I knew him better, in later years, I thought I could recognise
+     the sensitive nature which he had as a boy.... His change of
+     retrospective feeling about his school days was very
+     characteristic. In his earlier books he always spoke of the
+     Charter House as Slaughter House and Smithfield. As he became
+     famous and prosperous his memory softened, and Slaughter House
+     was changed into Grey Friars where Colonel Newcome ended his
+     life."
+
+In February, 1829, when he was not as yet eighteen, Thackeray went up to
+Trinity College, Cambridge, and was, I think, removed in 1830. It may be
+presumed, therefore, that his studies there were not very serviceable to
+him. There are few, if any, records left of his doings at the
+university,--unless it be the fact that he did there commence the
+literary work of his life. The line about the cabbages, and the scheme
+of the school magazine, can hardly be said to have amounted even to a
+commencement. In 1829 a little periodical was brought out at Cambridge,
+called _The Snob_, with an assurance on the title that it was _not_
+conducted by members of the university. It is presumed that Thackeray
+took a hand in editing this. He certainly wrote, and published in the
+little paper, some burlesque lines on the subject which was given for
+the Chancellor's prize poem of the year. This was _Timbuctoo_, and
+Tennyson was the victor on the occasion. There is some good fun in the
+four first and four last lines of Thackeray's production.
+
+     In Africa,--a quarter of the world,--
+     Men's skins are black; their hair is crisped and curled;
+     And somewhere there, unknown to public view
+     A mighty city lies, called Timbuctoo.
+
+            *       *       *       *       *
+
+     I see her tribes the hill of glory mount,
+     And sell their sugars on their own account;
+     While round her throne the prostrate nations come,
+     Sue for her rice, and barter for her rum.
+
+I cannot find in _The Snob_ internal evidence of much literary merit
+beyond this. But then how many great writers have there been from whose
+early lucubrations no future literary excellence could be
+prognosticated?
+
+There is something at any rate in the name of the publication which
+tells of work that did come. Thackeray's mind was at all times
+peculiarly exercised with a sense of snobbishness. His appreciation of
+the vice grew abnormally, so that at last he had a morbid horror of a
+snob--a morbid fear lest this or the other man should turn snob on his
+hands. It is probable that the idea was taken from the early _Snob_ at
+Cambridge, either from his own participation in the work or from his
+remembrance of it. _The Snob_ lived, I think, but nine weeks, and was
+followed at an interval, in 1830, by _The Gownsman_, which lived to the
+seventeenth number, and at the opening of which Thackeray no doubt had a
+hand. It professed to be a continuation of _The Snob_. It contains a
+dedication to all proctors, which I should not be sorry to attribute to
+him. "To all Proctors, past, present, and future--
+
+     Whose taste it is our privilege to follow,
+     Whose virtue it is our duty to imitate,
+     Whose presence it is our interest to avoid."
+
+There is, however, nothing beyond fancy to induce me to believe that
+Thackeray was the author of the dedication, and I do not know that there
+is any evidence to show that he was connected with _The Snob_ beyond the
+writing of _Timbuctoo_.
+
+In 1830 he left Cambridge, and went to Weimar either in that year or in
+1831. Between Weimar and Paris he spent some portion of his earlier
+years, while his family,--his mother, that is, and his stepfather,--were
+living in Devonshire. It was then the purport of his life to become an
+artist, and he studied drawing at Paris, affecting especially
+Bonnington, the young English artist who had himself painted at Paris
+and who had died in 1828. He never learned to draw,--perhaps never could
+have learned. That he was idle, and did not do his best, we may take for
+granted. He was always idle, and only on some occasions, when the spirit
+moved him thoroughly, did he do his best even in after life. But with
+drawing,--or rather without it,--he did wonderfully well even when he
+did his worst. He did illustrate his own books, and everyone knows how
+incorrect were his delineations. But as illustrations they were
+excellent. How often have I wished that characters of my own creating
+might be sketched as faultily, if with the same appreciation of the
+intended purpose. Let anyone look at the "plates," as they are called in
+_Vanity Fair_, and compare each with the scenes and the characters
+intended to be displayed, and there see whether the artist,--if we may
+call him so,--has not managed to convey in the picture the exact feeling
+which he has described in the text. I have a little sketch of his, in
+which a cannon-ball is supposed to have just carried off the head of an
+aide-de-camp,--messenger I had perhaps better say, lest I might affront
+military feelings,--who is kneeling on the field of battle and
+delivering a despatch to Marlborough on horseback. The graceful ease
+with which the duke receives the message though the messenger's head be
+gone, and the soldier-like precision with which the headless hero
+finishes his last effort of military obedience, may not have been
+portrayed with well-drawn figures, but no finished illustration ever
+told its story better. Dickens has informed us that he first met
+Thackeray in 1835, on which occasion the young artist aspirant, looking
+no doubt after profitable employment, "proposed to become the
+illustrator of my earliest book." It is singular that such should have
+been the first interview between the two great novelists. We may presume
+that the offer was rejected.
+
+In 1832, Thackeray came of age, and inherited his fortune,--as to which
+various stories have been told. It seems to have amounted to about five
+hundred a year, and to have passed through his hands in a year or two,
+interest and principal. It has been told of him that it was all taken
+away from him at cards, but such was not the truth. Some went in an
+Indian bank in which he invested it. A portion was lost at cards. But
+with some of it,--the larger part as I think,--he endeavoured, in
+concert with his stepfather, to float a newspaper, which failed. There
+seem to have been two newspapers in which he was so concerned, _The
+National Standard_ and _The Constitutional_. On the latter he was
+engaged with his stepfather, and in carrying that on he lost the last of
+his money. _The National Standard_ had been running for some weeks when
+Thackeray joined it, and lost his money in it. It ran only for little
+more than twelve months, and then, the money having gone, the periodical
+came to an end. I know no road to fortune more tempting to a young man,
+or one that with more certainty leads to ruin. Thackeray, who in a way
+more or less correct, often refers in his writings, if not to the
+incidents, at any rate to the remembrances of his own life, tells us
+much of the story of this newspaper in _Lovel the Widower_. "They are
+welcome," says the bachelor, "to make merry at my charges in respect of
+a certain bargain which I made on coming to London, and in which, had I
+been Moses Primrose purchasing green spectacles, I could scarcely have
+been more taken in. My Jenkinson was an old college acquaintance, whom I
+was idiot enough to imagine a respectable man. The fellow had a very
+smooth tongue and sleek sanctified exterior. He was rather a popular
+preacher, and used to cry a good deal in the pulpit. He and a queer wine
+merchant and bill discounter, Sherrick by name, had somehow got
+possession of that neat little literary paper, _The Museum_, which
+perhaps you remember, and this eligible literary property my friend
+Honeyman, with his wheedling tongue, induced me to purchase." Here is
+the history of Thackeray's money, told by himself plainly enough, but
+with no intention on his part of narrating an incident in his own life
+to the public. But the drollery of the circumstances, his own mingled
+folly and young ambition, struck him as being worth narration, and the
+more forcibly as he remembered all the ins and outs of his own
+reflections at the time,--how he had meant to enchant the world, and
+make his fortune. There was literary capital in it of which he could
+make use after so many years. Then he tells us of this ambition, and of
+the folly of it; and at the same time puts forward the excuses to be
+made for it. "I daresay I gave myself airs as editor of that confounded
+_Museum_, and proposed to educate the public taste, to diffuse morality
+and sound literature throughout the nation, and to pocket a liberal
+salary in return for my services. I daresay I printed my own sonnets, my
+own tragedy, my own verses.... I daresay I wrote satirical articles....
+I daresay I made a gaby of myself to the world. Pray, my good friend,
+hast thou never done likewise? If thou hast never been a fool, be sure
+thou wilt never be a wise man." Thackeray was quite aware of his early
+weaknesses, and in the maturity of life knew well that he had not been
+precociously wise. He delighted so to tell his friends, and he delighted
+also to tell the public, not meaning that any but an inner circle should
+know that he was speaking of himself. But the story now is plain to all
+who can read.[1]
+
+It was thus that he lost his money; and then, not having prospered very
+well with his drawing lessons in Paris or elsewhere, he was fain to take
+up literature as a profession. It is a business which has its
+allurements. It requires no capital, no special education, no training,
+and may be taken up at any time without a moment's delay. If a man can
+command a table, a chair, pen, paper, and ink, he can commence his trade
+as literary man. It is thus that aspirants generally do commence it. A
+man may or may not have another employment to back him, or means of his
+own; or,--as was the case with Thackeray, when, after his first
+misadventure, he had to look about him for the means of living,--he may
+have nothing but his intellect and his friends. But the idea comes to
+the man that as he has the pen and ink, and time on his hand, why
+should he not write and make money?
+
+It is an idea that comes to very many men and women, old as well as
+young,--to many thousands who at last are crushed by it, of whom the
+world knows nothing. A man can make the attempt though he has not a coat
+fit to go out into the street with; or a woman, though she be almost in
+rags. There is no apprenticeship wanted. Indeed there is no room for
+such apprenticeship. It is an art which no one teaches; there is no
+professor who, in a dozen lessons, even pretends to show the aspirant
+how to write a book or an article. If you would be a watchmaker, you
+must learn; or a lawyer, a cook, or even a housemaid. Before you can
+clean a horse you must go into the stable, and begin at the beginning.
+Even the cab-driving tiro must sit for awhile on the box, and learn
+something of the streets, before he can ply for a fare. But the literary
+beginner rushes at once at the top rung of his ladder;--as though a
+youth, having made up his mind to be a clergyman, should demand, without
+preliminary steps, to be appointed Bishop of London. That he should be
+able to read and write is presumed, and that only. So much may be
+presumed of everyone, and nothing more is wanted.
+
+In truth nothing more is wanted,--except those inner lights as to which,
+so many men live and die without having learned whether they possess
+them or not. Practice, industry, study of literature, cultivation of
+taste, and the rest, will of course lend their aid, will probably be
+necessary before high excellence is attained. But the instances are not
+to seek,--are at the fingers of us all,--in which the first uninstructed
+effort has succeeded. A boy, almost, or perhaps an old woman, has sat
+down and the book has come, and the world has read it, and the
+booksellers have been civil and have written their cheques. When all
+trades, all professions, all seats at offices, all employments at which
+a crust can be earned, are so crowded that a young man knows not where
+to look for the means of livelihood, is there not an attraction in this
+which to the self-confident must be almost invincible? The booksellers
+are courteous and write their cheques, but that is not half the whole?
+_Monstrari digito!_ That is obtained. The happy aspirant is written of
+in newspapers, or, perhaps, better still, he writes of others. When the
+barrister of forty-five has hardly got a name beyond Chancery Lane, this
+glorious young scribe, with the first down on his lips, has printed his
+novel and been talked about.
+
+The temptation is irresistible, and thousands fall into it. How is a man
+to know that he is not the lucky one or the gifted one? There is the
+table and there the pen and ink. Among the unfortunate he who fails
+altogether and from the first start is not the most unfortunate. A short
+period of life is wasted, and a sharp pang is endured. Then the
+disappointed one is relegated to the condition of life which he would
+otherwise have filled a little earlier. He has been wounded, but not
+killed, or even maimed. But he who has a little success, who succeeds in
+earning a few halcyon, but, ah! so dangerous guineas, is drawn into a
+trade from which he will hardly escape till he be driven from it, if he
+come out alive, by sheer hunger. He hangs on till the guineas become
+crowns and shillings,--till some sad record of his life, made when he
+applies for charity, declares that he has worked hard for the last year
+or two and has earned less than a policeman in the streets or a porter
+at a railway. It is to that that he is brought by applying himself to a
+business which requires only a table and chair, with pen, ink, and
+paper! It is to that which he is brought by venturing to believe that he
+has been gifted with powers of imagination, creation, and expression.
+
+The young man who makes the attempt knows that he must run the chance.
+He is well aware that nine must fail where one will make his running
+good. So much as that does reach his ears, and recommends itself to his
+common sense. But why should it not be he as well as another? There is
+always some lucky one winning the prize. And this prize when it has been
+won is so well worth the winning! He can endure starvation,--so he tells
+himself,--as well as another. He will try. But yet he knows that he has
+but one chance out of ten in his favour, and it is only in his happier
+moments that he flatters himself that that remains to him. Then there
+falls upon him,--in the midst of that labour which for its success
+especially requires that a man's heart shall be light, and that he be
+always at his best,--doubt and despair. If there be no chance, of what
+use is his labour?
+
+     Were it not better done as others use,
+     To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,
+
+and amuse himself after that fashion? Thus the very industry which alone
+could give him a chance is discarded. It is so that the young man feels
+who, with some slight belief in himself and with many doubts, sits down
+to commence the literary labour by which he hopes to live.
+
+So it was, no doubt, with Thackeray. Such were his hopes and his
+fears;--with a resolution of which we can well understand that it should
+have waned at times, of earning his bread, if he did not make his
+fortune, in the world of literature. One has not to look far for
+evidence of the condition I have described,--that it was so, Amaryllis
+and all. How or when he made his very first attempt in London, I have
+not learned; but he had not probably spent his money without forming
+"press" acquaintances, and had thus found an aperture for the thin end
+of the wedge. He wrote for _The Constitutional_, of which he was part
+proprietor, beginning his work for that paper as a correspondent from
+Paris. For a while he was connected with _The Times_ newspaper, though
+his work there did not I think amount to much. His first regular
+employment was on _Fraser's Magazine_, when Mr. Fraser's shop was in
+Regent Street, when Oliver Yorke was the presumed editor, and among
+contributors, Carlyle was one of the most notable. I imagine that the
+battle of life was difficult enough with him even after he had become
+one of the leading props of that magazine. All that he wrote was not
+taken, and all that was taken was not approved. In 1837-38, the _History
+of Samuel Titmarsh and the Great Hoggarty Diamond_ appeared in the
+magazine. The _Great Hoggarty Diamond_ is now known to all readers of
+Thackeray's works. It is not my purpose to speak specially of it here,
+except to assert that it has been thought to be a great success. When it
+was being brought out, the author told a friend of his,--and of
+mine,--that it was not much thought of at Fraser's, and that he had been
+called upon to shorten it. That is an incident disagreeable in its
+nature to any literary gentleman, and likely to be specially so when he
+knows that his provision of bread, certainly of improved bread and
+butter, is at stake. The man who thus darkens his literary brow with the
+frown of disapproval, has at his disposal all the loaves and all the
+fishes that are going. If the writer be successful, there will come a
+time when he will be above such frowns; but, when that opinion went
+forth, Thackeray had not yet made his footing good, and the notice to
+him respecting it must have been very bitter. It was in writing this
+_Hoggarty Diamond_ that Thackeray first invented the name of Michael
+Angelo Titmarsh. Samuel Titmarsh was the writer, whereas Michael Angelo
+was an intending illustrator. Thackeray's nose had been broken in a
+school fight, while he was quite a little boy, by another little boy, at
+the Charter House; and there was probably some association intended to
+be jocose with the name of the great artist, whose nose was broken by
+his fellow-student Torrigiano, and who, as it happened, died exactly
+three centuries before Thackeray.
+
+I can understand all the disquietude of his heart when that warning, as
+to the too great length of his story, was given to him. He was not a man
+capable of feeling at any time quite assured in his position, and when
+that occurred he was very far from assurance. I think that at no time
+did he doubt the sufficiency of his own mental qualification for the
+work he had taken in hand; but he doubted all else. He doubted the
+appreciation of the world; he doubted his fitness for turning
+his intellect to valuable account; he doubted his physical
+capacity,--dreading his own lack of industry; he doubted his luck; he
+doubted the continual absence of some of those misfortunes on which the
+works of literary men are shipwrecked. Though he was aware of his own
+power, he always, to the last, was afraid that his own deficiencies
+should be too strong against him. It was his nature to be idle,--to put
+off his work,--and then to be angry with himself for putting it off.
+Ginger was hot in the mouth with him, and all the allurements of the
+world were strong upon him. To find on Monday morning an excuse why he
+should not on Monday do Monday's work was, at the time, an inexpressible
+relief to him, but had become deep regret,--almost a remorse,--before
+the Monday was over. To such a one it was not given to believe in
+himself with that sturdy rock-bound foundation which we see to have
+belonged to some men from the earliest struggles of their career. To
+him, then, must have come an inexpressible pang when he was told that
+his story must be curtailed.
+
+Who else would have told such a story of himself to the first
+acquaintance he chanced to meet? Of Thackeray it might be predicted that
+he certainly would do so. No little wound of the kind ever came to him
+but what he disclosed it at once. "They have only bought so many of my
+new book." "Have you seen the abuse of my last number?" "What am I to
+turn my hand to? They are getting tired of my novels." "They don't read
+it," he said to me of _Esmond_. "So you don't mean to publish my work?"
+he said once to a publisher in an open company. Other men keep their
+little troubles to themselves. I have heard even of authors who have
+declared how all the publishers were running after their books; I have
+heard some discourse freely of their fourth and fifth editions; I have
+known an author to boast of his thousands sold in this country, and his
+tens of thousands in America; but I never heard anyone else declare that
+no one would read his _chef-d'oeuvre_, and that the world was becoming
+tired of him. It was he who said, when he was fifty, that a man past
+fifty should never write a novel.
+
+And yet, as I have said, he was from an early age fully conscious of his
+own ability. That he was so is to be seen in the handling of many of
+his early works,--in _Barry Lyndon_, for instance, and the _Memoirs of
+Mr. C. James Yellowplush_. The sound is too certain for doubt of that
+kind. But he had not then, nor did he ever achieve that assurance of
+public favour which makes a man confident that his work will be
+successful. During the years of which we are now speaking Thackeray was
+a literary Bohemian in this sense,--that he never regarded his own
+status as certain. While performing much of the best of his life's work
+he was not sure of his market, not certain of his readers, his
+publishers, or his price; nor was he certain of himself.
+
+It is impossible not to form some contrast between him and Dickens as to
+this period of his life,--a comparison not as to their literary merits,
+but literary position. Dickens was one year his junior in age, and at
+this time, viz. 1837-38, had reached almost the zenith of his
+reputation. _Pickwick_ had been published, and _Oliver Twist_ and
+_Nicholas Nickleby_ were being published. All the world was talking
+about the young author who was assuming his position with a confidence
+in his own powers which was fully justified both by his present and
+future success. It was manifest that he could make, not only his own
+fortune, but that of his publishers, and that he was a literary hero
+bound to be worshipped by all literary grades of men, down to the
+"devils" of the printing-office. At that time, Thackeray, the older man,
+was still doubting, still hesitating, still struggling. Everyone then
+had accepted the name of Charles Dickens. That of William Thackeray was
+hardly known beyond the circle of those who are careful to make
+themselves acquainted with such matters. It was then the custom, more
+generally than it is at present, to maintain anonymous writing in
+magazines. Now, if anything of special merit be brought out, the name of
+the author, if not published, is known. It was much less so at the
+period in question; and as the world of readers began to be acquainted
+with Jeames Yellowplush, Catherine Hayes, and other heroes and heroines,
+the names of the author had to be inquired for. I remember myself, when
+I was already well acquainted with the immortal Jeames, asking who was
+the writer. The works of Charles Dickens were at that time as well known
+to be his, and as widely read in England, as those almost of
+Shakespeare.
+
+It will be said of course that this came from the earlier popularity of
+Dickens. That is of course; but why should it have been so? They had
+begun to make their effort much at the same time; and if there was any
+advantage in point of position as they commenced, it was with Thackeray.
+It might be said that the genius of the one was brighter than that of
+the other, or, at any rate, that it was more precocious. But
+after-judgment has, I think, not declared either of the suggestions to
+be true. I will make no comparison between two such rivals, who were so
+distinctly different from each, and each of whom, within so very short a
+period, has come to stand on a pedestal so high,--the two exalted to so
+equal a vocation. And if Dickens showed the best of his power early in
+life, so did Thackeray the best of his intellect. In no display of
+mental force did he rise above _Barry Lyndon_. I hardly know how the
+teller of a narrative shall hope to mount in simply intellectual faculty
+above the effort there made. In what then was the difference? Why was
+Dickens already a great man when Thackeray was still a literary
+Bohemian?
+
+The answer is to be found not in the extent or in the nature of the
+genius of either man, but in the condition of mind,--which indeed may be
+read plainly in their works by those who have eyes to see. The one was
+steadfast, industrious, full of purpose, never doubting of himself,
+always putting his best foot foremost and standing firmly on it when he
+got it there; with no inward trepidation, with no moments in which he
+was half inclined to think that this race was not for his winning, this
+goal not to be reached by his struggles. The sympathy of friends was
+good to him, but he could have done without it. The good opinion which
+he had of himself was never shaken by adverse criticism; and the
+criticism on the other side, by which it was exalted, came from the
+enumeration of the number of copies sold. He was a firm reliant man,
+very little prone to change, who, when he had discovered the nature of
+his own talent, knew how to do the very best with it.
+
+It may almost be said that Thackeray was the very opposite of this.
+Unsteadfast, idle, changeable of purpose, aware of his own intellect but
+not trusting it, no man ever failed more generally than he to put his
+best foot foremost. Full as his works are of pathos, full of humour,
+full of love and charity, tending, as they always do, to truth and
+honour and manly worth and womanly modesty, excelling, as they seem to
+me to do, most other written precepts that I know, they always seem to
+lack something that might have been there. There is a touch of vagueness
+which indicates that his pen was not firm while he was using it. He
+seems to me to have been dreaming ever of some high flight, and then to
+have told himself, with a half-broken heart, that it was beyond his
+power to soar up into those bright regions. I can fancy as the sheets
+went from him every day he told himself, in regard to every sheet, that
+it was a failure. Dickens was quite sure of his sheets.
+
+"I have got to make it shorter!" Then he would put his hands in his
+pockets, and stretch himself, and straighten the lines of his face, over
+which a smile would come, as though this intimation from his editor were
+the best joke in the world; and he would walk away, with his heart
+bleeding, and every nerve in an agony. There are none of us who want to
+have much of his work shortened now.
+
+In 1837 Thackeray married Isabella, daughter of Colonel Matthew Shawe,
+and from this union there came three daughters, Anne, Jane, and Harriet.
+The name of the eldest, now Mrs. Richmond Ritchie, who has followed so
+closely in her father's steps, is a household word to the world of novel
+readers; the second died as a child; the younger lived to marry Leslie
+Stephen, who is too well known for me to say more than that he wrote,
+the other day, the little volume on Dr. Johnson in this series; but she,
+too, has now followed her father. Of Thackeray's married life what need
+be said shall be contained in a very few words. It was grievously
+unhappy; but the misery of it came from God, and was in no wise due to
+human fault. She became ill, and her mind failed her. There was a period
+during which he would not believe that her illness was more than
+illness, and then he clung to her and waited on her with an assiduity of
+affection which only made his task the more painful to him. At last it
+became evident that she should live in the companionship of some one
+with whom her life might be altogether quiet, and she has since been
+domiciled with a lady with whom she has been happy. Thus she was, after
+but a few years of married life, taken away from him, and he became as
+it were a widower till the end of his days.
+
+At this period, and indeed for some years after his marriage, his chief
+literary dependence was on _Fraser's Magazine_. He wrote also at this
+time in the _New Monthly Magazine_. In 1840 he brought out his _Paris
+Sketch Book_, as to which he tells us by a notice printed with the first
+edition, that half of the sketches had already been published in various
+periodicals. Here he used the name Michael Angelo Titmarsh, as he did
+also with the _Journey from Cornhill to Cairo_. Dickens had called
+himself Boz, and clung to the name with persistency as long as the
+public would permit it. Thackeray's affection for assumed names was more
+intermittent, though I doubt whether he used his own name altogether
+till it appeared on the title-page of _Vanity Fair_. About this time
+began his connection with _Punch_, in which much of his best work
+appeared. Looking back at our old friend as he used to come out from
+week to week at this time, we can hardly boast that we used to recognise
+how good the literary pabulum was that was then given for our
+consumption. We have to admit that the ordinary reader, as the ordinary
+picture-seer, requires to be guided by a name. We are moved to absolute
+admiration by a Raphael or a Hobbema, but hardly till we have learned
+the name of the painter, or, at any rate, the manner of his painting. I
+am not sure that all lovers of poetry would recognise a _Lycidas_ coming
+from some hitherto unknown Milton. Gradually the good picture or the
+fine poem makes its way into the minds of a slowly discerning public.
+_Punch_, no doubt, became very popular, owing, perhaps, more to Leech,
+its artist, than to any other single person. Gradually the world of
+readers began to know that there was a speciality of humour to be found
+in its pages,--fun and sense, satire and good humour, compressed
+together in small literary morsels as the nature of its columns
+required. Gradually the name of Thackeray as one of the band of brethren
+was buzzed about, and gradually became known as that of the chief of the
+literary brothers. But during the years in which he did much for
+_Punch_, say from 1843 to 1853, he was still struggling to make good his
+footing in literature. They knew him well in the _Punch_ office, and no
+doubt the amount and regularity of the cheques from Messrs. Bradbury and
+Evans, the then and still owners of that happy periodical, made him
+aware that he had found for himself a satisfactory career. In "a good
+day for himself, the journal, and the world, Thackeray found _Punch_."
+This was said by his old friend Shirley Brooks, who himself lived to be
+editor of the paper and died in harness, and was said most truly.
+_Punch_ was more congenial to him, and no doubt more generous, than
+_Fraser_. There was still something of the literary Bohemian about him,
+but not as it had been before. He was still unfixed, looking out for
+some higher career, not altogether satisfied to be no more than one of
+an anonymous band of brothers, even though the brothers were the
+brothers of _Punch_. We can only imagine what were his thoughts as to
+himself and that other man, who was then known as the great novelist of
+the day,--of a rivalry with whom he was certainly conscious. _Punch_ was
+very much to him, but was not quite enough. That must have been very
+clear to himself as he meditated the beginning of _Vanity Fair_.
+
+Of the contributions to the periodical, the best known now are _The Snob
+Papers_ and _The Ballads of Policeman X_. But they were very numerous.
+Of Thackeray as a poet, or maker of verses, I will say a few words in a
+chapter which will be devoted to his own so-called ballads. Here it
+seems only necessary to remark that there was not apparently any time in
+his career at which he began to think seriously of appearing before the
+public as a poet. Such was the intention early in their career with many
+of our best known prose writers, with Milton, and Goldsmith, and Samuel
+Johnson, with Scott, Macaulay, and more lately with Matthew Arnold;
+writers of verse and prose who ultimately prevailed some in one
+direction, and others in the other. Milton and Goldsmith have been known
+best as poets, Johnson and Macaulay as writers of prose. But with all of
+them there has been a distinct effort in each art. Thackeray seems to
+have tumbled into versification by accident; writing it as amateurs do,
+a little now and again for his own delectation, and to catch the taste
+of partial friends. The reader feels that Thackeray would not have begun
+to print his verses unless the opportunity of doing so had been brought
+in his way by his doings in prose. And yet he had begun to write verses
+when he was very young;--at Cambridge, as we have seen, when he
+contributed more to the fame of Timbuctoo than I think even Tennyson has
+done,--and in his early years at Paris. Here again, though he must have
+felt the strength of his own mingled humour and pathos, he always struck
+with an uncertain note till he had gathered strength and confidence by
+popularity. Good as they generally were, his verses were accidents,
+written not as a writer writes who claims to be a poet, but as though
+they might have been the relaxation of a doctor or a barrister.
+
+And so they were. When Thackeray first settled himself in London, to
+make his living among the magazines and newspapers, I do not imagine
+that he counted much on his poetic powers. He describes it all in his
+own dialogue between the pen and the album.
+
+"Since he," says the pen, speaking of its master, Thackeray:
+
+     Since he my faithful service did engage,
+     To follow him through his queer pilgrimage
+     I've drawn and written many a line and page.
+
+     Caricatures I scribbled have, and rhymes,
+     And dinner-cards, and picture pantomimes,
+     And many little children's books at times.
+
+     I've writ the foolish fancy of his brain;
+     The aimless jest that, striking, hath caused pain;
+     The idle word that he'd wish back again.
+
+     I've helped him to pen many a line for bread.
+
+It was thus he thought of his work. There had been caricatures, and
+rhymes, and many little children's books; and then the lines written for
+his bread, which, except that they were written for _Punch_, were hardly
+undertaken with a more serious purpose. In all of it there was ample
+seriousness, had he known it himself. What a tale of the restlessness,
+of the ambition, of the glory, of the misfortunes of a great country is
+given in the ballads of Peter the French drummer! Of that brain so full
+of fancy the pen had lightly written all the fancies. He did not know it
+when he was doing so, but with that word, fancy, he has described
+exactly the gift with which his brain was specially endowed. If a writer
+be accurate, or sonorous, or witty, or simply pathetic, he may, I think,
+gauge his own powers. He may do so after experience with something of
+certainty. But fancy is a gift which the owner of it cannot measure, and
+the power of which, when he is using it, he cannot himself understand.
+There is the same lambent flame flickering over everything he did, even
+the dinner-cards and the picture pantomimes. He did not in the least
+know what he put into those things. So it was with his verses. It was
+only by degrees, when he was told of it by others, that he found that
+they too were of infinite value to him in his profession.
+
+The _Irish Sketch Book_ came out in 1843, in which he used, but only
+half used, the name of Michael Angelo Titmarsh. He dedicates it to
+Charles Lever, and in signing the dedication gave his own name. "Laying
+aside," he says, "for a moment the travelling title of Mr. Titmarsh, let
+me acknowledge these favours in my own name, and subscribe myself, &c.
+&c., W. M. Thackeray." So he gradually fell into the declaration of his
+own identity. In 1844 he made his journey to Turkey and Egypt,--_From
+Cornhill to Grand Cairo_, as he called it, still using the old nom de
+plume, but again signing the dedication with his own name. It was now
+made to the captain of the vessel in which he encountered that famous
+white squall, in describing which he has shown the wonderful power he
+had over words.
+
+In 1846 was commenced, in numbers, the novel which first made his name
+well known to the world. This was _Vanity Fair_, a work to which it is
+evident that he devoted all his mind. Up to this time his writings had
+consisted of short contributions, chiefly of sketches, each intended to
+stand by itself in the periodical to which it was sent. _Barry Lyndon_
+had hitherto been the longest; but that and _Catherine Hayes_, and the
+_Hoggarty Diamond_, though stories continued through various numbers,
+had not as yet reached the dignity,--or at any rate the length,--of a
+three-volume novel. But of late novels had grown to be much longer than
+those of the old well-known measure. Dickens had stretched his to nearly
+double the length, and had published them in twenty numbers. The attempt
+had caught the public taste and had been pre-eminently successful. The
+nature of the tale as originated by him was altogether unlike that to
+which the readers of modern novels had been used. No plot, with an
+arranged catastrophe or _dénoûment_, was necessary. Some untying of the
+various knots of the narrative no doubt were expedient, but these were
+of the simplest kind, done with the view of giving an end to that which
+might otherwise be endless. The adventures of a _Pickwick_ or a
+_Nickleby_ required very little of a plot, and this mode of telling a
+story, which might be continued on through any number of pages, as long
+as the characters were interesting, met with approval. Thackeray, who
+had never depended much on his plot in the shorter tales which he had
+hitherto told, determined to adopt the same form in his first great
+work, but with these changes;--That as the central character with
+Dickens had always been made beautiful with unnatural virtue,--for who
+was ever so unselfish as _Pickwick_, so manly and modest as _Nicholas_,
+or so good a boy as _Oliver_?--so should his centre of interest be in
+every respect abnormally bad.
+
+As to Thackeray's reason for this,--or rather as to that condition of
+mind which brought about this result,--I will say something in a final
+chapter, in which I will endeavour to describe the nature and effect of
+his work generally. Here it will be necessary only to declare that, such
+was the choice he now made of a subject in his first attempt to rise out
+of a world of small literary contributions, into the more assured
+position of the author of a work of importance. We are aware that the
+monthly nurses of periodical literature did not at first smile on the
+effort. The proprietors of magazines did not see their way to undertake
+_Vanity Fair_, and the publishers are said to have generally looked shy
+upon it. At last it was brought out in numbers,--twenty-four numbers
+instead of twenty, as with those by Dickens,--under the guardian hands
+of Messrs. Bradbury and Evans. This was completed in 1848, and then it
+was that, at the age of thirty-seven, Thackeray first achieved for
+himself a name and reputation through the country. Before this he had
+been known at _Fraser's_ and at the _Punch_ office. He was known at the
+Garrick Club, and had become individually popular among literary men in
+London. He had made many fast friends, and had been, as it were, found
+out by persons of distinction. But Jones, and Smith, and Robinson, in
+Liverpool, Manchester, and Birmingham, did not know him as they knew
+Dickens, Carlyle, Tennyson, and Macaulay,--not as they knew Landseer, or
+Stansfeld, or Turner; not as they knew Macready, Charles Kean, or Miss
+Faucit. In that year, 1848, his name became common in the memoirs of the
+time. On the 5th of June I find him dining with Macready, to meet Sir J.
+Wilson, Panizzi, Landseer, and others. A few days afterwards Macready
+dined with him. "Dined with Thackeray, met the Gordons, Kenyons,
+Procters, Reeve, Villiers, Evans, Stansfeld, and saw Mrs. Sartoris and
+S. C. Dance, White, H. Goldsmid, in the evening." Again; "Dined with
+Forster, having called and taken up Brookfield, met Rintoul, Kenyon,
+Procter, Kinglake, Alfred Tennyson, Thackeray." Macready was very
+accurate in jotting down the names of those he entertained, who
+entertained him, or were entertained with him. _Vanity Fair_ was coming
+out, and Thackeray had become one of the personages in literary
+society. In the January number of 1848 the _Edinburgh Review_ had an
+article on Thackeray's works generally as they were then known. It
+purports to combine the _Irish Sketch Book_, the _Journey from Cornhill
+to Grand Cairo_, and _Vanity Fair_ as far as it had then gone; but it
+does in truth deal chiefly with the literary merits of the latter. I
+will quote a passage from the article, as proving in regard to
+Thackeray's work an opinion which was well founded, and as telling the
+story of his life as far as it was then known;
+
+"Full many a valuable truth," says the reviewer, "has been sent
+undulating through the air by men who have lived and died unknown. At
+this moment the rising generation are supplied with the best of their
+mental aliment by writers whose names are a dead letter to the mass; and
+among the most remarkable of these is Michael Angelo Titmarsh, alias
+William Makepeace Thackeray, author of the _Irish Sketch Book_, of _A
+Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo_, of _Jeames's Diary_, of _The Snob
+Papers_ in _Punch_, of _Vanity Fair_, etc. etc.
+
+"Mr. Thackeray is now about thirty-seven years of age, of a good family,
+and originally intended for the bar. He kept seven or eight terms at
+Cambridge, but left the university without taking a degree, with the
+view of becoming an artist; and we well remember, ten or twelve years
+ago, finding him day after day engaged in copying pictures in the
+Louvre, in order to qualify himself for his intended profession. It may
+be doubted, however, whether any degree of assiduity would have enabled
+him to excel in the money-making branches, for his talent was altogether
+of the Hogarth kind, and was principally remarkable in the pen-and-ink
+sketches of character and situation, which he dashed off for the
+amusement of his friends. At the end of two or three years of desultory
+application he gave up the notion of becoming a painter, and took to
+literature. He set up and edited with marked ability a weekly journal,
+on the plan of _The Athenæum_ and _Literary Gazette_, but was unable to
+compete successfully with such long-established rivals. He then became a
+regular man of letters,--that is, he wrote for respectable magazines and
+newspapers, until the attention attracted to his contributions in
+_Fraser's Magazine_ and _Punch_ emboldened him to start on his own
+account, and risk an independent publication." Then follows a eulogistic
+and, as I think, a correct criticism on the book as far as it had gone.
+There are a few remarks perhaps a little less eulogistic as to some of
+his minor writings, _The Snob Papers_ in particular; and at the end
+there is a statement with which I think we shall all now agree; "A
+writer with such a pen and pencil as Mr. Thackeray's is an acquisition
+of real and high value in our literature."
+
+The reviewer has done his work in a tone friendly to the author, whom he
+knew,[2]--as indeed it may be said that this little book will be written
+with the same feeling,--but the public has already recognised the truth
+of the review generally. There can be no doubt that Thackeray, though he
+had hitherto been but a contributor of anonymous pieces to
+periodicals,--to what is generally considered as merely the ephemeral
+literature of the month,--had already become effective on the tastes and
+morals of readers. Affectation of finery; the vulgarity which apes good
+breeding but never approaches it; dishonest gambling, whether with dice
+or with railway shares; and that low taste for literary excitement which
+is gratified by mysterious murders and Old Bailey executions had already
+received condign punishment from Yellowplush, Titmarsh, Fitzboodle, and
+Ikey Solomon. Under all those names Thackeray had plied his trade as a
+satirist. Though the truths, as the reviewer said, had been merely sent
+undulating through the air, they had already become effective.
+
+Thackeray had now become a personage,--one of the recognised stars of
+the literary heaven of the day. It was an honour to know him; and we may
+well believe that the givers of dinners were proud to have him among
+their guests. He had opened his oyster,--with his pen, an achievement
+which he cannot be said to have accomplished until _Vanity Fair_ had
+come out. In inquiring about him from those who survive him, and knew
+him well in those days, I always hear the same account. "If I could only
+tell you the impromptu lines which fell from him!" "If I had only kept
+the drawings from his pen, which used to be chucked about as though they
+were worth nothing!" "If I could only remember the drolleries!" Had they
+been kept, there might now be many volumes of these sketches, as to
+which the reviewer says that their talent was "altogether of the Hogarth
+kind." Could there be any kind more valuable? Like Hogarth, he could
+always make his picture tell his story; though, unlike Hogarth, he had
+not learned to draw. I have had sent to me for my inspection an album of
+drawings and letters, which, in the course of twenty years, from 1829 to
+1849, were despatched from Thackeray to his old friend Edward
+Fitzgerald. Looking at the wit displayed in the drawings, I feel
+inclined to say that had he persisted he would have been a second
+Hogarth. There is a series of ballet scenes, in which "Flore et Zephyr"
+are the two chief performers, which for expression and drollery exceed
+anything that I know of the kind. The set in this book are lithographs,
+which were published, but I do not remember to have seen them elsewhere.
+There are still among us many who knew him well;--Edward Fitzgerald and
+George Venables, James Spedding and Kinglake, Mrs. Procter,--the widow
+of Barry Cornwall, who loved him well,--and Monckton Milnes, as he used
+to be, whose touching lines written just after Thackeray's death will
+close this volume, Frederick Pollock and Frank Fladgate, John Blackwood
+and William Russell,--and they all tell the same story. Though he so
+rarely talked, as good talkers do, and was averse to sit down to work,
+there were always falling from his mouth and pen those little pearls.
+Among the friends who had been kindest and dearest to him in the days of
+his strugglings he once mentioned three to me,--Matthew Higgins, or
+Jacob Omnium as he was more popularly called; William Stirling, who
+became Sir William Maxwell; and Russell Sturgis, who is now the senior
+partner in the great house of Barings. Alas, only the last of these
+three is left among us! Thackeray was a man of no great power of
+conversation. I doubt whether he ever shone in what is called general
+society. He was not a man to be valuable at a dinner-table as a good
+talker. It was when there were but two or three together that he was
+happy himself and made others happy; and then it would rather be from
+some special piece of drollery that the joy of the moment would come,
+than from the discussion of ordinary topics. After so many years his old
+friends remember the fag-ends of the doggerel lines which used to drop
+from him without any effort on all occasions of jollity. And though he
+could be very sad,--laden with melancholy, as I think must have been the
+case with him always,--the feeling of fun would quickly come to him, and
+the queer rhymes would be poured out as plentifully as the sketches were
+made. Here is a contribution which I find hanging in the memory of an
+old friend, the serious nature of whose literary labours would certainly
+have driven such lines from his mind, had they not at the time caught
+fast hold of him:
+
+     In the romantic little town of Highbury
+     My father kept a circulatin' library;
+     He followed in his youth that man immortal, who
+     Conquered the Frenchmen on the plains of Waterloo.
+     Mamma was an inhabitant of Drogheda,
+     Very good she was to darn and to embroider.
+     In the famous island of Jamaica,
+     For thirty years I've been a sugar-baker;
+     And here I sit, the Muses' 'appy vot'ry,
+     A cultivatin' every kind of po'try,
+
+There may, perhaps, have been a mistake in a line, but the poem has been
+handed down with fair correctness over a period of forty years. He was
+always versifying. He once owed me five pounds seventeen shillings and
+sixpence, his share of a dinner bill at Richmond. He sent me a cheque
+for the amount in rhyme, giving the proper financial document on the
+second half of a sheet of note paper. I gave the poem away as an
+autograph, and now forget the lines. This was all trifling, the reader
+will say. No doubt. Thackeray was always trifling, and yet always
+serious. In attempting to understand his character it is necessary for
+you to bear within your own mind the idea that he was always, within his
+own bosom, encountering melancholy with buffoonery, and meanness with
+satire. The very spirit of burlesque dwelt within him,--a spirit which
+does not see the grand the less because of the travesties which it is
+always engendering.
+
+In his youthful,--all but boyish,--days in London, he delighted to "put
+himself up" at the Bedford, in Covent Garden. Then in his early married
+days he lived in Albion Street, and from thence went to Great Coram
+Street, till his household there was broken up by his wife's illness. He
+afterwards took lodgings in St. James's Chambers, and then a house in
+Young Street, Kensington. Here he lived from 1847, when he was achieving
+his great triumph with _Vanity Fair_, down to 1853, when he removed to a
+house which he bought in Onslow Square. In Young Street there had come
+to lodge opposite to him an Irish gentleman, who, on the part of his
+injured country, felt very angry with Thackeray. _The Irish Sketch Book_
+had not been complimentary, nor were the descriptions which Thackeray
+had given generally of Irishmen; and there was extant an absurd idea
+that in his abominable heroine Catherine Hayes he had alluded to Miss
+Catherine Hayes the Irish singer. Word was taken to Thackeray that this
+Irishman intended to come across the street and avenge his country on
+the calumniator's person. Thackeray immediately called upon the
+gentleman, and it is said that the visit was pleasant to both parties.
+There certainly was no blood shed.
+
+He had now succeeded,--in 1848,--in making for himself a standing as a
+man of letters, and an income. What was the extent of his income I have
+no means of saying; nor is it a subject on which, as I think, inquiry
+should be made. But he was not satisfied with his position. He felt it
+to be precarious, and he was always thinking of what he owed to his two
+girls. That _arbitrium popularis auræ_ on which he depended for his
+daily bread was not regarded by him with the confidence which it
+deserved. He did not probably know how firm was the hold he had obtained
+of the public ear. At any rate he was anxious, and endeavoured to secure
+for himself a permanent income in the public service. He had become by
+this time acquainted, probably intimate, with the Marquis of
+Clanricarde, who was then Postmaster-General. In 1848 there fell a
+vacancy in the situation of Assistant-Secretary at the General Post
+Office, and Lord Clanricarde either offered it to him or promised to
+give it to him. The Postmaster-General had the disposal of the
+place,--but was not altogether free from control in the matter. When he
+made known his purpose at the Post Office, he was met by an assurance
+from the officer next under him that the thing could not be done. The
+services were wanted of a man who had had experience in the Post Office;
+and, moreover, it was necessary that the feelings of other gentlemen
+should be consulted. Men who have been serving in an office many years
+do not like to see even a man of genius put over their heads. In fact,
+the office would have been up in arms at such an injustice. Lord
+Clanricarde, who in a matter of patronage was not scrupulous, was still
+a good-natured man and amenable. He attempted to befriend his friend
+till he found that it was impossible, and then, with the best grace in
+the world, accepted the official nominee that was offered to him.
+
+It may be said that had Thackeray succeeded in that attempt he would
+surely have ruined himself. No man can be fit for the management and
+performance of special work who has learned nothing of it before his
+thirty-seventh year; and no man could have been less so than Thackeray.
+There are men who, though they be not fit, are disposed to learn their
+lesson and make themselves as fit as possible. Such cannot be said to
+have been the case with this man. For the special duties which he would
+have been called upon to perform, consisting to a great extent of the
+maintenance of discipline over a large body of men, training is
+required, and the service would have suffered for awhile under any
+untried elderly tiro. Another man might have put himself into harness.
+Thackeray never would have done so. The details of his work after the
+first month would have been inexpressibly wearisome to him. To have gone
+into the city, and to have remained there every day from eleven till
+five, would have been all but impossible to him. He would not have done
+it. And then he would have been tormented by the feeling that he was
+taking the pay and not doing the work. There is a belief current, not
+confined to a few, that a man may be a Government Secretary with a
+generous salary, and have nothing to do. The idea is something that
+remains to us from the old days of sinecures. If there be now remaining
+places so pleasant, or gentlemen so happy, I do not know them.
+Thackeray's notion of his future duties was probably very vague. He
+would have repudiated the notion that he was looking for a sinecure, but
+no doubt considered that the duties would be easy and light. It is not
+too much to assert, that he who could drop his pearls as I have said
+above, throwing them wide cast without an effort, would have found his
+work as Assistant-Secretary at the General Post Office to be altogether
+too much for him. And then it was no doubt his intention to join
+literature with the Civil Service. He had been taught to regard the
+Civil Service as easy, and had counted upon himself as able to add it to
+his novels, and his work with his _Punch_ brethren, and to his
+contributions generally to the literature of the day. He might have done
+so, could he have risen at five, and have sat at his private desk for
+three hours before he began his official routine at the public one. A
+capability for grinding, an aptitude for continuous task work, a
+disposition to sit in one's chair as though fixed to it by cobbler's
+wax, will enable a man in the prime of life to go through the tedium of
+a second day's work every day; but of all men Thackeray was the last to
+bear the wearisome perseverance of such a life. Some more or less
+continuous attendance at his office he must have given, and with it
+would have gone _Punch_ and the novels, the ballads, the burlesques, the
+essays, the lectures, and the monthly papers full of mingled satire and
+tenderness, which have left to us that Thackeray which we could so ill
+afford to lose out of the literature of the nineteenth century. And
+there would have remained to the Civil Service the memory of a
+disgraceful job.
+
+He did not, however, give up the idea of the Civil Service. In a letter
+to his American friend, Mr. Reed, dated 8th November, 1854, he says;
+"The secretaryship of our Legation at Washington was vacant the other
+day, and I instantly asked for it; but in the very kindest letter Lord
+Clarendon showed how the petition was impossible. First, the place was
+given away. Next, it would not be fair to appoint out of the service.
+But the first was an excellent reason;--not a doubt of it." The validity
+of the second was probably not so apparent to him as it is to one who
+has himself waited long for promotion. "So if ever I come," he
+continues, "as I hope and trust to do this time next year, it must be in
+my own coat, and not the Queen's." Certainly in his own coat, and not in
+the Queen's, must Thackeray do anything by which he could mend his
+fortune or make his reputation. There never was a man less fit for the
+Queen's coat.
+
+Nevertheless he held strong ideas that much was due by the Queen's
+ministers to men of letters, and no doubt had his feelings of slighted
+merit, because no part of the debt due was paid to him. In 1850 he wrote
+a letter to _The Morning Chronicle_, which has since been republished,
+in which he alludes to certain opinions which had been put forth in _The
+Examiner_. "I don't see," he says, "why men of letters should not very
+cheerfully coincide with Mr. Examiner in accepting all the honours,
+places, and prizes which they can get. The amount of such as will be
+awarded to them will not, we may be pretty sure, impoverish the country
+much; and if it is the custom of the State to reward by money, or titles
+of honour, or stars and garters of any sort, individuals who do the
+country service,--and if individuals are gratified at having 'Sir' or
+'My lord' appended to their names, or stars and ribbons hooked on to
+their coats and waistcoats, as men most undoubtedly are, and as their
+wives, families, and relations are,--there can be no reason why men of
+letters should not have the chance, as well as men of the robe or the
+sword; or why, if honour and money are good for one profession, they
+should not be good for another. No man in other callings thinks himself
+degraded by receiving a reward from his Government; nor, surely, need
+the literary man be more squeamish about pensions, and ribbons, and
+titles, than the ambassador, or general, or judge. Every European state
+but ours rewards its men of letters. The American Government gives them
+their full share of its small patronage; and if Americans, why not
+Englishmen?"
+
+In this a great subject is discussed which would be too long for these
+pages; but I think that there now exists a feeling that literature can
+herself, for herself, produce a rank as effective as any that a Queen's
+minister can bestow. Surely it would be a repainting of the lily, an
+adding a flavour to the rose, a gilding of refined gold to create
+to-morrow a Lord Viscount Tennyson, a Baron Carlyle, or a Right
+Honourable Sir Robert Browning. And as for pay and pension, the less the
+better of it for any profession, unless so far as it may be payment made
+for work done. Then the higher the payment the better, in literature as
+in all other trades. It may be doubted even whether a special rank of
+its own be good for literature, such as that which is achieved by the
+happy possessors of the forty chairs of the Academy in France. Even
+though they had an angel to make the choice,--which they have not,--that
+angel would do more harm to the excluded than good to the selected.
+
+_Pendennis_, _Esmond_, and _The Newcomes_ followed _Vanity Fair_,--not
+very quickly indeed, always at an interval of two years,--in 1850, 1852,
+and 1854. As I purpose to devote a separate short chapter, or part of a
+chapter, to each of these, I need say nothing here of their special
+merits or demerits. _Esmond_ was brought out as a whole. The others
+appeared in numbers. "He lisped in numbers, for the numbers came." It is
+a mode of pronunciation in literature by no means very articulate, but
+easy of production and lucrative. But though easy it is seductive, and
+leads to idleness. An author by means of it can raise money and
+reputation on his book before he has written it, and when the pang of
+parturition is over in regard to one part, he feels himself entitled to
+a period of ease because the amount required for the next division will
+occupy him only half the month. This to Thackeray was so alluring that
+the entirety of the final half was not always given to the task. His
+self-reproaches and bemoanings when sometimes the day for reappearing
+would come terribly nigh, while yet the necessary amount of copy was
+far from being ready, were often very ludicrous and very sad;--ludicrous
+because he never told of his distress without adding to it something of
+ridicule which was irresistible, and sad because those who loved him
+best were aware that physical suffering had already fallen upon him, and
+that he was deterred by illness from the exercise of continuous energy.
+I myself did not know him till after the time now in question. My
+acquaintance with him was quite late in his life. But he has told me
+something of it, and I have heard from those who lived with him how
+continual were his sufferings. In 1854, he says in one of his letters to
+Mr. Reed,--the only private letters of his which I know to have been
+published; "I am to-day just out of bed after another, about the
+dozenth, severe fit of spasms which I have had this year. My book would
+have been written but for them." His work was always going on, but
+though not fuller of matter,--that would have been almost
+impossible,--would have been better in manner had he been delayed
+neither by suffering nor by that palsying of the energies which
+suffering produces.
+
+This ought to have been the happiest period of his life, and should have
+been very happy. He had become fairly easy in his circumstances. He had
+succeeded in his work, and had made for himself a great name. He was
+fond of popularity, and especially anxious to be loved by a small circle
+of friends. These good things he had thoroughly achieved. Immediately
+after the publication of _Vanity Fair_ he stood high among the literary
+heroes of his country, and had endeared himself especially to a special
+knot of friends. His face and figure, his six feet four in height, with
+his flowing hair, already nearly gray, and his broken nose, his broad
+forehead and ample chest, encountered everywhere either love or respect;
+and his daughters to him were all the world,--the bairns of whom he
+says, at the end of the _White Squall_ ballad;
+
+     I thought, as day was breaking,
+     My little girls were waking,
+     And smiling, and making
+       A prayer at home for me.
+
+Nothing could have been more tender or endearing than his relations with
+his children. But still there was a skeleton in his cupboard,--or rather
+two skeletons. His home had been broken up by his wife's malady, and his
+own health was shattered. When he was writing _Pendennis_, in 1849, he
+had a severe fever, and then those spasms came, of which four or five
+years afterwards he wrote to Mr. Reed. His home, as a home should be,
+was never restored to him,--or his health. Just at that period of life
+at which a man generally makes a happy exchange in taking his wife's
+drawing-room in lieu of the smoking-room of his club, and assumes those
+domestic ways of living which are becoming and pleasant for matured
+years, that drawing-room and those domestic ways were closed against
+him. The children were then no more than babies, as far as society was
+concerned,--things to kiss and play with, and make a home happy if they
+could only have had their mother with them. I have no doubt there were
+those who thought that Thackeray was very jolly under his adversity.
+Jolly he was. It was the manner of the man to be so,--if that continual
+playfulness which was natural to him, lying over a melancholy which was
+as continual, be compatible with jollity. He laughed, and ate, and
+drank, and threw his pearls about with miraculous profusion. But I fancy
+that he was far from happy. I remember once, when I was young,
+receiving advice as to the manner in which I had better spend my
+evenings; I was told that I ought to go home, drink tea, and read good
+books. It was excellent advice, but I found that the reading of good
+books in solitude was not an occupation congenial to me. It was so, I
+take it, with Thackeray. He did not like his lonely drawing-room, and
+went back to his life among the clubs by no means with contentment.
+
+In 1853, Thackeray having then his own two girls to provide for, added a
+third to his family, and adopted Amy Crowe, the daughter of an old
+friend, and sister of the well-known artist now among us. How it came to
+pass that she wanted a home, or that this special home suited her, it
+would be unnecessary here to tell even if I knew. But that he did give a
+home to this young lady, making her in all respects the same as another
+daughter, should be told of him. He was a man who liked to broaden his
+back for the support of others, and to make himself easy under such
+burdens. In 1862, she married a Thackeray cousin, a young officer with
+the Victoria Cross, Edward Thackeray, and went out to India,--where she
+died.
+
+In 1854, the year in which _The Newcomes_ came out, Thackeray had broken
+his close alliance with _Punch_. In December of that year there appeared
+from his pen an article in _The Quarterly_ on _John Leech's Pictures of
+Life and Character_. It is a rambling discourse on picture-illustration
+in general, full of interest, but hardly good as a criticism,--a portion
+of literary work for which he was not specially fitted. In it he tells
+us how Richard Doyle, the artist, had given up his work for _Punch_, not
+having been able, as a Roman Catholic, to endure the skits which, at
+that time, were appearing in one number after another against what was
+then called Papal aggression. The reviewer,--Thackeray himself,--then
+tells us of the secession of himself from the board of brethren.
+"Another member of Mr. Punch's cabinet, the biographer of _Jeames_, the
+author of _The Snob Papers_, resigned his functions, on account of Mr.
+Punch's assaults upon the present Emperor of the French nation, whose
+anger Jeames thought it was unpatriotic to arouse." How hard it must be
+for Cabinets to agree! This man or that is sure to have some pet
+conviction of his own, and the better the man the stronger the
+conviction! Then the reviewer went on in favour of the artist of whom he
+was specially speaking, making a comparison which must at the time have
+been odious enough to some of the brethren. "There can be no blinking
+the fact that in Mr. Punch's Cabinet John Leech is the right-hand man.
+Fancy a number of _Punch_ without Leech's pictures! What would you give
+for it?" Then he breaks out into strong admiration of that one
+friend,--perhaps with a little disregard as to the feelings of other
+friends.[3] This _Critical Review_, if it may properly be so called,--at
+any rate it is so named as now published,--is to be found in our
+author's collected works, in the same volume with _Catherine_. It is
+there preceded by another, from _The Westminster Review_, written
+fourteen years earlier, on _The Genius of Cruikshank_. This contains a
+descriptive catalogue of Cruikshank's works up to that period, and is
+interesting from the piquant style in which it is written. I fancy that
+these two are the only efforts of the kind which he made,--and in both
+he dealt with the two great caricaturists of his time, he himself being,
+in the imaginative part of a caricaturist's work, equal in power to
+either of them.
+
+We now come to a phase of Thackeray's life in which he achieved a
+remarkable success, attributable rather to his fame as a writer than to
+any particular excellence in the art which he then exercised. He took
+upon himself the functions of a lecturer, being moved to do so by a hope
+that he might thus provide a sum of money for the future sustenance of
+his children. No doubt he had been advised to this course, though I do
+not know from whom specially the advice may have come. Dickens had
+already considered the subject, but had not yet consented to read in
+public for money on his own account. John Forster, writing of the year
+1846, says of Dickens and the then only thought-of exercise of a new
+profession; "I continued to oppose, for reasons to be stated in their
+place, that which he had set his heart upon too strongly to abandon, and
+which I still can wish he had preferred to surrender with all that
+seemed to be its enormous gain." And again he says, speaking of a
+proposition which had been made to Dickens from the town of Bradford;
+"At first this was entertained, but was abandoned, with some reluctance,
+upon the argument that to become publicly a reader must alter, without
+improving, his position publicly as a writer, and that it was a change
+to be justified only when the higher calling should have failed of the
+old success." The meaning of this was that the money to be made would
+be sweet, but that the descent to a profession which was considered to
+be lower than that of literature itself would carry with it something
+that was bitter. It was as though one who had sat on the woolsack as
+Lord Chancellor should raise the question whether for the sake of the
+income attached to it, he might, without disgrace, occupy a seat on a
+lower bench; as though an architect should consider with himself the
+propriety of making his fortune as a contractor; or the head of a
+college lower his dignity, while he increased his finances, by taking
+pupils. When such discussions arise, money generally carries the
+day,--and should do so. When convinced that money may be earned without
+disgrace, we ought to allow money to carry the day. When we talk of
+sordid gain and filthy lucre, we are generally hypocrites. If gains be
+sordid and lucre filthy, where is the priest, the lawyer, the doctor, or
+the man of literature, who does not wish for dirty hands? An income, and
+the power of putting by something for old age, something for those who
+are to come after, is the wholesome and acknowledged desire of all
+professional men. Thackeray having children, and being gifted with no
+power of making his money go very far, was anxious enough on the
+subject. We may say now, that had he confined himself to his pen, he
+would not have wanted while he lived, but would have left but little
+behind him. That he was anxious we have seen, by his attempts to
+subsidise his literary gains by a Government office. I cannot but think
+that had he undertaken public duties for which he was ill qualified, and
+received a salary which he could hardly have earned, he would have done
+less for his fame than by reading to the public. Whether he did that
+well or ill, he did it well enough for the money. The people who heard
+him, and who paid for their seats, were satisfied with their
+bargain,--as they were also in the case of Dickens; and I venture to say
+that in becoming publicly a reader, neither did Dickens or Thackeray
+"alter his position as a writer," and "that it was a change to be
+justified," though the success of the old calling had in no degree
+waned. What Thackeray did enabled him to leave a comfortable income for
+his children, and one earned honestly, with the full approval of the
+world around him.
+
+Having saturated his mind with the literature of Queen Anne's time,--not
+probably in the first instance as a preparation for _Esmond_, but in
+such a way as to induce him to create an Esmond,--he took the authors
+whom he knew so well as the subject for his first series of lectures. He
+wrote _The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century_ in 1851, while
+he must have been at work on _Esmond_, and first delivered the course at
+Willis's Rooms in that year. He afterwards went with these through many
+of our provincial towns, and then carried them to the United States,
+where he delivered them to large audiences in the winter of 1852 and
+1853. Some few words as to the merits of the composition I will
+endeavour to say in another place. I myself never heard him lecture, and
+can therefore give no opinion of the performance. That which I have
+heard from others has been very various. It is, I think, certain that he
+had none of those wonderful gifts of elocution which made it a pleasure
+to listen to Dickens, whatever he read or whatever he said; nor had he
+that power of application by using which his rival taught himself with
+accuracy the exact effect to be given to every word. The rendering of a
+piece by Dickens was composed as an oratorio is composed, and was then
+studied by heart as music is studied. And the piece was all given by
+memory, without any looking at the notes or words. There was nothing of
+this with Thackeray. But the thing read was in itself of great interest
+to educated people. The words were given clearly, with sufficient
+intonation for easy understanding, so that they who were willing to hear
+something from him felt on hearing that they had received full value for
+their money. At any rate, the lectures were successful. The money was
+made,--and was kept.
+
+He came from his first trip to America to his new house in Onslow
+Square, and then published _The Newcomes_. This, too, was one of his
+great works, as to which I shall have to speak hereafter. Then, having
+enjoyed his success in the first attempt to lecture, he prepared a
+second series. He never essayed the kind of reading which with Dickens
+became so wonderfully popular. Dickens recited portions from his
+well-known works. Thackeray wrote his lectures expressly for the
+purpose. They have since been added to his other literature, but they
+were prepared as lectures. The second series were _The Four Georges_. In
+a lucrative point of view they were even more successful than the first,
+the sum of money realised in the United States having been considerable.
+In England they were less popular, even if better attended, the subject
+chosen having been distasteful to many. There arose the question whether
+too much freedom had not been taken with an office which, though it be
+no longer considered to be founded on divine right, is still as sacred
+as can be anything that is human. If there is to remain among us a
+sovereign, that sovereign, even though divested of political power,
+should be endowed with all that personal respect can give. If we wish
+ourselves to be high, we should treat that which is over us as high.
+And this should not depend altogether on personal character, though we
+know,--as we have reason to know,--how much may be added to the firmness
+of the feeling by personal merit. The respect of which we speak should,
+in the strongest degree, be a possession of the immediate occupant, and
+will naturally become dim,--or perhaps be exaggerated,--in regard to the
+past, as history or fable may tell of them. No one need hesitate to
+speak his mind of King John, let him be ever so strong a stickler for
+the privileges of majesty. But there are degrees of distance, and the
+throne of which we wish to preserve the dignity seems to be assailed
+when unmeasured evil is said of one who has sat there within our own
+memory. There would seem to each of us to be a personal affront were a
+departed relative delineated with all those faults by which we must own
+that even our near relatives have been made imperfect. It is a general
+conviction as to this which so frequently turns the biography of those
+recently dead into mere eulogy. The fictitious charity which is enjoined
+by the _de mortuis nil nisi bonum_ banishes truth. The feeling of which
+I speak almost leads me at this moment to put down my pen. And, if so
+much be due to all subjects, is less due to a sovereign?
+
+Considerations such as these diminished, I think, the popularity of
+Thackeray's second series of lectures; or, rather, not their popularity,
+but the estimation in which they were held. On this head he defended
+himself more than once very gallantly, and had a great deal to say on
+his side of the question. "Suppose, for example, in America,--in
+Philadelphia or in New York,--that I had spoken about George IV. in
+terms of praise and affected reverence, do you believe they would have
+hailed his name with cheers, or have heard it with anything of
+respect?" And again; "We degrade our own honour and the sovereign's by
+unduly and unjustly praising him; and the mere slaverer and flatterer is
+one who comes forward, as it were, with flash notes, and pays with false
+coin his tribute to Cæsar. I don't disguise that I feel somehow on my
+trial here for loyalty,--for honest English feeling." This was said by
+Thackeray at a dinner at Edinburgh, in 1857, and shows how the matter
+rested on his mind. Thackeray's loyalty was no doubt true enough, but
+was mixed with but little of reverence. He was one who revered modesty
+and innocence rather than power, against which he had in the bottom of
+his heart something of republican tendency. His leaning was no doubt of
+the more manly kind. But in what he said at Edinburgh he hardly hit the
+nail on the head. No one had suggested that he should have said good
+things of a king which he did not believe to be true. The question was
+whether it may not be well sometimes for us to hold our tongues. An
+American literary man, here in England, would not lecture on the morals
+of Hamilton, on the manners of General Jackson, on the general amenities
+of President Johnson.
+
+In 1857 Thackeray stood for Oxford, in the liberal interest, in
+opposition to Mr. Cardwell. He had been induced to do this by his old
+friend Charles Neate, who himself twice sat for Oxford, and died now not
+many months since. He polled 1,017 votes, against 1,070 by Mr. Cardwell;
+and was thus again saved by his good fortune from attempting to fill a
+situation in which he would not have shone. There are, no doubt, many to
+whom a seat in Parliament comes almost as the birthright of a well-born
+and well-to-do English gentleman. They go there with no more idea of
+shining than they do when they are elected to a first-class
+club;--hardly with more idea of being useful. It is the thing to do, and
+the House of Commons is the place where a man ought to be--for a certain
+number of hours. Such men neither succeed nor fail, for nothing is
+expected of them. From such a one as Thackeray something would have been
+expected, which would not have been forthcoming. He was too desultory
+for regular work,--full of thought, but too vague for practical
+questions. He could not have endured to sit for two or three hours at a
+time with his hat over his eyes, pretending to listen, as is the duty of
+a good legislator. He was a man intolerant of tedium, and in the best of
+his time impatient of slow work. Nor, though his liberal feelings were
+very strong, were his political convictions definite or accurate. He was
+a man who mentally drank in much, feeding his fancy hourly with what he
+saw, what he heard, what he read, and then pouring it all out with an
+immense power of amplification. But it would have been impossible for
+him to study and bring home to himself the various points of a
+complicated bill with a hundred and fifty clauses. In becoming a man of
+letters, and taking that branch of letters which fell to him, he
+obtained the special place that was fitted for him. He was a round peg
+in a round hole. There was no other hole which he would have fitted
+nearly so well. But he had his moment of political ambition, like
+others,--and paid a thousand pounds for his attempt.
+
+In 1857 the first number of _The Virginians_ appeared, and the
+last,--the twenty-fourth,--in October, 1859. This novel, as all my
+readers are aware, is a continuance of _Esmond_, and will be spoken of
+in its proper place. He was then forty-eight years old, very gray, with
+much of age upon him, which had come from suffering,--age shown by
+dislike of activity and by an old man's way of thinking about many
+things,--speaking as though the world were all behind him instead of
+before; but still with a stalwart outward bearing, very erect in his
+gait, and a countenance peculiarly expressive and capable of much
+dignity. I speak of his personal appearance at this time, because it was
+then only that I became acquainted with him. In 1859 he undertook the
+last great work of his life, the editorship of _The Cornhill Magazine_,
+a periodical set on foot by Mr. George Smith, of the house of Smith and
+Elder, with an amount of energy greater than has generally been bestowed
+upon such enterprises. It will be well remembered still how much _The
+Cornhill_ was talked about and thought of before it first appeared, and
+how much of that thinking and talking was due to the fact that Mr.
+Thackeray was to edit it. _Macmillan's_, I think, was the first of the
+shilling magazines, having preceded _The Cornhill_ by a month, and it
+would ill become me, who have been a humble servant to each of them, to
+give to either any preference. But it must be acknowledged that a great
+deal was expected from _The Cornhill_, and I think it will be confessed
+that it was the general opinion that a great deal was given by it.
+Thackeray had become big enough to give a special _éclat_ to any
+literary exploit to which he attached himself. Since the days of _The
+Constitutional_ he had fought his way up the ladder and knew how to take
+his stand there with an assurance of success. When it became known to
+the world of readers that a new magazine was to appear under Thackeray's
+editorship, the world of readers was quite sure that there would be a
+large sale. Of the first number over one hundred and ten thousand were
+sold, and of the second and third over one hundred thousand. It is in
+the nature of such things that the sale should fall off when the novelty
+is over. People believe that a new delight has come, a new joy for ever,
+and then find that the joy is not quite so perfect or enduring as they
+had expected. But the commencement of such enterprises may be taken as a
+measure of what will follow. The magazine, either by Thackeray's name or
+by its intrinsic merits,--probably by both,--achieved a great success.
+My acquaintance with him grew from my having been one of his staff from
+the first.
+
+About two months before the opening day I wrote to him suggesting that
+he should accept from me a series of four short stories on which I was
+engaged. I got back a long letter in which he said nothing about my
+short stories, but asking whether I could go to work at once and let him
+have a long novel, so that it might begin with the first number. At the
+same time I heard from the publisher, who suggested some interesting
+little details as to honorarium. The little details were very
+interesting, but absolutely no time was allowed to me. It was required
+that the first portion of my book should be in the printer's hands
+within a month. Now it was my theory,--and ever since this occurrence
+has been my practice,--to see the end of my own work before the public
+should see the commencement.[4] If I did this thing I must not only
+abandon my theory, but instantly contrive a story, or begin to write it
+before it was contrived. That was what I did, urged by the interesting
+nature of the details. A novelist cannot always at the spur of the
+moment make his plot and create his characters who shall, with an
+arranged sequence of events, live with a certain degree of eventful
+decorum, through that portion of their lives which is to be portrayed. I
+hesitated, but allowed myself to be allured to what I felt to be wrong,
+much dreading the event. How seldom is it that theories stand the wear
+and tear of practice! I will not say that the story which came was good,
+but it was received with greater favour than any I had written before or
+have written since. I think that almost anything would have been then
+accepted coming under Thackeray's editorship.
+
+I was astonished that work should be required in such haste, knowing
+that much preparation had been made, and that the service of almost any
+English novelist might have been obtained if asked for in due time. It
+was my readiness that was needed, rather than any other gift! The riddle
+was read to me after a time. Thackeray had himself intended to begin
+with one of his own great novels, but had put it off till it was too
+late. _Lovel the Widower_ was commenced at the same time with my own
+story, but _Lovel the Widower_ was not substantial enough to appear as
+the principal joint at the banquet. Though your guests will undoubtedly
+dine off the little delicacies you provide for them, there must be a
+heavy saddle of mutton among the viands prepared. I was the saddle of
+mutton, Thackeray having omitted to get his joint down to the fire in
+time enough. My fitness lay in my capacity for quick roasting.
+
+It may be interesting to give a list of the contributors to the first
+number. My novel called _Framley Parsonage_ came first. At this banquet
+the saddle of mutton was served before the delicacies. Then there was a
+paper by Sir John Bowring on _The Chinese and Outer Barbarians_. The
+commencing number of _Lovel the Widower_ followed. George Lewes came
+next with his first chapters of _Studies in Animal Life_. Then there was
+Father Prout's _Inauguration Ode_, dedicated to the author of _Vanity
+Fair_,--which should have led the way. I need hardly say that Father
+Prout was the Rev. F. Mahony. Then followed _Our Volunteers_, by Sir
+John Burgoyne; _A Man of Letters of the Last Generation_, by Thornton
+Hunt; _The Search for Sir John Franklin_, from a private journal of an
+officer of the Fox, now Sir Allen Young; and _The First Morning of
+1860_, by Mrs. Archer Clive. The number was concluded by the first of
+those _Roundabout Papers_ by Thackeray himself, which became so
+delightful a portion of the literature of _The Cornhill Magazine_.
+
+It would be out of my power, and hardly interesting, to give an entire
+list of those who wrote for _The Cornhill_ under Thackeray's editorial
+direction. But I may name a few, to show how strong was the support
+which he received. Those who contributed to the first number I have
+named. Among those who followed were Alfred Tennyson, Jacob Omnium, Lord
+Houghton, William Russell, Mrs. Beecher Stowe, Mrs. Browning, Robert
+Bell, George Augustus Sala, Mrs. Gaskell, James Hinton, Mary Howitt,
+John Kaye, Charles Lever, Frederick Locker, Laurence Oliphant, John
+Ruskin, Fitzjames Stephen, T. A. Trollope, Henry Thompson, Herman
+Merivale, Adelaide Proctor, Matthew Arnold, the present Lord Lytton, and
+Miss Thackeray, now Mrs. Ritchie. Thackeray continued the editorship for
+two years and four months, namely, up to April, 1862; but, as all
+readers will remember, he continued to write for it till he died, the
+day before Christmas Day, in 1863. His last contribution was, I think, a
+paper written for and published in the November number, called,
+"_Strange to say on Club Paper_," in which he vindicated Lord Clyde from
+the accusation of having taken the club stationery home with him. It was
+not a great subject, for no one could or did believe that the
+Field-Marshal had been guilty of any meanness; but the handling of it
+has made it interesting, and his indignation has made it beautiful.
+
+The magazine was a great success, but justice compels me to say that
+Thackeray was not a good editor. As he would have been an indifferent
+civil servant, an indifferent member of Parliament, so was he
+perfunctory as an editor. It has sometimes been thought well to select a
+popular literary man as an editor; first, because his name will attract,
+and then with an idea that he who can write well himself will be a
+competent judge of the writings of others. The first may sell a
+magazine, but will hardly make it good; and the second will not avail
+much, unless the editor so situated be patient enough to read what is
+sent to him. Of a magazine editor it is required that he should be
+patient, scrupulous, judicious, but above all things hard-hearted. I
+think it may be doubted whether Thackeray did bring himself to read the
+basketfuls of manuscripts with which he was deluged, but he probably
+did, sooner or later, read the touching little private notes by which
+they were accompanied,--the heartrending appeals, in which he was told
+that if this or the other little article could be accepted and paid for,
+a starving family might be saved from starvation for a month. He tells
+us how he felt on receiving such letters in one of his _Roundabout
+Papers_, which he calls "_Thorns in the cushion_." "How am I to know,"
+he says--"though to be sure I begin to know now,--as I take the letters
+off the tray, which of those envelopes contains a real _bona fide_
+letter, and which a thorn? One of the best invitations this year I
+mistook for a thorn letter, and kept it without opening." Then he gives
+the sample of a thorn letter. It is from a governess with a poem, and
+with a prayer for insertion and payment. "We have known better days,
+sir. I have a sick and widowed mother to maintain, and little brothers
+and sisters who look to me." He could not stand this, and the money
+would be sent, out of his own pocket, though the poem might
+be--postponed, till happily it should be lost.
+
+From such material a good editor could not be made. Nor, in truth, do I
+think that he did much of the editorial work. I had once made an
+arrangement, not with Thackeray, but with the proprietors, as to some
+little story. The story was sent back to me by Thackeray--rejected.
+_Virginibus puerisque!_ That was the gist of his objection. There was a
+project in a gentleman's mind,--as told in my story,--to run away with a
+married woman! Thackeray's letter was very kind, very regretful,--full
+of apology for such treatment to such a contributor. But--_Virginibus
+puerisque!_ I was quite sure that Thackeray had not taken the trouble to
+read the story himself. Some moral deputy had read it, and disapproving,
+no doubt properly, of the little project to which I have alluded, had
+incited the editor to use his authority. That Thackeray had suffered
+when he wrote it was easy to see, fearing that he was giving pain to one
+he would fain have pleased. I wrote him a long letter in return, as full
+of drollery as I knew how to make it. In four or five days there came a
+reply in the same spirit,--boiling over with fun. He had kept my letter
+by him, not daring to open it,--as he says that he did with that
+eligible invitation. At last he had given it to one of his girls to
+examine,--to see whether the thorn would be too sharp, whether I had
+turned upon him with reproaches. A man so susceptible, so prone to work
+by fits and starts, so unmethodical, could not have been a good editor.
+
+In 1862 he went into the new house which he had built for himself at
+Palace Green. I remember well, while this was still being built, how his
+friends used to discuss his imprudence in building it. Though he had
+done well with himself, and had made and was making a large income, was
+he entitled to live in a house the rent of which could not be counted at
+less than from five hundred to six hundred pounds a year? Before he had
+been there two years, he solved the question by dying,--when the house
+was sold for two thousand pounds more than it had cost. He himself, in
+speaking of his project, was wont to declare that he was laying out his
+money in the best way he could for the interest of his children;--and it
+turned out that he was right.
+
+In 1863 he died in the house which he had built, and at the period of
+his death was writing a new novel in numbers, called _Denis Duval_. In
+_The Cornhill_, _The Adventures of Philip_ had appeared. This new
+enterprise was destined for commencement on 1st January, 1864, and,
+though the writer was gone, it kept its promise, as far as it went.
+Three numbers, and what might probably have been intended for half of a
+fourth, appeared. It may be seen, therefore, that he by no means held to
+my theory, that the author should see the end of his work before the
+public sees the commencement. But neither did Dickens or Mrs. Gaskell,
+both of whom died with stories not completed, which, when they died,
+were in the course of publication. All the evidence goes against the
+necessity of such precaution. Nevertheless, were I giving advice to a
+tiro in novel writing, I should recommend it.
+
+With the last chapter of _Denis Duval_ was published in the magazine a
+set of notes on the book, taken for the most part from Thackeray's own
+papers, and showing how much collateral work he had given to the
+fabrication of his novel. No doubt in preparing other tales, especially
+_Esmond_, a very large amount of such collateral labour was found
+necessary. He was a man who did very much of such work, delighting to
+deal in little historical incidents. They will be found in almost
+everything that he did, and I do not know that he was ever accused of
+gross mistakes. But I doubt whether on that account he should be called
+a laborious man. He could go down to Winchelsea, when writing about the
+little town, to see in which way the streets lay, and to provide himself
+with what we call local colouring. He could jot down the suggestions, as
+they came to his mind, of his future story. There was an irregularity in
+such work which was to his taste. His very notes would be delightful to
+read, partaking of the nature of pearls when prepared only for his own
+use. But he could not bring himself to sit at his desk and do an
+allotted task day after day. He accomplished what must be considered as
+quite a sufficient life's work. He had about twenty-five years for the
+purpose, and that which he has left is an ample produce for the time.
+Nevertheless he was a man of fits and starts, who, not having been in
+his early years drilled to method, never achieved it in his career.
+
+He died on the day before Christmas Day, as has been said above, very
+suddenly, in his bed, early in the morning, in the fifty-third year of
+his life. To those who saw him about in the world there seemed to be no
+reason why he should not continue his career for the next twenty years.
+But those who knew him were so well aware of his constant sufferings,
+that, though they expected no sudden catastrophe, they were hardly
+surprised when it came. His death was probably caused by those spasms of
+which he had complained ten years before, in his letter to Mr. Reed. On
+the last day but one of the year, a crowd of sorrowing friends stood
+over his grave as he was laid to rest in Kensal Green; and, as quickly
+afterwards as it could be executed, a bust to his memory was put up in
+Westminster Abbey. It is a fine work of art, by Marochetti; but, as a
+likeness, is, I think, less effective than that which was modelled, and
+then given to the Garrick Club, by Durham, and has lately been put into
+marble, and now stands in the upper vestibule of the club. Neither of
+them, in my opinion, give so accurate an idea of the man as a statuette
+in bronze, by Boehm, of which two or three copies were made. One of them
+is in my possession. It has been alleged, in reference to this, that
+there is something of a caricature in the lengthiness of the figure, in
+the two hands thrust into the trousers pockets, and in the protrusion of
+the chin. But this feeling has originated in the general idea that any
+face, or any figure, not made by the artist more beautiful or more
+graceful than the original is an injustice. The face must be smoother,
+the pose of the body must be more dignified, the proportions more
+perfect, than in the person represented, or satisfaction is not felt.
+Mr. Boehm has certainly not flattered, but, as far as my eye can judge,
+he has given the figure of the man exactly as he used to stand before
+us. I have a portrait of him in crayon, by Samuel Lawrence, as like, but
+hardly as natural.
+
+A little before his death Thackeray told me that he had then succeeded
+in replacing the fortune which he had lost as a young man. Ho had, in
+fact, done better, for he left an income of seven hundred and fifty
+pounds behind him.
+
+It has been said of Thackeray that he was a cynic. This has been said so
+generally, that the charge against him has become proverbial. This,
+stated barely, leaves one of two impressions on the mind, or perhaps the
+two together,--that this cynicism was natural to his character and came
+out in his life, or that it is the characteristic of his writings. Of
+the nature of his writings generally, I will speak in the last chapter
+of this little book. As to his personal character as a cynic, I must
+find room to quote the following first stanzas of the little poem which
+appeared to his memory in _Punch_, from the pen of Shirley Brooks;
+
+     He was a cynic! By his life all wrought
+       Of generous acts, mild words, and gentle ways;
+     His heart wide open to all kindly thought,
+       His hand so quick to give, his tongue to praise!
+
+     He was a cynic! You might read it writ
+       In that broad brow, crowned with its silver hair;
+     In those blue eyes, with childlike candour lit,
+       In that sweet smile his lips were wont to wear!
+
+     He was a cynic! By the love that clung
+       About him from his children, friends, and kin;
+     By the sharp pain light pen and gossip tongue
+       Wrought in him, chafing the soft heart within!
+
+The spirit and nature of the man have been caught here with absolute
+truth. A public man should of course be judged from his public work. If
+he wrote as a cynic,--a point which I will not discuss here,--it may be
+fair that he who is to be known as a writer should be so called. But, as
+a man, I protest that it would be hard to find an individual farther
+removed from the character. Over and outside his fancy, which was the
+gift which made him so remarkable,--a certain feminine softness was the
+most remarkable trait about him. To give some immediate pleasure was the
+great delight of his life,--a sovereign to a schoolboy, gloves to a
+girl, a dinner to a man, a compliment to a woman. His charity was
+overflowing. His generosity excessive. I heard once a story of woe from
+a man who was the dear friend of both of us. The gentleman wanted a
+large sum of money instantly,--something under two thousand pounds,--had
+no natural friends who could provide it, but must go utterly to the wall
+without it. Pondering over this sad condition of things just revealed to
+me, I met Thackeray between the two mounted heroes at the Horse Guards,
+and told him the story. "Do you mean to say that I am to find two
+thousand pounds?" he said, angrily, with some expletives. I explained
+that I had not even suggested the doing of anything,--only that we might
+discuss the matter. Then there came over his face a peculiar smile, and
+a wink in his eye, and he whispered his suggestion, as though half
+ashamed of his meanness. "I'll go half," he said, "if anybody will do
+the rest." And he did go half, at a day or two's notice, though the
+gentleman was no more than simply a friend. I am glad to be able to add
+that the money was quickly repaid. I could tell various stories of the
+same kind, only that I lack space, and that they, if simply added one to
+the other, would lack interest.
+
+He was no cynic, but he was a satirist, and could now and then be a
+satirist in conversation, hitting very hard when he did hit. When he was
+in America he met at dinner a literary gentleman of high character,
+middle-aged, and most dignified deportment. The gentleman was one whose
+character and acquirements stood very high,--deservedly so,--but who, in
+society, had that air of wrapping his toga around him, which adds, or is
+supposed to add, many cubits to a man's height. But he had a broken
+nose. At dinner he talked much of the tender passion, and did so in a
+manner which stirred up Thackeray's feeling of the ridiculous. "What has
+the world come to," said Thackeray out loud to the table, "when two
+broken-nosed old fogies like you and me sit talking about love to each
+other!" The gentleman was astounded, and could only sit wrapping his
+toga in silent dismay for the rest of the evening. Thackeray then, as at
+other similar times, had no idea of giving pain, but when he saw a
+foible he put his foot upon it, and tried to stamp it out.
+
+Such is my idea of the man whom many call a cynic, but whom I regard as
+one of the most soft-hearted of human beings, sweet as Charity itself,
+who went about the world dropping pearls, doing good, and never wilfully
+inflicting a wound.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] The report that he had lost all his money and was going to live by
+painting in Paris, was still prevalent in London in 1836. Macready, on
+the 27th April of that year, says in his _Diary_; "At Garrick Club,
+where I dined and saw the papers. Met Thackeray, who has spent all his
+fortune, and is now about to settle in Paris, I believe as an artist."
+But at this time he was, in truth, turning to literature as a
+profession.
+
+[2] The article was written by Abraham Hayward, who is still with us,
+and was no doubt instigated by a desire to assist Thackeray in his
+struggle upwards, in which it succeeded.
+
+[3] For a week there existed at the _Punch_ office a grudge against
+Thackeray in reference to this awkward question: "What would you give
+for your _Punch_ without John Leech?" Then he asked the confraternity to
+dinner,--_more Thackerayano_,--and the confraternity came. Who can doubt
+but they were very jolly over the little blunder? For years afterwards
+Thackeray was a guest at the well-known _Punch_ dinner, though he was no
+longer one of the contributors.
+
+[4] I had begun an Irish story and half finished it, which would reach
+just the required length. Would that do, I asked. I was civilly told
+that my Irish story would no doubt be charming, but was not quite the
+thing that was wanted. Could I not begin a new one,--English,--and if
+possible about clergymen? The details were so interesting that had a
+couple of archbishops been demanded, I should have produced them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+FRASER'S MAGAZINE AND PUNCH.
+
+
+How Thackeray commenced his connection with _Fraser's Magazine_ I am
+unable to say. We know how he had come to London with a view to a
+literary career, and that he had at one time made an attempt to earn his
+bread as a correspondent to a newspaper from Paris. It is probable that
+he became acquainted with the redoubtable Oliver Yorke, otherwise Dr.
+Maginn, or some of his staff, through the connection which he had thus
+opened with the press. He was not known, or at any rate he was
+unrecognised, by _Fraser_ in January, 1835, in which month an amusing
+catalogue was given of the writers then employed, with portraits of
+them, all seated at a symposium. I can trace no article to his pen
+before November, 1837, when the _Yellowplush Correspondence_ was
+commenced, though it is hardly probable that he should have commenced
+with a work of so much pretension. There had been published a volume
+called _My Book, or the Anatomy of Conduct_, by John Skelton, and a very
+absurd book no doubt it was. We may presume that it contained maxims on
+etiquette, and that it was intended to convey in print those invaluable
+lessons on deportment which, as Dickens has told us, were subsequently
+given by Mr. Turveydrop, in the academy kept by him for that purpose.
+Thackeray took this as his foundation for the _Fashionable Fax and
+Polite Annygoats_, by Jeames Yellowplush, with which he commenced those
+repeated attacks against snobbism which he delighted to make through a
+considerable portion of his literary life. Oliver Yorke has himself
+added four or five pages of his own to Thackeray's lucubrations; and
+with the second, and some future numbers, there appeared illustrations
+by Thackeray himself, illustrations at this time not having been common
+with the magazine. From all this I gather that the author was already
+held in estimation by _Fraser's_ confraternity. I remember well my own
+delight with _Yellowplush_ at the time, and how I inquired who was the
+author. It was then that I first heard Thackeray's name.
+
+The _Yellowplush Papers_ were continued through nine numbers. No further
+reference was made to Mr. Skelton and his book beyond that given at the
+beginning of the first number, and the satire is only shown by the
+attempt made by Yellowplush, the footman, to give his ideas generally on
+the manners of noble life. The idea seems to be that a gentleman may, in
+heart and in action, be as vulgar as a footman. No doubt he may, but the
+chances are very much that he won't. But the virtue of the memoir does
+not consist in the lessons, but in the general drollery of the letters.
+The "orthogwaphy is inaccuwate," as a certain person says in the
+memoirs,--"so inaccuwate" as to take a positive study to "compwehend"
+it; but the joke, though old, is so handled as to be very amusing.
+Thackeray soon rushes away from his criticisms on snobbism to other
+matters. There are the details of a card-sharping enterprise, in which
+we cannot but feel that we recognise something of the author's own
+experiences in the misfortunes of Mr. Dawkins; there is the Earl of
+Crab's, and then the first of those attacks which he was tempted to
+make on the absurdities of his brethren of letters, and the only one
+which now has the appearance of having been ill-natured. His first
+victims were Dr. Dionysius Lardner and Mr. Edward Bulwer Lytton, as he
+was then. We can surrender the doctor to the whip of the satirist; and
+for "Sawedwadgeorgeearllittnbulwig," as the novelist is made to call
+himself, we can well believe that he must himself have enjoyed the
+_Yellowplush Memoirs_ if he ever re-read them in after life. The speech
+in which he is made to dissuade the footman from joining the world of
+letters is so good that I will venture to insert it: "Bullwig was
+violently affected; a tear stood in his glistening i. 'Yellowplush,'
+says he, seizing my hand, 'you _are_ right. Quit not your present
+occupation; black boots, clean knives, wear plush all your life, but
+don't turn literary man. Look at me. I am the first novelist in Europe.
+I have ranged with eagle wings over the wide regions of literature, and
+perched on every eminence in its turn. I have gazed with eagle eyes on
+the sun of philosophy, and fathomed the mysterious depths of the human
+mind. All languages are familiar to me, all thoughts are known to me,
+all men understood by me. I have gathered wisdom from the honeyed lips
+of Plato, as we wandered in the gardens of the Academies; wisdom, too,
+from the mouth of Job Johnson, as we smoked our backy in Seven Dials.
+Such must be the studies, and such is the mission, in this world of the
+Poet-Philosopher. But the knowledge is only emptiness; the initiation is
+but misery; the initiated a man shunned and banned by his fellows. Oh!'
+said Bullwig, clasping his hands, and throwing his fine i's up to the
+chandelier, 'the curse of Pwomethus descends upon his wace. Wath and
+punishment pursue them from genewation to genewation! Wo to genius, the
+heaven-scaler, the fire-stealer! Wo and thrice-bitter desolation! Earth
+is the wock on which Zeus, wemorseless, stwetches his withing
+wictim;--men, the vultures that feed and fatten on him. Ai, ai! it is
+agony eternal,--gwoaning and solitawy despair! And you, Yellowplush,
+would penetwate these mystewies; you would waise the awful veil, and
+stand in the twemendous Pwesence. Beware, as you value your peace,
+beware! Withdraw, wash Neophyte! For heaven's sake! O for heaven's
+sake!'--Here he looked round with agony;--'give me a glass of
+bwandy-and-water, for this clawet is beginning to disagwee with me.'" It
+was thus that Thackeray began that vein of satire on his contemporaries
+of which it may be said that the older he grew the more amusing it was,
+and at the same time less likely to hurt the feelings of the author
+satirised.
+
+The next tale of any length from Thackeray's pen, in the magazine, was
+that called _Catherine_, which is the story taken from the life of a
+wretched woman called Catherine Hayes. It is certainly not pleasant
+reading, and was not written with a pleasant purpose. It assumes to have
+come from the pen of Ikey Solomon, of Horsemonger Lane, and its object
+is to show how disgusting would be the records of thieves, cheats, and
+murderers if their doings and language were described according to their
+nature instead of being handled in such a way as to create sympathy, and
+therefore imitation. Bulwer's _Eugene Aram_, Harrison Ainsworth's _Jack
+Sheppard_, and Dickens' Nancy were in his mind, and it was thus that he
+preached his sermon against the selection of such heroes and heroines by
+the novelists of the day. "Be it granted," he says, in his epilogue,
+"Solomon is dull; but don't attack his morality. He humbly submits
+that, in his poem, no man shall mistake virtue for vice, no man shall
+allow a single sentiment of pity or admiration to enter his bosom for
+any character in the poem, it being from beginning to end a scene of
+unmixed rascality, performed by persons who never deviate into good
+feeling." The intention is intelligible enough, but such a story neither
+could have been written nor read,--certainly not written by Thackeray,
+nor read by the ordinary reader of a first-class magazine,--had he not
+been enabled to adorn it by infinite wit. Captain Brock, though a brave
+man, is certainly not described as an interesting or gallant soldier;
+but he is possessed of great resources. Captain Macshane, too, is a
+thorough blackguard; but he is one with a dash of loyalty about him, so
+that the reader can almost sympathise with him, and is tempted to say
+that Ikey Solomon has not quite kept his promise.
+
+_Catherine_ appeared in 1839 and 1840. In the latter of those years _The
+Shabby Genteel_ story also came out. Then in 1841 there followed _The
+History of Samuel Titmarsh and the Great Hoggarty Diamond_, illustrated
+by Samuel's cousin, Michael Angelo. But though so announced in _Fraser_,
+there were no illustrations, and those attached to the story in later
+editions are not taken from sketches by Thackeray. This, as far as I
+know, was the first use of the name Titmarsh, and seems to indicate some
+intention on the part of the author of creating a hoax as to two
+personages,--one the writer and the other the illustrator. If it were so
+he must soon have dropped the idea. In the last paragraph he has shaken
+off his cousin Michael. The main object of the story is to expose the
+villany of bubble companies, and the danger they run who venture to have
+dealings with city matters which they do not understand. I cannot but
+think that he altered his mind and changed his purpose while he was
+writing it, actuated probably by that editorial monition as to its
+length.
+
+In 1842 were commenced _The Confessions of George Fitz-Boodle_, which
+were continued into 1843. I do not think that they attracted much
+attention, or that they have become peculiarly popular since. They are
+supposed to contain the reminiscences of a younger son, who moans over
+his poverty, complains of womankind generally, laughs at the world all
+round, and intersperses his pages with one or two excellent ballads. I
+quote one, written for the sake of affording a parody, with the parody
+along with it, because the two together give so strong an example of the
+condition of Thackeray's mind in regard to literary products. The
+"humbug" of everything, the pretence, the falseness of affected
+sentiment, the remoteness of poetical pathos from the true condition of
+the average minds of men and women, struck him so strongly, that he
+sometimes allowed himself almost to feel,--or at any rate, to say,--that
+poetical expression, as being above nature, must be unnatural. He had
+declared to himself that all humbug was odious, and should be by him
+laughed down to the extent of his capacity. His Yellowplush, his
+Catherine Hayes, his Fitz-Boodle, his Barry Lyndon, and Becky Sharp,
+with many others of this kind, were all invented and treated for this
+purpose and after this fashion. I shall have to say more on the same
+subject when I come to _The Snob Papers_. In this instance he wrote a
+very pretty ballad, _The Willow Tree_,--so good that if left by itself
+it would create no idea of absurdity or extravagant pathos in the mind
+of the ordinary reader,--simply that he might render his own work absurd
+by his own parody.
+
+     THE WILLOW-TREE.
+
+     No. I.
+
+          THE WILLOW-TREE.
+
+          No. II.
+
+     Know ye the willow-tree,
+       Whose gray leaves quiver,
+     Whispering gloomily
+       To yon pale river?
+     Lady, at eventide
+       Wander not near it!
+     They say its branches hide
+       A sad lost spirit!
+
+          Long by the willow-tree
+            Vainly they sought her,
+          Wild rang the mother's screams
+            O'er the gray water.
+          "Where is my lovely one?
+            Where is my daughter?
+
+          Rouse thee, sir constable--
+            Rouse thee and look.
+          Fisherman, bring your net,
+            Boatman, your hook.
+          Beat in the lily-beds,
+            Dive in the brook."
+
+     Once to the willow-tree
+       A maid came fearful,
+     Pale seemed her cheek to be,
+       Her blue eye tearful.
+     Soon as she saw the tree,
+       Her steps moved fleeter.
+     No one was there--ah me!--
+       No one to meet her!
+
+          Vainly the constable
+            Shouted and called her.
+          Vainly the fisherman
+            Beat the green alder.
+          Vainly he threw the net.
+            Never it hauled her!
+
+     Quick beat her heart to hear
+       The far bells' chime
+     Toll from the chapel-tower
+       The trysting-time.
+     But the red sun went down
+       In golden flame,
+     And though she looked around,
+       Yet no one came!
+
+          Mother beside the fire
+            Sat, her night-cap in;
+          Father in easychair,
+            Gloomily napping;
+          When at the window-sill
+            Came a light tapping.
+
+     Presently came the night,
+       Sadly to greet her,--
+     Moon in her silver light,
+       Stars in their glitter.
+     Then sank the moon away
+       Under the billow.
+     Still wept the maid alone--
+       There by the willow!
+
+          And a pale countenance
+            Looked through the casement.
+          Loud beat the mother's heart,
+            Sick with amazement,
+          And at the vision which
+            Came to surprise her!
+          Shrieking in an agony--
+            "Lor'! it's Elizar!"
+
+     Through the long darkness,
+       By the stream rolling,
+     Hour after hour went on
+       Tolling and tolling.
+     Long was the darkness,
+       Lonely and stilly.
+     Shrill came the night wind,
+       Piercing and chilly.
+
+          Yes, 'twas Elizabeth;--
+            Yes, 'twas their girl;
+          Pale was her cheek, and her
+            Hair out of curl.
+          "Mother!" the loved one,
+            Blushing, exclaimed,
+          "Let not your innocent
+            Lizzy be blamed.
+
+          Yesterday, going to Aunt
+            Jones's to tea,
+          Mother, dear mother, I
+            Forgot the door-key!
+          And as the night was cold,
+            And the way steep,
+          Mrs. Jones kept me to
+            Breakfast and sleep."
+
+     Shrill blew the morning breeze,
+       Biting and cold.
+     Bleak peers the gray dawn
+       Over the wold!
+     Bleak over moor and stream
+       Looks the gray dawn,
+     Gray with dishevelled hair.
+     Still stands the willow there--
+       The maid is gone!
+
+          Whether her pa and ma
+            Fully believed her,
+          That we shall never know.
+            Stern they received her;
+          And for the work of that
+            Cruel, though short, night,--
+          Sent her to bed without
+            Tea for a fortnight.
+
+       Domine, Domine!
+       Sing we a litany--
+     Sing for poor maiden-hearts broken and weary;
+       Sing we a litany,
+     Wail we and weep we a wild miserere!
+
+            MORAL.
+
+            Hey diddle diddlety,
+            Cat and the fiddlety,
+          Maidens of England take caution by she!
+            Let love and suicide
+            Never tempt you aside,
+          And always remember to take the door-key!
+
+Mr. George Fitz-Boodle gave his name to other narratives beyond his own
+_Confessions_. A series of stories was carried on by him in _Fraser_,
+called _Men's Wives_, containing three; _Ravenwing_, _Mr. and Mrs.
+Frank Berry_, and _Dennis Hoggarty's Wife_. The first chapter in _Mr.
+and Mrs. Frank Berry_ describes "The Fight at Slaughter House."
+Slaughter House, as Mr. Venables reminded us in the last chapter, was
+near Smithfield in London,--the school which afterwards became Grey
+Friars; and the fight between Biggs and Berry is the record of one which
+took place in the flesh when Thackeray was at the Charter House. But Mr.
+Fitz-Boodle's name was afterwards attached to a greater work than these,
+to a work so great that subsequent editors have thought him to be
+unworthy of the honour. In the January number, 1844, of _Fraser's
+Magazine_, are commenced the _Memoirs of Barry Lyndon_, and the
+authorship is attributed to Mr. Fitz-Boodle. The title given in the
+magazine was _The Luck of Barry Lyndon: a Romance of the last Century_.
+By Fitz-Boodle. In the collected edition of Thackeray's works the
+_Memoirs_ are given as "Written by himself," and were, I presume, so
+brought out by Thackeray, after they had appeared in _Fraser_. Why Mr.
+George Fitz-Boodle should have been robbed of so great an honour I do
+not know.
+
+In imagination, language, construction, and general literary capacity,
+Thackeray never did anything more remarkable than _Barry Lyndon_. I have
+quoted the words which he put into the mouth of Ikey Solomon, declaring
+that in the story which he has there told he has created nothing but
+disgust for the wicked characters he has produced, and that he has "used
+his humble endeavours to cause the public also to hate them." Here, in
+_Barry Lyndon_, he has, probably unconsciously, acted in direct
+opposition to his own principles: Barry Lyndon is as great a scoundrel
+as the mind of man ever conceived. He is one who might have taken as his
+motto Satan's words; "Evil, be thou my good." And yet his story is so
+written that it is almost impossible not to entertain something of a
+friendly feeling for him. He tells his own adventures as a card-sharper,
+bully, and liar; as a heartless wretch, who had neither love nor
+gratitude in his composition; who had no sense even of loyalty; who
+regarded gambling as the highest occupation to which a man could devote
+himself, and fraud as always justified by success; a man possessed by
+all meannesses except cowardice. And the reader is so carried away by
+his frankness and energy as almost to rejoice when he succeeds, and to
+grieve with him when he is brought to the ground.
+
+The man is perfectly satisfied as to the reasonableness,--I might almost
+say, as to the rectitude,--of his own conduct throughout. He is one of a
+decayed Irish family, that could boast of good blood. His father had
+obtained possession of the remnants of the property by turning
+Protestant, thus ousting the elder brother, who later on becomes his
+nephew's confederate in gambling. The elder brother is true to the old
+religion, and as the law stood in the last century, the younger brother,
+by changing his religion, was able to turn him out. Barry, when a boy,
+learns the slang and the gait of the debauched gentlemen of the day. He
+is specially proud of being a gentleman by birth and manners. He had
+been kidnapped, and made to serve as a common soldier, but boasts that
+he was at once fit for the occasion when enabled to show as a court
+gentleman. "I came to it at once," he says, "and as if I had never done
+anything else all my life. I had a gentleman to wait upon me, a French
+_friseur_ to dress my hair of a morning. I knew the taste of chocolate
+as by intuition almost, and could distinguish between the right Spanish
+and the French before I had been a week in my new position. I had rings
+on all my fingers and watches in both my fobs, canes, trinkets, and
+snuffboxes of all sorts. I had the finest natural taste for lace and
+china of any man I ever knew."
+
+To dress well, to wear a sword with a grace, to carry away his plunder
+with affected indifference, and to appear to be equally easy when he
+loses his last ducat, to be agreeable to women, and to look like a
+gentleman,--these are his accomplishments. In one place he rises to the
+height of a grand professor in the art of gambling, and gives his
+lessons with almost a noble air. "Play grandly, honourably. Be not of
+course cast down at losing; but above all, be not eager at winning, as
+mean souls are." And he boasts of his accomplishments with so much
+eloquence as to make the reader sure that he believes in them. He is
+quite pathetic over himself, and can describe with heartrending words
+the evils that befall him when others use against him successfully any
+of the arts which he practises himself.
+
+The marvel of the book is not so much that the hero should evidently
+think well of himself, as that the author should so tell his story as to
+appear to be altogether on the hero's side. In _Catherine_, the horrors
+described are most truly disgusting,--so much that the story, though
+very clever, is not pleasant reading. _The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon_ are
+very pleasant to read. There is nothing to shock or disgust. The style
+of narrative is exactly that which might be used as to the exploits of a
+man whom the author intended to represent as deserving of sympathy and
+praise,--so that the reader is almost brought to sympathise. But I
+should be doing an injustice to Thackeray if I were to leave an
+impression that he had taught lessons tending to evil practice, such as
+he supposed to have been left by _Jack Sheppard_ or _Eugene Aram_. No
+one will be tempted to undertake the life of a _chevalier d'industrie_
+by reading the book, or be made to think that cheating at cards is
+either an agreeable or a profitable profession. The following is
+excellent as a tirade in favour of gambling, coming from Redmond de
+Balibari, as he came to be called during his adventures abroad, but it
+will hardly persuade anyone to be a gambler;
+
+"We always played on parole with anybody,--any person, that is, of
+honour and noble lineage. We never pressed for our winnings, or declined
+to receive promissory notes in lieu of gold. But woe to the man who did
+not pay when the note became due! Redmond de Balibari was sure to wait
+upon him with his bill, and I promise you there were very few bad debts.
+On the contrary, gentlemen were grateful to us for our forbearance, and
+our character for honour stood unimpeached. In latter times, a vulgar
+national prejudice has chosen to cast a slur upon the character of men
+of honour engaged in the profession of play; but I speak of the good old
+days of Europe, before the cowardice of the French aristocracy (in the
+shameful revolution, which served them right) brought discredit upon our
+order. They cry fie now upon men engaged in play; but I should like to
+know how much more honourable _their_ modes of livelihood are than ours.
+The broker of the Exchange, who bulls and bears, and buys and sells, and
+dabbles with lying loans, and trades upon state-secrets,--what is he but
+a gamester? The merchant who deals in teas and tallow, is he any better?
+His bales of dirty indigo are his dice, his cards come up every year
+instead of every ten minutes, and the sea is his green-table. You call
+the profession of the law an honourable one, where a man will lie for
+any bidder;--lie down poverty for the sake of a fee from wealth; lie
+down right because wrong is in his brief. You call a doctor an
+honourable man,--a swindling quack who does not believe in the nostrums
+which he prescribes, and takes your guinea for whispering in your ear
+that it is a fine morning. And yet, forsooth, a gallant man, who sits
+him down before the baize and challenges all comers, his money against
+theirs, his fortune against theirs, is proscribed by your modern moral
+world! It is a conspiracy of the middle-class against gentlemen. It is
+only the shopkeeper cant which is to go down nowadays. I say that play
+was an institution of chivalry. It has been wrecked along with other
+privileges of men of birth. When Seingalt engaged a man for
+six-and-thirty hours without leaving the table, do you think he showed
+no courage? How have we had the best blood and the brightest eyes too,
+of Europe throbbing round the table, as I and my uncle have held the
+cards and the bank against some terrible player, who was matching some
+thousands out of his millions against our all, which was there on the
+baize! When we engaged that daring Alexis Kossloffsky, and won seven
+thousand louis on a single coup, had we lost we should have been beggars
+the next day; when _he_ lost, he was only a village and a few hundred
+serfs in pawn the worse. When at Toeplitz the Duke of Courland brought
+fourteen lacqueys, each with four bags of florins, and challenged our
+bank to play against the sealed bags, what did we ask? 'Sir,' said we,
+'we have but eighty thousand florins in bank, or two hundred thousand at
+three months. If your highness's bags do not contain more than eighty
+thousand we will meet you.' And we did; and after eleven hours' play,
+in which our bank was at one time reduced to two hundred and three
+ducats, we won seventeen thousand florins of him. Is _this_ not
+something like boldness? Does this profession not require skill, and
+perseverance, and bravery? Four crowned heads looked on at the game, and
+an imperial princess, when I turned up the ace of hearts and made
+Paroli, burst into tears. No man on the European Continent held a higher
+position than Redmond Barry then; and when the Duke of Courland lost he
+was pleased to say that we had won nobly. And so we had, and spent nobly
+what we won." This is very grand, and is put as an eloquent man would
+put it who really wished to defend gambling.
+
+The rascal, of course, comes to a miserable end, but the tone of the
+narrative is continued throughout. He is brought to live at last with
+his old mother in the Fleet prison, on a wretched annuity of fifty
+pounds per annum, which she has saved out of the general wreck, and
+there he dies of delirium tremens. For an assumed tone of continued
+irony, maintained through the long memoir of a life, never becoming
+tedious, never unnatural, astounding us rather by its naturalness, I
+know nothing equal to _Barry Lyndon_.
+
+As one reads, one sometimes is struck by a conviction that this or the
+other writer has thoroughly liked the work on which he is engaged. There
+is a gusto about his passages, a liveliness in the language, a spring in
+the motion of the words, an eagerness of description, a lilt, if I may
+so call it, in the progress of the narrative, which makes the reader
+feel that the author has himself greatly enjoyed what he has written. He
+has evidently gone on with his work without any sense of weariness, or
+doubt; and the words have come readily to him. So it has been with
+_Barry Lyndon_. "My mind was filled full with those blackguards,"
+Thackeray once said to a friend. It is easy enough to see that it was
+so. In the passage which I have above quoted, his mind was running over
+with the idea that a rascal might be so far gone in rascality as to be
+in love with his own trade.
+
+This was the last of Thackeray's long stories in _Fraser_. I have given
+by no means a complete catalogue of his contributions to the magazine,
+but I have perhaps mentioned those which are best known. There were many
+short pieces which have now been collected in his works, such as _Little
+Travels and Roadside Sketches_, and the _Carmen Lilliense_, in which the
+poet is supposed to be detained at Lille by want of money. There are
+others which I think are not to be found in the collected works, such as
+a _Box of Novels by Titmarsh_, and _Titmarsh in the Picture Galleries_.
+After the name of Titmarsh had been once assumed it was generally used
+in the papers which he sent to _Fraser_.
+
+Thackeray's connection with _Punch_ began in 1843, and, as far as I can
+learn, _Miss Tickletoby's Lectures on English History_ was his first
+contribution. They, however, have not been found worthy of a place in
+the collected edition. His short pieces during a long period of his life
+were so numerous that to have brought them all together would have
+weighted his more important works with too great an amount of extraneous
+matter. The same lady, Miss Tickletoby, gave a series of lectures. There
+was _The History of the next French Revolution_, and _The Wanderings of
+our Fat Contributor_,--the first of which is, and the latter is not,
+perpetuated in his works. Our old friend Jeames Yellowplush, or De la
+Pluche,--for we cannot for a moment doubt that he is the same
+Jeames,--is very prolific, and as excellent in his orthography, his
+sense, and satire, as ever. These papers began with _The Lucky
+Speculator_. He lives in The Albany; he hires a brougham; and is devoted
+to Miss Emily Flimsey, the daughter of Sir George, who had been his
+master,--to the great injury of poor Maryanne, the fellow-servant who
+had loved him in his kitchen days. Then there follows that wonderful
+ballad, _Jeames of Backley Square_. Upon this he writes an angry letter
+to _Punch_, dated from his chambers in The Albany; "Has a reglar
+suscriber to your amusing paper, I beg leaf to state that I should never
+have done so had I supposed that it was your 'abbit to igspose the
+mistaries of privit life, and to hinger the delligit feelings of umble
+individyouls like myself." He writes in his own defence, both as to
+Maryanne and to the share-dealing by which he had made his fortune; and
+he ends with declaring his right to the position which he holds. "You
+are corrict in stating that I am of hancient Normin fam'ly. This is more
+than Peal can say, to whomb I applied for a barnetcy; but the primmier
+being of low igstraction, natrally stikles for his horder." And the
+letter is signed "Fitzjames De la Pluche." Then follows his diary,
+beginning with a description of the way in which he rushed into
+_Punch's_ office, declaring his misfortunes, when losses had come upon
+him. "I wish to be paid for my contribewtions to your paper.
+Suckmstances is altered with me." Whereupon he gets a cheque upon
+Messrs. Pump and Aldgate, and has himself carried away to new
+speculations. He leaves his diary behind him, and _Punch_
+surreptitiously publishes it. There is much in the diary which comes
+from Thackeray's very heart. Who does not remember his indignation
+against Lord Bareacres? "I gave the old humbug a few shares out of my
+own pocket. 'There, old Pride,' says I, 'I like to see you down on your
+knees to a footman. There, old Pomposity! Take fifty pounds. I like to
+see you come cringing and begging for it!' Whenever I see him in a very
+public place, I take my change for my money. I digg him in the ribbs, or
+clap his padded old shoulders. I call him 'Bareacres, my old brick,' and
+I see him wince. It does my 'art good." It does Thackeray's heart good
+to pour himself out in indignation against some imaginary Bareacres. He
+blows off his steam with such an eagerness that he forgets for a time,
+or nearly forgets, his cacography. Then there are "Jeames on Time
+Bargings," "Jeames on the Gauge Question," "Mr. Jeames again." Of all
+our author's heroes Jeames is perhaps the most amusing. There is not
+much in that joke of bad spelling, and we should have been inclined to
+say beforehand, that Mrs. Malaprop had done it so well and so
+sufficiently, that no repetition of it would be received with great
+favour. Like other dishes, it depends upon the cooking. Jeames, with his
+"suckmstances," high or low, will be immortal.
+
+There were _The Travels in London_, a long series of them; and then
+_Punch's Prize Novelists_, in which Thackeray imitates the language and
+plots of Bulwer, Disraeli, Charles Lever, G. P. R. James, Mrs. Gore, and
+Cooper, the American. They are all excellent; perhaps Codlingsby is the
+best. Mendoza, when he is fighting with the bargeman, or drinking with
+Codlingsby, or receiving Louis Philippe in his rooms, seems to have come
+direct from the pen of our Premier. Phil Fogerty's jump, and the younger
+and the elder horsemen, as they come riding into the story, one in his
+armour and the other with his feathers, have the very savour and tone of
+Lever and James; but then the savour and the tone are not so piquant. I
+know nothing in the way of imitation to equal Codlingsby, if it be not
+The Tale of Drury Lane, by W. S. in the _Rejected Addresses_, of which
+it is said that Walter Scott declared that he must have written it
+himself. The scene between Dr. Franklin, Louis XVI., Marie Antoinette,
+and Tatua, the chief of the Nose-rings, as told in _The Stars and
+Stripes_, is perfect in its way, but it fails as being a caricature of
+Cooper. The caricaturist has been carried away beyond and above his
+model, by his own sense of fun.
+
+Of the ballads which appeared in _Punch_ I will speak elsewhere, as I
+must give a separate short chapter to our author's power of
+versification; but I must say a word of _The Snob Papers_, which were at
+the time the most popular and the best known of all Thackeray's
+contributions to _Punch_. I think that perhaps they were more charming,
+more piquant, more apparently true, when they came out one after another
+in the periodical, than they are now as collected together. I think that
+one at a time would be better than many. And I think that the first half
+in the long list of snobs would have been more manifestly snobs to us
+than they are now with the second half of the list appended. In fact,
+there are too many of them, till the reader is driven to tell himself
+that the meaning of it all is that Adam's family is from first to last a
+family of snobs. "First," says Thackeray, in preface, "the world was
+made; then, as a matter of course, snobs; they existed for years and
+years, and were no more known than America. But presently,--ingens
+patebat tellus,--the people became darkly aware that there was such a
+race. Not above five-and-twenty years since, a name, an expressive
+monosyllable, arose to designate that case. That name has spread over
+England like railroads subsequently; snobs are known and recognised
+throughout an empire on which I am given to understand the sun never
+sets. _Punch_ appears at the right season to chronicle their history;
+and the individual comes forth to write that history in _Punch_.
+
+"I have,--and for this gift I congratulate myself with a deep and
+abiding thankfulness,--an eye for a snob. If the truthful is the
+beautiful, it is beautiful to study even the snobbish;--to track snobs
+through history as certain little dogs in Hampshire hunt out truffles;
+to sink shafts in society, and come upon rich veins of snob-ore.
+Snobbishness is like Death, in a quotation from Horace, which I hope you
+never heard, 'beating with equal foot at poor men's doors, and kicking
+at the gates of emperors.' It is a great mistake to judge of snobs
+lightly, and think they exist among the lower classes merely. An immense
+percentage of snobs, I believe, is to be found in every rank of this
+mortal life. You must not judge hastily or vulgarly of snobs; to do so
+shows that you are yourself a snob. I myself have been taken for one."
+
+The state of Thackeray's mind when he commenced his delineations of
+snobbery is here accurately depicted. Written, as these papers were, for
+_Punch_, and written, as they were, by Thackeray, it was a necessity
+that every idea put forth should be given as a joke, and that the satire
+on society in general should be wrapped up in burlesque absurdity. But
+not the less eager and serious was his intention. When he tells us, at
+the end of the first chapter, of a certain Colonel Snobley, whom he met
+at "Bagnigge Wells," as he says, and with whom he was so disgusted that
+he determined to drive the man out of the house, we are well aware that
+he had met an offensive military gentleman,--probably at Tunbridge.
+Gentlemen thus offensive, even though tamely offensive, were peculiarly
+offensive to him. We presume, by what follows, that this gentleman,
+ignorantly,--for himself most unfortunately,--spoke of Public[=o]la.
+Thackeray was disgusted,--disgusted that such a name should be lugged
+into ordinary conversation at all, and then that a man should talk about
+a name with which he was so little acquainted as not to know how to
+pronounce it. The man was therefore a snob, and ought to be put down; in
+all which I think that Thackeray was unnecessarily hard on the man, and
+gave him too much importance.
+
+So it was with him in his whole intercourse with snobs,--as he calls
+them. He saw something that was distasteful, and a man instantly became
+a snob in his estimation. "But you _can_ draw," a man once said to him,
+there having been some discussion on the subject of Thackeray's art
+powers. The man meant no doubt to be civil, but meant also to imply that
+for the purpose needed the drawing was good enough, a matter on which he
+was competent to form an opinion. Thackeray instantly put the man down
+as a snob for flattering him. The little courtesies of the world and the
+little discourtesies became snobbish to him. A man could not wear his
+hat, or carry his umbrella, or mount his horse, without falling into
+some error of snobbism before his hypercritical eyes. St. Michael would
+have carried his armour amiss, and St. Cecilia have been snobbish as she
+twanged her harp.
+
+I fancy that a policeman considers that every man in the street would be
+properly "run in," if only all the truth about the man had been known.
+The tinker thinks that every pot is unsound. The cobbler doubts the
+stability of every shoe. So at last it grew to be the case with
+Thackeray. There was more hope that the city should be saved because of
+its ten just men, than for society, if society were to depend on ten who
+were not snobs. All this arose from the keenness of his vision into that
+which was really mean. But that keenness became so aggravated by the
+intenseness of his search that the slightest speck of dust became to his
+eyes as a foul stain. Public[=o]la, as we saw, damned one poor man to a
+wretched immortality, and another was called pitilessly over the coals,
+because he had mixed a grain of flattery with a bushel of truth.
+Thackeray tells us that he was born to hunt out snobs, as certain dogs
+are trained to find truffles. But we can imagine that a dog, very
+energetic at producing truffles, and not finding them as plentiful as
+his heart desired, might occasionally produce roots which were not
+genuine,--might be carried on in his energies till to his senses every
+fungus-root became a truffle. I think that there has been something of
+this with our author's snob-hunting, and that his zeal was at last
+greater than his discrimination.
+
+The nature of the task which came upon him made this fault almost
+unavoidable. When a hit is made, say with a piece at a theatre, or with
+a set of illustrations, or with a series of papers on this or the other
+subject,--when something of this kind has suited the taste of the
+moment, and gratified the public, there is a natural inclination on the
+part of those who are interested to continue that which has been found
+to be good. It pays and it pleases, and it seems to suit everybody. Then
+it is continued usque ad nauseam. We see it in everything. When the king
+said he liked partridges, partridges were served to him every day. The
+world was pleased with certain ridiculous portraits of its big men. The
+big men were soon used up, and the little men had to be added.
+
+We can imagine that even _Punch_ may occasionally be at a loss for
+subjects wherewith to delight its readers. In fact, _The Snob Papers_
+were too good to be brought to an end, and therefore there were
+forty-five of them. A dozen would have been better. As he himself says
+in his last paper, "for a mortal year we have been together flattering
+and abusing the human race." It was exactly that. Of course we
+know,--everybody always knows,--that a bad specimen of his order may be
+found in every division of society. There may be a snob king, a snob
+parson, a snob member of parliament, a snob grocer, tailor, goldsmith,
+and the like. But that is not what has been meant. We did not want a
+special satirist to tell us what we all knew before. Had snobbishness
+been divided for us into its various attributes and characteristics,
+rather than attributed to various classes, the end sought,--the
+exposure, namely, of the evil,--would have been better attained. The
+snobbishness of flattery, of falsehood, of cowardice, lying,
+time-serving, money-worship, would have been perhaps attacked to a
+better purpose than that of kings, priests, soldiers, merchants, or men
+of letters. The assault as made by Thackeray seems to have been made on
+the profession generally.
+
+The paper on clerical snobs is intended to be essentially generous, and
+is ended by an allusion to certain old clerical friends which has a
+sweet tone of tenderness in it. "How should he who knows you, not
+respect you or your calling? May this pen never write a pennyworth again
+if it ever casts ridicule upon either." But in the meantime he has
+thrown his stone at the covetousness of bishops, because of certain
+Irish prelates who died rich many years before he wrote. The
+insinuation is that bishops generally take more of the loaves and fishes
+than they ought, whereas the fact is that bishops' incomes are generally
+so insufficient for the requirements demanded of them, that a feeling
+prevails that a clergyman to be fit for a bishopric should have a
+private income. He attacks the snobbishness of the universities, showing
+us how one class of young men consists of fellow-commoners, who wear
+lace and drink wine with their meals, and another class consists of
+sizars, or servitors, who wear badges, as being poor, and are never
+allowed to take their food with their fellow-students. That arrangements
+fit for past times are not fit for these is true enough. Consequently
+they should gradually be changed; and from day to day are changed. But
+there is no snobbishness in this. Was the fellow-commoner a snob when he
+acted in accordance with the custom of his rank and standing? or the
+sizar who accepted aid in achieving that education which he could not
+have got without it? or the tutor of the college, who carried out the
+rules entrusted to him? There are two military snobs, Rag and Famish.
+One is a swindler and the other a debauched young idiot. No doubt they
+are both snobs, and one has been, while the other is, an officer. But
+there is,--I think, not an unfairness so much as an absence of
+intuition,--in attaching to soldiers especially two vices to which all
+classes are open. Rag was a gambling snob, and Famish a drunken
+snob,--but they were not specially military snobs. There is a chapter
+devoted to dinner-giving snobs, in which I think the doctrine laid down
+will not hold water, and therefore that the snobbism imputed is not
+proved. "Your usual style of meal," says the satirist--"that is
+plenteous, comfortable, and in its perfection,--should be that to which
+you welcome your friends." Then there is something said about the
+"Brummagem plate pomp," and we are told that it is right that dukes
+should give grand dinners, but that we,--of the middle class,--should
+entertain our friends with the simplicity which is customary with us. In
+all this there is, I think, a mistake. The duke gives a grand dinner
+because he thinks his friends will like it, sitting down when alone with
+the duchess, we may suppose, with a retinue and grandeur less than that
+which is arrayed for gala occasions. So is it with Mr. Jones, who is no
+snob because he provides a costly dinner,--if he can afford it. He does
+it because he thinks his friends will like it. It may be that the grand
+dinner is a bore,--and that the leg of mutton with plenty of gravy and
+potatoes all hot, would be nicer. I generally prefer the leg of mutton
+myself. But I do not think that snobbery is involved in the other. A
+man, no doubt, may be a snob in giving a dinner. I am not a snob because
+for the occasion I eke out my own dozen silver forks with plated ware;
+but if I make believe that my plated ware is true silver, then I am a
+snob.
+
+In that matter of association with our betters,--we will for the moment
+presume that gentlemen and ladies with titles or great wealth are our
+betters,--great and delicate questions arise as to what is snobbery, and
+what is not, in speaking of which Thackeray becomes very indignant, and
+explains the intensity of his feelings as thoroughly by a charming
+little picture as by his words. It is a picture of Queen Elizabeth as
+she is about to trample with disdain on the coat which that snob Raleigh
+is throwing for her use on the mud before her. This is intended to
+typify the low parasite nature of the Englishman which has been
+described in the previous page or two. "And of these calm
+moralists,"--it matters not for our present purpose who were the
+moralists in question,--"is there one I wonder whose heart would not
+throb with pleasure if he could be seen walking arm-in-arm with a couple
+of dukes down Pall Mall? No; it is impossible, in our condition of
+society, not to be sometimes a snob." And again: "How should it be
+otherwise in a country where lordolatry is part of our creed, and where
+our children are brought up to respect the 'Peerage' as the Englishman's
+second Bible." Then follows the wonderfully graphic picture of Queen
+Elizabeth and Raleigh.
+
+In all this Thackeray has been carried away from the truth by his hatred
+for a certain meanness of which there are no doubt examples enough. As
+for Raleigh, I think we have always sympathised with the young man,
+instead of despising him, because he felt on the impulse of the moment
+that nothing was too good for the woman and the queen combined. The idea
+of getting something in return for his coat could hardly have come so
+quick to him as that impulse in favour of royalty and womanhood. If one
+of us to-day should see the queen passing, would he not raise his hat,
+and assume, unconsciously, something of an altered demeanour because of
+his reverence for majesty? In doing so he would have no mean desire of
+getting anything. The throne and its occupant are to him honourable, and
+he honours them. There is surely no greater mistake than to suppose that
+reverence is snobbishness. I meet a great man in the street, and some
+chance having brought me to his knowledge, he stops and says a word to
+me. Am I a snob because I feel myself to be graced by his notice? Surely
+not. And if his acquaintance goes further and he asks me to dinner, am I
+not entitled so far to think well of myself because I have been found
+worthy of his society?
+
+They who have raised themselves in the world, and they, too, whose
+position has enabled them to receive all that estimation can give, all
+that society can furnish, all that intercourse with the great can give,
+are more likely to be pleasant companions than they who have been less
+fortunate. That picture of two companion dukes in Pall Mall is too
+gorgeous for human eye to endure. A man would be scorched to cinders by
+so much light, as he would be crushed by a sack of sovereigns even
+though he might be allowed to have them if he could carry them away. But
+there can be no doubt that a peer taken at random as a companion would
+be preferable to a clerk from a counting-house,--taken at random. The
+clerk might turn out a scholar on your hands, and the peer no better
+than a poor spendthrift;--but the chances are the other way.
+
+A tufthunter is a snob, a parasite is a snob, the man who allows the
+manhood within him to be awed by a coronet is a snob. The man who
+worships mere wealth is a snob. But so also is he who, in fear lest he
+should be called a snob, is afraid to seek the acquaintance,--or if it
+come to speak of the acquaintance,--of those whose acquaintance is
+manifestly desirable. In all this I feel that Thackeray was carried
+beyond the truth by his intense desire to put down what is mean.
+
+It is in truth well for us all to know what constitutes snobbism, and I
+think that Thackeray, had he not been driven to dilution and dilatation,
+could have told us. If you will keep your hands from picking and
+stealing, and your tongue from evil speaking, lying, and slandering, you
+will not be a snob. The lesson seems to be simple, and perhaps a little
+trite, but if you look into it, it will be found to contain nearly all
+that is necessary.
+
+But the excellence of each individual picture as it is drawn is not the
+less striking because there may be found some fault with the series as a
+whole. What can excel the telling of the story of Captain Shindy at his
+club,--which is, I must own, as true as it is graphic. Captain Shindy is
+a real snob. "'Look at it, sir; is it cooked? Smell it, sir. Is it meat
+fit for a gentleman?' he roars out to the steward, who stands trembling
+before him, and who in vain tells him that the Bishop of Bullocksmithy
+has just had three from the same loin." The telling as regards Captain
+Shindy is excellent, but the sidelong attack upon the episcopate is
+cruel. "All the waiters in the club are huddled round the captain's
+mutton-chop. He roars out the most horrible curses at John for not
+bringing the pickles. He utters the most dreadful oaths because Thomas
+has not arrived with the Harvey sauce. Peter comes tumbling with the
+water-jug over Jeames, who is bringing the 'glittering canisters with
+bread.'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Poor Mrs. Shindy and the children are, meanwhile, in dingy lodgings
+somewhere, waited upon by a charity girl in pattens."
+
+The visit to Castle Carabas, and the housekeeper's description of the
+wonders of the family mansion, is as good. "'The Side Entrance and
+'All,' says the housekeeper. 'The halligator hover the mantelpiece was
+brought home by Hadmiral St. Michaels, when a capting with Lord Hanson.
+The harms on the cheers is the harms of the Carabas family. The great
+'all is seventy feet in lenth, fifty-six in breath, and thirty-eight
+feet 'igh. The carvings of the chimlies, representing the buth of Venus
+and 'Ercules and 'Eyelash, is by Van Chislum, the most famous sculpture
+of his hage and country. The ceiling, by Calimanco, represents Painting,
+Harchitecture, and Music,--the naked female figure with the
+barrel-organ,--introducing George, first Lord Carabas, to the Temple of
+the Muses. The winder ornaments is by Vanderputty. The floor is
+Patagonian marble; and the chandelier in the centre was presented to
+Lionel, second marquis, by Lewy the Sixteenth, whose 'ead was cut hoff
+in the French Revolution. We now henter the South Gallery," etc. etc.
+All of which is very good fun, with a dash of truth in it also as to the
+snobbery;--only in this it will be necessary to be quite sure where the
+snobbery lies. If my Lord Carabas has a "buth of Venus," beautiful for
+all eyes to see, there is no snobbery, only good-nature, in the showing
+it; nor is there snobbery in going to see it, if a beautiful "buth of
+Venus" has charms for you. If you merely want to see the inside of a
+lord's house, and the lord is puffed up with the pride of showing his,
+then there will be two snobs.
+
+Of all those papers it may be said that each has that quality of a pearl
+about it which in the previous chapter I endeavoured to explain. In each
+some little point is made in excellent language, so as to charm by its
+neatness, incision, and drollery. But _The Snob Papers_ had better be
+read separately, and not taken in the lump.
+
+Thackeray ceased to write for _Punch_ in 1852, either entirely or almost
+so.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+VANITY FAIR.
+
+
+Something has been said, in the biographical chapter, of the way in
+which _Vanity Fair_ was produced, and of the period in the author's life
+in which it was written. He had become famous,--to a limited extent,--by
+the exquisite nature of his contributions to periodicals; but he desired
+to do something larger, something greater, something, perhaps, less
+ephemeral. For though _Barry Lyndon_ and others have not proved to be
+ephemeral, it was thus that he regarded them. In this spirit he went to
+work and wrote _Vanity Fair_.
+
+It may be as well to speak first of the faults which were attributed to
+it. It was said that the good people were all fools, and that the clever
+people were all knaves. When the critics,--the talking critics as well
+as the writing critics,--began to discuss _Vanity Fair_, there had
+already grown up a feeling as to Thackeray as an author--that he was one
+who had taken up the business of castigating the vices of the world.
+Scott had dealt with the heroics, whether displayed in his Flora
+MacIvors or Meg Merrilieses, in his Ivanhoes or Ochiltrees. Miss
+Edgeworth had been moral; Miss Austen conventional; Bulwer had been
+poetical and sentimental; Marryat and Lever had been funny and
+pugnacious, always with a dash of gallantry, displaying funny naval and
+funny military life; and Dickens had already become great in painting
+the virtues of the lower orders. But by all these some kind of virtue
+had been sung, though it might be only the virtue of riding a horse or
+fighting a duel. Even Eugene Aram and Jack Sheppard, with whom Thackeray
+found so much fault, were intended to be fine fellows, though they broke
+into houses and committed murders. The primary object of all those
+writers was to create an interest by exciting sympathy. To enhance our
+sympathy personages were introduced who were very vile indeed,--as
+Bucklaw, in the guise of a lover, to heighten our feelings for
+Ravenswood and Lucy; as Wild, as a thief-taker, to make us more anxious
+for the saving of Jack; as Ralph Nickleby, to pile up the pity for his
+niece Kate. But each of these novelists might have appropriately begun
+with an _Arma virumque cano_. The song was to be of something
+godlike,--even with a Peter Simple. With Thackeray it had been
+altogether different. Alas, alas! the meanness of human wishes; the
+poorness of human results! That had been his tone. There can be no doubt
+that the heroic had appeared contemptible to him, as being untrue. The
+girl who had deceived her papa and mamma seemed more probable to him
+than she who perished under the willow-tree from sheer love,--as given
+in the last chapter. Why sing songs that are false? Why tell of Lucy
+Ashtons and Kate Nicklebys, when pretty girls, let them be ever so
+beautiful, can be silly and sly? Why pour philosophy out of the mouth of
+a fashionable young gentleman like Pelham, seeing that young gentlemen
+of that sort rarely, or we may say never, talk after that fashion? Why
+make a housebreaker a gallant charming young fellow, the truth being
+that housebreakers as a rule are as objectionable in their manners as
+they are in their morals? Thackeray's mind had in truth worked in this
+way, and he had become a satirist. That had been all very well for
+_Fraser_ and _Punch_; but when his satire was continued through a long
+novel, in twenty-four parts, readers,--who do in truth like the heroic
+better than the wicked,--began to declare that this writer was no
+novelist, but only a cynic.
+
+Thence the question arises what a novel should be,--which I will
+endeavour to discuss very shortly in a later chapter. But this special
+fault was certainly found with _Vanity Fair_ at the time. Heroines
+should not only be beautiful, but should be endowed also with a quasi
+celestial grace,--grace of dignity, propriety, and reticence. A heroine
+should hardly want to be married, the arrangement being almost too
+mundane,--and, should she be brought to consent to undergo such bond,
+because of its acknowledged utility, it should be at some period so
+distant as hardly to present itself to the mind as a reality. Eating and
+drinking should be altogether indifferent to her, and her clothes should
+be picturesque rather than smart, and that from accident rather than
+design. Thackeray's Amelia does not at all come up to the description
+here given. She is proud of having a lover, constantly declaring to
+herself and to others that he is "the greatest and the best of
+men,"--whereas the young gentleman is, in truth, a very little man. She
+is not at all indifferent as to her finery, nor, as we see incidentally,
+to enjoying her suppers at Vauxhall. She is anxious to be married,--and
+as soon as possible. A hero too should be dignified and of a noble
+presence; a man who, though he may be as poor as Nicholas Nickleby,
+should nevertheless be beautiful on all occasions, and never deficient
+in readiness, address, or self-assertion. _Vanity Fair_ is specially
+declared by the author to be "a novel without a hero," and therefore we
+have hardly a right to complain of deficiency of heroic conduct in any
+of the male characters. But Captain Dobbin does become the hero, and is
+deficient. Why was he called Dobbin, except to make him ridiculous? Why
+is he so shamefully ugly, so shy, so awkward? Why was he the son of a
+grocer? Thackeray in so depicting him was determined to run counter to
+the recognised taste of novel readers. And then again there was the
+feeling of another great fault. Let there be the virtuous in a novel and
+let there be the vicious, the dignified and the undignified, the sublime
+and the ridiculous,--only let the virtuous, the dignified, and the
+sublime be in the ascendant. Edith Bellenden, and Lord Evandale, and
+Morton himself would be too stilted, were they not enlivened by Mause,
+and Cuddie, and Poundtext. But here, in this novel, the vicious and the
+absurd have been made to be of more importance than the good and the
+noble. Becky Sharp and Rawdon Crawley are the real heroine and hero of
+the story. It is with them that the reader is called upon to interest
+himself. It is of them that he will think when he is reading the book.
+It is by them that he will judge the book when he has read it. There was
+no doubt a feeling with the public that though satire may be very well
+in its place, it should not be made the backbone of a work so long and
+so important as this. A short story such as _Catherine_ or _Barry
+Lyndon_ might be pronounced to have been called for by the iniquities of
+an outside world; but this seemed to the readers to have been addressed
+almost to themselves. Now men and women like to be painted as Titian
+would paint them, or Raffaelle,--not as Rembrandt, or even Rubens.
+
+Whether the ideal or the real is the best form of a novel may be
+questioned, but there can be no doubt that as there are novelists who
+cannot descend from the bright heaven of the imagination to walk with
+their feet upon the earth, so there are others to whom it is not given
+to soar among clouds. The reader must please himself, and make his
+selection if he cannot enjoy both. There are many who are carried into a
+heaven of pathos by the woes of a Master of Ravenswood, who fail
+altogether to be touched by the enduring constancy of a Dobbin. There
+are others,--and I will not say but they may enjoy the keenest delight
+which literature can give,--who cannot employ their minds on fiction
+unless it be conveyed in poetry. With Thackeray it was essential that
+the representations made by him should be, to his own thinking,
+lifelike. A Dobbin seemed to him to be such a one as might probably be
+met with in the world, whereas to his thinking a Ravenswood was simply a
+creature of the imagination. He would have said of such, as we would say
+of female faces by Raffaelle, that women would like to be like them, but
+are not like them. Men might like to be like Ravenswood, and women may
+dream of men so formed and constituted, but such men do not exist.
+Dobbins do, and therefore Thackeray chose to write of a Dobbin.
+
+So also of the preference given to Becky Sharp and to Rawdon Crawley.
+Thackeray thought that more can be done by exposing the vices than
+extolling the virtues of mankind. No doubt he had a more thorough belief
+in the one than in the other. The Dobbins he did encounter--seldom; the
+Rawdon Crawleys very often. He saw around him so much that was mean! He
+was hurt so often by the little vanities of people! It was thus that he
+was driven to that overthoughtfulness about snobs of which I have spoken
+in the last chapter. It thus became natural to him to insist on the
+thing which he hated with unceasing assiduity, and only to break out now
+and again into a rapture of love for the true nobility which was dear to
+him,--as he did with the character of Captain Dobbin.
+
+It must be added to all this that, before he has done with his snob or
+his knave, he will generally weave in some little trait of humanity by
+which the sinner shall be relieved from the absolute darkness of utter
+iniquity. He deals with no Varneys or Deputy-Shepherds, all villany and
+all lies, because the snobs and knaves he had seen had never been all
+snob or all knave. Even Shindy probably had some feeling for the poor
+woman he left at home. Rawdon Crawley loved his wicked wife dearly, and
+there were moments even with her in which some redeeming trait half
+reconciles her to the reader.
+
+Such were the faults which were found in _Vanity Fair_; but though the
+faults were found freely, the book was read by all. Those who are old
+enough can well remember the effect which it had, and the welcome which
+was given to the different numbers as they appeared. Though the story is
+vague and wandering, clearly commenced without any idea of an ending,
+yet there is something in the telling which makes every portion of it
+perfect in itself. There are absurdities in it which would not be
+admitted to anyone who had not a peculiar gift of making even his
+absurdities delightful. No schoolgirl who ever lived would have thrown
+back her gift-book, as Rebecca did the "dixonary," out of the carriage
+window as she was taken away from school. But who does not love that
+scene with which the novel commences? How could such a girl as Amelia
+Osborne have got herself into such society as that in which we see her
+at Vauxhall? But we forgive it all because of the telling. And then
+there is that crowning absurdity of Sir Pitt Crawley and his
+establishment.
+
+I never could understand how Thackeray in his first serious attempt
+could have dared to subject himself and Sir Pitt Crawley to the critics
+of the time. Sir Pitt is a baronet, a man of large property, and in
+Parliament, to whom Becky Sharp goes as a governess at the end of a
+delightful visit with her friend Amelia Sedley, on leaving Miss
+Pinkerton's school. The Sedley carriage takes her to Sir Pitt's door.
+"When the bell was rung a head appeared between the interstices of the
+dining-room shutters, and the door was opened by a man in drab breeches
+and gaiters, with a dirty old coat, a foul old neckcloth lashed round
+his bristly neck, a shining bald head, a leering red face, a pair of
+twinkling gray eyes, and a mouth perpetually on the grin.
+
+"'This Sir Pitt Crawley's?' says John from the box.
+
+"'E'es,' says the man at the door with a nod.
+
+"'Hand down these 'ere trunks there,' said John.
+
+"'Hand 'em down yourself,' said the porter." But John on the box
+declines to do this, as he cannot leave his horses.
+
+"The bald-headed man, taking his hands out of his breeches' pockets,
+advanced on this summons, and throwing Miss Sharp's trunk over his
+shoulder, carried it into the house." Then Becky is shown into the
+house, and a dismantled dining-room is described, into which she is led
+by the dirty man with the trunk.
+
+     Two kitchen chairs, and a round table, and an attenuated old
+     poker and tongs, were, however, gathered round the fireplace,
+     as was a saucepan over a feeble, sputtering fire. There was a
+     bit of cheese and bread and a tin candlestick on the table,
+     and a little black porter in a pint pot.
+
+     "Had your dinner, I suppose?" This was said by him of the bald
+     head. "It is not too warm for you? Like a drop of beer?"
+
+     "Where is Sir Pitt Crawley?" said Miss Sharp majestically.
+
+     "He, he! _I_'m Sir Pitt Crawley. Rek'lect you owe me a pint
+     for bringing down your luggage. He, he! ask Tinker if I
+     ain't."
+
+     The lady addressed as Mrs. Tinker at this moment made her
+     appearance, with a pipe and a paper of tobacco, for which she
+     had been despatched a minute before Miss Sharp's arrival; and
+     she handed the articles over to Sir Pitt, who had taken his
+     seat by the fire.
+
+     "Where's the farden?" said he. "I gave you three-halfpence;
+     where's the change, old Tinker?"
+
+     "There," replied Mrs. Tinker, flinging down the coin. "It's
+     only baronets as cares about farthings."
+
+Sir Pitt Crawley has always been to me a stretch of audacity which I
+have been unable to understand. But it has been accepted; and from this
+commencement of Sir Pitt Crawley have grown the wonderful characters of
+the Crawley family,--old Miss Crawley, the worldly, wicked,
+pleasure-loving aunt, the Rev. Bute Crawley and his wife, who are quite
+as worldly, the sanctimonious elder son, who in truth is not less so,
+and Rawdon, who ultimately becomes Becky's husband,--who is the bad hero
+of the book, as Dobbin is the good hero. They are admirable; but it is
+quite clear that Thackeray had known nothing of what was coming about
+them when he caused Sir Pitt to eat his tripe with Mrs. Tinker in the
+London dining-room.
+
+There is a double story running through the book, the parts of which are
+but lightly woven together, of which the former tells us the life and
+adventures of that singular young woman Becky Sharp, and the other the
+troubles and ultimate success of our noble hero Captain Dobbin. Though
+it be true that readers prefer, or pretend to prefer, the romantic to
+the common in their novels, and complain of pages which are defiled with
+that which is low, yet I find that the absurd, the ludicrous, and even
+the evil, leave more impression behind them than the grand, the
+beautiful, or even the good. Dominie Sampson, Dugald Dalgetty, and
+Bothwell are, I think, more remembered than Fergus MacIvor, than Ivanhoe
+himself, or Mr. Butler the minister. It certainly came to pass that, in
+spite of the critics, Becky Sharp became the first attraction in _Vanity
+Fair_. When we speak now of _Vanity Fair_, it is always to Becky that
+our thoughts recur. She has made a position for herself in the world of
+fiction, and is one of our established personages.
+
+I have already said how she left school, throwing the "dixonary" out of
+the window, like dust from her feet, and was taken to spend a few
+halcyon weeks with her friend Amelia Sedley, at the Sedley mansion in
+Russell Square. There she meets a brother Sedley home from India,--the
+immortal Jos,--at whom she began to set her hitherto untried cap. Here
+we become acquainted both with the Sedley and with the Osborne families,
+with all their domestic affections and domestic snobbery, and have to
+confess that the snobbery is stronger than the affection. As we desire
+to love Amelia Sedley, we wish that the people around her were less
+vulgar or less selfish,--especially we wish it in regard to that
+handsome young fellow, George Osborne, whom she loves with her whole
+heart. But with Jos Sedley we are inclined to be content, though he be
+fat, purse-proud, awkward, a drunkard, and a coward, because we do not
+want anything better for Becky. Becky does not want anything better for
+herself, because the man has money. She has been born a pauper. She
+knows herself to be but ill qualified to set up as a beauty,--though by
+dint of cleverness she does succeed in that afterwards. She has no
+advantages in regard to friends or family as she enters life. She must
+earn her bread for herself. Young as she is, she loves money, and has a
+great idea of the power of money. Therefore, though Jos is distasteful
+at all points, she instantly makes her attack. She fails, however, at
+any rate for the present. She never becomes his wife, but at last she
+succeeds in getting some of his money. But before that time comes she
+has many a suffering to endure, and many a triumph to enjoy.
+
+She goes to Sir Pitt Crawley as governess for his second family, and is
+taken down to Queen's Crawley in the country. There her cleverness
+prevails, even with the baronet, of whom I have just given Thackeray's
+portrait. She keeps his accounts, and writes his letters, and helps him
+to save money; she reads with the elder sister books they ought not to
+have read; she flatters the sanctimonious son. In point of fact, she
+becomes all in all at Queen's Crawley, so that Sir Pitt himself falls in
+love with her,--for there is reason to think that Sir Pitt may soon
+become again a widower. But there also came down to the baronet's house,
+on an occasion of general entertaining, Captain Rawdon Crawley. Of
+course Becky sets her cap at him, and of course succeeds. She always
+succeeds. Though she is only the governess, he insists upon dancing with
+her, to the neglect of all the young ladies of the neighbourhood. They
+continue to walk together by moonlight,--or starlight,--the great,
+heavy, stupid, half-tipsy dragoon, and the intriguing, covetous,
+altogether unprincipled young woman. And the two young people absolutely
+come to love one another in their way,--the heavy, stupid, fuddled
+dragoon, and the false, covetous, altogether unprincipled young woman.
+
+The fat aunt Crawley is a maiden lady, very rich, and Becky quite
+succeeds in gaining the rich aunt by her wiles. The aunt becomes so fond
+of Becky down in the country, that when she has to return to her own
+house in town, sick from over-eating, she cannot be happy without taking
+Becky with her. So Becky is installed in the house in London, having
+been taken away abruptly from her pupils, to the great dismay of the old
+lady's long-established resident companion. They all fall in love with
+her; she makes herself so charming, she is so clever; she can even, by
+help of a little care in dressing, become so picturesque! As all this
+goes on, the reader feels what a great personage is Miss Rebecca Sharp.
+
+Lady Crawley dies down in the country, while Becky is still staying with
+his sister, who will not part with her. Sir Pitt at once rushes up to
+town, before the funeral, looking for consolation where only he can find
+it. Becky brings him down word from his sister's room that the old lady
+is too ill to see him.
+
+     "So much the better," Sir Pitt answered; "I want to see you,
+     Miss Sharp. I want you back at Queen's Crawley, miss," the
+     baronet said. His eyes had such a strange look, and were fixed
+     upon her so stedfastly that Rebecca Sharp began almost to
+     tremble. Then she half promises, talks about the dear
+     children, and angles with the old man. "I tell you I want
+     you," he says; "I'm going back to the vuneral, will you come
+     back?--yes or no?"
+
+     "I daren't. I don't think--it wouldn't be right--to be
+     alone--with you, sir," Becky said, seemingly in great
+     agitation.
+
+     "I say again, I want you. I can't get on without you. I didn't
+     see what it was till you went away. The house all goes wrong.
+     It's not the same place. All my accounts has got muddled
+     again. You must come back. Do come back. Dear Becky, do come."
+
+     "Come,--as what, sir?" Rebecca gasped out.
+
+     "Come as Lady Crawley, if you like. There, will that zatisfy
+     you? Come back and be my wife. You're vit for it. Birth be
+     hanged. You're as good a lady as ever I see. You've got more
+     brains in your little vinger than any baronet's wife in the
+     country. Will you come? Yes or no?" Rebecca is startled, but
+     the old man goes on. "I'll make you happy; zee if I don't. You
+     shall do what you like, spend what you like, and have it all
+     your own way. I'll make you a settlement. I'll do everything
+     regular. Look here," and the old man fell down on his knees
+     and leered at her like a satyr.
+
+But Rebecca, though she had been angling, angling for favour and love
+and power, had not expected this. For once in her life she loses her
+presence of mind, and exclaims: "Oh Sir Pitt; oh sir; I--I'm married
+already!" She has married Rawdon Crawley, Sir Pitt's younger son, Miss
+Crawley's favourite among those of her family who are looking for her
+money. But she keeps her secret for the present, and writes a charming
+letter to the Captain; "Dearest,--Something tells me that we shall
+conquer. You shall leave that odious regiment. Quit gaming, racing, and
+be a good boy, and we shall all live in Park Lane, and _ma tante_ shall
+leave us all her money." _Ma tante's_ money has been in her mind all
+through, but yet she loves him.
+
+     "Suppose the old lady doesn't come to," Rawdon said to his
+     little wife as they sat together in the snug little Brompton
+     lodgings. She had been trying the new piano all the morning.
+     The new gloves fitted her to a nicety. The new shawl became
+     her wonderfully. The new rings glittered on her little hands,
+     and the new watch ticked at her waist.
+
+     "_I'll_ make your fortune," she said; and Delilah patted
+     Samson's cheek.
+
+     "You can do anything," he said, kissing the little hand. "By
+     Jove you can! and we'll drive down to the Star and Garter and
+     dine, by Jove!"
+
+They were neither of them quite heartless at that moment, nor did Rawdon
+ever become quite bad. Then follow the adventures of Becky as a married
+woman, through all of which there is a glimmer of love for her stupid
+husband, while it is the real purpose of her heart to get money how she
+may,--by her charms, by her wit, by her lies, by her readiness. She
+makes love to everyone,--even to her sanctimonious brother-in-law, who
+becomes Sir Pitt in his time,--and always succeeds. But in her
+love-making there is nothing of love. She gets hold of that
+well-remembered old reprobate, the Marquis of Steyne, who possesses the
+two valuable gifts of being very dissolute and very rich, and from him
+she obtains money and jewels to her heart's desire. The abominations of
+Lord Steyne are depicted in the strongest language of which _Vanity
+Fair_ admits. The reader's hair stands almost on end in horror at the
+wickedness of the two wretches,--at her desire for money, sheer money;
+and his for wickedness, sheer wickedness. Then her husband finds her
+out,--poor Rawdon! who with all his faults and thickheaded stupidity,
+has become absolutely entranced by the wiles of his little wife. He is
+carried off to a sponging-house, in order that he may be out of the way,
+and, on escaping unexpectedly from thraldom, finds the lord in his
+wife's drawing-room. Whereupon he thrashes the old lord, nearly killing
+him; takes away the plunder which he finds on his wife's person, and
+hurries away to seek assistance as to further revenge;--for he is
+determined to shoot the marquis, or to be shot. He goes to one Captain
+Macmurdo, who is to act as his second, and there he pours out his heart.
+"You don't know how fond I was of that one," Rawdon said,
+half-inarticulately. "Damme, I followed her like a footman! I gave up
+everything I had to her. I'm a beggar because I would marry her. By
+Jove, sir, I've pawned my own watch to get her anything she fancied. And
+she,--she's been making a purse for herself all the time, and grudged me
+a hundred pounds to get me out of quod!" His friend alleges that the
+wife may be innocent after all. "It may be so," Rawdon exclaimed sadly;
+"but this don't look very innocent!" And he showed the captain the
+thousand-pound note which he had found in Becky's pocketbook.
+
+But the marquis can do better than fight; and Rawdon, in spite of his
+true love, can do better than follow the quarrel up to his own undoing.
+The marquis, on the spur of the moment, gets the lady's husband
+appointed governor of Coventry Island, with a salary of three thousand
+pounds a year; and poor Rawdon at last condescends to accept the
+appointment. He will not see his wife again, but he makes her an
+allowance out of his income.
+
+In arranging all this, Thackeray is enabled to have a side blow at the
+British way of distributing patronage,--for the favour of which he was
+afterwards himself a candidate. He quotes as follows from _The Royalist_
+newspaper: "We hear that the governorship"--of Coventry Island--"has
+been offered to Colonel Rawdon Crawley, C.B., a distinguished Waterloo
+officer. We need not only men of acknowledged bravery, but men of
+administrative talents to superintend the affairs of our colonies; and
+we have no doubt that the gentleman selected by the Colonial Office to
+fill the lamented vacancy which has occurred at Coventry Island, is
+admirably calculated for the post." The reader, however, is aware that
+the officer in question cannot write a sentence or speak two words
+correctly.
+
+Our heroine's adventures are carried on much further, but they cannot be
+given here in detail. To the end she is the same,--utterly false,
+selfish, covetous, and successful. To have made such a woman really in
+love would have been a mistake. Her husband she likes best,--because he
+is, or was, her own. But there is no man so foul, so wicked, so
+unattractive, but that she can fawn over him for money and jewels. There
+are women to whom nothing is nasty, either in person, language, scenes,
+actions, or principle,--and Becky is one of them; and yet she is herself
+attractive. A most wonderful sketch, for the perpetration of which all
+Thackeray's power of combined indignation and humour was necessary!
+
+The story of Amelia and her two lovers, George Osborne and Captain, or
+as he came afterwards to be, Major, and Colonel Dobbin, is less
+interesting, simply because goodness and eulogy are less exciting than
+wickedness and censure. Amelia is a true, honest-hearted, thoroughly
+English young woman, who loves her love because he is grand,--to her
+eyes,--and loving him, loves him with all her heart. Readers have said
+that she is silly, only because she is not heroic. I do not know that
+she is more silly than many young ladies whom we who are old have loved
+in our youth, or than those whom our sons are loving at the present
+time. Readers complain of Amelia because she is absolutely true to
+nature. There are no Raffaellistic touches, no added graces, no divine
+romance. She is feminine all over, and British,--loving, true,
+thoroughly unselfish, yet with a taste for having things comfortable,
+forgiving, quite capable of jealousy, but prone to be appeased at once,
+at the first kiss; quite convinced that her lover, her husband, her
+children are the people in all the world to whom the greatest
+consideration is due. Such a one is sure to be the dupe of a Becky
+Sharp, should a Becky Sharp come in her way,--as is the case with so
+many sweet Amelias whom we have known. But in a matter of love she is
+sound enough and sensible enough,--and she is as true as steel. I know
+no trait in Amelia which a man would be ashamed to find in his own
+daughter.
+
+She marries her George Osborne, who, to tell the truth of him, is but a
+poor kind of fellow, though he is a brave soldier. He thinks much of his
+own person, and is selfish. Thackeray puts in a touch or two here and
+there by which he is made to be odious. He would rather give a present
+to himself than to the girl who loved him. Nevertheless, when her father
+is ruined he marries her, and he fights bravely at Waterloo, and is
+killed. "No more firing was heard at Brussels. The pursuit rolled miles
+away. Darkness came down on the field and the city,--and Amelia was
+praying for George, who was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet
+through his heart."
+
+Then follows the long courtship of Dobbin, the true hero,--he who has
+been the friend of George since their old school-days; who has lived
+with him and served him, and has also loved Amelia. But he has loved
+her,--as one man may love another,--solely with a view to the profit of
+his friend. He has known all along that George and Amelia have been
+engaged to each other as boy and girl. George would have neglected her,
+but Dobbin would not allow it. George would have jilted the girl who
+loved him, but Dobbin would not let him. He had nothing to get for
+himself, but loving her as he did, it was the work of his life to get
+for her all that she wanted.
+
+George is shot at Waterloo, and then come fifteen years of
+widowhood,--fifteen years during which Becky is carrying on her
+manoeuvres,--fifteen years during which Amelia cannot bring herself to
+accept the devotion of the old captain, who becomes at last a colonel.
+But at the end she is won. "The vessel is in port. He has got the prize
+he has been trying for all his life. The bird has come in at last. There
+it is, with its head on its shoulder, billing and cooing clean up to his
+heart, with soft outstretched fluttering wings. This is what he has
+asked for every day and hour for eighteen years. This is what he has
+pined after. Here it is,--the summit, the end, the last page of the
+third volume."
+
+The reader as he closes the book has on his mind a strong conviction,
+the strongest possible conviction, that among men George is as weak and
+Dobbin as noble as any that he has met in literature; and that among
+women Amelia is as true and Becky as vile as any he has encountered. Of
+so much he will be conscious. In addition to this he will unconsciously
+have found that every page he has read will have been of interest to
+him. There has been no padding, no longueurs; every bit will have had
+its weight with him. And he will find too at the end, if he will think
+of it--though readers, I fear, seldom think much of this in regard to
+books they have read--that the lesson taught in every page has been
+good. There may be details of evil painted so as to disgust,--painted
+almost too plainly,--but none painted so as to allure.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+PENDENNIS AND THE NEWCOMES.
+
+
+The absence of the heroic was, in Thackeray, so palpable to Thackeray
+himself that in his original preface to _Pendennis_, when he began to be
+aware that his reputation was made, he tells his public what they may
+expect and what they may not, and makes his joking complaint of the
+readers of his time because they will not endure with patience the true
+picture of a natural man. "Even the gentlemen of our age," he
+says,--adding that the story of _Pendennis_ is an attempt to describe
+one of them, just as he is,--"even those we cannot show as they are with
+the notorious selfishness of their time and their education. Since the
+author of _Tom Jones_ was buried, no writer of fiction among us has been
+permitted to depict to his utmost power a MAN. We must shape him, and
+give him a certain conventional temper." Then he rebukes his audience
+because they will not listen to the truth. "You will not hear what moves
+in the real world, what passes in society, in the clubs, colleges,
+mess-rooms,--what is the life and talk of your sons." You want the
+Raffaellistic touch, or that of some painter of horrors equally removed
+from the truth. I tell you how a man really does act,--as did Fielding
+with Tom Jones,--but it does not satisfy you. You will not sympathise
+with this young man of mine, this Pendennis, because he is neither
+angel nor imp. If it be so, let it be so. I will not paint for you
+angels or imps, because I do not see them. The young man of the day,
+whom I do see, and of whom I know the inside and the out thoroughly, him
+I have painted for you; and here he is, whether you like the picture or
+not. This is what Thackeray meant, and, having this in his mind, he
+produced _Pendennis_.
+
+The object of a novel should be to instruct in morals while it amuses. I
+cannot think but that every novelist who has thought much of his art
+will have realised as much as that for himself. Whether this may best be
+done by the transcendental or by the commonplace is the question which
+it more behoves the reader than the author to answer, because the author
+may be fairly sure that he who can do the one will not, probably cannot,
+do the other. If a lad be only five feet high he does not try to enlist
+in the Guards. Thackeray complains that many ladies have "remonstrated
+and subscribers left him," because of his realistic tendency.
+Nevertheless he has gone on with his work, and, in _Pendennis_, has
+painted a young man as natural as Tom Jones. Had he expended himself in
+the attempt, he could not have drawn a Master of Ravenswood.
+
+It has to be admitted that Pendennis is not a fine fellow. He is not as
+weak, as selfish, as untrustworthy as that George Osborne whom Amelia
+married in _Vanity Fair_; but nevertheless, he is weak, and selfish, and
+untrustworthy. He is not such a one as a father would wish to see his
+son, or a mother to welcome as a lover for her daughter. But then,
+fathers are so often doomed to find their sons not all that they wish,
+and mothers to see their girls falling in love with young men who are
+not Paladins. In our individual lives we are contented to endure an
+admixture of evil, which we should resent if imputed to us in the
+general. We presume ourselves to be truth-speaking, noble in our
+sentiments, generous in our actions, modest and unselfish, chivalrous
+and devoted. But we forgive and pass over in silence a few delinquencies
+among ourselves. What boy at school ever is a coward,--in the general?
+What gentleman ever tells a lie? What young lady is greedy? We take it
+for granted, as though they were fixed rules in life, that our boys from
+our public schools look us in the face and are manly; that our gentlemen
+tell the truth as a matter of course; and that our young ladies are
+refined and unselfish. Thackeray is always protesting that it is not so,
+and that no good is to be done by blinking the truth. He knows that we
+have our little home experiences. Let us have the facts out, and mend
+what is bad if we can. This novel of _Pendennis_ is one of his loudest
+protests to this effect.
+
+I will not attempt to tell the story of Pendennis, how his mother loved
+him, how he first came to be brought up together with Laura Bell, how he
+thrashed the other boys when he was a boy, and how he fell in love with
+Miss Fotheringay, née Costigan, and was determined to marry her while he
+was still a hobbledehoy, how he went up to Boniface, that well-known
+college at Oxford, and there did no good, spending money which he had
+not got, and learning to gamble. The English gentleman, as we know,
+never lies; but Pendennis is not quite truthful; when the college tutor,
+thinking that he hears the rattling of dice, makes his way into Pen's
+room, Pen and his two companions are found with three _Homers_ before
+them, and Pen asks the tutor with great gravity; "What was the present
+condition of the river Scamander, and whether it was navigable or no?"
+He tells his mother that, during a certain vacation he must stay up and
+read, instead of coming home,--but, nevertheless, he goes up to London
+to amuse himself. The reader is soon made to understand that, though Pen
+may be a fine gentleman, he is not trustworthy. But he repents and comes
+home, and kisses his mother; only, alas! he will always be kissing
+somebody else also.
+
+The story of the Amorys and the Claverings, and that wonderful French
+cook M. Alcide Mirobolant, forms one of those delightful digressions
+which Thackeray scatters through his novels rather than weaves into
+them. They generally have but little to do with the story itself, and
+are brought in only as giving scope for some incident to the real hero
+or heroine. But in this digression Pen is very much concerned indeed,
+for he is brought to the very verge of matrimony with that peculiarly
+disagreeable lady Miss Amory. He does escape at last, but only within a
+few pages of the end, when we are made unhappy by the lady's victory
+over that poor young sinner Foker, with whom we have all come to
+sympathise, in spite of his vulgarity and fast propensities. She would
+to the last fain have married Pen, in whom she believes, thinking that
+he would make a name for her. "Il me faut des émotions," says Blanche.
+Whereupon the author, as he leaves her, explains the nature of this Miss
+Amory's feelings. "For this young lady was not able to carry out any
+emotion to the full, but had a sham enthusiasm, a sham hatred, a sham
+love, a sham taste, a sham grief; each of which flared and shone very
+vehemently for an instant, but subsided and gave place to the next sham
+emotion." Thackeray, when he drew this portrait, must certainly have
+had some special young lady in his view. But though we are made unhappy
+for Foker, Foker too escapes at last, and Blanche, with her emotions,
+marries that very doubtful nobleman Comte Montmorenci de Valentinois.
+
+But all this of Miss Amory is but an episode. The purport of the story
+is the way in which the hero is made to enter upon the world, subject as
+he has been to the sweet teaching of his mother, and subject as he is
+made to be to the worldly lessons of his old uncle the major. Then he is
+ill, and nearly dies, and his mother comes up to nurse him. And there is
+his friend Warrington, of whose family down in Suffolk we shall have
+heard something when we have read _The Virginians_,--one I think of the
+finest characters, as it is certainly one of the most touching, that
+Thackeray ever drew. Warrington, and Pen's mother, and Laura are our
+hero's better angels,--angels so good as to make us wonder that a
+creature so weak should have had such angels about him; though we are
+driven to confess that their affection and loyalty for him are natural.
+There is a melancholy beneath the roughness of Warrington, and a
+feminine softness combined with the reticent manliness of the man, which
+have endeared him to readers beyond perhaps any character in the book.
+Major Pendennis has become immortal. Selfish, worldly, false, padded,
+caring altogether for things mean and poor in themselves; still the
+reader likes him. It is not quite all for himself. To Pen he is
+good,--to Pen who is the head of his family, and to come after him as
+the Pendennis of the day. To Pen and to Pen's mother he is beneficent
+after his lights. In whatever he undertakes it is so contrived that the
+reader shall in some degree sympathise with him. And so it is with poor
+old Costigan, the drunken Irish captain, Miss Fotheringay's papa. He was
+not a pleasant person. "We have witnessed the déshabille of Major
+Pendennis," says our author; "will any one wish to be valet-de-chambre
+to our other hero, Costigan? It would seem that the captain, before
+issuing from his bedroom, scented himself with otto of whisky." Yet
+there is a kindliness about him which softens our hearts, though in
+truth he is very careful that the kindness shall always be shown to
+himself.
+
+Among these people Pen makes his way to the end of the novel, coming
+near to shipwreck on various occasions, and always deserving the
+shipwreck which he has almost encountered. Then there will arise the
+question whether it might not have been better that he should be
+altogether shipwrecked, rather than housed comfortably with such a wife
+as Laura, and left to that enjoyment of happiness forever after, which
+is the normal heaven prepared for heroes and heroines who have done
+their work well through three volumes. It is almost the only instance in
+all Thackeray's works in which this state of bliss is reached. George
+Osborne, who is the beautiful lover in _Vanity Fair_, is killed almost
+before our eyes, on the field of battle, and we feel that Nemesis has
+with justice taken hold of him. Poor old Dobbin does marry the widow,
+after fifteen years of further service, when we know him to be a
+middle-aged man and her a middle-aged woman. That glorious Paradise of
+which I have spoken requires a freshness which can hardly be attributed
+to the second marriage of a widow who has been fifteen years mourning
+for her first husband. Clive Newcome, "the first young man," if we may
+so call him, of the novel which I shall mention just now, is carried so
+far beyond his matrimonial elysium that we are allowed to see too
+plainly how far from true may be those promises of hymeneal happiness
+forever after. The cares of married life have settled down heavily upon
+his young head before we leave him. He not only marries, but loses his
+wife, and is left a melancholy widower with his son. Esmond and Beatrix
+certainly reach no such elysium as that of which we are speaking. But
+Pen, who surely deserved a Nemesis, though perhaps not one so black as
+that demanded by George Osborne's delinquencies, is treated as though he
+had been passed through the fire, and had come out,--if not pure gold,
+still gold good enough for goldsmiths. "And what sort of a husband will
+this Pendennis be?" This is the question asked by the author himself at
+the end of the novel; feeling, no doubt, some hesitation as to the
+justice of what he had just done. "And what sort of a husband will this
+Pendennis be?" many a reader will ask, doubting the happiness of such a
+marriage and the future of Laura. The querists are referred to that lady
+herself, who, seeing his faults and wayward moods--seeing and owning
+that there are better men than he--loves him always with the most
+constant affection. The assertion could be made with perfect confidence,
+but is not to the purpose. That Laura's affection should be constant, no
+one would doubt; but more than that is wanted for happiness. How about
+Pendennis and his constancy?
+
+_The Newcomes_, which I bracket in this chapter with _Pendennis_, was
+not written till after _Esmond_, and appeared between that novel and
+_The Virginians_, which was a sequel to _Esmond_. It is supposed to be
+edited by Pen, whose own adventures we have just completed, and is
+commenced by that celebrated night passed by Colonel Newcome and his boy
+Clive at the Cave of Harmony, during which the colonel is at first so
+pleasantly received and so genially entertained, but from which he is at
+last banished, indignant at the iniquities of our drunken old friend
+Captain Costigan, with whom we had become intimate in Pen's own memoirs.
+The boy Clive is described as being probably about sixteen. At the end
+of the story he has run through the adventures of his early life, and is
+left a melancholy man, a widower, one who has suffered the extremity of
+misery from a stepmother, and who is wrapped up in the only son that is
+left to him,--as had been the case with his father at the beginning of
+the novel. _The Newcomes_, therefore, like Thackeray's other tales, is
+rather a slice from the biographical memoirs of a family, than a romance
+or novel in itself.
+
+It is full of satire from the first to the last page. Every word of it
+seems to have been written to show how vile and poor a place this world
+is; how prone men are to deceive, how prone to be deceived. There is a
+scene in which "his Excellency Rummun Loll, otherwise his Highness
+Rummun Loll," is introduced to Colonel Newcome,--or rather
+presented,--for the two men had known each other before. All London was
+talking of Rummun Loll, taking him for an Indian prince, but the
+colonel, who had served in India, knew better. Rummun Loll was no more
+than a merchant, who had made a precarious fortune by doubtful means.
+All the girls, nevertheless, are running after his Excellency. "He's
+known to have two wives already in India," says Barnes Newcome; "but, by
+gad, for a settlement, I believe some of the girls here would marry
+him." We have a delightful illustration of the London girls, with their
+bare necks and shoulders, sitting round Rummun Loll and worshipping him
+as he reposes on his low settee. There are a dozen of them so enchanted
+that the men who wish to get a sight of the Rummun are quite kept at a
+distance. This is satire on the women. A few pages on we come upon a
+clergyman who is no more real than Rummun Loll. The clergyman, Charles
+Honeyman, had married the colonel's sister and had lost his wife, and
+now the brothers-in-law meet. "'Poor, poor Emma!' exclaimed the
+ecclesiastic, casting his eyes towards the chandelier and passing a
+white cambric pocket-handkerchief gracefully before them. No man in
+London understood the ring business or the pocket-handkerchief business
+better, or smothered his emotion more beautifully. 'In the gayest
+moments, in the giddiest throng of fashion, the thoughts of the past
+will rise; the departed will be among us still. But this is not the
+strain wherewith to greet the friend newly arrived on our shores. How it
+rejoices me to behold you in old England.'" And so the satirist goes on
+with Mr. Honeyman the clergyman. Mr. Honeyman the clergyman has been
+already mentioned, in that extract made in our first chapter from _Lovel
+the Widower_. It was he who assisted another friend, "with his wheedling
+tongue," in inducing Thackeray to purchase that "neat little literary
+paper,"--called then _The Museum_, but which was in truth _The National
+Standard_. In describing Barnes Newcome, the colonel's relative,
+Thackeray in the same scene attacks the sharpness of the young men of
+business of the present day. There were, or were to be, some
+transactions with Rummun Loll, and Barnes Newcome, being in doubt, asks
+the colonel a question or two as to the certainty of the Rummun's money,
+much to the colonel's disgust. "The young man of business had dropped
+his drawl or his languor, and was speaking quite unaffectedly,
+good-naturedly, and selfishly. Had you talked to him for a week you
+would not have made him understand the scorn and loathing with which the
+colonel regarded him. Here was a young fellow as keen as the oldest
+curmudgeon,--a lad with scarce a beard to his chin, that would pursue
+his bond as rigidly as Shylock." "Barnes Newcome never missed a church,"
+he goes on, "or dressing for dinner. He never kept a tradesman waiting
+for his money. He seldom drank too much, and never was late for
+business, or huddled over his toilet, however brief his sleep or severe
+his headache. In a word, he was as scrupulously whited as any sepulchre
+in the whole bills of mortality." Thackeray had lately seen some Barnes
+Newcome when he wrote that.
+
+It is all satire; but there is generally a touch of pathos even through
+the satire. It is satire when Miss Quigley, the governess in Park
+Street, falls in love with the old colonel after some dim fashion of her
+own. "When she is walking with her little charges in the Park, faint
+signals of welcome appear on her wan cheeks. She knows the dear colonel
+amidst a thousand horsemen." The colonel had drunk a glass of wine with
+her after his stately fashion, and the foolish old maid thinks too much
+of it. Then we are told how she knits purses for him, "as she sits alone
+in the schoolroom,--high up in that lone house, when the little ones are
+long since asleep,--before her dismal little tea-tray, and her little
+desk containing her mother's letters and her mementoes of home." Miss
+Quigley is an ass; but we are made to sympathise entirely with the ass,
+because of that morsel of pathos as to her mother's letters.
+
+Clive Newcome, our hero, who is a second Pen, but a better fellow, is
+himself a satire on young men,--on young men who are idle and ambitious
+at the same time. He is a painter; but, instead of being proud of his
+art, is half ashamed of it,--because not being industrious he has not,
+while yet young, learned to excel. He is "doing" a portrait of Mrs.
+Pendennis, Laura, and thus speaks of his business. "No. 666,"--he is
+supposed to be quoting from the catalogue of the Royal Academy for the
+year,--"No. 666. Portrait of Joseph Muggins, Esq., Newcome, George
+Street. No. 979. Portrait of Mrs. Muggins on her gray pony, Newcome. No.
+579. Portrait of Joseph Muggins, Esq.'s dog Toby, Newcome. This is what
+I am fit for. These are the victories I have set myself on achieving. Oh
+Mrs. Pendennis! isn't it humiliating? Why isn't there a war? Why haven't
+I a genius? There is a painter who lives hard by, and who begs me to
+come and look at his work. He is in the Muggins line too. He gets his
+canvases with a good light upon them; excludes the contemplation of
+other objects; stands beside his picture in an attitude himself; and
+thinks that he and they are masterpieces. Oh me, what drivelling
+wretches we are! Fame!--except that of just the one or two,--what's the
+use of it?" In all of which Thackeray is speaking his own feelings about
+himself as well as the world at large. What's the use of it all? Oh
+vanitas vanitatum! Oh vanity and vexation of spirit! "So Clive Newcome,"
+he says afterwards, "lay on a bed of down and tossed and tumbled there.
+He went to fine dinners, and sat silent over them; rode fine horses, and
+black care jumped up behind the moody horseman." As I write this I have
+before me a letter from Thackeray to a friend describing his own
+success when _Vanity Fair_ was coming out, full of the same feeling. He
+is making money, but he spends it so fast that he never has any; and as
+for the opinions expressed on his books, he cares little for what he
+hears. There was always present to him a feeling of black care seated
+behind the horseman,--and would have been equally so had there been no
+real care present to him. A sardonic melancholy was the characteristic
+most common to him,--which, however, was relieved by an always present
+capacity for instant frolic. It was these attributes combined which made
+him of all satirists the most humorous, and of all humorists the most
+satirical. It was these that produced the Osbornes, the Dobbins, the
+Pens, the Clives, and the Newcomes, whom, when he loved them the most,
+he could not save himself from describing as mean and unworthy. A
+somewhat heroic hero of romance,--such a one, let us say, as Waverley,
+or Lovel in _The Antiquary_, or Morton in _Old Mortality_,--was
+revolting to him, as lacking those foibles which human nature seemed to
+him to demand.
+
+The story ends with two sad tragedies, neither of which would have been
+demanded by the story, had not such sadness been agreeable to the
+author's own idiosyncrasy. The one is the ruin of the old colonel's
+fortunes, he having allowed himself to be enticed into bubble
+speculations; and the other is the loss of all happiness, and even
+comfort, to Clive the hero, by the abominations of his mother-in-law.
+The woman is so iniquitous, and so tremendous in her iniquities, that
+she rises to tragedy. Who does not know Mrs. Mack the Campaigner? Why at
+the end of his long story should Thackeray have married his hero to so
+lackadaisical a heroine as poor little Rosey, or brought on the stage
+such a she-demon as Rosey's mother? But there is the Campaigner in all
+her vigour, a marvel of strength of composition,--one of the most
+vividly drawn characters in fiction;--but a woman so odious that one is
+induced to doubt whether she should have been depicted.
+
+The other tragedy is altogether of a different kind, and though
+unnecessary to the story, and contrary to that practice of story-telling
+which seems to demand that calamities to those personages with whom we
+are to sympathise should not be brought in at the close of a work of
+fiction, is so beautifully told that no lover of Thackeray's work would
+be willing to part with it. The old colonel, as we have said, is ruined
+by speculation, and in his ruin is brought to accept the alms of the
+brotherhood of the Grey Friars. Then we are introduced to the Charter
+House, at which, as most of us know, there still exists a brotherhood of
+the kind. He dons the gown,--this old colonel, who had always been
+comfortable in his means, and latterly apparently rich,--and occupies
+the single room, and eats the doled bread, and among his poor brothers
+sits in the chapel of his order. The description is perhaps as fine as
+anything that Thackeray ever did. The gentleman is still the gentleman,
+with all the pride of gentry;--but not the less is he the humble
+bedesman, aware that he is living upon charity, not made to grovel by
+any sense of shame, but knowing that, though his normal pride may be
+left to him, an outward demeanour of humility is befitting.
+
+And then he dies. "At the usual evening hour the chapel bell began to
+toll, and Thomas Newcome's hands outside the bed feebly beat time,--and,
+just as the last bell struck, a peculiar sweet smile shone over his
+face, and he lifted up his head a little, and quickly said,
+'Adsum,'--and fell back. It was the word we used at school when names
+were called; and, lo, he whose heart was as that of a little child had
+answered to his name, and stood in the presence of his Maker!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+ESMOND AND THE VIRGINIANS.
+
+
+The novel with which we are now going to deal I regard as the greatest
+work that Thackeray did. Though I do not hesitate to compare himself
+with himself, I will make no comparison between him and others; I
+therefore abstain from assigning to _Esmond_ any special niche among
+prose fictions in the English language, but I rank it so high as to
+justify me in placing him among the small number of the highest class of
+English novelists. Much as I think of _Barry Lyndon_ and _Vanity Fair_,
+I cannot quite say this of them; but, as a chain is not stronger than
+its weakest link, so is a poet, or a dramatist, or a novelist to be
+placed in no lower level than that which he has attained by his highest
+sustained flight. The excellence which has been reached here Thackeray
+achieved, without doubt, by giving a greater amount of forethought to
+the work he had before him than had been his wont. When we were young we
+used to be told, in our house at home, that "elbow-grease" was the one
+essential necessary to getting a tough piece of work well done. If a
+mahogany table was to be made to shine, it was elbow-grease that the
+operation needed. Forethought is the elbow-grease which a novelist,--or
+poet, or dramatist,--requires. It is not only his plot that has to be
+turned and re-turned in his mind, not his plot chiefly, but he has to
+make himself sure of his situations, of his characters, of his effects,
+so that when the time comes for hitting the nail he may know where to
+hit it on the head,--so that he may himself understand the passion, the
+calmness, the virtues, the vices, the rewards and punishments which he
+means to explain to others,--so that his proportions shall be correct,
+and he be saved from the absurdity of devoting two-thirds of his book to
+the beginning, or two-thirds to the completion of his task. It is from
+want of this special labour, more frequently than from intellectual
+deficiency, that the tellers of stories fail so often to hit their nails
+on the head. To think of a story is much harder work than to write it.
+The author can sit down with the pen in his hand for a given time, and
+produce a certain number of words. That is comparatively easy, and if he
+have a conscience in regard to his task, work will be done regularly.
+But to think it over as you lie in bed, or walk about, or sit cosily
+over your fire, to turn it all in your thoughts, and make the things
+fit,--that requires elbow-grease of the mind. The arrangement of the
+words is as though you were walking simply along a road. The arrangement
+of your story is as though you were carrying a sack of flour while you
+walked. Fielding had carried his sack of flour before he wrote _Tom
+Jones_, and Scott his before he produced _Ivanhoe_. So had Thackeray
+done,--a very heavy sack of flour,--in creating _Esmond_. In _Vanity
+Fair_, in _Pendennis_, and in _The Newcomes_, there was more of that
+mere wandering in which no heavy burden was borne. The richness of the
+author's mind, the beauty of his language, his imagination and
+perception of character are all there. For that which was lovely he has
+shown his love, and for the hateful his hatred; but, nevertheless, they
+are comparatively idle books. His only work, as far as I can judge them,
+in which there is no touch of idleness, is _Esmond_. _Barry Lyndon_ is
+consecutive, and has the well-sustained purpose of exhibiting a finished
+rascal; but _Barry Lyndon_ is not quite the same from beginning to end.
+All his full-fledged novels, except _Esmond_, contain rather strings of
+incidents and memoirs of individuals, than a completed story. But
+_Esmond_ is a whole from beginning to end, with its tale well told, its
+purpose developed, its moral brought home,--and its nail hit well on the
+head and driven in.
+
+I told Thackeray once that it was not only his best work, but so much
+the best, that there was none second to it. "That was what I intended,"
+he said, "but I have failed. Nobody reads it. After all, what does it
+matter?" he went on after awhile. "If they like anything, one ought to
+be satisfied. After all, Esmond was a prig." Then he laughed and changed
+the subject, not caring to dwell on thoughts painful to him. The
+elbow-grease of thinking was always distasteful to him, and had no doubt
+been so when he conceived and carried out this work.
+
+To the ordinary labour necessary for such a novel he added very much by
+his resolution to write it in a style different, not only from that
+which he had made his own, but from that also which belonged to the
+time. He had devoted himself to the reading of the literature of Queen
+Anne's reign, and having chosen to throw his story into that period, and
+to create in it personages who were to be peculiarly concerned with the
+period, he resolved to use as the vehicle for his story the forms of
+expression then prevalent. No one who has not tried it can understand
+how great is the difficulty of mastering a phase of one's own language
+other than that which habit has made familiar. To write in another
+language, if the language be sufficiently known, is a much less arduous
+undertaking. The lad who attempts to write his essay in Ciceronian Latin
+struggles to achieve a style which is not indeed common to him, but is
+more common than any other he has become acquainted with in that tongue.
+But Thackeray in his work had always to remember his Swift, his Steele,
+and his Addison, and to forget at the same time the modes of expression
+which the day had adopted. Whether he asked advice on the subject, I do
+not know. But I feel sure that if he did he must have been counselled
+against it. Let my reader think what advice he would give to any writer
+on such a subject. Probably he asked no advice, and would have taken
+none. No doubt he found himself, at first imperceptibly, gliding into a
+phraseology which had attractions for his ear, and then probably was so
+charmed with the peculiarly masculine forms of sentences which thus
+became familiar to him, that he thought it would be almost as difficult
+to drop them altogether as altogether to assume the use of them. And if
+he could do so successfully, how great would be the assistance given to
+the local colouring which is needed for a novel in prose, the scene of
+which is thrown far back from the writer's period! Were I to write a
+poem about Coeur de Lion I should not mar my poem by using the simple
+language of the day; but if I write a prose story of the time, I cannot
+altogether avoid some attempt at far-away quaintnesses in language. To
+call a purse a "gypsire," and to begin your little speeches with "Marry
+come up," or to finish them with "Quotha," are but poor attempts. But
+even they have had their effect. Scott did the best he could with his
+Coeur de Lion. When we look to it we find that it was but little;
+though in his hands it passed for much. "By my troth," said the knight,
+"thou hast sung well and heartily, and in high praise of thine order."
+We doubt whether he achieved any similarity to the language of the time;
+but still, even in the little which he attempted there was something of
+the picturesque. But how much more would be done if in very truth the
+whole language of a story could be thrown with correctness into the form
+of expression used at the time depicted?
+
+It was this that Thackeray tried in his _Esmond_, and he has done it
+almost without a flaw. The time in question is near enough to us, and
+the literature sufficiently familiar to enable us to judge. Whether folk
+swore by their troth in the days of king Richard I. we do not know, but
+when we read Swift's letters, and Addison's papers, or Defoe's novels we
+do catch the veritable sounds of Queen Anne's age, and can say for
+ourselves whether Thackeray has caught them correctly or not. No reader
+can doubt that he has done so. Nor is the reader ever struck with the
+affectation of an assumed dialect. The words come as though they had
+been written naturally,--though not natural to the middle of the
+nineteenth century. It was a tour de force; and successful as such a
+tour de force so seldom is. But though Thackeray was successful in
+adopting the tone he wished to assume, he never quite succeeded, as far
+as my ear can judge, in altogether dropping it again.
+
+And yet it has to be remembered that though _Esmond_ deals with the
+times of Queen Anne, and "copies the language" of the time, as Thackeray
+himself says in the dedication, the story is not supposed to have been
+written till the reign of George II. Esmond in his narrative speaks of
+Fielding and Hogarth, who did their best work under George II. The idea
+is that Henry Esmond, the hero, went out to Virginia after the events
+told, and there wrote the memoir in the form of an autobiography. The
+estate of Castlewood in Virginia had been given to the Esmond family by
+Charles II., and this Esmond, our hero, finding that expatriation would
+best suit both his domestic happiness and his political
+difficulties,--as the reader of the book will understand might be the
+case,--settles himself in the colony, and there writes the history of
+his early life. He retains the manners, and with the manners the
+language of his youth. He lives among his own people, a country
+gentleman with a broad domain, mixing but little with the world beyond,
+and remains an English gentleman of the time of Queen Anne. The story is
+continued in _The Virginians_, the name given to a record of two lads
+who were grandsons of Harry Esmond, whose names are Warrington. Before
+_The Virginians_ appeared we had already become acquainted with a scion
+of that family, the friend of Arthur Pendennis, a younger son of Sir
+Miles Warrington, of Suffolk. Henry Esmond's daughter had in a previous
+generation married a younger son of the then baronet. This is mentioned
+now to show the way in which Thackeray's mind worked afterwards upon the
+details and characters which he had originated in _Esmond_.
+
+It is not my purpose to tell the story here, but rather to explain the
+way in which it is written, to show how it differs from other stories,
+and thus to explain its effect. Harry Esmond, who tells the story, is of
+course the hero. There are two heroines who equally command our
+sympathy,--Lady Castlewood the wife of Harry's kinsman, and her
+daughter Beatrix. Thackeray himself declared the man to be a prig, and
+he was not altogether wrong. Beatrix, with whom throughout the whole
+book he is in love, knew him well. "Shall I be frank with you, Harry,"
+she says, when she is engaged to another suitor, "and say that if you
+had not been down on your knees and so humble, you might have fared
+better with me? A woman of my spirit, cousin, is to be won by gallantry,
+and not by sighs and rueful faces. All the time you are worshipping and
+singing hymns to me, I know very well I am no goddess." And again: "As
+for you, you want a woman to bring your slippers and cap, and to sit at
+your feet and cry, O caro, caro! O bravo! whilst you read your
+Shakespeares and Miltons and stuff." He was a prig, and the girl he
+loved knew him, and being quite of another way of thinking herself,
+would have nothing to say to him in the way of love. But without
+something of the aptitudes of a prig the character which the author
+intended could not have been drawn. There was to be courage,--military
+courage,--and that propensity to fighting which the tone of the age
+demanded in a finished gentleman. Esmond therefore is ready enough to
+use his sword. But at the same time he has to live as becomes one whose
+name is in some degree under a cloud; for though he be not in truth an
+illegitimate offshoot of the noble family which is his, and though he
+knows that he is not so, still he has to live as though he were. He
+becomes a soldier, and it was just then that our army was accustomed "to
+swear horribly in Flanders." But Esmond likes his books, and cannot
+swear or drink like other soldiers. Nevertheless he has a sort of liking
+for fast ways in others, knowing that such are the ways of a gallant
+cavalier. There is a melancholy over his life which makes him always,
+to himself and to others, much older than his years. He is well aware
+that, being as he is, it is impossible that Beatrix should love him. Now
+and then there is a dash of lightness about him, as though he had taught
+himself in his philosophy that even sorrow may be borne with a
+smile,--as though there was something in him of the Stoic's doctrine,
+which made him feel that even disappointed love should not be seen to
+wound too deep. But still when he smiles, even when he indulges in some
+little pleasantry, there is that garb of melancholy over him which
+always makes a man a prig. But he is a gentleman from the crown of his
+head to the sole of his foot. Thackeray had let the whole power of his
+intellect apply itself to a conception of the character of a gentleman.
+This man is brave, polished, gifted with that old-fashioned courtesy
+which ladies used to love, true as steel, loyal as faith himself, with a
+power of self-abnegation which astonishes the criticising reader when he
+finds such a virtue carried to such an extent without seeming to be
+unnatural. To draw the picture of a man and say that he is gifted with
+all the virtues is easy enough,--easy enough to describe him as
+performing all the virtues. The difficulty is to put your man on his
+legs, and make him move about, carrying his virtues with a natural gait,
+so that the reader shall feel that he is becoming acquainted with flesh
+and blood, not with a wooden figure. The virtues are all there with
+Henry Esmond, and the flesh and blood also, so that the reader believes
+in them. But still there is left a flavour of the character which
+Thackeray himself tasted when he called his hero a prig.
+
+The two heroines, Lady Castlewood and Beatrix, are mother and daughter,
+of whom the former is in love with Esmond, and the latter is loved by
+him. Fault has been found with the story, because of the unnatural
+rivalry,--because it has been felt that a mother's solicitude for her
+daughter should admit of no such juxtaposition. But the criticism has
+come, I think, from those who have failed to understand, not from those
+who have understood, the tale;--not because they have read it, but
+because they have not read it, and have only looked at it or heard of
+it. Lady Castlewood is perhaps ten years older than the boy Esmond, whom
+she first finds in her husband's house, and takes as a protégé; and from
+the moment in which she finds that he is in love with her own daughter,
+she does her best to bring about a marriage between them. Her husband is
+alive, and though he is a drunken brute,--after the manner of lords of
+that time,--she is thoroughly loyal to him. The little touches, of which
+the woman is herself altogether unconscious, that gradually turn a love
+for the boy into a love for the man, are told so delicately, that it is
+only at last that the reader perceives what has in truth happened to the
+woman. She is angry with him, grateful to him, careful over him,
+gradually conscious of all his worth, and of all that he does to her and
+hers, till at last her heart is unable to resist. But then she is a
+widow;--and Beatrix has declared that her ambition will not allow her to
+marry so humble a swain, and Esmond has become,--as he says of himself
+when he calls himself "an old gentleman,"--"the guardian of all the
+family," "fit to be the grandfather of you all."
+
+The character of Lady Castlewood has required more delicacy in its
+manipulation than perhaps any other which Thackeray has drawn. There is
+a mixture in it of self-negation and of jealousy, of gratefulness of
+heart and of the weary thoughtfulness of age, of occasional
+sprightliness with deep melancholy, of injustice with a thorough
+appreciation of the good around her, of personal weakness,--as shown
+always in her intercourse with her children, and of personal
+strength,--as displayed when she vindicates the position of her kinsman
+Henry to the Duke of Hamilton, who is about to marry Beatrix;--a mixture
+which has required a master's hand to trace. These contradictions are
+essentially feminine. Perhaps it must be confessed that in the
+unreasonableness of the woman, the author has intended to bear more
+harshly on the sex than it deserves. But a true woman will forgive him,
+because of the truth of Lady Castlewood's heart. Her husband had been
+killed in a duel, and there were circumstances which had induced her at
+the moment to quarrel with Harry and to be unjust to him. He had been
+ill, and had gone away to the wars, and then she had learned the truth,
+and had been wretched enough. But when he comes back, and she sees him,
+by chance at first, as the anthem is being sung in the cathedral choir,
+as she is saying her prayers, her heart flows over with tenderness to
+him. "I knew you would come back," she said; "and to-day, Harry, in the
+anthem when they sang it,--'When the Lord turned the captivity of Zion
+we were like them that dream,'--I thought, yes, like them that
+dream,--them that dream. And then it went on, 'They that sow in tears
+shall reap in joy, and he that goeth forth and weepeth, shall doubtless
+come home again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him.' I looked
+up from the book and saw you. I was not surprised when I saw you. I knew
+you would come, my dear, and saw the gold sunshine round your head." And
+so it goes on, running into expressions of heartmelting tenderness. And
+yet she herself does not know that her own heart is seeking his with
+all a woman's love. She is still willing that he should possess Beatrix.
+"I would call you my son," she says, "sooner than the greatest prince in
+Europe." But she warns him of the nature of her own girl. "'Tis for my
+poor Beatrix I tremble, whose headstrong will affrights me, whose
+jealous temper, and whose vanity no prayers of mine can cure." It is but
+very gradually that Esmond becomes aware of the truth. Indeed, he has
+not become altogether aware of it till the tale closes. The reader does
+not see that transfer of affection from the daughter to the mother which
+would fail to reach his sympathy. In the last page of the last chapter
+it is told that it is so,--that Esmond marries Lady Castlewood,--but it
+is not told till all the incidents of the story have been completed.
+
+But of the three characters I have named, Beatrix is the one that has
+most strongly exercised the writer's powers, and will most interest the
+reader. As far as outward person is concerned she is very lovely,--so
+charming, that every man that comes near to her submits himself to her
+attractions and caprices. It is but rarely that a novelist can succeed
+in impressing his reader with a sense of female loveliness. The attempt
+is made so frequently,--comes so much as a matter of course in every
+novel that is written, and fails so much as a matter of course, that the
+reader does not feel the failure. There are things which we do not
+expect to have done for us in literature because they are done so
+seldom. Novelists are apt to describe the rural scenes among which their
+characters play their parts, but seldom leave any impression of the
+places described. Even in poetry how often does this occur? The words
+used are pretty, well chosen, perhaps musical to the ear, and in that
+way befitting; but unless the spot has violent characteristics of its
+own, such as Burley's cave or the waterfall of Lodore, no striking
+portrait is left. Nor are we disappointed as we read, because we have
+not been taught to expect it to be otherwise. So it is with those
+word-painted portraits of women, which are so frequently given and so
+seldom convey any impression. Who has an idea of the outside look of
+Sophia Western, or Edith Bellenden, or even of Imogen, though
+Iachimo, who described her, was so good at words? A series of
+pictures,--illustrations,--as we have with Dickens' novels, and with
+Thackeray's, may leave an impression of a figure,--though even then not
+often of feminine beauty. But in this work Thackeray has succeeded in
+imbuing us with a sense of the outside loveliness of Beatrix by the mere
+force of words. We are not only told it, but we feel that she was such a
+one as a man cannot fail to covet, even when his judgment goes against
+his choice.
+
+Here the judgment goes altogether against the choice. The girl grows up
+before us from her early youth till her twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth
+year, and becomes,--such as her mother described her,--one whose
+headlong will, whose jealousy, and whose vanity nothing could restrain.
+She has none of those soft foibles, half allied to virtues, by which
+weak women fall away into misery or perhaps distraction. She does not
+want to love or to be loved. She does not care to be fondled. She has no
+longing for caresses. She wants to be admired,--and to make use of the
+admiration she shall achieve for the material purposes of her life. She
+wishes to rise in the world; and her beauty is the sword with which she
+must open her oyster. As to her heart, it is a thing of which she
+becomes aware, only to assure herself that it must be laid aside and
+put out of the question. Now and again Esmond touches it. She just
+feels that she has a heart to be touched. But she never has a doubt as
+to her conduct in that respect. She will not allow her dreams of
+ambition to be disturbed by such folly as love.
+
+In all that there might be something, if not good and great,
+nevertheless grand, if her ambition, though worldly, had in it a touch
+of nobility. But this poor creature is made with her bleared blind eyes
+to fall into the very lowest depths of feminine ignobility. One lover
+comes after another. Harry Esmond is, of course, the lover with whom the
+reader interests himself. At last there comes a duke,--fifty years old,
+indeed, but with semi-royal appanages. As his wife she will become a
+duchess, with many diamonds, and be her Excellency. The man is stern,
+cold, and jealous; but she does not doubt for a moment. She is to be
+Duchess of Hamilton, and towers already in pride of place above her
+mother, and her kinsman lover, and all her belongings. The story here,
+with its little incidents of birth, and blood, and ignoble pride, and
+gratified ambition, with a dash of true feminine nobility on the part of
+the girl's mother, is such as to leave one with the impression that it
+has hardly been beaten in English prose fiction. Then, in the last
+moment, the duke is killed in a duel, and the news is brought to the
+girl by Esmond. She turns upon him and rebukes him harshly. Then she
+moves away, and feels in a moment that there is nothing left for her in
+this world, and that she can only throw herself upon devotion for
+consolation. "I am best in my own room and by myself," she said. Her
+eyes were quite dry, nor did Esmond ever see them otherwise, save once,
+in respect of that grief. She gave him a cold hand as she went out.
+"Thank you, brother," she said in a low voice, and with a simplicity
+more touching than tears, "all that you have said is true and kind, and
+I will go away and will ask pardon."
+
+But the consolation coming from devotion did not go far with such a one
+as her. We cannot rest on religion merely by saying that we will do so.
+Very speedily there comes consolation in another form. Queen Anne is on
+her deathbed, and a young Stuart prince appears upon the scene, of whom
+some loyal hearts dream that they can make a king. He is such as Stuarts
+were, and only walks across the novelist's canvas to show his folly and
+heartlessness. But there is a moment in which Beatrix thinks that she
+may rise in the world to the proud place of a royal mistress. That is
+her last ambition! That is her pride! That is to be her glory! The
+bleared eyes can see no clearer than that. But the mock prince passes
+away, and nothing but the disgrace of the wish remains.
+
+Such is the story of _Esmond_, leaving with it, as does all Thackeray's
+work, a melancholy conviction of the vanity of all things human.
+_Vanitas vanitatum_, as he wrote on the pages of the French lady's
+album, and again in one of the earlier numbers of _The Cornhill
+Magazine_. With much that is picturesque, much that is droll, much that
+is valuable as being a correct picture of the period selected, the gist
+of the book is melancholy throughout. It ends with the promise of
+happiness to come, but that is contained merely in a concluding
+paragraph. The one woman, during the course of the story, becomes a
+widow, with a living love in which she has no hope, with children for
+whom her fears are almost stronger than her affection, who never can
+rally herself to happiness for a moment. The other, with all her beauty
+and all her brilliance, becomes what we have described,--and marries at
+last her brother's tutor, who becomes a bishop by means of her
+intrigues. Esmond, the hero, who is compounded of all good gifts, after
+a childhood and youth tinged throughout with melancholy, vanishes from
+us, with the promise that he is to be rewarded by the hand of the mother
+of the girl he has loved.
+
+And yet there is not a page in the book over which a thoughtful reader
+cannot pause with delight. The nature in it is true nature. Given a
+story thus sad, and persons thus situated, and it is thus that the
+details would follow each other, and thus that the people would conduct
+themselves. It was the tone of Thackeray's mind to turn away from the
+prospect of things joyful, and to see,--or believe that he saw,--in all
+human affairs, the seed of something base, of something which would be
+antagonistic to true contentment. All his snobs, and all his fools, and
+all his knaves, come from the same conviction. Is it not the doctrine on
+which our religion is founded,--though the sadness of it there is
+alleviated by the doubtful promise of a heaven?
+
+     Though thrice a thousand years are passed
+       Since David's son, the sad and splendid,
+     The weary king ecclesiast
+       Upon his awful tablets penned it.
+
+So it was that Thackeray preached his sermon. But melancholy though it
+be, the lesson taught in _Esmond_ is salutary from beginning to end. The
+sermon truly preached is that glory can only come from that which is
+truly glorious, and that the results of meanness end always in the mean.
+No girl will be taught to wish to shine like Beatrix, nor will any youth
+be made to think that to gain the love of such a one it can be worth his
+while to expend his energy or his heart.
+
+_Esmond_ was published in 1852. It was not till 1858, some time after he
+had returned from his lecturing tours, that he published the sequel
+called _The Virginians_. It was first brought out in twenty-four monthly
+numbers, and ran through the years 1858 and 1859, Messrs. Bradbury and
+Evans having been the publishers. It takes up by no means the story of
+_Esmond_, and hardly the characters. The twin lads, who are called the
+Virginians, and whose name is Warrington, are grandsons of Esmond and
+his wife Lady Castlewood. Their one daughter, born at the estate in
+Virginia, had married a Warrington, and the Virginians are the issue of
+that marriage. In the story, one is sent to England, there to make his
+way; and the other is for awhile supposed to have been killed by the
+Indians. How he was not killed, but after awhile comes again forward in
+the world of fiction, will be found in the story, which it is not our
+purpose to set forth here. The most interesting part of the narrative is
+that which tells us of the later fortunes of Madame Beatrix,--the
+Baroness Bernstein,--the lady who had in her youth been Beatrix Esmond,
+who had then condescended to become Mrs. Tasker, the tutor's wife,
+whence she rose to be the "lady" of a bishop, and, after the bishop had
+been put to rest under a load of marble, had become the baroness,--a
+rich old woman, courted by all her relatives because of her wealth.
+
+In _The Virginians_, as a work of art, is discovered, more strongly than
+had shown itself yet in any of his works, that propensity to wandering
+which came to Thackeray because of his idleness. It is, I think, to be
+found in every book he ever wrote,--except _Esmond_; but is here more
+conspicuous than it had been in his earlier years. Though he can settle
+himself down to his pen and ink,--not always even to that without a
+struggle, but to that with sufficient burst of energy to produce a
+large average amount of work,--he cannot settle himself down to the task
+of contriving a story. There have been those,--and they have not been
+bad judges of literature,--who have told me that they have best liked
+these vague narratives. The mind of the man has been clearly exhibited
+in them. In them he has spoken out his thoughts, and given the world to
+know his convictions, as well as could have been done in the carrying
+out any well-conducted plot. And though the narratives be vague, the
+characters are alive. In _The Virginians_, the two young men and their
+mother, and the other ladies with whom they have to deal, and especially
+their aunt, the Baroness Bernstein, are all alive. For desultory
+reading, for that picking up of a volume now and again which requires
+permission to forget the plot of a novel, this novel is admirably
+adapted. There is not a page of it vacant or dull. But he who takes it
+up to read as a whole, will find that it is the work of a desultory
+writer, to whom it is not infrequently difficult to remember the
+incidents of his own narrative. "How good it is, even as it is!--but if
+he would have done his best for us, what might he not have done!" This,
+I think, is what we feel when we read _The Virginians_. The author's
+mind has in one way been active enough,--and powerful, as it always is;
+but he has been unable to fix it to an intended purpose, and has gone on
+from day to day furthering the difficulty he has intended to master,
+till the book, under the stress of circumstances,--demands for copy and
+the like,--has been completed before the difficulty has even in truth
+been encountered.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+THACKERAY'S BURLESQUES.
+
+
+As so much of Thackeray's writing partakes of the nature of burlesque,
+it would have been unnecessary to devote a separate chapter to the
+subject, were it not that there are among his tales two or three so
+exceedingly good of their kind, coming so entirely up to our idea of
+what a prose burlesque should be, that were I to omit to mention them I
+should pass over a distinctive portion of our author's work.
+
+The volume called _Burlesques_, published in 1869, begins with the
+_Novels by Eminent Hands_, and _Jeames's Diary_, to which I have already
+alluded. It contains also _The Tremendous Adventures of Major Gahagan_,
+_A Legend of the Rhine_, and _Rebecca and Rowena_. It is of these that I
+will now speak. _The History of the Next French Revolution_ and _Cox's
+Diary_, with which the volume is concluded, are, according to my
+thinking, hardly equal to the others; nor are they so properly called
+burlesques.
+
+Nor will I say much of Major Gahagan, though his adventures are very
+good fun. He is a warrior,--that is, of course,--and he is one in whose
+wonderful narrative all that distant India can produce in the way of
+boasting, is superadded to Ireland's best efforts in the same line.
+Baron Munchausen was nothing to him; and to the bare and simple
+miracles of the baron is joined that humour without which Thackeray
+never tells any story. This is broad enough, no doubt, but is still
+humour;--as when the major tells us that he always kept in his own
+apartment a small store of gunpowder; "always keeping it under my bed,
+with a candle burning for fear of accidents." Or when he describes his
+courage; "I was running,--running as the brave stag before the
+hounds,--running, as I have done a great number of times in my life,
+when there was no help for it but a run." Then he tells us of his
+digestion. "Once in Spain I ate the leg of a horse, and was so eager to
+swallow this morsel, that I bolted the shoe as well as the hoof, and
+never felt the slightest inconvenience from either." He storms a
+citadel, and has only a snuff box given him for his reward. "Never
+mind," says Major Gahagan; "when they want me to storm a fort again, I
+shall know better." By which we perceive that the major remembered his
+Horace, and had in his mind the soldier who had lost his purse. But the
+major's adventures, excellent as they are, lack the continued interest
+which is attached to the two following stories.
+
+Of what nature is _The Legend of the Rhine_, we learn from the
+commencement. "It was in the good old days of chivalry, when every
+mountain that bathes its shadow in the Rhine had its castle; not
+inhabited as now by a few rats and owls, nor covered with moss and
+wallflowers and funguses and creeping ivy. No, no; where the ivy now
+clusters there grew strong portcullis and bars of steel; where the
+wallflowers now quiver in the ramparts there were silken banners
+embroidered with wonderful heraldry; men-at-arms marched where now you
+shall only see a bank of moss or a hideous black champignon; and in
+place of the rats and owlets, I warrant me there were ladies and
+knights to revel in the great halls, and to feast and dance, and to make
+love there." So that we know well beforehand of what kind will this
+story be. It will be pure romance,--burlesqued. "Ho seneschal, fill me a
+cup of hot liquor; put sugar in it, good fellow; yea, and a little hot
+water,--but very little, for my soul is sad as I think of those days and
+knights of old."
+
+A knight is riding alone on his war-horse, with all his armour with
+him,--and his luggage. His rank is shown by the name on his portmanteau,
+and his former address and present destination by a card which was
+attached. It had run, "Count Ludwig de Hombourg, Jerusalem, but the name
+of the Holy City had been dashed out with the pen, and that of Godesberg
+substituted." "By St. Hugo of Katzenellenbogen," said the good knight
+shivering, "'tis colder here than at Damascus. Shall I be at Godesberg
+in time for dinner?" He has come to see his friend Count Karl, Margrave
+of Godesberg.
+
+But at Godesberg everything is in distress and sorrow. There is a new
+inmate there, one Sir Gottfried, since whose arrival the knight of the
+castle has become a wretched man, having been taught to believe all
+evils of his wife, and of his child Otto, and a certain stranger, one
+Hildebrandt. Gottfried, we see with half an eye, has done it all. It is
+in vain that Ludwig de Hombourg tells his old friend Karl that this
+Gottfried is a thoroughly bad fellow, that he had been found to be a
+cardsharper in the Holy Land, and had been drummed out of his regiment.
+"'Twas but some silly quarrel over the wine-cup," says Karl. "Hugo de
+Brodenel would have no black bottle on the board." We think we can
+remember the quarrel of "Brodenel" and the black bottle, though so many
+things have taken place since that.
+
+There is a festival in the castle, and Hildebrandt comes with the other
+guests. Then Ludwig's attention is called by poor Karl, the father, to a
+certain family likeness. Can it be that he is not the father of his own
+child? He is playing cards with his friend Ludwig when that traitor
+Gottfried comes and whispers to him, and makes an appointment. "I will
+be there too," thought Count Ludwig, the good Knight of Hombourg.
+
+On the next morning, before the stranger knight had shaken off his
+slumbers, all had been found out and everything done. The lady has been
+sent to a convent and her son to a monastery. The knight of the castle
+has no comfort but in his friend Gottfried, a distant cousin who is to
+inherit everything. All this is told to Sir Ludwig,--who immediately
+takes steps to repair the mischief. "A cup of coffee straight," says he
+to the servitors. "Bid the cook pack me a sausage and bread in paper,
+and the groom saddle Streithengst. We have far to ride." So this
+redresser of wrongs starts off, leaving the Margrave in his grief.
+
+Then there is a great fight between Sir Ludwig and Sir Gottfried,
+admirably told in the manner of the later chroniclers,--a hermit sitting
+by and describing everything almost as well as Rebecca did on the tower.
+Sir Ludwig being in the right, of course gains the day. But the escape
+of the fallen knight's horse is the cream of this chapter. "Away, ay,
+away!--away amid the green vineyards and golden cornfields; away up the
+steep mountains, where he frightened the eagles in their eyries; away
+down the clattering ravines, where the flashing cataracts tumble; away
+through the dark pine-forests, where the hungry wolves are howling; away
+over the dreary wolds, where the wild wind walks alone; away through the
+splashing quagmires, where the will-o'-the wisp slunk frightened among
+the reeds; away through light and darkness, storm and sunshine; away by
+tower and town, highroad and hamlet.... Brave horse! gallant steed!
+snorting child of Araby! On went the horse, over mountains, rivers,
+turnpikes, applewomen; and never stopped until he reached a
+livery-stable in Cologne, where his master was accustomed to put him
+up!"
+
+The conquered knight, Sir Gottfried, of course reveals the truth. This
+Hildebrandt is no more than the lady's brother,--as it happened a
+brother in disguise,--and hence the likeness. Wicked knights when they
+die always divulge their wicked secrets, and this knight Gottfried does
+so now. Sir Ludwig carries the news home to the afflicted husband and
+father; who of course instantly sends off messengers for his wife and
+son. The wife won't come. All she wants is to have her dresses and
+jewels sent to her. Of so cruel a husband she has had enough. As for the
+son, he has jumped out of a boat on the Rhine, as he was being carried
+to his monastery, and was drowned!
+
+But he was not drowned, but had only dived. "The gallant boy swam on
+beneath the water, never lifting his head for a single moment between
+Godesberg and Cologne; the distance being twenty-five or thirty miles."
+
+Then he becomes an archer, dressed in green from head to foot. How it
+was is all told in the story; and he goes to shoot for a prize at the
+Castle of Adolf the Duke of Cleeves. On his way he shoots a raven
+marvellously,--almost as marvellously as did Robin Hood the twig in
+Ivanhoe. Then one of his companions is married, or nearly married, to
+the mysterious "Lady of Windeck,"--would have been married but for Otto,
+and that the bishop and dean, who were dragged up from their long-ago
+graves to perform the ghostly ceremony, were prevented by the ill-timed
+mirth of a certain old canon of the church named Schidnischmidt. The
+reader has to read the name out long before he recognises an old friend.
+But this of the Lady of Windeck is an episode.
+
+How at the shooting-match, which of course ensued, Otto shot for and won
+the heart of a fair lady, the duke's daughter, need not be told here,
+nor how he quarrelled with the Rowski of Donnerblitz,--the hideous and
+sulky, but rich and powerful, nobleman who had come to take the hand,
+whether he could win the heart or not, of the daughter of the duke. It
+is all arranged according to the proper and romantic order. Otto, though
+he enlists in the duke's archer-guard as simple soldier, contrives to
+fight with the Rowski de Donnerblitz, Margrave of Eulenschrenkenstein,
+and of course kills him. "'Yield, yield, Sir Rowski!' shouted he in a
+calm voice. A blow dealt madly at his head was the reply. It was the
+last blow that the count of Eulenschrenkenstein ever struck in battle.
+The curse was on his lips as the crashing steel descended into his brain
+and split it in two. He rolled like a dog from his horse, his enemy's
+knee was in a moment on his chest, and the dagger of mercy at his
+throat, as the knight once more called upon him to yield." The knight
+was of course the archer who had come forward as an unknown champion,
+and had touched the Rowski's shield with the point of his lance. For
+this story, as well as the rest, is a burlesque on our dear old
+favourite Ivanhoe.
+
+That everything goes right at last, that the wife comes back from her
+monastery, and joins her jealous husband, and that the duke's daughter
+has always, in truth, known that the poor archer was a noble
+knight,--these things are all matters of course.
+
+But the best of the three burlesques is _Rebecca and Rowena, or A
+Romance upon Romance_, which I need not tell my readers is a
+continuation of _Ivanhoe_. Of this burlesque it is the peculiar
+characteristic that, while it has been written to ridicule the persons
+and the incidents of that perhaps the most favourite novel in the
+English language, it has been so written that it would not have offended
+the author had he lived to read it, nor does it disgust or annoy those
+who most love the original. There is not a word in it having an
+intention to belittle Scott. It has sprung from the genuine humour
+created in Thackeray's mind by his aspect of the romantic. We remember
+how reticent, how dignified was Rowena,--how cold we perhaps thought
+her, whether there was so little of that billing and cooing, that
+kissing and squeezing, between her and Ivanhoe which we used to think
+necessary to lovers' blisses. And there was left too on our minds, an
+idea that Ivanhoe had liked the Jewess almost as well as Rowena, and
+that Rowena might possibly have become jealous. Thackeray's mind at once
+went to work and pictured to him a Rowena such as such a woman might
+become after marriage; and as Ivanhoe was of a melancholy nature and apt
+to be hipped, and grave, and silent, as a matter of course Thackeray
+presumes him to have been henpecked after his marriage.
+
+Our dear Wamba disturbs his mistress in some devotional conversation
+with her chaplain, and the stern lady orders that the fool shall have
+three-dozen lashes. "I got you out of Front de Boeuf's castle," said
+poor Wamba, piteously, appealing to Sir Wilfrid of Ivanhoe, "and canst
+thou not save me from the lash?"
+
+"Yes; from Front de Boeuf's castle, _when you were locked up with the
+Jewess in the tower_!" said Rowena, haughtily replying to the timid
+appeal of her husband. "Gurth, give him four-dozen,"--and this was all
+poor Wamba got by applying for the mediation of his master. Then the
+satirist moralises; "Did you ever know a right-minded woman pardon
+another for being handsomer and more love-worthy than herself?" Rowena
+is "always flinging Rebecca into Ivanhoe's teeth;" and altogether life
+at Rotherwood, as described by the later chronicles, is not very happy
+even when most domestic. Ivanhoe becomes sad and moody. He takes to
+drinking, and his lady does not forget to tell him of it. "Ah dear axe!"
+he exclaims, apostrophising his weapon, "ah gentle steel! that was a
+merry time when I sent thee crashing into the pate of the Emir Abdul
+Melek!" There was nothing left to him but his memories; and "in a word,
+his life was intolerable." So he determines that he will go and look
+after king Richard, who of course was wandering abroad. He anticipates a
+little difficulty with his wife; but she is only too happy to let him
+go, comforting herself with the idea that Athelstane will look after
+her. So her husband starts on his journey. "Then Ivanhoe's trumpet blew.
+Then Rowena waved her pocket-handkerchief. Then the household gave a
+shout. Then the pursuivant of the good knight, Sir Wilfrid the Crusader,
+flung out his banner,--which was argent, a gules cramoisy with three
+Moors impaled,--then Wamba gave a lash on his mule's haunch, and
+Ivanhoe, heaving a great sigh, turned the tail of his war-horse upon the
+castle of his fathers."
+
+Ivanhoe finds Coeur de Leon besieging the Castle of Chalons, and there
+they both do wondrous deeds, Ivanhoe always surpassing the king. The
+jealousy of the courtiers, the ingratitude of the king, and the
+melancholy of the knight, who is never comforted except when he has
+slaughtered some hundreds, are delightful. Roger de Backbite and Peter
+de Toadhole are intended to be quite real. Then his majesty sings,
+passing off as his own, a song of Charles Lever's. Sir Wilfrid declares
+the truth, and twits the king with his falsehood, whereupon he has the
+guitar thrown at his head for his pains. He catches the guitar, however,
+gracefully in his left hand, and sings his own immortal ballad of _King
+Canute_,--than which Thackeray never did anything better.
+
+     "Might I stay the sun above us, good Sir Bishop?" Canute cried;
+     "Could I bid the silver moon to pause upon her heavenly ride?
+     If the moon obeys my orders, sure I can command the tide.
+
+     Will the advancing waves obey me, Bishop, if I make the sign?"
+     Said the bishop, bowing lowly; "Land and sea, my lord, are thine."
+     Canute turned towards the ocean; "Back," he said, "thou foaming
+           brine."
+
+     But the sullen ocean answered with a louder deeper roar,
+     And the rapid waves drew nearer, falling, sounding on the shore;
+     Back the keeper and the bishop, back the king and courtiers bore.
+
+We must go to the book to look at the picture of the king as he is
+killing the youngest of the sons of the Count of Chalons. Those
+illustrations of Doyle's are admirable. The size of the king's head, and
+the size of his battle-axe as contrasted with the size of the child, are
+burlesque all over. But the king has been wounded by a bolt from the bow
+of Sir Bertrand de Gourdon while he is slaughtering the infant, and
+there is an end of him. Ivanhoe, too, is killed at the siege,--Sir Roger
+de Backbite having stabbed him in the back during the scene. Had he not
+been then killed, his widow Rowena could not have married Athelstane,
+which she soon did after hearing the sad news; nor could he have had
+that celebrated epitaph in Latin and English;
+
+     Hie est Guilfridus, belli dum vixit avidus.
+     Cum gladeo et lancea Normannia et quoque Francia
+     Verbera dura dabat. Per Turcos multum equitabat.
+     Guilbertum occidit;--atque Hyerosolyma vidit.
+     Heu! nunc sub fossa sunt tanti militis ossa.
+     Uxor Athelstani est conjux castissima Thani.[5]
+
+The translation we are told was by Wamba;
+
+     Under the stone you behold,
+     Buried and coffined and cold,
+     Lieth Sir Wilfrid the Bold.
+
+     Always he marched in advance,
+     Warring in Flanders and France,
+     Doughty with sword and with lance
+
+     Famous in Saracen fight,
+     Rode in his youth, the Good Knight,
+     Scattering Paynims in flight.
+
+     Brian, the Templar untrue,
+     Fairly in tourney he slew;
+     Saw Hierusalem too.
+
+     Now he is buried and gone,
+     Lying beneath the gray stone.
+     Where shall you find such a one?
+
+     Long time his widow deplored,
+     Weeping, the fate of her lord,
+     Sadly cut off by the sword.
+
+     When she was eased of her pain,
+     Came the good lord Athelstane,
+     When her ladyship married again.
+
+The next chapter begins naturally as follows; "I trust nobody will
+suppose, from the events described in the last chapter, that our friend
+Ivanhoe is really dead." He is of course cured of his wounds, though
+they take six years in the curing. And then he makes his way back to
+Rotherwood, in a friar's disguise, much as he did on that former
+occasion when we first met him, and there is received by Athelstane and
+Rowena,--and their boy!--while Wamba sings him a song:
+
+     Then you know the worth of a lass,
+     Once you have come to forty year!
+
+No one, of course, but Wamba knows Ivanhoe, who roams about the country,
+melancholy,--as he of course would be,--charitable,--as he perhaps might
+be,--for we are specially told that he had a large fortune and nothing
+to do with it, and slaying robbers wherever he met them;--but sad at
+heart all the time. Then there comes a little burst of the author's own
+feelings, while he is burlesquing. "Ah my dear friends and British
+public, are there not others who are melancholy under a mask of gaiety,
+and who in the midst of crowds are lonely! Liston was a most melancholy
+man; Grimaldi had feelings; and then others I wot of. But psha!--let us
+have the next chapter." In all of which there was a touch of
+earnestness.
+
+Ivanhoe's griefs were enhanced by the wickedness of king John, under
+whom he would not serve. "It was Sir Wilfrid of Ivanhoe, I need scarcely
+say, who got the Barons of England to league together and extort from
+the king that famous instrument and palladium of our liberties, at
+present in the British Museum, Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury,--The
+Magna Charta." Athelstane also quarrels with the king, whose orders he
+disobeys, and Rotherwood is attacked by the royal army. No one was of
+real service in the way of fighting except Ivanhoe,--and how could he
+take up that cause? "No; be hanged to me," said the knight bitterly.
+"This is a quarrel in which I can't interfere. Common politeness
+forbids. Let yonder ale-swilling Athelstane defend his,--ha,
+ha!--_wife_; and my Lady Rowena guard her,--ha, ha!--_son_!" and he
+laughed wildly and madly.
+
+But Athelstane is killed,--this time in earnest,--and then Ivanhoe
+rushes to the rescue. He finds Gurth dead at the park-lodge, and though
+he is all alone,--having outridden his followers,--he rushes up the
+chestnut avenue to the house, which is being attacked. "An Ivanhoe! an
+Ivanhoe!" he bellowed out with a shout that overcame all the din of
+battle;--"Notre Dame à la recousse?" and to hurl his lance through the
+midriff of Reginald de Bracy, who was commanding the assault,--who fell
+howling with anguish,--to wave his battle-axe over his own head, and to
+cut off those of thirteen men-at-arms, was the work of an instant. "An
+Ivanhoe! an Ivanhoe!" he still shouted, and down went a man as sure as
+he said "hoe!"
+
+Nevertheless he is again killed by multitudes, or very nearly,--and has
+again to be cured by the tender nursing of Wamba. But Athelstane is
+really dead, and Rowena and the boy have to be found. He does his duty
+and finds them,--just in time to be present at Rowena's death. She has
+been put in prison by king John, and is in extremis when her first
+husband gets to her. "Wilfrid, my early loved,"[6] slowly gasped she
+removing her gray hair from her furrowed temples, and gazing on her boy
+fondly as he nestled on Ivanhoe's knee,--"promise me by St. Waltheof of
+Templestowe,--promise me one boon!"
+
+"I do," said Ivanhoe, clasping the boy, and thinking that it was to that
+little innocent that the promise was intended to apply.
+
+"By St. Waltheof?"
+
+"By St. Waltheof!"
+
+"Promise me then," gasped Rowena, staring wildly at him, "that you will
+never marry a Jewess!"
+
+"By St. Waltheof!" cried Ivanhoe, "but this is too much," and he did not
+make the promise.
+
+"Having placed young Cedric at school at the Hall of Dotheboys, in
+Yorkshire, and arranged his family affairs, Sir Wilfrid of Ivanhoe
+quitted a country which had no longer any charm for him, as there was no
+fighting to be done, and in which his stay was rendered less agreeable
+by the notion that king John would hang him." So he goes forth and
+fights again, in league with the Knights of St. John,--the Templars
+naturally having a dislike to him because of Brian de Bois Guilbert.
+"The only fault that the great and gallant, though severe and ascetic
+Folko of Heydenbraten, the chief of the Order of St. John, found with
+the melancholy warrior whose lance did such service to the cause, was
+that he did not persecute the Jews as so religious a knight should. So
+the Jews, in cursing the Christians, always excepted the name of the
+Desdichado,--or the double disinherited, as he now was,--the Desdichado
+Doblado." Then came the battle of Alarcos, and the Moors were all but in
+possession of the whole of Spain. Sir Wilfrid, like other good
+Christians, cannot endure this, so he takes ship in Bohemia, where he
+happens to be quartered, and has himself carried to Barcelona, and
+proceeds "to slaughter the Moors forthwith." Then there is a scene in
+which Isaac of York comes on as a messenger, to ransom from a Spanish
+knight, Don Beltram de Cuchilla y Trabuco, y Espada, y Espelon, a little
+Moorish girl. The Spanish knight of course murders the little girl
+instead of taking the ransom. Two hundred thousand dirhems are offered,
+however much that may be; but the knight, who happens to be in funds at
+the time, prefers to kill the little girl. All this is only necessary to
+the story as introducing Isaac of York. Sir Wilfrid is of course intent
+upon finding Rebecca. Through all his troubles and triumphs, from his
+gaining and his losing of Rowena, from the day on which he had been
+"_locked up with the Jewess in the tower_," he had always been true to
+her. "Away from me!" said the old Jew, tottering. "Away, Rebecca
+is,--dead!" Then Ivanhoe goes out and kills fifty thousand Moors, and
+there is the picture of him,--killing them.
+
+But Rebecca is not dead at all. Her father had said so because Rebecca
+had behaved very badly to him. She had refused to marry the Moorish
+prince, or any of her own people, the Jews, and had gone as far as to
+declare her passion for Ivanhoe and her resolution to be a Christian.
+All the Jews and Jewesses in Valencia turned against her,--so that she
+was locked up in the back-kitchen and almost starved to death. But
+Ivanhoe found her of course, and makes her Mrs. Ivanhoe, or Lady Wilfrid
+the second. Then Thackeray tells us how for many years he, Thackeray,
+had not ceased to feel that it ought to be so. "Indeed I have thought of
+it any time these five-and-twenty years,--ever since, as a boy at
+school, I commenced the noble study of novels,--ever since the day when,
+lying on sunny slopes, of half-holidays, the fair chivalrous figures
+and beautiful shapes of knights and ladies were visible to me, ever
+since I grew to love Rebecca, that sweetest creature of the poet's
+fancy, and longed to see her righted."
+
+And so, no doubt, it had been. The very burlesque had grown from the way
+in which his young imagination had been moved by Scott's romance. He had
+felt from the time of those happy half-holidays in which he had been
+lucky enough to get hold of the novel, that according to all laws of
+poetic justice, Rebecca, as being the more beautiful and the more
+interesting of the heroines, was entitled to the possession of the hero.
+We have all of us felt the same. But to him had been present at the same
+time all that is ludicrous in our ideas of middle-age chivalry; the
+absurdity of its recorded deeds, the blood-thirstiness of its
+recreations, the selfishness of its men, the falseness of its honour,
+the cringing of its loyalty, the tyranny of its princes. And so there
+came forth Rebecca and Rowena, all broad fun from beginning to end, but
+never without a purpose,--the best burlesque, as I think, in our
+language.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[5] I doubt that Thackeray did not write the Latin epitaph, but I hardly
+dare suggest the name of any author. The "vixit avidus" is quite worthy
+of Thackeray; but had he tried his hand at such mode of expression he
+would have done more of it. I should like to know whether he had been in
+company with Father Prout at the time.
+
+[6] There is something almost illnatured in his treatment of Rowena, who
+is very false in her declarations of love;--and it is to be feared that
+by Rowena, the author intends the normal married lady of English
+society.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+THACKERAY'S LECTURES.
+
+
+In speaking of Thackeray's life I have said why and how it was that he
+took upon himself to lecture, and have also told the reader that he was
+altogether successful in carrying out the views proposed to himself. Of
+his peculiar manner of lecturing I have said but little, never having
+heard him. "He pounded along,--very clearly," I have been told; from
+which I surmise that there was no special grace of eloquence, but that
+he was always audible. I cannot imagine that he should have been ever
+eloquent. He could not have taken the trouble necessary with his voice,
+with his cadences, or with his outward appearance. I imagine that they
+who seem so naturally to fall into the proprieties of elocution have
+generally taken a great deal of trouble beyond that which the mere
+finding of their words has cost them. It is clearly to the matter of
+what he then gave the world, and not to the manner, that we must look
+for what interest is to be found in the lectures.
+
+Those on _The English Humorists_ were given first. The second set was on
+_The Four Georges_. In the volume now before us _The Georges_ are
+printed first, and the whole is produced simply as a part of Thackeray's
+literary work. Looked at, however, in that light the merit of the two
+sets of biographical essays is very different. In the one we have all
+the anecdotes which could be brought together respecting four of our
+kings,--who as men were not peculiar, though their reigns were, and will
+always be, famous, because the country during the period was increasing
+greatly in prosperity and was ever strengthening the hold it had upon
+its liberties. In the other set the lecturer was a man of letters
+dealing with men of letters, and himself a prince among humorists is
+dealing with the humorists of his own country and language. One could
+not imagine a better subject for such discourses from Thackeray's mouth
+than the latter. The former was not, I think, so good.
+
+In discussing the lives of kings the biographer may trust to personal
+details or to historical facts. He may take the man, and say what good
+or evil may be said of him as a man;--or he may take the period, and
+tell his readers what happened to the country while this or the other
+king was on the throne. In the case with which we are dealing, the
+lecturer had not time enough or room enough for real history. His object
+was to let his audience know of what nature were the men; and we are
+bound to say that the pictures have not on the whole been flattering. It
+was almost necessary that with such a subject such should be the result.
+A story of family virtues, with princes and princesses well brought up,
+with happy family relations, all couleur de rose,--as it would of course
+become us to write if we were dealing with the life of a living
+sovereign,--would not be interesting. No one on going to hear Thackeray
+lecture on the Georges expected that. There must be some piquancy given,
+or the lecture would be dull;--and the eulogy of personal virtues can
+seldom be piquant. It is difficult to speak fittingly of a sovereign,
+either living or not, long since gone. You can hardly praise such a
+one without flattery. You can hardly censure him without injustice.
+We are either ignorant of his personal doings or we know them as
+secrets, which have been divulged for the most part either falsely or
+treacherously,--often both falsely and treacherously. It is better,
+perhaps, that we should not deal with the personalities of princes.
+
+I believe that Thackeray fancied that he had spoken well of George III.,
+and am sure that it was his intention to do so. But the impression he
+leaves is poor. "He is said not to have cared for Shakespeare or tragedy
+much; farces and pantomimes were his joy;--and especially when clown
+swallowed a carrot or a string of sausages, he would laugh so
+outrageously that the lovely princess by his side would have to say, 'My
+gracious monarch, do compose yourself.' 'George, be a king!' were the
+words which she,"--his mother,--"was ever croaking in the ears of her
+son; and a king the simple, stubborn, affectionate, bigoted man tried to
+be." "He did his best; he worked according to his lights; what virtues
+he knew he tried to practise; what knowledge he could master he strove
+to acquire." If the lectures were to be popular, it was absolutely
+necessary that they should be written in this strain. A lecture simply
+laudatory on the life of St. Paul would not draw even the bench of
+bishops to listen to it; but were a flaw found in the apostle's life,
+the whole Church of England would be bound to know all about it. I am
+quite sure that Thackeray believed every word that he said in the
+lectures, and that he intended to put in the good and the bad, honestly,
+as they might come to his hand. We may be quite sure that he did not
+intend to flatter the royal family;--equally sure that he would not
+calumniate. There were, however, so many difficulties to be encountered
+that I cannot but think that the subject was ill-chosen. In making them
+so amusing as he did and so little offensive great ingenuity was shown.
+
+I will now go back to the first series, in which the lecturer treated of
+Swift, Congreve, Addison, Steele, Prior, Gay, Pope, Hogarth, Smollett,
+Fielding, Sterne, and Goldsmith. All these Thackeray has put in their
+proper order, placing the men from the date of their birth, except
+Prior, who was in truth the eldest of the lot, but whom it was necessary
+to depose, in order that the great Swift might stand first on the list,
+and Smollett, who was not born till fourteen years after Fielding, eight
+years after Sterne, and who has been moved up, I presume, simply from
+caprice. From the birth of the first to the death of the last, was a
+period of nearly a hundred years. They were never absolutely all alive
+together; but it was nearly so, Addison and Prior having died before
+Smollett was born. Whether we should accept as humorists the full
+catalogue, may be a question; though we shall hardly wish to eliminate
+any one from such a dozen of names. Pope we should hardly define as a
+humorist, were we to be seeking for a definition specially fit for him,
+though we shall certainly not deny the gift of humour to the author of
+_The Rape of the Lock_, or to the translator of any portion of _The
+Odyssey_. Nor should we have included Fielding or Smollett, in spite of
+Parson Adams and Tabitha Bramble, unless anxious to fill a good company.
+That Hogarth was specially a humorist no one will deny; but in speaking
+of humorists we should have presumed, unless otherwise notified, that
+humorists in letters only had been intended. As Thackeray explains
+clearly what he means by a humorist, I may as well here repeat the
+passage: "If humour only meant laughter, you would scarcely feel more
+interest about humorous writers than about the private life of poor
+Harlequin just mentioned, who possesses in common with these the power
+of making you laugh. But the men regarding whose lives and stories your
+kind presence here shows that you have curiosity and sympathy, appeal to
+a great number of our other faculties, besides our mere sense of
+ridicule. The humorous writer professes to awaken and direct your love,
+your pity, your kindness,--your scorn for untruth, pretension,
+imposture,--your tenderness for the weak, the poor, the oppressed, the
+unhappy. To the best of his means and ability he comments on all the
+ordinary actions and passions of life almost. He takes upon himself to
+be the week-day preacher, so to speak. Accordingly, as he finds, and
+speaks, and feels the truth best, we regard him, esteem him,--sometimes
+love him. And as his business is to mark other people's lives and
+peculiarities, we moralise upon _his_ life when he is gone,--and
+yesterday's preacher becomes the text for to-day's sermon."
+
+Having thus explained his purpose, Thackeray begins his task, and puts
+Swift in his front rank as a humorist. The picture given of this great
+man has very manifestly the look of truth, and if true, is terrible
+indeed. We do, in fact, know it to be true,--even though it be admitted
+that there is still room left for a book to be written on the life of
+the fearful dean. Here was a man endued with an intellect pellucid as
+well as brilliant; who could not only conceive but see also,--with some
+fine instincts too; whom fortune did not flout; whom circumstances
+fairly served; but who, from first to last, was miserable himself, who
+made others miserable, and who deserved misery. Our business, during the
+page or two which we can give to the subject, is not with Swift but
+with Thackeray's picture of Swift. It is painted with colours terribly
+strong and with shadows fearfully deep. "Would you like to have lived
+with him?" Thackeray asks. Then he says how pleasant it would have been
+to have passed some time with Fielding, Johnson, or Goldsmith. "I should
+like to have been Shakespeare's shoeblack," he says. "But Swift! If you
+had been his inferior in parts,--and that, with a great respect for all
+persons present, I fear is only very likely,--his equal in mere social
+station, he would have bullied, scorned, and insulted you. If,
+undeterred by his great reputation, you had met him like a man, he would
+have quailed before you and not had the pluck to reply,--and gone home,
+and years after written a foul epigram upon you." There is a picture!
+"If you had been a lord with a blue riband, who flattered his vanity, or
+could help his ambition, he would have been the most delightful company
+in the world.... How he would have torn your enemies to pieces for you,
+and made fun of the Opposition! His servility was so boisterous that it
+looked like independence." He was a man whose mind was never fixed on
+high things, but was striving always after something which, little as it
+might be, and successful as he was, should always be out of his reach.
+It had been his misfortune to become a clergyman, because the way to
+church preferment seemed to be the readiest. He became, as we all know,
+a dean,--but never a bishop, and was therefore wretched. Thackeray
+describes him as a clerical highwayman, seizing on all he could get. But
+"the great prize has not yet come. The coach with the mitre and crozier
+in it, which he intends to have for _his_ share, has been delayed on the
+way from St. James's; and he waits and waits till nightfall, when his
+runners come and tell him that the coach has taken a different way and
+escaped him. So he fires his pistol into the air with a curse, and rides
+away into his own country;"--or, in other words, takes a poor deanery in
+Ireland.
+
+Thackeray explains very correctly, as I think, the nature of the weapons
+which the man used,--namely, the words and style with which he wrote.
+"That Swift was born at No. 7, Hoey's Court, Dublin, on November 30,
+1667, is a certain fact, of which nobody will deny the sister-island the
+honour and glory; but it seems to me he was no more an Irishman than a
+man born of English parents at Calcutta is a Hindoo. Goldsmith was an
+Irishman and always an Irishman; Steele was an Irishman and always an
+Irishman; Swift's heart was English and in England, his habits English,
+his logic eminently English; his statement is elaborately simple; he
+shuns tropes and metaphors, and uses his ideas and words with a wise
+thrift and economy, as he used his money;--with which he could be
+generous and splendid upon great occasions, but which he husbanded when
+there was no need to spend it. He never indulges in needless
+extravagance of rhetoric, lavish epithets, profuse imagery. He lays his
+opinions before you with a grave simplicity and a perfect neatness."
+This is quite true of him, and the result is that though you may deny
+him sincerity, simplicity, humanity, or good taste, you can hardly find
+fault with his language.
+
+Swift was a clergyman, and this is what Thackeray says of him in regard
+to his sacred profession. "I know of few things more conclusive as to
+the sincerity of Swift's religion, than his advice to poor John Gay to
+turn clergyman, and look out for a seat on the Bench! Gay, the author of
+_The Beggar's Opera_; Gay, the wildest of the wits about town! It was
+this man that Jonathan Swift advised to take orders, to mount in a
+cassock and bands,--just as he advised him to husband his shillings, and
+put his thousand pounds out to interest."
+
+It was not that he was without religion,--or without, rather, his
+religious beliefs and doubts, "for Swift," says Thackeray, "was a
+reverent, was a pious spirit. For Swift could love and could pray." Left
+to himself and to the natural thoughts of his mind, without those
+"orders" to which he had bound himself as a necessary part of his trade,
+he could have turned to his God with questionings which need not then
+have been heartbreaking. "It is my belief," says Thackeray, "that he
+suffered frightfully from the consciousness of his own scepticism, and
+that he had bent his pride so far down as to put his apostasy out to
+hire." I doubt whether any of Swift's works are very much read now, but
+perhaps Gulliver's travels are oftener in the hands of modern readers
+than any other. Of all the satires in our language it is probably the
+most cynical, the most absolutely illnatured, and therefore the falsest.
+Let those who care to form an opinion of Swift's mind from the best
+known of his works, turn to Thackeray's account of Gulliver. I can
+imagine no greater proof of misery than to have been able to write such
+a book as that.
+
+It is thus that the lecturer concludes his lecture about Swift. "He
+shrank away from all affections sooner or later. Stella and Vanessa both
+died near him, and away from him. He had not heart enough to see them
+die. He broke from his fastest friend, Sheridan. He slunk away from his
+fondest admirer, Pope. His laugh jars on one's ear after seven-score
+years. He was always alone,--alone and gnashing in the darkness, except
+when Stella's sweet smile came and shone on him. When that went, silence
+and utter night closed over him. An immense genius, an awful downfall
+and ruin! So great a man he seems to me, that thinking of him is like
+thinking of an empire falling. We have other great names to
+mention,--none I think, however, so great or so gloomy." And so we pass
+on from Swift, feeling that though the man was certainly a humorist, we
+have had as yet but little to do with humour.
+
+Congreve is the next who, however truly he may have been a humorist, is
+described here rather as a man of fashion. A man of fashion he certainly
+was, but is best known in our literature as a comedian,--worshipping
+that comic Muse to whom Thackeray hesitates to introduce his audience,
+because she is not only merry but shameless also. Congreve's muse was
+about as bad as any muse that ever misbehaved herself,--and I think, as
+little amusing. "Reading in these plays now," says Thackeray, "is like
+shutting your ears and looking at people dancing. What does it
+mean?--the measures, the grimaces, the bowing, shuffling, and
+retreating, the cavaliers seuls advancing upon their ladies, then ladies
+and men twirling round at the end in a mad galop, after which everybody
+bows and the quaint rite is celebrated?" It is always so with Congreve's
+plays, and Etherege's and Wycherley's. The world we meet there is not
+our world, and as we read the plays we have no sympathy with these
+unknown people. It was not that they lived so long ago. They are much
+nearer to us in time than the men and women who figured on the stage in
+the reign of James I. But their nature is farther from our nature. They
+sparkle but never warm. They are witty but leave no impression. I might
+almost go further, and say that they are wicked but never allure. "When
+Voltaire came to visit the Great Congreve," says Thackeray, "the latter
+rather affected to despise his literary reputation; and in this,
+perhaps, the great Congreve was not far wrong. A touch of Steele's
+tenderness is worth all his finery; a flash of Swift's lightning, a beam
+of Addison's pure sunshine, and his tawdry playhouse taper is invisible.
+But the ladies loved him, and he was undoubtedly a pretty fellow."
+
+There is no doubt as to the true humour of Addison, who next comes up
+before us, but I think that he makes hardly so good a subject for a
+lecturer as the great gloomy man of intellect, or the frivolous man of
+pleasure. Thackeray tells us all that is to be said about him as a
+humorist in so few lines that I may almost insert them on this page:
+"But it is not for his reputation as the great author of _Cato_ and _The
+Campaign_, or for his merits as Secretary of State, or for his rank and
+high distinction as Lady Warwick's husband, or for his eminence as an
+examiner of political questions on the Whig side, or a guardian of
+British liberties, that we admire Joseph Addison. It is as a Tattler of
+small talk and a Spectator of mankind that we cherish and love him, and
+owe as much pleasure to him as to any human being that ever wrote. He
+came in that artificial age, and began to speak with his noble natural
+voice. He came the gentle satirist, who hit no unfair blow; the kind
+judge, who castigated only in smiling. While Swift went about hanging
+and ruthless, a literary Jeffreys, in Addison's kind court only minor
+cases were tried;--only peccadilloes and small sins against society,
+only a dangerous libertinism in tuckers and hoops, or a nuisance in the
+abuse of beaux canes and snuffboxes." Steele set _The Tatler_ a going.
+"But with his friend's discovery of _The Tatler_, Addison's calling was
+found, and the most delightful Tattler in the world began to speak. He
+does not go very deep. Let gentlemen of a profound genius, critics
+accustomed to the plunge of the bathos, console themselves by thinking
+that he couldn't go very deep. There is no trace of suffering in his
+writing. He was so good, so honest, so healthy, so cheerfully
+selfish,--if I must use the word!"
+
+Such was Addison as a humorist; and when the hearer shall have heard
+also,--or the reader read,--that this most charming Tattler also wrote
+_Cato_, became a Secretary of State, and married a countess, he will
+have learned all that Thackeray had to tell of him.
+
+Steele was one who stood much less high in the world's esteem, and who
+left behind him a much smaller name,--but was quite Addison's equal as a
+humorist and a wit. Addison, though he had the reputation of a toper,
+was respectability itself. Steele was almost always disreputable. He was
+brought from Ireland, placed at the Charter House, and then transferred
+to Oxford, where he became acquainted with Addison. Thackeray says that
+"Steele found Addison a stately college don at Oxford." The stateliness
+and the don's rank were attributable no doubt to the more sober
+character of the English lad, for, in fact, the two men were born in the
+same year, 1672. Steele, who during his life was affected by various
+different tastes, first turned himself to literature, but early in life
+was bitten by the hue of a red coat and became a trooper in the Horse
+Guards. To the end he vacillated in the same way. "In that charming
+paper in _The Tatler_, in which he records his father's death, his
+mother's griefs, his own most solemn and tender emotions, he says he is
+interrupted by the arrival of a hamper of wine, 'the same as is to be
+sold at Garraway's next week;' upon the receipt of which he sends for
+three friends, and they fall to instantly, drinking two bottles apiece,
+with great benefit to themselves, and not separating till two o'clock in
+the morning."
+
+He had two wives, whom he loved dearly and treated badly. He hired grand
+houses, and bought fine horses for which he could never pay. He was
+often religious, but more often drunk. As a man of letters, other men of
+letters who followed him, such as Thackeray, could not be very proud of
+him. But everybody loved him; and he seems to have been the inventor of
+that flying literature which, with many changes in form and manner, has
+done so much for the amusement and edification of readers ever since his
+time. He was always commencing, or carrying on,--often editing,--some
+one of the numerous periodicals which appeared during his time.
+Thackeray mentions seven: _The Tatler_, _The Spectator_, _The Guardian_,
+_The Englishman_, _The Lover_, _The Reader_, and _The Theatre_; that
+three of them are well known to this day,--the three first named,--and
+are to be found in all libraries, is proof that his life was not thrown
+away.
+
+I almost question Prior's right to be in the list, unless indeed the
+mastery over well-turned conceits is to be included within the border of
+humour. But Thackeray had a strong liking for Prior, and in his own
+humorous way rebukes his audience for not being familiar with _The Town
+and Country Mouse_. He says that Prior's epigrams have the genuine
+sparkle, and compares Prior to Horace. "His song, his philosophy, his
+good sense, his happy easy turns and melody, his loves and his
+epicureanism bear a great resemblance to that most delightful and
+accomplished master." I cannot say that I agree with this. Prior is
+generally neat in his expression. Horace is happy,--which is surely a
+great deal more.
+
+All that is said of Gay, Pope, Hogarth, Smollett, and Fielding is worth
+reading, and may be of great value both to those who have not time to
+study the authors, and to those who desire to have their own judgments
+somewhat guided, somewhat assisted. That they were all men of humour
+there can be no doubt. Whether either of them, except perhaps Gay, would
+have been specially ranked as a humorist among men of letters, may be a
+question.
+
+Sterne was a humorist, and employed his pen in that line, if ever a
+writer did so, and so was Goldsmith. Of the excellence and largeness of
+the disposition of the one, and the meanness and littleness of the
+other, it is not necessary that I should here say much. But I will give
+a short passage from our author as to each. He has been quoting somewhat
+at length from Sterne, and thus he ends; "And with this pretty dance and
+chorus the volume artfully concludes. Even here one can't give the whole
+description. There is not a page in Sterne's writing but has something
+that were better away, a latent corruption,--a hint as of an impure
+presence. Some of that dreary double entendre may be attributed to freer
+times and manners than ours,--but not all. The foul satyr's eyes leer
+out of the leaves constantly. The last words the famous author wrote
+were bad and wicked. The last lines the poor stricken wretch penned were
+for pity and pardon." Now a line or two about Goldsmith, and I will then
+let my reader go to the volume and study the lectures for himself. "The
+poor fellow was never so friendless but that he could befriend some
+one; never so pinched and wretched but he could give of his crust, and
+speak his word of compassion. If he had but his flute left, he would
+give that, and make the children happy in the dreary London courts."
+
+Of this too I will remind my readers,--those who have bookshelves
+well-filled to adorn their houses,--that Goldsmith stands in the front
+where all the young people see the volumes. There are few among the
+young people who do not refresh their sense of humour occasionally from
+that shelf, Sterne is relegated to some distant and high corner. The
+less often that he is taken down the better. Thackeray makes some half
+excuse for him because of the greater freedom of the times. But "the
+times" were the same for the two. Both Sterne and Goldsmith wrote in the
+reign of George II.; both died in the reign of George III.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+THACKERAY'S BALLADS.
+
+
+We have a volume of Thackeray's poems, republished under the name of
+_Ballads_, which is, I think, to a great extent a misnomer. They are all
+readable, almost all good, full of humour, and with some fine touches of
+pathos, most happy in their versification, and, with a few exceptions,
+hitting well on the head the nail which he intended to hit. But they are
+not on that account ballads. Literally, a ballad is a song, but it has
+come to signify a short chronicle in verse, which may be political, or
+pathetic, or grotesque,--or it may have all three characteristics or any
+two of them; but not on that account is any grotesque poem a
+ballad,--nor, of course, any pathetic or any political poem. _Jacob
+Omnium's Hoss_ may fairly be called a ballad, containing as it does a
+chronicle of a certain well-defined transaction; and the story of _King
+Canute_ is a ballad,--one of the best that has been produced in our
+language in modern years. But such pieces as those called _The End of
+the Play_ and _Vanitas Vanitatum_, which are didactic as well as
+pathetic, are not ballads in the common sense; nor are such songs as
+_The Mahogany Tree_, or the little collection called _Love Songs made
+Easy_. The majority of the pieces are not ballads, but if they be good
+of the kind we should be ungrateful to quarrel much with the name.
+
+How very good most of them are, I did not know till I re-read them for
+the purpose of writing this chapter. There is a manifest falling off in
+some few,--which has come from that source of literary failure which is
+now so common. If a man write a book or a poem because it is in him to
+write it,--the motive power being altogether in himself and coming from
+his desire to express himself,--he will write it well, presuming him to
+be capable of the effort. But if he write his book or poem simply
+because a book or poem is required from him, let his capability be what
+it may, it is not unlikely that he will do it badly. Thackeray
+occasionally suffered from the weakness thus produced. A ballad from
+_Policeman X_,--_Bow Street Ballads_ they were first called,--was
+required by _Punch_, and had to be forthcoming, whatever might be the
+poet's humour, by a certain time. _Jacob Omnium's Hoss_ is excellent.
+His heart and feeling were all there, on behalf of his friend, and
+against that obsolete old court of justice. But we can tell well when he
+was looking through the police reports for a subject, and taking what
+chance might send him, without any special interest in the matter. _The
+Knight and the Lady of Bath_, and the _Damages Two Hundred Pounds_, as
+they were demanded at Guildford, taste as though they were written to
+order.
+
+Here, in his verses as in his prose, the charm of Thackeray's work lies
+in the mingling of humour with pathos and indignation. There is hardly a
+piece that is not more or less funny, hardly a piece that is not
+satirical;--and in most of them, for those who will look a little below
+the surface, there is something that will touch them. Thackeray, though
+he rarely uttered a word, either with his pen or his mouth, in which
+there was not an intention to reach our sense of humour, never was only
+funny. When he was most determined to make us laugh, he had always a
+further purpose;--some pity was to be extracted from us on behalf of the
+sorrows of men, or some indignation at the evil done by them.
+
+This is the beginning of that story as to the _Two Hundred Pounds_, for
+which as a ballad I do not care very much:
+
+     Special jurymen of England who admire your country's laws,
+     And proclaim a British jury worthy of the nation's applause,
+     Gaily compliment each other at the issue of a cause,
+     Which was tried at Guildford 'sizes, this day week as ever was.
+
+Here he is indignant, not only in regard to some miscarriage of justice
+on that special occasion, but at the general unfitness of jurymen for
+the work confided to them. "Gaily compliment yourselves," he says, "on
+your beautiful constitution, from which come such beautiful results as
+those I am going to tell you!" When he reminded us that Ivanhoe had
+produced Magna Charta, there was a purpose of irony even there in regard
+to our vaunted freedom. With all your Magna Charta and your juries, what
+are you but snobs! There is nothing so often misguided as general
+indignation, and I think that in his judgment of outside things, in the
+measure which he usually took of them, Thackeray was very frequently
+misguided. A satirist by trade will learn to satirise everything, till
+the light of the sun and the moon's loveliness will become evil and mean
+to him. I think that he was mistaken in his views of things. But we have
+to do with him as a writer, not as a political economist or a
+politician. His indignation was all true, and the expression of it was
+often perfect. The lines in which he addresses that Pallis Court, at
+the end of Jacob Omnium's Hoss, are almost sublime.
+
+     O Pallis Court, you move
+       My pity most profound.
+     A most amusing sport
+       You thought it, I'll be bound,
+     To saddle hup a three-pound debt,
+       With two-and-twenty pound.
+
+     Good sport it is to you
+       To grind the honest poor,
+     To pay their just or unjust debts
+       With eight hundred per cent, for Lor;
+     Make haste and get your costes in,
+       They will not last much mor!
+
+     Come down from that tribewn,
+       Thou shameless and unjust;
+     Thou swindle, picking pockets in
+       The name of Truth august;
+     Come down, thou hoary Blasphemy,
+       For die thou shalt and must.
+
+     And go it, Jacob Homnium,
+       And ply your iron pen,
+     And rise up, Sir John Jervis,
+       And shut me up that den;
+     That sty for fattening lawyers in,
+       On the bones of honest men.
+
+"Come down from that tribewn, thou shameless and unjust!" It is
+impossible not to feel that he felt this as he wrote it.
+
+There is a branch of his poetry which he calls,--or which at any rate is
+now called, _Lyra Hybernica_, for which no doubt _The Groves of Blarney_
+was his model. There have been many imitations since, of which perhaps
+Barham's ballad on the coronation was the best, "When to Westminster the
+Royal Spinster and the Duke of Leinster all in order did repair!"
+Thackeray in some of his attempts has been equally droll and equally
+graphic. That on _The Cristal Palace_,--not that at Sydenham, but its
+forerunner, the palace of the Great Exhibition,--is very good, as the
+following catalogue of its contents will show;
+
+     There's holy saints
+     And window paints,
+       By Maydiayval Pugin;
+     Alhamborough Jones
+     Did paint the tones
+       Of yellow and gambouge in.
+
+     There's fountains there
+     And crosses fair;
+       There's water-gods with urns;
+     There's organs three,
+     To play, d'ye see?
+       "God save the Queen," by turns.
+
+     There's statues bright
+     Of marble white,
+       Of silver, and of copper;
+     And some in zinc,
+     And some, I think,
+       That isn't over proper.
+
+     There's staym ingynes,
+     That stands in lines,
+       Enormous and amazing,
+     That squeal and snort
+     Like whales in sport,
+       Or elephants a grazing.
+
+     There's carts and gigs,
+     And pins for pigs,
+       There's dibblers and there's harrows,
+     And ploughs like toys
+     For little boys,
+       And ilegant wheel-barrows.
+
+     For thim genteels
+     Who ride on wheels,
+       There's plenty to indulge 'em
+     There's droskys snug
+     From Paytersbug,
+       And vayhycles from Bulgium.
+
+     There's cabs on stands
+     And shandthry danns;
+       There's waggons from New York here;
+     There's Lapland sleighs
+     Have cross'd the seas,
+       And jaunting cyars from Cork here.
+
+In writing this Thackeray was a little late with his copy for _Punch_;
+not, we should say, altogether an uncommon accident to him. It should
+have been with the editor early on Saturday, if not before, but did not
+come till late on Saturday evening. The editor, who was among men the
+most good-natured and I should think the most forbearing, either could
+not, or in this case would not, insert it in the next week's issue, and
+Thackeray, angry and disgusted, sent it to _The Times_. In _The Times_
+of next Monday it appeared,--very much I should think to the delight of
+the readers of that august newspaper.
+
+Mr. Molony's account of the ball given to the Nepaulese ambassadors by
+the Peninsular and Oriental Company, is so like Barham's coronation in
+the account it gives of the guests, that one would fancy it must be by
+the same hand.
+
+     The noble Chair[7] stud at the stair
+       And bade the dhrums to thump; and he
+     Did thus evince to that Black Prince
+       The welcome of his Company.[8]
+
+     O fair the girls and rich the curls,
+       And bright the oys you saw there was;
+     And fixed each oye you then could spoi
+       On General Jung Bahawther was!
+
+     This gineral great then tuck his sate,
+       With all the other ginerals,
+     Bedad his troat, his belt, his coat,
+       All bleezed with precious minerals;
+     And as he there, with princely air,
+       Recloinin on his cushion was,
+     All round about his royal chair
+       The squeezin and the pushin was.
+
+     O Pat, such girls, such jukes and earls,
+       Such fashion and nobilitee!
+     Just think of Tim, and fancy him
+       Amidst the high gentilitee!
+     There was the Lord de L'Huys, and the Portygeese
+       Ministher and his lady there,
+     And I recognised, with much surprise,
+       Our messmate, Bob O'Grady, there.
+
+All these are very good fun,--so good in humour and so good in
+expression, that it would be needless to criticise their peculiar
+dialect, were it not that Thackeray has made for himself a reputation by
+his writing of Irish. In this he has been so entirely successful that
+for many English readers he has established a new language which may
+not improperly be called Hybernico-Thackerayan. If comedy is to be got
+from peculiarities of dialect, as no doubt it is, one form will do as
+well as another, so long as those who read it know no better. So it has
+been with Thackeray's Irish, for in truth he was not familiar with the
+modes of pronunciation which make up Irish brogue. Therefore, though he
+is always droll, he is not true to nature. Many an Irishman coming to
+London, not unnaturally tries to imitate the talk of Londoners. You or
+I, reader, were we from the West, and were the dear County Galway to
+send either of us to Parliament, would probably endeavour to drop the
+dear brogue of our country, and in doing so we should make some
+mistakes. It was these mistakes which Thackeray took for the natural
+Irish tone. He was amused to hear a major called "Meejor," but was
+unaware that the sound arose from Pat's affection of English softness of
+speech. The expression natural to the unadulterated Irishman would
+rather be "Ma-ajor." He discovers his own provincialism, and trying to
+be polite and urbane, he says "Meejor." In one of the lines I have
+quoted there occurs the word "troat." Such a sound never came naturally
+from the mouth of an Irishman. He puts in an h instead of omitting it,
+and says "dhrink." He comes to London, and finding out that he is wrong
+with his "dhrink," he leaves out all the h's he can, and thus comes to
+"troat." It is this which Thackeray has heard. There is a little piece
+called the _Last Irish Grievance_, to which Thackeray adds a still later
+grievance, by the false sounds which he elicits from the calumniated
+mouth of the pretended Irish poet. Slaves are "sleeves," places are
+"pleeces," Lord John is "Lard Jahn," fatal is "fetal," danger is
+"deenger," and native is "neetive." All these are unintended slanders.
+Tea, Hibernicé, is "tay," please is "plaise," sea is "say," and ease is
+"aise." The softer sound of e is broadened out by the natural
+Irishman,--not, to my ear, without a certain euphony;--but no one in
+Ireland says or hears the reverse. The Irishman who in London might talk
+of his "neetive" race, would be mincing his words to please the ear of
+the cockney.
+
+_The Chronicle of the Drum_ would be a true ballad all through, were it
+not that there is tacked on to it a long moral in an altered metre. I do
+not much value the moral, but the ballad is excellent, not only in much
+of its versification and in the turns of its language, but in the quaint
+and true picture it gives of the French nation. The drummer, either by
+himself or by some of his family, has drummed through a century of
+French battling, caring much for his country and its glory, but
+understanding nothing of the causes for which he is enthusiastic.
+Whether for King, Republic, or Emperor, whether fighting and conquering
+or fighting and conquered, he is happy as long as he can beat his drum
+on a field of glory. But throughout his adventures there is a touch of
+chivalry about our drummer. In all the episodes of his country's career
+he feels much of patriotism and something of tenderness. It is thus he
+sings during the days of the Revolution:
+
+     We had taken the head of King Capet,
+       We called for the blood of his wife;
+     Undaunted she came to the scaffold,
+       And bared her fair neck to the knife.
+     As she felt the foul fingers that touched her,
+       She shrank, but she deigned not to speak;
+     She looked with a royal disdain,
+       And died with a blush on her cheek!
+
+     'Twas thus that our country was saved!
+       So told us the Safety Committee!
+     But, psha, I've the heart of a soldier,--
+       All gentleness, mercy, and pity.
+     I loathed to assist at such deeds,
+       And my drum beat its loudest of tunes,
+     As we offered to justice offended,
+       The blood of the bloody tribunes.
+
+     Away with such foul recollections!
+       No more of the axe and the block.
+     I saw the last fight of the sections,
+       As they fell 'neath our guns at St. Rock.
+     Young Bonaparte led us that day.
+
+And so it goes on. I will not continue the stanza, because it contains
+the worst rhyme that Thackeray ever permitted himself to use. _The
+Chronicle of the Drum_ has not the finish which he achieved afterwards,
+but it is full of national feeling, and carries on its purpose to the
+end with an admirable persistency;
+
+     A curse on those British assassins
+       Who ordered the slaughter of Ney;
+     A curse on Sir Hudson who tortured
+       The life of our hero away.
+     A curse on all Russians,--I hate them;
+       On all Prussian and Austrian fry;
+     And, oh, but I pray we may meet them
+       And fight them again ere I die.
+
+_The White Squall_,--which I can hardly call a ballad, unless any
+description of a scene in verse may be included in the name,--is surely
+one of the most graphic descriptions ever put into verse. Nothing
+written by Thackeray shows more plainly his power over words and rhymes.
+He draws his picture without a line omitted or a line too much, saying
+with apparent facility all that he has to say, and so saying it that
+every word conveys its natural meaning.
+
+     When a squall, upon a sudden,
+     Came o'er the waters scudding;
+     And the clouds began to gather,
+     And the sea was lashed to lather,
+     And the lowering thunder grumbled,
+     And the lightning jumped and tumbled,
+     And the ship and all the ocean
+     Woke up in wild commotion.
+     Then the wind set up a howling,
+     And the poodle dog a yowling,
+     And the cocks began a crowing,
+     And the old cow raised a lowing,
+     As she heard the tempest blowing;
+     And fowls and geese did cackle,
+     And the cordage and the tackle
+     Began to shriek and crackle;
+     And the spray dashed o'er the funnels,
+     And down the deck in runnels;
+     And the rushing water soaks all,
+     From the seamen in the fo'ksal
+     To the stokers whose black faces
+     Peer out of their bed-places;
+     And the captain, he was bawling,
+     And the sailors pulling, hauling,
+     And the quarter-deck tarpauling
+     Was shivered in the squalling;
+     And the passengers awaken,
+     Most pitifully shaken;
+     And the steward jumps up and hastens
+     For the necessary basins.
+
+     Then the Greeks they groaned and quivered,
+     And they knelt, and moaned, and shivered,
+     As the plunging waters met them,
+     And splashed and overset them;
+     And they call in their emergence
+     Upon countless saints and virgins;
+     And their marrowbones are bended,
+     And they think the world is ended.
+
+     And the Turkish women for'ard
+     Were frightened and behorror'd;
+     And shrieking and bewildering,
+     The mothers clutched their children;
+     The men sang "Allah! Illah!
+     Mashallah Bis-millah!"
+     As the warning waters doused them,
+     And splashed them and soused them
+     And they called upon the Prophet,
+     And thought but little of it.
+
+     Then all the fleas in Jewry
+     Jumped up and bit like fury;
+     And the progeny of Jacob
+     Did on the main-deck wake up.
+     (I wot these greasy Rabbins
+     Would never pay for cabins);
+     And each man moaned and jabbered in
+     His filthy Jewish gaberdine,
+     In woe and lamentation,
+     And howling consternation.
+     And the splashing water drenches
+     Their dirty brats and wenches;
+     And they crawl from bales and benches,
+     In a hundred thousand stenches.
+     This was the White Squall famous,
+     Which latterly o'ercame us.
+
+_Peg of Limavaddy_ has always been very popular, and the public have
+not, I think, been generally aware that the young lady in question lived
+in truth at Newton Limavady (with one d). But with the correct name
+Thackeray would hardly have been so successful with his rhymes.
+
+     Citizen or Squire
+       Tory, Whig, or Radi-
+     Cal would all desire
+       Peg of Limavaddy.
+     Had I Homer's fire
+       Or that of Sergeant Taddy
+     Meetly I'd admire
+       Peg of Limavaddy.
+     And till I expire
+       Or till I go mad I
+     Will sing unto my lyre
+       Peg of Limavaddy.
+
+_The Cane-bottomed Chair_ is another, better, I think, than _Peg of
+Limavaddy_, as containing that mixture of burlesque with the pathetic
+which belonged so peculiarly to Thackeray, and which was indeed the very
+essence of his genius.
+
+     But of all the cheap treasures that garnish my nest,
+       There's one that I love and I cherish the best.
+     For the finest of couches that's padded with hair
+       I never would change thee, my cane-bottomed chair.
+
+     'Tis a bandy-legged, high-bottomed, worm-eaten seat,
+       With a creaking old back and twisted old feet;
+     But since the fair morning when Fanny sat there,
+       I bless thee and love thee, old cane-bottomed chair.
+
+            *       *       *       *       *
+
+     She comes from the past and revisits my room,
+       She looks as she then did all beauty and bloom;
+     So smiling and tender, so fresh and so fair,
+       And yonder she sits in my cane-bottomed chair.
+
+This, in the volume which I have now before me, is followed by a picture
+of Fanny in the chair, to which I cannot but take exception. I am quite
+sure that when Fanny graced the room and seated herself in the chair of
+her old bachelor friend, she had not on a low dress and loosely-flowing
+drawing-room shawl, nor was there a footstool ready for her feet. I
+doubt also the headgear. Fanny on that occasion was dressed in her
+morning apparel, and had walked through the streets, carried no fan,
+and wore no brooch but one that might be necessary for pinning her
+shawl.
+
+_The Great Cossack Epic_ is the longest of the ballads. It is a legend
+of St. Sophia of Kioff, telling how Father Hyacinth, by the aid of St.
+Sophia, whose wooden statue he carried with him, escaped across the
+Borysthenes with all the Cossacks at his tail. It is very good fun; but
+not equal to many of the others. Nor is the _Carmen Lilliense_ quite to
+my taste. I should not have declared at once that it had come from
+Thackeray's hand, had I not known it.
+
+But who could doubt the _Bouillabaisse_? Who else could have written
+that? Who at the same moment could have been so merry and so
+melancholy,--could have gone so deep into the regrets of life, with
+words so appropriate to its jollities? I do not know how far my readers
+will agree with me that to read it always must be a fresh pleasure; but
+in order that they may agree with me, if they can, I will give it to
+them entire. If there be one whom it does not please, he will like
+nothing that Thackeray ever wrote in verse.
+
+     THE BALLAD OF BOUILLABAISSE.
+
+     A street there is in Paris famous,
+       For which no rhyme our language yields,
+     Rue Neuve des Petits Champs its name is--
+       The New Street of the Little Fields;
+     And here's an inn, not rich and splendid,
+       But still in comfortable case;
+     The which in youth I oft attended,
+       To eat a bowl of Bouillabaisse.
+
+     This Bouillabaisse a noble dish is,--
+       A sort of soup, or broth, or brew
+     Or hotch-potch of all sorts of fishes,
+       That Greenwich never could outdo;
+     Green herbs, red peppers, mussels, saffron,
+       Soles, onions, garlic, roach, and dace:
+     All these you eat at Terré's tavern,
+       In that one dish of Bouillabaisse.
+
+     Indeed, a rich and savoury stew 'tis;
+       And true philosophers, methinks,
+     Who love all sorts of natural beauties,
+       Should love good victuals and good drinks.
+     And Cordelier or Benedictine
+       Might gladly sure his lot embrace,
+     Nor find a fast-day too afflicting
+       Which served him up a Bouillabaisse.
+
+     I wonder if the house still there is?
+       Yes, here the lamp is, as before;
+     The smiling red-cheeked écaillère is
+       Still opening oysters at the door.
+     Is Terré still alive and able?
+       I recollect his droll grimace;
+     He'd come and smile before your table,
+       And hope you liked your Bouillabaisse.
+
+     We enter,--nothing's changed or older.
+       "How's Monsieur Terré, waiter, pray?"
+     The waiter stares and shrugs his shoulder,--
+       "Monsieur is dead this many a day."
+     "It is the lot of saint and sinner;
+       So honest Terré's run his race."
+     "What will Monsieur require for dinner?"
+       "Say, do you still cook Bouillabaisse?"
+
+     "Oh, oui, Monsieur," 's the waiter's answer,
+       "Quel vin Monsieur desire-t-il?"
+     "Tell me a good one." "That I can, sir:
+       The chambertin with yellow seal."
+     "So Terré's gone," I say, and sink in
+       My old accustom'd corner-place;
+     "He's done with feasting and with drinking,
+       With Burgundy and Bouillabaisse."
+
+     My old accustomed corner here is,
+       The table still is in the nook;
+     Ah! vanish'd many a busy year is
+       This well-known chair since last I took.
+     When first I saw ye, cari luoghi,
+       I'd scarce a beard upon my face,
+     And now a grizzled, grim old fogy,
+       I sit and wait for Bouillabaisse.
+
+     Where are you, old companions trusty,
+       Of early days here met to dine?
+     Come, waiter! quick, a flagon crusty;
+       I'll pledge them in the good old wine.
+     The kind old voices and old faces
+       My memory can quick retrace;
+     Around the board they take their places,
+       And share the wine and Bouillabaisse.
+
+     There's Jack has made a wondrous marriage;
+       There's laughing Tom is laughing yet;
+     There's brave Augustus drives his carriage;
+       There's poor old Fred in the _Gazette_;
+     O'er James's head the grass is growing.
+       Good Lord! the world has wagged apace
+     Since here we set the claret flowing,
+       And drank, and ate the Bouillabaisse.
+
+     Ah me! how quick the days are flitting!
+       I mind me of a time that's gone,
+     When here I'd sit, as now I'm sitting,
+       In this same place,--but not alone.
+     A fair young face was nestled near me,
+       A dear, dear face looked fondly up,
+     And sweetly spoke and smiled to cheer me!
+       There's no one now to share my cup.
+
+            *       *       *       *       *
+
+     I drink it as the Fates ordain it.
+       Come fill it, and have done with rhymes;
+     Fill up the lonely glass, and drain it
+       In memory of dear old times.
+     Welcome the wine, whate'er the seal is;
+       And sit you down and say your grace
+     With thankful heart, whate'er the meal is.
+       Here comes the smoking Bouillabaisse.
+
+I am not disposed to say that Thackeray will hold a high place among
+English poets. He would have been the first to ridicule such an
+assumption made on his behalf. But I think that his verses will be more
+popular than those of many highly reputed poets, and that as years roll
+on they will gain rather than lose in public estimation.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[7] Chair--_i.e._ Chairman.
+
+[8] _I.e._ The P. and O. Company.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+THACKERAY'S STYLE AND MANNER OF WORK.
+
+
+A novel in style should be easy, lucid, and of course grammatical. The
+same may be said of any book; but that which is intended to recreate
+should be easily understood,--for which purpose lucid narration is an
+essential. In matter it should be moral and amusing. In manner it may be
+realistic, or sublime, or ludicrous;--or it may be all these if the
+author can combine them. As to Thackeray's performance in style and
+matter I will say something further on. His manner was mainly realistic,
+and I will therefore speak first of that mode of expression which was
+peculiarly his own.
+
+Realism in style has not all the ease which seems to belong to it. It is
+the object of the author who affects it so to communicate with his
+reader that all his words shall seem to be natural to the occasion. We
+do not think the language of Dogberry natural, when he tells neighbour
+Seacole that "to write and read comes by nature." That is ludicrous. Nor
+is the language of Hamlet natural when he shows to his mother the
+portrait of his father;
+
+     See what a grace was seated on this brow;
+     Hyperion's curls; the front of Jove himself;
+     An eye like Mars, to threaten and command.
+
+That is sublime. Constance is natural when she turns away from the
+Cardinal, declaring that
+
+     He talks to me that never had a son.
+
+In one respect both the sublime and ludicrous are easier than the
+realistic. They are not required to be true. A man with an imagination
+and culture may feign either of them without knowing the ways of men. To
+be realistic you must know accurately that which you describe. How often
+do we find in novels that the author makes an attempt at realism and
+falls into a bathos of absurdity, because he cannot use appropriate
+language? "No human being ever spoke like that," we say to
+ourselves,--while we should not question the naturalness of the
+production, either in the grand or the ridiculous.
+
+And yet in very truth the realistic must not be true,--but just so far
+removed from truth as to suit the erroneous idea of truth which the
+reader may be supposed to entertain. For were a novelist to narrate a
+conversation between two persons of fair but not high education, and to
+use the ill-arranged words and fragments of speech which are really
+common in such conversations, he would seem to have sunk to the
+ludicrous, and to be attributing to the interlocutors a mode of language
+much beneath them. Though in fact true, it would seem to be far from
+natural. But on the other hand, were he to put words grammatically
+correct into the mouths of his personages, and to round off and to
+complete the spoken sentences, the ordinary reader would instantly feel
+such a style to be stilted and unreal. This reader would not analyse it,
+but would in some dim but sufficiently critical manner be aware that his
+author was not providing him with a naturally spoken dialogue. To
+produce the desired effect the narrator must go between the two. He must
+mount somewhat above the ordinary conversational powers of such persons
+as are to be represented,--lest he disgust. But he must by no means soar
+into correct phraseology,--lest he offend. The realistic,--by which we
+mean that which shall seem to be real,--lies between the two, and in
+reaching it the writer has not only to keep his proper distance on both
+sides, but has to maintain varying distances in accordance with the
+position, mode of life, and education of the speakers. Lady Castlewood
+in _Esmond_ would not have been properly made to speak with absolute
+precision; but she goes nearer to the mark than her more ignorant lord,
+the viscount; less near, however, than her better-educated kinsman,
+Henry Esmond. He, however, is not made to speak altogether by the card,
+or he would be unnatural. Nor would each of them speak always in the
+same strain, but they would alter their language according to their
+companion,--according even to the hour of the day. All this the reader
+unconsciously perceives, and will not think the language to be natural
+unless the proper variations be there.
+
+In simple narrative the rule is the same as in dialogue, though it does
+not admit of the same palpable deviation from correct construction. The
+story of any incident, to be realistic, will admit neither of
+sesquipedalian grandeur nor of grotesque images. The one gives an idea
+of romance and the other of burlesque, to neither of which is truth
+supposed to appertain. We desire to soar frequently, and then we try
+romance. We desire to recreate ourselves with the easy and droll. Dulce
+est desipere in loco. Then we have recourse to burlesque. But in neither
+do we expect human nature.
+
+I cannot but think that in the hands of the novelist the middle course
+is the most powerful. Much as we may delight in burlesque, we cannot
+claim for it the power of achieving great results. So much I think will
+be granted. For the sublime we look rather to poetry than to prose, and
+though I will give one or two instances just now in which it has been
+used with great effect in prose fiction, it does not come home to the
+heart, teaching a lesson, as does the realistic. The girl who reads is
+touched by Lucy Ashton, but she feels herself to be convinced of the
+facts as to Jeanie Deans, and asks herself whether she might not emulate
+them.
+
+Now as to the realism of Thackeray, I must rather appeal to my readers
+than attempt to prove it by quotation. Whoever it is that speaks in his
+pages, does it not seem that such a person would certainly have used
+such words on such an occasion? If there be need of examination to learn
+whether it be so or not, let the reader study all that falls from the
+mouth of Lady Castlewood through the novel called _Esmond_, or all that
+falls from the mouth of Beatrix. They are persons peculiarly
+situated,--noble women, but who have still lived much out of the world.
+The former is always conscious of a sorrow; the latter is always
+striving after an effect;--and both on this account are difficult of
+management. A period for the story has been chosen which is strange and
+unknown to us, and which has required a peculiar language. One would
+have said beforehand that whatever might be the charms of the book, it
+would not be natural. And yet the ear is never wounded by a tone that is
+false. It is not always the case that in novel reading the ear should be
+wounded because the words spoken are unnatural. Bulwer does not wound,
+though he never puts into the mouth of any of his persons words such as
+would have been spoken. They are not expected from him. It is something
+else that he provides. From Thackeray they are expected,--and from many
+others. But Thackeray never disappoints. Whether it be a great duke,
+such as he who was to have married Beatrix, or a mean chaplain, such as
+Tusher, or Captain Steele the humorist, they talk,--not as they would
+have talked probably, of which I am no judge,--but as we feel that they
+might have talked. We find ourselves willing to take it as proved
+because it is there, which is the strongest possible evidence of the
+realistic capacity of the writer.
+
+As to the sublime in novels, it is not to be supposed that any very high
+rank of sublimity is required to put such works within the pale of that
+definition. I allude to those in which an attempt is made to soar above
+the ordinary actions and ordinary language of life. We may take as an
+instance _The Mysteries of Udolpho_. That is intended to be sublime
+throughout. Even the writer never for a moment thought of descending to
+real life. She must have been untrue to her own idea of her own business
+had she done so. It is all stilted,--all of a certain altitude among the
+clouds. It has been in its time a popular book, and has had its world of
+readers. Those readers no doubt preferred the diluted romance of Mrs.
+Radcliff to the condensed realism of Fielding. At any rate they did not
+look for realism. _Pelham_ may be taken as another instance of the
+sublime, though there is so much in it that is of the world worldly,
+though an intentional fall to the ludicrous is often made in it. The
+personages talk in glittering dialogues, throwing about philosophy,
+science, and the classics, in a manner which is always suggestive and
+often amusing. The book is brilliant with intellect. But no word is
+ever spoken as it would have been spoken;--no detail is ever narrated as
+it would have occurred. Bulwer no doubt regarded novels as romantic, and
+would have looked with contempt on any junction of realism and romance,
+though, in varying his work, he did not think it beneath him to vary his
+sublimity with the ludicrous. The sublime in novels is no doubt most
+effective when it breaks out, as though by some burst of nature, in the
+midst of a story true to life. "If," said Evan Maccombich, "the Saxon
+gentlemen are laughing because a poor man such as me thinks my life, or
+the life of six of my degree, is worth that of Vich Ian Vohr, it's like
+enough they may be very right; but if they laugh because they think I
+would not keep my word and come back to redeem him, I can tell them they
+ken neither the heart of a Hielandman nor the honour of a gentleman."
+That is sublime. And, again, when Balfour of Burley slaughters Bothwell,
+the death scene is sublime. "Die, bloodthirsty dog!" said Burley. "Die
+as thou hast lived! Die like the beasts that perish--hoping nothing,
+believing nothing!"----"And fearing nothing," said Bothwell. Horrible as
+is the picture, it is sublime. As is also that speech of Meg Merrilies,
+as she addresses Mr. Bertram, standing on the bank. "Ride your ways,"
+said the gipsy; "ride your ways, Laird of Ellangowan; ride your ways,
+Godfrey Bertram. This day have ye quenched seven smoking hearths; see if
+the fire in your ain parlour burn the blyther for that. Ye have riven
+the thack off seven cottar houses; look if your ain rooftree stand the
+faster. Ye may stable your stirks in the shealings at Derncleugh; see
+that the hare does not couch on the hearthstane at Ellangowan." That is
+romance, and reaches the very height of the sublime. That does not
+offend, impossible though it be that any old woman should have spoken
+such words, because it does in truth lift the reader up among the bright
+stars. It is thus that the sublime may be mingled with the realistic, if
+the writer has the power. Thackeray also rises in that way to a high
+pitch, though not in many instances. Romance does not often justify to
+him an absence of truth. The scene between Lady Castlewood and the Duke
+of Hamilton is one, when she explains to her child's suitor who Henry
+Esmond is. "My daughter may receive presents from the head of our
+house," says the lady, speaking up for her kinsman. "My daughter may
+thankfully take kindness from her father's, her mother's, her brother's
+dearest friend." The whole scene is of the same nature, and is evidence
+of Thackeray's capacity for the sublime. And again, when the same lady
+welcomes the same kinsman on his return from the wars, she rises as
+high. But as I have already quoted a part of the passage in the chapter
+on this novel, I will not repeat it here.
+
+It may perhaps be said of the sublime in novels,--which I have
+endeavoured to describe as not being generally of a high order,--that it
+is apt to become cold, stilted, and unsatisfactory. What may be done by
+impossible castles among impossible mountains, peopled by impossible
+heroes and heroines, and fraught with impossible horrors, _The Mysteries
+of Udolpho_ have shown us. But they require a patient reader, and one
+who can content himself with a long protracted and most unemotional
+excitement. The sublimity which is effected by sparkling speeches is
+better, if the speeches really have something in them beneath the
+sparkles. Those of Bulwer generally have. Those of his imitators are
+often without anything, the sparkles even hardly sparkling. At the best
+they fatigue; and a novel, if it fatigues, is unpardonable. Its only
+excuse is to be found in the amusement it affords. It should instruct
+also, no doubt, but it never will do so unless it hides its instruction
+and amuses. Scott understood all this, when he allowed himself only such
+sudden bursts as I have described. Even in _The Bride of Lammermoor_,
+which I do not regard as among the best of his performances, as he soars
+high into the sublime, so does he descend low into the ludicrous.
+
+In this latter division of pure fiction,--the burlesque, as it is
+commonly called, or the ludicrous,--Thackeray is quite as much at home
+as in the realistic, though, the vehicle being less powerful, he has
+achieved smaller results by it. Manifest as are the objects in his view
+when he wrote _The Hoggarty Diamond_ or _The Legend of the Rhine_, they
+were less important and less evidently effected than those attempted by
+_Vanity Fair_ and _Pendennis_. Captain Shindy, the Snob, does not tell
+us so plainly what is not a gentleman as does Colonel Newcome what is.
+Nevertheless the ludicrous has, with Thackeray, been very powerful, and
+very delightful.
+
+In trying to describe what is done by literature of this class, it is
+especially necessary to remember that different readers are affected in
+a different way. That which is one man's meat is another man's poison.
+In the sublime, when the really grand has been reached, it is the
+reader's own fault if he be not touched. We know that many are
+indifferent to the soliloquies of Hamlet, but we do not hesitate to
+declare to ourselves that they are so because they lack the power of
+appreciating grand language. We do not scruple to attribute to those who
+are indifferent some inferiority of intelligence. And in regard to the
+realistic, when the truth of a well-told story or life-like character
+does not come home, we think that then, too, there is deficiency in the
+critical ability. But there is nothing necessarily lacking to a man
+because he does not enjoy _The Heathen Chinee_ or _The Biglow Papers_;
+and the man to whom these delights of American humour are leather and
+prunello may be of all the most enraptured by the wit of Sam Weller or
+the mock piety of Pecksniff. It is a matter of taste and not of
+intellect, as one man likes caviare after his dinner, while another
+prefers apple-pie; and the man himself cannot, or, as far as we can see,
+does not direct his own taste in the one matter more than in the other.
+
+Therefore I cannot ask others to share with me the delight which I have
+in the various and peculiar expressions of the ludicrous which are
+common to Thackeray. Some considerable portion of it consists in bad
+spelling. We may say that Charles James Harrington Fitzroy Yellowplush,
+or C. FitzJeames De La Pluche, as he is afterwards called, would be
+nothing but for his "orthogwaphy so carefully inaccuwate." As I have
+before said, Mrs. Malaprop had seemed to have reached the height of this
+humour, and in having done so to have made any repetition unpalatable.
+But Thackeray's studied blundering is altogether different from that of
+Sheridan. Mrs. Malaprop uses her words in a delightfully wrong sense.
+Yellowplush would be a very intelligible, if not quite an accurate
+writer, had he not made for himself special forms of English words
+altogether new to the eye.
+
+"My ma wrapped up my buth in a mistry. I may be illygitmit; I may have
+been changed at nus; but I've always had gen'l'm'nly tastes through
+life, and have no doubt that I come of a gen'l'm'nly origum." We cannot
+admit that there is wit, or even humour, in bad spelling alone. Were it
+not that Yellowplush, with his bad spelling, had so much to say for
+himself, there would be nothing in it; but there is always a sting of
+satire directed against some real vice, or some growing vulgarity, which
+is made sharper by the absurdity of the language. In _The Diary of
+George IV._ there are the following reflections on a certain
+correspondence; "Wooden you phansy, now, that the author of such a
+letter, instead of writun about pipple of tip-top quality, was
+describin' Vinegar Yard? Would you beleave that the lady he was a-ritin'
+to was a chased modist lady of honour and mother of a family? _O
+trumpery! o morris!_ as Homer says. This is a higeous pictur of manners,
+such as I weap to think of, as every morl man must weap." We do not
+wonder that when he makes his "ajew" he should have been called
+up to be congratulated on the score of his literary performances by
+his master, before the Duke, and Lord Bagwig, and Dr. Larner, and
+"Sawedwadgeorgeearllittnbulwig." All that Yellowplush says or writes are
+among the pearls which Thackeray was continually scattering abroad.
+
+But this of the distinguished footman was only one of the forms of the
+ludicrous which he was accustomed to use in the furtherance of some
+purpose which he had at heart. It was his practice to clothe things most
+revolting with an assumed grace and dignity, and to add to the weight of
+his condemnation by the astounding mendacity of the parody thus drawn.
+There was a grim humour in this which has been displeasing to some, as
+seeming to hold out to vice a hand which has appeared for too long a
+time to be friendly. As we are disposed to be not altogether sympathetic
+with a detective policeman who shall have spent a jolly night with a
+delinquent, for the sake of tracing home the suspected guilt to his
+late comrade, so are some disposed to be almost angry with our author,
+who seems to be too much at home with his rascals, and to live with them
+on familiar terms till we doubt whether he does not forget their
+rascality. _Barry Lyndon_ is the strongest example we have of this style
+of the ludicrous, and the critics of whom I speak have thought that our
+friendly relations with Barry have been too genial, too apparently
+genuine, so that it might almost be doubtful whether during the
+narrative we might not, at this or the other crisis, be rather with him
+than against him. "After all," the reader might say, on coming to that
+passage in which Barry defends his trade as a gambler,--a passage which
+I have quoted in speaking of the novel,--"after all, this man is more
+hero than scoundrel;" so well is the burlesque humour maintained, so
+well does the scoundrel hide his own villany. I can easily understand
+that to some it should seem too long drawn out. To me it seems to be the
+perfection of humour,--and of philosophy. If such a one as Barry Lyndon,
+a man full of intellect, can be made thus to love and cherish his vice,
+and to believe in its beauty, how much more necessary is it to avoid the
+footsteps which lead to it? But, as I have said above, there is no
+standard by which to judge of the excellence of the ludicrous as there
+is of the sublime, and even the realistic.
+
+No writer ever had a stronger proclivity towards parody than Thackeray;
+and we may, I think, confess that there is no form of literary drollery
+more dangerous. The parody will often mar the gem of which it coarsely
+reproduces the outward semblance. The word "damaged," used instead of
+"damask," has destroyed to my ear for ever the music of one of the
+sweetest passages in Shakespeare. But it must be acknowledged of
+Thackeray that, fond as he is of this branch of humour, he has done
+little or no injury by his parodies. They run over with fun, but are so
+contrived that they do not lessen the flavour of the original. I have
+given in one of the preceding chapters a little set of verses of his
+own, called _The Willow Tree_, and his own parody on his own work. There
+the reader may see how effective a parody may be in destroying the
+sentiment of the piece parodied. But in dealing with other authors he
+has been grotesque without being severely critical, and has been very
+like, without making ugly or distasteful that which he has imitated. No
+one who has admired _Coningsby_ will admire it the less because of
+_Codlingsby_. Nor will the undoubted romance of _Eugene Aram_ be
+lessened in the estimation of any reader of novels by the well-told
+career of _George de Barnwell_. One may say that to laugh _Ivanhoe_ out
+of face, or to lessen the glory of that immortal story, would be beyond
+the power of any farcical effect. Thackeray in his _Rowena and Rebecca_
+certainly had no such purpose. Nothing of _Ivanhoe_ is injured, nothing
+made less valuable than it was before, yet, of all prose parodies in the
+language, it is perhaps the most perfect. Every character is maintained,
+every incident has a taste of Scott. It has the twang of _Ivanhoe_ from
+beginning to end, and yet there is not a word in it by which the author
+of _Ivanhoe_ could have been offended. But then there is the purpose
+beyond that of the mere parody. Prudish women have to be laughed at, and
+despotic kings, and parasite lords and bishops. The ludicrous alone is
+but poor fun; but when the ludicrous has a meaning, it can be very
+effective in the hands of such a master as this.
+
+     "He to die!" resumed the bishop. "He a mortal like to us!
+     Death was not for him intended, though _communis omnibus_.
+     Keeper, you are irreligious, for to talk and cavil thus!"
+
+So much I have said of the manner in which Thackeray did his work,
+endeavouring to represent human nature as he saw it, so that his readers
+should learn to love what is good, and to hate what is evil. As to the
+merits of his style, it will be necessary to insist on them the less,
+because it has been generally admitted to be easy, lucid, and
+grammatical. I call that style easy by which the writer has succeeded in
+conveying to the reader that which the reader is intended to receive
+with the least possible amount of trouble to him. I call that style
+lucid which conveys to the reader most accurately all that the writer
+wishes to convey on any subject. The two virtues will, I think, be seen
+to be very different. An author may wish to give an idea that a certain
+flavour is bitter. He shall leave a conviction that it is simply
+disagreeable. Then he is not lucid. But he shall convey so much as that,
+in such a manner as to give the reader no trouble in arriving at the
+conclusion. Therefore he is easy. The subject here suggested is as
+little complicated as possible; but in the intercourse which is going on
+continually between writers and readers, affairs of all degrees of
+complication are continually being discussed, of a nature so complicated
+that the inexperienced writer is puzzled at every turn to express
+himself, and the altogether inartistic writer fails to do so. Who among
+writers has not to acknowledge that he is often unable to tell all that
+he has to tell? Words refuse to do it for him. He struggles and stumbles
+and alters and adds, but finds at last that he has gone either too far
+or not quite far enough. Then there comes upon him the necessity of
+choosing between two evils. He must either give up the fulness of his
+thought, and content himself with presenting some fragment of it in that
+lucid arrangement of words which he affects; or he must bring out his
+thought with ambages; he must mass his sentences inconsequentially; he
+must struggle up hill almost hopelessly with his phrases,--so that at
+the end the reader will have to labour as he himself has laboured, or
+else to leave behind much of the fruit which it has been intended that
+he should garner. It is the ill-fortune of some to be neither easy or
+lucid; and there is nothing more wonderful in the history of letters
+than the patience of readers when called upon to suffer under the double
+calamity. It is as though a man were reading a dialogue of Plato,
+understanding neither the subject nor the language. But it is often the
+case that one has to be sacrificed to the other. The pregnant writer
+will sometimes solace himself by declaring that it is not his business
+to supply intelligence to the reader; and then, in throwing out the
+entirety of his thought, will not stop to remember that he cannot hope
+to scatter his ideas far and wide unless he can make them easily
+intelligible. Then the writer who is determined that his book shall not
+be put down because it is troublesome, is too apt to avoid the knotty
+bits and shirk the rocky turns, because he cannot with ease to himself
+make them easy to others. If this be acknowledged, I shall be held to be
+right in saying not only that ease and lucidity in style are different
+virtues, but that they are often opposed to each other. They may,
+however, be combined, and then the writer will have really learned the
+art of writing. Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci. It is to be
+done, I believe, in all languages. A man by art and practice shall at
+least obtain such a masterhood over words as to express all that he
+thinks, in phrases that shall be easily understood.
+
+In such a small space as can here be allowed, I cannot give instances to
+prove that this has been achieved by Thackeray. Nor would instances
+prove the existence of the virtue, though instances might the absence.
+The proof lies in the work of the man's life, and can only become plain
+to those who have read his writings. I must refer readers to their own
+experiences, and ask them whether they have found themselves compelled
+to study passages in Thackeray in order that they might find a recondite
+meaning, or whether they have not been sure that they and the author
+have together understood all that there was to understand in the matter.
+Have they run backward over the passages, and then gone on, not quite
+sure what the author has meant? If not, then he has been easy and lucid.
+We have not had it so easy with all modern writers, nor with all that
+are old. I may best perhaps explain my meaning by taking something
+written long ago; something very valuable, in order that I may not
+damage my argument by comparing the easiness of Thackeray with the
+harshness of some author who has in other respects failed of obtaining
+approbation. If you take the play of _Cymbeline_ you will, I think, find
+it to be anything but easy reading. Nor is Shakespeare always lucid. For
+purposes of his own he will sometimes force his readers to doubt his
+meaning, even after prolonged study. It has ever been so with _Hamlet_.
+My readers will not, I think, be so crossgrained with me as to suppose
+that I am putting Thackeray as a master of style above Shakespeare. I am
+only endeavouring to explain by reference to the great master the
+condition of literary production which he attained. Whatever Thackeray
+says, the reader cannot fail to understand; and whatever Thackeray
+attempts to communicate, he succeeds in conveying.
+
+That he is grammatical I must leave to my readers' judgment, with a
+simple assertion in his favour. There are some who say that grammar,--by
+which I mean accuracy of composition, in accordance with certain
+acknowledged rules,--is only a means to an end; and that, if a writer
+can absolutely achieve the end by some other mode of his own, he need
+not regard the prescribed means. If a man can so write as to be easily
+understood, and to convey lucidly that which he has to convey without
+accuracy of grammar, why should he subject himself to unnecessary
+trammels? Why not make a path for himself, if the path so made will
+certainly lead him whither he wishes to go? The answer is, that no other
+path will lead others whither he wishes to carry them but that which is
+common to him and to those others. It is necessary that there should be
+a ground equally familiar to the writer and to his readers. If there be
+no such common ground, they will certainly not come into full accord.
+There have been recusants who, by a certain acuteness of their own, have
+partly done so,--wilful recusants; but they have been recusants, not to
+the extent of discarding grammar,--which no writer could do and not be
+altogether in the dark,--but so far as to have created for themselves a
+phraseology which has been picturesque by reason of its illicit
+vagaries; as a woman will sometimes please ill-instructed eyes and ears
+by little departures from feminine propriety. They have probably
+laboured in their vocation as sedulously as though they had striven to
+be correct, and have achieved at the best but a short-lived
+success;--as is the case also with the unconventional female. The charm
+of the disorderly soon loses itself in the ugliness of disorder. And
+there are others rebellious from grammar, who are, however, hardly to be
+called rebels, because the laws which they break have never been
+altogether known to them. Among those very dear to me in English
+literature, one or two might be named of either sort, whose works,
+though they have that in them which will insure to them a long life,
+will become from year to year less valuable and less venerable, because
+their authors have either scorned or have not known that common ground
+of language on which the author and his readers should stand together.
+My purport here is only with Thackeray, and I say that he stands always
+on that common ground. He quarrels with none of the laws. As the lady
+who is most attentive to conventional propriety may still have her own
+fashion of dress and her own mode of speech, so had Thackeray very
+manifestly his own style; but it is one the correctness of which has
+never been impugned.
+
+I hold that gentleman to be the best dressed whose dress no one
+observes. I am not sure but that the same may be said of an author's
+written language. Only, where shall we find an example of such
+perfection? Always easy, always lucid, always correct, we may find them;
+but who is the writer, easy, lucid, and correct, who has not impregnated
+his writing with something of that personal flavour which we call
+mannerism? To speak of authors well known to all readers--Does not _The
+Rambler_ taste of Johnson; _The Decline and Fall_, of Gibbon; _The
+Middle Ages_, of Hallam; _The History of England_, of Macaulay; and _The
+Invasion of the Crimea_, of Kinglake? Do we not know the elephantine
+tread of _The Saturday_, and the precise toe of _The Spectator_? I have
+sometimes thought that Swift has been nearest to the mark of
+any,--writing English and not writing Swift. But I doubt whether an
+accurate observer would not trace even here the "mark of the beast."
+Thackeray, too, has a strong flavour of Thackeray. I am inclined to
+think that his most besetting sin in style,--the little earmark by which
+he is most conspicuous,--is a certain affected familiarity. He indulges
+too frequently in little confidences with individual readers, in which
+pretended allusions to himself are frequent. "What would you do? what
+would you say now, if you were in such a position?" he asks. He
+describes this practice of his in the preface to _Pendennis_. "It is a
+sort of confidential talk between writer and reader.... In the course of
+his volubility the perpetual speaker must of necessity lay bare his own
+weaknesses, vanities, peculiarities." In the short contributions to
+periodicals on which he tried his 'prentice hand, such addresses and
+conversations were natural and efficacious; but in a larger work of
+fiction they cause an absence of that dignity to which even a novel may
+aspire. You feel that each morsel as you read it is a detached bit, and
+that it has all been written in detachments. The book is robbed of its
+integrity by a certain good-humoured geniality of language, which causes
+the reader to be almost too much at home with his author. There is a
+saying that familiarity breeds contempt, and I have been sometimes
+inclined to think that our author has sometimes failed to stand up for
+himself with sufficiency of "personal deportment."
+
+In other respects Thackeray's style is excellent. As I have said before,
+the reader always understands his words without an effort, and receives
+all that the author has to give.
+
+There now remains to be discussed the matter of our author's work. The
+manner and the style are but the natural wrappings in which the goods
+have been prepared for the market. Of these goods it is no doubt true
+that unless the wrappings be in some degree meritorious the article will
+not be accepted at all; but it is the kernel which we seek, which, if it
+be not of itself sweet and digestible, cannot be made serviceable by any
+shell however pretty or easy to be cracked. I have said previously that
+it is the business of a novel to instruct in morals and to amuse. I will
+go further, and will add, having been for many years a most prolific
+writer of novels myself, that I regard him who can put himself into
+close communication with young people year after year without making
+some attempt to do them good, as a very sorry fellow indeed. However
+poor your matter may be, however near you may come to that "foolishest
+of existing mortals," as Carlyle presumes some unfortunate novelist to
+be, still, if there be those who read your works, they will undoubtedly
+be more or less influenced by what they find there. And it is because
+the novelist amuses that he is thus influential. The sermon too often
+has no such effect, because it is applied with the declared intention of
+having it. The palpable and overt dose the child rejects; but that which
+is cunningly insinuated by the aid of jam or honey is accepted
+unconsciously, and goes on upon its curative mission. So it is with the
+novel. It is taken because of its jam and honey. But, unlike the honest
+simple jam and honey of the household cupboard, it is never unmixed with
+physic. There will be the dose within it, either curative or poisonous.
+The girl will be taught modesty or immodesty, truth or falsehood; the
+lad will be taught honour or dishonour, simplicity or affectation.
+Without the lesson the amusement will not be there. There are novels
+which certainly can teach nothing; but then neither can they amuse any
+one.
+
+I should be said to insist absurdly on the power of my own confraternity
+if I were to declare that the bulk of the young people in the upper and
+middle classes receive their moral teaching chiefly from the novels they
+read. Mothers would no doubt think of their own sweet teaching; fathers
+of the examples which they set; and schoolmasters of the excellence of
+their instructions. Happy is the country that has such mothers, fathers,
+and schoolmasters! But the novelist creeps in closer than the
+schoolmaster, closer than the father, closer almost than the mother. He
+is the chosen guide, the tutor whom the young pupil chooses for herself.
+She retires with him, suspecting no lesson, safe against rebuke,
+throwing herself head and heart into the narration as she can hardly do
+into her task-work; and there she is taught,--how she shall learn to
+love; how she shall receive the lover when he comes; how far she should
+advance to meet the joy; why she should be reticent, and not throw
+herself at once into this new delight. It is the same with the young
+man, though he would be more prone even than she to reject the suspicion
+of such tutorship. But he too will there learn either to speak the
+truth, or to lie; and will receive from his novel lessons either of real
+manliness, or of that affected apishness and tailor-begotten demeanour
+which too many professors of the craft give out as their dearest
+precepts.
+
+At any rate the close intercourse is admitted. Where is the house now
+from which novels are tabooed? Is it not common to allow them almost
+indiscriminately, so that young and old each chooses his own novel?
+Shall he, then, to whom this close fellowship is allowed,--this inner
+confidence,--shall he not be careful what words he uses, and what
+thoughts he expresses, when he sits in council with his young friend?
+This, which it will certainly be his duty to consider with so much care,
+will be the matter of his work. We know what was thought of such matter,
+when Lydia in the play was driven to the necessity of flinging
+"_Peregrine Pickle_ under the toilet," and thrusting "_Lord Aimwell_
+under the sofa." We have got beyond that now, and are tolerably sure
+that our girls do not hide their novels. The more freely they are
+allowed, the more necessary is it that he who supplies shall take care
+that they are worthy of the trust that is given to them.
+
+Now let the reader ask himself what are the lessons which Thackeray has
+taught. Let him send his memory running back over all those characters
+of whom we have just been speaking, and ask himself whether any girl has
+been taught to be immodest, or any man unmanly, by what Thackeray has
+written. A novelist has two modes of teaching,--by good example or bad.
+It is not to be supposed that because the person treated of be evil,
+therefore the precept will be evil. If so, some personages with whom we
+have been made well acquainted from our youth upwards, would have been
+omitted in our early lessons. It may be a question whether the teaching
+is not more efficacious which comes from the evil example. What story
+was ever more powerful in showing the beauty of feminine reticence, and
+the horrors of feminine evil-doing, than the fate of Effie Deans? The
+Templar would have betrayed a woman to his lust, but has not encouraged
+others by the freedom of his life. Varney was utterly bad,--but though a
+gay courtier, he has enticed no others to go the way that he went. So
+it has been with Thackeray. His examples have been generally of that
+kind,--but they have all been efficacious in their teaching on the side
+of modesty and manliness, truth and simplicity. When some girl shall
+have traced from first to last the character of Beatrix, what, let us
+ask, will be the result on her mind? Beatrix was born noble, clever,
+beautiful, with certain material advantages, which it was within her
+compass to improve by her nobility, wit, and beauty. She was quite alive
+to that fact, and thought of those material advantages, to the utter
+exclusion, in our mind, of any idea of moral goodness. She realised it
+all, and told herself that that was the game she would play.
+"Twenty-five!" says she; "and in eight years no man has ever touched my
+heart!" That is her boast when she is about to be married,--her only
+boast of herself. "A most detestable young woman!" some will say. "An
+awful example!" others will add. Not a doubt of it. She proves the
+misery of her own career so fully that no one will follow it. The
+example is so awful that it will surely deter. The girl will declare to
+herself that not in that way will she look for the happiness which she
+hopes to enjoy; and the young man will say as he reads it, that no
+Beatrix shall touch his heart.
+
+You may go through all his characters with the same effect. Pendennis
+will be scorned because he is light; Warrington loved because he is
+strong and merciful; Dobbin will be honoured because he is unselfish;
+and the old colonel, though he be foolish, vain, and weak, almost
+worshipped because he is so true a gentleman. It is in the handling of
+questions such as these that we have to look for the matter of the
+novelist,--those moral lessons which he mixes up with his jam and his
+honey. I say that with Thackeray the physic is always curative and
+never poisonous. He may he admitted safely into that close fellowship,
+and be allowed to accompany the dear ones to their retreats. The girl
+will never become bold under his preaching, or taught to throw herself
+at men's heads. Nor will the lad receive a false flashy idea of what
+becomes a youth, when he is first about to take his place among men.
+
+As to that other question, whether Thackeray be amusing as well as
+salutary, I must leave it to public opinion. There is now being brought
+out of his works a more splendid edition than has ever been produced in
+any age or any country of the writings of such an author. A certain
+fixed number of copies only is being issued, and each copy will cost £33
+12s. when completed. It is understood that a very large proportion of
+the edition has been already bought or ordered. Cost, it will be said,
+is a bad test of excellence. It will not prove the merit of a book any
+more than it will of a horse. But it is proof of the popularity of the
+book. Print and illustrate and bind up some novels how you will, no one
+will buy them. Previous to these costly volumes, there have been two
+entire editions of his works since the author's death, one comparatively
+cheap and the other dear. Before his death his stories had been
+scattered in all imaginable forms. I may therefore assert that their
+charm has been proved by their popularity.
+
+There remains for us only this question,--whether the nature of
+Thackeray's works entitle him to be called a cynic. The word is one
+which is always used in a bad sense. "Of a dog; currish," is the
+definition which we get from Johnson,--quite correctly, and in
+accordance with its etymology. And he gives us examples. "How vilely
+does this cynic rhyme," he takes from Shakespeare; and Addison speaks of
+a man degenerating into a cynic. That Thackeray's nature was soft and
+kindly,--gentle almost to a fault,--has been shown elsewhere. But they
+who have called him a cynic have spoken of him merely as a writer,--and
+as writer he has certainly taken upon himself the special task of
+barking at the vices and follies of the world around him. Any satirist
+might in the same way be called a cynic in so far as his satire goes.
+Swift was a cynic certainly. Pope was cynical when he was a satirist.
+Juvenal was all cynical, because he was all satirist. If that be what is
+meant, Thackeray was certainly a cynic. But that is not all that the
+word implies. It intends to go back beyond the work of the man, and to
+describe his heart. It says of any satirist so described that he has
+given himself up to satire, not because things have been evil, but
+because he himself has been evil. Hamlet is a satirist, whereas
+Thersites is a cynic. If Thackeray be judged after this fashion, the
+word is as inappropriate to the writer as to the man.
+
+But it has to be confessed that Thackeray did allow his intellect to be
+too thoroughly saturated with the aspect of the ill side of things. We
+can trace the operation of his mind from his earliest days, when he
+commenced his parodies at school; when he brought out _The Snob_ at
+Cambridge, when he sent _Yellowplush_ out upon the world as a satirist
+on the doings of gentlemen generally; when he wrote his _Catherine_, to
+show the vileness of the taste for what he would have called Newgate
+literature; and _The Hoggarty Diamond_, to attack bubble companies; and
+_Barry Lyndon_, to expose the pride which a rascal may take in his
+rascality. Becky Sharp, Major Pendennis, Beatrix, both as a young and
+as an old woman, were written with the same purpose. There is a touch of
+satire in every drawing that he made. A jeer is needed for something
+that is ridiculous, scorn has to be thrown on something that is vile.
+The same feeling is to be found in every line of every ballad.
+
+     VANITAS VANITATUM.
+
+     Methinks the text is never stale,
+       And life is every day renewing
+     Fresh comments on the old old tale,
+       Of Folly, Fortune, Glory, Ruin.
+
+     Hark to the preacher, preaching still!
+       He lifts his voice and cries his sermon,
+     Here at St. Peter's of Cornhill,
+       As yonder on the Mount of Hermon--
+
+     For you and me to heart to take
+       (O dear beloved brother readers),
+     To-day,--as when the good king spake
+       Beneath the solemn Syrian cedars.
+
+It was just so with him always. He was "crying his sermon," hoping, if
+it might be so, to do something towards lessening the evils he saw
+around him. We all preach our sermon, but not always with the same
+earnestness. He had become so urgent in the cause, so loud in his
+denunciations, that he did not stop often to speak of the good things
+around him. Now and again he paused and blessed amid the torrent of his
+anathemas. There are Dobbin, and Esmond, and Colonel Newcome. But his
+anathemas are the loudest. It has been so I think nearly always with the
+eloquent preachers.
+
+I will insert here,--especially here at the end of this chapter, in
+which I have spoken of Thackeray's matter and manner of writing, because
+of the justice of the criticism conveyed,--the lines which Lord Houghton
+wrote on his death, and which are to be found in the February number of
+_The Cornhill_ of 1864. It was the first number printed after his death.
+I would add that, though no Dean applied for permission to bury
+Thackeray in Westminster Abbey, his bust was placed there without delay.
+What is needed by the nation in such a case is simply a lasting memorial
+there, where such memorials are most often seen and most highly
+honoured. But we can all of us sympathise with the feeling of the poet,
+writing immediately on the loss of such a friend:
+
+     When one, whose nervous English verse
+       Public and party hates defied,
+     Who bore and bandied many a curse
+       Of angry times,--when Dryden died,
+
+     Our royal abbey's Bishop-Dean
+       Waited for no suggestive prayer,
+     But, ere one day closed o'er the scene,
+       Craved, as a boon, to lay him there.
+
+     The wayward faith, the faulty life,
+       Vanished before a nation's pain.
+     Panther and Hind forgot their strife,
+       And rival statesmen thronged the fane.
+
+     O gentle censor of our age!
+       Prime master of our ampler tongue!
+     Whose word of wit and generous page
+       Were never wrath, except with wrong,--
+
+     Fielding--without the manner's dross,
+       Scott--with a spirit's larger room,
+     What Prelate deems thy grave his loss?
+       What Halifax erects thy tomb?
+
+     But, may be, he,--who so could draw
+       The hidden great,--the humble wise,
+     Yielding with them to God's good law,
+       Makes the Pantheon where he lies.
+
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+            *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+CHARLES DICKENS AND EVANS, CRYSTAL PALACE PRESS.
+
+
+
+
+ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS.
+
+EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY.
+
+
+These Short Books are addressed to the general public with a view both
+to stirring and satisfying an interest in literature and its great
+topics in the minds of those who have to run as they read. An immense
+class is growing up, and must every year increase, whose education will
+have made them alive to the importance of the masters of our literature,
+and capable of intelligent curiosity as to their performances. The
+Series is intended to give the means of nourishing this curiosity, to an
+extent that shall be copious enough to be profitable for knowledge and
+life, and yet be brief enough to serve those whose leisure is scanty.
+
+The following are arranged for:
+
+SPENSER         The Dean of St. Paul's.   [In the Press.
+
+HUME            Professor Huxley.         [Ready.
+
+BUNYAN          James Anthony Froude.
+
+JOHNSON         Leslie Stephen.           [Ready.
+
+GOLDSMITH       William Black.            [Ready.
+
+MILTON          Mark Pattison.
+
+COWPER          Goldwin Smith.
+
+SWIFT           John Morley.
+
+BURNS           Principal Shairp.         [Ready.
+
+SCOTT           Richard H. Hutton.        [Ready.
+
+SHELLEY         J. A. Symonds.            [Ready.
+
+GIBBON          J. C. Morison.            [Ready.
+
+BYRON           Professor Nichol.
+
+DEFOE           W. Minto.                 [Ready.
+
+BURKE           John Morley.
+
+HAWTHORNE       Henry James, Jnr.
+
+CHAUCER         A. W. Ward.
+
+THACKERAY       Anthony Trollope.         [Ready.
+
+ADAM SMITH      Leonard H. Courtney, M.P.
+
+BENTLEY         Professor R. C. Jebb.
+
+LANDOR          Professor Sidney Colvin.
+
+POPE            Leslie Stephen.
+
+WORDSWORTH      F. W. H. Myers.
+
+SOUTHEY         Professor E. Dowden.
+
+[OTHERS WILL BE ANNOUNCED.]
+
+
+OPINIONS OF THE PRESS.
+
+"The new series opens well with Mr. Leslie Stephen's sketch of Dr.
+Johnson. It could hardly have been done better; and it will convey to
+the readers for whom it is intended a juster estimate of Johnson than
+either of the two essays of Lord Macaulay."--_Pall Mall Gazette._
+
+"We have come across few writers who have had a clearer insight into
+Johnson's character, or who have brought to the study of it a better
+knowledge of the time in which Johnson lived and the men whom he
+knew."--_Saturday Review._
+
+"We could not wish for a more suggestive introduction to Scott and his
+poems and novels."--_Examiner._
+
+"The tone of the volume is excellent throughout."--_Athenæum_ Review of
+"Scott."
+
+"As a clear, thoughtful, and attractive record of the life and works of
+the greatest among the world's historians, it deserves the highest
+praise."--_Examiner_ Review of "Gibbon."
+
+"The lovers of this great poet (Shelley) are to be congratulated at
+having at their command so fresh, clear, and intelligent a presentment
+of the subject, written by a man of adequate and wide
+culture."--_Athenæum._
+
+"It may fairly be said that no one now living could have expounded Hume
+with more sympathy or with equal perspicuity."--_Athenæum._
+
+"The story of Defoe's adventurous life may be followed with keen
+interest in Mr. Minto's attractive book."--_Academy._
+
+
+
+            *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:
+
+
+   The poems WILLOW TREE No. I and WILLOW TREE No. II were side by
+   side in the original.
+
+   There are variant spellings of the following name:
+
+        Jeames Yellowplush
+        Mr. C. James Yellowplush
+
+        Spellings were left as in the original.
+
+   The following changes were made to the text:
+
+        page 5--Thackeray's version was 'Cabbages, bright green
+        cabbages,'{added missing ending quotation mark} and we
+        thought it very witty.
+
+        page 78--Then there are "Jeames on Time Bargings," "Jeames on
+        the Gauge{original had Guage} Question," "Mr. Jeames again."
+
+        page 131--"I knew you would come back," she said; "and to-day,
+        Harry{original has Henry}, in the anthem when they sang
+
+        page 143--The wife won't{original has wo'n't} come.
+
+        page 143--On his way he{original has be} shoots a raven
+        marvellously
+
+        page 158--As Thackeray explains clearly what he means by a
+        humorist, I may as well here repeat the passage:{punctuation
+        missing in original} "If humour only meant laughter
+
+        page 166--I will then let my reader go to the volume and study
+        the lectures for himself.{no punctuation in original} "The
+        poor fellow was never
+
+        page 212--[Ready.{original is missing period--this occurred in
+        the line referencing DEFOE and the line referencing THACKERAY}
+
+   The following words used an "oe" ligature in the original:
+
+        Boeuf
+        chef-d'oevre
+        Coeur
+        manoeuvres
+
+
+
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+<h1>The Project Gutenberg eBook, Thackeray, by Anthony Trollope</h1>
+<pre>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at <a href = "http://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a></pre>
+<p>Title: Thackeray</p>
+<p>Author: Anthony Trollope</p>
+<p>Release Date: June 21, 2006  [eBook #18645]</p>
+<p>Language: English</p>
+<p>Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1</p>
+<p>***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THACKERAY***</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>E-text prepared by Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier, Lisa Reigel,<br />
+    and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team<br />
+    (http://www.pgdp.net/)</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class = "mynote">Transcriber's Note:<br />
+<br />The letter "o" with a macron is rendered [=o] in this text. It only
+appears in the word "Public[=o]la".<br />
+<br />A few typographical errors have been corrected.
+They have been marked in the text with <ins class="correction" title="like this">popups</ins>.
+A complete list of corrections <a href="#notes">follows</a> the text.</div>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+
+<h5 style="margin-top: 2em">English Men of Letters</h5>
+
+<p class="center"><span style="font-size: 80%">EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY</span></p>
+
+<p class="center"><span style="font-size: 80%">THACKERAY</span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 35%;" />
+<p class="gap">&nbsp;</p>
+<h1>THACKERAY</h1>
+
+<h5>BY</h5>
+
+<h2>ANTHONY TROLLOPE</h2>
+
+
+<p class="center gap">
+London:<br />
+MACMILLAN AND CO.<br />
+1879.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p class="center" style="margin-top: 2em"><i>The Right of Translation and Reproduction is Reserved.</i></p>
+
+
+<p class="center" style="margin-top: 2em">CHARLES DICKENS AND EVANS,<br />
+CRYSTAL PALACE PRESS.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_v" id="Page_v">[Pg v]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CONTENTS.</h2>
+
+<ul class="toc">
+<li><a href="#CHAPTER_I">CHAPTER I.</a> <span class="tocright">PAGE</span></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">Biographical</span> <span class="tocright"><a href="#Page_1">1</a></span></li>
+<li>&nbsp;</li>
+<li><a href="#CHAPTER_II">CHAPTER II.</a></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">Fraser's Magazine and Punch</span>  <span class="tocright"><a href="#Page_62">62</a></span></li>
+<li>&nbsp;</li>
+<li><a href="#CHAPTER_III">CHAPTER III.</a></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">Vanity Fair</span> <span class="tocright"><a href="#Page_90">90</a></span></li>
+<li>&nbsp;</li>
+<li><a href="#CHAPTER_IV">CHAPTER IV.</a></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">Pendennis and the Newcomes</span>  <span class="tocright"><a href="#Page_108">108</a></span></li>
+<li>&nbsp;</li>
+<li><a href="#CHAPTER_V">CHAPTER V.</a></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">Esmond and the Virginians</span> <span class="tocright"><a href="#Page_122">122</a></span></li>
+<li>&nbsp;</li>
+<li><a href="#CHAPTER_VI">CHAPTER VI.</a></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">Thackeray's Burlesques</span> <span class="tocright"><a href="#Page_139">139</a></span></li>
+<li>&nbsp;</li>
+<li><a name="Page_vi" id="Page_vi"></a><a href="#CHAPTER_VII">CHAPTER VII.</a></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">Thackeray's Lectures</span> <span class="tocright"><a href="#Page_154">154</a></span></li>
+<li>&nbsp;</li>
+<li><a href="#CHAPTER_VIII">CHAPTER VIII.</a></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">Thackeray's Ballads</span> <span class="tocright"><a href="#Page_168">168</a></span></li>
+<li>&nbsp;</li>
+<li><a href="#CHAPTER_IX">CHAPTER IX.</a></li>
+<li><span class="smcap">Thackeray's Style and Manner of Work</span> <span class="tocright"><a href="#Page_184">184</a></span></li>
+</ul>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h1>THACKERAY</h1>
+
+
+
+<p class="gap"><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></a>CHAPTER I.</h2>
+
+<h3>BIOGRAPHICAL.</h3>
+
+
+<p>In the foregoing volumes of this series of <i>English Men of Letters</i>, and
+in other works of a similar nature which have appeared lately as to the
+<i>Ancient Classics</i> and <i>Foreign Classics</i>, biography has naturally been,
+if not the leading, at any rate a considerable element. The desire is
+common to all readers to know not only what a great writer has written,
+but also of what nature has been the man who has produced such great
+work. As to all the authors taken in hand before, there has been extant
+some written record of the man's life. Biographical details have been
+more or less known to the world, so that, whether of a Cicero, or of a
+Goethe, or of our own Johnson, there has been a story to tell. Of
+Thackeray no life has been written; and though they who knew him,&mdash;and
+possibly many who did not,&mdash;are conversant with anecdotes of the man,
+who was one so well known in society as to have created many anecdotes,
+yet there has been no memoir of his life sufficient to supply the wants
+of even so small a work as this purports to be. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span>For this the reason may
+simply be told. Thackeray, not long before his death, had had his taste
+offended by some fulsome biography. Paragraphs, of which the eulogy
+seemed to have been the produce rather of personal love than of inquiry
+or judgment, disgusted him, and he begged of his girls that when he
+should have gone there should nothing of the sort be done with his name.</p>
+
+<p>We can imagine how his mind had worked, how he had declared to himself
+that, as by those loving hands into which his letters, his notes, his
+little details,&mdash;his literary remains, as such documents used to be
+called,&mdash;might naturally fall, truth of his foibles and of his
+shortcomings could not be told, so should not his praises be written, or
+that flattering portrait be limned which biographers are wont to
+produce. Acting upon these instructions, his daughters,&mdash;while there
+were two living, and since that the one surviving,&mdash;have carried out the
+order which has appeared to them to be sacred. Such being the case, it
+certainly is not my purpose now to write what may be called a life of
+Thackeray. In this preliminary chapter I will give such incidents and
+anecdotes of his life as will tell the reader perhaps all about him that
+a reader is entitled to ask. I will tell how he became an author, and
+will say how first he worked and struggled, and then how he worked and
+prospered, and became a household word in English literature;&mdash;how, in
+this way, he passed through that course of mingled failure and success
+which, though the literary aspirant may suffer, is probably better both
+for the writer and for the writings than unclouded early glory. The
+suffering no doubt is acute, and a touch of melancholy, perhaps of
+indignation, may be given to words which have been <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span>written while the
+heart has been too full of its own wrongs; but this is better than the
+continued note of triumph which is still heard in the final voices of
+the spoilt child of literature, even when they are losing their music.
+Then I will tell how Thackeray died, early indeed, but still having done
+a good life's work. Something of his manner, something of his appearance
+I can say, something perhaps of his condition of mind; because for some
+few years he was known to me. But of the continual intercourse of
+himself with the world, and of himself with his own works, I can tell
+little, because no record of his life has been made public.</p>
+
+<p>William Makepeace Thackeray was born at Calcutta, on July 18, 1811. His
+father was Richmond Thackeray, son of W. M. Thackeray of Hadley, near
+Barnet, in Middlesex. A relation of his, of the same name, a Rev. Mr.
+Thackeray, I knew well as rector of Hadley, many years afterwards. Him I
+believe to have been a second cousin of our Thackeray, but I think they
+had never met each other. Another cousin was Provost of Kings at
+Cambridge, fifty years ago, as Cambridge men will remember. Clergymen of
+the family have been numerous in England during the century, and there
+was one, a Rev. Elias Thackeray, whom I also knew in my youth, a
+dignitary, if I remember right, in the diocese of Meath. The Thackerays
+seem to have affected the Church; but such was not at any period of his
+life the bias of our novelist's mind.</p>
+
+<p>His father and grandfather were Indian civil servants. His mother was
+Anne Becher, whose father was also in the Company's service. She married
+early in India, and was only nineteen when her son was born. She was
+left <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span>a widow in 1816, with only one child, and was married a few years
+afterwards to Major Henry Carmichael Smyth, with whom Thackeray lived on
+terms of affectionate intercourse till the major died. All who knew
+William Makepeace remember his mother well, a handsome, spare,
+gray-haired lady, whom Thackeray treated with a courtly deference as
+well as constant affection. There was, however, something of discrepancy
+between them as to matters of religion. Mrs. Carmichael Smyth was
+disposed to the somewhat austere observance of the evangelical section
+of the Church. Such, certainly, never became the case with her son.
+There was disagreement on the subject, and probably unhappiness at
+intervals, but never, I think, quarrelling. Thackeray's house was his
+mother's home whenever she pleased it, and the home also of his
+stepfather.</p>
+
+<p>He was brought a child from India, and was sent early to the Charter
+House. Of his life and doings there his friend and schoolfellow George
+Venables writes to me as follows;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"My recollection of him, though fresh enough, does not furnish
+much material for biography. He came to school young,&mdash;a
+pretty, gentle, and rather timid boy. I think his experience
+there was not generally pleasant. Though he had afterwards a
+scholarlike knowledge of Latin, he did not attain distinction
+in the school; and I should think that the character of the
+head-master, Dr. Russell, which was vigorous, unsympathetic,
+and stern, though not severe, was uncongenial to his own. With
+the boys who knew him, Thackeray was popular; but he had no
+skill in games, and, I think, no taste for them.... He was
+already known by his faculty of making verses, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span>chiefly
+parodies. I only remember one line of one parody on a poem of
+L. E. L.'s, about 'Violets, dark blue violets;' Thackeray's
+version was 'Cabbages, bright green cabbages,<ins class="correction" title="Transcriber's note: quotation mark missing in original">'</ins> and we thought
+it very witty. He took part in a scheme, which came to
+nothing, for a school magazine, and he wrote verses for it, of
+which I only remember that they were good of their kind. When
+I knew him better, in later years, I thought I could recognise
+the sensitive nature which he had as a boy.... His change of
+retrospective feeling about his school days was very
+characteristic. In his earlier books he always spoke of the
+Charter House as Slaughter House and Smithfield. As he became
+famous and prosperous his memory softened, and Slaughter House
+was changed into Grey Friars where Colonel Newcome ended his
+life."</p></div>
+
+<p>In February, 1829, when he was not as yet eighteen, Thackeray went up to
+Trinity College, Cambridge, and was, I think, removed in 1830. It may be
+presumed, therefore, that his studies there were not very serviceable to
+him. There are few, if any, records left of his doings at the
+university,&mdash;unless it be the fact that he did there commence the
+literary work of his life. The line about the cabbages, and the scheme
+of the school magazine, can hardly be said to have amounted even to a
+commencement. In 1829 a little periodical was brought out at Cambridge,
+called <i>The Snob</i>, with an assurance on the title that it was <i>not</i>
+conducted by members of the university. It is presumed that Thackeray
+took a hand in editing this. He certainly wrote, and published in the
+little paper, some burlesque lines on the subject which was given for
+the Chancellor's prize poem of the year. This was <i>Timbuctoo</i>, and
+Tennyson was the victor on the occasion. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span>There is some good fun in the
+four first and four last lines of Thackeray's production.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">In Africa,&mdash;a quarter of the world,&mdash;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Men's skins are black; their hair is crisped and curled;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And somewhere there, unknown to public view</span><br />
+<span class="i0">A mighty city lies, called Timbuctoo.</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0" style="margin-top: .5em;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">I see her tribes the hill of glory mount,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And sell their sugars on their own account;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">While round her throne the prostrate nations come,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Sue for her rice, and barter for her rum.</span><br />
+</div></div>
+
+<p>I cannot find in <i>The Snob</i> internal evidence of much literary merit
+beyond this. But then how many great writers have there been from whose
+early lucubrations no future literary excellence could be
+prognosticated?</p>
+
+<p>There is something at any rate in the name of the publication which
+tells of work that did come. Thackeray's mind was at all times
+peculiarly exercised with a sense of snobbishness. His appreciation of
+the vice grew abnormally, so that at last he had a morbid horror of a
+snob&mdash;a morbid fear lest this or the other man should turn snob on his
+hands. It is probable that the idea was taken from the early <i>Snob</i> at
+Cambridge, either from his own participation in the work or from his
+remembrance of it. <i>The Snob</i> lived, I think, but nine weeks, and was
+followed at an interval, in 1830, by <i>The Gownsman</i>, which lived to the
+seventeenth number, and at the opening of which Thackeray no doubt had a
+hand. It professed to be a continuation of <i>The Snob</i>. It contains a
+dedication to all proctors, which I should not be sorry to attribute to
+him. "To all Proctors, past, present, and future&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Whose taste it is our privilege to follow,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Whose virtue it is our duty to imitate,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Whose presence it is our interest to avoid."</span><br />
+</div></div>
+
+<p>There is, however, nothing beyond fancy to induce me to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span>believe that
+Thackeray was the author of the dedication, and I do not know that there
+is any evidence to show that he was connected with <i>The Snob</i> beyond the
+writing of <i>Timbuctoo</i>.</p>
+
+<p>In 1830 he left Cambridge, and went to Weimar either in that year or in
+1831. Between Weimar and Paris he spent some portion of his earlier
+years, while his family,&mdash;his mother, that is, and his stepfather,&mdash;were
+living in Devonshire. It was then the purport of his life to become an
+artist, and he studied drawing at Paris, affecting especially
+Bonnington, the young English artist who had himself painted at Paris
+and who had died in 1828. He never learned to draw,&mdash;perhaps never could
+have learned. That he was idle, and did not do his best, we may take for
+granted. He was always idle, and only on some occasions, when the spirit
+moved him thoroughly, did he do his best even in after life. But with
+drawing,&mdash;or rather without it,&mdash;he did wonderfully well even when he
+did his worst. He did illustrate his own books, and everyone knows how
+incorrect were his delineations. But as illustrations they were
+excellent. How often have I wished that characters of my own creating
+might be sketched as faultily, if with the same appreciation of the
+intended purpose. Let anyone look at the "plates," as they are called in
+<i>Vanity Fair</i>, and compare each with the scenes and the characters
+intended to be displayed, and there see whether the artist,&mdash;if we may
+call him so,&mdash;has not managed to convey in the picture the exact feeling
+which he has described in the text. I have a little sketch of his, in
+which a cannon-ball is supposed to have just carried off the head of an
+aide-de-camp,&mdash;messenger I had perhaps better say, lest I might affront
+military feelings,&mdash;who is kneeling on the field of battle and
+delivering a despatch to Marlborough <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span>on horseback. The graceful ease
+with which the duke receives the message though the messenger's head be
+gone, and the soldier-like precision with which the headless hero
+finishes his last effort of military obedience, may not have been
+portrayed with well-drawn figures, but no finished illustration ever
+told its story better. Dickens has informed us that he first met
+Thackeray in 1835, on which occasion the young artist aspirant, looking
+no doubt after profitable employment, "proposed to become the
+illustrator of my earliest book." It is singular that such should have
+been the first interview between the two great novelists. We may presume
+that the offer was rejected.</p>
+
+<p>In 1832, Thackeray came of age, and inherited his fortune,&mdash;as to which
+various stories have been told. It seems to have amounted to about five
+hundred a year, and to have passed through his hands in a year or two,
+interest and principal. It has been told of him that it was all taken
+away from him at cards, but such was not the truth. Some went in an
+Indian bank in which he invested it. A portion was lost at cards. But
+with some of it,&mdash;the larger part as I think,&mdash;he endeavoured, in
+concert with his stepfather, to float a newspaper, which failed. There
+seem to have been two newspapers in which he was so concerned, <i>The
+National Standard</i> and <i>The Constitutional</i>. On the latter he was
+engaged with his stepfather, and in carrying that on he lost the last of
+his money. <i>The National Standard</i> had been running for some weeks when
+Thackeray joined it, and lost his money in it. It ran only for little
+more than twelve months, and then, the money having gone, the periodical
+came to an end. I know no road to fortune more tempting to a young man,
+or one that with more certainty leads to ruin. Thackeray, who in a way
+more or <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span>less correct, often refers in his writings, if not to the
+incidents, at any rate to the remembrances of his own life, tells us
+much of the story of this newspaper in <i>Lovel the Widower</i>. "They are
+welcome," says the bachelor, "to make merry at my charges in respect of
+a certain bargain which I made on coming to London, and in which, had I
+been Moses Primrose purchasing green spectacles, I could scarcely have
+been more taken in. My Jenkinson was an old college acquaintance, whom I
+was idiot enough to imagine a respectable man. The fellow had a very
+smooth tongue and sleek sanctified exterior. He was rather a popular
+preacher, and used to cry a good deal in the pulpit. He and a queer wine
+merchant and bill discounter, Sherrick by name, had somehow got
+possession of that neat little literary paper, <i>The Museum</i>, which
+perhaps you remember, and this eligible literary property my friend
+Honeyman, with his wheedling tongue, induced me to purchase." Here is
+the history of Thackeray's money, told by himself plainly enough, but
+with no intention on his part of narrating an incident in his own life
+to the public. But the drollery of the circumstances, his own mingled
+folly and young ambition, struck him as being worth narration, and the
+more forcibly as he remembered all the ins and outs of his own
+reflections at the time,&mdash;how he had meant to enchant the world, and
+make his fortune. There was literary capital in it of which he could
+make use after so many years. Then he tells us of this ambition, and of
+the folly of it; and at the same time puts forward the excuses to be
+made for it. "I daresay I gave myself airs as editor of that confounded
+<i>Museum</i>, and proposed to educate the public taste, to diffuse morality
+and sound literature throughout the nation, and to pocket a liberal
+salary in return for my services. I daresay I printed my own sonnets, my
+own <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span>tragedy, my own verses.... I daresay I wrote satirical articles....
+I daresay I made a gaby of myself to the world. Pray, my good friend,
+hast thou never done likewise? If thou hast never been a fool, be sure
+thou wilt never be a wise man." Thackeray was quite aware of his early
+weaknesses, and in the maturity of life knew well that he had not been
+precociously wise. He delighted so to tell his friends, and he delighted
+also to tell the public, not meaning that any but an inner circle should
+know that he was speaking of himself. But the story now is plain to all
+who can read.<a name="FNanchor_1" id="FNanchor_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a></p>
+
+<p>It was thus that he lost his money; and then, not having prospered very
+well with his drawing lessons in Paris or elsewhere, he was fain to take
+up literature as a profession. It is a business which has its
+allurements. It requires no capital, no special education, no training,
+and may be taken up at any time without a moment's delay. If a man can
+command a table, a chair, pen, paper, and ink, he can commence his trade
+as literary man. It is thus that aspirants generally do commence it. A
+man may or may not have another employment to back him, or means of his
+own; or,&mdash;as was the case with Thackeray, when, after his first
+misadventure, he had to look about him for the means of living,&mdash;he may
+have nothing but his intellect and his friends. But the idea comes to
+the man that as he has the pen and ink, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span>and time on his hand, why
+should he not write and make money?</p>
+
+<p>It is an idea that comes to very many men and women, old as well as
+young,&mdash;to many thousands who at last are crushed by it, of whom the
+world knows nothing. A man can make the attempt though he has not a coat
+fit to go out into the street with; or a woman, though she be almost in
+rags. There is no apprenticeship wanted. Indeed there is no room for
+such apprenticeship. It is an art which no one teaches; there is no
+professor who, in a dozen lessons, even pretends to show the aspirant
+how to write a book or an article. If you would be a watchmaker, you
+must learn; or a lawyer, a cook, or even a housemaid. Before you can
+clean a horse you must go into the stable, and begin at the beginning.
+Even the cab-driving tiro must sit for awhile on the box, and learn
+something of the streets, before he can ply for a fare. But the literary
+beginner rushes at once at the top rung of his ladder;&mdash;as though a
+youth, having made up his mind to be a clergyman, should demand, without
+preliminary steps, to be appointed Bishop of London. That he should be
+able to read and write is presumed, and that only. So much may be
+presumed of everyone, and nothing more is wanted.</p>
+
+<p>In truth nothing more is wanted,&mdash;except those inner lights as to which,
+so many men live and die without having learned whether they possess
+them or not. Practice, industry, study of literature, cultivation of
+taste, and the rest, will of course lend their aid, will probably be
+necessary before high excellence is attained. But the instances are not
+to seek,&mdash;are at the fingers of us all,&mdash;in which the first uninstructed
+effort has succeeded. A boy, almost, or perhaps an old woman, has sat
+down <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span>and the book has come, and the world has read it, and the
+booksellers have been civil and have written their cheques. When all
+trades, all professions, all seats at offices, all employments at which
+a crust can be earned, are so crowded that a young man knows not where
+to look for the means of livelihood, is there not an attraction in this
+which to the self-confident must be almost invincible? The booksellers
+are courteous and write their cheques, but that is not half the whole?
+<i>Monstrari digito!</i> That is obtained. The happy aspirant is written of
+in newspapers, or, perhaps, better still, he writes of others. When the
+barrister of forty-five has hardly got a name beyond Chancery Lane, this
+glorious young scribe, with the first down on his lips, has printed his
+novel and been talked about.</p>
+
+<p>The temptation is irresistible, and thousands fall into it. How is a man
+to know that he is not the lucky one or the gifted one? There is the
+table and there the pen and ink. Among the unfortunate he who fails
+altogether and from the first start is not the most unfortunate. A short
+period of life is wasted, and a sharp pang is endured. Then the
+disappointed one is relegated to the condition of life which he would
+otherwise have filled a little earlier. He has been wounded, but not
+killed, or even maimed. But he who has a little success, who succeeds in
+earning a few halcyon, but, ah! so dangerous guineas, is drawn into a
+trade from which he will hardly escape till he be driven from it, if he
+come out alive, by sheer hunger. He hangs on till the guineas become
+crowns and shillings,&mdash;till some sad record of his life, made when he
+applies for charity, declares that he has worked hard for the last year
+or two and has earned less than a policeman in the streets or a porter
+at a railway. It is to that that he is <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span>brought by applying himself to a
+business which requires only a table and chair, with pen, ink, and
+paper! It is to that which he is brought by venturing to believe that he
+has been gifted with powers of imagination, creation, and expression.</p>
+
+<p>The young man who makes the attempt knows that he must run the chance.
+He is well aware that nine must fail where one will make his running
+good. So much as that does reach his ears, and recommends itself to his
+common sense. But why should it not be he as well as another? There is
+always some lucky one winning the prize. And this prize when it has been
+won is so well worth the winning! He can endure starvation,&mdash;so he tells
+himself,&mdash;as well as another. He will try. But yet he knows that he has
+but one chance out of ten in his favour, and it is only in his happier
+moments that he flatters himself that that remains to him. Then there
+falls upon him,&mdash;in the midst of that labour which for its success
+especially requires that a man's heart shall be light, and that he be
+always at his best,&mdash;doubt and despair. If there be no chance, of what
+use is his labour?</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Were it not better done as others use,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,</span><br />
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and amuse himself after that fashion? Thus the very industry which alone
+could give him a chance is discarded. It is so that the young man feels
+who, with some slight belief in himself and with many doubts, sits down
+to commence the literary labour by which he hopes to live.</p>
+
+<p>So it was, no doubt, with Thackeray. Such were his hopes and his
+fears;&mdash;with a resolution of which we can well understand that it should
+have waned at times, of earning his bread, if he did not make his
+fortune, in the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span>world of literature. One has not to look far for
+evidence of the condition I have described,&mdash;that it was so, Amaryllis
+and all. How or when he made his very first attempt in London, I have
+not learned; but he had not probably spent his money without forming
+"press" acquaintances, and had thus found an aperture for the thin end
+of the wedge. He wrote for <i>The Constitutional</i>, of which he was part
+proprietor, beginning his work for that paper as a correspondent from
+Paris. For a while he was connected with <i>The Times</i> newspaper, though
+his work there did not I think amount to much. His first regular
+employment was on <i>Fraser's Magazine</i>, when Mr. Fraser's shop was in
+Regent Street, when Oliver Yorke was the presumed editor, and among
+contributors, Carlyle was one of the most notable. I imagine that the
+battle of life was difficult enough with him even after he had become
+one of the leading props of that magazine. All that he wrote was not
+taken, and all that was taken was not approved. In 1837-38, the <i>History
+of Samuel Titmarsh and the Great Hoggarty Diamond</i> appeared in the
+magazine. The <i>Great Hoggarty Diamond</i> is now known to all readers of
+Thackeray's works. It is not my purpose to speak specially of it here,
+except to assert that it has been thought to be a great success. When it
+was being brought out, the author told a friend of his,&mdash;and of
+mine,&mdash;that it was not much thought of at Fraser's, and that he had been
+called upon to shorten it. That is an incident disagreeable in its
+nature to any literary gentleman, and likely to be specially so when he
+knows that his provision of bread, certainly of improved bread and
+butter, is at stake. The man who thus darkens his literary brow with the
+frown of disapproval, has at his disposal all the loaves and all the
+fishes that are going. If the writer be <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span>successful, there will come a
+time when he will be above such frowns; but, when that opinion went
+forth, Thackeray had not yet made his footing good, and the notice to
+him respecting it must have been very bitter. It was in writing this
+<i>Hoggarty Diamond</i> that Thackeray first invented the name of Michael
+Angelo Titmarsh. Samuel Titmarsh was the writer, whereas Michael Angelo
+was an intending illustrator. Thackeray's nose had been broken in a
+school fight, while he was quite a little boy, by another little boy, at
+the Charter House; and there was probably some association intended to
+be jocose with the name of the great artist, whose nose was broken by
+his fellow-student Torrigiano, and who, as it happened, died exactly
+three centuries before Thackeray.</p>
+
+<p>I can understand all the disquietude of his heart when that warning, as
+to the too great length of his story, was given to him. He was not a man
+capable of feeling at any time quite assured in his position, and when
+that occurred he was very far from assurance. I think that at no time
+did he doubt the sufficiency of his own mental qualification for the
+work he had taken in hand; but he doubted all else. He doubted the
+appreciation of the world; he doubted his fitness for turning his
+intellect to valuable account; he doubted his physical
+capacity,&mdash;dreading his own lack of industry; he doubted his luck; he
+doubted the continual absence of some of those misfortunes on which the
+works of literary men are shipwrecked. Though he was aware of his own
+power, he always, to the last, was afraid that his own deficiencies
+should be too strong against him. It was his nature to be idle,&mdash;to put
+off his work,&mdash;and then to be angry with himself for putting it off.
+Ginger was hot in the mouth with him, and all the allurements of the
+world were strong <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span>upon him. To find on Monday morning an excuse why he
+should not on Monday do Monday's work was, at the time, an inexpressible
+relief to him, but had become deep regret,&mdash;almost a remorse,&mdash;before
+the Monday was over. To such a one it was not given to believe in
+himself with that sturdy rock-bound foundation which we see to have
+belonged to some men from the earliest struggles of their career. To
+him, then, must have come an inexpressible pang when he was told that
+his story must be curtailed.</p>
+
+<p>Who else would have told such a story of himself to the first
+acquaintance he chanced to meet? Of Thackeray it might be predicted that
+he certainly would do so. No little wound of the kind ever came to him
+but what he disclosed it at once. "They have only bought so many of my
+new book." "Have you seen the abuse of my last number?" "What am I to
+turn my hand to? They are getting tired of my novels." "They don't read
+it," he said to me of <i>Esmond</i>. "So you don't mean to publish my work?"
+he said once to a publisher in an open company. Other men keep their
+little troubles to themselves. I have heard even of authors who have
+declared how all the publishers were running after their books; I have
+heard some discourse freely of their fourth and fifth editions; I have
+known an author to boast of his thousands sold in this country, and his
+tens of thousands in America; but I never heard anyone else declare that
+no one would read his <i>chef-d'&oelig;uvre</i>, and that the world was becoming
+tired of him. It was he who said, when he was fifty, that a man past
+fifty should never write a novel.</p>
+
+<p>And yet, as I have said, he was from an early age fully conscious of his
+own ability. That he was so is to be <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span>seen in the handling of many of
+his early works,&mdash;in <i>Barry Lyndon</i>, for instance, and the <i>Memoirs of
+Mr. C. James Yellowplush</i>. The sound is too certain for doubt of that
+kind. But he had not then, nor did he ever achieve that assurance of
+public favour which makes a man confident that his work will be
+successful. During the years of which we are now speaking Thackeray was
+a literary Bohemian in this sense,&mdash;that he never regarded his own
+status as certain. While performing much of the best of his life's work
+he was not sure of his market, not certain of his readers, his
+publishers, or his price; nor was he certain of himself.</p>
+
+<p>It is impossible not to form some contrast between him and Dickens as to
+this period of his life,&mdash;a comparison not as to their literary merits,
+but literary position. Dickens was one year his junior in age, and at
+this time, viz. 1837-38, had reached almost the zenith of his
+reputation. <i>Pickwick</i> had been published, and <i>Oliver Twist</i> and
+<i>Nicholas Nickleby</i> were being published. All the world was talking
+about the young author who was assuming his position with a confidence
+in his own powers which was fully justified both by his present and
+future success. It was manifest that he could make, not only his own
+fortune, but that of his publishers, and that he was a literary hero
+bound to be worshipped by all literary grades of men, down to the
+"devils" of the printing-office. At that time, Thackeray, the older man,
+was still doubting, still hesitating, still struggling. Everyone then
+had accepted the name of Charles Dickens. That of William Thackeray was
+hardly known beyond the circle of those who are careful to make
+themselves acquainted with such matters. It was then the custom, more
+generally than it is at present, to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span>maintain anonymous writing in
+magazines. Now, if anything of special merit be brought out, the name of
+the author, if not published, is known. It was much less so at the
+period in question; and as the world of readers began to be acquainted
+with Jeames Yellowplush, Catherine Hayes, and other heroes and heroines,
+the names of the author had to be inquired for. I remember myself, when
+I was already well acquainted with the immortal Jeames, asking who was
+the writer. The works of Charles Dickens were at that time as well known
+to be his, and as widely read in England, as those almost of
+Shakespeare.</p>
+
+<p>It will be said of course that this came from the earlier popularity of
+Dickens. That is of course; but why should it have been so? They had
+begun to make their effort much at the same time; and if there was any
+advantage in point of position as they commenced, it was with Thackeray.
+It might be said that the genius of the one was brighter than that of
+the other, or, at any rate, that it was more precocious. But
+after-judgment has, I think, not declared either of the suggestions to
+be true. I will make no comparison between two such rivals, who were so
+distinctly different from each, and each of whom, within so very short a
+period, has come to stand on a pedestal so high,&mdash;the two exalted to so
+equal a vocation. And if Dickens showed the best of his power early in
+life, so did Thackeray the best of his intellect. In no display of
+mental force did he rise above <i>Barry Lyndon</i>. I hardly know how the
+teller of a narrative shall hope to mount in simply intellectual faculty
+above the effort there made. In what then was the difference? Why was
+Dickens already a great man when Thackeray was still a literary
+Bohemian?</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span></p><p>The answer is to be found not in the extent or in the nature of the
+genius of either man, but in the condition of mind,&mdash;which indeed may be
+read plainly in their works by those who have eyes to see. The one was
+steadfast, industrious, full of purpose, never doubting of himself,
+always putting his best foot foremost and standing firmly on it when he
+got it there; with no inward trepidation, with no moments in which he
+was half inclined to think that this race was not for his winning, this
+goal not to be reached by his struggles. The sympathy of friends was
+good to him, but he could have done without it. The good opinion which
+he had of himself was never shaken by adverse criticism; and the
+criticism on the other side, by which it was exalted, came from the
+enumeration of the number of copies sold. He was a firm reliant man,
+very little prone to change, who, when he had discovered the nature of
+his own talent, knew how to do the very best with it.</p>
+
+<p>It may almost be said that Thackeray was the very opposite of this.
+Unsteadfast, idle, changeable of purpose, aware of his own intellect but
+not trusting it, no man ever failed more generally than he to put his
+best foot foremost. Full as his works are of pathos, full of humour,
+full of love and charity, tending, as they always do, to truth and
+honour and manly worth and womanly modesty, excelling, as they seem to
+me to do, most other written precepts that I know, they always seem to
+lack something that might have been there. There is a touch of vagueness
+which indicates that his pen was not firm while he was using it. He
+seems to me to have been dreaming ever of some high flight, and then to
+have told himself, with a half-broken heart, that it was beyond his
+power to soar up into those bright regions. I can fancy <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span>as the sheets
+went from him every day he told himself, in regard to every sheet, that
+it was a failure. Dickens was quite sure of his sheets.</p>
+
+<p>"I have got to make it shorter!" Then he would put his hands in his
+pockets, and stretch himself, and straighten the lines of his face, over
+which a smile would come, as though this intimation from his editor were
+the best joke in the world; and he would walk away, with his heart
+bleeding, and every nerve in an agony. There are none of us who want to
+have much of his work shortened now.</p>
+
+<p>In 1837 Thackeray married Isabella, daughter of Colonel Matthew Shawe,
+and from this union there came three daughters, Anne, Jane, and Harriet.
+The name of the eldest, now Mrs. Richmond Ritchie, who has followed so
+closely in her father's steps, is a household word to the world of novel
+readers; the second died as a child; the younger lived to marry Leslie
+Stephen, who is too well known for me to say more than that he wrote,
+the other day, the little volume on Dr. Johnson in this series; but she,
+too, has now followed her father. Of Thackeray's married life what need
+be said shall be contained in a very few words. It was grievously
+unhappy; but the misery of it came from God, and was in no wise due to
+human fault. She became ill, and her mind failed her. There was a period
+during which he would not believe that her illness was more than
+illness, and then he clung to her and waited on her with an assiduity of
+affection which only made his task the more painful to him. At last it
+became evident that she should live in the companionship of some one
+with whom her life might be altogether quiet, and she has since been
+domiciled with a lady with whom she has been happy. Thus she was, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span>after
+but a few years of married life, taken away from him, and he became as
+it were a widower till the end of his days.</p>
+
+<p>At this period, and indeed for some years after his marriage, his chief
+literary dependence was on <i>Fraser's Magazine</i>. He wrote also at this
+time in the <i>New Monthly Magazine</i>. In 1840 he brought out his <i>Paris
+Sketch Book</i>, as to which he tells us by a notice printed with the first
+edition, that half of the sketches had already been published in various
+periodicals. Here he used the name Michael Angelo Titmarsh, as he did
+also with the <i>Journey from Cornhill to Cairo</i>. Dickens had called
+himself Boz, and clung to the name with persistency as long as the
+public would permit it. Thackeray's affection for assumed names was more
+intermittent, though I doubt whether he used his own name altogether
+till it appeared on the title-page of <i>Vanity Fair</i>. About this time
+began his connection with <i>Punch</i>, in which much of his best work
+appeared. Looking back at our old friend as he used to come out from
+week to week at this time, we can hardly boast that we used to recognise
+how good the literary pabulum was that was then given for our
+consumption. We have to admit that the ordinary reader, as the ordinary
+picture-seer, requires to be guided by a name. We are moved to absolute
+admiration by a Raphael or a Hobbema, but hardly till we have learned
+the name of the painter, or, at any rate, the manner of his painting. I
+am not sure that all lovers of poetry would recognise a <i>Lycidas</i> coming
+from some hitherto unknown Milton. Gradually the good picture or the
+fine poem makes its way into the minds of a slowly discerning public.
+<i>Punch</i>, no doubt, became very popular, owing, perhaps, more to Leech,
+its artist, than to any other single person. Gradually the world <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span>of
+readers began to know that there was a speciality of humour to be found
+in its pages,&mdash;fun and sense, satire and good humour, compressed
+together in small literary morsels as the nature of its columns
+required. Gradually the name of Thackeray as one of the band of brethren
+was buzzed about, and gradually became known as that of the chief of the
+literary brothers. But during the years in which he did much for
+<i>Punch</i>, say from 1843 to 1853, he was still struggling to make good his
+footing in literature. They knew him well in the <i>Punch</i> office, and no
+doubt the amount and regularity of the cheques from Messrs. Bradbury and
+Evans, the then and still owners of that happy periodical, made him
+aware that he had found for himself a satisfactory career. In "a good
+day for himself, the journal, and the world, Thackeray found <i>Punch</i>."
+This was said by his old friend Shirley Brooks, who himself lived to be
+editor of the paper and died in harness, and was said most truly.
+<i>Punch</i> was more congenial to him, and no doubt more generous, than
+<i>Fraser</i>. There was still something of the literary Bohemian about him,
+but not as it had been before. He was still unfixed, looking out for
+some higher career, not altogether satisfied to be no more than one of
+an anonymous band of brothers, even though the brothers were the
+brothers of <i>Punch</i>. We can only imagine what were his thoughts as to
+himself and that other man, who was then known as the great novelist of
+the day,&mdash;of a rivalry with whom he was certainly conscious. <i>Punch</i> was
+very much to him, but was not quite enough. That must have been very
+clear to himself as he meditated the beginning of <i>Vanity Fair</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Of the contributions to the periodical, the best known now are <i>The Snob
+Papers</i> and <i>The Ballads of Policeman X</i>. But they were very numerous.
+Of Thackeray <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span>as a poet, or maker of verses, I will say a few words in a
+chapter which will be devoted to his own so-called ballads. Here it
+seems only necessary to remark that there was not apparently any time in
+his career at which he began to think seriously of appearing before the
+public as a poet. Such was the intention early in their career with many
+of our best known prose writers, with Milton, and Goldsmith, and Samuel
+Johnson, with Scott, Macaulay, and more lately with Matthew Arnold;
+writers of verse and prose who ultimately prevailed some in one
+direction, and others in the other. Milton and Goldsmith have been known
+best as poets, Johnson and Macaulay as writers of prose. But with all of
+them there has been a distinct effort in each art. Thackeray seems to
+have tumbled into versification by accident; writing it as amateurs do,
+a little now and again for his own delectation, and to catch the taste
+of partial friends. The reader feels that Thackeray would not have begun
+to print his verses unless the opportunity of doing so had been brought
+in his way by his doings in prose. And yet he had begun to write verses
+when he was very young;&mdash;at Cambridge, as we have seen, when he
+contributed more to the fame of Timbuctoo than I think even Tennyson has
+done,&mdash;and in his early years at Paris. Here again, though he must have
+felt the strength of his own mingled humour and pathos, he always struck
+with an uncertain note till he had gathered strength and confidence by
+popularity. Good as they generally were, his verses were accidents,
+written not as a writer writes who claims to be a poet, but as though
+they might have been the relaxation of a doctor or a barrister.</p>
+
+<p>And so they were. When Thackeray first settled himself in London, to
+make his living among the magazines and newspapers, I do not imagine
+that he counted much <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span>on his poetic powers. He describes it all in his
+own dialogue between the pen and the album.</p>
+
+<p>"Since he," says the pen, speaking of its master, Thackeray:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Since he my faithful service did engage,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">To follow him through his queer pilgrimage</span><br />
+<span class="i0">I've drawn and written many a line and page.</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Caricatures I scribbled have, and rhymes,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And dinner-cards, and picture pantomimes,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And many little children's books at times.</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">I've writ the foolish fancy of his brain;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">The aimless jest that, striking, hath caused pain;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">The idle word that he'd wish back again.</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">I've helped him to pen many a line for bread.</span><br />
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It was thus he thought of his work. There had been caricatures, and
+rhymes, and many little children's books; and then the lines written for
+his bread, which, except that they were written for <i>Punch</i>, were hardly
+undertaken with a more serious purpose. In all of it there was ample
+seriousness, had he known it himself. What a tale of the restlessness,
+of the ambition, of the glory, of the misfortunes of a great country is
+given in the ballads of Peter the French drummer! Of that brain so full
+of fancy the pen had lightly written all the fancies. He did not know it
+when he was doing so, but with that word, fancy, he has described
+exactly the gift with which his brain was specially endowed. If a writer
+be accurate, or sonorous, or witty, or simply pathetic, he may, I think,
+gauge his own powers. He may do so after experience with something of
+certainty. But fancy is a gift which the owner of it cannot measure, and
+the power of which, when he is using it, he cannot himself understand.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span>There is the same lambent flame flickering over everything he did, even
+the dinner-cards and the picture pantomimes. He did not in the least
+know what he put into those things. So it was with his verses. It was
+only by degrees, when he was told of it by others, that he found that
+they too were of infinite value to him in his profession.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Irish Sketch Book</i> came out in 1843, in which he used, but only
+half used, the name of Michael Angelo Titmarsh. He dedicates it to
+Charles Lever, and in signing the dedication gave his own name. "Laying
+aside," he says, "for a moment the travelling title of Mr. Titmarsh, let
+me acknowledge these favours in my own name, and subscribe myself, &amp;c.
+&amp;c., W. M. Thackeray." So he gradually fell into the declaration of his
+own identity. In 1844 he made his journey to Turkey and Egypt,&mdash;<i>From
+Cornhill to Grand Cairo</i>, as he called it, still using the old nom de
+plume, but again signing the dedication with his own name. It was now
+made to the captain of the vessel in which he encountered that famous
+white squall, in describing which he has shown the wonderful power he
+had over words.</p>
+
+<p>In 1846 was commenced, in numbers, the novel which first made his name
+well known to the world. This was <i>Vanity Fair</i>, a work to which it is
+evident that he devoted all his mind. Up to this time his writings had
+consisted of short contributions, chiefly of sketches, each intended to
+stand by itself in the periodical to which it was sent. <i>Barry Lyndon</i>
+had hitherto been the longest; but that and <i>Catherine Hayes</i>, and the
+<i>Hoggarty Diamond</i>, though stories continued through various numbers,
+had not as yet reached the dignity,&mdash;or at any rate the length,&mdash;of a
+three-volume novel. But of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span>late novels had grown to be much longer than
+those of the old well-known measure. Dickens had stretched his to nearly
+double the length, and had published them in twenty numbers. The attempt
+had caught the public taste and had been pre-eminently successful. The
+nature of the tale as originated by him was altogether unlike that to
+which the readers of modern novels had been used. No plot, with an
+arranged catastrophe or <i>d&eacute;no&ucirc;ment</i>, was necessary. Some untying of the
+various knots of the narrative no doubt were expedient, but these were
+of the simplest kind, done with the view of giving an end to that which
+might otherwise be endless. The adventures of a <i>Pickwick</i> or a
+<i>Nickleby</i> required very little of a plot, and this mode of telling a
+story, which might be continued on through any number of pages, as long
+as the characters were interesting, met with approval. Thackeray, who
+had never depended much on his plot in the shorter tales which he had
+hitherto told, determined to adopt the same form in his first great
+work, but with these changes;&mdash;That as the central character with
+Dickens had always been made beautiful with unnatural virtue,&mdash;for who
+was ever so unselfish as <i>Pickwick</i>, so manly and modest as <i>Nicholas</i>,
+or so good a boy as <i>Oliver</i>?&mdash;so should his centre of interest be in
+every respect abnormally bad.</p>
+
+<p>As to Thackeray's reason for this,&mdash;or rather as to that condition of
+mind which brought about this result,&mdash;I will say something in a final
+chapter, in which I will endeavour to describe the nature and effect of
+his work generally. Here it will be necessary only to declare that, such
+was the choice he now made of a subject in his first attempt to rise out
+of a world of small literary contributions, into the more assured
+position of the author of a work of importance. We are aware that the
+monthly nurses of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span>periodical literature did not at first smile on the
+effort. The proprietors of magazines did not see their way to undertake
+<i>Vanity Fair</i>, and the publishers are said to have generally looked shy
+upon it. At last it was brought out in numbers,&mdash;twenty-four numbers
+instead of twenty, as with those by Dickens,&mdash;under the guardian hands
+of Messrs. Bradbury and Evans. This was completed in 1848, and then it
+was that, at the age of thirty-seven, Thackeray first achieved for
+himself a name and reputation through the country. Before this he had
+been known at <i>Fraser's</i> and at the <i>Punch</i> office. He was known at the
+Garrick Club, and had become individually popular among literary men in
+London. He had made many fast friends, and had been, as it were, found
+out by persons of distinction. But Jones, and Smith, and Robinson, in
+Liverpool, Manchester, and Birmingham, did not know him as they knew
+Dickens, Carlyle, Tennyson, and Macaulay,&mdash;not as they knew Landseer, or
+Stansfeld, or Turner; not as they knew Macready, Charles Kean, or Miss
+Faucit. In that year, 1848, his name became common in the memoirs of the
+time. On the 5th of June I find him dining with Macready, to meet Sir J.
+Wilson, Panizzi, Landseer, and others. A few days afterwards Macready
+dined with him. "Dined with Thackeray, met the Gordons, Kenyons,
+Procters, Reeve, Villiers, Evans, Stansfeld, and saw Mrs. Sartoris and
+S. C. Dance, White, H. Goldsmid, in the evening." Again; "Dined with
+Forster, having called and taken up Brookfield, met Rintoul, Kenyon,
+Procter, Kinglake, Alfred Tennyson, Thackeray." Macready was very
+accurate in jotting down the names of those he entertained, who
+entertained him, or were entertained with him. <i>Vanity Fair</i> was coming
+out, and Thackeray had become one of the personages in literary
+society. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span>In the January number of 1848 the <i>Edinburgh Review</i> had an
+article on Thackeray's works generally as they were then known. It
+purports to combine the <i>Irish Sketch Book</i>, the <i>Journey from Cornhill
+to Grand Cairo</i>, and <i>Vanity Fair</i> as far as it had then gone; but it
+does in truth deal chiefly with the literary merits of the latter. I
+will quote a passage from the article, as proving in regard to
+Thackeray's work an opinion which was well founded, and as telling the
+story of his life as far as it was then known;</p>
+
+<p>"Full many a valuable truth," says the reviewer, "has been sent
+undulating through the air by men who have lived and died unknown. At
+this moment the rising generation are supplied with the best of their
+mental aliment by writers whose names are a dead letter to the mass; and
+among the most remarkable of these is Michael Angelo Titmarsh, alias
+William Makepeace Thackeray, author of the <i>Irish Sketch Book</i>, of <i>A
+Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo</i>, of <i>Jeames's Diary</i>, of <i>The Snob
+Papers</i> in <i>Punch</i>, of <i>Vanity Fair</i>, etc. etc.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Thackeray is now about thirty-seven years of age, of a good family,
+and originally intended for the bar. He kept seven or eight terms at
+Cambridge, but left the university without taking a degree, with the
+view of becoming an artist; and we well remember, ten or twelve years
+ago, finding him day after day engaged in copying pictures in the
+Louvre, in order to qualify himself for his intended profession. It may
+be doubted, however, whether any degree of assiduity would have enabled
+him to excel in the money-making branches, for his talent was altogether
+of the Hogarth kind, and was principally remarkable in the pen-and-ink
+sketches of character and situation, which he dashed off for the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span>amusement of his friends. At the end of two or three years of desultory
+application he gave up the notion of becoming a painter, and took to
+literature. He set up and edited with marked ability a weekly journal,
+on the plan of <i>The Athen&aelig;um</i> and <i>Literary Gazette</i>, but was unable to
+compete successfully with such long-established rivals. He then became a
+regular man of letters,&mdash;that is, he wrote for respectable magazines and
+newspapers, until the attention attracted to his contributions in
+<i>Fraser's Magazine</i> and <i>Punch</i> emboldened him to start on his own
+account, and risk an independent publication." Then follows a eulogistic
+and, as I think, a correct criticism on the book as far as it had gone.
+There are a few remarks perhaps a little less eulogistic as to some of
+his minor writings, <i>The Snob Papers</i> in particular; and at the end
+there is a statement with which I think we shall all now agree; "A
+writer with such a pen and pencil as Mr. Thackeray's is an acquisition
+of real and high value in our literature."</p>
+
+<p>The reviewer has done his work in a tone friendly to the author, whom he
+knew,<a name="FNanchor_2" id="FNanchor_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a>&mdash;as indeed it may be said that this little book will be written
+with the same feeling,&mdash;but the public has already recognised the truth
+of the review generally. There can be no doubt that Thackeray, though he
+had hitherto been but a contributor of anonymous pieces to
+periodicals,&mdash;to what is generally considered as merely the ephemeral
+literature of the month,&mdash;had already become effective on the tastes and
+morals of readers. Affectation of finery; the vulgarity which apes good
+breeding but never approaches it; <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span>dishonest gambling, whether with dice
+or with railway shares; and that low taste for literary excitement which
+is gratified by mysterious murders and Old Bailey executions had already
+received condign punishment from Yellowplush, Titmarsh, Fitzboodle, and
+Ikey Solomon. Under all those names Thackeray had plied his trade as a
+satirist. Though the truths, as the reviewer said, had been merely sent
+undulating through the air, they had already become effective.</p>
+
+<p>Thackeray had now become a personage,&mdash;one of the recognised stars of
+the literary heaven of the day. It was an honour to know him; and we may
+well believe that the givers of dinners were proud to have him among
+their guests. He had opened his oyster,&mdash;with his pen, an achievement
+which he cannot be said to have accomplished until <i>Vanity Fair</i> had
+come out. In inquiring about him from those who survive him, and knew
+him well in those days, I always hear the same account. "If I could only
+tell you the impromptu lines which fell from him!" "If I had only kept
+the drawings from his pen, which used to be chucked about as though they
+were worth nothing!" "If I could only remember the drolleries!" Had they
+been kept, there might now be many volumes of these sketches, as to
+which the reviewer says that their talent was "altogether of the Hogarth
+kind." Could there be any kind more valuable? Like Hogarth, he could
+always make his picture tell his story; though, unlike Hogarth, he had
+not learned to draw. I have had sent to me for my inspection an album of
+drawings and letters, which, in the course of twenty years, from 1829 to
+1849, were despatched from Thackeray to his old friend Edward
+Fitzgerald. Looking at the wit displayed in the drawings, I feel
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span>inclined to say that had he persisted he would have been a second
+Hogarth. There is a series of ballet scenes, in which "Flore et Zephyr"
+are the two chief performers, which for expression and drollery exceed
+anything that I know of the kind. The set in this book are lithographs,
+which were published, but I do not remember to have seen them elsewhere.
+There are still among us many who knew him well;&mdash;Edward Fitzgerald and
+George Venables, James Spedding and Kinglake, Mrs. Procter,&mdash;the widow
+of Barry Cornwall, who loved him well,&mdash;and Monckton Milnes, as he used
+to be, whose touching lines written just after Thackeray's death will
+close this volume, Frederick Pollock and Frank Fladgate, John Blackwood
+and William Russell,&mdash;and they all tell the same story. Though he so
+rarely talked, as good talkers do, and was averse to sit down to work,
+there were always falling from his mouth and pen those little pearls.
+Among the friends who had been kindest and dearest to him in the days of
+his strugglings he once mentioned three to me,&mdash;Matthew Higgins, or
+Jacob Omnium as he was more popularly called; William Stirling, who
+became Sir William Maxwell; and Russell Sturgis, who is now the senior
+partner in the great house of Barings. Alas, only the last of these
+three is left among us! Thackeray was a man of no great power of
+conversation. I doubt whether he ever shone in what is called general
+society. He was not a man to be valuable at a dinner-table as a good
+talker. It was when there were but two or three together that he was
+happy himself and made others happy; and then it would rather be from
+some special piece of drollery that the joy of the moment would come,
+than from the discussion of ordinary topics. After so many years his old
+friends remember the fag-ends of the doggerel lines which used to drop
+from him without any <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span>effort on all occasions of jollity. And though he
+could be very sad,&mdash;laden with melancholy, as I think must have been the
+case with him always,&mdash;the feeling of fun would quickly come to him, and
+the queer rhymes would be poured out as plentifully as the sketches were
+made. Here is a contribution which I find hanging in the memory of an
+old friend, the serious nature of whose literary labours would certainly
+have driven such lines from his mind, had they not at the time caught
+fast hold of him:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">In the romantic little town of Highbury</span><br />
+<span class="i0">My father kept a circulatin' library;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">He followed in his youth that man immortal, who</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Conquered the Frenchmen on the plains of Waterloo.</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Mamma was an inhabitant of Drogheda,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Very good she was to darn and to embroider.</span><br />
+<span class="i0">In the famous island of Jamaica,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">For thirty years I've been a sugar-baker;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And here I sit, the Muses' 'appy vot'ry,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">A cultivatin' every kind of po'try,</span><br />
+</div></div>
+
+<p>There may, perhaps, have been a mistake in a line, but the poem has been
+handed down with fair correctness over a period of forty years. He was
+always versifying. He once owed me five pounds seventeen shillings and
+sixpence, his share of a dinner bill at Richmond. He sent me a cheque
+for the amount in rhyme, giving the proper financial document on the
+second half of a sheet of note paper. I gave the poem away as an
+autograph, and now forget the lines. This was all trifling, the reader
+will say. No doubt. Thackeray was always trifling, and yet always
+serious. In attempting to understand his character it is necessary for
+you to bear within your own mind the idea that he was always, within his
+own bosom, encountering melancholy with buffoonery, and meanness with
+satire. The very spirit of burlesque dwelt within him,&mdash;a spirit which
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span>does not see the grand the less because of the travesties which it is
+always engendering.</p>
+
+<p>In his youthful,&mdash;all but boyish,&mdash;days in London, he delighted to "put
+himself up" at the Bedford, in Covent Garden. Then in his early married
+days he lived in Albion Street, and from thence went to Great Coram
+Street, till his household there was broken up by his wife's illness. He
+afterwards took lodgings in St. James's Chambers, and then a house in
+Young Street, Kensington. Here he lived from 1847, when he was achieving
+his great triumph with <i>Vanity Fair</i>, down to 1853, when he removed to a
+house which he bought in Onslow Square. In Young Street there had come
+to lodge opposite to him an Irish gentleman, who, on the part of his
+injured country, felt very angry with Thackeray. <i>The Irish Sketch Book</i>
+had not been complimentary, nor were the descriptions which Thackeray
+had given generally of Irishmen; and there was extant an absurd idea
+that in his abominable heroine Catherine Hayes he had alluded to Miss
+Catherine Hayes the Irish singer. Word was taken to Thackeray that this
+Irishman intended to come across the street and avenge his country on
+the calumniator's person. Thackeray immediately called upon the
+gentleman, and it is said that the visit was pleasant to both parties.
+There certainly was no blood shed.</p>
+
+<p>He had now succeeded,&mdash;in 1848,&mdash;in making for himself a standing as a
+man of letters, and an income. What was the extent of his income I have
+no means of saying; nor is it a subject on which, as I think, inquiry
+should be made. But he was not satisfied with his position. He felt it
+to be precarious, and he was always thinking of what he owed to his two
+girls. That <i>arbitrium popularis aur&aelig;</i> on which he depended for his
+daily bread was not <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span>regarded by him with the confidence which it
+deserved. He did not probably know how firm was the hold he had obtained
+of the public ear. At any rate he was anxious, and endeavoured to secure
+for himself a permanent income in the public service. He had become by
+this time acquainted, probably intimate, with the Marquis of
+Clanricarde, who was then Postmaster-General. In 1848 there fell a
+vacancy in the situation of Assistant-Secretary at the General Post
+Office, and Lord Clanricarde either offered it to him or promised to
+give it to him. The Postmaster-General had the disposal of the
+place,&mdash;but was not altogether free from control in the matter. When he
+made known his purpose at the Post Office, he was met by an assurance
+from the officer next under him that the thing could not be done. The
+services were wanted of a man who had had experience in the Post Office;
+and, moreover, it was necessary that the feelings of other gentlemen
+should be consulted. Men who have been serving in an office many years
+do not like to see even a man of genius put over their heads. In fact,
+the office would have been up in arms at such an injustice. Lord
+Clanricarde, who in a matter of patronage was not scrupulous, was still
+a good-natured man and amenable. He attempted to befriend his friend
+till he found that it was impossible, and then, with the best grace in
+the world, accepted the official nominee that was offered to him.</p>
+
+<p>It may be said that had Thackeray succeeded in that attempt he would
+surely have ruined himself. No man can be fit for the management and
+performance of special work who has learned nothing of it before his
+thirty-seventh year; and no man could have been less so than Thackeray.
+There are men who, though they be not fit, are disposed to learn their
+lesson and make themselves as <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span>fit as possible. Such cannot be said to
+have been the case with this man. For the special duties which he would
+have been called upon to perform, consisting to a great extent of the
+maintenance of discipline over a large body of men, training is
+required, and the service would have suffered for awhile under any
+untried elderly tiro. Another man might have put himself into harness.
+Thackeray never would have done so. The details of his work after the
+first month would have been inexpressibly wearisome to him. To have gone
+into the city, and to have remained there every day from eleven till
+five, would have been all but impossible to him. He would not have done
+it. And then he would have been tormented by the feeling that he was
+taking the pay and not doing the work. There is a belief current, not
+confined to a few, that a man may be a Government Secretary with a
+generous salary, and have nothing to do. The idea is something that
+remains to us from the old days of sinecures. If there be now remaining
+places so pleasant, or gentlemen so happy, I do not know them.
+Thackeray's notion of his future duties was probably very vague. He
+would have repudiated the notion that he was looking for a sinecure, but
+no doubt considered that the duties would be easy and light. It is not
+too much to assert, that he who could drop his pearls as I have said
+above, throwing them wide cast without an effort, would have found his
+work as Assistant-Secretary at the General Post Office to be altogether
+too much for him. And then it was no doubt his intention to join
+literature with the Civil Service. He had been taught to regard the
+Civil Service as easy, and had counted upon himself as able to add it to
+his novels, and his work with his <i>Punch</i> brethren, and to his
+contributions generally to the literature of the day. He might have done
+so, could <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span>he have risen at five, and have sat at his private desk for
+three hours before he began his official routine at the public one. A
+capability for grinding, an aptitude for continuous task work, a
+disposition to sit in one's chair as though fixed to it by cobbler's
+wax, will enable a man in the prime of life to go through the tedium of
+a second day's work every day; but of all men Thackeray was the last to
+bear the wearisome perseverance of such a life. Some more or less
+continuous attendance at his office he must have given, and with it
+would have gone <i>Punch</i> and the novels, the ballads, the burlesques, the
+essays, the lectures, and the monthly papers full of mingled satire and
+tenderness, which have left to us that Thackeray which we could so ill
+afford to lose out of the literature of the nineteenth century. And
+there would have remained to the Civil Service the memory of a
+disgraceful job.</p>
+
+<p>He did not, however, give up the idea of the Civil Service. In a letter
+to his American friend, Mr. Reed, dated 8th November, 1854, he says;
+"The secretaryship of our Legation at Washington was vacant the other
+day, and I instantly asked for it; but in the very kindest letter Lord
+Clarendon showed how the petition was impossible. First, the place was
+given away. Next, it would not be fair to appoint out of the service.
+But the first was an excellent reason;&mdash;not a doubt of it." The validity
+of the second was probably not so apparent to him as it is to one who
+has himself waited long for promotion. "So if ever I come," he
+continues, "as I hope and trust to do this time next year, it must be in
+my own coat, and not the Queen's." Certainly in his own coat, and not in
+the Queen's, must Thackeray do anything by which he could mend his
+fortune or make his reputation. There never was a man less fit for the
+Queen's coat.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span></p><p>Nevertheless he held strong ideas that much was due by the Queen's
+ministers to men of letters, and no doubt had his feelings of slighted
+merit, because no part of the debt due was paid to him. In 1850 he wrote
+a letter to <i>The Morning Chronicle</i>, which has since been republished,
+in which he alludes to certain opinions which had been put forth in <i>The
+Examiner</i>. "I don't see," he says, "why men of letters should not very
+cheerfully coincide with Mr. Examiner in accepting all the honours,
+places, and prizes which they can get. The amount of such as will be
+awarded to them will not, we may be pretty sure, impoverish the country
+much; and if it is the custom of the State to reward by money, or titles
+of honour, or stars and garters of any sort, individuals who do the
+country service,&mdash;and if individuals are gratified at having 'Sir' or
+'My lord' appended to their names, or stars and ribbons hooked on to
+their coats and waistcoats, as men most undoubtedly are, and as their
+wives, families, and relations are,&mdash;there can be no reason why men of
+letters should not have the chance, as well as men of the robe or the
+sword; or why, if honour and money are good for one profession, they
+should not be good for another. No man in other callings thinks himself
+degraded by receiving a reward from his Government; nor, surely, need
+the literary man be more squeamish about pensions, and ribbons, and
+titles, than the ambassador, or general, or judge. Every European state
+but ours rewards its men of letters. The American Government gives them
+their full share of its small patronage; and if Americans, why not
+Englishmen?"</p>
+
+<p>In this a great subject is discussed which would be too long for these
+pages; but I think that there now exists a feeling that literature can
+herself, for herself, produce a rank as effective as any that a Queen's
+minister <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span>can bestow. Surely it would be a repainting of the lily, an
+adding a flavour to the rose, a gilding of refined gold to create
+to-morrow a Lord Viscount Tennyson, a Baron Carlyle, or a Right
+Honourable Sir Robert Browning. And as for pay and pension, the less the
+better of it for any profession, unless so far as it may be payment made
+for work done. Then the higher the payment the better, in literature as
+in all other trades. It may be doubted even whether a special rank of
+its own be good for literature, such as that which is achieved by the
+happy possessors of the forty chairs of the Academy in France. Even
+though they had an angel to make the choice,&mdash;which they have not,&mdash;that
+angel would do more harm to the excluded than good to the selected.</p>
+
+<p><i>Pendennis</i>, <i>Esmond</i>, and <i>The Newcomes</i> followed <i>Vanity Fair</i>,&mdash;not
+very quickly indeed, always at an interval of two years,&mdash;in 1850, 1852,
+and 1854. As I purpose to devote a separate short chapter, or part of a
+chapter, to each of these, I need say nothing here of their special
+merits or demerits. <i>Esmond</i> was brought out as a whole. The others
+appeared in numbers. "He lisped in numbers, for the numbers came." It is
+a mode of pronunciation in literature by no means very articulate, but
+easy of production and lucrative. But though easy it is seductive, and
+leads to idleness. An author by means of it can raise money and
+reputation on his book before he has written it, and when the pang of
+parturition is over in regard to one part, he feels himself entitled to
+a period of ease because the amount required for the next division will
+occupy him only half the month. This to Thackeray was so alluring that
+the entirety of the final half was not always given to the task. His
+self-reproaches and bemoanings when sometimes the day for reappearing
+would come <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span>terribly nigh, while yet the necessary amount of copy was
+far from being ready, were often very ludicrous and very sad;&mdash;ludicrous
+because he never told of his distress without adding to it something of
+ridicule which was irresistible, and sad because those who loved him
+best were aware that physical suffering had already fallen upon him, and
+that he was deterred by illness from the exercise of continuous energy.
+I myself did not know him till after the time now in question. My
+acquaintance with him was quite late in his life. But he has told me
+something of it, and I have heard from those who lived with him how
+continual were his sufferings. In 1854, he says in one of his letters to
+Mr. Reed,&mdash;the only private letters of his which I know to have been
+published; "I am to-day just out of bed after another, about the
+dozenth, severe fit of spasms which I have had this year. My book would
+have been written but for them." His work was always going on, but
+though not fuller of matter,&mdash;that would have been almost
+impossible,&mdash;would have been better in manner had he been delayed
+neither by suffering nor by that palsying of the energies which
+suffering produces.</p>
+
+<p>This ought to have been the happiest period of his life, and should have
+been very happy. He had become fairly easy in his circumstances. He had
+succeeded in his work, and had made for himself a great name. He was
+fond of popularity, and especially anxious to be loved by a small circle
+of friends. These good things he had thoroughly achieved. Immediately
+after the publication of <i>Vanity Fair</i> he stood high among the literary
+heroes of his country, and had endeared himself especially to a special
+knot of friends. His face and figure, his six feet four in height, with
+his flowing hair, already nearly gray, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span>and his broken nose, his broad
+forehead and ample chest, encountered everywhere either love or respect;
+and his daughters to him were all the world,&mdash;the bairns of whom he
+says, at the end of the <i>White Squall</i> ballad;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">I thought, as day was breaking,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">My little girls were waking,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And smiling, and making</span><br />
+<span class="i1">A prayer at home for me.</span><br />
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Nothing could have been more tender or endearing than his relations with
+his children. But still there was a skeleton in his cupboard,&mdash;or rather
+two skeletons. His home had been broken up by his wife's malady, and his
+own health was shattered. When he was writing <i>Pendennis</i>, in 1849, he
+had a severe fever, and then those spasms came, of which four or five
+years afterwards he wrote to Mr. Reed. His home, as a home should be,
+was never restored to him,&mdash;or his health. Just at that period of life
+at which a man generally makes a happy exchange in taking his wife's
+drawing-room in lieu of the smoking-room of his club, and assumes those
+domestic ways of living which are becoming and pleasant for matured
+years, that drawing-room and those domestic ways were closed against
+him. The children were then no more than babies, as far as society was
+concerned,&mdash;things to kiss and play with, and make a home happy if they
+could only have had their mother with them. I have no doubt there were
+those who thought that Thackeray was very jolly under his adversity.
+Jolly he was. It was the manner of the man to be so,&mdash;if that continual
+playfulness which was natural to him, lying over a melancholy which was
+as continual, be compatible with jollity. He laughed, and ate, and
+drank, and threw his pearls about with miraculous profusion. But I fancy
+that he was far <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span>from happy. I remember once, when I was young,
+receiving advice as to the manner in which I had better spend my
+evenings; I was told that I ought to go home, drink tea, and read good
+books. It was excellent advice, but I found that the reading of good
+books in solitude was not an occupation congenial to me. It was so, I
+take it, with Thackeray. He did not like his lonely drawing-room, and
+went back to his life among the clubs by no means with contentment.</p>
+
+<p>In 1853, Thackeray having then his own two girls to provide for, added a
+third to his family, and adopted Amy Crowe, the daughter of an old
+friend, and sister of the well-known artist now among us. How it came to
+pass that she wanted a home, or that this special home suited her, it
+would be unnecessary here to tell even if I knew. But that he did give a
+home to this young lady, making her in all respects the same as another
+daughter, should be told of him. He was a man who liked to broaden his
+back for the support of others, and to make himself easy under such
+burdens. In 1862, she married a Thackeray cousin, a young officer with
+the Victoria Cross, Edward Thackeray, and went out to India,&mdash;where she
+died.</p>
+
+<p>In 1854, the year in which <i>The Newcomes</i> came out, Thackeray had broken
+his close alliance with <i>Punch</i>. In December of that year there appeared
+from his pen an article in <i>The Quarterly</i> on <i>John Leech's Pictures of
+Life and Character</i>. It is a rambling discourse on picture-illustration
+in general, full of interest, but hardly good as a criticism,&mdash;a portion
+of literary work for which he was not specially fitted. In it he tells
+us how Richard Doyle, the artist, had given up his work for <i>Punch</i>, not
+having been able, as a Roman Catholic, to endure the skits which, at
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span>that time, were appearing in one number after another against what was
+then called Papal aggression. The reviewer,&mdash;Thackeray himself,&mdash;then
+tells us of the secession of himself from the board of brethren.
+"Another member of Mr. Punch's cabinet, the biographer of <i>Jeames</i>, the
+author of <i>The Snob Papers</i>, resigned his functions, on account of Mr.
+Punch's assaults upon the present Emperor of the French nation, whose
+anger Jeames thought it was unpatriotic to arouse." How hard it must be
+for Cabinets to agree! This man or that is sure to have some pet
+conviction of his own, and the better the man the stronger the
+conviction! Then the reviewer went on in favour of the artist of whom he
+was specially speaking, making a comparison which must at the time have
+been odious enough to some of the brethren. "There can be no blinking
+the fact that in Mr. Punch's Cabinet John Leech is the right-hand man.
+Fancy a number of <i>Punch</i> without Leech's pictures! What would you give
+for it?" Then he breaks out into strong admiration of that one
+friend,&mdash;perhaps with a little disregard as to the feelings of other
+friends.<a name="FNanchor_3" id="FNanchor_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> This <i>Critical Review</i>, if it may properly be so called,&mdash;at
+any rate it is so named as now published,&mdash;is to be found in our
+author's collected works, in the same volume with <i>Catherine</i>. It is
+there preceded by another, from <i>The Westminster Review</i>, written
+fourteen years earlier, on <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span><i>The Genius of Cruikshank</i>. This contains a
+descriptive catalogue of Cruikshank's works up to that period, and is
+interesting from the piquant style in which it is written. I fancy that
+these two are the only efforts of the kind which he made,&mdash;and in both
+he dealt with the two great caricaturists of his time, he himself being,
+in the imaginative part of a caricaturist's work, equal in power to
+either of them.</p>
+
+<p>We now come to a phase of Thackeray's life in which he achieved a
+remarkable success, attributable rather to his fame as a writer than to
+any particular excellence in the art which he then exercised. He took
+upon himself the functions of a lecturer, being moved to do so by a hope
+that he might thus provide a sum of money for the future sustenance of
+his children. No doubt he had been advised to this course, though I do
+not know from whom specially the advice may have come. Dickens had
+already considered the subject, but had not yet consented to read in
+public for money on his own account. John Forster, writing of the year
+1846, says of Dickens and the then only thought-of exercise of a new
+profession; "I continued to oppose, for reasons to be stated in their
+place, that which he had set his heart upon too strongly to abandon, and
+which I still can wish he had preferred to surrender with all that
+seemed to be its enormous gain." And again he says, speaking of a
+proposition which had been made to Dickens from the town of Bradford;
+"At first this was entertained, but was abandoned, with some reluctance,
+upon the argument that to become publicly a reader must alter, without
+improving, his position publicly as a writer, and that it was a change
+to be justified only when the higher calling should have failed of the
+old success." The meaning of this was that the money to be made <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span>would
+be sweet, but that the descent to a profession which was considered to
+be lower than that of literature itself would carry with it something
+that was bitter. It was as though one who had sat on the woolsack as
+Lord Chancellor should raise the question whether for the sake of the
+income attached to it, he might, without disgrace, occupy a seat on a
+lower bench; as though an architect should consider with himself the
+propriety of making his fortune as a contractor; or the head of a
+college lower his dignity, while he increased his finances, by taking
+pupils. When such discussions arise, money generally carries the
+day,&mdash;and should do so. When convinced that money may be earned without
+disgrace, we ought to allow money to carry the day. When we talk of
+sordid gain and filthy lucre, we are generally hypocrites. If gains be
+sordid and lucre filthy, where is the priest, the lawyer, the doctor, or
+the man of literature, who does not wish for dirty hands? An income, and
+the power of putting by something for old age, something for those who
+are to come after, is the wholesome and acknowledged desire of all
+professional men. Thackeray having children, and being gifted with no
+power of making his money go very far, was anxious enough on the
+subject. We may say now, that had he confined himself to his pen, he
+would not have wanted while he lived, but would have left but little
+behind him. That he was anxious we have seen, by his attempts to
+subsidise his literary gains by a Government office. I cannot but think
+that had he undertaken public duties for which he was ill qualified, and
+received a salary which he could hardly have earned, he would have done
+less for his fame than by reading to the public. Whether he did that
+well or ill, he did it well enough for the money. The people who heard
+him, and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span>who paid for their seats, were satisfied with their
+bargain,&mdash;as they were also in the case of Dickens; and I venture to say
+that in becoming publicly a reader, neither did Dickens or Thackeray
+"alter his position as a writer," and "that it was a change to be
+justified," though the success of the old calling had in no degree
+waned. What Thackeray did enabled him to leave a comfortable income for
+his children, and one earned honestly, with the full approval of the
+world around him.</p>
+
+<p>Having saturated his mind with the literature of Queen Anne's time,&mdash;not
+probably in the first instance as a preparation for <i>Esmond</i>, but in
+such a way as to induce him to create an Esmond,&mdash;he took the authors
+whom he knew so well as the subject for his first series of lectures. He
+wrote <i>The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century</i> in 1851, while
+he must have been at work on <i>Esmond</i>, and first delivered the course at
+Willis's Rooms in that year. He afterwards went with these through many
+of our provincial towns, and then carried them to the United States,
+where he delivered them to large audiences in the winter of 1852 and
+1853. Some few words as to the merits of the composition I will
+endeavour to say in another place. I myself never heard him lecture, and
+can therefore give no opinion of the performance. That which I have
+heard from others has been very various. It is, I think, certain that he
+had none of those wonderful gifts of elocution which made it a pleasure
+to listen to Dickens, whatever he read or whatever he said; nor had he
+that power of application by using which his rival taught himself with
+accuracy the exact effect to be given to every word. The rendering of a
+piece by Dickens was composed as an oratorio is composed, and was then
+studied by heart as music is studied. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span>And the piece was all given by
+memory, without any looking at the notes or words. There was nothing of
+this with Thackeray. But the thing read was in itself of great interest
+to educated people. The words were given clearly, with sufficient
+intonation for easy understanding, so that they who were willing to hear
+something from him felt on hearing that they had received full value for
+their money. At any rate, the lectures were successful. The money was
+made,&mdash;and was kept.</p>
+
+<p>He came from his first trip to America to his new house in Onslow
+Square, and then published <i>The Newcomes</i>. This, too, was one of his
+great works, as to which I shall have to speak hereafter. Then, having
+enjoyed his success in the first attempt to lecture, he prepared a
+second series. He never essayed the kind of reading which with Dickens
+became so wonderfully popular. Dickens recited portions from his
+well-known works. Thackeray wrote his lectures expressly for the
+purpose. They have since been added to his other literature, but they
+were prepared as lectures. The second series were <i>The Four Georges</i>. In
+a lucrative point of view they were even more successful than the first,
+the sum of money realised in the United States having been considerable.
+In England they were less popular, even if better attended, the subject
+chosen having been distasteful to many. There arose the question whether
+too much freedom had not been taken with an office which, though it be
+no longer considered to be founded on divine right, is still as sacred
+as can be anything that is human. If there is to remain among us a
+sovereign, that sovereign, even though divested of political power,
+should be endowed with all that personal respect can give. If we wish
+ourselves to be high, we should treat <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span>that which is over us as high.
+And this should not depend altogether on personal character, though we
+know,&mdash;as we have reason to know,&mdash;how much may be added to the firmness
+of the feeling by personal merit. The respect of which we speak should,
+in the strongest degree, be a possession of the immediate occupant, and
+will naturally become dim,&mdash;or perhaps be exaggerated,&mdash;in regard to the
+past, as history or fable may tell of them. No one need hesitate to
+speak his mind of King John, let him be ever so strong a stickler for
+the privileges of majesty. But there are degrees of distance, and the
+throne of which we wish to preserve the dignity seems to be assailed
+when unmeasured evil is said of one who has sat there within our own
+memory. There would seem to each of us to be a personal affront were a
+departed relative delineated with all those faults by which we must own
+that even our near relatives have been made imperfect. It is a general
+conviction as to this which so frequently turns the biography of those
+recently dead into mere eulogy. The fictitious charity which is enjoined
+by the <i>de mortuis nil nisi bonum</i> banishes truth. The feeling of which
+I speak almost leads me at this moment to put down my pen. And, if so
+much be due to all subjects, is less due to a sovereign?</p>
+
+<p>Considerations such as these diminished, I think, the popularity of
+Thackeray's second series of lectures; or, rather, not their popularity,
+but the estimation in which they were held. On this head he defended
+himself more than once very gallantly, and had a great deal to say on
+his side of the question. "Suppose, for example, in America,&mdash;in
+Philadelphia or in New York,&mdash;that I had spoken about George IV. in
+terms of praise and affected reverence, do you believe they would have
+hailed his name with cheers, or have heard it with anything of
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span>respect?" And again; "We degrade our own honour and the sovereign's by
+unduly and unjustly praising him; and the mere slaverer and flatterer is
+one who comes forward, as it were, with flash notes, and pays with false
+coin his tribute to C&aelig;sar. I don't disguise that I feel somehow on my
+trial here for loyalty,&mdash;for honest English feeling." This was said by
+Thackeray at a dinner at Edinburgh, in 1857, and shows how the matter
+rested on his mind. Thackeray's loyalty was no doubt true enough, but
+was mixed with but little of reverence. He was one who revered modesty
+and innocence rather than power, against which he had in the bottom of
+his heart something of republican tendency. His leaning was no doubt of
+the more manly kind. But in what he said at Edinburgh he hardly hit the
+nail on the head. No one had suggested that he should have said good
+things of a king which he did not believe to be true. The question was
+whether it may not be well sometimes for us to hold our tongues. An
+American literary man, here in England, would not lecture on the morals
+of Hamilton, on the manners of General Jackson, on the general amenities
+of President Johnson.</p>
+
+<p>In 1857 Thackeray stood for Oxford, in the liberal interest, in
+opposition to Mr. Cardwell. He had been induced to do this by his old
+friend Charles Neate, who himself twice sat for Oxford, and died now not
+many months since. He polled 1,017 votes, against 1,070 by Mr. Cardwell;
+and was thus again saved by his good fortune from attempting to fill a
+situation in which he would not have shone. There are, no doubt, many to
+whom a seat in Parliament comes almost as the birthright of a well-born
+and well-to-do English gentleman. They go there with no more idea of
+shining than they do when <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span>they are elected to a first-class
+club;&mdash;hardly with more idea of being useful. It is the thing to do, and
+the House of Commons is the place where a man ought to be&mdash;for a certain
+number of hours. Such men neither succeed nor fail, for nothing is
+expected of them. From such a one as Thackeray something would have been
+expected, which would not have been forthcoming. He was too desultory
+for regular work,&mdash;full of thought, but too vague for practical
+questions. He could not have endured to sit for two or three hours at a
+time with his hat over his eyes, pretending to listen, as is the duty of
+a good legislator. He was a man intolerant of tedium, and in the best of
+his time impatient of slow work. Nor, though his liberal feelings were
+very strong, were his political convictions definite or accurate. He was
+a man who mentally drank in much, feeding his fancy hourly with what he
+saw, what he heard, what he read, and then pouring it all out with an
+immense power of amplification. But it would have been impossible for
+him to study and bring home to himself the various points of a
+complicated bill with a hundred and fifty clauses. In becoming a man of
+letters, and taking that branch of letters which fell to him, he
+obtained the special place that was fitted for him. He was a round peg
+in a round hole. There was no other hole which he would have fitted
+nearly so well. But he had his moment of political ambition, like
+others,&mdash;and paid a thousand pounds for his attempt.</p>
+
+<p>In 1857 the first number of <i>The Virginians</i> appeared, and the
+last,&mdash;the twenty-fourth,&mdash;in October, 1859. This novel, as all my
+readers are aware, is a continuance of <i>Esmond</i>, and will be spoken of
+in its proper place. He was then forty-eight years old, very gray, with
+much of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span>age upon him, which had come from suffering,&mdash;age shown by
+dislike of activity and by an old man's way of thinking about many
+things,&mdash;speaking as though the world were all behind him instead of
+before; but still with a stalwart outward bearing, very erect in his
+gait, and a countenance peculiarly expressive and capable of much
+dignity. I speak of his personal appearance at this time, because it was
+then only that I became acquainted with him. In 1859 he undertook the
+last great work of his life, the editorship of <i>The Cornhill Magazine</i>,
+a periodical set on foot by Mr. George Smith, of the house of Smith and
+Elder, with an amount of energy greater than has generally been bestowed
+upon such enterprises. It will be well remembered still how much <i>The
+Cornhill</i> was talked about and thought of before it first appeared, and
+how much of that thinking and talking was due to the fact that Mr.
+Thackeray was to edit it. <i>Macmillan's</i>, I think, was the first of the
+shilling magazines, having preceded <i>The Cornhill</i> by a month, and it
+would ill become me, who have been a humble servant to each of them, to
+give to either any preference. But it must be acknowledged that a great
+deal was expected from <i>The Cornhill</i>, and I think it will be confessed
+that it was the general opinion that a great deal was given by it.
+Thackeray had become big enough to give a special <i>&eacute;clat</i> to any
+literary exploit to which he attached himself. Since the days of <i>The
+Constitutional</i> he had fought his way up the ladder and knew how to take
+his stand there with an assurance of success. When it became known to
+the world of readers that a new magazine was to appear under Thackeray's
+editorship, the world of readers was quite sure that there would be a
+large sale. Of the first number over one hundred and ten <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span>thousand were
+sold, and of the second and third over one hundred thousand. It is in
+the nature of such things that the sale should fall off when the novelty
+is over. People believe that a new delight has come, a new joy for ever,
+and then find that the joy is not quite so perfect or enduring as they
+had expected. But the commencement of such enterprises may be taken as a
+measure of what will follow. The magazine, either by Thackeray's name or
+by its intrinsic merits,&mdash;probably by both,&mdash;achieved a great success.
+My acquaintance with him grew from my having been one of his staff from
+the first.</p>
+
+<p>About two months before the opening day I wrote to him suggesting that
+he should accept from me a series of four short stories on which I was
+engaged. I got back a long letter in which he said nothing about my
+short stories, but asking whether I could go to work at once and let him
+have a long novel, so that it might begin with the first number. At the
+same time I heard from the publisher, who suggested some interesting
+little details as to honorarium. The little details were very
+interesting, but absolutely no time was allowed to me. It was required
+that the first portion of my book should be in the printer's hands
+within a month. Now it was my theory,&mdash;and ever since this occurrence
+has been my practice,&mdash;to see the end of my own work before the public
+should see the commencement.<a name="FNanchor_4" id="FNanchor_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> If I did this thing I must not only
+abandon my theory, but instantly contrive a story, or <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span>begin to write it
+before it was contrived. That was what I did, urged by the interesting
+nature of the details. A novelist cannot always at the spur of the
+moment make his plot and create his characters who shall, with an
+arranged sequence of events, live with a certain degree of eventful
+decorum, through that portion of their lives which is to be portrayed. I
+hesitated, but allowed myself to be allured to what I felt to be wrong,
+much dreading the event. How seldom is it that theories stand the wear
+and tear of practice! I will not say that the story which came was good,
+but it was received with greater favour than any I had written before or
+have written since. I think that almost anything would have been then
+accepted coming under Thackeray's editorship.</p>
+
+<p>I was astonished that work should be required in such haste, knowing
+that much preparation had been made, and that the service of almost any
+English novelist might have been obtained if asked for in due time. It
+was my readiness that was needed, rather than any other gift! The riddle
+was read to me after a time. Thackeray had himself intended to begin
+with one of his own great novels, but had put it off till it was too
+late. <i>Lovel the Widower</i> was commenced at the same time with my own
+story, but <i>Lovel the Widower</i> was not substantial enough to appear as
+the principal joint at the banquet. Though your guests will undoubtedly
+dine off the little delicacies you provide for them, there must be a
+heavy saddle of mutton among the viands prepared. I was the saddle of
+mutton, Thackeray having omitted to get his joint down to the fire in
+time enough. My fitness lay in my capacity for quick roasting.</p>
+
+<p>It may be interesting to give a list of the contributors to the first
+number. My novel called <i>Framley Parsonage</i> <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span>came first. At this banquet
+the saddle of mutton was served before the delicacies. Then there was a
+paper by Sir John Bowring on <i>The Chinese and Outer Barbarians</i>. The
+commencing number of <i>Lovel the Widower</i> followed. George Lewes came
+next with his first chapters of <i>Studies in Animal Life</i>. Then there was
+Father Prout's <i>Inauguration Ode</i>, dedicated to the author of <i>Vanity
+Fair</i>,&mdash;which should have led the way. I need hardly say that Father
+Prout was the Rev. F. Mahony. Then followed <i>Our Volunteers</i>, by Sir
+John Burgoyne; <i>A Man of Letters of the Last Generation</i>, by Thornton
+Hunt; <i>The Search for Sir John Franklin</i>, from a private journal of an
+officer of the Fox, now Sir Allen Young; and <i>The First Morning of
+1860</i>, by Mrs. Archer Clive. The number was concluded by the first of
+those <i>Roundabout Papers</i> by Thackeray himself, which became so
+delightful a portion of the literature of <i>The Cornhill Magazine</i>.</p>
+
+<p>It would be out of my power, and hardly interesting, to give an entire
+list of those who wrote for <i>The Cornhill</i> under Thackeray's editorial
+direction. But I may name a few, to show how strong was the support
+which he received. Those who contributed to the first number I have
+named. Among those who followed were Alfred Tennyson, Jacob Omnium, Lord
+Houghton, William Russell, Mrs. Beecher Stowe, Mrs. Browning, Robert
+Bell, George Augustus Sala, Mrs. Gaskell, James Hinton, Mary Howitt,
+John Kaye, Charles Lever, Frederick Locker, Laurence Oliphant, John
+Ruskin, Fitzjames Stephen, T. A. Trollope, Henry Thompson, Herman
+Merivale, Adelaide Proctor, Matthew Arnold, the present Lord Lytton, and
+Miss Thackeray, now Mrs. Ritchie. Thackeray continued the editorship for
+two years and four months, namely, up to April, 1862; but, as all
+readers will remember, he continued to write for it till he <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span>died, the
+day before Christmas Day, in 1863. His last contribution was, I think, a
+paper written for and published in the November number, called,
+"<i>Strange to say on Club Paper</i>," in which he vindicated Lord Clyde from
+the accusation of having taken the club stationery home with him. It was
+not a great subject, for no one could or did believe that the
+Field-Marshal had been guilty of any meanness; but the handling of it
+has made it interesting, and his indignation has made it beautiful.</p>
+
+<p>The magazine was a great success, but justice compels me to say that
+Thackeray was not a good editor. As he would have been an indifferent
+civil servant, an indifferent member of Parliament, so was he
+perfunctory as an editor. It has sometimes been thought well to select a
+popular literary man as an editor; first, because his name will attract,
+and then with an idea that he who can write well himself will be a
+competent judge of the writings of others. The first may sell a
+magazine, but will hardly make it good; and the second will not avail
+much, unless the editor so situated be patient enough to read what is
+sent to him. Of a magazine editor it is required that he should be
+patient, scrupulous, judicious, but above all things hard-hearted. I
+think it may be doubted whether Thackeray did bring himself to read the
+basketfuls of manuscripts with which he was deluged, but he probably
+did, sooner or later, read the touching little private notes by which
+they were accompanied,&mdash;the heartrending appeals, in which he was told
+that if this or the other little article could be accepted and paid for,
+a starving family might be saved from starvation for a month. He tells
+us how he felt on receiving such letters in one of his <i>Roundabout
+Papers</i>, which he calls "<i>Thorns in the cushion</i>." "How am I to know,"
+he says&mdash;"though to be sure I <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span>begin to know now,&mdash;as I take the letters
+off the tray, which of those envelopes contains a real <i>bona fide</i>
+letter, and which a thorn? One of the best invitations this year I
+mistook for a thorn letter, and kept it without opening." Then he gives
+the sample of a thorn letter. It is from a governess with a poem, and
+with a prayer for insertion and payment. "We have known better days,
+sir. I have a sick and widowed mother to maintain, and little brothers
+and sisters who look to me." He could not stand this, and the money
+would be sent, out of his own pocket, though the poem might
+be&mdash;postponed, till happily it should be lost.</p>
+
+<p>From such material a good editor could not be made. Nor, in truth, do I
+think that he did much of the editorial work. I had once made an
+arrangement, not with Thackeray, but with the proprietors, as to some
+little story. The story was sent back to me by Thackeray&mdash;rejected.
+<i>Virginibus puerisque!</i> That was the gist of his objection. There was a
+project in a gentleman's mind,&mdash;as told in my story,&mdash;to run away with a
+married woman! Thackeray's letter was very kind, very regretful,&mdash;full
+of apology for such treatment to such a contributor. But&mdash;<i>Virginibus
+puerisque!</i> I was quite sure that Thackeray had not taken the trouble to
+read the story himself. Some moral deputy had read it, and disapproving,
+no doubt properly, of the little project to which I have alluded, had
+incited the editor to use his authority. That Thackeray had suffered
+when he wrote it was easy to see, fearing that he was giving pain to one
+he would fain have pleased. I wrote him a long letter in return, as full
+of drollery as I knew how to make it. In four or five days there came a
+reply in the same spirit,&mdash;boiling over with fun. He had kept my letter
+by him, not <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span>daring to open it,&mdash;as he says that he did with that
+eligible invitation. At last he had given it to one of his girls to
+examine,&mdash;to see whether the thorn would be too sharp, whether I had
+turned upon him with reproaches. A man so susceptible, so prone to work
+by fits and starts, so unmethodical, could not have been a good editor.</p>
+
+<p>In 1862 he went into the new house which he had built for himself at
+Palace Green. I remember well, while this was still being built, how his
+friends used to discuss his imprudence in building it. Though he had
+done well with himself, and had made and was making a large income, was
+he entitled to live in a house the rent of which could not be counted at
+less than from five hundred to six hundred pounds a year? Before he had
+been there two years, he solved the question by dying,&mdash;when the house
+was sold for two thousand pounds more than it had cost. He himself, in
+speaking of his project, was wont to declare that he was laying out his
+money in the best way he could for the interest of his children;&mdash;and it
+turned out that he was right.</p>
+
+<p>In 1863 he died in the house which he had built, and at the period of
+his death was writing a new novel in numbers, called <i>Denis Duval</i>. In
+<i>The Cornhill</i>, <i>The Adventures of Philip</i> had appeared. This new
+enterprise was destined for commencement on 1st January, 1864, and,
+though the writer was gone, it kept its promise, as far as it went.
+Three numbers, and what might probably have been intended for half of a
+fourth, appeared. It may be seen, therefore, that he by no means held to
+my theory, that the author should see the end of his work before the
+public sees the commencement. But neither did Dickens or Mrs. Gaskell,
+both of whom died with stories not completed, which, when they died,
+were in the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span>course of publication. All the evidence goes against the
+necessity of such precaution. Nevertheless, were I giving advice to a
+tiro in novel writing, I should recommend it.</p>
+
+<p>With the last chapter of <i>Denis Duval</i> was published in the magazine a
+set of notes on the book, taken for the most part from Thackeray's own
+papers, and showing how much collateral work he had given to the
+fabrication of his novel. No doubt in preparing other tales, especially
+<i>Esmond</i>, a very large amount of such collateral labour was found
+necessary. He was a man who did very much of such work, delighting to
+deal in little historical incidents. They will be found in almost
+everything that he did, and I do not know that he was ever accused of
+gross mistakes. But I doubt whether on that account he should be called
+a laborious man. He could go down to Winchelsea, when writing about the
+little town, to see in which way the streets lay, and to provide himself
+with what we call local colouring. He could jot down the suggestions, as
+they came to his mind, of his future story. There was an irregularity in
+such work which was to his taste. His very notes would be delightful to
+read, partaking of the nature of pearls when prepared only for his own
+use. But he could not bring himself to sit at his desk and do an
+allotted task day after day. He accomplished what must be considered as
+quite a sufficient life's work. He had about twenty-five years for the
+purpose, and that which he has left is an ample produce for the time.
+Nevertheless he was a man of fits and starts, who, not having been in
+his early years drilled to method, never achieved it in his career.</p>
+
+<p>He died on the day before Christmas Day, as has been said above, very
+suddenly, in his bed, early in the morning, in the fifty-third year of
+his life. To those who <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span>saw him about in the world there seemed to be no
+reason why he should not continue his career for the next twenty years.
+But those who knew him were so well aware of his constant sufferings,
+that, though they expected no sudden catastrophe, they were hardly
+surprised when it came. His death was probably caused by those spasms of
+which he had complained ten years before, in his letter to Mr. Reed. On
+the last day but one of the year, a crowd of sorrowing friends stood
+over his grave as he was laid to rest in Kensal Green; and, as quickly
+afterwards as it could be executed, a bust to his memory was put up in
+Westminster Abbey. It is a fine work of art, by Marochetti; but, as a
+likeness, is, I think, less effective than that which was modelled, and
+then given to the Garrick Club, by Durham, and has lately been put into
+marble, and now stands in the upper vestibule of the club. Neither of
+them, in my opinion, give so accurate an idea of the man as a statuette
+in bronze, by Boehm, of which two or three copies were made. One of them
+is in my possession. It has been alleged, in reference to this, that
+there is something of a caricature in the lengthiness of the figure, in
+the two hands thrust into the trousers pockets, and in the protrusion of
+the chin. But this feeling has originated in the general idea that any
+face, or any figure, not made by the artist more beautiful or more
+graceful than the original is an injustice. The face must be smoother,
+the pose of the body must be more dignified, the proportions more
+perfect, than in the person represented, or satisfaction is not felt.
+Mr. Boehm has certainly not flattered, but, as far as my eye can judge,
+he has given the figure of the man exactly as he used to stand before
+us. I have a portrait of him in crayon, by Samuel Lawrence, as like, but
+hardly as natural.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span></p><p>A little before his death Thackeray told me that he had then succeeded
+in replacing the fortune which he had lost as a young man. Ho had, in
+fact, done better, for he left an income of seven hundred and fifty
+pounds behind him.</p>
+
+<p>It has been said of Thackeray that he was a cynic. This has been said so
+generally, that the charge against him has become proverbial. This,
+stated barely, leaves one of two impressions on the mind, or perhaps the
+two together,&mdash;that this cynicism was natural to his character and came
+out in his life, or that it is the characteristic of his writings. Of
+the nature of his writings generally, I will speak in the last chapter
+of this little book. As to his personal character as a cynic, I must
+find room to quote the following first stanzas of the little poem which
+appeared to his memory in <i>Punch</i>, from the pen of Shirley Brooks;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">He was a cynic! By his life all wrought</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Of generous acts, mild words, and gentle ways;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">His heart wide open to all kindly thought,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">His hand so quick to give, his tongue to praise!</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">He was a cynic! You might read it writ</span><br />
+<span class="i1">In that broad brow, crowned with its silver hair;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">In those blue eyes, with childlike candour lit,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">In that sweet smile his lips were wont to wear!</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">He was a cynic! By the love that clung</span><br />
+<span class="i1">About him from his children, friends, and kin;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">By the sharp pain light pen and gossip tongue</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Wrought in him, chafing the soft heart within!</span><br />
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The spirit and nature of the man have been caught here with absolute
+truth. A public man should of course be judged from his public work. If
+he wrote as a cynic,&mdash;a point which I will not discuss here,&mdash;it may be
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span>fair that he who is to be known as a writer should be so called. But, as
+a man, I protest that it would be hard to find an individual farther
+removed from the character. Over and outside his fancy, which was the
+gift which made him so remarkable,&mdash;a certain feminine softness was the
+most remarkable trait about him. To give some immediate pleasure was the
+great delight of his life,&mdash;a sovereign to a schoolboy, gloves to a
+girl, a dinner to a man, a compliment to a woman. His charity was
+overflowing. His generosity excessive. I heard once a story of woe from
+a man who was the dear friend of both of us. The gentleman wanted a
+large sum of money instantly,&mdash;something under two thousand pounds,&mdash;had
+no natural friends who could provide it, but must go utterly to the wall
+without it. Pondering over this sad condition of things just revealed to
+me, I met Thackeray between the two mounted heroes at the Horse Guards,
+and told him the story. "Do you mean to say that I am to find two
+thousand pounds?" he said, angrily, with some expletives. I explained
+that I had not even suggested the doing of anything,&mdash;only that we might
+discuss the matter. Then there came over his face a peculiar smile, and
+a wink in his eye, and he whispered his suggestion, as though half
+ashamed of his meanness. "I'll go half," he said, "if anybody will do
+the rest." And he did go half, at a day or two's notice, though the
+gentleman was no more than simply a friend. I am glad to be able to add
+that the money was quickly repaid. I could tell various stories of the
+same kind, only that I lack space, and that they, if simply added one to
+the other, would lack interest.</p>
+
+<p>He was no cynic, but he was a satirist, and could now and then be a
+satirist in conversation, hitting very hard when he did hit. When he was
+in America he met <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span>at dinner a literary gentleman of high character,
+middle-aged, and most dignified deportment. The gentleman was one whose
+character and acquirements stood very high,&mdash;deservedly so,&mdash;but who, in
+society, had that air of wrapping his toga around him, which adds, or is
+supposed to add, many cubits to a man's height. But he had a broken
+nose. At dinner he talked much of the tender passion, and did so in a
+manner which stirred up Thackeray's feeling of the ridiculous. "What has
+the world come to," said Thackeray out loud to the table, "when two
+broken-nosed old fogies like you and me sit talking about love to each
+other!" The gentleman was astounded, and could only sit wrapping his
+toga in silent dismay for the rest of the evening. Thackeray then, as at
+other similar times, had no idea of giving pain, but when he saw a
+foible he put his foot upon it, and tried to stamp it out.</p>
+
+<p>Such is my idea of the man whom many call a cynic, but whom I regard as
+one of the most soft-hearted of human beings, sweet as Charity itself,
+who went about the world dropping pearls, doing good, and never wilfully
+inflicting a wound.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnotehead">FOOTNOTES:</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1" id="Footnote_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> The report that he had lost all his money and was going to
+live by painting in Paris, was still prevalent in London in 1836.
+Macready, on the 27th April of that year, says in his <i>Diary</i>; "At
+Garrick Club, where I dined and saw the papers. Met Thackeray, who has
+spent all his fortune, and is now about to settle in Paris, I believe as
+an artist." But at this time he was, in truth, turning to literature as
+a profession.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2" id="Footnote_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> The article was written by Abraham Hayward, who is still
+with us, and was no doubt instigated by a desire to assist Thackeray in
+his struggle upwards, in which it succeeded.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3" id="Footnote_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> For a week there existed at the <i>Punch</i> office a grudge
+against Thackeray in reference to this awkward question: "What would you
+give for your <i>Punch</i> without John Leech?" Then he asked the
+confraternity to dinner,&mdash;<i>more Thackerayano</i>,&mdash;and the confraternity
+came. Who can doubt but they were very jolly over the little blunder?
+For years afterwards Thackeray was a guest at the well-known <i>Punch</i>
+dinner, though he was no longer one of the contributors.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4" id="Footnote_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> I had begun an Irish story and half finished it, which
+would reach just the required length. Would that do, I asked. I was
+civilly told that my Irish story would no doubt be charming, but was not
+quite the thing that was wanted. Could I not begin a new
+one,&mdash;English,&mdash;and if possible about clergymen? The details were so
+interesting that had a couple of archbishops been demanded, I should
+have produced them.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II"></a>CHAPTER II.</h2>
+
+<h3>FRASER'S MAGAZINE AND PUNCH.</h3>
+
+
+<p>How Thackeray commenced his connection with <i>Fraser's Magazine</i> I am
+unable to say. We know how he had come to London with a view to a
+literary career, and that he had at one time made an attempt to earn his
+bread as a correspondent to a newspaper from Paris. It is probable that
+he became acquainted with the redoubtable Oliver Yorke, otherwise Dr.
+Maginn, or some of his staff, through the connection which he had thus
+opened with the press. He was not known, or at any rate he was
+unrecognised, by <i>Fraser</i> in January, 1835, in which month an amusing
+catalogue was given of the writers then employed, with portraits of
+them, all seated at a symposium. I can trace no article to his pen
+before November, 1837, when the <i>Yellowplush Correspondence</i> was
+commenced, though it is hardly probable that he should have commenced
+with a work of so much pretension. There had been published a volume
+called <i>My Book, or the Anatomy of Conduct</i>, by John Skelton, and a very
+absurd book no doubt it was. We may presume that it contained maxims on
+etiquette, and that it was intended to convey in print those invaluable
+lessons on deportment which, as Dickens has told us, were subsequently
+given by Mr. Turveydrop, in the academy kept by him for that <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span>purpose.
+Thackeray took this as his foundation for the <i>Fashionable Fax and
+Polite Annygoats</i>, by Jeames Yellowplush, with which he commenced those
+repeated attacks against snobbism which he delighted to make through a
+considerable portion of his literary life. Oliver Yorke has himself
+added four or five pages of his own to Thackeray's lucubrations; and
+with the second, and some future numbers, there appeared illustrations
+by Thackeray himself, illustrations at this time not having been common
+with the magazine. From all this I gather that the author was already
+held in estimation by <i>Fraser's</i> confraternity. I remember well my own
+delight with <i>Yellowplush</i> at the time, and how I inquired who was the
+author. It was then that I first heard Thackeray's name.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Yellowplush Papers</i> were continued through nine numbers. No further
+reference was made to Mr. Skelton and his book beyond that given at the
+beginning of the first number, and the satire is only shown by the
+attempt made by Yellowplush, the footman, to give his ideas generally on
+the manners of noble life. The idea seems to be that a gentleman may, in
+heart and in action, be as vulgar as a footman. No doubt he may, but the
+chances are very much that he won't. But the virtue of the memoir does
+not consist in the lessons, but in the general drollery of the letters.
+The "orthogwaphy is inaccuwate," as a certain person says in the
+memoirs,&mdash;"so inaccuwate" as to take a positive study to "compwehend"
+it; but the joke, though old, is so handled as to be very amusing.
+Thackeray soon rushes away from his criticisms on snobbism to other
+matters. There are the details of a card-sharping enterprise, in which
+we cannot but feel that we recognise something of the author's own
+experiences in the misfortunes of Mr. Dawkins; there is the Earl of
+Crab's, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span>and then the first of those attacks which he was tempted to
+make on the absurdities of his brethren of letters, and the only one
+which now has the appearance of having been ill-natured. His first
+victims were Dr. Dionysius Lardner and Mr. Edward Bulwer Lytton, as he
+was then. We can surrender the doctor to the whip of the satirist; and
+for "Sawedwadgeorgeearllittnbulwig," as the novelist is made to call
+himself, we can well believe that he must himself have enjoyed the
+<i>Yellowplush Memoirs</i> if he ever re-read them in after life. The speech
+in which he is made to dissuade the footman from joining the world of
+letters is so good that I will venture to insert it: "Bullwig was
+violently affected; a tear stood in his glistening i. 'Yellowplush,'
+says he, seizing my hand, 'you <i>are</i> right. Quit not your present
+occupation; black boots, clean knives, wear plush all your life, but
+don't turn literary man. Look at me. I am the first novelist in Europe.
+I have ranged with eagle wings over the wide regions of literature, and
+perched on every eminence in its turn. I have gazed with eagle eyes on
+the sun of philosophy, and fathomed the mysterious depths of the human
+mind. All languages are familiar to me, all thoughts are known to me,
+all men understood by me. I have gathered wisdom from the honeyed lips
+of Plato, as we wandered in the gardens of the Academies; wisdom, too,
+from the mouth of Job Johnson, as we smoked our backy in Seven Dials.
+Such must be the studies, and such is the mission, in this world of the
+Poet-Philosopher. But the knowledge is only emptiness; the initiation is
+but misery; the initiated a man shunned and banned by his fellows. Oh!'
+said Bullwig, clasping his hands, and throwing his fine i's up to the
+chandelier, 'the curse of Pwomethus descends upon his wace. Wath and
+punishment pursue them from <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span>genewation to genewation! Wo to genius, the
+heaven-scaler, the fire-stealer! Wo and thrice-bitter desolation! Earth
+is the wock on which Zeus, wemorseless, stwetches his withing
+wictim;&mdash;men, the vultures that feed and fatten on him. Ai, ai! it is
+agony eternal,&mdash;gwoaning and solitawy despair! And you, Yellowplush,
+would penetwate these mystewies; you would waise the awful veil, and
+stand in the twemendous Pwesence. Beware, as you value your peace,
+beware! Withdraw, wash Neophyte! For heaven's sake! O for heaven's
+sake!'&mdash;Here he looked round with agony;&mdash;'give me a glass of
+bwandy-and-water, for this clawet is beginning to disagwee with me.'" It
+was thus that Thackeray began that vein of satire on his contemporaries
+of which it may be said that the older he grew the more amusing it was,
+and at the same time less likely to hurt the feelings of the author
+satirised.</p>
+
+<p>The next tale of any length from Thackeray's pen, in the magazine, was
+that called <i>Catherine</i>, which is the story taken from the life of a
+wretched woman called Catherine Hayes. It is certainly not pleasant
+reading, and was not written with a pleasant purpose. It assumes to have
+come from the pen of Ikey Solomon, of Horsemonger Lane, and its object
+is to show how disgusting would be the records of thieves, cheats, and
+murderers if their doings and language were described according to their
+nature instead of being handled in such a way as to create sympathy, and
+therefore imitation. Bulwer's <i>Eugene Aram</i>, Harrison Ainsworth's <i>Jack
+Sheppard</i>, and Dickens' Nancy were in his mind, and it was thus that he
+preached his sermon against the selection of such heroes and heroines by
+the novelists of the day. "Be it granted," he says, in his epilogue,
+"Solomon is dull; but <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span>don't attack his morality. He humbly submits
+that, in his poem, no man shall mistake virtue for vice, no man shall
+allow a single sentiment of pity or admiration to enter his bosom for
+any character in the poem, it being from beginning to end a scene of
+unmixed rascality, performed by persons who never deviate into good
+feeling." The intention is intelligible enough, but such a story neither
+could have been written nor read,&mdash;certainly not written by Thackeray,
+nor read by the ordinary reader of a first-class magazine,&mdash;had he not
+been enabled to adorn it by infinite wit. Captain Brock, though a brave
+man, is certainly not described as an interesting or gallant soldier;
+but he is possessed of great resources. Captain Macshane, too, is a
+thorough blackguard; but he is one with a dash of loyalty about him, so
+that the reader can almost sympathise with him, and is tempted to say
+that Ikey Solomon has not quite kept his promise.</p>
+
+<p><i>Catherine</i> appeared in 1839 and 1840. In the latter of those years <i>The
+Shabby Genteel</i> story also came out. Then in 1841 there followed <i>The
+History of Samuel Titmarsh and the Great Hoggarty Diamond</i>, illustrated
+by Samuel's cousin, Michael Angelo. But though so announced in <i>Fraser</i>,
+there were no illustrations, and those attached to the story in later
+editions are not taken from sketches by Thackeray. This, as far as I
+know, was the first use of the name Titmarsh, and seems to indicate some
+intention on the part of the author of creating a hoax as to two
+personages,&mdash;one the writer and the other the illustrator. If it were so
+he must soon have dropped the idea. In the last paragraph he has shaken
+off his cousin Michael. The main object of the story is to expose the
+villany of bubble companies, and the danger they run who venture to have
+dealings with city matters which they do not <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span>understand. I cannot but
+think that he altered his mind and changed his purpose while he was
+writing it, actuated probably by that editorial monition as to its
+length.</p>
+
+<p>In 1842 were commenced <i>The Confessions of George Fitz-Boodle</i>, which
+were continued into 1843. I do not think that they attracted much
+attention, or that they have become peculiarly popular since. They are
+supposed to contain the reminiscences of a younger son, who moans over
+his poverty, complains of womankind generally, laughs at the world all
+round, and intersperses his pages with one or two excellent ballads. I
+quote one, written for the sake of affording a parody, with the parody
+along with it, because the two together give so strong an example of the
+condition of Thackeray's mind in regard to literary products. The
+"humbug" of everything, the pretence, the falseness of affected
+sentiment, the remoteness of poetical pathos from the true condition of
+the average minds of men and women, struck him so strongly, that he
+sometimes allowed himself almost to feel,&mdash;or at any rate, to say,&mdash;that
+poetical expression, as being above nature, must be unnatural. He had
+declared to himself that all humbug was odious, and should be by him
+laughed down to the extent of his capacity. His Yellowplush, his
+Catherine Hayes, his Fitz-Boodle, his Barry Lyndon, and Becky Sharp,
+with many others of this kind, were all invented and treated for this
+purpose and after this fashion. I shall have to say more on the same
+subject when I come to <i>The Snob Papers</i>. In this instance he wrote a
+very pretty ballad, <i>The Willow Tree</i>,&mdash;so good that if left by itself
+it would create no idea of absurdity or extravagant pathos in the mind
+of the ordinary reader,&mdash;simply that he might render his own work absurd
+by his own parody.</p>
+
+<div class="columnleft"><div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">THE WILLOW-TREE.</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i3">No. I.</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Know ye the willow-tree,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Whose gray leaves quiver,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Whispering gloomily</span><br />
+<span class="i1">To yon pale river?</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Lady, at eventide</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Wander not near it!</span><br />
+<span class="i0">They say its branches hide</span><br />
+<span class="i1">A sad lost spirit!</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Once to the willow-tree</span><br />
+<span class="i1">A maid came fearful,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Pale seemed her cheek to be,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Her blue eye tearful.</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Soon as she saw the tree,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Her steps moved fleeter.</span><br />
+<span class="i0">No one was there--ah me!--</span><br />
+<span class="i1">No one to meet her!</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Quick beat her heart to hear</span><br />
+<span class="i1">The far bells' chime</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Toll from the chapel-tower</span><br />
+<span class="i1">The trysting-time.</span><br />
+<span class="i0">But the red sun went down</span><br />
+<span class="i1">In golden flame,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And though she looked around,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Yet no one came!</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Presently came the night,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Sadly to greet her,--</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Moon in her silver light,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Stars in their glitter.</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Then sank the moon away</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Under the billow.</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Still wept the maid alone--</span><br />
+<span class="i1">There by the willow!</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Through the long darkness,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">By the stream rolling,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Hour after hour went on</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Tolling and tolling.</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Long was the darkness,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Lonely and stilly.</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Shrill came the night wind,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Piercing and chilly.</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Shrill blew the morning breeze,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Biting and cold.</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Bleak peers the gray dawn</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Over the wold!</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Bleak over moor and stream</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Looks the gray dawn,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Gray with dishevelled hair.</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Still stands the willow there--</span><br />
+<span class="i1">The maid is gone!</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Domine, Domine!</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Sing we a litany--</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Sing for poor maiden-hearts broken and weary;</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Sing we a litany,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Wail we and weep we a wild miserere!</span><br />
+</div></div></div>
+
+<div class="columnright"><div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span><span class="i1">THE WILLOW-TREE.</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i3">No. II.</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Long by the willow-tree</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Vainly they sought her,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Wild rang the mother's screams</span><br />
+<span class="i1">O'er the gray water.</span><br />
+<span class="i0">"Where is my lovely one?</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Where is my daughter?</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Rouse thee, sir constable--</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Rouse thee and look.</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Fisherman, bring your net,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Boatman, your hook.</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Beat in the lily-beds,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Dive in the brook."</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Vainly the constable</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Shouted and called her.</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Vainly the fisherman</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Beat the green alder.</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Vainly he threw the net.</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Never it hauled her!</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Mother beside the fire</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Sat, her night-cap in;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Father in easychair,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Gloomily napping;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">When at the window-sill</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Came a light tapping.</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And a pale countenance</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Looked through the casement.</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Loud beat the mother's heart,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Sick with amazement,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And at the vision which</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Came to surprise her!</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Shrieking in an agony--</span><br />
+<span class="i1">"Lor'! it's Elizar!"</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span><span class="i0">Yes, 'twas Elizabeth;--</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Yes, 'twas their girl;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Pale was her cheek, and her</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Hair out of curl.</span><br />
+<span class="i0">"Mother!" the loved one,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Blushing, exclaimed,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">"Let not your innocent</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Lizzy be blamed.</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Yesterday, going to Aunt</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Jones's to tea,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Mother, dear mother, I</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Forgot the door-key!</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And as the night was cold,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">And the way steep,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Mrs. Jones kept me to</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Breakfast and sleep."</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Whether her pa and ma</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Fully believed her,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">That we shall never know.</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Stern they received her;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And for the work of that</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Cruel, though short, night,--</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Sent her to bed without</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Tea for a fortnight.</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i3">MORAL.</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Hey diddle diddlety,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Cat and the fiddlety,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Maidens of England take caution by she!</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Let love and suicide</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Never tempt you aside,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And always remember to take the door-key!</span><br />
+</div></div></div>
+
+
+<p class="bottom">Mr. George Fitz-Boodle gave his name to other narratives beyond his own
+<i>Confessions</i>. A series of stories was carried on by him in <i>Fraser</i>,
+called <i>Men's Wives</i>, containing three; <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span><i>Ravenwing</i>, <i>Mr. and Mrs.
+Frank Berry</i>, and <i>Dennis Hoggarty's Wife</i>. The first chapter in <i>Mr.
+and Mrs. Frank Berry</i> describes "The Fight at Slaughter House."
+Slaughter House, as Mr. Venables reminded us in the last chapter, was
+near Smithfield in London,&mdash;the school which afterwards became Grey
+Friars; and the fight between Biggs and Berry is the record of one which
+took place in the flesh when Thackeray was at the Charter House. But Mr.
+Fitz-Boodle's name was afterwards attached to a greater work than these,
+to a work so great that subsequent editors have thought him to be
+unworthy of the honour. In the January number, 1844, of <i>Fraser's
+Magazine</i>, are commenced the <i>Memoirs of Barry Lyndon</i>, and the
+authorship is attributed to Mr. Fitz-Boodle. The title given in the
+magazine was <i>The Luck of Barry Lyndon: a Romance of the last Century</i>.
+By Fitz-Boodle. In the collected edition of Thackeray's works the
+<i>Memoirs</i> are given as "Written by himself," and were, I presume, so
+brought out by Thackeray, after they had appeared in <i>Fraser</i>. Why Mr.
+George Fitz-Boodle should have been robbed of so great an honour I do
+not know.</p>
+
+<p>In imagination, language, construction, and general literary capacity,
+Thackeray never did anything more remarkable than <i>Barry Lyndon</i>. I have
+quoted the words which he put into the mouth of Ikey Solomon, declaring
+that in the story which he has there told he has created nothing but
+disgust for the wicked characters he has produced, and that he has "used
+his humble endeavours to cause the public also to hate them." Here, in
+<i>Barry Lyndon</i>, he has, probably unconsciously, acted in direct
+opposition to his own principles: Barry Lyndon is as great a scoundrel
+as the mind of man ever conceived. He is one who might have taken as his
+motto Satan's <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span>words; "Evil, be thou my good." And yet his story is so
+written that it is almost impossible not to entertain something of a
+friendly feeling for him. He tells his own adventures as a card-sharper,
+bully, and liar; as a heartless wretch, who had neither love nor
+gratitude in his composition; who had no sense even of loyalty; who
+regarded gambling as the highest occupation to which a man could devote
+himself, and fraud as always justified by success; a man possessed by
+all meannesses except cowardice. And the reader is so carried away by
+his frankness and energy as almost to rejoice when he succeeds, and to
+grieve with him when he is brought to the ground.</p>
+
+<p>The man is perfectly satisfied as to the reasonableness,&mdash;I might almost
+say, as to the rectitude,&mdash;of his own conduct throughout. He is one of a
+decayed Irish family, that could boast of good blood. His father had
+obtained possession of the remnants of the property by turning
+Protestant, thus ousting the elder brother, who later on becomes his
+nephew's confederate in gambling. The elder brother is true to the old
+religion, and as the law stood in the last century, the younger brother,
+by changing his religion, was able to turn him out. Barry, when a boy,
+learns the slang and the gait of the debauched gentlemen of the day. He
+is specially proud of being a gentleman by birth and manners. He had
+been kidnapped, and made to serve as a common soldier, but boasts that
+he was at once fit for the occasion when enabled to show as a court
+gentleman. "I came to it at once," he says, "and as if I had never done
+anything else all my life. I had a gentleman to wait upon me, a French
+<i>friseur</i> to dress my hair of a morning. I knew the taste of chocolate
+as by intuition almost, and could distinguish <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span>between the right Spanish
+and the French before I had been a week in my new position. I had rings
+on all my fingers and watches in both my fobs, canes, trinkets, and
+snuffboxes of all sorts. I had the finest natural taste for lace and
+china of any man I ever knew."</p>
+
+<p>To dress well, to wear a sword with a grace, to carry away his plunder
+with affected indifference, and to appear to be equally easy when he
+loses his last ducat, to be agreeable to women, and to look like a
+gentleman,&mdash;these are his accomplishments. In one place he rises to the
+height of a grand professor in the art of gambling, and gives his
+lessons with almost a noble air. "Play grandly, honourably. Be not of
+course cast down at losing; but above all, be not eager at winning, as
+mean souls are." And he boasts of his accomplishments with so much
+eloquence as to make the reader sure that he believes in them. He is
+quite pathetic over himself, and can describe with heartrending words
+the evils that befall him when others use against him successfully any
+of the arts which he practises himself.</p>
+
+<p>The marvel of the book is not so much that the hero should evidently
+think well of himself, as that the author should so tell his story as to
+appear to be altogether on the hero's side. In <i>Catherine</i>, the horrors
+described are most truly disgusting,&mdash;so much that the story, though
+very clever, is not pleasant reading. <i>The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon</i> are
+very pleasant to read. There is nothing to shock or disgust. The style
+of narrative is exactly that which might be used as to the exploits of a
+man whom the author intended to represent as deserving of sympathy and
+praise,&mdash;so that the reader is almost brought to sympathise. But I
+should be doing an injustice to Thackeray if I were to leave an
+impression that he had <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span>taught lessons tending to evil practice, such as
+he supposed to have been left by <i>Jack Sheppard</i> or <i>Eugene Aram</i>. No
+one will be tempted to undertake the life of a <i>chevalier d'industrie</i>
+by reading the book, or be made to think that cheating at cards is
+either an agreeable or a profitable profession. The following is
+excellent as a tirade in favour of gambling, coming from Redmond de
+Balibari, as he came to be called during his adventures abroad, but it
+will hardly persuade anyone to be a gambler;</p>
+
+<p>"We always played on parole with anybody,&mdash;any person, that is, of
+honour and noble lineage. We never pressed for our winnings, or declined
+to receive promissory notes in lieu of gold. But woe to the man who did
+not pay when the note became due! Redmond de Balibari was sure to wait
+upon him with his bill, and I promise you there were very few bad debts.
+On the contrary, gentlemen were grateful to us for our forbearance, and
+our character for honour stood unimpeached. In latter times, a vulgar
+national prejudice has chosen to cast a slur upon the character of men
+of honour engaged in the profession of play; but I speak of the good old
+days of Europe, before the cowardice of the French aristocracy (in the
+shameful revolution, which served them right) brought discredit upon our
+order. They cry fie now upon men engaged in play; but I should like to
+know how much more honourable <i>their</i> modes of livelihood are than ours.
+The broker of the Exchange, who bulls and bears, and buys and sells, and
+dabbles with lying loans, and trades upon state-secrets,&mdash;what is he but
+a gamester? The merchant who deals in teas and tallow, is he any better?
+His bales of dirty indigo are his dice, his cards come up every year
+instead of every ten minutes, and the sea is his <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span>green-table. You call
+the profession of the law an honourable one, where a man will lie for
+any bidder;&mdash;lie down poverty for the sake of a fee from wealth; lie
+down right because wrong is in his brief. You call a doctor an
+honourable man,&mdash;a swindling quack who does not believe in the nostrums
+which he prescribes, and takes your guinea for whispering in your ear
+that it is a fine morning. And yet, forsooth, a gallant man, who sits
+him down before the baize and challenges all comers, his money against
+theirs, his fortune against theirs, is proscribed by your modern moral
+world! It is a conspiracy of the middle-class against gentlemen. It is
+only the shopkeeper cant which is to go down nowadays. I say that play
+was an institution of chivalry. It has been wrecked along with other
+privileges of men of birth. When Seingalt engaged a man for
+six-and-thirty hours without leaving the table, do you think he showed
+no courage? How have we had the best blood and the brightest eyes too,
+of Europe throbbing round the table, as I and my uncle have held the
+cards and the bank against some terrible player, who was matching some
+thousands out of his millions against our all, which was there on the
+baize! When we engaged that daring Alexis Kossloffsky, and won seven
+thousand louis on a single coup, had we lost we should have been beggars
+the next day; when <i>he</i> lost, he was only a village and a few hundred
+serfs in pawn the worse. When at Toeplitz the Duke of Courland brought
+fourteen lacqueys, each with four bags of florins, and challenged our
+bank to play against the sealed bags, what did we ask? 'Sir,' said we,
+'we have but eighty thousand florins in bank, or two hundred thousand at
+three months. If your highness's bags do not contain more than eighty
+thousand we will meet you.' And we <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span>did; and after eleven hours' play,
+in which our bank was at one time reduced to two hundred and three
+ducats, we won seventeen thousand florins of him. Is <i>this</i> not
+something like boldness? Does this profession not require skill, and
+perseverance, and bravery? Four crowned heads looked on at the game, and
+an imperial princess, when I turned up the ace of hearts and made
+Paroli, burst into tears. No man on the European Continent held a higher
+position than Redmond Barry then; and when the Duke of Courland lost he
+was pleased to say that we had won nobly. And so we had, and spent nobly
+what we won." This is very grand, and is put as an eloquent man would
+put it who really wished to defend gambling.</p>
+
+<p>The rascal, of course, comes to a miserable end, but the tone of the
+narrative is continued throughout. He is brought to live at last with
+his old mother in the Fleet prison, on a wretched annuity of fifty
+pounds per annum, which she has saved out of the general wreck, and
+there he dies of delirium tremens. For an assumed tone of continued
+irony, maintained through the long memoir of a life, never becoming
+tedious, never unnatural, astounding us rather by its naturalness, I
+know nothing equal to <i>Barry Lyndon</i>.</p>
+
+<p>As one reads, one sometimes is struck by a conviction that this or the
+other writer has thoroughly liked the work on which he is engaged. There
+is a gusto about his passages, a liveliness in the language, a spring in
+the motion of the words, an eagerness of description, a lilt, if I may
+so call it, in the progress of the narrative, which makes the reader
+feel that the author has himself greatly enjoyed what he has written. He
+has evidently gone on with his work without any sense of weariness, or
+doubt; <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span>and the words have come readily to him. So it has been with
+<i>Barry Lyndon</i>. "My mind was filled full with those blackguards,"
+Thackeray once said to a friend. It is easy enough to see that it was
+so. In the passage which I have above quoted, his mind was running over
+with the idea that a rascal might be so far gone in rascality as to be
+in love with his own trade.</p>
+
+<p>This was the last of Thackeray's long stories in <i>Fraser</i>. I have given
+by no means a complete catalogue of his contributions to the magazine,
+but I have perhaps mentioned those which are best known. There were many
+short pieces which have now been collected in his works, such as <i>Little
+Travels and Roadside Sketches</i>, and the <i>Carmen Lilliense</i>, in which the
+poet is supposed to be detained at Lille by want of money. There are
+others which I think are not to be found in the collected works, such as
+a <i>Box of Novels by Titmarsh</i>, and <i>Titmarsh in the Picture Galleries</i>.
+After the name of Titmarsh had been once assumed it was generally used
+in the papers which he sent to <i>Fraser</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Thackeray's connection with <i>Punch</i> began in 1843, and, as far as I can
+learn, <i>Miss Tickletoby's Lectures on English History</i> was his first
+contribution. They, however, have not been found worthy of a place in
+the collected edition. His short pieces during a long period of his life
+were so numerous that to have brought them all together would have
+weighted his more important works with too great an amount of extraneous
+matter. The same lady, Miss Tickletoby, gave a series of lectures. There
+was <i>The History of the next French Revolution</i>, and <i>The Wanderings of
+our Fat Contributor</i>,&mdash;the first of which is, and the latter is not,
+perpetuated in his works. Our old friend Jeames Yellowplush, or De la
+Pluche,&mdash;for <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span>we cannot for a moment doubt that he is the same
+Jeames,&mdash;is very prolific, and as excellent in his orthography, his
+sense, and satire, as ever. These papers began with <i>The Lucky
+Speculator</i>. He lives in The Albany; he hires a brougham; and is devoted
+to Miss Emily Flimsey, the daughter of Sir George, who had been his
+master,&mdash;to the great injury of poor Maryanne, the fellow-servant who
+had loved him in his kitchen days. Then there follows that wonderful
+ballad, <i>Jeames of Backley Square</i>. Upon this he writes an angry letter
+to <i>Punch</i>, dated from his chambers in The Albany; "Has a reglar
+suscriber to your amusing paper, I beg leaf to state that I should never
+have done so had I supposed that it was your 'abbit to igspose the
+mistaries of privit life, and to hinger the delligit feelings of umble
+individyouls like myself." He writes in his own defence, both as to
+Maryanne and to the share-dealing by which he had made his fortune; and
+he ends with declaring his right to the position which he holds. "You
+are corrict in stating that I am of hancient Normin fam'ly. This is more
+than Peal can say, to whomb I applied for a barnetcy; but the primmier
+being of low igstraction, natrally stikles for his horder." And the
+letter is signed "Fitzjames De la Pluche." Then follows his diary,
+beginning with a description of the way in which he rushed into
+<i>Punch's</i> office, declaring his misfortunes, when losses had come upon
+him. "I wish to be paid for my contribewtions to your paper.
+Suckmstances is altered with me." Whereupon he gets a cheque upon
+Messrs. Pump and Aldgate, and has himself carried away to new
+speculations. He leaves his diary behind him, and <i>Punch</i>
+surreptitiously publishes it. There is much in the diary which comes
+from Thackeray's very heart. Who does not remember his indignation
+against <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span>Lord Bareacres? "I gave the old humbug a few shares out of my
+own pocket. 'There, old Pride,' says I, 'I like to see you down on your
+knees to a footman. There, old Pomposity! Take fifty pounds. I like to
+see you come cringing and begging for it!' Whenever I see him in a very
+public place, I take my change for my money. I digg him in the ribbs, or
+clap his padded old shoulders. I call him 'Bareacres, my old brick,' and
+I see him wince. It does my 'art good." It does Thackeray's heart good
+to pour himself out in indignation against some imaginary Bareacres. He
+blows off his steam with such an eagerness that he forgets for a time,
+or nearly forgets, his cacography. Then there are "Jeames on Time
+Bargings," "Jeames on the <ins class="correction" title="Transcriber's note: original has Guage">Gauge</ins> Question," "Mr. Jeames again." Of all
+our author's heroes Jeames is perhaps the most amusing. There is not
+much in that joke of bad spelling, and we should have been inclined to
+say beforehand, that Mrs. Malaprop had done it so well and so
+sufficiently, that no repetition of it would be received with great
+favour. Like other dishes, it depends upon the cooking. Jeames, with his
+"suckmstances," high or low, will be immortal.</p>
+
+<p>There were <i>The Travels in London</i>, a long series of them; and then
+<i>Punch's Prize Novelists</i>, in which Thackeray imitates the language and
+plots of Bulwer, Disraeli, Charles Lever, G. P. R. James, Mrs. Gore, and
+Cooper, the American. They are all excellent; perhaps Codlingsby is the
+best. Mendoza, when he is fighting with the bargeman, or drinking with
+Codlingsby, or receiving Louis Philippe in his rooms, seems to have come
+direct from the pen of our Premier. Phil Fogerty's jump, and the younger
+and the elder horsemen, as they come riding into the story, one in his
+armour and the other with his feathers, have the very savour and tone of
+Lever and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span>James; but then the savour and the tone are not so piquant. I
+know nothing in the way of imitation to equal Codlingsby, if it be not
+The Tale of Drury Lane, by W. S. in the <i>Rejected Addresses</i>, of which
+it is said that Walter Scott declared that he must have written it
+himself. The scene between Dr. Franklin, Louis XVI., Marie Antoinette,
+and Tatua, the chief of the Nose-rings, as told in <i>The Stars and
+Stripes</i>, is perfect in its way, but it fails as being a caricature of
+Cooper. The caricaturist has been carried away beyond and above his
+model, by his own sense of fun.</p>
+
+<p>Of the ballads which appeared in <i>Punch</i> I will speak elsewhere, as I
+must give a separate short chapter to our author's power of
+versification; but I must say a word of <i>The Snob Papers</i>, which were at
+the time the most popular and the best known of all Thackeray's
+contributions to <i>Punch</i>. I think that perhaps they were more charming,
+more piquant, more apparently true, when they came out one after another
+in the periodical, than they are now as collected together. I think that
+one at a time would be better than many. And I think that the first half
+in the long list of snobs would have been more manifestly snobs to us
+than they are now with the second half of the list appended. In fact,
+there are too many of them, till the reader is driven to tell himself
+that the meaning of it all is that Adam's family is from first to last a
+family of snobs. "First," says Thackeray, in preface, "the world was
+made; then, as a matter of course, snobs; they existed for years and
+years, and were no more known than America. But presently,&mdash;ingens
+patebat tellus,&mdash;the people became darkly aware that there was such a
+race. Not above five-and-twenty years since, a name, an expressive
+monosyllable, arose to designate that case. That <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span>name has spread over
+England like railroads subsequently; snobs are known and recognised
+throughout an empire on which I am given to understand the sun never
+sets. <i>Punch</i> appears at the right season to chronicle their history;
+and the individual comes forth to write that history in <i>Punch</i>.</p>
+
+<p>"I have,&mdash;and for this gift I congratulate myself with a deep and
+abiding thankfulness,&mdash;an eye for a snob. If the truthful is the
+beautiful, it is beautiful to study even the snobbish;&mdash;to track snobs
+through history as certain little dogs in Hampshire hunt out truffles;
+to sink shafts in society, and come upon rich veins of snob-ore.
+Snobbishness is like Death, in a quotation from Horace, which I hope you
+never heard, 'beating with equal foot at poor men's doors, and kicking
+at the gates of emperors.' It is a great mistake to judge of snobs
+lightly, and think they exist among the lower classes merely. An immense
+percentage of snobs, I believe, is to be found in every rank of this
+mortal life. You must not judge hastily or vulgarly of snobs; to do so
+shows that you are yourself a snob. I myself have been taken for one."</p>
+
+<p>The state of Thackeray's mind when he commenced his delineations of
+snobbery is here accurately depicted. Written, as these papers were, for
+<i>Punch</i>, and written, as they were, by Thackeray, it was a necessity
+that every idea put forth should be given as a joke, and that the satire
+on society in general should be wrapped up in burlesque absurdity. But
+not the less eager and serious was his intention. When he tells us, at
+the end of the first chapter, of a certain Colonel Snobley, whom he met
+at "Bagnigge Wells," as he says, and with whom he was so disgusted that
+he determined to drive the man out of the house, we are well aware that
+he had met an <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span>offensive military gentleman,&mdash;probably at Tunbridge.
+Gentlemen thus offensive, even though tamely offensive, were peculiarly
+offensive to him. We presume, by what follows, that this gentleman,
+ignorantly,&mdash;for himself most unfortunately,&mdash;spoke of Public[=o]la.
+Thackeray was disgusted,&mdash;disgusted that such a name should be lugged
+into ordinary conversation at all, and then that a man should talk about
+a name with which he was so little acquainted as not to know how to
+pronounce it. The man was therefore a snob, and ought to be put down; in
+all which I think that Thackeray was unnecessarily hard on the man, and
+gave him too much importance.</p>
+
+<p>So it was with him in his whole intercourse with snobs,&mdash;as he calls
+them. He saw something that was distasteful, and a man instantly became
+a snob in his estimation. "But you <i>can</i> draw," a man once said to him,
+there having been some discussion on the subject of Thackeray's art
+powers. The man meant no doubt to be civil, but meant also to imply that
+for the purpose needed the drawing was good enough, a matter on which he
+was competent to form an opinion. Thackeray instantly put the man down
+as a snob for flattering him. The little courtesies of the world and the
+little discourtesies became snobbish to him. A man could not wear his
+hat, or carry his umbrella, or mount his horse, without falling into
+some error of snobbism before his hypercritical eyes. St. Michael would
+have carried his armour amiss, and St. Cecilia have been snobbish as she
+twanged her harp.</p>
+
+<p>I fancy that a policeman considers that every man in the street would be
+properly "run in," if only all the truth about the man had been known.
+The tinker thinks that every pot is unsound. The cobbler doubts the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span>stability of every shoe. So at last it grew to be the case with
+Thackeray. There was more hope that the city should be saved because of
+its ten just men, than for society, if society were to depend on ten who
+were not snobs. All this arose from the keenness of his vision into that
+which was really mean. But that keenness became so aggravated by the
+intenseness of his search that the slightest speck of dust became to his
+eyes as a foul stain. Public[=o]la, as we saw, damned one poor man to a
+wretched immortality, and another was called pitilessly over the coals,
+because he had mixed a grain of flattery with a bushel of truth.
+Thackeray tells us that he was born to hunt out snobs, as certain dogs
+are trained to find truffles. But we can imagine that a dog, very
+energetic at producing truffles, and not finding them as plentiful as
+his heart desired, might occasionally produce roots which were not
+genuine,&mdash;might be carried on in his energies till to his senses every
+fungus-root became a truffle. I think that there has been something of
+this with our author's snob-hunting, and that his zeal was at last
+greater than his discrimination.</p>
+
+<p>The nature of the task which came upon him made this fault almost
+unavoidable. When a hit is made, say with a piece at a theatre, or with
+a set of illustrations, or with a series of papers on this or the other
+subject,&mdash;when something of this kind has suited the taste of the
+moment, and gratified the public, there is a natural inclination on the
+part of those who are interested to continue that which has been found
+to be good. It pays and it pleases, and it seems to suit everybody. Then
+it is continued usque ad nauseam. We see it in everything. When the king
+said he liked partridges, partridges were served to him every day. The
+world was pleased with certain <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span>ridiculous portraits of its big men. The
+big men were soon used up, and the little men had to be added.</p>
+
+<p>We can imagine that even <i>Punch</i> may occasionally be at a loss for
+subjects wherewith to delight its readers. In fact, <i>The Snob Papers</i>
+were too good to be brought to an end, and therefore there were
+forty-five of them. A dozen would have been better. As he himself says
+in his last paper, "for a mortal year we have been together flattering
+and abusing the human race." It was exactly that. Of course we
+know,&mdash;everybody always knows,&mdash;that a bad specimen of his order may be
+found in every division of society. There may be a snob king, a snob
+parson, a snob member of parliament, a snob grocer, tailor, goldsmith,
+and the like. But that is not what has been meant. We did not want a
+special satirist to tell us what we all knew before. Had snobbishness
+been divided for us into its various attributes and characteristics,
+rather than attributed to various classes, the end sought,&mdash;the
+exposure, namely, of the evil,&mdash;would have been better attained. The
+snobbishness of flattery, of falsehood, of cowardice, lying,
+time-serving, money-worship, would have been perhaps attacked to a
+better purpose than that of kings, priests, soldiers, merchants, or men
+of letters. The assault as made by Thackeray seems to have been made on
+the profession generally.</p>
+
+<p>The paper on clerical snobs is intended to be essentially generous, and
+is ended by an allusion to certain old clerical friends which has a
+sweet tone of tenderness in it. "How should he who knows you, not
+respect you or your calling? May this pen never write a pennyworth again
+if it ever casts ridicule upon either." But in the meantime he has
+thrown his stone at the covetousness of bishops, because of certain
+Irish prelates who died rich many years before <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span>he wrote. The
+insinuation is that bishops generally take more of the loaves and fishes
+than they ought, whereas the fact is that bishops' incomes are generally
+so insufficient for the requirements demanded of them, that a feeling
+prevails that a clergyman to be fit for a bishopric should have a
+private income. He attacks the snobbishness of the universities, showing
+us how one class of young men consists of fellow-commoners, who wear
+lace and drink wine with their meals, and another class consists of
+sizars, or servitors, who wear badges, as being poor, and are never
+allowed to take their food with their fellow-students. That arrangements
+fit for past times are not fit for these is true enough. Consequently
+they should gradually be changed; and from day to day are changed. But
+there is no snobbishness in this. Was the fellow-commoner a snob when he
+acted in accordance with the custom of his rank and standing? or the
+sizar who accepted aid in achieving that education which he could not
+have got without it? or the tutor of the college, who carried out the
+rules entrusted to him? There are two military snobs, Rag and Famish.
+One is a swindler and the other a debauched young idiot. No doubt they
+are both snobs, and one has been, while the other is, an officer. But
+there is,&mdash;I think, not an unfairness so much as an absence of
+intuition,&mdash;in attaching to soldiers especially two vices to which all
+classes are open. Rag was a gambling snob, and Famish a drunken
+snob,&mdash;but they were not specially military snobs. There is a chapter
+devoted to dinner-giving snobs, in which I think the doctrine laid down
+will not hold water, and therefore that the snobbism imputed is not
+proved. "Your usual style of meal," says the satirist&mdash;"that is
+plenteous, comfortable, and in its perfection,&mdash;should be that to which
+you welcome your <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span>friends." Then there is something said about the
+"Brummagem plate pomp," and we are told that it is right that dukes
+should give grand dinners, but that we,&mdash;of the middle class,&mdash;should
+entertain our friends with the simplicity which is customary with us. In
+all this there is, I think, a mistake. The duke gives a grand dinner
+because he thinks his friends will like it, sitting down when alone with
+the duchess, we may suppose, with a retinue and grandeur less than that
+which is arrayed for gala occasions. So is it with Mr. Jones, who is no
+snob because he provides a costly dinner,&mdash;if he can afford it. He does
+it because he thinks his friends will like it. It may be that the grand
+dinner is a bore,&mdash;and that the leg of mutton with plenty of gravy and
+potatoes all hot, would be nicer. I generally prefer the leg of mutton
+myself. But I do not think that snobbery is involved in the other. A
+man, no doubt, may be a snob in giving a dinner. I am not a snob because
+for the occasion I eke out my own dozen silver forks with plated ware;
+but if I make believe that my plated ware is true silver, then I am a
+snob.</p>
+
+<p>In that matter of association with our betters,&mdash;we will for the moment
+presume that gentlemen and ladies with titles or great wealth are our
+betters,&mdash;great and delicate questions arise as to what is snobbery, and
+what is not, in speaking of which Thackeray becomes very indignant, and
+explains the intensity of his feelings as thoroughly by a charming
+little picture as by his words. It is a picture of Queen Elizabeth as
+she is about to trample with disdain on the coat which that snob Raleigh
+is throwing for her use on the mud before her. This is intended to
+typify the low parasite nature of the Englishman which has been
+described in the previous page or two. "And of these calm
+moralists,"&mdash;it matters not for our present purpose <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span>who were the
+moralists in question,&mdash;"is there one I wonder whose heart would not
+throb with pleasure if he could be seen walking arm-in-arm with a couple
+of dukes down Pall Mall? No; it is impossible, in our condition of
+society, not to be sometimes a snob." And again: "How should it be
+otherwise in a country where lordolatry is part of our creed, and where
+our children are brought up to respect the 'Peerage' as the Englishman's
+second Bible." Then follows the wonderfully graphic picture of Queen
+Elizabeth and Raleigh.</p>
+
+<p>In all this Thackeray has been carried away from the truth by his hatred
+for a certain meanness of which there are no doubt examples enough. As
+for Raleigh, I think we have always sympathised with the young man,
+instead of despising him, because he felt on the impulse of the moment
+that nothing was too good for the woman and the queen combined. The idea
+of getting something in return for his coat could hardly have come so
+quick to him as that impulse in favour of royalty and womanhood. If one
+of us to-day should see the queen passing, would he not raise his hat,
+and assume, unconsciously, something of an altered demeanour because of
+his reverence for majesty? In doing so he would have no mean desire of
+getting anything. The throne and its occupant are to him honourable, and
+he honours them. There is surely no greater mistake than to suppose that
+reverence is snobbishness. I meet a great man in the street, and some
+chance having brought me to his knowledge, he stops and says a word to
+me. Am I a snob because I feel myself to be graced by his notice? Surely
+not. And if his acquaintance goes further and he asks me to dinner, am I
+not entitled so far to think well of myself because I have been found
+worthy of his society?</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span></p><p>They who have raised themselves in the world, and they, too, whose
+position has enabled them to receive all that estimation can give, all
+that society can furnish, all that intercourse with the great can give,
+are more likely to be pleasant companions than they who have been less
+fortunate. That picture of two companion dukes in Pall Mall is too
+gorgeous for human eye to endure. A man would be scorched to cinders by
+so much light, as he would be crushed by a sack of sovereigns even
+though he might be allowed to have them if he could carry them away. But
+there can be no doubt that a peer taken at random as a companion would
+be preferable to a clerk from a counting-house,&mdash;taken at random. The
+clerk might turn out a scholar on your hands, and the peer no better
+than a poor spendthrift;&mdash;but the chances are the other way.</p>
+
+<p>A tufthunter is a snob, a parasite is a snob, the man who allows the
+manhood within him to be awed by a coronet is a snob. The man who
+worships mere wealth is a snob. But so also is he who, in fear lest he
+should be called a snob, is afraid to seek the acquaintance,&mdash;or if it
+come to speak of the acquaintance,&mdash;of those whose acquaintance is
+manifestly desirable. In all this I feel that Thackeray was carried
+beyond the truth by his intense desire to put down what is mean.</p>
+
+<p>It is in truth well for us all to know what constitutes snobbism, and I
+think that Thackeray, had he not been driven to dilution and dilatation,
+could have told us. If you will keep your hands from picking and
+stealing, and your tongue from evil speaking, lying, and slandering, you
+will not be a snob. The lesson seems to be simple, and perhaps a little
+trite, but if you look into it, it will be found to contain nearly all
+that is necessary.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span></p><p>But the excellence of each individual picture as it is drawn is not the
+less striking because there may be found some fault with the series as a
+whole. What can excel the telling of the story of Captain Shindy at his
+club,&mdash;which is, I must own, as true as it is graphic. Captain Shindy is
+a real snob. "'Look at it, sir; is it cooked? Smell it, sir. Is it meat
+fit for a gentleman?' he roars out to the steward, who stands trembling
+before him, and who in vain tells him that the Bishop of Bullocksmithy
+has just had three from the same loin." The telling as regards Captain
+Shindy is excellent, but the sidelong attack upon the episcopate is
+cruel. "All the waiters in the club are huddled round the captain's
+mutton-chop. He roars out the most horrible curses at John for not
+bringing the pickles. He utters the most dreadful oaths because Thomas
+has not arrived with the Harvey sauce. Peter comes tumbling with the
+water-jug over Jeames, who is bringing the 'glittering canisters with
+bread.'</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>"Poor Mrs. Shindy and the children are, meanwhile, in dingy lodgings
+somewhere, waited upon by a charity girl in pattens."</p>
+
+<p>The visit to Castle Carabas, and the housekeeper's description of the
+wonders of the family mansion, is as good. "'The Side Entrance and
+'All,' says the housekeeper. 'The halligator hover the mantelpiece was
+brought home by Hadmiral St. Michaels, when a capting with Lord Hanson.
+The harms on the cheers is the harms of the Carabas family. The great
+'all is seventy feet in lenth, fifty-six in breath, and thirty-eight
+feet 'igh. The carvings of the chimlies, representing the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span>buth of Venus
+and 'Ercules and 'Eyelash, is by Van Chislum, the most famous sculpture
+of his hage and country. The ceiling, by Calimanco, represents Painting,
+Harchitecture, and Music,&mdash;the naked female figure with the
+barrel-organ,&mdash;introducing George, first Lord Carabas, to the Temple of
+the Muses. The winder ornaments is by Vanderputty. The floor is
+Patagonian marble; and the chandelier in the centre was presented to
+Lionel, second marquis, by Lewy the Sixteenth, whose 'ead was cut hoff
+in the French Revolution. We now henter the South Gallery," etc. etc.
+All of which is very good fun, with a dash of truth in it also as to the
+snobbery;&mdash;only in this it will be necessary to be quite sure where the
+snobbery lies. If my Lord Carabas has a "buth of Venus," beautiful for
+all eyes to see, there is no snobbery, only good-nature, in the showing
+it; nor is there snobbery in going to see it, if a beautiful "buth of
+Venus" has charms for you. If you merely want to see the inside of a
+lord's house, and the lord is puffed up with the pride of showing his,
+then there will be two snobs.</p>
+
+<p>Of all those papers it may be said that each has that quality of a pearl
+about it which in the previous chapter I endeavoured to explain. In each
+some little point is made in excellent language, so as to charm by its
+neatness, incision, and drollery. But <i>The Snob Papers</i> had better be
+read separately, and not taken in the lump.</p>
+
+<p>Thackeray ceased to write for <i>Punch</i> in 1852, either entirely or almost
+so.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III"></a>CHAPTER III.</h2>
+
+<h3>VANITY FAIR.</h3>
+
+
+<p>Something has been said, in the biographical chapter, of the way in
+which <i>Vanity Fair</i> was produced, and of the period in the author's life
+in which it was written. He had become famous,&mdash;to a limited extent,&mdash;by
+the exquisite nature of his contributions to periodicals; but he desired
+to do something larger, something greater, something, perhaps, less
+ephemeral. For though <i>Barry Lyndon</i> and others have not proved to be
+ephemeral, it was thus that he regarded them. In this spirit he went to
+work and wrote <i>Vanity Fair</i>.</p>
+
+<p>It may be as well to speak first of the faults which were attributed to
+it. It was said that the good people were all fools, and that the clever
+people were all knaves. When the critics,&mdash;the talking critics as well
+as the writing critics,&mdash;began to discuss <i>Vanity Fair</i>, there had
+already grown up a feeling as to Thackeray as an author&mdash;that he was one
+who had taken up the business of castigating the vices of the world.
+Scott had dealt with the heroics, whether displayed in his Flora
+MacIvors or Meg Merrilieses, in his Ivanhoes or Ochiltrees. Miss
+Edgeworth had been moral; Miss Austen conventional; Bulwer had been
+poetical and sentimental; Marryat and Lever had been funny and
+pugnacious, always with a dash of gallantry, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span>displaying funny naval and
+funny military life; and Dickens had already become great in painting
+the virtues of the lower orders. But by all these some kind of virtue
+had been sung, though it might be only the virtue of riding a horse or
+fighting a duel. Even Eugene Aram and Jack Sheppard, with whom Thackeray
+found so much fault, were intended to be fine fellows, though they broke
+into houses and committed murders. The primary object of all those
+writers was to create an interest by exciting sympathy. To enhance our
+sympathy personages were introduced who were very vile indeed,&mdash;as
+Bucklaw, in the guise of a lover, to heighten our feelings for
+Ravenswood and Lucy; as Wild, as a thief-taker, to make us more anxious
+for the saving of Jack; as Ralph Nickleby, to pile up the pity for his
+niece Kate. But each of these novelists might have appropriately begun
+with an <i>Arma virumque cano</i>. The song was to be of something
+godlike,&mdash;even with a Peter Simple. With Thackeray it had been
+altogether different. Alas, alas! the meanness of human wishes; the
+poorness of human results! That had been his tone. There can be no doubt
+that the heroic had appeared contemptible to him, as being untrue. The
+girl who had deceived her papa and mamma seemed more probable to him
+than she who perished under the willow-tree from sheer love,&mdash;as given
+in the last chapter. Why sing songs that are false? Why tell of Lucy
+Ashtons and Kate Nicklebys, when pretty girls, let them be ever so
+beautiful, can be silly and sly? Why pour philosophy out of the mouth of
+a fashionable young gentleman like Pelham, seeing that young gentlemen
+of that sort rarely, or we may say never, talk after that fashion? Why
+make a housebreaker a gallant charming young fellow, the truth being
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span>that housebreakers as a rule are as objectionable in their manners as
+they are in their morals? Thackeray's mind had in truth worked in this
+way, and he had become a satirist. That had been all very well for
+<i>Fraser</i> and <i>Punch</i>; but when his satire was continued through a long
+novel, in twenty-four parts, readers,&mdash;who do in truth like the heroic
+better than the wicked,&mdash;began to declare that this writer was no
+novelist, but only a cynic.</p>
+
+<p>Thence the question arises what a novel should be,&mdash;which I will
+endeavour to discuss very shortly in a later chapter. But this special
+fault was certainly found with <i>Vanity Fair</i> at the time. Heroines
+should not only be beautiful, but should be endowed also with a quasi
+celestial grace,&mdash;grace of dignity, propriety, and reticence. A heroine
+should hardly want to be married, the arrangement being almost too
+mundane,&mdash;and, should she be brought to consent to undergo such bond,
+because of its acknowledged utility, it should be at some period so
+distant as hardly to present itself to the mind as a reality. Eating and
+drinking should be altogether indifferent to her, and her clothes should
+be picturesque rather than smart, and that from accident rather than
+design. Thackeray's Amelia does not at all come up to the description
+here given. She is proud of having a lover, constantly declaring to
+herself and to others that he is "the greatest and the best of
+men,"&mdash;whereas the young gentleman is, in truth, a very little man. She
+is not at all indifferent as to her finery, nor, as we see incidentally,
+to enjoying her suppers at Vauxhall. She is anxious to be married,&mdash;and
+as soon as possible. A hero too should be dignified and of a noble
+presence; a man who, though he may be as poor as Nicholas Nickleby,
+should nevertheless be beautiful on all <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span>occasions, and never deficient
+in readiness, address, or self-assertion. <i>Vanity Fair</i> is specially
+declared by the author to be "a novel without a hero," and therefore we
+have hardly a right to complain of deficiency of heroic conduct in any
+of the male characters. But Captain Dobbin does become the hero, and is
+deficient. Why was he called Dobbin, except to make him ridiculous? Why
+is he so shamefully ugly, so shy, so awkward? Why was he the son of a
+grocer? Thackeray in so depicting him was determined to run counter to
+the recognised taste of novel readers. And then again there was the
+feeling of another great fault. Let there be the virtuous in a novel and
+let there be the vicious, the dignified and the undignified, the sublime
+and the ridiculous,&mdash;only let the virtuous, the dignified, and the
+sublime be in the ascendant. Edith Bellenden, and Lord Evandale, and
+Morton himself would be too stilted, were they not enlivened by Mause,
+and Cuddie, and Poundtext. But here, in this novel, the vicious and the
+absurd have been made to be of more importance than the good and the
+noble. Becky Sharp and Rawdon Crawley are the real heroine and hero of
+the story. It is with them that the reader is called upon to interest
+himself. It is of them that he will think when he is reading the book.
+It is by them that he will judge the book when he has read it. There was
+no doubt a feeling with the public that though satire may be very well
+in its place, it should not be made the backbone of a work so long and
+so important as this. A short story such as <i>Catherine</i> or <i>Barry
+Lyndon</i> might be pronounced to have been called for by the iniquities of
+an outside world; but this seemed to the readers to have been addressed
+almost to themselves. Now men and women like to be painted as <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span>Titian
+would paint them, or Raffaelle,&mdash;not as Rembrandt, or even Rubens.</p>
+
+<p>Whether the ideal or the real is the best form of a novel may be
+questioned, but there can be no doubt that as there are novelists who
+cannot descend from the bright heaven of the imagination to walk with
+their feet upon the earth, so there are others to whom it is not given
+to soar among clouds. The reader must please himself, and make his
+selection if he cannot enjoy both. There are many who are carried into a
+heaven of pathos by the woes of a Master of Ravenswood, who fail
+altogether to be touched by the enduring constancy of a Dobbin. There
+are others,&mdash;and I will not say but they may enjoy the keenest delight
+which literature can give,&mdash;who cannot employ their minds on fiction
+unless it be conveyed in poetry. With Thackeray it was essential that
+the representations made by him should be, to his own thinking,
+lifelike. A Dobbin seemed to him to be such a one as might probably be
+met with in the world, whereas to his thinking a Ravenswood was simply a
+creature of the imagination. He would have said of such, as we would say
+of female faces by Raffaelle, that women would like to be like them, but
+are not like them. Men might like to be like Ravenswood, and women may
+dream of men so formed and constituted, but such men do not exist.
+Dobbins do, and therefore Thackeray chose to write of a Dobbin.</p>
+
+<p>So also of the preference given to Becky Sharp and to Rawdon Crawley.
+Thackeray thought that more can be done by exposing the vices than
+extolling the virtues of mankind. No doubt he had a more thorough belief
+in the one than in the other. The Dobbins he did encounter&mdash;seldom; the
+Rawdon Crawleys very often. He <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span>saw around him so much that was mean! He
+was hurt so often by the little vanities of people! It was thus that he
+was driven to that overthoughtfulness about snobs of which I have spoken
+in the last chapter. It thus became natural to him to insist on the
+thing which he hated with unceasing assiduity, and only to break out now
+and again into a rapture of love for the true nobility which was dear to
+him,&mdash;as he did with the character of Captain Dobbin.</p>
+
+<p>It must be added to all this that, before he has done with his snob or
+his knave, he will generally weave in some little trait of humanity by
+which the sinner shall be relieved from the absolute darkness of utter
+iniquity. He deals with no Varneys or Deputy-Shepherds, all villany and
+all lies, because the snobs and knaves he had seen had never been all
+snob or all knave. Even Shindy probably had some feeling for the poor
+woman he left at home. Rawdon Crawley loved his wicked wife dearly, and
+there were moments even with her in which some redeeming trait half
+reconciles her to the reader.</p>
+
+<p>Such were the faults which were found in <i>Vanity Fair</i>; but though the
+faults were found freely, the book was read by all. Those who are old
+enough can well remember the effect which it had, and the welcome which
+was given to the different numbers as they appeared. Though the story is
+vague and wandering, clearly commenced without any idea of an ending,
+yet there is something in the telling which makes every portion of it
+perfect in itself. There are absurdities in it which would not be
+admitted to anyone who had not a peculiar gift of making even his
+absurdities delightful. No schoolgirl who ever lived would have thrown
+back her gift-book, as Rebecca did the "dixonary," out of the carriage
+window as she was taken <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span>away from school. But who does not love that
+scene with which the novel commences? How could such a girl as Amelia
+Osborne have got herself into such society as that in which we see her
+at Vauxhall? But we forgive it all because of the telling. And then
+there is that crowning absurdity of Sir Pitt Crawley and his
+establishment.</p>
+
+<p>I never could understand how Thackeray in his first serious attempt
+could have dared to subject himself and Sir Pitt Crawley to the critics
+of the time. Sir Pitt is a baronet, a man of large property, and in
+Parliament, to whom Becky Sharp goes as a governess at the end of a
+delightful visit with her friend Amelia Sedley, on leaving Miss
+Pinkerton's school. The Sedley carriage takes her to Sir Pitt's door.
+"When the bell was rung a head appeared between the interstices of the
+dining-room shutters, and the door was opened by a man in drab breeches
+and gaiters, with a dirty old coat, a foul old neckcloth lashed round
+his bristly neck, a shining bald head, a leering red face, a pair of
+twinkling gray eyes, and a mouth perpetually on the grin.</p>
+
+<p>"'This Sir Pitt Crawley's?' says John from the box.</p>
+
+<p>"'E'es,' says the man at the door with a nod.</p>
+
+<p>"'Hand down these 'ere trunks there,' said John.</p>
+
+<p>"'Hand 'em down yourself,' said the porter." But John on the box
+declines to do this, as he cannot leave his horses.</p>
+
+<p>"The bald-headed man, taking his hands out of his breeches' pockets,
+advanced on this summons, and throwing Miss Sharp's trunk over his
+shoulder, carried it into the house." Then Becky is shown into the
+house, and a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span>dismantled dining-room is described, into which she is led
+by the dirty man with the trunk.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Two kitchen chairs, and a round table, and an attenuated old
+poker and tongs, were, however, gathered round the fireplace,
+as was a saucepan over a feeble, sputtering fire. There was a
+bit of cheese and bread and a tin candlestick on the table,
+and a little black porter in a pint pot.</p>
+
+<p>"Had your dinner, I suppose?" This was said by him of the bald
+head. "It is not too warm for you? Like a drop of beer?"</p>
+
+<p>"Where is Sir Pitt Crawley?" said Miss Sharp majestically.</p>
+
+<p>"He, he! <i>I</i>'m Sir Pitt Crawley. Rek'lect you owe me a pint
+for bringing down your luggage. He, he! ask Tinker if I
+ain't."</p>
+
+<p>The lady addressed as Mrs. Tinker at this moment made her
+appearance, with a pipe and a paper of tobacco, for which she
+had been despatched a minute before Miss Sharp's arrival; and
+she handed the articles over to Sir Pitt, who had taken his
+seat by the fire.</p>
+
+<p>"Where's the farden?" said he. "I gave you three-halfpence;
+where's the change, old Tinker?"</p>
+
+<p>"There," replied Mrs. Tinker, flinging down the coin. "It's
+only baronets as cares about farthings."</p></div>
+
+<p>Sir Pitt Crawley has always been to me a stretch of audacity which I
+have been unable to understand. But it has been accepted; and from this
+commencement of Sir Pitt Crawley have grown the wonderful characters of
+the Crawley family,&mdash;old Miss Crawley, the worldly, wicked,
+pleasure-loving aunt, the Rev. Bute Crawley and his wife, who are quite
+as worldly, the sanctimonious elder son, who in truth is not less so,
+and Rawdon, who ultimately becomes Becky's husband,&mdash;who is the bad hero
+of the book, as Dobbin is the good hero. They are admirable; but it is
+quite clear that Thackeray had known nothing of what was coming about
+them when he <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span>caused Sir Pitt to eat his tripe with Mrs. Tinker in the
+London dining-room.</p>
+
+<p>There is a double story running through the book, the parts of which are
+but lightly woven together, of which the former tells us the life and
+adventures of that singular young woman Becky Sharp, and the other the
+troubles and ultimate success of our noble hero Captain Dobbin. Though
+it be true that readers prefer, or pretend to prefer, the romantic to
+the common in their novels, and complain of pages which are defiled with
+that which is low, yet I find that the absurd, the ludicrous, and even
+the evil, leave more impression behind them than the grand, the
+beautiful, or even the good. Dominie Sampson, Dugald Dalgetty, and
+Bothwell are, I think, more remembered than Fergus MacIvor, than Ivanhoe
+himself, or Mr. Butler the minister. It certainly came to pass that, in
+spite of the critics, Becky Sharp became the first attraction in <i>Vanity
+Fair</i>. When we speak now of <i>Vanity Fair</i>, it is always to Becky that
+our thoughts recur. She has made a position for herself in the world of
+fiction, and is one of our established personages.</p>
+
+<p>I have already said how she left school, throwing the "dixonary" out of
+the window, like dust from her feet, and was taken to spend a few
+halcyon weeks with her friend Amelia Sedley, at the Sedley mansion in
+Russell Square. There she meets a brother Sedley home from India,&mdash;the
+immortal Jos,&mdash;at whom she began to set her hitherto untried cap. Here
+we become acquainted both with the Sedley and with the Osborne families,
+with all their domestic affections and domestic snobbery, and have to
+confess that the snobbery is stronger than the affection. As we desire
+to love Amelia Sedley, we wish that the people around her were less
+vulgar or less selfish,&mdash;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span>especially we wish it in regard to that
+handsome young fellow, George Osborne, whom she loves with her whole
+heart. But with Jos Sedley we are inclined to be content, though he be
+fat, purse-proud, awkward, a drunkard, and a coward, because we do not
+want anything better for Becky. Becky does not want anything better for
+herself, because the man has money. She has been born a pauper. She
+knows herself to be but ill qualified to set up as a beauty,&mdash;though by
+dint of cleverness she does succeed in that afterwards. She has no
+advantages in regard to friends or family as she enters life. She must
+earn her bread for herself. Young as she is, she loves money, and has a
+great idea of the power of money. Therefore, though Jos is distasteful
+at all points, she instantly makes her attack. She fails, however, at
+any rate for the present. She never becomes his wife, but at last she
+succeeds in getting some of his money. But before that time comes she
+has many a suffering to endure, and many a triumph to enjoy.</p>
+
+<p>She goes to Sir Pitt Crawley as governess for his second family, and is
+taken down to Queen's Crawley in the country. There her cleverness
+prevails, even with the baronet, of whom I have just given Thackeray's
+portrait. She keeps his accounts, and writes his letters, and helps him
+to save money; she reads with the elder sister books they ought not to
+have read; she flatters the sanctimonious son. In point of fact, she
+becomes all in all at Queen's Crawley, so that Sir Pitt himself falls in
+love with her,&mdash;for there is reason to think that Sir Pitt may soon
+become again a widower. But there also came down to the baronet's house,
+on an occasion of general entertaining, Captain Rawdon Crawley. Of
+course Becky sets her cap at him, and of course succeeds. She always
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span>succeeds. Though she is only the governess, he insists upon dancing with
+her, to the neglect of all the young ladies of the neighbourhood. They
+continue to walk together by moonlight,&mdash;or starlight,&mdash;the great,
+heavy, stupid, half-tipsy dragoon, and the intriguing, covetous,
+altogether unprincipled young woman. And the two young people absolutely
+come to love one another in their way,&mdash;the heavy, stupid, fuddled
+dragoon, and the false, covetous, altogether unprincipled young woman.</p>
+
+<p>The fat aunt Crawley is a maiden lady, very rich, and Becky quite
+succeeds in gaining the rich aunt by her wiles. The aunt becomes so fond
+of Becky down in the country, that when she has to return to her own
+house in town, sick from over-eating, she cannot be happy without taking
+Becky with her. So Becky is installed in the house in London, having
+been taken away abruptly from her pupils, to the great dismay of the old
+lady's long-established resident companion. They all fall in love with
+her; she makes herself so charming, she is so clever; she can even, by
+help of a little care in dressing, become so picturesque! As all this
+goes on, the reader feels what a great personage is Miss Rebecca Sharp.</p>
+
+<p>Lady Crawley dies down in the country, while Becky is still staying with
+his sister, who will not part with her. Sir Pitt at once rushes up to
+town, before the funeral, looking for consolation where only he can find
+it. Becky brings him down word from his sister's room that the old lady
+is too ill to see him.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"So much the better," Sir Pitt answered; "I want to see you,
+Miss Sharp. I want you back at Queen's Crawley, miss," the
+baronet said. His eyes had such a strange look, and were fixed
+upon her so stedfastly that Rebecca Sharp began almost to
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span>tremble. Then she half promises, talks about the dear
+children, and angles with the old man. "I tell you I want
+you," he says; "I'm going back to the vuneral, will you come
+back?&mdash;yes or no?"</p>
+
+<p>"I daren't. I don't think&mdash;it wouldn't be right&mdash;to be
+alone&mdash;with you, sir," Becky said, seemingly in great
+agitation.</p>
+
+<p>"I say again, I want you. I can't get on without you. I didn't
+see what it was till you went away. The house all goes wrong.
+It's not the same place. All my accounts has got muddled
+again. You must come back. Do come back. Dear Becky, do come."</p>
+
+<p>"Come,&mdash;as what, sir?" Rebecca gasped out.</p>
+
+<p>"Come as Lady Crawley, if you like. There, will that zatisfy
+you? Come back and be my wife. You're vit for it. Birth be
+hanged. You're as good a lady as ever I see. You've got more
+brains in your little vinger than any baronet's wife in the
+country. Will you come? Yes or no?" Rebecca is startled, but
+the old man goes on. "I'll make you happy; zee if I don't. You
+shall do what you like, spend what you like, and have it all
+your own way. I'll make you a settlement. I'll do everything
+regular. Look here," and the old man fell down on his knees
+and leered at her like a satyr.</p></div>
+
+<p>But Rebecca, though she had been angling, angling for favour and love
+and power, had not expected this. For once in her life she loses her
+presence of mind, and exclaims: "Oh Sir Pitt; oh sir; I&mdash;I'm married
+already!" She has married Rawdon Crawley, Sir Pitt's younger son, Miss
+Crawley's favourite among those of her family who are looking for her
+money. But she keeps her secret for the present, and writes a charming
+letter to the Captain; "Dearest,&mdash;Something tells me that we shall
+conquer. You shall leave that odious regiment. Quit gaming, racing, and
+be a good boy, and we shall all live in Park Lane, and <i>ma tante</i> shall
+leave us all her money." <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span><i>Ma tante's</i> money has been in her mind all
+through, but yet she loves him.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"Suppose the old lady doesn't come to," Rawdon said to his
+little wife as they sat together in the snug little Brompton
+lodgings. She had been trying the new piano all the morning.
+The new gloves fitted her to a nicety. The new shawl became
+her wonderfully. The new rings glittered on her little hands,
+and the new watch ticked at her waist.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>I'll</i> make your fortune," she said; and Delilah patted
+Samson's cheek.</p>
+
+<p>"You can do anything," he said, kissing the little hand. "By
+Jove you can! and we'll drive down to the Star and Garter and
+dine, by Jove!"</p></div>
+
+<p>They were neither of them quite heartless at that moment, nor did Rawdon
+ever become quite bad. Then follow the adventures of Becky as a married
+woman, through all of which there is a glimmer of love for her stupid
+husband, while it is the real purpose of her heart to get money how she
+may,&mdash;by her charms, by her wit, by her lies, by her readiness. She
+makes love to everyone,&mdash;even to her sanctimonious brother-in-law, who
+becomes Sir Pitt in his time,&mdash;and always succeeds. But in her
+love-making there is nothing of love. She gets hold of that
+well-remembered old reprobate, the Marquis of Steyne, who possesses the
+two valuable gifts of being very dissolute and very rich, and from him
+she obtains money and jewels to her heart's desire. The abominations of
+Lord Steyne are depicted in the strongest language of which <i>Vanity
+Fair</i> admits. The reader's hair stands almost on end in horror at the
+wickedness of the two wretches,&mdash;at her desire for money, sheer money;
+and his for wickedness, sheer wickedness. Then her husband finds her
+out,&mdash;poor Rawdon! who with all his faults and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span>thickheaded stupidity,
+has become absolutely entranced by the wiles of his little wife. He is
+carried off to a sponging-house, in order that he may be out of the way,
+and, on escaping unexpectedly from thraldom, finds the lord in his
+wife's drawing-room. Whereupon he thrashes the old lord, nearly killing
+him; takes away the plunder which he finds on his wife's person, and
+hurries away to seek assistance as to further revenge;&mdash;for he is
+determined to shoot the marquis, or to be shot. He goes to one Captain
+Macmurdo, who is to act as his second, and there he pours out his heart.
+"You don't know how fond I was of that one," Rawdon said,
+half-inarticulately. "Damme, I followed her like a footman! I gave up
+everything I had to her. I'm a beggar because I would marry her. By
+Jove, sir, I've pawned my own watch to get her anything she fancied. And
+she,&mdash;she's been making a purse for herself all the time, and grudged me
+a hundred pounds to get me out of quod!" His friend alleges that the
+wife may be innocent after all. "It may be so," Rawdon exclaimed sadly;
+"but this don't look very innocent!" And he showed the captain the
+thousand-pound note which he had found in Becky's pocketbook.</p>
+
+<p>But the marquis can do better than fight; and Rawdon, in spite of his
+true love, can do better than follow the quarrel up to his own undoing.
+The marquis, on the spur of the moment, gets the lady's husband
+appointed governor of Coventry Island, with a salary of three thousand
+pounds a year; and poor Rawdon at last condescends to accept the
+appointment. He will not see his wife again, but he makes her an
+allowance out of his income.</p>
+
+<p>In arranging all this, Thackeray is enabled to have a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span>side blow at the
+British way of distributing patronage,&mdash;for the favour of which he was
+afterwards himself a candidate. He quotes as follows from <i>The Royalist</i>
+newspaper: "We hear that the governorship"&mdash;of Coventry Island&mdash;"has
+been offered to Colonel Rawdon Crawley, C.B., a distinguished Waterloo
+officer. We need not only men of acknowledged bravery, but men of
+administrative talents to superintend the affairs of our colonies; and
+we have no doubt that the gentleman selected by the Colonial Office to
+fill the lamented vacancy which has occurred at Coventry Island, is
+admirably calculated for the post." The reader, however, is aware that
+the officer in question cannot write a sentence or speak two words
+correctly.</p>
+
+<p>Our heroine's adventures are carried on much further, but they cannot be
+given here in detail. To the end she is the same,&mdash;utterly false,
+selfish, covetous, and successful. To have made such a woman really in
+love would have been a mistake. Her husband she likes best,&mdash;because he
+is, or was, her own. But there is no man so foul, so wicked, so
+unattractive, but that she can fawn over him for money and jewels. There
+are women to whom nothing is nasty, either in person, language, scenes,
+actions, or principle,&mdash;and Becky is one of them; and yet she is herself
+attractive. A most wonderful sketch, for the perpetration of which all
+Thackeray's power of combined indignation and humour was necessary!</p>
+
+<p>The story of Amelia and her two lovers, George Osborne and Captain, or
+as he came afterwards to be, Major, and Colonel Dobbin, is less
+interesting, simply because goodness and eulogy are less exciting than
+wickedness and censure. Amelia is a true, honest-hearted, thoroughly
+English young woman, who loves her love <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span>because he is grand,&mdash;to her
+eyes,&mdash;and loving him, loves him with all her heart. Readers have said
+that she is silly, only because she is not heroic. I do not know that
+she is more silly than many young ladies whom we who are old have loved
+in our youth, or than those whom our sons are loving at the present
+time. Readers complain of Amelia because she is absolutely true to
+nature. There are no Raffaellistic touches, no added graces, no divine
+romance. She is feminine all over, and British,&mdash;loving, true,
+thoroughly unselfish, yet with a taste for having things comfortable,
+forgiving, quite capable of jealousy, but prone to be appeased at once,
+at the first kiss; quite convinced that her lover, her husband, her
+children are the people in all the world to whom the greatest
+consideration is due. Such a one is sure to be the dupe of a Becky
+Sharp, should a Becky Sharp come in her way,&mdash;as is the case with so
+many sweet Amelias whom we have known. But in a matter of love she is
+sound enough and sensible enough,&mdash;and she is as true as steel. I know
+no trait in Amelia which a man would be ashamed to find in his own
+daughter.</p>
+
+<p>She marries her George Osborne, who, to tell the truth of him, is but a
+poor kind of fellow, though he is a brave soldier. He thinks much of his
+own person, and is selfish. Thackeray puts in a touch or two here and
+there by which he is made to be odious. He would rather give a present
+to himself than to the girl who loved him. Nevertheless, when her father
+is ruined he marries her, and he fights bravely at Waterloo, and is
+killed. "No more firing was heard at Brussels. The pursuit rolled miles
+away. Darkness came down on the field and the city,&mdash;and Amelia was
+praying for George, who was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet
+through his heart."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span></p><p>Then follows the long courtship of Dobbin, the true hero,&mdash;he who has
+been the friend of George since their old school-days; who has lived
+with him and served him, and has also loved Amelia. But he has loved
+her,&mdash;as one man may love another,&mdash;solely with a view to the profit of
+his friend. He has known all along that George and Amelia have been
+engaged to each other as boy and girl. George would have neglected her,
+but Dobbin would not allow it. George would have jilted the girl who
+loved him, but Dobbin would not let him. He had nothing to get for
+himself, but loving her as he did, it was the work of his life to get
+for her all that she wanted.</p>
+
+<p>George is shot at Waterloo, and then come fifteen years of
+widowhood,&mdash;fifteen years during which Becky is carrying on her
+man&oelig;uvres,&mdash;fifteen years during which Amelia cannot bring herself to
+accept the devotion of the old captain, who becomes at last a colonel.
+But at the end she is won. "The vessel is in port. He has got the prize
+he has been trying for all his life. The bird has come in at last. There
+it is, with its head on its shoulder, billing and cooing clean up to his
+heart, with soft outstretched fluttering wings. This is what he has
+asked for every day and hour for eighteen years. This is what he has
+pined after. Here it is,&mdash;the summit, the end, the last page of the
+third volume."</p>
+
+<p>The reader as he closes the book has on his mind a strong conviction,
+the strongest possible conviction, that among men George is as weak and
+Dobbin as noble as any that he has met in literature; and that among
+women Amelia is as true and Becky as vile as any he has encountered. Of
+so much he will be conscious. In addition to this he will unconsciously
+have found that every page he has read will have been of interest to
+him. There has <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span>been no padding, no longueurs; every bit will have had
+its weight with him. And he will find too at the end, if he will think
+of it&mdash;though readers, I fear, seldom think much of this in regard to
+books they have read&mdash;that the lesson taught in every page has been
+good. There may be details of evil painted so as to disgust,&mdash;painted
+almost too plainly,&mdash;but none painted so as to allure.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV"></a>CHAPTER IV.</h2>
+
+<h3>PENDENNIS AND THE NEWCOMES.</h3>
+
+
+<p>The absence of the heroic was, in Thackeray, so palpable to Thackeray
+himself that in his original preface to <i>Pendennis</i>, when he began to be
+aware that his reputation was made, he tells his public what they may
+expect and what they may not, and makes his joking complaint of the
+readers of his time because they will not endure with patience the true
+picture of a natural man. "Even the gentlemen of our age," he
+says,&mdash;adding that the story of <i>Pendennis</i> is an attempt to describe
+one of them, just as he is,&mdash;"even those we cannot show as they are with
+the notorious selfishness of their time and their education. Since the
+author of <i>Tom Jones</i> was buried, no writer of fiction among us has been
+permitted to depict to his utmost power a <span class="smcap lowercase">MAN</span>. We must shape
+him, and give him a certain conventional temper." Then he rebukes his
+audience because they will not listen to the truth. "You will not hear
+what moves in the real world, what passes in society, in the clubs,
+colleges, mess-rooms,&mdash;what is the life and talk of your sons." You want
+the Raffaellistic touch, or that of some painter of horrors equally
+removed from the truth. I tell you how a man really does act,&mdash;as did
+Fielding with Tom Jones,&mdash;but it does not satisfy you. You will not
+sympathise with this young man of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span>mine, this Pendennis, because he is
+neither angel nor imp. If it be so, let it be so. I will not paint for
+you angels or imps, because I do not see them. The young man of the day,
+whom I do see, and of whom I know the inside and the out thoroughly, him
+I have painted for you; and here he is, whether you like the picture or
+not. This is what Thackeray meant, and, having this in his mind, he
+produced <i>Pendennis</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The object of a novel should be to instruct in morals while it amuses. I
+cannot think but that every novelist who has thought much of his art
+will have realised as much as that for himself. Whether this may best be
+done by the transcendental or by the commonplace is the question which
+it more behoves the reader than the author to answer, because the author
+may be fairly sure that he who can do the one will not, probably cannot,
+do the other. If a lad be only five feet high he does not try to enlist
+in the Guards. Thackeray complains that many ladies have "remonstrated
+and subscribers left him," because of his realistic tendency.
+Nevertheless he has gone on with his work, and, in <i>Pendennis</i>, has
+painted a young man as natural as Tom Jones. Had he expended himself in
+the attempt, he could not have drawn a Master of Ravenswood.</p>
+
+<p>It has to be admitted that Pendennis is not a fine fellow. He is not as
+weak, as selfish, as untrustworthy as that George Osborne whom Amelia
+married in <i>Vanity Fair</i>; but nevertheless, he is weak, and selfish, and
+untrustworthy. He is not such a one as a father would wish to see his
+son, or a mother to welcome as a lover for her daughter. But then,
+fathers are so often doomed to find their sons not all that they wish,
+and mothers to see their girls falling in love with young men who are
+not <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span>Paladins. In our individual lives we are contented to endure an
+admixture of evil, which we should resent if imputed to us in the
+general. We presume ourselves to be truth-speaking, noble in our
+sentiments, generous in our actions, modest and unselfish, chivalrous
+and devoted. But we forgive and pass over in silence a few delinquencies
+among ourselves. What boy at school ever is a coward,&mdash;in the general?
+What gentleman ever tells a lie? What young lady is greedy? We take it
+for granted, as though they were fixed rules in life, that our boys from
+our public schools look us in the face and are manly; that our gentlemen
+tell the truth as a matter of course; and that our young ladies are
+refined and unselfish. Thackeray is always protesting that it is not so,
+and that no good is to be done by blinking the truth. He knows that we
+have our little home experiences. Let us have the facts out, and mend
+what is bad if we can. This novel of <i>Pendennis</i> is one of his loudest
+protests to this effect.</p>
+
+<p>I will not attempt to tell the story of Pendennis, how his mother loved
+him, how he first came to be brought up together with Laura Bell, how he
+thrashed the other boys when he was a boy, and how he fell in love with
+Miss Fotheringay, n&eacute;e Costigan, and was determined to marry her while he
+was still a hobbledehoy, how he went up to Boniface, that well-known
+college at Oxford, and there did no good, spending money which he had
+not got, and learning to gamble. The English gentleman, as we know,
+never lies; but Pendennis is not quite truthful; when the college tutor,
+thinking that he hears the rattling of dice, makes his way into Pen's
+room, Pen and his two companions are found with three <i>Homers</i> before
+them, and Pen asks the tutor with great gravity; "What was <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span>the present
+condition of the river Scamander, and whether it was navigable or no?"
+He tells his mother that, during a certain vacation he must stay up and
+read, instead of coming home,&mdash;but, nevertheless, he goes up to London
+to amuse himself. The reader is soon made to understand that, though Pen
+may be a fine gentleman, he is not trustworthy. But he repents and comes
+home, and kisses his mother; only, alas! he will always be kissing
+somebody else also.</p>
+
+<p>The story of the Amorys and the Claverings, and that wonderful French
+cook M. Alcide Mirobolant, forms one of those delightful digressions
+which Thackeray scatters through his novels rather than weaves into
+them. They generally have but little to do with the story itself, and
+are brought in only as giving scope for some incident to the real hero
+or heroine. But in this digression Pen is very much concerned indeed,
+for he is brought to the very verge of matrimony with that peculiarly
+disagreeable lady Miss Amory. He does escape at last, but only within a
+few pages of the end, when we are made unhappy by the lady's victory
+over that poor young sinner Foker, with whom we have all come to
+sympathise, in spite of his vulgarity and fast propensities. She would
+to the last fain have married Pen, in whom she believes, thinking that
+he would make a name for her. "Il me faut des &eacute;motions," says Blanche.
+Whereupon the author, as he leaves her, explains the nature of this Miss
+Amory's feelings. "For this young lady was not able to carry out any
+emotion to the full, but had a sham enthusiasm, a sham hatred, a sham
+love, a sham taste, a sham grief; each of which flared and shone very
+vehemently for an instant, but subsided and gave place to the next sham
+emotion." Thackeray, when he drew <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span>this portrait, must certainly have
+had some special young lady in his view. But though we are made unhappy
+for Foker, Foker too escapes at last, and Blanche, with her emotions,
+marries that very doubtful nobleman Comte Montmorenci de Valentinois.</p>
+
+<p>But all this of Miss Amory is but an episode. The purport of the story
+is the way in which the hero is made to enter upon the world, subject as
+he has been to the sweet teaching of his mother, and subject as he is
+made to be to the worldly lessons of his old uncle the major. Then he is
+ill, and nearly dies, and his mother comes up to nurse him. And there is
+his friend Warrington, of whose family down in Suffolk we shall have
+heard something when we have read <i>The Virginians</i>,&mdash;one I think of the
+finest characters, as it is certainly one of the most touching, that
+Thackeray ever drew. Warrington, and Pen's mother, and Laura are our
+hero's better angels,&mdash;angels so good as to make us wonder that a
+creature so weak should have had such angels about him; though we are
+driven to confess that their affection and loyalty for him are natural.
+There is a melancholy beneath the roughness of Warrington, and a
+feminine softness combined with the reticent manliness of the man, which
+have endeared him to readers beyond perhaps any character in the book.
+Major Pendennis has become immortal. Selfish, worldly, false, padded,
+caring altogether for things mean and poor in themselves; still the
+reader likes him. It is not quite all for himself. To Pen he is
+good,&mdash;to Pen who is the head of his family, and to come after him as
+the Pendennis of the day. To Pen and to Pen's mother he is beneficent
+after his lights. In whatever he undertakes it is so contrived that the
+reader shall in some degree sympathise with him. And so it is <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span>with poor
+old Costigan, the drunken Irish captain, Miss Fotheringay's papa. He was
+not a pleasant person. "We have witnessed the d&eacute;shabille of Major
+Pendennis," says our author; "will any one wish to be valet-de-chambre
+to our other hero, Costigan? It would seem that the captain, before
+issuing from his bedroom, scented himself with otto of whisky." Yet
+there is a kindliness about him which softens our hearts, though in
+truth he is very careful that the kindness shall always be shown to
+himself.</p>
+
+<p>Among these people Pen makes his way to the end of the novel, coming
+near to shipwreck on various occasions, and always deserving the
+shipwreck which he has almost encountered. Then there will arise the
+question whether it might not have been better that he should be
+altogether shipwrecked, rather than housed comfortably with such a wife
+as Laura, and left to that enjoyment of happiness forever after, which
+is the normal heaven prepared for heroes and heroines who have done
+their work well through three volumes. It is almost the only instance in
+all Thackeray's works in which this state of bliss is reached. George
+Osborne, who is the beautiful lover in <i>Vanity Fair</i>, is killed almost
+before our eyes, on the field of battle, and we feel that Nemesis has
+with justice taken hold of him. Poor old Dobbin does marry the widow,
+after fifteen years of further service, when we know him to be a
+middle-aged man and her a middle-aged woman. That glorious Paradise of
+which I have spoken requires a freshness which can hardly be attributed
+to the second marriage of a widow who has been fifteen years mourning
+for her first husband. Clive Newcome, "the first young man," if we may
+so call him, of the novel which I shall mention just now, is carried so
+far <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span>beyond his matrimonial elysium that we are allowed to see too
+plainly how far from true may be those promises of hymeneal happiness
+forever after. The cares of married life have settled down heavily upon
+his young head before we leave him. He not only marries, but loses his
+wife, and is left a melancholy widower with his son. Esmond and Beatrix
+certainly reach no such elysium as that of which we are speaking. But
+Pen, who surely deserved a Nemesis, though perhaps not one so black as
+that demanded by George Osborne's delinquencies, is treated as though he
+had been passed through the fire, and had come out,&mdash;if not pure gold,
+still gold good enough for goldsmiths. "And what sort of a husband will
+this Pendennis be?" This is the question asked by the author himself at
+the end of the novel; feeling, no doubt, some hesitation as to the
+justice of what he had just done. "And what sort of a husband will this
+Pendennis be?" many a reader will ask, doubting the happiness of such a
+marriage and the future of Laura. The querists are referred to that lady
+herself, who, seeing his faults and wayward moods&mdash;seeing and owning
+that there are better men than he&mdash;loves him always with the most
+constant affection. The assertion could be made with perfect confidence,
+but is not to the purpose. That Laura's affection should be constant, no
+one would doubt; but more than that is wanted for happiness. How about
+Pendennis and his constancy?</p>
+
+<p><i>The Newcomes</i>, which I bracket in this chapter with <i>Pendennis</i>, was
+not written till after <i>Esmond</i>, and appeared between that novel and
+<i>The Virginians</i>, which was a sequel to <i>Esmond</i>. It is supposed to be
+edited by Pen, whose own adventures we have just completed, and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span>is
+commenced by that celebrated night passed by Colonel Newcome and his boy
+Clive at the Cave of Harmony, during which the colonel is at first so
+pleasantly received and so genially entertained, but from which he is at
+last banished, indignant at the iniquities of our drunken old friend
+Captain Costigan, with whom we had become intimate in Pen's own memoirs.
+The boy Clive is described as being probably about sixteen. At the end
+of the story he has run through the adventures of his early life, and is
+left a melancholy man, a widower, one who has suffered the extremity of
+misery from a stepmother, and who is wrapped up in the only son that is
+left to him,&mdash;as had been the case with his father at the beginning of
+the novel. <i>The Newcomes</i>, therefore, like Thackeray's other tales, is
+rather a slice from the biographical memoirs of a family, than a romance
+or novel in itself.</p>
+
+<p>It is full of satire from the first to the last page. Every word of it
+seems to have been written to show how vile and poor a place this world
+is; how prone men are to deceive, how prone to be deceived. There is a
+scene in which "his Excellency Rummun Loll, otherwise his Highness
+Rummun Loll," is introduced to Colonel Newcome,&mdash;or rather
+presented,&mdash;for the two men had known each other before. All London was
+talking of Rummun Loll, taking him for an Indian prince, but the
+colonel, who had served in India, knew better. Rummun Loll was no more
+than a merchant, who had made a precarious fortune by doubtful means.
+All the girls, nevertheless, are running after his Excellency. "He's
+known to have two wives already in India," says Barnes Newcome; "but, by
+gad, for a settlement, I believe some of the girls here would marry
+him." We have a delightful <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span>illustration of the London girls, with their
+bare necks and shoulders, sitting round Rummun Loll and worshipping him
+as he reposes on his low settee. There are a dozen of them so enchanted
+that the men who wish to get a sight of the Rummun are quite kept at a
+distance. This is satire on the women. A few pages on we come upon a
+clergyman who is no more real than Rummun Loll. The clergyman, Charles
+Honeyman, had married the colonel's sister and had lost his wife, and
+now the brothers-in-law meet. "'Poor, poor Emma!' exclaimed the
+ecclesiastic, casting his eyes towards the chandelier and passing a
+white cambric pocket-handkerchief gracefully before them. No man in
+London understood the ring business or the pocket-handkerchief business
+better, or smothered his emotion more beautifully. 'In the gayest
+moments, in the giddiest throng of fashion, the thoughts of the past
+will rise; the departed will be among us still. But this is not the
+strain wherewith to greet the friend newly arrived on our shores. How it
+rejoices me to behold you in old England.'" And so the satirist goes on
+with Mr. Honeyman the clergyman. Mr. Honeyman the clergyman has been
+already mentioned, in that extract made in our first chapter from <i>Lovel
+the Widower</i>. It was he who assisted another friend, "with his wheedling
+tongue," in inducing Thackeray to purchase that "neat little literary
+paper,"&mdash;called then <i>The Museum</i>, but which was in truth <i>The National
+Standard</i>. In describing Barnes Newcome, the colonel's relative,
+Thackeray in the same scene attacks the sharpness of the young men of
+business of the present day. There were, or were to be, some
+transactions with Rummun Loll, and Barnes Newcome, being in doubt, asks
+the colonel a question or two as to the certainty of the Rummun's money,
+much to the colonel's disgust. "The <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span>young man of business had dropped
+his drawl or his languor, and was speaking quite unaffectedly,
+good-naturedly, and selfishly. Had you talked to him for a week you
+would not have made him understand the scorn and loathing with which the
+colonel regarded him. Here was a young fellow as keen as the oldest
+curmudgeon,&mdash;a lad with scarce a beard to his chin, that would pursue
+his bond as rigidly as Shylock." "Barnes Newcome never missed a church,"
+he goes on, "or dressing for dinner. He never kept a tradesman waiting
+for his money. He seldom drank too much, and never was late for
+business, or huddled over his toilet, however brief his sleep or severe
+his headache. In a word, he was as scrupulously whited as any sepulchre
+in the whole bills of mortality." Thackeray had lately seen some Barnes
+Newcome when he wrote that.</p>
+
+<p>It is all satire; but there is generally a touch of pathos even through
+the satire. It is satire when Miss Quigley, the governess in Park
+Street, falls in love with the old colonel after some dim fashion of her
+own. "When she is walking with her little charges in the Park, faint
+signals of welcome appear on her wan cheeks. She knows the dear colonel
+amidst a thousand horsemen." The colonel had drunk a glass of wine with
+her after his stately fashion, and the foolish old maid thinks too much
+of it. Then we are told how she knits purses for him, "as she sits alone
+in the schoolroom,&mdash;high up in that lone house, when the little ones are
+long since asleep,&mdash;before her dismal little tea-tray, and her little
+desk containing her mother's letters and her mementoes of home." Miss
+Quigley is an ass; but we are made to sympathise entirely with the ass,
+because of that morsel of pathos as to her mother's letters.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span></p><p>Clive Newcome, our hero, who is a second Pen, but a better fellow, is
+himself a satire on young men,&mdash;on young men who are idle and ambitious
+at the same time. He is a painter; but, instead of being proud of his
+art, is half ashamed of it,&mdash;because not being industrious he has not,
+while yet young, learned to excel. He is "doing" a portrait of Mrs.
+Pendennis, Laura, and thus speaks of his business. "No. 666,"&mdash;he is
+supposed to be quoting from the catalogue of the Royal Academy for the
+year,&mdash;"No. 666. Portrait of Joseph Muggins, Esq., Newcome, George
+Street. No. 979. Portrait of Mrs. Muggins on her gray pony, Newcome. No.
+579. Portrait of Joseph Muggins, Esq.'s dog Toby, Newcome. This is what
+I am fit for. These are the victories I have set myself on achieving. Oh
+Mrs. Pendennis! isn't it humiliating? Why isn't there a war? Why haven't
+I a genius? There is a painter who lives hard by, and who begs me to
+come and look at his work. He is in the Muggins line too. He gets his
+canvases with a good light upon them; excludes the contemplation of
+other objects; stands beside his picture in an attitude himself; and
+thinks that he and they are masterpieces. Oh me, what drivelling
+wretches we are! Fame!&mdash;except that of just the one or two,&mdash;what's the
+use of it?" In all of which Thackeray is speaking his own feelings about
+himself as well as the world at large. What's the use of it all? Oh
+vanitas vanitatum! Oh vanity and vexation of spirit! "So Clive Newcome,"
+he says afterwards, "lay on a bed of down and tossed and tumbled there.
+He went to fine dinners, and sat silent over them; rode fine horses, and
+black care jumped up behind the moody horseman." As I write this I have
+before me a letter from Thackeray to a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span>friend describing his own
+success when <i>Vanity Fair</i> was coming out, full of the same feeling. He
+is making money, but he spends it so fast that he never has any; and as
+for the opinions expressed on his books, he cares little for what he
+hears. There was always present to him a feeling of black care seated
+behind the horseman,&mdash;and would have been equally so had there been no
+real care present to him. A sardonic melancholy was the characteristic
+most common to him,&mdash;which, however, was relieved by an always present
+capacity for instant frolic. It was these attributes combined which made
+him of all satirists the most humorous, and of all humorists the most
+satirical. It was these that produced the Osbornes, the Dobbins, the
+Pens, the Clives, and the Newcomes, whom, when he loved them the most,
+he could not save himself from describing as mean and unworthy. A
+somewhat heroic hero of romance,&mdash;such a one, let us say, as Waverley,
+or Lovel in <i>The Antiquary</i>, or Morton in <i>Old Mortality</i>,&mdash;was
+revolting to him, as lacking those foibles which human nature seemed to
+him to demand.</p>
+
+<p>The story ends with two sad tragedies, neither of which would have been
+demanded by the story, had not such sadness been agreeable to the
+author's own idiosyncrasy. The one is the ruin of the old colonel's
+fortunes, he having allowed himself to be enticed into bubble
+speculations; and the other is the loss of all happiness, and even
+comfort, to Clive the hero, by the abominations of his mother-in-law.
+The woman is so iniquitous, and so tremendous in her iniquities, that
+she rises to tragedy. Who does not know Mrs. Mack the Campaigner? Why at
+the end of his long story should Thackeray have married his hero to so
+lackadaisical a heroine as poor <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span>little Rosey, or brought on the stage
+such a she-demon as Rosey's mother? But there is the Campaigner in all
+her vigour, a marvel of strength of composition,&mdash;one of the most
+vividly drawn characters in fiction;&mdash;but a woman so odious that one is
+induced to doubt whether she should have been depicted.</p>
+
+<p>The other tragedy is altogether of a different kind, and though
+unnecessary to the story, and contrary to that practice of story-telling
+which seems to demand that calamities to those personages with whom we
+are to sympathise should not be brought in at the close of a work of
+fiction, is so beautifully told that no lover of Thackeray's work would
+be willing to part with it. The old colonel, as we have said, is ruined
+by speculation, and in his ruin is brought to accept the alms of the
+brotherhood of the Grey Friars. Then we are introduced to the Charter
+House, at which, as most of us know, there still exists a brotherhood of
+the kind. He dons the gown,&mdash;this old colonel, who had always been
+comfortable in his means, and latterly apparently rich,&mdash;and occupies
+the single room, and eats the doled bread, and among his poor brothers
+sits in the chapel of his order. The description is perhaps as fine as
+anything that Thackeray ever did. The gentleman is still the gentleman,
+with all the pride of gentry;&mdash;but not the less is he the humble
+bedesman, aware that he is living upon charity, not made to grovel by
+any sense of shame, but knowing that, though his normal pride may be
+left to him, an outward demeanour of humility is befitting.</p>
+
+<p>And then he dies. "At the usual evening hour the chapel bell began to
+toll, and Thomas Newcome's hands outside the bed feebly beat time,&mdash;and,
+just as the last <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span>bell struck, a peculiar sweet smile shone over his
+face, and he lifted up his head a little, and quickly said,
+'Adsum,'&mdash;and fell back. It was the word we used at school when names
+were called; and, lo, he whose heart was as that of a little child had
+answered to his name, and stood in the presence of his Maker!"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V"></a>CHAPTER V.</h2>
+
+<h3>ESMOND AND THE VIRGINIANS.</h3>
+
+
+<p>The novel with which we are now going to deal I regard as the greatest
+work that Thackeray did. Though I do not hesitate to compare himself
+with himself, I will make no comparison between him and others; I
+therefore abstain from assigning to <i>Esmond</i> any special niche among
+prose fictions in the English language, but I rank it so high as to
+justify me in placing him among the small number of the highest class of
+English novelists. Much as I think of <i>Barry Lyndon</i> and <i>Vanity Fair</i>,
+I cannot quite say this of them; but, as a chain is not stronger than
+its weakest link, so is a poet, or a dramatist, or a novelist to be
+placed in no lower level than that which he has attained by his highest
+sustained flight. The excellence which has been reached here Thackeray
+achieved, without doubt, by giving a greater amount of forethought to
+the work he had before him than had been his wont. When we were young we
+used to be told, in our house at home, that "elbow-grease" was the one
+essential necessary to getting a tough piece of work well done. If a
+mahogany table was to be made to shine, it was elbow-grease that the
+operation needed. Forethought is the elbow-grease which a novelist,&mdash;or
+poet, or dramatist,&mdash;requires. It is not only his plot that has <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span>to be
+turned and re-turned in his mind, not his plot chiefly, but he has to
+make himself sure of his situations, of his characters, of his effects,
+so that when the time comes for hitting the nail he may know where to
+hit it on the head,&mdash;so that he may himself understand the passion, the
+calmness, the virtues, the vices, the rewards and punishments which he
+means to explain to others,&mdash;so that his proportions shall be correct,
+and he be saved from the absurdity of devoting two-thirds of his book to
+the beginning, or two-thirds to the completion of his task. It is from
+want of this special labour, more frequently than from intellectual
+deficiency, that the tellers of stories fail so often to hit their nails
+on the head. To think of a story is much harder work than to write it.
+The author can sit down with the pen in his hand for a given time, and
+produce a certain number of words. That is comparatively easy, and if he
+have a conscience in regard to his task, work will be done regularly.
+But to think it over as you lie in bed, or walk about, or sit cosily
+over your fire, to turn it all in your thoughts, and make the things
+fit,&mdash;that requires elbow-grease of the mind. The arrangement of the
+words is as though you were walking simply along a road. The arrangement
+of your story is as though you were carrying a sack of flour while you
+walked. Fielding had carried his sack of flour before he wrote <i>Tom
+Jones</i>, and Scott his before he produced <i>Ivanhoe</i>. So had Thackeray
+done,&mdash;a very heavy sack of flour,&mdash;in creating <i>Esmond</i>. In <i>Vanity
+Fair</i>, in <i>Pendennis</i>, and in <i>The Newcomes</i>, there was more of that
+mere wandering in which no heavy burden was borne. The richness of the
+author's mind, the beauty of his language, his imagination and
+perception of character are all there. For that which was lovely he has
+shown his love, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span>and for the hateful his hatred; but, nevertheless, they
+are comparatively idle books. His only work, as far as I can judge them,
+in which there is no touch of idleness, is <i>Esmond</i>. <i>Barry Lyndon</i> is
+consecutive, and has the well-sustained purpose of exhibiting a finished
+rascal; but <i>Barry Lyndon</i> is not quite the same from beginning to end.
+All his full-fledged novels, except <i>Esmond</i>, contain rather strings of
+incidents and memoirs of individuals, than a completed story. But
+<i>Esmond</i> is a whole from beginning to end, with its tale well told, its
+purpose developed, its moral brought home,&mdash;and its nail hit well on the
+head and driven in.</p>
+
+<p>I told Thackeray once that it was not only his best work, but so much
+the best, that there was none second to it. "That was what I intended,"
+he said, "but I have failed. Nobody reads it. After all, what does it
+matter?" he went on after awhile. "If they like anything, one ought to
+be satisfied. After all, Esmond was a prig." Then he laughed and changed
+the subject, not caring to dwell on thoughts painful to him. The
+elbow-grease of thinking was always distasteful to him, and had no doubt
+been so when he conceived and carried out this work.</p>
+
+<p>To the ordinary labour necessary for such a novel he added very much by
+his resolution to write it in a style different, not only from that
+which he had made his own, but from that also which belonged to the
+time. He had devoted himself to the reading of the literature of Queen
+Anne's reign, and having chosen to throw his story into that period, and
+to create in it personages who were to be peculiarly concerned with the
+period, he resolved to use as the vehicle for his story the forms of
+expression then prevalent. No one who has not tried it can understand
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span>how great is the difficulty of mastering a phase of one's own language
+other than that which habit has made familiar. To write in another
+language, if the language be sufficiently known, is a much less arduous
+undertaking. The lad who attempts to write his essay in Ciceronian Latin
+struggles to achieve a style which is not indeed common to him, but is
+more common than any other he has become acquainted with in that tongue.
+But Thackeray in his work had always to remember his Swift, his Steele,
+and his Addison, and to forget at the same time the modes of expression
+which the day had adopted. Whether he asked advice on the subject, I do
+not know. But I feel sure that if he did he must have been counselled
+against it. Let my reader think what advice he would give to any writer
+on such a subject. Probably he asked no advice, and would have taken
+none. No doubt he found himself, at first imperceptibly, gliding into a
+phraseology which had attractions for his ear, and then probably was so
+charmed with the peculiarly masculine forms of sentences which thus
+became familiar to him, that he thought it would be almost as difficult
+to drop them altogether as altogether to assume the use of them. And if
+he could do so successfully, how great would be the assistance given to
+the local colouring which is needed for a novel in prose, the scene of
+which is thrown far back from the writer's period! Were I to write a
+poem about C&oelig;ur de Lion I should not mar my poem by using the simple
+language of the day; but if I write a prose story of the time, I cannot
+altogether avoid some attempt at far-away quaintnesses in language. To
+call a purse a "gypsire," and to begin your little speeches with "Marry
+come up," or to finish them with "Quotha," are but poor attempts. But
+even they have had their effect. Scott did the best he could with his
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span>C&oelig;ur de Lion. When we look to it we find that it was but little;
+though in his hands it passed for much. "By my troth," said the knight,
+"thou hast sung well and heartily, and in high praise of thine order."
+We doubt whether he achieved any similarity to the language of the time;
+but still, even in the little which he attempted there was something of
+the picturesque. But how much more would be done if in very truth the
+whole language of a story could be thrown with correctness into the form
+of expression used at the time depicted?</p>
+
+<p>It was this that Thackeray tried in his <i>Esmond</i>, and he has done it
+almost without a flaw. The time in question is near enough to us, and
+the literature sufficiently familiar to enable us to judge. Whether folk
+swore by their troth in the days of king Richard I. we do not know, but
+when we read Swift's letters, and Addison's papers, or Defoe's novels we
+do catch the veritable sounds of Queen Anne's age, and can say for
+ourselves whether Thackeray has caught them correctly or not. No reader
+can doubt that he has done so. Nor is the reader ever struck with the
+affectation of an assumed dialect. The words come as though they had
+been written naturally,&mdash;though not natural to the middle of the
+nineteenth century. It was a tour de force; and successful as such a
+tour de force so seldom is. But though Thackeray was successful in
+adopting the tone he wished to assume, he never quite succeeded, as far
+as my ear can judge, in altogether dropping it again.</p>
+
+<p>And yet it has to be remembered that though <i>Esmond</i> deals with the
+times of Queen Anne, and "copies the language" of the time, as Thackeray
+himself says in the dedication, the story is not supposed to have been
+written till the reign of George II. Esmond in his <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span>narrative speaks of
+Fielding and Hogarth, who did their best work under George II. The idea
+is that Henry Esmond, the hero, went out to Virginia after the events
+told, and there wrote the memoir in the form of an autobiography. The
+estate of Castlewood in Virginia had been given to the Esmond family by
+Charles II., and this Esmond, our hero, finding that expatriation would
+best suit both his domestic happiness and his political
+difficulties,&mdash;as the reader of the book will understand might be the
+case,&mdash;settles himself in the colony, and there writes the history of
+his early life. He retains the manners, and with the manners the
+language of his youth. He lives among his own people, a country
+gentleman with a broad domain, mixing but little with the world beyond,
+and remains an English gentleman of the time of Queen Anne. The story is
+continued in <i>The Virginians</i>, the name given to a record of two lads
+who were grandsons of Harry Esmond, whose names are Warrington. Before
+<i>The Virginians</i> appeared we had already become acquainted with a scion
+of that family, the friend of Arthur Pendennis, a younger son of Sir
+Miles Warrington, of Suffolk. Henry Esmond's daughter had in a previous
+generation married a younger son of the then baronet. This is mentioned
+now to show the way in which Thackeray's mind worked afterwards upon the
+details and characters which he had originated in <i>Esmond</i>.</p>
+
+<p>It is not my purpose to tell the story here, but rather to explain the
+way in which it is written, to show how it differs from other stories,
+and thus to explain its effect. Harry Esmond, who tells the story, is of
+course the hero. There are two heroines who equally command our
+sympathy,&mdash;Lady Castlewood the wife of Harry's kinsman, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span>and her
+daughter Beatrix. Thackeray himself declared the man to be a prig, and
+he was not altogether wrong. Beatrix, with whom throughout the whole
+book he is in love, knew him well. "Shall I be frank with you, Harry,"
+she says, when she is engaged to another suitor, "and say that if you
+had not been down on your knees and so humble, you might have fared
+better with me? A woman of my spirit, cousin, is to be won by gallantry,
+and not by sighs and rueful faces. All the time you are worshipping and
+singing hymns to me, I know very well I am no goddess." And again: "As
+for you, you want a woman to bring your slippers and cap, and to sit at
+your feet and cry, O caro, caro! O bravo! whilst you read your
+Shakespeares and Miltons and stuff." He was a prig, and the girl he
+loved knew him, and being quite of another way of thinking herself,
+would have nothing to say to him in the way of love. But without
+something of the aptitudes of a prig the character which the author
+intended could not have been drawn. There was to be courage,&mdash;military
+courage,&mdash;and that propensity to fighting which the tone of the age
+demanded in a finished gentleman. Esmond therefore is ready enough to
+use his sword. But at the same time he has to live as becomes one whose
+name is in some degree under a cloud; for though he be not in truth an
+illegitimate offshoot of the noble family which is his, and though he
+knows that he is not so, still he has to live as though he were. He
+becomes a soldier, and it was just then that our army was accustomed "to
+swear horribly in Flanders." But Esmond likes his books, and cannot
+swear or drink like other soldiers. Nevertheless he has a sort of liking
+for fast ways in others, knowing that such are the ways of a gallant
+cavalier. There is a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span>melancholy over his life which makes him always,
+to himself and to others, much older than his years. He is well aware
+that, being as he is, it is impossible that Beatrix should love him. Now
+and then there is a dash of lightness about him, as though he had taught
+himself in his philosophy that even sorrow may be borne with a
+smile,&mdash;as though there was something in him of the Stoic's doctrine,
+which made him feel that even disappointed love should not be seen to
+wound too deep. But still when he smiles, even when he indulges in some
+little pleasantry, there is that garb of melancholy over him which
+always makes a man a prig. But he is a gentleman from the crown of his
+head to the sole of his foot. Thackeray had let the whole power of his
+intellect apply itself to a conception of the character of a gentleman.
+This man is brave, polished, gifted with that old-fashioned courtesy
+which ladies used to love, true as steel, loyal as faith himself, with a
+power of self-abnegation which astonishes the criticising reader when he
+finds such a virtue carried to such an extent without seeming to be
+unnatural. To draw the picture of a man and say that he is gifted with
+all the virtues is easy enough,&mdash;easy enough to describe him as
+performing all the virtues. The difficulty is to put your man on his
+legs, and make him move about, carrying his virtues with a natural gait,
+so that the reader shall feel that he is becoming acquainted with flesh
+and blood, not with a wooden figure. The virtues are all there with
+Henry Esmond, and the flesh and blood also, so that the reader believes
+in them. But still there is left a flavour of the character which
+Thackeray himself tasted when he called his hero a prig.</p>
+
+<p>The two heroines, Lady Castlewood and Beatrix, are mother and daughter,
+of whom the former is in love with <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span>Esmond, and the latter is loved by
+him. Fault has been found with the story, because of the unnatural
+rivalry,&mdash;because it has been felt that a mother's solicitude for her
+daughter should admit of no such juxtaposition. But the criticism has
+come, I think, from those who have failed to understand, not from those
+who have understood, the tale;&mdash;not because they have read it, but
+because they have not read it, and have only looked at it or heard of
+it. Lady Castlewood is perhaps ten years older than the boy Esmond, whom
+she first finds in her husband's house, and takes as a prot&eacute;g&eacute;; and from
+the moment in which she finds that he is in love with her own daughter,
+she does her best to bring about a marriage between them. Her husband is
+alive, and though he is a drunken brute,&mdash;after the manner of lords of
+that time,&mdash;she is thoroughly loyal to him. The little touches, of which
+the woman is herself altogether unconscious, that gradually turn a love
+for the boy into a love for the man, are told so delicately, that it is
+only at last that the reader perceives what has in truth happened to the
+woman. She is angry with him, grateful to him, careful over him,
+gradually conscious of all his worth, and of all that he does to her and
+hers, till at last her heart is unable to resist. But then she is a
+widow;&mdash;and Beatrix has declared that her ambition will not allow her to
+marry so humble a swain, and Esmond has become,&mdash;as he says of himself
+when he calls himself "an old gentleman,"&mdash;"the guardian of all the
+family," "fit to be the grandfather of you all."</p>
+
+<p>The character of Lady Castlewood has required more delicacy in its
+manipulation than perhaps any other which Thackeray has drawn. There is
+a mixture in it of self-negation and of jealousy, of gratefulness of
+heart and of the weary thoughtfulness of age, of occasional
+sprightliness <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span>with deep melancholy, of injustice with a thorough
+appreciation of the good around her, of personal weakness,&mdash;as shown
+always in her intercourse with her children, and of personal
+strength,&mdash;as displayed when she vindicates the position of her kinsman
+Henry to the Duke of Hamilton, who is about to marry Beatrix;&mdash;a mixture
+which has required a master's hand to trace. These contradictions are
+essentially feminine. Perhaps it must be confessed that in the
+unreasonableness of the woman, the author has intended to bear more
+harshly on the sex than it deserves. But a true woman will forgive him,
+because of the truth of Lady Castlewood's heart. Her husband had been
+killed in a duel, and there were circumstances which had induced her at
+the moment to quarrel with Harry and to be unjust to him. He had been
+ill, and had gone away to the wars, and then she had learned the truth,
+and had been wretched enough. But when he comes back, and she sees him,
+by chance at first, as the anthem is being sung in the cathedral choir,
+as she is saying her prayers, her heart flows over with tenderness to
+him. "I knew you would come back," she said; "and to-day, <ins class="correction" title="Transcriber's note: original has Henry">Harry</ins>, in the
+anthem when they sang it,&mdash;'When the Lord turned the captivity of Zion
+we were like them that dream,'&mdash;I thought, yes, like them that
+dream,&mdash;them that dream. And then it went on, 'They that sow in tears
+shall reap in joy, and he that goeth forth and weepeth, shall doubtless
+come home again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him.' I looked
+up from the book and saw you. I was not surprised when I saw you. I knew
+you would come, my dear, and saw the gold sunshine round your head." And
+so it goes on, running into expressions of heartmelting tenderness. And
+yet she herself does not know that her own heart <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span>is seeking his with
+all a woman's love. She is still willing that he should possess Beatrix.
+"I would call you my son," she says, "sooner than the greatest prince in
+Europe." But she warns him of the nature of her own girl. "'Tis for my
+poor Beatrix I tremble, whose headstrong will affrights me, whose
+jealous temper, and whose vanity no prayers of mine can cure." It is but
+very gradually that Esmond becomes aware of the truth. Indeed, he has
+not become altogether aware of it till the tale closes. The reader does
+not see that transfer of affection from the daughter to the mother which
+would fail to reach his sympathy. In the last page of the last chapter
+it is told that it is so,&mdash;that Esmond marries Lady Castlewood,&mdash;but it
+is not told till all the incidents of the story have been completed.</p>
+
+<p>But of the three characters I have named, Beatrix is the one that has
+most strongly exercised the writer's powers, and will most interest the
+reader. As far as outward person is concerned she is very lovely,&mdash;so
+charming, that every man that comes near to her submits himself to her
+attractions and caprices. It is but rarely that a novelist can succeed
+in impressing his reader with a sense of female loveliness. The attempt
+is made so frequently,&mdash;comes so much as a matter of course in every
+novel that is written, and fails so much as a matter of course, that the
+reader does not feel the failure. There are things which we do not
+expect to have done for us in literature because they are done so
+seldom. Novelists are apt to describe the rural scenes among which their
+characters play their parts, but seldom leave any impression of the
+places described. Even in poetry how often does this occur? The words
+used are pretty, well chosen, perhaps musical to the ear, and in that
+way befitting; but unless <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span>the spot has violent characteristics of its
+own, such as Burley's cave or the waterfall of Lodore, no striking
+portrait is left. Nor are we disappointed as we read, because we have
+not been taught to expect it to be otherwise. So it is with those
+word-painted portraits of women, which are so frequently given and so
+seldom convey any impression. Who has an idea of the outside look of
+Sophia Western, or Edith Bellenden, or even of Imogen, though Iachimo,
+who described her, was so good at words? A series of
+pictures,&mdash;illustrations,&mdash;as we have with Dickens' novels, and with
+Thackeray's, may leave an impression of a figure,&mdash;though even then not
+often of feminine beauty. But in this work Thackeray has succeeded in
+imbuing us with a sense of the outside loveliness of Beatrix by the mere
+force of words. We are not only told it, but we feel that she was such a
+one as a man cannot fail to covet, even when his judgment goes against
+his choice.</p>
+
+<p>Here the judgment goes altogether against the choice. The girl grows up
+before us from her early youth till her twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth
+year, and becomes,&mdash;such as her mother described her,&mdash;one whose
+headlong will, whose jealousy, and whose vanity nothing could restrain.
+She has none of those soft foibles, half allied to virtues, by which
+weak women fall away into misery or perhaps distraction. She does not
+want to love or to be loved. She does not care to be fondled. She has no
+longing for caresses. She wants to be admired,&mdash;and to make use of the
+admiration she shall achieve for the material purposes of her life. She
+wishes to rise in the world; and her beauty is the sword with which she
+must open her oyster. As to her heart, it is a thing of which she
+becomes aware, only to assure herself that it must be laid aside and
+put <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span>out of the question. Now and again Esmond touches it. She just
+feels that she has a heart to be touched. But she never has a doubt as
+to her conduct in that respect. She will not allow her dreams of
+ambition to be disturbed by such folly as love.</p>
+
+<p>In all that there might be something, if not good and great,
+nevertheless grand, if her ambition, though worldly, had in it a touch
+of nobility. But this poor creature is made with her bleared blind eyes
+to fall into the very lowest depths of feminine ignobility. One lover
+comes after another. Harry Esmond is, of course, the lover with whom the
+reader interests himself. At last there comes a duke,&mdash;fifty years old,
+indeed, but with semi-royal appanages. As his wife she will become a
+duchess, with many diamonds, and be her Excellency. The man is stern,
+cold, and jealous; but she does not doubt for a moment. She is to be
+Duchess of Hamilton, and towers already in pride of place above her
+mother, and her kinsman lover, and all her belongings. The story here,
+with its little incidents of birth, and blood, and ignoble pride, and
+gratified ambition, with a dash of true feminine nobility on the part of
+the girl's mother, is such as to leave one with the impression that it
+has hardly been beaten in English prose fiction. Then, in the last
+moment, the duke is killed in a duel, and the news is brought to the
+girl by Esmond. She turns upon him and rebukes him harshly. Then she
+moves away, and feels in a moment that there is nothing left for her in
+this world, and that she can only throw herself upon devotion for
+consolation. "I am best in my own room and by myself," she said. Her
+eyes were quite dry, nor did Esmond ever see them otherwise, save once,
+in respect of that grief. She gave him a cold hand as she went out.
+"Thank you, brother," she said in a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span>low voice, and with a simplicity
+more touching than tears, "all that you have said is true and kind, and
+I will go away and will ask pardon."</p>
+
+<p>But the consolation coming from devotion did not go far with such a one
+as her. We cannot rest on religion merely by saying that we will do so.
+Very speedily there comes consolation in another form. Queen Anne is on
+her deathbed, and a young Stuart prince appears upon the scene, of whom
+some loyal hearts dream that they can make a king. He is such as Stuarts
+were, and only walks across the novelist's canvas to show his folly and
+heartlessness. But there is a moment in which Beatrix thinks that she
+may rise in the world to the proud place of a royal mistress. That is
+her last ambition! That is her pride! That is to be her glory! The
+bleared eyes can see no clearer than that. But the mock prince passes
+away, and nothing but the disgrace of the wish remains.</p>
+
+<p>Such is the story of <i>Esmond</i>, leaving with it, as does all Thackeray's
+work, a melancholy conviction of the vanity of all things human.
+<i>Vanitas vanitatum</i>, as he wrote on the pages of the French lady's
+album, and again in one of the earlier numbers of <i>The Cornhill
+Magazine</i>. With much that is picturesque, much that is droll, much that
+is valuable as being a correct picture of the period selected, the gist
+of the book is melancholy throughout. It ends with the promise of
+happiness to come, but that is contained merely in a concluding
+paragraph. The one woman, during the course of the story, becomes a
+widow, with a living love in which she has no hope, with children for
+whom her fears are almost stronger than her affection, who never can
+rally herself to happiness for a moment. The other, with all her beauty
+and all her brilliance, becomes what we have described,&mdash;and marries <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span>at
+last her brother's tutor, who becomes a bishop by means of her
+intrigues. Esmond, the hero, who is compounded of all good gifts, after
+a childhood and youth tinged throughout with melancholy, vanishes from
+us, with the promise that he is to be rewarded by the hand of the mother
+of the girl he has loved.</p>
+
+<p>And yet there is not a page in the book over which a thoughtful reader
+cannot pause with delight. The nature in it is true nature. Given a
+story thus sad, and persons thus situated, and it is thus that the
+details would follow each other, and thus that the people would conduct
+themselves. It was the tone of Thackeray's mind to turn away from the
+prospect of things joyful, and to see,&mdash;or believe that he saw,&mdash;in all
+human affairs, the seed of something base, of something which would be
+antagonistic to true contentment. All his snobs, and all his fools, and
+all his knaves, come from the same conviction. Is it not the doctrine on
+which our religion is founded,&mdash;though the sadness of it there is
+alleviated by the doubtful promise of a heaven?</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Though thrice a thousand years are passed</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Since David's son, the sad and splendid,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">The weary king ecclesiast</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Upon his awful tablets penned it.</span><br />
+</div></div>
+
+<p>So it was that Thackeray preached his sermon. But melancholy though it
+be, the lesson taught in <i>Esmond</i> is salutary from beginning to end. The
+sermon truly preached is that glory can only come from that which is
+truly glorious, and that the results of meanness end always in the mean.
+No girl will be taught to wish to shine like Beatrix, nor will any youth
+be made to think that to gain the love of such a one it can be worth his
+while to expend his energy or his heart.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span></p><p><i>Esmond</i> was published in 1852. It was not till 1858, some time after he
+had returned from his lecturing tours, that he published the sequel
+called <i>The Virginians</i>. It was first brought out in twenty-four monthly
+numbers, and ran through the years 1858 and 1859, Messrs. Bradbury and
+Evans having been the publishers. It takes up by no means the story of
+<i>Esmond</i>, and hardly the characters. The twin lads, who are called the
+Virginians, and whose name is Warrington, are grandsons of Esmond and
+his wife Lady Castlewood. Their one daughter, born at the estate in
+Virginia, had married a Warrington, and the Virginians are the issue of
+that marriage. In the story, one is sent to England, there to make his
+way; and the other is for awhile supposed to have been killed by the
+Indians. How he was not killed, but after awhile comes again forward in
+the world of fiction, will be found in the story, which it is not our
+purpose to set forth here. The most interesting part of the narrative is
+that which tells us of the later fortunes of Madame Beatrix,&mdash;the
+Baroness Bernstein,&mdash;the lady who had in her youth been Beatrix Esmond,
+who had then condescended to become Mrs. Tasker, the tutor's wife,
+whence she rose to be the "lady" of a bishop, and, after the bishop had
+been put to rest under a load of marble, had become the baroness,&mdash;a
+rich old woman, courted by all her relatives because of her wealth.</p>
+
+<p>In <i>The Virginians</i>, as a work of art, is discovered, more strongly than
+had shown itself yet in any of his works, that propensity to wandering
+which came to Thackeray because of his idleness. It is, I think, to be
+found in every book he ever wrote,&mdash;except <i>Esmond</i>; but is here more
+conspicuous than it had been in his earlier years. Though he can settle
+himself down to his pen and ink,&mdash;not always even to that without a
+struggle, but <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span>to that with sufficient burst of energy to produce a
+large average amount of work,&mdash;he cannot settle himself down to the task
+of contriving a story. There have been those,&mdash;and they have not been
+bad judges of literature,&mdash;who have told me that they have best liked
+these vague narratives. The mind of the man has been clearly exhibited
+in them. In them he has spoken out his thoughts, and given the world to
+know his convictions, as well as could have been done in the carrying
+out any well-conducted plot. And though the narratives be vague, the
+characters are alive. In <i>The Virginians</i>, the two young men and their
+mother, and the other ladies with whom they have to deal, and especially
+their aunt, the Baroness Bernstein, are all alive. For desultory
+reading, for that picking up of a volume now and again which requires
+permission to forget the plot of a novel, this novel is admirably
+adapted. There is not a page of it vacant or dull. But he who takes it
+up to read as a whole, will find that it is the work of a desultory
+writer, to whom it is not infrequently difficult to remember the
+incidents of his own narrative. "How good it is, even as it is!&mdash;but if
+he would have done his best for us, what might he not have done!" This,
+I think, is what we feel when we read <i>The Virginians</i>. The author's
+mind has in one way been active enough,&mdash;and powerful, as it always is;
+but he has been unable to fix it to an intended purpose, and has gone on
+from day to day furthering the difficulty he has intended to master,
+till the book, under the stress of circumstances,&mdash;demands for copy and
+the like,&mdash;has been completed before the difficulty has even in truth
+been encountered.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VI" id="CHAPTER_VI"></a>CHAPTER VI.</h2>
+
+<h3>THACKERAY'S BURLESQUES.</h3>
+
+
+<p>As so much of Thackeray's writing partakes of the nature of burlesque,
+it would have been unnecessary to devote a separate chapter to the
+subject, were it not that there are among his tales two or three so
+exceedingly good of their kind, coming so entirely up to our idea of
+what a prose burlesque should be, that were I to omit to mention them I
+should pass over a distinctive portion of our author's work.</p>
+
+<p>The volume called <i>Burlesques</i>, published in 1869, begins with the
+<i>Novels by Eminent Hands</i>, and <i>Jeames's Diary</i>, to which I have already
+alluded. It contains also <i>The Tremendous Adventures of Major Gahagan</i>,
+<i>A Legend of the Rhine</i>, and <i>Rebecca and Rowena</i>. It is of these that I
+will now speak. <i>The History of the Next French Revolution</i> and <i>Cox's
+Diary</i>, with which the volume is concluded, are, according to my
+thinking, hardly equal to the others; nor are they so properly called
+burlesques.</p>
+
+<p>Nor will I say much of Major Gahagan, though his adventures are very
+good fun. He is a warrior,&mdash;that is, of course,&mdash;and he is one in whose
+wonderful narrative all that distant India can produce in the way of
+boasting, is superadded to Ireland's best efforts in the same line.
+Baron Munchausen was nothing to him; and to the bare <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span>and simple
+miracles of the baron is joined that humour without which Thackeray
+never tells any story. This is broad enough, no doubt, but is still
+humour;&mdash;as when the major tells us that he always kept in his own
+apartment a small store of gunpowder; "always keeping it under my bed,
+with a candle burning for fear of accidents." Or when he describes his
+courage; "I was running,&mdash;running as the brave stag before the
+hounds,&mdash;running, as I have done a great number of times in my life,
+when there was no help for it but a run." Then he tells us of his
+digestion. "Once in Spain I ate the leg of a horse, and was so eager to
+swallow this morsel, that I bolted the shoe as well as the hoof, and
+never felt the slightest inconvenience from either." He storms a
+citadel, and has only a snuff box given him for his reward. "Never
+mind," says Major Gahagan; "when they want me to storm a fort again, I
+shall know better." By which we perceive that the major remembered his
+Horace, and had in his mind the soldier who had lost his purse. But the
+major's adventures, excellent as they are, lack the continued interest
+which is attached to the two following stories.</p>
+
+<p>Of what nature is <i>The Legend of the Rhine</i>, we learn from the
+commencement. "It was in the good old days of chivalry, when every
+mountain that bathes its shadow in the Rhine had its castle; not
+inhabited as now by a few rats and owls, nor covered with moss and
+wallflowers and funguses and creeping ivy. No, no; where the ivy now
+clusters there grew strong portcullis and bars of steel; where the
+wallflowers now quiver in the ramparts there were silken banners
+embroidered with wonderful heraldry; men-at-arms marched where now you
+shall only see a bank of moss or a hideous black champignon; and in
+place of the rats and owlets, I warrant me there were <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span>ladies and
+knights to revel in the great halls, and to feast and dance, and to make
+love there." So that we know well beforehand of what kind will this
+story be. It will be pure romance,&mdash;burlesqued. "Ho seneschal, fill me a
+cup of hot liquor; put sugar in it, good fellow; yea, and a little hot
+water,&mdash;but very little, for my soul is sad as I think of those days and
+knights of old."</p>
+
+<p>A knight is riding alone on his war-horse, with all his armour with
+him,&mdash;and his luggage. His rank is shown by the name on his portmanteau,
+and his former address and present destination by a card which was
+attached. It had run, "Count Ludwig de Hombourg, Jerusalem, but the name
+of the Holy City had been dashed out with the pen, and that of Godesberg
+substituted." "By St. Hugo of Katzenellenbogen," said the good knight
+shivering, "'tis colder here than at Damascus. Shall I be at Godesberg
+in time for dinner?" He has come to see his friend Count Karl, Margrave
+of Godesberg.</p>
+
+<p>But at Godesberg everything is in distress and sorrow. There is a new
+inmate there, one Sir Gottfried, since whose arrival the knight of the
+castle has become a wretched man, having been taught to believe all
+evils of his wife, and of his child Otto, and a certain stranger, one
+Hildebrandt. Gottfried, we see with half an eye, has done it all. It is
+in vain that Ludwig de Hombourg tells his old friend Karl that this
+Gottfried is a thoroughly bad fellow, that he had been found to be a
+cardsharper in the Holy Land, and had been drummed out of his regiment.
+"'Twas but some silly quarrel over the wine-cup," says Karl. "Hugo de
+Brodenel would have no black bottle on the board." We think we can
+remember the quarrel of "Brodenel" and the black bottle, though so many
+things have taken place since that.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span></p><p>There is a festival in the castle, and Hildebrandt comes with the other
+guests. Then Ludwig's attention is called by poor Karl, the father, to a
+certain family likeness. Can it be that he is not the father of his own
+child? He is playing cards with his friend Ludwig when that traitor
+Gottfried comes and whispers to him, and makes an appointment. "I will
+be there too," thought Count Ludwig, the good Knight of Hombourg.</p>
+
+<p>On the next morning, before the stranger knight had shaken off his
+slumbers, all had been found out and everything done. The lady has been
+sent to a convent and her son to a monastery. The knight of the castle
+has no comfort but in his friend Gottfried, a distant cousin who is to
+inherit everything. All this is told to Sir Ludwig,&mdash;who immediately
+takes steps to repair the mischief. "A cup of coffee straight," says he
+to the servitors. "Bid the cook pack me a sausage and bread in paper,
+and the groom saddle Streithengst. We have far to ride." So this
+redresser of wrongs starts off, leaving the Margrave in his grief.</p>
+
+<p>Then there is a great fight between Sir Ludwig and Sir Gottfried,
+admirably told in the manner of the later chroniclers,&mdash;a hermit sitting
+by and describing everything almost as well as Rebecca did on the tower.
+Sir Ludwig being in the right, of course gains the day. But the escape
+of the fallen knight's horse is the cream of this chapter. "Away, ay,
+away!&mdash;away amid the green vineyards and golden cornfields; away up the
+steep mountains, where he frightened the eagles in their eyries; away
+down the clattering ravines, where the flashing cataracts tumble; away
+through the dark pine-forests, where the hungry wolves are howling; away
+over the dreary wolds, where the wild wind walks alone; away through the
+splashing <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span>quagmires, where the will-o'-the wisp slunk frightened among
+the reeds; away through light and darkness, storm and sunshine; away by
+tower and town, highroad and hamlet.... Brave horse! gallant steed!
+snorting child of Araby! On went the horse, over mountains, rivers,
+turnpikes, applewomen; and never stopped until he reached a
+livery-stable in Cologne, where his master was accustomed to put him
+up!"</p>
+
+<p>The conquered knight, Sir Gottfried, of course reveals the truth. This
+Hildebrandt is no more than the lady's brother,&mdash;as it happened a
+brother in disguise,&mdash;and hence the likeness. Wicked knights when they
+die always divulge their wicked secrets, and this knight Gottfried does
+so now. Sir Ludwig carries the news home to the afflicted husband and
+father; who of course instantly sends off messengers for his wife and
+son. The wife <ins class="correction" title="Transcriber's note: original has wo'n't">won't</ins> come. All she wants is to have her dresses and
+jewels sent to her. Of so cruel a husband she has had enough. As for the
+son, he has jumped out of a boat on the Rhine, as he was being carried
+to his monastery, and was drowned!</p>
+
+<p>But he was not drowned, but had only dived. "The gallant boy swam on
+beneath the water, never lifting his head for a single moment between
+Godesberg and Cologne; the distance being twenty-five or thirty miles."</p>
+
+<p>Then he becomes an archer, dressed in green from head to foot. How it
+was is all told in the story; and he goes to shoot for a prize at the
+Castle of Adolf the Duke of Cleeves. On his way <ins class="correction" title="Transcriber's note: original has be">he</ins> shoots a raven
+marvellously,&mdash;almost as marvellously as did Robin Hood the twig in
+Ivanhoe. Then one of his companions is married, or nearly married, to
+the mysterious "Lady of Windeck,"&mdash;would have been married but for Otto,
+and that the bishop and dean, who <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span>were dragged up from their long-ago
+graves to perform the ghostly ceremony, were prevented by the ill-timed
+mirth of a certain old canon of the church named Schidnischmidt. The
+reader has to read the name out long before he recognises an old friend.
+But this of the Lady of Windeck is an episode.</p>
+
+<p>How at the shooting-match, which of course ensued, Otto shot for and won
+the heart of a fair lady, the duke's daughter, need not be told here,
+nor how he quarrelled with the Rowski of Donnerblitz,&mdash;the hideous and
+sulky, but rich and powerful, nobleman who had come to take the hand,
+whether he could win the heart or not, of the daughter of the duke. It
+is all arranged according to the proper and romantic order. Otto, though
+he enlists in the duke's archer-guard as simple soldier, contrives to
+fight with the Rowski de Donnerblitz, Margrave of Eulenschrenkenstein,
+and of course kills him. "'Yield, yield, Sir Rowski!' shouted he in a
+calm voice. A blow dealt madly at his head was the reply. It was the
+last blow that the count of Eulenschrenkenstein ever struck in battle.
+The curse was on his lips as the crashing steel descended into his brain
+and split it in two. He rolled like a dog from his horse, his enemy's
+knee was in a moment on his chest, and the dagger of mercy at his
+throat, as the knight once more called upon him to yield." The knight
+was of course the archer who had come forward as an unknown champion,
+and had touched the Rowski's shield with the point of his lance. For
+this story, as well as the rest, is a burlesque on our dear old
+favourite Ivanhoe.</p>
+
+<p>That everything goes right at last, that the wife comes back from her
+monastery, and joins her jealous husband, and that the duke's daughter
+has always, in truth, known <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span>that the poor archer was a noble
+knight,&mdash;these things are all matters of course.</p>
+
+<p>But the best of the three burlesques is <i>Rebecca and Rowena, or A
+Romance upon Romance</i>, which I need not tell my readers is a
+continuation of <i>Ivanhoe</i>. Of this burlesque it is the peculiar
+characteristic that, while it has been written to ridicule the persons
+and the incidents of that perhaps the most favourite novel in the
+English language, it has been so written that it would not have offended
+the author had he lived to read it, nor does it disgust or annoy those
+who most love the original. There is not a word in it having an
+intention to belittle Scott. It has sprung from the genuine humour
+created in Thackeray's mind by his aspect of the romantic. We remember
+how reticent, how dignified was Rowena,&mdash;how cold we perhaps thought
+her, whether there was so little of that billing and cooing, that
+kissing and squeezing, between her and Ivanhoe which we used to think
+necessary to lovers' blisses. And there was left too on our minds, an
+idea that Ivanhoe had liked the Jewess almost as well as Rowena, and
+that Rowena might possibly have become jealous. Thackeray's mind at once
+went to work and pictured to him a Rowena such as such a woman might
+become after marriage; and as Ivanhoe was of a melancholy nature and apt
+to be hipped, and grave, and silent, as a matter of course Thackeray
+presumes him to have been henpecked after his marriage.</p>
+
+<p>Our dear Wamba disturbs his mistress in some devotional conversation
+with her chaplain, and the stern lady orders that the fool shall have
+three-dozen lashes. "I got you out of Front de B&oelig;uf's castle," said
+poor Wamba, piteously, appealing to Sir Wilfrid of Ivanhoe, "and canst
+thou not save me from the lash?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; from Front de B&oelig;uf's castle, <i>when you were</i> <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span><i>locked up with the
+Jewess in the tower</i>!" said Rowena, haughtily replying to the timid
+appeal of her husband. "Gurth, give him four-dozen,"&mdash;and this was all
+poor Wamba got by applying for the mediation of his master. Then the
+satirist moralises; "Did you ever know a right-minded woman pardon
+another for being handsomer and more love-worthy than herself?" Rowena
+is "always flinging Rebecca into Ivanhoe's teeth;" and altogether life
+at Rotherwood, as described by the later chronicles, is not very happy
+even when most domestic. Ivanhoe becomes sad and moody. He takes to
+drinking, and his lady does not forget to tell him of it. "Ah dear axe!"
+he exclaims, apostrophising his weapon, "ah gentle steel! that was a
+merry time when I sent thee crashing into the pate of the Emir Abdul
+Melek!" There was nothing left to him but his memories; and "in a word,
+his life was intolerable." So he determines that he will go and look
+after king Richard, who of course was wandering abroad. He anticipates a
+little difficulty with his wife; but she is only too happy to let him
+go, comforting herself with the idea that Athelstane will look after
+her. So her husband starts on his journey. "Then Ivanhoe's trumpet blew.
+Then Rowena waved her pocket-handkerchief. Then the household gave a
+shout. Then the pursuivant of the good knight, Sir Wilfrid the Crusader,
+flung out his banner,&mdash;which was argent, a gules cramoisy with three
+Moors impaled,&mdash;then Wamba gave a lash on his mule's haunch, and
+Ivanhoe, heaving a great sigh, turned the tail of his war-horse upon the
+castle of his fathers."</p>
+
+<p>Ivanhoe finds C&oelig;ur de Leon besieging the Castle of Chalons, and there
+they both do wondrous deeds, Ivanhoe always surpassing the king. The
+jealousy of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span>the courtiers, the ingratitude of the king, and the
+melancholy of the knight, who is never comforted except when he has
+slaughtered some hundreds, are delightful. Roger de Backbite and Peter
+de Toadhole are intended to be quite real. Then his majesty sings,
+passing off as his own, a song of Charles Lever's. Sir Wilfrid declares
+the truth, and twits the king with his falsehood, whereupon he has the
+guitar thrown at his head for his pains. He catches the guitar, however,
+gracefully in his left hand, and sings his own immortal ballad of <i>King
+Canute</i>,&mdash;than which Thackeray never did anything better.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Might I stay the sun above us, good Sir Bishop?" Canute cried;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">"Could I bid the silver moon to pause upon her heavenly ride?</span><br />
+<span class="i0">If the moon obeys my orders, sure I can command the tide.</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Will the advancing waves obey me, Bishop, if I make the sign?"</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Said the bishop, bowing lowly; "Land and sea, my lord, are thine."</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Canute turned towards the ocean; "Back," he said, "thou foaming brine."</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">But the sullen ocean answered with a louder deeper roar,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And the rapid waves drew nearer, falling, sounding on the shore;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Back the keeper and the bishop, back the king and courtiers bore.</span><br />
+</div></div>
+
+<p>We must go to the book to look at the picture of the king as he is
+killing the youngest of the sons of the Count of Chalons. Those
+illustrations of Doyle's are admirable. The size of the king's head, and
+the size of his battle-axe as contrasted with the size of the child, are
+burlesque all over. But the king has been wounded by a bolt from the bow
+of Sir Bertrand de Gourdon while he <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span>is slaughtering the infant, and
+there is an end of him. Ivanhoe, too, is killed at the siege,&mdash;Sir Roger
+de Backbite having stabbed him in the back during the scene. Had he not
+been then killed, his widow Rowena could not have married Athelstane,
+which she soon did after hearing the sad news; nor could he have had
+that celebrated epitaph in Latin and English;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Hie est Guilfridus, belli dum vixit avidus.</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Cum gladeo et lancea Normannia et quoque Francia</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Verbera dura dabat. Per Turcos multum equitabat.</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Guilbertum occidit;&mdash;atque Hyerosolyma vidit.</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Heu! nunc sub fossa sunt tanti militis ossa.</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Uxor Athelstani est conjux castissima Thani.<a name="FNanchor_5" id="FNanchor_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a></span><br />
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The translation we are told was by Wamba;</p>
+
+<div class="columnleft"><div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Under the stone you behold,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Buried and coffined and cold,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Lieth Sir Wilfrid the Bold.</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Always he marched in advance,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Warring in Flanders and France,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Doughty with sword and with lance</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Famous in Saracen fight,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Rode in his youth, the Good Knight,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Scattering Paynims in flight.</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Brian, the Templar untrue,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Fairly in tourney he slew;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Saw Hierusalem too.</span><br />
+</div></div></div>
+<div class="columnright"><div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Now he is buried and gone,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Lying beneath the gray stone.</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Where shall you find such a one?</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Long time his widow deplored,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Weeping, the fate of her lord,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Sadly cut off by the sword.</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">When she was eased of her pain,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Came the good lord Athelstane,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">When her ladyship married again.</span><br />
+</div></div></div>
+
+
+<p class="bottom"><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span></p><p>The next chapter begins naturally as follows; "I trust nobody will
+suppose, from the events described in the last chapter, that our friend
+Ivanhoe is really dead." He is of course cured of his wounds, though
+they take six years in the curing. And then he makes his way back to
+Rotherwood, in a friar's disguise, much as he did on that former
+occasion when we first met him, and there is received by Athelstane and
+Rowena,&mdash;and their boy!&mdash;while Wamba sings him a song:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Then you know the worth of a lass,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Once you have come to forty year!</span><br />
+</div></div>
+
+<p>No one, of course, but Wamba knows Ivanhoe, who roams about the country,
+melancholy,&mdash;as he of course would be,&mdash;charitable,&mdash;as he perhaps might
+be,&mdash;for we are specially told that he had a large fortune and nothing
+to do with it, and slaying robbers wherever he met them;&mdash;but sad at
+heart all the time. Then there comes a little burst of the author's own
+feelings, while he is burlesquing. "Ah my dear friends and British
+public, are there not others who are melancholy under a mask of gaiety,
+and who in the midst of crowds are lonely! Liston was a most melancholy
+man; Grimaldi had feelings; and then others I wot of. But psha!&mdash;let us
+have the next chapter." In all of which there was a touch of
+earnestness.</p>
+
+<p>Ivanhoe's griefs were enhanced by the wickedness of king John, under
+whom he would not serve. "It was Sir Wilfrid of Ivanhoe, I need scarcely
+say, who got the Barons of England to league together and extort from
+the king that famous instrument and palladium of our liberties, at
+present in the British Museum, Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury,&mdash;The
+Magna Charta." Athelstane also quarrels with the king, whose orders he
+disobeys, and Rotherwood is attacked by the royal army. No one was <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span>of
+real service in the way of fighting except Ivanhoe,&mdash;and how could he
+take up that cause? "No; be hanged to me," said the knight bitterly.
+"This is a quarrel in which I can't interfere. Common politeness
+forbids. Let yonder ale-swilling Athelstane defend his,&mdash;ha,
+ha!&mdash;<i>wife</i>; and my Lady Rowena guard her,&mdash;ha, ha!&mdash;<i>son</i>!" and he
+laughed wildly and madly.</p>
+
+<p>But Athelstane is killed,&mdash;this time in earnest,&mdash;and then Ivanhoe
+rushes to the rescue. He finds Gurth dead at the park-lodge, and though
+he is all alone,&mdash;having outridden his followers,&mdash;he rushes up the
+chestnut avenue to the house, which is being attacked. "An Ivanhoe! an
+Ivanhoe!" he bellowed out with a shout that overcame all the din of
+battle;&mdash;"Notre Dame &agrave; la recousse?" and to hurl his lance through the
+midriff of Reginald de Bracy, who was commanding the assault,&mdash;who fell
+howling with anguish,&mdash;to wave his battle-axe over his own head, and to
+cut off those of thirteen men-at-arms, was the work of an instant. "An
+Ivanhoe! an Ivanhoe!" he still shouted, and down went a man as sure as
+he said "hoe!"</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless he is again killed by multitudes, or very nearly,&mdash;and has
+again to be cured by the tender nursing of Wamba. But Athelstane is
+really dead, and Rowena and the boy have to be found. He does his duty
+and finds them,&mdash;just in time to be present at Rowena's death. She has
+been put in prison by king John, and is in extremis when her first
+husband gets to her. "Wilfrid, my early loved,"<a name="FNanchor_6" id="FNanchor_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a> slowly gasped she
+removing her gray <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span>hair from her furrowed temples, and gazing on her boy
+fondly as he nestled on Ivanhoe's knee,&mdash;"promise me by St. Waltheof of
+Templestowe,&mdash;promise me one boon!"</p>
+
+<p>"I do," said Ivanhoe, clasping the boy, and thinking that it was to that
+little innocent that the promise was intended to apply.</p>
+
+<p>"By St. Waltheof?"</p>
+
+<p>"By St. Waltheof!"</p>
+
+<p>"Promise me then," gasped Rowena, staring wildly at him, "that you will
+never marry a Jewess!"</p>
+
+<p>"By St. Waltheof!" cried Ivanhoe, "but this is too much," and he did not
+make the promise.</p>
+
+<p>"Having placed young Cedric at school at the Hall of Dotheboys, in
+Yorkshire, and arranged his family affairs, Sir Wilfrid of Ivanhoe
+quitted a country which had no longer any charm for him, as there was no
+fighting to be done, and in which his stay was rendered less agreeable
+by the notion that king John would hang him." So he goes forth and
+fights again, in league with the Knights of St. John,&mdash;the Templars
+naturally having a dislike to him because of Brian de Bois Guilbert.
+"The only fault that the great and gallant, though severe and ascetic
+Folko of Heydenbraten, the chief of the Order of St. John, found with
+the melancholy warrior whose lance did such service to the cause, was
+that he did not persecute the Jews as so religious a knight should. So
+the Jews, in cursing the Christians, always excepted the name of the
+Desdichado,&mdash;or the double disinherited, as he now was,&mdash;the Desdichado
+Doblado." Then came the battle of Alarcos, and the Moors were all but in
+possession of the whole of Spain. Sir Wilfrid, like other good
+Christians, cannot endure this, so he takes ship in Bohemia, where he
+happens to be quartered, and has himself carried to Barcelona, and
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span>proceeds "to slaughter the Moors forthwith." Then there is a scene in
+which Isaac of York comes on as a messenger, to ransom from a Spanish
+knight, Don Beltram de Cuchilla y Trabuco, y Espada, y Espelon, a little
+Moorish girl. The Spanish knight of course murders the little girl
+instead of taking the ransom. Two hundred thousand dirhems are offered,
+however much that may be; but the knight, who happens to be in funds at
+the time, prefers to kill the little girl. All this is only necessary to
+the story as introducing Isaac of York. Sir Wilfrid is of course intent
+upon finding Rebecca. Through all his troubles and triumphs, from his
+gaining and his losing of Rowena, from the day on which he had been
+"<i>locked up with the Jewess in the tower</i>," he had always been true to
+her. "Away from me!" said the old Jew, tottering. "Away, Rebecca
+is,&mdash;dead!" Then Ivanhoe goes out and kills fifty thousand Moors, and
+there is the picture of him,&mdash;killing them.</p>
+
+<p>But Rebecca is not dead at all. Her father had said so because Rebecca
+had behaved very badly to him. She had refused to marry the Moorish
+prince, or any of her own people, the Jews, and had gone as far as to
+declare her passion for Ivanhoe and her resolution to be a Christian.
+All the Jews and Jewesses in Valencia turned against her,&mdash;so that she
+was locked up in the back-kitchen and almost starved to death. But
+Ivanhoe found her of course, and makes her Mrs. Ivanhoe, or Lady Wilfrid
+the second. Then Thackeray tells us how for many years he, Thackeray,
+had not ceased to feel that it ought to be so. "Indeed I have thought of
+it any time these five-and-twenty years,&mdash;ever since, as a boy at
+school, I commenced the noble study of novels,&mdash;ever since the day when,
+lying on sunny slopes, of half-holidays, the fair <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span>chivalrous figures
+and beautiful shapes of knights and ladies were visible to me, ever
+since I grew to love Rebecca, that sweetest creature of the poet's
+fancy, and longed to see her righted."</p>
+
+<p>And so, no doubt, it had been. The very burlesque had grown from the way
+in which his young imagination had been moved by Scott's romance. He had
+felt from the time of those happy half-holidays in which he had been
+lucky enough to get hold of the novel, that according to all laws of
+poetic justice, Rebecca, as being the more beautiful and the more
+interesting of the heroines, was entitled to the possession of the hero.
+We have all of us felt the same. But to him had been present at the same
+time all that is ludicrous in our ideas of middle-age chivalry; the
+absurdity of its recorded deeds, the blood-thirstiness of its
+recreations, the selfishness of its men, the falseness of its honour,
+the cringing of its loyalty, the tyranny of its princes. And so there
+came forth Rebecca and Rowena, all broad fun from beginning to end, but
+never without a purpose,&mdash;the best burlesque, as I think, in our
+language.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnotehead">FOOTNOTES:</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5" id="Footnote_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> I doubt that Thackeray did not write the Latin epitaph, but
+I hardly dare suggest the name of any author. The "vixit avidus" is
+quite worthy of Thackeray; but had he tried his hand at such mode of
+expression he would have done more of it. I should like to know whether
+he had been in company with Father Prout at the time.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6" id="Footnote_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> There is something almost illnatured in his treatment of
+Rowena, who is very false in her declarations of love;&mdash;and it is to be
+feared that by Rowena, the author intends the normal married lady of
+English society.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VII" id="CHAPTER_VII"></a>CHAPTER VII.</h2>
+
+<h3>THACKERAY'S LECTURES.</h3>
+
+<p>In speaking of Thackeray's life I have said why and how it was that he
+took upon himself to lecture, and have also told the reader that he was
+altogether successful in carrying out the views proposed to himself. Of
+his peculiar manner of lecturing I have said but little, never having
+heard him. "He pounded along,&mdash;very clearly," I have been told; from
+which I surmise that there was no special grace of eloquence, but that
+he was always audible. I cannot imagine that he should have been ever
+eloquent. He could not have taken the trouble necessary with his voice,
+with his cadences, or with his outward appearance. I imagine that they
+who seem so naturally to fall into the proprieties of elocution have
+generally taken a great deal of trouble beyond that which the mere
+finding of their words has cost them. It is clearly to the matter of
+what he then gave the world, and not to the manner, that we must look
+for what interest is to be found in the lectures.</p>
+
+<p>Those on <i>The English Humorists</i> were given first. The second set was on
+<i>The Four Georges</i>. In the volume now before us <i>The Georges</i> are
+printed first, and the whole is produced simply as a part of Thackeray's
+literary work. Looked at, however, in that light the merit of the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span>two
+sets of biographical essays is very different. In the one we have all
+the anecdotes which could be brought together respecting four of our
+kings,&mdash;who as men were not peculiar, though their reigns were, and will
+always be, famous, because the country during the period was increasing
+greatly in prosperity and was ever strengthening the hold it had upon
+its liberties. In the other set the lecturer was a man of letters
+dealing with men of letters, and himself a prince among humorists is
+dealing with the humorists of his own country and language. One could
+not imagine a better subject for such discourses from Thackeray's mouth
+than the latter. The former was not, I think, so good.</p>
+
+<p>In discussing the lives of kings the biographer may trust to personal
+details or to historical facts. He may take the man, and say what good
+or evil may be said of him as a man;&mdash;or he may take the period, and
+tell his readers what happened to the country while this or the other
+king was on the throne. In the case with which we are dealing, the
+lecturer had not time enough or room enough for real history. His object
+was to let his audience know of what nature were the men; and we are
+bound to say that the pictures have not on the whole been flattering. It
+was almost necessary that with such a subject such should be the result.
+A story of family virtues, with princes and princesses well brought up,
+with happy family relations, all couleur de rose,&mdash;as it would of course
+become us to write if we were dealing with the life of a living
+sovereign,&mdash;would not be interesting. No one on going to hear Thackeray
+lecture on the Georges expected that. There must be some piquancy given,
+or the lecture would be dull;&mdash;and the eulogy of personal virtues can
+seldom be piquant. It is difficult to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span>speak fittingly of a sovereign,
+either living or not, long since gone. You can hardly praise such a one
+without flattery. You can hardly censure him without injustice. We are
+either ignorant of his personal doings or we know them as secrets, which
+have been divulged for the most part either falsely or
+treacherously,&mdash;often both falsely and treacherously. It is better,
+perhaps, that we should not deal with the personalities of princes.</p>
+
+<p>I believe that Thackeray fancied that he had spoken well of George III.,
+and am sure that it was his intention to do so. But the impression he
+leaves is poor. "He is said not to have cared for Shakespeare or tragedy
+much; farces and pantomimes were his joy;&mdash;and especially when clown
+swallowed a carrot or a string of sausages, he would laugh so
+outrageously that the lovely princess by his side would have to say, 'My
+gracious monarch, do compose yourself.' 'George, be a king!' were the
+words which she,"&mdash;his mother,&mdash;"was ever croaking in the ears of her
+son; and a king the simple, stubborn, affectionate, bigoted man tried to
+be." "He did his best; he worked according to his lights; what virtues
+he knew he tried to practise; what knowledge he could master he strove
+to acquire." If the lectures were to be popular, it was absolutely
+necessary that they should be written in this strain. A lecture simply
+laudatory on the life of St. Paul would not draw even the bench of
+bishops to listen to it; but were a flaw found in the apostle's life,
+the whole Church of England would be bound to know all about it. I am
+quite sure that Thackeray believed every word that he said in the
+lectures, and that he intended to put in the good and the bad, honestly,
+as they might come to his hand. We may be quite sure that he did not
+intend to flatter the royal family;&mdash;equally sure that he would not
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span>calumniate. There were, however, so many difficulties to be encountered
+that I cannot but think that the subject was ill-chosen. In making them
+so amusing as he did and so little offensive great ingenuity was shown.</p>
+
+<p>I will now go back to the first series, in which the lecturer treated of
+Swift, Congreve, Addison, Steele, Prior, Gay, Pope, Hogarth, Smollett,
+Fielding, Sterne, and Goldsmith. All these Thackeray has put in their
+proper order, placing the men from the date of their birth, except
+Prior, who was in truth the eldest of the lot, but whom it was necessary
+to depose, in order that the great Swift might stand first on the list,
+and Smollett, who was not born till fourteen years after Fielding, eight
+years after Sterne, and who has been moved up, I presume, simply from
+caprice. From the birth of the first to the death of the last, was a
+period of nearly a hundred years. They were never absolutely all alive
+together; but it was nearly so, Addison and Prior having died before
+Smollett was born. Whether we should accept as humorists the full
+catalogue, may be a question; though we shall hardly wish to eliminate
+any one from such a dozen of names. Pope we should hardly define as a
+humorist, were we to be seeking for a definition specially fit for him,
+though we shall certainly not deny the gift of humour to the author of
+<i>The Rape of the Lock</i>, or to the translator of any portion of <i>The
+Odyssey</i>. Nor should we have included Fielding or Smollett, in spite of
+Parson Adams and Tabitha Bramble, unless anxious to fill a good company.
+That Hogarth was specially a humorist no one will deny; but in speaking
+of humorists we should have presumed, unless otherwise notified, that
+humorists in letters only had been intended. As Thackeray explains
+clearly what he means by a humorist, I may as well here repeat the
+passage<ins class="correction" title="Transcriber's note: no punctuation in original">:</ins> <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span>"If humour only meant laughter, you would scarcely feel more
+interest about humorous writers than about the private life of poor
+Harlequin just mentioned, who possesses in common with these the power
+of making you laugh. But the men regarding whose lives and stories your
+kind presence here shows that you have curiosity and sympathy, appeal to
+a great number of our other faculties, besides our mere sense of
+ridicule. The humorous writer professes to awaken and direct your love,
+your pity, your kindness,&mdash;your scorn for untruth, pretension,
+imposture,&mdash;your tenderness for the weak, the poor, the oppressed, the
+unhappy. To the best of his means and ability he comments on all the
+ordinary actions and passions of life almost. He takes upon himself to
+be the week-day preacher, so to speak. Accordingly, as he finds, and
+speaks, and feels the truth best, we regard him, esteem him,&mdash;sometimes
+love him. And as his business is to mark other people's lives and
+peculiarities, we moralise upon <i>his</i> life when he is gone,&mdash;and
+yesterday's preacher becomes the text for to-day's sermon."</p>
+
+<p>Having thus explained his purpose, Thackeray begins his task, and puts
+Swift in his front rank as a humorist. The picture given of this great
+man has very manifestly the look of truth, and if true, is terrible
+indeed. We do, in fact, know it to be true,&mdash;even though it be admitted
+that there is still room left for a book to be written on the life of
+the fearful dean. Here was a man endued with an intellect pellucid as
+well as brilliant; who could not only conceive but see also,&mdash;with some
+fine instincts too; whom fortune did not flout; whom circumstances
+fairly served; but who, from first to last, was miserable himself, who
+made others miserable, and who deserved misery. Our business, during the
+page or two which we can give to the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span>subject, is not with Swift but
+with Thackeray's picture of Swift. It is painted with colours terribly
+strong and with shadows fearfully deep. "Would you like to have lived
+with him?" Thackeray asks. Then he says how pleasant it would have been
+to have passed some time with Fielding, Johnson, or Goldsmith. "I should
+like to have been Shakespeare's shoeblack," he says. "But Swift! If you
+had been his inferior in parts,&mdash;and that, with a great respect for all
+persons present, I fear is only very likely,&mdash;his equal in mere social
+station, he would have bullied, scorned, and insulted you. If,
+undeterred by his great reputation, you had met him like a man, he would
+have quailed before you and not had the pluck to reply,&mdash;and gone home,
+and years after written a foul epigram upon you." There is a picture!
+"If you had been a lord with a blue riband, who flattered his vanity, or
+could help his ambition, he would have been the most delightful company
+in the world.... How he would have torn your enemies to pieces for you,
+and made fun of the Opposition! His servility was so boisterous that it
+looked like independence." He was a man whose mind was never fixed on
+high things, but was striving always after something which, little as it
+might be, and successful as he was, should always be out of his reach.
+It had been his misfortune to become a clergyman, because the way to
+church preferment seemed to be the readiest. He became, as we all know,
+a dean,&mdash;but never a bishop, and was therefore wretched. Thackeray
+describes him as a clerical highwayman, seizing on all he could get. But
+"the great prize has not yet come. The coach with the mitre and crozier
+in it, which he intends to have for <i>his</i> share, has been delayed on the
+way from St. James's; and he waits and waits till nightfall, when his
+runners come and tell him that the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span>coach has taken a different way and
+escaped him. So he fires his pistol into the air with a curse, and rides
+away into his own country;"&mdash;or, in other words, takes a poor deanery in
+Ireland.</p>
+
+<p>Thackeray explains very correctly, as I think, the nature of the weapons
+which the man used,&mdash;namely, the words and style with which he wrote.
+"That Swift was born at No. 7, Hoey's Court, Dublin, on November 30,
+1667, is a certain fact, of which nobody will deny the sister-island the
+honour and glory; but it seems to me he was no more an Irishman than a
+man born of English parents at Calcutta is a Hindoo. Goldsmith was an
+Irishman and always an Irishman; Steele was an Irishman and always an
+Irishman; Swift's heart was English and in England, his habits English,
+his logic eminently English; his statement is elaborately simple; he
+shuns tropes and metaphors, and uses his ideas and words with a wise
+thrift and economy, as he used his money;&mdash;with which he could be
+generous and splendid upon great occasions, but which he husbanded when
+there was no need to spend it. He never indulges in needless
+extravagance of rhetoric, lavish epithets, profuse imagery. He lays his
+opinions before you with a grave simplicity and a perfect neatness."
+This is quite true of him, and the result is that though you may deny
+him sincerity, simplicity, humanity, or good taste, you can hardly find
+fault with his language.</p>
+
+<p>Swift was a clergyman, and this is what Thackeray says of him in regard
+to his sacred profession. "I know of few things more conclusive as to
+the sincerity of Swift's religion, than his advice to poor John Gay to
+turn clergyman, and look out for a seat on the Bench! Gay, the author of
+<i>The Beggar's Opera</i>; Gay, the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span>wildest of the wits about town! It was
+this man that Jonathan Swift advised to take orders, to mount in a
+cassock and bands,&mdash;just as he advised him to husband his shillings, and
+put his thousand pounds out to interest."</p>
+
+<p>It was not that he was without religion,&mdash;or without, rather, his
+religious beliefs and doubts, "for Swift," says Thackeray, "was a
+reverent, was a pious spirit. For Swift could love and could pray." Left
+to himself and to the natural thoughts of his mind, without those
+"orders" to which he had bound himself as a necessary part of his trade,
+he could have turned to his God with questionings which need not then
+have been heartbreaking. "It is my belief," says Thackeray, "that he
+suffered frightfully from the consciousness of his own scepticism, and
+that he had bent his pride so far down as to put his apostasy out to
+hire." I doubt whether any of Swift's works are very much read now, but
+perhaps Gulliver's travels are oftener in the hands of modern readers
+than any other. Of all the satires in our language it is probably the
+most cynical, the most absolutely illnatured, and therefore the falsest.
+Let those who care to form an opinion of Swift's mind from the best
+known of his works, turn to Thackeray's account of Gulliver. I can
+imagine no greater proof of misery than to have been able to write such
+a book as that.</p>
+
+<p>It is thus that the lecturer concludes his lecture about Swift. "He
+shrank away from all affections sooner or later. Stella and Vanessa both
+died near him, and away from him. He had not heart enough to see them
+die. He broke from his fastest friend, Sheridan. He slunk away from his
+fondest admirer, Pope. His laugh jars on one's ear after seven-score
+years. He was always alone,&mdash;alone <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span>and gnashing in the darkness, except
+when Stella's sweet smile came and shone on him. When that went, silence
+and utter night closed over him. An immense genius, an awful downfall
+and ruin! So great a man he seems to me, that thinking of him is like
+thinking of an empire falling. We have other great names to
+mention,&mdash;none I think, however, so great or so gloomy." And so we pass
+on from Swift, feeling that though the man was certainly a humorist, we
+have had as yet but little to do with humour.</p>
+
+<p>Congreve is the next who, however truly he may have been a humorist, is
+described here rather as a man of fashion. A man of fashion he certainly
+was, but is best known in our literature as a comedian,&mdash;worshipping
+that comic Muse to whom Thackeray hesitates to introduce his audience,
+because she is not only merry but shameless also. Congreve's muse was
+about as bad as any muse that ever misbehaved herself,&mdash;and I think, as
+little amusing. "Reading in these plays now," says Thackeray, "is like
+shutting your ears and looking at people dancing. What does it
+mean?&mdash;the measures, the grimaces, the bowing, shuffling, and
+retreating, the cavaliers seuls advancing upon their ladies, then ladies
+and men twirling round at the end in a mad galop, after which everybody
+bows and the quaint rite is celebrated?" It is always so with Congreve's
+plays, and Etherege's and Wycherley's. The world we meet there is not
+our world, and as we read the plays we have no sympathy with these
+unknown people. It was not that they lived so long ago. They are much
+nearer to us in time than the men and women who figured on the stage in
+the reign of James I. But their nature is farther from our nature. They
+sparkle but never warm. They are witty but leave no impression. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span>I might
+almost go further, and say that they are wicked but never allure. "When
+Voltaire came to visit the Great Congreve," says Thackeray, "the latter
+rather affected to despise his literary reputation; and in this,
+perhaps, the great Congreve was not far wrong. A touch of Steele's
+tenderness is worth all his finery; a flash of Swift's lightning, a beam
+of Addison's pure sunshine, and his tawdry playhouse taper is invisible.
+But the ladies loved him, and he was undoubtedly a pretty fellow."</p>
+
+<p>There is no doubt as to the true humour of Addison, who next comes up
+before us, but I think that he makes hardly so good a subject for a
+lecturer as the great gloomy man of intellect, or the frivolous man of
+pleasure. Thackeray tells us all that is to be said about him as a
+humorist in so few lines that I may almost insert them on this page:
+"But it is not for his reputation as the great author of <i>Cato</i> and <i>The
+Campaign</i>, or for his merits as Secretary of State, or for his rank and
+high distinction as Lady Warwick's husband, or for his eminence as an
+examiner of political questions on the Whig side, or a guardian of
+British liberties, that we admire Joseph Addison. It is as a Tattler of
+small talk and a Spectator of mankind that we cherish and love him, and
+owe as much pleasure to him as to any human being that ever wrote. He
+came in that artificial age, and began to speak with his noble natural
+voice. He came the gentle satirist, who hit no unfair blow; the kind
+judge, who castigated only in smiling. While Swift went about hanging
+and ruthless, a literary Jeffreys, in Addison's kind court only minor
+cases were tried;&mdash;only peccadilloes and small sins against society,
+only a dangerous libertinism in tuckers and hoops, or a nuisance in the
+abuse of beaux canes and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span>snuffboxes." Steele set <i>The Tatler</i> a going.
+"But with his friend's discovery of <i>The Tatler</i>, Addison's calling was
+found, and the most delightful Tattler in the world began to speak. He
+does not go very deep. Let gentlemen of a profound genius, critics
+accustomed to the plunge of the bathos, console themselves by thinking
+that he couldn't go very deep. There is no trace of suffering in his
+writing. He was so good, so honest, so healthy, so cheerfully
+selfish,&mdash;if I must use the word!"</p>
+
+<p>Such was Addison as a humorist; and when the hearer shall have heard
+also,&mdash;or the reader read,&mdash;that this most charming Tattler also wrote
+<i>Cato</i>, became a Secretary of State, and married a countess, he will
+have learned all that Thackeray had to tell of him.</p>
+
+<p>Steele was one who stood much less high in the world's esteem, and who
+left behind him a much smaller name,&mdash;but was quite Addison's equal as a
+humorist and a wit. Addison, though he had the reputation of a toper,
+was respectability itself. Steele was almost always disreputable. He was
+brought from Ireland, placed at the Charter House, and then transferred
+to Oxford, where he became acquainted with Addison. Thackeray says that
+"Steele found Addison a stately college don at Oxford." The stateliness
+and the don's rank were attributable no doubt to the more sober
+character of the English lad, for, in fact, the two men were born in the
+same year, 1672. Steele, who during his life was affected by various
+different tastes, first turned himself to literature, but early in life
+was bitten by the hue of a red coat and became a trooper in the Horse
+Guards. To the end he vacillated in the same way. "In that charming
+paper in <i>The Tatler</i>, in which he records his father's death, his
+mother's griefs, his own most solemn <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span>and tender emotions, he says he is
+interrupted by the arrival of a hamper of wine, 'the same as is to be
+sold at Garraway's next week;' upon the receipt of which he sends for
+three friends, and they fall to instantly, drinking two bottles apiece,
+with great benefit to themselves, and not separating till two o'clock in
+the morning."</p>
+
+<p>He had two wives, whom he loved dearly and treated badly. He hired grand
+houses, and bought fine horses for which he could never pay. He was
+often religious, but more often drunk. As a man of letters, other men of
+letters who followed him, such as Thackeray, could not be very proud of
+him. But everybody loved him; and he seems to have been the inventor of
+that flying literature which, with many changes in form and manner, has
+done so much for the amusement and edification of readers ever since his
+time. He was always commencing, or carrying on,&mdash;often editing,&mdash;some
+one of the numerous periodicals which appeared during his time.
+Thackeray mentions seven: <i>The Tatler</i>, <i>The Spectator</i>, <i>The Guardian</i>,
+<i>The Englishman</i>, <i>The Lover</i>, <i>The Reader</i>, and <i>The Theatre</i>; that
+three of them are well known to this day,&mdash;the three first named,&mdash;and
+are to be found in all libraries, is proof that his life was not thrown
+away.</p>
+
+<p>I almost question Prior's right to be in the list, unless indeed the
+mastery over well-turned conceits is to be included within the border of
+humour. But Thackeray had a strong liking for Prior, and in his own
+humorous way rebukes his audience for not being familiar with <i>The Town
+and Country Mouse</i>. He says that Prior's epigrams have the genuine
+sparkle, and compares Prior to Horace. "His song, his philosophy, his
+good sense, his happy easy <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span>turns and melody, his loves and his
+epicureanism bear a great resemblance to that most delightful and
+accomplished master." I cannot say that I agree with this. Prior is
+generally neat in his expression. Horace is happy,&mdash;which is surely a
+great deal more.</p>
+
+<p>All that is said of Gay, Pope, Hogarth, Smollett, and Fielding is worth
+reading, and may be of great value both to those who have not time to
+study the authors, and to those who desire to have their own judgments
+somewhat guided, somewhat assisted. That they were all men of humour
+there can be no doubt. Whether either of them, except perhaps Gay, would
+have been specially ranked as a humorist among men of letters, may be a
+question.</p>
+
+<p>Sterne was a humorist, and employed his pen in that line, if ever a
+writer did so, and so was Goldsmith. Of the excellence and largeness of
+the disposition of the one, and the meanness and littleness of the
+other, it is not necessary that I should here say much. But I will give
+a short passage from our author as to each. He has been quoting somewhat
+at length from Sterne, and thus he ends; "And with this pretty dance and
+chorus the volume artfully concludes. Even here one can't give the whole
+description. There is not a page in Sterne's writing but has something
+that were better away, a latent corruption,&mdash;a hint as of an impure
+presence. Some of that dreary double entendre may be attributed to freer
+times and manners than ours,&mdash;but not all. The foul satyr's eyes leer
+out of the leaves constantly. The last words the famous author wrote
+were bad and wicked. The last lines the poor stricken wretch penned were
+for pity and pardon." Now a line or two about Goldsmith, and I will then
+let my reader go to the volume and study the lectures for himself<ins class="correction" title="Transcriber's note: no punctuation in original">.</ins> "The
+poor fellow was never so friendless <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span>but that he could befriend some
+one; never so pinched and wretched but he could give of his crust, and
+speak his word of compassion. If he had but his flute left, he would
+give that, and make the children happy in the dreary London courts."</p>
+
+<p>Of this too I will remind my readers,&mdash;those who have bookshelves
+well-filled to adorn their houses,&mdash;that Goldsmith stands in the front
+where all the young people see the volumes. There are few among the
+young people who do not refresh their sense of humour occasionally from
+that shelf, Sterne is relegated to some distant and high corner. The
+less often that he is taken down the better. Thackeray makes some half
+excuse for him because of the greater freedom of the times. But "the
+times" were the same for the two. Both Sterne and Goldsmith wrote in the
+reign of George II.; both died in the reign of George III.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VIII" id="CHAPTER_VIII"></a>CHAPTER VIII.</h2>
+
+<h3>THACKERAY'S BALLADS.</h3>
+
+
+<p>We have a volume of Thackeray's poems, republished under the name of
+<i>Ballads</i>, which is, I think, to a great extent a misnomer. They are all
+readable, almost all good, full of humour, and with some fine touches of
+pathos, most happy in their versification, and, with a few exceptions,
+hitting well on the head the nail which he intended to hit. But they are
+not on that account ballads. Literally, a ballad is a song, but it has
+come to signify a short chronicle in verse, which may be political, or
+pathetic, or grotesque,&mdash;or it may have all three characteristics or any
+two of them; but not on that account is any grotesque poem a
+ballad,&mdash;nor, of course, any pathetic or any political poem. <i>Jacob
+Omnium's Hoss</i> may fairly be called a ballad, containing as it does a
+chronicle of a certain well-defined transaction; and the story of <i>King
+Canute</i> is a ballad,&mdash;one of the best that has been produced in our
+language in modern years. But such pieces as those called <i>The End of
+the Play</i> and <i>Vanitas Vanitatum</i>, which are didactic as well as
+pathetic, are not ballads in the common sense; nor are such songs as
+<i>The Mahogany Tree</i>, or the little collection called <i>Love Songs made
+Easy</i>. The majority of the pieces are not <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span>ballads, but if they be good
+of the kind we should be ungrateful to quarrel much with the name.</p>
+
+<p>How very good most of them are, I did not know till I re-read them for
+the purpose of writing this chapter. There is a manifest falling off in
+some few,&mdash;which has come from that source of literary failure which is
+now so common. If a man write a book or a poem because it is in him to
+write it,&mdash;the motive power being altogether in himself and coming from
+his desire to express himself,&mdash;he will write it well, presuming him to
+be capable of the effort. But if he write his book or poem simply
+because a book or poem is required from him, let his capability be what
+it may, it is not unlikely that he will do it badly. Thackeray
+occasionally suffered from the weakness thus produced. A ballad from
+<i>Policeman X</i>,&mdash;<i>Bow Street Ballads</i> they were first called,&mdash;was
+required by <i>Punch</i>, and had to be forthcoming, whatever might be the
+poet's humour, by a certain time. <i>Jacob Omnium's Hoss</i> is excellent.
+His heart and feeling were all there, on behalf of his friend, and
+against that obsolete old court of justice. But we can tell well when he
+was looking through the police reports for a subject, and taking what
+chance might send him, without any special interest in the matter. <i>The
+Knight and the Lady of Bath</i>, and the <i>Damages Two Hundred Pounds</i>, as
+they were demanded at Guildford, taste as though they were written to
+order.</p>
+
+<p>Here, in his verses as in his prose, the charm of Thackeray's work lies
+in the mingling of humour with pathos and indignation. There is hardly a
+piece that is not more or less funny, hardly a piece that is not
+satirical;&mdash;and in most of them, for those who will look a little below
+the surface, there is something that will touch them. Thackeray, though
+he rarely uttered a word, either <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span>with his pen or his mouth, in which
+there was not an intention to reach our sense of humour, never was only
+funny. When he was most determined to make us laugh, he had always a
+further purpose;&mdash;some pity was to be extracted from us on behalf of the
+sorrows of men, or some indignation at the evil done by them.</p>
+
+<p>This is the beginning of that story as to the <i>Two Hundred Pounds</i>, for
+which as a ballad I do not care very much:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Special jurymen of England who admire your country's laws,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And proclaim a British jury worthy of the nation's applause,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Gaily compliment each other at the issue of a cause,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Which was tried at Guildford 'sizes, this day week as ever was.</span><br />
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Here he is indignant, not only in regard to some miscarriage of justice
+on that special occasion, but at the general unfitness of jurymen for
+the work confided to them. "Gaily compliment yourselves," he says, "on
+your beautiful constitution, from which come such beautiful results as
+those I am going to tell you!" When he reminded us that Ivanhoe had
+produced Magna Charta, there was a purpose of irony even there in regard
+to our vaunted freedom. With all your Magna Charta and your juries, what
+are you but snobs! There is nothing so often misguided as general
+indignation, and I think that in his judgment of outside things, in the
+measure which he usually took of them, Thackeray was very frequently
+misguided. A satirist by trade will learn to satirise everything, till
+the light of the sun and the moon's loveliness will become evil and mean
+to him. I think that he was mistaken in his views of things. But we have
+to do with him as a writer, not as a political economist or a
+politician. His indignation was all true, and the expression of it was
+often perfect. The lines in which he <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span>addresses that Pallis Court, at
+the end of Jacob Omnium's Hoss, are almost sublime.</p>
+
+<div class="columnleft">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">O Pallis Court, you move</span><br />
+<span class="i1">My pity most profound.</span><br />
+<span class="i0">A most amusing sport</span><br />
+<span class="i1">You thought it, I'll be bound,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">To saddle hup a three-pound debt,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">With two-and-twenty pound.</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Good sport it is to you</span><br />
+<span class="i1">To grind the honest poor,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">To pay their just or unjust debts</span><br />
+<span class="i1">With eight hundred per cent, for Lor;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Make haste and get your costes in,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">They will not last much mor!</span><br />
+</div></div></div>
+<div class="columnright">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Come down from that tribewn,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Thou shameless and unjust;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Thou swindle, picking pockets in</span><br />
+<span class="i1">The name of Truth august;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Come down, thou hoary Blasphemy,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">For die thou shalt and must.</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And go it, Jacob Homnium,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">And ply your iron pen,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And rise up, Sir John Jervis,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">And shut me up that den;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">That sty for fattening lawyers in,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">On the bones of honest men.</span><br />
+</div></div></div>
+
+<p class="bottom">"Come down from that tribewn, thou shameless and unjust!" It is
+impossible not to feel that he felt this as he wrote it.</p>
+
+<p>There is a branch of his poetry which he calls,&mdash;or which at any rate is
+now called, <i>Lyra Hybernica</i>, for which no doubt <i>The Groves of Blarney</i>
+was his model. There have been many imitations since, of which perhaps
+Barham's ballad on the coronation was the best, "When to Westminster the
+Royal Spinster and the Duke of Leinster all in order did repair!"
+Thackeray in some of his attempts has been equally droll and equally
+graphic. That on <i>The Cristal Palace</i>,&mdash;not that at Sydenham, but its
+forerunner, the palace of the Great Exhibition,&mdash;is very good, as the
+following catalogue of its contents will show;</p>
+
+<div class="columnleft">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">There's holy saints</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And window paints,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">By Maydiayval Pugin;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Alhamborough Jones</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Did paint the tones</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Of yellow and gambouge in.</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">There's fountains there</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And crosses fair;</span><br />
+<span class="i1">There's water-gods with urns;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">There's organs three,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">To play, d'ye see?</span><br />
+<span class="i1">"God save the Queen," by turns.</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">There's statues bright</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Of marble white,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Of silver, and of copper;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And some in zinc,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And some, I think,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">That isn't over proper.</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">There's staym ingynes,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">That stands in lines,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Enormous and amazing,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">That squeal and snort</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Like whales in sport,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Or elephants a grazing.</span><br />
+</div></div></div>
+<div class="columnright">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">There's carts and gigs,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And pins for pigs,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">There's dibblers and there's harrows,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And ploughs like toys</span><br />
+<span class="i0">For little boys,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">And ilegant wheel-barrows.</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">For thim genteels</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Who ride on wheels,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">There's plenty to indulge 'em</span><br />
+<span class="i0">There's droskys snug</span><br />
+<span class="i0">From Paytersbug,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">And vayhycles from Bulgium.</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">There's cabs on stands</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And shandthry danns;</span><br />
+<span class="i1">There's waggons from New York here;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">There's Lapland sleighs</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Have cross'd the seas,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">And jaunting cyars from Cork here.</span><br />
+</div></div></div>
+
+
+<p class="bottom">In writing this Thackeray was a little late with his copy for <i>Punch</i>;
+not, we should say, altogether an uncommon accident to him. It should
+have been with the editor early on Saturday, if not before, but did not
+come till late on Saturday evening. The editor, who was among men the
+most good-natured and I should think the most forbearing, either could
+not, or in this case would not, insert it in the next week's issue, and
+Thackeray, angry and disgusted, sent it to <i>The Times</i>. In <i>The Times</i>
+of next Monday it appeared,&mdash;very much I should think to the delight of
+the readers of that august newspaper.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Molony's account of the ball given to the Nepaulese ambassadors by
+the Peninsular and Oriental Company, is so like Barham's coronation in
+the account <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span>it gives of the guests, that one would fancy it must be by
+the same hand.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The noble Chair<a name="FNanchor_7" id="FNanchor_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a> stud at the stair</span><br />
+<span class="i1">And bade the dhrums to thump; and he</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Did thus evince to that Black Prince</span><br />
+<span class="i1">The welcome of his Company.<a name="FNanchor_8" id="FNanchor_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a></span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">O fair the girls and rich the curls,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">And bright the oys you saw there was;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And fixed each oye you then could spoi</span><br />
+<span class="i1">On General Jung Bahawther was!</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">This gineral great then tuck his sate,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">With all the other ginerals,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Bedad his troat, his belt, his coat,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">All bleezed with precious minerals;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And as he there, with princely air,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Recloinin on his cushion was,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">All round about his royal chair</span><br />
+<span class="i1">The squeezin and the pushin was.</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">O Pat, such girls, such jukes and earls,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Such fashion and nobilitee!</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Just think of Tim, and fancy him</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Amidst the high gentilitee!</span><br />
+<span class="i0">There was the Lord de L'Huys, and the Portygeese</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Ministher and his lady there,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And I recognised, with much surprise,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Our messmate, Bob O'Grady, there.</span><br />
+</div></div>
+
+<p>All these are very good fun,&mdash;so good in humour and so good in
+expression, that it would be needless to criticise their peculiar
+dialect, were it not that Thackeray has made for himself a reputation by
+his writing of Irish. In this he has been so entirely successful that
+for many English <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span>readers he has established a new language which may
+not improperly be called Hybernico-Thackerayan. If comedy is to be got
+from peculiarities of dialect, as no doubt it is, one form will do as
+well as another, so long as those who read it know no better. So it has
+been with Thackeray's Irish, for in truth he was not familiar with the
+modes of pronunciation which make up Irish brogue. Therefore, though he
+is always droll, he is not true to nature. Many an Irishman coming to
+London, not unnaturally tries to imitate the talk of Londoners. You or
+I, reader, were we from the West, and were the dear County Galway to
+send either of us to Parliament, would probably endeavour to drop the
+dear brogue of our country, and in doing so we should make some
+mistakes. It was these mistakes which Thackeray took for the natural
+Irish tone. He was amused to hear a major called "Meejor," but was
+unaware that the sound arose from Pat's affection of English softness of
+speech. The expression natural to the unadulterated Irishman would
+rather be "Ma-ajor." He discovers his own provincialism, and trying to
+be polite and urbane, he says "Meejor." In one of the lines I have
+quoted there occurs the word "troat." Such a sound never came naturally
+from the mouth of an Irishman. He puts in an h instead of omitting it,
+and says "dhrink." He comes to London, and finding out that he is wrong
+with his "dhrink," he leaves out all the h's he can, and thus comes to
+"troat." It is this which Thackeray has heard. There is a little piece
+called the <i>Last Irish Grievance</i>, to which Thackeray adds a still later
+grievance, by the false sounds which he elicits from the calumniated
+mouth of the pretended Irish poet. Slaves are "sleeves," places are
+"pleeces," Lord John is "Lard Jahn," fatal is "fetal," danger is
+"deenger," and native is "neetive." <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span>All these are unintended slanders.
+Tea, Hibernic&eacute;, is "tay," please is "plaise," sea is "say," and ease is
+"aise." The softer sound of e is broadened out by the natural
+Irishman,&mdash;not, to my ear, without a certain euphony;&mdash;but no one in
+Ireland says or hears the reverse. The Irishman who in London might talk
+of his "neetive" race, would be mincing his words to please the ear of
+the cockney.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Chronicle of the Drum</i> would be a true ballad all through, were it
+not that there is tacked on to it a long moral in an altered metre. I do
+not much value the moral, but the ballad is excellent, not only in much
+of its versification and in the turns of its language, but in the quaint
+and true picture it gives of the French nation. The drummer, either by
+himself or by some of his family, has drummed through a century of
+French battling, caring much for his country and its glory, but
+understanding nothing of the causes for which he is enthusiastic.
+Whether for King, Republic, or Emperor, whether fighting and conquering
+or fighting and conquered, he is happy as long as he can beat his drum
+on a field of glory. But throughout his adventures there is a touch of
+chivalry about our drummer. In all the episodes of his country's career
+he feels much of patriotism and something of tenderness. It is thus he
+sings during the days of the Revolution:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">We had taken the head of King Capet,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">We called for the blood of his wife;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Undaunted she came to the scaffold,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">And bared her fair neck to the knife.</span><br />
+<span class="i0">As she felt the foul fingers that touched her,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">She shrank, but she deigned not to speak;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">She looked with a royal disdain,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">And died with a blush on her cheek!</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span><span class="i0">'Twas thus that our country was saved!</span><br />
+<span class="i1">So told us the Safety Committee!</span><br />
+<span class="i0">But, psha, I've the heart of a soldier,&mdash;</span><br />
+<span class="i1">All gentleness, mercy, and pity.</span><br />
+<span class="i0">I loathed to assist at such deeds,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">And my drum beat its loudest of tunes,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">As we offered to justice offended,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">The blood of the bloody tribunes.</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Away with such foul recollections!</span><br />
+<span class="i1">No more of the axe and the block.</span><br />
+<span class="i0">I saw the last fight of the sections,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">As they fell 'neath our guns at St. Rock.</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Young Bonaparte led us that day.</span><br />
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And so it goes on. I will not continue the stanza, because it contains
+the worst rhyme that Thackeray ever permitted himself to use. <i>The
+Chronicle of the Drum</i> has not the finish which he achieved afterwards,
+but it is full of national feeling, and carries on its purpose to the
+end with an admirable persistency;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">A curse on those British assassins</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Who ordered the slaughter of Ney;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">A curse on Sir Hudson who tortured</span><br />
+<span class="i1">The life of our hero away.</span><br />
+<span class="i0">A curse on all Russians,&mdash;I hate them;</span><br />
+<span class="i1">On all Prussian and Austrian fry;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And, oh, but I pray we may meet them</span><br />
+<span class="i1">And fight them again ere I die.</span><br />
+</div></div>
+
+<p><i>The White Squall</i>,&mdash;which I can hardly call a ballad, unless any
+description of a scene in verse may be included in the name,&mdash;is surely
+one of the most graphic descriptions ever put into verse. Nothing
+written by Thackeray shows more plainly his power over words and rhymes.
+He draws his picture without a line omitted or a line too much, saying
+with apparent facility all that he has to say, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span>and so saying it that
+every word conveys its natural meaning.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">When a squall, upon a sudden,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Came o'er the waters scudding;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And the clouds began to gather,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And the sea was lashed to lather,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And the lowering thunder grumbled,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And the lightning jumped and tumbled,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And the ship and all the ocean</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Woke up in wild commotion.</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Then the wind set up a howling,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And the poodle dog a yowling,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And the cocks began a crowing,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And the old cow raised a lowing,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">As she heard the tempest blowing;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And fowls and geese did cackle,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And the cordage and the tackle</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Began to shriek and crackle;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And the spray dashed o'er the funnels,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And down the deck in runnels;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And the rushing water soaks all,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">From the seamen in the fo'ksal</span><br />
+<span class="i0">To the stokers whose black faces</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Peer out of their bed-places;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And the captain, he was bawling,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And the sailors pulling, hauling,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And the quarter-deck tarpauling</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Was shivered in the squalling;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And the passengers awaken,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Most pitifully shaken;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And the steward jumps up and hastens</span><br />
+<span class="i0">For the necessary basins.</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Then the Greeks they groaned and quivered,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And they knelt, and moaned, and shivered,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">As the plunging waters met them,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And splashed and overset them;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And they call in their emergence</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Upon countless saints and virgins;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And their marrowbones are bended,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And they think the world is ended.</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span><span class="i0">And the Turkish women for'ard</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Were frightened and behorror'd;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And shrieking and bewildering,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">The mothers clutched their children;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">The men sang "Allah! Illah!</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Mashallah Bis-millah!"</span><br />
+<span class="i0">As the warning waters doused them,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And splashed them and soused them</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And they called upon the Prophet,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And thought but little of it.</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Then all the fleas in Jewry</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Jumped up and bit like fury;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And the progeny of Jacob</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Did on the main-deck wake up.</span><br />
+<span class="i0">(I wot these greasy Rabbins</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Would never pay for cabins);</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And each man moaned and jabbered in</span><br />
+<span class="i0">His filthy Jewish gaberdine,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">In woe and lamentation,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And howling consternation.</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And the splashing water drenches</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Their dirty brats and wenches;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And they crawl from bales and benches,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">In a hundred thousand stenches.</span><br />
+<span class="i0">This was the White Squall famous,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Which latterly o'ercame us.</span><br />
+</div></div>
+
+<p><i>Peg of Limavaddy</i> has always been very popular, and the public have
+not, I think, been generally aware that the young lady in question lived
+in truth at Newton Limavady (with one d). But with the correct name
+Thackeray would hardly have been so successful with his rhymes.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Citizen or Squire</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Tory, Whig, or Radi-</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Cal would all desire</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Peg of Limavaddy.</span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span><span class="i0">Had I Homer's fire</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Or that of Sergeant Taddy</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Meetly I'd admire</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Peg of Limavaddy.</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And till I expire</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Or till I go mad I</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Will sing unto my lyre</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Peg of Limavaddy.</span><br />
+</div></div>
+
+<p><i>The Cane-bottomed Chair</i> is another, better, I think, than <i>Peg of
+Limavaddy</i>, as containing that mixture of burlesque with the pathetic
+which belonged so peculiarly to Thackeray, and which was indeed the very
+essence of his genius.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">But of all the cheap treasures that garnish my nest,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">There's one that I love and I cherish the best.</span><br />
+<span class="i0">For the finest of couches that's padded with hair</span><br />
+<span class="i1">I never would change thee, my cane-bottomed chair.</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'Tis a bandy-legged, high-bottomed, worm-eaten seat,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">With a creaking old back and twisted old feet;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">But since the fair morning when Fanny sat there,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">I bless thee and love thee, old cane-bottomed chair.</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i3" style="margin-top: .5em;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">She comes from the past and revisits my room,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">She looks as she then did all beauty and bloom;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">So smiling and tender, so fresh and so fair,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">And yonder she sits in my cane-bottomed chair.</span><br />
+</div></div>
+
+<p>This, in the volume which I have now before me, is followed by a picture
+of Fanny in the chair, to which I cannot but take exception. I am quite
+sure that when Fanny graced the room and seated herself in the chair of
+her old bachelor friend, she had not on a low dress and loosely-flowing
+drawing-room shawl, nor was there a footstool ready for her feet. I
+doubt also the headgear. Fanny on that occasion was dressed in her
+morning apparel, and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span>had walked through the streets, carried no fan,
+and wore no brooch but one that might be necessary for pinning her
+shawl.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Great Cossack Epic</i> is the longest of the ballads. It is a legend
+of St. Sophia of Kioff, telling how Father Hyacinth, by the aid of St.
+Sophia, whose wooden statue he carried with him, escaped across the
+Borysthenes with all the Cossacks at his tail. It is very good fun; but
+not equal to many of the others. Nor is the <i>Carmen Lilliense</i> quite to
+my taste. I should not have declared at once that it had come from
+Thackeray's hand, had I not known it.</p>
+
+<p>But who could doubt the <i>Bouillabaisse</i>? Who else could have written
+that? Who at the same moment could have been so merry and so
+melancholy,&mdash;could have gone so deep into the regrets of life, with
+words so appropriate to its jollities? I do not know how far my readers
+will agree with me that to read it always must be a fresh pleasure; but
+in order that they may agree with me, if they can, I will give it to
+them entire. If there be one whom it does not please, he will like
+nothing that Thackeray ever wrote in verse.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">THE BALLAD OF BOUILLABAISSE.</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">A street there is in Paris famous,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">For which no rhyme our language yields,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Rue Neuve des Petits Champs its name is&mdash;</span><br />
+<span class="i1">The New Street of the Little Fields;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And here's an inn, not rich and splendid,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">But still in comfortable case;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">The which in youth I oft attended,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">To eat a bowl of Bouillabaisse.</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">This Bouillabaisse a noble dish is,&mdash;</span><br />
+<span class="i1">A sort of soup, or broth, or brew</span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span><span class="i0">Or hotch-potch of all sorts of fishes,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">That Greenwich never could outdo;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Green herbs, red peppers, mussels, saffron,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Soles, onions, garlic, roach, and dace:</span><br />
+<span class="i0">All these you eat at Terr&eacute;'s tavern,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">In that one dish of Bouillabaisse.</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Indeed, a rich and savoury stew 'tis;</span><br />
+<span class="i1">And true philosophers, methinks,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Who love all sorts of natural beauties,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Should love good victuals and good drinks.</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And Cordelier or Benedictine</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Might gladly sure his lot embrace,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Nor find a fast-day too afflicting</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Which served him up a Bouillabaisse.</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">I wonder if the house still there is?</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Yes, here the lamp is, as before;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">The smiling red-cheeked &eacute;caill&egrave;re is</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Still opening oysters at the door.</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Is Terr&eacute; still alive and able?</span><br />
+<span class="i1">I recollect his droll grimace;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">He'd come and smile before your table,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">And hope you liked your Bouillabaisse.</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">We enter,&mdash;nothing's changed or older.</span><br />
+<span class="i1">"How's Monsieur Terr&eacute;, waiter, pray?"</span><br />
+<span class="i0">The waiter stares and shrugs his shoulder,&mdash;</span><br />
+<span class="i1">"Monsieur is dead this many a day."</span><br />
+<span class="i0">"It is the lot of saint and sinner;</span><br />
+<span class="i1">So honest Terr&eacute;'s run his race."</span><br />
+<span class="i0">"What will Monsieur require for dinner?"</span><br />
+<span class="i1">"Say, do you still cook Bouillabaisse?"</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Oh, oui, Monsieur," 's the waiter's answer,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">"Quel vin Monsieur desire-t-il?"</span><br />
+<span class="i0">"Tell me a good one." "That I can, sir:</span><br />
+<span class="i1">The chambertin with yellow seal."</span><br />
+<span class="i0">"So Terr&eacute;'s gone," I say, and sink in</span><br />
+<span class="i1">My old accustom'd corner-place;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">"He's done with feasting and with drinking,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">With Burgundy and Bouillabaisse."</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span><span class="i0">My old accustomed corner here is,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">The table still is in the nook;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Ah! vanish'd many a busy year is</span><br />
+<span class="i1">This well-known chair since last I took.</span><br />
+<span class="i0">When first I saw ye, cari luoghi,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">I'd scarce a beard upon my face,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And now a grizzled, grim old fogy,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">I sit and wait for Bouillabaisse.</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Where are you, old companions trusty,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Of early days here met to dine?</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Come, waiter! quick, a flagon crusty;</span><br />
+<span class="i1">I'll pledge them in the good old wine.</span><br />
+<span class="i0">The kind old voices and old faces</span><br />
+<span class="i1">My memory can quick retrace;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Around the board they take their places,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">And share the wine and Bouillabaisse.</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">There's Jack has made a wondrous marriage;</span><br />
+<span class="i1">There's laughing Tom is laughing yet;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">There's brave Augustus drives his carriage;</span><br />
+<span class="i1">There's poor old Fred in the <i>Gazette</i>;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">O'er James's head the grass is growing.</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Good Lord! the world has wagged apace</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Since here we set the claret flowing,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">And drank, and ate the Bouillabaisse.</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Ah me! how quick the days are flitting!</span><br />
+<span class="i1">I mind me of a time that's gone,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">When here I'd sit, as now I'm sitting,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">In this same place,&mdash;but not alone.</span><br />
+<span class="i0">A fair young face was nestled near me,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">A dear, dear face looked fondly up,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And sweetly spoke and smiled to cheer me!</span><br />
+<span class="i1">There's no one now to share my cup.</span><br />
+<span class="i1" style="margin-top: .5em;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*</span><br />
+<span class="i0">I drink it as the Fates ordain it.</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Come fill it, and have done with rhymes;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Fill up the lonely glass, and drain it</span><br />
+<span class="i1">In memory of dear old times.</span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span><span class="i0">Welcome the wine, whate'er the seal is;</span><br />
+<span class="i1">And sit you down and say your grace</span><br />
+<span class="i0">With thankful heart, whate'er the meal is.</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Here comes the smoking Bouillabaisse.</span><br />
+</div></div>
+
+<p>I am not disposed to say that Thackeray will hold a high place among
+English poets. He would have been the first to ridicule such an
+assumption made on his behalf. But I think that his verses will be more
+popular than those of many highly reputed poets, and that as years roll
+on they will gain rather than lose in public estimation.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+<div class="footnotehead">FOOTNOTES:</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7" id="Footnote_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> Chair&mdash;<i>i.e.</i> Chairman.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8" id="Footnote_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> <i>I.e.</i> The P. and O. Company.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IX" id="CHAPTER_IX"></a>CHAPTER IX.</h2>
+
+<h3>THACKERAY'S STYLE AND MANNER OF WORK.</h3>
+
+
+<p>A novel in style should be easy, lucid, and of course grammatical. The
+same may be said of any book; but that which is intended to recreate
+should be easily understood,&mdash;for which purpose lucid narration is an
+essential. In matter it should be moral and amusing. In manner it may be
+realistic, or sublime, or ludicrous;&mdash;or it may be all these if the
+author can combine them. As to Thackeray's performance in style and
+matter I will say something further on. His manner was mainly realistic,
+and I will therefore speak first of that mode of expression which was
+peculiarly his own.</p>
+
+<p>Realism in style has not all the ease which seems to belong to it. It is
+the object of the author who affects it so to communicate with his
+reader that all his words shall seem to be natural to the occasion. We
+do not think the language of Dogberry natural, when he tells neighbour
+Seacole that "to write and read comes by nature." That is ludicrous. Nor
+is the language of Hamlet natural when he shows to his mother the
+portrait of his father;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">See what a grace was seated on this brow;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Hyperion's curls; the front of Jove himself;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">An eye like Mars, to threaten and command.</span><br />
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span></p><p>That is sublime. Constance is natural when she turns away from the
+Cardinal, declaring that</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">He talks to me that never had a son.</span><br />
+</div></div>
+
+<p>In one respect both the sublime and ludicrous are easier than the
+realistic. They are not required to be true. A man with an imagination
+and culture may feign either of them without knowing the ways of men. To
+be realistic you must know accurately that which you describe. How often
+do we find in novels that the author makes an attempt at realism and
+falls into a bathos of absurdity, because he cannot use appropriate
+language? "No human being ever spoke like that," we say to
+ourselves,&mdash;while we should not question the naturalness of the
+production, either in the grand or the ridiculous.</p>
+
+<p>And yet in very truth the realistic must not be true,&mdash;but just so far
+removed from truth as to suit the erroneous idea of truth which the
+reader may be supposed to entertain. For were a novelist to narrate a
+conversation between two persons of fair but not high education, and to
+use the ill-arranged words and fragments of speech which are really
+common in such conversations, he would seem to have sunk to the
+ludicrous, and to be attributing to the interlocutors a mode of language
+much beneath them. Though in fact true, it would seem to be far from
+natural. But on the other hand, were he to put words grammatically
+correct into the mouths of his personages, and to round off and to
+complete the spoken sentences, the ordinary reader would instantly feel
+such a style to be stilted and unreal. This reader would not analyse it,
+but would in some dim but sufficiently critical manner be aware that his
+author was not providing him with a naturally spoken <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span>dialogue. To
+produce the desired effect the narrator must go between the two. He must
+mount somewhat above the ordinary conversational powers of such persons
+as are to be represented,&mdash;lest he disgust. But he must by no means soar
+into correct phraseology,&mdash;lest he offend. The realistic,&mdash;by which we
+mean that which shall seem to be real,&mdash;lies between the two, and in
+reaching it the writer has not only to keep his proper distance on both
+sides, but has to maintain varying distances in accordance with the
+position, mode of life, and education of the speakers. Lady Castlewood
+in <i>Esmond</i> would not have been properly made to speak with absolute
+precision; but she goes nearer to the mark than her more ignorant lord,
+the viscount; less near, however, than her better-educated kinsman,
+Henry Esmond. He, however, is not made to speak altogether by the card,
+or he would be unnatural. Nor would each of them speak always in the
+same strain, but they would alter their language according to their
+companion,&mdash;according even to the hour of the day. All this the reader
+unconsciously perceives, and will not think the language to be natural
+unless the proper variations be there.</p>
+
+<p>In simple narrative the rule is the same as in dialogue, though it does
+not admit of the same palpable deviation from correct construction. The
+story of any incident, to be realistic, will admit neither of
+sesquipedalian grandeur nor of grotesque images. The one gives an idea
+of romance and the other of burlesque, to neither of which is truth
+supposed to appertain. We desire to soar frequently, and then we try
+romance. We desire to recreate ourselves with the easy and droll. Dulce
+est desipere in loco. Then we have recourse to burlesque. But in neither
+do we expect human nature.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span></p><p>I cannot but think that in the hands of the novelist the middle course
+is the most powerful. Much as we may delight in burlesque, we cannot
+claim for it the power of achieving great results. So much I think will
+be granted. For the sublime we look rather to poetry than to prose, and
+though I will give one or two instances just now in which it has been
+used with great effect in prose fiction, it does not come home to the
+heart, teaching a lesson, as does the realistic. The girl who reads is
+touched by Lucy Ashton, but she feels herself to be convinced of the
+facts as to Jeanie Deans, and asks herself whether she might not emulate
+them.</p>
+
+<p>Now as to the realism of Thackeray, I must rather appeal to my readers
+than attempt to prove it by quotation. Whoever it is that speaks in his
+pages, does it not seem that such a person would certainly have used
+such words on such an occasion? If there be need of examination to learn
+whether it be so or not, let the reader study all that falls from the
+mouth of Lady Castlewood through the novel called <i>Esmond</i>, or all that
+falls from the mouth of Beatrix. They are persons peculiarly
+situated,&mdash;noble women, but who have still lived much out of the world.
+The former is always conscious of a sorrow; the latter is always
+striving after an effect;&mdash;and both on this account are difficult of
+management. A period for the story has been chosen which is strange and
+unknown to us, and which has required a peculiar language. One would
+have said beforehand that whatever might be the charms of the book, it
+would not be natural. And yet the ear is never wounded by a tone that is
+false. It is not always the case that in novel reading the ear should be
+wounded because the words spoken are unnatural. Bulwer does not wound,
+though he never puts <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span>into the mouth of any of his persons words such as
+would have been spoken. They are not expected from him. It is something
+else that he provides. From Thackeray they are expected,&mdash;and from many
+others. But Thackeray never disappoints. Whether it be a great duke,
+such as he who was to have married Beatrix, or a mean chaplain, such as
+Tusher, or Captain Steele the humorist, they talk,&mdash;not as they would
+have talked probably, of which I am no judge,&mdash;but as we feel that they
+might have talked. We find ourselves willing to take it as proved
+because it is there, which is the strongest possible evidence of the
+realistic capacity of the writer.</p>
+
+<p>As to the sublime in novels, it is not to be supposed that any very high
+rank of sublimity is required to put such works within the pale of that
+definition. I allude to those in which an attempt is made to soar above
+the ordinary actions and ordinary language of life. We may take as an
+instance <i>The Mysteries of Udolpho</i>. That is intended to be sublime
+throughout. Even the writer never for a moment thought of descending to
+real life. She must have been untrue to her own idea of her own business
+had she done so. It is all stilted,&mdash;all of a certain altitude among the
+clouds. It has been in its time a popular book, and has had its world of
+readers. Those readers no doubt preferred the diluted romance of Mrs.
+Radcliff to the condensed realism of Fielding. At any rate they did not
+look for realism. <i>Pelham</i> may be taken as another instance of the
+sublime, though there is so much in it that is of the world worldly,
+though an intentional fall to the ludicrous is often made in it. The
+personages talk in glittering dialogues, throwing about philosophy,
+science, and the classics, in a manner which is always suggestive and
+often amusing. The book is <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span>brilliant with intellect. But no word is
+ever spoken as it would have been spoken;&mdash;no detail is ever narrated as
+it would have occurred. Bulwer no doubt regarded novels as romantic, and
+would have looked with contempt on any junction of realism and romance,
+though, in varying his work, he did not think it beneath him to vary his
+sublimity with the ludicrous. The sublime in novels is no doubt most
+effective when it breaks out, as though by some burst of nature, in the
+midst of a story true to life. "If," said Evan Maccombich, "the Saxon
+gentlemen are laughing because a poor man such as me thinks my life, or
+the life of six of my degree, is worth that of Vich Ian Vohr, it's like
+enough they may be very right; but if they laugh because they think I
+would not keep my word and come back to redeem him, I can tell them they
+ken neither the heart of a Hielandman nor the honour of a gentleman."
+That is sublime. And, again, when Balfour of Burley slaughters Bothwell,
+the death scene is sublime. "Die, bloodthirsty dog!" said Burley. "Die
+as thou hast lived! Die like the beasts that perish&mdash;hoping nothing,
+believing nothing!"&mdash;&mdash;"And fearing nothing," said Bothwell. Horrible as
+is the picture, it is sublime. As is also that speech of Meg Merrilies,
+as she addresses Mr. Bertram, standing on the bank. "Ride your ways,"
+said the gipsy; "ride your ways, Laird of Ellangowan; ride your ways,
+Godfrey Bertram. This day have ye quenched seven smoking hearths; see if
+the fire in your ain parlour burn the blyther for that. Ye have riven
+the thack off seven cottar houses; look if your ain rooftree stand the
+faster. Ye may stable your stirks in the shealings at Derncleugh; see
+that the hare does not couch on the hearthstane at Ellangowan." That is
+romance, and reaches the very <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span>height of the sublime. That does not
+offend, impossible though it be that any old woman should have spoken
+such words, because it does in truth lift the reader up among the bright
+stars. It is thus that the sublime may be mingled with the realistic, if
+the writer has the power. Thackeray also rises in that way to a high
+pitch, though not in many instances. Romance does not often justify to
+him an absence of truth. The scene between Lady Castlewood and the Duke
+of Hamilton is one, when she explains to her child's suitor who Henry
+Esmond is. "My daughter may receive presents from the head of our
+house," says the lady, speaking up for her kinsman. "My daughter may
+thankfully take kindness from her father's, her mother's, her brother's
+dearest friend." The whole scene is of the same nature, and is evidence
+of Thackeray's capacity for the sublime. And again, when the same lady
+welcomes the same kinsman on his return from the wars, she rises as
+high. But as I have already quoted a part of the passage in the chapter
+on this novel, I will not repeat it here.</p>
+
+<p>It may perhaps be said of the sublime in novels,&mdash;which I have
+endeavoured to describe as not being generally of a high order,&mdash;that it
+is apt to become cold, stilted, and unsatisfactory. What may be done by
+impossible castles among impossible mountains, peopled by impossible
+heroes and heroines, and fraught with impossible horrors, <i>The Mysteries
+of Udolpho</i> have shown us. But they require a patient reader, and one
+who can content himself with a long protracted and most unemotional
+excitement. The sublimity which is effected by sparkling speeches is
+better, if the speeches really have something in them beneath the
+sparkles. Those of Bulwer generally have. Those of his imitators are
+often without anything, the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span>sparkles even hardly sparkling. At the best
+they fatigue; and a novel, if it fatigues, is unpardonable. Its only
+excuse is to be found in the amusement it affords. It should instruct
+also, no doubt, but it never will do so unless it hides its instruction
+and amuses. Scott understood all this, when he allowed himself only such
+sudden bursts as I have described. Even in <i>The Bride of Lammermoor</i>,
+which I do not regard as among the best of his performances, as he soars
+high into the sublime, so does he descend low into the ludicrous.</p>
+
+<p>In this latter division of pure fiction,&mdash;the burlesque, as it is
+commonly called, or the ludicrous,&mdash;Thackeray is quite as much at home
+as in the realistic, though, the vehicle being less powerful, he has
+achieved smaller results by it. Manifest as are the objects in his view
+when he wrote <i>The Hoggarty Diamond</i> or <i>The Legend of the Rhine</i>, they
+were less important and less evidently effected than those attempted by
+<i>Vanity Fair</i> and <i>Pendennis</i>. Captain Shindy, the Snob, does not tell
+us so plainly what is not a gentleman as does Colonel Newcome what is.
+Nevertheless the ludicrous has, with Thackeray, been very powerful, and
+very delightful.</p>
+
+<p>In trying to describe what is done by literature of this class, it is
+especially necessary to remember that different readers are affected in
+a different way. That which is one man's meat is another man's poison.
+In the sublime, when the really grand has been reached, it is the
+reader's own fault if he be not touched. We know that many are
+indifferent to the soliloquies of Hamlet, but we do not hesitate to
+declare to ourselves that they are so because they lack the power of
+appreciating grand language. We do not scruple to attribute to those who
+are indifferent some inferiority of intelligence. And in regard <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span>to the
+realistic, when the truth of a well-told story or life-like character
+does not come home, we think that then, too, there is deficiency in the
+critical ability. But there is nothing necessarily lacking to a man
+because he does not enjoy <i>The Heathen Chinee</i> or <i>The Biglow Papers</i>;
+and the man to whom these delights of American humour are leather and
+prunello may be of all the most enraptured by the wit of Sam Weller or
+the mock piety of Pecksniff. It is a matter of taste and not of
+intellect, as one man likes caviare after his dinner, while another
+prefers apple-pie; and the man himself cannot, or, as far as we can see,
+does not direct his own taste in the one matter more than in the other.</p>
+
+<p>Therefore I cannot ask others to share with me the delight which I have
+in the various and peculiar expressions of the ludicrous which are
+common to Thackeray. Some considerable portion of it consists in bad
+spelling. We may say that Charles James Harrington Fitzroy Yellowplush,
+or C. FitzJeames De La Pluche, as he is afterwards called, would be
+nothing but for his "orthogwaphy so carefully inaccuwate." As I have
+before said, Mrs. Malaprop had seemed to have reached the height of this
+humour, and in having done so to have made any repetition unpalatable.
+But Thackeray's studied blundering is altogether different from that of
+Sheridan. Mrs. Malaprop uses her words in a delightfully wrong sense.
+Yellowplush would be a very intelligible, if not quite an accurate
+writer, had he not made for himself special forms of English words
+altogether new to the eye.</p>
+
+<p>"My ma wrapped up my buth in a mistry. I may be illygitmit; I may have
+been changed at nus; but I've always had gen'l'm'nly tastes through
+life, and have no doubt that I come of a gen'l'm'nly origum." We cannot
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span>admit that there is wit, or even humour, in bad spelling alone. Were it
+not that Yellowplush, with his bad spelling, had so much to say for
+himself, there would be nothing in it; but there is always a sting of
+satire directed against some real vice, or some growing vulgarity, which
+is made sharper by the absurdity of the language. In <i>The Diary of
+George IV.</i> there are the following reflections on a certain
+correspondence; "Wooden you phansy, now, that the author of such a
+letter, instead of writun about pipple of tip-top quality, was
+describin' Vinegar Yard? Would you beleave that the lady he was a-ritin'
+to was a chased modist lady of honour and mother of a family? <i>O
+trumpery! o morris!</i> as Homer says. This is a higeous pictur of manners,
+such as I weap to think of, as every morl man must weap." We do not
+wonder that when he makes his "ajew" he should have been called up to be
+congratulated on the score of his literary performances by his master,
+before the Duke, and Lord Bagwig, and Dr. Larner, and
+"Sawedwadgeorgeearllittnbulwig." All that Yellowplush says or writes are
+among the pearls which Thackeray was continually scattering abroad.</p>
+
+<p>But this of the distinguished footman was only one of the forms of the
+ludicrous which he was accustomed to use in the furtherance of some
+purpose which he had at heart. It was his practice to clothe things most
+revolting with an assumed grace and dignity, and to add to the weight of
+his condemnation by the astounding mendacity of the parody thus drawn.
+There was a grim humour in this which has been displeasing to some, as
+seeming to hold out to vice a hand which has appeared for too long a
+time to be friendly. As we are disposed to be not altogether sympathetic
+with a detective policeman who shall have spent a jolly night with a
+delinquent, for the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span>sake of tracing home the suspected guilt to his
+late comrade, so are some disposed to be almost angry with our author,
+who seems to be too much at home with his rascals, and to live with them
+on familiar terms till we doubt whether he does not forget their
+rascality. <i>Barry Lyndon</i> is the strongest example we have of this style
+of the ludicrous, and the critics of whom I speak have thought that our
+friendly relations with Barry have been too genial, too apparently
+genuine, so that it might almost be doubtful whether during the
+narrative we might not, at this or the other crisis, be rather with him
+than against him. "After all," the reader might say, on coming to that
+passage in which Barry defends his trade as a gambler,&mdash;a passage which
+I have quoted in speaking of the novel,&mdash;"after all, this man is more
+hero than scoundrel;" so well is the burlesque humour maintained, so
+well does the scoundrel hide his own villany. I can easily understand
+that to some it should seem too long drawn out. To me it seems to be the
+perfection of humour,&mdash;and of philosophy. If such a one as Barry Lyndon,
+a man full of intellect, can be made thus to love and cherish his vice,
+and to believe in its beauty, how much more necessary is it to avoid the
+footsteps which lead to it? But, as I have said above, there is no
+standard by which to judge of the excellence of the ludicrous as there
+is of the sublime, and even the realistic.</p>
+
+<p>No writer ever had a stronger proclivity towards parody than Thackeray;
+and we may, I think, confess that there is no form of literary drollery
+more dangerous. The parody will often mar the gem of which it coarsely
+reproduces the outward semblance. The word "damaged," used instead of
+"damask," has destroyed to my ear for <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span>ever the music of one of the
+sweetest passages in Shakespeare. But it must be acknowledged of
+Thackeray that, fond as he is of this branch of humour, he has done
+little or no injury by his parodies. They run over with fun, but are so
+contrived that they do not lessen the flavour of the original. I have
+given in one of the preceding chapters a little set of verses of his
+own, called <i>The Willow Tree</i>, and his own parody on his own work. There
+the reader may see how effective a parody may be in destroying the
+sentiment of the piece parodied. But in dealing with other authors he
+has been grotesque without being severely critical, and has been very
+like, without making ugly or distasteful that which he has imitated. No
+one who has admired <i>Coningsby</i> will admire it the less because of
+<i>Codlingsby</i>. Nor will the undoubted romance of <i>Eugene Aram</i> be
+lessened in the estimation of any reader of novels by the well-told
+career of <i>George de Barnwell</i>. One may say that to laugh <i>Ivanhoe</i> out
+of face, or to lessen the glory of that immortal story, would be beyond
+the power of any farcical effect. Thackeray in his <i>Rowena and Rebecca</i>
+certainly had no such purpose. Nothing of <i>Ivanhoe</i> is injured, nothing
+made less valuable than it was before, yet, of all prose parodies in the
+language, it is perhaps the most perfect. Every character is maintained,
+every incident has a taste of Scott. It has the twang of <i>Ivanhoe</i> from
+beginning to end, and yet there is not a word in it by which the author
+of <i>Ivanhoe</i> could have been offended. But then there is the purpose
+beyond that of the mere parody. Prudish women have to be laughed at, and
+despotic kings, and parasite lords and bishops. The ludicrous alone is
+but poor fun; but <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span>when the ludicrous has a meaning, it can be very
+effective in the hands of such a master as this.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"He to die!" resumed the bishop. "He a mortal like to us!</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Death was not for him intended, though <i>communis omnibus</i>.</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Keeper, you are irreligious, for to talk and cavil thus!"</span><br />
+</div></div>
+
+<p>So much I have said of the manner in which Thackeray did his work,
+endeavouring to represent human nature as he saw it, so that his readers
+should learn to love what is good, and to hate what is evil. As to the
+merits of his style, it will be necessary to insist on them the less,
+because it has been generally admitted to be easy, lucid, and
+grammatical. I call that style easy by which the writer has succeeded in
+conveying to the reader that which the reader is intended to receive
+with the least possible amount of trouble to him. I call that style
+lucid which conveys to the reader most accurately all that the writer
+wishes to convey on any subject. The two virtues will, I think, be seen
+to be very different. An author may wish to give an idea that a certain
+flavour is bitter. He shall leave a conviction that it is simply
+disagreeable. Then he is not lucid. But he shall convey so much as that,
+in such a manner as to give the reader no trouble in arriving at the
+conclusion. Therefore he is easy. The subject here suggested is as
+little complicated as possible; but in the intercourse which is going on
+continually between writers and readers, affairs of all degrees of
+complication are continually being discussed, of a nature so complicated
+that the inexperienced writer is puzzled at every turn to express
+himself, and the altogether inartistic writer fails to do so. Who among
+writers has not to acknowledge that he is often unable to tell all that
+he has to tell? Words refuse to do it for him. He struggles and stumbles
+and alters and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span>adds, but finds at last that he has gone either too far
+or not quite far enough. Then there comes upon him the necessity of
+choosing between two evils. He must either give up the fulness of his
+thought, and content himself with presenting some fragment of it in that
+lucid arrangement of words which he affects; or he must bring out his
+thought with ambages; he must mass his sentences inconsequentially; he
+must struggle up hill almost hopelessly with his phrases,&mdash;so that at
+the end the reader will have to labour as he himself has laboured, or
+else to leave behind much of the fruit which it has been intended that
+he should garner. It is the ill-fortune of some to be neither easy or
+lucid; and there is nothing more wonderful in the history of letters
+than the patience of readers when called upon to suffer under the double
+calamity. It is as though a man were reading a dialogue of Plato,
+understanding neither the subject nor the language. But it is often the
+case that one has to be sacrificed to the other. The pregnant writer
+will sometimes solace himself by declaring that it is not his business
+to supply intelligence to the reader; and then, in throwing out the
+entirety of his thought, will not stop to remember that he cannot hope
+to scatter his ideas far and wide unless he can make them easily
+intelligible. Then the writer who is determined that his book shall not
+be put down because it is troublesome, is too apt to avoid the knotty
+bits and shirk the rocky turns, because he cannot with ease to himself
+make them easy to others. If this be acknowledged, I shall be held to be
+right in saying not only that ease and lucidity in style are different
+virtues, but that they are often opposed to each other. They may,
+however, be combined, and then the writer will have really learned the
+art of writing. Omne tulit punctum qui <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span>miscuit utile dulci. It is to be
+done, I believe, in all languages. A man by art and practice shall at
+least obtain such a masterhood over words as to express all that he
+thinks, in phrases that shall be easily understood.</p>
+
+<p>In such a small space as can here be allowed, I cannot give instances to
+prove that this has been achieved by Thackeray. Nor would instances
+prove the existence of the virtue, though instances might the absence.
+The proof lies in the work of the man's life, and can only become plain
+to those who have read his writings. I must refer readers to their own
+experiences, and ask them whether they have found themselves compelled
+to study passages in Thackeray in order that they might find a recondite
+meaning, or whether they have not been sure that they and the author
+have together understood all that there was to understand in the matter.
+Have they run backward over the passages, and then gone on, not quite
+sure what the author has meant? If not, then he has been easy and lucid.
+We have not had it so easy with all modern writers, nor with all that
+are old. I may best perhaps explain my meaning by taking something
+written long ago; something very valuable, in order that I may not
+damage my argument by comparing the easiness of Thackeray with the
+harshness of some author who has in other respects failed of obtaining
+approbation. If you take the play of <i>Cymbeline</i> you will, I think, find
+it to be anything but easy reading. Nor is Shakespeare always lucid. For
+purposes of his own he will sometimes force his readers to doubt his
+meaning, even after prolonged study. It has ever been so with <i>Hamlet</i>.
+My readers will not, I think, be so crossgrained with me as to suppose
+that I am putting Thackeray as a master of style above Shakespeare. I am
+only endeavouring to explain by <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span>reference to the great master the
+condition of literary production which he attained. Whatever Thackeray
+says, the reader cannot fail to understand; and whatever Thackeray
+attempts to communicate, he succeeds in conveying.</p>
+
+<p>That he is grammatical I must leave to my readers' judgment, with a
+simple assertion in his favour. There are some who say that grammar,&mdash;by
+which I mean accuracy of composition, in accordance with certain
+acknowledged rules,&mdash;is only a means to an end; and that, if a writer
+can absolutely achieve the end by some other mode of his own, he need
+not regard the prescribed means. If a man can so write as to be easily
+understood, and to convey lucidly that which he has to convey without
+accuracy of grammar, why should he subject himself to unnecessary
+trammels? Why not make a path for himself, if the path so made will
+certainly lead him whither he wishes to go? The answer is, that no other
+path will lead others whither he wishes to carry them but that which is
+common to him and to those others. It is necessary that there should be
+a ground equally familiar to the writer and to his readers. If there be
+no such common ground, they will certainly not come into full accord.
+There have been recusants who, by a certain acuteness of their own, have
+partly done so,&mdash;wilful recusants; but they have been recusants, not to
+the extent of discarding grammar,&mdash;which no writer could do and not be
+altogether in the dark,&mdash;but so far as to have created for themselves a
+phraseology which has been picturesque by reason of its illicit
+vagaries; as a woman will sometimes please ill-instructed eyes and ears
+by little departures from feminine propriety. They have probably
+laboured in their vocation as sedulously as though they had striven to
+be correct, and have achieved at the best but a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span>short-lived
+success;&mdash;as is the case also with the unconventional female. The charm
+of the disorderly soon loses itself in the ugliness of disorder. And
+there are others rebellious from grammar, who are, however, hardly to be
+called rebels, because the laws which they break have never been
+altogether known to them. Among those very dear to me in English
+literature, one or two might be named of either sort, whose works,
+though they have that in them which will insure to them a long life,
+will become from year to year less valuable and less venerable, because
+their authors have either scorned or have not known that common ground
+of language on which the author and his readers should stand together.
+My purport here is only with Thackeray, and I say that he stands always
+on that common ground. He quarrels with none of the laws. As the lady
+who is most attentive to conventional propriety may still have her own
+fashion of dress and her own mode of speech, so had Thackeray very
+manifestly his own style; but it is one the correctness of which has
+never been impugned.</p>
+
+<p>I hold that gentleman to be the best dressed whose dress no one
+observes. I am not sure but that the same may be said of an author's
+written language. Only, where shall we find an example of such
+perfection? Always easy, always lucid, always correct, we may find them;
+but who is the writer, easy, lucid, and correct, who has not impregnated
+his writing with something of that personal flavour which we call
+mannerism? To speak of authors well known to all readers&mdash;Does not <i>The
+Rambler</i> taste of Johnson; <i>The Decline and Fall</i>, of Gibbon; <i>The
+Middle Ages</i>, of Hallam; <i>The History of England</i>, of Macaulay; and <i>The
+Invasion of the Crimea</i>, of Kinglake? Do we not know the elephantine
+tread of <i>The Saturday</i>, and the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span>precise toe of <i>The Spectator</i>? I have
+sometimes thought that Swift has been nearest to the mark of
+any,&mdash;writing English and not writing Swift. But I doubt whether an
+accurate observer would not trace even here the "mark of the beast."
+Thackeray, too, has a strong flavour of Thackeray. I am inclined to
+think that his most besetting sin in style,&mdash;the little earmark by which
+he is most conspicuous,&mdash;is a certain affected familiarity. He indulges
+too frequently in little confidences with individual readers, in which
+pretended allusions to himself are frequent. "What would you do? what
+would you say now, if you were in such a position?" he asks. He
+describes this practice of his in the preface to <i>Pendennis</i>. "It is a
+sort of confidential talk between writer and reader.... In the course of
+his volubility the perpetual speaker must of necessity lay bare his own
+weaknesses, vanities, peculiarities." In the short contributions to
+periodicals on which he tried his 'prentice hand, such addresses and
+conversations were natural and efficacious; but in a larger work of
+fiction they cause an absence of that dignity to which even a novel may
+aspire. You feel that each morsel as you read it is a detached bit, and
+that it has all been written in detachments. The book is robbed of its
+integrity by a certain good-humoured geniality of language, which causes
+the reader to be almost too much at home with his author. There is a
+saying that familiarity breeds contempt, and I have been sometimes
+inclined to think that our author has sometimes failed to stand up for
+himself with sufficiency of "personal deportment."</p>
+
+<p>In other respects Thackeray's style is excellent. As I have said before,
+the reader always understands his words without an effort, and receives
+all that the author has to give.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span></p><p>There now remains to be discussed the matter of our author's work. The
+manner and the style are but the natural wrappings in which the goods
+have been prepared for the market. Of these goods it is no doubt true
+that unless the wrappings be in some degree meritorious the article will
+not be accepted at all; but it is the kernel which we seek, which, if it
+be not of itself sweet and digestible, cannot be made serviceable by any
+shell however pretty or easy to be cracked. I have said previously that
+it is the business of a novel to instruct in morals and to amuse. I will
+go further, and will add, having been for many years a most prolific
+writer of novels myself, that I regard him who can put himself into
+close communication with young people year after year without making
+some attempt to do them good, as a very sorry fellow indeed. However
+poor your matter may be, however near you may come to that "foolishest
+of existing mortals," as Carlyle presumes some unfortunate novelist to
+be, still, if there be those who read your works, they will undoubtedly
+be more or less influenced by what they find there. And it is because
+the novelist amuses that he is thus influential. The sermon too often
+has no such effect, because it is applied with the declared intention of
+having it. The palpable and overt dose the child rejects; but that which
+is cunningly insinuated by the aid of jam or honey is accepted
+unconsciously, and goes on upon its curative mission. So it is with the
+novel. It is taken because of its jam and honey. But, unlike the honest
+simple jam and honey of the household cupboard, it is never unmixed with
+physic. There will be the dose within it, either curative or poisonous.
+The girl will be taught modesty or immodesty, truth or falsehood; the
+lad will be taught honour or dishonour, simplicity or <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span>affectation.
+Without the lesson the amusement will not be there. There are novels
+which certainly can teach nothing; but then neither can they amuse any
+one.</p>
+
+<p>I should be said to insist absurdly on the power of my own confraternity
+if I were to declare that the bulk of the young people in the upper and
+middle classes receive their moral teaching chiefly from the novels they
+read. Mothers would no doubt think of their own sweet teaching; fathers
+of the examples which they set; and schoolmasters of the excellence of
+their instructions. Happy is the country that has such mothers, fathers,
+and schoolmasters! But the novelist creeps in closer than the
+schoolmaster, closer than the father, closer almost than the mother. He
+is the chosen guide, the tutor whom the young pupil chooses for herself.
+She retires with him, suspecting no lesson, safe against rebuke,
+throwing herself head and heart into the narration as she can hardly do
+into her task-work; and there she is taught,&mdash;how she shall learn to
+love; how she shall receive the lover when he comes; how far she should
+advance to meet the joy; why she should be reticent, and not throw
+herself at once into this new delight. It is the same with the young
+man, though he would be more prone even than she to reject the suspicion
+of such tutorship. But he too will there learn either to speak the
+truth, or to lie; and will receive from his novel lessons either of real
+manliness, or of that affected apishness and tailor-begotten demeanour
+which too many professors of the craft give out as their dearest
+precepts.</p>
+
+<p>At any rate the close intercourse is admitted. Where is the house now
+from which novels are tabooed? Is it not common to allow them almost
+indiscriminately, so that young and old each chooses his own novel?
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span>Shall he, then, to whom this close fellowship is allowed,&mdash;this inner
+confidence,&mdash;shall he not be careful what words he uses, and what
+thoughts he expresses, when he sits in council with his young friend?
+This, which it will certainly be his duty to consider with so much care,
+will be the matter of his work. We know what was thought of such matter,
+when Lydia in the play was driven to the necessity of flinging
+"<i>Peregrine Pickle</i> under the toilet," and thrusting "<i>Lord Aimwell</i>
+under the sofa." We have got beyond that now, and are tolerably sure
+that our girls do not hide their novels. The more freely they are
+allowed, the more necessary is it that he who supplies shall take care
+that they are worthy of the trust that is given to them.</p>
+
+<p>Now let the reader ask himself what are the lessons which Thackeray has
+taught. Let him send his memory running back over all those characters
+of whom we have just been speaking, and ask himself whether any girl has
+been taught to be immodest, or any man unmanly, by what Thackeray has
+written. A novelist has two modes of teaching,&mdash;by good example or bad.
+It is not to be supposed that because the person treated of be evil,
+therefore the precept will be evil. If so, some personages with whom we
+have been made well acquainted from our youth upwards, would have been
+omitted in our early lessons. It may be a question whether the teaching
+is not more efficacious which comes from the evil example. What story
+was ever more powerful in showing the beauty of feminine reticence, and
+the horrors of feminine evil-doing, than the fate of Effie Deans? The
+Templar would have betrayed a woman to his lust, but has not encouraged
+others by the freedom of his life. Varney was utterly bad,&mdash;but though a
+gay courtier, he has enticed no others <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span>to go the way that he went. So
+it has been with Thackeray. His examples have been generally of that
+kind,&mdash;but they have all been efficacious in their teaching on the side
+of modesty and manliness, truth and simplicity. When some girl shall
+have traced from first to last the character of Beatrix, what, let us
+ask, will be the result on her mind? Beatrix was born noble, clever,
+beautiful, with certain material advantages, which it was within her
+compass to improve by her nobility, wit, and beauty. She was quite alive
+to that fact, and thought of those material advantages, to the utter
+exclusion, in our mind, of any idea of moral goodness. She realised it
+all, and told herself that that was the game she would play.
+"Twenty-five!" says she; "and in eight years no man has ever touched my
+heart!" That is her boast when she is about to be married,&mdash;her only
+boast of herself. "A most detestable young woman!" some will say. "An
+awful example!" others will add. Not a doubt of it. She proves the
+misery of her own career so fully that no one will follow it. The
+example is so awful that it will surely deter. The girl will declare to
+herself that not in that way will she look for the happiness which she
+hopes to enjoy; and the young man will say as he reads it, that no
+Beatrix shall touch his heart.</p>
+
+<p>You may go through all his characters with the same effect. Pendennis
+will be scorned because he is light; Warrington loved because he is
+strong and merciful; Dobbin will be honoured because he is unselfish;
+and the old colonel, though he be foolish, vain, and weak, almost
+worshipped because he is so true a gentleman. It is in the handling of
+questions such as these that we have to look for the matter of the
+novelist,&mdash;those moral lessons which he mixes up with his jam and his
+honey. I say <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span>that with Thackeray the physic is always curative and
+never poisonous. He may he admitted safely into that close fellowship,
+and be allowed to accompany the dear ones to their retreats. The girl
+will never become bold under his preaching, or taught to throw herself
+at men's heads. Nor will the lad receive a false flashy idea of what
+becomes a youth, when he is first about to take his place among men.</p>
+
+<p>As to that other question, whether Thackeray be amusing as well as
+salutary, I must leave it to public opinion. There is now being brought
+out of his works a more splendid edition than has ever been produced in
+any age or any country of the writings of such an author. A certain
+fixed number of copies only is being issued, and each copy will cost &pound;33
+12s. when completed. It is understood that a very large proportion of
+the edition has been already bought or ordered. Cost, it will be said,
+is a bad test of excellence. It will not prove the merit of a book any
+more than it will of a horse. But it is proof of the popularity of the
+book. Print and illustrate and bind up some novels how you will, no one
+will buy them. Previous to these costly volumes, there have been two
+entire editions of his works since the author's death, one comparatively
+cheap and the other dear. Before his death his stories had been
+scattered in all imaginable forms. I may therefore assert that their
+charm has been proved by their popularity.</p>
+
+<p>There remains for us only this question,&mdash;whether the nature of
+Thackeray's works entitle him to be called a cynic. The word is one
+which is always used in a bad sense. "Of a dog; currish," is the
+definition which we get from Johnson,&mdash;quite correctly, and in
+accordance with its etymology. And he gives us examples. "How vilely
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span>does this cynic rhyme," he takes from Shakespeare; and Addison speaks of
+a man degenerating into a cynic. That Thackeray's nature was soft and
+kindly,&mdash;gentle almost to a fault,&mdash;has been shown elsewhere. But they
+who have called him a cynic have spoken of him merely as a writer,&mdash;and
+as writer he has certainly taken upon himself the special task of
+barking at the vices and follies of the world around him. Any satirist
+might in the same way be called a cynic in so far as his satire goes.
+Swift was a cynic certainly. Pope was cynical when he was a satirist.
+Juvenal was all cynical, because he was all satirist. If that be what is
+meant, Thackeray was certainly a cynic. But that is not all that the
+word implies. It intends to go back beyond the work of the man, and to
+describe his heart. It says of any satirist so described that he has
+given himself up to satire, not because things have been evil, but
+because he himself has been evil. Hamlet is a satirist, whereas
+Thersites is a cynic. If Thackeray be judged after this fashion, the
+word is as inappropriate to the writer as to the man.</p>
+
+<p>But it has to be confessed that Thackeray did allow his intellect to be
+too thoroughly saturated with the aspect of the ill side of things. We
+can trace the operation of his mind from his earliest days, when he
+commenced his parodies at school; when he brought out <i>The Snob</i> at
+Cambridge, when he sent <i>Yellowplush</i> out upon the world as a satirist
+on the doings of gentlemen generally; when he wrote his <i>Catherine</i>, to
+show the vileness of the taste for what he would have called Newgate
+literature; and <i>The Hoggarty Diamond</i>, to attack bubble companies; and
+<i>Barry Lyndon</i>, to expose the pride which a rascal may take in his
+rascality. Becky Sharp, Major Pendennis, Beatrix, both as a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span>young and
+as an old woman, were written with the same purpose. There is a touch of
+satire in every drawing that he made. A jeer is needed for something
+that is ridiculous, scorn has to be thrown on something that is vile.
+The same feeling is to be found in every line of every ballad.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">VANITAS VANITATUM.</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Methinks the text is never stale,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">And life is every day renewing</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Fresh comments on the old old tale,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Of Folly, Fortune, Glory, Ruin.</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Hark to the preacher, preaching still!</span><br />
+<span class="i1">He lifts his voice and cries his sermon,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Here at St. Peter's of Cornhill,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">As yonder on the Mount of Hermon&mdash;</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">For you and me to heart to take</span><br />
+<span class="i1">(O dear beloved brother readers),</span><br />
+<span class="i0">To-day,&mdash;as when the good king spake</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Beneath the solemn Syrian cedars.</span><br />
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It was just so with him always. He was "crying his sermon," hoping, if
+it might be so, to do something towards lessening the evils he saw
+around him. We all preach our sermon, but not always with the same
+earnestness. He had become so urgent in the cause, so loud in his
+denunciations, that he did not stop often to speak of the good things
+around him. Now and again he paused and blessed amid the torrent of his
+anathemas. There are Dobbin, and Esmond, and Colonel Newcome. But his
+anathemas are the loudest. It has been so I think nearly always with the
+eloquent preachers.</p>
+
+<p>I will insert here,&mdash;especially here at the end of this <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span>chapter, in
+which I have spoken of Thackeray's matter and manner of writing, because
+of the justice of the criticism conveyed,&mdash;the lines which Lord Houghton
+wrote on his death, and which are to be found in the February number of
+<i>The Cornhill</i> of 1864. It was the first number printed after his death.
+I would add that, though no Dean applied for permission to bury
+Thackeray in Westminster Abbey, his bust was placed there without delay.
+What is needed by the nation in such a case is simply a lasting memorial
+there, where such memorials are most often seen and most highly
+honoured. But we can all of us sympathise with the feeling of the poet,
+writing immediately on the loss of such a friend:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">When one, whose nervous English verse</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Public and party hates defied,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Who bore and bandied many a curse</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Of angry times,&mdash;when Dryden died,</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Our royal abbey's Bishop-Dean</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Waited for no suggestive prayer,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">But, ere one day closed o'er the scene,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Craved, as a boon, to lay him there.</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The wayward faith, the faulty life,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Vanished before a nation's pain.</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Panther and Hind forgot their strife,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">And rival statesmen thronged the fane.</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">O gentle censor of our age!</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Prime master of our ampler tongue!</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Whose word of wit and generous page</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Were never wrath, except with wrong,&mdash;</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span><span class="i0">Fielding&mdash;without the manner's dross,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Scott&mdash;with a spirit's larger room,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">What Prelate deems thy grave his loss?</span><br />
+<span class="i1">What Halifax erects thy tomb?</span><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">But, may be, he,&mdash;who so could draw</span><br />
+<span class="i1">The hidden great,&mdash;the humble wise,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Yielding with them to God's good law,</span><br />
+<span class="i1">Makes the Pantheon where he lies.</span><br />
+</div></div>
+
+
+<p class="center biggap"><b>THE END.</b></p>
+
+
+<p class="center gap">CHARLES DICKENS AND EVANS, CRYSTAL PALACE PRESS.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS.</h2>
+
+<h3>EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY.</h3>
+
+
+<p>These Short Books are addressed to the general public with a view both
+to stirring and satisfying an interest in literature and its great
+topics in the minds of those who have to run as they read. An immense
+class is growing up, and must every year increase, whose education will
+have made them alive to the importance of the masters of our literature,
+and capable of intelligent curiosity as to their performances. The
+Series is intended to give the means of nourishing this curiosity, to an
+extent that shall be copious enough to be profitable for knowledge and
+life, and yet be brief enough to serve those whose leisure is scanty.</p>
+
+
+<p>The following are arranged for:</p>
+
+<table summary="English Men of Letters books" cellpadding="3">
+<tr>
+  <td style="width: 35%">SPENSER</td>
+  <td style="width: 50%">The Dean of St. Paul's.</td>
+  <td style="width: 15%">[In the Press.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>HUME</td>
+  <td>Professor Huxley.</td>
+  <td>[Ready.</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>BUNYAN</td>
+  <td>James Anthony Froude.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>JOHNSON</td>
+  <td>Leslie Stephen.</td>
+  <td>[Ready.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>GOLDSMITH</td>
+  <td>William Black.</td>
+  <td>[Ready.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>MILTON</td>
+  <td>Mark Pattison.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>COWPER</td>
+  <td>Goldwin Smith.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>SWIFT</td>
+  <td>John Morley.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>BURNS</td>
+  <td>Principal Shairp.</td>
+  <td>[Ready.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>SCOTT</td>
+  <td>Richard H. Hutton.</td>
+  <td>[Ready.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>SHELLEY</td>
+  <td>J. A. Symonds.</td>
+  <td>[Ready.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>GIBBON</td>
+  <td>J. C. Morison.</td>
+  <td>[Ready.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>BYRON</td>
+  <td>Professor Nichol.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>DEFOE</td>
+  <td>W. Minto.</td>
+  <td>[Ready<ins class="correction" title="Transcriber's note: period missing in original">.</ins></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>BURKE</td>
+  <td>John Morley.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>HAWTHORNE</td>
+  <td>Henry James, Jnr.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>CHAUCER</td>
+  <td>A. W. Ward.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>THACKERAY</td>
+  <td>Anthony Trollope.</td>
+  <td>[Ready<ins class="correction" title="Transcriber's note: period missing in original">.</ins></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>ADAM SMITH</td>
+  <td>Leonard H. Courtney, M.P.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>BENTLEY</td>
+  <td>Professor R. C. Jebb.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>LANDOR</td>
+  <td>Professor Sidney Colvin.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>POPE</td>
+  <td>Leslie Stephen.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>WORDSWORTH</td>
+  <td>F. W. H. Myers.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>SOUTHEY</td>
+  <td>Professor E. Dowden.</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+<p style="margin-left: 5em;">[OTHERS WILL BE ANNOUNCED.]</p>
+
+
+<h3>OPINIONS OF THE PRESS.</h3>
+
+<p>"The new series opens well with Mr. Leslie Stephen's sketch of Dr.
+Johnson. It could hardly have been done better; and it will convey to
+the readers for whom it is intended a juster estimate of Johnson than
+either of the two essays of Lord Macaulay."&mdash;<i>Pall Mall Gazette.</i></p>
+
+<p>"We have come across few writers who have had a clearer insight into
+Johnson's character, or who have brought to the study of it a better
+knowledge of the time in which Johnson lived and the men whom he
+knew."&mdash;<i>Saturday Review.</i></p>
+
+<p>"We could not wish for a more suggestive introduction to Scott and his
+poems and novels."&mdash;<i>Examiner.</i></p>
+
+<p>"The tone of the volume is excellent throughout."&mdash;<i>Athen&aelig;um</i> Review of
+"Scott."</p>
+
+<p>"As a clear, thoughtful, and attractive record of the life and works of
+the greatest among the world's historians, it deserves the highest
+praise."&mdash;<i>Examiner</i> Review of "Gibbon."</p>
+
+<p>"The lovers of this great poet (Shelley) are to be congratulated at
+having at their command so fresh, clear, and intelligent a presentment
+of the subject, written by a man of adequate and wide
+culture."&mdash;<i>Athen&aelig;um.</i></p>
+
+<p>"It may fairly be said that no one now living could have expounded Hume
+with more sympathy or with equal perspicuity."&mdash;<i>Athen&aelig;um.</i></p>
+
+<p>"The story of Defoe's adventurous life may be followed with keen
+interest in Mr. Minto's attractive book."&mdash;<i>Academy.</i></p>
+
+<div class="notebox">
+<a name="notes" id="notes"></a><p><b>TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:</b></p>
+
+<p>There are variant spellings of the following name:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Jeames Yellowplush</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Mr. C. James Yellowplush</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Spellings were left as in the original.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>The following changes were made to the text:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>page 5&mdash;Thackeray's version was 'Cabbages, bright green
+cabbages,'{added missing ending quotation mark} and we thought
+it very witty.</p>
+
+<p>page 78&mdash;Then there are "Jeames on Time Bargings," "Jeames on
+the Gauge{original had Guage} Question," "Mr. Jeames again."</p>
+
+<p>page 131&mdash;"I knew you would come back," she said; "and to-day,
+Harry{original has Henry}, in the anthem when they sang</p>
+
+<p>page 143&mdash;The wife won't{original has wo'n't} come.</p>
+
+<p>page 143&mdash;On his way he{original has be} shoots a raven
+marvellously</p>
+
+<p>page 157&mdash;As Thackeray explains clearly what he means by a
+humorist, I may as well here repeat the passage:{punctuation
+missing in original} "If humour only meant laughter</p>
+
+<p>page 166&mdash;I will then let my reader go to the volume and study
+the lectures for himself.{no punctuation in original} "The poor
+fellow was never</p>
+
+<p>page 212&mdash;[Ready.{original is missing period&mdash;this occurred in
+the line referencing DEFOE and the line referencing THACKERAY}</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
+<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THACKERAY***</p>
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Thackeray, by Anthony Trollope
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Thackeray
+
+
+Author: Anthony Trollope
+
+
+
+Release Date: June 21, 2006  [eBook #18645]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THACKERAY***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier, Lisa Reigel, and the
+Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+(http://www.pgdp.net/)
+
+
+
+Transcriber's note:
+
+   The letter "o" with a macron is rendered [=o] in this text. It
+   only appears in the word "Public[=o]la".
+
+   A detailed transcriber's note will be found at the end of the text.
+
+
+
+
+
+English Men of Letters
+
+Edited by John Morley
+
+THACKERAY
+
+by
+
+ANTHONY TROLLOPE
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+London:
+MacMillan and Co.
+1879.
+The Right of Translation and Reproduction is Reserved.
+Charles Dickens and Evans,
+Crystal Palace Press.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+                                         PAGE
+BIOGRAPHICAL                                1
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+FRASER'S MAGAZINE AND PUNCH                62
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+VANITY FAIR                                90
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+PENDENNIS AND THE NEWCOMES                108
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+ESMOND AND THE VIRGINIANS                 122
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+THACKERAY'S BURLESQUES                    139
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+THACKERAY'S LECTURES                      154
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+THACKERAY'S BALLADS                       168
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+THACKERAY'S STYLE AND MANNER OF WORK      184
+
+
+
+
+THACKERAY
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+BIOGRAPHICAL.
+
+
+In the foregoing volumes of this series of _English Men of Letters_, and
+in other works of a similar nature which have appeared lately as to the
+_Ancient Classics_ and _Foreign Classics_, biography has naturally been,
+if not the leading, at any rate a considerable element. The desire is
+common to all readers to know not only what a great writer has written,
+but also of what nature has been the man who has produced such great
+work. As to all the authors taken in hand before, there has been extant
+some written record of the man's life. Biographical details have been
+more or less known to the world, so that, whether of a Cicero, or of a
+Goethe, or of our own Johnson, there has been a story to tell. Of
+Thackeray no life has been written; and though they who knew him,--and
+possibly many who did not,--are conversant with anecdotes of the man,
+who was one so well known in society as to have created many anecdotes,
+yet there has been no memoir of his life sufficient to supply the wants
+of even so small a work as this purports to be. For this the reason may
+simply be told. Thackeray, not long before his death, had had his taste
+offended by some fulsome biography. Paragraphs, of which the eulogy
+seemed to have been the produce rather of personal love than of inquiry
+or judgment, disgusted him, and he begged of his girls that when he
+should have gone there should nothing of the sort be done with his name.
+
+We can imagine how his mind had worked, how he had declared to himself
+that, as by those loving hands into which his letters, his notes, his
+little details,--his literary remains, as such documents used to be
+called,--might naturally fall, truth of his foibles and of his
+shortcomings could not be told, so should not his praises be written, or
+that flattering portrait be limned which biographers are wont to
+produce. Acting upon these instructions, his daughters,--while there
+were two living, and since that the one surviving,--have carried out the
+order which has appeared to them to be sacred. Such being the case, it
+certainly is not my purpose now to write what may be called a life of
+Thackeray. In this preliminary chapter I will give such incidents and
+anecdotes of his life as will tell the reader perhaps all about him that
+a reader is entitled to ask. I will tell how he became an author, and
+will say how first he worked and struggled, and then how he worked and
+prospered, and became a household word in English literature;--how, in
+this way, he passed through that course of mingled failure and success
+which, though the literary aspirant may suffer, is probably better both
+for the writer and for the writings than unclouded early glory. The
+suffering no doubt is acute, and a touch of melancholy, perhaps of
+indignation, may be given to words which have been written while the
+heart has been too full of its own wrongs; but this is better than the
+continued note of triumph which is still heard in the final voices of
+the spoilt child of literature, even when they are losing their music.
+Then I will tell how Thackeray died, early indeed, but still having done
+a good life's work. Something of his manner, something of his appearance
+I can say, something perhaps of his condition of mind; because for some
+few years he was known to me. But of the continual intercourse of
+himself with the world, and of himself with his own works, I can tell
+little, because no record of his life has been made public.
+
+William Makepeace Thackeray was born at Calcutta, on July 18, 1811. His
+father was Richmond Thackeray, son of W. M. Thackeray of Hadley, near
+Barnet, in Middlesex. A relation of his, of the same name, a Rev. Mr.
+Thackeray, I knew well as rector of Hadley, many years afterwards. Him I
+believe to have been a second cousin of our Thackeray, but I think they
+had never met each other. Another cousin was Provost of Kings at
+Cambridge, fifty years ago, as Cambridge men will remember. Clergymen of
+the family have been numerous in England during the century, and there
+was one, a Rev. Elias Thackeray, whom I also knew in my youth, a
+dignitary, if I remember right, in the diocese of Meath. The Thackerays
+seem to have affected the Church; but such was not at any period of his
+life the bias of our novelist's mind.
+
+His father and grandfather were Indian civil servants. His mother was
+Anne Becher, whose father was also in the Company's service. She married
+early in India, and was only nineteen when her son was born. She was
+left a widow in 1816, with only one child, and was married a few years
+afterwards to Major Henry Carmichael Smyth, with whom Thackeray lived on
+terms of affectionate intercourse till the major died. All who knew
+William Makepeace remember his mother well, a handsome, spare,
+gray-haired lady, whom Thackeray treated with a courtly deference as
+well as constant affection. There was, however, something of discrepancy
+between them as to matters of religion. Mrs. Carmichael Smyth was
+disposed to the somewhat austere observance of the evangelical section
+of the Church. Such, certainly, never became the case with her son.
+There was disagreement on the subject, and probably unhappiness at
+intervals, but never, I think, quarrelling. Thackeray's house was his
+mother's home whenever she pleased it, and the home also of his
+stepfather.
+
+He was brought a child from India, and was sent early to the Charter
+House. Of his life and doings there his friend and schoolfellow George
+Venables writes to me as follows;
+
+     "My recollection of him, though fresh enough, does not furnish
+     much material for biography. He came to school young,--a
+     pretty, gentle, and rather timid boy. I think his experience
+     there was not generally pleasant. Though he had afterwards a
+     scholarlike knowledge of Latin, he did not attain distinction
+     in the school; and I should think that the character of the
+     head-master, Dr. Russell, which was vigorous, unsympathetic,
+     and stern, though not severe, was uncongenial to his own. With
+     the boys who knew him, Thackeray was popular; but he had no
+     skill in games, and, I think, no taste for them.... He was
+     already known by his faculty of making verses, chiefly
+     parodies. I only remember one line of one parody on a poem of
+     L. E. L.'s, about 'Violets, dark blue violets;' Thackeray's
+     version was 'Cabbages, bright green cabbages,' and we thought
+     it very witty. He took part in a scheme, which came to
+     nothing, for a school magazine, and he wrote verses for it, of
+     which I only remember that they were good of their kind. When
+     I knew him better, in later years, I thought I could recognise
+     the sensitive nature which he had as a boy.... His change of
+     retrospective feeling about his school days was very
+     characteristic. In his earlier books he always spoke of the
+     Charter House as Slaughter House and Smithfield. As he became
+     famous and prosperous his memory softened, and Slaughter House
+     was changed into Grey Friars where Colonel Newcome ended his
+     life."
+
+In February, 1829, when he was not as yet eighteen, Thackeray went up to
+Trinity College, Cambridge, and was, I think, removed in 1830. It may be
+presumed, therefore, that his studies there were not very serviceable to
+him. There are few, if any, records left of his doings at the
+university,--unless it be the fact that he did there commence the
+literary work of his life. The line about the cabbages, and the scheme
+of the school magazine, can hardly be said to have amounted even to a
+commencement. In 1829 a little periodical was brought out at Cambridge,
+called _The Snob_, with an assurance on the title that it was _not_
+conducted by members of the university. It is presumed that Thackeray
+took a hand in editing this. He certainly wrote, and published in the
+little paper, some burlesque lines on the subject which was given for
+the Chancellor's prize poem of the year. This was _Timbuctoo_, and
+Tennyson was the victor on the occasion. There is some good fun in the
+four first and four last lines of Thackeray's production.
+
+     In Africa,--a quarter of the world,--
+     Men's skins are black; their hair is crisped and curled;
+     And somewhere there, unknown to public view
+     A mighty city lies, called Timbuctoo.
+
+            *       *       *       *       *
+
+     I see her tribes the hill of glory mount,
+     And sell their sugars on their own account;
+     While round her throne the prostrate nations come,
+     Sue for her rice, and barter for her rum.
+
+I cannot find in _The Snob_ internal evidence of much literary merit
+beyond this. But then how many great writers have there been from whose
+early lucubrations no future literary excellence could be
+prognosticated?
+
+There is something at any rate in the name of the publication which
+tells of work that did come. Thackeray's mind was at all times
+peculiarly exercised with a sense of snobbishness. His appreciation of
+the vice grew abnormally, so that at last he had a morbid horror of a
+snob--a morbid fear lest this or the other man should turn snob on his
+hands. It is probable that the idea was taken from the early _Snob_ at
+Cambridge, either from his own participation in the work or from his
+remembrance of it. _The Snob_ lived, I think, but nine weeks, and was
+followed at an interval, in 1830, by _The Gownsman_, which lived to the
+seventeenth number, and at the opening of which Thackeray no doubt had a
+hand. It professed to be a continuation of _The Snob_. It contains a
+dedication to all proctors, which I should not be sorry to attribute to
+him. "To all Proctors, past, present, and future--
+
+     Whose taste it is our privilege to follow,
+     Whose virtue it is our duty to imitate,
+     Whose presence it is our interest to avoid."
+
+There is, however, nothing beyond fancy to induce me to believe that
+Thackeray was the author of the dedication, and I do not know that there
+is any evidence to show that he was connected with _The Snob_ beyond the
+writing of _Timbuctoo_.
+
+In 1830 he left Cambridge, and went to Weimar either in that year or in
+1831. Between Weimar and Paris he spent some portion of his earlier
+years, while his family,--his mother, that is, and his stepfather,--were
+living in Devonshire. It was then the purport of his life to become an
+artist, and he studied drawing at Paris, affecting especially
+Bonnington, the young English artist who had himself painted at Paris
+and who had died in 1828. He never learned to draw,--perhaps never could
+have learned. That he was idle, and did not do his best, we may take for
+granted. He was always idle, and only on some occasions, when the spirit
+moved him thoroughly, did he do his best even in after life. But with
+drawing,--or rather without it,--he did wonderfully well even when he
+did his worst. He did illustrate his own books, and everyone knows how
+incorrect were his delineations. But as illustrations they were
+excellent. How often have I wished that characters of my own creating
+might be sketched as faultily, if with the same appreciation of the
+intended purpose. Let anyone look at the "plates," as they are called in
+_Vanity Fair_, and compare each with the scenes and the characters
+intended to be displayed, and there see whether the artist,--if we may
+call him so,--has not managed to convey in the picture the exact feeling
+which he has described in the text. I have a little sketch of his, in
+which a cannon-ball is supposed to have just carried off the head of an
+aide-de-camp,--messenger I had perhaps better say, lest I might affront
+military feelings,--who is kneeling on the field of battle and
+delivering a despatch to Marlborough on horseback. The graceful ease
+with which the duke receives the message though the messenger's head be
+gone, and the soldier-like precision with which the headless hero
+finishes his last effort of military obedience, may not have been
+portrayed with well-drawn figures, but no finished illustration ever
+told its story better. Dickens has informed us that he first met
+Thackeray in 1835, on which occasion the young artist aspirant, looking
+no doubt after profitable employment, "proposed to become the
+illustrator of my earliest book." It is singular that such should have
+been the first interview between the two great novelists. We may presume
+that the offer was rejected.
+
+In 1832, Thackeray came of age, and inherited his fortune,--as to which
+various stories have been told. It seems to have amounted to about five
+hundred a year, and to have passed through his hands in a year or two,
+interest and principal. It has been told of him that it was all taken
+away from him at cards, but such was not the truth. Some went in an
+Indian bank in which he invested it. A portion was lost at cards. But
+with some of it,--the larger part as I think,--he endeavoured, in
+concert with his stepfather, to float a newspaper, which failed. There
+seem to have been two newspapers in which he was so concerned, _The
+National Standard_ and _The Constitutional_. On the latter he was
+engaged with his stepfather, and in carrying that on he lost the last of
+his money. _The National Standard_ had been running for some weeks when
+Thackeray joined it, and lost his money in it. It ran only for little
+more than twelve months, and then, the money having gone, the periodical
+came to an end. I know no road to fortune more tempting to a young man,
+or one that with more certainty leads to ruin. Thackeray, who in a way
+more or less correct, often refers in his writings, if not to the
+incidents, at any rate to the remembrances of his own life, tells us
+much of the story of this newspaper in _Lovel the Widower_. "They are
+welcome," says the bachelor, "to make merry at my charges in respect of
+a certain bargain which I made on coming to London, and in which, had I
+been Moses Primrose purchasing green spectacles, I could scarcely have
+been more taken in. My Jenkinson was an old college acquaintance, whom I
+was idiot enough to imagine a respectable man. The fellow had a very
+smooth tongue and sleek sanctified exterior. He was rather a popular
+preacher, and used to cry a good deal in the pulpit. He and a queer wine
+merchant and bill discounter, Sherrick by name, had somehow got
+possession of that neat little literary paper, _The Museum_, which
+perhaps you remember, and this eligible literary property my friend
+Honeyman, with his wheedling tongue, induced me to purchase." Here is
+the history of Thackeray's money, told by himself plainly enough, but
+with no intention on his part of narrating an incident in his own life
+to the public. But the drollery of the circumstances, his own mingled
+folly and young ambition, struck him as being worth narration, and the
+more forcibly as he remembered all the ins and outs of his own
+reflections at the time,--how he had meant to enchant the world, and
+make his fortune. There was literary capital in it of which he could
+make use after so many years. Then he tells us of this ambition, and of
+the folly of it; and at the same time puts forward the excuses to be
+made for it. "I daresay I gave myself airs as editor of that confounded
+_Museum_, and proposed to educate the public taste, to diffuse morality
+and sound literature throughout the nation, and to pocket a liberal
+salary in return for my services. I daresay I printed my own sonnets, my
+own tragedy, my own verses.... I daresay I wrote satirical articles....
+I daresay I made a gaby of myself to the world. Pray, my good friend,
+hast thou never done likewise? If thou hast never been a fool, be sure
+thou wilt never be a wise man." Thackeray was quite aware of his early
+weaknesses, and in the maturity of life knew well that he had not been
+precociously wise. He delighted so to tell his friends, and he delighted
+also to tell the public, not meaning that any but an inner circle should
+know that he was speaking of himself. But the story now is plain to all
+who can read.[1]
+
+It was thus that he lost his money; and then, not having prospered very
+well with his drawing lessons in Paris or elsewhere, he was fain to take
+up literature as a profession. It is a business which has its
+allurements. It requires no capital, no special education, no training,
+and may be taken up at any time without a moment's delay. If a man can
+command a table, a chair, pen, paper, and ink, he can commence his trade
+as literary man. It is thus that aspirants generally do commence it. A
+man may or may not have another employment to back him, or means of his
+own; or,--as was the case with Thackeray, when, after his first
+misadventure, he had to look about him for the means of living,--he may
+have nothing but his intellect and his friends. But the idea comes to
+the man that as he has the pen and ink, and time on his hand, why
+should he not write and make money?
+
+It is an idea that comes to very many men and women, old as well as
+young,--to many thousands who at last are crushed by it, of whom the
+world knows nothing. A man can make the attempt though he has not a coat
+fit to go out into the street with; or a woman, though she be almost in
+rags. There is no apprenticeship wanted. Indeed there is no room for
+such apprenticeship. It is an art which no one teaches; there is no
+professor who, in a dozen lessons, even pretends to show the aspirant
+how to write a book or an article. If you would be a watchmaker, you
+must learn; or a lawyer, a cook, or even a housemaid. Before you can
+clean a horse you must go into the stable, and begin at the beginning.
+Even the cab-driving tiro must sit for awhile on the box, and learn
+something of the streets, before he can ply for a fare. But the literary
+beginner rushes at once at the top rung of his ladder;--as though a
+youth, having made up his mind to be a clergyman, should demand, without
+preliminary steps, to be appointed Bishop of London. That he should be
+able to read and write is presumed, and that only. So much may be
+presumed of everyone, and nothing more is wanted.
+
+In truth nothing more is wanted,--except those inner lights as to which,
+so many men live and die without having learned whether they possess
+them or not. Practice, industry, study of literature, cultivation of
+taste, and the rest, will of course lend their aid, will probably be
+necessary before high excellence is attained. But the instances are not
+to seek,--are at the fingers of us all,--in which the first uninstructed
+effort has succeeded. A boy, almost, or perhaps an old woman, has sat
+down and the book has come, and the world has read it, and the
+booksellers have been civil and have written their cheques. When all
+trades, all professions, all seats at offices, all employments at which
+a crust can be earned, are so crowded that a young man knows not where
+to look for the means of livelihood, is there not an attraction in this
+which to the self-confident must be almost invincible? The booksellers
+are courteous and write their cheques, but that is not half the whole?
+_Monstrari digito!_ That is obtained. The happy aspirant is written of
+in newspapers, or, perhaps, better still, he writes of others. When the
+barrister of forty-five has hardly got a name beyond Chancery Lane, this
+glorious young scribe, with the first down on his lips, has printed his
+novel and been talked about.
+
+The temptation is irresistible, and thousands fall into it. How is a man
+to know that he is not the lucky one or the gifted one? There is the
+table and there the pen and ink. Among the unfortunate he who fails
+altogether and from the first start is not the most unfortunate. A short
+period of life is wasted, and a sharp pang is endured. Then the
+disappointed one is relegated to the condition of life which he would
+otherwise have filled a little earlier. He has been wounded, but not
+killed, or even maimed. But he who has a little success, who succeeds in
+earning a few halcyon, but, ah! so dangerous guineas, is drawn into a
+trade from which he will hardly escape till he be driven from it, if he
+come out alive, by sheer hunger. He hangs on till the guineas become
+crowns and shillings,--till some sad record of his life, made when he
+applies for charity, declares that he has worked hard for the last year
+or two and has earned less than a policeman in the streets or a porter
+at a railway. It is to that that he is brought by applying himself to a
+business which requires only a table and chair, with pen, ink, and
+paper! It is to that which he is brought by venturing to believe that he
+has been gifted with powers of imagination, creation, and expression.
+
+The young man who makes the attempt knows that he must run the chance.
+He is well aware that nine must fail where one will make his running
+good. So much as that does reach his ears, and recommends itself to his
+common sense. But why should it not be he as well as another? There is
+always some lucky one winning the prize. And this prize when it has been
+won is so well worth the winning! He can endure starvation,--so he tells
+himself,--as well as another. He will try. But yet he knows that he has
+but one chance out of ten in his favour, and it is only in his happier
+moments that he flatters himself that that remains to him. Then there
+falls upon him,--in the midst of that labour which for its success
+especially requires that a man's heart shall be light, and that he be
+always at his best,--doubt and despair. If there be no chance, of what
+use is his labour?
+
+     Were it not better done as others use,
+     To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,
+
+and amuse himself after that fashion? Thus the very industry which alone
+could give him a chance is discarded. It is so that the young man feels
+who, with some slight belief in himself and with many doubts, sits down
+to commence the literary labour by which he hopes to live.
+
+So it was, no doubt, with Thackeray. Such were his hopes and his
+fears;--with a resolution of which we can well understand that it should
+have waned at times, of earning his bread, if he did not make his
+fortune, in the world of literature. One has not to look far for
+evidence of the condition I have described,--that it was so, Amaryllis
+and all. How or when he made his very first attempt in London, I have
+not learned; but he had not probably spent his money without forming
+"press" acquaintances, and had thus found an aperture for the thin end
+of the wedge. He wrote for _The Constitutional_, of which he was part
+proprietor, beginning his work for that paper as a correspondent from
+Paris. For a while he was connected with _The Times_ newspaper, though
+his work there did not I think amount to much. His first regular
+employment was on _Fraser's Magazine_, when Mr. Fraser's shop was in
+Regent Street, when Oliver Yorke was the presumed editor, and among
+contributors, Carlyle was one of the most notable. I imagine that the
+battle of life was difficult enough with him even after he had become
+one of the leading props of that magazine. All that he wrote was not
+taken, and all that was taken was not approved. In 1837-38, the _History
+of Samuel Titmarsh and the Great Hoggarty Diamond_ appeared in the
+magazine. The _Great Hoggarty Diamond_ is now known to all readers of
+Thackeray's works. It is not my purpose to speak specially of it here,
+except to assert that it has been thought to be a great success. When it
+was being brought out, the author told a friend of his,--and of
+mine,--that it was not much thought of at Fraser's, and that he had been
+called upon to shorten it. That is an incident disagreeable in its
+nature to any literary gentleman, and likely to be specially so when he
+knows that his provision of bread, certainly of improved bread and
+butter, is at stake. The man who thus darkens his literary brow with the
+frown of disapproval, has at his disposal all the loaves and all the
+fishes that are going. If the writer be successful, there will come a
+time when he will be above such frowns; but, when that opinion went
+forth, Thackeray had not yet made his footing good, and the notice to
+him respecting it must have been very bitter. It was in writing this
+_Hoggarty Diamond_ that Thackeray first invented the name of Michael
+Angelo Titmarsh. Samuel Titmarsh was the writer, whereas Michael Angelo
+was an intending illustrator. Thackeray's nose had been broken in a
+school fight, while he was quite a little boy, by another little boy, at
+the Charter House; and there was probably some association intended to
+be jocose with the name of the great artist, whose nose was broken by
+his fellow-student Torrigiano, and who, as it happened, died exactly
+three centuries before Thackeray.
+
+I can understand all the disquietude of his heart when that warning, as
+to the too great length of his story, was given to him. He was not a man
+capable of feeling at any time quite assured in his position, and when
+that occurred he was very far from assurance. I think that at no time
+did he doubt the sufficiency of his own mental qualification for the
+work he had taken in hand; but he doubted all else. He doubted the
+appreciation of the world; he doubted his fitness for turning
+his intellect to valuable account; he doubted his physical
+capacity,--dreading his own lack of industry; he doubted his luck; he
+doubted the continual absence of some of those misfortunes on which the
+works of literary men are shipwrecked. Though he was aware of his own
+power, he always, to the last, was afraid that his own deficiencies
+should be too strong against him. It was his nature to be idle,--to put
+off his work,--and then to be angry with himself for putting it off.
+Ginger was hot in the mouth with him, and all the allurements of the
+world were strong upon him. To find on Monday morning an excuse why he
+should not on Monday do Monday's work was, at the time, an inexpressible
+relief to him, but had become deep regret,--almost a remorse,--before
+the Monday was over. To such a one it was not given to believe in
+himself with that sturdy rock-bound foundation which we see to have
+belonged to some men from the earliest struggles of their career. To
+him, then, must have come an inexpressible pang when he was told that
+his story must be curtailed.
+
+Who else would have told such a story of himself to the first
+acquaintance he chanced to meet? Of Thackeray it might be predicted that
+he certainly would do so. No little wound of the kind ever came to him
+but what he disclosed it at once. "They have only bought so many of my
+new book." "Have you seen the abuse of my last number?" "What am I to
+turn my hand to? They are getting tired of my novels." "They don't read
+it," he said to me of _Esmond_. "So you don't mean to publish my work?"
+he said once to a publisher in an open company. Other men keep their
+little troubles to themselves. I have heard even of authors who have
+declared how all the publishers were running after their books; I have
+heard some discourse freely of their fourth and fifth editions; I have
+known an author to boast of his thousands sold in this country, and his
+tens of thousands in America; but I never heard anyone else declare that
+no one would read his _chef-d'oeuvre_, and that the world was becoming
+tired of him. It was he who said, when he was fifty, that a man past
+fifty should never write a novel.
+
+And yet, as I have said, he was from an early age fully conscious of his
+own ability. That he was so is to be seen in the handling of many of
+his early works,--in _Barry Lyndon_, for instance, and the _Memoirs of
+Mr. C. James Yellowplush_. The sound is too certain for doubt of that
+kind. But he had not then, nor did he ever achieve that assurance of
+public favour which makes a man confident that his work will be
+successful. During the years of which we are now speaking Thackeray was
+a literary Bohemian in this sense,--that he never regarded his own
+status as certain. While performing much of the best of his life's work
+he was not sure of his market, not certain of his readers, his
+publishers, or his price; nor was he certain of himself.
+
+It is impossible not to form some contrast between him and Dickens as to
+this period of his life,--a comparison not as to their literary merits,
+but literary position. Dickens was one year his junior in age, and at
+this time, viz. 1837-38, had reached almost the zenith of his
+reputation. _Pickwick_ had been published, and _Oliver Twist_ and
+_Nicholas Nickleby_ were being published. All the world was talking
+about the young author who was assuming his position with a confidence
+in his own powers which was fully justified both by his present and
+future success. It was manifest that he could make, not only his own
+fortune, but that of his publishers, and that he was a literary hero
+bound to be worshipped by all literary grades of men, down to the
+"devils" of the printing-office. At that time, Thackeray, the older man,
+was still doubting, still hesitating, still struggling. Everyone then
+had accepted the name of Charles Dickens. That of William Thackeray was
+hardly known beyond the circle of those who are careful to make
+themselves acquainted with such matters. It was then the custom, more
+generally than it is at present, to maintain anonymous writing in
+magazines. Now, if anything of special merit be brought out, the name of
+the author, if not published, is known. It was much less so at the
+period in question; and as the world of readers began to be acquainted
+with Jeames Yellowplush, Catherine Hayes, and other heroes and heroines,
+the names of the author had to be inquired for. I remember myself, when
+I was already well acquainted with the immortal Jeames, asking who was
+the writer. The works of Charles Dickens were at that time as well known
+to be his, and as widely read in England, as those almost of
+Shakespeare.
+
+It will be said of course that this came from the earlier popularity of
+Dickens. That is of course; but why should it have been so? They had
+begun to make their effort much at the same time; and if there was any
+advantage in point of position as they commenced, it was with Thackeray.
+It might be said that the genius of the one was brighter than that of
+the other, or, at any rate, that it was more precocious. But
+after-judgment has, I think, not declared either of the suggestions to
+be true. I will make no comparison between two such rivals, who were so
+distinctly different from each, and each of whom, within so very short a
+period, has come to stand on a pedestal so high,--the two exalted to so
+equal a vocation. And if Dickens showed the best of his power early in
+life, so did Thackeray the best of his intellect. In no display of
+mental force did he rise above _Barry Lyndon_. I hardly know how the
+teller of a narrative shall hope to mount in simply intellectual faculty
+above the effort there made. In what then was the difference? Why was
+Dickens already a great man when Thackeray was still a literary
+Bohemian?
+
+The answer is to be found not in the extent or in the nature of the
+genius of either man, but in the condition of mind,--which indeed may be
+read plainly in their works by those who have eyes to see. The one was
+steadfast, industrious, full of purpose, never doubting of himself,
+always putting his best foot foremost and standing firmly on it when he
+got it there; with no inward trepidation, with no moments in which he
+was half inclined to think that this race was not for his winning, this
+goal not to be reached by his struggles. The sympathy of friends was
+good to him, but he could have done without it. The good opinion which
+he had of himself was never shaken by adverse criticism; and the
+criticism on the other side, by which it was exalted, came from the
+enumeration of the number of copies sold. He was a firm reliant man,
+very little prone to change, who, when he had discovered the nature of
+his own talent, knew how to do the very best with it.
+
+It may almost be said that Thackeray was the very opposite of this.
+Unsteadfast, idle, changeable of purpose, aware of his own intellect but
+not trusting it, no man ever failed more generally than he to put his
+best foot foremost. Full as his works are of pathos, full of humour,
+full of love and charity, tending, as they always do, to truth and
+honour and manly worth and womanly modesty, excelling, as they seem to
+me to do, most other written precepts that I know, they always seem to
+lack something that might have been there. There is a touch of vagueness
+which indicates that his pen was not firm while he was using it. He
+seems to me to have been dreaming ever of some high flight, and then to
+have told himself, with a half-broken heart, that it was beyond his
+power to soar up into those bright regions. I can fancy as the sheets
+went from him every day he told himself, in regard to every sheet, that
+it was a failure. Dickens was quite sure of his sheets.
+
+"I have got to make it shorter!" Then he would put his hands in his
+pockets, and stretch himself, and straighten the lines of his face, over
+which a smile would come, as though this intimation from his editor were
+the best joke in the world; and he would walk away, with his heart
+bleeding, and every nerve in an agony. There are none of us who want to
+have much of his work shortened now.
+
+In 1837 Thackeray married Isabella, daughter of Colonel Matthew Shawe,
+and from this union there came three daughters, Anne, Jane, and Harriet.
+The name of the eldest, now Mrs. Richmond Ritchie, who has followed so
+closely in her father's steps, is a household word to the world of novel
+readers; the second died as a child; the younger lived to marry Leslie
+Stephen, who is too well known for me to say more than that he wrote,
+the other day, the little volume on Dr. Johnson in this series; but she,
+too, has now followed her father. Of Thackeray's married life what need
+be said shall be contained in a very few words. It was grievously
+unhappy; but the misery of it came from God, and was in no wise due to
+human fault. She became ill, and her mind failed her. There was a period
+during which he would not believe that her illness was more than
+illness, and then he clung to her and waited on her with an assiduity of
+affection which only made his task the more painful to him. At last it
+became evident that she should live in the companionship of some one
+with whom her life might be altogether quiet, and she has since been
+domiciled with a lady with whom she has been happy. Thus she was, after
+but a few years of married life, taken away from him, and he became as
+it were a widower till the end of his days.
+
+At this period, and indeed for some years after his marriage, his chief
+literary dependence was on _Fraser's Magazine_. He wrote also at this
+time in the _New Monthly Magazine_. In 1840 he brought out his _Paris
+Sketch Book_, as to which he tells us by a notice printed with the first
+edition, that half of the sketches had already been published in various
+periodicals. Here he used the name Michael Angelo Titmarsh, as he did
+also with the _Journey from Cornhill to Cairo_. Dickens had called
+himself Boz, and clung to the name with persistency as long as the
+public would permit it. Thackeray's affection for assumed names was more
+intermittent, though I doubt whether he used his own name altogether
+till it appeared on the title-page of _Vanity Fair_. About this time
+began his connection with _Punch_, in which much of his best work
+appeared. Looking back at our old friend as he used to come out from
+week to week at this time, we can hardly boast that we used to recognise
+how good the literary pabulum was that was then given for our
+consumption. We have to admit that the ordinary reader, as the ordinary
+picture-seer, requires to be guided by a name. We are moved to absolute
+admiration by a Raphael or a Hobbema, but hardly till we have learned
+the name of the painter, or, at any rate, the manner of his painting. I
+am not sure that all lovers of poetry would recognise a _Lycidas_ coming
+from some hitherto unknown Milton. Gradually the good picture or the
+fine poem makes its way into the minds of a slowly discerning public.
+_Punch_, no doubt, became very popular, owing, perhaps, more to Leech,
+its artist, than to any other single person. Gradually the world of
+readers began to know that there was a speciality of humour to be found
+in its pages,--fun and sense, satire and good humour, compressed
+together in small literary morsels as the nature of its columns
+required. Gradually the name of Thackeray as one of the band of brethren
+was buzzed about, and gradually became known as that of the chief of the
+literary brothers. But during the years in which he did much for
+_Punch_, say from 1843 to 1853, he was still struggling to make good his
+footing in literature. They knew him well in the _Punch_ office, and no
+doubt the amount and regularity of the cheques from Messrs. Bradbury and
+Evans, the then and still owners of that happy periodical, made him
+aware that he had found for himself a satisfactory career. In "a good
+day for himself, the journal, and the world, Thackeray found _Punch_."
+This was said by his old friend Shirley Brooks, who himself lived to be
+editor of the paper and died in harness, and was said most truly.
+_Punch_ was more congenial to him, and no doubt more generous, than
+_Fraser_. There was still something of the literary Bohemian about him,
+but not as it had been before. He was still unfixed, looking out for
+some higher career, not altogether satisfied to be no more than one of
+an anonymous band of brothers, even though the brothers were the
+brothers of _Punch_. We can only imagine what were his thoughts as to
+himself and that other man, who was then known as the great novelist of
+the day,--of a rivalry with whom he was certainly conscious. _Punch_ was
+very much to him, but was not quite enough. That must have been very
+clear to himself as he meditated the beginning of _Vanity Fair_.
+
+Of the contributions to the periodical, the best known now are _The Snob
+Papers_ and _The Ballads of Policeman X_. But they were very numerous.
+Of Thackeray as a poet, or maker of verses, I will say a few words in a
+chapter which will be devoted to his own so-called ballads. Here it
+seems only necessary to remark that there was not apparently any time in
+his career at which he began to think seriously of appearing before the
+public as a poet. Such was the intention early in their career with many
+of our best known prose writers, with Milton, and Goldsmith, and Samuel
+Johnson, with Scott, Macaulay, and more lately with Matthew Arnold;
+writers of verse and prose who ultimately prevailed some in one
+direction, and others in the other. Milton and Goldsmith have been known
+best as poets, Johnson and Macaulay as writers of prose. But with all of
+them there has been a distinct effort in each art. Thackeray seems to
+have tumbled into versification by accident; writing it as amateurs do,
+a little now and again for his own delectation, and to catch the taste
+of partial friends. The reader feels that Thackeray would not have begun
+to print his verses unless the opportunity of doing so had been brought
+in his way by his doings in prose. And yet he had begun to write verses
+when he was very young;--at Cambridge, as we have seen, when he
+contributed more to the fame of Timbuctoo than I think even Tennyson has
+done,--and in his early years at Paris. Here again, though he must have
+felt the strength of his own mingled humour and pathos, he always struck
+with an uncertain note till he had gathered strength and confidence by
+popularity. Good as they generally were, his verses were accidents,
+written not as a writer writes who claims to be a poet, but as though
+they might have been the relaxation of a doctor or a barrister.
+
+And so they were. When Thackeray first settled himself in London, to
+make his living among the magazines and newspapers, I do not imagine
+that he counted much on his poetic powers. He describes it all in his
+own dialogue between the pen and the album.
+
+"Since he," says the pen, speaking of its master, Thackeray:
+
+     Since he my faithful service did engage,
+     To follow him through his queer pilgrimage
+     I've drawn and written many a line and page.
+
+     Caricatures I scribbled have, and rhymes,
+     And dinner-cards, and picture pantomimes,
+     And many little children's books at times.
+
+     I've writ the foolish fancy of his brain;
+     The aimless jest that, striking, hath caused pain;
+     The idle word that he'd wish back again.
+
+     I've helped him to pen many a line for bread.
+
+It was thus he thought of his work. There had been caricatures, and
+rhymes, and many little children's books; and then the lines written for
+his bread, which, except that they were written for _Punch_, were hardly
+undertaken with a more serious purpose. In all of it there was ample
+seriousness, had he known it himself. What a tale of the restlessness,
+of the ambition, of the glory, of the misfortunes of a great country is
+given in the ballads of Peter the French drummer! Of that brain so full
+of fancy the pen had lightly written all the fancies. He did not know it
+when he was doing so, but with that word, fancy, he has described
+exactly the gift with which his brain was specially endowed. If a writer
+be accurate, or sonorous, or witty, or simply pathetic, he may, I think,
+gauge his own powers. He may do so after experience with something of
+certainty. But fancy is a gift which the owner of it cannot measure, and
+the power of which, when he is using it, he cannot himself understand.
+There is the same lambent flame flickering over everything he did, even
+the dinner-cards and the picture pantomimes. He did not in the least
+know what he put into those things. So it was with his verses. It was
+only by degrees, when he was told of it by others, that he found that
+they too were of infinite value to him in his profession.
+
+The _Irish Sketch Book_ came out in 1843, in which he used, but only
+half used, the name of Michael Angelo Titmarsh. He dedicates it to
+Charles Lever, and in signing the dedication gave his own name. "Laying
+aside," he says, "for a moment the travelling title of Mr. Titmarsh, let
+me acknowledge these favours in my own name, and subscribe myself, &c.
+&c., W. M. Thackeray." So he gradually fell into the declaration of his
+own identity. In 1844 he made his journey to Turkey and Egypt,--_From
+Cornhill to Grand Cairo_, as he called it, still using the old nom de
+plume, but again signing the dedication with his own name. It was now
+made to the captain of the vessel in which he encountered that famous
+white squall, in describing which he has shown the wonderful power he
+had over words.
+
+In 1846 was commenced, in numbers, the novel which first made his name
+well known to the world. This was _Vanity Fair_, a work to which it is
+evident that he devoted all his mind. Up to this time his writings had
+consisted of short contributions, chiefly of sketches, each intended to
+stand by itself in the periodical to which it was sent. _Barry Lyndon_
+had hitherto been the longest; but that and _Catherine Hayes_, and the
+_Hoggarty Diamond_, though stories continued through various numbers,
+had not as yet reached the dignity,--or at any rate the length,--of a
+three-volume novel. But of late novels had grown to be much longer than
+those of the old well-known measure. Dickens had stretched his to nearly
+double the length, and had published them in twenty numbers. The attempt
+had caught the public taste and had been pre-eminently successful. The
+nature of the tale as originated by him was altogether unlike that to
+which the readers of modern novels had been used. No plot, with an
+arranged catastrophe or _denoument_, was necessary. Some untying of the
+various knots of the narrative no doubt were expedient, but these were
+of the simplest kind, done with the view of giving an end to that which
+might otherwise be endless. The adventures of a _Pickwick_ or a
+_Nickleby_ required very little of a plot, and this mode of telling a
+story, which might be continued on through any number of pages, as long
+as the characters were interesting, met with approval. Thackeray, who
+had never depended much on his plot in the shorter tales which he had
+hitherto told, determined to adopt the same form in his first great
+work, but with these changes;--That as the central character with
+Dickens had always been made beautiful with unnatural virtue,--for who
+was ever so unselfish as _Pickwick_, so manly and modest as _Nicholas_,
+or so good a boy as _Oliver_?--so should his centre of interest be in
+every respect abnormally bad.
+
+As to Thackeray's reason for this,--or rather as to that condition of
+mind which brought about this result,--I will say something in a final
+chapter, in which I will endeavour to describe the nature and effect of
+his work generally. Here it will be necessary only to declare that, such
+was the choice he now made of a subject in his first attempt to rise out
+of a world of small literary contributions, into the more assured
+position of the author of a work of importance. We are aware that the
+monthly nurses of periodical literature did not at first smile on the
+effort. The proprietors of magazines did not see their way to undertake
+_Vanity Fair_, and the publishers are said to have generally looked shy
+upon it. At last it was brought out in numbers,--twenty-four numbers
+instead of twenty, as with those by Dickens,--under the guardian hands
+of Messrs. Bradbury and Evans. This was completed in 1848, and then it
+was that, at the age of thirty-seven, Thackeray first achieved for
+himself a name and reputation through the country. Before this he had
+been known at _Fraser's_ and at the _Punch_ office. He was known at the
+Garrick Club, and had become individually popular among literary men in
+London. He had made many fast friends, and had been, as it were, found
+out by persons of distinction. But Jones, and Smith, and Robinson, in
+Liverpool, Manchester, and Birmingham, did not know him as they knew
+Dickens, Carlyle, Tennyson, and Macaulay,--not as they knew Landseer, or
+Stansfeld, or Turner; not as they knew Macready, Charles Kean, or Miss
+Faucit. In that year, 1848, his name became common in the memoirs of the
+time. On the 5th of June I find him dining with Macready, to meet Sir J.
+Wilson, Panizzi, Landseer, and others. A few days afterwards Macready
+dined with him. "Dined with Thackeray, met the Gordons, Kenyons,
+Procters, Reeve, Villiers, Evans, Stansfeld, and saw Mrs. Sartoris and
+S. C. Dance, White, H. Goldsmid, in the evening." Again; "Dined with
+Forster, having called and taken up Brookfield, met Rintoul, Kenyon,
+Procter, Kinglake, Alfred Tennyson, Thackeray." Macready was very
+accurate in jotting down the names of those he entertained, who
+entertained him, or were entertained with him. _Vanity Fair_ was coming
+out, and Thackeray had become one of the personages in literary
+society. In the January number of 1848 the _Edinburgh Review_ had an
+article on Thackeray's works generally as they were then known. It
+purports to combine the _Irish Sketch Book_, the _Journey from Cornhill
+to Grand Cairo_, and _Vanity Fair_ as far as it had then gone; but it
+does in truth deal chiefly with the literary merits of the latter. I
+will quote a passage from the article, as proving in regard to
+Thackeray's work an opinion which was well founded, and as telling the
+story of his life as far as it was then known;
+
+"Full many a valuable truth," says the reviewer, "has been sent
+undulating through the air by men who have lived and died unknown. At
+this moment the rising generation are supplied with the best of their
+mental aliment by writers whose names are a dead letter to the mass; and
+among the most remarkable of these is Michael Angelo Titmarsh, alias
+William Makepeace Thackeray, author of the _Irish Sketch Book_, of _A
+Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo_, of _Jeames's Diary_, of _The Snob
+Papers_ in _Punch_, of _Vanity Fair_, etc. etc.
+
+"Mr. Thackeray is now about thirty-seven years of age, of a good family,
+and originally intended for the bar. He kept seven or eight terms at
+Cambridge, but left the university without taking a degree, with the
+view of becoming an artist; and we well remember, ten or twelve years
+ago, finding him day after day engaged in copying pictures in the
+Louvre, in order to qualify himself for his intended profession. It may
+be doubted, however, whether any degree of assiduity would have enabled
+him to excel in the money-making branches, for his talent was altogether
+of the Hogarth kind, and was principally remarkable in the pen-and-ink
+sketches of character and situation, which he dashed off for the
+amusement of his friends. At the end of two or three years of desultory
+application he gave up the notion of becoming a painter, and took to
+literature. He set up and edited with marked ability a weekly journal,
+on the plan of _The Athenaeum_ and _Literary Gazette_, but was unable to
+compete successfully with such long-established rivals. He then became a
+regular man of letters,--that is, he wrote for respectable magazines and
+newspapers, until the attention attracted to his contributions in
+_Fraser's Magazine_ and _Punch_ emboldened him to start on his own
+account, and risk an independent publication." Then follows a eulogistic
+and, as I think, a correct criticism on the book as far as it had gone.
+There are a few remarks perhaps a little less eulogistic as to some of
+his minor writings, _The Snob Papers_ in particular; and at the end
+there is a statement with which I think we shall all now agree; "A
+writer with such a pen and pencil as Mr. Thackeray's is an acquisition
+of real and high value in our literature."
+
+The reviewer has done his work in a tone friendly to the author, whom he
+knew,[2]--as indeed it may be said that this little book will be written
+with the same feeling,--but the public has already recognised the truth
+of the review generally. There can be no doubt that Thackeray, though he
+had hitherto been but a contributor of anonymous pieces to
+periodicals,--to what is generally considered as merely the ephemeral
+literature of the month,--had already become effective on the tastes and
+morals of readers. Affectation of finery; the vulgarity which apes good
+breeding but never approaches it; dishonest gambling, whether with dice
+or with railway shares; and that low taste for literary excitement which
+is gratified by mysterious murders and Old Bailey executions had already
+received condign punishment from Yellowplush, Titmarsh, Fitzboodle, and
+Ikey Solomon. Under all those names Thackeray had plied his trade as a
+satirist. Though the truths, as the reviewer said, had been merely sent
+undulating through the air, they had already become effective.
+
+Thackeray had now become a personage,--one of the recognised stars of
+the literary heaven of the day. It was an honour to know him; and we may
+well believe that the givers of dinners were proud to have him among
+their guests. He had opened his oyster,--with his pen, an achievement
+which he cannot be said to have accomplished until _Vanity Fair_ had
+come out. In inquiring about him from those who survive him, and knew
+him well in those days, I always hear the same account. "If I could only
+tell you the impromptu lines which fell from him!" "If I had only kept
+the drawings from his pen, which used to be chucked about as though they
+were worth nothing!" "If I could only remember the drolleries!" Had they
+been kept, there might now be many volumes of these sketches, as to
+which the reviewer says that their talent was "altogether of the Hogarth
+kind." Could there be any kind more valuable? Like Hogarth, he could
+always make his picture tell his story; though, unlike Hogarth, he had
+not learned to draw. I have had sent to me for my inspection an album of
+drawings and letters, which, in the course of twenty years, from 1829 to
+1849, were despatched from Thackeray to his old friend Edward
+Fitzgerald. Looking at the wit displayed in the drawings, I feel
+inclined to say that had he persisted he would have been a second
+Hogarth. There is a series of ballet scenes, in which "Flore et Zephyr"
+are the two chief performers, which for expression and drollery exceed
+anything that I know of the kind. The set in this book are lithographs,
+which were published, but I do not remember to have seen them elsewhere.
+There are still among us many who knew him well;--Edward Fitzgerald and
+George Venables, James Spedding and Kinglake, Mrs. Procter,--the widow
+of Barry Cornwall, who loved him well,--and Monckton Milnes, as he used
+to be, whose touching lines written just after Thackeray's death will
+close this volume, Frederick Pollock and Frank Fladgate, John Blackwood
+and William Russell,--and they all tell the same story. Though he so
+rarely talked, as good talkers do, and was averse to sit down to work,
+there were always falling from his mouth and pen those little pearls.
+Among the friends who had been kindest and dearest to him in the days of
+his strugglings he once mentioned three to me,--Matthew Higgins, or
+Jacob Omnium as he was more popularly called; William Stirling, who
+became Sir William Maxwell; and Russell Sturgis, who is now the senior
+partner in the great house of Barings. Alas, only the last of these
+three is left among us! Thackeray was a man of no great power of
+conversation. I doubt whether he ever shone in what is called general
+society. He was not a man to be valuable at a dinner-table as a good
+talker. It was when there were but two or three together that he was
+happy himself and made others happy; and then it would rather be from
+some special piece of drollery that the joy of the moment would come,
+than from the discussion of ordinary topics. After so many years his old
+friends remember the fag-ends of the doggerel lines which used to drop
+from him without any effort on all occasions of jollity. And though he
+could be very sad,--laden with melancholy, as I think must have been the
+case with him always,--the feeling of fun would quickly come to him, and
+the queer rhymes would be poured out as plentifully as the sketches were
+made. Here is a contribution which I find hanging in the memory of an
+old friend, the serious nature of whose literary labours would certainly
+have driven such lines from his mind, had they not at the time caught
+fast hold of him:
+
+     In the romantic little town of Highbury
+     My father kept a circulatin' library;
+     He followed in his youth that man immortal, who
+     Conquered the Frenchmen on the plains of Waterloo.
+     Mamma was an inhabitant of Drogheda,
+     Very good she was to darn and to embroider.
+     In the famous island of Jamaica,
+     For thirty years I've been a sugar-baker;
+     And here I sit, the Muses' 'appy vot'ry,
+     A cultivatin' every kind of po'try,
+
+There may, perhaps, have been a mistake in a line, but the poem has been
+handed down with fair correctness over a period of forty years. He was
+always versifying. He once owed me five pounds seventeen shillings and
+sixpence, his share of a dinner bill at Richmond. He sent me a cheque
+for the amount in rhyme, giving the proper financial document on the
+second half of a sheet of note paper. I gave the poem away as an
+autograph, and now forget the lines. This was all trifling, the reader
+will say. No doubt. Thackeray was always trifling, and yet always
+serious. In attempting to understand his character it is necessary for
+you to bear within your own mind the idea that he was always, within his
+own bosom, encountering melancholy with buffoonery, and meanness with
+satire. The very spirit of burlesque dwelt within him,--a spirit which
+does not see the grand the less because of the travesties which it is
+always engendering.
+
+In his youthful,--all but boyish,--days in London, he delighted to "put
+himself up" at the Bedford, in Covent Garden. Then in his early married
+days he lived in Albion Street, and from thence went to Great Coram
+Street, till his household there was broken up by his wife's illness. He
+afterwards took lodgings in St. James's Chambers, and then a house in
+Young Street, Kensington. Here he lived from 1847, when he was achieving
+his great triumph with _Vanity Fair_, down to 1853, when he removed to a
+house which he bought in Onslow Square. In Young Street there had come
+to lodge opposite to him an Irish gentleman, who, on the part of his
+injured country, felt very angry with Thackeray. _The Irish Sketch Book_
+had not been complimentary, nor were the descriptions which Thackeray
+had given generally of Irishmen; and there was extant an absurd idea
+that in his abominable heroine Catherine Hayes he had alluded to Miss
+Catherine Hayes the Irish singer. Word was taken to Thackeray that this
+Irishman intended to come across the street and avenge his country on
+the calumniator's person. Thackeray immediately called upon the
+gentleman, and it is said that the visit was pleasant to both parties.
+There certainly was no blood shed.
+
+He had now succeeded,--in 1848,--in making for himself a standing as a
+man of letters, and an income. What was the extent of his income I have
+no means of saying; nor is it a subject on which, as I think, inquiry
+should be made. But he was not satisfied with his position. He felt it
+to be precarious, and he was always thinking of what he owed to his two
+girls. That _arbitrium popularis aurae_ on which he depended for his
+daily bread was not regarded by him with the confidence which it
+deserved. He did not probably know how firm was the hold he had obtained
+of the public ear. At any rate he was anxious, and endeavoured to secure
+for himself a permanent income in the public service. He had become by
+this time acquainted, probably intimate, with the Marquis of
+Clanricarde, who was then Postmaster-General. In 1848 there fell a
+vacancy in the situation of Assistant-Secretary at the General Post
+Office, and Lord Clanricarde either offered it to him or promised to
+give it to him. The Postmaster-General had the disposal of the
+place,--but was not altogether free from control in the matter. When he
+made known his purpose at the Post Office, he was met by an assurance
+from the officer next under him that the thing could not be done. The
+services were wanted of a man who had had experience in the Post Office;
+and, moreover, it was necessary that the feelings of other gentlemen
+should be consulted. Men who have been serving in an office many years
+do not like to see even a man of genius put over their heads. In fact,
+the office would have been up in arms at such an injustice. Lord
+Clanricarde, who in a matter of patronage was not scrupulous, was still
+a good-natured man and amenable. He attempted to befriend his friend
+till he found that it was impossible, and then, with the best grace in
+the world, accepted the official nominee that was offered to him.
+
+It may be said that had Thackeray succeeded in that attempt he would
+surely have ruined himself. No man can be fit for the management and
+performance of special work who has learned nothing of it before his
+thirty-seventh year; and no man could have been less so than Thackeray.
+There are men who, though they be not fit, are disposed to learn their
+lesson and make themselves as fit as possible. Such cannot be said to
+have been the case with this man. For the special duties which he would
+have been called upon to perform, consisting to a great extent of the
+maintenance of discipline over a large body of men, training is
+required, and the service would have suffered for awhile under any
+untried elderly tiro. Another man might have put himself into harness.
+Thackeray never would have done so. The details of his work after the
+first month would have been inexpressibly wearisome to him. To have gone
+into the city, and to have remained there every day from eleven till
+five, would have been all but impossible to him. He would not have done
+it. And then he would have been tormented by the feeling that he was
+taking the pay and not doing the work. There is a belief current, not
+confined to a few, that a man may be a Government Secretary with a
+generous salary, and have nothing to do. The idea is something that
+remains to us from the old days of sinecures. If there be now remaining
+places so pleasant, or gentlemen so happy, I do not know them.
+Thackeray's notion of his future duties was probably very vague. He
+would have repudiated the notion that he was looking for a sinecure, but
+no doubt considered that the duties would be easy and light. It is not
+too much to assert, that he who could drop his pearls as I have said
+above, throwing them wide cast without an effort, would have found his
+work as Assistant-Secretary at the General Post Office to be altogether
+too much for him. And then it was no doubt his intention to join
+literature with the Civil Service. He had been taught to regard the
+Civil Service as easy, and had counted upon himself as able to add it to
+his novels, and his work with his _Punch_ brethren, and to his
+contributions generally to the literature of the day. He might have done
+so, could he have risen at five, and have sat at his private desk for
+three hours before he began his official routine at the public one. A
+capability for grinding, an aptitude for continuous task work, a
+disposition to sit in one's chair as though fixed to it by cobbler's
+wax, will enable a man in the prime of life to go through the tedium of
+a second day's work every day; but of all men Thackeray was the last to
+bear the wearisome perseverance of such a life. Some more or less
+continuous attendance at his office he must have given, and with it
+would have gone _Punch_ and the novels, the ballads, the burlesques, the
+essays, the lectures, and the monthly papers full of mingled satire and
+tenderness, which have left to us that Thackeray which we could so ill
+afford to lose out of the literature of the nineteenth century. And
+there would have remained to the Civil Service the memory of a
+disgraceful job.
+
+He did not, however, give up the idea of the Civil Service. In a letter
+to his American friend, Mr. Reed, dated 8th November, 1854, he says;
+"The secretaryship of our Legation at Washington was vacant the other
+day, and I instantly asked for it; but in the very kindest letter Lord
+Clarendon showed how the petition was impossible. First, the place was
+given away. Next, it would not be fair to appoint out of the service.
+But the first was an excellent reason;--not a doubt of it." The validity
+of the second was probably not so apparent to him as it is to one who
+has himself waited long for promotion. "So if ever I come," he
+continues, "as I hope and trust to do this time next year, it must be in
+my own coat, and not the Queen's." Certainly in his own coat, and not in
+the Queen's, must Thackeray do anything by which he could mend his
+fortune or make his reputation. There never was a man less fit for the
+Queen's coat.
+
+Nevertheless he held strong ideas that much was due by the Queen's
+ministers to men of letters, and no doubt had his feelings of slighted
+merit, because no part of the debt due was paid to him. In 1850 he wrote
+a letter to _The Morning Chronicle_, which has since been republished,
+in which he alludes to certain opinions which had been put forth in _The
+Examiner_. "I don't see," he says, "why men of letters should not very
+cheerfully coincide with Mr. Examiner in accepting all the honours,
+places, and prizes which they can get. The amount of such as will be
+awarded to them will not, we may be pretty sure, impoverish the country
+much; and if it is the custom of the State to reward by money, or titles
+of honour, or stars and garters of any sort, individuals who do the
+country service,--and if individuals are gratified at having 'Sir' or
+'My lord' appended to their names, or stars and ribbons hooked on to
+their coats and waistcoats, as men most undoubtedly are, and as their
+wives, families, and relations are,--there can be no reason why men of
+letters should not have the chance, as well as men of the robe or the
+sword; or why, if honour and money are good for one profession, they
+should not be good for another. No man in other callings thinks himself
+degraded by receiving a reward from his Government; nor, surely, need
+the literary man be more squeamish about pensions, and ribbons, and
+titles, than the ambassador, or general, or judge. Every European state
+but ours rewards its men of letters. The American Government gives them
+their full share of its small patronage; and if Americans, why not
+Englishmen?"
+
+In this a great subject is discussed which would be too long for these
+pages; but I think that there now exists a feeling that literature can
+herself, for herself, produce a rank as effective as any that a Queen's
+minister can bestow. Surely it would be a repainting of the lily, an
+adding a flavour to the rose, a gilding of refined gold to create
+to-morrow a Lord Viscount Tennyson, a Baron Carlyle, or a Right
+Honourable Sir Robert Browning. And as for pay and pension, the less the
+better of it for any profession, unless so far as it may be payment made
+for work done. Then the higher the payment the better, in literature as
+in all other trades. It may be doubted even whether a special rank of
+its own be good for literature, such as that which is achieved by the
+happy possessors of the forty chairs of the Academy in France. Even
+though they had an angel to make the choice,--which they have not,--that
+angel would do more harm to the excluded than good to the selected.
+
+_Pendennis_, _Esmond_, and _The Newcomes_ followed _Vanity Fair_,--not
+very quickly indeed, always at an interval of two years,--in 1850, 1852,
+and 1854. As I purpose to devote a separate short chapter, or part of a
+chapter, to each of these, I need say nothing here of their special
+merits or demerits. _Esmond_ was brought out as a whole. The others
+appeared in numbers. "He lisped in numbers, for the numbers came." It is
+a mode of pronunciation in literature by no means very articulate, but
+easy of production and lucrative. But though easy it is seductive, and
+leads to idleness. An author by means of it can raise money and
+reputation on his book before he has written it, and when the pang of
+parturition is over in regard to one part, he feels himself entitled to
+a period of ease because the amount required for the next division will
+occupy him only half the month. This to Thackeray was so alluring that
+the entirety of the final half was not always given to the task. His
+self-reproaches and bemoanings when sometimes the day for reappearing
+would come terribly nigh, while yet the necessary amount of copy was
+far from being ready, were often very ludicrous and very sad;--ludicrous
+because he never told of his distress without adding to it something of
+ridicule which was irresistible, and sad because those who loved him
+best were aware that physical suffering had already fallen upon him, and
+that he was deterred by illness from the exercise of continuous energy.
+I myself did not know him till after the time now in question. My
+acquaintance with him was quite late in his life. But he has told me
+something of it, and I have heard from those who lived with him how
+continual were his sufferings. In 1854, he says in one of his letters to
+Mr. Reed,--the only private letters of his which I know to have been
+published; "I am to-day just out of bed after another, about the
+dozenth, severe fit of spasms which I have had this year. My book would
+have been written but for them." His work was always going on, but
+though not fuller of matter,--that would have been almost
+impossible,--would have been better in manner had he been delayed
+neither by suffering nor by that palsying of the energies which
+suffering produces.
+
+This ought to have been the happiest period of his life, and should have
+been very happy. He had become fairly easy in his circumstances. He had
+succeeded in his work, and had made for himself a great name. He was
+fond of popularity, and especially anxious to be loved by a small circle
+of friends. These good things he had thoroughly achieved. Immediately
+after the publication of _Vanity Fair_ he stood high among the literary
+heroes of his country, and had endeared himself especially to a special
+knot of friends. His face and figure, his six feet four in height, with
+his flowing hair, already nearly gray, and his broken nose, his broad
+forehead and ample chest, encountered everywhere either love or respect;
+and his daughters to him were all the world,--the bairns of whom he
+says, at the end of the _White Squall_ ballad;
+
+     I thought, as day was breaking,
+     My little girls were waking,
+     And smiling, and making
+       A prayer at home for me.
+
+Nothing could have been more tender or endearing than his relations with
+his children. But still there was a skeleton in his cupboard,--or rather
+two skeletons. His home had been broken up by his wife's malady, and his
+own health was shattered. When he was writing _Pendennis_, in 1849, he
+had a severe fever, and then those spasms came, of which four or five
+years afterwards he wrote to Mr. Reed. His home, as a home should be,
+was never restored to him,--or his health. Just at that period of life
+at which a man generally makes a happy exchange in taking his wife's
+drawing-room in lieu of the smoking-room of his club, and assumes those
+domestic ways of living which are becoming and pleasant for matured
+years, that drawing-room and those domestic ways were closed against
+him. The children were then no more than babies, as far as society was
+concerned,--things to kiss and play with, and make a home happy if they
+could only have had their mother with them. I have no doubt there were
+those who thought that Thackeray was very jolly under his adversity.
+Jolly he was. It was the manner of the man to be so,--if that continual
+playfulness which was natural to him, lying over a melancholy which was
+as continual, be compatible with jollity. He laughed, and ate, and
+drank, and threw his pearls about with miraculous profusion. But I fancy
+that he was far from happy. I remember once, when I was young,
+receiving advice as to the manner in which I had better spend my
+evenings; I was told that I ought to go home, drink tea, and read good
+books. It was excellent advice, but I found that the reading of good
+books in solitude was not an occupation congenial to me. It was so, I
+take it, with Thackeray. He did not like his lonely drawing-room, and
+went back to his life among the clubs by no means with contentment.
+
+In 1853, Thackeray having then his own two girls to provide for, added a
+third to his family, and adopted Amy Crowe, the daughter of an old
+friend, and sister of the well-known artist now among us. How it came to
+pass that she wanted a home, or that this special home suited her, it
+would be unnecessary here to tell even if I knew. But that he did give a
+home to this young lady, making her in all respects the same as another
+daughter, should be told of him. He was a man who liked to broaden his
+back for the support of others, and to make himself easy under such
+burdens. In 1862, she married a Thackeray cousin, a young officer with
+the Victoria Cross, Edward Thackeray, and went out to India,--where she
+died.
+
+In 1854, the year in which _The Newcomes_ came out, Thackeray had broken
+his close alliance with _Punch_. In December of that year there appeared
+from his pen an article in _The Quarterly_ on _John Leech's Pictures of
+Life and Character_. It is a rambling discourse on picture-illustration
+in general, full of interest, but hardly good as a criticism,--a portion
+of literary work for which he was not specially fitted. In it he tells
+us how Richard Doyle, the artist, had given up his work for _Punch_, not
+having been able, as a Roman Catholic, to endure the skits which, at
+that time, were appearing in one number after another against what was
+then called Papal aggression. The reviewer,--Thackeray himself,--then
+tells us of the secession of himself from the board of brethren.
+"Another member of Mr. Punch's cabinet, the biographer of _Jeames_, the
+author of _The Snob Papers_, resigned his functions, on account of Mr.
+Punch's assaults upon the present Emperor of the French nation, whose
+anger Jeames thought it was unpatriotic to arouse." How hard it must be
+for Cabinets to agree! This man or that is sure to have some pet
+conviction of his own, and the better the man the stronger the
+conviction! Then the reviewer went on in favour of the artist of whom he
+was specially speaking, making a comparison which must at the time have
+been odious enough to some of the brethren. "There can be no blinking
+the fact that in Mr. Punch's Cabinet John Leech is the right-hand man.
+Fancy a number of _Punch_ without Leech's pictures! What would you give
+for it?" Then he breaks out into strong admiration of that one
+friend,--perhaps with a little disregard as to the feelings of other
+friends.[3] This _Critical Review_, if it may properly be so called,--at
+any rate it is so named as now published,--is to be found in our
+author's collected works, in the same volume with _Catherine_. It is
+there preceded by another, from _The Westminster Review_, written
+fourteen years earlier, on _The Genius of Cruikshank_. This contains a
+descriptive catalogue of Cruikshank's works up to that period, and is
+interesting from the piquant style in which it is written. I fancy that
+these two are the only efforts of the kind which he made,--and in both
+he dealt with the two great caricaturists of his time, he himself being,
+in the imaginative part of a caricaturist's work, equal in power to
+either of them.
+
+We now come to a phase of Thackeray's life in which he achieved a
+remarkable success, attributable rather to his fame as a writer than to
+any particular excellence in the art which he then exercised. He took
+upon himself the functions of a lecturer, being moved to do so by a hope
+that he might thus provide a sum of money for the future sustenance of
+his children. No doubt he had been advised to this course, though I do
+not know from whom specially the advice may have come. Dickens had
+already considered the subject, but had not yet consented to read in
+public for money on his own account. John Forster, writing of the year
+1846, says of Dickens and the then only thought-of exercise of a new
+profession; "I continued to oppose, for reasons to be stated in their
+place, that which he had set his heart upon too strongly to abandon, and
+which I still can wish he had preferred to surrender with all that
+seemed to be its enormous gain." And again he says, speaking of a
+proposition which had been made to Dickens from the town of Bradford;
+"At first this was entertained, but was abandoned, with some reluctance,
+upon the argument that to become publicly a reader must alter, without
+improving, his position publicly as a writer, and that it was a change
+to be justified only when the higher calling should have failed of the
+old success." The meaning of this was that the money to be made would
+be sweet, but that the descent to a profession which was considered to
+be lower than that of literature itself would carry with it something
+that was bitter. It was as though one who had sat on the woolsack as
+Lord Chancellor should raise the question whether for the sake of the
+income attached to it, he might, without disgrace, occupy a seat on a
+lower bench; as though an architect should consider with himself the
+propriety of making his fortune as a contractor; or the head of a
+college lower his dignity, while he increased his finances, by taking
+pupils. When such discussions arise, money generally carries the
+day,--and should do so. When convinced that money may be earned without
+disgrace, we ought to allow money to carry the day. When we talk of
+sordid gain and filthy lucre, we are generally hypocrites. If gains be
+sordid and lucre filthy, where is the priest, the lawyer, the doctor, or
+the man of literature, who does not wish for dirty hands? An income, and
+the power of putting by something for old age, something for those who
+are to come after, is the wholesome and acknowledged desire of all
+professional men. Thackeray having children, and being gifted with no
+power of making his money go very far, was anxious enough on the
+subject. We may say now, that had he confined himself to his pen, he
+would not have wanted while he lived, but would have left but little
+behind him. That he was anxious we have seen, by his attempts to
+subsidise his literary gains by a Government office. I cannot but think
+that had he undertaken public duties for which he was ill qualified, and
+received a salary which he could hardly have earned, he would have done
+less for his fame than by reading to the public. Whether he did that
+well or ill, he did it well enough for the money. The people who heard
+him, and who paid for their seats, were satisfied with their
+bargain,--as they were also in the case of Dickens; and I venture to say
+that in becoming publicly a reader, neither did Dickens or Thackeray
+"alter his position as a writer," and "that it was a change to be
+justified," though the success of the old calling had in no degree
+waned. What Thackeray did enabled him to leave a comfortable income for
+his children, and one earned honestly, with the full approval of the
+world around him.
+
+Having saturated his mind with the literature of Queen Anne's time,--not
+probably in the first instance as a preparation for _Esmond_, but in
+such a way as to induce him to create an Esmond,--he took the authors
+whom he knew so well as the subject for his first series of lectures. He
+wrote _The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century_ in 1851, while
+he must have been at work on _Esmond_, and first delivered the course at
+Willis's Rooms in that year. He afterwards went with these through many
+of our provincial towns, and then carried them to the United States,
+where he delivered them to large audiences in the winter of 1852 and
+1853. Some few words as to the merits of the composition I will
+endeavour to say in another place. I myself never heard him lecture, and
+can therefore give no opinion of the performance. That which I have
+heard from others has been very various. It is, I think, certain that he
+had none of those wonderful gifts of elocution which made it a pleasure
+to listen to Dickens, whatever he read or whatever he said; nor had he
+that power of application by using which his rival taught himself with
+accuracy the exact effect to be given to every word. The rendering of a
+piece by Dickens was composed as an oratorio is composed, and was then
+studied by heart as music is studied. And the piece was all given by
+memory, without any looking at the notes or words. There was nothing of
+this with Thackeray. But the thing read was in itself of great interest
+to educated people. The words were given clearly, with sufficient
+intonation for easy understanding, so that they who were willing to hear
+something from him felt on hearing that they had received full value for
+their money. At any rate, the lectures were successful. The money was
+made,--and was kept.
+
+He came from his first trip to America to his new house in Onslow
+Square, and then published _The Newcomes_. This, too, was one of his
+great works, as to which I shall have to speak hereafter. Then, having
+enjoyed his success in the first attempt to lecture, he prepared a
+second series. He never essayed the kind of reading which with Dickens
+became so wonderfully popular. Dickens recited portions from his
+well-known works. Thackeray wrote his lectures expressly for the
+purpose. They have since been added to his other literature, but they
+were prepared as lectures. The second series were _The Four Georges_. In
+a lucrative point of view they were even more successful than the first,
+the sum of money realised in the United States having been considerable.
+In England they were less popular, even if better attended, the subject
+chosen having been distasteful to many. There arose the question whether
+too much freedom had not been taken with an office which, though it be
+no longer considered to be founded on divine right, is still as sacred
+as can be anything that is human. If there is to remain among us a
+sovereign, that sovereign, even though divested of political power,
+should be endowed with all that personal respect can give. If we wish
+ourselves to be high, we should treat that which is over us as high.
+And this should not depend altogether on personal character, though we
+know,--as we have reason to know,--how much may be added to the firmness
+of the feeling by personal merit. The respect of which we speak should,
+in the strongest degree, be a possession of the immediate occupant, and
+will naturally become dim,--or perhaps be exaggerated,--in regard to the
+past, as history or fable may tell of them. No one need hesitate to
+speak his mind of King John, let him be ever so strong a stickler for
+the privileges of majesty. But there are degrees of distance, and the
+throne of which we wish to preserve the dignity seems to be assailed
+when unmeasured evil is said of one who has sat there within our own
+memory. There would seem to each of us to be a personal affront were a
+departed relative delineated with all those faults by which we must own
+that even our near relatives have been made imperfect. It is a general
+conviction as to this which so frequently turns the biography of those
+recently dead into mere eulogy. The fictitious charity which is enjoined
+by the _de mortuis nil nisi bonum_ banishes truth. The feeling of which
+I speak almost leads me at this moment to put down my pen. And, if so
+much be due to all subjects, is less due to a sovereign?
+
+Considerations such as these diminished, I think, the popularity of
+Thackeray's second series of lectures; or, rather, not their popularity,
+but the estimation in which they were held. On this head he defended
+himself more than once very gallantly, and had a great deal to say on
+his side of the question. "Suppose, for example, in America,--in
+Philadelphia or in New York,--that I had spoken about George IV. in
+terms of praise and affected reverence, do you believe they would have
+hailed his name with cheers, or have heard it with anything of
+respect?" And again; "We degrade our own honour and the sovereign's by
+unduly and unjustly praising him; and the mere slaverer and flatterer is
+one who comes forward, as it were, with flash notes, and pays with false
+coin his tribute to Caesar. I don't disguise that I feel somehow on my
+trial here for loyalty,--for honest English feeling." This was said by
+Thackeray at a dinner at Edinburgh, in 1857, and shows how the matter
+rested on his mind. Thackeray's loyalty was no doubt true enough, but
+was mixed with but little of reverence. He was one who revered modesty
+and innocence rather than power, against which he had in the bottom of
+his heart something of republican tendency. His leaning was no doubt of
+the more manly kind. But in what he said at Edinburgh he hardly hit the
+nail on the head. No one had suggested that he should have said good
+things of a king which he did not believe to be true. The question was
+whether it may not be well sometimes for us to hold our tongues. An
+American literary man, here in England, would not lecture on the morals
+of Hamilton, on the manners of General Jackson, on the general amenities
+of President Johnson.
+
+In 1857 Thackeray stood for Oxford, in the liberal interest, in
+opposition to Mr. Cardwell. He had been induced to do this by his old
+friend Charles Neate, who himself twice sat for Oxford, and died now not
+many months since. He polled 1,017 votes, against 1,070 by Mr. Cardwell;
+and was thus again saved by his good fortune from attempting to fill a
+situation in which he would not have shone. There are, no doubt, many to
+whom a seat in Parliament comes almost as the birthright of a well-born
+and well-to-do English gentleman. They go there with no more idea of
+shining than they do when they are elected to a first-class
+club;--hardly with more idea of being useful. It is the thing to do, and
+the House of Commons is the place where a man ought to be--for a certain
+number of hours. Such men neither succeed nor fail, for nothing is
+expected of them. From such a one as Thackeray something would have been
+expected, which would not have been forthcoming. He was too desultory
+for regular work,--full of thought, but too vague for practical
+questions. He could not have endured to sit for two or three hours at a
+time with his hat over his eyes, pretending to listen, as is the duty of
+a good legislator. He was a man intolerant of tedium, and in the best of
+his time impatient of slow work. Nor, though his liberal feelings were
+very strong, were his political convictions definite or accurate. He was
+a man who mentally drank in much, feeding his fancy hourly with what he
+saw, what he heard, what he read, and then pouring it all out with an
+immense power of amplification. But it would have been impossible for
+him to study and bring home to himself the various points of a
+complicated bill with a hundred and fifty clauses. In becoming a man of
+letters, and taking that branch of letters which fell to him, he
+obtained the special place that was fitted for him. He was a round peg
+in a round hole. There was no other hole which he would have fitted
+nearly so well. But he had his moment of political ambition, like
+others,--and paid a thousand pounds for his attempt.
+
+In 1857 the first number of _The Virginians_ appeared, and the
+last,--the twenty-fourth,--in October, 1859. This novel, as all my
+readers are aware, is a continuance of _Esmond_, and will be spoken of
+in its proper place. He was then forty-eight years old, very gray, with
+much of age upon him, which had come from suffering,--age shown by
+dislike of activity and by an old man's way of thinking about many
+things,--speaking as though the world were all behind him instead of
+before; but still with a stalwart outward bearing, very erect in his
+gait, and a countenance peculiarly expressive and capable of much
+dignity. I speak of his personal appearance at this time, because it was
+then only that I became acquainted with him. In 1859 he undertook the
+last great work of his life, the editorship of _The Cornhill Magazine_,
+a periodical set on foot by Mr. George Smith, of the house of Smith and
+Elder, with an amount of energy greater than has generally been bestowed
+upon such enterprises. It will be well remembered still how much _The
+Cornhill_ was talked about and thought of before it first appeared, and
+how much of that thinking and talking was due to the fact that Mr.
+Thackeray was to edit it. _Macmillan's_, I think, was the first of the
+shilling magazines, having preceded _The Cornhill_ by a month, and it
+would ill become me, who have been a humble servant to each of them, to
+give to either any preference. But it must be acknowledged that a great
+deal was expected from _The Cornhill_, and I think it will be confessed
+that it was the general opinion that a great deal was given by it.
+Thackeray had become big enough to give a special _eclat_ to any
+literary exploit to which he attached himself. Since the days of _The
+Constitutional_ he had fought his way up the ladder and knew how to take
+his stand there with an assurance of success. When it became known to
+the world of readers that a new magazine was to appear under Thackeray's
+editorship, the world of readers was quite sure that there would be a
+large sale. Of the first number over one hundred and ten thousand were
+sold, and of the second and third over one hundred thousand. It is in
+the nature of such things that the sale should fall off when the novelty
+is over. People believe that a new delight has come, a new joy for ever,
+and then find that the joy is not quite so perfect or enduring as they
+had expected. But the commencement of such enterprises may be taken as a
+measure of what will follow. The magazine, either by Thackeray's name or
+by its intrinsic merits,--probably by both,--achieved a great success.
+My acquaintance with him grew from my having been one of his staff from
+the first.
+
+About two months before the opening day I wrote to him suggesting that
+he should accept from me a series of four short stories on which I was
+engaged. I got back a long letter in which he said nothing about my
+short stories, but asking whether I could go to work at once and let him
+have a long novel, so that it might begin with the first number. At the
+same time I heard from the publisher, who suggested some interesting
+little details as to honorarium. The little details were very
+interesting, but absolutely no time was allowed to me. It was required
+that the first portion of my book should be in the printer's hands
+within a month. Now it was my theory,--and ever since this occurrence
+has been my practice,--to see the end of my own work before the public
+should see the commencement.[4] If I did this thing I must not only
+abandon my theory, but instantly contrive a story, or begin to write it
+before it was contrived. That was what I did, urged by the interesting
+nature of the details. A novelist cannot always at the spur of the
+moment make his plot and create his characters who shall, with an
+arranged sequence of events, live with a certain degree of eventful
+decorum, through that portion of their lives which is to be portrayed. I
+hesitated, but allowed myself to be allured to what I felt to be wrong,
+much dreading the event. How seldom is it that theories stand the wear
+and tear of practice! I will not say that the story which came was good,
+but it was received with greater favour than any I had written before or
+have written since. I think that almost anything would have been then
+accepted coming under Thackeray's editorship.
+
+I was astonished that work should be required in such haste, knowing
+that much preparation had been made, and that the service of almost any
+English novelist might have been obtained if asked for in due time. It
+was my readiness that was needed, rather than any other gift! The riddle
+was read to me after a time. Thackeray had himself intended to begin
+with one of his own great novels, but had put it off till it was too
+late. _Lovel the Widower_ was commenced at the same time with my own
+story, but _Lovel the Widower_ was not substantial enough to appear as
+the principal joint at the banquet. Though your guests will undoubtedly
+dine off the little delicacies you provide for them, there must be a
+heavy saddle of mutton among the viands prepared. I was the saddle of
+mutton, Thackeray having omitted to get his joint down to the fire in
+time enough. My fitness lay in my capacity for quick roasting.
+
+It may be interesting to give a list of the contributors to the first
+number. My novel called _Framley Parsonage_ came first. At this banquet
+the saddle of mutton was served before the delicacies. Then there was a
+paper by Sir John Bowring on _The Chinese and Outer Barbarians_. The
+commencing number of _Lovel the Widower_ followed. George Lewes came
+next with his first chapters of _Studies in Animal Life_. Then there was
+Father Prout's _Inauguration Ode_, dedicated to the author of _Vanity
+Fair_,--which should have led the way. I need hardly say that Father
+Prout was the Rev. F. Mahony. Then followed _Our Volunteers_, by Sir
+John Burgoyne; _A Man of Letters of the Last Generation_, by Thornton
+Hunt; _The Search for Sir John Franklin_, from a private journal of an
+officer of the Fox, now Sir Allen Young; and _The First Morning of
+1860_, by Mrs. Archer Clive. The number was concluded by the first of
+those _Roundabout Papers_ by Thackeray himself, which became so
+delightful a portion of the literature of _The Cornhill Magazine_.
+
+It would be out of my power, and hardly interesting, to give an entire
+list of those who wrote for _The Cornhill_ under Thackeray's editorial
+direction. But I may name a few, to show how strong was the support
+which he received. Those who contributed to the first number I have
+named. Among those who followed were Alfred Tennyson, Jacob Omnium, Lord
+Houghton, William Russell, Mrs. Beecher Stowe, Mrs. Browning, Robert
+Bell, George Augustus Sala, Mrs. Gaskell, James Hinton, Mary Howitt,
+John Kaye, Charles Lever, Frederick Locker, Laurence Oliphant, John
+Ruskin, Fitzjames Stephen, T. A. Trollope, Henry Thompson, Herman
+Merivale, Adelaide Proctor, Matthew Arnold, the present Lord Lytton, and
+Miss Thackeray, now Mrs. Ritchie. Thackeray continued the editorship for
+two years and four months, namely, up to April, 1862; but, as all
+readers will remember, he continued to write for it till he died, the
+day before Christmas Day, in 1863. His last contribution was, I think, a
+paper written for and published in the November number, called,
+"_Strange to say on Club Paper_," in which he vindicated Lord Clyde from
+the accusation of having taken the club stationery home with him. It was
+not a great subject, for no one could or did believe that the
+Field-Marshal had been guilty of any meanness; but the handling of it
+has made it interesting, and his indignation has made it beautiful.
+
+The magazine was a great success, but justice compels me to say that
+Thackeray was not a good editor. As he would have been an indifferent
+civil servant, an indifferent member of Parliament, so was he
+perfunctory as an editor. It has sometimes been thought well to select a
+popular literary man as an editor; first, because his name will attract,
+and then with an idea that he who can write well himself will be a
+competent judge of the writings of others. The first may sell a
+magazine, but will hardly make it good; and the second will not avail
+much, unless the editor so situated be patient enough to read what is
+sent to him. Of a magazine editor it is required that he should be
+patient, scrupulous, judicious, but above all things hard-hearted. I
+think it may be doubted whether Thackeray did bring himself to read the
+basketfuls of manuscripts with which he was deluged, but he probably
+did, sooner or later, read the touching little private notes by which
+they were accompanied,--the heartrending appeals, in which he was told
+that if this or the other little article could be accepted and paid for,
+a starving family might be saved from starvation for a month. He tells
+us how he felt on receiving such letters in one of his _Roundabout
+Papers_, which he calls "_Thorns in the cushion_." "How am I to know,"
+he says--"though to be sure I begin to know now,--as I take the letters
+off the tray, which of those envelopes contains a real _bona fide_
+letter, and which a thorn? One of the best invitations this year I
+mistook for a thorn letter, and kept it without opening." Then he gives
+the sample of a thorn letter. It is from a governess with a poem, and
+with a prayer for insertion and payment. "We have known better days,
+sir. I have a sick and widowed mother to maintain, and little brothers
+and sisters who look to me." He could not stand this, and the money
+would be sent, out of his own pocket, though the poem might
+be--postponed, till happily it should be lost.
+
+From such material a good editor could not be made. Nor, in truth, do I
+think that he did much of the editorial work. I had once made an
+arrangement, not with Thackeray, but with the proprietors, as to some
+little story. The story was sent back to me by Thackeray--rejected.
+_Virginibus puerisque!_ That was the gist of his objection. There was a
+project in a gentleman's mind,--as told in my story,--to run away with a
+married woman! Thackeray's letter was very kind, very regretful,--full
+of apology for such treatment to such a contributor. But--_Virginibus
+puerisque!_ I was quite sure that Thackeray had not taken the trouble to
+read the story himself. Some moral deputy had read it, and disapproving,
+no doubt properly, of the little project to which I have alluded, had
+incited the editor to use his authority. That Thackeray had suffered
+when he wrote it was easy to see, fearing that he was giving pain to one
+he would fain have pleased. I wrote him a long letter in return, as full
+of drollery as I knew how to make it. In four or five days there came a
+reply in the same spirit,--boiling over with fun. He had kept my letter
+by him, not daring to open it,--as he says that he did with that
+eligible invitation. At last he had given it to one of his girls to
+examine,--to see whether the thorn would be too sharp, whether I had
+turned upon him with reproaches. A man so susceptible, so prone to work
+by fits and starts, so unmethodical, could not have been a good editor.
+
+In 1862 he went into the new house which he had built for himself at
+Palace Green. I remember well, while this was still being built, how his
+friends used to discuss his imprudence in building it. Though he had
+done well with himself, and had made and was making a large income, was
+he entitled to live in a house the rent of which could not be counted at
+less than from five hundred to six hundred pounds a year? Before he had
+been there two years, he solved the question by dying,--when the house
+was sold for two thousand pounds more than it had cost. He himself, in
+speaking of his project, was wont to declare that he was laying out his
+money in the best way he could for the interest of his children;--and it
+turned out that he was right.
+
+In 1863 he died in the house which he had built, and at the period of
+his death was writing a new novel in numbers, called _Denis Duval_. In
+_The Cornhill_, _The Adventures of Philip_ had appeared. This new
+enterprise was destined for commencement on 1st January, 1864, and,
+though the writer was gone, it kept its promise, as far as it went.
+Three numbers, and what might probably have been intended for half of a
+fourth, appeared. It may be seen, therefore, that he by no means held to
+my theory, that the author should see the end of his work before the
+public sees the commencement. But neither did Dickens or Mrs. Gaskell,
+both of whom died with stories not completed, which, when they died,
+were in the course of publication. All the evidence goes against the
+necessity of such precaution. Nevertheless, were I giving advice to a
+tiro in novel writing, I should recommend it.
+
+With the last chapter of _Denis Duval_ was published in the magazine a
+set of notes on the book, taken for the most part from Thackeray's own
+papers, and showing how much collateral work he had given to the
+fabrication of his novel. No doubt in preparing other tales, especially
+_Esmond_, a very large amount of such collateral labour was found
+necessary. He was a man who did very much of such work, delighting to
+deal in little historical incidents. They will be found in almost
+everything that he did, and I do not know that he was ever accused of
+gross mistakes. But I doubt whether on that account he should be called
+a laborious man. He could go down to Winchelsea, when writing about the
+little town, to see in which way the streets lay, and to provide himself
+with what we call local colouring. He could jot down the suggestions, as
+they came to his mind, of his future story. There was an irregularity in
+such work which was to his taste. His very notes would be delightful to
+read, partaking of the nature of pearls when prepared only for his own
+use. But he could not bring himself to sit at his desk and do an
+allotted task day after day. He accomplished what must be considered as
+quite a sufficient life's work. He had about twenty-five years for the
+purpose, and that which he has left is an ample produce for the time.
+Nevertheless he was a man of fits and starts, who, not having been in
+his early years drilled to method, never achieved it in his career.
+
+He died on the day before Christmas Day, as has been said above, very
+suddenly, in his bed, early in the morning, in the fifty-third year of
+his life. To those who saw him about in the world there seemed to be no
+reason why he should not continue his career for the next twenty years.
+But those who knew him were so well aware of his constant sufferings,
+that, though they expected no sudden catastrophe, they were hardly
+surprised when it came. His death was probably caused by those spasms of
+which he had complained ten years before, in his letter to Mr. Reed. On
+the last day but one of the year, a crowd of sorrowing friends stood
+over his grave as he was laid to rest in Kensal Green; and, as quickly
+afterwards as it could be executed, a bust to his memory was put up in
+Westminster Abbey. It is a fine work of art, by Marochetti; but, as a
+likeness, is, I think, less effective than that which was modelled, and
+then given to the Garrick Club, by Durham, and has lately been put into
+marble, and now stands in the upper vestibule of the club. Neither of
+them, in my opinion, give so accurate an idea of the man as a statuette
+in bronze, by Boehm, of which two or three copies were made. One of them
+is in my possession. It has been alleged, in reference to this, that
+there is something of a caricature in the lengthiness of the figure, in
+the two hands thrust into the trousers pockets, and in the protrusion of
+the chin. But this feeling has originated in the general idea that any
+face, or any figure, not made by the artist more beautiful or more
+graceful than the original is an injustice. The face must be smoother,
+the pose of the body must be more dignified, the proportions more
+perfect, than in the person represented, or satisfaction is not felt.
+Mr. Boehm has certainly not flattered, but, as far as my eye can judge,
+he has given the figure of the man exactly as he used to stand before
+us. I have a portrait of him in crayon, by Samuel Lawrence, as like, but
+hardly as natural.
+
+A little before his death Thackeray told me that he had then succeeded
+in replacing the fortune which he had lost as a young man. Ho had, in
+fact, done better, for he left an income of seven hundred and fifty
+pounds behind him.
+
+It has been said of Thackeray that he was a cynic. This has been said so
+generally, that the charge against him has become proverbial. This,
+stated barely, leaves one of two impressions on the mind, or perhaps the
+two together,--that this cynicism was natural to his character and came
+out in his life, or that it is the characteristic of his writings. Of
+the nature of his writings generally, I will speak in the last chapter
+of this little book. As to his personal character as a cynic, I must
+find room to quote the following first stanzas of the little poem which
+appeared to his memory in _Punch_, from the pen of Shirley Brooks;
+
+     He was a cynic! By his life all wrought
+       Of generous acts, mild words, and gentle ways;
+     His heart wide open to all kindly thought,
+       His hand so quick to give, his tongue to praise!
+
+     He was a cynic! You might read it writ
+       In that broad brow, crowned with its silver hair;
+     In those blue eyes, with childlike candour lit,
+       In that sweet smile his lips were wont to wear!
+
+     He was a cynic! By the love that clung
+       About him from his children, friends, and kin;
+     By the sharp pain light pen and gossip tongue
+       Wrought in him, chafing the soft heart within!
+
+The spirit and nature of the man have been caught here with absolute
+truth. A public man should of course be judged from his public work. If
+he wrote as a cynic,--a point which I will not discuss here,--it may be
+fair that he who is to be known as a writer should be so called. But, as
+a man, I protest that it would be hard to find an individual farther
+removed from the character. Over and outside his fancy, which was the
+gift which made him so remarkable,--a certain feminine softness was the
+most remarkable trait about him. To give some immediate pleasure was the
+great delight of his life,--a sovereign to a schoolboy, gloves to a
+girl, a dinner to a man, a compliment to a woman. His charity was
+overflowing. His generosity excessive. I heard once a story of woe from
+a man who was the dear friend of both of us. The gentleman wanted a
+large sum of money instantly,--something under two thousand pounds,--had
+no natural friends who could provide it, but must go utterly to the wall
+without it. Pondering over this sad condition of things just revealed to
+me, I met Thackeray between the two mounted heroes at the Horse Guards,
+and told him the story. "Do you mean to say that I am to find two
+thousand pounds?" he said, angrily, with some expletives. I explained
+that I had not even suggested the doing of anything,--only that we might
+discuss the matter. Then there came over his face a peculiar smile, and
+a wink in his eye, and he whispered his suggestion, as though half
+ashamed of his meanness. "I'll go half," he said, "if anybody will do
+the rest." And he did go half, at a day or two's notice, though the
+gentleman was no more than simply a friend. I am glad to be able to add
+that the money was quickly repaid. I could tell various stories of the
+same kind, only that I lack space, and that they, if simply added one to
+the other, would lack interest.
+
+He was no cynic, but he was a satirist, and could now and then be a
+satirist in conversation, hitting very hard when he did hit. When he was
+in America he met at dinner a literary gentleman of high character,
+middle-aged, and most dignified deportment. The gentleman was one whose
+character and acquirements stood very high,--deservedly so,--but who, in
+society, had that air of wrapping his toga around him, which adds, or is
+supposed to add, many cubits to a man's height. But he had a broken
+nose. At dinner he talked much of the tender passion, and did so in a
+manner which stirred up Thackeray's feeling of the ridiculous. "What has
+the world come to," said Thackeray out loud to the table, "when two
+broken-nosed old fogies like you and me sit talking about love to each
+other!" The gentleman was astounded, and could only sit wrapping his
+toga in silent dismay for the rest of the evening. Thackeray then, as at
+other similar times, had no idea of giving pain, but when he saw a
+foible he put his foot upon it, and tried to stamp it out.
+
+Such is my idea of the man whom many call a cynic, but whom I regard as
+one of the most soft-hearted of human beings, sweet as Charity itself,
+who went about the world dropping pearls, doing good, and never wilfully
+inflicting a wound.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] The report that he had lost all his money and was going to live by
+painting in Paris, was still prevalent in London in 1836. Macready, on
+the 27th April of that year, says in his _Diary_; "At Garrick Club,
+where I dined and saw the papers. Met Thackeray, who has spent all his
+fortune, and is now about to settle in Paris, I believe as an artist."
+But at this time he was, in truth, turning to literature as a
+profession.
+
+[2] The article was written by Abraham Hayward, who is still with us,
+and was no doubt instigated by a desire to assist Thackeray in his
+struggle upwards, in which it succeeded.
+
+[3] For a week there existed at the _Punch_ office a grudge against
+Thackeray in reference to this awkward question: "What would you give
+for your _Punch_ without John Leech?" Then he asked the confraternity to
+dinner,--_more Thackerayano_,--and the confraternity came. Who can doubt
+but they were very jolly over the little blunder? For years afterwards
+Thackeray was a guest at the well-known _Punch_ dinner, though he was no
+longer one of the contributors.
+
+[4] I had begun an Irish story and half finished it, which would reach
+just the required length. Would that do, I asked. I was civilly told
+that my Irish story would no doubt be charming, but was not quite the
+thing that was wanted. Could I not begin a new one,--English,--and if
+possible about clergymen? The details were so interesting that had a
+couple of archbishops been demanded, I should have produced them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+FRASER'S MAGAZINE AND PUNCH.
+
+
+How Thackeray commenced his connection with _Fraser's Magazine_ I am
+unable to say. We know how he had come to London with a view to a
+literary career, and that he had at one time made an attempt to earn his
+bread as a correspondent to a newspaper from Paris. It is probable that
+he became acquainted with the redoubtable Oliver Yorke, otherwise Dr.
+Maginn, or some of his staff, through the connection which he had thus
+opened with the press. He was not known, or at any rate he was
+unrecognised, by _Fraser_ in January, 1835, in which month an amusing
+catalogue was given of the writers then employed, with portraits of
+them, all seated at a symposium. I can trace no article to his pen
+before November, 1837, when the _Yellowplush Correspondence_ was
+commenced, though it is hardly probable that he should have commenced
+with a work of so much pretension. There had been published a volume
+called _My Book, or the Anatomy of Conduct_, by John Skelton, and a very
+absurd book no doubt it was. We may presume that it contained maxims on
+etiquette, and that it was intended to convey in print those invaluable
+lessons on deportment which, as Dickens has told us, were subsequently
+given by Mr. Turveydrop, in the academy kept by him for that purpose.
+Thackeray took this as his foundation for the _Fashionable Fax and
+Polite Annygoats_, by Jeames Yellowplush, with which he commenced those
+repeated attacks against snobbism which he delighted to make through a
+considerable portion of his literary life. Oliver Yorke has himself
+added four or five pages of his own to Thackeray's lucubrations; and
+with the second, and some future numbers, there appeared illustrations
+by Thackeray himself, illustrations at this time not having been common
+with the magazine. From all this I gather that the author was already
+held in estimation by _Fraser's_ confraternity. I remember well my own
+delight with _Yellowplush_ at the time, and how I inquired who was the
+author. It was then that I first heard Thackeray's name.
+
+The _Yellowplush Papers_ were continued through nine numbers. No further
+reference was made to Mr. Skelton and his book beyond that given at the
+beginning of the first number, and the satire is only shown by the
+attempt made by Yellowplush, the footman, to give his ideas generally on
+the manners of noble life. The idea seems to be that a gentleman may, in
+heart and in action, be as vulgar as a footman. No doubt he may, but the
+chances are very much that he won't. But the virtue of the memoir does
+not consist in the lessons, but in the general drollery of the letters.
+The "orthogwaphy is inaccuwate," as a certain person says in the
+memoirs,--"so inaccuwate" as to take a positive study to "compwehend"
+it; but the joke, though old, is so handled as to be very amusing.
+Thackeray soon rushes away from his criticisms on snobbism to other
+matters. There are the details of a card-sharping enterprise, in which
+we cannot but feel that we recognise something of the author's own
+experiences in the misfortunes of Mr. Dawkins; there is the Earl of
+Crab's, and then the first of those attacks which he was tempted to
+make on the absurdities of his brethren of letters, and the only one
+which now has the appearance of having been ill-natured. His first
+victims were Dr. Dionysius Lardner and Mr. Edward Bulwer Lytton, as he
+was then. We can surrender the doctor to the whip of the satirist; and
+for "Sawedwadgeorgeearllittnbulwig," as the novelist is made to call
+himself, we can well believe that he must himself have enjoyed the
+_Yellowplush Memoirs_ if he ever re-read them in after life. The speech
+in which he is made to dissuade the footman from joining the world of
+letters is so good that I will venture to insert it: "Bullwig was
+violently affected; a tear stood in his glistening i. 'Yellowplush,'
+says he, seizing my hand, 'you _are_ right. Quit not your present
+occupation; black boots, clean knives, wear plush all your life, but
+don't turn literary man. Look at me. I am the first novelist in Europe.
+I have ranged with eagle wings over the wide regions of literature, and
+perched on every eminence in its turn. I have gazed with eagle eyes on
+the sun of philosophy, and fathomed the mysterious depths of the human
+mind. All languages are familiar to me, all thoughts are known to me,
+all men understood by me. I have gathered wisdom from the honeyed lips
+of Plato, as we wandered in the gardens of the Academies; wisdom, too,
+from the mouth of Job Johnson, as we smoked our backy in Seven Dials.
+Such must be the studies, and such is the mission, in this world of the
+Poet-Philosopher. But the knowledge is only emptiness; the initiation is
+but misery; the initiated a man shunned and banned by his fellows. Oh!'
+said Bullwig, clasping his hands, and throwing his fine i's up to the
+chandelier, 'the curse of Pwomethus descends upon his wace. Wath and
+punishment pursue them from genewation to genewation! Wo to genius, the
+heaven-scaler, the fire-stealer! Wo and thrice-bitter desolation! Earth
+is the wock on which Zeus, wemorseless, stwetches his withing
+wictim;--men, the vultures that feed and fatten on him. Ai, ai! it is
+agony eternal,--gwoaning and solitawy despair! And you, Yellowplush,
+would penetwate these mystewies; you would waise the awful veil, and
+stand in the twemendous Pwesence. Beware, as you value your peace,
+beware! Withdraw, wash Neophyte! For heaven's sake! O for heaven's
+sake!'--Here he looked round with agony;--'give me a glass of
+bwandy-and-water, for this clawet is beginning to disagwee with me.'" It
+was thus that Thackeray began that vein of satire on his contemporaries
+of which it may be said that the older he grew the more amusing it was,
+and at the same time less likely to hurt the feelings of the author
+satirised.
+
+The next tale of any length from Thackeray's pen, in the magazine, was
+that called _Catherine_, which is the story taken from the life of a
+wretched woman called Catherine Hayes. It is certainly not pleasant
+reading, and was not written with a pleasant purpose. It assumes to have
+come from the pen of Ikey Solomon, of Horsemonger Lane, and its object
+is to show how disgusting would be the records of thieves, cheats, and
+murderers if their doings and language were described according to their
+nature instead of being handled in such a way as to create sympathy, and
+therefore imitation. Bulwer's _Eugene Aram_, Harrison Ainsworth's _Jack
+Sheppard_, and Dickens' Nancy were in his mind, and it was thus that he
+preached his sermon against the selection of such heroes and heroines by
+the novelists of the day. "Be it granted," he says, in his epilogue,
+"Solomon is dull; but don't attack his morality. He humbly submits
+that, in his poem, no man shall mistake virtue for vice, no man shall
+allow a single sentiment of pity or admiration to enter his bosom for
+any character in the poem, it being from beginning to end a scene of
+unmixed rascality, performed by persons who never deviate into good
+feeling." The intention is intelligible enough, but such a story neither
+could have been written nor read,--certainly not written by Thackeray,
+nor read by the ordinary reader of a first-class magazine,--had he not
+been enabled to adorn it by infinite wit. Captain Brock, though a brave
+man, is certainly not described as an interesting or gallant soldier;
+but he is possessed of great resources. Captain Macshane, too, is a
+thorough blackguard; but he is one with a dash of loyalty about him, so
+that the reader can almost sympathise with him, and is tempted to say
+that Ikey Solomon has not quite kept his promise.
+
+_Catherine_ appeared in 1839 and 1840. In the latter of those years _The
+Shabby Genteel_ story also came out. Then in 1841 there followed _The
+History of Samuel Titmarsh and the Great Hoggarty Diamond_, illustrated
+by Samuel's cousin, Michael Angelo. But though so announced in _Fraser_,
+there were no illustrations, and those attached to the story in later
+editions are not taken from sketches by Thackeray. This, as far as I
+know, was the first use of the name Titmarsh, and seems to indicate some
+intention on the part of the author of creating a hoax as to two
+personages,--one the writer and the other the illustrator. If it were so
+he must soon have dropped the idea. In the last paragraph he has shaken
+off his cousin Michael. The main object of the story is to expose the
+villany of bubble companies, and the danger they run who venture to have
+dealings with city matters which they do not understand. I cannot but
+think that he altered his mind and changed his purpose while he was
+writing it, actuated probably by that editorial monition as to its
+length.
+
+In 1842 were commenced _The Confessions of George Fitz-Boodle_, which
+were continued into 1843. I do not think that they attracted much
+attention, or that they have become peculiarly popular since. They are
+supposed to contain the reminiscences of a younger son, who moans over
+his poverty, complains of womankind generally, laughs at the world all
+round, and intersperses his pages with one or two excellent ballads. I
+quote one, written for the sake of affording a parody, with the parody
+along with it, because the two together give so strong an example of the
+condition of Thackeray's mind in regard to literary products. The
+"humbug" of everything, the pretence, the falseness of affected
+sentiment, the remoteness of poetical pathos from the true condition of
+the average minds of men and women, struck him so strongly, that he
+sometimes allowed himself almost to feel,--or at any rate, to say,--that
+poetical expression, as being above nature, must be unnatural. He had
+declared to himself that all humbug was odious, and should be by him
+laughed down to the extent of his capacity. His Yellowplush, his
+Catherine Hayes, his Fitz-Boodle, his Barry Lyndon, and Becky Sharp,
+with many others of this kind, were all invented and treated for this
+purpose and after this fashion. I shall have to say more on the same
+subject when I come to _The Snob Papers_. In this instance he wrote a
+very pretty ballad, _The Willow Tree_,--so good that if left by itself
+it would create no idea of absurdity or extravagant pathos in the mind
+of the ordinary reader,--simply that he might render his own work absurd
+by his own parody.
+
+     THE WILLOW-TREE.
+
+     No. I.
+
+          THE WILLOW-TREE.
+
+          No. II.
+
+     Know ye the willow-tree,
+       Whose gray leaves quiver,
+     Whispering gloomily
+       To yon pale river?
+     Lady, at eventide
+       Wander not near it!
+     They say its branches hide
+       A sad lost spirit!
+
+          Long by the willow-tree
+            Vainly they sought her,
+          Wild rang the mother's screams
+            O'er the gray water.
+          "Where is my lovely one?
+            Where is my daughter?
+
+          Rouse thee, sir constable--
+            Rouse thee and look.
+          Fisherman, bring your net,
+            Boatman, your hook.
+          Beat in the lily-beds,
+            Dive in the brook."
+
+     Once to the willow-tree
+       A maid came fearful,
+     Pale seemed her cheek to be,
+       Her blue eye tearful.
+     Soon as she saw the tree,
+       Her steps moved fleeter.
+     No one was there--ah me!--
+       No one to meet her!
+
+          Vainly the constable
+            Shouted and called her.
+          Vainly the fisherman
+            Beat the green alder.
+          Vainly he threw the net.
+            Never it hauled her!
+
+     Quick beat her heart to hear
+       The far bells' chime
+     Toll from the chapel-tower
+       The trysting-time.
+     But the red sun went down
+       In golden flame,
+     And though she looked around,
+       Yet no one came!
+
+          Mother beside the fire
+            Sat, her night-cap in;
+          Father in easychair,
+            Gloomily napping;
+          When at the window-sill
+            Came a light tapping.
+
+     Presently came the night,
+       Sadly to greet her,--
+     Moon in her silver light,
+       Stars in their glitter.
+     Then sank the moon away
+       Under the billow.
+     Still wept the maid alone--
+       There by the willow!
+
+          And a pale countenance
+            Looked through the casement.
+          Loud beat the mother's heart,
+            Sick with amazement,
+          And at the vision which
+            Came to surprise her!
+          Shrieking in an agony--
+            "Lor'! it's Elizar!"
+
+     Through the long darkness,
+       By the stream rolling,
+     Hour after hour went on
+       Tolling and tolling.
+     Long was the darkness,
+       Lonely and stilly.
+     Shrill came the night wind,
+       Piercing and chilly.
+
+          Yes, 'twas Elizabeth;--
+            Yes, 'twas their girl;
+          Pale was her cheek, and her
+            Hair out of curl.
+          "Mother!" the loved one,
+            Blushing, exclaimed,
+          "Let not your innocent
+            Lizzy be blamed.
+
+          Yesterday, going to Aunt
+            Jones's to tea,
+          Mother, dear mother, I
+            Forgot the door-key!
+          And as the night was cold,
+            And the way steep,
+          Mrs. Jones kept me to
+            Breakfast and sleep."
+
+     Shrill blew the morning breeze,
+       Biting and cold.
+     Bleak peers the gray dawn
+       Over the wold!
+     Bleak over moor and stream
+       Looks the gray dawn,
+     Gray with dishevelled hair.
+     Still stands the willow there--
+       The maid is gone!
+
+          Whether her pa and ma
+            Fully believed her,
+          That we shall never know.
+            Stern they received her;
+          And for the work of that
+            Cruel, though short, night,--
+          Sent her to bed without
+            Tea for a fortnight.
+
+       Domine, Domine!
+       Sing we a litany--
+     Sing for poor maiden-hearts broken and weary;
+       Sing we a litany,
+     Wail we and weep we a wild miserere!
+
+            MORAL.
+
+            Hey diddle diddlety,
+            Cat and the fiddlety,
+          Maidens of England take caution by she!
+            Let love and suicide
+            Never tempt you aside,
+          And always remember to take the door-key!
+
+Mr. George Fitz-Boodle gave his name to other narratives beyond his own
+_Confessions_. A series of stories was carried on by him in _Fraser_,
+called _Men's Wives_, containing three; _Ravenwing_, _Mr. and Mrs.
+Frank Berry_, and _Dennis Hoggarty's Wife_. The first chapter in _Mr.
+and Mrs. Frank Berry_ describes "The Fight at Slaughter House."
+Slaughter House, as Mr. Venables reminded us in the last chapter, was
+near Smithfield in London,--the school which afterwards became Grey
+Friars; and the fight between Biggs and Berry is the record of one which
+took place in the flesh when Thackeray was at the Charter House. But Mr.
+Fitz-Boodle's name was afterwards attached to a greater work than these,
+to a work so great that subsequent editors have thought him to be
+unworthy of the honour. In the January number, 1844, of _Fraser's
+Magazine_, are commenced the _Memoirs of Barry Lyndon_, and the
+authorship is attributed to Mr. Fitz-Boodle. The title given in the
+magazine was _The Luck of Barry Lyndon: a Romance of the last Century_.
+By Fitz-Boodle. In the collected edition of Thackeray's works the
+_Memoirs_ are given as "Written by himself," and were, I presume, so
+brought out by Thackeray, after they had appeared in _Fraser_. Why Mr.
+George Fitz-Boodle should have been robbed of so great an honour I do
+not know.
+
+In imagination, language, construction, and general literary capacity,
+Thackeray never did anything more remarkable than _Barry Lyndon_. I have
+quoted the words which he put into the mouth of Ikey Solomon, declaring
+that in the story which he has there told he has created nothing but
+disgust for the wicked characters he has produced, and that he has "used
+his humble endeavours to cause the public also to hate them." Here, in
+_Barry Lyndon_, he has, probably unconsciously, acted in direct
+opposition to his own principles: Barry Lyndon is as great a scoundrel
+as the mind of man ever conceived. He is one who might have taken as his
+motto Satan's words; "Evil, be thou my good." And yet his story is so
+written that it is almost impossible not to entertain something of a
+friendly feeling for him. He tells his own adventures as a card-sharper,
+bully, and liar; as a heartless wretch, who had neither love nor
+gratitude in his composition; who had no sense even of loyalty; who
+regarded gambling as the highest occupation to which a man could devote
+himself, and fraud as always justified by success; a man possessed by
+all meannesses except cowardice. And the reader is so carried away by
+his frankness and energy as almost to rejoice when he succeeds, and to
+grieve with him when he is brought to the ground.
+
+The man is perfectly satisfied as to the reasonableness,--I might almost
+say, as to the rectitude,--of his own conduct throughout. He is one of a
+decayed Irish family, that could boast of good blood. His father had
+obtained possession of the remnants of the property by turning
+Protestant, thus ousting the elder brother, who later on becomes his
+nephew's confederate in gambling. The elder brother is true to the old
+religion, and as the law stood in the last century, the younger brother,
+by changing his religion, was able to turn him out. Barry, when a boy,
+learns the slang and the gait of the debauched gentlemen of the day. He
+is specially proud of being a gentleman by birth and manners. He had
+been kidnapped, and made to serve as a common soldier, but boasts that
+he was at once fit for the occasion when enabled to show as a court
+gentleman. "I came to it at once," he says, "and as if I had never done
+anything else all my life. I had a gentleman to wait upon me, a French
+_friseur_ to dress my hair of a morning. I knew the taste of chocolate
+as by intuition almost, and could distinguish between the right Spanish
+and the French before I had been a week in my new position. I had rings
+on all my fingers and watches in both my fobs, canes, trinkets, and
+snuffboxes of all sorts. I had the finest natural taste for lace and
+china of any man I ever knew."
+
+To dress well, to wear a sword with a grace, to carry away his plunder
+with affected indifference, and to appear to be equally easy when he
+loses his last ducat, to be agreeable to women, and to look like a
+gentleman,--these are his accomplishments. In one place he rises to the
+height of a grand professor in the art of gambling, and gives his
+lessons with almost a noble air. "Play grandly, honourably. Be not of
+course cast down at losing; but above all, be not eager at winning, as
+mean souls are." And he boasts of his accomplishments with so much
+eloquence as to make the reader sure that he believes in them. He is
+quite pathetic over himself, and can describe with heartrending words
+the evils that befall him when others use against him successfully any
+of the arts which he practises himself.
+
+The marvel of the book is not so much that the hero should evidently
+think well of himself, as that the author should so tell his story as to
+appear to be altogether on the hero's side. In _Catherine_, the horrors
+described are most truly disgusting,--so much that the story, though
+very clever, is not pleasant reading. _The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon_ are
+very pleasant to read. There is nothing to shock or disgust. The style
+of narrative is exactly that which might be used as to the exploits of a
+man whom the author intended to represent as deserving of sympathy and
+praise,--so that the reader is almost brought to sympathise. But I
+should be doing an injustice to Thackeray if I were to leave an
+impression that he had taught lessons tending to evil practice, such as
+he supposed to have been left by _Jack Sheppard_ or _Eugene Aram_. No
+one will be tempted to undertake the life of a _chevalier d'industrie_
+by reading the book, or be made to think that cheating at cards is
+either an agreeable or a profitable profession. The following is
+excellent as a tirade in favour of gambling, coming from Redmond de
+Balibari, as he came to be called during his adventures abroad, but it
+will hardly persuade anyone to be a gambler;
+
+"We always played on parole with anybody,--any person, that is, of
+honour and noble lineage. We never pressed for our winnings, or declined
+to receive promissory notes in lieu of gold. But woe to the man who did
+not pay when the note became due! Redmond de Balibari was sure to wait
+upon him with his bill, and I promise you there were very few bad debts.
+On the contrary, gentlemen were grateful to us for our forbearance, and
+our character for honour stood unimpeached. In latter times, a vulgar
+national prejudice has chosen to cast a slur upon the character of men
+of honour engaged in the profession of play; but I speak of the good old
+days of Europe, before the cowardice of the French aristocracy (in the
+shameful revolution, which served them right) brought discredit upon our
+order. They cry fie now upon men engaged in play; but I should like to
+know how much more honourable _their_ modes of livelihood are than ours.
+The broker of the Exchange, who bulls and bears, and buys and sells, and
+dabbles with lying loans, and trades upon state-secrets,--what is he but
+a gamester? The merchant who deals in teas and tallow, is he any better?
+His bales of dirty indigo are his dice, his cards come up every year
+instead of every ten minutes, and the sea is his green-table. You call
+the profession of the law an honourable one, where a man will lie for
+any bidder;--lie down poverty for the sake of a fee from wealth; lie
+down right because wrong is in his brief. You call a doctor an
+honourable man,--a swindling quack who does not believe in the nostrums
+which he prescribes, and takes your guinea for whispering in your ear
+that it is a fine morning. And yet, forsooth, a gallant man, who sits
+him down before the baize and challenges all comers, his money against
+theirs, his fortune against theirs, is proscribed by your modern moral
+world! It is a conspiracy of the middle-class against gentlemen. It is
+only the shopkeeper cant which is to go down nowadays. I say that play
+was an institution of chivalry. It has been wrecked along with other
+privileges of men of birth. When Seingalt engaged a man for
+six-and-thirty hours without leaving the table, do you think he showed
+no courage? How have we had the best blood and the brightest eyes too,
+of Europe throbbing round the table, as I and my uncle have held the
+cards and the bank against some terrible player, who was matching some
+thousands out of his millions against our all, which was there on the
+baize! When we engaged that daring Alexis Kossloffsky, and won seven
+thousand louis on a single coup, had we lost we should have been beggars
+the next day; when _he_ lost, he was only a village and a few hundred
+serfs in pawn the worse. When at Toeplitz the Duke of Courland brought
+fourteen lacqueys, each with four bags of florins, and challenged our
+bank to play against the sealed bags, what did we ask? 'Sir,' said we,
+'we have but eighty thousand florins in bank, or two hundred thousand at
+three months. If your highness's bags do not contain more than eighty
+thousand we will meet you.' And we did; and after eleven hours' play,
+in which our bank was at one time reduced to two hundred and three
+ducats, we won seventeen thousand florins of him. Is _this_ not
+something like boldness? Does this profession not require skill, and
+perseverance, and bravery? Four crowned heads looked on at the game, and
+an imperial princess, when I turned up the ace of hearts and made
+Paroli, burst into tears. No man on the European Continent held a higher
+position than Redmond Barry then; and when the Duke of Courland lost he
+was pleased to say that we had won nobly. And so we had, and spent nobly
+what we won." This is very grand, and is put as an eloquent man would
+put it who really wished to defend gambling.
+
+The rascal, of course, comes to a miserable end, but the tone of the
+narrative is continued throughout. He is brought to live at last with
+his old mother in the Fleet prison, on a wretched annuity of fifty
+pounds per annum, which she has saved out of the general wreck, and
+there he dies of delirium tremens. For an assumed tone of continued
+irony, maintained through the long memoir of a life, never becoming
+tedious, never unnatural, astounding us rather by its naturalness, I
+know nothing equal to _Barry Lyndon_.
+
+As one reads, one sometimes is struck by a conviction that this or the
+other writer has thoroughly liked the work on which he is engaged. There
+is a gusto about his passages, a liveliness in the language, a spring in
+the motion of the words, an eagerness of description, a lilt, if I may
+so call it, in the progress of the narrative, which makes the reader
+feel that the author has himself greatly enjoyed what he has written. He
+has evidently gone on with his work without any sense of weariness, or
+doubt; and the words have come readily to him. So it has been with
+_Barry Lyndon_. "My mind was filled full with those blackguards,"
+Thackeray once said to a friend. It is easy enough to see that it was
+so. In the passage which I have above quoted, his mind was running over
+with the idea that a rascal might be so far gone in rascality as to be
+in love with his own trade.
+
+This was the last of Thackeray's long stories in _Fraser_. I have given
+by no means a complete catalogue of his contributions to the magazine,
+but I have perhaps mentioned those which are best known. There were many
+short pieces which have now been collected in his works, such as _Little
+Travels and Roadside Sketches_, and the _Carmen Lilliense_, in which the
+poet is supposed to be detained at Lille by want of money. There are
+others which I think are not to be found in the collected works, such as
+a _Box of Novels by Titmarsh_, and _Titmarsh in the Picture Galleries_.
+After the name of Titmarsh had been once assumed it was generally used
+in the papers which he sent to _Fraser_.
+
+Thackeray's connection with _Punch_ began in 1843, and, as far as I can
+learn, _Miss Tickletoby's Lectures on English History_ was his first
+contribution. They, however, have not been found worthy of a place in
+the collected edition. His short pieces during a long period of his life
+were so numerous that to have brought them all together would have
+weighted his more important works with too great an amount of extraneous
+matter. The same lady, Miss Tickletoby, gave a series of lectures. There
+was _The History of the next French Revolution_, and _The Wanderings of
+our Fat Contributor_,--the first of which is, and the latter is not,
+perpetuated in his works. Our old friend Jeames Yellowplush, or De la
+Pluche,--for we cannot for a moment doubt that he is the same
+Jeames,--is very prolific, and as excellent in his orthography, his
+sense, and satire, as ever. These papers began with _The Lucky
+Speculator_. He lives in The Albany; he hires a brougham; and is devoted
+to Miss Emily Flimsey, the daughter of Sir George, who had been his
+master,--to the great injury of poor Maryanne, the fellow-servant who
+had loved him in his kitchen days. Then there follows that wonderful
+ballad, _Jeames of Backley Square_. Upon this he writes an angry letter
+to _Punch_, dated from his chambers in The Albany; "Has a reglar
+suscriber to your amusing paper, I beg leaf to state that I should never
+have done so had I supposed that it was your 'abbit to igspose the
+mistaries of privit life, and to hinger the delligit feelings of umble
+individyouls like myself." He writes in his own defence, both as to
+Maryanne and to the share-dealing by which he had made his fortune; and
+he ends with declaring his right to the position which he holds. "You
+are corrict in stating that I am of hancient Normin fam'ly. This is more
+than Peal can say, to whomb I applied for a barnetcy; but the primmier
+being of low igstraction, natrally stikles for his horder." And the
+letter is signed "Fitzjames De la Pluche." Then follows his diary,
+beginning with a description of the way in which he rushed into
+_Punch's_ office, declaring his misfortunes, when losses had come upon
+him. "I wish to be paid for my contribewtions to your paper.
+Suckmstances is altered with me." Whereupon he gets a cheque upon
+Messrs. Pump and Aldgate, and has himself carried away to new
+speculations. He leaves his diary behind him, and _Punch_
+surreptitiously publishes it. There is much in the diary which comes
+from Thackeray's very heart. Who does not remember his indignation
+against Lord Bareacres? "I gave the old humbug a few shares out of my
+own pocket. 'There, old Pride,' says I, 'I like to see you down on your
+knees to a footman. There, old Pomposity! Take fifty pounds. I like to
+see you come cringing and begging for it!' Whenever I see him in a very
+public place, I take my change for my money. I digg him in the ribbs, or
+clap his padded old shoulders. I call him 'Bareacres, my old brick,' and
+I see him wince. It does my 'art good." It does Thackeray's heart good
+to pour himself out in indignation against some imaginary Bareacres. He
+blows off his steam with such an eagerness that he forgets for a time,
+or nearly forgets, his cacography. Then there are "Jeames on Time
+Bargings," "Jeames on the Gauge Question," "Mr. Jeames again." Of all
+our author's heroes Jeames is perhaps the most amusing. There is not
+much in that joke of bad spelling, and we should have been inclined to
+say beforehand, that Mrs. Malaprop had done it so well and so
+sufficiently, that no repetition of it would be received with great
+favour. Like other dishes, it depends upon the cooking. Jeames, with his
+"suckmstances," high or low, will be immortal.
+
+There were _The Travels in London_, a long series of them; and then
+_Punch's Prize Novelists_, in which Thackeray imitates the language and
+plots of Bulwer, Disraeli, Charles Lever, G. P. R. James, Mrs. Gore, and
+Cooper, the American. They are all excellent; perhaps Codlingsby is the
+best. Mendoza, when he is fighting with the bargeman, or drinking with
+Codlingsby, or receiving Louis Philippe in his rooms, seems to have come
+direct from the pen of our Premier. Phil Fogerty's jump, and the younger
+and the elder horsemen, as they come riding into the story, one in his
+armour and the other with his feathers, have the very savour and tone of
+Lever and James; but then the savour and the tone are not so piquant. I
+know nothing in the way of imitation to equal Codlingsby, if it be not
+The Tale of Drury Lane, by W. S. in the _Rejected Addresses_, of which
+it is said that Walter Scott declared that he must have written it
+himself. The scene between Dr. Franklin, Louis XVI., Marie Antoinette,
+and Tatua, the chief of the Nose-rings, as told in _The Stars and
+Stripes_, is perfect in its way, but it fails as being a caricature of
+Cooper. The caricaturist has been carried away beyond and above his
+model, by his own sense of fun.
+
+Of the ballads which appeared in _Punch_ I will speak elsewhere, as I
+must give a separate short chapter to our author's power of
+versification; but I must say a word of _The Snob Papers_, which were at
+the time the most popular and the best known of all Thackeray's
+contributions to _Punch_. I think that perhaps they were more charming,
+more piquant, more apparently true, when they came out one after another
+in the periodical, than they are now as collected together. I think that
+one at a time would be better than many. And I think that the first half
+in the long list of snobs would have been more manifestly snobs to us
+than they are now with the second half of the list appended. In fact,
+there are too many of them, till the reader is driven to tell himself
+that the meaning of it all is that Adam's family is from first to last a
+family of snobs. "First," says Thackeray, in preface, "the world was
+made; then, as a matter of course, snobs; they existed for years and
+years, and were no more known than America. But presently,--ingens
+patebat tellus,--the people became darkly aware that there was such a
+race. Not above five-and-twenty years since, a name, an expressive
+monosyllable, arose to designate that case. That name has spread over
+England like railroads subsequently; snobs are known and recognised
+throughout an empire on which I am given to understand the sun never
+sets. _Punch_ appears at the right season to chronicle their history;
+and the individual comes forth to write that history in _Punch_.
+
+"I have,--and for this gift I congratulate myself with a deep and
+abiding thankfulness,--an eye for a snob. If the truthful is the
+beautiful, it is beautiful to study even the snobbish;--to track snobs
+through history as certain little dogs in Hampshire hunt out truffles;
+to sink shafts in society, and come upon rich veins of snob-ore.
+Snobbishness is like Death, in a quotation from Horace, which I hope you
+never heard, 'beating with equal foot at poor men's doors, and kicking
+at the gates of emperors.' It is a great mistake to judge of snobs
+lightly, and think they exist among the lower classes merely. An immense
+percentage of snobs, I believe, is to be found in every rank of this
+mortal life. You must not judge hastily or vulgarly of snobs; to do so
+shows that you are yourself a snob. I myself have been taken for one."
+
+The state of Thackeray's mind when he commenced his delineations of
+snobbery is here accurately depicted. Written, as these papers were, for
+_Punch_, and written, as they were, by Thackeray, it was a necessity
+that every idea put forth should be given as a joke, and that the satire
+on society in general should be wrapped up in burlesque absurdity. But
+not the less eager and serious was his intention. When he tells us, at
+the end of the first chapter, of a certain Colonel Snobley, whom he met
+at "Bagnigge Wells," as he says, and with whom he was so disgusted that
+he determined to drive the man out of the house, we are well aware that
+he had met an offensive military gentleman,--probably at Tunbridge.
+Gentlemen thus offensive, even though tamely offensive, were peculiarly
+offensive to him. We presume, by what follows, that this gentleman,
+ignorantly,--for himself most unfortunately,--spoke of Public[=o]la.
+Thackeray was disgusted,--disgusted that such a name should be lugged
+into ordinary conversation at all, and then that a man should talk about
+a name with which he was so little acquainted as not to know how to
+pronounce it. The man was therefore a snob, and ought to be put down; in
+all which I think that Thackeray was unnecessarily hard on the man, and
+gave him too much importance.
+
+So it was with him in his whole intercourse with snobs,--as he calls
+them. He saw something that was distasteful, and a man instantly became
+a snob in his estimation. "But you _can_ draw," a man once said to him,
+there having been some discussion on the subject of Thackeray's art
+powers. The man meant no doubt to be civil, but meant also to imply that
+for the purpose needed the drawing was good enough, a matter on which he
+was competent to form an opinion. Thackeray instantly put the man down
+as a snob for flattering him. The little courtesies of the world and the
+little discourtesies became snobbish to him. A man could not wear his
+hat, or carry his umbrella, or mount his horse, without falling into
+some error of snobbism before his hypercritical eyes. St. Michael would
+have carried his armour amiss, and St. Cecilia have been snobbish as she
+twanged her harp.
+
+I fancy that a policeman considers that every man in the street would be
+properly "run in," if only all the truth about the man had been known.
+The tinker thinks that every pot is unsound. The cobbler doubts the
+stability of every shoe. So at last it grew to be the case with
+Thackeray. There was more hope that the city should be saved because of
+its ten just men, than for society, if society were to depend on ten who
+were not snobs. All this arose from the keenness of his vision into that
+which was really mean. But that keenness became so aggravated by the
+intenseness of his search that the slightest speck of dust became to his
+eyes as a foul stain. Public[=o]la, as we saw, damned one poor man to a
+wretched immortality, and another was called pitilessly over the coals,
+because he had mixed a grain of flattery with a bushel of truth.
+Thackeray tells us that he was born to hunt out snobs, as certain dogs
+are trained to find truffles. But we can imagine that a dog, very
+energetic at producing truffles, and not finding them as plentiful as
+his heart desired, might occasionally produce roots which were not
+genuine,--might be carried on in his energies till to his senses every
+fungus-root became a truffle. I think that there has been something of
+this with our author's snob-hunting, and that his zeal was at last
+greater than his discrimination.
+
+The nature of the task which came upon him made this fault almost
+unavoidable. When a hit is made, say with a piece at a theatre, or with
+a set of illustrations, or with a series of papers on this or the other
+subject,--when something of this kind has suited the taste of the
+moment, and gratified the public, there is a natural inclination on the
+part of those who are interested to continue that which has been found
+to be good. It pays and it pleases, and it seems to suit everybody. Then
+it is continued usque ad nauseam. We see it in everything. When the king
+said he liked partridges, partridges were served to him every day. The
+world was pleased with certain ridiculous portraits of its big men. The
+big men were soon used up, and the little men had to be added.
+
+We can imagine that even _Punch_ may occasionally be at a loss for
+subjects wherewith to delight its readers. In fact, _The Snob Papers_
+were too good to be brought to an end, and therefore there were
+forty-five of them. A dozen would have been better. As he himself says
+in his last paper, "for a mortal year we have been together flattering
+and abusing the human race." It was exactly that. Of course we
+know,--everybody always knows,--that a bad specimen of his order may be
+found in every division of society. There may be a snob king, a snob
+parson, a snob member of parliament, a snob grocer, tailor, goldsmith,
+and the like. But that is not what has been meant. We did not want a
+special satirist to tell us what we all knew before. Had snobbishness
+been divided for us into its various attributes and characteristics,
+rather than attributed to various classes, the end sought,--the
+exposure, namely, of the evil,--would have been better attained. The
+snobbishness of flattery, of falsehood, of cowardice, lying,
+time-serving, money-worship, would have been perhaps attacked to a
+better purpose than that of kings, priests, soldiers, merchants, or men
+of letters. The assault as made by Thackeray seems to have been made on
+the profession generally.
+
+The paper on clerical snobs is intended to be essentially generous, and
+is ended by an allusion to certain old clerical friends which has a
+sweet tone of tenderness in it. "How should he who knows you, not
+respect you or your calling? May this pen never write a pennyworth again
+if it ever casts ridicule upon either." But in the meantime he has
+thrown his stone at the covetousness of bishops, because of certain
+Irish prelates who died rich many years before he wrote. The
+insinuation is that bishops generally take more of the loaves and fishes
+than they ought, whereas the fact is that bishops' incomes are generally
+so insufficient for the requirements demanded of them, that a feeling
+prevails that a clergyman to be fit for a bishopric should have a
+private income. He attacks the snobbishness of the universities, showing
+us how one class of young men consists of fellow-commoners, who wear
+lace and drink wine with their meals, and another class consists of
+sizars, or servitors, who wear badges, as being poor, and are never
+allowed to take their food with their fellow-students. That arrangements
+fit for past times are not fit for these is true enough. Consequently
+they should gradually be changed; and from day to day are changed. But
+there is no snobbishness in this. Was the fellow-commoner a snob when he
+acted in accordance with the custom of his rank and standing? or the
+sizar who accepted aid in achieving that education which he could not
+have got without it? or the tutor of the college, who carried out the
+rules entrusted to him? There are two military snobs, Rag and Famish.
+One is a swindler and the other a debauched young idiot. No doubt they
+are both snobs, and one has been, while the other is, an officer. But
+there is,--I think, not an unfairness so much as an absence of
+intuition,--in attaching to soldiers especially two vices to which all
+classes are open. Rag was a gambling snob, and Famish a drunken
+snob,--but they were not specially military snobs. There is a chapter
+devoted to dinner-giving snobs, in which I think the doctrine laid down
+will not hold water, and therefore that the snobbism imputed is not
+proved. "Your usual style of meal," says the satirist--"that is
+plenteous, comfortable, and in its perfection,--should be that to which
+you welcome your friends." Then there is something said about the
+"Brummagem plate pomp," and we are told that it is right that dukes
+should give grand dinners, but that we,--of the middle class,--should
+entertain our friends with the simplicity which is customary with us. In
+all this there is, I think, a mistake. The duke gives a grand dinner
+because he thinks his friends will like it, sitting down when alone with
+the duchess, we may suppose, with a retinue and grandeur less than that
+which is arrayed for gala occasions. So is it with Mr. Jones, who is no
+snob because he provides a costly dinner,--if he can afford it. He does
+it because he thinks his friends will like it. It may be that the grand
+dinner is a bore,--and that the leg of mutton with plenty of gravy and
+potatoes all hot, would be nicer. I generally prefer the leg of mutton
+myself. But I do not think that snobbery is involved in the other. A
+man, no doubt, may be a snob in giving a dinner. I am not a snob because
+for the occasion I eke out my own dozen silver forks with plated ware;
+but if I make believe that my plated ware is true silver, then I am a
+snob.
+
+In that matter of association with our betters,--we will for the moment
+presume that gentlemen and ladies with titles or great wealth are our
+betters,--great and delicate questions arise as to what is snobbery, and
+what is not, in speaking of which Thackeray becomes very indignant, and
+explains the intensity of his feelings as thoroughly by a charming
+little picture as by his words. It is a picture of Queen Elizabeth as
+she is about to trample with disdain on the coat which that snob Raleigh
+is throwing for her use on the mud before her. This is intended to
+typify the low parasite nature of the Englishman which has been
+described in the previous page or two. "And of these calm
+moralists,"--it matters not for our present purpose who were the
+moralists in question,--"is there one I wonder whose heart would not
+throb with pleasure if he could be seen walking arm-in-arm with a couple
+of dukes down Pall Mall? No; it is impossible, in our condition of
+society, not to be sometimes a snob." And again: "How should it be
+otherwise in a country where lordolatry is part of our creed, and where
+our children are brought up to respect the 'Peerage' as the Englishman's
+second Bible." Then follows the wonderfully graphic picture of Queen
+Elizabeth and Raleigh.
+
+In all this Thackeray has been carried away from the truth by his hatred
+for a certain meanness of which there are no doubt examples enough. As
+for Raleigh, I think we have always sympathised with the young man,
+instead of despising him, because he felt on the impulse of the moment
+that nothing was too good for the woman and the queen combined. The idea
+of getting something in return for his coat could hardly have come so
+quick to him as that impulse in favour of royalty and womanhood. If one
+of us to-day should see the queen passing, would he not raise his hat,
+and assume, unconsciously, something of an altered demeanour because of
+his reverence for majesty? In doing so he would have no mean desire of
+getting anything. The throne and its occupant are to him honourable, and
+he honours them. There is surely no greater mistake than to suppose that
+reverence is snobbishness. I meet a great man in the street, and some
+chance having brought me to his knowledge, he stops and says a word to
+me. Am I a snob because I feel myself to be graced by his notice? Surely
+not. And if his acquaintance goes further and he asks me to dinner, am I
+not entitled so far to think well of myself because I have been found
+worthy of his society?
+
+They who have raised themselves in the world, and they, too, whose
+position has enabled them to receive all that estimation can give, all
+that society can furnish, all that intercourse with the great can give,
+are more likely to be pleasant companions than they who have been less
+fortunate. That picture of two companion dukes in Pall Mall is too
+gorgeous for human eye to endure. A man would be scorched to cinders by
+so much light, as he would be crushed by a sack of sovereigns even
+though he might be allowed to have them if he could carry them away. But
+there can be no doubt that a peer taken at random as a companion would
+be preferable to a clerk from a counting-house,--taken at random. The
+clerk might turn out a scholar on your hands, and the peer no better
+than a poor spendthrift;--but the chances are the other way.
+
+A tufthunter is a snob, a parasite is a snob, the man who allows the
+manhood within him to be awed by a coronet is a snob. The man who
+worships mere wealth is a snob. But so also is he who, in fear lest he
+should be called a snob, is afraid to seek the acquaintance,--or if it
+come to speak of the acquaintance,--of those whose acquaintance is
+manifestly desirable. In all this I feel that Thackeray was carried
+beyond the truth by his intense desire to put down what is mean.
+
+It is in truth well for us all to know what constitutes snobbism, and I
+think that Thackeray, had he not been driven to dilution and dilatation,
+could have told us. If you will keep your hands from picking and
+stealing, and your tongue from evil speaking, lying, and slandering, you
+will not be a snob. The lesson seems to be simple, and perhaps a little
+trite, but if you look into it, it will be found to contain nearly all
+that is necessary.
+
+But the excellence of each individual picture as it is drawn is not the
+less striking because there may be found some fault with the series as a
+whole. What can excel the telling of the story of Captain Shindy at his
+club,--which is, I must own, as true as it is graphic. Captain Shindy is
+a real snob. "'Look at it, sir; is it cooked? Smell it, sir. Is it meat
+fit for a gentleman?' he roars out to the steward, who stands trembling
+before him, and who in vain tells him that the Bishop of Bullocksmithy
+has just had three from the same loin." The telling as regards Captain
+Shindy is excellent, but the sidelong attack upon the episcopate is
+cruel. "All the waiters in the club are huddled round the captain's
+mutton-chop. He roars out the most horrible curses at John for not
+bringing the pickles. He utters the most dreadful oaths because Thomas
+has not arrived with the Harvey sauce. Peter comes tumbling with the
+water-jug over Jeames, who is bringing the 'glittering canisters with
+bread.'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Poor Mrs. Shindy and the children are, meanwhile, in dingy lodgings
+somewhere, waited upon by a charity girl in pattens."
+
+The visit to Castle Carabas, and the housekeeper's description of the
+wonders of the family mansion, is as good. "'The Side Entrance and
+'All,' says the housekeeper. 'The halligator hover the mantelpiece was
+brought home by Hadmiral St. Michaels, when a capting with Lord Hanson.
+The harms on the cheers is the harms of the Carabas family. The great
+'all is seventy feet in lenth, fifty-six in breath, and thirty-eight
+feet 'igh. The carvings of the chimlies, representing the buth of Venus
+and 'Ercules and 'Eyelash, is by Van Chislum, the most famous sculpture
+of his hage and country. The ceiling, by Calimanco, represents Painting,
+Harchitecture, and Music,--the naked female figure with the
+barrel-organ,--introducing George, first Lord Carabas, to the Temple of
+the Muses. The winder ornaments is by Vanderputty. The floor is
+Patagonian marble; and the chandelier in the centre was presented to
+Lionel, second marquis, by Lewy the Sixteenth, whose 'ead was cut hoff
+in the French Revolution. We now henter the South Gallery," etc. etc.
+All of which is very good fun, with a dash of truth in it also as to the
+snobbery;--only in this it will be necessary to be quite sure where the
+snobbery lies. If my Lord Carabas has a "buth of Venus," beautiful for
+all eyes to see, there is no snobbery, only good-nature, in the showing
+it; nor is there snobbery in going to see it, if a beautiful "buth of
+Venus" has charms for you. If you merely want to see the inside of a
+lord's house, and the lord is puffed up with the pride of showing his,
+then there will be two snobs.
+
+Of all those papers it may be said that each has that quality of a pearl
+about it which in the previous chapter I endeavoured to explain. In each
+some little point is made in excellent language, so as to charm by its
+neatness, incision, and drollery. But _The Snob Papers_ had better be
+read separately, and not taken in the lump.
+
+Thackeray ceased to write for _Punch_ in 1852, either entirely or almost
+so.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+VANITY FAIR.
+
+
+Something has been said, in the biographical chapter, of the way in
+which _Vanity Fair_ was produced, and of the period in the author's life
+in which it was written. He had become famous,--to a limited extent,--by
+the exquisite nature of his contributions to periodicals; but he desired
+to do something larger, something greater, something, perhaps, less
+ephemeral. For though _Barry Lyndon_ and others have not proved to be
+ephemeral, it was thus that he regarded them. In this spirit he went to
+work and wrote _Vanity Fair_.
+
+It may be as well to speak first of the faults which were attributed to
+it. It was said that the good people were all fools, and that the clever
+people were all knaves. When the critics,--the talking critics as well
+as the writing critics,--began to discuss _Vanity Fair_, there had
+already grown up a feeling as to Thackeray as an author--that he was one
+who had taken up the business of castigating the vices of the world.
+Scott had dealt with the heroics, whether displayed in his Flora
+MacIvors or Meg Merrilieses, in his Ivanhoes or Ochiltrees. Miss
+Edgeworth had been moral; Miss Austen conventional; Bulwer had been
+poetical and sentimental; Marryat and Lever had been funny and
+pugnacious, always with a dash of gallantry, displaying funny naval and
+funny military life; and Dickens had already become great in painting
+the virtues of the lower orders. But by all these some kind of virtue
+had been sung, though it might be only the virtue of riding a horse or
+fighting a duel. Even Eugene Aram and Jack Sheppard, with whom Thackeray
+found so much fault, were intended to be fine fellows, though they broke
+into houses and committed murders. The primary object of all those
+writers was to create an interest by exciting sympathy. To enhance our
+sympathy personages were introduced who were very vile indeed,--as
+Bucklaw, in the guise of a lover, to heighten our feelings for
+Ravenswood and Lucy; as Wild, as a thief-taker, to make us more anxious
+for the saving of Jack; as Ralph Nickleby, to pile up the pity for his
+niece Kate. But each of these novelists might have appropriately begun
+with an _Arma virumque cano_. The song was to be of something
+godlike,--even with a Peter Simple. With Thackeray it had been
+altogether different. Alas, alas! the meanness of human wishes; the
+poorness of human results! That had been his tone. There can be no doubt
+that the heroic had appeared contemptible to him, as being untrue. The
+girl who had deceived her papa and mamma seemed more probable to him
+than she who perished under the willow-tree from sheer love,--as given
+in the last chapter. Why sing songs that are false? Why tell of Lucy
+Ashtons and Kate Nicklebys, when pretty girls, let them be ever so
+beautiful, can be silly and sly? Why pour philosophy out of the mouth of
+a fashionable young gentleman like Pelham, seeing that young gentlemen
+of that sort rarely, or we may say never, talk after that fashion? Why
+make a housebreaker a gallant charming young fellow, the truth being
+that housebreakers as a rule are as objectionable in their manners as
+they are in their morals? Thackeray's mind had in truth worked in this
+way, and he had become a satirist. That had been all very well for
+_Fraser_ and _Punch_; but when his satire was continued through a long
+novel, in twenty-four parts, readers,--who do in truth like the heroic
+better than the wicked,--began to declare that this writer was no
+novelist, but only a cynic.
+
+Thence the question arises what a novel should be,--which I will
+endeavour to discuss very shortly in a later chapter. But this special
+fault was certainly found with _Vanity Fair_ at the time. Heroines
+should not only be beautiful, but should be endowed also with a quasi
+celestial grace,--grace of dignity, propriety, and reticence. A heroine
+should hardly want to be married, the arrangement being almost too
+mundane,--and, should she be brought to consent to undergo such bond,
+because of its acknowledged utility, it should be at some period so
+distant as hardly to present itself to the mind as a reality. Eating and
+drinking should be altogether indifferent to her, and her clothes should
+be picturesque rather than smart, and that from accident rather than
+design. Thackeray's Amelia does not at all come up to the description
+here given. She is proud of having a lover, constantly declaring to
+herself and to others that he is "the greatest and the best of
+men,"--whereas the young gentleman is, in truth, a very little man. She
+is not at all indifferent as to her finery, nor, as we see incidentally,
+to enjoying her suppers at Vauxhall. She is anxious to be married,--and
+as soon as possible. A hero too should be dignified and of a noble
+presence; a man who, though he may be as poor as Nicholas Nickleby,
+should nevertheless be beautiful on all occasions, and never deficient
+in readiness, address, or self-assertion. _Vanity Fair_ is specially
+declared by the author to be "a novel without a hero," and therefore we
+have hardly a right to complain of deficiency of heroic conduct in any
+of the male characters. But Captain Dobbin does become the hero, and is
+deficient. Why was he called Dobbin, except to make him ridiculous? Why
+is he so shamefully ugly, so shy, so awkward? Why was he the son of a
+grocer? Thackeray in so depicting him was determined to run counter to
+the recognised taste of novel readers. And then again there was the
+feeling of another great fault. Let there be the virtuous in a novel and
+let there be the vicious, the dignified and the undignified, the sublime
+and the ridiculous,--only let the virtuous, the dignified, and the
+sublime be in the ascendant. Edith Bellenden, and Lord Evandale, and
+Morton himself would be too stilted, were they not enlivened by Mause,
+and Cuddie, and Poundtext. But here, in this novel, the vicious and the
+absurd have been made to be of more importance than the good and the
+noble. Becky Sharp and Rawdon Crawley are the real heroine and hero of
+the story. It is with them that the reader is called upon to interest
+himself. It is of them that he will think when he is reading the book.
+It is by them that he will judge the book when he has read it. There was
+no doubt a feeling with the public that though satire may be very well
+in its place, it should not be made the backbone of a work so long and
+so important as this. A short story such as _Catherine_ or _Barry
+Lyndon_ might be pronounced to have been called for by the iniquities of
+an outside world; but this seemed to the readers to have been addressed
+almost to themselves. Now men and women like to be painted as Titian
+would paint them, or Raffaelle,--not as Rembrandt, or even Rubens.
+
+Whether the ideal or the real is the best form of a novel may be
+questioned, but there can be no doubt that as there are novelists who
+cannot descend from the bright heaven of the imagination to walk with
+their feet upon the earth, so there are others to whom it is not given
+to soar among clouds. The reader must please himself, and make his
+selection if he cannot enjoy both. There are many who are carried into a
+heaven of pathos by the woes of a Master of Ravenswood, who fail
+altogether to be touched by the enduring constancy of a Dobbin. There
+are others,--and I will not say but they may enjoy the keenest delight
+which literature can give,--who cannot employ their minds on fiction
+unless it be conveyed in poetry. With Thackeray it was essential that
+the representations made by him should be, to his own thinking,
+lifelike. A Dobbin seemed to him to be such a one as might probably be
+met with in the world, whereas to his thinking a Ravenswood was simply a
+creature of the imagination. He would have said of such, as we would say
+of female faces by Raffaelle, that women would like to be like them, but
+are not like them. Men might like to be like Ravenswood, and women may
+dream of men so formed and constituted, but such men do not exist.
+Dobbins do, and therefore Thackeray chose to write of a Dobbin.
+
+So also of the preference given to Becky Sharp and to Rawdon Crawley.
+Thackeray thought that more can be done by exposing the vices than
+extolling the virtues of mankind. No doubt he had a more thorough belief
+in the one than in the other. The Dobbins he did encounter--seldom; the
+Rawdon Crawleys very often. He saw around him so much that was mean! He
+was hurt so often by the little vanities of people! It was thus that he
+was driven to that overthoughtfulness about snobs of which I have spoken
+in the last chapter. It thus became natural to him to insist on the
+thing which he hated with unceasing assiduity, and only to break out now
+and again into a rapture of love for the true nobility which was dear to
+him,--as he did with the character of Captain Dobbin.
+
+It must be added to all this that, before he has done with his snob or
+his knave, he will generally weave in some little trait of humanity by
+which the sinner shall be relieved from the absolute darkness of utter
+iniquity. He deals with no Varneys or Deputy-Shepherds, all villany and
+all lies, because the snobs and knaves he had seen had never been all
+snob or all knave. Even Shindy probably had some feeling for the poor
+woman he left at home. Rawdon Crawley loved his wicked wife dearly, and
+there were moments even with her in which some redeeming trait half
+reconciles her to the reader.
+
+Such were the faults which were found in _Vanity Fair_; but though the
+faults were found freely, the book was read by all. Those who are old
+enough can well remember the effect which it had, and the welcome which
+was given to the different numbers as they appeared. Though the story is
+vague and wandering, clearly commenced without any idea of an ending,
+yet there is something in the telling which makes every portion of it
+perfect in itself. There are absurdities in it which would not be
+admitted to anyone who had not a peculiar gift of making even his
+absurdities delightful. No schoolgirl who ever lived would have thrown
+back her gift-book, as Rebecca did the "dixonary," out of the carriage
+window as she was taken away from school. But who does not love that
+scene with which the novel commences? How could such a girl as Amelia
+Osborne have got herself into such society as that in which we see her
+at Vauxhall? But we forgive it all because of the telling. And then
+there is that crowning absurdity of Sir Pitt Crawley and his
+establishment.
+
+I never could understand how Thackeray in his first serious attempt
+could have dared to subject himself and Sir Pitt Crawley to the critics
+of the time. Sir Pitt is a baronet, a man of large property, and in
+Parliament, to whom Becky Sharp goes as a governess at the end of a
+delightful visit with her friend Amelia Sedley, on leaving Miss
+Pinkerton's school. The Sedley carriage takes her to Sir Pitt's door.
+"When the bell was rung a head appeared between the interstices of the
+dining-room shutters, and the door was opened by a man in drab breeches
+and gaiters, with a dirty old coat, a foul old neckcloth lashed round
+his bristly neck, a shining bald head, a leering red face, a pair of
+twinkling gray eyes, and a mouth perpetually on the grin.
+
+"'This Sir Pitt Crawley's?' says John from the box.
+
+"'E'es,' says the man at the door with a nod.
+
+"'Hand down these 'ere trunks there,' said John.
+
+"'Hand 'em down yourself,' said the porter." But John on the box
+declines to do this, as he cannot leave his horses.
+
+"The bald-headed man, taking his hands out of his breeches' pockets,
+advanced on this summons, and throwing Miss Sharp's trunk over his
+shoulder, carried it into the house." Then Becky is shown into the
+house, and a dismantled dining-room is described, into which she is led
+by the dirty man with the trunk.
+
+     Two kitchen chairs, and a round table, and an attenuated old
+     poker and tongs, were, however, gathered round the fireplace,
+     as was a saucepan over a feeble, sputtering fire. There was a
+     bit of cheese and bread and a tin candlestick on the table,
+     and a little black porter in a pint pot.
+
+     "Had your dinner, I suppose?" This was said by him of the bald
+     head. "It is not too warm for you? Like a drop of beer?"
+
+     "Where is Sir Pitt Crawley?" said Miss Sharp majestically.
+
+     "He, he! _I_'m Sir Pitt Crawley. Rek'lect you owe me a pint
+     for bringing down your luggage. He, he! ask Tinker if I
+     ain't."
+
+     The lady addressed as Mrs. Tinker at this moment made her
+     appearance, with a pipe and a paper of tobacco, for which she
+     had been despatched a minute before Miss Sharp's arrival; and
+     she handed the articles over to Sir Pitt, who had taken his
+     seat by the fire.
+
+     "Where's the farden?" said he. "I gave you three-halfpence;
+     where's the change, old Tinker?"
+
+     "There," replied Mrs. Tinker, flinging down the coin. "It's
+     only baronets as cares about farthings."
+
+Sir Pitt Crawley has always been to me a stretch of audacity which I
+have been unable to understand. But it has been accepted; and from this
+commencement of Sir Pitt Crawley have grown the wonderful characters of
+the Crawley family,--old Miss Crawley, the worldly, wicked,
+pleasure-loving aunt, the Rev. Bute Crawley and his wife, who are quite
+as worldly, the sanctimonious elder son, who in truth is not less so,
+and Rawdon, who ultimately becomes Becky's husband,--who is the bad hero
+of the book, as Dobbin is the good hero. They are admirable; but it is
+quite clear that Thackeray had known nothing of what was coming about
+them when he caused Sir Pitt to eat his tripe with Mrs. Tinker in the
+London dining-room.
+
+There is a double story running through the book, the parts of which are
+but lightly woven together, of which the former tells us the life and
+adventures of that singular young woman Becky Sharp, and the other the
+troubles and ultimate success of our noble hero Captain Dobbin. Though
+it be true that readers prefer, or pretend to prefer, the romantic to
+the common in their novels, and complain of pages which are defiled with
+that which is low, yet I find that the absurd, the ludicrous, and even
+the evil, leave more impression behind them than the grand, the
+beautiful, or even the good. Dominie Sampson, Dugald Dalgetty, and
+Bothwell are, I think, more remembered than Fergus MacIvor, than Ivanhoe
+himself, or Mr. Butler the minister. It certainly came to pass that, in
+spite of the critics, Becky Sharp became the first attraction in _Vanity
+Fair_. When we speak now of _Vanity Fair_, it is always to Becky that
+our thoughts recur. She has made a position for herself in the world of
+fiction, and is one of our established personages.
+
+I have already said how she left school, throwing the "dixonary" out of
+the window, like dust from her feet, and was taken to spend a few
+halcyon weeks with her friend Amelia Sedley, at the Sedley mansion in
+Russell Square. There she meets a brother Sedley home from India,--the
+immortal Jos,--at whom she began to set her hitherto untried cap. Here
+we become acquainted both with the Sedley and with the Osborne families,
+with all their domestic affections and domestic snobbery, and have to
+confess that the snobbery is stronger than the affection. As we desire
+to love Amelia Sedley, we wish that the people around her were less
+vulgar or less selfish,--especially we wish it in regard to that
+handsome young fellow, George Osborne, whom she loves with her whole
+heart. But with Jos Sedley we are inclined to be content, though he be
+fat, purse-proud, awkward, a drunkard, and a coward, because we do not
+want anything better for Becky. Becky does not want anything better for
+herself, because the man has money. She has been born a pauper. She
+knows herself to be but ill qualified to set up as a beauty,--though by
+dint of cleverness she does succeed in that afterwards. She has no
+advantages in regard to friends or family as she enters life. She must
+earn her bread for herself. Young as she is, she loves money, and has a
+great idea of the power of money. Therefore, though Jos is distasteful
+at all points, she instantly makes her attack. She fails, however, at
+any rate for the present. She never becomes his wife, but at last she
+succeeds in getting some of his money. But before that time comes she
+has many a suffering to endure, and many a triumph to enjoy.
+
+She goes to Sir Pitt Crawley as governess for his second family, and is
+taken down to Queen's Crawley in the country. There her cleverness
+prevails, even with the baronet, of whom I have just given Thackeray's
+portrait. She keeps his accounts, and writes his letters, and helps him
+to save money; she reads with the elder sister books they ought not to
+have read; she flatters the sanctimonious son. In point of fact, she
+becomes all in all at Queen's Crawley, so that Sir Pitt himself falls in
+love with her,--for there is reason to think that Sir Pitt may soon
+become again a widower. But there also came down to the baronet's house,
+on an occasion of general entertaining, Captain Rawdon Crawley. Of
+course Becky sets her cap at him, and of course succeeds. She always
+succeeds. Though she is only the governess, he insists upon dancing with
+her, to the neglect of all the young ladies of the neighbourhood. They
+continue to walk together by moonlight,--or starlight,--the great,
+heavy, stupid, half-tipsy dragoon, and the intriguing, covetous,
+altogether unprincipled young woman. And the two young people absolutely
+come to love one another in their way,--the heavy, stupid, fuddled
+dragoon, and the false, covetous, altogether unprincipled young woman.
+
+The fat aunt Crawley is a maiden lady, very rich, and Becky quite
+succeeds in gaining the rich aunt by her wiles. The aunt becomes so fond
+of Becky down in the country, that when she has to return to her own
+house in town, sick from over-eating, she cannot be happy without taking
+Becky with her. So Becky is installed in the house in London, having
+been taken away abruptly from her pupils, to the great dismay of the old
+lady's long-established resident companion. They all fall in love with
+her; she makes herself so charming, she is so clever; she can even, by
+help of a little care in dressing, become so picturesque! As all this
+goes on, the reader feels what a great personage is Miss Rebecca Sharp.
+
+Lady Crawley dies down in the country, while Becky is still staying with
+his sister, who will not part with her. Sir Pitt at once rushes up to
+town, before the funeral, looking for consolation where only he can find
+it. Becky brings him down word from his sister's room that the old lady
+is too ill to see him.
+
+     "So much the better," Sir Pitt answered; "I want to see you,
+     Miss Sharp. I want you back at Queen's Crawley, miss," the
+     baronet said. His eyes had such a strange look, and were fixed
+     upon her so stedfastly that Rebecca Sharp began almost to
+     tremble. Then she half promises, talks about the dear
+     children, and angles with the old man. "I tell you I want
+     you," he says; "I'm going back to the vuneral, will you come
+     back?--yes or no?"
+
+     "I daren't. I don't think--it wouldn't be right--to be
+     alone--with you, sir," Becky said, seemingly in great
+     agitation.
+
+     "I say again, I want you. I can't get on without you. I didn't
+     see what it was till you went away. The house all goes wrong.
+     It's not the same place. All my accounts has got muddled
+     again. You must come back. Do come back. Dear Becky, do come."
+
+     "Come,--as what, sir?" Rebecca gasped out.
+
+     "Come as Lady Crawley, if you like. There, will that zatisfy
+     you? Come back and be my wife. You're vit for it. Birth be
+     hanged. You're as good a lady as ever I see. You've got more
+     brains in your little vinger than any baronet's wife in the
+     country. Will you come? Yes or no?" Rebecca is startled, but
+     the old man goes on. "I'll make you happy; zee if I don't. You
+     shall do what you like, spend what you like, and have it all
+     your own way. I'll make you a settlement. I'll do everything
+     regular. Look here," and the old man fell down on his knees
+     and leered at her like a satyr.
+
+But Rebecca, though she had been angling, angling for favour and love
+and power, had not expected this. For once in her life she loses her
+presence of mind, and exclaims: "Oh Sir Pitt; oh sir; I--I'm married
+already!" She has married Rawdon Crawley, Sir Pitt's younger son, Miss
+Crawley's favourite among those of her family who are looking for her
+money. But she keeps her secret for the present, and writes a charming
+letter to the Captain; "Dearest,--Something tells me that we shall
+conquer. You shall leave that odious regiment. Quit gaming, racing, and
+be a good boy, and we shall all live in Park Lane, and _ma tante_ shall
+leave us all her money." _Ma tante's_ money has been in her mind all
+through, but yet she loves him.
+
+     "Suppose the old lady doesn't come to," Rawdon said to his
+     little wife as they sat together in the snug little Brompton
+     lodgings. She had been trying the new piano all the morning.
+     The new gloves fitted her to a nicety. The new shawl became
+     her wonderfully. The new rings glittered on her little hands,
+     and the new watch ticked at her waist.
+
+     "_I'll_ make your fortune," she said; and Delilah patted
+     Samson's cheek.
+
+     "You can do anything," he said, kissing the little hand. "By
+     Jove you can! and we'll drive down to the Star and Garter and
+     dine, by Jove!"
+
+They were neither of them quite heartless at that moment, nor did Rawdon
+ever become quite bad. Then follow the adventures of Becky as a married
+woman, through all of which there is a glimmer of love for her stupid
+husband, while it is the real purpose of her heart to get money how she
+may,--by her charms, by her wit, by her lies, by her readiness. She
+makes love to everyone,--even to her sanctimonious brother-in-law, who
+becomes Sir Pitt in his time,--and always succeeds. But in her
+love-making there is nothing of love. She gets hold of that
+well-remembered old reprobate, the Marquis of Steyne, who possesses the
+two valuable gifts of being very dissolute and very rich, and from him
+she obtains money and jewels to her heart's desire. The abominations of
+Lord Steyne are depicted in the strongest language of which _Vanity
+Fair_ admits. The reader's hair stands almost on end in horror at the
+wickedness of the two wretches,--at her desire for money, sheer money;
+and his for wickedness, sheer wickedness. Then her husband finds her
+out,--poor Rawdon! who with all his faults and thickheaded stupidity,
+has become absolutely entranced by the wiles of his little wife. He is
+carried off to a sponging-house, in order that he may be out of the way,
+and, on escaping unexpectedly from thraldom, finds the lord in his
+wife's drawing-room. Whereupon he thrashes the old lord, nearly killing
+him; takes away the plunder which he finds on his wife's person, and
+hurries away to seek assistance as to further revenge;--for he is
+determined to shoot the marquis, or to be shot. He goes to one Captain
+Macmurdo, who is to act as his second, and there he pours out his heart.
+"You don't know how fond I was of that one," Rawdon said,
+half-inarticulately. "Damme, I followed her like a footman! I gave up
+everything I had to her. I'm a beggar because I would marry her. By
+Jove, sir, I've pawned my own watch to get her anything she fancied. And
+she,--she's been making a purse for herself all the time, and grudged me
+a hundred pounds to get me out of quod!" His friend alleges that the
+wife may be innocent after all. "It may be so," Rawdon exclaimed sadly;
+"but this don't look very innocent!" And he showed the captain the
+thousand-pound note which he had found in Becky's pocketbook.
+
+But the marquis can do better than fight; and Rawdon, in spite of his
+true love, can do better than follow the quarrel up to his own undoing.
+The marquis, on the spur of the moment, gets the lady's husband
+appointed governor of Coventry Island, with a salary of three thousand
+pounds a year; and poor Rawdon at last condescends to accept the
+appointment. He will not see his wife again, but he makes her an
+allowance out of his income.
+
+In arranging all this, Thackeray is enabled to have a side blow at the
+British way of distributing patronage,--for the favour of which he was
+afterwards himself a candidate. He quotes as follows from _The Royalist_
+newspaper: "We hear that the governorship"--of Coventry Island--"has
+been offered to Colonel Rawdon Crawley, C.B., a distinguished Waterloo
+officer. We need not only men of acknowledged bravery, but men of
+administrative talents to superintend the affairs of our colonies; and
+we have no doubt that the gentleman selected by the Colonial Office to
+fill the lamented vacancy which has occurred at Coventry Island, is
+admirably calculated for the post." The reader, however, is aware that
+the officer in question cannot write a sentence or speak two words
+correctly.
+
+Our heroine's adventures are carried on much further, but they cannot be
+given here in detail. To the end she is the same,--utterly false,
+selfish, covetous, and successful. To have made such a woman really in
+love would have been a mistake. Her husband she likes best,--because he
+is, or was, her own. But there is no man so foul, so wicked, so
+unattractive, but that she can fawn over him for money and jewels. There
+are women to whom nothing is nasty, either in person, language, scenes,
+actions, or principle,--and Becky is one of them; and yet she is herself
+attractive. A most wonderful sketch, for the perpetration of which all
+Thackeray's power of combined indignation and humour was necessary!
+
+The story of Amelia and her two lovers, George Osborne and Captain, or
+as he came afterwards to be, Major, and Colonel Dobbin, is less
+interesting, simply because goodness and eulogy are less exciting than
+wickedness and censure. Amelia is a true, honest-hearted, thoroughly
+English young woman, who loves her love because he is grand,--to her
+eyes,--and loving him, loves him with all her heart. Readers have said
+that she is silly, only because she is not heroic. I do not know that
+she is more silly than many young ladies whom we who are old have loved
+in our youth, or than those whom our sons are loving at the present
+time. Readers complain of Amelia because she is absolutely true to
+nature. There are no Raffaellistic touches, no added graces, no divine
+romance. She is feminine all over, and British,--loving, true,
+thoroughly unselfish, yet with a taste for having things comfortable,
+forgiving, quite capable of jealousy, but prone to be appeased at once,
+at the first kiss; quite convinced that her lover, her husband, her
+children are the people in all the world to whom the greatest
+consideration is due. Such a one is sure to be the dupe of a Becky
+Sharp, should a Becky Sharp come in her way,--as is the case with so
+many sweet Amelias whom we have known. But in a matter of love she is
+sound enough and sensible enough,--and she is as true as steel. I know
+no trait in Amelia which a man would be ashamed to find in his own
+daughter.
+
+She marries her George Osborne, who, to tell the truth of him, is but a
+poor kind of fellow, though he is a brave soldier. He thinks much of his
+own person, and is selfish. Thackeray puts in a touch or two here and
+there by which he is made to be odious. He would rather give a present
+to himself than to the girl who loved him. Nevertheless, when her father
+is ruined he marries her, and he fights bravely at Waterloo, and is
+killed. "No more firing was heard at Brussels. The pursuit rolled miles
+away. Darkness came down on the field and the city,--and Amelia was
+praying for George, who was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet
+through his heart."
+
+Then follows the long courtship of Dobbin, the true hero,--he who has
+been the friend of George since their old school-days; who has lived
+with him and served him, and has also loved Amelia. But he has loved
+her,--as one man may love another,--solely with a view to the profit of
+his friend. He has known all along that George and Amelia have been
+engaged to each other as boy and girl. George would have neglected her,
+but Dobbin would not allow it. George would have jilted the girl who
+loved him, but Dobbin would not let him. He had nothing to get for
+himself, but loving her as he did, it was the work of his life to get
+for her all that she wanted.
+
+George is shot at Waterloo, and then come fifteen years of
+widowhood,--fifteen years during which Becky is carrying on her
+manoeuvres,--fifteen years during which Amelia cannot bring herself to
+accept the devotion of the old captain, who becomes at last a colonel.
+But at the end she is won. "The vessel is in port. He has got the prize
+he has been trying for all his life. The bird has come in at last. There
+it is, with its head on its shoulder, billing and cooing clean up to his
+heart, with soft outstretched fluttering wings. This is what he has
+asked for every day and hour for eighteen years. This is what he has
+pined after. Here it is,--the summit, the end, the last page of the
+third volume."
+
+The reader as he closes the book has on his mind a strong conviction,
+the strongest possible conviction, that among men George is as weak and
+Dobbin as noble as any that he has met in literature; and that among
+women Amelia is as true and Becky as vile as any he has encountered. Of
+so much he will be conscious. In addition to this he will unconsciously
+have found that every page he has read will have been of interest to
+him. There has been no padding, no longueurs; every bit will have had
+its weight with him. And he will find too at the end, if he will think
+of it--though readers, I fear, seldom think much of this in regard to
+books they have read--that the lesson taught in every page has been
+good. There may be details of evil painted so as to disgust,--painted
+almost too plainly,--but none painted so as to allure.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+PENDENNIS AND THE NEWCOMES.
+
+
+The absence of the heroic was, in Thackeray, so palpable to Thackeray
+himself that in his original preface to _Pendennis_, when he began to be
+aware that his reputation was made, he tells his public what they may
+expect and what they may not, and makes his joking complaint of the
+readers of his time because they will not endure with patience the true
+picture of a natural man. "Even the gentlemen of our age," he
+says,--adding that the story of _Pendennis_ is an attempt to describe
+one of them, just as he is,--"even those we cannot show as they are with
+the notorious selfishness of their time and their education. Since the
+author of _Tom Jones_ was buried, no writer of fiction among us has been
+permitted to depict to his utmost power a MAN. We must shape him, and
+give him a certain conventional temper." Then he rebukes his audience
+because they will not listen to the truth. "You will not hear what moves
+in the real world, what passes in society, in the clubs, colleges,
+mess-rooms,--what is the life and talk of your sons." You want the
+Raffaellistic touch, or that of some painter of horrors equally removed
+from the truth. I tell you how a man really does act,--as did Fielding
+with Tom Jones,--but it does not satisfy you. You will not sympathise
+with this young man of mine, this Pendennis, because he is neither
+angel nor imp. If it be so, let it be so. I will not paint for you
+angels or imps, because I do not see them. The young man of the day,
+whom I do see, and of whom I know the inside and the out thoroughly, him
+I have painted for you; and here he is, whether you like the picture or
+not. This is what Thackeray meant, and, having this in his mind, he
+produced _Pendennis_.
+
+The object of a novel should be to instruct in morals while it amuses. I
+cannot think but that every novelist who has thought much of his art
+will have realised as much as that for himself. Whether this may best be
+done by the transcendental or by the commonplace is the question which
+it more behoves the reader than the author to answer, because the author
+may be fairly sure that he who can do the one will not, probably cannot,
+do the other. If a lad be only five feet high he does not try to enlist
+in the Guards. Thackeray complains that many ladies have "remonstrated
+and subscribers left him," because of his realistic tendency.
+Nevertheless he has gone on with his work, and, in _Pendennis_, has
+painted a young man as natural as Tom Jones. Had he expended himself in
+the attempt, he could not have drawn a Master of Ravenswood.
+
+It has to be admitted that Pendennis is not a fine fellow. He is not as
+weak, as selfish, as untrustworthy as that George Osborne whom Amelia
+married in _Vanity Fair_; but nevertheless, he is weak, and selfish, and
+untrustworthy. He is not such a one as a father would wish to see his
+son, or a mother to welcome as a lover for her daughter. But then,
+fathers are so often doomed to find their sons not all that they wish,
+and mothers to see their girls falling in love with young men who are
+not Paladins. In our individual lives we are contented to endure an
+admixture of evil, which we should resent if imputed to us in the
+general. We presume ourselves to be truth-speaking, noble in our
+sentiments, generous in our actions, modest and unselfish, chivalrous
+and devoted. But we forgive and pass over in silence a few delinquencies
+among ourselves. What boy at school ever is a coward,--in the general?
+What gentleman ever tells a lie? What young lady is greedy? We take it
+for granted, as though they were fixed rules in life, that our boys from
+our public schools look us in the face and are manly; that our gentlemen
+tell the truth as a matter of course; and that our young ladies are
+refined and unselfish. Thackeray is always protesting that it is not so,
+and that no good is to be done by blinking the truth. He knows that we
+have our little home experiences. Let us have the facts out, and mend
+what is bad if we can. This novel of _Pendennis_ is one of his loudest
+protests to this effect.
+
+I will not attempt to tell the story of Pendennis, how his mother loved
+him, how he first came to be brought up together with Laura Bell, how he
+thrashed the other boys when he was a boy, and how he fell in love with
+Miss Fotheringay, nee Costigan, and was determined to marry her while he
+was still a hobbledehoy, how he went up to Boniface, that well-known
+college at Oxford, and there did no good, spending money which he had
+not got, and learning to gamble. The English gentleman, as we know,
+never lies; but Pendennis is not quite truthful; when the college tutor,
+thinking that he hears the rattling of dice, makes his way into Pen's
+room, Pen and his two companions are found with three _Homers_ before
+them, and Pen asks the tutor with great gravity; "What was the present
+condition of the river Scamander, and whether it was navigable or no?"
+He tells his mother that, during a certain vacation he must stay up and
+read, instead of coming home,--but, nevertheless, he goes up to London
+to amuse himself. The reader is soon made to understand that, though Pen
+may be a fine gentleman, he is not trustworthy. But he repents and comes
+home, and kisses his mother; only, alas! he will always be kissing
+somebody else also.
+
+The story of the Amorys and the Claverings, and that wonderful French
+cook M. Alcide Mirobolant, forms one of those delightful digressions
+which Thackeray scatters through his novels rather than weaves into
+them. They generally have but little to do with the story itself, and
+are brought in only as giving scope for some incident to the real hero
+or heroine. But in this digression Pen is very much concerned indeed,
+for he is brought to the very verge of matrimony with that peculiarly
+disagreeable lady Miss Amory. He does escape at last, but only within a
+few pages of the end, when we are made unhappy by the lady's victory
+over that poor young sinner Foker, with whom we have all come to
+sympathise, in spite of his vulgarity and fast propensities. She would
+to the last fain have married Pen, in whom she believes, thinking that
+he would make a name for her. "Il me faut des emotions," says Blanche.
+Whereupon the author, as he leaves her, explains the nature of this Miss
+Amory's feelings. "For this young lady was not able to carry out any
+emotion to the full, but had a sham enthusiasm, a sham hatred, a sham
+love, a sham taste, a sham grief; each of which flared and shone very
+vehemently for an instant, but subsided and gave place to the next sham
+emotion." Thackeray, when he drew this portrait, must certainly have
+had some special young lady in his view. But though we are made unhappy
+for Foker, Foker too escapes at last, and Blanche, with her emotions,
+marries that very doubtful nobleman Comte Montmorenci de Valentinois.
+
+But all this of Miss Amory is but an episode. The purport of the story
+is the way in which the hero is made to enter upon the world, subject as
+he has been to the sweet teaching of his mother, and subject as he is
+made to be to the worldly lessons of his old uncle the major. Then he is
+ill, and nearly dies, and his mother comes up to nurse him. And there is
+his friend Warrington, of whose family down in Suffolk we shall have
+heard something when we have read _The Virginians_,--one I think of the
+finest characters, as it is certainly one of the most touching, that
+Thackeray ever drew. Warrington, and Pen's mother, and Laura are our
+hero's better angels,--angels so good as to make us wonder that a
+creature so weak should have had such angels about him; though we are
+driven to confess that their affection and loyalty for him are natural.
+There is a melancholy beneath the roughness of Warrington, and a
+feminine softness combined with the reticent manliness of the man, which
+have endeared him to readers beyond perhaps any character in the book.
+Major Pendennis has become immortal. Selfish, worldly, false, padded,
+caring altogether for things mean and poor in themselves; still the
+reader likes him. It is not quite all for himself. To Pen he is
+good,--to Pen who is the head of his family, and to come after him as
+the Pendennis of the day. To Pen and to Pen's mother he is beneficent
+after his lights. In whatever he undertakes it is so contrived that the
+reader shall in some degree sympathise with him. And so it is with poor
+old Costigan, the drunken Irish captain, Miss Fotheringay's papa. He was
+not a pleasant person. "We have witnessed the deshabille of Major
+Pendennis," says our author; "will any one wish to be valet-de-chambre
+to our other hero, Costigan? It would seem that the captain, before
+issuing from his bedroom, scented himself with otto of whisky." Yet
+there is a kindliness about him which softens our hearts, though in
+truth he is very careful that the kindness shall always be shown to
+himself.
+
+Among these people Pen makes his way to the end of the novel, coming
+near to shipwreck on various occasions, and always deserving the
+shipwreck which he has almost encountered. Then there will arise the
+question whether it might not have been better that he should be
+altogether shipwrecked, rather than housed comfortably with such a wife
+as Laura, and left to that enjoyment of happiness forever after, which
+is the normal heaven prepared for heroes and heroines who have done
+their work well through three volumes. It is almost the only instance in
+all Thackeray's works in which this state of bliss is reached. George
+Osborne, who is the beautiful lover in _Vanity Fair_, is killed almost
+before our eyes, on the field of battle, and we feel that Nemesis has
+with justice taken hold of him. Poor old Dobbin does marry the widow,
+after fifteen years of further service, when we know him to be a
+middle-aged man and her a middle-aged woman. That glorious Paradise of
+which I have spoken requires a freshness which can hardly be attributed
+to the second marriage of a widow who has been fifteen years mourning
+for her first husband. Clive Newcome, "the first young man," if we may
+so call him, of the novel which I shall mention just now, is carried so
+far beyond his matrimonial elysium that we are allowed to see too
+plainly how far from true may be those promises of hymeneal happiness
+forever after. The cares of married life have settled down heavily upon
+his young head before we leave him. He not only marries, but loses his
+wife, and is left a melancholy widower with his son. Esmond and Beatrix
+certainly reach no such elysium as that of which we are speaking. But
+Pen, who surely deserved a Nemesis, though perhaps not one so black as
+that demanded by George Osborne's delinquencies, is treated as though he
+had been passed through the fire, and had come out,--if not pure gold,
+still gold good enough for goldsmiths. "And what sort of a husband will
+this Pendennis be?" This is the question asked by the author himself at
+the end of the novel; feeling, no doubt, some hesitation as to the
+justice of what he had just done. "And what sort of a husband will this
+Pendennis be?" many a reader will ask, doubting the happiness of such a
+marriage and the future of Laura. The querists are referred to that lady
+herself, who, seeing his faults and wayward moods--seeing and owning
+that there are better men than he--loves him always with the most
+constant affection. The assertion could be made with perfect confidence,
+but is not to the purpose. That Laura's affection should be constant, no
+one would doubt; but more than that is wanted for happiness. How about
+Pendennis and his constancy?
+
+_The Newcomes_, which I bracket in this chapter with _Pendennis_, was
+not written till after _Esmond_, and appeared between that novel and
+_The Virginians_, which was a sequel to _Esmond_. It is supposed to be
+edited by Pen, whose own adventures we have just completed, and is
+commenced by that celebrated night passed by Colonel Newcome and his boy
+Clive at the Cave of Harmony, during which the colonel is at first so
+pleasantly received and so genially entertained, but from which he is at
+last banished, indignant at the iniquities of our drunken old friend
+Captain Costigan, with whom we had become intimate in Pen's own memoirs.
+The boy Clive is described as being probably about sixteen. At the end
+of the story he has run through the adventures of his early life, and is
+left a melancholy man, a widower, one who has suffered the extremity of
+misery from a stepmother, and who is wrapped up in the only son that is
+left to him,--as had been the case with his father at the beginning of
+the novel. _The Newcomes_, therefore, like Thackeray's other tales, is
+rather a slice from the biographical memoirs of a family, than a romance
+or novel in itself.
+
+It is full of satire from the first to the last page. Every word of it
+seems to have been written to show how vile and poor a place this world
+is; how prone men are to deceive, how prone to be deceived. There is a
+scene in which "his Excellency Rummun Loll, otherwise his Highness
+Rummun Loll," is introduced to Colonel Newcome,--or rather
+presented,--for the two men had known each other before. All London was
+talking of Rummun Loll, taking him for an Indian prince, but the
+colonel, who had served in India, knew better. Rummun Loll was no more
+than a merchant, who had made a precarious fortune by doubtful means.
+All the girls, nevertheless, are running after his Excellency. "He's
+known to have two wives already in India," says Barnes Newcome; "but, by
+gad, for a settlement, I believe some of the girls here would marry
+him." We have a delightful illustration of the London girls, with their
+bare necks and shoulders, sitting round Rummun Loll and worshipping him
+as he reposes on his low settee. There are a dozen of them so enchanted
+that the men who wish to get a sight of the Rummun are quite kept at a
+distance. This is satire on the women. A few pages on we come upon a
+clergyman who is no more real than Rummun Loll. The clergyman, Charles
+Honeyman, had married the colonel's sister and had lost his wife, and
+now the brothers-in-law meet. "'Poor, poor Emma!' exclaimed the
+ecclesiastic, casting his eyes towards the chandelier and passing a
+white cambric pocket-handkerchief gracefully before them. No man in
+London understood the ring business or the pocket-handkerchief business
+better, or smothered his emotion more beautifully. 'In the gayest
+moments, in the giddiest throng of fashion, the thoughts of the past
+will rise; the departed will be among us still. But this is not the
+strain wherewith to greet the friend newly arrived on our shores. How it
+rejoices me to behold you in old England.'" And so the satirist goes on
+with Mr. Honeyman the clergyman. Mr. Honeyman the clergyman has been
+already mentioned, in that extract made in our first chapter from _Lovel
+the Widower_. It was he who assisted another friend, "with his wheedling
+tongue," in inducing Thackeray to purchase that "neat little literary
+paper,"--called then _The Museum_, but which was in truth _The National
+Standard_. In describing Barnes Newcome, the colonel's relative,
+Thackeray in the same scene attacks the sharpness of the young men of
+business of the present day. There were, or were to be, some
+transactions with Rummun Loll, and Barnes Newcome, being in doubt, asks
+the colonel a question or two as to the certainty of the Rummun's money,
+much to the colonel's disgust. "The young man of business had dropped
+his drawl or his languor, and was speaking quite unaffectedly,
+good-naturedly, and selfishly. Had you talked to him for a week you
+would not have made him understand the scorn and loathing with which the
+colonel regarded him. Here was a young fellow as keen as the oldest
+curmudgeon,--a lad with scarce a beard to his chin, that would pursue
+his bond as rigidly as Shylock." "Barnes Newcome never missed a church,"
+he goes on, "or dressing for dinner. He never kept a tradesman waiting
+for his money. He seldom drank too much, and never was late for
+business, or huddled over his toilet, however brief his sleep or severe
+his headache. In a word, he was as scrupulously whited as any sepulchre
+in the whole bills of mortality." Thackeray had lately seen some Barnes
+Newcome when he wrote that.
+
+It is all satire; but there is generally a touch of pathos even through
+the satire. It is satire when Miss Quigley, the governess in Park
+Street, falls in love with the old colonel after some dim fashion of her
+own. "When she is walking with her little charges in the Park, faint
+signals of welcome appear on her wan cheeks. She knows the dear colonel
+amidst a thousand horsemen." The colonel had drunk a glass of wine with
+her after his stately fashion, and the foolish old maid thinks too much
+of it. Then we are told how she knits purses for him, "as she sits alone
+in the schoolroom,--high up in that lone house, when the little ones are
+long since asleep,--before her dismal little tea-tray, and her little
+desk containing her mother's letters and her mementoes of home." Miss
+Quigley is an ass; but we are made to sympathise entirely with the ass,
+because of that morsel of pathos as to her mother's letters.
+
+Clive Newcome, our hero, who is a second Pen, but a better fellow, is
+himself a satire on young men,--on young men who are idle and ambitious
+at the same time. He is a painter; but, instead of being proud of his
+art, is half ashamed of it,--because not being industrious he has not,
+while yet young, learned to excel. He is "doing" a portrait of Mrs.
+Pendennis, Laura, and thus speaks of his business. "No. 666,"--he is
+supposed to be quoting from the catalogue of the Royal Academy for the
+year,--"No. 666. Portrait of Joseph Muggins, Esq., Newcome, George
+Street. No. 979. Portrait of Mrs. Muggins on her gray pony, Newcome. No.
+579. Portrait of Joseph Muggins, Esq.'s dog Toby, Newcome. This is what
+I am fit for. These are the victories I have set myself on achieving. Oh
+Mrs. Pendennis! isn't it humiliating? Why isn't there a war? Why haven't
+I a genius? There is a painter who lives hard by, and who begs me to
+come and look at his work. He is in the Muggins line too. He gets his
+canvases with a good light upon them; excludes the contemplation of
+other objects; stands beside his picture in an attitude himself; and
+thinks that he and they are masterpieces. Oh me, what drivelling
+wretches we are! Fame!--except that of just the one or two,--what's the
+use of it?" In all of which Thackeray is speaking his own feelings about
+himself as well as the world at large. What's the use of it all? Oh
+vanitas vanitatum! Oh vanity and vexation of spirit! "So Clive Newcome,"
+he says afterwards, "lay on a bed of down and tossed and tumbled there.
+He went to fine dinners, and sat silent over them; rode fine horses, and
+black care jumped up behind the moody horseman." As I write this I have
+before me a letter from Thackeray to a friend describing his own
+success when _Vanity Fair_ was coming out, full of the same feeling. He
+is making money, but he spends it so fast that he never has any; and as
+for the opinions expressed on his books, he cares little for what he
+hears. There was always present to him a feeling of black care seated
+behind the horseman,--and would have been equally so had there been no
+real care present to him. A sardonic melancholy was the characteristic
+most common to him,--which, however, was relieved by an always present
+capacity for instant frolic. It was these attributes combined which made
+him of all satirists the most humorous, and of all humorists the most
+satirical. It was these that produced the Osbornes, the Dobbins, the
+Pens, the Clives, and the Newcomes, whom, when he loved them the most,
+he could not save himself from describing as mean and unworthy. A
+somewhat heroic hero of romance,--such a one, let us say, as Waverley,
+or Lovel in _The Antiquary_, or Morton in _Old Mortality_,--was
+revolting to him, as lacking those foibles which human nature seemed to
+him to demand.
+
+The story ends with two sad tragedies, neither of which would have been
+demanded by the story, had not such sadness been agreeable to the
+author's own idiosyncrasy. The one is the ruin of the old colonel's
+fortunes, he having allowed himself to be enticed into bubble
+speculations; and the other is the loss of all happiness, and even
+comfort, to Clive the hero, by the abominations of his mother-in-law.
+The woman is so iniquitous, and so tremendous in her iniquities, that
+she rises to tragedy. Who does not know Mrs. Mack the Campaigner? Why at
+the end of his long story should Thackeray have married his hero to so
+lackadaisical a heroine as poor little Rosey, or brought on the stage
+such a she-demon as Rosey's mother? But there is the Campaigner in all
+her vigour, a marvel of strength of composition,--one of the most
+vividly drawn characters in fiction;--but a woman so odious that one is
+induced to doubt whether she should have been depicted.
+
+The other tragedy is altogether of a different kind, and though
+unnecessary to the story, and contrary to that practice of story-telling
+which seems to demand that calamities to those personages with whom we
+are to sympathise should not be brought in at the close of a work of
+fiction, is so beautifully told that no lover of Thackeray's work would
+be willing to part with it. The old colonel, as we have said, is ruined
+by speculation, and in his ruin is brought to accept the alms of the
+brotherhood of the Grey Friars. Then we are introduced to the Charter
+House, at which, as most of us know, there still exists a brotherhood of
+the kind. He dons the gown,--this old colonel, who had always been
+comfortable in his means, and latterly apparently rich,--and occupies
+the single room, and eats the doled bread, and among his poor brothers
+sits in the chapel of his order. The description is perhaps as fine as
+anything that Thackeray ever did. The gentleman is still the gentleman,
+with all the pride of gentry;--but not the less is he the humble
+bedesman, aware that he is living upon charity, not made to grovel by
+any sense of shame, but knowing that, though his normal pride may be
+left to him, an outward demeanour of humility is befitting.
+
+And then he dies. "At the usual evening hour the chapel bell began to
+toll, and Thomas Newcome's hands outside the bed feebly beat time,--and,
+just as the last bell struck, a peculiar sweet smile shone over his
+face, and he lifted up his head a little, and quickly said,
+'Adsum,'--and fell back. It was the word we used at school when names
+were called; and, lo, he whose heart was as that of a little child had
+answered to his name, and stood in the presence of his Maker!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+ESMOND AND THE VIRGINIANS.
+
+
+The novel with which we are now going to deal I regard as the greatest
+work that Thackeray did. Though I do not hesitate to compare himself
+with himself, I will make no comparison between him and others; I
+therefore abstain from assigning to _Esmond_ any special niche among
+prose fictions in the English language, but I rank it so high as to
+justify me in placing him among the small number of the highest class of
+English novelists. Much as I think of _Barry Lyndon_ and _Vanity Fair_,
+I cannot quite say this of them; but, as a chain is not stronger than
+its weakest link, so is a poet, or a dramatist, or a novelist to be
+placed in no lower level than that which he has attained by his highest
+sustained flight. The excellence which has been reached here Thackeray
+achieved, without doubt, by giving a greater amount of forethought to
+the work he had before him than had been his wont. When we were young we
+used to be told, in our house at home, that "elbow-grease" was the one
+essential necessary to getting a tough piece of work well done. If a
+mahogany table was to be made to shine, it was elbow-grease that the
+operation needed. Forethought is the elbow-grease which a novelist,--or
+poet, or dramatist,--requires. It is not only his plot that has to be
+turned and re-turned in his mind, not his plot chiefly, but he has to
+make himself sure of his situations, of his characters, of his effects,
+so that when the time comes for hitting the nail he may know where to
+hit it on the head,--so that he may himself understand the passion, the
+calmness, the virtues, the vices, the rewards and punishments which he
+means to explain to others,--so that his proportions shall be correct,
+and he be saved from the absurdity of devoting two-thirds of his book to
+the beginning, or two-thirds to the completion of his task. It is from
+want of this special labour, more frequently than from intellectual
+deficiency, that the tellers of stories fail so often to hit their nails
+on the head. To think of a story is much harder work than to write it.
+The author can sit down with the pen in his hand for a given time, and
+produce a certain number of words. That is comparatively easy, and if he
+have a conscience in regard to his task, work will be done regularly.
+But to think it over as you lie in bed, or walk about, or sit cosily
+over your fire, to turn it all in your thoughts, and make the things
+fit,--that requires elbow-grease of the mind. The arrangement of the
+words is as though you were walking simply along a road. The arrangement
+of your story is as though you were carrying a sack of flour while you
+walked. Fielding had carried his sack of flour before he wrote _Tom
+Jones_, and Scott his before he produced _Ivanhoe_. So had Thackeray
+done,--a very heavy sack of flour,--in creating _Esmond_. In _Vanity
+Fair_, in _Pendennis_, and in _The Newcomes_, there was more of that
+mere wandering in which no heavy burden was borne. The richness of the
+author's mind, the beauty of his language, his imagination and
+perception of character are all there. For that which was lovely he has
+shown his love, and for the hateful his hatred; but, nevertheless, they
+are comparatively idle books. His only work, as far as I can judge them,
+in which there is no touch of idleness, is _Esmond_. _Barry Lyndon_ is
+consecutive, and has the well-sustained purpose of exhibiting a finished
+rascal; but _Barry Lyndon_ is not quite the same from beginning to end.
+All his full-fledged novels, except _Esmond_, contain rather strings of
+incidents and memoirs of individuals, than a completed story. But
+_Esmond_ is a whole from beginning to end, with its tale well told, its
+purpose developed, its moral brought home,--and its nail hit well on the
+head and driven in.
+
+I told Thackeray once that it was not only his best work, but so much
+the best, that there was none second to it. "That was what I intended,"
+he said, "but I have failed. Nobody reads it. After all, what does it
+matter?" he went on after awhile. "If they like anything, one ought to
+be satisfied. After all, Esmond was a prig." Then he laughed and changed
+the subject, not caring to dwell on thoughts painful to him. The
+elbow-grease of thinking was always distasteful to him, and had no doubt
+been so when he conceived and carried out this work.
+
+To the ordinary labour necessary for such a novel he added very much by
+his resolution to write it in a style different, not only from that
+which he had made his own, but from that also which belonged to the
+time. He had devoted himself to the reading of the literature of Queen
+Anne's reign, and having chosen to throw his story into that period, and
+to create in it personages who were to be peculiarly concerned with the
+period, he resolved to use as the vehicle for his story the forms of
+expression then prevalent. No one who has not tried it can understand
+how great is the difficulty of mastering a phase of one's own language
+other than that which habit has made familiar. To write in another
+language, if the language be sufficiently known, is a much less arduous
+undertaking. The lad who attempts to write his essay in Ciceronian Latin
+struggles to achieve a style which is not indeed common to him, but is
+more common than any other he has become acquainted with in that tongue.
+But Thackeray in his work had always to remember his Swift, his Steele,
+and his Addison, and to forget at the same time the modes of expression
+which the day had adopted. Whether he asked advice on the subject, I do
+not know. But I feel sure that if he did he must have been counselled
+against it. Let my reader think what advice he would give to any writer
+on such a subject. Probably he asked no advice, and would have taken
+none. No doubt he found himself, at first imperceptibly, gliding into a
+phraseology which had attractions for his ear, and then probably was so
+charmed with the peculiarly masculine forms of sentences which thus
+became familiar to him, that he thought it would be almost as difficult
+to drop them altogether as altogether to assume the use of them. And if
+he could do so successfully, how great would be the assistance given to
+the local colouring which is needed for a novel in prose, the scene of
+which is thrown far back from the writer's period! Were I to write a
+poem about Coeur de Lion I should not mar my poem by using the simple
+language of the day; but if I write a prose story of the time, I cannot
+altogether avoid some attempt at far-away quaintnesses in language. To
+call a purse a "gypsire," and to begin your little speeches with "Marry
+come up," or to finish them with "Quotha," are but poor attempts. But
+even they have had their effect. Scott did the best he could with his
+Coeur de Lion. When we look to it we find that it was but little;
+though in his hands it passed for much. "By my troth," said the knight,
+"thou hast sung well and heartily, and in high praise of thine order."
+We doubt whether he achieved any similarity to the language of the time;
+but still, even in the little which he attempted there was something of
+the picturesque. But how much more would be done if in very truth the
+whole language of a story could be thrown with correctness into the form
+of expression used at the time depicted?
+
+It was this that Thackeray tried in his _Esmond_, and he has done it
+almost without a flaw. The time in question is near enough to us, and
+the literature sufficiently familiar to enable us to judge. Whether folk
+swore by their troth in the days of king Richard I. we do not know, but
+when we read Swift's letters, and Addison's papers, or Defoe's novels we
+do catch the veritable sounds of Queen Anne's age, and can say for
+ourselves whether Thackeray has caught them correctly or not. No reader
+can doubt that he has done so. Nor is the reader ever struck with the
+affectation of an assumed dialect. The words come as though they had
+been written naturally,--though not natural to the middle of the
+nineteenth century. It was a tour de force; and successful as such a
+tour de force so seldom is. But though Thackeray was successful in
+adopting the tone he wished to assume, he never quite succeeded, as far
+as my ear can judge, in altogether dropping it again.
+
+And yet it has to be remembered that though _Esmond_ deals with the
+times of Queen Anne, and "copies the language" of the time, as Thackeray
+himself says in the dedication, the story is not supposed to have been
+written till the reign of George II. Esmond in his narrative speaks of
+Fielding and Hogarth, who did their best work under George II. The idea
+is that Henry Esmond, the hero, went out to Virginia after the events
+told, and there wrote the memoir in the form of an autobiography. The
+estate of Castlewood in Virginia had been given to the Esmond family by
+Charles II., and this Esmond, our hero, finding that expatriation would
+best suit both his domestic happiness and his political
+difficulties,--as the reader of the book will understand might be the
+case,--settles himself in the colony, and there writes the history of
+his early life. He retains the manners, and with the manners the
+language of his youth. He lives among his own people, a country
+gentleman with a broad domain, mixing but little with the world beyond,
+and remains an English gentleman of the time of Queen Anne. The story is
+continued in _The Virginians_, the name given to a record of two lads
+who were grandsons of Harry Esmond, whose names are Warrington. Before
+_The Virginians_ appeared we had already become acquainted with a scion
+of that family, the friend of Arthur Pendennis, a younger son of Sir
+Miles Warrington, of Suffolk. Henry Esmond's daughter had in a previous
+generation married a younger son of the then baronet. This is mentioned
+now to show the way in which Thackeray's mind worked afterwards upon the
+details and characters which he had originated in _Esmond_.
+
+It is not my purpose to tell the story here, but rather to explain the
+way in which it is written, to show how it differs from other stories,
+and thus to explain its effect. Harry Esmond, who tells the story, is of
+course the hero. There are two heroines who equally command our
+sympathy,--Lady Castlewood the wife of Harry's kinsman, and her
+daughter Beatrix. Thackeray himself declared the man to be a prig, and
+he was not altogether wrong. Beatrix, with whom throughout the whole
+book he is in love, knew him well. "Shall I be frank with you, Harry,"
+she says, when she is engaged to another suitor, "and say that if you
+had not been down on your knees and so humble, you might have fared
+better with me? A woman of my spirit, cousin, is to be won by gallantry,
+and not by sighs and rueful faces. All the time you are worshipping and
+singing hymns to me, I know very well I am no goddess." And again: "As
+for you, you want a woman to bring your slippers and cap, and to sit at
+your feet and cry, O caro, caro! O bravo! whilst you read your
+Shakespeares and Miltons and stuff." He was a prig, and the girl he
+loved knew him, and being quite of another way of thinking herself,
+would have nothing to say to him in the way of love. But without
+something of the aptitudes of a prig the character which the author
+intended could not have been drawn. There was to be courage,--military
+courage,--and that propensity to fighting which the tone of the age
+demanded in a finished gentleman. Esmond therefore is ready enough to
+use his sword. But at the same time he has to live as becomes one whose
+name is in some degree under a cloud; for though he be not in truth an
+illegitimate offshoot of the noble family which is his, and though he
+knows that he is not so, still he has to live as though he were. He
+becomes a soldier, and it was just then that our army was accustomed "to
+swear horribly in Flanders." But Esmond likes his books, and cannot
+swear or drink like other soldiers. Nevertheless he has a sort of liking
+for fast ways in others, knowing that such are the ways of a gallant
+cavalier. There is a melancholy over his life which makes him always,
+to himself and to others, much older than his years. He is well aware
+that, being as he is, it is impossible that Beatrix should love him. Now
+and then there is a dash of lightness about him, as though he had taught
+himself in his philosophy that even sorrow may be borne with a
+smile,--as though there was something in him of the Stoic's doctrine,
+which made him feel that even disappointed love should not be seen to
+wound too deep. But still when he smiles, even when he indulges in some
+little pleasantry, there is that garb of melancholy over him which
+always makes a man a prig. But he is a gentleman from the crown of his
+head to the sole of his foot. Thackeray had let the whole power of his
+intellect apply itself to a conception of the character of a gentleman.
+This man is brave, polished, gifted with that old-fashioned courtesy
+which ladies used to love, true as steel, loyal as faith himself, with a
+power of self-abnegation which astonishes the criticising reader when he
+finds such a virtue carried to such an extent without seeming to be
+unnatural. To draw the picture of a man and say that he is gifted with
+all the virtues is easy enough,--easy enough to describe him as
+performing all the virtues. The difficulty is to put your man on his
+legs, and make him move about, carrying his virtues with a natural gait,
+so that the reader shall feel that he is becoming acquainted with flesh
+and blood, not with a wooden figure. The virtues are all there with
+Henry Esmond, and the flesh and blood also, so that the reader believes
+in them. But still there is left a flavour of the character which
+Thackeray himself tasted when he called his hero a prig.
+
+The two heroines, Lady Castlewood and Beatrix, are mother and daughter,
+of whom the former is in love with Esmond, and the latter is loved by
+him. Fault has been found with the story, because of the unnatural
+rivalry,--because it has been felt that a mother's solicitude for her
+daughter should admit of no such juxtaposition. But the criticism has
+come, I think, from those who have failed to understand, not from those
+who have understood, the tale;--not because they have read it, but
+because they have not read it, and have only looked at it or heard of
+it. Lady Castlewood is perhaps ten years older than the boy Esmond, whom
+she first finds in her husband's house, and takes as a protege; and from
+the moment in which she finds that he is in love with her own daughter,
+she does her best to bring about a marriage between them. Her husband is
+alive, and though he is a drunken brute,--after the manner of lords of
+that time,--she is thoroughly loyal to him. The little touches, of which
+the woman is herself altogether unconscious, that gradually turn a love
+for the boy into a love for the man, are told so delicately, that it is
+only at last that the reader perceives what has in truth happened to the
+woman. She is angry with him, grateful to him, careful over him,
+gradually conscious of all his worth, and of all that he does to her and
+hers, till at last her heart is unable to resist. But then she is a
+widow;--and Beatrix has declared that her ambition will not allow her to
+marry so humble a swain, and Esmond has become,--as he says of himself
+when he calls himself "an old gentleman,"--"the guardian of all the
+family," "fit to be the grandfather of you all."
+
+The character of Lady Castlewood has required more delicacy in its
+manipulation than perhaps any other which Thackeray has drawn. There is
+a mixture in it of self-negation and of jealousy, of gratefulness of
+heart and of the weary thoughtfulness of age, of occasional
+sprightliness with deep melancholy, of injustice with a thorough
+appreciation of the good around her, of personal weakness,--as shown
+always in her intercourse with her children, and of personal
+strength,--as displayed when she vindicates the position of her kinsman
+Henry to the Duke of Hamilton, who is about to marry Beatrix;--a mixture
+which has required a master's hand to trace. These contradictions are
+essentially feminine. Perhaps it must be confessed that in the
+unreasonableness of the woman, the author has intended to bear more
+harshly on the sex than it deserves. But a true woman will forgive him,
+because of the truth of Lady Castlewood's heart. Her husband had been
+killed in a duel, and there were circumstances which had induced her at
+the moment to quarrel with Harry and to be unjust to him. He had been
+ill, and had gone away to the wars, and then she had learned the truth,
+and had been wretched enough. But when he comes back, and she sees him,
+by chance at first, as the anthem is being sung in the cathedral choir,
+as she is saying her prayers, her heart flows over with tenderness to
+him. "I knew you would come back," she said; "and to-day, Harry, in the
+anthem when they sang it,--'When the Lord turned the captivity of Zion
+we were like them that dream,'--I thought, yes, like them that
+dream,--them that dream. And then it went on, 'They that sow in tears
+shall reap in joy, and he that goeth forth and weepeth, shall doubtless
+come home again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him.' I looked
+up from the book and saw you. I was not surprised when I saw you. I knew
+you would come, my dear, and saw the gold sunshine round your head." And
+so it goes on, running into expressions of heartmelting tenderness. And
+yet she herself does not know that her own heart is seeking his with
+all a woman's love. She is still willing that he should possess Beatrix.
+"I would call you my son," she says, "sooner than the greatest prince in
+Europe." But she warns him of the nature of her own girl. "'Tis for my
+poor Beatrix I tremble, whose headstrong will affrights me, whose
+jealous temper, and whose vanity no prayers of mine can cure." It is but
+very gradually that Esmond becomes aware of the truth. Indeed, he has
+not become altogether aware of it till the tale closes. The reader does
+not see that transfer of affection from the daughter to the mother which
+would fail to reach his sympathy. In the last page of the last chapter
+it is told that it is so,--that Esmond marries Lady Castlewood,--but it
+is not told till all the incidents of the story have been completed.
+
+But of the three characters I have named, Beatrix is the one that has
+most strongly exercised the writer's powers, and will most interest the
+reader. As far as outward person is concerned she is very lovely,--so
+charming, that every man that comes near to her submits himself to her
+attractions and caprices. It is but rarely that a novelist can succeed
+in impressing his reader with a sense of female loveliness. The attempt
+is made so frequently,--comes so much as a matter of course in every
+novel that is written, and fails so much as a matter of course, that the
+reader does not feel the failure. There are things which we do not
+expect to have done for us in literature because they are done so
+seldom. Novelists are apt to describe the rural scenes among which their
+characters play their parts, but seldom leave any impression of the
+places described. Even in poetry how often does this occur? The words
+used are pretty, well chosen, perhaps musical to the ear, and in that
+way befitting; but unless the spot has violent characteristics of its
+own, such as Burley's cave or the waterfall of Lodore, no striking
+portrait is left. Nor are we disappointed as we read, because we have
+not been taught to expect it to be otherwise. So it is with those
+word-painted portraits of women, which are so frequently given and so
+seldom convey any impression. Who has an idea of the outside look of
+Sophia Western, or Edith Bellenden, or even of Imogen, though
+Iachimo, who described her, was so good at words? A series of
+pictures,--illustrations,--as we have with Dickens' novels, and with
+Thackeray's, may leave an impression of a figure,--though even then not
+often of feminine beauty. But in this work Thackeray has succeeded in
+imbuing us with a sense of the outside loveliness of Beatrix by the mere
+force of words. We are not only told it, but we feel that she was such a
+one as a man cannot fail to covet, even when his judgment goes against
+his choice.
+
+Here the judgment goes altogether against the choice. The girl grows up
+before us from her early youth till her twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth
+year, and becomes,--such as her mother described her,--one whose
+headlong will, whose jealousy, and whose vanity nothing could restrain.
+She has none of those soft foibles, half allied to virtues, by which
+weak women fall away into misery or perhaps distraction. She does not
+want to love or to be loved. She does not care to be fondled. She has no
+longing for caresses. She wants to be admired,--and to make use of the
+admiration she shall achieve for the material purposes of her life. She
+wishes to rise in the world; and her beauty is the sword with which she
+must open her oyster. As to her heart, it is a thing of which she
+becomes aware, only to assure herself that it must be laid aside and
+put out of the question. Now and again Esmond touches it. She just
+feels that she has a heart to be touched. But she never has a doubt as
+to her conduct in that respect. She will not allow her dreams of
+ambition to be disturbed by such folly as love.
+
+In all that there might be something, if not good and great,
+nevertheless grand, if her ambition, though worldly, had in it a touch
+of nobility. But this poor creature is made with her bleared blind eyes
+to fall into the very lowest depths of feminine ignobility. One lover
+comes after another. Harry Esmond is, of course, the lover with whom the
+reader interests himself. At last there comes a duke,--fifty years old,
+indeed, but with semi-royal appanages. As his wife she will become a
+duchess, with many diamonds, and be her Excellency. The man is stern,
+cold, and jealous; but she does not doubt for a moment. She is to be
+Duchess of Hamilton, and towers already in pride of place above her
+mother, and her kinsman lover, and all her belongings. The story here,
+with its little incidents of birth, and blood, and ignoble pride, and
+gratified ambition, with a dash of true feminine nobility on the part of
+the girl's mother, is such as to leave one with the impression that it
+has hardly been beaten in English prose fiction. Then, in the last
+moment, the duke is killed in a duel, and the news is brought to the
+girl by Esmond. She turns upon him and rebukes him harshly. Then she
+moves away, and feels in a moment that there is nothing left for her in
+this world, and that she can only throw herself upon devotion for
+consolation. "I am best in my own room and by myself," she said. Her
+eyes were quite dry, nor did Esmond ever see them otherwise, save once,
+in respect of that grief. She gave him a cold hand as she went out.
+"Thank you, brother," she said in a low voice, and with a simplicity
+more touching than tears, "all that you have said is true and kind, and
+I will go away and will ask pardon."
+
+But the consolation coming from devotion did not go far with such a one
+as her. We cannot rest on religion merely by saying that we will do so.
+Very speedily there comes consolation in another form. Queen Anne is on
+her deathbed, and a young Stuart prince appears upon the scene, of whom
+some loyal hearts dream that they can make a king. He is such as Stuarts
+were, and only walks across the novelist's canvas to show his folly and
+heartlessness. But there is a moment in which Beatrix thinks that she
+may rise in the world to the proud place of a royal mistress. That is
+her last ambition! That is her pride! That is to be her glory! The
+bleared eyes can see no clearer than that. But the mock prince passes
+away, and nothing but the disgrace of the wish remains.
+
+Such is the story of _Esmond_, leaving with it, as does all Thackeray's
+work, a melancholy conviction of the vanity of all things human.
+_Vanitas vanitatum_, as he wrote on the pages of the French lady's
+album, and again in one of the earlier numbers of _The Cornhill
+Magazine_. With much that is picturesque, much that is droll, much that
+is valuable as being a correct picture of the period selected, the gist
+of the book is melancholy throughout. It ends with the promise of
+happiness to come, but that is contained merely in a concluding
+paragraph. The one woman, during the course of the story, becomes a
+widow, with a living love in which she has no hope, with children for
+whom her fears are almost stronger than her affection, who never can
+rally herself to happiness for a moment. The other, with all her beauty
+and all her brilliance, becomes what we have described,--and marries at
+last her brother's tutor, who becomes a bishop by means of her
+intrigues. Esmond, the hero, who is compounded of all good gifts, after
+a childhood and youth tinged throughout with melancholy, vanishes from
+us, with the promise that he is to be rewarded by the hand of the mother
+of the girl he has loved.
+
+And yet there is not a page in the book over which a thoughtful reader
+cannot pause with delight. The nature in it is true nature. Given a
+story thus sad, and persons thus situated, and it is thus that the
+details would follow each other, and thus that the people would conduct
+themselves. It was the tone of Thackeray's mind to turn away from the
+prospect of things joyful, and to see,--or believe that he saw,--in all
+human affairs, the seed of something base, of something which would be
+antagonistic to true contentment. All his snobs, and all his fools, and
+all his knaves, come from the same conviction. Is it not the doctrine on
+which our religion is founded,--though the sadness of it there is
+alleviated by the doubtful promise of a heaven?
+
+     Though thrice a thousand years are passed
+       Since David's son, the sad and splendid,
+     The weary king ecclesiast
+       Upon his awful tablets penned it.
+
+So it was that Thackeray preached his sermon. But melancholy though it
+be, the lesson taught in _Esmond_ is salutary from beginning to end. The
+sermon truly preached is that glory can only come from that which is
+truly glorious, and that the results of meanness end always in the mean.
+No girl will be taught to wish to shine like Beatrix, nor will any youth
+be made to think that to gain the love of such a one it can be worth his
+while to expend his energy or his heart.
+
+_Esmond_ was published in 1852. It was not till 1858, some time after he
+had returned from his lecturing tours, that he published the sequel
+called _The Virginians_. It was first brought out in twenty-four monthly
+numbers, and ran through the years 1858 and 1859, Messrs. Bradbury and
+Evans having been the publishers. It takes up by no means the story of
+_Esmond_, and hardly the characters. The twin lads, who are called the
+Virginians, and whose name is Warrington, are grandsons of Esmond and
+his wife Lady Castlewood. Their one daughter, born at the estate in
+Virginia, had married a Warrington, and the Virginians are the issue of
+that marriage. In the story, one is sent to England, there to make his
+way; and the other is for awhile supposed to have been killed by the
+Indians. How he was not killed, but after awhile comes again forward in
+the world of fiction, will be found in the story, which it is not our
+purpose to set forth here. The most interesting part of the narrative is
+that which tells us of the later fortunes of Madame Beatrix,--the
+Baroness Bernstein,--the lady who had in her youth been Beatrix Esmond,
+who had then condescended to become Mrs. Tasker, the tutor's wife,
+whence she rose to be the "lady" of a bishop, and, after the bishop had
+been put to rest under a load of marble, had become the baroness,--a
+rich old woman, courted by all her relatives because of her wealth.
+
+In _The Virginians_, as a work of art, is discovered, more strongly than
+had shown itself yet in any of his works, that propensity to wandering
+which came to Thackeray because of his idleness. It is, I think, to be
+found in every book he ever wrote,--except _Esmond_; but is here more
+conspicuous than it had been in his earlier years. Though he can settle
+himself down to his pen and ink,--not always even to that without a
+struggle, but to that with sufficient burst of energy to produce a
+large average amount of work,--he cannot settle himself down to the task
+of contriving a story. There have been those,--and they have not been
+bad judges of literature,--who have told me that they have best liked
+these vague narratives. The mind of the man has been clearly exhibited
+in them. In them he has spoken out his thoughts, and given the world to
+know his convictions, as well as could have been done in the carrying
+out any well-conducted plot. And though the narratives be vague, the
+characters are alive. In _The Virginians_, the two young men and their
+mother, and the other ladies with whom they have to deal, and especially
+their aunt, the Baroness Bernstein, are all alive. For desultory
+reading, for that picking up of a volume now and again which requires
+permission to forget the plot of a novel, this novel is admirably
+adapted. There is not a page of it vacant or dull. But he who takes it
+up to read as a whole, will find that it is the work of a desultory
+writer, to whom it is not infrequently difficult to remember the
+incidents of his own narrative. "How good it is, even as it is!--but if
+he would have done his best for us, what might he not have done!" This,
+I think, is what we feel when we read _The Virginians_. The author's
+mind has in one way been active enough,--and powerful, as it always is;
+but he has been unable to fix it to an intended purpose, and has gone on
+from day to day furthering the difficulty he has intended to master,
+till the book, under the stress of circumstances,--demands for copy and
+the like,--has been completed before the difficulty has even in truth
+been encountered.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+THACKERAY'S BURLESQUES.
+
+
+As so much of Thackeray's writing partakes of the nature of burlesque,
+it would have been unnecessary to devote a separate chapter to the
+subject, were it not that there are among his tales two or three so
+exceedingly good of their kind, coming so entirely up to our idea of
+what a prose burlesque should be, that were I to omit to mention them I
+should pass over a distinctive portion of our author's work.
+
+The volume called _Burlesques_, published in 1869, begins with the
+_Novels by Eminent Hands_, and _Jeames's Diary_, to which I have already
+alluded. It contains also _The Tremendous Adventures of Major Gahagan_,
+_A Legend of the Rhine_, and _Rebecca and Rowena_. It is of these that I
+will now speak. _The History of the Next French Revolution_ and _Cox's
+Diary_, with which the volume is concluded, are, according to my
+thinking, hardly equal to the others; nor are they so properly called
+burlesques.
+
+Nor will I say much of Major Gahagan, though his adventures are very
+good fun. He is a warrior,--that is, of course,--and he is one in whose
+wonderful narrative all that distant India can produce in the way of
+boasting, is superadded to Ireland's best efforts in the same line.
+Baron Munchausen was nothing to him; and to the bare and simple
+miracles of the baron is joined that humour without which Thackeray
+never tells any story. This is broad enough, no doubt, but is still
+humour;--as when the major tells us that he always kept in his own
+apartment a small store of gunpowder; "always keeping it under my bed,
+with a candle burning for fear of accidents." Or when he describes his
+courage; "I was running,--running as the brave stag before the
+hounds,--running, as I have done a great number of times in my life,
+when there was no help for it but a run." Then he tells us of his
+digestion. "Once in Spain I ate the leg of a horse, and was so eager to
+swallow this morsel, that I bolted the shoe as well as the hoof, and
+never felt the slightest inconvenience from either." He storms a
+citadel, and has only a snuff box given him for his reward. "Never
+mind," says Major Gahagan; "when they want me to storm a fort again, I
+shall know better." By which we perceive that the major remembered his
+Horace, and had in his mind the soldier who had lost his purse. But the
+major's adventures, excellent as they are, lack the continued interest
+which is attached to the two following stories.
+
+Of what nature is _The Legend of the Rhine_, we learn from the
+commencement. "It was in the good old days of chivalry, when every
+mountain that bathes its shadow in the Rhine had its castle; not
+inhabited as now by a few rats and owls, nor covered with moss and
+wallflowers and funguses and creeping ivy. No, no; where the ivy now
+clusters there grew strong portcullis and bars of steel; where the
+wallflowers now quiver in the ramparts there were silken banners
+embroidered with wonderful heraldry; men-at-arms marched where now you
+shall only see a bank of moss or a hideous black champignon; and in
+place of the rats and owlets, I warrant me there were ladies and
+knights to revel in the great halls, and to feast and dance, and to make
+love there." So that we know well beforehand of what kind will this
+story be. It will be pure romance,--burlesqued. "Ho seneschal, fill me a
+cup of hot liquor; put sugar in it, good fellow; yea, and a little hot
+water,--but very little, for my soul is sad as I think of those days and
+knights of old."
+
+A knight is riding alone on his war-horse, with all his armour with
+him,--and his luggage. His rank is shown by the name on his portmanteau,
+and his former address and present destination by a card which was
+attached. It had run, "Count Ludwig de Hombourg, Jerusalem, but the name
+of the Holy City had been dashed out with the pen, and that of Godesberg
+substituted." "By St. Hugo of Katzenellenbogen," said the good knight
+shivering, "'tis colder here than at Damascus. Shall I be at Godesberg
+in time for dinner?" He has come to see his friend Count Karl, Margrave
+of Godesberg.
+
+But at Godesberg everything is in distress and sorrow. There is a new
+inmate there, one Sir Gottfried, since whose arrival the knight of the
+castle has become a wretched man, having been taught to believe all
+evils of his wife, and of his child Otto, and a certain stranger, one
+Hildebrandt. Gottfried, we see with half an eye, has done it all. It is
+in vain that Ludwig de Hombourg tells his old friend Karl that this
+Gottfried is a thoroughly bad fellow, that he had been found to be a
+cardsharper in the Holy Land, and had been drummed out of his regiment.
+"'Twas but some silly quarrel over the wine-cup," says Karl. "Hugo de
+Brodenel would have no black bottle on the board." We think we can
+remember the quarrel of "Brodenel" and the black bottle, though so many
+things have taken place since that.
+
+There is a festival in the castle, and Hildebrandt comes with the other
+guests. Then Ludwig's attention is called by poor Karl, the father, to a
+certain family likeness. Can it be that he is not the father of his own
+child? He is playing cards with his friend Ludwig when that traitor
+Gottfried comes and whispers to him, and makes an appointment. "I will
+be there too," thought Count Ludwig, the good Knight of Hombourg.
+
+On the next morning, before the stranger knight had shaken off his
+slumbers, all had been found out and everything done. The lady has been
+sent to a convent and her son to a monastery. The knight of the castle
+has no comfort but in his friend Gottfried, a distant cousin who is to
+inherit everything. All this is told to Sir Ludwig,--who immediately
+takes steps to repair the mischief. "A cup of coffee straight," says he
+to the servitors. "Bid the cook pack me a sausage and bread in paper,
+and the groom saddle Streithengst. We have far to ride." So this
+redresser of wrongs starts off, leaving the Margrave in his grief.
+
+Then there is a great fight between Sir Ludwig and Sir Gottfried,
+admirably told in the manner of the later chroniclers,--a hermit sitting
+by and describing everything almost as well as Rebecca did on the tower.
+Sir Ludwig being in the right, of course gains the day. But the escape
+of the fallen knight's horse is the cream of this chapter. "Away, ay,
+away!--away amid the green vineyards and golden cornfields; away up the
+steep mountains, where he frightened the eagles in their eyries; away
+down the clattering ravines, where the flashing cataracts tumble; away
+through the dark pine-forests, where the hungry wolves are howling; away
+over the dreary wolds, where the wild wind walks alone; away through the
+splashing quagmires, where the will-o'-the wisp slunk frightened among
+the reeds; away through light and darkness, storm and sunshine; away by
+tower and town, highroad and hamlet.... Brave horse! gallant steed!
+snorting child of Araby! On went the horse, over mountains, rivers,
+turnpikes, applewomen; and never stopped until he reached a
+livery-stable in Cologne, where his master was accustomed to put him
+up!"
+
+The conquered knight, Sir Gottfried, of course reveals the truth. This
+Hildebrandt is no more than the lady's brother,--as it happened a
+brother in disguise,--and hence the likeness. Wicked knights when they
+die always divulge their wicked secrets, and this knight Gottfried does
+so now. Sir Ludwig carries the news home to the afflicted husband and
+father; who of course instantly sends off messengers for his wife and
+son. The wife won't come. All she wants is to have her dresses and
+jewels sent to her. Of so cruel a husband she has had enough. As for the
+son, he has jumped out of a boat on the Rhine, as he was being carried
+to his monastery, and was drowned!
+
+But he was not drowned, but had only dived. "The gallant boy swam on
+beneath the water, never lifting his head for a single moment between
+Godesberg and Cologne; the distance being twenty-five or thirty miles."
+
+Then he becomes an archer, dressed in green from head to foot. How it
+was is all told in the story; and he goes to shoot for a prize at the
+Castle of Adolf the Duke of Cleeves. On his way he shoots a raven
+marvellously,--almost as marvellously as did Robin Hood the twig in
+Ivanhoe. Then one of his companions is married, or nearly married, to
+the mysterious "Lady of Windeck,"--would have been married but for Otto,
+and that the bishop and dean, who were dragged up from their long-ago
+graves to perform the ghostly ceremony, were prevented by the ill-timed
+mirth of a certain old canon of the church named Schidnischmidt. The
+reader has to read the name out long before he recognises an old friend.
+But this of the Lady of Windeck is an episode.
+
+How at the shooting-match, which of course ensued, Otto shot for and won
+the heart of a fair lady, the duke's daughter, need not be told here,
+nor how he quarrelled with the Rowski of Donnerblitz,--the hideous and
+sulky, but rich and powerful, nobleman who had come to take the hand,
+whether he could win the heart or not, of the daughter of the duke. It
+is all arranged according to the proper and romantic order. Otto, though
+he enlists in the duke's archer-guard as simple soldier, contrives to
+fight with the Rowski de Donnerblitz, Margrave of Eulenschrenkenstein,
+and of course kills him. "'Yield, yield, Sir Rowski!' shouted he in a
+calm voice. A blow dealt madly at his head was the reply. It was the
+last blow that the count of Eulenschrenkenstein ever struck in battle.
+The curse was on his lips as the crashing steel descended into his brain
+and split it in two. He rolled like a dog from his horse, his enemy's
+knee was in a moment on his chest, and the dagger of mercy at his
+throat, as the knight once more called upon him to yield." The knight
+was of course the archer who had come forward as an unknown champion,
+and had touched the Rowski's shield with the point of his lance. For
+this story, as well as the rest, is a burlesque on our dear old
+favourite Ivanhoe.
+
+That everything goes right at last, that the wife comes back from her
+monastery, and joins her jealous husband, and that the duke's daughter
+has always, in truth, known that the poor archer was a noble
+knight,--these things are all matters of course.
+
+But the best of the three burlesques is _Rebecca and Rowena, or A
+Romance upon Romance_, which I need not tell my readers is a
+continuation of _Ivanhoe_. Of this burlesque it is the peculiar
+characteristic that, while it has been written to ridicule the persons
+and the incidents of that perhaps the most favourite novel in the
+English language, it has been so written that it would not have offended
+the author had he lived to read it, nor does it disgust or annoy those
+who most love the original. There is not a word in it having an
+intention to belittle Scott. It has sprung from the genuine humour
+created in Thackeray's mind by his aspect of the romantic. We remember
+how reticent, how dignified was Rowena,--how cold we perhaps thought
+her, whether there was so little of that billing and cooing, that
+kissing and squeezing, between her and Ivanhoe which we used to think
+necessary to lovers' blisses. And there was left too on our minds, an
+idea that Ivanhoe had liked the Jewess almost as well as Rowena, and
+that Rowena might possibly have become jealous. Thackeray's mind at once
+went to work and pictured to him a Rowena such as such a woman might
+become after marriage; and as Ivanhoe was of a melancholy nature and apt
+to be hipped, and grave, and silent, as a matter of course Thackeray
+presumes him to have been henpecked after his marriage.
+
+Our dear Wamba disturbs his mistress in some devotional conversation
+with her chaplain, and the stern lady orders that the fool shall have
+three-dozen lashes. "I got you out of Front de Boeuf's castle," said
+poor Wamba, piteously, appealing to Sir Wilfrid of Ivanhoe, "and canst
+thou not save me from the lash?"
+
+"Yes; from Front de Boeuf's castle, _when you were locked up with the
+Jewess in the tower_!" said Rowena, haughtily replying to the timid
+appeal of her husband. "Gurth, give him four-dozen,"--and this was all
+poor Wamba got by applying for the mediation of his master. Then the
+satirist moralises; "Did you ever know a right-minded woman pardon
+another for being handsomer and more love-worthy than herself?" Rowena
+is "always flinging Rebecca into Ivanhoe's teeth;" and altogether life
+at Rotherwood, as described by the later chronicles, is not very happy
+even when most domestic. Ivanhoe becomes sad and moody. He takes to
+drinking, and his lady does not forget to tell him of it. "Ah dear axe!"
+he exclaims, apostrophising his weapon, "ah gentle steel! that was a
+merry time when I sent thee crashing into the pate of the Emir Abdul
+Melek!" There was nothing left to him but his memories; and "in a word,
+his life was intolerable." So he determines that he will go and look
+after king Richard, who of course was wandering abroad. He anticipates a
+little difficulty with his wife; but she is only too happy to let him
+go, comforting herself with the idea that Athelstane will look after
+her. So her husband starts on his journey. "Then Ivanhoe's trumpet blew.
+Then Rowena waved her pocket-handkerchief. Then the household gave a
+shout. Then the pursuivant of the good knight, Sir Wilfrid the Crusader,
+flung out his banner,--which was argent, a gules cramoisy with three
+Moors impaled,--then Wamba gave a lash on his mule's haunch, and
+Ivanhoe, heaving a great sigh, turned the tail of his war-horse upon the
+castle of his fathers."
+
+Ivanhoe finds Coeur de Leon besieging the Castle of Chalons, and there
+they both do wondrous deeds, Ivanhoe always surpassing the king. The
+jealousy of the courtiers, the ingratitude of the king, and the
+melancholy of the knight, who is never comforted except when he has
+slaughtered some hundreds, are delightful. Roger de Backbite and Peter
+de Toadhole are intended to be quite real. Then his majesty sings,
+passing off as his own, a song of Charles Lever's. Sir Wilfrid declares
+the truth, and twits the king with his falsehood, whereupon he has the
+guitar thrown at his head for his pains. He catches the guitar, however,
+gracefully in his left hand, and sings his own immortal ballad of _King
+Canute_,--than which Thackeray never did anything better.
+
+     "Might I stay the sun above us, good Sir Bishop?" Canute cried;
+     "Could I bid the silver moon to pause upon her heavenly ride?
+     If the moon obeys my orders, sure I can command the tide.
+
+     Will the advancing waves obey me, Bishop, if I make the sign?"
+     Said the bishop, bowing lowly; "Land and sea, my lord, are thine."
+     Canute turned towards the ocean; "Back," he said, "thou foaming
+           brine."
+
+     But the sullen ocean answered with a louder deeper roar,
+     And the rapid waves drew nearer, falling, sounding on the shore;
+     Back the keeper and the bishop, back the king and courtiers bore.
+
+We must go to the book to look at the picture of the king as he is
+killing the youngest of the sons of the Count of Chalons. Those
+illustrations of Doyle's are admirable. The size of the king's head, and
+the size of his battle-axe as contrasted with the size of the child, are
+burlesque all over. But the king has been wounded by a bolt from the bow
+of Sir Bertrand de Gourdon while he is slaughtering the infant, and
+there is an end of him. Ivanhoe, too, is killed at the siege,--Sir Roger
+de Backbite having stabbed him in the back during the scene. Had he not
+been then killed, his widow Rowena could not have married Athelstane,
+which she soon did after hearing the sad news; nor could he have had
+that celebrated epitaph in Latin and English;
+
+     Hie est Guilfridus, belli dum vixit avidus.
+     Cum gladeo et lancea Normannia et quoque Francia
+     Verbera dura dabat. Per Turcos multum equitabat.
+     Guilbertum occidit;--atque Hyerosolyma vidit.
+     Heu! nunc sub fossa sunt tanti militis ossa.
+     Uxor Athelstani est conjux castissima Thani.[5]
+
+The translation we are told was by Wamba;
+
+     Under the stone you behold,
+     Buried and coffined and cold,
+     Lieth Sir Wilfrid the Bold.
+
+     Always he marched in advance,
+     Warring in Flanders and France,
+     Doughty with sword and with lance
+
+     Famous in Saracen fight,
+     Rode in his youth, the Good Knight,
+     Scattering Paynims in flight.
+
+     Brian, the Templar untrue,
+     Fairly in tourney he slew;
+     Saw Hierusalem too.
+
+     Now he is buried and gone,
+     Lying beneath the gray stone.
+     Where shall you find such a one?
+
+     Long time his widow deplored,
+     Weeping, the fate of her lord,
+     Sadly cut off by the sword.
+
+     When she was eased of her pain,
+     Came the good lord Athelstane,
+     When her ladyship married again.
+
+The next chapter begins naturally as follows; "I trust nobody will
+suppose, from the events described in the last chapter, that our friend
+Ivanhoe is really dead." He is of course cured of his wounds, though
+they take six years in the curing. And then he makes his way back to
+Rotherwood, in a friar's disguise, much as he did on that former
+occasion when we first met him, and there is received by Athelstane and
+Rowena,--and their boy!--while Wamba sings him a song:
+
+     Then you know the worth of a lass,
+     Once you have come to forty year!
+
+No one, of course, but Wamba knows Ivanhoe, who roams about the country,
+melancholy,--as he of course would be,--charitable,--as he perhaps might
+be,--for we are specially told that he had a large fortune and nothing
+to do with it, and slaying robbers wherever he met them;--but sad at
+heart all the time. Then there comes a little burst of the author's own
+feelings, while he is burlesquing. "Ah my dear friends and British
+public, are there not others who are melancholy under a mask of gaiety,
+and who in the midst of crowds are lonely! Liston was a most melancholy
+man; Grimaldi had feelings; and then others I wot of. But psha!--let us
+have the next chapter." In all of which there was a touch of
+earnestness.
+
+Ivanhoe's griefs were enhanced by the wickedness of king John, under
+whom he would not serve. "It was Sir Wilfrid of Ivanhoe, I need scarcely
+say, who got the Barons of England to league together and extort from
+the king that famous instrument and palladium of our liberties, at
+present in the British Museum, Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury,--The
+Magna Charta." Athelstane also quarrels with the king, whose orders he
+disobeys, and Rotherwood is attacked by the royal army. No one was of
+real service in the way of fighting except Ivanhoe,--and how could he
+take up that cause? "No; be hanged to me," said the knight bitterly.
+"This is a quarrel in which I can't interfere. Common politeness
+forbids. Let yonder ale-swilling Athelstane defend his,--ha,
+ha!--_wife_; and my Lady Rowena guard her,--ha, ha!--_son_!" and he
+laughed wildly and madly.
+
+But Athelstane is killed,--this time in earnest,--and then Ivanhoe
+rushes to the rescue. He finds Gurth dead at the park-lodge, and though
+he is all alone,--having outridden his followers,--he rushes up the
+chestnut avenue to the house, which is being attacked. "An Ivanhoe! an
+Ivanhoe!" he bellowed out with a shout that overcame all the din of
+battle;--"Notre Dame a la recousse?" and to hurl his lance through the
+midriff of Reginald de Bracy, who was commanding the assault,--who fell
+howling with anguish,--to wave his battle-axe over his own head, and to
+cut off those of thirteen men-at-arms, was the work of an instant. "An
+Ivanhoe! an Ivanhoe!" he still shouted, and down went a man as sure as
+he said "hoe!"
+
+Nevertheless he is again killed by multitudes, or very nearly,--and has
+again to be cured by the tender nursing of Wamba. But Athelstane is
+really dead, and Rowena and the boy have to be found. He does his duty
+and finds them,--just in time to be present at Rowena's death. She has
+been put in prison by king John, and is in extremis when her first
+husband gets to her. "Wilfrid, my early loved,"[6] slowly gasped she
+removing her gray hair from her furrowed temples, and gazing on her boy
+fondly as he nestled on Ivanhoe's knee,--"promise me by St. Waltheof of
+Templestowe,--promise me one boon!"
+
+"I do," said Ivanhoe, clasping the boy, and thinking that it was to that
+little innocent that the promise was intended to apply.
+
+"By St. Waltheof?"
+
+"By St. Waltheof!"
+
+"Promise me then," gasped Rowena, staring wildly at him, "that you will
+never marry a Jewess!"
+
+"By St. Waltheof!" cried Ivanhoe, "but this is too much," and he did not
+make the promise.
+
+"Having placed young Cedric at school at the Hall of Dotheboys, in
+Yorkshire, and arranged his family affairs, Sir Wilfrid of Ivanhoe
+quitted a country which had no longer any charm for him, as there was no
+fighting to be done, and in which his stay was rendered less agreeable
+by the notion that king John would hang him." So he goes forth and
+fights again, in league with the Knights of St. John,--the Templars
+naturally having a dislike to him because of Brian de Bois Guilbert.
+"The only fault that the great and gallant, though severe and ascetic
+Folko of Heydenbraten, the chief of the Order of St. John, found with
+the melancholy warrior whose lance did such service to the cause, was
+that he did not persecute the Jews as so religious a knight should. So
+the Jews, in cursing the Christians, always excepted the name of the
+Desdichado,--or the double disinherited, as he now was,--the Desdichado
+Doblado." Then came the battle of Alarcos, and the Moors were all but in
+possession of the whole of Spain. Sir Wilfrid, like other good
+Christians, cannot endure this, so he takes ship in Bohemia, where he
+happens to be quartered, and has himself carried to Barcelona, and
+proceeds "to slaughter the Moors forthwith." Then there is a scene in
+which Isaac of York comes on as a messenger, to ransom from a Spanish
+knight, Don Beltram de Cuchilla y Trabuco, y Espada, y Espelon, a little
+Moorish girl. The Spanish knight of course murders the little girl
+instead of taking the ransom. Two hundred thousand dirhems are offered,
+however much that may be; but the knight, who happens to be in funds at
+the time, prefers to kill the little girl. All this is only necessary to
+the story as introducing Isaac of York. Sir Wilfrid is of course intent
+upon finding Rebecca. Through all his troubles and triumphs, from his
+gaining and his losing of Rowena, from the day on which he had been
+"_locked up with the Jewess in the tower_," he had always been true to
+her. "Away from me!" said the old Jew, tottering. "Away, Rebecca
+is,--dead!" Then Ivanhoe goes out and kills fifty thousand Moors, and
+there is the picture of him,--killing them.
+
+But Rebecca is not dead at all. Her father had said so because Rebecca
+had behaved very badly to him. She had refused to marry the Moorish
+prince, or any of her own people, the Jews, and had gone as far as to
+declare her passion for Ivanhoe and her resolution to be a Christian.
+All the Jews and Jewesses in Valencia turned against her,--so that she
+was locked up in the back-kitchen and almost starved to death. But
+Ivanhoe found her of course, and makes her Mrs. Ivanhoe, or Lady Wilfrid
+the second. Then Thackeray tells us how for many years he, Thackeray,
+had not ceased to feel that it ought to be so. "Indeed I have thought of
+it any time these five-and-twenty years,--ever since, as a boy at
+school, I commenced the noble study of novels,--ever since the day when,
+lying on sunny slopes, of half-holidays, the fair chivalrous figures
+and beautiful shapes of knights and ladies were visible to me, ever
+since I grew to love Rebecca, that sweetest creature of the poet's
+fancy, and longed to see her righted."
+
+And so, no doubt, it had been. The very burlesque had grown from the way
+in which his young imagination had been moved by Scott's romance. He had
+felt from the time of those happy half-holidays in which he had been
+lucky enough to get hold of the novel, that according to all laws of
+poetic justice, Rebecca, as being the more beautiful and the more
+interesting of the heroines, was entitled to the possession of the hero.
+We have all of us felt the same. But to him had been present at the same
+time all that is ludicrous in our ideas of middle-age chivalry; the
+absurdity of its recorded deeds, the blood-thirstiness of its
+recreations, the selfishness of its men, the falseness of its honour,
+the cringing of its loyalty, the tyranny of its princes. And so there
+came forth Rebecca and Rowena, all broad fun from beginning to end, but
+never without a purpose,--the best burlesque, as I think, in our
+language.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[5] I doubt that Thackeray did not write the Latin epitaph, but I hardly
+dare suggest the name of any author. The "vixit avidus" is quite worthy
+of Thackeray; but had he tried his hand at such mode of expression he
+would have done more of it. I should like to know whether he had been in
+company with Father Prout at the time.
+
+[6] There is something almost illnatured in his treatment of Rowena, who
+is very false in her declarations of love;--and it is to be feared that
+by Rowena, the author intends the normal married lady of English
+society.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+THACKERAY'S LECTURES.
+
+
+In speaking of Thackeray's life I have said why and how it was that he
+took upon himself to lecture, and have also told the reader that he was
+altogether successful in carrying out the views proposed to himself. Of
+his peculiar manner of lecturing I have said but little, never having
+heard him. "He pounded along,--very clearly," I have been told; from
+which I surmise that there was no special grace of eloquence, but that
+he was always audible. I cannot imagine that he should have been ever
+eloquent. He could not have taken the trouble necessary with his voice,
+with his cadences, or with his outward appearance. I imagine that they
+who seem so naturally to fall into the proprieties of elocution have
+generally taken a great deal of trouble beyond that which the mere
+finding of their words has cost them. It is clearly to the matter of
+what he then gave the world, and not to the manner, that we must look
+for what interest is to be found in the lectures.
+
+Those on _The English Humorists_ were given first. The second set was on
+_The Four Georges_. In the volume now before us _The Georges_ are
+printed first, and the whole is produced simply as a part of Thackeray's
+literary work. Looked at, however, in that light the merit of the two
+sets of biographical essays is very different. In the one we have all
+the anecdotes which could be brought together respecting four of our
+kings,--who as men were not peculiar, though their reigns were, and will
+always be, famous, because the country during the period was increasing
+greatly in prosperity and was ever strengthening the hold it had upon
+its liberties. In the other set the lecturer was a man of letters
+dealing with men of letters, and himself a prince among humorists is
+dealing with the humorists of his own country and language. One could
+not imagine a better subject for such discourses from Thackeray's mouth
+than the latter. The former was not, I think, so good.
+
+In discussing the lives of kings the biographer may trust to personal
+details or to historical facts. He may take the man, and say what good
+or evil may be said of him as a man;--or he may take the period, and
+tell his readers what happened to the country while this or the other
+king was on the throne. In the case with which we are dealing, the
+lecturer had not time enough or room enough for real history. His object
+was to let his audience know of what nature were the men; and we are
+bound to say that the pictures have not on the whole been flattering. It
+was almost necessary that with such a subject such should be the result.
+A story of family virtues, with princes and princesses well brought up,
+with happy family relations, all couleur de rose,--as it would of course
+become us to write if we were dealing with the life of a living
+sovereign,--would not be interesting. No one on going to hear Thackeray
+lecture on the Georges expected that. There must be some piquancy given,
+or the lecture would be dull;--and the eulogy of personal virtues can
+seldom be piquant. It is difficult to speak fittingly of a sovereign,
+either living or not, long since gone. You can hardly praise such a
+one without flattery. You can hardly censure him without injustice.
+We are either ignorant of his personal doings or we know them as
+secrets, which have been divulged for the most part either falsely or
+treacherously,--often both falsely and treacherously. It is better,
+perhaps, that we should not deal with the personalities of princes.
+
+I believe that Thackeray fancied that he had spoken well of George III.,
+and am sure that it was his intention to do so. But the impression he
+leaves is poor. "He is said not to have cared for Shakespeare or tragedy
+much; farces and pantomimes were his joy;--and especially when clown
+swallowed a carrot or a string of sausages, he would laugh so
+outrageously that the lovely princess by his side would have to say, 'My
+gracious monarch, do compose yourself.' 'George, be a king!' were the
+words which she,"--his mother,--"was ever croaking in the ears of her
+son; and a king the simple, stubborn, affectionate, bigoted man tried to
+be." "He did his best; he worked according to his lights; what virtues
+he knew he tried to practise; what knowledge he could master he strove
+to acquire." If the lectures were to be popular, it was absolutely
+necessary that they should be written in this strain. A lecture simply
+laudatory on the life of St. Paul would not draw even the bench of
+bishops to listen to it; but were a flaw found in the apostle's life,
+the whole Church of England would be bound to know all about it. I am
+quite sure that Thackeray believed every word that he said in the
+lectures, and that he intended to put in the good and the bad, honestly,
+as they might come to his hand. We may be quite sure that he did not
+intend to flatter the royal family;--equally sure that he would not
+calumniate. There were, however, so many difficulties to be encountered
+that I cannot but think that the subject was ill-chosen. In making them
+so amusing as he did and so little offensive great ingenuity was shown.
+
+I will now go back to the first series, in which the lecturer treated of
+Swift, Congreve, Addison, Steele, Prior, Gay, Pope, Hogarth, Smollett,
+Fielding, Sterne, and Goldsmith. All these Thackeray has put in their
+proper order, placing the men from the date of their birth, except
+Prior, who was in truth the eldest of the lot, but whom it was necessary
+to depose, in order that the great Swift might stand first on the list,
+and Smollett, who was not born till fourteen years after Fielding, eight
+years after Sterne, and who has been moved up, I presume, simply from
+caprice. From the birth of the first to the death of the last, was a
+period of nearly a hundred years. They were never absolutely all alive
+together; but it was nearly so, Addison and Prior having died before
+Smollett was born. Whether we should accept as humorists the full
+catalogue, may be a question; though we shall hardly wish to eliminate
+any one from such a dozen of names. Pope we should hardly define as a
+humorist, were we to be seeking for a definition specially fit for him,
+though we shall certainly not deny the gift of humour to the author of
+_The Rape of the Lock_, or to the translator of any portion of _The
+Odyssey_. Nor should we have included Fielding or Smollett, in spite of
+Parson Adams and Tabitha Bramble, unless anxious to fill a good company.
+That Hogarth was specially a humorist no one will deny; but in speaking
+of humorists we should have presumed, unless otherwise notified, that
+humorists in letters only had been intended. As Thackeray explains
+clearly what he means by a humorist, I may as well here repeat the
+passage: "If humour only meant laughter, you would scarcely feel more
+interest about humorous writers than about the private life of poor
+Harlequin just mentioned, who possesses in common with these the power
+of making you laugh. But the men regarding whose lives and stories your
+kind presence here shows that you have curiosity and sympathy, appeal to
+a great number of our other faculties, besides our mere sense of
+ridicule. The humorous writer professes to awaken and direct your love,
+your pity, your kindness,--your scorn for untruth, pretension,
+imposture,--your tenderness for the weak, the poor, the oppressed, the
+unhappy. To the best of his means and ability he comments on all the
+ordinary actions and passions of life almost. He takes upon himself to
+be the week-day preacher, so to speak. Accordingly, as he finds, and
+speaks, and feels the truth best, we regard him, esteem him,--sometimes
+love him. And as his business is to mark other people's lives and
+peculiarities, we moralise upon _his_ life when he is gone,--and
+yesterday's preacher becomes the text for to-day's sermon."
+
+Having thus explained his purpose, Thackeray begins his task, and puts
+Swift in his front rank as a humorist. The picture given of this great
+man has very manifestly the look of truth, and if true, is terrible
+indeed. We do, in fact, know it to be true,--even though it be admitted
+that there is still room left for a book to be written on the life of
+the fearful dean. Here was a man endued with an intellect pellucid as
+well as brilliant; who could not only conceive but see also,--with some
+fine instincts too; whom fortune did not flout; whom circumstances
+fairly served; but who, from first to last, was miserable himself, who
+made others miserable, and who deserved misery. Our business, during the
+page or two which we can give to the subject, is not with Swift but
+with Thackeray's picture of Swift. It is painted with colours terribly
+strong and with shadows fearfully deep. "Would you like to have lived
+with him?" Thackeray asks. Then he says how pleasant it would have been
+to have passed some time with Fielding, Johnson, or Goldsmith. "I should
+like to have been Shakespeare's shoeblack," he says. "But Swift! If you
+had been his inferior in parts,--and that, with a great respect for all
+persons present, I fear is only very likely,--his equal in mere social
+station, he would have bullied, scorned, and insulted you. If,
+undeterred by his great reputation, you had met him like a man, he would
+have quailed before you and not had the pluck to reply,--and gone home,
+and years after written a foul epigram upon you." There is a picture!
+"If you had been a lord with a blue riband, who flattered his vanity, or
+could help his ambition, he would have been the most delightful company
+in the world.... How he would have torn your enemies to pieces for you,
+and made fun of the Opposition! His servility was so boisterous that it
+looked like independence." He was a man whose mind was never fixed on
+high things, but was striving always after something which, little as it
+might be, and successful as he was, should always be out of his reach.
+It had been his misfortune to become a clergyman, because the way to
+church preferment seemed to be the readiest. He became, as we all know,
+a dean,--but never a bishop, and was therefore wretched. Thackeray
+describes him as a clerical highwayman, seizing on all he could get. But
+"the great prize has not yet come. The coach with the mitre and crozier
+in it, which he intends to have for _his_ share, has been delayed on the
+way from St. James's; and he waits and waits till nightfall, when his
+runners come and tell him that the coach has taken a different way and
+escaped him. So he fires his pistol into the air with a curse, and rides
+away into his own country;"--or, in other words, takes a poor deanery in
+Ireland.
+
+Thackeray explains very correctly, as I think, the nature of the weapons
+which the man used,--namely, the words and style with which he wrote.
+"That Swift was born at No. 7, Hoey's Court, Dublin, on November 30,
+1667, is a certain fact, of which nobody will deny the sister-island the
+honour and glory; but it seems to me he was no more an Irishman than a
+man born of English parents at Calcutta is a Hindoo. Goldsmith was an
+Irishman and always an Irishman; Steele was an Irishman and always an
+Irishman; Swift's heart was English and in England, his habits English,
+his logic eminently English; his statement is elaborately simple; he
+shuns tropes and metaphors, and uses his ideas and words with a wise
+thrift and economy, as he used his money;--with which he could be
+generous and splendid upon great occasions, but which he husbanded when
+there was no need to spend it. He never indulges in needless
+extravagance of rhetoric, lavish epithets, profuse imagery. He lays his
+opinions before you with a grave simplicity and a perfect neatness."
+This is quite true of him, and the result is that though you may deny
+him sincerity, simplicity, humanity, or good taste, you can hardly find
+fault with his language.
+
+Swift was a clergyman, and this is what Thackeray says of him in regard
+to his sacred profession. "I know of few things more conclusive as to
+the sincerity of Swift's religion, than his advice to poor John Gay to
+turn clergyman, and look out for a seat on the Bench! Gay, the author of
+_The Beggar's Opera_; Gay, the wildest of the wits about town! It was
+this man that Jonathan Swift advised to take orders, to mount in a
+cassock and bands,--just as he advised him to husband his shillings, and
+put his thousand pounds out to interest."
+
+It was not that he was without religion,--or without, rather, his
+religious beliefs and doubts, "for Swift," says Thackeray, "was a
+reverent, was a pious spirit. For Swift could love and could pray." Left
+to himself and to the natural thoughts of his mind, without those
+"orders" to which he had bound himself as a necessary part of his trade,
+he could have turned to his God with questionings which need not then
+have been heartbreaking. "It is my belief," says Thackeray, "that he
+suffered frightfully from the consciousness of his own scepticism, and
+that he had bent his pride so far down as to put his apostasy out to
+hire." I doubt whether any of Swift's works are very much read now, but
+perhaps Gulliver's travels are oftener in the hands of modern readers
+than any other. Of all the satires in our language it is probably the
+most cynical, the most absolutely illnatured, and therefore the falsest.
+Let those who care to form an opinion of Swift's mind from the best
+known of his works, turn to Thackeray's account of Gulliver. I can
+imagine no greater proof of misery than to have been able to write such
+a book as that.
+
+It is thus that the lecturer concludes his lecture about Swift. "He
+shrank away from all affections sooner or later. Stella and Vanessa both
+died near him, and away from him. He had not heart enough to see them
+die. He broke from his fastest friend, Sheridan. He slunk away from his
+fondest admirer, Pope. His laugh jars on one's ear after seven-score
+years. He was always alone,--alone and gnashing in the darkness, except
+when Stella's sweet smile came and shone on him. When that went, silence
+and utter night closed over him. An immense genius, an awful downfall
+and ruin! So great a man he seems to me, that thinking of him is like
+thinking of an empire falling. We have other great names to
+mention,--none I think, however, so great or so gloomy." And so we pass
+on from Swift, feeling that though the man was certainly a humorist, we
+have had as yet but little to do with humour.
+
+Congreve is the next who, however truly he may have been a humorist, is
+described here rather as a man of fashion. A man of fashion he certainly
+was, but is best known in our literature as a comedian,--worshipping
+that comic Muse to whom Thackeray hesitates to introduce his audience,
+because she is not only merry but shameless also. Congreve's muse was
+about as bad as any muse that ever misbehaved herself,--and I think, as
+little amusing. "Reading in these plays now," says Thackeray, "is like
+shutting your ears and looking at people dancing. What does it
+mean?--the measures, the grimaces, the bowing, shuffling, and
+retreating, the cavaliers seuls advancing upon their ladies, then ladies
+and men twirling round at the end in a mad galop, after which everybody
+bows and the quaint rite is celebrated?" It is always so with Congreve's
+plays, and Etherege's and Wycherley's. The world we meet there is not
+our world, and as we read the plays we have no sympathy with these
+unknown people. It was not that they lived so long ago. They are much
+nearer to us in time than the men and women who figured on the stage in
+the reign of James I. But their nature is farther from our nature. They
+sparkle but never warm. They are witty but leave no impression. I might
+almost go further, and say that they are wicked but never allure. "When
+Voltaire came to visit the Great Congreve," says Thackeray, "the latter
+rather affected to despise his literary reputation; and in this,
+perhaps, the great Congreve was not far wrong. A touch of Steele's
+tenderness is worth all his finery; a flash of Swift's lightning, a beam
+of Addison's pure sunshine, and his tawdry playhouse taper is invisible.
+But the ladies loved him, and he was undoubtedly a pretty fellow."
+
+There is no doubt as to the true humour of Addison, who next comes up
+before us, but I think that he makes hardly so good a subject for a
+lecturer as the great gloomy man of intellect, or the frivolous man of
+pleasure. Thackeray tells us all that is to be said about him as a
+humorist in so few lines that I may almost insert them on this page:
+"But it is not for his reputation as the great author of _Cato_ and _The
+Campaign_, or for his merits as Secretary of State, or for his rank and
+high distinction as Lady Warwick's husband, or for his eminence as an
+examiner of political questions on the Whig side, or a guardian of
+British liberties, that we admire Joseph Addison. It is as a Tattler of
+small talk and a Spectator of mankind that we cherish and love him, and
+owe as much pleasure to him as to any human being that ever wrote. He
+came in that artificial age, and began to speak with his noble natural
+voice. He came the gentle satirist, who hit no unfair blow; the kind
+judge, who castigated only in smiling. While Swift went about hanging
+and ruthless, a literary Jeffreys, in Addison's kind court only minor
+cases were tried;--only peccadilloes and small sins against society,
+only a dangerous libertinism in tuckers and hoops, or a nuisance in the
+abuse of beaux canes and snuffboxes." Steele set _The Tatler_ a going.
+"But with his friend's discovery of _The Tatler_, Addison's calling was
+found, and the most delightful Tattler in the world began to speak. He
+does not go very deep. Let gentlemen of a profound genius, critics
+accustomed to the plunge of the bathos, console themselves by thinking
+that he couldn't go very deep. There is no trace of suffering in his
+writing. He was so good, so honest, so healthy, so cheerfully
+selfish,--if I must use the word!"
+
+Such was Addison as a humorist; and when the hearer shall have heard
+also,--or the reader read,--that this most charming Tattler also wrote
+_Cato_, became a Secretary of State, and married a countess, he will
+have learned all that Thackeray had to tell of him.
+
+Steele was one who stood much less high in the world's esteem, and who
+left behind him a much smaller name,--but was quite Addison's equal as a
+humorist and a wit. Addison, though he had the reputation of a toper,
+was respectability itself. Steele was almost always disreputable. He was
+brought from Ireland, placed at the Charter House, and then transferred
+to Oxford, where he became acquainted with Addison. Thackeray says that
+"Steele found Addison a stately college don at Oxford." The stateliness
+and the don's rank were attributable no doubt to the more sober
+character of the English lad, for, in fact, the two men were born in the
+same year, 1672. Steele, who during his life was affected by various
+different tastes, first turned himself to literature, but early in life
+was bitten by the hue of a red coat and became a trooper in the Horse
+Guards. To the end he vacillated in the same way. "In that charming
+paper in _The Tatler_, in which he records his father's death, his
+mother's griefs, his own most solemn and tender emotions, he says he is
+interrupted by the arrival of a hamper of wine, 'the same as is to be
+sold at Garraway's next week;' upon the receipt of which he sends for
+three friends, and they fall to instantly, drinking two bottles apiece,
+with great benefit to themselves, and not separating till two o'clock in
+the morning."
+
+He had two wives, whom he loved dearly and treated badly. He hired grand
+houses, and bought fine horses for which he could never pay. He was
+often religious, but more often drunk. As a man of letters, other men of
+letters who followed him, such as Thackeray, could not be very proud of
+him. But everybody loved him; and he seems to have been the inventor of
+that flying literature which, with many changes in form and manner, has
+done so much for the amusement and edification of readers ever since his
+time. He was always commencing, or carrying on,--often editing,--some
+one of the numerous periodicals which appeared during his time.
+Thackeray mentions seven: _The Tatler_, _The Spectator_, _The Guardian_,
+_The Englishman_, _The Lover_, _The Reader_, and _The Theatre_; that
+three of them are well known to this day,--the three first named,--and
+are to be found in all libraries, is proof that his life was not thrown
+away.
+
+I almost question Prior's right to be in the list, unless indeed the
+mastery over well-turned conceits is to be included within the border of
+humour. But Thackeray had a strong liking for Prior, and in his own
+humorous way rebukes his audience for not being familiar with _The Town
+and Country Mouse_. He says that Prior's epigrams have the genuine
+sparkle, and compares Prior to Horace. "His song, his philosophy, his
+good sense, his happy easy turns and melody, his loves and his
+epicureanism bear a great resemblance to that most delightful and
+accomplished master." I cannot say that I agree with this. Prior is
+generally neat in his expression. Horace is happy,--which is surely a
+great deal more.
+
+All that is said of Gay, Pope, Hogarth, Smollett, and Fielding is worth
+reading, and may be of great value both to those who have not time to
+study the authors, and to those who desire to have their own judgments
+somewhat guided, somewhat assisted. That they were all men of humour
+there can be no doubt. Whether either of them, except perhaps Gay, would
+have been specially ranked as a humorist among men of letters, may be a
+question.
+
+Sterne was a humorist, and employed his pen in that line, if ever a
+writer did so, and so was Goldsmith. Of the excellence and largeness of
+the disposition of the one, and the meanness and littleness of the
+other, it is not necessary that I should here say much. But I will give
+a short passage from our author as to each. He has been quoting somewhat
+at length from Sterne, and thus he ends; "And with this pretty dance and
+chorus the volume artfully concludes. Even here one can't give the whole
+description. There is not a page in Sterne's writing but has something
+that were better away, a latent corruption,--a hint as of an impure
+presence. Some of that dreary double entendre may be attributed to freer
+times and manners than ours,--but not all. The foul satyr's eyes leer
+out of the leaves constantly. The last words the famous author wrote
+were bad and wicked. The last lines the poor stricken wretch penned were
+for pity and pardon." Now a line or two about Goldsmith, and I will then
+let my reader go to the volume and study the lectures for himself. "The
+poor fellow was never so friendless but that he could befriend some
+one; never so pinched and wretched but he could give of his crust, and
+speak his word of compassion. If he had but his flute left, he would
+give that, and make the children happy in the dreary London courts."
+
+Of this too I will remind my readers,--those who have bookshelves
+well-filled to adorn their houses,--that Goldsmith stands in the front
+where all the young people see the volumes. There are few among the
+young people who do not refresh their sense of humour occasionally from
+that shelf, Sterne is relegated to some distant and high corner. The
+less often that he is taken down the better. Thackeray makes some half
+excuse for him because of the greater freedom of the times. But "the
+times" were the same for the two. Both Sterne and Goldsmith wrote in the
+reign of George II.; both died in the reign of George III.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+THACKERAY'S BALLADS.
+
+
+We have a volume of Thackeray's poems, republished under the name of
+_Ballads_, which is, I think, to a great extent a misnomer. They are all
+readable, almost all good, full of humour, and with some fine touches of
+pathos, most happy in their versification, and, with a few exceptions,
+hitting well on the head the nail which he intended to hit. But they are
+not on that account ballads. Literally, a ballad is a song, but it has
+come to signify a short chronicle in verse, which may be political, or
+pathetic, or grotesque,--or it may have all three characteristics or any
+two of them; but not on that account is any grotesque poem a
+ballad,--nor, of course, any pathetic or any political poem. _Jacob
+Omnium's Hoss_ may fairly be called a ballad, containing as it does a
+chronicle of a certain well-defined transaction; and the story of _King
+Canute_ is a ballad,--one of the best that has been produced in our
+language in modern years. But such pieces as those called _The End of
+the Play_ and _Vanitas Vanitatum_, which are didactic as well as
+pathetic, are not ballads in the common sense; nor are such songs as
+_The Mahogany Tree_, or the little collection called _Love Songs made
+Easy_. The majority of the pieces are not ballads, but if they be good
+of the kind we should be ungrateful to quarrel much with the name.
+
+How very good most of them are, I did not know till I re-read them for
+the purpose of writing this chapter. There is a manifest falling off in
+some few,--which has come from that source of literary failure which is
+now so common. If a man write a book or a poem because it is in him to
+write it,--the motive power being altogether in himself and coming from
+his desire to express himself,--he will write it well, presuming him to
+be capable of the effort. But if he write his book or poem simply
+because a book or poem is required from him, let his capability be what
+it may, it is not unlikely that he will do it badly. Thackeray
+occasionally suffered from the weakness thus produced. A ballad from
+_Policeman X_,--_Bow Street Ballads_ they were first called,--was
+required by _Punch_, and had to be forthcoming, whatever might be the
+poet's humour, by a certain time. _Jacob Omnium's Hoss_ is excellent.
+His heart and feeling were all there, on behalf of his friend, and
+against that obsolete old court of justice. But we can tell well when he
+was looking through the police reports for a subject, and taking what
+chance might send him, without any special interest in the matter. _The
+Knight and the Lady of Bath_, and the _Damages Two Hundred Pounds_, as
+they were demanded at Guildford, taste as though they were written to
+order.
+
+Here, in his verses as in his prose, the charm of Thackeray's work lies
+in the mingling of humour with pathos and indignation. There is hardly a
+piece that is not more or less funny, hardly a piece that is not
+satirical;--and in most of them, for those who will look a little below
+the surface, there is something that will touch them. Thackeray, though
+he rarely uttered a word, either with his pen or his mouth, in which
+there was not an intention to reach our sense of humour, never was only
+funny. When he was most determined to make us laugh, he had always a
+further purpose;--some pity was to be extracted from us on behalf of the
+sorrows of men, or some indignation at the evil done by them.
+
+This is the beginning of that story as to the _Two Hundred Pounds_, for
+which as a ballad I do not care very much:
+
+     Special jurymen of England who admire your country's laws,
+     And proclaim a British jury worthy of the nation's applause,
+     Gaily compliment each other at the issue of a cause,
+     Which was tried at Guildford 'sizes, this day week as ever was.
+
+Here he is indignant, not only in regard to some miscarriage of justice
+on that special occasion, but at the general unfitness of jurymen for
+the work confided to them. "Gaily compliment yourselves," he says, "on
+your beautiful constitution, from which come such beautiful results as
+those I am going to tell you!" When he reminded us that Ivanhoe had
+produced Magna Charta, there was a purpose of irony even there in regard
+to our vaunted freedom. With all your Magna Charta and your juries, what
+are you but snobs! There is nothing so often misguided as general
+indignation, and I think that in his judgment of outside things, in the
+measure which he usually took of them, Thackeray was very frequently
+misguided. A satirist by trade will learn to satirise everything, till
+the light of the sun and the moon's loveliness will become evil and mean
+to him. I think that he was mistaken in his views of things. But we have
+to do with him as a writer, not as a political economist or a
+politician. His indignation was all true, and the expression of it was
+often perfect. The lines in which he addresses that Pallis Court, at
+the end of Jacob Omnium's Hoss, are almost sublime.
+
+     O Pallis Court, you move
+       My pity most profound.
+     A most amusing sport
+       You thought it, I'll be bound,
+     To saddle hup a three-pound debt,
+       With two-and-twenty pound.
+
+     Good sport it is to you
+       To grind the honest poor,
+     To pay their just or unjust debts
+       With eight hundred per cent, for Lor;
+     Make haste and get your costes in,
+       They will not last much mor!
+
+     Come down from that tribewn,
+       Thou shameless and unjust;
+     Thou swindle, picking pockets in
+       The name of Truth august;
+     Come down, thou hoary Blasphemy,
+       For die thou shalt and must.
+
+     And go it, Jacob Homnium,
+       And ply your iron pen,
+     And rise up, Sir John Jervis,
+       And shut me up that den;
+     That sty for fattening lawyers in,
+       On the bones of honest men.
+
+"Come down from that tribewn, thou shameless and unjust!" It is
+impossible not to feel that he felt this as he wrote it.
+
+There is a branch of his poetry which he calls,--or which at any rate is
+now called, _Lyra Hybernica_, for which no doubt _The Groves of Blarney_
+was his model. There have been many imitations since, of which perhaps
+Barham's ballad on the coronation was the best, "When to Westminster the
+Royal Spinster and the Duke of Leinster all in order did repair!"
+Thackeray in some of his attempts has been equally droll and equally
+graphic. That on _The Cristal Palace_,--not that at Sydenham, but its
+forerunner, the palace of the Great Exhibition,--is very good, as the
+following catalogue of its contents will show;
+
+     There's holy saints
+     And window paints,
+       By Maydiayval Pugin;
+     Alhamborough Jones
+     Did paint the tones
+       Of yellow and gambouge in.
+
+     There's fountains there
+     And crosses fair;
+       There's water-gods with urns;
+     There's organs three,
+     To play, d'ye see?
+       "God save the Queen," by turns.
+
+     There's statues bright
+     Of marble white,
+       Of silver, and of copper;
+     And some in zinc,
+     And some, I think,
+       That isn't over proper.
+
+     There's staym ingynes,
+     That stands in lines,
+       Enormous and amazing,
+     That squeal and snort
+     Like whales in sport,
+       Or elephants a grazing.
+
+     There's carts and gigs,
+     And pins for pigs,
+       There's dibblers and there's harrows,
+     And ploughs like toys
+     For little boys,
+       And ilegant wheel-barrows.
+
+     For thim genteels
+     Who ride on wheels,
+       There's plenty to indulge 'em
+     There's droskys snug
+     From Paytersbug,
+       And vayhycles from Bulgium.
+
+     There's cabs on stands
+     And shandthry danns;
+       There's waggons from New York here;
+     There's Lapland sleighs
+     Have cross'd the seas,
+       And jaunting cyars from Cork here.
+
+In writing this Thackeray was a little late with his copy for _Punch_;
+not, we should say, altogether an uncommon accident to him. It should
+have been with the editor early on Saturday, if not before, but did not
+come till late on Saturday evening. The editor, who was among men the
+most good-natured and I should think the most forbearing, either could
+not, or in this case would not, insert it in the next week's issue, and
+Thackeray, angry and disgusted, sent it to _The Times_. In _The Times_
+of next Monday it appeared,--very much I should think to the delight of
+the readers of that august newspaper.
+
+Mr. Molony's account of the ball given to the Nepaulese ambassadors by
+the Peninsular and Oriental Company, is so like Barham's coronation in
+the account it gives of the guests, that one would fancy it must be by
+the same hand.
+
+     The noble Chair[7] stud at the stair
+       And bade the dhrums to thump; and he
+     Did thus evince to that Black Prince
+       The welcome of his Company.[8]
+
+     O fair the girls and rich the curls,
+       And bright the oys you saw there was;
+     And fixed each oye you then could spoi
+       On General Jung Bahawther was!
+
+     This gineral great then tuck his sate,
+       With all the other ginerals,
+     Bedad his troat, his belt, his coat,
+       All bleezed with precious minerals;
+     And as he there, with princely air,
+       Recloinin on his cushion was,
+     All round about his royal chair
+       The squeezin and the pushin was.
+
+     O Pat, such girls, such jukes and earls,
+       Such fashion and nobilitee!
+     Just think of Tim, and fancy him
+       Amidst the high gentilitee!
+     There was the Lord de L'Huys, and the Portygeese
+       Ministher and his lady there,
+     And I recognised, with much surprise,
+       Our messmate, Bob O'Grady, there.
+
+All these are very good fun,--so good in humour and so good in
+expression, that it would be needless to criticise their peculiar
+dialect, were it not that Thackeray has made for himself a reputation by
+his writing of Irish. In this he has been so entirely successful that
+for many English readers he has established a new language which may
+not improperly be called Hybernico-Thackerayan. If comedy is to be got
+from peculiarities of dialect, as no doubt it is, one form will do as
+well as another, so long as those who read it know no better. So it has
+been with Thackeray's Irish, for in truth he was not familiar with the
+modes of pronunciation which make up Irish brogue. Therefore, though he
+is always droll, he is not true to nature. Many an Irishman coming to
+London, not unnaturally tries to imitate the talk of Londoners. You or
+I, reader, were we from the West, and were the dear County Galway to
+send either of us to Parliament, would probably endeavour to drop the
+dear brogue of our country, and in doing so we should make some
+mistakes. It was these mistakes which Thackeray took for the natural
+Irish tone. He was amused to hear a major called "Meejor," but was
+unaware that the sound arose from Pat's affection of English softness of
+speech. The expression natural to the unadulterated Irishman would
+rather be "Ma-ajor." He discovers his own provincialism, and trying to
+be polite and urbane, he says "Meejor." In one of the lines I have
+quoted there occurs the word "troat." Such a sound never came naturally
+from the mouth of an Irishman. He puts in an h instead of omitting it,
+and says "dhrink." He comes to London, and finding out that he is wrong
+with his "dhrink," he leaves out all the h's he can, and thus comes to
+"troat." It is this which Thackeray has heard. There is a little piece
+called the _Last Irish Grievance_, to which Thackeray adds a still later
+grievance, by the false sounds which he elicits from the calumniated
+mouth of the pretended Irish poet. Slaves are "sleeves," places are
+"pleeces," Lord John is "Lard Jahn," fatal is "fetal," danger is
+"deenger," and native is "neetive." All these are unintended slanders.
+Tea, Hibernice, is "tay," please is "plaise," sea is "say," and ease is
+"aise." The softer sound of e is broadened out by the natural
+Irishman,--not, to my ear, without a certain euphony;--but no one in
+Ireland says or hears the reverse. The Irishman who in London might talk
+of his "neetive" race, would be mincing his words to please the ear of
+the cockney.
+
+_The Chronicle of the Drum_ would be a true ballad all through, were it
+not that there is tacked on to it a long moral in an altered metre. I do
+not much value the moral, but the ballad is excellent, not only in much
+of its versification and in the turns of its language, but in the quaint
+and true picture it gives of the French nation. The drummer, either by
+himself or by some of his family, has drummed through a century of
+French battling, caring much for his country and its glory, but
+understanding nothing of the causes for which he is enthusiastic.
+Whether for King, Republic, or Emperor, whether fighting and conquering
+or fighting and conquered, he is happy as long as he can beat his drum
+on a field of glory. But throughout his adventures there is a touch of
+chivalry about our drummer. In all the episodes of his country's career
+he feels much of patriotism and something of tenderness. It is thus he
+sings during the days of the Revolution:
+
+     We had taken the head of King Capet,
+       We called for the blood of his wife;
+     Undaunted she came to the scaffold,
+       And bared her fair neck to the knife.
+     As she felt the foul fingers that touched her,
+       She shrank, but she deigned not to speak;
+     She looked with a royal disdain,
+       And died with a blush on her cheek!
+
+     'Twas thus that our country was saved!
+       So told us the Safety Committee!
+     But, psha, I've the heart of a soldier,--
+       All gentleness, mercy, and pity.
+     I loathed to assist at such deeds,
+       And my drum beat its loudest of tunes,
+     As we offered to justice offended,
+       The blood of the bloody tribunes.
+
+     Away with such foul recollections!
+       No more of the axe and the block.
+     I saw the last fight of the sections,
+       As they fell 'neath our guns at St. Rock.
+     Young Bonaparte led us that day.
+
+And so it goes on. I will not continue the stanza, because it contains
+the worst rhyme that Thackeray ever permitted himself to use. _The
+Chronicle of the Drum_ has not the finish which he achieved afterwards,
+but it is full of national feeling, and carries on its purpose to the
+end with an admirable persistency;
+
+     A curse on those British assassins
+       Who ordered the slaughter of Ney;
+     A curse on Sir Hudson who tortured
+       The life of our hero away.
+     A curse on all Russians,--I hate them;
+       On all Prussian and Austrian fry;
+     And, oh, but I pray we may meet them
+       And fight them again ere I die.
+
+_The White Squall_,--which I can hardly call a ballad, unless any
+description of a scene in verse may be included in the name,--is surely
+one of the most graphic descriptions ever put into verse. Nothing
+written by Thackeray shows more plainly his power over words and rhymes.
+He draws his picture without a line omitted or a line too much, saying
+with apparent facility all that he has to say, and so saying it that
+every word conveys its natural meaning.
+
+     When a squall, upon a sudden,
+     Came o'er the waters scudding;
+     And the clouds began to gather,
+     And the sea was lashed to lather,
+     And the lowering thunder grumbled,
+     And the lightning jumped and tumbled,
+     And the ship and all the ocean
+     Woke up in wild commotion.
+     Then the wind set up a howling,
+     And the poodle dog a yowling,
+     And the cocks began a crowing,
+     And the old cow raised a lowing,
+     As she heard the tempest blowing;
+     And fowls and geese did cackle,
+     And the cordage and the tackle
+     Began to shriek and crackle;
+     And the spray dashed o'er the funnels,
+     And down the deck in runnels;
+     And the rushing water soaks all,
+     From the seamen in the fo'ksal
+     To the stokers whose black faces
+     Peer out of their bed-places;
+     And the captain, he was bawling,
+     And the sailors pulling, hauling,
+     And the quarter-deck tarpauling
+     Was shivered in the squalling;
+     And the passengers awaken,
+     Most pitifully shaken;
+     And the steward jumps up and hastens
+     For the necessary basins.
+
+     Then the Greeks they groaned and quivered,
+     And they knelt, and moaned, and shivered,
+     As the plunging waters met them,
+     And splashed and overset them;
+     And they call in their emergence
+     Upon countless saints and virgins;
+     And their marrowbones are bended,
+     And they think the world is ended.
+
+     And the Turkish women for'ard
+     Were frightened and behorror'd;
+     And shrieking and bewildering,
+     The mothers clutched their children;
+     The men sang "Allah! Illah!
+     Mashallah Bis-millah!"
+     As the warning waters doused them,
+     And splashed them and soused them
+     And they called upon the Prophet,
+     And thought but little of it.
+
+     Then all the fleas in Jewry
+     Jumped up and bit like fury;
+     And the progeny of Jacob
+     Did on the main-deck wake up.
+     (I wot these greasy Rabbins
+     Would never pay for cabins);
+     And each man moaned and jabbered in
+     His filthy Jewish gaberdine,
+     In woe and lamentation,
+     And howling consternation.
+     And the splashing water drenches
+     Their dirty brats and wenches;
+     And they crawl from bales and benches,
+     In a hundred thousand stenches.
+     This was the White Squall famous,
+     Which latterly o'ercame us.
+
+_Peg of Limavaddy_ has always been very popular, and the public have
+not, I think, been generally aware that the young lady in question lived
+in truth at Newton Limavady (with one d). But with the correct name
+Thackeray would hardly have been so successful with his rhymes.
+
+     Citizen or Squire
+       Tory, Whig, or Radi-
+     Cal would all desire
+       Peg of Limavaddy.
+     Had I Homer's fire
+       Or that of Sergeant Taddy
+     Meetly I'd admire
+       Peg of Limavaddy.
+     And till I expire
+       Or till I go mad I
+     Will sing unto my lyre
+       Peg of Limavaddy.
+
+_The Cane-bottomed Chair_ is another, better, I think, than _Peg of
+Limavaddy_, as containing that mixture of burlesque with the pathetic
+which belonged so peculiarly to Thackeray, and which was indeed the very
+essence of his genius.
+
+     But of all the cheap treasures that garnish my nest,
+       There's one that I love and I cherish the best.
+     For the finest of couches that's padded with hair
+       I never would change thee, my cane-bottomed chair.
+
+     'Tis a bandy-legged, high-bottomed, worm-eaten seat,
+       With a creaking old back and twisted old feet;
+     But since the fair morning when Fanny sat there,
+       I bless thee and love thee, old cane-bottomed chair.
+
+            *       *       *       *       *
+
+     She comes from the past and revisits my room,
+       She looks as she then did all beauty and bloom;
+     So smiling and tender, so fresh and so fair,
+       And yonder she sits in my cane-bottomed chair.
+
+This, in the volume which I have now before me, is followed by a picture
+of Fanny in the chair, to which I cannot but take exception. I am quite
+sure that when Fanny graced the room and seated herself in the chair of
+her old bachelor friend, she had not on a low dress and loosely-flowing
+drawing-room shawl, nor was there a footstool ready for her feet. I
+doubt also the headgear. Fanny on that occasion was dressed in her
+morning apparel, and had walked through the streets, carried no fan,
+and wore no brooch but one that might be necessary for pinning her
+shawl.
+
+_The Great Cossack Epic_ is the longest of the ballads. It is a legend
+of St. Sophia of Kioff, telling how Father Hyacinth, by the aid of St.
+Sophia, whose wooden statue he carried with him, escaped across the
+Borysthenes with all the Cossacks at his tail. It is very good fun; but
+not equal to many of the others. Nor is the _Carmen Lilliense_ quite to
+my taste. I should not have declared at once that it had come from
+Thackeray's hand, had I not known it.
+
+But who could doubt the _Bouillabaisse_? Who else could have written
+that? Who at the same moment could have been so merry and so
+melancholy,--could have gone so deep into the regrets of life, with
+words so appropriate to its jollities? I do not know how far my readers
+will agree with me that to read it always must be a fresh pleasure; but
+in order that they may agree with me, if they can, I will give it to
+them entire. If there be one whom it does not please, he will like
+nothing that Thackeray ever wrote in verse.
+
+     THE BALLAD OF BOUILLABAISSE.
+
+     A street there is in Paris famous,
+       For which no rhyme our language yields,
+     Rue Neuve des Petits Champs its name is--
+       The New Street of the Little Fields;
+     And here's an inn, not rich and splendid,
+       But still in comfortable case;
+     The which in youth I oft attended,
+       To eat a bowl of Bouillabaisse.
+
+     This Bouillabaisse a noble dish is,--
+       A sort of soup, or broth, or brew
+     Or hotch-potch of all sorts of fishes,
+       That Greenwich never could outdo;
+     Green herbs, red peppers, mussels, saffron,
+       Soles, onions, garlic, roach, and dace:
+     All these you eat at Terre's tavern,
+       In that one dish of Bouillabaisse.
+
+     Indeed, a rich and savoury stew 'tis;
+       And true philosophers, methinks,
+     Who love all sorts of natural beauties,
+       Should love good victuals and good drinks.
+     And Cordelier or Benedictine
+       Might gladly sure his lot embrace,
+     Nor find a fast-day too afflicting
+       Which served him up a Bouillabaisse.
+
+     I wonder if the house still there is?
+       Yes, here the lamp is, as before;
+     The smiling red-cheeked ecaillere is
+       Still opening oysters at the door.
+     Is Terre still alive and able?
+       I recollect his droll grimace;
+     He'd come and smile before your table,
+       And hope you liked your Bouillabaisse.
+
+     We enter,--nothing's changed or older.
+       "How's Monsieur Terre, waiter, pray?"
+     The waiter stares and shrugs his shoulder,--
+       "Monsieur is dead this many a day."
+     "It is the lot of saint and sinner;
+       So honest Terre's run his race."
+     "What will Monsieur require for dinner?"
+       "Say, do you still cook Bouillabaisse?"
+
+     "Oh, oui, Monsieur," 's the waiter's answer,
+       "Quel vin Monsieur desire-t-il?"
+     "Tell me a good one." "That I can, sir:
+       The chambertin with yellow seal."
+     "So Terre's gone," I say, and sink in
+       My old accustom'd corner-place;
+     "He's done with feasting and with drinking,
+       With Burgundy and Bouillabaisse."
+
+     My old accustomed corner here is,
+       The table still is in the nook;
+     Ah! vanish'd many a busy year is
+       This well-known chair since last I took.
+     When first I saw ye, cari luoghi,
+       I'd scarce a beard upon my face,
+     And now a grizzled, grim old fogy,
+       I sit and wait for Bouillabaisse.
+
+     Where are you, old companions trusty,
+       Of early days here met to dine?
+     Come, waiter! quick, a flagon crusty;
+       I'll pledge them in the good old wine.
+     The kind old voices and old faces
+       My memory can quick retrace;
+     Around the board they take their places,
+       And share the wine and Bouillabaisse.
+
+     There's Jack has made a wondrous marriage;
+       There's laughing Tom is laughing yet;
+     There's brave Augustus drives his carriage;
+       There's poor old Fred in the _Gazette_;
+     O'er James's head the grass is growing.
+       Good Lord! the world has wagged apace
+     Since here we set the claret flowing,
+       And drank, and ate the Bouillabaisse.
+
+     Ah me! how quick the days are flitting!
+       I mind me of a time that's gone,
+     When here I'd sit, as now I'm sitting,
+       In this same place,--but not alone.
+     A fair young face was nestled near me,
+       A dear, dear face looked fondly up,
+     And sweetly spoke and smiled to cheer me!
+       There's no one now to share my cup.
+
+            *       *       *       *       *
+
+     I drink it as the Fates ordain it.
+       Come fill it, and have done with rhymes;
+     Fill up the lonely glass, and drain it
+       In memory of dear old times.
+     Welcome the wine, whate'er the seal is;
+       And sit you down and say your grace
+     With thankful heart, whate'er the meal is.
+       Here comes the smoking Bouillabaisse.
+
+I am not disposed to say that Thackeray will hold a high place among
+English poets. He would have been the first to ridicule such an
+assumption made on his behalf. But I think that his verses will be more
+popular than those of many highly reputed poets, and that as years roll
+on they will gain rather than lose in public estimation.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[7] Chair--_i.e._ Chairman.
+
+[8] _I.e._ The P. and O. Company.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+THACKERAY'S STYLE AND MANNER OF WORK.
+
+
+A novel in style should be easy, lucid, and of course grammatical. The
+same may be said of any book; but that which is intended to recreate
+should be easily understood,--for which purpose lucid narration is an
+essential. In matter it should be moral and amusing. In manner it may be
+realistic, or sublime, or ludicrous;--or it may be all these if the
+author can combine them. As to Thackeray's performance in style and
+matter I will say something further on. His manner was mainly realistic,
+and I will therefore speak first of that mode of expression which was
+peculiarly his own.
+
+Realism in style has not all the ease which seems to belong to it. It is
+the object of the author who affects it so to communicate with his
+reader that all his words shall seem to be natural to the occasion. We
+do not think the language of Dogberry natural, when he tells neighbour
+Seacole that "to write and read comes by nature." That is ludicrous. Nor
+is the language of Hamlet natural when he shows to his mother the
+portrait of his father;
+
+     See what a grace was seated on this brow;
+     Hyperion's curls; the front of Jove himself;
+     An eye like Mars, to threaten and command.
+
+That is sublime. Constance is natural when she turns away from the
+Cardinal, declaring that
+
+     He talks to me that never had a son.
+
+In one respect both the sublime and ludicrous are easier than the
+realistic. They are not required to be true. A man with an imagination
+and culture may feign either of them without knowing the ways of men. To
+be realistic you must know accurately that which you describe. How often
+do we find in novels that the author makes an attempt at realism and
+falls into a bathos of absurdity, because he cannot use appropriate
+language? "No human being ever spoke like that," we say to
+ourselves,--while we should not question the naturalness of the
+production, either in the grand or the ridiculous.
+
+And yet in very truth the realistic must not be true,--but just so far
+removed from truth as to suit the erroneous idea of truth which the
+reader may be supposed to entertain. For were a novelist to narrate a
+conversation between two persons of fair but not high education, and to
+use the ill-arranged words and fragments of speech which are really
+common in such conversations, he would seem to have sunk to the
+ludicrous, and to be attributing to the interlocutors a mode of language
+much beneath them. Though in fact true, it would seem to be far from
+natural. But on the other hand, were he to put words grammatically
+correct into the mouths of his personages, and to round off and to
+complete the spoken sentences, the ordinary reader would instantly feel
+such a style to be stilted and unreal. This reader would not analyse it,
+but would in some dim but sufficiently critical manner be aware that his
+author was not providing him with a naturally spoken dialogue. To
+produce the desired effect the narrator must go between the two. He must
+mount somewhat above the ordinary conversational powers of such persons
+as are to be represented,--lest he disgust. But he must by no means soar
+into correct phraseology,--lest he offend. The realistic,--by which we
+mean that which shall seem to be real,--lies between the two, and in
+reaching it the writer has not only to keep his proper distance on both
+sides, but has to maintain varying distances in accordance with the
+position, mode of life, and education of the speakers. Lady Castlewood
+in _Esmond_ would not have been properly made to speak with absolute
+precision; but she goes nearer to the mark than her more ignorant lord,
+the viscount; less near, however, than her better-educated kinsman,
+Henry Esmond. He, however, is not made to speak altogether by the card,
+or he would be unnatural. Nor would each of them speak always in the
+same strain, but they would alter their language according to their
+companion,--according even to the hour of the day. All this the reader
+unconsciously perceives, and will not think the language to be natural
+unless the proper variations be there.
+
+In simple narrative the rule is the same as in dialogue, though it does
+not admit of the same palpable deviation from correct construction. The
+story of any incident, to be realistic, will admit neither of
+sesquipedalian grandeur nor of grotesque images. The one gives an idea
+of romance and the other of burlesque, to neither of which is truth
+supposed to appertain. We desire to soar frequently, and then we try
+romance. We desire to recreate ourselves with the easy and droll. Dulce
+est desipere in loco. Then we have recourse to burlesque. But in neither
+do we expect human nature.
+
+I cannot but think that in the hands of the novelist the middle course
+is the most powerful. Much as we may delight in burlesque, we cannot
+claim for it the power of achieving great results. So much I think will
+be granted. For the sublime we look rather to poetry than to prose, and
+though I will give one or two instances just now in which it has been
+used with great effect in prose fiction, it does not come home to the
+heart, teaching a lesson, as does the realistic. The girl who reads is
+touched by Lucy Ashton, but she feels herself to be convinced of the
+facts as to Jeanie Deans, and asks herself whether she might not emulate
+them.
+
+Now as to the realism of Thackeray, I must rather appeal to my readers
+than attempt to prove it by quotation. Whoever it is that speaks in his
+pages, does it not seem that such a person would certainly have used
+such words on such an occasion? If there be need of examination to learn
+whether it be so or not, let the reader study all that falls from the
+mouth of Lady Castlewood through the novel called _Esmond_, or all that
+falls from the mouth of Beatrix. They are persons peculiarly
+situated,--noble women, but who have still lived much out of the world.
+The former is always conscious of a sorrow; the latter is always
+striving after an effect;--and both on this account are difficult of
+management. A period for the story has been chosen which is strange and
+unknown to us, and which has required a peculiar language. One would
+have said beforehand that whatever might be the charms of the book, it
+would not be natural. And yet the ear is never wounded by a tone that is
+false. It is not always the case that in novel reading the ear should be
+wounded because the words spoken are unnatural. Bulwer does not wound,
+though he never puts into the mouth of any of his persons words such as
+would have been spoken. They are not expected from him. It is something
+else that he provides. From Thackeray they are expected,--and from many
+others. But Thackeray never disappoints. Whether it be a great duke,
+such as he who was to have married Beatrix, or a mean chaplain, such as
+Tusher, or Captain Steele the humorist, they talk,--not as they would
+have talked probably, of which I am no judge,--but as we feel that they
+might have talked. We find ourselves willing to take it as proved
+because it is there, which is the strongest possible evidence of the
+realistic capacity of the writer.
+
+As to the sublime in novels, it is not to be supposed that any very high
+rank of sublimity is required to put such works within the pale of that
+definition. I allude to those in which an attempt is made to soar above
+the ordinary actions and ordinary language of life. We may take as an
+instance _The Mysteries of Udolpho_. That is intended to be sublime
+throughout. Even the writer never for a moment thought of descending to
+real life. She must have been untrue to her own idea of her own business
+had she done so. It is all stilted,--all of a certain altitude among the
+clouds. It has been in its time a popular book, and has had its world of
+readers. Those readers no doubt preferred the diluted romance of Mrs.
+Radcliff to the condensed realism of Fielding. At any rate they did not
+look for realism. _Pelham_ may be taken as another instance of the
+sublime, though there is so much in it that is of the world worldly,
+though an intentional fall to the ludicrous is often made in it. The
+personages talk in glittering dialogues, throwing about philosophy,
+science, and the classics, in a manner which is always suggestive and
+often amusing. The book is brilliant with intellect. But no word is
+ever spoken as it would have been spoken;--no detail is ever narrated as
+it would have occurred. Bulwer no doubt regarded novels as romantic, and
+would have looked with contempt on any junction of realism and romance,
+though, in varying his work, he did not think it beneath him to vary his
+sublimity with the ludicrous. The sublime in novels is no doubt most
+effective when it breaks out, as though by some burst of nature, in the
+midst of a story true to life. "If," said Evan Maccombich, "the Saxon
+gentlemen are laughing because a poor man such as me thinks my life, or
+the life of six of my degree, is worth that of Vich Ian Vohr, it's like
+enough they may be very right; but if they laugh because they think I
+would not keep my word and come back to redeem him, I can tell them they
+ken neither the heart of a Hielandman nor the honour of a gentleman."
+That is sublime. And, again, when Balfour of Burley slaughters Bothwell,
+the death scene is sublime. "Die, bloodthirsty dog!" said Burley. "Die
+as thou hast lived! Die like the beasts that perish--hoping nothing,
+believing nothing!"----"And fearing nothing," said Bothwell. Horrible as
+is the picture, it is sublime. As is also that speech of Meg Merrilies,
+as she addresses Mr. Bertram, standing on the bank. "Ride your ways,"
+said the gipsy; "ride your ways, Laird of Ellangowan; ride your ways,
+Godfrey Bertram. This day have ye quenched seven smoking hearths; see if
+the fire in your ain parlour burn the blyther for that. Ye have riven
+the thack off seven cottar houses; look if your ain rooftree stand the
+faster. Ye may stable your stirks in the shealings at Derncleugh; see
+that the hare does not couch on the hearthstane at Ellangowan." That is
+romance, and reaches the very height of the sublime. That does not
+offend, impossible though it be that any old woman should have spoken
+such words, because it does in truth lift the reader up among the bright
+stars. It is thus that the sublime may be mingled with the realistic, if
+the writer has the power. Thackeray also rises in that way to a high
+pitch, though not in many instances. Romance does not often justify to
+him an absence of truth. The scene between Lady Castlewood and the Duke
+of Hamilton is one, when she explains to her child's suitor who Henry
+Esmond is. "My daughter may receive presents from the head of our
+house," says the lady, speaking up for her kinsman. "My daughter may
+thankfully take kindness from her father's, her mother's, her brother's
+dearest friend." The whole scene is of the same nature, and is evidence
+of Thackeray's capacity for the sublime. And again, when the same lady
+welcomes the same kinsman on his return from the wars, she rises as
+high. But as I have already quoted a part of the passage in the chapter
+on this novel, I will not repeat it here.
+
+It may perhaps be said of the sublime in novels,--which I have
+endeavoured to describe as not being generally of a high order,--that it
+is apt to become cold, stilted, and unsatisfactory. What may be done by
+impossible castles among impossible mountains, peopled by impossible
+heroes and heroines, and fraught with impossible horrors, _The Mysteries
+of Udolpho_ have shown us. But they require a patient reader, and one
+who can content himself with a long protracted and most unemotional
+excitement. The sublimity which is effected by sparkling speeches is
+better, if the speeches really have something in them beneath the
+sparkles. Those of Bulwer generally have. Those of his imitators are
+often without anything, the sparkles even hardly sparkling. At the best
+they fatigue; and a novel, if it fatigues, is unpardonable. Its only
+excuse is to be found in the amusement it affords. It should instruct
+also, no doubt, but it never will do so unless it hides its instruction
+and amuses. Scott understood all this, when he allowed himself only such
+sudden bursts as I have described. Even in _The Bride of Lammermoor_,
+which I do not regard as among the best of his performances, as he soars
+high into the sublime, so does he descend low into the ludicrous.
+
+In this latter division of pure fiction,--the burlesque, as it is
+commonly called, or the ludicrous,--Thackeray is quite as much at home
+as in the realistic, though, the vehicle being less powerful, he has
+achieved smaller results by it. Manifest as are the objects in his view
+when he wrote _The Hoggarty Diamond_ or _The Legend of the Rhine_, they
+were less important and less evidently effected than those attempted by
+_Vanity Fair_ and _Pendennis_. Captain Shindy, the Snob, does not tell
+us so plainly what is not a gentleman as does Colonel Newcome what is.
+Nevertheless the ludicrous has, with Thackeray, been very powerful, and
+very delightful.
+
+In trying to describe what is done by literature of this class, it is
+especially necessary to remember that different readers are affected in
+a different way. That which is one man's meat is another man's poison.
+In the sublime, when the really grand has been reached, it is the
+reader's own fault if he be not touched. We know that many are
+indifferent to the soliloquies of Hamlet, but we do not hesitate to
+declare to ourselves that they are so because they lack the power of
+appreciating grand language. We do not scruple to attribute to those who
+are indifferent some inferiority of intelligence. And in regard to the
+realistic, when the truth of a well-told story or life-like character
+does not come home, we think that then, too, there is deficiency in the
+critical ability. But there is nothing necessarily lacking to a man
+because he does not enjoy _The Heathen Chinee_ or _The Biglow Papers_;
+and the man to whom these delights of American humour are leather and
+prunello may be of all the most enraptured by the wit of Sam Weller or
+the mock piety of Pecksniff. It is a matter of taste and not of
+intellect, as one man likes caviare after his dinner, while another
+prefers apple-pie; and the man himself cannot, or, as far as we can see,
+does not direct his own taste in the one matter more than in the other.
+
+Therefore I cannot ask others to share with me the delight which I have
+in the various and peculiar expressions of the ludicrous which are
+common to Thackeray. Some considerable portion of it consists in bad
+spelling. We may say that Charles James Harrington Fitzroy Yellowplush,
+or C. FitzJeames De La Pluche, as he is afterwards called, would be
+nothing but for his "orthogwaphy so carefully inaccuwate." As I have
+before said, Mrs. Malaprop had seemed to have reached the height of this
+humour, and in having done so to have made any repetition unpalatable.
+But Thackeray's studied blundering is altogether different from that of
+Sheridan. Mrs. Malaprop uses her words in a delightfully wrong sense.
+Yellowplush would be a very intelligible, if not quite an accurate
+writer, had he not made for himself special forms of English words
+altogether new to the eye.
+
+"My ma wrapped up my buth in a mistry. I may be illygitmit; I may have
+been changed at nus; but I've always had gen'l'm'nly tastes through
+life, and have no doubt that I come of a gen'l'm'nly origum." We cannot
+admit that there is wit, or even humour, in bad spelling alone. Were it
+not that Yellowplush, with his bad spelling, had so much to say for
+himself, there would be nothing in it; but there is always a sting of
+satire directed against some real vice, or some growing vulgarity, which
+is made sharper by the absurdity of the language. In _The Diary of
+George IV._ there are the following reflections on a certain
+correspondence; "Wooden you phansy, now, that the author of such a
+letter, instead of writun about pipple of tip-top quality, was
+describin' Vinegar Yard? Would you beleave that the lady he was a-ritin'
+to was a chased modist lady of honour and mother of a family? _O
+trumpery! o morris!_ as Homer says. This is a higeous pictur of manners,
+such as I weap to think of, as every morl man must weap." We do not
+wonder that when he makes his "ajew" he should have been called
+up to be congratulated on the score of his literary performances by
+his master, before the Duke, and Lord Bagwig, and Dr. Larner, and
+"Sawedwadgeorgeearllittnbulwig." All that Yellowplush says or writes are
+among the pearls which Thackeray was continually scattering abroad.
+
+But this of the distinguished footman was only one of the forms of the
+ludicrous which he was accustomed to use in the furtherance of some
+purpose which he had at heart. It was his practice to clothe things most
+revolting with an assumed grace and dignity, and to add to the weight of
+his condemnation by the astounding mendacity of the parody thus drawn.
+There was a grim humour in this which has been displeasing to some, as
+seeming to hold out to vice a hand which has appeared for too long a
+time to be friendly. As we are disposed to be not altogether sympathetic
+with a detective policeman who shall have spent a jolly night with a
+delinquent, for the sake of tracing home the suspected guilt to his
+late comrade, so are some disposed to be almost angry with our author,
+who seems to be too much at home with his rascals, and to live with them
+on familiar terms till we doubt whether he does not forget their
+rascality. _Barry Lyndon_ is the strongest example we have of this style
+of the ludicrous, and the critics of whom I speak have thought that our
+friendly relations with Barry have been too genial, too apparently
+genuine, so that it might almost be doubtful whether during the
+narrative we might not, at this or the other crisis, be rather with him
+than against him. "After all," the reader might say, on coming to that
+passage in which Barry defends his trade as a gambler,--a passage which
+I have quoted in speaking of the novel,--"after all, this man is more
+hero than scoundrel;" so well is the burlesque humour maintained, so
+well does the scoundrel hide his own villany. I can easily understand
+that to some it should seem too long drawn out. To me it seems to be the
+perfection of humour,--and of philosophy. If such a one as Barry Lyndon,
+a man full of intellect, can be made thus to love and cherish his vice,
+and to believe in its beauty, how much more necessary is it to avoid the
+footsteps which lead to it? But, as I have said above, there is no
+standard by which to judge of the excellence of the ludicrous as there
+is of the sublime, and even the realistic.
+
+No writer ever had a stronger proclivity towards parody than Thackeray;
+and we may, I think, confess that there is no form of literary drollery
+more dangerous. The parody will often mar the gem of which it coarsely
+reproduces the outward semblance. The word "damaged," used instead of
+"damask," has destroyed to my ear for ever the music of one of the
+sweetest passages in Shakespeare. But it must be acknowledged of
+Thackeray that, fond as he is of this branch of humour, he has done
+little or no injury by his parodies. They run over with fun, but are so
+contrived that they do not lessen the flavour of the original. I have
+given in one of the preceding chapters a little set of verses of his
+own, called _The Willow Tree_, and his own parody on his own work. There
+the reader may see how effective a parody may be in destroying the
+sentiment of the piece parodied. But in dealing with other authors he
+has been grotesque without being severely critical, and has been very
+like, without making ugly or distasteful that which he has imitated. No
+one who has admired _Coningsby_ will admire it the less because of
+_Codlingsby_. Nor will the undoubted romance of _Eugene Aram_ be
+lessened in the estimation of any reader of novels by the well-told
+career of _George de Barnwell_. One may say that to laugh _Ivanhoe_ out
+of face, or to lessen the glory of that immortal story, would be beyond
+the power of any farcical effect. Thackeray in his _Rowena and Rebecca_
+certainly had no such purpose. Nothing of _Ivanhoe_ is injured, nothing
+made less valuable than it was before, yet, of all prose parodies in the
+language, it is perhaps the most perfect. Every character is maintained,
+every incident has a taste of Scott. It has the twang of _Ivanhoe_ from
+beginning to end, and yet there is not a word in it by which the author
+of _Ivanhoe_ could have been offended. But then there is the purpose
+beyond that of the mere parody. Prudish women have to be laughed at, and
+despotic kings, and parasite lords and bishops. The ludicrous alone is
+but poor fun; but when the ludicrous has a meaning, it can be very
+effective in the hands of such a master as this.
+
+     "He to die!" resumed the bishop. "He a mortal like to us!
+     Death was not for him intended, though _communis omnibus_.
+     Keeper, you are irreligious, for to talk and cavil thus!"
+
+So much I have said of the manner in which Thackeray did his work,
+endeavouring to represent human nature as he saw it, so that his readers
+should learn to love what is good, and to hate what is evil. As to the
+merits of his style, it will be necessary to insist on them the less,
+because it has been generally admitted to be easy, lucid, and
+grammatical. I call that style easy by which the writer has succeeded in
+conveying to the reader that which the reader is intended to receive
+with the least possible amount of trouble to him. I call that style
+lucid which conveys to the reader most accurately all that the writer
+wishes to convey on any subject. The two virtues will, I think, be seen
+to be very different. An author may wish to give an idea that a certain
+flavour is bitter. He shall leave a conviction that it is simply
+disagreeable. Then he is not lucid. But he shall convey so much as that,
+in such a manner as to give the reader no trouble in arriving at the
+conclusion. Therefore he is easy. The subject here suggested is as
+little complicated as possible; but in the intercourse which is going on
+continually between writers and readers, affairs of all degrees of
+complication are continually being discussed, of a nature so complicated
+that the inexperienced writer is puzzled at every turn to express
+himself, and the altogether inartistic writer fails to do so. Who among
+writers has not to acknowledge that he is often unable to tell all that
+he has to tell? Words refuse to do it for him. He struggles and stumbles
+and alters and adds, but finds at last that he has gone either too far
+or not quite far enough. Then there comes upon him the necessity of
+choosing between two evils. He must either give up the fulness of his
+thought, and content himself with presenting some fragment of it in that
+lucid arrangement of words which he affects; or he must bring out his
+thought with ambages; he must mass his sentences inconsequentially; he
+must struggle up hill almost hopelessly with his phrases,--so that at
+the end the reader will have to labour as he himself has laboured, or
+else to leave behind much of the fruit which it has been intended that
+he should garner. It is the ill-fortune of some to be neither easy or
+lucid; and there is nothing more wonderful in the history of letters
+than the patience of readers when called upon to suffer under the double
+calamity. It is as though a man were reading a dialogue of Plato,
+understanding neither the subject nor the language. But it is often the
+case that one has to be sacrificed to the other. The pregnant writer
+will sometimes solace himself by declaring that it is not his business
+to supply intelligence to the reader; and then, in throwing out the
+entirety of his thought, will not stop to remember that he cannot hope
+to scatter his ideas far and wide unless he can make them easily
+intelligible. Then the writer who is determined that his book shall not
+be put down because it is troublesome, is too apt to avoid the knotty
+bits and shirk the rocky turns, because he cannot with ease to himself
+make them easy to others. If this be acknowledged, I shall be held to be
+right in saying not only that ease and lucidity in style are different
+virtues, but that they are often opposed to each other. They may,
+however, be combined, and then the writer will have really learned the
+art of writing. Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci. It is to be
+done, I believe, in all languages. A man by art and practice shall at
+least obtain such a masterhood over words as to express all that he
+thinks, in phrases that shall be easily understood.
+
+In such a small space as can here be allowed, I cannot give instances to
+prove that this has been achieved by Thackeray. Nor would instances
+prove the existence of the virtue, though instances might the absence.
+The proof lies in the work of the man's life, and can only become plain
+to those who have read his writings. I must refer readers to their own
+experiences, and ask them whether they have found themselves compelled
+to study passages in Thackeray in order that they might find a recondite
+meaning, or whether they have not been sure that they and the author
+have together understood all that there was to understand in the matter.
+Have they run backward over the passages, and then gone on, not quite
+sure what the author has meant? If not, then he has been easy and lucid.
+We have not had it so easy with all modern writers, nor with all that
+are old. I may best perhaps explain my meaning by taking something
+written long ago; something very valuable, in order that I may not
+damage my argument by comparing the easiness of Thackeray with the
+harshness of some author who has in other respects failed of obtaining
+approbation. If you take the play of _Cymbeline_ you will, I think, find
+it to be anything but easy reading. Nor is Shakespeare always lucid. For
+purposes of his own he will sometimes force his readers to doubt his
+meaning, even after prolonged study. It has ever been so with _Hamlet_.
+My readers will not, I think, be so crossgrained with me as to suppose
+that I am putting Thackeray as a master of style above Shakespeare. I am
+only endeavouring to explain by reference to the great master the
+condition of literary production which he attained. Whatever Thackeray
+says, the reader cannot fail to understand; and whatever Thackeray
+attempts to communicate, he succeeds in conveying.
+
+That he is grammatical I must leave to my readers' judgment, with a
+simple assertion in his favour. There are some who say that grammar,--by
+which I mean accuracy of composition, in accordance with certain
+acknowledged rules,--is only a means to an end; and that, if a writer
+can absolutely achieve the end by some other mode of his own, he need
+not regard the prescribed means. If a man can so write as to be easily
+understood, and to convey lucidly that which he has to convey without
+accuracy of grammar, why should he subject himself to unnecessary
+trammels? Why not make a path for himself, if the path so made will
+certainly lead him whither he wishes to go? The answer is, that no other
+path will lead others whither he wishes to carry them but that which is
+common to him and to those others. It is necessary that there should be
+a ground equally familiar to the writer and to his readers. If there be
+no such common ground, they will certainly not come into full accord.
+There have been recusants who, by a certain acuteness of their own, have
+partly done so,--wilful recusants; but they have been recusants, not to
+the extent of discarding grammar,--which no writer could do and not be
+altogether in the dark,--but so far as to have created for themselves a
+phraseology which has been picturesque by reason of its illicit
+vagaries; as a woman will sometimes please ill-instructed eyes and ears
+by little departures from feminine propriety. They have probably
+laboured in their vocation as sedulously as though they had striven to
+be correct, and have achieved at the best but a short-lived
+success;--as is the case also with the unconventional female. The charm
+of the disorderly soon loses itself in the ugliness of disorder. And
+there are others rebellious from grammar, who are, however, hardly to be
+called rebels, because the laws which they break have never been
+altogether known to them. Among those very dear to me in English
+literature, one or two might be named of either sort, whose works,
+though they have that in them which will insure to them a long life,
+will become from year to year less valuable and less venerable, because
+their authors have either scorned or have not known that common ground
+of language on which the author and his readers should stand together.
+My purport here is only with Thackeray, and I say that he stands always
+on that common ground. He quarrels with none of the laws. As the lady
+who is most attentive to conventional propriety may still have her own
+fashion of dress and her own mode of speech, so had Thackeray very
+manifestly his own style; but it is one the correctness of which has
+never been impugned.
+
+I hold that gentleman to be the best dressed whose dress no one
+observes. I am not sure but that the same may be said of an author's
+written language. Only, where shall we find an example of such
+perfection? Always easy, always lucid, always correct, we may find them;
+but who is the writer, easy, lucid, and correct, who has not impregnated
+his writing with something of that personal flavour which we call
+mannerism? To speak of authors well known to all readers--Does not _The
+Rambler_ taste of Johnson; _The Decline and Fall_, of Gibbon; _The
+Middle Ages_, of Hallam; _The History of England_, of Macaulay; and _The
+Invasion of the Crimea_, of Kinglake? Do we not know the elephantine
+tread of _The Saturday_, and the precise toe of _The Spectator_? I have
+sometimes thought that Swift has been nearest to the mark of
+any,--writing English and not writing Swift. But I doubt whether an
+accurate observer would not trace even here the "mark of the beast."
+Thackeray, too, has a strong flavour of Thackeray. I am inclined to
+think that his most besetting sin in style,--the little earmark by which
+he is most conspicuous,--is a certain affected familiarity. He indulges
+too frequently in little confidences with individual readers, in which
+pretended allusions to himself are frequent. "What would you do? what
+would you say now, if you were in such a position?" he asks. He
+describes this practice of his in the preface to _Pendennis_. "It is a
+sort of confidential talk between writer and reader.... In the course of
+his volubility the perpetual speaker must of necessity lay bare his own
+weaknesses, vanities, peculiarities." In the short contributions to
+periodicals on which he tried his 'prentice hand, such addresses and
+conversations were natural and efficacious; but in a larger work of
+fiction they cause an absence of that dignity to which even a novel may
+aspire. You feel that each morsel as you read it is a detached bit, and
+that it has all been written in detachments. The book is robbed of its
+integrity by a certain good-humoured geniality of language, which causes
+the reader to be almost too much at home with his author. There is a
+saying that familiarity breeds contempt, and I have been sometimes
+inclined to think that our author has sometimes failed to stand up for
+himself with sufficiency of "personal deportment."
+
+In other respects Thackeray's style is excellent. As I have said before,
+the reader always understands his words without an effort, and receives
+all that the author has to give.
+
+There now remains to be discussed the matter of our author's work. The
+manner and the style are but the natural wrappings in which the goods
+have been prepared for the market. Of these goods it is no doubt true
+that unless the wrappings be in some degree meritorious the article will
+not be accepted at all; but it is the kernel which we seek, which, if it
+be not of itself sweet and digestible, cannot be made serviceable by any
+shell however pretty or easy to be cracked. I have said previously that
+it is the business of a novel to instruct in morals and to amuse. I will
+go further, and will add, having been for many years a most prolific
+writer of novels myself, that I regard him who can put himself into
+close communication with young people year after year without making
+some attempt to do them good, as a very sorry fellow indeed. However
+poor your matter may be, however near you may come to that "foolishest
+of existing mortals," as Carlyle presumes some unfortunate novelist to
+be, still, if there be those who read your works, they will undoubtedly
+be more or less influenced by what they find there. And it is because
+the novelist amuses that he is thus influential. The sermon too often
+has no such effect, because it is applied with the declared intention of
+having it. The palpable and overt dose the child rejects; but that which
+is cunningly insinuated by the aid of jam or honey is accepted
+unconsciously, and goes on upon its curative mission. So it is with the
+novel. It is taken because of its jam and honey. But, unlike the honest
+simple jam and honey of the household cupboard, it is never unmixed with
+physic. There will be the dose within it, either curative or poisonous.
+The girl will be taught modesty or immodesty, truth or falsehood; the
+lad will be taught honour or dishonour, simplicity or affectation.
+Without the lesson the amusement will not be there. There are novels
+which certainly can teach nothing; but then neither can they amuse any
+one.
+
+I should be said to insist absurdly on the power of my own confraternity
+if I were to declare that the bulk of the young people in the upper and
+middle classes receive their moral teaching chiefly from the novels they
+read. Mothers would no doubt think of their own sweet teaching; fathers
+of the examples which they set; and schoolmasters of the excellence of
+their instructions. Happy is the country that has such mothers, fathers,
+and schoolmasters! But the novelist creeps in closer than the
+schoolmaster, closer than the father, closer almost than the mother. He
+is the chosen guide, the tutor whom the young pupil chooses for herself.
+She retires with him, suspecting no lesson, safe against rebuke,
+throwing herself head and heart into the narration as she can hardly do
+into her task-work; and there she is taught,--how she shall learn to
+love; how she shall receive the lover when he comes; how far she should
+advance to meet the joy; why she should be reticent, and not throw
+herself at once into this new delight. It is the same with the young
+man, though he would be more prone even than she to reject the suspicion
+of such tutorship. But he too will there learn either to speak the
+truth, or to lie; and will receive from his novel lessons either of real
+manliness, or of that affected apishness and tailor-begotten demeanour
+which too many professors of the craft give out as their dearest
+precepts.
+
+At any rate the close intercourse is admitted. Where is the house now
+from which novels are tabooed? Is it not common to allow them almost
+indiscriminately, so that young and old each chooses his own novel?
+Shall he, then, to whom this close fellowship is allowed,--this inner
+confidence,--shall he not be careful what words he uses, and what
+thoughts he expresses, when he sits in council with his young friend?
+This, which it will certainly be his duty to consider with so much care,
+will be the matter of his work. We know what was thought of such matter,
+when Lydia in the play was driven to the necessity of flinging
+"_Peregrine Pickle_ under the toilet," and thrusting "_Lord Aimwell_
+under the sofa." We have got beyond that now, and are tolerably sure
+that our girls do not hide their novels. The more freely they are
+allowed, the more necessary is it that he who supplies shall take care
+that they are worthy of the trust that is given to them.
+
+Now let the reader ask himself what are the lessons which Thackeray has
+taught. Let him send his memory running back over all those characters
+of whom we have just been speaking, and ask himself whether any girl has
+been taught to be immodest, or any man unmanly, by what Thackeray has
+written. A novelist has two modes of teaching,--by good example or bad.
+It is not to be supposed that because the person treated of be evil,
+therefore the precept will be evil. If so, some personages with whom we
+have been made well acquainted from our youth upwards, would have been
+omitted in our early lessons. It may be a question whether the teaching
+is not more efficacious which comes from the evil example. What story
+was ever more powerful in showing the beauty of feminine reticence, and
+the horrors of feminine evil-doing, than the fate of Effie Deans? The
+Templar would have betrayed a woman to his lust, but has not encouraged
+others by the freedom of his life. Varney was utterly bad,--but though a
+gay courtier, he has enticed no others to go the way that he went. So
+it has been with Thackeray. His examples have been generally of that
+kind,--but they have all been efficacious in their teaching on the side
+of modesty and manliness, truth and simplicity. When some girl shall
+have traced from first to last the character of Beatrix, what, let us
+ask, will be the result on her mind? Beatrix was born noble, clever,
+beautiful, with certain material advantages, which it was within her
+compass to improve by her nobility, wit, and beauty. She was quite alive
+to that fact, and thought of those material advantages, to the utter
+exclusion, in our mind, of any idea of moral goodness. She realised it
+all, and told herself that that was the game she would play.
+"Twenty-five!" says she; "and in eight years no man has ever touched my
+heart!" That is her boast when she is about to be married,--her only
+boast of herself. "A most detestable young woman!" some will say. "An
+awful example!" others will add. Not a doubt of it. She proves the
+misery of her own career so fully that no one will follow it. The
+example is so awful that it will surely deter. The girl will declare to
+herself that not in that way will she look for the happiness which she
+hopes to enjoy; and the young man will say as he reads it, that no
+Beatrix shall touch his heart.
+
+You may go through all his characters with the same effect. Pendennis
+will be scorned because he is light; Warrington loved because he is
+strong and merciful; Dobbin will be honoured because he is unselfish;
+and the old colonel, though he be foolish, vain, and weak, almost
+worshipped because he is so true a gentleman. It is in the handling of
+questions such as these that we have to look for the matter of the
+novelist,--those moral lessons which he mixes up with his jam and his
+honey. I say that with Thackeray the physic is always curative and
+never poisonous. He may he admitted safely into that close fellowship,
+and be allowed to accompany the dear ones to their retreats. The girl
+will never become bold under his preaching, or taught to throw herself
+at men's heads. Nor will the lad receive a false flashy idea of what
+becomes a youth, when he is first about to take his place among men.
+
+As to that other question, whether Thackeray be amusing as well as
+salutary, I must leave it to public opinion. There is now being brought
+out of his works a more splendid edition than has ever been produced in
+any age or any country of the writings of such an author. A certain
+fixed number of copies only is being issued, and each copy will cost L33
+12s. when completed. It is understood that a very large proportion of
+the edition has been already bought or ordered. Cost, it will be said,
+is a bad test of excellence. It will not prove the merit of a book any
+more than it will of a horse. But it is proof of the popularity of the
+book. Print and illustrate and bind up some novels how you will, no one
+will buy them. Previous to these costly volumes, there have been two
+entire editions of his works since the author's death, one comparatively
+cheap and the other dear. Before his death his stories had been
+scattered in all imaginable forms. I may therefore assert that their
+charm has been proved by their popularity.
+
+There remains for us only this question,--whether the nature of
+Thackeray's works entitle him to be called a cynic. The word is one
+which is always used in a bad sense. "Of a dog; currish," is the
+definition which we get from Johnson,--quite correctly, and in
+accordance with its etymology. And he gives us examples. "How vilely
+does this cynic rhyme," he takes from Shakespeare; and Addison speaks of
+a man degenerating into a cynic. That Thackeray's nature was soft and
+kindly,--gentle almost to a fault,--has been shown elsewhere. But they
+who have called him a cynic have spoken of him merely as a writer,--and
+as writer he has certainly taken upon himself the special task of
+barking at the vices and follies of the world around him. Any satirist
+might in the same way be called a cynic in so far as his satire goes.
+Swift was a cynic certainly. Pope was cynical when he was a satirist.
+Juvenal was all cynical, because he was all satirist. If that be what is
+meant, Thackeray was certainly a cynic. But that is not all that the
+word implies. It intends to go back beyond the work of the man, and to
+describe his heart. It says of any satirist so described that he has
+given himself up to satire, not because things have been evil, but
+because he himself has been evil. Hamlet is a satirist, whereas
+Thersites is a cynic. If Thackeray be judged after this fashion, the
+word is as inappropriate to the writer as to the man.
+
+But it has to be confessed that Thackeray did allow his intellect to be
+too thoroughly saturated with the aspect of the ill side of things. We
+can trace the operation of his mind from his earliest days, when he
+commenced his parodies at school; when he brought out _The Snob_ at
+Cambridge, when he sent _Yellowplush_ out upon the world as a satirist
+on the doings of gentlemen generally; when he wrote his _Catherine_, to
+show the vileness of the taste for what he would have called Newgate
+literature; and _The Hoggarty Diamond_, to attack bubble companies; and
+_Barry Lyndon_, to expose the pride which a rascal may take in his
+rascality. Becky Sharp, Major Pendennis, Beatrix, both as a young and
+as an old woman, were written with the same purpose. There is a touch of
+satire in every drawing that he made. A jeer is needed for something
+that is ridiculous, scorn has to be thrown on something that is vile.
+The same feeling is to be found in every line of every ballad.
+
+     VANITAS VANITATUM.
+
+     Methinks the text is never stale,
+       And life is every day renewing
+     Fresh comments on the old old tale,
+       Of Folly, Fortune, Glory, Ruin.
+
+     Hark to the preacher, preaching still!
+       He lifts his voice and cries his sermon,
+     Here at St. Peter's of Cornhill,
+       As yonder on the Mount of Hermon--
+
+     For you and me to heart to take
+       (O dear beloved brother readers),
+     To-day,--as when the good king spake
+       Beneath the solemn Syrian cedars.
+
+It was just so with him always. He was "crying his sermon," hoping, if
+it might be so, to do something towards lessening the evils he saw
+around him. We all preach our sermon, but not always with the same
+earnestness. He had become so urgent in the cause, so loud in his
+denunciations, that he did not stop often to speak of the good things
+around him. Now and again he paused and blessed amid the torrent of his
+anathemas. There are Dobbin, and Esmond, and Colonel Newcome. But his
+anathemas are the loudest. It has been so I think nearly always with the
+eloquent preachers.
+
+I will insert here,--especially here at the end of this chapter, in
+which I have spoken of Thackeray's matter and manner of writing, because
+of the justice of the criticism conveyed,--the lines which Lord Houghton
+wrote on his death, and which are to be found in the February number of
+_The Cornhill_ of 1864. It was the first number printed after his death.
+I would add that, though no Dean applied for permission to bury
+Thackeray in Westminster Abbey, his bust was placed there without delay.
+What is needed by the nation in such a case is simply a lasting memorial
+there, where such memorials are most often seen and most highly
+honoured. But we can all of us sympathise with the feeling of the poet,
+writing immediately on the loss of such a friend:
+
+     When one, whose nervous English verse
+       Public and party hates defied,
+     Who bore and bandied many a curse
+       Of angry times,--when Dryden died,
+
+     Our royal abbey's Bishop-Dean
+       Waited for no suggestive prayer,
+     But, ere one day closed o'er the scene,
+       Craved, as a boon, to lay him there.
+
+     The wayward faith, the faulty life,
+       Vanished before a nation's pain.
+     Panther and Hind forgot their strife,
+       And rival statesmen thronged the fane.
+
+     O gentle censor of our age!
+       Prime master of our ampler tongue!
+     Whose word of wit and generous page
+       Were never wrath, except with wrong,--
+
+     Fielding--without the manner's dross,
+       Scott--with a spirit's larger room,
+     What Prelate deems thy grave his loss?
+       What Halifax erects thy tomb?
+
+     But, may be, he,--who so could draw
+       The hidden great,--the humble wise,
+     Yielding with them to God's good law,
+       Makes the Pantheon where he lies.
+
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+            *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+CHARLES DICKENS AND EVANS, CRYSTAL PALACE PRESS.
+
+
+
+
+ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS.
+
+EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY.
+
+
+These Short Books are addressed to the general public with a view both
+to stirring and satisfying an interest in literature and its great
+topics in the minds of those who have to run as they read. An immense
+class is growing up, and must every year increase, whose education will
+have made them alive to the importance of the masters of our literature,
+and capable of intelligent curiosity as to their performances. The
+Series is intended to give the means of nourishing this curiosity, to an
+extent that shall be copious enough to be profitable for knowledge and
+life, and yet be brief enough to serve those whose leisure is scanty.
+
+The following are arranged for:
+
+SPENSER         The Dean of St. Paul's.   [In the Press.
+
+HUME            Professor Huxley.         [Ready.
+
+BUNYAN          James Anthony Froude.
+
+JOHNSON         Leslie Stephen.           [Ready.
+
+GOLDSMITH       William Black.            [Ready.
+
+MILTON          Mark Pattison.
+
+COWPER          Goldwin Smith.
+
+SWIFT           John Morley.
+
+BURNS           Principal Shairp.         [Ready.
+
+SCOTT           Richard H. Hutton.        [Ready.
+
+SHELLEY         J. A. Symonds.            [Ready.
+
+GIBBON          J. C. Morison.            [Ready.
+
+BYRON           Professor Nichol.
+
+DEFOE           W. Minto.                 [Ready.
+
+BURKE           John Morley.
+
+HAWTHORNE       Henry James, Jnr.
+
+CHAUCER         A. W. Ward.
+
+THACKERAY       Anthony Trollope.         [Ready.
+
+ADAM SMITH      Leonard H. Courtney, M.P.
+
+BENTLEY         Professor R. C. Jebb.
+
+LANDOR          Professor Sidney Colvin.
+
+POPE            Leslie Stephen.
+
+WORDSWORTH      F. W. H. Myers.
+
+SOUTHEY         Professor E. Dowden.
+
+[OTHERS WILL BE ANNOUNCED.]
+
+
+OPINIONS OF THE PRESS.
+
+"The new series opens well with Mr. Leslie Stephen's sketch of Dr.
+Johnson. It could hardly have been done better; and it will convey to
+the readers for whom it is intended a juster estimate of Johnson than
+either of the two essays of Lord Macaulay."--_Pall Mall Gazette._
+
+"We have come across few writers who have had a clearer insight into
+Johnson's character, or who have brought to the study of it a better
+knowledge of the time in which Johnson lived and the men whom he
+knew."--_Saturday Review._
+
+"We could not wish for a more suggestive introduction to Scott and his
+poems and novels."--_Examiner._
+
+"The tone of the volume is excellent throughout."--_Athenaeum_ Review of
+"Scott."
+
+"As a clear, thoughtful, and attractive record of the life and works of
+the greatest among the world's historians, it deserves the highest
+praise."--_Examiner_ Review of "Gibbon."
+
+"The lovers of this great poet (Shelley) are to be congratulated at
+having at their command so fresh, clear, and intelligent a presentment
+of the subject, written by a man of adequate and wide
+culture."--_Athenaeum._
+
+"It may fairly be said that no one now living could have expounded Hume
+with more sympathy or with equal perspicuity."--_Athenaeum._
+
+"The story of Defoe's adventurous life may be followed with keen
+interest in Mr. Minto's attractive book."--_Academy._
+
+
+
+            *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:
+
+
+   The poems WILLOW TREE No. I and WILLOW TREE No. II were side by
+   side in the original.
+
+   There are variant spellings of the following name:
+
+        Jeames Yellowplush
+        Mr. C. James Yellowplush
+
+        Spellings were left as in the original.
+
+   The following changes were made to the text:
+
+        page 5--Thackeray's version was 'Cabbages, bright green
+        cabbages,'{added missing ending quotation mark} and we
+        thought it very witty.
+
+        page 78--Then there are "Jeames on Time Bargings," "Jeames on
+        the Gauge{original had Guage} Question," "Mr. Jeames again."
+
+        page 131--"I knew you would come back," she said; "and to-day,
+        Harry{original has Henry}, in the anthem when they sang
+
+        page 143--The wife won't{original has wo'n't} come.
+
+        page 143--On his way he{original has be} shoots a raven
+        marvellously
+
+        page 158--As Thackeray explains clearly what he means by a
+        humorist, I may as well here repeat the passage:{punctuation
+        missing in original} "If humour only meant laughter
+
+        page 166--I will then let my reader go to the volume and study
+        the lectures for himself.{no punctuation in original} "The
+        poor fellow was never
+
+        page 212--[Ready.{original is missing period--this occurred in
+        the line referencing DEFOE and the line referencing THACKERAY}
+
+   The following words used an "oe" ligature in the original:
+
+        Boeuf
+        chef-d'oevre
+        Coeur
+        manoeuvres
+
+
+
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