From Chaucer to Tennyson
Dickens, though he may have taken a hint of it from the mock heroic
language of _Jonathan Wild_; but as practiced by a thousand imitators,
ever since, it has gradually become a burden.
It would not be the whole truth to say that the difference between the
humor of Thackeray and Dickens is the same as between that of Shakspere
and Ben Jonson. Yet it is true that the "humors" of Ben Jonson have an
analogy with the extremer instances of Dickens's character sketches in
this respect, namely, that they are both studies of the eccentric, the
abnormal, the whimsical, rather than of the typical and universal;
studies of manners, rather than of whole characters. And it is easily
conceivable that, at no distant day, the oddities of Captain Cuttle,
Deportment Turveydrop, Mark Tapley, and Newman Noggs will seem as
far-fetched and impossible as those of Captain Otter, Fastidious Brisk
and Sir Amorous La-Foole.
When Dickens was looking about for some one to take Seymour's place as
illustrator of _Pickwick_, Thackeray applied for the job, but without
success. He was then a young man of twenty-five, and still hesitating
between art and literature. He had begun to draw caricatures with his
pencil when a school-boy at the Charter House, and to scribble them with
his pen when a student at Cambridge, editing _The Snob_, a weekly
under-graduate paper, and parodying the prize poem _Timbuctoo_ of his
contemporary at the university, Alfred Tennyson. Then he went abroad to
study art, passing a season at Weimar, where he met Goethe and filled
the albums of the young Saxon ladies with caricatures; afterward living
a bohemian existence in the Latin quarter at Paris, studying art in a
desultory way, and seeing men and cities; accumulating portfolios full
of sketches, but laying up stores of material to be used afterward to
greater advantage when he should settle upon his true medium of
expression. By 1837, having lost his fortune of five hundred pounds a
year in speculation and gambling, he began to contribute to _Fraser's_,
and thereafter to the _New Monthly_, Cruikshank's _Comic Almanac_,
_Punch_, and other periodicals, clever burlesques, art criticisms by
"Michael Angelo Titmarsh," _Yellowplush Papers_, and all manner of
skits, satirical character sketches, and humorous tales, like the _Great
Hoggarty Diamond_ and the _Luck of Barry Lyndon_. Some of these were
collected in the _Paris Sketch-Book_, 1840, and the _Irish Sketch-Book_,
1843; but Thackeray was slow in winning recognition, and it was not
until the publication of his first great novel, _Vanity Fair_, in
monthly parts, during 1846-1848, that he achieved any thing like the
general reputation that Dickens had reached at a bound. _Vanity Fair_
described itself, on its title-page, as "a novel without a hero." It was
also a novel without a plot--in the sense in which _Bleak House_ or
_Nicholas Nickleby_ had a plot--and in that respect it set the fashion
for the latest school of realistic fiction, being a transcript of life,
without necessary beginning or end. Indeed, one of the pleasantest
things to a reader of Thackeray is the way which his characters have of
re-appearing, as old acquaintances, in his different books; just as, in
real life, people drop out of mind and then turn up again in other years
and places. _Vanity Fair_ is Thackeray's masterpiece, but it is not the
best introduction to his writings. There are no illusions in it, and,
to a young reader fresh from Scott's romances or Dickens's sympathetic
extravagances, it will seem hard and repellent. But men who, like
Thackeray, have seen life and tasted its bitterness and felt its
hollowness know how to prize it. Thackeray does not merely expose the
cant, the emptiness, the self-seeking, the false pretenses, flunkeyism,
and snobbery--the "mean admiration of mean things"--in the great world
of London society; his keen, unsparing vision detects the base alloy in
the purest natures. There are no "heroes" in his books, no perfect
characters. Even his good women, such as Helen and Laura Pendennis, are
capable of cruel injustice toward less fortunate sisters, like little
Fanny; and Amelia Sedley is led, by blind feminine instinct, to snub and
tyrannize over poor Dobbin. The shabby miseries of life, the numbing and
belittling influences of failure and poverty on the most generous
natures, are the tragic themes which Thackeray handles by preference. He
has been called a cynic, but the boyish playfulness of his humor and his
kindly spirit are incompatible with cynicism. Charlotte Bronte said that
Fielding was the vulture and Thackeray the eagle. The comparison would
have been truer if made between Swift and Thackeray. Swift was a cynic;
his pen was driven by hate, but Thackeray's by love, and it was not in
bitterness but in sadness that the latter laid bare the wickedness of
the world. He was himself a thorough man of the world, and he had that
dislike for a display of feeling which characterizes the modern
Englishman. But behind his satiric mask he concealed the manliest
tenderness, and a reverence for every thing in human nature that is good
and true. Thackeray's other great novels are _Pendennis_, 1849; _Henry
Esmond_, 1852, and _The Newcomes_, 1855--the last of which contains his
most lovable character, the pathetic and immortal figure of Colonel
Newcome, a creation worthy to stand, in its dignity and its sublime
weakness, by the side of Don Quixote. It was alleged against Thackeray
that he made all his good characters, like Major Dobbin and Amelia
Sedley and Colonel Newcome, intellectually feeble, and his brilliant
characters, like Becky Sharp and Lord Steyne and Blanche Amory, morally
bad. This is not entirely true, but the other complaint--that his women
are inferior to his men--is true in a general way. Somewhat inferior to
his other novels were _The Virginians_, 1858, and _The Adventures of
Philip_, 1862. All of these were stories of contemporary life, except
_Henry Esmond_ and its sequel, _The Virginians_, which, though not
precisely historical fictions, introduced historical figures, such as
Washington and the Earl of Peterborough. Their period of action was the
18th century, and the dialogue was a cunning imitation of the language
of that time. Thackeray was strongly attracted by the 18th century. His
literary teachers were Addison, Swift, Steele, Gay, Johnson, Richardson,
Goldsmith, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne, and his special master and
model was Fielding. He projected a history of the century, and his
studies in this kind took shape in his two charming series of lectures
on _The English Humorists_ and _The Four Georges_. These he delivered in
England and in America, to which country he, like Dickens, made two
several visits.
Thackeray's genius was, perhaps, less astonishing than Dickens's; less
fertile, spontaneous, and inventive; but his art is sounder, and his
delineation of character more truthful. After one has formed a taste for
his books, Dickens's sentiment will seem overdone, and much of his humor
will have the air of buffoonery. Thackeray had the advantage in another
particular: he described the life of the upper classes, and Dickens of
the lower. It may be true that the latter offers richer material to the
novelist, in the play of elementary passions and in strong native
developments of character. It is true, also, that Thackeray approached
"society" rather to satirize it than to set forth its agreeableness.
Yet, after all, it is "the great world" which he describes, that world
upon which the broadening and refining processes of a high civilization
have done their utmost, and which, consequently, must possess an
intellectual interest superior to any thing in the life of London
thieves, traveling showmen, and coachees. Thackeray is the equal of
Swift as a satirist, of Dickens as a humorist, and of Scott as a
novelist. The one element lacking in him--and which Scott had in a high
degree--is the poetic imagination. "I have no brains above my eyes" he
said; "I describe what I see." Hence there is wanting in his creations
that final charm which Shakspere's have. For what the eyes see is not
all.
The great woman who wrote under the pen-name of George Eliot was a
humorist, too. She had a rich, deep humor of her own, and a wit that
crystallized into sayings which are not epigrams only because their
wisdom strikes more than their smartness. But humor was not, as with
Thackeray and Dickens, her point of view. A country girl, the daughter
of a land agent and surveyor at Nuneaton, in Warwickshire, her early
letters and journals exhibit a Calvinistic gravity and moral severity.
Later, when her truth to her convictions led her to renounce the
Christian belief, she carried into positivism the same religious
earnestness, and wrote the one English hymn of the religion of humanity:
O, let me join the choir invisible, etc.
Her first published work was a translation of Strauss's _Leben Jesu_,
1846. In 1851 she went to London and became one of the editors of the
Radical organ, the _Westminster Review_. Here she formed a connection--a
marriage in all but the name--with George Henry Lewes, who was, like
herself, a freethinker, and who published, among other things, a
_Biographical History of Philosophy_. Lewes had also written fiction,
and it was at his suggestion that his wife undertook story writing. Her
_Scenes of Clerical Life_ were contributed to _Blackwood's Magazine_ for
1857, and published in book form in the following year. _Adam Bede_
followed in 1859, the _Mill on the Floss_ in 1860, _Silas Marner_ in
1861, _Romola_ in 1863, _Felix Holt_ in 1866, and _Middlemarch_ in 1872.
All of these, except _Romola_, are tales of provincial and largely of
domestic life in the midland counties. _Romola_ is an historical novel,
the scene of which is Florence in the 15th century; the Florence of
Macchiavelli and of Savonarola.
George Eliot's method was very different from that of Thackeray or
Dickens. She did not crowd her canvas with the swarming life of cities.
Her figures are comparatively few, and they are selected from the
middle-class families of rural parishes or small towns, amid that
atmosphere of "fine old leisure;" whose disappearance she lamented. Her
drama is a still-life drama, intensely and profoundly inward. Character
is the stuff that she works in, and she deals with it more subtly than
Thackeray. With him the tragedy is produced by the pressure of society
and its false standards upon the individual; with her, by the malign
influence of individuals upon one another. She watches "the stealthy
convergence of human fates," the intersection at various angles of the
planes of character, the power that the lower nature has to thwart,
stupefy, or corrupt the higher, which has become entangled with it in
the mesh of destiny. At the bottom of every one of her stories there is
a problem of the conscience or the intellect. In this respect she
resembles Hawthorne, though she is not, like him, a romancer, but a
realist.
There is a melancholy philosophy in her books, most of which are tales
of failure or frustration. The _Mill on the Floss_ contains a large
element of autobiography, and its heroine, Maggie Tulliver, is, perhaps,
her idealized self. Her aspirations after a fuller and nobler existence
are condemned to struggle against the resistance of a narrow, provincial
environment, and the pressure of untoward fates. She is tempted to seek
an escape even through a desperate throwing off of moral obligations,
and is driven back to her duty only to die by a sudden stroke of
destiny. "Life is a bad business," wrote George Eliot, in a letter to a
friend, "and we must make the most of it." _Adam Bede_ is, in