Studies in Literature and History
those perfectly impossible heroes,' etc., etc.
One would be almost inclined to infer from this passage that the
author had identified himself so completely with his own creation as
to have become slightly infected with Mr. Barry Lyndon's sophistry;
for it is impossible to maintain seriously that rogues and fools are
no less successful in life than men of honesty and talent. But the
truth is that Thackeray found in a daring rogue a much finer subject
for character-drawing than in the blameless hero, while he was deeply
implicated in the formidable revolt which Carlyle was leading against
the respectabilities of that day.
It is worth notice that in Barry Lyndon's military reminiscences, done
with great vigour and fidelity of detail, we have a very early example
of the realistic as contrasted with the romantic treatment of
campaigns, of life in the bivouac and the barrack. This method, which
has latterly had immense vogue, seems to have been first invented in
France, where Thackeray may have taken the hint from Stendhal; but we
are disposed to believe that he was the first who proclaimed it in
England. As it professes to give the true unvarnished aspect of war it
would certainly have accorded with Thackeray's natural contempt, so
often shown in his writings, for the commonplaces of the military
romancer who revelled in the pomp and circumstance of glorious
battles, the charges, the heroic exploits, the honours, rather than
the horrors, of the fighting business. Moreover, it is not only in
style and treatment but also in sentiment and in certain peculiar
prepossessions, that we can trace in this novel the lines which the
writer followed throughout his narratives, and his favourite
delineations of character. For diplomatists he has always a curious
contempt, and he never misses an opportunity of ridiculing them. 'Mon
Dieu,' says Lyndon, 'what fools they are; what dullards, what
fribbles, what addle-headed coxcombs; this is one of the lies of the
world, this diplomacy'--as if it were not also a most important and
difficult branch of the national services. Abject reverence of great
folk he regarded as the besetting disease of middle-class Englishmen;
and so we find Lyndon remarking, by the way, that Mr. Hunt, Lord
Bullingdon's governor, 'being a college tutor and an Englishman, was
ready to go on his knees to any one who resembled a man of fashion.'
And the kindly cynicism which discoloured Thackeray's ideas about
women, notwithstanding his tender admiration and love for the best of
them, comes out pointedly in old Sir Charles Lyndon's advice to Barry
on the subject of matrimony:
'Get a friend, sir, and that friend a woman, a good household
drudge, who loves you. _That_ is the most precious sort of
friendship, for the expense of it is all on the woman's side. The
man need not contribute anything. If he's a rogue, she'll vow he's
an angel; if he's a brute, she will like him all the better for his
ill-treatment of her. They like it, sir, these women; they are born
to be our greatest comforts and conveniences, our moral boot-jacks,
as it were.'
Barry Lyndon discloses the promise and potency of Thackeray's genius.
In _Vanity Fair_, his next work, it has attained its climax; the
dramatic figures are more finely conceived, the plot is varied and
more skilfully elaborated, the actors more numerous and life-like; and
whereas in his preceding stories he has mainly used the form of a
fictitious memoir, whereby the hero is made to tell his own tale, in
this 'Novel without a Hero' the author proceeds by narration. The tone
is still governed by irony and pathos, wherein Thackeray chiefly
excels; yet the contrasts between weak and strong natures, the
superiority of honesty and the moral sense over craftiness and
unscrupulous cleverness, are now touched off with a lighter and surer
hand. The unmitigated villain and the coarse-tongued hard-hearted
virago have disappeared with other primitive stage properties; the
human comedy is played by men and women of the upper world, with their
virtues and frailties sufficiently set in relief, yet not exaggerated,
for the purposes of the social drama. The book's very title, _Vanity
Fair_, denotes a transition from the scathing satire of his earlier
manner to more indulgent irony, from Swift to Sterne, two authors whom
Thackeray had evidently studied attentively. In his short preface the
author preludes with the gentler note when he invites people of a
lazy, benevolent, or sarcastic mood to step into the puppet show for a
moment and look at the performance.
The book's success, Mrs. Ritchie tells us, was slow; the sale hung
fire. 'One has heard of the journeys which the manuscript made to
various publishers' houses before it could find any one ready to
undertake the venture, and how long its appearance was delayed by
various doubts and hesitations, until it was at last brought out in
its yellow covers by Messrs. Bradbury and Evans on January 1, 1847.'
But when the last numbers were appearing Thackeray wrote that,
'although it does everything but sell, it appears really to increase
my reputation immensely'--as it assuredly did. That a signal success
in literature is nearly always achieved, not by following the beaten
road, but by a bold departure from it, is a principle that could be
abundantly established by examples, and which seems almost a truism
when it is stated. _Vanity Fair_ was decidedly a work of great
freshness and originality; but publishers are circumspect and rarely
adventurous, they distrust novelties and prefer to follow the
prevailing fashion as far as it will go, wherein we may discern one
reason why the accouchement of the first literary child is usually so
laborious.
To criticise at length any single novel of Thackeray's would be far
beyond the scope or purpose of this article. Our object is rather to
illustrate the course and development of his distinctive literary
qualities, the slow effacement of prejudices which never entirely
disappeared, and the rapid expansion of his highest artistic
faculties. To begin with the prejudices. In _Vanity Fair_ he still
makes merciless war upon the poor paltry snob, whom one must suppose
to have infested English society of that day in a very rampant form;
though unless we have had great changes for the better in the last
fifty years, one might suspect exaggeration. And another important
reform of manners must have supervened in the same period if we are to
believe that in these novels the English servant is not unfairly
caricatured. As we know him at the present day, in the class that
lives with gentle-folk, he may be touchy and troublesome, with much
self-assertiveness, but also with much self-respect. He has as many
faults as other people, but among them brutal rudeness is practically
unknown; yet when Rebecca Sharp is driven in Mr. Sedley's carriage to
Sir Pitt Crawley's, having given nothing to the domestics on leaving
the Sedleys, the coachman is ludicrously rude to a poor governess.
'"I shall write to Mr. Sedley, and inform him of your conduct,"
said Miss Sharp to him.
'"Don't," replied that functionary; "I hope you've forgot nothink?
Miss 'Melia's gownds--have you got them--as the lady's maid was to
have 'ad? I hope they'll fit you. Shut the door, Jim, you'll get no
good out of _'er_," continued John, pointing with his thumb towards
Miss Sharp; "a bad lot, I tell you, a bad lot."'
One may conjecture that Thackeray's natural turn for comic burlesque,
which comes out so plainly in his drawings, had become ingrained and
inveterate by early practice, and certainly his immoderate delight in
setting snobs and flunkeys on a pillory became a flaw in the
perfection of his higher composition. It might well produce, among
foreigners at any rate, an unreal impression of the true relations
existing between different classes of English society.
But these are slight blemishes upon the surface of an epoch-making
book, for _Vanity Fair_ inaugurated a new school of novel-writing
in this country, with its combined vigour and subtlety of
character-drawing, and with the marvellous dexterity of its scenes and
dramatic situations. The army and military life in all its phases had
a remarkable attraction for him; in all his larger books one or more
officers are brought prominently upon the foreground of his canvas. He
hits off the strong and weak points of the profession, in war and
peace, with a truth and humour that gave freshness and originality to
the whole subject, and the best of these pictures are in _Vanity
Fair_. There is not one of its leading _militaires_--Dobbin and
Osborne, Crawley and Major O'Dowd--in whom a typical representative of
well-known varieties may not be recognised. His fine picturesque
handiwork, his consistent preference of the real to the romantic, and
his reserve in the use of such tempting materials as the battlefield
affords to the story-teller, are shown in his treatment of the episode
of Waterloo. He is far too good an artist to lay out for us a grand
scene of fierce fighting and carnage; nor does he, like Lever, produce
Wellington and Bonaparte acting or speaking up to the popular
conception of these mighty heroes. He is content to follow his own
personages into that famous field, and to show how perilous
circumstance brings out the force or feebleness of each character,
male and female, whether of the wives left behind at Brussels, or the
soldiers in the fighting line at Waterloo. It is only at the end of
his chapter, after some seriocomic incidents and dialogues exhibiting
the behaviour of the non-combatants--of Jos Sedley, Mrs. O'Dowd, Lady
Bareacres, and the rest--that his narrative rises suddenly to the epic
note in a brief passage full of admirable energy and pathos:
'All our friends took their share and fought like men in the great
field. All day long, whilst the women were praying ten miles away,
the lines of the dauntless English infantry were receiving and
repelling the furious charges of the French horsemen. Guns which
were heard at Brussels were ploughing up their ranks, and comrades
falling, and the resolute survivors closing in. Toward evening the
attack of the French, repeated and resisted so bravely, slackened
in its fury ... they were preparing for a final onset. It came at
last, the columns of the Imperial Guard marched up the hill of St.
Jean.... Unscared by the thunder of the artillery, which hurled
death from the English line, the dark rolling column pressed on and
up the hill. It seemed almost to crest the eminence, when it began
to wave and falter. Then it stopped, still facing the shot. Then at
last the English troops rushed from the post from which no enemy
had been able to dislodge them, and the Guard turned and fled.
'No more firing was heard at Brussels; the pursuit rolled miles
away. Darkness came down on the field and city; and Amelia was
praying for George who was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet
through his heart.'
The military critic might pick holes in this description, and
Thackeray might as well have thrown the English infantry into squares
instead of into line. Yet the passage is instinct with compressed
emotion; and the sudden transition from the general battle to the
single death is a good touch of tragic art.
In _Pendennis_ (1850) we may discern the slowly softening influences
of years that bring the philosophic mind, of a calmer and easier time,
and perhaps also of a different class of readers. Thackeray has now
discovered that, as he says in his preface, 'to describe a real rascal
you must make him too hideous to show;' and that 'Society will not