Studies in Literature and History
tolerate the Natural in our Art.' Even the attempt to describe, in
_Pendennis_, one of 'the gentlemen of our age, no better nor worse
than most educated men,' has startled the prudery of the public for
whom he now finds himself writing. 'Many ladies have remonstrated, and
subscribers left me, because, in the course of the story, I described
a young man resisting and affected by temptation.' Here, again, is
another instance of the changes which rules of taste and convention
may undergo in the course of a generation; for surely not even the
straitest middle-class sect would in our day banish _Pendennis_ on the
score of impropriety. Mrs. Ritchie mentions that the author's
descriptions of literary life were criticised on the ground that he
was trying to win favour with the non-literary classes by decrying his
own profession--an absurd accusation which nettled him into replying.
The truth seems to be that Thackeray, who poked fun at the weak sides
of every class and calling, saw no reason why he should leave out his
own; and the men of letters might have been comforted by observing
that he dealt with them much more tenderly than with their natural
enemy the publisher, who has taken philosophically, for all we have
ever heard, the unmerciful caricatures of Bungay and Bacon in
Paternoster Row. Yet it may have been annoying to find such a writer
confidentially whispering to his readers 'that there is no race of
people who talk about books, or perhaps read books, so little as
literary men.'
_Pendennis_ is in Thackeray's best style, as the novelist of manners.
It opens, like _Vanity Fair_, with a short amusing scene that poses,
as the French say, some leading actor in the play, and encourages the
reader to go on. Next follows, as is usual with our author, a short
retrospective account of the people and places among whom the plot is
laid, with a descriptive pedigree of his hero. In his habit of setting
his portraits in a framework of family history (compare the Crawleys,
the Newcomes, the Esmonds) he resembles, though with less prolixity,
Balzac, and he displays much knowledge and observation of English
provincial life. He is, we imagine, the first high-class writer who
brought the Bohemian, possibly an importation from France, into the
English novel; and the contrast between the seedy strolling adventurer
and strait-laced respectability provides him with material for
inexhaustible irony, with much good-natured sympathy for the waifs and
strays. He has always a soft corner in his heart for reckless
hardihood; and every one must be glad that his 'poor friend Colonel
Altamont,' who had been doomed to execution, was respited at the last
moment, as Thackeray tells us in his preface, on the very technical
plea that the author had not sufficient experience of gaol-birds and
the gallows. Merciful good nature toward a daring scamp, who was free
with his money and kind to women, was probably at the bottom of the
condonation. We know from a paper, reproduced (to our thinking
unnecessarily) in one of these volumes, that in 1840 Thackeray went to
see Courvoisier hanged, and was so much upset by the spectacle that he
prayed for the abolition of capital punishment to wipe out its stain
of national blood-guiltiness. It may be noticed, moreover, that his
stern denunciation of crime and folly has by this time settled down
into a philosophic mood that is almost fatalistic, as when he suggests
that 'circumstance only brings out the latent defect or quality, and
does not create it'; that 'our mental changes are, like our grey hairs
and wrinkles, no more than the fulfilment of the plan of mortal growth
and decay,' so that each man is born with the natural seed of fortune
or failure. The voyage of life
'has been prosperous, and you are riding into port, the people
huzzaing and the guns saluting, and the lucky captain bows from the
ship's side, and there is a care under the star on his breast that
nobody knows of; or you are wrecked and lashed, hopeless, to a
solitary spar out at sea; the sinking man and the successful one
are thinking each about home, very likely, and remembering the time
when they were children; alone on the hopeless spar, drowning out
of sight; alone in the midst of the crowd applauding you.'
In such fine passages as these we hear the elegiac strain of the
antique world, wherein remorseless fate held dominion over human
efforts and destiny. Like other great writers who are touched with
humorous melancholy, he falls often into the moralising vein; he stops
his narrative to address his reader with some ironical observation,
after the manner of Fielding, whose leisurely tone of satire is so
audible in the following quotation from _Pendennis_ that he might well
have written it:
'Even his child, his cruel Emily, he would have taken to his heart
and forgiven with tears; and what more can one say of the Christian
charity of a man than that he is actually ready to forgive those
who have done him every kindness, and with whom he is wrong in a
dispute?'
As we have said that _Vanity Fair_ touches the climax of Thackeray's
peculiar genius, so in our judgment _Esmond_ shows the gathered
strength and maturity of his literary power, and has won for him an
eminent place in the distinguished order of historical novelists. We
may say that the art of historical romance was brought to perfection
in our own century, although French writers trace far back into the
eighteenth century, and even further, the method of weaving authentic
events and famous personages into the tissue of a story which turns
upon fictitious adventures in love and war. The elder novelists dealt
largely in extravagant sentiment, in conventional language, and in
marvellous exploits embroidered upon the sober chronicles which served
as the framework of their drama; they were content to set upon stilts
the traditional hero or heroine of former days, whose ideas and
conversation expressed with little disguise the manners, not of the
period to which they belonged, but of the author's own time and of the
society for whom he was writing. These books are, therefore, full of
glaring anachronisms and improbabilities; the knights and dames are
sometimes (as in the _Grand Cyrus_) thinly veiled portraits of
contemporary notabilities, but they are often mere lay figures
representing the prevailing fashions of thought and feeling. The
virtuous hero abounds in judicious reflections; the heroines are
chaste and beauteous damsels--Joan of Arc herself appears in one
romance as an adorable shepherdess--and love-making is conducted after
the model of a Parisian _precieuse_.
It is the opinion of a recent French critic, who has made careful
study of his subject, that the new school was founded by
Chateaubriand, who first, at the last century's end, laid an axe to
the root of all this rhetorical artifice, these frigid and grotesque
incongruities, and filled his romances with local colour, stamping
them with the impress of reality and conformity to nature, by
picturesque reproduction of the landscape, costumes, usages, and
conditions of existence of the time and country in which he might be
unwinding his tale. But Chateaubriand, like Byron (who was of a
similar temperament), never could put himself, to use a French phrase,
into another man's skin; he is to be detected soliloquising and
dispensing noble sentiments under the costume of a Christian martyr or
an American savage, and thus the fidelity of his scene-painting was
still marred by the artificiality of the discourse. It was the
Waverley novel that lifted the historical romance far beyond
Chateaubriand's level, that established it, in England, France, and
Italy on the true principle of creating vivid representations of a
bygone age by a skilful mixture of fact and fiction, and by a correct
and harmonious combination of characters, manners, and environment.
But during the twenty years that intervene between the dates, taken
roughly, of Scott's worst novel and Thackeray's best, the flood tide
of romanticism had risen to its highest point, and had then ebbed very
low, on both sides of the British Channel. And we can see that the
younger writer was no votary of the older school of high-flying
chivalrous romance, with its tournaments, its crusaders, its valiant
warriors, and distressed maidens. His youthful aversion for shams and
conventionalities, his strong propensity toward burlesque and
persiflage, his early life among cities and commonplace folk, seem to
have obscured in some degree his appreciation of even such splendid
compositions as _Ivanhoe_ or _The Talisman_; or, at any rate, his
sense of the ridiculous overpowered his admiration. The result was
that, as Scott had exalted his mediaeval heroes and heroines far above
the level of real life, had revived the legendary age of chivalry and
adventure with all the magnificence of his poetic imagination,
Thackeray had at first set himself, conversely, to strip the trappings
off these fine folk, and to poke his fun at the feudal lords and
ladies by treating them as ordinary middle-class men and women
masquerading in old armour or drapery. He came in as a writer on the
ebb-tide of romanticism, when the reaction showed its popular form in
a curious outburst of the taste for burlesques and parodies on the
stage and in the light reading of the time. Whether the creation of
this taste is to be ascribed to the appearance of two writers with
such genius for wit and fun as Thackeray and Dickens, or whether they
only supplied a natural demand, may be questionable; they undoubtedly
headed the army of Comus, and thereby raised the whole standard of
facetious literature. But the defect of this school was its propensity
to take a hilarious or sardonic view, not only of mediaeval romance,
but of quaint old times generally; and one leading embodiment of this
mocking spirit was _Punch_ founded in 1841. A'Beckett's _Comic History
of England_, which ran through many numbers, seems to this generation
a dreary and deleterious specimen of misplaced farce; though
historically it is not quite such bad work as Dickens's _Child's
History of England_, which he meant to be serious. Among Thackeray's
very numerous contributions to _Punch_ are _Miss Tickletoby's Lectures
on English History_, which might well have been consigned to
oblivion, _Rebecca and Rowena_, and _The Prize Novelists_. The
sarcastic and the sentimental temper must always be hostile to each
other; between romance and ridicule the antipathy is fundamental; and
although one regrets that he ever wrote _Rebecca and Rowena_, the
melodramatic novels of Bulwer-Lytton were fair enough game for the
parodist. However, it is certain that in his earlier writings
Thackeray did much to laugh away the novel of mediaeval chivalry; and
while we think he often carried his irreverent jocosity much too far,
since after all chivalry is better than cockneyism, we may award him
the very high honour of becoming, latterly, one of the founders of a
new and admirable historical school in England.
The eighteenth century was always Thackeray's favourite period; he
liked the rational, unpretentious tone of its best literature, its
practical politics and tolerance, its common sense, and its habit of
keeping very close, in art as in action, to the realities of the world
as we find it. Swift is the most unromantic of any writer that
possessed great imaginative faculty; Defoe was a master of minute
life-like detail, an inimitable imitator of truth; Hogarth's paintings
are like Wesley's or Whitefield's sermons, they are stern, unvarnished
denunciations of vice and profligacy; Fielding was the easy,
large-hearted moralist, who hated above all sins cant and knavery,