Studies in Literature and History
Mrs. Mackenzie, and of Sir Barnes Newcome, fatigue the reader; for
whereas in the delineation of his amiable and high-principled
characters Thackeray is careful to shade off their bright qualities by
a mixture of natural weakness, these ill-favoured portraits stand out
in the full glare of unredeemed insolence and low cunning.
In his last novel, broken off half-way by his death, Thackeray went
back once more to that eighteenth century, which, as he says in one of
his letters, 'occupied him to the exclusion almost of the nineteenth,'
and to the method of weaving fiction out of historical materials. We
have already remarked upon his practice of opening with a kind of
family history, which explains the antecedent connections,
relationship, and pedigree of the persons who are coming upon the
stage, and marks out the background of his story. In _Denis Duval_ he
carries this preamble through two chapters, and arranges all the
pieces on his board so carefully that an inattentive reader might lose
his way among the preliminary details. One sees with what pleasure he
has studied his favourite period in France and England, and how he
enjoyed constructing, like Defoe, a fictitious autobiography that
reads like a picturesque and genuine memoir of the times. Having thus
laid out his plan, and prepared his _mise en scene_, he begins his
third chapter with an animated entry of his actors, who thenceforward
play their parts in a succession of incidents and adventures, that are
all adjusted and fitted in to the framework of time and place that he
has taken so much pains to design for them. In this manner he touches
upon the great events of contemporary history, like the French War, or
illustrates the state of England by bringing in highwaymen and the
press-gang; while a minute description of localities lends an air of
simplicity to the tale of an old man who has (as he says) an
extraordinarily clear remembrance of his boyhood.
The Notes which appeared in the _Cornhill Magazine_, June 1864, as an
epilogue to the last lines written by Thackeray, when the story
stopped abruptly, throw curious light on the methods of gathering his
material and preparing his work. Just as he visited the Blenheim
battlefield, when he was engaged upon _Esmond_, so he went down to
Romney Marsh, where Denis Duval was born and bred, surveyed Rye and
Winchelsea as if he were drawing plans of those towns, and collected
local traditions of the coast and the country, of the smugglers, the
Huguenot settlements, and the old war time of 1778-82. The _Annual
Register_ and the _Gentleman's Magazine_ furnished him with suggestive
incidents and circumstantial reports which he expanded with admirable
fertility of imagination; so that by combining what he saw with what
he read he could lift the curtain and light up again an obscure corner
of the Kentish coast, and the doings of the queer folk who lived on it
a century before he went there. That he never finished this novel is
much to be lamented, for Denis had just become a midshipman on board
the _Serapis_, and we learn from these 'Notes' that he was to take
part in the great fight which ended in the capture of that ship by
Paul Jones, after the most bloody and desperate duel in the long and
glorious record of the British Navy. Captain Pearson, who commanded
the _Serapis_, reported his defeat to the Admiralty in a letter of
which 'Mr. Thackeray seems to have thought much,' and, indeed, it is
precisely the sort of document--quiet, formal, with a masculine
contempt for adjectives (there is not one in the whole letter)--which
denotes a character after Thackeray's own heart.
'We dropt alongside of each other, head and stern, when, the fluke
of our spare anchor hooking his quarter, we became so close, fore
and aft, that the muzzles of our guns touched each other's sides.'
Here we have the style which Thackeray loved; and 'tis pity that we
have so narrowly missed the picture of a fierce naval battle by an
artist who could describe strenuous action in steady phrase, and who
knew that the hard-fighting commander is usually a cool, resolute,
resourceful man, for whom it is a matter of plain duty to fight his
ship till he is fairly beaten, and to report the result briefly,
whatever it may be, to his superiors. One can observe the mellowing
influence upon Thackeray of the atmosphere of past times and the
afterglow of heroic deeds; for in _Denis Duval_ there is no trace of
the scorching satire which pursues us in _The Newcomes_; nor does he
once pause to moralise, or to enlarge upon the innumerable hypocrisies
of modern society. It is questionable, indeed, whether this fine
fragment binds up well in a volume with the _Roundabout Papers_, which
bring the author back into the light of common day, and to the
trivialities of ordinary society.
It has not been thought necessary, in this biographical edition, to
issue the several volumes in the order of the dates at which they were
written; nor has the attempt been made to preserve some serial
continuity of their style or subject. The arrangement, moreover,
serves to accentuate unnecessarily the undeniable imparity of
Thackeray's different books; for _Punch_ and the _Sketch Books_ are
interposed between _Barry Lyndon_ and _Esmond_; while even the wild
and wicked Lyndon hardly deserved to be handcuffed in the same volume
with Fitzboodle, whom in the body he would have crushed like an
insect. Yet the classification of Thackeray's novels might be easily
made, for _Barry Lyndon_, _Esmond_, _The Virginians_, and _Denis
Duval_ fall together in one homogeneous group, having a strong family
resemblance in tone and treatment, and following generally the
chronological succession of the periods with which they are concerned.
If to Esmond is awarded the precedence that is due to him not by
seniority, but by importance, we have the wars of the eighteenth
century between England and France from Marlborough's campaigns down
to Rodney's great naval victory of 1783, in which Duval was destined
to take part. These works represent Thackeray's very considerable
contribution to the Historic School of English novelists; and we may
count them also a valuable commentary upon English history, for
without doubt every luminous illustration of past times and personages
acts as a powerful stimulant to the national mind, by exciting a
keener interest in the nation's story and a clearer appreciation of
its reality. Chateaubriand has affirmed that Walter Scott's romances
produced a revolution in the art of writing histories, that no greater
master of the art of historical divination has ever lived, and that
his profound insight into the mediaeval world, its names, the true
relation between different classes, its political and social aspects,
originated a new and brilliant historical method which superseded the
dim and limited views of scholarly erudition. For Thackeray we make no
such extensive or extravagant claims; but it may be said that the
dramatic conception of history in his novels and lectures was of
great service to his readers and hearers by the vivid impressions
which they conveyed of the life, character, and feelings of their
forefathers, of their failings, virtues, and memorable achievements.
Some material objections may be taken to the system of teaching by
graphic pictures in Thackeray, as in Carlyle's _French Revolution_,
and in both cases the philosophy leaves much to be desired, for the
writer's own idiosyncrasy colours all his work. Yet when we remember
how few are the readers to whom the accurate Dryasdust, with his
careful research and well attested facts, brings any lasting
enlightenment, we may well believe that very many owe their distinct
ideas of the state of England and its people during the last century
to Thackeray's genius for carefully studied autobiographical fiction.
To the four historical novels mentioned above let us add three novels
of nineteenth-century manners--_Vanity Fair_, _Pendennis_, _The
Newcomes_--and we have seven books (one incomplete) upon which
Thackeray's name and fame survive, and will be handed down to
posterity. The list is by no means long if it be compared with the
outturn of Scott and Bulwer-Lytton, or of his foremost contemporary
Dickens; and Stevenson, who resembles him in the subdued realistic
style of narrating a perilous fight or adventure, has left us a larger
bequest. But they are amply sufficient to build up for him a lasting
monument in English literature; and their very paucity may serve as a
warning against the prevailing sin of copious and indiscriminate
productiveness, by which so many second-rate novelists of the present
day exhaust their powers and drown a respectable reputation in a flood
of writing, which sinks in quality in proportion to the rise in
quantity.
How far the character and personal experiences of an author are
revealed or disguised in his writings is a question which has often
been discussed. Bulwer once endeavoured, in a whimsical essay, to
prove that men of letters are the only people whose characters are
really ascertainable, because you may know them intimately by their
works; but herein he merely touched upon the general truth or truism
that society at large judges every man only by his public
performances, and does not trouble itself at all about anything else.
In the category of those who display in their writings their tastes
and prejudices, their feelings and the special bent of their mind, we
may certainly place Thackeray, who was a moralist and a satirist, very
sensitive to the ills and follies of humanity, and impressionable in
the highest degree. For such a man it was impossible to refrain from
giving his opinions, his praise or his blame, in all that he wrote
upon everything that interested him; and in portraying the society
which surrounded him, he inevitably portrayed himself. He displayed as
much as any writer the general complexion of his intellectual
propensities and sympathies; and we can even trace in him the
existence of some of the minor human frailties which he was most apt
to condemn, an unconscious tendency which is not altogether uncommon.
But he is essentially a high-minded man of letters, acutely sensitive
to absurdities, impatient of meanness, of affectation, and of
ignominious admiration of trivial things; a resolute representative of
the independent literary spirit, with a strong desire to see things as
they are, and with the gift of describing them truthfully. He
repudiated 'the absurd outcry about neglected men of genius'; and in a
letter quoted by Mrs. Ritchie he writes:
'I have been earning my own bread with my own pen for near twenty
years now, and sometimes very hardly too; but in the worst time,
please God, never lost my own respect.'
His delicacy of feeling comes out in a letter from the United States,
where he was lecturing--
'As for writing about this country, about Goshen, about the
friends I have found here, and who are helping me to procure
independence for my children, if I cut jokes upon them, may I
choke on the instant'--
having probably in remembrance, as he wrote, Charles Dickens and the
_American Notes_.
On the other hand, he was not free from the defects of his qualities,
mental and artistic, from the propensity to set points of character in
violent relief, or from the somewhat unfair generalisation which grows
out of the habit of drawing types and distributing colours for
satirical effect.
In regard to his religion, it appears to have been of the
rationalistic eighteenth-century order in which moral ideas are
entirely dominant, to the exclusion of the deeply spiritual modes of
thought; and we may say of him, as of Carlyle, that his philosophy was