Born, at Calcutta, 18 July 1811. Brought to England at his father’s death, 1816. At Charterhouse School, 1822–28. Matric., Trin. Coll., Camb., Feb. 1829. Left Cambridge, 1830; took no degree. Travelled on Continent, 1830–31. Lived in Hare Court, Temple, and studied Law, 1831–32. Edited “National Standard,” May to Dec. 1833. After severe monetary losses, removed to Paris, Dec. 1833. Contrib. to “Fraser’s Mag.” from about 1833. Married Isabella Gethin Creagh Shawe, 20 Aug. 1836. Settled in London. Contrib. to “Fraser’s Mag.,” “New Monthly Mag.,” “Ainsworth’s Mag.,” “Times,” “Westminster Rev.,” etc. Separation from his wife, 1840. Travelled in East, Aug. to Oct. 1844. Contrib. to “Punch,” 1842–50. Called to Bar at Middle Temple, 26 May 1848. First lectured in London, 1851. In America lecturing, Dec. 1852 to spring of 1853; again, Dec. 1855 to April 1856. Lectured in England and Scotland, 1856. Stood as M.P. for City of Oxford, 1857; was defeated. Edited “Cornhill Mag.,” Nov. 1859 to March 1862. Died, in London, 24 Dec. 1863. Buried at Kensal Green. Works: “The Yellowplush Correspondence” (anon.), 1838; “The Paris Sketch-book” (under pseud. “Mr. Titmarsh”), 1840; “An Essay on the Genius of George Cruikshank” (anon.), 1840; “Comic Tales and Sketches” (under pseud. “Michael Angelo Titmarsh”), 1841; “The Second Funeral of Napoleon” (under pseud. “M. A. Titmarsh”), 1841; “The Irish Sketch-Book” (2 vols.), 1843; “The Luck of Barry Lyndon,” 1844; “Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Cairo,” 1846; “Mrs. Perkin’s Ball” (under pseud. “M. A. Titmarsh”) [1847]; “The Book of Snobs,” 1848; “Vanity Fair,” 1848; “Our Street” (under pseud. “M. A. Titmarsh”), 1848; “Dr. Birch and his Young Friends” (under pseud. “M. A. Titmarsh”) 1849; “The History of Samuel Titmarsh; and the Great Hoggarty Diamond,” 1849; “An Interesting Event” (under pseud. “M. A. Titmarsh”), 1849; “The History of Pendennis” (2 vols.), 1849–1850; “Rebecca and Rowena” (under pseud. “M. A. Titmarsh”), 1850; Text to “Sketches after English Landscape Painters,” 1850; “The Kiekleburys on the Rhine” (under pseud. “M. A. Titmarsh”), 1851; “The History of Henry Esmond,” 1852; “The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century,” 1853; “Men’s Wives,” 1853; “The Newcomes” (2 vols.), 1854–55; “Miscellanies” (4 vols.), 1854–57; “Ballads,” 1855; “The Rose and Ring” (under pseud. “M. A. Titmarsh”), 1855; “The Virginians” (2 vols.), 1858–59; “Lovel the Widower,” 1861; “The Four Georges,” 1861; “The Adventures of Philip,” 1862; “Roundabout Papers,” 1863 [1862]. Posthumous: “Dennis Duval,” 1867; “Ballads and Tales,” 1869; “The Orphan of Pimlico,” 1876; “Etchings while at Cambridge,” 1878; “The Chronicle of the Drum,” 1886; “A Collection of Letters … 1847–1855,” 1887; “Sultan Stork, etc.,” 1887. Collected Works: in 26 vols., 1869–86.

Personal

  What a misfortune it is to have a broken nose, like poor dear Thackeray! He would have been positively handsome, and is positively ugly in consequence of it. John and his friend Venables broke the bridge of Thackeray’s nose when they were schoolboys playing together. What a mishap to befall a young lad just beginning life.

  By the by, there is a friend of mine that I promised to introduce to you. He is the cleverest of all the London writers, I think,—his name is Thackeray; a gentleman, a Cambridge man. I told him he had better not waste his time with inferior magazines when he writes the best things (he is the Yellow Plush of Fraser and the Major Gahagan of the New Monthly), but go at once to you. He is shy, I suppose, for he said he wished you would invite him to contribute. If you will let me know whether you wish to hear from him I will communicate your reply; or if you wish to see him, he lives No. 13 Great Coram Street, Russell Square. He is also literary reviewer in the Times.

  Went to Thackeray’s lecture on the “Humorists” at Willis’s Rooms. It was a very large assembly, including Mrs. Carlyle, Dickens, Leslie, and innumerable noteworthy people. Thackeray is a much older-looking man than I had expected; a square powerful face, and most acute and sparkling eyes, grayish hair and eyebrows. He reads in a definite, rather dry manner, but makes you understand thoroughly what he is about. The lecture was full of point, but the subject was not a very interesting one, and he tried to fix our sympathy on his good-natured, volatile, and frivolous hero rather more than was meet. “Poor Dick Steele” one ends with, as one began; and I cannot see, more than I did before, the element of greatness in him.

  We think there was no disappointment with his lectures. Those who knew his books found the author in the lecturer. Those who did not know his books were charmed in the lecturer by what is charming in the author—the unaffected humanity, the tenderness, the sweetness, the genial play of fancy, and the sad touch of truth, with that glancing stroke of satire which, lightning-like, illumines while it withers. The lectures were even more delightful than the books, because the tone of the voice and the appearance of the man, the general personal magnetism, explained and alleviated so much that would otherwise have seemed doubtful or unfair. For those who had long felt in the writings of Thackeray a reality quite inexpressible, there was a secret delight in finding it justified in his speaking; for he speaks as he writes—simply, directly, without flourish, without any cant of oratory, commending what he says by its intrinsic sense, and the sympathetic and humane way in which it was spoken. Thackeray is the kind of “stump orator” that would have pleased Carlyle. He never thrusts himself between you and his thought. If his conception of the time and his estimate of the men differ from your own, you have at least no doubt what his view is, nor how sincere and necessary it is to him.

  Thackeray has very rarely come athwart me since his return: he is a big fellow, soul and body; of many gifts and qualities (particularly in the Hogarth line, with a dash of Sterne super-added), of enormous appetite withal, and very uncertain and chaotic in all points except his outer breeding, which is fixed enough, and perfect according to the modern English style. I rather dread explosions in his history. A big, fierce, weeping, hungry man; not a strong one. Ay de mi!

  Thackeray has a dread of servants, insomuch that he hates to address them or to ask them for anything. His morbid sensibility, in this regard, has perhaps led him to study and muse upon them, so that he may be presumed to have a more intimate knowledge of this class than any other man.

  The first drawback in his books, as in his manners, is the impression conveyed by both that he never can have known a good and sensible woman. I do not believe he has any idea whatever of such women as abound among the matronage of England,—women of excellent capacity and cultivation applied to the natural business of life. It is perhaps not changing the subject to say next what the other drawback is. Mr. Thackeray has said more, and more effectually, about snobs and snobism than any other man; and yet his frittered life, and his obedience to the call of the great are the observed of all observers. As it is so, so it must be; but “Oh! the pity of it! the pity of it!”

  I breakfasted this morning with Fowler of Lincoln, to meet Thackeray (the author) who delivered his lecture on George III in Oxford last night. I was much pleased with what I saw of him; his manner is simple and unaffected: he shows no anxiety to shine in conversation, though full of fun and anecdote when drawn out. He seemed delighted with the reception he had met with last night—the undergraduates seem to have behaved with most unusual moderation.

  Mr. Thackeray is forty-six years old, though from the silvery whiteness of his hair he appears somewhat older. He is very tall, standing upwards of six feet two inches and as he walks erect, his height makes him conspicuous in every assembly. His face is bloodless, and not particularly expressive but remarkable for the fracture of the bridge of the nose, the result of an accident in youth. He wears a small grey whisker but otherwise is clean shaven. No one meeting him could fail to recognize in him a gentleman: his bearing is cold and uninviting, his style of conversation either openly cynical or affectedly good-natured and benevolent; his bonhommie is forced, his wit biting, his pride easily touched—but his appearance is invariably that of the cool, suave, well-bred gentleman, who, whatever may be rankling within, suffers no surface display of emotion.

  I believe you have never seen Thackeray, he has the appearance of a colossal infant—smooth white shiny ringletty hair, flaxen, alas! with advancing years, a roundish face with a little dab of a nose, upon which it is a perpetual wonder how he keeps his spectacles, a sweet but rather piping voice, with something of the childish treble in it, and a very tall, slightly stooping figure—such are the characteristics of the great “snob” of England. His manner is like that of England—nothing original, all planed down into perfect uniformity with that of his fellow-creatures. There was not much more distinction in his talk than in his white choker, or black coat and waistcoat.

  This great writer—our greatest novelist since Scott, (and in some senses greater, because deeper, more to the quick, more naked than he), our foremost wit and man of letters since Macaulay—has been taken from us with an awful unexpectedness. He was found dead in bed this morning. This is to us so great a personal as well as public calamity, that we feel little able to order our words aright or to see through our blinding tears. Mr. Thackeray was so much greater, so much nobler than his works, great and noble as they are, that it is difficult to speak of him without apparent excess…. We know of no death in the world of letters since Macaulay’s which will make so many mourners,—for he was a faithful friend. No one, we believe, will ever know the amount of true kindness and help, given often at a time when kindness cost much, to nameless, unheard-of suffering. A man of spotless honor, of the strongest possible home affections, of the most scrupulous truthfulness of observation and of word, we may use for him his own words to his “faithful old gold pen”:

  My conviction was, that beneath an occasional affectation of cynicism, there was a tenderness of heart which he was more eager to repress than to exhibit; that he was no idolater of rank in the sense in which Moore was said dearly to love a lord, but he had his best pleasures in the society of those of his own social position—men of letters and artists; and that, however fond of “the full flow of London talk,” his own home was the centre of his affections. He was a sensitive man, as I have seen on more than one occasion.

  With the first grasp of his broad hand, and the first look of his large, serious gray eyes, I received an impression of the essential manliness of his nature,—of his honesty, his proud, almost defiant candor, his ever-present, yet shrinking tenderness, and that sadness of the moral sentiment which the world persisted in regarding as cynicism. This impression deepened with my further acquaintance, and was never modified. Although he belonged to the sensitive, irritable genius, his only manifestations of impatience, which I remember were when that which he had written with a sigh was interpreted as a sneer. When so misunderstood, he scorned to set himself right. “I have no brain above the eyes,” he was accustomed to say; “I describe what I see.” He was quick and unerring in detecting the weaknesses of his friends, and spoke of them with a tone of disappointment sometimes bordering on exasperation: but he was equally severe upon his own short-comings. He allowed no friend to think him better than his own deliberate estimate made him, I have never known a man whose nature was so immovably based on truth.

  It is no part of this little Memorial to refer to what may be called his public relations, and his success as a lecturer. I merely record my recollection of the peculiar voice and cadence; the exquisite manner of reading poetry; the elocution, matchless in its simplicity; his tranquil attitude—the only movement of his hands being when he wiped his glasses as he began and turned over the leaves of his manuscript; his gentle intonations. There was sweet music in his way of repeating the most hackneyed lines, which freshened them anew. I seem still to hear him say,—

  Though he said witty things now and then, he was not a wit, in the sense in which Jerrold was, and he complained, sometimes, that his best things occurred to him after the occasion had gone by! He shone most—as in his books,—in little subtle remarks on life, and little descriptive sketches suggested by the talk. We remember in particular, one evening, after a dinner party at his house, a fancy picture he drew of Shakespeare during his last years at Stratford, sitting out in the summer afternoon watching the people, which all who heard it, brief as it was, thought equal to the best things in his Lectures. But it was not for this sort of talent,—rarely exerted by him,—that people admired his conversation. They admired, above all, the broad sagacity, sharp insight, large and tolerant liberality, which marked him as one who was a sage as well as a story-teller, and whose stories were valuable because he was a sage.

  His medical attendants attributed his death to effusion on the brain. They added that he had a very large brain, weighing no less than 58¹/₂ oz. He thus died of the complaint which seemed to trouble him least.

  I am surprised almost to find how much I am thinking of him; so little as I had seen him for the last ten years; not once for the last five. I have been told—by you, for one—that he was spoiled. I am glad therefore that I have scarce seen him since he was “old Thackeray.” I keep reading his “Newcomes” of nights, and as it were hear him saying so much in it; and it seems to me as if he might be coming up my Stairs and about to come (singing) into my Room, as in old Charlotte Street, etc., thirty years ago.

  The last line he wrote, and the last proof he corrected, are among these papers through which I have so sorrowfully made my way. The condition of the little pages of manuscript where Death stopped his hand, shows that he had carried them about, and often taken them out of his pocket here and there, for patient revision and interlineation. The last words he corrected in print, were, “And my heart throbbed with an exquisite bliss.” God grant that on that Christmas Eve when he laid his head back on his pillow and threw up his arms as he had been wont to do when very weary, some consciousness of duty done and Christian hope throughout life humbly cherished, may have caused his own heart so to throb, when he passed away to his Redeemer’s rest! He was found peacefully lying as above described, composed, undisturbed, and to all appearance asleep, on the twenty-fourth of December, 1863. He was only in his fifty-third year; so young a man, that the mother who blessed him in his first sleep, blessed him in his last…. On the bright wintry day, the last but one of the old year, he was laid in his grave at Kensal Green, there to mingle the dust to which the mortal part of him had returned, with that of a third child, lost in her infancy years ago. The heads of a great concourse of his fellow-workers in the Arts, were bowed around his tomb.

  I have been this Sunday afternoon on pilgrimage to Thackeray’s tomb at Kensal Green; the great master would have smiled at the break-down of my devotion. “You’ll find it by the great red brick tomb of Mr. Cheese” was the direction. I found the last resting place of the lamented Cheese, red and brick as they had said; Thackeray’s I could not find. I wandered, sick at heart, amongst sarcophagi and mausolea and truncated columns and obelisks and urns. “Where do you bury the Christians?” I asked, as I gazed round on the symbols of paganism. “We buries the Dissenters, sir,” blandly replied the policeman, “in the t’other side of the Cimitiry!”

  Lord Macaulay rests at the foot of the statue of Addison, whose character and genius none had painted as he…. And whilst, from one side of that statue, his bust looks toward the Royal Sepulchres, in the opposite niche is enshrined that of another no less profound admirer of the “Spectator;” who had often expressed his interest in the spot as he wandered through the transept—William Makepeace Thackeray.

  Thackeray was remarkable both for the clearness of his handwriting and for the general neatness of his manuscripts.

  He was essentially of a nervous temperament, and altogether deficient in that vigorous self-possession which enables a man to shine in public assemblies; for it was absolute pain to him to be called upon to make a speech, and even in ordinary conversation he showed no particular desire to hold a prominent place. But, the above considerations apart, it would be easier to know many men in a few days than it would be thoroughly to understand Thackeray in the same number of years…. He never became energetic, but spoke with that calm deliberation which distinguished his public readings; and there was one peculiarity which, among others, I especially remarked, viz., that when he made a humorous point, which inevitably caused me to laugh, his own countenance was unmoved, like that of the comedian Liston, who, as is well known, looked as if he wondered what had occurred to excite the risibility of his audience.

  I had the opportunity, both in England and America, of observing the literary habits of Thackeray, and it always seemed to me that he did his work with comparative ease, but was somewhat influenced by a custom of procrastination. Nearly all his stories were written in monthly instalments for magazines, with the press at his heels. He told me that when he began a novel he rarely knew how many people were to figure in it, and, to use his own words, he was always very shaky about their moral conduct. He said that sometimes, especially if he had been dining late and did not feel in remarkably good-humor next morning, he was inclined to make his characters villainously wicked; but if he arose serene with an unclouded brain, there was no end to the lovely actions he was willing to make his men and women perform. When he had written a passage that had pleased him very much he could not resist clapping on his hat and rushing forth to find an acquaintance to whom he might instantly read his successful composition…. The most finished and elegant of all lecturers, Thackeray often made a very poor appearance when he attempted to deliver a set speech to a public assembly. He frequently broke down after the first two or three sentences. He prepared what he intended to say with great exactness, and his favorite delusion was that he was about to astonish everybody with a remarkable effort. It never disturbed him that he commonly made a woful failure when he attempted speech-making, but he sat down with such cool serenity if he found that he could not recall what he wished to say, that his audience could not help joining in and smiling with him when he came to a stand-still.

  A member of “The Garrick,” who was specially unpopular with the majority of the members, was literally drawn out of the club by Thackeray. His figure, being very peculiar, was sketched in pen and ink by his implacable persecutor. On every pad on the writing-tables, or whatever paper he could venture to appropriate, he presented him in the most ridiculous and derogatory situation that could be imagined, always with his back towards you; but unmistakable. His victim, it must be admitted, bore this desecration of his “lively effigies” with great equanimity for a considerable period; but at length, one very strong—perhaps too strong—example of the artist’s graphic and satirical abilities, combined with the conviction that he was generally objectionable, induced him to retire from the club.

  Thackeray was, even to his latest day, and after considerable experience, an uncertain speaker. The idea that he had to make a speech on any occasion disturbed his mind, and worked upon his nerves…. Sometimes he would suddenly break down: at others, his words would flow placidly from him to the end; but he never managed a peroration, nor rose to eloquence. He gossiped in his own delightful way with his audience—when he was in the mood; and when he could not do this easily, he collapsed. The set phrases, the rhetorical flights, the clap-traps of a chairmanship, were impossible to him.

  Having been most kindly received, he took umbrage at some hard rallying, perhaps rather of others than himself, and not only declined her [Lady Ashburton] invitations, but spoke of her with discourtesy and personal dislike. After some months, when the angry feeling on his part had had time to die out, he received from her a card of invitation to dinner. He returned it with an admirable drawing on the back, representing himself kneeling at her feet with his hair all aflame from the hot coals she was energetically pouring on his head out of an ornamental brazier. This act of contrition was followed by a complete reconciliation, and much friendship on her part towards him and his family.

  His voice, as I recall it, was at once low and deep, with a peculiar and indescribable cadence; his elocution was matchless in its simplicity. His attitude was impressive and tranquil, the only movement of his hands being when he wiped his glasses as he turned over the leaves of his manuscript. He read poetry exquisitely.

  His remarks, with an occasional touch of satiric humor, were in their general spirit genial and benevolent; and it was easy to see that his disposition was charitable, however shrewd and even caustic his expressions may sometimes have been. I do not think he struck me as being what is technically called a conversationist—that is, one who would be invited to dinner for the purpose of keeping up the round of talk—and there was not the least shadow of attempt to show himself off; and though what he said was always sensible and to the point, it was the language of a well-bred and accomplished gentleman, who assumed no sort of superiority, but seemed naturally and simply at ease with his companions of the moment.

  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 headmaster, 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.

  A tall, ruddy, simple-looking Englishman, who cordially held out his hand, and met me with a friendly smile. There was nothing like a scowl on his face, and it was neither thin, bilious, nor ill-natured, but plump, rubicund, and indicative of an excellent digestion…. In person he was a “large man”—his height I think was over six feet. His eyes were mild in expression, his hair nearly gray, his dress plain and unpretending. Everything about the individual produced the impression that pretense was hateful to him…. His face and figure indicated a decided fondness for roast beef, canvas-back ducks—of which he spoke in terms of enthusiasm—plum-pudding, “Bordeaux,” of which he told me he drank a bottle daily at his dinner, and all the material good things of life.

  It was because Thackeray so desired the respect of others, was so anxious for the social consideration of the people he was meeting, that he thought so much about snobs and snobbishness…. He looked at the snobbish mind so closely and with such interest, because that mind had been directed upon himself. He examined it as a private soldier examines the cat-o’-nine-tails. It was the quickness of his sensibility to disrespect or unkindness, it was his keenly sympathetic consciousness of the hostile feelings of people toward himself, which awakened a rather indolent mind to such energetic perception of the snobbish moods. It was this which caused him to look with such power upon a snob. During his fifty years of life he had conned a vast number of snobbish thoughts, and must have accumulated a great quantity of snob lore. No doubt, he thought too much about snobs.

  Thackeray came to Washington while I was there. He gave his course of lectures on the “English Humorists of the Eighteenth Century.” His style, especially in his earlier writings, had one quality which the critics did not seem to notice; it was not conventional, but spun out of the brain. With the power of thought to take hold of the mind, and a rich, deep, melodious voice, he contrived, without one gesture, or any apparent emotion in his delivery, to charm away an hour as pleasantly as I have ever felt it in a lecture. What he told me of his way of composing confirms me in my criticism on his style. He did not dash his pen on paper, like Walter Scott, and write off twenty pages without stopping, but, dictating to an amanuensis,—a plan which leaves the brain to work undisturbed by the pen-labor,—dictating from his chair, and often from his bed, he gave out sentence by sentence, slowly, as they were moulded in his mind.

  On Christmas day 1863 we were startled by the news of Thackeray’s death. He had then for many months given up the editorship of the Cornhill Magazine,—a position for which he was hardly fitted either by his habits or temperament,—but was still employed in writing for its pages. I had known him only for four years, but had grown into much intimacy with him and his family. I regard him as one of the most tender-hearted human beings I ever knew, who, with an exaggerated contempt for the foibles of the world at large, would entertain an almost equally exaggerated sympathy with the joys and troubles of individuals around him. He had been unfortunate in early life—unfortunate in regard to money—unfortunate with an afflicted wife—unfortunate in having his home broken up before his children were fit to be his companions. This threw him too much upon clubs, and taught him to dislike general society. But it never affected his heart, or clouded his imagination. He could still revel in the pangs and joys of fictitious life, and could still feel—as he did to the very last—the duty of showing to his readers the evil consequences of evil conduct.

  That Christmas of 1863 was saddened by the news of Thackeray’s death. I had seen him the last time in November in Trafalgar Square, looking strong and full of life. I remember walking back after him to see him again. It has been one of the regrets of my life not to have known Thackeray. “Esmond” had been my favourite novel, and I loved the creator of Colonel Newcome, although I had never spoken to him.

  He was a bon vivant: fond of a nice little dinner, a connoisseur of wines, the devotee of a good cigar, a willing receiver of many little pleasures which an ascetic judgment would pronounce wasteful and slothful…. No reproach of excess of grossness of any kind attaches to his character. Though perhaps he was self-indulgent, he was not a voluptuary. His pleasure was as innocent as that of Colonel Newcome when he visited the smoky depths of Bohemia with young Clive, and the dinner was but the means of sociability and hospitality, the preparation for a more intellectual treat, a key to the fetters which keep some hearts and minds in this oddly-constituted and misgiving world from the openness and confidence of brotherhood.

  As I was standing in my office, I heard heavy footsteps on the stairs leading from the street. Presently the door was opened; and Charles Sumner walked in, followed by William M. Thackeray, a man of such lofty stature and proportionate stoutness that he actually made the Massachusetts senator look comparatively small.

  Thackeray, with all his good-nature, varied as it was by occasional bursts of the opposite quality, thought it fair to caricature other people, but very unfair for other people to caricature him. When Mr. Edmund Yates wrote and published a not particularly flattering, but not ill-natured description of him, derived solely from the knowledge he had acquired of him in the Garrick Club, of which they were both members, he forgot the similar case of Fowker, in which he was the offending party, and vowed such social vengeance against Mr. Yates as it was possible for him to take. The result was a literary fiasco, which led to the withdrawal of Mr. Yates from the Club, and threatened to lead to the withdrawal of Charles Dickens also. Happily for the Club, and perhaps for Thackeray also, this consummation of a dispute, which Mr. Thackeray ought never to have instigated, was averted.

  When Thackeray was here on his last visit I was presented to him, at the old theatre at the corner of Broome Street and Broadway. I thought him, with his great height, his spectacles, which gave him a very pedantic appearance, and his chin always carried in the air, the most pompous, supercilious person I had ever met; but I lived to alter that opinion, and in a very short time…. Thackeray then lived with a very great and dear friend of mine and my father’s, and they had rooms together in Houston Street. I had a house next door but one to them, and this is how I became so intimate with Thackeray…. Thackeray, I suppose, took a fancy to me; at any rate it was understood every night when I came home from acting that if I saw a light in a certain window I was to go in…. When I did find them in, we never parted until half-past two or three in the morning. Then was the time to see Thackeray at his best, because then he was like a boy; he did not attempt to be the genius of the party…. Such an unsophisticated, gentle-hearted creature as he was.

  The two key-secrets of Thackeray’s great life, as I take it, were these—Disappointment, and Religion. The first was his poison; the second was his antidote. And, as always, the antidote won. No wonder that he was disappointed. First a man of fortune, then a ruined and a struggling artist, then a journalist, recognised to the full as such even by the brothers of the craft, but, like them, very little beyond it—then at last the novelist and the famous man.

  A writer like Mr. Thackeray gave himself to the world in his art, and with rather too little than too much reserve. Anyone can read a melancholy chapter of his life “a living sorrow,” in the “Hoggarty Diamond.” Who wants the details except the lover of tattle? Anybody can tell that he has loved unhappily, or what are the fortunes of Clive Newcome, of the elder George Warrington, of Henry Esmond derived from? They are written in tears. Everyone sees that Mr. Thackeray was not particularly happy at school, that he enjoyed himself at college, that he lived a good deal in Paris, that he often heard the chimes at midnight, that he had lost money at cards. We have the evidence of Mr. Deuceace, of Blundell Blundell, of Pendennis, of Captain Costigan. He had met and studied minxes, or he could not have given us Becky and Betty. What do the names of the minxes of real life matter to us? I could a tale, or a tradition unfold concerning one of these ladies but this is not a column of the New Journalism. What Mr. Thackeray thought of that glorious institution we can read in his remarks on “Young Grub Street;” he is as frank about his animosities as about his dinners and his liking for a good dinner. All his experience he gave us, all his loves, hates, hopes and fears, his religion, his devotion to good letters, his generosity, his little bouts of impatience and petulance. What more, I ask, do we want?… Some thought him a snob; some called him a cynic; one declared that “there is a want of heart in all he writes;” that “his style of conversation is either openly cynical or affectedly good-natured and benevolent.” We only see, feel, and understand in proportion as we have eyes, hearts, and brains. All these may be exercised on the Thackeray who declares himself in his books, just as well as on any Thackeray of a stout, well-padded biography.

  Thackeray spent a good deal of his time on stilts. He wrote, too, as he talked; but then, he was a very disagreeable companion to those who did not want to boast that they knew him. In his society people had to do two things when one would have been quite enough; they had to smile titteringly as well as to listen.

  I first met Thackeray at dinner, when I was staying with Leech…. I was introduced by our host, and for his sake he gave me a cordial greeting. “We must be about the same height,” he said; “we’ll measure.” And when, as we stood dos-à-dos, and the bystanders gave their verdict, “a dead heat” (the length was six feet three inches)…. He said so many good things, being the best talker I have ever listened to.

  It need not be told here that Thackeray loved the great world and the strange, noble, and even ignoble creatures it contains; he loved delightful women always, and “liked to see them straight,” as he says somewhere; and would have said to his favorites, as Dr. Johnson said to Mrs. Thrale; “Be brisk, and be splendid, and be publick;” but he loved above all his fireside corner and his “little girls,” and the friends they drew about them. Not the least characteristic incident of his life is his flight home from America, leaving his engagements to lecture and everything else to take care of themselves, because he saw Christmas approaching and stockings which might be otherwise unfilled. He bravely said he was homesick; and with no excuse to anyone he stepped on board a Boston steamer, and vanished thus from the centre of his admirers.

  I had a sincere regard for Thackeray. I well remember his striking personality—striking to those who had the ability to recognise it: the look of the man, the latent power, and the occasional keenness of his remarks on men and their actions, as if he saw through and through them. Thackeray drew many unto him, for he had engaging as well as fine qualities. He was open-handed and kind-hearted. He had not an overweening opinion of his literary consequence, and he was generous as regarded the people whom the world chose to call his rivals…. If I am not much mistaken, the man Thackeray was melancholy—he had known tribulation, he had suffered. He was not a light-hearted wag or a gay-natured rover, but a sorrowing man. He could make you a jest, or propound some jovial or outrageous sentiment, and imply, “Let us be festive,” but the jollity rarely came. However, I ought to say that though Thackeray was not cheerily, he was at times grotesquely, humorous. Indeed, he had a weakness for buffoonery. I have seen him pirouette, wave his arm majestically, and declaim in burlesque—an intentionally awkward imitation of the ridiculous manner that is sometimes met with in French opera.

  Thackeray’s genius was the flowering of a century and a half of family culture; a culture of which the beautiful after-efflorescence still blooms in “Old Kensington,” the “Story of Elizabeth,” and the “Village on the Cliff.” Thackeray’s robustness of character, his hatred of shams, his scorn of all things base, had their roots deep down in the manly life of the old Yorkshire moorland. The power of producing high-class mental work to order, when work must needs be done, came to him from a century of later ancestors who had made their bread by their brains…. The clerical traditions of a family, with nineteen parsons among them, made Thackeray, quite apart from his intellectual convictions, the friend of true churchmen, and filled his imagination with the poetry of the rites of the Church. “How should he who knows you,” he wrote, “not respect you or your calling? May this pen never write a pennyworth again if it ever cast ridicule upon either.”… But the greatest single influence of Thackeray’s life-work was still his mother. My earliest portrait of him is that of a little child clinging to his mother, her arm around his neck, and the father sitting close by. At any rate it is something that the best of Bengal civilian families in the last century furnished the mother of Thackeray. The lofty tenderness for women which he learned from that mother he lavished on his wife, until parted from her by her dark malady; it overflowed to his daughters, and breathes in his works.

  He was a complete success [1852]. He was as delightful as his own literary personages are, and so “like his writings” that every one spoke of it. His allusions, his voice, his looks, were all just what we had expected. Never did a long-hoped-for hero fill the bill so thoroughly. His loving and life-giving genius spoke in every word. Wonderful examples of excellence those papers on “The Four Georges,” and delivered in a clear, fine, rich voice. Their simplicity was matchless, and the fun in him came out as he described the fourth George, and then stopped, not smiling himself, while we all laughed. He silently stood, his head tipped back, and then calmly wiped his spectacles and went on. He had a charm as a speaker which no one has since caught: it defies analysis, as does his genius. It was Thackerayian…. A kind-hearted, noble, tender man; a generous, sincere gentleman; a healthy, good liver, and with a fine grip to his hearty hand. He was a big man and heavy, and walked with a strong step; a healthful, broad-shouldered Englishman, whose jollity and fun seemed to forbid reticence on his part, but who could and did, at the touch of humbug or affectation, retreat into himself, turn away with an expression of polished irony on his face, and, with a singular movement of the head, assure the bore that he was no longer needed.

  In May, his third child, Harriet Marion—afterwards Mrs. Leslie Stephen—was born, and his wife became very ill. The illness eventually affected her mind, and Thackeray, who regarded this as only a natural sequence of the illness, which would pass away in time, when her health was restored, threw all business aside, sent his children to their grandparents at Paris, and for many months travelled with his wife from watering-place to watering-place, as the doctors as a last resource had recommended, hoping against hope that the cloud on her intellect would dissolve…. At last Thackeray was compelled to realise the truth—that his poor wife would never recover sufficiently to undertake the duties of a mother and a wife. She was unable to manage her life, though she took interest in any pleasant things around her, especially in music; but it was essential that she should be properly cared for, and, with this object, she was placed with Mr. and Mrs. Thompson at Leigh, in Essex. She outlived her husband by so many years that it was with a shock, having already been dead to the world for nearly forty years, that the announcement of her death, in January, 1894, at the age of seventy-five, was read. She was interred in the same grave at Kensal Green cemetery as her husband.

  Thackeray shocked Charlotte Brontë sadly by the fashion of his talk on literary subjects. The truth is, Charlotte Brontë’s heroics roused Thackeray’s antagonism. He declined to pose on a pedestal for her admiration, and with characteristic contrariety of nature he seemed to be tempted to say the very things that set Charlotte Brontë’s teeth, so to speak, on edge, and affronted all her ideals. He insisted on discussing his books very much as a clerk in a bank would discuss the ledgers he had to keep for a salary. But all this was, on Thackeray’s part, an affectation; an affectation into which he was provoked by what he considered Charlotte Brontë’s highfalutin’. Miss Brontë wanted to persuade him that he was a great man with a “mission;” and Thackeray, with many wicked jests, declined to recognise the “mission.”

Art

  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.

  He had a genuine gift of drawing. The delicious “Book of Snobs” is poor without his own woodcuts; and he not only had the eye and the faculty of a draughtsman, he was one of the best of art critics. He had the true instinct and relish, and the nicety and directness, necessary for just as well as high criticism: the white light of the intellect found its way into this as into every region of his work.

  Thackeray has been called a “lesser Hogarth,” and, since he himself has included Hogarth among the humorists rather than among artists, we may admit, I think, the comparison so far; in their humour the two have a considerable amount in common. That Thackeray can in any true sense be called an artist—confining the term to pictorial art,—I do not for a moment believe. In drawing, as in writing, he had an inimitable gift of humorous conception; he had a wonderful power of catching a fit expression and fixing it in three or four strokes, and a fine capacity for humorous detail, but of technique he is absolutely innocent; “touching” as in Madame’s hand in the last sketch, was ever anything so impossible? And we must remember, in this connection, that Thackeray could not claim to be an untaught genius, since he started his career by studying for an artist.

  All his life he preferred the pencil to the pen. As I have already said, he often found writing wearisome and the strain of composition irksome; there were times even when he almost hated the chain that held him to the desk. But he always turned to the drawing-board with pleasure…. He was at his best when illustrating his own writings. There has hardly been an artist who could make his drawings so helpful to the text. His characters are as truly depicted by the pencil as by the pen, and they tell the story together. His drawing may not always have been quite accurate, the perspective may have occasionally been wrong, and an arm may have slightly resembled a fin, or leg have been slightly out of correct drawing; but for quaint fancy and humour they have rarely been surpassed.

  How ill we could spare Thackeray’s illustrations. Who can forget the sense of fitness which has recommended to him these drawings, weak and insufficient in themselves, but so evidently imbued with the living literary conception? That he could not satisfactorily illustrate the thoughts of others we have abundant evidence, but where have we ever seen book illustrations more helpful to the right understanding of the author’s thought than those in “The Christmas Books,” “Dr. Birch,” “Our Street,” and “The Kickleburys on the Rhine”?

Barry Lyndon, 1844

  In imagination, language, construction, and general literary capacity, Thackeray never did anything more remarkable than “Barry Lyndon.”

  “Barry Lyndon,” the autobiography of the Irish adventurer, gambler, and scoundrel is a masterpiece. It is a worthy precursor of “Esmond” in the difficult piece of the historical novel. The hero is a scamp of the last century, not of ours. The world in which he moves is a world of long ago, a world as yet unshrivelled in the fire of the French Revolution. And it is a real world. We never feel doubt or hesitation about that. The characters, adventures, surroundings, all produce on us the impression of life. In the telling of the story, too, what witchery of style. How eloquent, for instance, the passage in which Barry Lyndon defends gambling—how admirable the long episode of the ill-fated love of the Princess Olivia, and of her terrible end! “Barry Lyndon” appeared in Fraser during the greater part of 1844, and one may legitimately wonder that the world did not then discover that a great novelist was writing for its amusement and edification. And perhaps an even greater work was to follow.

  Certainly a master-piece.

  In Barry Lyndon there is imagined to the life a scoundrel of such rare quality that he never supposes for a moment but he is the finest sort of a gentleman; and so, in fact, he was, as most gentlemen went in his day. Of course, the picture is over-colored; it was the vice of Thackeray, or of Thackeray’s time, to surcharge all imitations of life and character, so that a generation apparently much slower, if not duller than ours, should not possibly miss the artist’s meaning. But I do not think it is so much surcharged as Esmond; Barry Lyndon is by no manner of means so conscious as that mirror of gentlemanhood, with its manifold self-reverberations; and for these reasons I am inclined to think he is the most perfect creation of Thackeray’s mind.

  I cannot tell how often I have read the “Scarlet Letter” and “Smoke,” “Henry Esmond” and “Père Goriot,” the “Rise of Silas Lapham” and the “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” To make a choice of them is frankly impossible, or even to say that these six are the favorite half-dozen. But if a selection is imperative, I am ready for the moment at least, to declare that Thackeray is the novelist I would rather discuss here and now, well aware that no favourite has a right to expect a long continuance in grace. And the reason why I pick out Thackeray from among the other novelists I like as well as I like him (if not better) is that I may thus call attention to a book of his which I believe to be somewhat neglected. I hold this book to be his best artistically, the one most to be respected, if not the one to be regarded with the most warmth. It is perhaps the only story of Thackeray’s which the majority of his readers have never taken up. It is the tale of his telling which most clearly reveals some of his best qualities and which most artfully masks some of his worst defects. It is the “Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq., Written by Himself.”… “Barry Lyndon” is neither insipid nor dull; yet its secret history would be interesting enough. It was written when Thackeray was not yet thirty-five years of age—for he flowered late, like most of the greater novelists…. As Thackeray paints the portrait, it is worthy to hang in any rogues’ gallery—as the original was worthy to be hanged on any scaffold. The villain double-dyed is very rare in modern fiction, and Barry Lyndon is an altogether incomparable scoundrel, who believes in himself, tells us his own misdeeds, and ever proclaims himself a very fine fellow—and honestly expects us to take him at his own valuation, while all our knowledge of his evil doings is derived from his own self-laudatory statements!

  “Barry Lyndon!”—the greatest of all these stories and the first in which the author’s genius shines unfettered.

Book of Snobs, 1848

  Never was satire so keen and unflinching. It is the boldest book ever written by a man who had no personal pique to gratify. We are not surprised that the author of it should have been blackballed at the clubs; the wonder rather is, that the doors of private mansions do not “grate harsh thunder” when he stands before them, and that “Jeames” does not positively refuse to take up his name.

  I regard as a master-piece of humour. Its playfulness is, of course, of the satiric kind. The keen and vivacious satire of an accomplished man of the world is Thackeray’s distinctive note as a humourist…. There is exaggeration, there is caricature, in the “Book of Snobs.” But it is substantially true. It is a very direct, a very amusing, and I will add, a very philosophical indictment of a specially English vice—a dominant vice, we may say, of the English mind, an unreasonable deference for artificial superiorities.

  The “Snob Papers” had a very marked effect, and may be said to have made Thackeray famous. He had at last found out how to reach the public ear. The style was admirable, and the freshness and vigour of the portrait painting undeniable. It has been stated (Spielmann, p. 319) that Thackeray got leave to examine the complaint books of several clubs in order to obtain material for his description of club snobs. He was speaking, in any case, upon a very familiar topic, and the vivacity of his sketches naturally suggested identification with particular individuals. These must be in any case doubtful, and the practice was against Thackeray’s artistic principles.

Vanity Fair, 1848

  I brought away the last four numbers of “Vanity Fair,” and read one of them in bed, during the night. Very good, indeed, beats Dickens out of the world.

  You mentioned Thackeray and the last number of “Vanity Fair.” The more I read Thackeray’s works the more certain I am that he stands alone—alone in his sagacity, alone in his truth, alone in his feeling (his feeling, though he makes no noise about it, is about the most genuine that ever lived on a printed page), alone in his power, alone in his simplicity, alone in his self-control. Thackeray is a Titan, so strong that he can afford to perform with calm the most herculean feats; there is the charm and majesty of repose in his greatest efforts; he borrows nothing from fever, his is never the energy of delirium—his energy is sane energy, deliberate energy, thoughtful energy. The last number of “Vanity Fair” proves this peculiarly. Forcible, exciting in its force, still more impressive than exciting, carrying on the interest of the narrative in a flow, deep, full, resistless, it is still quiet—as quiet as reflection, as quiet as memory; and to me there are parts of it that sound as solemn as an oracle. Thackeray is never borne away by his own ardour—he has it under control. His genius obeys him—it is his servant, it works no fantastic changes at its own wild will, it must still achieve the task which reason and sense assign it, and none other. Thackeray is unique. I can say no more, I will say no less.

  An attempt, somewhat after the manner of Fielding, to represent the world as it is, especially the selfish, heartless, and cunning portion of it. The author has Fielding’s cosy manner of talking to his readers in the pauses of his narrative, and, like Fielding, takes his personages mostly from ordinary life. The novel, though it touches often upon topics which have been worn threadbare and reproduces many commonplace types of character, is still, on the whole, a fresh and vigorous transcript of English life, and has numerous profound touches of humanity and humor.

  I can read nothing but “Vanity Fair,” over and over again, which fills me with delight, wonder, and humility. I would sooner have drawn Rawdon Crawley than all the folks I ever drew.

  I confess to being unable to read “Vanity Fair,” from the moral disgust it occasions.

  His greatest work, one of the great masterpieces of genius in our, or indeed in any language, without doubt is “Vanity Fair.”

  I once made a pilgrimage with Thackeray (at my request, of course, the visits were planned) to the various houses where his books had been written; and I remember when he came to Young Street, Kensington, he said, with mock gravity, “Down on your knees, you rogue, for here ‘Vanity Fair’ was penned! And I will go down with you, for I have a high opinion of that little production myself.” He was always perfectly honest in his expressions about his own writings, and it was delightful to hear him praise them when he could depend on his listeners. A friend congratulated him once on that touch in “Vanity Fair” in which Becky “admires” her husband when he is giving Steyne the punishment which ruins her for life. “Well,” he said, “when I wrote the sentence, I slapped my fist on the table and said, ‘That is a touch of genius!’”

  The tale may be said to have been in some degree deceptive, for the novel certainly had a heroine, Miss Rebecca, or, as she is profanely but more commonly called, Becky Sharp. No one, however, stopped to criticise the title; it was acknowledged at once to be a great work, not indeed of the very highest class, such as “Ivanhoe” or “Woodstock,” but rather of the school of Fielding, and worthy of the master, being indeed much such a work as he himself, if polished into decorum by the more refined civilization of the nineteenth century, would have written.

  If I were called upon to name the saddest incident and the most tragic touch in modern fiction, I should select the close of the thirty-second chapter of “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.

  How did Thackeray achieve his effects? Becky Sharp is a unique and permanent figure in literature, a subtle embodiment of duplicity, ambition, and selfishness. She is avaricious, hypocritical, specious, and crafty. Though not malignant nor to a certainty criminal, she is a conscienceless little malefactor, whose ill deeds are only limited by the ignoble dimensions of her passions. She lies with amazing glibness, is utterly faithless to her hulking husband, and utterly indifferent to her child. Her mendacity is superlative, and double-dealing enters into all her transactions. But she is so shrewd, so vivacious, so artful, so immensely clever and good-humoured, she has so much prettiness of manner and person, that, while we despise her, and have not the least pity for her when retribution falls heavily upon her, our indignation against her is not so great as we feel that it ought to be, principally because her sins have a certain feminine archness and irresponsibility in them, which keeps them well down to the level of comedy. When we close the book we know her through and through, and thoroughly understand all the complex workings of her strategic mind. How do we know her so well? Thackeray is not exegetical, and does not depend on elaborate analysis for his effects. The actions of the characters are themselves fully expository, and do not call for any outside comments or enlargement on the part of the author. This is the case to such an extent that, when we examine the completeness with which the characters are revealed to us, we are inclined to believe that Thackeray’s art is of the very highest kind, and that, though in form it is undramatic, intrinsically it is powerfully dramatic.

  We have been to the show. What now are our reflections? What higher and braver thoughts have come to our minds when, wearied with toil and the witness of life’s discordant realities, we turned aside to dream of the unreal? What encouragement have we gained for efforts at well-doing by the sight of honest work and patient endurance rewarded? Or what warning have we had from the contemplation of vice and intrigue overtaken by disaster, or at least by disappointment? Instead of these we have found—and to some extent been ashamed to find—ourselves admiring a creation that is as seductive as it is evil. Added to this we were conscious of a loss of some portion of that which it is most calamitous to lose. Woe to him who parts from his trust in mankind, who does not believe that in this world there is goodness beyond that which he has never found in his own being the capacity to practise! In this book the artist—and he was an eminently great artist—seemed to have endeavored to drive mankind to their own unaided struggles, taking away from them all good examples, and leaving them to conclude that nothing is real but folly and perfidy.

  I do think that any boy—at least any boy who is genuine, and has not prematurely learnt to feign liking for what he thinks he ought to like—can really enjoy “Vanity Fair.” The full beauty of Becky (I can honestly say that I always saw some of it) is necessarily hidden from him; he can not taste the majesty of the crowning scene with Lord Steyne, or the even finer, though less dramatic, negotiations which avert the duel; his knowledge of life is insufficient to allow him to detect the magnificent thoroughness and the more magnificent irony of the general treatment. On the other hand, he is sure, if he is good for anything, to be disgusted with the namby-pambyness of Amelia, with the chuckle-headed goodness of Dobbin, with the vicious nincompoopery and selfishness of George Osborne. For these are things which, though experience may lead to the retraction of an opinion that any of the three is unnatural, leave on some tolerably mature judgments the impression that they are one-sided and out of composition, if not of drawing.

  After reading “Pendennis” I went to “Vanity Fair,” which I now think the poorest of Thackeray’s novels—crude, heavy-handed, caricatured.

  George Osborn ought to be the hero of “Vanity Fair,” and in truth is handsome and outwardly attractive enough; but in almost all the higher qualities he is almost beneath contempt. What more can be said in his praise than that he won and retained the love of one of the sweetest and purest of women? Major Dobbin, with whom he is contrasted, is everything externally that the conventional hero of fiction ought not to be—uncouth and ridiculous, rough and forbidding. It is, however, within this ungainly casket that Thackeray places a truly beautiful soul, honest and brave, patient and unselfish, true and faithful. With the fortunes of these four persons the story is mainly concerned. But there are besides many others—Joseph Sedley, the older Osborne, and the Crawleys—all drawn to the life, and with a pencil that never falters. Whether we like his views of life and of society or not, we cannot help feeling that these pictures are as true in outline as they are faithful in detail. Thackeray never fails in his purpose to amuse, but in the exercise of his sterner functions as a moralist and censor, he may sometimes arouse a sentiment of pity for the puppets of his fancy on whom he has brought down with such terrible effect the lash of his retributory satire.

  I cannot help thinking that although “Vanity Fair” was written in 1845 and the following years, it was really begun in 1817, when the little boy, so lately come from India, found himself shut in behind those filigree iron gates at Chiswick, of which he writes when he described Miss Pinkerton’s establishment. Whether Miss Pinkerton was, or was not, own sister to the great Doctor at the head of the boarding-school for young gentlemen on Chiswick Mall, to which “Billy boy” (as the author of “Vanity Fair” used to be called in those early days) was sent, remains to be proved. There is certainly a very strong likeness between those two majestic beings, the awe-inspiring Doctor and the great Miss Pinkerton whose dignity and whose Johnsonian language marked an epoch in education…. My brother-in-law has some of the early MS. of “Vanity Fair.” It is curious to compare it with that of “Esmond,” for instance, which flows on straight and with scarcely an alteration. The early chapters of “Vanity Fair” are, on the contrary, altered and rewritten with many erasures and with sentences turned in many different ways.

  The story is none too engrossing, but the strength lies in the truth of the characters. It is indeed a novel “without a hero,” devoid of thrilling occurrences or adventures, without a murder, or a forged will and with no lofty virtues or monstrous vices, for “Becky Sharp,” Thackeray’s most celebrated character, is no tigress, only a cat, or it may be a tiger-cat. The book is a thorough picture of English middle-class life. Thackeray is merciless in his treatment of this mediocrity, the spoilt child of the English novelist. The mean and ignoble standard of second-rate morality, too timid to be vicious, too indolent to be virtuous, is exposed in a number of characters that may be regarded as typical. “Vanity Fair” is the author’s masterpiece; witness the delicacy and quiet reserve in the most touching scenes: the parting of George Osborne and Amelia, the battlefield of Waterloo and the death of Osborne—all depicted in a few brief memorable lines.

History of Pendennis, 1849–50

  A book which, with all its wealth of wit, humor, and worldly knowledge, still leaves the saddest impression on the mind of all of Thackeray’s works. It is enjoyed while we are engaged in reading its many-peopled pages; the separate scenes and incidents are full of matter; but it wants unity and purpose, and the wide information of the superficies of life it conveys is of the kind which depresses rather than exhilarates.

  I can easily believe that a girl should be taught to wish to love by reading how Laura Bell loved Pendennis. Pendennis was not, in truth, a very worthy man, nor did he make a very good husband; but the girl’s love was so beautiful, and the wife’s love, when she became a wife, so womanlike, and at the same time so sweet, so unselfish, so wifely, so worshipful—in the sense in which wives are told that they ought to worship their husbands—that I cannot believe that any girl can be injured, or even not benefited, by reading of Laura’s love.

  The “History of Pendennis”—more veracious than many a history of more pretension—is at once the delight and the despair of all young men who seek to lead the literary life. Indeed, one may often wonder how many men there are now getting on in years, who have taken to literature as the honest trade whereby they were to get their bread, after a youthful reading of those wonderful chapters which tell the entrancing tale of Pen’s spending an evening in writing “The Church Porch” up to a plate in an annual, and which set forth the starting of the “Pall Mall Gazette,” written by a gentleman for gentlemen. And who is there to say that “Pendennis” is better or more beautiful or more captivating than “Henry Esmond” or “Vanity Fair” or “The Virginians.” When I recall certain pages of those books and of their fellows, “The Newcomes,” and the incomparable “Barry Lyndon,” I am ready to break out into dithyrambic rhapsodies of enthusiasm, and I know I had best be silent. The dithyrambic rhapsodist is not a fashionable critic, just now.

  Here, as in “Vanity Fair,” the heroism has been found a little insipid; and there may be good ground for finding Laura Pendennis dull, though she has a spirit of her own. In later books she becomes, what Thackeray’s people very seldom are, a tiresome as well as uninviting person. Costigan is unique, and so is Major Pendennis, a type which, allowing for differences of period and manners, will exist as long as society does, and which has been seized and depicted by Thackeray as by no other novelist. His two encounters, from both of which he comes out victorious, one with Costigan in the first, the other with Morgan in the second volume, are admirable touches of genius. In opposition to the worldliness of the Major, with which Pendennis does not escape being tainted, we have Warrington, whose nobility of nature has come unscathed through a severe trial, and who, a thorough gentleman if a rough one, is really the guardian of Pendennis’s career. There is, it should be noted, a characteristic and acknowledged confusion in the plot of Pendennis, which will not spoil any intelligent reader’s pleasure.

  It is a delightful, a great book, and contains some of the best scenes that Thackeray ever described, some of the best characters he ever painted. Among the latter comes, first and foremost, an old flame of mine, and probably of many men who are now no longer young—I mean, of course, Laura Bell. Thackeray was not usually at his happiest when dealing with good women.

  I think it was “Pendennis” I began with, and I lived in the book to the very last line of it, and made its alien circumstance mine to the smallest detail. I am still not sure but it is the author’s greatest book, and I speak from a thorough acquaintance with every line he has written, except the “Virginians,” which I have never been able to read quite through; most of his work I have read twice, and some of it twenty times.

  In the same way perhaps that “Vanity Fair” was begun at Chiswick in the year 1818, some of the early chapters of “Pendennis” must have been written within the first quarter of the century, and Fairoaks and Charteris are certainly to be found between the folded sheets which travelled from Charterhouse and Cambridge to the mother at Larkbeare by Ottery St. Mary’s. Some one very like Helen Pendennis was the mistress of Larkbeare, where my father spent his holidays as a boy; and there was a little orphan niece called Mary Graham, who also lived in the old house, with its seven straight windows and its background of shading trees. Major Pendennis, most assuredly, was not to be found there. I have heard my father describe the bitter journey in winter-time, when he drove from Charterhouse to Larkbeare upon the top of the snowy Exeter coach. On one occasion my grandmother told me he had to be lifted down, so benumbed was he with the cold. The journey from Cambridge must have been longer still, but he was older and better able to stand it, nor was it always winter-time then, any more than it is now. Between 1824 and 1825, after his fight with Mr. Venables and the accident which broke the bridge of his nose, my father left Penny’s house and went to live in Charterhouse Square with Mrs. Boyes, who took in boys belonging to Charterhouse and Merchant Tailors. It was a low brick house with a tiled roof; he once pointed it out to us, and he took us across the playground and into the old chapel.

  In “Pendennis,” begun almost immediately after finishing “Vanity Fair,” Thackeray took his stand by Fielding, defending “the Natural in Art,” and announcing that he was going to present the public with a new “Tom Jones.” His specific intent was an exact account of the doings of a young man, at school, at college, in the inns of court, and at the clubs, as he had observed them. But if “Pendennis” be compared with its prototype, certain points of difference are clear. Tom Jones yields to temptation. Arthur Pendennis and George Warrington, bundles of high manly qualities and very great weaknesses, are for a time led astray by passions which they afterward overcome. Thackeray admits frankly that there are some passages in the careers of his gentlemen that will not bear telling. Fielding concealed nothing; “Tom Jones” is a study in the nude. Thackeray reluctantly draped his figures, out of respect to conventions he was inclined from time to time to ridicule.

Henry Esmond, 1852

  Though I have had to run to London several times, I generally ran back as fast as I could; much preferring the fresh air and the fields to the smoke and “the wilderness of monkeys” in London. Thackeray I saw for ten minutes: he was just in the agony of finishing a Novel: which has arisen out of the Reading necessary for his Lectures and relates to those Times—of Queen Anne, I mean. He will get £1000 for his Novel. He was wanting to finish it, and rush off to the Continent, I think, to shake off the fumes of it.

  There is abundance of incident in the book, but not much more plot than in one of Defoe’s novels: neither is there, generally speaking, a plot in man’s life, though there may be and often is in sections of it. Unity is given not by consecutive and self-developing story, but by the ordinary events of life blended with those peculiar to a stirring time acting on a family group, and bringing out and ripening their qualities; these again controlling the subsequent events, just as happens in life. The book has the great charm of reality.

  “Esmond,” appears to me the book of the century, in its department. I have read it three times; and each time with new wonder at its rich ripe wisdom, and at the singular charm of Esmond’s own character. The power that astonishes me the most in Thackeray is his fertility, shown in the way in which he opens glimpses into a multitudinous world as he proceeds. The chief moral charm is in the paternal vigilance and sympathy which constitute the spirit of his narration.

  For myself, I own that I regard “Esmond” as the first and finest novel in the English language. Taken as a whole, I think that it is without a peer. There is in it a completeness of historical plot, and an absence of that taint of unnatural life which blemishes, perhaps, all our other historical novels, which places it above its brethren. And, beyond this, it is replete with a tenderness which is almost divine,—a tenderness which no poetry has surpassed. Let those who doubt this go back and study again the life of Lady Castlewood. In “Esmond,” above all his works, Thackeray achieves the great triumph of touching the innermost core of his subject, without ever wounding the taste. We catch all the aroma, but the palpable body of the thing never stays with us till it palls us. Who ever wrote of love with more delicacy than Thackeray has written in Esmond?

  “Esmond” was from the first most liked among literary men who can appreciate a style having no resemblance to the fashion of the day; but there was a vein of tenderness and true pathos in the story which, in spite of some objectionable features in the plot, and of a somewhat wearisome genealogical introduction, have by degrees gained for it a high rank among the author’s works.

  Amongst all these transformed novels will appear a single genuine one, elevated, touching, simple, original, the history of Henry Esmond. Thackeray has not written a less popular nor a more beautiful story.

  If I could possess only one of his works, I think I should choose “Henry Esmond.” To my thinking, it is a marvel in literature, and I have read it oftener than any of the other works.

  “Henry Esmond,” which was given to the world complete, should be read, if possible, at a sitting, when its completeness, as a whole, will, I think, be felt. As a work of art, it is Thackeray’s masterpiece; as the reproduction of a past age—as a historical novel—it is unrivaled. There is nothing like it, nothing so perfect, in English fiction.

  There are few productions in the world of fiction which exhibit the finish of “Esmond,” for the author has not only drawn his characters with unusual skill, but delighted the reader with repeated bursts of natural, unaffected eloquence, in language sedulously borrowed from the age of Steele and Addison.

  In Beatrix Esmond, the broad marks in the character of an ambitious and brilliant woman are well given by the incidents of the novel, and that scene in which she and the Prince are found together by Esmond at Castlewood is highly true and dramatic. But Thackeray does not make the wilfulness and brilliancy of the woman as dazzling and charming as he had wished them to be, or, perhaps, had conceived them to be. His imagination has flagged, and he altogether fails in his obvious efforts to goad it into a fresh apprehension of the character.

  Of Thackeray’s works certainly the most remarkable and perhaps the best is “Esmond.” Many novelists following in the wake of Scott have attempted to reproduce for us past manners, scenes, and characters; but in “Esmond” Thackeray not only does this—he reproduces for us the style in which men wrote and talked in the days of Queen Anne. To produce the forgotten phraseology, to remember always not how his age would express an idea, but how Steele, or Swift, or Addison would have expressed it, might have been pronounced impossible of accomplishment. Yet in “Esmond” Thackeray did accomplish it, and with perfect success. The colouring throughout is exquisite and harmonious, never by a single false note is the melody broken.

  A perfect fiction.

  A reader of light novels may find it difficult to acquire a taste for Thackeray. It requires good taste to appreciate the marvellous art shown in every line of “Henry Esmond.” It is worth taking pains to reach to that taste. Once gained, it is gained forever. Once gained, the meretricious in literature is easily discovered by the sense so refined.

  “Esmond” is beyond doubt the first of Thackeray’s novels as a work of art. There is something in the exquisite finish and the harmony of this which we can only express by the epithet, artistic; it is a pure combination of perfect taste and perfect workmanship, which puts it in a separate class, in which many of the greatest literary works have no claim to rank…. As a composition “Esmond” is almost without a flaw. The details of the execution are all worked out in the same masterly manner, and the language is perfect. We may take, as one instance of the exquisite finish of the minor points, the little explanation of Esmond’s prejudice against Marlborough.

  It is difficult to think of Esmond as of a character in fiction. His story is so perfectly set in a framework of history, that one can scarcely believe that he did not really exist as he is represented, side by side with Addison, Steele, General Webb, Lord Mohun, and the Chevalier of St. George. For the same reason, it is impossible to regard the book which tells Esmond’s story in the light of a mere novel. It is a novel, undoubtedly, but it is also more. It is a history, and that of the best kind, for it deals with the social rather than the political side of events. It is a history of English people of the period in which the action of the story is laid—namely, in the reigns of William III and Anne. It presents us with a series of pictures of their life and manners, dealing also, as true history always must, with the state of religion and literature…. The characters of Henry Esmond and of Lady Castlewood are such as grow upon one with every fresh reading of the book. The author is too great an artist to make either of them flawless. In the lady, especially, we mark those particular defects which we are sometimes inclined to think Thackeray must have believed inseparable from all charming women. But when these are subtracted, we feel that in Esmond and his mistress we have before us a perfect gentleman and lady, in the best sense of the words.

  The greatest book in its own special kind ever written.

  The book shows even more than the lectures how thoroughly he had imbibed the spirit of the Queen Anne writers. His style had reached its highest perfection, and the tenderness of the feeling has won perhaps more admirers for this book than for the more powerful and sterner performances of the earlier period. The manuscript, now in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge, shows that it was written with very few corrections, and in great part dictated to his eldest daughter and Mr. Crowe. Earlier manuscripts show much more alteration, and he clearly obtained a completer mastery of his tools by long practice. He took, however, much pains to get correct statements of fact, and read for that purpose at the libraries of the British Museum and the Athenæum.

  The artistic perfection of “Henry Esmond”—the single and striking exception among his works.

  To be sure she [Beatrix Esmond] is never directly seen, but always through the eyes of that intolerable prig, Henry Esmond, which are fixed mainly upon his own perfections. Even if she had been directly seen, however, I doubt if there would have been much real drama in her, though plenty of theatre. Several coups de théâtre there are in her career, and chiefly that when Esmond and her brother find her at Castlewood with the young Pretender, and prevent her for the time from giving her worthlessness to his worthlessness. If one reads the story in cold blood it is hard to believe in it at all, it is at every moment so palpably and visibly fabricated; and perhaps Beatrix is no more a doll than those other eighteenth-century marionettes; but compared with Becky Sharp a doll she certainly is. It is only in her avatar of Madame Bernstein, in “The Virginians,” that she begins to persuade you she is at best anything more than a nineteenth-century actress made up for her part. She suffers, of course, from the self-parade of Esmond, and has not, poor girl, half a chance to show herself for what she is. Her honest, selfish worldliness is, however, more interesting than her mother’s much-manipulated virtues.

English Humourists, 1853

  A lecture should not read like an essay; and, therefore, it surprises me that these lectures so carefully prepared, so skilfully adapted to meet the requirements of oral delivery, should be such agreeable reading. As lectures, they wanted only a little more point, and emphasis and animation on the part of the speaker: as essays, they atone in eloquence and earnestness for what they want in finish and purity of style.

  Next to Macaulay and Hazlitt, he is the most entertaining of critics. You read his lectures with quite as much gusto as you do “Pendennis,” and with infinitely more than you do such dull mimicry of the past as is to be found in “Esmond.” Clever, too, of course, sagacious often, and sometimes powerful, are his criticisms, and a geniality not frequent in his fictions, is often here. Sympathy with his subject is also a quality he possesses and parades; indeed, he appears as one born out of his proper time, and seems, occasionally, to sigh for the age of big-wigs, bagnios, and sponging-houses.

  He gave his lectures on “The English Humourists” to large audiences in Carusi’s saloon. The interest of these lectures was in their matter, and in their author, but not in their manner of delivery; for he was utterly wanting in those graces of oratory which add so much to the pleasure of listening to the reading of a genuinely literary performance. He was closely confined to his manuscript, which he read in a monotone; yet he was always audible, and he commanded the closest attention of his auditors.

  By judicious selection, by innuendo, here a pitying aposiopesis, there an indignant outburst, the charges are heaped up. Swift was a toady at heart, and used Stella vilely for the sake of that hussy Vanessa. Congreve had captivating manners—of course he had, the dog! And we all know what that meant in those days. Dick Steele drank and failed to pay his creditors. Sterne—now really I know what Club life is, ladies and gentlemen, and I might tell you a thing or two if I would: but really, speaking as a gentleman before a polite audience, I warn you against Sterne.

  A good deal of fault has lately been found with Thackeray’s lecture on Swift. We still think it both delightful and just. The rhapsody about Stella is not to our mind. Rhapsodies about real women are usually out of place. Stella was no saint, but a quick-witted, sharp-tongued hussy, whose fate it was to win the love and pacify the soul of the greatest Englishman of his time—for to call Swift an Irishman is sheer folly. But, apart from this not unnatural slip, what, we wonder, is the matter with Thackeray’s lecture, regarded, not as a storehouse of facts, or as an estimate of Swift’s writings, but as a sketch of character? Mr. Collins says quite as harsh things about Swift as are to be found in Thackeray’s lecture, but he does not attempt, as Thackeray does, to throw a strong light upon this strange and moving figure. It is a hard thing to attempt—failure in such a case is almost inevitable; but we do not think Thackeray wholly failed. An ounce of mother-wit is often worth a pound of clergy. Insight is not the child of study. But here, again, the matter should be brought to the test by each reader for himself. Read Thackeray’s lecture once again.

  Thackeray knew not only the literature but the life of the eighteenth century as few have known it. In minute acquaintance with facts he has doubtless been surpassed by many professional historians; but there is no book to be compared to “Esmond” as a picture of life in the age of Queen Anne; and the lectures on the humourists are saturated, as “Esmond” is, with the eighteenth century spirit. The figures of the humourists live and move before our eyes. We may not always agree with the critic’s opinion, but we can hardly fail to understand the subject better through his mode of treatment. Strong objection has been taken, perhaps in some respects with justice, to his handling of Swift. Yet, much as has been written about Swift, where does there exist a picture of him so vivid, so suggestive and so memorable? Who else has done such justice to Steele? Who has written better about Hogarth? Thackeray succeeded because he not only knew the work of these men but felt with them. He was at the bottom of the eighteenth century type. Much of Swift himself, softened and humanised, something of Fielding, whom he justly regarded as a model, and a great deal of Hogarth may be detected in Thackeray.

The Newcomes, 1854–55

  This is by far the best of Thackeray’s stories.

  “The Newcomes” is perhaps the most genial of the author’s works, and the one which best exhibits the maturity and the range of his powers. It seems written with a pen diamond-pointed, so glittering and incisive is its slightest touch.

  Generally accounted his masterpiece; and which, if less sparkling than “Vanity Fair,” and less severely testing the artistic skill of the author than “Esmond,” yet deserves its fame by presenting us, in Colonel Newcome and Ethel, with the most beautiful pictures both of man and woman that he ever drew.

  Thackeray rose to the perfection of his art in fiction in “The Newcomes;” and it is such books as this which show us what a fine teacher and instructor the novel may become in the hands of genius. In the representation of human nature this story is worthy of Richardson or Fielding. It is the chef-d’œuvre, in our opinion, of its author.

  One day, while the great novel of “The Newcomes” was in course of publication, Lowell, who was then in London, met Thackeray on the street. The novelist was serious in manner, and his looks and voice told of weariness and affliction. He saw the kindly inquiry in the poet’s eyes, and said, “Come into Evans’s, and I’ll tell you all about it. I have killed the Colonel.” So they walked in and took a table in a remote corner, and then Thackeray, drawing the fresh sheets of MS. from his breast pocket, read through that exquisitely touching chapter which records the death of Colonel Newcome. When he came to the final Adsum, the tears which had been swelling his lids for some time trickled down his face, and the last word was almost an inarticulate sob.

  There has been a diversity of opinion about Thackeray, his temper, and principles; and they who did not understand him have made some cruel mistakes. Whoever desires to know what sort of man he was, his love of goodness, and his contempt of evil, let him read “The Newcomes.”

  “The Newcomes” was written in the years that came between my father’s first and second journey to America. He began the preface at Baden on the 7th of July 1853, he finished his book at Paris on the 28th of June 1855, and in the autumn of that year he returned to America. The story had been in his mind for a long time. While still writing “Esmond” he speaks of a new novel “opening with something like Fareham and the old people there,” and of “a hero who will be born in India, and have a half-brother and sister.” And there is also the description to be read of the little wood near to Berne, in Switzerland, into which he strayed one day, and where, as he tells us, “the story was actually revealed to him.”

  It is an epitome of human life in its manifold variety of social and individual phrases unmatched, I think, in fiction. Its range is extraordinary for the thread of a single story to follow. Yet all its parts are as interdependent as they are numerous and varied. It is Thackeray’s largest canvas, and it is filled with the greatest ease and to the borders. It stands incontestably at the head of the novels of manners. And it illustrates manners with an unexampled crowd of characters, the handling of which, without repetition or confusion, without digression or discord, exhibits the control of the artist equally with the imaginative and creative faculty of the poet—the “maker.” The framework of “The Newcomes” would include three or four of Balzac’s most elaborate books, which compared with it, indeed, seem like studies and episodes, lacking the large body and ample current of Thackeray’s epic.

The Virginians, 1858–59

  “The Virginians” is the most carefully planned of his novels, and the most mature as regards his ideas, but the work has not been carried out so perfectly as some others.

  “The Virginians,” Thackeray told Motley “was devilish stupid, but at the same time most admirable;” and the criticism, paradoxical as it may seem, possesses an element of truth. “Devilish stupid” the book, of course, is not. But it is thoroughly ill “composed,” to borrow the art critic’s term. The first half and the second half scarcely hang together; the interest is divided, somewhat clumsily, between the two brothers—and I, for one, confess to be very sorry when George comes to life again, and is installed as hero vice Henry deposed. But, with all drawbacks, the hand of the great master is there, in the matchless style, the admirable scenes, the excellent delineations of character, the exact reproduction of the life of the last century. All this is on the “most remarkable” side.

  I have never quite understood the common depreciation of “The Virginians” which contains things equal, if not superior, to the very finest of its author’s other work, and includes the very ripest expression of his philosophy of life. For though indeed I do not approve a novel more because it contains the expression of a philosophy of life, others do. So, too, the irregularity and formlessness of plot which characterised most of Thackeray’s work undoubtedly appear in it; but then, according to the views of our briskest and most modern critics, plot is a very subordinate requisite in a novel, and may be very well dispensed with. Here again I do not agree, and I should say that Thackeray’s greatest fault was his extreme inattention to construction, which is all the more remarkable inasmuch as he was by no means a very rapid or an extremely prolific writer.

The Four Georges, 1861

  I have heard Thackeray’s four lectures on the four Georges, truculent enough in their general satire,—though not much beyond the last half-volume of “Harry Esmond” about Queen Anne,—but full of generous passages about individuals. The sketches of the German princes of the seventeenth century, and down to the middle of the eighteenth, with which he opened, amused me more than anything else. They were capital. The passage most applauded was a beautiful tribute of loyalty to Queen Victoria, and the tone and manners of her Court. It was given, on his part, with much feeling, and brought down the house—always crowded—very fervently…. His audience was the best the city could give, and about twelve hundred strong, besides which, he repeated the lecture about George III to an audience of two thousand, two or three evenings ago.

  I heard one of Thackeray’s lectures, the one on George III, and thought it better than good—fine and touching. To what is it that people are objecting? At any rate, they crowd and pay.

  No one succeeded better than Mr. Thackeray in cutting his coat according to his cloth: here he flattered the aristocracy, but when he crossed the Atlantic, George Washington became the idol of his worship, the “Four Georges” the objects of his bitterest attacks. These last-named Lectures have been dead failures in England, though as literary compositions they are most excellent.

  Thackeray’s lectures on “The Four Georges” are a piece of history, written in the spirit of Macaulay. But he may escape the censure which Macaulay, to some extent justly, incurred, because he is not, like Macaulay, a professional historian. In proportion as his work is less pretentious, his responsibility to claims and ideals of scientific history is less serious. He takes a small field of the historian’s province. We have only to ask how he acquits himself within these narrow limits.

Poems

  The greatest of living satirists…. This collection contains nothing more mirth-provoking than the “Ballads of Policeman X,” by Mr. Thackeray.

  We should not forget his verses,—he would have laughed if they had been called poems; but they had more imaginative vis, more daintiness of phrase, more true sensibility and sense, than much that is called so by its authors and the public.

  With all his wonderful finish there was not the same width in Praed as in Thackeray; and had he not achieved one of the highest reputations as a novelist, the latter would have gained no inconsiderable place as a singer of every-day life. Imagination was absent in him; but humour, satire, playfulness, tenderness, were abundant.

  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.

  Little has yet been said of Thackeray’s performances in poetry. They formed a small but not the least significant part of his life’s work. The grace and apparent spontaneity of his versification are beyond question. Some of the more serious efforts, such as “The Chronicle of the Drum” (1841), are full of power, and instinct with true poetic feeling. Both the half-humorous half-pathetic ballads and the wholly extravagant ones must be classed with the best work in that kind; and the translations from Béranger are as good as verse translations can be. He had the true poetic instinct, and proved it by writing poetry which equalled his prose in grace and feeling.

  Another great name here somewhat wofully misrepresented is that of Thackeray; whose “White Squall” is now and then rather too provocative of such emotions as nature’s might provoke in the digestive economy of a bad sailor. To make the gorge rise at it is hardly the sign or the property of elegance in verse: and if indecency, which means nothing more than unseemliness, is very properly considered as a reason for excluding from elegant society the most brilliant examples of the most illustrious writers ever touched by so much as a passing shade of it, the rule should be applied equally to every variety of the repulsive and the unbecoming—not by any means only to matters of sexual indecorum and erotic indelicacy. To none of the other selections from the lighter work of the same illustrious hand is any such objection or suggestion applicable: but not one of them shows Thackeray at his very best as a comic poet.

  His so-called ballads have the charm that belongs to the wholly or half-playful exercises, the recreations in rhyme, of a supreme literary craftsman. They are not verses of society; they are either too richly humorous, or too sharply satiric, or too deeply coloured by feeling. Through them, as all through his prose, mirth glides by the easiest transitions into sadness, mockery trembles into tenderness, to the strain of boon good-fellowship succeeds the irrepressible reminder that all below is vanity. Carelessly as they seem to have been penned, they abound in happy rhymes and turns of phrase, they show the hand of the writer born to work in metre no less than in prose. “The White Squall” is a really wonderful tour de force of vivid, rattling description and novel, dexterous rhyming; there is the true martial note in the rough swinging verses of “The Chronicle of the Drum;” and as for the Irish Ballads, they seem bound to amuse till the drying up of the fountain of laughter. Since Burns wrote the “Ordination,” no more telling, mirth-provoking bit of satire has been done in rhyme than the immortal “Battle of Limerick;” and where could there be found a more delicious revel of vocables, all honeyed by the Milesian usage, than in Mr. Maloney’s account of the ball that was given to the Nepaulese ambassador?

  What an admirable gift had Thackeray! Who is so genial, tender, and humorous? Why, the very negligence of his verse has its charm! Read his Horatian “Wait till you come to Forty Year.”

General

  There is a man in our own days whose words are not framed to tickle delicate ears; who, to my thinking, comes before the great ones of society much as the son of Imlah came before the throned kings of Judah and Israel; and who speaks truth as deep, with a power as prophet-like and as vital—a mien as dauntless and as daring. Is the satirist of “Vanity Fair” admired in high places? I cannot tell; but I think if some of those amongst whom he hurls the Greek fire of his sarcasm, and over whom he flashes the levin-branch of his denunciation, were to take his warnings in time, they or their seed might yet escape a fatal Ramoth-Gilead. Why have I alluded to this man? I have alluded to him, reader, because I think I see in him an intellect profounder and more unique than his contemporaries have yet recognized; because I regard him as the first social regenerator of the day—as the very master of that working corps who would restore to rectitude the warped system of things; because I think no commentator on his writings has yet found the comparison that suits him, the terms which rightly characterise his talent. They say he is like Fielding; they talk of his wit, humor, comic powers. He resembles Fielding as an eagle does a vulture; Fielding could stoop on carrion, but Thackeray never does. His wit is bright, his humor attractive, but both bear the same relation to his serious genius, that the mere lambent sheet-lightning, playing under the edge of the summer cloud, does to the electric death-spark hid in its womb.

  He is a nice discerner and skillful delineator—so skillful that, if there were a detective police for the follies and infirmities of human nature, he would be elected chief by acclamation. But I have no affinities for this sagacity, and no great admiration for his detective revelations. I prefer those nice analyses that find sustenance instead of detecting poison; the one work is for our Channings, the other for Thackeray and the wise in their generation.

  Mr. Thackeray’s humour does not mainly consist in the creation of oddities of manner, habit, or feeling; but in so representing actual men and women as to excite a sense of incongruity in the reader’s mind—a feeling that the follies and vices described are deviations from an ideal of humanity always present to the writer. The real is described vividly, with that perception of individuality which constitutes the artist; but the description implies and suggests a standard higher than itself, not by any direct assertion of such a standard, but by an unmistakable irony. The moral antithesis of actual and ideal is the root from which springs the peculiar charm of Mr. Thackeray’s writings; that mixture of gaiety and seriousness, of sarcasm and tenderness, of enjoyment and cynicism, which reflects so well the contradictory consciousness of man as a being with senses and passions and limited knowledge, yet with a conscience and a reason speaking to him of eternal laws and a moral order of the universe. It is this that makes Mr. Thackeray a profound moralist, just as Hogarth showed his knowledge of perspective by drawing a landscape throughout in violation of its rules…. No one could be simply amused with Mr. Thackeray’s descriptions or his dialogues. A shame at one’s own defects, at the defects of the world in which one was living, was irresistibly aroused along with the reception of the particular portraiture. But while he was dealing with his own age, his keen perceptive faculty prevailed, and the actual predominates in his pictures of modern society.

  Thackeray all cynicism, with an affectation of fashionable experience.

  In Dickens, the lower part of “the World” is brought into the Police Court, as it were, and there, after cross-examination, discharged or committed, as the case may be. The characters are real and low, but are facts. That is one way. Thackeray’s is another and better. One of his books is like a Dionysius ear, through which you hear the World talking, entirely unconscious of being overheard.

  Thackeray finds that God has made no allowance for the poor thing in his universe,—more’s the pity, he thinks,—but ’tis not for us to be wiser; we must renounce ideals and accept London.

  If it were asked what one aspect of life Mr. Thackeray has distinctively exhibited, the answer could be given in one word,—the trivial aspect. The characters he draws are neither the best of men nor the worst. But the atmosphere of triviality which envelopes them all was never before so plainly perceivable. He paints the world as a great Vanity Fair, and none has done that so well. The realism of Thackeray can hardly fail to have a good effect in fictitious literature. It represents the extreme point of reaction against the false idealism of the Minerva Press. It is a pre-Raphaelite school of novel writing. And as pre-Raphaelitism is not to be valued in itself, so much as in being the passage to a new and nobler ideal, the stern realism of Thackeray may lead the way to something better than itself.

  Our own opinion is, that his success is on the wane; his writings never were understood or appreciated even by the middle classes; the aristocracy have been alienated by his American onslaught on their body, and the educated and refined are not sufficiently numerous to constitute an audience; moreover, there is a want of heart in all he writes, which is not to be balanced by the most brilliant sarcasm and the most perfect knowledge of the workings of the human heart.

  No one can read Mr. Thackeray’s writings without feeling that he is perpetually treading as close as he dare to the border line that separates the world which may be described in books from the world which it is prohibited so to describe. No one knows better than this accomplished artist where that line is, and how curious are its windings and turns. The charge against him is that he knows it but too well; that with an anxious care and a wistful eye he is ever approximating to its edge, and hinting with subtle art how thoroughly he is familiar with and how interesting he could make the interdicted region on the other side. He never violates a single conventional rule, but at the same time, the shadow of the immorality that is not seen is scarcely ever wanting to his delineation of the society that is seen,—every one may perceive what is passing in his fancy.

  Thackeray’s success is almost solely owing to his moral influence. Much as we respect his intellectual powers, we have a far higher admiration of his heart—that noble, courageous generosity for which language has no word. He is emphatically the true gentleman of our generation, who has appealed to our best and most chivalric sympathies, and raising us from the slough and pollution of the Regency has made us once more “a nation of gentlemen.”

  Mr. Thackeray, I believe, is as perfect a master in his kind of art as is to be found in the whole series of British prose writers; a man in whom strength of understanding, acquired knowledge of men, subtlety of perception, deep philosophic humour, and exquisiteness of literary taste, are combined in a degree and after a manner not seen in any known precedent.

  Thackeray’s range is limited. His genius is not opulent, but it is profuse. He does not create many types, but he endlessly illustrates what he does create. In this he reminds a traveler of Ruysdael and Wouvermann, the old painters. There are plenty of their pictures in the German galleries, and there is no mistaking them. This is a Ruysdael, how rich and tranquil! this is a Wouvermann, how open and smiling! are the instinctive words with which you greet them. The scope, the method, almost the figures and the composition are the same in each Ruysdael, in each Wouvermann, but you are not troubled. Ruysdael’s heavy tree, Wouvermann’s white horse, are not less agreeable in Dresden than in Berlin, or Munich, or Vienna. And shall we not be as tolerant in literature as in painting? Why should we expect simple pastoral nature in Victor Hugo, or electrical bursts of passion in Scott, or the “ideal” in Thackeray?

  The clear, transparent simplicity of the boy at the Charterhouse never deserted him. In fact he often reminded me of a boy. On this very day of which I am speaking he wore an old shooting-coat much too short for him: it sat upon the giant as a boy’s jacket would fit an ordinary mortal. And then the contrast would strike one. This mighty, vehement, white-headed boy had written the simplest, purest, most idiomatic English; he had sketched, with a touch incomparably delicate and finished, the intricate mental relations of a meditative but feverish age, of an active yet pensive society; he was a master of that implied and constructive irony which is the last refinement of banter, that irony which is a feature of our modern literature, of which, to repeat what I have said elsewhere, we see no sign in that emphatic satire of Dryden, only an occasional trace in the polemical poetry of Pope and the polemical prose of Bolingbroke, but which bursts into perfect flower in the serious books of Mr. Thackeray and the satirical speeches of Mr. Disraeli.

  Have we exchanged a word about Thackeray since his Death? I am quite surprised to see how I sit moping about him: to be sure, I keep reading his Books. Oh, the Newcomes are fine! And now I have got hold of Pendennis, and seem to like that much more than when I first read it. I keep hearing him say so much of it; and really think I shall hear his Step up the Stairs to this Lodging as in old Charlotte Street thirty years ago. Really, a grand figure has sunk under Earth.

  Running as he did, a literary race with another eminent humorist, it was his spécialité to be able to paint a gentleman with all his faults without caricaturing him into something which no other gentleman ever saw. Again, we are eminently a practical people. Even in our hours of relaxation we carry with us our love for what “can be” rather than what “might be.” We love a Hogarth better than a Watts, and the lecturer who proves his case by practical experiment better than one who wanders into theory and foretells important but, until proved, to us problematical results. When we read books of amusement we would rather have a good description of a schoolboy’s feelings than the ideal passion of an Othello or a Hamlet. That is our normal state of taste, and Thackeray suited the market; nor did he suit by the supply of a low description of goods. If through want of imagination he fell far short of the great names in the world of art, he followed in the footsteps of two of the master-spirits, Goethe and Shakespeare, in the delineation of his characters. He affected to have no heroes; but taking such as he gave us to be heroes in the sense of the principals in his story, we invariably find that they had much infirmity of mind and temper, and that he maintains our interest in a man or a woman, even after we have ceased to respect them.

  Thackeray, who, apart from all question as to his truth or as to his power, most certainly possessed one of the richest minds with which a novelist has ever been gifted, it was said more frequently than of men who can boast not one tithe of his genius, that he lacked variety.

  No author is more fertile in dissertations; he constantly enters his story to reprimand or instruct us; he adds theoretical to active morality…. Of all satirists, Thackeray, after Swift, is the most gloomy. Even his countrymen have reproached him with depicting the world uglier than it is. Indignation, grief, scorn, disgust, are his ordinary sentiments. When he digresses, and imagines tender souls, he exaggerates their sensibility, in order to render their oppression more odious. The selfishness which wounds them appears horrible, and this resigned sweetness is a mortal insult to their tyrants: it is the same hatred which has calculated the kindliness of the victims and the harshness of the persecutors…. He does as a novelist what Hobbes does as a philosopher. Almost everywhere, when he described fine sentiments, he derives them from an ugly source. Tenderness, kindness, love, are in his characters the effect of the nerves, of instinct, or of a moral disease…. He does not animate beings, he lets puppets act. He only combines their actions to make them ridiculous, odious, or disappointing. After a few scenes we recognise the spring, and thenceforth we are always forseeing when it is going to act.

  In fiction, out of 1,000 volumes issued recently in a single day, no fewer than 55 were by Thackeray, and 25 by Scott. The steady advance of the popular relish for Thackeray is unmistakable. Every year the admirers of this noblest among novelists are multiplied, and the librarian finds it more and more difficult to satisfy their applications.

  But surely Thackeray must be held the prince of Carthusians, seeing that he has illustrated in his works every part of our house?

  For myself, I honestly confess that I never could learn anything from Thackeray; there is a certain feeble amiability even about his best characters, which, if it is free from the depressing influence of his bad ones, is certainly anything but bracing.

  Ranks as the third master of the novel of modern manners and morals…. He was made to be a satirist; his gaze penetrated to the very hearts of men, and the caustic acuteness of his description cut into and laid open the most secret blemishes with the inexorable accuracy of a dissecting-knife. Scarcely ever has a great satirist proved so great a narrator as Thackeray.

  Thackeray, whom I in vain tried to vindicate from the charge of a prevailing “spirit of caustic cynicism,” Mr. de Quincey appeared to regard as simply a crotchety illusion or a blind partiality my remonstrances in favour of the author of “Pendennis.”… It has always been a puzzle to me how such a gracious nature, so delicately responsive to every fine touch, so acutely predisposed to the appeals of genuine pathos, should have missed the force and beauty of what is tender in Thackeray.

  Thackeray in “Esmond,” exhibited powers which vindicated for their possessors a very rare infusion of that higher poetic spirit which might have made of both something greater than the painters of the manners of a day and a class. But to paint the manners of a day and a class as Dickens and Thackeray have done is to deserve fame and the gratitude of posterity. The age of Victoria may claim in this respect an equality at least with that of the reign which produced Fielding and Smollett; for if there are some who would demand for Fielding a higher place on the whole than can be given either to Dickens or to Thackeray, there are many on the other hand who would not say that either Dickens or Thackeray is distinctly superior to Smollett. The age must claim a high place in art which could in one department alone produce two such competitors. Their effect upon their time was something marvellous. People talked Dickens or thought Thackeray.

  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.

  Thackeray’s ideal of life is really childlike in its purity. In “Vanity Fair” he took, like Fielding whom he did not study in vain, a broad canvas on which to paint an image of the world. As Fielding, in Tom Jones, and Blifil, represented the two opposite poles about which our world turns, so Thackeray contrasted Becky Sharp and the Crawley side of the world with the side of Major Dobbin and Amelia. When it was said that his good people were innocent babies, that was his praise; for a childlike innocence, remote enough from the conception of the cynic, was Thackeray’s ideal to the last. If Major Dobbin seemed too weak, Thackeray mended the fault in Colonel Newcome, to whom he gave the same feature of unworldly simplicity and innocence. Thackeray’s sensibility made him, perhaps, a little too much afraid of the conscious idlers who consider themselves men of the world. Being himself tenderly framed, he took refuge like the hermit crab in a shell that was not his own but served well for protection. He certainly was, in his younger days, somewhat too much in awe of the conventions of society; for there is an implied bowing down before them in some of the Snob papers that is saved only by its honest origin from being not conventionally but essentially vulgar.

  The somewhat slack and, I always think, somewhat low-pitched satirist.

  In his delineation of character, in the perfect naturalness with which all his personages act out their respective parts, no novelist is more realistic than Thackeray…. Some readers will receive that impression from Thackeray’s novels; but they will be those who think that the evil and the unhappiness predominate. So thought the author himself. But the world in general think differently, and agree to look upon Thackeray as a satirist.

  Thackeray, with some remarkable slovenliness (he is probably the last writer of the first eminence of whom the enemy “and which” has made a conquest), elaborated, rather it would seem by practice and natural genius, than in the carrying out of any theory, a style which for the lighter purposes of literature has no rival in urbanity, flexibility, and width of range since Addison, and which has found the widest acceptance among men of letters.

  He is to the age of Victoria what Addison and Steele were to the age of Anne—its painter; not like his disciple, Anthony Trollope, its photographer. His own temperament deeply influences his pictorial handling: to assume the absolute accuracy of his pictures would be like inferring, from the too exclusive study of some modern painters, that the men and women of the Victorian epoch invariably lived in rooms hung with yellow.

  This social life which Trollope does not penetrate, which Reade exaggerates, look at it with a curious, sceptical eye, sharpened by a wearied heart; be superior to all the fine illusions of existence, by defect of spiritual insight as well as by the subtility of external observation; lay bare all the hypocrisies and rascalities of “proper” people, without losing faith in the possibility of virtue; survey men and women in their play rather than in their real struggle and work; bring all the resources of keen observation, incisive wit, and delicate humor to the task of exhibiting the frailties of humanity, without absolutely teaching that it is hopelessly vicious and effete—and you have Thackeray, a kindly man of genius, honestly forced by his peculiar intellect and experience to inculcate the dreadful doctrine that life does not pay.

  My pleasure in reading fiction is limited to a very few authors. Scott I know intimately, but there is not any novelist whom I appreciate so heartily except Thackeray, whose masterpieces I have read over and over again; indeed, I never tire of them.

  With Thackeray, as with Michael Angelo, the art which conceals art is characteristic. The simplest of means produce the largest of effects. In the fewest words, in the plainest sentences, without the ghost of visible effort or the slightest strain after effect, Thackeray has in “Vanity Fair” given us the most living and Homeric picture of the “Battle of Waterloo” that exists. In scenes of domestic pathos, he is a household Æschylus at times. I know nothing of the 100-book school, as I have said, and don’t want to know anything. But if I were to advise those who are learned amongst us as to a course for study, I should select passages, I think, rather than books, for very especial attention. And I would have them know those passages almost by heart. Amongst them, for the simplicity of sublimity, for that same quality of massiveness, for homely pathos and quiet power, I would refer readers to one than which I think English prose can rise no higher. Of tears in the voice we have all heard; this I should call “tears in the pen.” It is the story of the death of Helen Pendennis; where in the last and beautiful reconciliation between the estranged mother and son, he kneels like a child to say the Lord’s Prayer at her feet, sobs out that wonderful message of love and faith to “generations of sinful and humbled men,” and sees her die. If Thackeray could write such prose as this, it is because he was a poet. Happy the novelist who has any of that sacred fire to keep alive in him, for he has ten chances to one in his favour against all comers, when it comes to a bid for greatness.

  Thackeray had a quarrel with himself and a quarrel with society; but his was not a temper to push things to extremes. He could not acquiesce in the ways of the world, its shabbiness, its shams, its snobbery, its knavery; he could not acquiesce, and yet it is only for born prophets to break with the world and go forth into the wilderness crying, “Repent!”… Thackeray had not the austerity and lonely strength needful for a prophet; he would not be a pseudo-prophet; therefore he chose his part—to remain in the world, to tolerate the worldlings, and yet to be their adversary and circumventer, or at least a thorn in their sides.

  Personally, he scarce appeals to us as the ideal gentleman; if there were nothing else, perpetual nosing after snobbery at least suggests the snob; but about the men he made, there can be no such question of reserve. And whether because he was himself a gentleman in a very high degree, or because his methods were in a very high degree suited to his class of work, or from the common operation of both causes, a gentleman came from his pen by the gift of nature. He could draw him as a character part, full of pettiness, tainted with vulgarity, and yet still a gentleman, in the inimitable Major Pendennis. He could draw him as the full-blown hero in Colonel Esmond. He could draw him—the next thing to the work of God—human and true and noble and frail in Colonel Newcome. If the art of being a gentleman were forgotten, like the art of staining glass, it might be learned anew from that one character.

  A friend of mine tells me that once, when he was a little boy, he was sitting under a table, reading “Vanity Fair.” A tall, white-haired old gentleman came in and said, “What are you reading? ‘Vanity Fair’? That’s not a book for you.” The tall gentleman was Thackeray. He might have said every day to me, in my boyhood, “That’s not the book for you.” But they were all the books for me, beloved books, full of the kindest friends, the noblest gentlemen, the purest ladies, the wittiest, best-hearted people, with a few wicked noblemen to hate, a few campaigners to avoid. People may say that Thackeray makes one too sentimental, too tolerant. They may urge similar objections against a well-known passage in the letters of Paul of Tarsus. In the matter of style Thackeray is inimitable, and not to be imitated. But no writer except Fielding, perhaps, and George Sand, gives a young student so brilliant an example of what style may be, had one time to think of it.

  No one ever wrote with more perfect frankness than Thackeray. If he felt happy he said so brightly; if he felt sad he openly betrayed his dejection. And underlying all the humorous drollery of his letters is a strain of profound weariness, of utter lassitude and depression. He, too, like Amiel, lacked the courage to be light-hearted in the incessant warfare of life…. The very fulness of his life at times wearies and repulses him. He cries out impatiently that idleness is best, and that a blessed repose of mind and body is worth all the troublesome turmoil of success. It is plain that he enjoys very little of that solid satisfaction which most authors derive from a perpetual contemplation of their own laurels; and this loss, irreparable indeed to him, is not wholly without compensation to his readers…. We admire Thackeray none the less after reading this bundle of letters; and, in view of the disastrous revelations too often forced upon the world by the publication of a writer’s correspondence, there can be no stronger praise than to add that we love him a great deal more.

  Thackeray is the young man’s first love.

  The great modern master of novelists, him of the big heart and the generous sympathy, that great lay preacher and critic of manners, who has written such classic prose and given such grand character-studies in “Vanity Fair” and “Pendennis” and “Henry Esmond” and “The Newcomes.”

  Esmond apart, there is scarce a man or a woman in Thackeray whom it is possible to love unreservedly or thoroughly respect. That gives the measure of the man, and determines the quality of his influence. He was the average clubman plus genius and a style. And, if there is any truth in the theory that it is the function of art not to degrade but to ennoble—not to dishearten but to encourage—not to deal with things ugly and paltry and mean but with great things and beautiful and lofty—then, it is argued, his example is one to depreciate and to condemn…. He may not have been a great man but assuredly he was a great writer; he may have been a faulty novelist but assuredly he was a rare artist in words. Setting aside Cardinal Newman’s, the style he wrote is certainly less open to criticism than that of any other modern Englishman. He was neither super-eloquent like Mr. Ruskin nor a Germanised Jeremy like Carlyle; he was not marmoreally emphatic as Landor was, nor was he slovenly and inexpressive as was the great Sir Walter; he neither dallied with antithesis like Macaulay nor rioted in verbal vulgarisms with Dickens; he abstained from technology and what may be called Lord Burleighism as carefully as George Eliot indulged in them, and he avoided conceits as sedulously as Mr. George Meredith goes out of his way to hunt for them. He is a better writer than any one of these, in that he is always a master of speech and of himself, and that he is always careful yet natural, and choice yet seemingly spontaneous.

  William Makepeace Goliath, white waistcoat and all.

  It is precisely because Thackeray, discerning so well the abundant misery and hollowness in life, discerns also all that is not miserable and hollow, that he is so great. He has neither the somewhat bestial pessimism of M. Zola, nor the fatuous gaiety of M. Ohnet. Like any classic, he stands the test of experience, of psychology. We have mentioned together Swift, Addison, and Steele, we might take Lucretius, Virgil, and Horace. Each has left a picture of patrician life, glittering and tedious. Lucretius, contrasting the splendour without and the gloom within; Virgil, the restlessness and haste with the placid peace of the country; Horace, content to let it all go by, neither envying nor despising. Something of each, again, is in Thackeray: an English classic not less true and real than the classic Romans.

  Thackeray’s readers were and are limited by the limitations of his subjects, by nothing else. He did much that Scott did not attempt and that Dickens could not ever have conceived; but for every million that can understand Scott and Dickens there are probably only a thousand that can understand Thackeray. His minute observation of the upper classes of his day is lost on persons to whom those classes are not familiar, partly because such persons do not recognize what he is dealing with, and partly because they are not interested in the questions with which he is most preoccupied. Indeed, of all great novelists Thackeray is the narrowest, not because the range of his vision is confined to the upper classes, for these viewed comprehensively form a complete microcosm and in many ways exhibit the problems and possibilities of life better than any other class; but because, accepting the upper classes as the world, he views them from one position only, and his view of them is extremely partial. Only a few of his characters he knows from the inside; all the rest he knows from the outside only. Men who were clients of the world or its victims, who were struggling with it or hostile to it—these men Thackeray knew from the inside. But the world itself, which for him meant the aristocratic class as a body—he was familiar with its aspect, but he never understood its spirit…. A more important question is whether the interest with which he is read now is as fresh and vital as that with which he was read originally. I should say it was not; and I should say so for this reason, that as compared with Scott and Dickens he lacked the qualities by which the vitality of his work could be perpetuated. He lacked their extraordinary breadth and their extraordinary variety; he lacked the qualities that made them so peculiarly and so comprehensively national. They each gave us a nation—a nation which still lives; Thackeray gave us a fragment of a generation, which already is almost past.

  Some people have a quiet way of testing the quality of a man’s literary culture and determining the presence or absence of the instinct for literature by his feeling for Thackeray; and it is certainly true that no one of our novelists has given us so much literature in proportion to the mass of his writing as this splendid artist, whose briefest and most hurried notes disclose the touch of a master in every line. Thackeray’s point of view is, however, widely misunderstood, and the deep and beautiful tenderness which underlies so much of his work does not make itself felt at the first glance.

  Thackeray, with a fine and sympathetic soul, had a creative imagination that was far stronger on the darker and fouler sides of life than it was on the brighter and purer side of life. He saw the bright and pure side: he loved it, he felt with it, he made us love it. But his artistic genius worked with more free and consummate zest when he painted the dark and the foul. His creative imagination fell short of the true equipoise, of that just vision of chiaroscuro, which we find in the greatest masters of the human heart. This limitation of his genius has been visited upon Thackeray with a heavy hand. And such as it is, he must bear it.

  I owe him a debt of gratitude which it would be difficult to over-estimate. He saved me from no end of dangerous follies by kindling in me a spark of sobering self-criticism, which enabled me to catch little side-glimpses of myself, when I was on the verge of committing a bêtise. He aroused in me a salutary scepticism as to the worth of much which the world has stamped with its approval. He blew away a good deal of that romantic haze which hid reality from me and prevented me from appraising men and things at their proper value.

  I admire Thackeray’s style, and the pathetic quality in his writings; in this he never faltered. I like his sardonic melancholy. Thackeray, in a passing mood, might quite well have said: “Who breathes must suffer, and who thinks must mourn, and he alone is blest who ne’er was born.” He shows knowledge with human nature and much acquaintance with life—not a wide acquaintance, but complete within its limits. The vernacular of his Fokers and his Fred Bayhams is classical, and so is their slang.

  On the rare occasion when I met him in the snuggery at Onslow Square, or elsewhere, I found him one of the gentlest of satirists. At the same time he was extremely outspoken; he had a childish inability to conceal, and, like a child, he sometimes repeated what was not intended for repetition.

  His appeal was mainly if not quite exclusively to the refined and educated class of readers; and it was among their interests and occupations that he sought the material of his art. He has left the field of the stronger and more primitive passions, the votum, timor, ira of humanity, to others; and it is from the voluptas, gaudia, discursus—the pleasures, ambitions, pursuits of society, with the activities they stimulate, the weaknesses they foster, and the virtues which occasionally redeem them, that he collected the farrago of his books. But among these he moves a supreme and unapproachable master; the possessor of a far more limited domain than Dickens, but traversing it with a far surer foot and surveying it with a far more penetrating eye.

  Thackeray was a finished novelist; but, alas! he was nearly forty years of age, and he was to die at fifty-two. The brief remainder of his existence was crowded with splendid work; but Thackeray is unquestionably one of those writers who give us the impression of having more in them than accident ever permitted them to produce. Fielding had escorted the genius of Thackeray to the doors of success…. But Thackeray was no consistent disciple of Fielding, and when we reach his masterpieces—“Esmond,” for instance—the resemblance between the two writers has become purely superficial. Thackeray is more difficult to describe in a few words than perhaps any other author of his merit. He is a bundle of contradictions—slipshod in style, and yet exquisitely mannered; a student of reality in conduct, and yet carried away by every romantic mirage of sentiment and prejudice; a cynic with a tear in his eye, a pessimist that believes the best of everybody. The fame of Thackeray largely depends on his palpitating and almost pathetic vitality; he suffers, laughs, reflects, sentimentalises, and meanwhile we run beside the giant figure, and, looking up at the gleam of the great spectacles, we share his emotion. His extraordinary power of entering into the life of the eighteenth century, and reconstructing it before us, is the most definite of his purely intellectual claims to our regard.

  Eleven years before, young Thackeray had married Miss Isabella Shawe, the daughter of a colonel in the army. He had three children, two of whom—Mrs. Ritchie, whose work is so well known, and Mrs. Leslie Stephen—grew up to be the greatest delight to him, as if in compensation for his terribly unhappy married life. After the birth of her third daughter, his wife became ill, and lost her mind. At first Thackeray would not believe that it was anything but illness, and night after night, after his work at the office of Fraser’s or Punch was over, he would sit up with the poor demented creature, when everybody but the devoted husband could see that there was no cure for her. It was finally necessary to put her into an asylum, where she lived, hopelessly insane, long after her husband’s death. It was during these terrible years that Thackeray was writing the sense and nonsense, the fun and satire, which, with John Leach’s pictures, were making the reputation of Punch. Into every joke there must have gone an aching heart.

  Once convince a young man that Thackeray’s world is the real world, that vulgarity, meanness, trickery, and fraud abound, and you put him in a yoke from which he shall never free himself. This is the yoke of base expectation…. Thackeray has no faith; he does not entertain high expectations. His characters do shameless things, and Thackeray says to the reader, “Be not surprised, injured-seeming friend; you would have done the like under the like temptation.” At first you contradict, you resent, but little by little Thackeray’s opinion of you inoculates you; the virus takes; you lose your conviction that you would have acted differently; you concede that such conduct was not impossible, even for you,—no, nor improbable,—and, on the whole, after reflection, that the conduct was excusable, was good enough, was justified, was inevitable, was right, was scrupulously right, and only a Don Quixote would have acted otherwise.

  One always recognises in Thackeray the powerful artist, who, like a Japanese painter, will with a few lines place a living man or woman before you, never to be forgotten.

  In all of these writings we are struck with the honesty, earnestness, and common-sense of the critic, even though we may occasionally fail to recognise the big view of the statesman. Yet Thackeray was more of a statesman than his colleague Douglas Jerrold, who for years was practically Punch’s Prime Minister. It was, moreover, greatly on a question of statesmanship that he left Punch (just as Doyle had left it on a question of religion); for he did not choose to identify himself with the “savageness” of the particular colleague first-mentioned, whose political writings he believed to be against the interests of the country as well as against the dignity of the paper. Yet this repugnance of his for violence has been cited as a reproach. He was not fierce enough, we are told—not vehement enough in his denunciations of human folly; and it is evidently reckoned for unrighteousness that he preferred irony as a flail for the evil-doer, to burning wrath and hot denunciation. Perhaps the famous old lady who considered Thackeray “an uncomfortable writer” was the first to discover him to be a Cynic. Perhaps she was right—but, in that case, a Cynic after Thackeray’s own heart.

  He is already a classic. He is the representative English man of letters of his time, and one of the few great novelists of the world.

  Apart from the high intellectual level of Thackeray’s writings, nothing would induce him to abate one jot of his prejudices to suit the taste of the public, though no one knew better than he what would suit the majority of novel-readers.

  Thackeray I take to have been an author whose native bent was towards reality in fiction. But he lived in a literary time when it was all but impossible for one to be directly true; one must somehow bring the truth in circuitously, apologetically, almost shamefacedly. A direct rendering of life was then supposed to be wanting in “imagination,” and though Thackeray despised and mocked the false in fiction as much as any man who ever lived, he could not help being a man of his time. He put on a fine literary air of being above his business; he talked of fiction as fable-land, when he ought to have known it and proclaimed it the very home of truth, where alone we can see men through all their disguises; he formed the vicious habit of spoiling the illusion, or clouding the clear air of his art, by the intrusion of his own personality; and in fine he showed himself in spite of his right instincts a survival of the romanticistic period whose traces in others (especially Bulwer and Disraeli) he knew how so deliriously to burlesque. I shall affront some of those who like Thackeray most (but not most wisely), by saying that he came short of his great possibilities by his willingness to dawdle (and shall I say twaddle?) over his scene when it was strictly his affair to represent it, and by his preference of caricature to character, and sentimentality to sentiment. All the same he was a great talent, and the Ever-Womanly knew his ultimate truth so well that she revealed herself to him as she had not to any other English novelist since Jane Austen’s time.

  Character-drawing, mastery of style, humor, pathos, passion—all these Thackeray had. One thing he lacked—high poetic imagination. “I have no brains above my eyes,” Prof. Beers has quoted him as saying: “I describe what I see.” None knew more fully the world in which men love and fear and flatter and hate and sorrow, but beyond his horizon lay the forest of Arden and the seacoast of Bohemia.

  Thackeray took no print from the romantic generation; he passed it over, and went back to Addison, Fielding, Goldsmith, Swift. His masters were the English humorists of the eighteenth century. He planned a literary history of that century, a design which was carried out on other lines by his son-in-law, Leslie Stephen. If he wrote historical novels, their period was that of the Georges, and not of Richard the Lion Heart. It will not do, of course, to lay too much stress on Thackeray, whose profession was satire and his temper purely anti-romantic.

  If, then, we find that in all great walks of life—in the Church, in war, in commerce, and in diplomacy—Mr. Thackeray has nothing but abuse and sneers for success; if we find that he loves to portray the ludicrous and the discreditable only, is it unfair to say that he is the apostle of Mediocrity? Mediocre ways of life, mediocre thoughts, mediocre inclinations (miscalled passions) mediocre achievements—these, if not positively enjoined, as they sometimes are, are in effect all that is left to one who takes Mr. Thackeray for his guide. For the rest, never had a mean gospel so doughty an Apostle.

  One mark of Thackeray’s realism is his refusal to take his art seriously. In his view an author is but the master of a set of puppets with which he can represent real life, if he please, but over whose movements it is absurd to pretend that he has not absolute control. Hence Thackeray jests at his art in a tone that was most unpleasant to minor craftsmen. This tone has done him a disservice with later readers, and belies the essential importance of his work; for though the world which he pictures is a bit antique in our eyes, its problems are ours, and granting the thirty years’ difference in time, Thackeray treats them in a way as significant for us as that of Meredith or Ibsen.