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 William Mal<epeace Thacl<eray. 
 
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Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tliis book is in 
 tlie Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013563014 
 
William Makepeace Thackeray 
 
Modern English Writers 
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD . . . Professor Saintsbury. 
 
 R. L. STEVENSON . . . . L. Cope Cornford. 
 
 JOHN RUSKIN Mrs. Meynell. 
 
 TENNYSON Andrew Lang. 
 
 GEORGE ELIOT . . . . A. T. Quiller-Couch. 
 
 BROWNING C. H. Herford. 
 
 FROUDE John Oliver Hobbes. 
 
 HUXLEY Edward Clodd. 
 
 THACKERAY Charles Whibley. 
 
 DICKENS W. E. Henley. 
 
 *^* Other Volumes will be announced in due course. 
 
William Makepeace Thackeray 
 
 BY 
 
 CHARLES WHIBLEY 
 
 
 ^ 
 
 f|? 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 DODD, MEAD & COMPANY 
 
 1903 
 
Copyright, igoj 
 By Dodd, Mead & Company 
 
 Published October, i()o^ 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I. BIOGRAPHICAL ----- I 
 II. THACKERAY IN LONDON. THE TOWN 
 
 AND TASTE OF HIS TIME 1 9 
 
 III. THE PICTURESQUE REPORTER BARRY 
 
 LYNDON - - 42 
 
 IV. PUNCH AND CANITY FAIR 74 
 V. PENDENNIS. THACKERAY AND THE 
 
 WORLD OF LETTERS - I16 
 
 VI. LECTURES AND LECTURING. ESMOND 1 54 
 
 VII. THE NEWCOMES A PARLIAMENTARY 
 
 ELECTION - - - 187 
 
 VIII. THE VIRGINIANS THE EDITORSHIP OF 
 
 THE CORNHILL - - - 212 
 
 IX. THE WRITER AND THE MAN - - 234 
 
 INDEX - - - - - -251 
 
THACKERAY 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 William Makepeace Thackeray was born at 
 Calcutta on July i8, 1811. His family, sprung from 
 yoemen of Yorkshire, was distinguished through- 
 out the eighteenth century in the learned professions, 
 as well as in the civil and military services of India. 
 Thackerays not a few had lived and died in the 
 making of our Eastern Empire. They had done 
 those deeds of simple heroism which benefit a peo- 
 ple, and bring their authors but little fame. They 
 had built roads, they had administered justice, and 
 more than one had fallen on the battle-field. Emi- 
 nent amongst them was Richmond Thackeray, Col- 
 lector at Alipur, who in 18 10 married Anne Becher, 
 herself the daughter of a family famous in Bengal. 
 Five years later the Collector died, leaving a widow 
 and one son, William Makepeace, just four years old, 
 who grew up to be the author of Vanity Fair. Like 
 Clive Newcome, William Makepeace left India a child 
 of six, and when he pictured the Colonel "tottering 
 up the steps of the ghaut," he pictured his own ex- 
 perience. " I wrote this," he confessed, " remem- 
 
2 THACKERAY 
 
 bering in long, long distant days such a ghaut, or 
 river-stair at Calcutta; and a day when down those 
 steps, to a boat which was in waiting, came two 
 children, whose mothers remained on shore. 
 We were first cousins ; had been little playmates and 
 friends from the time of our birth ; and the first 
 house in London to which I was taken was that of 
 our aunt." The little playmate was his cousin, 
 Richmond Shakespear, whose death, deplored in a 
 Roundabout Paper^ took place two years before his 
 own. In those days a visit to the enchained Emperor 
 was a proper incident of travel, and a vision of the 
 Corsican ogre was one of Thackeray's earliest and 
 most vivid impressions. " Our ship touched at an 
 island on the way home," he wrote, "where my 
 black servant took me a long walk over rocks and 
 hills until we reached a garden, where we saw a man 
 walking. 'That's he,' said the black man: 'that is 
 Bonaparte ! He eats three sheep every day, and all 
 the little children he can lay hands upon.' " 
 
 He arrived in England when " she was in mourn- 
 ing for the young Princess Charlotte, the hope of the 
 Empire." Nor did he look again upon his native 
 East. But its influence never left him. If his 
 childish memory was vague and tear-bedimmed, the 
 tradition of his family was strong and imperious. 
 Moreover, the chain which bound him to India was 
 not snapped by the homeward voyage. His guardian 
 was his great-uncle, Peter Moore, who at Hadley 
 Manor lived the life of a country gentleman, and 
 lavishly spent the fortune he had so easily acquired 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 in India. An active politician, Moore devoted many 
 years to the support of the Whig party in the House 
 of Commons, and, though he should have known 
 better, joined in the pitiful attacks made upon 
 Warren Hastings. But speculation was the real 
 business of his life, and so keenly did he pursue it 
 that he died at Abbeville an impoverished exile. 
 His influence was not unimportant, since, as we 
 may suppose, he quickened Thackeray's early im- 
 pressions of India, w^hile his career was doubtless 
 the first romance in being that the boy had con- 
 templated. At any rate, India is the vague back- 
 ground of more than one of Thackeray's novels, 
 and Mr. Jos. Sedley, Colonel Newcome, and even 
 Boggley Wollah and the Bundelcund Banking Com- 
 pany, are as near to fact as to fiction. 
 
 Like many another Anglo-Indian boy, Thackeray 
 suffered ill-treatment and neglect at his first school, 
 which was hard by Miss Pmkerton's at Chiswick, 
 and which no doubt was kept in the fear of God 
 by Dr. Swishtail. But in 1821 his mother returned 
 from India, the wife of Major Carmichael Smyth, the 
 kindest of stepfathers, and a year later Thackeray 
 was sent to the Charterhouse. Here he remained six 
 indolent years, and as the place is woven into the 
 very web of his novels, this time of idleness was not 
 wasted. No writer has ever been more loyal to his 
 school than was Thackeray to the Charterhouse. It 
 appears as Gray Friars or Slaughter House again and 
 again ; the best of his characters neglect the educa- 
 tion that was there provided ; and even his sympathy 
 
THACKERAY 
 
 for Richard Steele is the keener, because the Chris- 
 tian Hero was once a gown boy at the old school. 
 
 But if the Charterhouse was a pleasant memory, 
 the memory had mellowed with time. For Thackeray 
 was not very happy at school, nor was the system of 
 Dr. Russell, for a while triumphantly successful, 
 likely to inspire an intelligent or imaginative boy. 
 He learnt no Greek, he tells us, and little Latin. 
 The famous scene in Pendennis, wherein Pendennis 
 cannot construe the Greek play despite the prompting 
 of Timmins, is drawn from life, and there can be no 
 mistaking the Doctor's speech. " Pendennis, sir," 
 said he, "your idleness is incorrigible and your 
 stupidity beyond example. You are a disgrace to 
 your school, and to your family, and I have no doubt 
 will prove so in after-life to your country. 
 Miserable trifler ! A boy who construes Se: and, in- 
 stead of de but, at sixteen years of age, is guilty not 
 merely of folly, and ignorance, and dulness incon- 
 ceivable, but of crime, of deadly crime, of filial 
 ingratitude, which I tremble to contemplate." The 
 rhodomontade of the Doctor is confirmed by con- 
 temporaries. Dean Liddell, who " sat next " to 
 Thackeray at school, has left a sketch of him. " He 
 never attempted to learn the lesson," says the Dean, 
 "never exerted himself to grapple with the Horace. 
 We spent our time mostly in drawing, with such skill 
 as we could command. His handiwork was very 
 superior to mine, and his taste for comic scenes at 
 that time exhibited itself in burlesque representations 
 of Shakespeare. I remember one — Macbeth as a 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 butcher brandishing two blood-reeking knives, and 
 Lady Macbeth as a butcher's wife clapping him on 
 the shoulder to encourage him." Thus the faculty 
 of drawing declared itself early, as a few experi- 
 ments remain to prove. But Dean Liddell repudiates 
 the charge that he destroyed Thackeray's " oppor- 
 tunities of self-improvement " by doing his Latin 
 verses. 
 
 For the rest, Thackeray, the schoolboy, appears to 
 have been " pretty, gentle, and rather timid," as Ven- 
 ables, the smasher of his nose and his lifelong friend, 
 describes him. He was never flogged, and only in- 
 spected the famous flogging-block " as an amateur." 
 He had a taste for " pastry-cookery," and once con- 
 sumed a half-a-crown's worth, "including ginger- 
 beer." He had a still keener taste for reading, not 
 the Latin and Greek books prescribed by his masters, 
 but The Heart of Mid- Lothian by the author of //^^t;- 
 erley, or Life tn London by Pierce Egan. In other 
 words, Dumbiedikes meant more to him than the 
 Pious jEneas, and he professed a far deeper sympathy 
 with Tom and Jerry, not forgetting Bob Logic, than 
 with Caesar crossing the Rubicon, or Hannibal split- 
 ting the Alps with vinegar. More than penny-tarts, 
 more than games, he loved the novels of his boyhood. 
 " I trouble you to find such novels in the present 
 dav ! " he exclaims when, in his De fuventute^ he 
 glances back into the past. " O Scottish Chiefs, 
 didn't we weep over you ! O Mysteries of Udolpho, 
 didn't I and Briggs Minor draw pictures out of you ! " 
 In fact, his was the childhood proper to a writer of 
 
6 THACKERAY 
 
 romance, and if his career at school was undistin- 
 guished either by vice or virtue, it was by no means 
 fruitless. The young Thackeray was already observ- 
 ant, and not only did he know how to use his eyes, 
 but he could store up his experience. He, too, saw 
 the celebrated fight between Berry and Biggs; he, 
 too, rejoiced that at the I02d round Biggs, the bully, 
 failed to come up to time ; he, too, marvelled at the 
 dignity of the head-boy, whom he confidently be- 
 lieved would be Prime Minister of England, and who, 
 he was surprised to find in after-life, did not top six 
 feet. Like unnumbered others, he remembered the 
 time when the big boys wore moustaches and smoked 
 cigars, and he cherished the memory — this one unique 
 • — of " old Hawkins," the cock of the school, who 
 once thrashed a bargee at Jack Randall's in Slaughter 
 House Lane. In brief, he carried from the Charter- 
 house the true flavour of the place, and if he left 
 behind him all knowledge of the classics, he was 
 already more apt for literature than the famous head- 
 boy himself. 
 
 But he did not love the Charterhouse until he had 
 created it for himself. Not even the presence of such 
 friends as Liddell, Venables, and John Leech atoned 
 for Russell's savagery. The Doctor's eye was always 
 upon him, whom he denounced for " an idle, shuf- 
 fling, profligate boy," and in the last letter written 
 from school the boy desires nothing so much as a re- 
 lease from his bondage. " There are but three hun- 
 dred and seventy in the school," he wrote ; " I wish 
 there were only three hundred and sixty-nine." So 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL 7 
 
 in 1828 he said a joyous good-bye to the Doctor, to 
 Biggs and Berry and all the rest, and prepared him- 
 self with his stepfather's help to enter the University 
 of Cambridge. IVinity was his college, and William 
 Whewell was his tutor, and while he loved his col- 
 lege, he cherished neither sympathy nor respect for 
 the great man who wrote The Plurality of Worlds. 
 Crump, in The Snob Papers., the Grand Llama who 
 would not permit an undergraduate to sit down in his 
 presence, owes something to that Master of Trinity 
 whom Sir Francis Doyle called " God's greatest 
 work," and whom Thackeray attacked with a violence 
 that was neither humorous nor just. Moreover, his 
 brief sojourn at Cambridge — he stayed but four terms 
 — was undistinguished. It has been told a dozen 
 times how he was a bye-term man and took a fourth 
 class in his May, but these details are of no impor- 
 tance : it is enough to remember that he belonged to 
 as brilliant a set as has rarely illuminated either uni- 
 versity, and that at Trinity he made his first experi- 
 ments in literature. 
 
 The friend of Tennyson, FitzGerald, Monckton 
 Milnes, and Kinglake — to say nothing of John Allen, 
 Brookfield, and Kemble — was not likely to refrain his 
 hand from the English language, and Thackeray's 
 ambition was assured. It is characteristic that his 
 first step was in the direction of university journalism, 
 and he enhanced the vapid humour of The Snob ^ with 
 
 ' " The Snob, a Literary Journal, not conducted by members of 
 the University," was published by W. H. Smith of Rose Crescent 
 in 1829. Eleven numbers appeared, of which the first was dated 
 
8 THACKERAY 
 
 a few specimens of verse and prose. Timbuctoo, the 
 parody of a prize poem, is his, and he ingenuously 
 records how proud he was to hear it praised by those 
 who knew not its authorship. It is not a sparlcling 
 travesty ; indeed it is chiefly memorable because the 
 subject, given out for the Chancellor's Medal, sug- 
 gested a set of verses to Tennyson in which the 
 master's genius is already revealed. Thackeray's, 
 also, were the reflections of Dorothea Julia Ramsbot- 
 tom, while he claimed with a proper pride the simple 
 advertisement : " Sidney Sussex College. — Wanted a 
 few Freshmen ; please apply at the Buttery." 
 
 Once he had seen himself in print, Thackeray did 
 not pause, and he claimed an active share in The 
 Gownsman ' which followed The Snob. There is noth- 
 
 April 9. Lettsom and Brookfield are reputed to have been its 
 editors. In addition to the contributions mentioned above, Thack- 
 eray wrote a set of verses " To Genevieve," and is said to have 
 written the whole of No. 8, with the editor's help, in five hours. 
 Much ingenuity has been spent by bibliographers in detecting 
 Thackeray's hand here or there. But the ingenuity is wasted, 
 since the humour of Tie Snob does not even hold the promise of 
 better things. It should be noted that " snob " in the cant of 1829 
 meant a townsman, and that the little journal was not the herald 
 of The Snob Papers. 
 
 ' Of The Gownsman seventeen numbers were published, the first 
 on November 5, 1829, the last on February 25, 1830. A note in 
 Edward FitzGerald's copy of The Gownsman suggested that the 
 contributions signed 9 were from the hand of Thackeray. But the 
 matter was put beyond doubt by Mr. C. P. Johnson, who, writing 
 in The Athenceum, April 30, 1887, pointed out that the manuscript 
 of one of these contributions, a set of rhymes entitled " I'd be a 
 Tadpole," existed in Mr. Sabin's possession, written and signed by 
 Thackeray. All those, therefore, which are signed 9 may confi- 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 ing sparkling in its eighteen numbers, and the wonder 
 is that it survived two terms. Meanwhile more serious 
 projects engrossed him, and he destined a paper upon 
 The Revolt of Islam for The Chimara, a journal which 
 never made its appearance. But with that zest of life 
 which always distinguished him, he had other than 
 literary interests. In his second year, we are told, he 
 plunged into the many extravagances which presently 
 involved Pendennis in ruin, and, like Pendennis, he 
 profited enormously. Duns, no doubt, followed the 
 purveyors of little dinners up his chastened staircase, 
 and if he took his fate less tragically than Arthur Pen- 
 dennis, he, too, suffered remorse and embarrassment. 
 But the compensations were obvious. The friendships 
 which he made ended only with his life, and he must 
 have been noble, indeed, who was the friend of Alfred 
 Tennyson and of Edward FitzGerald. Moreover, 
 Cambridge taught him the literary use of the univer- 
 sity, as the Charterhouse had taught him the literary 
 use of a public school. In a few chapters of Penden- 
 nis he sketched the life of an undergraduate, which 
 has eluded all his rivals save only Cuthbert Bede. He 
 sketched it, moreover, in the true spirit of boyish ex- 
 travagance, which he felt at Cambridge, and preserved 
 even in the larger world of London ; and if Trinity 
 
 dently be ascribed to Thackeray, and it is highly probable that he 
 wrote others as well. Anthony Trollope, for instance, is doubtless 
 right in giving him credit for the general dedication : " To all 
 Proctors, past, present, and future, . . . whose taste it is our 
 privilege to follow, whose virtue it is our duty to imitate, whose 
 presence it is our interest to avoid." But the discussion is rather 
 curious than profitable. 
 
lO THACKERAY 
 
 and the rustling gown of Mr. Whewell had taught 
 him nothing more than this, he would not have con- 
 templated them in vain. 
 
 For Thackeray, while he had neglected scholarship, 
 had already learnt the more valuable lessons of life 
 and travel — lessons not one of which he forgot when 
 he sat him down to the composition of fiction. Paris 
 had always been familiar to him, and no sooner had 
 he made up his mind to leave Cambridge than he set 
 out — in 1830 — for Germany. He visited Weimar, 
 the quietude of whose tiny Court he celebrated when 
 he drew his sketch of Pumpernickel and its society ; 
 and there he gave himself up to the study of German 
 literature and to the worship of Goethe. Already his 
 head was full of literary schemes. He would trans- 
 late the German ballads into English, he would write 
 a treatise upon German manners : in brief, he adopted 
 and dismissed the innumerable projects which cloud 
 the brain of ambitious youth. But, what is more im- 
 portant, he made his first entry into " society," and he 
 saw Goethe. In Eraser's Magazine of January, 1840, 
 there are some Recollections of Germany which may 
 be ascribed to him, and in which are set forth the per- 
 turbation of a young student who confronts the pon- 
 tiff of letters for the first time. But a letter, addressed 
 to G. H. Lewes, presents a better picture, and proves 
 that a quarter of a century had not dimmed the youth- 
 ful impression. 
 
 " Five-and-twenty years ago," thus he wrote in 
 1855, " at least a score of young English lads used to 
 live at Weimar for study, or sport, or society : all of 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL 1 1 
 
 which were to be had in the friendly little Saxon 
 capital. The Grand Duke and Duchess received us 
 with the kindliest hospitality. The Court was splen- 
 did, but most pleasant and homely. We were invited 
 in our turn to dinners, balls, and assemblies there. 
 Such young men as had a right appeared in uniforms, 
 diplomatic and military. Some, I remember, invented 
 gorgeous clothing : the kind old Hof-Marschall of 
 those days. Monsieur de Spiegel (who had two of the 
 most lovely daughters eyes ever looked on), being in 
 no wise difficult as to the admission of these young 
 Englanders." So Thackeray spent his days in the 
 study of literature and in a pleasant hero-worship. 
 He purchased Schiller's sword, and he saw Goethe. 
 " Vidi tantum," said he ; "I saw him but three times." 
 But the image was ineffaceable. " Of course I re- 
 member well," again Thackeray speaks, " the per- 
 turbation of spirit with which, as a lad of nineteen, I 
 received the long-expected intimation that the Herr 
 Geheimrath would see me on such a morning. This 
 notable audience took place in a little ante-chamber 
 of his private apartments, covered all round with 
 antique casts and bas-reliefs. He was habited in a 
 long grey or drab redingote, with a white neckcloth 
 and a red ribbon in his buttonhole. He kept his hands 
 behind his back, as in Rauch's statuette. His com- 
 plexion was very bright, clear, and rosy. His eyes 
 extraordinarily dark, piercing, and brilliant. I felt 
 quite afraid before them, and recollect comparing 
 them to the eyes of the hero of a certain romance 
 called Melmoth the Wanderer." But Thackeray was 
 
12 THACKERAY 
 
 relieved to find that the great man spoke French with 
 not a good accent, was emboldened to send him 
 Eraser's Magaxine^ and heard with pride that he had 
 deigned to look at some of his drawings. The meet- 
 ing is a link in the unbroken chain of literary tradi- 
 tion, and it is not surprising that Thackeray should 
 have guarded a proud memory of the poet who lit the 
 torch of romanticism, then — in 1830 — dazzling the 
 eyes of Europe. 
 
 Meanwhile he was intent upon a profession. 
 Though only twenty he reflected that at that age his 
 father had seen five years' service, and the inaction 
 irked him. Accordingly he chose the law, and read 
 for a while in the chambers of Mr. Taprell, a well- 
 known conveyancer. But the study of deeds did not 
 long engross him. The few months which he spent 
 in London were devoted to the companionship of his 
 friends and to the practice of caricature. He smoked 
 pipes with FitzGerald and Tennyson, he frequented 
 the theatres with John Kemble, and under the aus- 
 pices of Charles Buller he presently got his first in- 
 sight into Radical politics. Indeed he gave his help 
 in canvassing Liskeard for his friend, who sat on the 
 Liberal side of the first reformed Parliament, and so 
 well did the Cornish electors remember him that they 
 would have elected him many years afterwards as their 
 representative. But he tired of politics as speedily as 
 of law, and went ofF to Paris to study painting and 
 French literature. And then came the opportunity 
 of journalism. He deserted the atelier of Gros (or 
 another) for the office of The National Standard^ and 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 13 
 
 henceforth, save for a brief interval, he followed the 
 trade of letters. 
 
 No writer has suffered more bitterly than Thack- 
 eray from the indiscreet zeal of admirers. Nothing 
 that he ever wrote has seemed to the bibliographers too 
 trivial for preservation. To " spot " his contribu- 
 tions to Eraser's and other magazines has become a 
 kind of parlour game for the cultured, and since his 
 death many pieces have been unearthed which he no 
 doubt was happy to forget. The injustice of this 
 practice is obvious. Thackeray had abundant time 
 in which to collect the work by which he chose to be 
 remembered, and no good purpose is served by the 
 pious ingenuity of those who bind up into books the 
 experiments in journalism overlooked by himself. 
 The excellence of Vanity Fair imparts no quality to 
 a set of articles contributed fifteen years previously to 
 a dead newspaper. However, it is now idle to ignore 
 hh juvenilia, and though they throw little light upon 
 his maturer works, as editors are wont to pretend, 
 it may be said that he emerges from a trying ordeal 
 far better than would the most of men. Literature 
 was in his blood ; he was born with a style which 
 was neither involved nor extravagant ; his apprentice- 
 ship to the other arts was an interlude ; and at an 
 age when most are wrestling with the stubbornness 
 of our English tongue, he was already proprietor and 
 editor of a newspaper. 
 
 Whatever we may think of the venture, we can 
 have no doubt of Thackeray's courage and enterprise. 
 To own and to edit a newspaper is always a desper- 
 
H 
 
 THACKERAY 
 
 ate hazard, more easily faced, it is true, with the 
 half-conscious recklessness of youth than with the 
 settled calm of maturer years. Now, Thackeray was 
 no more than twenty-one when he purchased and 
 managed The National Standard, a paper which had 
 survived eighteen numbers without distinction. Its 
 editor had been Mr. F. W. M. Bayley, and Thack- 
 eray noted the transference of responsibility with an 
 expected quip. " We have got rid of the old Bailey," 
 said he, " and changed the governor." The change 
 availed him as little as his energy. He not only 
 edited the paper — he wrote for it, he illustrated it, he 
 supplied it with foreign correspondence. Neither 
 his drawings nor his articles do him much credit. 
 They are youthful chiefly in their immaturity. No 
 doubt they appealed pleasantly to the taste of the 
 time at which they were written. The Romantic 
 movement in France had encouraged a love of whatever 
 was strange or supernatural, and we find Thackeray 
 caught up, against his wont, in the humour of the 
 moment. Now he is found translating Hoffman and 
 The Mahabarata, or sketching the Charruas Indians 
 at the inspiration of the ingenious Janin. Now he 
 essays a story of his own, and in The Devil 's IVager, 
 afterwards adapted for The Paris Sketchbook, proves 
 that he, commonly untouched by movements, felt at 
 least a side-wind of romanticism. But all in vain. 
 
 The National Standard was " hauled down," to 
 use his own phrase, after it had floated but a few 
 months in the breeze, and Thackeray, thrown back 
 upon painting, worked in the studios of Brine and 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL I5 
 
 Gros, or copied the Old Masters industriously in the 
 Louvre. Meantime he continued to make experi- 
 ments in literature, found his way to the office of 
 Eraser's Magazine, and was buying experience at not 
 too high a rate. His own experience was doubtless 
 that of Mr. Batchelor in Lovel the Widower. That 
 unfortunate gentleman, it will be remembered, pur- 
 chased The Museum from his friend Honeyman, who 
 " was in dreadful straits for money," and a " queer 
 wine-merchant and bill-discounter" named Sherrick. 
 Thackeray, like Batchelor, " gave himself airs as 
 editor" — that is certain. He, too, " proposed to ed- 
 ucate the public taste, to diffuse morality and sound 
 literature throughout the nation." But his fortune 
 was not yet exhausted ; the gutters of Fleet Street 
 still yawned ; and what had been saved from The Na- 
 tional Standard was presently engulfed by the hapless 
 Constitutional. 
 
 While Thackeray had squandered a part of his patri- 
 mony, his stepfather. Major Carmichael Smyth, had 
 made unlucky investments, and father and son, whose 
 equal friendship suggests the tie which bound Clive 
 Newcome to the Colonel, collaborated in founding 
 a Radical paper. Such heavy artillery as Grote and 
 Molesworth came to their aid, and the banner under 
 which they fought bore the proud title of The Constitu- 
 tional. Thackeray was appointed correspondent in 
 Paris, where for some six months he discharged his 
 duties in the proper spirit of Radicalism. No doubt 
 he was influenced by his journal ; no doubt the con- 
 pciousness that the austere Grote had his eye upon 
 
l6 THACKERAY 
 
 him encouraged him to dulness. But the truth is 
 that Thaciceray's letters to The Constitutional are par- 
 ticularly grave. They express the commonplaces of 
 his party. The misdemeanours of Louis Philippe 
 are sternly admonished, and the easy escape of Louis 
 Napoleon after the descent upon Strassburg naturally 
 suggests that there is one law for the rich and another 
 for the poor. Yet The Constitutional proves clearly 
 enough that Thackeray was a competent journalist. 
 His work may not be absolutely intelligent; it is 
 nevertheless remarkable that a man of twenty-five 
 should write with so stern a repression of himself. 
 The letters have very little fancy ; their style is of 
 the tamest ; and though Thackeray knew the temper 
 of the Parisians well enough, though he foresaw the 
 downfall of the Orleans family, his gift of prophecy 
 is not brilliant. But he had the trick of leader-writ- 
 ing, and had he not been a humourist, he might have 
 made the columns of The Times reverberate with its 
 own kind of thunder. 
 
 The downfall of The Constitutional xendicreA Thack- 
 eray penniless. The rupees gathered in India were 
 all dissipated in journalism and gambling. While 
 Fleet Street had swallowed much, the card-table had 
 also claimed its share. The fate of Mr. Dawkins, 
 who lost his fortune to the ingenious Mr. Deuceace, 
 had been Thackeray's own. " I have not seen that 
 man," he told Sir Theodore Martin of a gambler at 
 Spa, " since he drove me down in his cabriolet to my 
 banker's in the City, where I sold out my patrimony 
 and handed it over to him." But not only had he 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL 1 7 
 
 lost his patrimony ; he had incurred an added respon- 
 sibility, having married Miss Creagh Shawe, a lady of 
 Doneraile, at the British Embassy in Paris ; so that 
 in 1837, when he returned to London and the maga- 
 zines, he was no better ofF than other adventurers 
 who work for their bread. Indeed, as he told Mrs. 
 Brookfield, he once wrote with Longueville Jones in 
 Galignani' s Messenger for ten francs a-day, and he in- 
 stalled himself in Great Coram Street without a very 
 clear prospect of success. 
 
 But temperament and experience were in his 
 favour. He was far better equipped for the craft 
 of letters than the most of his contemporaries. He 
 knew something of the great world which lies beyond 
 Cambridge and London ; he had studied the life of 
 foreign cities ; and he had sojourned in no place 
 which had not contributed something to the material 
 of his art. Being no recluse, he had always mixed 
 freely with his fellows : he was as familiar with such 
 haunts as the Cider Cellars and the Coal Hole as with 
 the stolid mansions of Bloomsbury or the more ele- 
 gant palaces of Belgravia. The fact that at five-and- 
 twenty he had got rid of a comfortable fortune proves 
 that he faced life with a certain recklessness, and his 
 intelligence was warrant enough that the money had 
 not been squandered in vain. Nor was his tempera- 
 ment less happy than his education. Energy, cour- 
 age, and good spirits were his. In the letters of 
 FitzGerald you get a glimpse of him, pleasure-loving, 
 humorous, and alert. Now he is pouring contempt 
 upon the works of Raphael, now he is poking fun at 
 
1 8 THACKERAY 
 
 Spedding's venerable forehead, which he and Fitz- 
 Gerald "found somehow or other in all things, just 
 peering out of all things." Thackeray saw it in a 
 milestone. " He also drew the forehead rising with 
 a sober light over Mont Blanc, and reflected in the 
 Lake of Geneva." And his character, joyous and 
 confident, was not hidden from those who saw him. 
 It shines boldly in his aspect, as it is revealed by 
 Maclise in his drawing of the Fraserians. A big 
 burly man he was — Carlyle a few years later described 
 him as " a half-monstrous Cornish giant " — with a 
 mass of hair kempt or unkempt in the romantic 
 fashion, a high-stock about his neck, and an eye-glass 
 stuck insolently in his eye. Old for his years in looks 
 as in experience, he held his own with such captains 
 of the press as Lockhart and Maginn, and was ready 
 to engage in the violent warfare of letters with as fine 
 a spirit as any of them. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THACKERAY IN LONDON. THE TOWN AND TASTE OF 
 HIS TIME 
 
 When Thackeray came to seek his fortune in Lon- 
 don, Queen Victoria had just ascended the throne, but 
 the view of life generally known as Early Victorian 
 was already fashionable. The excesses of the Dandies 
 had suffered the natural reaction : elegance was re- 
 placed by a certain coarseness, of which an exagger- 
 ated sentimentality was a necessary part. Elegance 
 is apt to be heartless, while coarseness finds an excuse 
 in a noisy appeal to the more obvious emotions, and 
 the emotions of 1837 were neither subtle nor re- 
 strained. It was an age, in fact, which saw D'Orsay 
 disputing the sovereignty of Red Herrings, and which 
 found a satisfaction in unctuously deploring that 
 nobleman's lapses from the path of virtue. Com- 
 mercial prosperity, moreover, had diffused whatever 
 culture the epoch might boast, and the culture had 
 become all the thinner for the diffusion. Wealth, 
 divorced from manners and intelligence, marked the 
 rise to power of the great middle class, while rail- 
 ways^ drove the country still farther on the road to 
 
 ' Charles Greville describe; how, on July 18, 1837, he entered a 
 train for the first time. He records that " the first sensation is a 
 slight degree of nervousness, and a feeling of being run away 
 
 19 
 
20 THACKERAY 
 
 democracy. An increase in the number of clubs 
 proves that a desire of social success was general, and 
 assuredly the chronicler of snobs found his material 
 ready to his hand. P'or the vast fortunes acquired by 
 industry threatened to overshadow the eminence of 
 birth or talent, and the Young England movement, 
 which startled England some seven years later, was 
 but a protest of the upper and lower classes against 
 the domination of the prosperous and arrogant class 
 which came between them. 
 
 The popular amusements suiFered a like decay. 
 Eccentricity and exoticism seemed of higher account 
 than beauty and good sense. The Back Kitchen and 
 the Cave of Harmony, to give them Thackeray's own 
 titles, were the most eagerly frequented haunts of the 
 day, and though of their kind they were excellent, 
 they did not illustrate the virtue of elegance and re- 
 finement. But their sudden rise to popularity is an 
 interesting chapter in the history of manners, and no 
 writer has pictured them more vividly than Thackeray. 
 They were, like their age, strange mixtures of black- 
 guardism and sentiment. Heartrending allusions to 
 angels alternated in their songs with such pieces of 
 brutal realism as Sam Hall or The Body-Snatcher. 
 The celebrated Hodgen, who sang this blood-curdling 
 masterpiece to Pendennis and Warrington in the Back 
 Kitchen, appeared " sitting on a coffin, with a flask 
 
 with, but a sense of security soon supervenes, and the velocity is 
 delightful." He also tells us, with what to-day appears ingenuous- 
 ness, that an engineer was turned off by the company for going at 
 the rate of forty-five miles an hour. 
 
THACKERAY IN LONDON 21 
 
 of gin before him, with a spade, and a candle stuck 
 in a skull." The very glasses quivered on the table 
 as with terror, and no other singer had a chance 
 against the Snatcher. 
 
 The haunts themselves were appropriate to their 
 entertainment. They were commonly long rooms, 
 running along the first floor of public-houses, and 
 while the chairman smiled blandly at the end of a 
 long table, and flourished a portentous cigar, his cus- 
 tomers supped or sipped their brandy-and-water. For 
 many years there were no regular singers ; visitors 
 " obliged " as complaisantly as did Colonel Newcome 
 before his ears were shocked by ribaldry, and the few 
 artists engaged were content with three or four shil- 
 lings a-week, with a screw of tobacco thrown in. 
 Now and again, however, a star arose above the hori- 
 zon, a star such as the famous John W. Sharp,^ who 
 in Thackeray's day shone brilliantly upon the Cave 
 of Harmony. 'Jim Crow, as he sang it after the 
 American Rice, is still a splendid memory, and one 
 is not surprised that the chairman's announcement, 
 
 1 John W. Sharp was for long the King of the Concert-Room, 
 and Thackeray must have known him well. He made his first 
 appearance at Evans's in 1839, and attracted crowds thither for 
 some seven years. He shared a lodging at Hampstead with Labern, 
 a rascal who knew better than any of his contemporaries how to 
 write a popular song, and after the manner of their kind they 
 travelled the same road to the devil. During an interlude John 
 W. Sharp managed the Lord Nelson Music Hall in Euston 
 Square, where he sang the Corsican Brothers and Paul Pry in 
 character. He died m 1856, and was by far the most accom- 
 plished and engaging of his class. 
 
22 THACKERAY 
 
 " I claim your attention for a comic song from Mr. 
 Sharp," was greeted with immense applause. But, 
 like Mr. Hodgen, John W. Sharp retired presently to 
 Vauxhall Gardens ; and so long as the great Labern 
 was sober enough to write his songs, he triumphed 
 over all audiences with a daring mixture of savagery 
 and pathos, which is as intimately characteristic of 
 his age as the early romances of Sir Edward Bulwer. 
 
 The literary world differed little enough from the 
 world of society : for all its noble sentiments, it was 
 marked by bad taste and lack of restraint. The rep- 
 utation of Scott had got its second wind, so to say, 
 but the other great men were either forgotten or ill- 
 considered. Coleridge and Lamb belonged to the 
 previous generation, and Dickens was only just rising 
 above the horizon. Sketches by Boz had heralded a 
 new talent, and Pickwick was already on the road to 
 immortality. Indeed, Thackeray, as he confessed 
 many years afterwards at a dinner of the Royal 
 Academy, had carried a bundle of sketches up to 
 Furnivall's Inn after Seymour's suicide, and had ap- 
 plied to the youthful Dickens for the post of illus- 
 trator. But the year of Victoria's accession to the 
 throne held very little of hope or promise. Literature 
 had become less an art than a fashionable pastime. 
 Lord Byron had shown the world that a title was not 
 incompatible with genius, and many a sprig of nobility 
 thought that the certainty of genius resided in his 
 birth. That amusing humbug, Don Telesforo de 
 Trueba y Cosio, had startled the town with The In- 
 cognito^ or Sins and Peccadillos, while Lord Mulgrave 
 
THACKERAY IN LONDON 
 
 23 
 
 hoped that his title might atone for such stuff as 
 Matilda and The Contrast. Sir Egerton Brydges had 
 proved that mechanical industry might turn out son- 
 nets, or achieve epics, while Sir Edward Bulwer was 
 eloquently testifying that nothing was impossible to a 
 new-made baronet. Even the Dandies were incom- 
 plete if they had put no volume to their credit, and 
 it redounds to the honour of the peerless D'Orsay 
 that he did not essay literature as well as the other 
 arts. 
 
 For Lady Blessington's industry an ample excuse 
 may be found : hers was the facility of a sanguine 
 Irish brain, and in the Keepsakes and Books of Beauty 
 she crystallised the prevailing taste with an ingenious 
 lack of humour. In truth, no age ever parodied 
 itself more prettily than did this one in its vapid 
 bundles of poetry and portraiture. The lady who 
 languished in a " bertha " worried the Muses with the 
 same careless effrontery as the fop who ruffled it in 
 the coats of Stultz. And if perchance an author 
 might boast no title, there were nobles enough among 
 the characters of a popular novel to fill the House of 
 Lords or pack the country houses of England. In 
 Miss Landon's Ethel Churchill — -to take a casual in- 
 stance — the reader is introduced to Lord Wharton, 
 to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, to Alexander Pope 
 himself, and it was Ethel Churchill which Thackeray 
 himself approved with more than half his heart in the 
 savage columns of Eraser's. 
 
 But mixed up with the popular gentility was a keen 
 enjoyment of " low life." The coarseness in man- 
 
24 
 
 THACKERAY 
 
 ners which, I have said, is the natural companion of 
 sentimentality, was equally matched by a coarseness 
 in literature. Pelham is not content to be a " gentle- 
 man " ; he must also patter the flash ; and while the 
 hero masqueraded as a cracksman, so the cracksman 
 seemed a hero to the sentimental novelist. " The 
 ruffian cly thee Guinea Pig, for stashing the lush " is 
 as intimately a part of Bulwer's work as such exam- 
 ples of hysteria as, " O that woman's love ! how 
 strong it is in its weakness ! how beautiful in its 
 guilt ! " But Ainsworth played the game with more 
 fancy, and with a better success than Bulwer. For 
 Ainsworth's highwaymen are all marvels of sensi- 
 bility ; his very housebreakers crack their cribs with 
 the best of motives, and wipe away a tear of heart- 
 broken regret as they go ofF with the swag. 
 
 And side by side with a fiction made ridiculous by 
 false sentiment, there flourished a method of criticism 
 which knew no sentiment at all. Bulwer was noth- 
 ing if not genteel ; there was little gentility in 
 Macaulay or Croker, in Lockhart or Maginn. Such 
 critics as these attacked their victim with the gloves 
 off, nor did they hesitate to punish literary incom- 
 petence with a ferocity which the worst vices might 
 have inspired. Flouts and gibes were better to their 
 purpose than solid argument, and on occasion the 
 best of them did not shrink from gross personalities. 
 Lockhart, " the Scorpion that delighteth to sting the 
 faces of men," had the prettiest method, while Croker 
 outdid them all, even Maginn himself, in brutality. 
 The Secretary to the Admiralty, not content with charg- 
 
THACKERAY IN LONDON 25 
 
 ing Lady Morgan with " licentiousness, profligacy, 
 irreverence, blasphemy, libertinism, disloyalty, and 
 atheism," topped it all by calling her " a female Me- 
 thuselah." And if Maginn's savage attack upon 
 Grantley Berkeley were abundantly justified, no one 
 can help regretting the bad manners wherewith it was 
 conducted. 
 
 But the ferocity of the early Victorian critics is 
 easily explained. Party spirit ran high, and neither 
 Tory nor Whig could discover a speck of worth in 
 his opposite. While The Edinburgh was steadfast in 
 the opinion that Tories were as destitute of literary 
 talent as of moral rectitude, Blackwood' s^ Eraser's, and 
 The ^arterly were prepared to slaughter Whig poets 
 and Whig politicians in the name of patriotism. 
 Macaulay's onslaught upon Croker's Boswell is su- 
 perior in taste alone to Croker's own bludgeonings, 
 and the worst of Hazlitt's excesses did not justify the 
 monstrous contempt of Maginn and his band.* 
 Moreover, there is another excuse for the insolence 
 which prevailed. The best of the critics were scholars 
 
 ' The savagery which was popular when Thackeray came to 
 London was no new thing. The critics had been straining their 
 vocabulary for more than five-and-twenty years. Maginn, writing 
 to William Blackwood in 1823, says of Hazlitt, "You have called 
 him pimpled, affected, ignorant, a Cockney scribbler, etc., but 
 what is that to what he has said of the most brilliant men of the 
 age ? Hook-nosed Wellington, vulture-beaked Southey, hanging- 
 browed Croker, down-looking Jack Murray, and Mudford fat as 
 fleecy-hosiery." Here the advantage is on Hazlitt's side. But 
 the habit of abuse had not grown weaker with time, and it 
 culminated in Fraser's Magazine. 
 
26 THACKERAY 
 
 and men of taste, who were not unnaturally lashed to 
 fury at the praises ignobly lavished upon amateurs. 
 Whenever they remembered that literature and 
 politics were not indissolubly connected, their slash- 
 ings were justified, and it may wisely be pleaded in 
 their defence that they held aloft the banner of their 
 calling. Their most heinous fault, then, was a fault 
 of manners, not of intelligence, and the memory of 
 such critics as Hazlitt and Macaulay, Lockhart and 
 Maginn, will be secure when the names of many 
 victims whose vanity they ridiculed are lost in 
 oblivion. Had it not been for The Edinburgh who 
 would ever have heard of Montgomery .? 
 
 Such was the world of letters into which Thackeray 
 came, and his attitude from the first was an attitude 
 of protest, as, indeed, we should expect of a writer 
 whose humour and outlook, when they were not his 
 own, were borrowed from the eighteenth century. 
 It was a strange accident that enrolled him under 
 Eraser's flag ; but though he was a Whig fighting on 
 the side of High-Toryism, he remained loyal at once 
 to himself and his colleagues. His criticism was 
 seldom coloured by his environment. Maybe he 
 praised Miss Landon, who was a favourite of 
 Maginn's, more highly than he would have done, had 
 he enjoyed the freedom of another magazine. It is 
 possible that had he written elsewhere he would not 
 have detected "a hundred beautiful poems " in Ethel 
 Churchill ; but it chimed exactly with his taste and 
 temper to demolish Bulwer and Ainsworth, and them 
 he demolished with the best of spirits. However, it 
 
THACKERAY IN LONDON 
 
 27 
 
 was probably the influence of Maginn which attracted 
 Thackeray to Eraser's. He had met this gay and 
 dashing free-lance as early as 1832, so that when he 
 began gravely to write for the magazines the ac- 
 quaintance was already of some years' standing. At 
 the outset he was charmed, like many another, with 
 the brilliant talk and enthusiastic scholarship of 
 Maginn, who taught him, he tells us, to appreciate 
 Homer, and engaged him to read a passage every 
 day. 
 
 But not only had he known Maginn ; when he re- 
 turned to London in 1837 he had already tried his 
 pen in the pages of Regina., as the initiate were 
 pleased to call the magazine. His contributions to 
 Eraser's have not all been identified, and perhaps it 
 is as well they should be left hidden where they 
 admirably served their turn. Yet there is little doubt 
 that Elizabeth Brownrigge : a Tale, in which the lusus 
 natura school of literature, and its prime example, 
 Eugene Aram, are burlesqued, is from Thackeray's 
 hand. It betrays his touch in matter as in manner ; 
 and since it was published, in 1832, a few months 
 after his early meeting with Maginn, it must e'en have 
 been composed in a first flush of enthusiasm. A 
 piece or two followed in 1834 and 1835, and, as has 
 been said, Thackeray appears in Maclise's group of 
 the Fraserians ; but from 1837 onwards he is stead- 
 fast in loyalty, and after that year Oliver Yorke had 
 no better supporter. 
 
 He wrote under many names, by this time familiar 
 — M. A. Titmarsh, Jeames Yellowplush, Fitz-- 
 
28 THACKERAY 
 
 Boodle, Dolly Duster, and what not. He turned his 
 facile hand to anything : stories, criticism of books 
 and pictures, correspondence from Paris — he managed 
 them all with gaiety and address. The sentimental 
 ruffian was the favourite object of his attack, and it 
 is not strange that the champion of Fielding's irony 
 should run atilt at Bulwer and Ainsworth. Now he 
 throws his criticism into the shape of a story, now he 
 lets Jeames Yellowplush wield the tomahawk for 
 him. He was savage, like his colleagues — too savage, 
 he afterwards confessed to Bulwer with an apology ; 
 but it must be said in his defence that time has amply 
 justified whatever savagery he displayed. Oddly 
 enough, it was the painters who found the greater 
 ofFence in his criticism, and they were angry without 
 warrant.' For never was there a more amiable and 
 misguided judge of the pictorial art. Yet Thackeray 
 had painted in the studios, he had copied in the 
 Louvre, he was indefatigable in the illustration of 
 what he saw. But he took no more into a picture- 
 gallery than a trick of picturesque prose, a faculty of 
 indiscreet appreciation, much prudery, and a good 
 heart. 
 
 The sentiment with which he examined a picture 
 was irreproachable ; the keenness wherewith he looked 
 through the paint and canvas to the purpose behind it 
 is miraculous; "the intention of Mulready's Seven 
 Agei" says he, " is godlike." He protests, like the 
 Early Victorian that he was, against Etty's nudity : a 
 Sleeping Nymph he finds so naked " as to be unfit for 
 • See FitzGerala's Letters (1894), vol. i. p. 193. 
 
THACKERAY IN LONDON 
 
 79 
 
 appearance among respectable people at an exhibition." 
 Alas, for the respectable people of 1838 ! But not 
 only does he espy the disease ; he discovers a remedy : 
 " A large curtain of fig-leaves should be hung over 
 every one of Etty's pictures, and the world should 
 pass on, content to know that there are some glorious 
 colours beneath." That is prudishness reduced to the 
 absurd. One doubts whether even the respectable 
 Victorians would have found pleasure in the knowl- 
 edge that somewhere or other a mass of glorious 
 colour was covered by fig-leaves. But Etty " offended 
 propriety " as badly as David or Girodet, and there 
 was an end on't. 
 
 However, if Etty was rather too " human," the 
 classics were not human enough, and Thackeray's 
 scorn of the cold, marmoreal Greeks was eloquent 
 even for his age. The Gothic cult, encouraged by 
 the Romantic movement, inspired him to an excess of 
 zeal, to an outbreak of sentiment, which to-day are 
 hardly intelligible. " The contemplation of such 
 specimens of Greek art as we possess hath always, to 
 tell the truth, left us in a state of unpleasant wonder- 
 ment and perplexity. It carries corporeal beauty to a 
 pitch of painful perfection, and deifies the body and 
 bones truly ; but, by dint of sheer beauty, it leaves 
 humanity altogether inhuman — quite heartless and 
 passionless." Thus Thackeray at a moment when 
 we " possessed " the Elgin Marbles ! Mere beauty, 
 in his view, should be fig-leaved as tightly as mere 
 colour, and the world be free to admire the school 
 which teaches that " love is the first and highest ele- 
 
3° 
 
 THACKERAY 
 
 merit of beauty in art." Nor is this the worst ; his 
 hint to amateurs concerning pictures and their merits 
 is, " Look to have your heart touched by them." So, 
 too, he finds a picture by Eastlake " as pure as a Sab- 
 bath hymn sung by the voices of children," and would 
 reserve " one of the best places in the gallery " for 
 the coldly chaste productions of Ary Scheffer. With 
 the same sentimentality of purpose he thinks William 
 Hunt as good as Hogarth, and objects to Delacroix 
 with the irrelevant question, " What's the use of be- 
 ing uncomfortable?" "Skill and handling are great 
 parts of a painter's trade, but heart is the first," thus 
 he sums up the question ; " this is God's direct gift 
 to him, and cannot be got in any academy, or under 
 any master ; " and never elsewhere does he more 
 clearly acknowledge the limitations imposed upon him 
 by his age. Many months passed in the studios of 
 Paris had taught him no more than a jargon which 
 Ruskin adopted as his own, and the appreciation of a 
 certain M. Biard, whose " Slave Trade " — now hap- 
 pily forgotten — seems to have shaken London to its 
 very foundations. But the criticism of painting did 
 not long engross Thackeray, who was trying his hand 
 at the art of fiction, and who had already won the 
 praise of his friends, though the approval of the peo- 
 ple, in his own view the best judges, was withheld 
 for a weary ten years. 
 
 But if his stories did not please the people, they 
 afi^orded the best possible training to himself. Not 
 only did they give him the experience which he 
 lacked, but they were, so to say, sketches for his 
 
THACKERAY IN LONDON 
 
 31 
 
 larger works. The same characters, the same names, 
 the same situations were afterwards used by him with 
 more conspicuous success. A Shabby Genteel Story 
 grew into Philip, and though the process is not always 
 so clearly visible, the stories contributed obscurely to 
 Eraser's and The New Monthly were the germs of the 
 novels which won for Thackeray his fame and name. 
 But the stories are best worth studying, because they 
 prove that he was at the outset inspired by the views 
 which characterised his maturer talent. A strange 
 mixture of contemptuous irony and that particular 
 kind of sentimentalism known as Early Victorian, he 
 seems to snigger behind his sobs, and to weep under 
 the secure cover of contemptuous irony. The worst 
 is that he could not, either early or late, keep his two 
 methods separate, so that while his pathos does not 
 melt the wise to tears, his irony is seldom sustained at 
 a perfect level. Catherine^ for instance, is excused 
 on the ground that it was'written "to counteract the 
 injurious influence of some popular fictions of the 
 day,, which made heroes of highwaymen and burglars, 
 and created a false sympathy for the vicious and crim- 
 inal." But if the excuse strikes a false note, what 
 shall we say of a writer who, in attempting an ironic 
 presentation, declares that " though we are only in the 
 third chapter of this history, we feel almost sick of 
 the characters that appear in it, and the adventures 
 which they are called upon to go through " ? 
 
 1 Catherine appeared in Fraser's Magazine in 1 839-40, and was 
 not published in a book until 1869, when it was included in volume 
 22 of the Library Edition. 
 
32 
 
 THACKERAY 
 
 Such a confession as this produces precisely the 
 effect which Thackeray wishes to avoid. It intro- 
 duces an element of morality into a scene which is 
 only reputable if moral and immoral have changed 
 places. Fielding in 'Jonathan Wild lashes no other 
 character with the scorn of his disapproval than 
 Heartfree, whose behaviour is " low and pitiful," and 
 whose wretched soliloquy is properly described as 
 " full of low and base ideas, without a syllable of 
 greatness." In truth, irony can only exist in a uni- 
 form atmosphere : given Fielding's definition of great- 
 ness, 'Jonathan Wild is a masterpiece of wit. But 
 introduce into that masterpiece digressions upon right 
 and wrong in their usual acceptation, and you get a 
 confusion of epithets, an inextricable jumble of two 
 languages. Now, this is the too frequent fault of 
 Thackeray's experiments in irony : by suddenly 
 changing the atmosphere of his stories, he involves 
 himself in the same charge, which he brings with some 
 justice against Bulwer and Ainsworth. So often does 
 he halt between the two methods of expression, that 
 his meaning, doubtful to himself, is obscure to others. 
 More than once he discusses Catherine as though she 
 were not an instrument of irony but a living person. 
 He confesses that the story was " a mistake all 
 through. It was not made disgusting enough ; 
 . the author had a sneaking kindness for his 
 heroine, and did not like to make her quite worthless." 
 
 But the true ironist is impartial : he should permit 
 no hint to escape him of kindness or disgust ; he 
 should put the crimes of his hero or heroine in the 
 
THACKERAY IN LONDON 
 
 light of achievements ; and he should rise superior to 
 the temptation of commentary. If in one sense 
 Catherine is not disgusting enough, in another it is too 
 disgusting. The author's intermittent partiality in- 
 creases the realism of the story, and that which should 
 be merely intellectual wears a semblance of morality. 
 Nor did Thackeray make the best of his material : 
 the life of Catherine Hayes, " the traitoress of Bir- 
 mingham," as it is told in the bald simplicity of The 
 Newgate Calendar, grips a firmer hold upon the fancy 
 than Thackeray's satire, which is chiefly interesting 
 as a step on the road towards the excellence of Barry 
 Lyndon. For Catherine Hayes was a very real per- 
 sonage, who murdered her weak, adoring husband with 
 a cold-blooded atrocity rare even in the eighteenth 
 century, and who was burned alive for " petty trea- 
 son " in 1726. Yet though the story was thus faith- 
 fully founded upon fact, it was construed as a delib- 
 erate attack upon Miss Catherine Hayes, the Irish 
 singer, and the Press of Ireland was fiercely indignant. 
 In a ballad, which he wrote at the time, and sent 
 many years after to Miss Procter, Thackeray cele- 
 brated the episode : 
 
 " A Saxon who thinks that he dthraws 
 Our porthraits as loike as two pays, 
 Insulted one day without cause 
 Our innocent singer, Miss Hayes. 
 
 " And though he meant somebody else 
 (At layst so the raycreant says, 
 Declaring that history tells 
 
 Of another, -a. wicked Miss Hayes), 
 
34 
 
 THACKERAY 
 
 " Yet Ireland, the free and the brave. 
 
 Says, what's that to do with the case ? 
 How dare he, the cowardly slave, 
 To mintion the name of a Hayes ? 
 »*♦*** 
 " The Freeman in language refined. 
 
 The Post whom no prayer can appayse, 
 Lashed fiercely the wretch who maligned 
 The innocent name of a Hayes. 
 ****** 
 " Accursed let his memory be, 
 
 Who dares to say aught in dispraise 
 Of Oireland, the land of the free, 
 
 And of beauty and janius and Hayes." 
 
 Nor did the trouble end here. Some ten years later a 
 set of young Irishmen ^ determined that Thackeray 
 had made a deliberate attempt to ruin their distin- 
 guished countrywoman ; and in revenge they deputed 
 a young gentleman to take lodgings opposite the nov- 
 elist's house, and await an opportunity of chastising 
 him. But Thackeray carried the war into the ene- 
 my's camp : he called upon the enraged Irishman, 
 told him the true history of the wicked Catherine 
 Hayes, and sent him back to Ireland without a thought 
 of revenge in his head. The anecdote is character- 
 istic of either side, and is the pleasantest incident in 
 the career, real or imagined, of Catherine Hayes. 
 Burlesque is bastard brother to irony, and if The 
 
 ' This suggestion to horsewhip Thackeray was made after a ref- 
 erence to Catherine Hayes in Pendeiiitis ; but the real offence was 
 committed in the earlier story, and therefore it is most properly 
 discussed here. See Hfortiing Chronicle, April 12, 1850, Callers 
 and Anchovies, a piece of controversy in Thackeray's best maimer. 
 
THACKERAY IN LONDON 
 
 35 
 
 Tremendous Adventures of Major Gahagan are bur- 
 lesque at its maddest, the two methods are agreeably 
 blended in The Tellowplush Papers, which also first 
 sparkled in the pages of Eraser's. Now, when Jeames 
 is a pseudonym for the author, he is nothing more 
 than an excuse for bad spelling. (In his inception he 
 was called Charles, but it was as Jeames that he rose to 
 grandeur, and should be remembered.) His views are 
 the views not of a flunkey, but of Thackeray himself. 
 His Letters to the Literati, for instance, throw no light 
 upon his character, they mark no point in his prog- 
 ress. They do but assail the " Honrabble Barnet " 
 in terms of deeper contempt than Thackeray would 
 have used, had he written in his own name and with 
 his own pen. We may therefore dismiss all those 
 essays in which the name of Yellowplush is usurped, 
 and consider only such pages as throw the light of 
 autobiography upon the ingenious flunkey. 
 
 Jeames, indeed, is an engaging figure, and no sooner 
 does he step upon the stage than he wins our sym- 
 pathy. For he, too, is painted in the colours of irony, 
 and owes something of his character to the Dean of 
 St. Patrick's. It has been said that he was drawn, as 
 he appeared in Buckley Square, after Mr. Foster, the 
 gentleman who for many years contributed the Fash- 
 ionable Intelligence to The Morning Post. But this is 
 incredible : from the first day that he encountered Mr. 
 Altamont, he has the makings of a genuine flunkey, 
 whom you could not match outside the famous Direc- 
 tions to Servants. At the outset he adopted the right 
 attitude of snobbery towards his own kind — " them 
 
36 
 
 THACKERAY 
 
 poor disrepattable creatures" he loftily calls them. 
 No sooner does he take service with Mr. Deuceace 
 than he reveals a sound knowledge of his craft. 
 " When you carry up a dish of meat," — thus the foot- 
 man is enjoined by Swift, — " dip your fingers in the 
 sauce, or lick it with your tongue, to try whether it 
 be good, and fit for your master's table." And Jeames 
 had already turned this philosophy into practice. 
 " There wasn't a bottle of wine," says he, " that we 
 didn't get a glass out of, nor a pound of sugar that we 
 didn't have some lumps of it." " We had keys to all 
 the cubbards — we pipped into all the letters that kern 
 and went — we pored over all the bill-files — we'd the 
 best pickens out of the dinners, the livvers of the 
 fowls, the forcemit balls out of the soup, the egs 
 from the sallit." All this they had as their rights, for 
 " a suvvant's purquisits is as sacred as the laws of 
 Hengland." 
 
 But if Jeames knew his rights, he knew also his 
 master's character. The Honrabble Halgernon was 
 a gambler and a swindler — that his servant saw ; but 
 he recognised that rank and birth can warrant the 
 last enormity. Yellowplush, then, is already a true 
 footman in Miss Shunt's Husband, that story of a 
 taboo, which may best be described as a modern 
 Cupid and Psyche, and he is a still finer expert in Mr. 
 Deuceace" s Amours. But it is not until he signs him- 
 self Fitz James de la Pluche * that he does perfect 
 
 ' The earlier series of Yellowplush Papers was printed in Fraser's 
 Magazine in 1837-38, and republished in the Comic Tales and 
 Sketches of 1841. The Diary of C. Jeames de la Pluche did not 
 
THACKERAY IN LONDON 
 
 37 
 
 justice to his talents. At last he was in the situation 
 which the author was best pleased to depict. He 
 was rising from one world to another, he was desert- 
 ing the servants'-hall for the drawing-room, and ex- 
 changing the fidelity of Mary Ann for the sly con- 
 tempt of Lady Angelina. He had become as fierce 
 a gambler as Mr. Deuceace himself; but it was not 
 the cards that tempted him — it was the railroads of 
 England ; and he played with such brilliant luck that 
 before long he was " a landed propriator — a Deppaty 
 Leftnant — a Capting." Under the auspices of his 
 friend. Lord Bareacres, he is presented at Court, 
 wearing upon his handsome brow the Halbert 'At — 
 " an 'at which is dear to the memory of hevery 
 Brittn ; an 'at which was invented by my Feald 
 Marshle, and adord Prins." However, the fall in 
 railway-stock is too much for the heroic de la Pluche : 
 with a note of warning against time-bargains, he re- 
 tires from the business of speculation, and settles 
 down with the still faithful Mary Hann at the " Wheel 
 of Fortune 'Otel." His name is simple Jeames 
 Plush once more, and he comes off better than most 
 upstarts. But his humour grows with the years, and 
 proves that Thackeray was a more highly accom- 
 plished master of his material in 1845 than when he 
 first came upon the town. 
 
 appear in Punch until 1845-46, and having been published by 
 Appleton of New York in 1853, first found its way into a volume, 
 on this side the Atlantic, in the Library Edition of 1869. But 
 since the later is a development of the earlier work, they are con- 
 sidered together in this place. 
 
38 
 
 THACKERAY 
 
 But the sentimental stories which he contributed in 
 these early days to the magazines are yet more closely 
 characteristic of his talent, yet more loudly prophetic 
 of what he was presently to achieve. In A Shabby 
 Genteel Story ^ the snob, as he saw him, is already 
 triumphant. Already he can exclaim with rapture, 
 " O, free and happy Britons, what a miserable, truck- 
 ling, cringing race ye are ! " Already he is eloquent 
 in denunciation of the tuft-hunter, the lick-spittle, the 
 sneak, " the man of a decent middle rank, who affects 
 to despise it, and herds only with persons of the 
 fashion." The author's suspicion of snobbishness is 
 too alert, as it was in the after-time ; his censure of 
 the harmless vanity displayed by foolish men and 
 women is too savage; the pretensions of Mrs. Gann 
 are treated with too heavy a hand. But in A Shabby 
 Genteel Story we see the beginning of a talent, ex- 
 ercised in the direction which it would always take, 
 and misapplied with a wilfulness which was con- 
 stant. Between A Shabby Genteel Story and Philip 
 are many works worthily accomplished ; yet a 
 comparison of the two proves that what Thack- 
 eray was in 1840 that he remained in 1861. His 
 style had gained an immeasurable ease ; his view of 
 life was more settled, if no less sentimental. But the 
 same drama still attracted him : he was still happiest 
 in the contemplation of the petty problems which 
 agitate the minds of snobs, and so profound was his 
 consistency that he closed his career with the same 
 
 ' This story was published in Fraser's Magazine in 1840, and 
 reprinted in the Miscellanies of 1855-57. 
 
THACKERAY IN LONDON 
 
 39 
 
 gospel wherewith twenty years before he had com- 
 menced it. 
 
 A better story both in style and composition is The 
 History of Samuel Titmarsh and the Great Hoggarty 
 Diamond} Here, at any rate, is a promise of the best 
 that was to come ; here, at last, is something besides 
 gaiety of heart and a sense of social contrast. Of 
 course the social contrast is still the essence of the 
 story, but the humour and pathos, which particularly 
 distinguished Thackeray, are agreeably blended, and 
 there is undoubtedly a freshness in the telling that 
 should have pleased the jaded taste of the time. 
 However, the positive achievement of Thackeray's 
 early experiments in fiction is not great ; the most of 
 them might well have been forgotten, and forgotten 
 they would have been, had not a tiresome fashion 
 of curiosity necessitated, as I have said, the patient 
 collection of the odds and ends contributed to the 
 magazines. But though at the moment they brought 
 their author no fame and little profit, they were not 
 written in vain. Even had they been lost, they would 
 still have served their purpose in sharpening the tools 
 which he would presently use with greater ease and 
 skill. 
 
 Above all, they show that Thackeray was not pip- 
 ing to the tune of the time. Andrea Fitch, in A 
 Shabby Genteel Story, is a true child of 1830, Spanish 
 cloak, fragrant Oronoko and all ; there are traces of 
 
 ' The Great Hoggarty Diamond made its first appearance in 
 Fraser's Magazine in 1 84 1, and was published as a book eight 
 years later. 
 
4© THACKERAY 
 
 French influence in his contributions to The National 
 Standard; but for the rest Thackeray cared as little 
 for the Romantic Movement as for the performances 
 of Bulwer and Ainsworth. As Dickens went back 
 to the life of an earlier age, to our English lanes and 
 English inns, so Thackeray sought inspiration in an 
 earlier literature, and is far more closely related to 
 Goldsmith and Fielding than to his fantastic contem- 
 poraries. He seems to have come straight out of the 
 eighteenth century, and to have blotted from his 
 sight the pearls of fancy with which his contempora- 
 ries adorned their works. It is not wonderful, there- 
 fore, that he did not command popularity. A gener- 
 ation which delighted in titled authors and ruffianly 
 heroes took small pleasure in the sentimental sim- 
 plicity of The Great Hoggarty Diamond^ nor are you 
 surprised that the publishers of the magazine in 
 which it appeared demanded of its author a speedy 
 termination. But, for all that, Thackeray was not 
 discouraged. His buoyant temper could easily sup- 
 port the disdain of the people, especially as his friends 
 were eager in appreciation. The chastened approval 
 of FitzGerald, given to few, was surely enough to 
 justify high hopes of the future, especially since Ten- 
 nyson and Carlyle agreed with FitzGerald. Ster- 
 ling, no doubt, overdid his praise, when he wondered 
 whether Fielding or Goldsmith had done better than 
 The Great Hoggarty Diamond; but at least he had 
 noted Thackeray's inspiration, and saw in which di- 
 rection his friend's talent should develop. 
 
 So the year 1841 found Thackeray with an empty 
 
THACKERAY IN LONDON 41 
 
 pocket, yet rich in the applause of his friends and in 
 the qualified approval of magazine-editors. But a 
 blow had fallen upon him, which literary success 
 could not soften. His wife, to whom he had been 
 married but a few short years, fell suddenly ill, and 
 though Thackeray hoped for a recovery until 1844, 
 she did not leave the maison de sant'e to which she had 
 been entrusted, and was never restored to health. 
 That Thackeray never ceased to mourn his broken 
 life is certain. " Though my marriage was a wreck," 
 he wrote long afterwards, " I would do it over again, 
 for behold love is the crown and completion of all 
 earthly good." Nor was his wife's illness the only 
 sorrow which beset him. An infant daughter had 
 died in the year before, an event to which there is a 
 touching reference in The Great Hoggarty Diamond, 
 while poverty intensified the melancholy of a reserved 
 and sensitive man. Thus Thackeray's period of ex- 
 periment ended in sorrow and ill-success, for which 
 he would have been the last to claim a general sym- 
 pathy. So far as one can tell from the scanty refer- 
 ences in FitzGerald's Letters and elsewhere, he was 
 resolute to hide his troubles from his friends, and he 
 sought in work and travel the surest solace of all. 
 Those near to him knew the courage with which he 
 bore the assaults of adverse fortune ; but as he says 
 himself, " such things are sacred and secret," and a 
 stranger " has no business to place them on paper for 
 all the world to read." 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE PICTURESQUE REPORTER BARRY LYNDON 
 
 We are nowadays so intimately acquainted with 
 the picturesque reporter, that we can hardly believe 
 in a time when he was not. He is the favourite of 
 the daily press, the one serious rival to the popular 
 novelist. He may be discovered, note-book in hand, 
 wherever steamboat or railroad can carry him. Now 
 he is greedily intent upon information ; now his aim 
 is to capture such random reflections as grow, like 
 wild-flowers, in the hedgerow. But whether it be 
 thought or fact which engages his mind, the result is 
 most often both trivial and transitory. He has sel- 
 dom the tact or the leisure to see, and he is perforce 
 content with hasty generalisations. He mistakes 
 that which happens once for an invariable circum- 
 stance, and an impolite porter is enough to involve 
 in a common charge a whole nation. So that while 
 the literature of " tourism " is ever increasing, it can- 
 not inflate our breasts with pride. But when Thack- 
 eray published his Paris Sketch Book^ in 1840, it was 
 
 1 The Sketch Book is a medley of fiction, politics, and criticism, 
 which had, with few exceptions, already seen the light in The 
 National Standard, in Fraser's Magazine, and elsewhere. Most 
 of the stories betray their origin. A Caution to Travellers, for 
 instance, describes the sorrows of an Englishman, who falls among 
 thieves in a Parisian gambling hell, and describes these sorrows 
 42 
 
THE PICTURESQUE REPORTER 43 
 
 happily rare. True, the fashion had been set in the 
 decline of the eighteenth century by the nascent ro- 
 manticism of Gray. True, two men of conspicuous 
 talent had cast a curious eye upon France twenty 
 years before the revolution. Sterne had crossed the 
 Channel, that he might embroider his own sentimen- 
 tality upon the fringe of what was then a foreign 
 country ; while Smollett had journeyed to Nice, that 
 he might find health for himself, and might at his 
 leisure record the habits and customs of his neigh- 
 bours. After Sterne and Smollett came Arthur Young, 
 that austere farmer who would have planted Cham- 
 bord with turnips, whose thoughts were so easily di- 
 verted from the palaces of the great to drill-ploughs 
 and harrows, and who, nevertheless, foresaw the 
 coming reign of terror, which had been suspected by 
 none save himself and Lord Chesterfield. But 
 
 in terms which have been familiar ever since the publication in 
 1777 of La Quinzaine Angloise d Paris, ou I' Art de s'y ruiner en 
 peu de terns. To this " ouvrage posthume du docteur Stearne " 
 Thackeray ovees at least one scene in his story, unless we admit 
 that such scenes have been the common property of fiction since the 
 flood. In Little Poinsinet, again, Thackeray has drawn in ex- 
 travagant colours a poor poet, who once enjoyed a certain celeb- 
 rity, and who having fallen into abject poverty, drowned himself. 
 Casanova came across him more than once in his pilgrimage 
 through life, saved him from a watery grave in the Tiber, merely 
 that a few years later the Guadalquivir might engulf him. In 
 Casanova's phrase Poinsinet was " un tout petit jeune horame, laid, 
 plein de feu, plaisant, et qui avait du talent pour le scene." 
 Thackeray sets him in another light, which was doubtless tradi- 
 tional. As for Thackeray's Cartouche, he belongs less to history 
 than to fancy and the chap-books. But he is a lively vagabond all 
 the same. 
 
44 THACKERAY 
 
 Thackeray did not need to go back to the eighteenth 
 century for an example. Charles Dickens, his great 
 contemporary, had already shown, in Sketches by Boz, 
 what sympathy and imagination might discover in 
 the familar haunts of one's own city. But, for all 
 that, when Thackeray set out to paint for his coun- 
 trymen the character and aspect of Paris, he was es- 
 saying, in the guise of a picturesque reporter, a kind 
 of writing as yet unstaled by sanguine ignorance and 
 the exigence of a daily paper. 
 
 From several points of view Thackeray seemed 
 well equipped for the task. He was the master of an 
 easy style, more familiar than correct, more boister- 
 ous than energetic. But such as it was, it fitted the 
 picturesque reporter like a glove. High spirits were 
 his constant companions, even when judgment de- 
 serted him for a while, and he carried his readers in 
 and out the theatres, picture-galleries, and gardens of 
 Paris with unfailing vivacity. Moreover, if his un- 
 derstanding was often befogged, he possessed an in- 
 tricate knowledge of his subject ; the French capital 
 had been his second home ; its life and literature had 
 been familiar to him from his boyhood ; he had lived 
 there not merely as an opulent tourist, or as a light- 
 hearted student in its schools of art, but as a poor 
 stranger writing for a living. He had, therefore, 
 every opportunity of expelling prejudice, and of com- 
 bating that hasty generalisation which is the bane of 
 the picturesque reporter. 
 
 Best of all, after Cambridge, he came to a Paris 
 quick with " movements," alert with genius and 
 
THE PICTURESQUE REPORTER 45 
 
 gaiety. The victorious Romantiques were in full pos- 
 session of the citadel ; Hugo and Dumas were mak- 
 ing an easy conquest of the playhouses, while Balzac 
 was creating his country anew in the Com'edie Humaine. 
 Had he chosen, Thackeray might have read the works 
 of Stendhal and Michelet, of Merimee and George 
 Sand, of Musset and Gautier, hot from the press. It 
 was, too, the heyday of the grisetie, when she and her 
 long-haired companion danced and chatted and laughed 
 with a zest and extravagance unknown to our chas- 
 tened epoch. Fantasy and wit were in the air; a 
 thousand Lucien de Rubempres were entering Paris 
 at every gate, and dreaming their dreams of poetry 
 and triumph under the trees of the Luxembourg, or 
 listening to the tempting voice of Lousteau and his 
 kin beneath the shadows of its gracious palace. And 
 the joy of life taught Thackeray to appreciate at least 
 the one charm of France which cannot grow old. 
 " I never landed at Calais pier," says he, " without 
 feeling that a load of sorrow was left on the other side 
 the water ; " in brief, the sparkling air of France, the 
 sense of holiday, the feeling of a vivid intelligence 
 abroad, the consciousness that the people are gayer 
 than ourselves, that, whether right or wrong, their 
 thoughts are quicker and more whimsical — all this 
 Thackeray suggests in spite of himself. 
 
 Even when the fetes of July fill his austere soul 
 with contempt, he owns that the sight is brilliant, 
 happy, and beautiful. " If you want to see the 
 French people to the greatest advantage," he writes, 
 "you should go to a festival like this, where their 
 
46 THACKERAY 
 
 manners and innocent gaiety show a very pleasing 
 contrast to the coarse and vulgar hilarity which the 
 same class exhibit in our own country at Epsom race- 
 course, for instance, or Greenwich Fair." Again, he 
 frankly acknowledges the delight which the French 
 take in comely surroundings, in the beauty of restaur- 
 ants, even in the proper adornment of a dirty, inodor- 
 ous wine-shop. He is enthusiastic when he sees a 
 crowd of mechanics, endimanches, gazing with intelli- 
 gent interest at the treasures of the Louvre ; he freely 
 owns that the French possess, what we do not, an ab- 
 stract appreciation of art. Even when he parades his 
 own sentimental method of criticism, he still reflects 
 that Paris is a paradise of painters, and that the happy 
 student who starves au sixieme may wander all the day 
 long in the resplendent palace of kings and emperors. 
 So far his sympathy takes him; but an inborn Philis- 
 tinism peeps out all the same, and he woefully mis- 
 reads the character of our neighbours. 
 
 He expects in the French the same political intelli- 
 gence which he finds in the English. He laughs 
 furiously at the fetes of July, because the revolution, 
 which they celebrate, is in his eye a failure. He 
 solemnly reproves the " Sancho-like gravity and 
 naivete " wherewith they applaud the achievements 
 of Louis Philippe, whom he finds a contemptible 
 monarch. But he forgets, in this heavy-handed re- 
 proof, that the Parisians are children of fancy, 
 changeable and whimsical ; children, too, who know 
 the rules of logic, and who gladly proceed from false 
 premisses to a logical, if a false, conclusion. For 
 
THE PICTURESQUE REPORTER 47 
 
 such vagaries as these he finds no censure too severe. 
 The monarchy, says he, is a sham, liberty is a sham, 
 the people is a political sham. 
 
 So he belabours monarch and people with a strange 
 lack of humour and sympathy. Heine, his great con- 
 temporary, who was sitting in the same stalls, reading 
 the same newspapers, witnessing the same festivals 
 and processions, saw the truth with a far keener eye 
 than did Thackeray. He knew that the French are 
 comedians by nature, ready to take service under any 
 manager, and to do their best for him whether he be 
 Charles X or Louis Philippe. In their view " the 
 play's the thing," and politics are but a single scene 
 in the drama of life. Partem et circenses they love 
 with a constant heart, and the circus is yet more to 
 their mind than the bread. But Thackeray would 
 demand of them political wisdom as well ; he would 
 ask them, when they were enjoying fireworks and the 
 fresh air, if their enjoyment were justified by the 
 political situation. And they would reply, properly 
 enough, that a pageant needed no excuse, and that a 
 summer holiday was its own justification. 
 
 Even The Second Funeral of Napoleon^ Thackeray's 
 
 ' T/ie Second Funeral of Napoleon was published in 1841. 
 Thackeray, with Monckton Milnes for companion, witnessed the 
 ceremony performed at the Invalides, and wrote his account post- 
 haste. The work, in fact, was " compiled in four days, the ballad 
 being added as an afterthought." The ballad — "The Chronicles 
 of the Drum " — is the best of its kind that Thackeray ever wrote. 
 The little book had a certain success. Writing to W. H. Thomp- 
 son in 1841, Edward FitzGerald asked : " Have you read 
 Thackeray's little book — the second Funeral of Napoleon ? If 
 
48 THACKERAY 
 
 liveliest essay in reporting, might have been touched 
 with a lighter hand. True, nothing could have been 
 more ridiculous than the behaviour of the Due de 
 Joinville, who, at the mere rumour of war with Eng- 
 land, threw his comfortable furniture overboard, 
 turned his yacht into a man-of-war, and exacted an 
 oath from every man of his crew that he would die 
 rather than give up the bones of the dead Emperor 
 to the hated English. The hated English had enter- 
 tained the Due de Joinville with all the honours ; 
 they had intrusted the sacred coffin to his keeping, 
 having previously carried it to the sea upon their own 
 shoulders. But no sooner was his precious freight on 
 board than the Due de Joinville wished to play an- 
 other part — the part of the soldier who would die but 
 not surrender. Though an attack was out of the 
 question, the hero would not be foiled of his applause, 
 and seriously to reprove him for his folly is to mis- 
 understand both the hero and his temperament. 
 Convinced that England was greedy to reclaim what 
 it had freely given up, the hero armed the hand 
 which yesterday he had held out in friendship. Once 
 more the Frenchman's premisses were false and his 
 logic sound ; and once more Thackeray considered 
 the situation with excessive gravity. 
 
 He somewhere blames the English for not loving 
 art for art's sake, and constantly incurs his own re- 
 proach. His artistic sympathy, in fact, was always 
 
 not, pray do ; and buy it, and ask others to buy it : as each copy 
 sold puts seven and one-half pence in T.'s pocket, which is very 
 empty just now, I take it." 
 
THE PICTURESQUE REPORTER 49 
 
 imperfect, his point of view always utilitarian or 
 philanthropic. His criticism of French literature, 
 for instance, is less intelligent even than his criticism 
 of French politics. He feels so little sympathy with 
 the drama and romance of France that he never 
 thinks of either apart from its subject and its moral 
 effect. The drama of Victor Hugo and M. Dumas 
 he finds " profoundly immoral and absurd " ; he 
 therefore prefers the drama of the common people, 
 which " is absurd, if you will, but good and right- 
 hearted." After he has seen " the most of the grand 
 dramas which have been produced at Paris for the 
 last half-dozen years," he declares that " a man may 
 take leave to be heartily ashamed of the manner in 
 which he has spent his time." By a still worse con- 
 fusion of ideas he deems it wrong " to enjoy a cool 
 supper at the Cafe Anglais " after the horrors of the 
 play, and thus he implicates not only the actors but 
 the audience in the crimes committed upon the pic- 
 tured scene. 
 
 It is not remarkable, therefore, that he approaches 
 the literature of the Romantic age without discrimina- 
 tion. As I have said, he might, if he would, have 
 read the masterpieces of Balzac, Dumas, Hugo, 
 Stendhal, and the rest hot from the press. Yet he 
 mentions none of the masters save in dispraise. In 
 the mellower age, which produced The Roundabout 
 Papers, he had learned to love the great Alexander, 
 but in the days of The Paris Sketch Book he shuddered 
 that he could not read Balzac or Dumas " without the 
 risk of lighting upon horrors." And whom did he 
 
50 THACKERAY 
 
 admire ? Why, Monsieur de Bernard, to be sure, 
 " who is more remarkable than any other French 
 author for writing like a gentleman : there is ease, 
 grace, and ton in his style, which cannot be discovered 
 in Balzac, or Soulie, or Dumas." So he prefers M. 
 de Bernard's Gerfaut^ and, still worse, M. Reybaud's 
 ineffable 'Jerome Paturot^ to the masterpieces of the 
 Com'edie Humaine, and at last you begin to think that 
 he is laughing in his sleeve. 
 
 But he is not laughing at all : he is expressing the 
 opinion of a gentlemanly Philistine, who esteems ton 
 higher than truth, and who revolts against Balzac's 
 candid insight. Indeed, any stick is good enough for 
 Balzac's back, and if that eminent novelist had not 
 put forth a long, dull, and pompous letter in Peytel's 
 favour, a victim of judicial murder would assuredly 
 have escaped the gallows. But time has fought, with 
 all its weapons, against the critic. Nobody will ever 
 read again MM. Reybaud and de Viel-Castel. But 
 Honore de Balzac is immortal, as Shakespeare is im- 
 mortal, for he wrote the truth not only of France but 
 of mankind. 
 
 Yet had Thackeray's point of view not been rigidly 
 fixed, had he taken less note of literature and the 
 drama, he might have composed a just picture of 
 French life and thought. The permanence of some 
 
 ' Jerome Paturot inspires Thackeray with the following reflec- 
 tion : •■ As for De Balzac, he is not fit for the salon. In point of 
 gentility, Dumas is about as genteel as a courier ; and Frederick 
 Soulie as elegant as a huissier." " These are hard words," as the 
 author says, and they are not ironical. 
 
THE PICTURESQUE REPORTER 5 1 
 
 of his criticisms is warrant of its truth. Well as he 
 knew Paris, he confessed that only a partial knowl- 
 edge was possible. " Intimacy there is none," said 
 he ; " we see but the outside of the people." And 
 much of the outside was then, as now, hostility to 
 England. Thackeray himself had no illusions. 
 " Don't let us endeavour to disguise it — they hate us. 
 Not all the protestations of friendship, not all the 
 wisdom of Palmerston, not all the diplomacy of our 
 distinguished plenipotentiary, Mr. Henry Lytton 
 Bulwer, can make it, in our time at least, permanent 
 and cordial." To-day, as in Thackeray's time, " men 
 get a character for patriotism in France merely for 
 hating England," and the hatred is so old that we 
 need not trouble to explain it, nor to set it down to 
 the criminality of this party or that. Indeed, when 
 Thackeray discusses the ever-interesting problem of 
 French and English, he is both wise and fair, even if 
 he arrive at no conclusion. At what conclusion could 
 he arrive ? Our differences are emphasised by our 
 propinquity, and perhaps France consults her own 
 temper best in choosing alliances at a distance. Lit- 
 tle as she knows of England, she knows less of Rus- 
 sia, and happily mistakes her ignorance for sympathy. 
 But he who would understand France, must put out 
 of his mind all thought of his own country, and this 
 task Thackeray found impossible. He judged Paris 
 rather by her divergencies from his standard than by 
 qualities of her own, and even where his intelligence 
 was sound, his sympathy was at fault. He had the 
 humour to smile, but not the charity to condone. 
 
52 THACKERAY 
 
 Yet The Paris Sketch Book was not written in vain. 
 Its true result may be seen in his novels ; and had he 
 not sojourned in France, he could not have drawn the 
 engaging de Florae, as true a Frenchman as ever was 
 portrayed by English hand. 
 
 The Paris Sketch Book was the deliberate result of a 
 long sojourn and many studies; its companion, The 
 Irish Sketch Book (1843), ^^^ composed on a different 
 plan. It is, in fact, a set of impressions gathered in 
 a single voyage, and therefore differs not at all from 
 what we should call to-day " special correspondence." 
 In 1842, when he undertook the trip, Thackeray 
 needed such relief as the rapidly shifting scenes of a 
 journey might bring. The placid course of his life 
 had been most rudely interrupted, and with a silent 
 courage that was characteristic, he sought in Ire- 
 land both change and " copy." At first FitzGerald 
 promised companionship, but his energy failed him, 
 and Thackeray set out alone. " There's that poor 
 fellow Thackeray gone off to Ireland," wrote Fitz- 
 Gerald ; " and what a lazy beast I am for not going 
 with him." But FitzGerald praised the book when 
 it was published, and declared that it was " all true." 
 And true no doubt it was, though it was a truth not 
 acceptable to all Irishmen. 
 
 It gives to the reader a vivid impression of some- 
 thing seen and noted on the spot. The writer de- 
 scribes with equal zest the landscape and the people ; 
 nothing comes amiss to his eager mind, whether it be 
 Irish politics or hot lobster. He is as keenly inter- 
 ested in the practical use of guano as in the curric- 
 
THE PICTURESQUE REPORTER 53 
 
 ulum of Templemoyle School. He sentimentalises, 
 after his fashion, over the poverty of the Widow 
 Fagan. " How much goodness and generosity — how 
 much purity, fine feeling — nay, happiness " — says he 
 in one of his favourite apostrophes, " may dwell 
 among the poor whom we have just been looking at ! 
 Here, thank God, is an instance of this happy and 
 cheerful poverty : and it is good to look, when we 
 can, at the heart that beats under the threadbare coat, 
 as well as the tattered old garment itself." Nowa- 
 days we take these qualities on trust ; and rightly 
 make no moral distinctions between rich and poor. 
 But the exclamatory passage just quoted is eminently 
 characteristic of its author, who unto the end of his 
 career delighted somewhat naively in the obvious 
 emotions. 
 
 On the other hand, the odd little chap-books, pub- 
 lished in Dublin, which described after their own 
 primitive manner the adventures of many an intrepid 
 horse-thief, and the tragedy of many a hard-fought 
 field, aroused his interest at once. Mr. James Freeny 
 is an excuse for one of his most agreeable essays, and 
 that reckless highwayman, no doubt, provided a hint 
 at least for Barry Lyndon. He is presented in ironical 
 style, without a word of excuse or reprobation, and 
 he pleasantly interrupts the prevailing sentiment. 
 Briefly, Thackeray, like many another traveller, found 
 Ireland a bundle of contrasts : generosity and squalor, 
 misery and lightheartedness, sport and rebellion, were 
 to his vision inextricably mixed. He frankly avowed 
 the difficulty of a conclusion. " To have an opinion 
 
54 THACKERAY 
 
 about Ireland," says he, " one must begin by getting 
 at the truth : and where is it to be had in the country ? 
 Or rather there are two truths, the Catholic truth and 
 the Protestant truth. The two parties do not see 
 things with the same eyes." None the less he was 
 on the side of the Irish, though he never tired of 
 ridiculing them, and he composed an attack upon the 
 English government of Ireland by way of preface, 
 which he was persuaded to suppress. Doubtless, had 
 he lived to-day, he would have been a Home Ruler, 
 as Sir Leslie Stephen says, but his opinion shifted 
 with time and circumstance, and it would be idle to 
 define it. The Sketch Book^ however, was not the 
 best result of his journey to Ireland ; that must be 
 sought in Barry Lyndon, and the admirable Irishmen, 
 such as Captain Costigan, encountered in his novels. 
 On the other hand, it had an immediate effect : it was 
 the first book which gave Thackeray a definite place 
 in the world of letters ; it was dedicated to Lever ; 
 and it drew a word of congratulation from the great 
 Dickens himself. 
 
 His next journey was farther afield, and might in 
 those days (1844) have seemed almost adventurous. 
 The offer of a passage on board a P. & O. boat per- 
 suaded him to realise an ancient project, and go to the 
 East. Before starting he arranged to write a book of 
 his travels for ;^200, he took with him the half- 
 finished manuscript of Barry Lyndon, and let few 
 weeks pass without sending something to Punch. 
 But, despite these manifold interruptions, his real pur- 
 pose was the composition of his Notes of a "Journey 
 
THE PICTURESQUE REPORTER 55 
 
 from Cornhill to Cairo, which, when they were pub- 
 lished in 1846, proved the best that their author had 
 yet achieved. The book is admirably picturesque in 
 style, and it contains passages of description which 
 Thackeray never excelled. For all his love of paint- 
 ing, literature was in his blood, and if the ateliers of 
 Paris had quickened his vision, the skill of putting 
 what he saw into words was inborn. Yet here, too, 
 are many traces of that sentimental Radicalism which 
 its author never conquered. He looks upon Athens 
 with a sternly practical eye, and, unmindful of its as- 
 sociations, merely notes that " its shabbiness beats 
 Ireland, and that is a strong word." Not even Cob- 
 den himself surpassed that contemptuous summary, 
 and it is characteristic of Thackeray's invincible 
 optimism. In his eyes there was no time like the 
 present, and a contemplation of Rhodes made him 
 ask, " When shall we have a real account of these 
 times and heroes — no good-natured pageant, like 
 those of the Scott romances, but a real authentic 
 story, to instruct and frighten honest people of the 
 present day, and make them thankful that the grocer 
 governs the world now in place of the baron ? " 
 
 So he congratulates himself that he learned no 
 Greek at school ; so he swears he would prefer two 
 hundred a-year in Fleet Street to the kingdom of the 
 Greeks ; so he echoes the common gag that Byron 
 did not write from his heart. And then, the more 
 profoundly to overwhelm you with regret, he will 
 sketch you a sunny landscape, in which " every fig- 
 tree is gilded and bright, as if it were an Hesperian 
 
56 THACKERAY 
 
 orchard," or he will recall a boyish memory of The 
 Arabian Nights, and he will do all this with so fine a 
 spirit, that you wonder how the shadow oi sentiment 
 and reform ever fell across his buoyant, pleasure-lov- 
 ing nature. But he gives the explanation himself: 
 Smyrna, says he, " rebuked all mutinous Cockneys 
 into silence." A mutinous Cockney — that is what 
 he was in one aspect, and his mutinous Cockneyism 
 made him as blind to the elegant triviality of life as to 
 Athens and its splendid memories. 
 
 But mutinous Cockney though he was on occa- 
 sion, he possessed one gift, too rarely used, which 
 should have corrected his error — the gift of irony. 
 On his way to the East he finished with much tribu- 
 lation his first complete essay in the art of fiction — 
 The Luck of Barry Lyndon, a piece of ironic presenta- 
 tion, which has not since been surpassed. He had 
 already tried his hand at irony and with ill-success, 
 for Catherine is but irony touched by a sentimental 
 regret ; and though he never relinquished this method 
 of satire, in his later novels it is so thick overlaid with 
 pathos as to be hardly recognisable. But in Barry 
 Lyndon the irony is sustained with a consistency rare 
 in Thackeray, who found in Jonathan Wild the best 
 model, and wrote in frank competition with his 
 master. 
 
 Now, irony is neither popular nor easily understood. 
 It is commonly supposed to be the easy trick of writ- 
 ing good when you mean bad. Johnson could find no 
 better instance of it for his dictionary than " Boling- 
 broke was a holy man," and he showed for once that 
 
THE PICTURESQUE REPORTER 57 
 
 his hatred for a great statesman was stronger than his 
 love of truth. The author of The Courtier was far 
 more wisely inspired, and explains what he rightly 
 calls " a handsome kind of raillery " with perfect 
 lucidity and the happiest examples. " There is like- 
 wise a handsome kind of raillery," says he, " which 
 consists in a certain dissimulation, when we speak one 
 thing and mean another : I don't say the quite con- 
 trary, as if we were to call a dwarf giant or a negro 
 white, or a very ugly a very beautiful person, because 
 the contrariety is too manifest, but when in a grave 
 and serious tone we express that to which inwardly 
 we express no regard or assent." 
 
 The ingenious Castiglione guards his definition, 
 which Johnson does not, and of course Castiglione is 
 in the right of it. For irony is something far subtler 
 than an interchange of opposites : it is a delicate 
 masking of the truth, a method of presenting a fact 
 with the greater force, because you set it upside down. 
 But the figure has been so variously employed that it 
 is wiser to give instances than to attempt a definition, 
 and it will be seen that, by whomsoever affected, its 
 essence is a hinted concealment of the truth. It is 
 the ignorance of CEdipus the king, for instance, 
 which touches the masterpiece of Sophocles with 
 irony. The audience knows, as the king does not, 
 that CEdipus' determination to discover the criminal 
 who pollutes the State will recoil upon himself, and 
 there is not a line of his utterance that is not double- 
 edged. That is to say, the poet takes his public into 
 a confidence from which his characters are excluded. 
 
58 THACKERAY 
 
 The Socratic irony, on the other hand, is a lacic of 
 knowledge assumed by the omniscient, the more easily 
 to entrap his opponents ; and though it differs from 
 the irony of Sophocles, it is true to the essential op- 
 position of word and sense. 
 
 Yet the spirit as well as the word must be opposed 
 to the sense if irony is to achieve its purpose. When 
 Voltaire insists in the face of unparalleled disaster 
 that all is for the best in the best of all possible 
 worlds, he is preaching a sermon against the folly of 
 optimism, and this he achieves not by a mere trans- 
 position of opposite words, but by changing the whole 
 spirit of his romance. When Fielding set out to 
 write The History of "Jonathan Wild the Great — the 
 masterpiece which profoundly influenced Thackeray — 
 he neither sang a paean to thievery, nor sought to 
 demonstrate the sacredness of property. He merely 
 drew the portrait of a " great " man, and let vice and 
 virtue change places. After the same fashion, Thack- 
 eray let his hero, as arrant a scamp as ever cheated 
 at cards or showed the white feather, tell his story in 
 his own terms ; and so fine a colour does Barry put 
 upon the meanest of his actions, that while the reader 
 detects his villainy in every line, he himself preserves 
 a splendid unconsciousness. It is true, as we shall 
 presently see, that the irony is false in many details, 
 that the sentiment of every-day life is frequently and 
 inappositely heard. But the blemishes of Barry Lyn- 
 don are not essential like the blemishes of Catherine^ 
 whose meaning is confused throughout by the inter- 
 vention of the author's disapproval. The reader and 
 
THE PICTURESQUE REPORTER 59 
 
 the narrator — Barry in his own person — preserve each 
 his own point of view, and the hero only speaks with 
 the voice of commonplace conviction, when the 
 author nods. Thus, for the most part, the terms of 
 life's equation are changed, and the equation is solved 
 in accordance with the rules of an imaginary algebra. 
 In other words, Thackeray recognised that the lan- 
 guage of irony is a language apart, in which thought, 
 to be understood, must be freely and consistently 
 translated ; and though that kind of humour, which 
 was the clear expression of his temperament, flashes 
 intermittently in all his works, it burns nowhere else 
 with so steady a flame as in Barry Lyndon. 
 
 Barry Lyndon was for the moment a palpable failure ; 
 it passed unnoticed through Eraser's Magazine in 
 1844, and its author never found it worth while to 
 print it as a book. America, with a better judgment, 
 pirated it in 1852, and it made a tardy appearance on 
 our side the Atlantic in a posthumous edition. But 
 the generation which delighted in the sentimental 
 scandals of Harrison Ainsworth would have nothing 
 to say to Barry Lyndon., a rascal drawn with spirit, 
 and touched with a rarely failing irony. The mean- 
 ing was not obvious ; therefore the book was despised 
 by the people. Why should we care about a criminal 
 whom we would not ask to dinner ? That is the 
 criticism commonly deemed adequate for Barry Lyn- 
 don, and it is not worth while to insist upon its ab- 
 surdity. The most primitive reader should see that 
 here is n-o question of right or wrong; that an appeal 
 is made not to the moral sense but to the intellect; 
 
6o THACKERAY 
 
 and that he who condemns Barry Lyndon on a false 
 ground, shows that he has misunderstood it. How- 
 ever, Thackeray was doubtless neither disturbed nor 
 surprised at the reception of his work, for he, too, 
 must have realised that irony is the boomerang of 
 literature, which invariably returns home upon him 
 who wields it. 
 
 In Barry Lyndon, then, Thackeray has sketched 
 with incomparable spirit and agility the career of a 
 braggart Irishman, a rascal who deserts from the 
 army, who habitually cheats at cards, who blackmails 
 men, and who bullies women. Of course it is part 
 of the game that the hero should not recognise the 
 semblance of a crime in his own chequered career, 
 and a splendid satisfaction gives a zest to his lightest 
 actions. His family (in his eyes) is " the noblest of 
 the island, and perhaps of the universal world " ; he 
 would assume the Irish crown over his coat-of-arms, 
 " but that there are so many silly pretenders to that 
 distinction, and render it common." The pretenders, 
 however, were not always a check upon his pride, 
 and when after his marriage he set out to visit his 
 estates in Devonshire, the Irish crown and the ancient 
 coat of the Barrys were painted on the panels of his 
 chariots " beside the Countess's coronet and the noble 
 cognisance of the noble family of Lyndon." At the 
 outset of his career Barry, like many another hero, 
 met neither success nor appreciation. The stage 
 upon which he was asked to play was far too small 
 for his genius, and to do him justice, he soon left 
 the humble cottage of his mother — Barryville it was 
 
THE PICTURESQUE REPORTER 6 1 
 
 called, with a proper magnificence — for the larger 
 world of adventure and chicanery. So, in the proper 
 spirit of the eighteenth century he is sent riding across 
 Ireland, on whose highroad he encounters not only 
 the celebrated one-eyed Captain Freeny, but the fair 
 lady in distress, the false companion of every true 
 knight. 
 
 Forced to enlist by fear of an iniquitous law, he 
 changes clothes with a milksop officer, and proudly 
 deserts his colours ; but once again — the last time for 
 many years — good fortune deserts him, and he is 
 kidnapped by a beggarly German and forced to be- 
 come a private in Billow's regiment. To this epoch 
 in his life he always looked back with pardonable dis- 
 pleasure. Like a true aristocrat, he "never had a 
 taste for anything but genteel company, and hated all 
 descriptions of low life." How, then, could he tol- 
 erate the squalor and discomfort which necessarily 
 disgraced the kidnapped private in a regiment of ruf- 
 fians ? Of course he made the best of a miserable 
 position. He kept inviolate that pride of birth which 
 never deserted him, and he did not soil his hands with 
 vulgar toil. When the stress of war was relaxed, 
 " many of our men," says he, "got leave to work in 
 trades ; but I had been brought up to none : and be- 
 sides, my honour forbade me." But, at least, he 
 could serve Captain van PotzdorfF as confidential 
 servant without putting a blot upon the scutcheon of 
 the Irish kings ; and when once he was promoted to 
 be a spy, his self-respect was assured. At this time 
 he was animated by a kind of optimism, which was 
 
62 THACKERAY 
 
 hardly worthy so great a man. " My maxim is to 
 bear all," he wrote, "to put up with water if you can- 
 not get burgundy, and if you have no velvet to be 
 content with frieze. But burgundy and velvet are 
 the best, bien entendu, and the man is a fool if he will 
 not secure the best when the scramble is open." The 
 real Barry speaks in the last sentence ; the shallow 
 optimism which would put up with water in any case 
 was the mere boast of youth. 
 
 Set by a lucky accident to spy upon his gifted un- 
 cle, le Chevalier de Balibari, the hero at last found the 
 career best suited to his genius. Henceforth the faro 
 table supplied his extravagant wants ; henceforth un- 
 cle and nephew took that place in the world for which 
 their skill and their graces eminently fitted them. 
 Nor could they have found a better arena for their 
 deeds of daring than the Duchy of X., for the Duchy 
 was not a Tom Tiddler's ground where any fool could 
 pick up gold. Gold there was to be had ; but skill 
 and resolution were necessary to its acquisition. 
 " None but men of courage and genius," says Barry 
 with pardonable pride, " could live and prosper in a 
 society where every one was bold and clever; and 
 here my uncle and I held our own — ay, and more 
 than our own." The luck of the tables may change 
 for a night, but persistence is the secret of success ; 
 and the two Irishmen won not only wealth but influ- 
 ence as well, by the subtle acceptance of promissory 
 notes. 
 
 Meanwhile the ingenious Barry was busy with 
 another project, " I had determined," he says, " as 
 
THE PICTURESQUE REPORTER 63 
 
 is proper with gentlemen (it is only your low people 
 who marry for mere affection), to consolidate my for- 
 tunes by marriage." And perhaps his uncle's brain 
 never conceived a bolder scheme than Barry's mar- 
 riage with the Countess Ida. That it came to naught, 
 and was followed by the tragic murder of a princess, 
 was not their fault.^ They knew not the spies that 
 were arrayed against them ; they did not fathom the 
 villainy of the police-minister, nor the ultimate cow- 
 ardice of Magny, the victim through whose embar- 
 rassment their triumph was to come. But fail they 
 did, and failure drove them once more to be wander- 
 ers upon the face of Europe, wanderers with a sound 
 knowledge of life and a devout worship of the goddess 
 Opportunity. 
 
 The second adventure of " the Tipperary Alci- 
 biades," as Sir Charles Lyndon ^ insolently called the 
 ingenious Barry, was more successful. On the death 
 of that baronet, Barry forced the wealthiest widow in 
 the three kingdoms to marry him, and thus attained 
 the climax of his life. The rest of the narrative is 
 but a record of decay : how he squandered the lady's 
 fortune, how he lost his son, the young Viscount of 
 Castle Lyndon, how, sunk in debt, he was put away 
 
 ' Thackeray, as Mrs. Ritchie tells us, took the episode of Duke 
 Victor and his Duchess from a book entitled L' Empire, cm dix arts 
 sous Napoleon, par un Chambellan : Paris, 1836. In this book the 
 story is told of the first king of Wurtemberg, who killed his wife 
 for adultery. 
 
 ' Sir Charles Lyndon is drawn after Charles Hanbury Williams, 
 a great wit in a witty age, a diplomatist and man of the world, 
 whose fate was hapless as Lyndon's own. 
 
64 THACKERAY 
 
 into the Fleet Prison, where his aged mother soothed 
 his declining years — all this is the natural Nemesis of 
 superb fortune. But while he was at his best he 
 challenges Jonathan Wild himself, and his theory of 
 greatness would not have shamed the great thief- 
 catcher himself. 
 
 Aided, no doubt, by the wit and intelligence of his 
 uncle, he formulated his views in what may be termed 
 a philosophy of conduct. He saw very early in. his 
 journey through the world that no man can be great 
 who is not boastful. " I own," said he, " that I am 
 disposed to brag of my birth and other acquirements ; 
 for I have always found that if a man does not give 
 himself a good word his friends will not do it for 
 him," and truly Barry Lyndon never conceals his 
 worth under a cloak of modesty. Without ceasing he 
 praises his courage, his beauty, his strength, his equal 
 skill with cards or sword, and the splendour of his 
 equipages. When he is in good luck, his story is a 
 paean of praise to his own prowess. And if we may 
 believe him, the fair sex outdid the hero himself in 
 admiration. It was his agreeable way to make love 
 to all women, " of whatever age or degree of beauty," 
 and who was there in Europe to resist his fascination .? 
 " I need not mention my successes among the fairer 
 portion of the creation," said he, in a passage which 
 his creator has freely adapted from the Memoires of 
 Casanova. " One of the most accomplished, the tall- 
 est, the most athletic, and the handsomest gentleman 
 of Europe as I was then, a young fellow of my figure 
 could not fail of having advantages, which a person 
 
THE PICTURESQUE REPORTER 65 
 
 of my spirit knew very well how to use. But upon 
 these subjects I am dumb. Charming SchuvalofF, black- 
 eyed Sczotarska, dark Valdez, tender Hegenheim, bril- 
 liant Langeac ! — ye gentle hearts that knew how to beat 
 in old times for the warm young Irish gentleman, where 
 are ye now ? . . . Oh ! to see the Valdez once 
 more, as on that day I met her first driving in state 
 with her eight mules and her retinue of gentlemen by 
 the side of yellow Man^anares ! Oh, for another 
 drive with Hegenheim in the gilded sledge over the 
 Saxon snow ! False as SchuvalofF was, 'twas better 
 to be jilted by her than to be adored by any other 
 woman. I can't think of any one of them without 
 tenderness. I have ringlets of all their hair in my 
 poor little museum of recollections." 
 
 So he treated them with the savagery that became a 
 man while he was with them, and when they were 
 vanished, he treasured the trinkets of their love with 
 a sensibility that the Chevalier de Seingalt himself, the 
 Irishman's great exemplar, might have envied. But 
 love after all was an interlude (or a series of inter- 
 ludes) in a chevaleresque, industrious career. The real 
 business of Barry's life, as of Casanova's, was gam- 
 bling, and he was far too noble to cast a slur on the 
 brilliant pursuit to which he owed his greatness. In 
 truth, his rhapsody on gaming does equal honour to 
 his head and his heart. He was not the man to make 
 excuses, or to cry pardon where no pardon was sought. 
 When he composed his celebrated defence of play he 
 was speaking of the good old times before " the cow- 
 ardice of the French aristocracy," to use his own ex- 
 
66 THACKERAY 
 
 pression, " brought ruin and discredit upon our order." 
 With a justified indignation he declares that "they 
 cry fie now upon men engaged in play ; but I should 
 like to know how much more honourable their modes 
 of livelihood are than ours. The broker of the Ex- 
 change, who bulls and bears, and buys and sells, and 
 dabbles with lying loans, and trades on State secrets, 
 what is he but a gamester ? The merchant who deals 
 in teas and tallow, is he any better.? His bales of 
 dirty indigo are his dice, his cards come up every year 
 instead of every ten minutes, and the see is his green 
 table. ... I say that play was an institution of 
 chivalry : it has been wrecked along with other priv- 
 ileges of men of birth. When Seingalt engaged a 
 man for six-and-thirty hours ^ without leaving the 
 table, do you think he showed no courage ? . . . 
 When, at Toeplitz, the Duke of Courland brought 
 fourteen lacqueys, each with four bags of florins, and 
 challenged our bank to play against the sealed bags, 
 what did we ask ? ' Sir,' said we, ' we have but 
 eighty thousand florins in the bank, or two hundred 
 thousand at three months. If your Highness's bags 
 do not contain more than eighty thousand, we will 
 meet you.' And we did, and after eleven hours' play, 
 in which our bank was at one time reduced to two 
 hundred and three ducats, we won seventeen thousand 
 florins of him. Is this not something like boldness ? 
 does this profession not require skill, and perseverance, 
 and bravery ? Four crowned heads looked on at the 
 
 ' Casanova de Seingalt played for forty-two hours without a 
 break, if one may believe his own story. 
 
THE PICTURESQUE REPORTER 67 
 
 game, and an Imperial princess, when I turned up the 
 ace of hearts and made Paroli, burst into tears. No 
 man on the European continent held a higher position 
 than Redmond Barry then, and when the Duke of 
 Courland lost he was pleased to say that we had won 
 nobly ; and so we had, and spent nobly what we 
 won." 
 
 Nor must it be supposed that Barry advocated the/ 
 employment of foul means. He had a theoretic con- 
 tempt for all common practices. " It is only the 
 clumsy fool who cheats" he said — " who resorts to 
 the vulgar expedients of cogged dice and cut cards. 
 Play grandly, honourably," this was his exhortation. 
 " Be not cast down at losing ; but, above all, be not 
 eager at winning, as mean souls are." Such was 
 Barry Lyndon's philosophy, and what gamester ever 
 formulated a better one ? So good is it, that it is 
 Casanova's own ; and when Barry, a confirmed cheat, 
 condemns cheating, he is but anticipating that hero's 
 famous method of " correcting " fortune. But great 
 as Barry was, his uncle, the Chevalier, had elements 
 of grandeur which the nephew could not comprehend. 
 In style and intellect he was incomparably the superior. 
 He, in fact, was the gamester doubled by the diplo- 
 matist — be-starred and be-ribboned as only the servants 
 of courts are be-ribboned and be-starred. Even in 
 gaming mere profit was not his sole end, and he never 
 forgot that true grandeur lies also in method. This 
 the nephew, eager for wealth, could not wholly appre- 
 ciate. " My uncle," said he, " (I speak with great 
 respect of him) was too much of a devotee, and too 
 
68 THACKERAY 
 
 much of a martinet at play, ever to win greatly y" and 
 forthwith he chid him for lack of daring, but he does 
 not see that his uncle's dignity and worldly wisdom 
 were worth more to them than many a stolen coup. 
 So the Chevalier finished his career as he began it, 
 torn between beauty and the Church. Now a mon- 
 astery claims him, now he succumbs to the fascinations 
 of a ballet-dancer. But in all things he is discreet 
 and a gentleman, nor could Thackeray have devised a 
 more suitable refuge for his declining years than the 
 Irish College, which lies apart under the shadow of 
 the Pantheon, and which fitted his demure dignity 
 as justly as Barry's roystering spirit was punished by 
 the Fleet. 
 
 In Barry Lyndon Thackeray found a task which 
 suited his talent ; and being happy in his task, he per- 
 formed it with a spirit and success which he did not 
 often surpass. For Barry is his best experiment in 
 irony, sustained for the most part with a proper sense 
 of his model and his intention. But it would not 
 have been written by Thackeray, if it had not lapsed 
 now and again from its lofty ideal. The author can- 
 not completely exclude himself and his opinions from 
 the drama. The sentimentalist, whom we know so 
 well, is often looking over the shoulder of the ironist, 
 and interrupting the conduct of the story with com- 
 ment or apology. When Barry drops a tear of sym- 
 pathy over the misery of his mother, we know that he 
 merely echoes the author of his being. Such a son as 
 Barry showed himself would be indifferent whether 
 his mother starved or not ; and when he tells you that 
 
THE PICTURESQUE REPORTER 69 
 
 " many a time the poor soul left him to go and break 
 her heart in her own room alone," he alienates your 
 sympathy without winning your belief. That is a 
 specimen of false pathos. On the other hand, the 
 emotion which he betrays on meeting his uncle for 
 the first time is natural and sincere. The old ruffian 
 with his apricot-coloured velvet and his noble man- 
 ners, appeared irresistible. As Barry declared, " he 
 burst into tears " — why he knew not ; yet the tears 
 are easily explained : he had met one of his own kin 
 splendidly apparelled, and he knew that his fortune 
 was made. But at other times we find this notable 
 swashbuckler babbling of flowers, or recalling his in- 
 fancy with a sigh, and we can only regard those back- 
 slidings into sensibility as a serious blemish. 
 
 The blemish is the more surprising, because Thack- 
 eray derived his portrait of Barry from the best sources, 
 and painted it after the best model. As I have said, 
 from beginning to end he kept his eye upon 'Jonathan 
 Wild, and he could not have found abetter inspiration ; 
 while the eighteenth century, that golden age of beaus 
 and bucks, supplied him with abundant material. The 
 true original of Barry was, no doubt, Andrew Robin- 
 son Stoney, bully and fortune-hunter, and my Lady 
 Lyndon is a very fair presentment of the Countess of 
 Strathmore, the daughter and heiress of George Bowes. 
 Stoney, of course, had a more brilliant career than the 
 hero of Thackeray's romance, for not only did he 
 marry and ill-treat Miss Newton, a fortune of .^30,- 
 000 ; but after her death he brought off the grand 
 coup, and captured the wealthiest blue-stocking of her 
 
70 THACKERAY 
 
 time. The Countess, again, outshone, if she re- 
 sembled, Lady Lyndon : she, too, dipped her finger in 
 the ink-pot, she wrote Confessions^ she patronised men 
 of learning and talent, and during her widowhood her 
 house was "fairly denominated a Temple of Folly." 
 She, too, had watched the death of one husband with- 
 out breaking her heart, and met more than her match 
 at a second venture. As for Stoney, who, after mar- 
 riage, assumed the name of Bowes, he lacked (says his 
 biographer) both moral principle and physical courage, 
 and Barry hung not an inch b ehind him. A chap- 
 book describes the marriage in terms which fit Barry 
 and his spouse to a hair. " Here then were joined in 
 holy wedlock," to quote the popular account, " two 
 such as for the honour of nature are seldom to be seen. 
 The one had broken the heart of a former wife, the 
 other had not lengthened the days of a former hus- 
 band ; in a battle royal of a main of cocks, the two sur- 
 viving ones contend for existence, and thus are these 
 two pitted as if by positive destruction." 
 
 Even in the smallest details the similarity of truth 
 and fiction is evident : the young Lord Glamis, for 
 instance, like Viscount Bullingdon, fled from his 
 brutal stepfather, and came back after many years to 
 claim his inheritance. But while Stoney Bowes sat 
 for the portrait, there are others who suggested a 
 
 ' TAf Confessions of the Countess of Strathjnore (1793), wrung 
 from her by her brutal husband, are a document which it would be 
 difficult to match in the records of the world. They prove con- 
 clusively that Stoney surpassed Barry himself in cowardice and 
 cynicism. 
 
THE PICTURESQUE REPORTER 7 1 
 
 touch here or there. It has been said that Casanova 
 was for something in the picture, and though it is 
 certain that Thackeray borrowed much from the in- 
 comparable Memoires^ especially from the scenes at 
 the green table, little of the Chevalier de Seingalt's 
 true character is revealed in the vulgar braggart that 
 was Barry Lyndon. For Casanova, despite his faults, 
 was a man of intelligence and knowledge. The 
 Prince de Ligne, who wrote with authority, gave him 
 credit for delicacy and honour; he was so deeply 
 tinctured with learning that he bored his friends with 
 quotations from Homer and Horace ; he was always 
 grateful, unless his pride were hurt ; and his char- 
 acter, complex and disconcerting, remains a puzzle 
 of biography. In any case, he is plainly remote from 
 Barry Lyndon, whom he could have met nowhere 
 else than over the cards. 
 
 Tiger Roche,* on the other hand, gave Thackeray 
 many a useful hint, and not even Barry could outdo 
 this Irishman in blackguardly conduct. For not only 
 had the Tiger, an artist in profitable matrimony, 
 robbed several unsuspecting ladies of their fortunes ; 
 he had bullied and beaten men all the world over. 
 He won his name in America, where, being charged 
 with robbery by an officer who declined to meet him, 
 he sprang at him like a "tiger," and "tore away a 
 mouthful of flesh," which he declared was " the 
 sweetest morsel he had ever tasted." But he most 
 
 ' An account of Tiger Roche is printed in Ireland Sixty Years 
 Since, and he is the hero of several chap-books which Thackeray 
 may have picked up during his journey in Ireland. 
 
72 THACKERAY 
 
 closely resembles Barry Lyndon in his sudden 
 alternations of courage and cowardice. At one mo- 
 ment brave as a tiger, at another he skulked like a 
 whipped cur ; and Thackeray has used one passage 
 in his life to excellent purpose. It will be remem- 
 bered that when Barry Lyndon lay in the Fleet Prison, 
 his pluck deserted him. A small man was " always 
 jeering him, and making game of him," and when he 
 asked him to fight, Barry hadn't the courage. This 
 episode is frankly borrowed from the life of Tiger 
 Roche, whose spirit so pitifully broke down in the 
 Fleet that he submitted to any insult. " On one 
 occasion," says his biographer, " he had a trifling dis- 
 pute with a fellow-prisoner, who kicked him, and 
 struck him a blow in the face. There was a time 
 when his fiery spirit would not have been satisfied but 
 with the blood of the offender. He now only turned 
 aside and cried like a child. It happened that his 
 countryman. Buck English, seizing a stick, flogged 
 him in a savage manner : Roche made no attempt to 
 retaliate or resist, but crouched under the punish- 
 ment." Yet no sooner was he out of prison than his 
 spirit and bravery returned ; he cheerfully faced the 
 point of the stoutest antagonist ; and then once more 
 he showed the white feather, and pitifully quailed be- 
 fore the insult of a bully. In picturesqueness Roche 
 has the advantage, but it is plain to see what he con- 
 tributed to the making of Barry Lyndon, who, how- 
 ever, is none the worse as a portrait because more 
 than one rufSan sat for it. 
 
 In the early 'Forties sentiment was stronger than 
 
THE PICTURESQUE REPORTER 73 
 
 intelligence. The story, which should have made 
 Thackeray famous, passed unnoticed through a 
 magazine. Not even the admirable episode of the 
 German Duchy, sketched with a technical mastery 
 and a knowledge of life which Thackeray seldom 
 surpassed, availed to find him readers. But mean- 
 time journalism was giving him the reputation that 
 literature could not give, and, like many another man 
 of letters, he was being loudly acclaimed for work 
 unworthy his talent. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 PUNCH AND VANITY FAIR 
 
 Writing to Frederick Tennyson in 1842, Edward 
 FitzGerald, a Cassandra of criticism, said : " Tell 
 Thackeray not to go to Punch yet." Artistically the 
 advice was sound. A comic paper, were it possible, 
 would be like a dinner of sauces, such as an accom- 
 plished cook would not consent to prepare. No man 
 can be funny either to order or at all times, and wit 
 is so precious a gift that it should flash upon us un- 
 expectedly. Punch, moreover, was already pontifical, 
 though but a year old. It had already taken its 
 place among British institutions, and despite its pro- 
 fession of wit and humour, it was (and is) portentously 
 serious. The mahogany-tree became sacred as soon 
 as it was carved, and it is not surprising to any one 
 who turns over its pages that its jubilee was celebrated 
 by a religious service. But to Thackeray it was not 
 so much a field for artistic expression as a means of 
 livelihood. For some ten years he served it loyally, 
 and contributed to its columns a vast deal of work- 
 manlike journalism. There the matter might have 
 ended; a few memorable pages might have been 
 rescued from oblivion, and the rest buried, as journal- 
 ism should always be buried, in the columns where 
 first it saw the light. 
 74 
 
PUNCH AND VANITY FAIR 75 
 
 But the demon of curiosity pursued Thackeray 
 from Fraser's to Punchy so that it is our own fault if we 
 do not know every line and scratch which he sent to 
 our only comic paper. The archaeologist has devoted 
 infinite research to the discovery of the unimportant. 
 He has told us how many " cartoons " were the fruit 
 of Thackeray's suggestion, how many "social cuts " 
 Thackeray's ingenuity designed. He has traced, with 
 indisputable authority, the hand of Thackeray through 
 many a weary volume. He tells us how often his 
 victim calls himself " Muff," how often he prefers to 
 be known as " Spec." Not a paragraph escapes him, 
 and while his energy is laudable, it is less than fair 
 to the novelist's memory. A writer is not at his best 
 in a note written with the printer's devil at the door, 
 and his personal view is very soon merged in the 
 general policy of a journal. 
 
 It is not, therefore, in his casual contributions to 
 Punch that we may hope to surprise the real Thack- 
 eray. We may marvel at the versatility of Interest 
 which enabled him to turn from France to Ireland, 
 from foolscap to the drawing-block. But if he alone 
 wielded both pen and pencil, his colleagues rivalled 
 him in the variety of subjects which they were ready 
 to treat at a moment's notice. In politics he reveals 
 himself a thorough-paced Liberal, a Home Ruler, at 
 first from conviction, and presently because he " loved 
 a quiet life," an admirer of Cobden, and, as became 
 the author of The Book of Snobs, a contemner of courts 
 and their parasites. Most of the windmills at which 
 he tilted long since lost their sails. To-day nobody 
 
yb THACKERAY 
 
 cares about Jenkins, under which name Thaciceray 
 guyed Foster of The Morning Post, or the Poet Bunn, 
 or James Silk Buckingham. And after these the 
 common objects of his scorn were Prince Albert and 
 his hat, Joinville and the French ; but when they 
 were ridiculed by others he felt a resentment, which 
 was partly justified, for, however strongly he felt, his 
 hand was never so heavy as Douglas Jerrold's. 
 
 The most of his contributions to Punch, then, are 
 the merest journey-work. The Legend of 'Jawhrahim 
 Heraudee, wherewith he made his debut in 1842, is no 
 better than Miss Tickletohy's Lectures upon English 
 History, a desperate attempt to be funny, which was 
 discouraged by the editor. The Fat Contributor is 
 just as little to one's mind, and it was not until 
 Thackeray resuscitated his old friend Jeames that he 
 did himself justice. The hunt for railway shares 
 gave the incomparable de la Pluche an admirable 
 chance to express his views upon finance and society; 
 but it was with The Book of Snobs that Thackeray first 
 found a new talent and hit the public taste. The 
 time of its appearance was propitious. In 1846 the 
 wave of revolution which broke over Europe two 
 years later was already gathering force and volume. 
 Democracy, if not fashionable, was popular. There 
 were thousands of Britons eager to see the follies and 
 vulgarities of the great world exposed ; and they took 
 the same delight in The Book of Snobs as our demo- 
 crats of to-day take in the gossip of " society " 
 papers. Old as the vice is now, it was not new in 
 1846 ; but Thackeray stamped it with an official 
 
PUNCH AND VANITY FAIR 77 
 
 name, which, like the quality it denotes, is im- 
 perishable.' 
 
 The origin of the word is lost in obscurity. It 
 was not Thackeray's own invention ; indeed it is not 
 uncommonly found in the works of Dickens, Lever, 
 and others -, nor was it always used in its familiar 
 sense. In the Cambridge of the early nineteenth 
 century it was a contemptuous term put upon the 
 townsmen by the members of the university ; and 
 since it makes its first appearance in the Gradus ad 
 Cantahrigiam of 1824,^ being absent from the earlier 
 edition (1803), its introduction may be approximately 
 fixed. Thackeray, the undergraduate, knew the name 
 well, since it was borne by the little journal for which 
 he wrote at Cambridge ; but there is all the difference 
 in the world between a " townsman " as opposed to a 
 
 ' Snobbishness is doubtless as old as the world, and you may 
 track it in any period you will. In 1802, says The Times, " a 
 scandalous intrusion was practised by persons employed by some 
 of the morning papers, to take down the names of persons of 
 fashion as they got out of their carriages to visit their friends." 
 One of these gentry, surprised in the servants' hall of the DileL 
 tante Theatre, in Tottenham Street, was, we are told, " sent to the 
 watch-house." To-day he would be far more kindly treated, and 
 he (or she) would assuredly drive to the theatre in a brougham. 
 But so far has snobbishness been carried in our day, that the press 
 shows a naive surprise if august personages can speak or walk. 
 Not long since it was gravely asserted that a certain princess, hav- 
 ing made a small purchase in a shop, defrayed the cost out of her 
 own purse. Out of whose purse, save her own, should she have 
 defrayed it ? 
 
 5 " Snob. A term applied indiscriminately to all who have not 
 the honour of being members of the University." 
 
78 THACKERAY 
 
 " gownsman " and the superfine gentry of The Book 
 of Snobs. Probably the general sense, which still sur- 
 vives, is also the older, the narrowed use of the word 
 at Cambridge being a mere piece of local exclusive- 
 ness. At any rate, De Quincey employs the word to 
 the same purpose as Thackeray in 1822,^ which proves 
 that it belonged not to a university, but to the world. 
 But certainty is impossible, nor does Thackeray help 
 us to pierce the mystery. " Not above five-and- 
 twenty years since," he writes, " a name, an express- 
 ive monosyllable, arose to designate the race." 
 Maybe he is thinking of De Quincey, maybe of his 
 own undergraduate journal. The effect in either case 
 is the same : he leaves us with a word which the 
 philologists cannot explain, and which the hardiest 
 lexicographer would hesitate to define.^ 
 
 So much for the word ; now for the quality. " We 
 cannot say what it is," wrote Thackeray, " any more 
 than we can define wit, or humour, or humbug ; but 
 we know what it is." Nevertheless he attempted a 
 definition himself, which does not enlighten us. 
 " He who meanly admires mean things is a snob — per- 
 haps that is a safe definition of the character." If it 
 
 ' See The Opium-Eater (edition 1862, p. 120) : " Those base 
 snobs who would put up with a vile Brummagem substitute.'" For 
 this quotation I am indebted to the courtesy of Dr. J. A. H. 
 Murray. 
 
 2 The last step in the word's development is the strangest of all. 
 The French took hold of it, and not knowing its meaning, bent it 
 to their will, so that in the Paris of to-day it means the top of the 
 fashion, and the word has acquired a sense precisely opposite to 
 that which it connoted in the Gradus ad Cantabrigiatn of 1824. 
 
PUNCH AND VANITY FAIR 79 
 
 were, then The Book of Snobs need not have been 
 written, for a single page would be sufBcient to con- 
 vince the most hardened sinner. Nor does Thackeray 
 live up to his definition through a single page. The 
 things which the most of his snobs admire are not 
 mean, unless rank, intelligence, and achievement are 
 all mean. But the truth is, Thackeray had " an eye 
 for a snob " ; he tracked Snobs through history, " as 
 certain little dogs in Hampshire hunt out truffles." 
 Wherever there was a man, he saw a snob; if the 
 man were of high rank, he overvalued himself; if he 
 were of low rank, he overvalued others. Lady Bare- 
 acres is a snob, because she spends more than she can 
 afford ; Lady Scraper is a snob, because she prefers a 
 mutton-chop eaten in splendour to a whole saddle 
 consumed in Brixton ; Sir Walter Raleigh was a 
 snob, because, being a loyal courtier, he spread his 
 cloak before the feet of his sovereign. 
 
 But from beginning to end Thackeray's bias is evi- 
 dent. He inclines so far to the side of the people 
 that he blames the kings of this world for the adula- 
 tion heaped upon them by fools. If sovereignty be 
 anything better than a disgrace, then Louis XIV was 
 a great king, since no man ever so well understood 
 the pageantry of a throne. Yet to Thackeray " old 
 squaretoes " was a snob, who depended wholly upon 
 his wig. He considers the army with the same prej- 
 udiced eye, and writes like a war-correspondent lately 
 returned from the front : the red-jackets are " great- 
 whiskered warriors, who have faced all dangers of 
 climate and battle " j the officers who perform " the 
 
8o THACKERAY 
 
 idiotic services " of command are " vacuous, good- 
 natured, gentlemanlike, rickety little lieutenants." 
 Rag and Famish, again, are in no sense snobs ; cads 
 they may be; but to include such rafFs as these and 
 Lord Byron in one category, is to confuse not merely 
 words but qualities. 
 
 At the university he is no more happy than in the 
 army. He is indignant because in his day noblemen 
 were granted degrees upon easy terms. But here was 
 no snobbishness ; it was merely part of an ancient 
 system, which could be attacked, and has been abol- 
 ished, on its merits. The sizar at Cambridge, the 
 servitor at Oxford, suffered an evident hardship ; yet 
 let it be remembered that philanthropy, not snobbish- 
 ness, was the first cause of their position, and that 
 similar hardships will be inevitable until we are all 
 equally rich, or equally poor, by Act of Parliament. 
 And then, as if to show the insecurity of his argu- 
 ment, he condemns Crump, the Master of Saint 
 Boniface, for whom, no doubt, we may read Whe- 
 well, because " he being a beggar, has managed to get 
 upon horseback." Would he have kept him, we 
 wonder, at an eternal charity school, or would he 
 have forced him to carry to the Master's Lodge an 
 air of affected humility ? It is, indeed, a touch of 
 true snobbishness to twit the successful scholar with 
 his humble origin, and Thackeray's argument is 
 marred by a manifest contradiction. He who at- 
 tempts to rise is a snob ; he who deigns to descend is 
 a snob ; and if equality is our only salvation, it is by 
 the author's reasoning plainly unattainable. 
 
PUNCH AND VANITY FAIR 8 1 
 
 With much of Thackeray's satire it is easy to 
 sympathise. All honest men hate tuft-hunting as 
 they hate an assumption of gentility. We none of 
 us can find words strong enough to condemn the 
 " Court Circular," which, while it treats the exalted in 
 rank as superhuman, invites the lower middle class to 
 spatter their familiar conversation with great names. 
 But Thackeray does not stay his hand at legitimate 
 denunciation. He worries his point, until he himself 
 becomes the mouthpiece of mean thoughts. He 
 seems to be haunted by a species of self-conscious- 
 ness ; he is surprised that he is where he is ; he 
 knows that somebody is above or below him ; but he 
 cannot take his place in the world (or anybody else's 
 place) for granted. He quite rightly holds a society 
 " which sets up to be polite, and ignores Arts and 
 Letters, to be a snobbish Society." But Arts and 
 Letters have always got the recognition they desire 
 from a Society which, by Thackeray's own argument, 
 has no right to encourage them. 
 
 In truth, there is a touch of wounded pride in 
 every page of this Book of Snobs, which Thackeray 
 should never have betrayed. At the very time at 
 which he was scarifying the Snob, he was dining 
 where he could, and moving with a proper pleasure 
 " in the inner circle." A year later he takes a genu- 
 ine and justified delight in riding with dukes and 
 duchesses at Spa. Like all other men, he preferred 
 good company to bad, and who would blame him ^. 
 Yet he cannot view the situation with a simple eye. 
 When the young Disraeli fluttered into the highest 
 
82 THACKERAY 
 
 society he professed a frank joy in his success. 
 When he dined at a distinguished peer's, " the only 
 commoner in the room," he was conscious of a tri- 
 umph, and a man of sense must surely confess 
 Disraeli's attitude at once more honest and more dig- 
 nified. How, then, shall we harmonise Thackeray's 
 practice and theory ? It would be hard, indeed, had 
 not Sir Leslie Stephen given us the key. " Thack- 
 eray was at this time," says Sir Leslie, " an inhabitant 
 of Bohemia, and enjoyed the humours and unconven- 
 tional ways of the region. But he was a native of 
 his own Tyburnia, forced into Bohemia by distress, 
 and there meeting many men of the Bludyer type 
 who were his inferiors in refinement and cultivation." 
 Truly, there is no easier method of falsifying facts 
 than to live with one's inferiors. No doubt Thack- 
 eray seemed a snob to the Bohemians of his acquaint- 
 ance, who resented his superiority with a jealous 
 rage ; no doubt, also, it was in Bohemia that he saw 
 the folly of pretence, and learned to exaggerate in his 
 mind's eye the outward shows of life. 
 
 But it was not merely his environment which con- 
 fused his vision. The Snob Papers betray a lack of 
 humour, an inability to look at things in their right 
 proportion, which it is not easy to condone. Thack- 
 eray was persuaded that all things are barbarous which 
 are not of practical utility. He agreed with Cobden, 
 he said, that Courts are barbarous, that " beef-eaters 
 are barbarous." He hated tradition, and denounced- 
 in set terms "the brutal, unchristian, blundering 
 Feudal system." But to denounce is not to abolish. 
 
PUNCH AND VANITY FAIR 83 
 
 As we are born of the past, so we cannot, by a mere 
 act of will, rid ourselves of our ancestry and its in- 
 fluence. The Feudal system may be all that a hostile 
 fancy paints it, but it shaped the world we live in, the 
 only world we shall ever live in. Nor would Thack- 
 eray's argument be sound, unless he re-created the 
 human race, and let it fight out its battles in vacuo. 
 
 But there is another reason why Thackeray was 
 prone to detect his favourite vices in everybody, — he 
 was strangely interested in the trivialities of life. 
 The philosopher who could not endure the " bounce" 
 of Dumas nor the brutality of M. de Balzac, liked to 
 reflect that Major Ponto's hollands was gin, that 
 Sackville Maine was ruined at the " Sarcophagus," 
 that Timmins' dinner was not yet paid for. True, 
 these lesser evils are part of the tragedy of life, but 
 they are not all its tragedy ; and it is Thackeray's 
 weakness sometimes to have mistaken the part for the 
 whole. Once taken hold of by this dominant idea, 
 he could not shake ofF the obsession ; he continued 
 until the end believing that every man he met was a 
 snob, and forgot that if snobbishness be the common 
 factor of humanity, it would be aS well to strike it 
 out and make an end of it. 
 
 But if The Book of Snobs is based upon a confusion 
 of thought, it none the less has conspicuous merits. 
 The style, though now and again forced to a witti- 
 cism, is often as lucid and supple as Thackeray's best ; 
 the sketches of character scattered up and down the 
 book are admirably fresh and truthful, nor does the 
 fact that he afterwards drew them on a larger scale 
 
84 THACKERAY 
 
 impair their interest and veracity. As I have said, 
 Thackeray made no scruple of repeating himself, and 
 The Book of Snobs^ no less than The Sketch Books^ con- 
 tains the ravir material of much fiction. Cinqbars 
 and Glenlivat, my lady Carabas and the Honourable 
 Sir George Tufto, were already alive in the pages of 
 Punch, and the years did no more than add to their 
 natural growth. But The Book of Snobs touched the 
 popular fancy, and made Thackeray famous. It 
 achieved more than this : it profoundly influenced its 
 author. Thackeray once told Motley that " the Snob 
 Papers were those of his writings he liked the least," 
 and we can easily believe it. None the less he 
 never shook himself free from its bondage. Hence- 
 forth he was, more often than not, a chronicler of 
 snobs, and it was only when his imagination carried 
 him back to the eighteenth century that he forgot the 
 twisted standard of life he had himself set up. It is 
 not uncommon, this spectacle of an author enslaved 
 by his own book ; but the slavery dimmed Thack- 
 eray's outlook upon the world, and it is impossible to 
 observe without regret the complacency wherewith 
 he answered the too urgent demand of the people. 
 
 To enumerate the miscellaneous prose and verse 
 which Thackeray sent to Punch in some ten years 
 were a thankless task. Wherever he went, to Brigh- 
 ton or to the East, he found time for a column of 
 jocular correspondence. But there are one or two 
 works which have deservedly been saved from the 
 wreckage of journalism. The Novels by Eminent 
 Hands are the best, as they were the first, of their 
 
PUNCH AND VANITY FAIR 85 
 
 kind — witty, pertinent, and good-natured. The 
 Travels in London and Mr. Brown s Letters to his 
 Nephew echo in every line the shrewd, middle-aged 
 man of the world, in whose pompous garb their au- 
 thor liked to masquerade. So he wrote much and 
 easily, and found time for the visits to Paris, which 
 were his best-loved pleasures. " He is in full play 
 and pay in London," wrote FitzGerald, "writing in 
 a dozen reviews, and a score of newspapers : and 
 while health lasts he sails before the wind." And 
 his success was due in great measure to Punch. 
 Punch., in other words, cut the string of his balloon, 
 which presently sped across the sky amid trailing 
 clouds of glory. One visible renown was a silver 
 statuette of the humpback presented him in 1848 by 
 Dr. John Brown and other admirers in Edinburgh. 
 Moreover, he could at last be easily placed. " Thack- 
 eray .^ Yes. The man on Punch ; " and once a 
 man is " placed," fame is never long in reaching him. 
 Nevertheless, he felt the strain of journalism, as all 
 must feel it. No sooner did he sit down to his 
 novel, whichever it might be, than a promised article 
 diverted him, and the terms on which he lived with 
 some of his colleagues did not lessen the strain. So 
 that his resignation, in 1853, ^^^ neither unexpected 
 nor inexplicable. He wrote to his mother that "it 
 was a general scorn and sadness which made him give 
 up Punch," and no doubt it was fatigue as well as a 
 difference of policy which induced his resignation. 
 In 1849 ^^ ^°^^ ^''^- Brookfield that he " was get- 
 ting so weary of Punch that he thought he must 
 
86 THACKERAY 
 
 have done with it." Four years later he had 
 done with it. " What do you think I have done 
 to-day ? " he wrote to the same friend; " I have sent 
 in my resignation to Punch. There appears in next 
 
 Punch an article so wicked, I think, by poor , 
 
 that upon my word I don't think I ought to pull any 
 longer in the same boat with such a savage little 
 Robespierre. The appearance of this incendiary ar- 
 ticle put me in such a rage that I could only cool my- 
 self with a ride in the park." 
 
 The article was an attack upon Louis Napoleon, 
 which Thackeray believed to be "dangerous for the 
 welfare and peace of the country." Nor was the 
 epilogue to his collaboration more agreeable than the 
 reason of his departure. Punch, like all those who 
 reserve to themselves the right of flaying others by ad- 
 verse criticism, has always been exquisitely sensitive 
 to the faintest reproach. A year after he had re- 
 signed, Thackeray, in an article upon Leech con- 
 tributed to The ^arterly, wrote " half a line regard- 
 ing his old Punch companions," to quote a letter ad- 
 dressed to Mr. Evans,' " which was perfectly true, 
 which I have often said, but which I ought not to 
 have written." The half-line is wholly void of of- 
 fence, yet Punch resented it with all the fury of a 
 delicate critic. " Fancy a number of Punch," wrote 
 Thackeray, " without Leech's pictures ! What 
 would you give for it? The learned gentlemen who 
 write the work must feel that without, it were as well 
 
 1 The letter is printed at length in Mr. Spielmann's History of 
 Punch. 
 
PUNCH AND VANITY FAIR 87 
 
 left alone. Surely there is nothing for offence in so 
 moderate a statement, in which, moreover, Thackeray 
 included himself. But the offence was given, and it 
 could only be purged by a dinner of reconciliation. 
 However, Thackeray had loyally served the journal 
 which, in its time, had been of excellent service to 
 him, and had found an appreciative audience for the 
 novels which had been appearing month after month 
 during the past six years. 
 
 On January i, 1847, there was published in a yellow 
 wrapper, now famous, the first number of Vanity Fair. 
 Until the fifth number, we are told, the story aroused 
 little interest, and the publishers, in the prudence of 
 their souls, were half persuaded to suppress it. Then 
 suddenly a trivial circumstance — the appearance, 'tis 
 said, of Mrs. Perkins's Ball — aroused the popular curi- 
 osity, and all the world was chattering of Vanity Fair. 
 Thus it is that books are commonly found good or bad 
 by accident, and owe what is called " success '' to any 
 other element than their own merit. But Vanity Fair 
 was doubly fortunate : deliberate criticism echoed the 
 people's voice, and before the story was half finished 
 it had been reviewed — with outspoken appreciation — 
 by Abraham Hayward in The Edinburgh. To-day the 
 heavy artillery of the quarterlies can neither kill a foe 
 nor save a friend ; but fifty years ago opinions were 
 not framed and broken in a night, and, incredible 
 though it seem, an article by Hayward helped to 
 decide the fate of the book. 
 
 Thackeray, then, was happy in the reception of 
 Vanity Fair, and the passing years have confirmed the 
 
88 THACKERAY 
 
 instant verdict. Indeed, stubborn as is the mind of 
 man, it would have been surprising if the book had 
 not touched the taste of the town. For it was fresh 
 both in matter and manner. It owed nothing to con- 
 temporaneous foppery ; it was as remote from Bulwer 
 as from Ainsworth. As in his shorter stories, so in 
 Vanity Fair, Thackeray forgot the rivals who en- 
 vironed him, and went back for inspiration to the 
 true English novel of Fielding. He called the book 
 " a novel without a hero " ; he might have called it 
 a novel without a plan. He confesses himself that 
 the moral crept in of itself, and that he " wasn't 
 going to write in this way when he began." In other 
 words, the story grew as it chose, from month to 
 month, and dragged its author after it. And this ex- 
 plains its failure to stop when it should. The logical 
 end of the book is Rawdon Crawley's appointment to 
 the Governorship of Coventry Island, and the re- 
 gathering of the threads — over 150 pages — is a wan- 
 ton and tedious operation. 
 
 So far as its construction goes, Vanity Fair is a 
 novel of adventure, of adventure in society, where 
 hearts and banks are broken more easily than heads 
 or dynasties ; and despite his own declaration that he 
 wanted to make " a set of people living without God 
 in the world," the book has not a plan or motive in 
 the sense that Balzac and the moderns have under- 
 stood it. For Thackeray, although he might, and he 
 chose, have studied the Com'edie Humaine, remained 
 old-fashioned to the end, and let his personages wander 
 up and down as they listed, content if only he could 
 
PUNCH AND VANITY FAIR 89 
 
 now and again slip in a sentiment, or castigate a 
 favourite vice on his own account. But the charge 
 commonly brought against Vanity Fair that it is heart- 
 less and cynical cannot be sustained for a moment. 
 A novel of manners does not exhaust the whole of 
 human life, and Thackeray had a perfect right to 
 choose such puppets for his shows as aroused his 
 keenest interest. Nor is the book merely a novel 
 of manners ; it is a satire as well. The author does 
 not ask his readers to profess sympathy with his ruf- 
 fians. He demands no more than an appreciation 
 of a witty presentment and of deft draughtsmanship. 
 If he had suppressed the sentiment, which ever rose 
 up in his heart. Vanity Fair might have been as 
 un-moral as The Way of the IVorld, and what a mas- 
 terpiece it would have been ! Even Amelia, a very 
 Niobe of tears, is drawn with a cold contempt, and 
 I am not certain that she is not as savage a piece of 
 satire as Becky herself. 
 
 But Thackeray, though he loved to masquerade as 
 a man of the world, could not help looking even at 
 his own creations with an eye of pity or dislike. 
 He plays the same part in his books as is played in 
 Greek tragedy by a chorus of tiresome elders, and it 
 is this constant intrusion which gives certain passages 
 in Vanity Fair a rakish, almost a battered, air. The 
 reader would never dream of taking such persons as 
 Rawdon and his Aunt seriously, were he not told to 
 do so by the author of their being. The reader, had 
 he been allowed, would have been content with an 
 artistic appreciation. But, says Thackeray, " as we 
 
90 THACKERAY 
 
 bring our characters forward, I will ask leave, as a 
 man and a brother, not only to introduce them, but 
 occasionally to step down from the platform and talk 
 about them; if they are good and kindly, to love 
 them, and shake them by the hand." And that is 
 what he is too often — a man and a brother ; he for- 
 gets the impartiality of the artist, and goes about bab- 
 bling with his own puppets. 
 
 These excesses of sentiment are plain for all to see. 
 They interrupt the progress of the story with irritating 
 frequency. They put a needless accent upon what is 
 called the "cynicism " of Thackeray, and confuse the 
 very simple method of the book. " Picture to your- 
 self, oh fair young reader," exclaims the author of 
 Miss Crawley, " a worldly, selfish, graceless, thankless, 
 religionless old woman, writhing in pain and fear, and 
 •without her wig. Picture her to yourself, and ere you 
 be old, learn to love and pray." The reference to the 
 wig betrays an animus which should never disturb a 
 novelist's serenity, and Miss Crawley is otherwise so 
 well drawn that she might safely be left to point her 
 own moral. So on another page he reminds us, with 
 his eye upon the obvious, that " the bustle, and 
 triumph, and laughter, and gaiety which Vanity Fair 
 exhibits in public do not always pursue the performer 
 into private life." And from this point of view he 
 defines the purpose of his romance. "This, dear 
 friends and companions," so he writes in his most 
 intimate style, " is my amiable object — to walk with 
 you through the Fair, to examine the shops and the 
 shows there ; and that we should all come home after 
 
PUNCH AND VANITY FAIR 9 1 
 
 the flare, and the noise, and the gaiety, and be per- 
 fectly miserable in private." But vv'hy should we be 
 miserable — in private or public — about that in which 
 our interest is, or should be, purely artistic ? 
 
 However, he is so closely set upon disquisition 
 that he cannot refrain the hand of sentiment even from 
 the character of Rawdon Crawley, whose rough, 
 amiable brutality might have been pictured without a 
 flaw. When the guardsman, who shot Captain 
 Marker, visits Queen's Crawley with his Rebecca, 
 even he, under the auspices of Thackeray, is some- 
 what abashed. " What recollections of boyhood and 
 innocence might have been flitting across his brain ? " 
 asks the novelist. " What pangs of dim remorse and 
 doubt and shame ? " If elsewhere the excellent 
 Rawdon is drawn with justice, no pangs of remorse 
 or shame would have flitted across his brain, and the 
 character is weakened by each attempt made by the 
 author's sentimentality to weaken that " spirit of one- 
 ness " which should animate it. We resent the in- 
 terpolation of moral comment, even when Amelia is 
 the moralist's excuse. " By heavens ! it is pitiful," 
 exclaims Thackeray, " the bootless love of women 
 for children in Vanity Fair." What is all this but a 
 confession of weakness. A story which needs anno- 
 tation fails of its main purpose, and the reader may 
 justly feel irritated who is not left to form his own 
 conclusions. 
 
 It is especially in satire that sermonising has no 
 place, for satire is of itself a method of reproof. 
 Though Aristophanes at times laid aside the lash for 
 
92 THACKERAY 
 
 the lyre, he knew the limits of his genre too well to 
 lapse into moral discourses. But Thackeray acts the 
 sheep-dog to his own characters. He plays propriety 
 before them, very much as Miss Briggs ensured the 
 public respectability of Becky Sharp. And when he 
 is angry with them, he scolds them with almost a 
 shrewish tongue. But, despite this concession to his 
 own and the popular taste, Thackeray — with Vanity 
 Fair — well deserved the place which he won in the 
 literature of his age. Its style, peculiarly simple and 
 straightforward, was free both from rhetoric and orna- 
 ment. It suppressed all the tricks of the novelist, and 
 threw what discredit it could upon fine writing. At 
 the same time, it was various enough to express the 
 diverse persons and changing emotions which are the 
 material of the book. The characters are as dis- 
 tinguished as the style. Seldom in the history of 
 English romance had a more genteel company been 
 gathered together, and even when it is disreputable, it 
 is still the best of bad company. Moreover, it is 
 characteristic of the author that for all his moralisings 
 he is most sincerely interested in his blackguards. He 
 cares so little himself for Amelia ' that he cannot ex- 
 pect to awake an appreciation in his readers; while 
 
 ' There is little doubt that Thackeray despised Amelia. When 
 Vanity Fair was being published, "he used to talk about it" to 
 Liddell and his wife, " and what he should do with the persons." 
 Mrs. Liddell said one day : " Oh, Mr. Thackeray, you must let 
 Dobbin marry Amelia." " Well," he replied, " he shall, and when 
 he has got her, he will not find her worth having." See Dean 
 Liddell's Life, p. 8, 
 
PUNCH AND VANITY FAIR 93 
 
 Dobbin, for all his nobility, is purposely awkward 
 where he is not ridiculous. 
 
 But Becky Sharp, always the central figure of the 
 book, is drawn with a firmer hand and brighter 
 colours. You must travel far indeed before you find 
 so good a portrait of the incarnate minx. When she 
 is off the stage the action languishes ; the squalor of 
 Queen's Crawley, the grimness of Gaunt House, hold 
 our attention merely as they affect the true heroine of 
 the book. When first she appears, flinging the 
 " dixonary " out of the window, the true note of her 
 character is struck, and never once does it ring false. 
 " She was small and slight in person," thus she is 
 described ; " pale, sandy-haired, and with eyes habit- 
 ually cast down : when they looked up, they were 
 very large, odd, and attractive." They had already 
 done execution upon the curate, and they were ready 
 to vanquish fat Jos. Sedley, or a whole wilderness 
 of Crawleys. In truth, there was scarce a member of 
 that aristocratic family which did not instantly suc- 
 cumb to her artillery. In less than a year she had 
 won the Baronet's confidence ; she was a trouvaille 
 in the eyes of Miss Crawley; the Captain was wild 
 about her; and even Mrs. Bute was never happy out 
 of her sight. Her airs and graces, delicately touched 
 by French influence, were irresistible, and "when she 
 was agitated, and alluded to her maternal relative, she 
 spoke with ever so slight a foreign accent, which gave 
 a great charm to her clear, ringing voice." 
 
 Thus with success she assumed a certainty of 
 manner which, though natural to her, was unsuspected 
 
94 THACKERAY 
 
 by her early friends. When first she encountered 
 George Osborne, after a sojourn in Hampshire, she 
 ^bullied him in fine style. "But, oh! Mr. Osborne, 
 what a difference eighteen months' experience makes ! 
 eighteen months spent, pardon me for saying so, with 
 gentlemen." How admirably, too, she comports her- 
 self in the first strong situation of the book, when she 
 is forced to confess her marriage to Sir Pitt ! " I 
 can't be your wife, sir," says she, with exquisite 
 humility ; " let me — let me be your daughter." And 
 when she is married, and exiled from the world of the 
 Crawleys, with what skill does she manage the 
 sharper's victims, with what address does she present 
 Mrs. Crawley's husband to society ! Then, again, 
 the campaign which she conducts at Brussels — that 
 little campaign within a great one — is as triumphant as 
 the Duke's. She manages friends and foes with equal 
 success and eflrontery ; the famous ball is her peculiar 
 victory ; she insults Amelia, while she captures the 
 heart of the cad, Amelia's husband ; and, best of all, 
 she repels the interested advances of Lady Bareacres, 
 with an insolence which enchants you, though it prove 
 her lack of breeding. 
 
 Like all the great, she is without scruple and with- 
 out pity. She robs Briggs as cheerfully as she ruins 
 Raggles, and she permits no consideration of kindness 
 or loyalty to interrupt her intrigue. In brief, she is 
 rare among the creations of Thackeray because she is 
 uniform and homogeneous. Even Rawdon feels the 
 twinges of remorse, but Becky knows no remorse save 
 failure. When she attends Sir Pitt's funeral at 
 
PUNCH AND VANITY FAIR 95 
 
 Queen's Crawley, she lets her mind wander back to 
 10 the past in a spirit of gratulation. "I have passed 
 ii beyond it, because I have brains," thought she, " and 
 almost all the rest of the world are fools." Brilliant 
 as is her conquest of the Marquis, she reveals the ad- 
 venturess yet more splendidly in her victory over Sir 
 Pitt the younger. " You remain a baronet," says she 
 to him. " No, Sir Pitt Crawley, I know you better. 
 I know your talents and ambition. You fancy you 
 hide them both : but you can conceal neither from 
 me. I showed Lord Steyne your pamphlet on Malt." 
 So the trap is laid in sight of the bird, baited with 
 praise and approached by vanity. But Becky never 
 falls below her opportunity : her entry into Gaunt 
 House is superb ; and the moment of her greatest 
 triumph, when she sits at the grand exclusive table 
 with his Royal Highness, and is served on gold plate, 
 is worth the years of intrigue which had achieved it. 
 There is a certain attraction even in her degringolade, 
 and though one wishes she had not tried to fascinate 
 Lord Steyne anew, she shows a fine spirit of gaiety 
 and courage in the sombre atmosphere of Pumper- 
 nickel. "She was at home with everybody in the 
 place — pedlars, punters, tumblers, students, and all." 
 Though her adversaries were meaner, and the stakes 
 lower, she was still playing the same game of life 
 which she played against the Marquis of Steyne, and, 
 after her fashion, she was a winner to the end. 
 
 Such is the central figure of Vanity Fair^ and some 
 others, though they do but enhance Rebecca's 
 splendour, are drawn with an equally sure hand. 
 
96 THACKERAY 
 
 Throughout the book there is a sense of life touched 
 by caricature, which has kept it fresh in an age of 
 changed morals and different taste. Above all, 
 IThackeray shows himself an adept in bringing his 
 -^characters on the scene, and in setting forth their 
 dominant traits in half-a-dozen lines. At Rawdon 
 Crawley's first appearance, the reader has an intimate 
 acquaintance with that deboshed dragoon. " A per- 
 fect and celebrated ' blood,' or dandy about town, was 
 this young officer. Boxing, rat-hunting, the fives' 
 court,' and four-in-hand were the fashion of the 
 British aristocracy ; and he was an adept in all these 
 noble sciences. And though he belonged to the 
 Household troops, who, as it was their duty to rally 
 round theTPrince Regent, had not shown their valour 
 in foreign service yet, Rawdon Crawley had already 
 (a propos of play, of which he was immoderately fond) 
 fought three bloody duels, in which he gave ample 
 proofs of his contempt for death." This passage 
 puts you on terms with the hero at once, and your 
 acquaintance is cemented by Becky's own comment : 
 
 ' The Fives' Court does not mean the home of the innocent sport 
 pursued by Cavanagh. It was the haunt of the Fancy, and there 
 the prize-fighters had their tournaments. The following lines de- 
 scribe its character eloquently enough : — 
 
 " I've left the Fives' Court rush — the flash— the rally ; 
 The noise of ' Go it, Jack ' — the stop — the blow — 
 The shout — the chattering hit — the check — the sally," 
 
 They are to be found in Peter Corcoran's The Fancy (1820), the 
 work of J, H, Reynolds, the friend of Keats, Jack, it may be 
 noted in passing, is Randall, the Nonpareil, the hero " good with 
 both hands, and only ten stone four." 
 
PUNCH AND VANITY FAIR 97 
 
 "Well, he is a very large young dandy. He is six 
 feet high, and speaks with a great voice, and swears a 
 great deal ; and orders about the servants, who all 
 adore him nevertheless." 
 
 Such was the Samson whose locks his Becky 
 sheared, and his gradual submission is the one pathetic 
 episode of the book. He is not very wise. His 
 single talent is for gaming, and though his constant 
 success suggested a charge of foul play, the charge 
 was never justified. At the beginning of a game he 
 would play carelessly, but his style was transformed 
 by loss, and he always got up from the table a winner. 
 At billiards he pursued the same tactics. " Like a 
 great general," says Thackeray, " his genius used to 
 rise with the danger, and when the luck had been un- 
 favourable to him for a whole game, and the bets were 
 consequently against him, he would with consummate 
 skill and boldness make some prodigious hits which 
 would restore the battle, and come in a victor at the 
 end, to the astonishment of everybody — of everybody, 
 that is, who was a stranger to his play." Becky, in 
 fact, was the one adversary to whom he succumbed, 
 and it was his simple devotion that undid him. At 
 first he believed in her affection with a childlike faith, 
 but, as she gradually deserted him, he was driven to a 
 more equal alliance with his son. Nor did he recover 
 his senses until he was trapped to the sponging-house, 
 in which crisis of his fate he bore himself as a soldier 
 and a gentleman. Rawdon Crawley, in brief, is not 
 merely sympathetic, he is also true to life. Now, this 
 is the more striking, since Vanity Fair is composed in 
 
98 THACKERAY 
 
 varying planes of caricature. The elder Sir Pitt and 
 Dobbin, for instance, do not inhabit the same world, 
 while the atmosphere which Peggy O'Dowd breathes 
 is not the same as enwraps the Lady Jane. In other 
 words, burlesque and realism jostle up and- dowrt-the 
 book, and it is not always easy to interpret the author's 
 meaning. But Rawdon, despite certain extravagances 
 of diction and manner, is more of a man than the 
 most of those whom he encounters, and he finds no 
 worthy rival outside the works of Thackeray. Com- 
 pare him to Sir Mulberry Hawk or the bucks of 
 Bulwer, and in a moment you will realise his superi- 
 ority. And though many a writer has tried his hand 
 since at the delineation of the British dandy, frozen 
 in Lord Dundreary to a type, Rawdon Crawley holds 
 his own after fifty years. 
 
 With the same ease Thackeray presents his other 
 characters. No sooner does old Sir Pitt shoulder 
 Becky's trunk than we know him for what he is. 
 The author, indeed, saves his baronet from improba- 
 bility by introducing him to a note of extravagant 
 caricature ; and after his supper with Mrs. Tinker 
 nothing that he does or says can surprise us. But 
 that is due rather to Thackeray's skill than to the 
 old man's verisimilitude. If we may believe Charles 
 Kingsley, Sir Pitt is " almost the only exact portrait 
 in the book"; and yet you will match him more 
 nearly in the Restoration comedy than in modern 
 Hampshire. He might well have sat upon the bench 
 with Sir John Brute. "Who do you call a drunken 
 fellow, you slut you.?" asks Sir John of his wife; 
 
PUNCH AND VANITY FAIR QQ 
 
 ^-" I'm a man of quality ; the King has made me a 
 knight." ^ Is not that boast composed in precisely 
 the same spirit as Sir Pitt's introduction to Becky .? 
 " He, he ! ['m Sir Pitt Crawley. Reklect you owe 
 me a pint for bringing down your luggage. He, he ! 
 Ask Tinker if I ain't." 
 
 The Rev. Bute is painted in more modest colours : 
 " A tall, stately, jolly, shovel-hatted man," was he, 
 who " had a fine voice, sang ' A southerly wind and a 
 cloudy sky,' and gave the whoop in chorus with gen- 
 eral applause. He rode to hounds in a pepper-and- 
 salt frock, and was one of the best fishermen in the 
 county." But Thackeray is at his best with the 
 Crawleys, and all save the younger Pitt, who is mon- 
 strous, carry the blood of human life in their veins. 
 Miss Crawley, an admirable specimen of the selfish 
 worldling, trained to egoism by wealth and Jacobin 
 literature, never rings false save in the comments of 
 her creator, while " the eager, active, black-faced " 
 Mrs. Bute, " the smart, active little body who wrote 
 
 .;- her husband's sermons," is a more pestilent schemer 
 than Becky herself, without Becky's wit or Becky's 
 fascination. Excellent, too, though in another vein, 
 are the Osbornes, father and son. True, the British 
 merchant is a trifle conventional ; but the young sol- 
 dier, who would be a gentleman, is assuredly one of 
 the best (or worst) cads in fiction. 
 
 It is, then, for a ^t of well-drawn characters, 
 touched one and all with caricature, that we especially 
 value Vanity Fair ; yet in praising the characters we 
 ^ ' See Sir John Vanbrugh's TAe Provoked Wife, Act iv. sc. iv. 
 
lOO THACKERAY 
 
 must not forget the situations in which they play their 
 part. It is said that when Thackeray wrote the scene 
 wherein Rawdon Crawley surprises his wife with Lord 
 Steyne he exclaimed," By Jove ! that's genius." And 
 with some right, since he had led up to that memora- 
 ble crisis with far more than his usual skill. Still bet- 
 ter, and far less showy, is the episode of Waterloo, in 
 which, for the first time, Thackeray proved how well 
 he could give a romantic turn to history. The mod- 
 ern novelist, if he pitched upon the year 1815 for his 
 period, would make no scruple of dragging Napoleon 
 and Wellington upon his mimic scene. He would be 
 intrepid enough to make these heroes talk the com- 
 monest platitudes to their friends ; he would vulgarise 
 their speeches by the accent of his own suburb ; or 
 in the other extreme he would present them as the 
 dummies of a pedantic archaeologist. Thackeray's 
 method is vastly more artistic. The chapters in which 
 the drama of Waterloo is presented are dominated by 
 great events, but only the distant rumble of the guns 
 is heard, and the reader never gets nearer to the bat- 
 tle-field than Brussels. In other words, Thackeray 
 does not lose hold of his own personages. He has 
 no desire to show how they affect history — that is the 
 foolish method of the historical novelist; he prefers 
 to show how history affects them — a much more 
 reasonable process. When you recall his description 
 of Waterloo, it is Jos. Sedley's spirited escape and 
 the poor, silly Amelia's tragedy that leap to your 
 mind. "No more firing was heard at Brussels — the 
 pursuit rolled miles away. Darkness came down on 
 
PUNCH AND VANITY FAIR lOI 
 
 the field and city : and Amelia was praying for George, 
 who was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet through 
 his heart." That gives us a more vivid vision of the 
 battle than the mock heroics of a false Napoleon, and 
 is truer, besides, both to fiction and to fact. 
 
 Vanity Fair is not, broadly speaking, a roman a clef^ 
 but the ingenious have identified certain characters, 
 and there is no doubt that Thackeray owed something 
 of his inspiration to living men and women. At the 
 same time, it is rash to push resemblances too far : as 
 did the foolish gossip who detected Charlotte Bronte 
 in Becky Sharp, and declared that Rochester was a 
 portrait, drawn in revenge, of Thackeray himself. 
 That is reducing a hazardous method to absurdity ; 
 yet Thackeray did not overlook his contemporaries, 
 and even Becky is said to have had her original. 
 " One morning a hansom drove up to the door," says 
 Mrs. Ritchie, " and out of it there emerged the most 
 charming, dazzling little lady dressed in black, who 
 greeted my father with great affection and brilliancy, 
 and who, departing presently, gave my father a large 
 bunch of fresh violets." The " dazzling little lady " 
 was supposed to be Becky, though Thackeray, of 
 course, never confessed that a model sat for his her- 
 oine ; but Dobbin's amiability absolved his author 
 from reticence, and there is no doubt that John Allen, 
 Archdeacon of Salop, Thackeray's friend and con- 
 temporary at Cambridge, suggested some traits of the 
 awkward, unselfish major. These resemblances, how- 
 ever, are slight and unimportant. The Marquis of 
 Steyne and Mr. Wenham, on the other hand, have 
 
102 THACKERAY 
 
 been generally recognised for Lord Hertford and Mr. 
 Croker, and they better than any others will show how 
 Thackeray turned biography into fiction. They are 
 the more interesting, too, because they were sketched, 
 almost in competition, with the Monmouth and Rigby 
 of that master in ironic portraiture, Benjamin Disraeli, 
 whose knowledge of the men was more profound, and 
 whose touch was at once more brilliant and more sav- 
 age than Thackeray's. 
 
 When Coningsby was published, in 1844, Thackeray 
 reviewed it with considerable contempt in The Pic- 
 torial Times. He declared that the author had " all 
 the qualities of Pitt and Byron and Burke and the 
 great Mr. Widdicombe of Batty's amphitheatre." 
 " Everybody was reading the book," said he, " be- 
 cause everybody recognises everybody's portrait." 
 The review is manifestly unfair when we remember 
 that very soon afterwards Thackeray was trying his 
 own hand at the presentation of the Marquis of Hert- 
 ford, and of the gentleman whom he calls " the Right 
 Honourable John Wilson Joker." It is true that 
 Thackeray allows himself a wider latitude than his 
 rival. Yet it is impossible to mistake the original of 
 Steyne and Wenham, and Thackeray must share the 
 reproach, if reproach be deserved, which he heaps 
 upon Mr. Disraeli.' Nor has Thackeray the same 
 
 ' One passage in Thackeray's review might be justly referred, 
 without the change of a syllable, to Vanity Fair. " What person 
 is there," wrote the reviewer, " in town or country, from the squire 
 down to the lady's maid, who will not be anxious to peruse a work 
 in which the secrets of high life are so exposed ? In all the fash- 
 
PUNCH AND VANITY FAIR 
 
 103 
 
 excuse as his rival of complete success. Neither the 
 great noble nor the obsequious parasite of Vanity Fair 
 is touched with his happiest hand. It is evident that 
 he spent little care upon the portraiture of Lord 
 Steyne, who is less a man than a bundle of vices and 
 brutality. The prejudices which deformed The Book 
 of Snobs are here very wide awake, and you cannot 
 but think that in the gross traits of the Marquis the 
 author is expressing his general dislike of the class to 
 which the Marquis belongs. It is not as though the 
 drama were facilitated by the ruffianly behaviour and 
 aspect of Becky's lover. A man is always more 
 effective than a monster, and Steyne's monstrosity is 
 palliated by very few touches of humanity. He is 
 too much an afFair of buck-teeth and bushy whiskers. 
 A scowl too often " gathers over his heavy brow." 
 His jaw is so infamously underhung that you are sur- 
 prised his friends do not send for the police at his first 
 apparition. Yet he is represented as the friend of 
 " the most august personages," and as the daring rival 
 of Mr. Fox at hazard. His moral aspect is far worse 
 even than his physical. It is his pleasant pastime to 
 bully women and children. For instance, he heartily 
 disliked Becky's boy. " When they met by mis- 
 chance he made sarcastic bows or remarks to the 
 child, or glared at him with savage-looking eyes." 
 Here, indeed, we are at close quarters with the ogre 
 of the fairy story, and with the best intentions in the 
 
 ioiiable novels ever published there is nothing so piquant or so 
 magnificently genteel. Every politician, too, will read with avidity 
 — the details are so personal." 
 
I04 THACKERAY 
 
 world we can no longer put faith in my Lord 
 Steyne. 
 
 Yet worse remains. When Becky confesses to the 
 Marquis that she has ruined Briggs his comment is : 
 " Ruined her ? then why don't you turn her out ? " 
 Now, though many a man might have cherished this 
 amiable thought, none, with the habit of life, would 
 have given it utterance, least of all to a woman who 
 flattered a passing fancy. Absurd, also, is his be- 
 haviour at Gaunt House, whose ladies he addresses in 
 a tone which would disgrace an angry bricklayer ; and 
 at each excess the reader's faith grows weaker. After 
 all, the Marquis of Steyne is described as a great 
 noble, who has lived with princes and conducted em- 
 bassies ; and though the manners of the Regent's 
 Court were free enough, they were not marked by the 
 savagery, inseparable from this ruffian of eyebrows 
 and hideous grins. In fiction you expect verisimili- 
 tude, and a novelist is not easily credible who paints 
 you Bill Sykes and writes the Marquis of Steyne be- 
 neath the portrait. 
 
 To Thackeray Steyne was but an incidental char- 
 acter. Monmouth is the essence of Disraeli's Con- 
 ingsby, and is drawn with extraordinary diligence and 
 insight. It is not astonishing, therefore, that where 
 Thackeray presented a monster, Disraeli presented a 
 man. Steyne is symbolised by a tooth. Monmouth 
 is a grand seigneur., with a taste for evil courses. His 
 aspect, if forbidding, is still magnificent, and his 
 temper, while autocratic, is never brutal. He evades 
 scenes as eagerly as Lord Steyne courts them, since it 
 
PUNCH AND VANITY FAIR IO5 
 
 is more agreeable to his dignity to have his own way 
 without argument; and he never forgets his nobility, 
 even though he is inexorable in revenge or hate. His 
 fine manners fascinate the countryside, and for a 
 selfish man his good humour is remarkable. But 
 none dare take advantage of his amiability. Even 
 Coningsby finds him " superb and icy " ; and it is not 
 surprising, for he is one "whose contempt for man- 
 kind was absolute, — not a fluctuating sentiment, not 
 a mournful conviction ebbing and flowing with cir- 
 cumstances, but a fixed, profound, unalterable in- 
 stinct." 
 
 Adonmouth, in fact, is plainly drawn from the life : 
 he has many traits, perfectly consistent with each 
 other, which mark him out from the rest of his kind. 
 Rich as he is, lofty as is his position, he exhibits a 
 signal weakness in his love of gold. The experience 
 of a worldly life has taught him that a rich man can- 
 not be bought, and that which you cannot buy be- 
 comes invested in his eyes " with a kind of halo 
 amounting almost to sanctity." So bitterly heartless 
 is he that he cannot tolerate the presence of any 
 woman more than two years, and when he is struck 
 with a fatal illness at his villa at Richmond, he has no 
 better company about him than Clotilde, Ermengarde, 
 and their kind. 
 
 For the rest, he is pictured as lavish, dissolute, 
 ease-loving, and tyrannical. He is not exacting, since 
 he demands of his family no more than obedience, and 
 of others no more than that they should divert him. 
 " Members of this family," says he to Coningsby, 
 
Io6 THACKERAY 
 
 " may think as they like, but they must act as I 
 please ; " while at the same time he tolerates Ville- 
 becque and all his friends, if only they distract his 
 mind. Above all, he is determined to avoid anything 
 that is disagreeable ; and it is this resolve which ex- 
 plains the power and influence of Rigby, who is a 
 loyal buffer between his lordship and the sordid 
 troubles of life. Physically, too, he is a man, not a 
 bogey, though he has a certain glance " under which 
 men always quailed." It is thus that he presents 
 himself to his nephew: " He was in height above the 
 middle size, but was somewhat portly and corpulent. 
 His countenance was strongly marked : sagacity on 
 the brow, sensuality in the mouth and jaw. His head 
 was bald, but there were remains of the rich brown 
 locks on which he once prided himself. His large 
 deep blue eyes, madid and yet piercing, showed that 
 the secretions of his brain were apportioned, half to 
 voluptuousness, half to common-sense. But his gen- 
 eral mien was truly grand — full of a natural nobility, of 
 which no one was more sensible than himself." There 
 is a man seen and studied, no mere phantom of ugli- 
 ness and bad morals. 
 
 It is Monmouth's chief merit to be like a man. 
 His accurate resemblance to Lord Hertford gives him 
 an incidental interest. And no student of the early 
 nineteenth century can deny the excellence of the 
 portrait. Yet the real Hertford was a far more 
 amazing creature than his literary portraits suggest. 
 At first sight the conflicting testimonies seem irrecon- 
 cilable. Says Greville: "His life and death were 
 
PUNCH AND VANITY FAIR I07 
 
 equally disgusting and revolting to every good and 
 moral feeling." Says Croker : " I never Knew a man 
 so fixed upon doing what he considered his duty." 
 Here are the extremes, each biassed by personal and 
 political prejudice. But Hertford's character will 
 always remain unintelligible, until its progress and 
 decay are both recognised. In his youth, under the 
 title of Yarmouth, familiarly translated as Red 
 Herrings, he was among the most brilliant of the 
 Regent's Court, and was honestly declared to be 
 " the most good-natured man alive." Gifted with a 
 better intelligence and a stronger temperament than 
 his fellows, he more than held his own, whether at 
 cards or talk, with the dandies of his time. The 
 manners of the age, no doubt, were loose enough ; 
 but Hertford was no worse than Brummel, Scrope 
 Davies and the rest, who are not held up to public 
 shame. Even his enemies allowed him a talent for 
 gaiety, which made his parties the most agreeable in 
 London ; and at cards his supremacy was incontest- 
 able : he won large sums, because he always played a 
 cool and shrewd game. He married, too early for a 
 man of pleasure, the famous Maria Fagniani, and with 
 her he inherited the ample fortune bequeathed by the 
 two bucks who claimed to be her father. The mar- 
 riage was unhappy, and Lady Hertford was for many 
 years the ma'itresse en titre of Marshal Junot. But it 
 could not well have prospered, since Hertford, like 
 Monmouth, did not long endure the society of any 
 woman. 
 
 Meanwhile, for all his gaiety and his gambling, he 
 
I08 THACKERAY 
 
 was sent to Paris and elsewhere as Envoy Extra- 
 ordinary, he was appointed Lord Warden of the 
 Stannaries, he held more than one office in the 
 Household, and, though he is a favourite subject for 
 the political satirist (as what Tory was not ?), he is 
 not always held up to contempt. One set of doggerel 
 verses, indeed, picture him as kicking the Regent for 
 his infamous behaviour to a lady — a piece of daring 
 chivalry, such as is seldom put down to his credit. 
 However, in 1822 he succeeded to his father's wealth 
 and influence, was given the Garter, and asserted his 
 position as a great noble with all the pomp and cere- 
 mony which he could command. Thus far he had 
 been guilty of no act unworthy a courtier, and so 
 stern a moralist as Peel gave him an unsolicited testi- 
 monial, of which any man might be proud. " I was 
 really pleased at Lord Hertford's getting the Garter," 
 wrote the statesman. " I was pleased very disinter- 
 estedly, and for his own sake merely, for I like him. 
 He is a gentleman, and not an every-day one." 
 
 But presently the love of pleasure dominated his 
 intellect. His cynical contempt for mankind was ex- 
 pressed in a basely crapulous life, which has eclipsed 
 the record of his good qualities. After the passing of 
 the Reform Bill he renounced politics, and took a dis- 
 like of England ; wherefore he wandered up and down 
 France and Italy with a band of demireps and parasites 
 for his camp-followers. Like Steyne, he was haunted 
 by the fear of madness, which he had inherited along 
 with his wealth and his titles ; nor is there any doubt 
 that the excesses of his last years were the result of 
 
PUNCH AND VANITY FAIR IO9 
 
 senile insanity.^ At the end he was scarce his own 
 master, and in the last letter addressed to Crolcer he 
 betrays his own helplessness. " I believe we are 
 going to change, because they say so, but I don't 
 know." There is a genuine pathos in this surrender 
 of a once masterful man. He who had exacted 
 obedience from all now bowed before the fancy of the 
 last favourite that chance sent him. But he atoned 
 for this passing weakness by the ferocity of his will, 
 a monument of posthumous brutality and cynical in- 
 solence, which advertised his vices and his savagery 
 even more loudly than did the habit of his life. Yet 
 a vast line of carriages followed his remains out of 
 London, and among them, to the great scandal of the 
 Duke of Bedford, was the carriage of Sir Robert Peel, 
 who had remained faithful in his admiration, and who 
 doubtless would have agreed with Wellington that 
 " had Hertford lived in London, instead of frittering 
 away his time in Paris, he would have become Prime 
 Minister of England." ^ Such was the original of 
 
 ' " The lamentable doings of his later years," wrote Croker, 
 " were neither more nor less than insanity. You know, and he 
 was himself well aware, that there is hereditary madness in the 
 family. He often talked and even wrote about it to me." 
 
 'See Gronow's Reminiscences (1890), vol. ii. p. 323 : -Ah,'' 
 added the Duke of Wellington, " Lord Hertford is a man of extra- 
 ordinary talent. He deserves to be classed among those men who 
 possess transcendent abilities. What a pity it is that he does not 
 live more in England, and occupy his place in the House of Lords- 
 It was only the other day that Sir Robert Peel observed when 
 speaking of Hertford that he was a man of great comprehension ; 
 not only versed in the sciences, but able to animate his mass of 
 knowledge by a bright and active imagination." 
 
no THACKERAY 
 
 Thackeray's Steyne and Disraeli's Monmouth, and 
 while Steyne is overshadowed by Monmouth, Wen- 
 ham is completely eclipsed by Rigby, than whom a 
 fiercer caricature was never drawn. 
 
 Mr. Wenham, the satellite, is a sketch faintly dis- 
 cerned in the background. He is neither finished 
 with care nor informed with venom. He is mean 
 enough, to be sure, but commonplace in his meanness. 
 The portrait, in brief, has neither the force nor the 
 rascality which distinguish Mr. Nicholas Rigby, the 
 villain of Coningsby, after whom rather than after na- 
 ture it seems to be drawn. Of course Wenham's 
 admiration for his master is liberally expressed. He 
 declares that his excellent friend, the Marquis of 
 Steyne, is " one of the most generous and kindest 
 men in the world, as he is one of the greatest." 
 When he swears " upon his honour and word as a 
 gentleman " he " puts his hand on his waistcoat with 
 a parliamentary air," and he sings his patron's praises 
 to Rawdon Crawley " with the same fluent oratory " 
 wherewith he attempts to abash the House of Com- 
 mons, and with as little effect. But, as the excellent 
 Captain Macmurdo observed, he " don't stick at a 
 trifle," and maybe his respect for the Marquis is as 
 genuine as " one of Mrs. Wenham's headaches." 
 Nevertheless, he serves his master well, and he saves 
 a scandal with an adroitness which deceives neither 
 Macmurdo nor his principal. Indeed, had he not led 
 the Colonel into an ambush of bailifi^s, his conduct, 
 contemptible enough, would not have been disgrace- 
 ful. Yet the intention is clear. The parliamentary 
 
PUNCH AND VANITY FAIR IH 
 
 manner, the facile eloquence, the cheerful subservi- 
 ence to the best and greatest of men, proclaim that 
 Thackeray when he sketched Wenham had in his 
 mind's eye the conventional portrait of John Wilson 
 Croker. 
 
 Rigby, on the other hand, almost defeats his crea- 
 tor's animosity. He is so base as to be almost super- 
 human. He is the parasite incarnate, vilely obse- 
 quious to the great man his patron, truculently offen- 
 sive to everybody else. He has allowed Lord Mon- 
 mouth to buy him body and soul, "with his clear 
 head, his indefatigable industry, his audacious tongue, 
 and his ready and unscrupulous pen ; with all his 
 dates, all his lampoons, all his private memoirs, and 
 all his political intrigues." There is no office too 
 menial for his performance, if only his master require 
 it, and a word or a dinner is enough to atone for the 
 degradation of the most odious service. At his lord- 
 ship's command he is always ready with a " slashing " 
 article, and who is so good at a slashing article as 
 Rigby ? Or he will bore a country audience with 
 the French Rovolution, which is his forte, or he will 
 cheerfully denounce as un-English all the views 
 wherewith he is not in agreement. So, incapable of 
 dignity, strange to honour, ignorant of generosity, he 
 scales the height of his ambition and becomes his pa- 
 tron's executor. Here is his apotheosis, here is the 
 halo placed upon his head, at the expense of good 
 feeling and independence. In most transactions 
 " there is some portion which no one cares to accom- 
 plish, and which everybody wishes to be achieved." 
 
112 THACKERAY 
 
 And this is Rigby's portion, which he achieves with- 
 out a murmur of complaint, and for which he is re- 
 warded by a comfortable legacy and much scandal. 
 
 Now, the venom of this portrait lies in its half- 
 truth. Croker was as good at a " slashing article " 
 as Rigby himself; he, too, was the obliging friend of 
 the great ; he, too, took the keenest delight in polit- 
 ical intrigue. But while all that Rigby accomplished is 
 turned to his dishonour, Croker was a useful public serv- 
 ant, a sound man of letters, and a politician of keen 
 though narrow intelligence. His gift of organisation 
 was conspicuous. He proved himself an excellent 
 Secretary to the Admiralty; he helped to establish 
 The Quarterly Review;^ and he was the effective 
 founder of the Athenaeum Club. Noscitur a sodis, 
 and he cannot be wholly bad who is the associate of 
 Wellington, Peel, Scott, and Lockhart. The great 
 Duke, indeed, regarded Croker as his oldest and clos- 
 est friend, and there is no great man of that age whose 
 
 ' It was in T^e Quarterly that Croker did his best work, and 
 though his judgment in politics was generally sound, it was marred 
 by an habitual violence of expression. Malevolence was so deeply 
 ingrained in him, that he was unconscious of its use, and, in truth, 
 it was a fault of style rather than a depravation of thought. At the 
 same time. The Quarterly would have been better without him. 
 Sir Walter Scott, who loved the man, saw at the very outset how 
 great a danger he was to The Quarterly. Yet after thirty years he 
 was still supplying sixty-four pages to each number, and sprinkling 
 the articles of others from the pepper-box of his abuse. Lockhart 
 resigned himself humbly to be " over-Crokered." It took the 
 courage of Elwin, a country parson, to get rid of him, and even 
 Elwin allowed that he had " fine and generous elements in his 
 nature." 
 
PUNCH AND VANITY FAIR II3 
 
 house and society Croker did not frequent. His 
 friendship with Hertford was of old standing, and on 
 Croker's side disinterested ; and since Hertford was a 
 man of cultivation as well as of pleasure, the friend 
 of poets and of Ministers, his acquaintance was not of 
 itself a disgrace to any one. Moreover, for many 
 years the Secretary of the Admiralty managed the 
 Marquis's estates, and took not a penny for his 
 trouble. Even the prosecution of Suisse, the black- 
 guardly valet who, with the aid of one of Hertford's 
 cast-off mistresses, Angeline Borel, had stolen many 
 thousands of pounds, was an act of courage. Croker 
 could not profit by the case, which inevitably involved 
 him in an ugly scandal. Yet he did not shrink from 
 an executor's duty, and has stood in the pillory ever 
 since. 
 
 He has been attacked by common consent. Nor 
 is party spite enough to explain the malevolence of 
 his critics.^ Macaulay, of course, attacked him be- 
 cause he did not like his political views, and made no 
 attempt to hide his malice. " See whether I do not 
 dust that varlet's jacket for him in the next number 
 
 ' At least one political opponent has sung his praises. " Croker," 
 wrote Lord Brougliam, "was a most important person in Opposi- 
 tion. Nothing could exceed liis ability and his thorough knowledge 
 of Ms subject. . . . His talents were of a very high order, and 
 have not, I think, been sufficiently allowed. He was also a man 
 of great personal kindness to his friends, tliough a good hater of liis 
 enemies, and so much devoted to his opinions that he voluntarily 
 retired from Parliament as soon as the Reform Bill passed, and he 
 never returned." In this tribute there is nothing to suggest either 
 Wenham or Rigby. 
 
114 THACKERAY 
 
 of Blue and Yellow," he wrote, before the Boswell 
 appeared; "I detest him more than cold boiled veal." 
 But Disraeli was not influenced by public animosity, 
 and Thackeray (maybe) did no more than follow 
 Disraeli's lead. What, then, is the cause of this 
 fierce and various hostility ? The ^arterly is partly 
 to blame. For many years it was the world's habit to 
 ascribe all harsh criticisms to the single pen of Croker. 
 It is an old trick, as common now as then, but as- 
 suredly it put upon Croker many an undeserved 
 affront. But The ^arterly, at its bitterest, was in- 
 sufficient to arouse the cloud of obloquy which 
 enveloped Croker. It must be confessed also that his 
 temperament was unsympathetic. He liked to have a 
 finger in everybody's pie, and he possessed a curious 
 talent for making himself indispensable to the great. 
 Not that he was subservient. In fact his independ- 
 ence of spirit shines clearly in every page of his 
 Memoirs. But he found himself more at ease and 
 proved himself more agreeable among his superiors 
 than among his equals, and it was this faculty more 
 than any other that rendered him unpopular. But in 
 face of odium he betrayed no resentment. When 
 Thackeray was not elected to the Athenaeum, 
 Croker interfered in his favour, and when the libel 
 of Coningsby was pointed out to him many years 
 after its publication, he declared that he never read 
 novels, and heard of Rigby for the first time ! 
 
 Thus, chiefly because he was contemptuous and 
 morose, Croker has been held up by two novelists as 
 the vilest of men. Thackeray's Wenham, like 
 
PUNCH AND VANITY FAIR II5 
 
 Thackeray's Steyne, is but a partial portrait, which 
 reproduces no more than one imagined trait. It 
 suggests neither slashing articles nor political fidelity. 
 It suggests neither undigested learning nor a taste for 
 the French Revolution, and it must be confessed that 
 Rigby, like Monmouth, is far closer to the original. 
 And this enables us to contrast Disraeli's method with 
 Thackeray's. Disraeli, when he drew a character 
 from life, drew it with his eye unrelentingly fixed 
 upon the object. Thackeray, on the other hand, was 
 content with a suggestion, and declared that " he 
 never consciously copied anybody." Yet with Con- 
 ingsby before him, he cannot evade the responsibility 
 of Steyne and Wenham, though these, to be sure, are 
 remote enough to be innocuous. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 PENDENNIS. THACKERAY AND THE WORLD OF 
 LETTERS 
 
 Meanwhile Thackeray had deserted Bohemia for 
 Tyburnia or its outskirts. In other words, he had 
 exchanged the lodging of a bachelor for a house in 
 Kensington, and was overjoyed at his prosperity. 
 The letters addressed about this time to Mrs. Brook- 
 field reveal an exultant happiness, tempered now and 
 again by "blue devils," which is very agreeable to 
 contemplate. No man ever took a keener pleasure 
 in increased wealth and growing fame than did 
 Thackeray, and he expresses his pleasure with an 
 almost boyish simplicity. He frequents the houses 
 of the great with a pride which neither Mr. Pendennis 
 nor Clive Newcome could surpass, and if it were not 
 for the humour of the situation, whereof he was per- 
 fectly conscious, he might have afforded material for 
 another chapter of The Book of Snobs. One day he 
 is " to dine with the Dowager Duchess of Bedford, 
 afterwards to Mrs. Procter's, afterwards to Lady 
 Granville's." Another day it is the Duke of Devon- 
 shire, or Sir Robert Peel, or Lord Lansdowne who 
 seeks his company. He is naively delighted when he 
 is pointed out with the finger. " Lady C, beautiful, 
 serene, stupid old lady," he writes ; " she asked. Isn't 
 ii6 
 
PENDENNIS 117 
 
 that the great Mr. Thackeray ? O ! my stars, think 
 of that ! " So he accepted the role of the great Mr. 
 Thackeray without a shred of false modesty, and ex- 
 claimed in the proper phrase of the time, "What a 
 jaunty ofF-hand satiric rogue I am to be sure, — and a 
 gay young dog." He was so gay a young dog that 
 all houses were open to him, and his attitude towards 
 life and society is at once more amiable and just than 
 his books suggest. He is content with good company 
 of whatever sort it be, and after dining sumptuously 
 at the table of a " fortunate youth," " the young 
 men," he writes, " were clever, very frank and 
 gentlemanlike ; quite as pleasant companions as one 
 deserves to meet, and as for your humble servant, he 
 saw a chapter or two of Pendennis in some of them." 
 Nor is he blind to the advantages of his social emi- 
 nence. It even strikes him, as his daughter sorts the 
 cards in the chimney-glass, " that there are people 
 who would give their ears, or half their incomes, to 
 go to these fine places." 
 
 Abroad, as at home, he is accorded the respect due 
 to a great man. In Paris " the Embassy is wonder- 
 fully civil ; Lord Normanby is my dearest friend," 
 and he watches the Opera from Rothschild's box. 
 And then he escapes from his smart friends to spend 
 an evening with Jules Janin, whom once he flayed in 
 the interest of Dickens, and who now delights him. 
 Janin tells him that he is always entirely happy, that 
 he had never known repentance or satiety, and 
 Thackeray sketches an enchanting portrait of him, 
 which is very far from Balzac's bitter satire. He 
 
Il8 THACKERAY 
 
 pictures him "bouncing about the room, gesticulat- 
 ing, joking, gasconading, quoting Latin, pulling out 
 his books, which are very handsome, and tossing 
 about his curling brown hair ; — a magnificent, jolly, 
 intelligent face, such as would suit Pan, I should 
 think, a flood of humorous, rich, jovial talk." In 
 either capital he sees the best, and the best of many 
 kinds. His catholicity, in life at least, is remarkable. 
 He meets Sir Robert Peel at a picture-gallery, and who 
 do you think is the next person with whom he shakes 
 hands ? Why, Mrs. Rhodes, of the Back Kitchen, 
 and perhaps he is more at his ease with her than with 
 the great Minister. Though his preference for the 
 world of fashion is frank enough, he lived on terms 
 of intimacy with many of his confreres. Perhaps he 
 was never quite happy with Dickens, but until a fool- 
 ish quarrel divided them they were familiar friends, 
 and Dickens never had a more generous admirer than 
 Thackeray. Carlyle and Macaulay, Brookfield and 
 FitzGerald, Tennyson and the Procters, were his 
 loyal associates, and once in Paris he cheerfully allows 
 himself to be patronised by the great Harrison Ains- 
 worth. Charlotte Bronte's admiration for him is no- 
 torious. He resembled Fielding, she declared, "as an 
 eagle does a vulture." But this resemblance did not 
 prevent her from being in great trouble about his soul. 
 " He stirs in me both sorrow and anger," she wrote. 
 " Why should he lead so harassing a life ? Why 
 should his mocking tongue so perversely deny the 
 better feelings of his better moods ? " Of course 
 she took him and others too seriously, but Thackeray 
 
PENDENNIS 119 
 
 alone frightened her. In his presence, she confesses, 
 she was " fearfully stupid," and on the evening when 
 first she met him, " excitement and exhaustion made 
 savage work of her." But the admiration on either 
 side was sincere, and while she dedicated 'Jane Eyre 
 to the author of Vanity Fair, Thackeray repaid the 
 compliment by writing a touching and sympathetic 
 introduction to Emma. 
 
 Happy in his friends, Thackeray was happy also in 
 his work. There was scarce a number of Vanity 
 Fair which he did not produce " with inexpressible 
 throes." But when the work was done he took a 
 frank pleasure in it. He highly approved the simplic- 
 ity of his style, and he never grew tired of his own 
 characters. On one occasion he re-reads The Hog- 
 garty Diamond, and " upon my word and honour," 
 says he, " if it doesn't make you cry, I shall have a 
 mean opinion of you." About the same time he is 
 going to visit the Hotel de la Terrasse at Brussels, 
 " where Becky used to live. I shall pass by Captain 
 Osborne's lodging, where I recollect meeting him and 
 his little wife, who has married again, somebody told 
 me ; but it is always the way with these grandes pas- 
 sions — Mrs. Dobbins, or some such name, she is now ; 
 always an overrated woman, I thought. How curious 
 it is ! I believe perfectly in all those people, and feel 
 quite an interest in the inn in which they lived." 
 
 But his novel, though it brought him fame and 
 pleasure, did not bring him wealth, and he was still 
 dependent upon journalism for a livelihood. Though 
 he had given up The Examiner in 1845, he began, in 
 
I20 THACKERAY 
 
 the very midst of Vanity Fair^ "to blaze away in The 
 Chronicle again : it's an awful bribe that five guineas 
 an article." The novelist of to-day would doubtless 
 turn up his nose at the poor pittance which Thack- 
 eray received for his early novels — £^o a part, 'tis 
 said, drawings and all. And the truth is, that when 
 he had to pay a call of £ii2 on an abominable Irish 
 railway he was embarrassed to find the money. In- 
 deed, at the very time that Vanity Fair was bringing 
 him glory he was called to the Bar, in the hope, no 
 doubt, that he, the eagle, might follow Fielding, the 
 vulture, to the magisterial bench. But, happily, this 
 ambition and another (of a secretaryship at the Post 
 Office) were foiled, and Thackeray remained loyal to 
 his true and only vocation. 
 
 ■ No sooner was Vanity Fair finished than he set to 
 work upon Pendennis} It was written under different 
 skies, and with varying fortune. Now, the author is 
 delighted with his work ; now, he finds it, " without 
 any manner of doubt, awfully stupid." The fear of 
 " Bradley, the printer, coming to dun him " is ever 
 before him, and once, as we know from the dedica- 
 tion, the progress of the book was interrupted by ill- 
 ness. But he finished it in 1850, " very tired," as he 
 
 ' The first number of Pendennis was published in November, 
 1848. After the eleventh number (September, 1849) there was a 
 gap of three months, due to the author's illness, but the publication 
 was resumed in January, 1850, and in the following December the 
 last I'a double) number made its appearance. The book is appro- 
 priately dedicated to Dr. John Elliotson, who tended the author 
 through his illness, and " would take no other fee than thanks." 
 
PENDENNIS 121 
 
 told his mother, "weary and solemn-minded." Irk- 
 some as the task seemed, it brought with it compen- 
 sations, for Thackeray was intensely interested in his 
 own creations, and while he was writing, Pendennis 
 and the world were for him one and the same. 
 While, on the one hand, he looked upon life with the 
 eyes of a book, on the other the personages of his 
 story were real and beyond his control. " I wonder 
 what will happen with Pendennis and Fanny," he 
 writes one day ; " - . . somehow it seems as if it 
 were true. I shall know more about them to-mor- 
 row." He cannot conceal his admiration for the 
 Major, and he is delighted to encounter a familiar 
 friend. " At the station," says he, " whom do you 
 
 think I found ? Miss G , who says she is 
 
 Blanche Amory, and I think she is Blanche Amory — 
 amiable at times, amusing, clever, and depraved." 
 
 Who Miss G was is immaterial, but Thackeray's 
 
 own comment upon the poet of Mes Larmes is at 
 once curious and just. 
 
 In structure and composition Pendennis differs little 
 from Vanity Fair, for though it is a novel with a 
 hero, it is still a novel without a plot. It has the 
 same motive as Tom "Jones, Gil Bias, or le Pere Goriot. 
 In other words, it describes the impact of an enter- 
 prising, adventurous youth upon the world. But 
 unlike the heroes of the other masterpieces I have 
 mentioned, Pendennis moves in a formal little circle, 
 not of his own choosing. His adventures are lim- 
 ited, not merely by his lack of courage, but by a nar- 
 row, ruthless convention of life. From the very first 
 
122 THACKERAY 
 
 he is taken charge of by the tyrants of habit and cus- 
 tom. He is pushed along the common groove from 
 school to college, from college to London, until he 
 reaches the comfortable goal of fiction — a blameless 
 marriage. When Rastignac emerged from the hum- 
 ble boarding-house near the Pantheon, he was forti- 
 fied by the predatory philosophy of Vautrin to make 
 war upon society. Pendennis found a mentor more 
 circumspect than Rastignac's. His Vautrin was the 
 admirable Major, whose cynicism conceived nothing 
 worse than an entrance into the best houses and a 
 rich alliance.' But while Rastignac remains a tri- 
 umph of romantic portraiture, Pendennis ends as he 
 began, an intelligent, meritorious young gentleman. 
 
 The one generous adventure of his life, the adora- 
 tion of the Fotheringay, is properly represented as a 
 mere boyish folly, and it is difficult to believe sin- 
 
 ' Compare, for instance, the worldly-wise counsels which the 
 Major administers to his nephew with the fierce exhortations of 
 Vautrin, whose famous address to Eugtee de Rastignac is the 
 perfection of cynicism. " Voilk le carrefour de la vie, jeune 
 homme," says he, " choississez. Vous avez deji choisi : vous etes 
 alle chez notre cousin de Beauseant, et vous y avez flairS le luxe. 
 Vous etes alle chez Madame de Restaud, et vous y avez flaire la 
 Parisienne. Ce jour-la, vous etes revenu avec un mot ecrit sur votre 
 front, et que j'ai bien su lire : Parvenir ! parvenir i tout prix^ 
 ' Bravo ! ' ai-je dit, • voili un gaillard qui me va.' II vous a fallu 
 de I'argent. Ou en prendre ? " That question is easily resolved ; 
 and if you set this cynical rhapsody of Vautrin side by side with 
 the Major's amiable approval of " a good name, good manners, 
 good wits," you will understand the difference not merely between 
 the talent of Balzac and the talent of Thackeray, but something of 
 the difference between France and England. 
 
PENDENNIS 
 
 123 
 
 cerely in the episode of Fanny Bolton. A chance 
 meeting at Vauxhall, the ignition of a spark in a 
 childish heart — these are not the material of a 
 tragedy, or even of an embroilment. What is the 
 crisis, indeed, that could hang upon so slender a 
 thread of fate as a kiss innocently given or a word of 
 kindness spoken in a whisper ? The truth is, that 
 Thackeray dared not face the logic of his facts, and 
 his readers may be forgiven if they find the situation 
 incredible. Between Balzac and Thackeray, then, 
 there is a wide ocean of temperament and experi- 
 ence, and while Thackeray timidly hugs his shore, 
 Balzac dives into the deeps, unconscious of fear. 
 Le Pire Goriot is of universal significance. Penden- 
 nis, the book, is so severely English that it will 
 hardly cross the Channel. Pendennis, the hero, is not 
 merely an Englishman ; he is also a blurred reflection 
 of his author ; and it is not strange, therefore, that 
 both book and hero strike what Matthew Arnold 
 called a note of provincialism. 
 
 For Pendennis is in essence an autobiography. It 
 is, of course, an idle task to seek in the novel the 
 author's actual experience. Whether he borrowed 
 his own character or the character of a friend, 
 Thackeray liberally transformed it. He was content 
 to select a trait here, an episode there, keeping the 
 general effect of the picture true to its model. That 
 Pendennis was a reminiscence of himself he was 
 quite conscious. " Being entirely occupied with my 
 two new friends, JVIrs. Pendennis and her son Mr. 
 Arthur Pendennis," he wrote to Mrs. Brookfield, " I 
 
124 THACKERAY 
 
 got up early again this morning, and was with them 
 more than two hours before breakfast. He is a very 
 good-natured and generous young fellow, and I begin 
 to like him considerably. I wonder whether he is 
 interesting to me from selfish reasons, and because I 
 fancy we resemble each other in many points." 
 Moreover, in loyalty to his own school and college, 
 Thackeray gave Pendennis the same education he 
 had himself enjoyed. Arthur, too, was at Grey 
 Friars' School, distinguished as neither a dunce nor a 
 scholar. He, too, devoured all the unprofitable litera- 
 ture that came in his way, and spent his pocket-money 
 upon tarts for himself and his friends. Being nat- 
 urally disposed to indolence, he cared for fighting as 
 little as for learning; but, on the other hand, he nei- 
 ther told lies nor bullied little boys. 
 
 Again, when he had passed through the ordeal of 
 love, Pendennis, like the author of his being, went to 
 Cambridge, and the chapters which describe Pen's 
 triumph and failure at the University are of Thack- 
 eray's best. There are many failures to prove how 
 difficult it is to paint a picture of university life. 
 Some remember their Alma Mater as the sad home 
 of a priggish scholarship, while others recall their 
 contemporaries as the riffrafF of bars and race-courses. 
 But Thackeray's sense of reality saved him from 
 either pitfall. He accomplished his delicate task 
 without exaggeration, and with not more than a spice 
 of sentimentality. His Mr. Bloundell-BIoundell 
 doesn't ring quite true ; but the others — even the 
 lordly, the extravagant, the admirable Pen himself — 
 
PENDENNIS 125 
 
 are of the genuine metal. And how just is the rem- 
 iniscence evoked by " the old Oxbridge tracts " ! Is 
 it not in this spirit that one always looks back upon 
 the first precious days of freedom to think wildly or 
 to act foolishly ? " Here is Jack moaning with de- 
 spair and Byronic misanthropy, whose career at the 
 university was one of unmixed milk-punch. Here is 
 Tom's daring essay in defence of suicide and of re- 
 publicanism in general, . . . Tom, who wears 
 the starchiest tie in all the diocese, and would go to 
 Smithfield rather than eat a breakfast on a Friday 
 in Lent." And, best of all, there is Bob, " who has 
 made a fortune in railway committees, bellowing out 
 with Tancred and Godfrey : 
 
 " ' On to the breach, ye soldiers of the "cross, 
 Scale the red wall and swim the choking foss. 
 Ye dauntless archers, twang your crossbows well ; 
 On bill and battle-axe and mangonel ! 
 Ply battering-ram and hurtling catapult, 
 Jerusalem is ours — il Deus vult.' " 
 
 There is the true aspect of the University, mel- 
 lowed by a knowledge of the larger world. So, too, 
 when Thackeray brought Pendennis up to London, 
 he kept an eye upon his own experience. Pendennis, 
 like the author of his being, was as intimately at home 
 in Grub Street as in Baker Street or Carlton House 
 Terrace ; he, too, born to Tyburnia, strayed awhile 
 in the wilder province of Bohemia ; he, too, visited 
 the broken man of letters in jail, and himself knew 
 what it was to write for his bread. Moreover, the 
 London to which Pendennis came after his sojourn at 
 
126 THACKERAY 
 
 Cambridge was in all respects the London of Thack- 
 eray's youth ; and the curious may find a clear proof of 
 Thaciceray's fidelity to truth in the files of " Baron " 
 Nicholson's forgotten journal, The Town, to name 
 but one source of corroboration. As sketched by 
 that amiable ruffian, London is a paradise of night- 
 saloons and " free-and-easies." The Coal Hole, over 
 which presided " the pleasant, agreeable Rhodes," was 
 already the rival of the more famous Evans's, where 
 old English ballads alternated with the improvisations 
 of Charles Sloman, " the great little Jew." ^ There 
 the nobs from the West End — and Pendennis among 
 them — would finish the evening more sedately begun 
 at ball or rout, and would even condescend to play 
 their part in the entertainment. 
 
 In such haunts as these, then, — haunts meet for 
 the midnight Apollo, — Thackeray sets many a scene 
 in his drama, and his sympathy with Rhodes and his 
 like is as plain as his understanding of them. No 
 writer, indeed, has depicted this strange chapter in the 
 history of manners with Thackeray's skill and veri- 
 similitude. To compare his treatment of the theme 
 with Nicholson's is to note the diff'erence between the 
 artist and the journalist. Where Thackeray presents 
 a picture, the " Baron " affects a desire to prove that 
 " vice rarely reigns in the human heart unaccompanied 
 by better feelings." This desire, to be sure, was uni- 
 versal in that age, and Thackeray was no stranger to 
 it. But the current literature of the day proves 
 Thackeray the least of many offenders, and we may be 
 ' See above, p. 21. 
 
PENDENNIS 
 
 127 
 
 frankly grateful to him for saving from oblivion an 
 institution long since dead and gone. To revive the 
 glories of Evans's and the Coal Hole, higher spirits 
 and a livelier talent would be necessary than we can 
 find to-day ; no more will " the great improvisatore " 
 touch off the newest comer in a neat couplet ; no 
 more will the brutality of " Sam Hall " affront the 
 Philistine. Yet who will say that in exchanging the 
 " free-and-easy " for the " marble hall " we have got 
 the better of the bargain ? 
 
 So with equal step Thackeray and Pendennis pace 
 the stones of London. But that which they achieve 
 is far less important than those whom they encounter 
 by the way. As we have said, Pendennis does not 
 depend upon its plot, and its single complication — the 
 blackmailing of Clavering by Altamont, and Blanche 
 Amory's legitimacy — seems a trifle out of tone. No, 
 Pendennis, like Vanity Fair, is eminent for a set of 
 characters, shrewdly observed and wittily drawn. In 
 one respect it shows an advance upon Vanity Fair; 
 it is more uniform ; it is not composed in so many 
 varying planes of caricature. Its dramatis personcs, 
 with few exceptions, belong to the same age, and are 
 drawn to the same scale. Yet once again Thackeray 
 shows his interest in eccentricity and rascaldom. The 
 best of his characters are not those who conform to 
 the standard of the copy-book heading. In other 
 words, he is more at home with the sinners than with 
 the saints, and at the head of them all stands the 
 incomparable Major, who, if he sinned, sinned in the 
 cause of worldly success and good breeding. The 
 
128 THACKERAY 
 
 Major, in truth, is the most vital, as he is the most 
 entertaining, figure in the book. Amiable, heartless, 
 honourable, cunning, he epitomises in his character 
 and career some of the worst vices castigated in the 
 Book of Snobs. But, to prove that Thackeray the artist 
 is more sincere than Thackeray the moralist, he is 
 drawn with rare knowledge and insight. The world 
 in which he moves is narrow and select. Beyond the 
 confines of his own St. James's he knows nothing, 
 save a German Spa and half-a-dozen great houses. 
 The society which he affects is the best and the 
 worst. Marchionesses leave notes at his club ; the 
 young men like to walk with him down Pall Mall, 
 " for he touched his hat to everybody, and every other 
 man he met was a lord." On the other hand, he 
 does not disdain the little French parties which the 
 Marquis of Steyne gave at the Star and Garter, and 
 he is on terms of intimacy with that elderly buck 
 Lord Colchicum. 
 
 It is but natural, therefore, that he valued etiquette 
 more highly than polite letters, and that in his view 
 procedure was of greater import than morality. After 
 himself, he worshipped his family, which was but 
 another form of self. " My nephew marry a tragedy 
 queen ! " he exclaimed when he heard of Arthur's 
 entanglement. " Gracious mercy, people will laugh 
 at me so that 1 shall not dare show my head." 
 Wherefore, for his own sake as much as for his 
 nephew's, he declined the invitations of his exalted 
 friends, and reluctantly went to Fairoaks on his errand 
 of discretion. Here he behaved with his wonted 
 
PENDENNIS 129 
 
 magnificence. " Why are there no such things as 
 lettres-de-cachet" he asked, " and a Bastille for young 
 fellows of family ? " And it was in this spirit that 
 he tackled the question of his nephew's brief mad- 
 ness. His mind was made up from the first. "The 
 issue shan't be marriage, my dear sister," said he. 
 " We're not going to have a Pendennis, the head of 
 the house, marry a strolling mountebank from a 
 booth." And he handled the afi^air with a fine tact ; 
 he went so far, for the sake of the house, as to laugh 
 at the pretensions of his own nephew ; and he treated 
 Costigan with a mixed contempt and cajolery which 
 did credit to the world in which he lived. Nor could 
 Thackeray have found better foils for the Major's 
 worldliness than his sister's mild indulgence and the 
 swaggering blackguardism of Captain Costigan ; and 
 it is no wonder that the Major came off from the en- 
 counter with flying colours. 
 
 Henceforth he plays Mentor to Arthur's Tele- 
 machus. As I have said, he is the Vautrin of the 
 drama; but his philosophy (it may be repeated) is 
 neither so daring nor so romantic as the p'renchman's. 
 The world which he would have his nephew conquer 
 is merely the world of his own narrow acquaintance, 
 where a knowledge of fashionable families is far more 
 important than courage. " My dear boy," says he, 
 " you cannot begin your genealogical studies too early ; 
 I wish to Heaven you would read in Debrett every 
 day." The prospect which he holds out to his 
 nephew is comfortable, if commonplace — a rich mar- 
 riage, Parliament, distinction. " Remember," he ob- 
 
130 THACKERAY 
 
 serves with the genuine accent of sound counsel, — 
 " remember, it's as easy to marry a rich woman as a 
 poor woman : and a devilish deal pleasanter to sit 
 down to a good dinner than to a scrag of mutton in 
 lodgings. Make up your mind to that. A woman 
 with a jointure is a doosid deal easier a profession 
 than the law, let me tell you. Look out; I shall be 
 on the watch for you, and I shall die content, my boy, 
 if I can see you with a good lady-like wife, and a 
 good carriage and a good pair of horses, living in so- 
 ciety, and seeing your friends, like a gentleman." 
 That is an ideal of life, like another, and perhaps, 
 making an allowance for nationality, it is not very 
 different from Vautrin's own. Nor in this is there 
 any hint of insincerity. The ideal which the Major 
 holds up to others is ever before his own eyes. " I 
 am an old soldier, begad," he pleasantly remarks as 
 he rides in Sir Hugh Trumpington's brougham, " and 
 I learned in early life to make myself comfortable." 
 
 For him, in truth, society was a profession as well 
 as a cult. He studied his acquaintances, as other men 
 study law or theology. When the Duke gave the 
 Major a finger of a pipe-clayed glove to shake, the 
 Major was in high good-humour. " Yes, depend 
 upon it, my boy," thus he moralised ; " for a poor 
 man there is nothing like having good acquaintances. 
 Who were those men with whom you saw me in the 
 bow-window at Bays's ? Two were peers of the 
 realm. Hobanob will be a peer as soon as his grand- 
 uncle dies, and he has had his third seizure ; and of 
 the other four, not one has less than his seven thou- 
 
PENDENNIS 131 
 
 sand a-year. . . . That is the benefit of know- 
 ing rich men; I dine for nothing, sir; I go into the 
 country, and I'm mounted for nothing. Other fel- 
 lows keep hounds and gamekeepers for me. Sic vos 
 non vobls, as we used to say at Grey Friars, hey .? I'm 
 of the opinion of my old friend Leech, of the Forty- 
 Fourth ; and a devilish shrewd fellow he was, as most 
 Scotchmen are. Gad, sir. Leech used to say he was 
 so poor that he couldn't afford to know a poor 
 man." 
 
 And so the Major went through life, neither toil- 
 ing nor spinning, arrayed in all the magnificence which 
 the best of tailors and an irreproachable valet could 
 compass. A touch of birth or fashion made the 
 whole world kin for him. When his nephew lived in 
 chambers with Warrington, he was easily consoled 
 with the thought, " Suffolk Warringtons ! I shouldn't 
 wonder, a good family," and he was even reconciled 
 to Pen's attack upon literature, remembering that 
 nowadays clever fellows got into the very best houses. 
 Even his ignorances were such as become a gentle- 
 man. When Pendennis told him he was plucked, 
 " I wonder you can look me in the face after such a 
 disgrace, sir," thunders the Major, " I wonder you 
 submitted to it as a gentleman," and asked in amaze 
 whether it was done in public. Yet for all that he is 
 a gentleman always, a gentleman kindly and shrewd, 
 whose worldly wisdom is at once genial and dignified. 
 Thackeray, moreover, drew his portrait with evident 
 sympathy. Once, it is true, he lectured him after his 
 wont. " Is this jaded and selfish worldling," he asks. 
 
132 THACKERAY 
 
 " the lad who, a short while back, was ready to fling 
 away his worldly all, his hope, his ambition, his 
 chance of life for his love ? This is the man you are 
 proud of, old Pendennis." But old Pendennis es- 
 caped with less scolding than most, and Thackeray 
 did not hide his predilection. " My vanity," he told 
 Mrs. Brookfield, " would be to go through life as a 
 gentleman, as a Major Pendennis," and in this half- 
 humorous confession Thackeray was perhaps nearer 
 the truth than he thought. 
 
 Like master, like man, and the Major is admirably 
 matched in Morgan, the valet. Had that worthy 
 done nothing else than describe the Temple as " rather 
 a shy place," he would not have been created in vain. 
 But below-stairs, or at the " Wheel of Fortune," he 
 is as great an aristocrat as his master in another 
 sphere. Not only does he follow his master into " the 
 best houses " ; he has both made money and sur- 
 prised secrets. However, when he attempts black- 
 mail, he is no match for the Major, and he is speedily 
 forced to an abject surrender in a scene which is 
 among the best in the book. In his other descent 
 below-stairs, Thackeray is not so happy. Alcide 
 Mirobalant is on the one hand a concession to fash- 
 ion, on the other he is monstrously overdrawn. At 
 the time when Pendennis was written the world had 
 long been curious about cooks. Louis Eustache Ude 
 had won a place among the Fraserians, and though 
 many experts ridiculed the talent of this eminent sen- 
 timentalist, he nevertheless symbolised a prevailing 
 taste. In other words, gastronomy was the mode ; 
 
PENDENNIS 
 
 133 
 
 man was defined as a " dining animal," and the com- 
 mon-places of Brillat-Savarin were deftly served up 
 by novelist and critic. Lord Lytton had already pan- 
 egyrised the cook — qu'un cuisinier est un mortel 
 divin ! — in a famous chapter of Pelham. In his most 
 approved style he had exclaimed, " By Lucullus, what 
 a visionary bechamelle ! " He had pronounced Gul- 
 oseton's chickens "worthy the honour of being 
 dressed." He had even compared the lusty luscious- 
 ness of a pear to the style of the old English poets. 
 
 But concerning cookery, as concerning many other 
 arts of life, the locus classicus is to be found in the 
 works of Disraeli. It is in Tancred that the artistry 
 of the cook is most wittily expressed, without the 
 bombast of Lytton or the caricature of Thackeray. 
 Leander and the Papa Prevost are drawn with the 
 proper touch and in the true colours. Being artists, 
 they are conscious of their high destiny, and it is not 
 surprising that they wither without appreciation. 
 Leander at Montacute Castle, with no message from 
 the Duke, is like a poet whose verses are unread and 
 unsung. " How can he compose," asks Prevost, 
 " when he is not appreciated .'' " That is the proper 
 spirit of the mock heroic; that is the quiet solemnity, 
 which gives to irony its sharpest, surest point ; and 
 Thackeray, in following the fashion, fell below the 
 excellence of his model. 
 
 For it was in frank competition with Leander that 
 Monsieur Alcide Mirobalant, " chef of the bouche 
 of Sir Clavering, Baronet," was drawn. And he is 
 not a success, because all his traits are exaggerated. 
 
134 THACKERAY 
 
 He does not resemble a cook so much as the comic 
 Frenchman of convention. His costume is as 
 fantastic as himself, and is designed to excite laughter 
 rather than to convince you of his reality. You be- 
 lieve as little in the man himself as in his light green 
 frock, his crimson velvet waistcoat, his pantalon 
 ecossais, and the other appurtenances of his holiday 
 attire. His declaration of passion to the adorable 
 Blanche, made by means of the plats which she loved 
 best, is amusing enough, but it is a piece of frank 
 burlesque, suddenly introduced into a piece of 
 realism. Equally ludicrous is Mirobalant's encounter 
 with Pendennis at the Baymouth ball, and the ab- 
 surdity is heightened by the apology which Laura 
 forces Pendennis to make, and which proves that the 
 episode is taken seriously. In brief, Mirobalant is 
 out of tone, but he may be accepted as an interlude 
 of farce, as a specimen of that " comic relief," 
 which our playwrights believe to be the essence of 
 drama. 
 
 But while Mirobalant fails, the Blanche of his 
 adoration is a little triumph of portraiture. She is as 
 pert a jade as ever deceived in life, or masqueraded in 
 fiction. The Chevalier Strong, whose hatred of her 
 ; is unconcealed, describes her best. " Miss Amory," 
 says he, " is a muse — Miss Amory is a mystery — 
 Miss Amory is a femme incomprhe." And with her 
 little airs and graces, with her little poems, with her 
 fierce and selfish temper, she is exquisitely superficial 
 and malicious. She is of the type about which 
 men flutter, and which women decry and contemn. 
 
PENDENNIS 
 
 135 
 
 While Laura detects her hypocrisy in an instant, she 
 ensnares Pendennis with the deftest flattery, and only 
 transfers her love to the hapless Foker at the last 
 minute. When the cold, harsh world depreciates 
 her, she takes refuge in the little book bound in blue 
 velvet, with a gilt lock, and on it printed in gold the 
 title of " Mes Larmes." " Mes Larmes ! " she 
 murmurs, " isn't it a pretty title." But all is pretty 
 about her, her fair hair with its green reflections, her 
 dark wistful eyes, her little moues, and her dainty 
 frocks — all is pretty, indeed, except her devilry and 
 her cunning. No wonder the poor Baronet wishes 
 Missv was dead ; no wonder Ned Strong would like 
 to see her deep in a well, for, as Clavering admits, 
 " she turns all the house round in her quiet way, and 
 with her sentimental airs." But when she unmasks 
 her battery she is more than a match in mere world- 
 liness for the Major himself, and it is clear that 
 Thackeray drew her after life and with genuine de- 
 light. 
 
 Admirable, too, is Mr. Harry Foker, a reflection, 
 it is said, of one Archdeckne, long a familiar figure 
 in the clubs. Now, Foker is a downy cove, who 
 knows the time of day, and is willing to impart his 
 knowledge to his friends. In this peculiar quality of 
 downiness he is superior to the worthy brewer, his 
 father, or to his devoted mother, the exquisite Lady 
 Agnes. Safe from scrapes himself, he is ready with 
 sublime generosity to extricate others. This young 
 buck preaches to Pendennis in a strain which the 
 Major would have approved with all his heart. For 
 
136 THACKERAY 
 
 his part he had done with Oxbridge. " Parley voo's 
 the ticket," says he ; " It'ly and that sort of thing." 
 But he doesn't like to leave Pendennis among the 
 Philistines. He urges him to eat dinners, not give 
 them ; to ride other men's horses ; and to keep clear 
 of gambling. " They'll beat you at it. Pen, my boy, 
 even if they play on the square," he urges; " which 
 I don't say they don't, nor which I don't say they do, 
 mind. But / wouldn't play with 'em. You're no 
 match for 'em. You ain't up to their weight. It's 
 like little Black Strap standing up to Tom Spring — 
 the Black's a pretty fighter, but, Law bless you, his 
 arm ain't long enough to touch Tom, — and I tell 
 you, you're going it with fellers beyond your weight." 
 Such is Foker's philosophy, and very sound it is. 
 But this downy young gentleman is always on the 
 spot, whether he is nursing a debauched headache, or 
 driving Miss Pinckney to Richmond, or attending 
 Ben Budgem's night at the Three-cornered Hat, or 
 simpering over Miss Blanche at the piano. He is 
 always on the spot, and Thackeray has drawn him, 
 big cigar, fancy waistcoat, large buttons and all, with 
 the fidelity which comes of intimate acquaintance and 
 perfect understanding. 
 
 The rest of the less reputable characters are 
 realised with equal skill — the Costigans, the Claver- 
 ings, and Strongs. Altamont is monstrous even for 
 his company, but the others are true enough to them- 
 selves and their purpose. Costigan is as nearly re- 
 lated to the kings of Ireland as was his ancestor, 
 Barry Lyndon, and he is sketched with the same 
 
PENDENNIS 
 
 137 
 
 neatness and the same spice of malice which 
 Thackeray generally brings to the portraiture of 
 Irishmen. He was invented, as Thackeray said in a 
 paper entitled De Finibus, " as authors invent their 
 personages, out of scraps, heeltaps, odds and ends of 
 characters." But, though he was invented out of 
 scraps, Thackeray knew him so well, and his pride 
 of birth, and his love of brandy and idleness, and 
 his delight in his daughter's talent and marriage, that 
 when he encountered him in real life he recognised 
 him instantly. 
 
 " I was smoking in a tavern parlour one night," so 
 the author tells the story in De Finibus, " and this 
 Costigan came into the room alive, the very man : 
 the most remarkable resemblance of the printed 
 sketches of the man, of the rude drawings in which I 
 had depicted him. He had the same little coat, the 
 same battered hat, cocked on one eye, the same twinkle 
 in that eye. 'Sir,' said I, knowing him to be an old 
 friend whom I had met in unknown regions — ' Sir,' I 
 said, ' may I offer you a glass of brandy-and-water ? ' 
 '■ Bedad, ye may,' says he, ' and I'll sing ye a song tu.' 
 Of course he spoke with an Irish brogue. Of course 
 he had been in the army. . . . How had I come 
 to know him, to divine him ? Nothing shall convince 
 me that I have not seen that man in the world of 
 spirits." It may be left to the mystics to explain the 
 phenomenon. But the resemblance of the man in the 
 tavern to Costigan is a high tribute to Costigan's 
 human similitude. The resemblance explains also 
 the accusation often levelled at Thackeray of drawing 
 
138 THACKERAY 
 
 too nearly after life. The champions of Catherine 
 Hayes took umbrage at a name. Five Irishmen 
 recognised themselves, without warrant, in the Mul- 
 ligan of Mrs. Perkins' Ball., and their anger was but 
 another proof of Thackeray's skill. His characters 
 suggested something which was not mere fiction, 
 something which was alive, and the guilty braggart 
 caught sight of his likeness, as in a mirror, and con- 
 fessed. 
 
 Upon a set of eccentric characters, then, Pendennis 
 establishes its claim to immortality. Unhappily the 
 more reputable personages in the drama do not inspire 
 the same admiration as Mr. Foker and the Major. 
 Arthur Pendennis himself, the young Marquis of 
 Fairoaks, is a coxcomb, and not a very fine coxcomb 
 either. He would have been none the worse material 
 for that had Thackeray frankly pictured him a prig as 
 he frankly pictured George Osborne a cad. But 
 Thackeray both displays his own sympathy for Pen- 
 dennis and demands yours. In the author's eyes Pen 
 is a good-natured, generous young fellow, and so no 
 doubt he is at times. On the other hand, he is — in 
 his hours — a portentous prig. The truth is, he is so 
 many things that he is neither consistent nor intelli- 
 gible. Though he is a young man about town, his 
 nights, you are given to understand, were " wild," 
 not " wicked." He was " too lofty to stoop to a 
 vulgar intrigue," and " never could speak to one of 
 the sex but with respectful courtesy." His little pas- 
 sage with Fanny Bolton is so ludicrous that one won- 
 ders what all the pother is about. And Thackeray's 
 
PENDENNIS 139 
 
 lack of courage not only spoils the character of Pen- 
 dennis, it weakens the motive of the book. You 
 cannot believe him a devil of a fellow, who has so 
 few sins to his account ; and the kindest thing to say 
 of him is that he is true, not to human ■-nature, but to 
 the British nature of the early 'Forties. 
 
 As to the two ladies, Helen Pendennis and Laura, 
 we prefer to believe that they belong to no age nor 
 clime. In Thackeray's representation they suggest 
 nothing save dulness and insipidity. They are not 
 so much women as bottles of tears, reverberating 
 phonographs of sobs. Their talk is like the sad twit- 
 tering of sparrows in a wintry garden, or the pit-a-pat 
 of rain upon the window. At the smallest excuse, 
 " the two women rush into each other's embraces," 
 and while the mother is always " fond," Laura is ever 
 "affectionate and pure." Why this young woman 
 of sixteen, brought up in the seclusion of Fairoaks, 
 should be anything else than pure it is difBcult to sur- 
 mise. She was as pure, you are convinced, as the 
 white muslin frock, tied with a blue bow on the 
 shoulder, which she certainly wore. But it was the 
 fashion of the time to insist upon the obvious virtues, 
 which we now take for granted, and Laura or Flora 
 (as the Major called her) is essentially a thing not of 
 life but of fashion. 
 
 George Warrington, from the nobility of his char- 
 acter, must be classed with the two poor ladies, 
 though, of course, he is more substantial than they, 
 more closely compact of bone and muscle. He is 
 what is called nowadays a good all-round man, a Bo- 
 
140 THACKERAY 
 
 hemian who is a gentleman, an athlete who is also a 
 scholar. " He had been one of the hardest livers and 
 hardest readers of his time at Oxbridge," says Thack- 
 eray, " where the name of Stunning Warrington was 
 yet famous for beating bargemen, pulling matches, 
 winning prizes, and drinking milk-punch." He is 
 one of those heroes to whom nothing comes amiss : 
 he can write, he can box, he can talk. In fact, he is 
 a mixture of Guy Livingstone and the Grub Street 
 hack. The worst is that Thackeray has overdone his 
 love of squalor ; he has put him in an atmosphere of 
 tobacco, which is too thick for belief. The gentle- 
 man who wipes his wrist across his beard after a 
 draught of ale smacks of the fairy story, and the 
 dilapidation of his chambers is an unnecessary smudge 
 upon the portrait. His carpet is full of holes, you 
 are told, his Plato is battered, his tables are stained 
 with the circles of many pint-pots, he has scarcely 
 " an article of furniture that has not been in the 
 wars." Now, since there is no particular merit in 
 squalor, and since Warrington is drawn as a grave 
 and serious scholar, as well as a gentleman, many of 
 these traits contradict themselves, and he appears less 
 a man than a catalogue of " sterling " qualities. His 
 contempt of ambition, his secret consciousness of a 
 broken life, his candid honesty, his suppression of 
 himself in anonymous journalism, are excellent virtues 
 and well depicted. But a finer subtlety of detail 
 might have made the character at once credible and 
 consistent. As he is, he is not for a moment com- 
 parable to the Major, and if, as is said, he is drawn 
 
PENDENNIS 
 
 141 
 
 from George Stovin Venables, he assuredly does not 
 flatter his model. 
 
 But Pendennis had another claim, besides its char- 
 acters, to public recognition ; it aroused the public 
 curiosity upon another ground. It presented a picture 
 of the literary world, as Thackeray knew it, which is 
 neither pleasant nor unjustified. Grub Street was 
 never the most amiable quarter of the town, and 
 Thackeray described it with the contempt of one who 
 had strayed within its precincts in his own despite. 
 As has already been said, he was no native of Bo- 
 hemia, nor was he ever acclimatised to its heavy 
 atmosphere. But he knew it all the better, because 
 he looked upon it with the unprejudiced eye of an 
 outsider. Clearly, then, the experience of Pendennis 
 is in all respects his own, and the chapters in which 
 the foundation of The Pall Mall Gazette is set forth 
 are intimately autobiographical. Pendennis, in fact, 
 entered the world of letters by the same gate as 
 Thackeray, and for the same reasons. He, too, 
 wished to fill a depleted purse ; he, too, had a natural 
 gift, which could easily be turned into current coin of 
 the realm ; and when Arthur modestly tells Warring- 
 ton that " he cannot fly on his wing," Warrington 
 replies in words which accurately describe Thackeray 
 himself, " But you can on your own, my boy, which 
 is lighter and soars higher, perhaps." Poor Pen, de- 
 lighted at the praise, thinks of his " Ariadne in 
 Naxos," and Warrington instantly brings him down 
 to earth with a burst of laughter. He tells him it is 
 useless for him, an absurd little tomtit, to set up for a 
 
142 THACKERAY 
 
 Pindar, but he candidly allows that " he can write a 
 magazine article, and turn out a pretty copy of 
 verses." 
 
 In other words. Pen has the same talent which dis- 
 tinguished his author when he joined the staff of 
 Eraser's Magazine. And Pendennis rushes into Grub 
 Street with the delightful enthusiasm of inexperience 
 which the author of his being knew so intimately. 
 In a few pages the romance of the literary calling is 
 artfully displayed. In Pen's eyes all is poetry and 
 delight. What a career, to emulate "the sense, the 
 satire, the scholarship " of his friend Warrington ! 
 Shandon, again, is a man of genius, infamously com- 
 pelled by the avarice of the publishers to languish in 
 the Fleet. The knights of the pen are chivalrous, 
 brilliant, and honest, every one of them. Pen carries 
 his manuscripts to the oiBce " with a great deal of 
 bustle and pleasure ; such as a man feels at the out- 
 set of his literary career, when to see himself in print 
 is still a novel sensation." His first set of verses are 
 " screwed out " with the pleasure and excitement 
 which are the privilege of youth. When the first 
 parcel of books come for review from The Pall Mall 
 Gazette., he "had never been so delighted in his life : 
 his hand trembled as he cut the string of the packet, 
 and beheld within a smart set of new neat calico- 
 bound books — travels, and novels, ^d poems." It is 
 all fresh as sunshine, no shadow of drudgery lies 
 across his path as Pendennis, having sported his oak, 
 sits down to read and to review. 
 
 Moreover, the Press was not yet common enough 
 
PENDKNNIS 143 
 
 to have lost its mystery. Optimists still believed in 
 its mission and influence. Even Warrington, the 
 soft-hearted cynic, was amazed at the trade which he 
 followed. " Look at that, Pen," he said, as they 
 passed a newspaper office in the Strand. " There she 
 is — the great engine — she never sleeps. She has her 
 ambassadors in every quarter of the world — her cour- 
 iers upon every road. Her officers march along with 
 armies, and her envoys walk into statesmen's cabinets. 
 They are ubiquitous ? Yonder journal has an agent, 
 at this minute, giving bribes at Madrid ; and another 
 inspecting the price of potatoes in Covent Garden. 
 Look ! here comes the Foreign Express galloping in. 
 They will be able to give news to Downing Street to- 
 morrow : funds will rise or fall, fortunes be made or 
 lost; Lord B. will get up, and, holding the paper in 
 his hand, and seeing the noble Marquis in his place, 
 will make a great speech ; and — Mr. Doolan will be 
 called away from his supper at the Back Kitchen ; for 
 he is foreign sub-editor, and sees the mail on the 
 newspaper sheet before he goes to his own." 
 
 Thus with perfect candour Thackeray said what 
 might be said in praise of the world of letters. While 
 in Pendennis he pictured in vivid colours the enthusi- 
 asm of his youth, he made Warrington the mouth- 
 piece of his maturer opinion and harsher criticism. 
 The literary medal had, and has always had, a reverse, 
 and Thackeray did not hesitate to show it. His 
 Paternoster Row is given over to sordid rivalries and 
 eager toadyism. His Bungays and Bacons are as 
 ignorant as they are avaricious ; and Captain Shandon 
 
144 THACKERAY 
 
 is not a dignified example of literary genius. The 
 famous scene in the Fleet Prison, wherein the Captain 
 reads the prospectus of The Pall Mall Gaxette, is a 
 piece of satire which Thackeray did not often sur- 
 pass. It was to the gentlemen of England that the 
 imprisoned Captain made his appeal. He observed 
 from the secure retreat of the Fleet Prison that " the 
 good institutions, which had made our country glori- 
 ous, and the name of English Gentleman the proudest 
 in the world, were left without defence." He re- 
 ferred in moving words to the plain of Waterloo, and 
 on remarking how his venerable friend Bungay was 
 affected, declared that he had used the Duke and the 
 battle of Waterloo a hundred times — and " never 
 knew the Duke to fail." From friends the Captain 
 turned lightly to foes, dismissed in a sentence certain 
 "hireling advocates," and declared that they must not 
 " have Grub Street publishing Gazettes from White- 
 hall." Whereupon Bungay wagged his dull head and 
 says, " For a slashing article, there's nobody like the 
 Capting — no-obody like him." So with a flourish 
 the Captain addressed himself " to the higher circles 
 of Society : we care not to disown it — The Pall Mall 
 Gazette is written by gentlemen for gentlemen ; its 
 conductors speak to the classes in which they live and 
 were born." And Bungay awoke from a second 
 snooze, which held him as securely as sleep held 
 Jonathan Wild at the ministrations of the prison 
 chaplain. 
 
 Still more bitter is the satire of Bungay's dinner- 
 party, whose table-talk sounds like a travesty of 
 
PENDENNIS 145 
 
 Swift's " Polite Conversation." The entertainment 
 is as vulgar and fatuous as possible. Thackeray spares 
 nothing and nobody. Miss Bunion's vast appetite, 
 Mr. Wagg's bad puns, Wenham's snobbery, the 
 Captain's drunkenness, Percy Popjoy's ambition to be 
 taken for a literary man. Captain Sumph's ' silly stories 
 of Byron — are all ridiculed without stint or pity. The 
 conversation never sparkles for an instant. It is silly 
 and sordid from soup to dessert, and none of those 
 who "cut mutton" with Bungay proves worth his 
 salt. The satire is legitimate, but Thackeray's com- 
 ment is hardly just. " Not one word about litera- 
 ture," says he, " had been said during the whole 
 course of the night." And why, indeed, should this 
 word have been spoken ? Not only is the objection 
 unnecessary ; it weakens Thackeray's argument, since 
 there is no more reason why men of letters should 
 discuss literature with one another than why lawyers 
 should dispute of law, or parsons of theology. The 
 literary world is indicted in Pendennis for taking itself 
 and its craft too seriously, for claiming exemption 
 from the duties imposed by honest citizenship. Yet 
 when once it declares itself indifferent to its calling, 
 Thackeray is ready with a reproach. 
 
 But Thackeray did not frame his indictment against 
 journalists and publishers without warrant. He de- 
 scribed Grub Street, as he knew it, with scrupulous 
 
 ' It is scarcely worth while to trace all Bungay's guests to their 
 origins, but Sumph was doubtless suggested by Captain Medwin, 
 of the 24th Light Dragoons, who published (in 1824) a set of 
 foolish Conversations with Lord Byron. 
 
146 THACKERAY 
 
 accuracy. And it was not a very pleasant place. A 
 strange mixture of sentimentality and recrimination, 
 it inclined on the one side to insipidity, on the other 
 to violence. There v^as room within its borders both 
 for Bludyer and Popjoy : indeed it may be said that 
 Popjoy was Bludyer's best excuse. But such as they 
 were, Thackeray understood them, and their fellows, 
 intimately, and, since he had spent his life among 
 them, this knowledge is not surprising. He had 
 edited papers; he had contributed to them from at 
 home and abroad ; he had done the work of a special 
 correspondent ; he had for many years cut a figure in 
 the magazines, and in Pendennis he resumes his ex- 
 perience. Not a few of his characters are drawn 
 direct from life. Bungay, for instance, is an unamia- 
 ble portrait of Colborn the publisher, while Archer, 
 the quidnunc, whose advice is always wanted at the 
 Palace, and whose taste for cold beef the Duke him- 
 self consults, is none other than Tom Hill of The 
 Monthly Mirror, whom Theodore Hook painted as 
 Hull in Gilbert Gurney. 
 
 But by far the most famous portrait in the gallery 
 is Captain Shandon, for which sat Maginn, the 
 " bright broken " Irishman. It is not unkind, this 
 portrait, for the Captain is as gentle a ruffian as ever 
 wrote a slashing article or spent his last shilling on a 
 drink. There are many touches, too, which heighten 
 the verisimilitude, and make the intention certain. 
 The Doctor's knowledge of the Fleet was as intimate 
 as the Captain's, and the prospectus of The Pall Mall 
 Gazette, pompously composed within the walls of a 
 
PENDENNIS 147 
 
 prison, reminds us of The Tobias Correspondence, 
 wherein Maginn, from the security of a garret in 
 Wych Street, set forth "the whole art and mystery 
 of writing a paper." Nevertheless, the portrait does 
 not do perfect justice to the Doctor. For Maginn, 
 when his shillelah was laid aside, was a real man 
 of letters, and a finished scholar to boot. There 
 was, of course, something lacking in his character ; 
 and his ambition, if indeed he knew the meaning 
 of the word, never kept pace with his attain- 
 ments. For some years he concealed his name, 
 even from Blackwood ; and when he descended into 
 the pit of London journalism he speedily won a 
 reputation for what was worst in him. The savage 
 mangier of Grantley Berkeley, for instance, captured 
 a fame which was long withheld from the scholar 
 who turned Chevy Chase into Latin, and Homer into 
 the metre of a border ballad. 
 
 The truth is, facility and an inborn love of fight- 
 ing destroyed him. He could turn his hand so easily 
 to anything, prose or verse, Latin or English, that he 
 never did justice to his own talent. He once told 
 Blackwood that there was no chance of " his turning 
 author of anything beyond a spelling-book," and 
 though now and again he wrote a book for money, 
 with characteristic prodigality he left the best of his 
 work buried in Eraser's Magazine, where his essays 
 on Shakespeare and Rabelais and his brilliant versions 
 of Lucian remain to attest his sound judgment and 
 his happy hand. Nor should it be forgotten that so 
 fastidious a critic as Matthew Arnold praised his 
 
148 THACKERAY 
 
 Homeric ballads, and that Lockhart loved and served 
 him to the end. Unfortunately, his vices always 
 eclipsed his virtues in the popular eye ; his reckless 
 character soon got the better of his conspicuous 
 talent ; and when his collapse was complete, he 
 sacrificed principle for a pittance, and would write 
 for one side ai easily as for the other. But such as 
 he was, he belonged to his time, and Thackeray found 
 a full warrant as well in his gifts as in his misfortunes 
 for the portrait of Captain Shandon. 
 
 However, no sooner were those chapters of Pen- 
 dennis published which describe the literary world, 
 than the Press made a characteristic outcry against 
 Thackeray. The author was accused by The Chron- 
 icle of " fostering a baneful prejudice against literary 
 men." The Examiner^ with miraculous insight, de- 
 tected not merely the sin, but its motive. It charged 
 Thackeray with " condescending to caricature (as is 
 too often his habit) his literary fellow-labourers, in 
 order to pay court to the non-literary class." ^ Now, 
 such criticism as this is manifestly absurd. As 
 Thackeray himself said in reply, " If every charac- 
 ter in a story is to represent a class, not an individual, 
 novels would become impossible." This reply is un- 
 
 1 Yet Thackeray was born a man of letters, and he was con- 
 scious of his birthright. " The first literary man I ever met was 
 Croly,'' he told Elwin. " I was a lad of seventeen, on the top of 
 a coach, going to Cambridge. Somebody pointed Croly out to me. 
 I had read Salathiel at sixteen, and thought it divine. I turned 
 back and gazed at him. The person who pointed him out to me, 
 said, ' I see that lad is fated.' He knew it by the way I gazed 
 after a literary man." 
 
PENDENNIS 149 
 
 answerable and sufficient, and Thackeray, who was 
 accused again and again of attacking a profession or 
 a nation through an individual, made use of it many 
 times. 
 
 But in answer to The Chronicle and Examiner he 
 was not content with the obvious refutation. He set 
 forth with energy and eloquence his views upon the 
 dignity of literature. It was a subject upon which he 
 always wrote with wisdom and conviction, and all 
 men of letters owe him a debt of gratitude. He 
 looked upon his profession without cant or humbug; 
 he claimed for it neither favour nor privilege. " Men 
 of letters," said he, " had best silently assume that 
 they are as good as any other gentlemen." He de- 
 nied that the " non-literary class " delighted in the 
 degradation of authors, who, on the contrary, won by 
 their pen friends, sympathy, applause. He declares, 
 with perfect truth, that no man loses his social rank, 
 whatever it may be, by the practice of letters. With 
 equal truth he points out that many a man claims a 
 place in the world by his writings, which he did not 
 inherit, and which his writings alone could give him. 
 
 But, in return, he insists that a man of letters 
 should not be excused by his talent from performing 
 the common duties of citizenship. In other words, 
 he confesses a " prejudice against running into debt 
 and drunkenness and disorderly life." Nowadays, 
 when literature has entered upon a career of extreme 
 respectability, this prejudice is unnecessary. But in 
 the days of Bludyer and the Captain no one who re- 
 spected his craft could do less than impose upon his 
 
150 THACKERAY 
 
 fellow-craftsmen the obligations of order and honesty. 
 Moreover, Thackeray was not unduly censorious in 
 his judgment of his colleagues. While he would 
 have them preserve a high standard of life, he would 
 not condemn them too hardly if they failed. His 
 sympathy with Shandon is clearly expressed, and he 
 was no less kind to the model who sat for Shandon's 
 portrait. "I have carried money," said he, "and 
 from a noble brother man-of-letters, to some one not 
 unlike Shandon in prison, and have watched the beau- 
 tiful devotion of his wife in that place." But he was 
 never of those who believed that a servile imitation 
 of Shelley's or Byron's supposed vices was the short 
 cut to genius, and the simple, honest views which he 
 held he set forth with honest simplicity. 
 
 Nor, for the rest, would he cherish any illusions 
 concerning his craft. He puts the strongest case 
 against the professors of literature in the mouth of 
 Warrington, and that sturdy hack does not spare the 
 defendants. " A good deal of undeserved compassion 
 has been thrown away upon what is called a book- 
 seller's drudge," says Warrington ; and when Pen in 
 the inexperienced enthusiasm of youth protests against 
 the cynicism bred of solitary pipes and ale, " a fiddle- 
 stick about men of genius," cries Warrington, — " 1 
 deny that there are so many geniuses as people who 
 whimper about the fate of men of letters assert they 
 are." And in his own person Thackeray supports 
 Warrington's view. In a review of Lytton's Memoir 
 of Laman Blanchard^ he declines to pity what he 
 deems a fortunate career. He recognises that Blanch- 
 
PENDENNIS 151 
 
 ard followed the profession he loved best, and found 
 his delight not only in the scanty reward of his work, 
 but in the mere practice of literature. This attitude 
 is surely more reasonable than Lytton's posture of 
 sorrow and regret. After all, Blanchard's talent was 
 slender enough, and doubtless he put it to the best 
 possible use in the literature of the day. 
 
 Indeed, Thackeray's main argument that the man 
 of letters must obey the general law of life and con- 
 duct is irrefragable, and it is only when he would ap- 
 ply the tenets of the Manchester school to literature 
 that you disagree with him. Literature is not a mere 
 matter of supply and demand. Some men, at any 
 rate, write because they have something to say, and 
 are undeterred by lack of appreciation. Thackeray 
 himself did not renounce his craft because he failed to 
 find readers. For ten years he wrote assiduously for 
 the magazines, often without success. Barry Lyndon 
 was a sad failure when it appeared in the pages of 
 Regina, and Vanity Fair itself was within an ace of 
 being suppressed at the fifth number for lack of sub- 
 scribers. But Thackeray neither hesitated nor de- 
 spaired. He knew in his heart that what he " sup- 
 plied " was superior to the popular " demand " ; he 
 knew also that reputation was far better than what he 
 afterwards called it, " the cant of our trade " ; and 
 loyally he worked to win it. And his work was not 
 thrown away, for reputation, conferred by fellow- 
 craftsmen, is the assurance of self-respect, to sacrifice 
 which is the peculiar sin of literature. 
 
 Nevertheless, if Thackeray erred at all in the judg- 
 
152 THACKERAY 
 
 ment of his profession, he erred upon the right side. 
 That which he wrote seems less than half true to-day, 
 because the conditions of literary life are changed. 
 Men of letters long ago deserted Bohemia to live 
 upon the outskirts of Belgravia or within the sacred 
 precincts of Tyburnia. They no longer address an 
 audience of gentlemen from the Fleet, nor do they 
 write masterpieces while hiding from their creditors. 
 They pay their tailors, and they refrain from drink, 
 and so far they conform to the standard which Thack- 
 eray set up for them. But with their prosperity they 
 have developed new vices, which no Thackeray has 
 arisen to castigate. They are pompous ; they take 
 themselves and their profession all too gravely ; and, 
 worse still, they hunger and thirst after notoriety. It 
 is not legitimate reputation which keeps them awake 
 — that is no longer the cant of their trade. They are 
 sleeplessly eager for the advertisement not of their 
 works, but of themselves. They are unhappy when 
 they are taken for mere men, like lawyers or stock- 
 brokers. They would, if they could, go through life 
 with the stamp of their art upon them. It is hard to 
 say which Thackeray would have preferred, his own 
 age or ours. But it is certain that the chapters de- 
 voted to the literary profession claimed an audience 
 for Pendennis which would have been obstinately in- 
 different to its easy unaffected style, its pictures of 
 contemporary manners, and its half-a-dozen vividly 
 drawn characters. Perhaps the author's own com- 
 ment upon the book is the fairest. " I lit upon a very 
 stupid part, I'm sorry to say," he wrote to Mrs. 
 
PENDENNIS 153 
 
 Brookfield, after reading some back numbers of Pen- 
 dennis, " and yet how well written it is ! What a 
 shame the author don't write a complete good book ! " 
 A shame, indeed, which presently the author did his 
 best to remove. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 LECTURES AND LECTURING. ESMOND 
 
 In 1850, when the last number of Pendennis was 
 given to the world, Thackeray's reputation was firmly 
 assured. He was, in fact, the one rival near the 
 throne of Dickens, and the zealous readers of the 
 day enrolled themselves under one banner or the 
 other, according to temperament. A year later, elec- 
 tion to the Athenaeum Club set a seal upon his fame, 
 and it should be remembered to Croker's credit that 
 Thackeray, as has been said, owed this honour in 
 some measure to the advocacy of Mr. Wenham. 
 But in those days fame was not easily convertible into 
 money, and men of letters were not apt to make a 
 fortune with a single book. To enrich his family, 
 therefore, Thackeray resolved upon a course of lec- 
 tures. Within four years he travelled from end to 
 end of England, and paid two visits to America. It 
 was a task which was always irksome to him, yet he 
 performed it with excellent taste and tact ; and, after 
 the first display at Willis's Rooms, success was 
 assured. He never concealed the fatigue which the 
 long journeys and the oft-recurring lectures inflicted 
 upon him. He went to America, he wrote to his 
 daughter, " not because I like it, but because it 
 is right that I should secure some money against my 
 '54 
 
LECTURES AND LECTURING 155 
 
 death for your poor mother and you two girls." 
 Again, on his second visit across the Atlantic, " Oh, 
 how weary, weary I am of this lecturing," he com- 
 plained. 
 
 But once having taken the resolution, he did his 
 utmost to fit himself for the task. A month before 
 the first lecture, he tried the great room at Willis's, 
 and, as he told Mrs. Brookfield — " recited part of 
 the multiplication-table to a waiter at the opposite 
 end, so as to try my voice. He said he could hear 
 perfectly, and I dare say he could, but the thoughts 
 somehow swell and amplify with that high-pitched 
 voice and elaborate distinctness." And instantly 
 Thackeray discerns, after his wont, how " orators 
 become humbugs " ; nevertheless, he found this " dip 
 into a life new to him " interesting, and he acquired 
 to perfection what Motley called a " light-in-hand 
 manner." His first lecture, given on May 22, 185 1, 
 has been described by many an appreciative pen. 
 " It was given at Willis's Rooms," wrote Charlotte 
 Bronte, " where the Almack's balls are held — a great 
 painted and gilded saloon, with long sofas for benches. 
 The audience was said to be the cream of London 
 society, and it looked so. I did not at all expect 
 that the great lecturer would know me or notice me 
 under these circumstances, with admiring duchesses 
 and countesses seated in rows before him; but he 
 met me as I entered, shook hands, took me to his 
 mother, whom I had not before seen, and introduced 
 me." 
 
 But Charlotte Bronte could not help seeing that 
 
156 THACKERAY 
 
 her idol had feet of clay, and presently she set 
 forth her view in more critical terms. " I could not 
 always coincide with the sentiments expressed," she 
 wrote, " or the opinions broached ; but I admired 
 the gentlemanlike ease, the quiet humour, the taste, 
 the talent, and the originality of the lecturer." It is 
 impossible to recover the tone of a lecturer, or to 
 echo the accent of a dead actor. When the voice is 
 still, we can only place a humiliating reliance on press 
 notices, and these agree so far as to give a vague 
 impression of Thackeray's manner. In speaking, as 
 in writing, he esteemed ease above eloquence. As 
 in his books he shunned rhetoric, so in his lectures 
 he avoided elaboration.^ He regarded his audience 
 as friends with whom he was conversing, rather than 
 as strangers before whom he was making a display, 
 and he easily achieved the success at which he 
 aimed. 
 
 The matter of his lectures was no less character- 
 
 ' An article published in The New York Evening Post, and 
 printed in The Letters of W. M. Thackeray, sums up in flattering 
 terms the general opinion. " His elocution," says The Post, 
 " surprised those who had derived their impressions from the 
 English journals. His voice is a superb tenor, and possesses that 
 pathetic tremble which is so effective, in what is called emotive 
 eloquence, while his delivery was as well suited to the communica- 
 tion he had to make as could well have been imagined. His 
 enunciation is perfect. Every word he uttered might have been 
 heard in the remotest quarters of the room, yet he scarcely lifted 
 his voice above a colloquial tone. The most striking feature in 
 his whole manner was the utter absence of affectation of any 
 kind." 
 
LECTURES AND LECTURING I57 
 
 istic than their manner. In choosing The English 
 Humourists of the Eighteenth Century^ as the subject 
 of his first course, he did but follow the natural 
 bent of his mind. Had he been a man of leisure 
 he would, he says, have devoted himself to the study 
 of the past, and for some years he was resolved to 
 compose a serious history of Queen Anne and her 
 Court. For such a task he had many qualifications. 
 He possessed the imaginative faculty of living in an- 
 other age than his own ; he could see with a quick 
 artistic eye the trappings of dead and gone periods. 
 Despite his love of progress and modern ideas, he 
 submitted easily to the dictates of fancy, and could 
 understand the outward life of any age to which his 
 desultory reading carried him. When he was writing 
 his lectures on the Humourists, he declared that the 
 eighteenth century absorbed him to the exclusion of 
 the nineteenth. But while he had the imagination, 
 without which history cannot be written, he lacked 
 the no less indispensable faculty of criticism. He 
 refused to recognise the tyranny of facts. Such men 
 as he encountered in the past must conform not with 
 the truth of their careers but with his vision of them. 
 In other words, the novelist always got the better of 
 the historian. His Swift, Pope, and Sterne corre- 
 spond loosely with their originals. They are the 
 creatures of fiction, coloured by prejudice, and trans- 
 formed by fancy. 
 
 ' The Humourists, first delivered in 1 85 1, were published in the 
 shape of a book two years later. 
 
158 THACKERAY 
 
 The truth is that Thackeray, in his historical es- 
 says, considered the facts last of all. He began with 
 a purely personal view, to which words and deeds 
 were alike subservient. Thus in his intense convic- 
 tion he forgot that the humourists of the eighteenth 
 century were men like himself, whose qualities 
 should not elude a vigilant research. In his eyes 
 they were so many Esmonds or Warringtons, who, 
 so long as they did no violence to their century, 
 might aptly illustrate the lecturer's cynicism or em- 
 bellish his sentimentality. That he did not esteem 
 resemblance essential to a biographical portrait is evi- 
 dent on every page of his Lectures. But, that there 
 might be no doubt, he explains in a letter addressed 
 to M. Forgues "the history of Addison." Now, 
 M. Forgues had declared in a French paper, without 
 the slightest shadow of justice, that Thackeray had 
 praised Addison " to curry favour with the English 
 aristocracy." Thackeray naturally resented so gro- 
 tesque a calumny, and in self-defence he laid bare the 
 genesis of Addison's character. He confessed that 
 he had no personal liking for the man. But he ad- 
 mired his humour, and more than his humour he ad- 
 mired his conduct of life. " Rich or poor," says 
 he, " he was an upright, honest, dignified gentle- 
 man ; " and he praised him " as one of our profes- 
 sion," to silence " the absurd outcry about neglected 
 men of genius." This absurd outcry Thackeray 
 had done his best to silence elsewhere, and he might 
 have looked at Addison with no other object than 
 faithfully to paint his character. But that would 
 
LECTURES AND LECTURING 159 
 
 have been alien to his method, and he was content 
 that Addison, like the rest, should point a moral and 
 illustrate a theory. 
 
 His first lecture was devoted to Swift, and if we 
 have a right to demand verisimilitude, the Dean's 
 portrait is by far the worst in the gallery. The pic- 
 ture devised by Thackeray's imagination was vile, 
 and traits were ingeniously sought to justify it. The 
 motive which shaped his Addison we know; he does 
 not reveal the motive of his Swift. It is a pity, since 
 this piece of fierce injustice demands an excuse. 
 Not only is the essay packed with inaccuracies ; the 
 truth is always twisted to a sinister end. He begins 
 by asking an irrelevant question. " Would we," 
 says he, " have liked to live with him ? " With re- 
 spect, it may be pointed out that our preference has 
 nothing to do with the character and achievements of 
 Swift. But it is indubitably true that the best of 
 Swift's contemporaries did like to live with him, and 
 felt honoured in his acquaintance. For monstrous 
 though he appear to Thackeray, he had the genius of 
 friendship before all his fellows. The great men of 
 the time loved and reverenced him. Addison and 
 Pope, Harley and Bolingbroke, Arbuthnot and Gay 
 were faithful to the end of their lives or his. Bol- 
 ingbroke was as little sentimental as Swift. While 
 both were giants in intelligence, neither the one nor 
 the other anticipated the Victorian emotion. Yet 
 wrote Bolingbroke in 1729: "I loved you almost 
 twenty years ago." And in the same year the same 
 statesman addresses his friend in a strain of singular 
 
l60 THACKERAY 
 
 eloquence. "While my mind," says he, "grows 
 daily more independent of the world, and feels less 
 need of leaning on external objects, the ideas of 
 friendship return oftener : they busy me, they warm 
 me more. Is it that we grow more tender as the 
 moment of our great separation approaches ? Or is 
 it that they who are to live together in another state 
 (for vera amicitia non nisi inter bonos) begin to feel 
 strongly that divine sympathy which is to be the 
 great band of their future society ? " Would Bol- 
 ingbroke have written so fine a sentence to one who 
 was nothing but scorn, bitterness, rage, and obscenity ? 
 No : vera amicitia non nisi inter bonos., and inter bonos 
 both Bolingbroke and Swift take a lofty place. 
 
 So, too, the good Arbuthnot cherished the friend- 
 ship of Swift. " I can assure you," he wrote to the 
 Dean a few months before his death, — " I can assure 
 you, with great truth, that none of your friends or 
 acquaintance has a more warm heart towards you 
 than myself. I am going out of this troublesome 
 world ; and you among the rest of my friends shall 
 have my last prayers and good wishes." So, too. 
 Pope, from whom, says Thackeray without warrant. 
 Swift " slunk away," remained unto the end Swift's 
 friend and admirer. But such records of friendship 
 mean nothing to Thackeray, who seems to have 
 made up his mind about Swift before he wrote his 
 biography. He is quite sure, in defiance of facts, 
 that Swift's companionship and conversation were 
 without charm. He toadied his superiors, we are 
 told, this man who never stooped to flatter ; he bul- 
 
LECTURES AND LECTURING l6l 
 
 lied and insulted his inferiors ; he quailed before you 
 if you met him like a man, and then " watched for 
 you in a sewer, and came out to assail you with a 
 coward's blow and a dirty bludgeon." 
 
 It need scarce be said that for these libels Thack- 
 eray quotes no authority ; there is not an episode in 
 Swift's career to justify one of them; and the inap- 
 posite use of the word " sewer " is sufficient proof of 
 prejudice. Even when Thackeray does admit Swift's 
 kindness or devotion, he at the same time suggests 
 that the virtue is prompted by baseness. He insulted 
 a man as he served him, says the biographer, and 
 flung his benefactions into poor men's faces. Did 
 Pope harbour this unkind thought when Swift col- 
 lected a thousand guineas for him ? or young Harri- 
 son, whom he befriended ? Was this the view of 
 the fifty friends, for whom, while he failed, to ad- 
 vance himself, he found preferment ? Did Parnell, 
 or Gay, or Congreve, or Rowe, all of whom owed 
 places to him, look upon their benefactor with this 
 acrimony ? Was it in this spirit that the Irish 
 people remembered its champion ? Assuredly not. 
 In truth, no man of his time received the simple 
 worship which Ireland laid at the feet of Swift. 
 When he returned to Dublin from London in 1726 
 bonfires were lit, and the church-bells rang out peals 
 of welcome. Once upon a time Walpole was 
 minded to arrest the Dean, and he was asked if he 
 had ten thousand men to spare, for the job could not 
 be done with less. This monster, too, who insulted 
 where he gave, distributed a third of his income, and 
 
1 62 THACKERAY 
 
 won from his dependents, whom he was said to in- 
 sult, a frank and lasting affection. 
 
 Again, because Swift, who was, in Bolingbroke's 
 phrase, " a hypocrite reversed," did not advertise to 
 his guests his performance of family devotions, 
 Thackeray belabours him with charges of insincerity. 
 But it is clear that in his critic's eye he could do no 
 right. He was guilty of " boisterous servility," 
 though we know as little to whom he was servile as 
 how servility to any man can be boisterous. In the 
 same spirit Thackeray delights to paint his sojourn in 
 Temple's house in the blackest colours, as a time of 
 insult and oppression. Yet he was familiar enough 
 with the period to recognise that the relation of client 
 to patron was honourable and honourably understood. 
 When Swift wrote to Temple for a certificate of 
 morals and learning, he did but employ the conven- 
 tional terms of his age. Yet this is how a simple 
 action strikes Thackeray : " I don't know anything 
 more melancholy than the letter to Temple, in which, 
 after having broke from his bondage, the poor wretch 
 crouches piteously towards his cage again, and depre- 
 cates his master's anger." It is not the poor wretch's 
 letter that is melancholy ; it is the biographer's com- 
 ment. 
 
 ^ It is plain, therefore, that Thackeray entertained a 
 ■kind of personal hatred against Swift. When open 
 charges fail him, he is content with a hinted sugges- 
 tion of evil. He declares that Vanessa was not 
 .•merely a woman of taste and spirit, but " a fortune 
 too," as though the man, who indignantly refused the 
 
LECTURES AND LECTURING 163 
 
 money which Harley proffered him, and who never 
 begged a favour for himself, had his eye upon Va- 
 nessa's gold. On another page, he blames him for 
 changing sides, yet he should have known that Swift 
 was the most consistent politician of his time. How- 
 ever, it is idle to pursue the critic's inaccuracies, 
 though it may be worth while to attempt an explana- 
 tion of his acrimony. In the first place, I think, 
 Thackeray disliked Swift, because Swift did not take 
 that genial, worldly view of life, which was suitable 
 to the haunter of clubs and drawing-rooms. The 
 Dean of St. Patrick's was a misanthrope, who loved 
 his friends, and delighted in stealthy benevolence. 
 But he was a misanthrope for all that. A man, who 
 in his own phrase " understood not what was love," 
 and who by ill-health and isolation was driven back 
 upon his own intelligence, he had the leisure to con- 
 template, and the brain to measure the follies of the 
 human race. In contempt he is Olympian. He 
 gave no quarter, and he expected none. He laid bare 
 human folly, and he has suffered for his courageous 
 indiscretion. But he did not make his attacks upon 
 his fellows from mere savagery. He never put pen 
 to paper save in scorn of stupidity, or with a fixed 
 desire to reform abuses. And the easy-going man 
 about town not unnaturally saddled his back with all the 
 sins and all the absurdities that he castigated in others. 
 Worse still, Swift was an ironist, and, like all ironists, 
 he has been consistently vilified and misunderstood. 
 Yet surely the author of Barry Lyndon should have 
 understood this subtle artifice. But no ; like the bit- 
 
164 THACKERAY 
 
 terest Philistine, he imputes to Swift himself all the 
 sins which Swift denounces in others. He follows 
 the familiar critic in applying an infamously false 
 meaning to Swift's Modest Proposal. This tract, as 
 all the world might know, was written in a mood of 
 savage despair against the wrongs of Ireland. Out- 
 wardly humorous, it is aflame with a passion of sin- 
 cerity. Every sentence it contains is a cry of hope- 
 less misery, a detestation of suffering which " tore 
 the writer's heart." And Thackeray can say no 
 more than that neither Dick Steele, nor Goldsmith, 
 nor Fielding could have written it. Surely they could 
 not, for the lofty passion which inspires it was not 
 theirs. " Not one of these but melts at the thoughts 
 of childhood, fondles and caresses it," says Thack- 
 eray. " Mr. Dean has no such softness, and enters 
 the nursery with the tread and gaiety of an ogre." 
 No, Mr. Dean has no such softness, when the starv- 
 ing are to be fed and bitter wrongs clamour for 
 redress. He is not content to " fondle and caress " ; 
 he would also feed and succour. True, Thackeray is 
 not quite so foolish as a modern critic, who, having 
 read the passage in which " a very knowing Amer- 
 ican " declares " that a young healthy child, well 
 nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious, nourishing, 
 and wholesome food," charges Dean Swift with ig- 
 norance or contempt of our American Colonies. But 
 Thackeray's imputation of cannibalism is little less 
 gross, and it proves that, well as he knew the period, 
 he had not chosen to read aright the works of Jona- 
 than Swift. 
 
LECTURES AND LECTURING 1 65 
 
 What a strange perversion of mind it is, which 
 ascribes to the eager champion of right the very 
 wrongs which he eloquently condemns ! Yet in 
 Thackeray's opinion even Gulliver must be taken 
 literally, and judged by the offences in whose dispraise 
 it was written. " As for the humour and conduct of 
 this famous fable," he writes, " I suppose there is no 
 person who reads but must admire ; as for the moral, 
 I think it is horrible, shameful, blasphemous ; and 
 giant and great as this Dean is, I say we should hoot 
 him." And hoot him he does with the greatest heart- 
 iness. Yet I doubt whether " hooting " is the critic's 
 most useful weapon, and I am sure that so highly ac- 
 complished an ironist as Thackeray would have been 
 wiser to pierce the mystery of an adept incomparably 
 greater than himself, than to join in the general and 
 foolish " hoot " which for two centuries has been 
 heard in the Dean's dispraise. 
 
 I have dwelt at length upon Thackeray's portrait 
 of Swift, because, while it is typical of his method, it 
 presents with sad lucidity the worst vices of that 
 method. What the method was Thackeray clearly 
 explains in a question put to his audience. " In com- 
 mon life," he asks in the lecture on Steele, " don't 
 you often judge and misjudge a man's whole conduct, 
 setting out from a wrong impression ? " To this 
 question the lecturer himself could have given but one 
 answer. He misjudged his Humourists continually, 
 viewing them all with an air of sorrowful patronage, 
 as roysterers who fell far short of the standard set up 
 in 1850. This one he reproaches with having sat too 
 
1 66 THACKERAY 
 
 long at Button's with Mr. Addison ; that other dis- 
 pleases him because he has soiled his lace-ruffles with 
 Harry Fielding's claret. He seems to confuse a love 
 of genial company with habitual drunkenness, apply- 
 ing to his victims the process of a cross-examining 
 lawyer. " You were caught revelling last night in a 
 tavern, sir," you can hear him say ; " that is how you 
 squander your time, and waste your talents." It is 
 always " Poor Dick Steele," " poor Harry Fielding," 
 and " poor Congreve." Yet these men were not 
 homunculi that they should be fitted with nicknames 
 of contempt. They ask no condescension, and de- 
 serve no pity. Surely Congreve, who yields in good 
 fortune and accomplishment to none of his contem- 
 poraries, was " poor " neither in character nor esteem ? 
 And to the libel that " Harry " Fielding was stained 
 with ink and wine, a life of prodigious and productive 
 energy is the best answer. The worst of nicknames 
 is that they easily overpower truth and research. Mr. 
 Lecky^ complains with perfect justice that Steele has 
 always " received hard measures from modern critics," 
 for which injustice Thackeray is largely to blame. 
 What boots it that " poor Dick " was a keen soldier, 
 an indefatigable writer, an ardent politician .? It is far 
 more difficult to discover his good qualities than to 
 recognise the conventional portrait of a "tipsy cham- 
 pion," and so Steele takes his place with the rest in 
 an immemorial tavern. 
 
 Even where he approves, Thackeray damps his 
 approval with prejudice. His admiration of Field- 
 
 ' England in the Eighteenth Century, i. i86. 
 
LECTURES AND LECTURING 167 
 
 ing's novels is so frank and generous that you regret 
 the more deeply his inapposite qualification. As he 
 hoots at Swift for the last part of Gulliver, so he 
 thinks " Fielding's evident liking and admiration for 
 Mr. Jones show that the great humourist's moral 
 sense was blunted by his life, and that, here in Art 
 and Ethics, there is a great error." Whereon he 
 proceeds to belabour Mr. Thomas Jones, who, says 
 he, " would not rob a church, but that is all," and to 
 wonder which is the worse enemy to society — Jones 
 or Blifil. By this twisted sentiment he spoils what 
 might and should have been a noble panegyric. In 
 another place he is so thickly befogged by an austere 
 morality as to be unjust even to Pope, the god of his 
 devoutest idolatry. "I wish Addison could have 
 loved Pope better," says he. " The best satire that 
 ever has been penned would never have been written 
 then, and one of the best characters the world ever 
 knew would have been without flaw." It is hard to 
 say which is the stranger perversity — to see Pope's 
 character without a flaw, or to wish the Dunciad un- 
 written. Thackeray hails and salutes the achieving 
 genius ; he " does homage to the pen of a hero " ; 
 yet he contemplates with regret the hero's crowning 
 achievement, and having painted Swift all black, he 
 paints Pope all white. And thus it is that the didactic 
 spirit always fails to interpret the past. It informs 
 even his favourite Addison with a kind of inhumanity. 
 It is not easy to take an interest in one " who stooped 
 to put himself on a level with most men," who " must 
 have been one of the finest gentlemen the world ever 
 
1 68 THACKERAY 
 
 saw," and who, as he is drawn by Thackeray, might 
 have sat for his portrait in the gallery of Snobs. 
 
 Nevertheless, The English Humourists contain many 
 excellent passages not merely of description but of 
 criticism. Though Thackeray rates Sterne soundly 
 for outraging the code of the nineteenth century, he 
 sums up his talent in a phrase which only just misses 
 the truth. "The man is a great jester," says he, 
 " not a great humourist." Again, while he pities 
 Congreve, he has a shrewdly just understanding of 
 his comedy, to which he attributes " a jargon of its 
 own quite unlike life, a sort of moral of its own quite 
 unlike life too." But it is in the painting of manners 
 that his real gift lies. Scattered up and down his 
 lectures there are pages of description, distinguished 
 by an ease and grace which are Thackeray's own. 
 With how light a hand does he sketch the world of 
 The Spectator and revivify the London of our ances- 
 tors ! How deftly he resumes the England which 
 Hogarth saw and drew ! Nor does he anywhere 
 nrove this faculty more conspicuously than in his 
 Four Georges, a curious medley of sermonising and 
 memoirs. While on the one hand each monarch is 
 the text for a moral discourse, the letters and journals 
 of each reign most pleasantly adorn the tale. It is 
 no " drum-and-trumpet " history that he aspires to 
 write. "We are not the Historic Muse," says he, 
 "but her ladyship's attendant, tale-bearer, valet de 
 chambre, for whom no man is a hero." So he has 
 much to say of Bath and its visitors, but very little of 
 the American Rebellion ; so he describes the life of a 
 
LECTURES AND LECTURING 1 69 
 
 German Court with excellent humour, while he is 
 silent of campaigns and changing ministries. This 
 view of history is in perfect consonance with his tal- 
 ent, and to their purpose the lectures on the Four 
 Georges are admirably adapted. To-day they excite 
 no controversy ; they set forth no original views ; but 
 at the time of their delivery their author was absurdly 
 charged with disloyalty, and it is difficult to discern 
 what sentiment it was of national pride or prejudice 
 that he outraged. 
 
 The chief merit of the lectures is their style. 
 Composed for the lecture-hall, they appeal to the ear 
 rather than to the eye. The cadence of the prose is 
 nicely devised to claim and to hold the attention. It 
 displays at their best the variety, the ease, the care- 
 lessness, which we expect from Thackeray. Seldom 
 rhetorical, and never pompous, the lectures resemble 
 conversation rather than oratory, and quite apart from 
 the opinions of which they are the vehicle they gave 
 an intelligible pleasure to many audiences. It was, 
 indeed, with a keen sense of the theatre that Thack- 
 eray sought and found his effects. There is but one 
 — the attack upon Swift — that is monotonous in scope 
 and expression. In the rest grave and gay are cun- 
 ningly mixed; even the tragedy of George III is 
 pleasantly relieved by a sketch of George Selwyn and 
 his circle. From the point of view of the platform 
 this relief was happily contrived, since the most 
 sympathetic audience cannot easily spend an hour 
 with the same emotion. But when we have done our 
 utmost to imagine the effect which their author's 
 
I/O THACKERAY 
 
 voice and gesture gave to them, we cannot but re- 
 member that truth is the essence of biography, and 
 that the lectures on the Humourists are the worst blot 
 upon Thackeray's literary reputation. 
 
 The lectures were first given in London between 
 May and July, 1851. Three months later Thackeray 
 sailed for America, to find a new world and warm- 
 hearted friends. Wherever he went, north or south, 
 he was enthusiastically received, and no doubt it was 
 the hospitality of the place which deprived us of an- 
 other Sketchbook. The picturesque reporter was al- 
 ways alive in Thackeray, and, one is sure, he was 
 eager to record his impressions. But the spirit of 
 gratitude counselled silence, and though Thackeray's 
 judgment in the matter is sound, we may still regret 
 that the artist did not overcome the man. Neverthe- 
 less, the letters addressed to his friends do something 
 to make up the deficiency, and it is easy to recover 
 Thackeray's appreciation of America. Life was as 
 rapid in New York fifty years ago as it is said to be 
 to-day, and Thackeray was speedily caught up in the 
 whirl. " I hardly know what is said," he wrote, — 
 " am thinking of something else, nothing definite, 
 with an irrepressible longing to be in motion." The 
 noise and rattle of the street appall him. " Broadway 
 is miles upon miles long," he tells Mrs. Brookfield, 
 " a rush of life such as I have never seen ; not so full 
 as the Strand, but so rapid. The houses are always 
 being torn down and built up again, the railroad cars 
 drive slap into the midst of the city. There are bar- 
 ricades and scaffoldings banging everywhere. . . . 
 
LECTURES AND LECTURING I7I 
 
 Nobody is quiet here, no more am I. The rush and 
 restlessness please me, and I like, for a little, the 
 dash of the stream." For every city he has an apt 
 comparison or a shrewd character. Washington re- 
 minds him of Wiesbaden — " there are politics and 
 gaieties straggling all over it." Boston he finds like 
 Edinburgh — " a vast amount of Toryism and donnish- 
 ness everywhere"; while the company of New York 
 is in his eyes the simplest and least pretentious. " It 
 suffices," says he, " that a man should keep a fine 
 house, give parties, and have a daughter, to get all the 
 world to him." But much as he delighted in the 
 keen air, the splendour, and the generosity of the 
 North, he felt himself more intimately at home in the 
 South, where life was as quiet and sluggish as in 
 Kensington. He was happiest at New Orleans, 
 where " the sweet kind French tongue is spoken in 
 the shops." Despite his inborn Radicalism, he pro- 
 fessed no horror at slavery. " The negroes don't 
 shock me," he wrote in a letter, " or excite my com- 
 passionate feelings at all ; they are so grotesque and 
 happy that I can't cry over them." Some years later, 
 in a " Roundabout Paper " called A Mississippi Bubble^ 
 he bore a willing testimony to the " curious gaiety " 
 of the American negroes. " How they sang," he 
 exclaims ; " how they laughed and grinned ; how 
 they scraped, bowed, and complimented you and each 
 other." But for domestic purposes slavery seemed to 
 him " the dearest institution that can be devised." 
 He declared that in a Southern city fifteen negroes 
 did " the work which John, the cook, the housemaid, 
 
lya THACKERAY 
 
 and the help do perfectly in your own comfortable 
 London house." Indeed, comfort and happiness 
 made an easy conquest of political prejudice, and he 
 found all the ways of the South excellent. At a 
 tavern in Pontchartrain he had a bouillabaisse, worthy 
 of Marseilles, worthy of the Rue Neuve des Petits 
 Champs, which he himself celebrated in a ballad, and 
 everywhere flowed Medoc, good, superabundant, and 
 nothing to pay. How then should he, with his sin- 
 cere love of France, withhold admiration from the 
 Sunny South, still French in its luxury and abandon- 
 ment ? "As for New Orleans, in spring-time," sc 
 he rhapsodises, — "just when the orchards were flush- 
 ing over with peach-blossoms, and the sweet herbs 
 came to flavour the juleps — it seemed to me the city 
 of the world where you can eat and drink the most 
 and suffer the least." So when the war came be- 
 tween the North and South, Thackeray's sympathies 
 followed his heart, and " the abstraction of the two 
 Southern Commissioners from under our flag " in- 
 spired half-a-dozen pages of righteous indignation — 
 On Half a -Loaf- — rare in the works of Thackeray. 
 In brief, Thackeray's two journeys to America — he 
 revisited it in 1855 with The Four Georges — were dis- 
 turbed by nothing else than the fatigue and drudgery 
 of lecturing ; he brought home with him both fame 
 and money ; he had been appreciated by the people 
 and by the press — save by Boston, which found him 
 a snob, and by the Irish, who remembered Catherine 
 Hayes ; and he had stored his head, as we shall 
 presently see, with the material of another novel. 
 
LECTURES AND LECTURING 1 73 
 
 But the lectures did something else than fill Thack- 
 eray's pocket. As his Sketchbook held the raw ma- 
 terial of much admirable ficticm, so The English 
 Humourists were the wisest possible preparation for 
 the writing of Esmond. He did but translate into the 
 form of a novel the material which had already served 
 to amuse the distinguished audiences of Willis's 
 Rooms. Written in 1852, the story was published as 
 its author set sail for America. Indeed, a copy was 
 put into his hands at the very moment of starting. It 
 was the first, and it remained the only, book of which 
 Thackeray wrote the last page before the first was 
 printed. In other words, it was given to the world 
 not in parts but in three complete volumes, and it is 
 not surprising that it is^ better composed and more 
 closely consistent than any other of his works. Now, 
 Esmond is a deliberate attempt to reconstruct the past 
 in woFd, in fact, in feeling. The scene is laid in the 
 England of Queen Anne, and Thackeray puts his 
 curious knowledge of the {)eriod to the best advantage. 
 But he is never dominated by history ; as in the Lec- 
 tures, so in Esmond., it is the novelist who always 
 keeps the upper hand. Nor does he indicate his 
 period by any trick of phrase or artifice of diction. 
 His style is no affair of old trappings, made in War- 
 dour Street. You will search his pages in vain for 
 strange words or strangely constructed sentences. It 
 is true that he makes a few concessions to an ancient 
 fashion of spelling : he writes Peterborow, for in- 
 stance, and Bruxelles ; but for the rest he gives a 
 very liberal interpretation to archaeology. How, 
 
174 THACKERAY 
 
 then, does he produce the effect of another century ? 
 Merely by keeping his style at a higher level than it 
 usually attains. From beginning to end he writes 
 with a restraint which you will vainly seek in Pen- 
 dennis. He has thrown over the story a veil of 
 solemnity, through which his personages appear far 
 away like the distant shapes of another age. The 
 critic who declared that there is no page of Esmond 
 but might have been written by a contemporary of 
 Queen Anne was manifestly deceived. Examine the 
 text narrowly, and you will find both words and 
 phrases essentially modern. Indeed, it is the cadence 
 rather than the phrase that is of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury, and Thackeray's ear seldom misled him. In 
 other words, the author of Esmond has reproduced the_ 
 effect, not the actual language, of the past, an achieve- „ 
 ment at once more subtle and convincing than the 
 ransacking of some Gradus ad Parnassum for musty 
 names and otiose epithets. 
 
 The truth is, Thackeray's knowledge was profound 
 enough to be held in check. He had not crammed 
 the period up in a night to answer a popular demand. 
 There was no need for him to cloak a too obvious 
 ignorance with a parade of hastily acquired knowledge. 
 He did not attain local colour, after the fashion of 
 to-day, by admitting nothing into his novel that was 
 not obsolete. The heroes of modern romance do not 
 live in a real world ; they are ticketed in a museum 
 of antiquity ; they make love beneath trees whose 
 branches are haunted by stuffed birds ; the very words 
 they use belong not to human speech, but to a time- 
 
LECTURES AND LECTURING 1 75 
 
 worn phrase-book. But Thackeray's method, far 
 happier than that of his successors, was also an indi- 
 rect reproof to those of his contemporaries who pur- 
 sued the art of historical fiction. He swept away at 
 a stroke all the conventions of G. P. R. James and 
 his school, of Bulwer and Harrison Ainsworth. In 
 Esmond you will find none of the catch-phrases, once 
 so popular. He does not tell you that " as dawn was 
 breaking a solitary horseman might be seen " and the 
 rest of it. The best of his characters are real men 
 and women, although they belong to the past, and it 
 might be said that the shining merit of Esmond was 
 its naturalness. At the same time, while Thackeray 
 is not enslaved by archasology, he makes the period 
 clear by a thousand light and incidental touches. 
 When Esmond writes his verses to Gloriana, " Have 
 you never read them ? " he asks. " They were 
 thought pretty poems, and attributed by some to Mr. 
 Prior." And so, while he scrupulously avoids pom- 
 pous description and fine writing, he creates an atmos- 
 phere at once consistent and just. 
 
 When, in Vanity Fair^ Thackeray chose a great 
 historical setting for his characters, he made no at- 
 tempt to introduce Napoleon or Wellington upon the 
 mimic scene. He allowed his readers to hear no 
 more than the echo of the guns which swept the plain 
 of Waterloo. In Esmond he was less wisely coun- 
 selled, and though the temptation to let Steele, Addi- 
 son, and the others speak for themselves was strong, 
 the novel would have been all the better had he re- 
 sisted it. He had sketched these personages, for good 
 
176 THACKERAY 
 
 or evil, in his Lectures, and there he might have left 
 them to the judgment of posterity. But he must 
 needs ask them to play their part in the drama of Es- 
 mond; and it may be said that his characters are never 
 further from reality than w^hen they bear real names. 
 Nowf, if a novelist admits famous men into his 
 romance, he lays upon himself a double burden. For 
 the famous men must not only be picturesque and 
 consistent vv^ith the creatures of the writer's imagina- 
 tion — they must also be consistent with their own 
 history. That is to say, the author's fancy is, or 
 should be, hampered by truth, and the difficulty of the 
 problem is seen by the rarity of its solution. The 
 invention of imaginary characters carries with it no 
 such responsibility : to attempt an artistic presentation 
 of historical facts is doubly dangerous, because not 
 only does it control the author's imagination, but it 
 admits the reader into the workshop. The material 
 being known, the treatment of it can be more nar- 
 rowly scrutinised ; and dramatis persona bearing the 
 names of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison challenge 
 a criticism which Tom Smith and John Brown es- 
 cape. Thackeray, being a man of letters, has suc- 
 ceeded in a difficult task far better than the most of 
 his rivals. The heroes whom he borrows from real 
 life are never ridiculous. Though they often speak 
 with a voice which is not their own, their accent is 
 not inhuman, and even if you forget their names, you 
 might still deem them men. Nevertheless the author 
 is not at his ease with them. They neither move nor 
 speak with the naturalness which distinguishes Es- 
 
LECTURES AND LECTURING 1 77 
 
 mond and Castlewood, and whenever they appear 
 they enwrap the story in another atmosphere. 
 
 The positive errors may be passed over lightly. It 
 is superfluous, for instance, to ask why Thackeray 
 should have dressed up Prue Steele in the garb of 
 Mrs. Malaprop, or why he should insist that Roger 
 Sterne was an Irishman. Nor need we do more than 
 refer to the repeated and monstrous outrage upon 
 Jonathan Swift. ^ Let us take Richard Steele and 
 Joseph Addison, who are drawn with the deepest 
 sympathy and the greatest elaboration. They are 
 both a trifle bibulous. Dick the Scholar always " im- 
 parts a strong perfume of burnt sack along with his 
 caress," and Addison drinks too deeply of my Lord 
 Halifax's burgundy. Again, they both speak like 
 books. Steele quotes copiously from his own Toilers^ 
 and Addison cannot keep off the subject of his own 
 poems. And since men of letters have a life and 
 character apart from their printed works, this restric- 
 tion indicates a certain timidity in Thackeray's treat- 
 ment. For the rest, they are both amiable fellows, 
 
 ' Doctor Swift is represented in Esmond as morose in temper 
 and violent in manners. He is also, for this occasion, a wanton 
 friglitener of children, so that he recalls more closely than ever the 
 Marquis of Steyne, who, it will be remembered, terrified Becky's 
 boy when he met him on the stairs. 
 
 ^ Steele tells Esmond that he " drummed at his father's coffin," 
 and he tells the same tale in The Tatler, No. 181 : " I remember 
 I went into the room where his body lay, and my mother sat 
 weeping alone by it. I had my battledore in my hand, and fell 
 a-beating the coffin, and calling Papa ; for, I know not how, I had 
 some slight idea he was locked up there." 
 
lyS THACKERAY 
 
 even though they do some violence to their own char- 
 acters. They are bound together by that tie of 
 schoolboy loyalty which united Lamb and Coleridge, 
 and which Thackeray illustrated again and again. 
 Steele is a pleasant trifler, even when sober ; Addison 
 is not guiltless of pomposity even in his cups. The 
 scene wherein Esmond visited Addison at his lodging, 
 pictured the famous battle, and " drew the river on 
 the table aliquo mero" is admirably managed ; but the 
 dinner of the wits is as forced as Mr. Bungay's party, 
 and Esmond is never at its best when these miracles 
 of wit and learning are on the stage. However, 
 Thackeray himself realised their subordination ; he 
 knew that they were merely incidental to the action — 
 mere painted trappings in the background ; and he 
 makes it clear that his essential interest is in his own 
 characters. Had he suppressed all his great men, his 
 own story would still have been complete. 
 
 But there is one personage, the great Duke of 
 Marlborough, whom Thackeray has. sketched with 
 peculiar rancour, and against whom, in the person of 
 Esmond, he brings the most fantastic charges. It is 
 unnecessary to say that the portrait is inconsistent 
 with history as with itself. The Duke, indeed, as 
 Thackeray paints him, is no man but a monster, a 
 mere epitome of the vices, a proper pendant in 
 inconsequent ferocity to the Dean of St. Patrick's, 
 painted by the same hand. Being Commander-in- 
 Chief, he traitorously accepts bribes from the 
 French king, and loses battles that he may fill 
 his own pocket. His personal sins are worse even 
 
LECTURES AND LECTURING lyg 
 
 than those which sully his public reputation. In 
 cowardice and hypocrisy he almost outdoes Swift him- 
 self. " He would cringe to a shoeblack," we are told, 
 " as he would flatter a minister or monarch ; be 
 haughty, be humble, threaten, repent, weep, grasp 
 your hand (or stab you whenever he saw occasion)." 
 These words are strangely applied to a hero, at whose 
 feet all Europe knelt, and who never cringed to man 
 or woman save to Sarah, his own implacable Duchess. 
 Nor is this the worst. The Duke lied, we are told, 
 cheated fond women, and robbed poor beggars of 
 halfpence. And these charges are brought not by the 
 villain of the piece, but by Esmond himself, who is 
 not merely the hero of the romance, but who may, 
 without injustice, be accepted as the vehicle of Thack- 
 eray's own opinion. 
 
 Of course a writer of fiction is not upon oath : he 
 may handle history with a certain licence ; but he 
 oversteps his privilege when he paints white black, 
 and breathes the very soul of meanness into a hero or 
 a patriot. This is not the place to celebrate the serene 
 intelligence, the supreme mastery of the great Com- 
 mander, who never fought a battle which he did not 
 win, who never besieged a city which he did not take, 
 who was as great in diplomacy as in arms, and who, 
 in Chesterfield's phrase, " possessed the graces in the 
 highest degree, not to say engrossed them." What 
 Marlborough was and what he achieved stand in let- 
 ters of gold upon the scroll of history. But we may 
 try to discover the reason for Thackeray's perverse 
 hatred. Now, Thackeray failed as a historian, be- 
 
l8o THACKERAY 
 
 cause he always carried the prejudices of his own age 
 back into the past. He judged the heroes of a dead 
 century as though they were contemporary with him- 
 self and amenable to the same discipline. And one 
 of his prejudices was a dislike of success. He 
 was no hero-worshipper, attracted by dignity of man- 
 ner or grandeur of achievement. To him Louis XIV 
 was old " Square-Toes," and he found it possible to 
 imagine the Duke of Marlborough pilfering from a 
 beggar. Speaking in praise of the Duke of Berwick, 
 he says " fire and genius were given to baser^men " ; 
 and as it is not greatness but virtue which he admires, 
 he is persuaded to suspect genius, where'er it be 
 found. 
 
 But there was another reason why Thackeray 
 should have looked with displeasure upon Marl- 
 borough. General Webb, the conqueror of Wynen- 
 dael, was of his kindred, and having given Esmond a 
 brief for the General, Thackeray bade him plead 
 Webb's cause with all the energy of a violent 
 partisan. Now, a novel is not the best place for 
 polemics of this kind, and the controversy rudely 
 interrupts the serene course of Esmond. Neverthe- 
 less, Thackeray has contrived an amusing portrait of 
 General Webb, the heau sabreur with a grievance ; 
 and though, as he says, he does not love the stately 
 Muse of History, he has sketched the battle of 
 Wynendael with spirit and accuracy. The General, 
 " as Paris handsome and as Hector brave," is neither 
 a monster nor a caricature. He is just the foolish, 
 vain, genial ruffian that he was in real life. Thack- 
 
LECTURES AND LECTURING l8l 
 
 eray makes no attempt to palliate his devotion to the 
 bottle or his rancorous hatred for the Duke. He 
 represents him as a reckless hero, impatient of 
 discipline and contemptuous of his superior's prowess. 
 And General Webb does not cut a very glorious 
 figure when he comes home, to brag in his cups of 
 the valiant deeds he did on the battle-field. In truth 
 he well deserves the comment, put by Thackeray into 
 St. John's mouth : " II est fatiguant avec sa trompette 
 de Wynendael." But he is the excuse for one ex- 
 cellently dramatic scene : the generals are dining with 
 Prince Eugene, when The London Gazette arrives, and 
 reveals the truth that General Webb's name is 
 omitted from the despatch. 'Tis Marlborough's one 
 appearance upon the stage, and Thackeray, as 
 though conscious of his villain's greatness, puts but 
 two phrases in his mouth. " There's some mistake, 
 my dear General Webb," says he, as he notes the 
 omission. And when Webb, with unpardonable 
 insolence, hands him The Gazette on his sword's 
 point, " Take it," says the Duke to his Master of 
 the Horse. Not even Thackeray dare make the 
 great Duke ridiculous upon the scene ; and this 
 reticence is some atonement for an infamous portrait. 
 But when Thackeray deserts the great ones of his- 
 tory for the personages of his own creation, there is 
 no fumbling nor faltering. In none of his books 
 does he keep so firm a grasp upon his characters as in 
 Esmond, which is as consistent in portraiture as it is 
 in style and effect. Nor was the task which he set 
 himself a light one. Not only is the scene laid in 
 
1 82 THACKERAY 
 
 the England of Oueen Anne, but the action covers 
 many years, and the actors grow up under the 
 reader's gaze. Yet they are never false either to 
 their time or to themselves. What Esmond was, 
 when he first came to Castlewood, so he remained 
 until the last chapter, when his dear mistress's " eyes 
 of meek surrender yield to his respectful importunity." 
 He may not realise an ideal of all that is noble in 
 mankind. Some may detect in him the signs of a 
 nascent priggishness. Some may object that now and 
 again he resembles the author of his being too nearly 
 to be a true Augustan, — that his essentially modem 
 tirade upon the horrors of war, for instance, belongs 
 more intimately to Thackeray himself rhari :; a. soldier 
 of the eighteenth century. (Perhaps :: wis not for 
 nothing that Esmond, when he went zj Ci.tibridsie, 
 kept in Thackeray's own rooms, " i- --z-t grsat court 
 close by the gate.") Nevertheless re is a man of 
 blood and bone, who acts always ir. i;;:rd with his 
 own qualities. And in his dear mistre-ss he Ls well 
 matched. Lady Castlewood, an odd mixture of 
 caprice and devotion, of kindliness and anger, is 
 always the same and always herself. She, also, has 
 certain traits which we could dispense with in our 
 friends. She is almost as lachrymose as Mrs. Pen- 
 dennis ! She carries devotion too far, when she savs 
 to Esmond : " Let me kneel and worship vou." But 
 our preferences do not affect the truth of an ex- 
 quisite portrait, subtly conceived and finely drawn. 
 
 Again, the main theme of the book is treated with 
 the utmost delicacy. The transference of a man's 
 
LECTURES AND LECTURING 1 83 
 
 love from daughter to mother is not a sympathetic 
 motive from romance. But Thackeray insists so 
 gravely upon Esmond's admiration and my Lady's 
 gratitude, that her surrender is not surprising, is even 
 inevitable. Mrs. Beatrix is not so successful. She, 
 indeed, does not come into her own, until she appears 
 in later life as Madame de Bernstein. Her caprices 
 are too vain for belief; her rejections too heartless. 
 Yet how^ picturesquely she is brought upon the 
 scene ! Who will ever forget her descent of the 
 stairs, and the scarlet glint of her stocking ? How 
 splendid, too, is Esmond's enthusiasm, when he sees 
 her again on his return from the wars ! He had left 
 her a girl ; he now gazes upon " a woman whose 
 eyes are fire, whose look is love, whose voice is the 
 sweetest love-song, whose shape is perfect symmetry, 
 health, decision, activity, whose foot as it plants itself 
 upon the ground is firm but flexible, and whose mo- 
 tion, whether rapid or slow, is always perfect grace — 
 agile as a nymph, lofty as a queen — now melting, 
 now imperious, now sarcastic — there is no single 
 movement of hers but is beautiful." What wonder 
 that, as he thought of her, he felt young again, "re- 
 membering a paragon ! " 
 
 But if Beatrix is a picturesque apparition rather 
 than a real woman, the world of Castlewood, through 
 which she walks a magnificent shadow, is admirably 
 depicted. The vague background of rebellion and 
 Jesuitry gives an air of added gaiety and peace to the 
 gay or tranquil inhabitants. My Lord Castlewood 
 himself is one of those warm-hearted, foolish, shift- 
 
184 THACKERAY 
 
 less gentlemen whom Thackeray knew so well how 
 to draw. He is a Rawdon Crawley, more happily 
 mated, and when the crisis of his destiny arrives he 
 bears himself, as did Rawdon, like a man. Nothing 
 could be better than his conduct of the duel with 
 Lord Mohun, a duel most artfully composed from the 
 records of the time. Nor is the son, Francis the 
 Younger, unworthy his brave, spendthrift, debonair 
 father. Though he is as vain as his sister, his vanity 
 is tempered by an amiable disposition. " I know my 
 place," he tells Esmond. " I'm not proud ; I am 
 simply Francis James, Viscount Castlewood in the 
 peerage of Ireland." He is not clever, but he has 
 what the old Dowager calls the bd air. Mr. Steele 
 hits him off in a line. " The lad looks good things," 
 says he, "and his laugh lights up a conversation as 
 much as ten repartees from Mr. Congreve." And 
 while the principal actors in the drama are well un- 
 derstood and well drawn, Esmond is singularly free 
 from those stock-characters with which few novelists 
 can dispense. True, the Jesuit Holt, with his strange 
 comings and goings, his secret hiding-places, and his 
 inaccurate information, is a type rather than a man. 
 True, also, the old Marchioness, the wicked Dowager 
 of Chelsey, is but Miss Crawley artfully disguised, 
 and more thickly coated with paint. But, when all 
 deductions are made, Thackeray has achieved a 
 success granted to few novelists besides Sir Walter 
 Scott : he has peopled an unreal world with real men 
 and women, for though the age is Anne's, Esmond 
 and my Lady and Frank Castlewood are human 
 
LECTURES AND LECTURING 1 85 
 
 enough to have lived at any time and under any 
 sky. 
 
 But it is not merely for its characters that we 
 esteem Esmond^ nor for its many passages of dignified, 
 even elevated, prose. The book w'\\\ ever be mem- 
 orable also for one or tvi^o scenes of haunting beauty, 
 or dramatic intensity. Who can ever forget Es- 
 mond's visit to Walcote after his return from Vigo ? 
 It is in Winchester Cathedral that he sees my Lady 
 Castlewood and Frank after his estrangement, bring- 
 ing back w^ith him, in Tom Tusher's phrase, 
 " Gaditanian laurels." " And Harry's coming home 
 to supper. Huzzay ! huzzay ! " cries my lord. 
 " Mother, I shall run home and bid Beatrix put her 
 ribands on. Beatrix is a maid of honour, Henry. 
 Such a fine set-up minx ! " The passage expresses 
 the sentiment, not the sentimentality, of home-com- 
 ing, writhout a word too much, without a note falsely 
 struck. Still better is the last chapter of all, wherein 
 Esmond and the young lord pursue the Prince to 
 Castlewood. These dozen pages are, I think, 
 Thackeray's highest achievement. The three men 
 are perfectly realised — Esmond dignified and austere, 
 as becomes the head of the house; Frank chivalrous 
 and impulsive, like the sound-hearted boy he is; and 
 his Majesty, when once his rage is mastered, every 
 inch a king. " Eh, bien, Vicomte," says the young 
 Prince, who was a boy, and a French boy, " il ne 
 nous reste qu'un chose a faire : embrassons nous." 
 It is a brave picture, bravely painted, without a stroke 
 awry, without a superfluous touch. 
 
l86 THACKERAY 
 
 Since Esmond many hundreds (or is it thousands ?) 
 of historical novels have been published ; yet Esmoncfs 
 supremacy is still unchallenged. The author's own 
 opinion of the book changed with his temper. One 
 day he finds it " clever, but also stupid, and no mis- 
 take "; another, he wishes "the new novel was not 
 so grand and melancholy " ; and when he contem- 
 plated it in all the bravery of its three volumes, 
 " Esmond" he wrote, " looks very stately and hand- 
 some in print, and bore as he is, I think he will do 
 me credit." Thackeray's prediction has been ful- 
 filled. Esmond did him infinite credit, and came 
 nearest to being " the complete good book " which, 
 said he, it was a shame the author didn't write. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE NEWCOMES A PARLIAMENTARY ELECTION 
 
 The Newcomes ' was published to a chorus of 
 applause. The Press, of whatever temper and com- 
 plexion, received it in respectful admiration. " This 
 is Mr. Thackeray's masterpiece," said the old- 
 fashioned ^arterly, " as it is undoubtedly one of the 
 masterpieces of English fiction." The Oxford and 
 Cambridge Magazine^ the brand-new " organ of the 
 pre-Raphaelites, was no less emphatic, declaring The 
 Newcomes " the masterpiece of all novel-writing," and 
 numbering its author " among the great naturalists of 
 all time." Since 1855 the word "naturalist" has 
 borne many a heavy burden. It has supported the 
 dullest researches of M. Zola and his followers. It 
 has been inscribed upon the banner of those who be- 
 lieve that nothing is true save the abnormal, and 
 properly enough it has fallen into disrepute. But in 
 the mouth of the pre-Raphaelites it was a term of 
 adulation. They believe that all nature should be as 
 meticulously observed and as carefully described as the 
 foregrounds of their own works, and in calling 
 Thackeray a " naturalist," they did but share with 
 
 ^ The A^ewcomes : JMevioirs of a most respectable Fajtiily, edited 
 by Arthur Pendennis, Esq. ; published in twenty-four monthly 
 numbers from October, 1853, to August, 1855. 
 
 187 
 
y 
 
 l88 THACKERAY 
 
 him their own glory. Nor was the term wholly mis- 
 applied. In a sense, completely opposite to that 
 which it has since attained, it fits Thackeray closely 
 enough. So far as he looked upon the common 
 aspects of life, so far as he did not travel beyond his 
 own experience, Thackeray was a true naturalist. 
 
 The reader will vainly seek hairbreadth escapes or 
 curiosities of vice in the pages of The Newcomes, 
 which is so close to nature as to contain nothing ab- 
 normal. It was this perfect correspondence with the 
 average knowledge of life which partly explains the 
 book's popularity. But there is another reason why 
 The Newcomes should have found favour in the 
 world's eye. It seemed Mr. Thackeray's master- 
 piece, because it was most characteristic of his talent 
 and prejudices. It was, so to say, Pendennh carried 
 to a higher power, and it was acceptable to all those 
 who thought that Esmond was a rude interruption to 
 the author's real work. In other words, the thick- 
 and-thin admirers of Thackeray found in The New- 
 comes precisely what they expected, and found it in 
 fuller measure. Here was the same easy style of 
 writing which distinguished Vanity Fair and Penden- 
 nis, the same easy treatment of great personages, the 
 same liberal mixture of over-sweet honey and too- 
 bitter gall. But in half a century the unessential has 
 been winnowed from that which matters, and we may 
 ,look upon what appeared " the masterpiece of all 
 novel-writing" with a less partial eye. 
 
 The Newcomes is a comedy conducted, for the most 
 part, in defiance of the comic spirit. Instead of 
 
THE NEWCOMES 189 
 
 sketching a serious situation, and demonstrating with 
 a laugh its inherent comedy, the author too often puts 
 his characters into a situation of comedy and proves 
 that it is fit for nothing else than a sermon. If this 
 be a " natural " book, our fathers, like Coleridge, 
 must have never done anything but preach. The 
 Nevjcomes is long — in its newest edition it covers 
 more than eight hundred pages — yet if you took 
 away all the trite essays upon morality, all the exhor- 
 tations to good conduct, all the tearful deplorations of 
 villainy, the trouble of reading would be halved, and 
 the pleasure doubled. The most trivial episode in the 
 book is an excuse for a moving discourse, and while 
 the virtues of some actors are exaggerated, the vil- 
 lainies of others are monstrously overdone. 
 
 Like so many optimists, who fondly believe in the 
 perfectibility of the human race, Thackeray had a 
 touching faith in deep and manifold wickedness. It 
 is thus that he describes a punter at Baden : "That 
 man, so calm and well-bred, with a string of orders 
 on his breast, so well dressed, with such white hands, 
 has stabbed trusting hearts ; severed family ties ; 
 written lying vows ; signed false oaths ; torn up 
 pitilessly tender appeals for redress, and tossed away 
 into the fire supplications blistered with tears; packed 
 cards and cogged dice ; or used pistol and sword as 
 calmly and dexterously as he now ranges his battalions 
 of gold pieces." The cogging of dice and the pack- 
 ing of cards are easily credible, but who can put faith 
 in the lying vows and stabbed hearts ? These, in- 
 deed, are the trappings of the crudest melodrama, and 
 
190 
 
 THACKERAY 
 
 PA- 
 
 are out of place in a comedy of manners. It is not 
 surprising that the worthy J. J., himself a strayling 
 from a sentimental theatre, should believe in and 
 " shrink away from such lawless people," but their 
 introduction gives an air of unreality to Thackeray's 
 " naturalism," and suggests that the Pre-Raphaelite 
 view of life was as primitive as the inspiration of 
 their painting. 
 
 The truth is, that whenever Thackeray mounted 
 upon his predicatory hobby-horse (and this spirited 
 steed prances energetically through The Newcomes)^ 
 he does not know how far it will carry him. He 
 apostrophises his readers ; he apostrophises his char- 
 acters ; he_ calls upon vague unseen powers to redress, 
 the balance. " Beati illi ! " he exclaims, when he re- 
 gards the tie of friendship which unites the Colonel 
 and his son. " Beati illi ! oh man of the world, 
 whose wearied eyes may glance over this page, may 
 those who come after you so regard you ! O gener- 
 ous boy, who read in it, may you have such a friend 
 to trust and cherish in youth, and in future days 
 fondly and proudly to remember ! " The wearied 
 man of the world is as purely fantastic as the gentle- 
 man of the stabbed hearts and false oaths, and it is 
 difficult to see why he is called in to wonder at a 
 simple situation. And the puzzle is all the greater, 
 because Thackeray was very quick to detect false 
 sentiment in others. The Washerwoman of Finch- 
 ley Common always moved his ridicule ; but he was 
 not above taking a leaf out of her book. " Let us 
 be thankful for our race," says he, when he remem- 
 
THE NEWCOMES I9I 
 
 bers Thomas Newcome's earliest friend, " as we 
 think of the love that blesses some of us. Surely it 
 has something of heaven in it, and angels celestial 
 may rejoice in it, and admire it." Hovi^ever worthy 
 the sentiment may be, it is too obvious to need ex- 
 pression ; and, thus expressed, it seems to echo the 
 very tone and accent of the Washerwoman herself. 
 
 However, Thackeray was not eminent for his 
 philosophy, which was superficial, nor for his moral 
 reflections, which were commonplace ; and the chief 
 merit of The Newcomes^ as of Pendennis, lies in its 
 characterisation. A word first as to the conduct of 
 the story. His earliest critics admired, with justice, 
 the ease wherewith he " kept every member of the 
 crowd faithful to his own nature." A vast number 
 of actors play their part upon the stage of The New- 
 comes ; they grow from youth to middle life under the 
 eye of the reader, and they seldom, if ever, do vio- 
 lence to the law of their being. Moreover, the 
 novel, if it has neither plot nor hero, presents the 
 history of a whole family, and covers two genera- 
 tions. It is true that one lady dies, and is brought to 
 life again, but this is the sole outrage upon probability, 
 and none of the others ever goes back upon himself. 
 So, while Thackeray holds the threads tightly in his 
 own hands, he places them unravelled in the hands 
 of the reader. The exposition of the family and its 
 early history is a marvel of lucidity, which, though it 
 is packed with information, is never dull. 
 
 Yet, if the characters are consistent each with itself, 
 they are not always consistent with the general plan. 
 
Ig2 THACKERAY 
 
 In other words, like the personages of Vanity Fair, 
 they are drawn in varying planes. The Colonel, for 
 instance, Charles Honeynian, and Fred Bayham are 
 overcharged to caricature, and are not designed on the 
 same scale as Ethel and Barnes Newcome, the best 
 examples of Thackeray's " naturalism." At the first 
 publication of the book. Colonel Newcome ' seems to 
 have won all the suffrages. His nobility of character 
 attached the soft-hearted at once. He was said to 
 exceed Don Quixote himself, upon whom he was 
 modelled, in humane dignity. His death affected the 
 public, like the death of Paul Dombey, with the sense 
 of personal loss. Opinion has now undergone a re- 
 action, and the majority is content to accept Thack- 
 eray's own opinion. " He is a dear old boy," he 
 wrote to Miss Proctor, " but confess you think him 
 something of a twaddler." That is precisely what he 
 is : he is a twaddler, who harmonises very ill with his 
 surroundings, even when all deductions are made for 
 his training and for the many years he has spent in 
 India. 
 
 At his first entry into the Cave of Harmony, he 
 makes it evident that his style and stature are not 
 those of the men who surround him. He is at once 
 too simple and too pompous to be naturalistic. " And 
 this is the abode of the Muses," says he, as he looks 
 
 1 Ingenuity has been busy in seeking the original of Colonel 
 
 kjNewcome. He is probably a composite portrait, which owes 
 
 "f '' something to Sir Richmond Shakespear, something to an old pen- 
 
 '' ''' sioner at the Charterhouse, whom Thackeray visited, but most of 
 
 ,/if all to the author's stepfathar, Major Carmichael Smyth. 
 
THE NEWCOMES I93 
 
 about him with an amiable pride. He thinks Hoskins 
 as good as Incledon. He invites Mr. Nadab, the lit- 
 tle Jew, for whom we may read Sloman, to dine with 
 him, and at every sentimental ditty " the tears trickle 
 down the honest warrior's cheek." But when Cap- 
 tain Costigan has finished the second verse of the 
 ribald song which he volunteers, the Colonel starts 
 up, seizes his stick, and roars out Silence ! " ferocious 
 as though he had been going to do battle with a 
 Pindaree." Tradition assures us that the song the 
 Captain sang was the famous " Sam Hall," ' and if it 
 were, it is difficult to understand why it was so stub- 
 born a rock of offence. But the Colonel's fighting 
 blood is up; he involves the whole company in Costi- 
 gan's degradation and dishonour; and, as the chron- 
 icler says, " that uplifted arm had somehow fallen on 
 the back of every man in the room." In this same 
 spirit of the antique world he deplores the society 
 into which he is thrown. His brothers' lack of cor- 
 diality is as unintelligible to him as Costigan's drunken 
 shame. He carries unselfishness to the point of in- 
 humanity ; his generosity, his kindliness, his folly are 
 
 1 The song which is said to have aroused the Colonel's wrath, 
 the notorious Sam Hall, though it is familiar by tradition, has not 
 yet got into print. The hero of the ditty was one Jack Hall, a 
 chimney-sweeper — his name was changed to Sam by a poet's 
 licence — who was hanged at Tyburn in 1707 for breaking the 
 dwelling-house of Captain Guyon. He was so famous a rascal in 
 his own day that he inspired an elegy and an epitaph, as well as 
 the song which still survives. The " pretty new Tune," called The 
 Chimney-Sweep, to which the song was sung, may be found in Tom 
 D'Urfey's Wit and Mirth {\-j 12). 
 
194 THACKERAY 
 
 all too great for flesh and blood. Even the pathetic 
 scene, in which the Colonel says " Adsum," does not 
 move us as it should, because we have so little confi- 
 dence that the Colonel ever lived and breathed. 
 Thackeray has spared his readers nothing ; he has 
 deafened their ears with an appeal for pity. And 
 when the pity should be given, it is perforce with- 
 held ; for who can shed tears for the travesty of a 
 man ? 
 
 Charles Honeyman, too, is a frank caricature, and 
 though his hold upon life is not very secure, he is as 
 genial an impostor as fiction can present. On his 
 first appearance, with a begging letter, he strikes the 
 right note. Now, Charles has a style, which gives a 
 weight to his lightest word, a sense of importance to 
 his meanest action. Having ventured his all in the 
 acquisition of Lady Whittlesea's chapel, he addresses 
 the Colonel, upon whom he has drawn a bill. " Have 
 I genius ? " he asks in his best rhetorical manner. 
 " Am I blessed with gifts of eloquence to thrill and 
 soothe, to arouse the sluggish, to terrify the sinful, to 
 cheer and convince the timid, to lead the blind grop- 
 ing in darkness, and to trample the audacious sceptic 
 in the dust ? My own conscience, besides a hundred 
 testimonials from places of popular, most popular, 
 worship, from reverend prelates, from distinguished 
 clergy, tell me I have these gifts." So he cheerfully 
 listens to the voice, which urges Charles Honeyman 
 to go forth, and fight the good fight ; he as cheerfully 
 mulcts the Colonel of two hundred and fifty pounds. 
 But he is readily eloquent even upon the simplest 
 
THE NEWCOMES Ig5 
 
 themes. In lofty terms he refers to the brothers 
 Newcome, " whom to name," says he, " is to desig- 
 nate two of the merchant princes of the wealthiest 
 city the world has ever known." "The fellow is 
 always in the pulpit," muttered Barnes Newcome 
 with perfect truth ; but the pulpit was his profession, 
 and he was not one to forego an advertisement. 
 
 He is, indeed, a very accomplished cleric ; he sings ; 
 he plays on the violoncello ; he has a thousand tales 
 and quips, wherewith he entertains the ladies who 
 worship at his shrine. His notions of luxury, per- 
 haps, better befit a French Abbe of the old school 
 than the incumbent of Lady Whittlesea's chapel. 
 But the labourer is worthy of his hire, and why should 
 not the impassioned orator live in comfortable ease, 
 and beguile his leisure with the perusal of impudent 
 French books, signed by the hands of Balzac, Dumas, 
 or Paul de Kock ? With such qualities, and such 
 ambitions, he is naturally a sensitive soul. In the 
 words of his friend F. B., Charles was " great in the 
 lachrymatory line " ; and it was said that " no man in 
 London understood the ring-business or the pocket- 
 handkerchief-business better, or smothered his emotion 
 more beautifully." But poor Charles was ill suited 
 to fight the harsh, unsympathetic world. He fell 
 upon evil days ; he mortgaged his chapel to one Jew, 
 himself to another; and Sherrick, the Hebrew, who 
 used the basement of the sacred edifice as a wine- 
 vault, might, as F. B. said, "turn Lady Whittlesea 
 into a synagogue, and heave the chief Rabbi into the 
 pulpit." 
 
196 THACKERAY 
 
 Yet all was not lost. F. B. was still fertile in re- 
 source. He was taking tea with Mrs. Sherrick when 
 the great idea came to him. The singing boys had 
 all gone to the Cave of Harmony. Why should not 
 the ladies take their place, and sing Handel to the 
 strains of an organ ? It was a harmless dodge, as F. 
 B. said, but it drew immensely. Mrs. Sherrick and 
 her daughter adopted a nun-like costume, practised by 
 moonlight in the chapel, and " the thing took." 
 Charles Honeyman was himself again, and a few les- 
 sons from Husler, of the Haymarket, put a fine pol- 
 ish on his elocution. " His sermons are old," as F. 
 B. confessed, " but, so to speak, he has got them up 
 with new scenery, dresses, and effects ! " The flow- 
 ers came from Covent Garden. The Flemish-painted 
 window was picked up in Wardour Street; the new 
 hymn-books were large and gilt. In brief, all the 
 trappings were superb, and fashion set with a favour- 
 ing breeze towards Lady Whittlesea's chapel. Charles 
 himself, splendid in prosperity, affected a mediaeval 
 pose. An odour of mille-fleurs rustled by as he took 
 his place at the desk. His vestments were simpler 
 and more austere than heretofore ; the curl, upon 
 which he had lavished so much care, was gone from 
 his forehead. The performance succeeded marvel- 
 lously. Sherrick paced up and down the aisle, say- 
 ing, " Capital house, wasn't it ? " and Honeyman's 
 fortune was remade. 
 
 Honeyman is one very good example of Thack- 
 eray's caricature. Mr. Frederick Bayham is another, 
 extravagant as the accomplished, aristocratic Stiggins. 
 
THE NEWCOMES I97 
 
 Now F. B. also has a style, more robust and flam- 
 boyant than his friend's. F. B. is built upon a large 
 scale. He weighs fourteen stone, and his boots, 
 " known by the name of the Prussian general who 
 came up to help the other christener of boots at 
 Waterloo," his trousers, his dressing-gown, ragged 
 and flowing, even his voice, are all large. He speaks 
 in the grandiloquent manner which befits the man of 
 letters. " Salve, spes, fidei, lumen ecclesice^'' thus he 
 salutes his friend Honeyman ; and then tells him " by 
 cock and pye " that his wine is not worth a " bender" 
 a glass. He has an easy gift of imitation and of in- 
 solence. He gives an exhibition of his uncle the 
 bishop ; he reminds the Reverend Charles of the lies 
 which he told at school, and he desires to inform 
 Colonel Newcome that he is " an orphan himself, in 
 needy circumstances, and he heartily wishes he would 
 adopt him." Meanwhile he is delighted to dine with 
 the Colonel, and to declare his " deliberate opinion 
 that F. B. has got into a good thing." 
 
 But F. B., too, " descended from the ancient kings 
 that long the Tuscan sceptre swayed," has his mo- 
 ments of didacticism. It is not a panegyric of debt that 
 he sings, like Panurge, but a threnody. He addresses 
 a solemn warning to Clive, telling him that he dodges 
 down a street to avoid a boot-shop, or that his colos- 
 sal frame trembles if a sudden hand is put upon his 
 shoulder. And all this he does in a style which gives 
 you the impression that he is drawn from life, and then 
 exaggerated beyond the measure of reality. He is 
 eminent in whatever company he finds himself, 
 
igS THACKERAY 
 
 whether it be at the Cave of Harmony or in Park 
 Lane. When The Pall Mall Gazette offers him an 
 opening for his talents, he turns his hand to anything 
 with a joyous facility. Art, the drama, theology, are 
 the same to him. But his masterpiece, no doubt, is 
 " Pulpit Pencillings," which, signed Laud Latimer, 
 give a tone of rare respectability to the paper. "You 
 wouldn't suppose, now, my young Clive," says he, 
 " that the same hand which pens the Art criticisms, 
 occasionally when his Highness Pendennis is lazy, 
 takes a minor theatre, or turns the sportive epigram, 
 or the ephemeral paragraph, should adopt a grave 
 theme on a Sunday, and chronicle the Sermons of 
 British Divines ? " But thus it is that he assisted in 
 the rehabilitation of the Rev. Charles Honeyman, and 
 even that enterprise did not exhaust his versatility. 
 When the Bundelcund Banking Company was at the 
 height of its prosperity, F. Bayham betook himself to 
 the city. Here, as elsewhere, he cut a splendid fig- 
 ure. He moved among " managers and city nobs " ; 
 he ate " kibobs with nabobs." He took the rooms 
 which were once graced by the Rev. Charles; his 
 costume was at once more cleanly and yet more 
 variegated than before. No longer dependent upon 
 the pittance which he drew from The Pall Mall 
 Gazette, he assumed what he deemed his proper 
 station in life, and even contemplated marriage 
 and a settlement. But into whatever situation he was 
 cast, F. B. filled it in all senses with ease and humour, 
 and he remains one of the masterpieces in Thackeray's 
 gallery of portraits. 
 
THE NEWCOMES 1 99 
 
 But excellent as these two are, — Honeyman and 
 F. B., — they are not triumphs of "naturalism," and 
 Tf we are on the lookout for that quality, we must 
 seek it in Ethel Newcome and her brother. Now, 
 Ethel is not a flood of tears, a mere bundle of sensi- 
 bilities ; she is a real woman, and assuredly Thackeray 
 drew few characters which surpass her in verisimili- 
 tude and individuality. At her first entrance upon the 
 scene, child though she is, she is already determined 
 and herself. " Alone, farouche, and intractable," — • 
 it is in these terms that she is described, — and " alone, 
 farouche, and intractable " she remains to the end. 
 The prejudices of her family affect her so little that 
 she is ready to defend the Colonel and his son. " You 
 are always sneering about our uncle, and saying un- 
 kind things about Clive," she darts out at Barnes, and 
 her courage equals the generosity of her thought. She 
 is represented as gravely proud, yet kindly withal, 
 " quick to detect affectation or insincerity, impatient 
 of dulness and pomposity," and these qualities, added 
 to a gift of sarcasm, and a love of truth, which flashes 
 from her grey eyes, render her unpopular with both 
 men and women. 
 
 But Thackeray is not content with enumerating 
 her qualities : he makes her speak and act always in 
 accord with them. In her many encounters with her 
 brother and Lady Kew she is quietly victorious : 
 conscious of the schemes which are laid for her mar- 
 riage, she frustrates them with a natural bravery, and 
 an honest simplicity, which are admirably depicted. 
 " We are sold," she says ; " we are as much sold as 
 
200 THACKERAY 
 
 Turkish women ; " yet Kew might have held her to 
 the bargain had he not fallen below her lofty stand- 
 ard. When Lady Kew insults her, " Keep your bad 
 names," says she, " for my Aunt Julia; she is sick 
 and weak, and can't defend herself" She resolves 
 to accept neither abuse from the old lady nor lectures 
 from Kew. At Baden she defies every one of them — 
 Kew, his mother, and the Duchesse d'lvry. She 
 keeps the famous ball alive almost by herself. She 
 dances with Count Punter, with Captain Blackball, 
 with any one that comes along, and in answer to re- 
 monstrance asks, " Was she to be so proud as not to 
 know Lord Kew's friends ? " 
 
 It is not surprising, therefore, that she should de- 
 spise the humble obedience of Lady Clara. " The 
 sight of the patient timid little thing chafed Ethel, 
 who was always more haughty and flighty and bold 
 when in Clara's presence than at any other time." 
 But, despite the intrigue which goes on about her, 
 she is resolute to direct her own life. She refuses 
 the honest Kew, who " takes his share of the pain as 
 a boy at school takes his flogging, stoutly and in si- 
 lence," and she refuses him from a scruple, which, 
 though honourable enough, she might have waived. 
 In her treatment of Lord Farintosh, her other lover, 
 she behaves with a pride and dignity which the poor 
 Marquis cannot understand ; and the whole scene is 
 written with more than common skill. In brief, 
 though Thackeray too often held a loose hand upon 
 his plot, though he not seldom permitted his person- 
 ages to act and speak as they listed, he treated Ethel 
 
THE NEWCOMES 201 
 
 Newcome with consistent sympathy and care. He 
 had nnade up his mind about her before he began, and 
 he never forgot the admirable qualities which distin- 
 guish his heroine. He has sketched her appearance 
 with a precision which is rare in his works. She is 
 tall, he tells us, " a severe Diana"; her hair and 
 eyebrows are jet black, and in her black hair is "• a 
 gentle ripple,'' as when a fresh breeze blows over a 
 melon hudor " y her eyes are grey ; her mouth rather 
 large ; " her teeth as regular and bright as Lady 
 Kew's own." It is by these signs that we may rec- 
 ognise her, and if her features are familiar to our 
 sight, her heart and character are yet more clearly 
 revealed to our understanding ; she has no kinship 
 with the Lauras and Helens, whose tears have washed 
 the truth from so many of Thackeray's pages ; she is 
 a real woman, faithfully drawn, and the reader cannot 
 but regret that in the end she is mated with so indis- 
 tinct and irresolute a young man as Clive. 
 
 Barnes, her brother, is made of other metal ; yet 
 he also rings true to himself and to his author's pur- 
 pose. Nothing can surpass the placid self-assurance 
 wherewith this " fair-haired young gentleman, languid 
 and pale, and arrayed in the very height of fashion," 
 receives the Colonel. " Very happy to see you, I'm 
 sure," said the young man. "You find London very 
 much changed since you were here ? Very good time 
 to come — the very full of the season." He is so 
 pleased with himself and his career that he patronises 
 not merely his uncle but Sir Thomas de Boots and 
 the other fogeys that he meets at his club. He is 
 
202 THACKERAY 
 
 abashed at nothing — not even when he has to confess 
 that he has never heard of Don fixate. And why, 
 indeed, should he have heard of Don Quixote ? The 
 one end and aim of his life is to make money. For 
 this he would even sacrifice his own pleasures, and 
 after all what are pleasures to a man who worships 
 wealth and respectability with a constant heart ? If 
 he speaks of business, he instantly drops his languor 
 and affectation, and becomes simple, selfish, and alert. 
 In a moment he is as " keen as the oldest curmud- 
 geon ; a lad with scarce a beard to his chin, he would 
 pursue his bond as rigidly as Shylock." The Colonel 
 loathes his worldliness even more bitterly than his in- 
 solence. " If he is like this at twenty, what will he 
 be like at fifty ? " groans the old soldier. 
 
 Above all, the young man is determined never to 
 compromise himself in the eyes of his fellows. He 
 " never missed going to church or dressing for din- 
 ner. He never kept a tradesman waiting for his 
 money." For the same reason he never drank too 
 much, and always showed up at his office spick and 
 span. Of course he is a cheat and a coward, to 
 whom honour is of far less importance than the law. 
 He takes charge of letters, and keeps them back. 
 When the famous paper is found in Orme's History^ 
 which should benefit Clive, Barnes stoutly refuses to 
 make restitution. But though he is resolute enough 
 in holding on to his money-bags, at the mere sugges- 
 tion of a quarrel, this " Fenchurch Street fire-eater " 
 takes alarm. When Clive, having thrown a glass of 
 wine in Barnes' face overnight, visits him in the 
 
THE NEWCOMES 2O3 
 
 morning with an apology, he receives him with a 
 nonchalant civility, as though nothing had happened. 
 " You are come to breakfast, I hope," says he, and 
 swears that he has forgotten the row and the broken 
 glass. When he should have resented the appear- 
 ance of Jack Belsize at Baden, he trembles at the 
 very mention of his name, and shifts his hand un- 
 easily to a pistol at a moving shadow. But it is to 
 the Colonel and Clive that he most conspicuously 
 shows the white feather. He refuses to fight the 
 Colonel on account of their relationship, and assumes 
 a noble rage at the enforced discretion. But when 
 Clive takes up his father's quarrel, he turns tail and 
 flees in an agony of terror. It is old Sir Thomas de 
 Boots who best sums the matter up. " Yesterday," 
 says he to Barnes, " you talked as if you would bite 
 the Colonel's head off, and to-day, when his son 
 offers you every accommodation, by dash, sir, you're 
 afraid to meet him. It's my belief you had better 
 send for a policeman. A 22 is your man. Sir Barnes 
 Newcome." On the other hand, Thackeray, having 
 for the moment deserted caricature for naturalism, 
 does not make Barnes all bad. He endows him 
 with easy manners, a bitter satirical tongue, and a 
 gift of waltzing. He even admits that while he is 
 not handsome there is "something in his face odd- 
 looking and distinguished." He makes him a pres- 
 ent of beautiful feet and hands. In brief, as Thack- 
 eray explains, Barnes has an air. He has an air 
 when at the Newcome Athenasum he shows that the 
 true office of the bard is to appeal to the affections ; 
 
204 THACKERAY 
 
 that " to decorate the homely threshold, to wreathe 
 flowers round the domestic hearth, is the delightful 
 duty of the Christian singer." And it is only in 
 moments of stress, as when Belsize drags him from 
 his saddle, that his air evaporates. But Thackeray had 
 the tact never to make him inhuman, and he is from 
 first to last a piece of genuine and faithful portraiture. 
 Of the other characters some are good, some bad, 
 yet Thackeray moves them all on and off the stage 
 with an adroitness which the reader cannot but ad- 
 mire. Clive himself is a florid young man, for whom 
 it is diiBcult to entertain much sympathy. A livelier 
 Pendennis, he is generous, and gay, and noble-hearted, 
 and all that. " His laughter," we are told, " cheered 
 one like wine " ; but his very virtues render him 
 incredible, and he leaves pretty much the same im- 
 pression upon us as a barber's block. Moreover, he is 
 a painter, and painters in fiction are always dull, with 
 their chatter of Raphael and Michael Angelo, and the 
 sketches which they dash off at a stroke. As for 
 Rosey, she is but the shadow of a shade, which disap- 
 pears as silently as it comes. Her mother, on the 
 other hand, the famous campaigner, is made of sterner 
 stuff, both humanly and artistically. She is drawn 
 with so firm a hand, her intrigues and her avarice are 
 so vividly depicted, that she seems to have passed out 
 of literature into experience, and to be recognisable 
 wherever we have the misfortune to meet her. And 
 old Lady Kew, who uses her poor daughter Julia as a 
 pincushion, and who is, it must be confessed, a trifle 
 melodramatic, takes her place in the same corner of 
 
THE NEWCOMES 2O5 
 
 the gallery as Miss Crawley and the Baroness Bern- 
 stein. 
 
 Most of the rest we are content to forget. J. J. 
 and Miss Cann, for instance, are so highly character- 
 istic of their own age that they are wholly uninter- 
 esting to ours. But there is one scene in the drama, 
 laid at Baden, which not merely introduces a set of 
 Parisians, rare in English fiction, but which is com- 
 posed in such a vein of comedy as Thackeray seldom 
 struck. The trappings are as gay as the drama : the 
 tables, the avenues, the music of Baden are indicated 
 with a light hand. The ball, whereat the fates of 
 many are decided, is as good as a scene from an old 
 comedy. Above all, the French men and women, who 
 intrigue and gamble in the little capital of the Ger- 
 man state, are essentially French. They are en- 
 livened, it is true, with more than a touch of carica- 
 ture ; but for all that they think and act as befits their 
 nationality, and they could not under any circum- 
 stances be mistaken for the compatriots of The 
 Newcomes. The English novelist who would depict 
 a Frenchman is so often content to sketch a Briton, 
 change his clothes and break his English, that Thack- 
 eray's performance is the more remarkable. Indeed 
 we know not where to match his Floracs and his 
 Ivrys, unless it be in the Renee of Beauchamp' s Career, 
 who, however, is a greater achievement, since she is 
 natural as a flower, and owes nothing to the brilliant 
 colours of caricature. 
 
 But if to be prophetic is to be true, then Thack- 
 eray deserves the highest praise. His Madame d'lvry, 
 
206 THACKERAY 
 
 Royalist, Philippist, Catholic, Huguenot, the exponent 
 of all the fads and every fantasy, the haggard siren, 
 who believes herself the image of Mary Queen of 
 Scots, has been reincarnated a dozen times since 
 Thackeray. She died in Paris a brief five years ago, 
 and in Paris, w^e make no doubt, she is living again 
 to-day. And ce petit Cabasse, the student of lavs?, 
 whose lyrics — " les Rales d'un Asphyxie " — have not 
 passed unnoticed, whose family has been at feud with 
 I'Angleterre since the days of the Prince Noir — was 
 he not born again a " deliquescent " some fifteen 
 years since ? Did he not frequent the cenacles of the 
 Latin Quarter, and print his verses in the journals of 
 the decadence ? True, these types are eternal ; but 
 Thackeray, despite his English blood, understood them 
 perfectly, and drew them with an astonishing accuracy. 
 But by far the most engaging of them all is M. de 
 Florae, who plays an entertaining and distinguished 
 part in the comedy of Baden. Under all circum- 
 stances he proves himself a gentleman and a man of 
 honour. Thackeray wrote few better pages than 
 those which describe Clive's meeting with him at 
 Baden. Fortune has been unkind to M. de Florae ; 
 she has emptied his purse, his portmanteaus, his 
 jewel-box, his linen-closet. " This campaign has 
 been my Moscow, mon cher" he tells Clive. " I am 
 conquered by Benazet ; I have lost in almost every 
 combat. . . . Sometimes I have a mind to go 
 home; my mother, who is an angel of forgiveness, 
 would receive her prodigal, and kill the fatted veal for 
 me. But what will you ? He annoys me — the do- 
 
THE NEWCOMES 2O7 
 
 mestic veal." So they dine at Duluc's,and are waited 
 upon by Frederic, who plays Balderstone to Florae's 
 Ravenswood. " Yes ; I am Edgar," exclaims the 
 nobleman, who, even after Moscow, is still gay, pol- 
 ished, and good-tempered. And, then, acknowledg- 
 ing that the passions tear him, that play is fatal, but 
 not so fatal as women, he proposes to be Clive's 
 Mentor. " I saw you roder round the green tables," 
 says he with a fine fancy, " and marked your eyes as 
 they glistened over the heaps of gold, and looked at 
 some of our beauties of Baden." But, though he 
 suffer defeat, he is still master of his destiny. Per- 
 turbed neither by wealth nor by poverty, he is equal 
 to every encounter. Being a Catholic, he does not 
 feel a complete sympathy with his wife, nee Higg, of 
 Manchesterre, in the comte of Lancastre ; being a 
 gentleman, he treats her with a touching deference. 
 When his cousin dies, and he becomes a prince, he is 
 as modest (and as arrogant) as ever. He delights in 
 penny cigars, and when Barnes offers him a seat in his 
 brougham, " Bah ! " he says, " I prefer the p'eniboat.'^ 
 With perfect discretion he suppresses his princely 
 title ; with perfect philosophy he justifies the sup- 
 pression. " Moncontour cannot dine better than 
 Florae," says he. " Florae has two louis in his 
 pocket, and Moncontour exactly forty francs." 
 When he grows rich he is still the same Paul de 
 Florae, " sober and dignified " ; but in all circum- 
 stances he is charming, and Thackeray was in his 
 gayest mood when he invented M. le Prince de Mon- 
 contour. 
 
208 THACKERAY 
 
 In conclusion. The Nevucomes is a formless book 
 with brilliant passages, and it bears in every chapter 
 the traces of Thackeray's haphazard method. The 
 story was " revealed " to him, he says, at Berne in 
 Switzerland, where he had strayed into a little wood, 
 and both characters and plot grew under his hand as 
 they listed. It was written at odd times and in odd 
 places, and when it was finished, Thackeray con- 
 templated it, as he contemplated all his books, with a 
 curious aloofness. He hardly knew whether the peo- 
 ple of his drama " are not true ; whether they do not 
 live near us somewhere." Such was his attitude to- 
 wards his creations. He thought them alive; he 
 heard their voices ; he was touched by their grief; 
 but he was never really master of them ; and the 
 result is that half The Newcomes is irrelevant. 
 
 In 1857 Thackeray permitted himself a holiday 
 from literature, and stood for Parliament. His views 
 were Radical, and the seat which he chose to contest 
 was Oxford. Nor was it unexpected, this incursiorr 
 into politics, for politics had attracted him ever since, 
 at the age of twenty, he had aided Charles Buller at 
 Liskeard. In The Constitutional, as we have seen, he 
 had " supported consistently, though feebly, the great 
 cause of Radicalism," and he had expressed his sym- 
 pathy with Richard Cobden by contributing a drawing 
 or two to The Anti-Corn-Law Circular. But though 
 his interest in the affairs of the country was constant, 
 he cannot be called a violent partisan, and it would 
 puzzle the most ingenious reader to formulate his 
 political creed. The author of The Book of Snobs 
 
THE NEWCOMES 2O9 
 
 was obviously a staunch democrat, who loved the 
 people for its own sake, and who devoutly believed in 
 the natural wickedness of monarchs. "I would like 
 to see all men equal," he wrote in 1840, "and this 
 bloated aristocracy blasted to the wings of all the 
 winds." When Punch gave him his chance, he de- 
 scended from the general to the particular, and at- 
 tacked the Prince Consort, his hat, his Chancellor- 
 ship, and all that was his with a ceaseless violence.^ 
 The Bal Boudre, which the queen gave in 1845, 
 aroused his bitterest scorn, and inspired him to a piece 
 of satire that was neither pointed nor in good taste.^ 
 
 But for all his detestation of kings, for all his love 
 of the free and enlightened democracy, he had no 
 sympathy with the people when it attempted to cap- 
 ture its " rights " by force. He found its " views 
 about equalising property " mere robbery, and he 
 " thanked God that they had not a man of courage at 
 their head who might set the kingdom in a blaze." 
 
 1 In Mr. Spielmann's Hitherto Unidentified Contributions of W. 
 M. Thackeray to ' Punch ' the curious will find ample material for 
 forming a judgment on Thackeray's political opinions. 
 
 5 It has been said by more than one of his champions that 
 Thackeray had a profound admiration for the Queen and Prince 
 Albert. If this were so, he showed it in the oddest fashion, and 
 Shirley Brooks's well-known lines, quoted by Mr. Spielmann, ex- 
 pressed the general indignation : — 
 
 " We'll clear thy brain. Look westerly. See where yon Palace stands ; 
 Stains of the mud flung there by thee are on thy dirty hands." 
 
 But Shirley Brooks wrongly attributed the offence to Douglas 
 Jerrold, with whose disloyalty he contrasted 
 
 " The truthful, social sketch, drawn with Titmarshian skill 
 With colour bright as Dickens's, and pencil keener still." 
 
2IO THACKERAY 
 
 In Other words, his love of the people was platonic, 
 and was more than counterbalanced by his hatred of 
 physical force. So, too, in his treatment of Ireland, 
 he never showed a bigoted admiration of one party or 
 the other. He judged even the great O'Connell on 
 his merits, and while to-day he pronounced him " the 
 greatest man in the Empire," and eloquently com- 
 pared him to Washington, to-morrow he is a buffoon, 
 who, when " the Want of a Nation stares him in the 
 face, replies with a grin and a gibe," an old sharper, 
 who takes his compatriots' money, and " scorns even 
 to hide the jugglery by which he robs them." His 
 views upon Young Ireland were equally inconsistent. 
 In 1843 he contributed an effusion — " Daddy, I'm 
 Hungry " — to The Nation • yet two years later he 
 had never heard of Davis, whom he attacks with be- 
 coming energy. And through it all he was constant 
 only to one thing — Home Rule — which he supported 
 at first for the sake of Ireland, and secondly that 
 Great Britain might be well rid of a disloyal and 
 avaricious partner. 
 
 Such was Thackeray's political record, when in 
 1857 ^^ opposed Mr. Cardwell at Oxford. The cir- 
 cumstances of the election were peculiar : the sitting 
 member, Mr. Neate, had been unseated for "two- 
 pennyworth of bribery which he never committed," 
 and Thackeray frankly declared that " he would not 
 have stood against Cardwell, had he known he was 
 coming down." But having stood, he fought the 
 election with all his energy. The foremost plank in 
 his platform was the question of reform, which he 
 
THE NEWCOMES 211 
 
 had strenuously supported ever since his appearance 
 at Liskeard in 1832; and he not only pronounced 
 himself in favour of the ballot, but declared that it 
 was his ambition to amend the suffrage " in nature, 
 as well as in numbers." In accord with the princi- 
 ples which he had always professed, he believed that 
 the State would be benefited " by the skill and talents 
 of persons less aristocratic " than those who were 
 then administering it, nor did he spare the electors the 
 familiar commonplaces about " hard-working, honest, 
 rough-handed men." At the same time he loyally 
 promised to " advance the social happiness, the 
 knowledge, and the power of the people," and he 
 lost many votes by advocating the opening of muse- 
 ums on Sunday. But throughout the election he 
 showed himself a man of the world rather than a 
 serious politician. He owned that he " could not 
 speak very well, but," said he, " I shall learn," and 
 he plainly recognised that talking was not the chief 
 business of the House of Commons. That he was 
 not returned was not surprising, least of all to him- 
 self, and at the declaration of the poll he made his 
 happiest speech, told the story of Gregson and Gully, 
 how the victorious prize-fighter was the first to shake 
 the hand of the vanquished, and declared that he 
 would retire, to "take my place with my pen and ink 
 at my desk, and leave to Mr. Card well a business 
 which I am sure he understands better than I do." 
 Thus ended Thackeray's one political interlude, 
 which in his own phrase was " very good fun," and 
 the failure of which none regretted less than himself. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE VIRGINIANS THE EDITORSHIP OF THE 
 
 CORNHILL 
 
 So he returned to take his place with his pen and 
 ink at his desk, and four months after his defeat at 
 Oxford there appeared the first number of a new 
 novel — The Virginians^ a Tale of the Last Century. 
 As Esmond was the natural result of the lectures on 
 The Humourists, so The Virginians came in due 
 sequence after the lectures upon The Four Georges, 
 and Thackeray's two journeys to America. But no 
 books could diiFer more widely in treatment than 
 Esmond and The Virginians. Esmond is a deliberate 
 work of art, composed with a definite purpose, and in 
 a definite style. It is the worst fault of The Virgin- 
 ians that it is without form or shape. It is less a 
 novel than a series of essays interspersed with anec- 
 dotes, and with experiments in the art of literary imi- 
 tation. It professes by a permissible fiction to be 
 written by a descendant of the Warrington family. 
 But Thackeray too often forgets this fact, and lets the 
 story write itself in the language of the eighteenth 
 century. The consequence is that the two styles 
 constantly overlap. The story is now a modern 
 
 ' The Virginians was published in twenty-four monthly parts, 
 from November, 1857, to October, 1859. 
 212 
 
THE VIRGINIANS 213 
 
 retrospect, now an antique experience, and the author 
 is as uncertain of his style as he is mutable in his 
 point of view. Again and again he will interrupt a 
 narrative which belongs to the eighteenth century 
 with references to Carlyle, or to Mr. Disraeli's House 
 of Commons. One thing only is unchanging, — the 
 moral reflection, which is always of the nineteenth 
 century, whether it be expressed by the author or by 
 one of the actors in his drama. The result is a 
 jumble of interests, a confusion of tongues. 
 
 To say that the book is at its best when Thackeray 
 most resolutely suppresses himself is superfluous, and 
 the sudden intrusion of modern ideas may generally 
 be taken as a sign of the author's boredom with his 
 own characters. Yet, even where he adheres most 
 closely to his period, he shows in The Virginians signs 
 of haste and lassitude. The real personages whom 
 he introduces are too near to history to be part of fic- 
 tion. Tunbridge Wells in his eyes is a sort of 
 Madame Tussaud's, in which all the celebrities of the 
 time are collected, clothed and coloured precisely as 
 you would expect them, and obviously wax. No 
 doubt March and Selwyn, Johnson and Richardson, 
 James Wolfe and the Countess of Yarmouth, were 
 alive at the same time ; no doubt, also, an author who 
 includes them all in one chapter kills many birds with 
 a single stone. But he does it at too high a cost. 
 He sacrifices probability beyond all hope, and where 
 he should present the portrait of a man he suggests 
 the research of a popular text-book. And while he 
 destroys the verisimilitude of his characters by their 
 
214 THACKERAY 
 
 mere proximity one to another, he spoils each of 
 them by making him, as it were, a sublimation of the 
 truth. He treats them as he treated Steele and Addi- 
 son in Esmond: he never permits them to utter a 
 word that is unexpected. They must be true, every 
 one of them, to popular biography ; and yet we be- 
 lieve that even Lord March and Jack Morris some- 
 times opened their mouths without making a bet. 
 
 The Virginians, then, is a thing of patches, not an 
 organic whole, and though some of the chapters thus 
 loosely knit together are humorous or picturesque, it 
 is impossible to sustain one's interest in a bookso 
 various as this in style, character, and intention. But 
 it would not have been written by Thackeray if it 
 had not contained some half-dozen scenes of vivid 
 drama, and more than one admirably drawn portrait. 
 The purpose of the book, to which, by the way, the 
 author did not long adhere, is made clear in the open- 
 ing sentence. " On the library wall of one of the 
 most famous writers of America," says Thackeray, 
 " there hang two crossed swords, which his relatives 
 wore in the great War of Independence. The one 
 sword was gallantly drawn in the service of the king, 
 the other was the weapon of a brave and honoured 
 republican soldier." The two swords might have 
 suggested an interesting study of opposing loyalties 
 and severing patriotisms. But Thackeray forgot his 
 swords long before he came to the end of his novel; 
 and the fact that the two Warringtons took different 
 sides in the American Rebellion is either irrelevant or 
 obscured. 
 
THE VIRGINIANS 215 
 
 What remains is a story of life as it was lived in 
 the eighteenth century, with America for a shadowy 
 background, and with a far-off echo of Braddock's 
 campaign. The best scene is the first of all, in which 
 is described Harry Warrington's visit to the home of 
 his ancestors. Seldom has the sentiment of the re- 
 turned traveller been better rendered, and this traveller 
 returns to a home which he knew only by tradition 
 and report. Yet, though he looked upon the scene 
 for the first time, it was perfectly familiar to his eye. 
 He easily pictured the knights and huntsmen of a by- 
 gone age crossing the ford, to draw the sword per- 
 chance in the service of their king, or to hunt their 
 quarry with hawk and hound. Meantime "the clink- 
 ing of the blacksmith's forge, the noises of the even- 
 ing, the talk of the rooks, and the calling of the 
 birds," stirred in his mind the recollection of a past 
 he had never seen, and yet knew more intimately than 
 that which happened a year ago in Virginia. If only 
 Thackeray had kept the whole book in this same key 
 he would have written a masterpiece fit to rank with 
 Esmond^ but unhappily he soon let the necessity of 
 writing so much a-month conquer him, and the book 
 made itself the vehicle of the social prejudices and 
 historical sympathies of its author. Even though the 
 scene be laid at the Wells or the playhouse, the reader 
 cannot but think of Pendennis or Clive Newcome. 
 Harry Warrington is but these blameless youths in 
 another dress. Though he gambles with a braver 
 recklessness than the young Pendennis, he is, like 
 that hero, merely " wild," not " wicked " ; and yet. 
 
2l6 THACKERAY 
 
 despite the author's protestations, despite Harry's 
 virtuous attachment to the aged Maria, despite even 
 the priggish reprimands of James Wolfe, and the 
 sound advice of the amiable Lambert, the friend of 
 March and Selwyn must, one is sure, have been 
 wicked as well as wild. The Fortunate Youth, in- 
 deed, is not more easily convincing than Thackeray's 
 other heroes ; and while we are content to trace in the 
 features of General Lambert, the kind, scholarly old 
 soldier, who loved Rabelais, and sought his classical 
 quotations in Burton's Anatomy^ a resemblance to the 
 author of his being, it is, as usual, in the rogues, not 
 in the virtuous citizens, that Thackeray is at his best. 
 If Will Castlewood be exaggerated, Sampson, the 
 roystering parson, who loves wine better than his 
 prayers, and gambling better than either, is by no 
 means ill-drawn. Still better is my Lord of Castle- 
 wood, who, though he is a sharper and a coward, 
 preserves the outward seeming of a gentleman. He 
 is a fine specimen of the correct rogue : he is the 
 Barnes Newcome of his century, but better bred and 
 better mannered. The young Virginians are rightly 
 pleased to be in his company. Nothing can disturb 
 his invariable attitude of politeness, and his dissipated 
 pomposity is only skin-deep. He deplores to Harry 
 Warrington the love of play which has made him 
 the poorest peer in England ; and though his reputa- 
 tion is so bad that few care to play with him, he 
 regretfully spares the Mohock, as he called Harry, so 
 long as he is under his roof. At the same time, 
 he frankly recognised that he was a fool " to fatten 
 
THE VIRGINIANS 
 
 217 
 
 a goose for other people to feed off." In brief, " he 
 was aTar abler man than many who succeeded in 
 life. He had a good name, and somehow only 
 stained it ; a considerable wit, and nobody trusted it ; 
 and a very shrewd experience and knowledge of man- 
 kind, which made him distrust them, and himself 
 most of all, and which was perhaps the bar to his 
 own advancement." But such as he was, Thackeray 
 drew him with evident understanding ; and the best 
 of him is that, though he shows the white feather, 
 and cheats at the cards, he never loses the outward 
 restraint and decorum of a gentleman. 
 
 A far greater figure is the Baroness de Bernstein, 
 who not only confers distinction upon The Virginians, 
 but is one of the very best portraits in Thackeray's 
 gallery. Now Thackeray had a very keen eye for a 
 worldly old woman ; he understood, as few have 
 understood, both the comedy and the bitterness of her 
 existence. But never did he surpass the Baroness de 
 Bernstein, who is superior to Miss Crawley in force, 
 to Lady Kew in geniality, to both in humour. 
 Though she is but Beatrix Esmond grown up, she is 
 as far beyond that dashing young lady in tempera- 
 ment as in years ; though she be harsh and imperious 
 if she be not obeyed, she cherishes a warm affection 
 for those who bow the knee and live up to her stand- 
 ard of conduct. But the shallow artifices which the 
 Castlewood family adopted to gain her favour did not 
 deceive her for a moment, and, " being a woman of 
 great humour, she played upon the dispositions of the 
 various members of this family, amused herself with 
 
2l8 THACKERAY 
 
 their greedinesses, their humiliations, their artless 
 respect for her money-box, and clinging attachment 
 to her purse." But it was with a very different eye 
 that she looked upon the strayling from Virginia, 
 whose exclusion from Castlewood aroused her fury. 
 An incivility put upon him excited her ire at the very 
 outset. Perhaps it was the memory of the boy's 
 grandfather that angered her against the meanness of 
 the Castlewoods ; but this restless and resolute 
 woman instantly took Harry Warrington under her 
 charge, and, callous-hearted though she were, she 
 stoutly protected him against his cousins. The first 
 meeting between the old lady and the Virginian is 
 in Thackeray's best manner. When Harry first 
 entered the garden of Castlewood, the baroness was 
 
 already pacing the green terraces which sparkled 
 with the sweet morning dew, which lay twinkling, 
 also, on a flowery wilderness of trim parterres, and 
 on the crisp walls of the dark box hedges, under 
 which marble fauns and dryads were cooling them- 
 selves, whilst a thousand birds sang, the fountains 
 plashed and glittered in the rosy morning sunshine, 
 and the rooks cawed from the great wood." 
 
 Admirable as is the setting, the dialogue is worthy 
 of it. Nor was the baroness disappointed in the 
 young Mohock : she talked of none but him, she 
 praised his courage and address, until his cousins were 
 weary of his name ; and, with a rare confidence, she 
 told him the story of the house, and showed him the 
 room where his grandfather used to sleep, and the 
 secret cupboard where Mr. Holt, the Jesuit, con- 
 
 C( 
 
THE VIRGINIANS 219 
 
 cealed his papers. But sentiment was not natural to 
 her, and she very soon put it aside. With the 
 greatest cunning she held up the absurd Maria to 
 ridicule before the enamoured Virginian. "She takes 
 liberties with herself," said the old lady, drinking 
 from a great glass of negus. " She never had a good 
 constitution. She is forty-one years old. All her 
 upper teeth are false, and she can't eat with them." 
 What words could have been more cleverly devised 
 than these to kill the passion of love in a boy's 
 heart ? But the baroness did more ; she did not 
 scruple to steal the compromising letter which bound 
 Harry to his Maria, and she only failed to separate 
 the two because she did not rightly measure the 
 depth of the boy's loyalty. 
 
 Above all, she wished that Harry should not grow 
 up a milksop. She fondly believed that her nephew 
 was leading not merely a merry life, but a wicked 
 one, and had she known the truth she would have 
 been bitterly disappointed. Even when the scape- 
 grace was arrested she was still disposed to help him, 
 provided he was not too deeply committed, for avarice 
 quarrelled in her heart with affection, and in the old 
 lady's eyes her own advantage still came first. Yet 
 when Harry rejected her terms she was sincerely 
 proud of him ; she was delighted at the contempt 
 with which he treated her lawyer ; indeed she liked 
 nothing better than to see a man insolent in adversity. 
 And when her nephew was overwhelmed with ruin 
 she gave him the soundest advice. '"Fiddle-de-dee, 
 sir ! ' said she. ' Everybody has to put up with imper- 
 
220 THACKERAY 
 
 tinences ; and if you get a box on the ear, now you 
 are poor and cast down, you must say nothing about 
 it ; bear it with a smile, and, if you can, revenge it 
 ten years later. JHoi qui vous park, sir ! — do you 
 suppose I have had no humble-pie to eat ? All of us 
 in our turn are called upon to swallow it ; and now 
 you are no longer the Fortunate Youth, be the Clever 
 Youth, and win back the place you have lost by ill- 
 luck.' " 
 
 Dr. Tusher's widow no doubt had been given 
 plenty of humble-pie, but she was endowed with a 
 temperament which nothing could dismay, and at 
 every point she was her nephew's superior. Yet 
 keenly as she was interested in men and women, she 
 found a still keener enjoyment in gambling, and she 
 was never so happy as at the green table. " The 
 cards," said she, in a passage of admirable philosophy, 
 " don't cheat. A bad hand tells you the truth to 
 your face ; and there is nothing so flattering in the 
 world as a good suite of trumps." So the baroness is 
 drawn cynical and imperious, and from beginning to 
 end she is consistent and alive. For once Thackeray 
 was determined to depict a character without pointing 
 a moral or embellishing a sentiment, and though we 
 may regret the somewhat tedious surroundings in 
 which Madame de Bernstein finds herself, we would 
 not change a single touch in her admirable portrait. 
 
 Before the last number of The Virginians was pub- 
 lished, Thackeray had undertaken the editorship of 
 The Cornhill, an enterprise which brought wealth and 
 fame to all concerned with it. The hour was pro- 
 
THE VIRGINIANS 221 
 
 pitious, and the man was found. The magazines of 
 1859 were, with few exceptions, of a grave and sober 
 suit. The Quarterly and The Edinburgh had not yet 
 lost their autocracy ; they still dictated what the world 
 should think upon all matters of politics and litera- 
 ture. Blackwood' s alone succeeded in combining in- 
 struction with amusement, and its example was clearly 
 worth following. Nor could a better figurehead be 
 found for the ship which George Smith was about to 
 launch than the author of The Virginians. Thack- 
 eray's name was familiar to the whole English-speak- 
 ing world, and while the slightest essay which he 
 wrote himself was sure of attention, he was distin- 
 guished enough to enrol under his banner the greatest 
 of the land. Moreover, the public taste was not yet 
 debauched by " popular " literature, and it is not won- 
 derful that the liberal energy of George Smith was 
 instantly rewarded. 
 
 But the founder of The Cornhill did not make his 
 happy choice without hesitation. His first intention 
 was to rely upon Thackeray for a long story, and to 
 intrust the editorship to another hand. But when 
 Tom Hughes declined his aid, on the ground that he 
 was pledged to another house, the publisher invited 
 Thackeray to take the editor's chair, and it was under 
 Thackeray's auspices that the first number of The 
 Cornhill appeared. First of all a title was necessary, 
 and it was Thackeray who hit upon the obvious yet 
 distinguished name by which the magazine has been 
 known for nearly half a century. In September, 1859, 
 he wrote to George Smith from Coire, in Switzerland, 
 
222 THACKERAY 
 
 telling him that St. Lucius, the founder of St. Peter's 
 Church, Cornhill, was buried there. " Help us, good 
 St. Lucius ! " he exclaimed, and St. Lucius in return 
 gave him the happy inspiration. Six days later the 
 title was found : " The only name I can think of as 
 yet is ' The Cornhill Magazine.' It has a sound of 
 jollity and abundance about it." The proprietor wel- 
 comed the suggestion, and on January i, i860, the 
 first number appeared. Its success was instant and 
 overwhelming.^ " It was the literary event of the 
 year," said its proud founder ; " along Cornhill noth- 
 ing was to be seen but people carrying bundles of the 
 orange-coloured magazine." Of the first number 
 120,000 copies were sold, and while the commercial 
 triumph was never doubtful, the magazine won the 
 esteem of all the best judges. Monckton Milnes 
 thought it " almost too good both for the public it 
 was written for and for the money it had to earn." 
 Even FitzGerald, rarely roused to enthusiasm, pro- 
 nounced the first number " famous," though his eagle- 
 eye saw " the cockney let in " at the second number. 
 The success was well deserved and not surprising. 
 Not only did Thackeray attract the wisest contrib- 
 utors, but George Smith was " lavish to recklessness," ^ 
 
 ' See Mrs. Richmond Ritchie's " First Number of The Cornhill" 
 in The Cornhill oi ]\i\y , 1896, and Mr. G. M. Smith's " Our Birth 
 and Parentage" in The Cornhill of ]a.nu3.xy, 1901. 
 
 ^ Mr. Smith's figures are more eloquent than pages of comment. 
 The largest sum he paid for a novel was £'j,ooo, which was ex- 
 changed for Romola. The highest rate at which short articles 
 were rewarded was £i2, 12s. a page, which Thackeray received 
 for The Roundabout Papers, and the most ever spent upon a single 
 
THE VIRGINIANS 223 
 
 and the first number could hardly be surpassed in in- 
 terest and variety. Mr. Anthony Trollope opened 
 with the first chapters of Framley Parsonage^ Thack- 
 eray himself began Lovel the Widower^ and men so 
 distinguished as Sir John Bowring and Sir John Bur- 
 goyne were content to suppress their names and give 
 their knowledge. In brief, there was enough in the 
 new magazine to attract all readers ; the generous 
 founder was justified of his liberality ; and Thackeray 
 took a frank delight in his victory. No sooner was 
 the first number published than with a boyish enthu- 
 siasm, characteristic of him, he went ofi^ to Paris for 
 a holiday. During these happy days he could not 
 sleep, so he said, " for counting up his subscribers." 
 He told Mr. James T. Fields, who found him in the 
 Rue de la Paix half delirious with joy, that " London 
 was not big enough to contain him, and he was 
 obliged to add Paris to his residence." He was eager 
 to buy pocketfuls of diamonds, that he might spend 
 something at least of his princely income ; and if he 
 saw half-a-dozen Parisians chatting together, he was 
 sure that news of The Cornhill had reached France, 
 and that the circulation was still going up. But not 
 only did he feel a private joy in his success ; he blew 
 the trumpet of The Cornhill with a public and a signal 
 flourish. In a paper, entitled On some Late Great 
 Victories^ he celebrates his own and his proprietor's 
 triumph. He fancies the Imperator standing on the 
 steps of the temple on the Mons Frumentarius, and 
 
 number was ;^i,i83, 3s. 8d. These figures might well turn the 
 magazine-writer of to-day green with envy. 
 
224 THACKERAY 
 
 addressing the citizens. " Quirites," says he, " in 
 our campaign of six months we have been engaged 
 six times, and in each action have taken near upon a 
 hundred thousand prisoners. Go to ! What are other 
 magazines compared to our magazine ? " 
 
 But in the cup of victory there was already a bitter 
 drop ; there were already thorns in the cushion which 
 covered the throne of editorial state. Thackeray, in 
 fact, soon found the chair, in which at the outset he 
 took so just a pride, anything but comfortable. He 
 had neither the sense of business which distinguishes 
 the perfect editor, nor the hard heart which makes it 
 easy to reject a proffered contribution. He was in- 
 different to the stings of adverse criticism. The 
 shillelahs of all Donnybrook hurtled round his im- 
 pavid head. But he could not bear to refuse the idle 
 poetry or the foolish prose of those who thought their 
 happiness depended upon his acceptance of their 
 wares. " Before I was an editor," he wrote, " I did 
 not like the postman much ; but now ! " It was in 
 vain that he urged his correspondents to address their 
 letters to the office of the magazine. He was pur- 
 sued by complaints and entreaties even to his own 
 door. Wherever he sat down, there was the thorn 
 awaiting him, and he knew no remedy but to get rid 
 of the editorial cushion forever. In May, 1862, 
 then, he resigned. " I had rather have a quiet life 
 than gold-lace and epaulettes," he said, in a character- 
 istic letter of farewell, " and deeper than ever did 
 plummet sound, I fling my speaking-trumpet." But 
 though he resigned his editorship, he did not cease to 
 
THE VIRGINIANS 225 
 
 contribute. " Let my successor command The Corn- 
 hill" wrote he, " giving me always a passage on 
 board ; and if the printer's boy rings at my door of 
 an early morning, with a message that there are three 
 pages wanting or four too much, I will send out my 
 benediction to that printer's boy, and take t'other 
 half-hour's doze." 
 
 However, Thackeray's success is indisputable. The 
 Cornhill in his hands was not a mere rag-bag of odds 
 and ends ; it was a genuine magazine of literature, 
 and the readers and writers of this age may look upon 
 it with an envious regret. The vast interest which it 
 excited, the vast circulation which it achieved, would 
 be impossible to-day ; nor can we contemplate the 
 change which has come over the public taste with 
 equanimity. The best books are for the few now, as 
 always ; but magazines make a direct appeal to the 
 people, and survive only by the people's favour. 
 Forty years ago Tennyson and Swinburne, Locker 
 and Matthew Arnold, Lytton and Sir John Herschel, 
 Sir James Stephen and Washington Irving, could 
 ensure a generous publisher a hundred thousand sub- 
 scribers. To-day they would be powerless to attract. 
 They were not " bright " ; they were not " chatty " ; 
 they were poets and men of letters giving their best 
 and winning their proper reward. Contrast Thack- 
 eray's Cornhill with the printed stuff that is read to 
 shreds in every 'bus and railroad of the kingdom, 
 and you may measure the disastrous change which has 
 come over the public taste. Can anything be more 
 ignoble than the incoherent, useless information, the 
 
226 THACKERAY 
 
 ruthless uncovering of privacy, which are the distin- 
 guishing marks of our popular magazines ? And 
 against this irrelevant gossip the best wits of the age 
 would fight in vain ; yet pestered though Thackeray 
 was by thorns in his cushion, he was still an editor 
 who might treat his contributors with generosity and 
 his subscribers with respect. 
 
 Of Thackeray's own contributions to The Cornhill 
 there is little to say. Lovel the Widower is the trans- 
 lation into another medium of a little play — A Sheep 
 in Wolf's Clothing — which Thackeray composed for 
 his friends. It contains the same reminiscences, the 
 same reflections, which illumine Thackeray's larger 
 works. Mr. Batchelor, like the author of his being, 
 purchases a paper which brings him more experience 
 than profit, and assumes the role^ generally enacted 
 by Pendennis, of special providence to all the charac- 
 ters of the story. But it is neither fresh nor spark- 
 ling, and little else need be said of it than that it made 
 its first appearance in the first number of The Cornhill 
 side by side with Framley Parsonage^ and that doubt- 
 less it satisfied a public loyally determined to admire 
 all that came from Thackeray's pen. Nor was 
 Philip a more genuine success. Though it was built 
 upon an ampler scale, and expressed a higher ambi- 
 tion, it is formless and void. It bears upon its pages 
 all the signs of fatigue. Neither the action nor the 
 characters progress at more than a foot's pace ; the 
 same situation recurs with a wearisome iteration ; the 
 hero is always poor and always quarrelling with his 
 bread and butter ; and when the split panel of a car- 
 
THE VIRGINIANS 22/ 
 
 riage — surely a clumsy artifice — reveals old Ring- 
 wood's will, the reader can but be delighted that never 
 again will Philip take counsel with Pendennis, the 
 Cynic, and his too amiable Laura. 
 
 At the same time, Philip disarms criticism. No 
 one was more honestly conscious of its defects than 
 Thackeray himself. He knew that it was a mere 
 echo from the past, and he spoke of it in the tone of 
 tired depreciation. " Oh, it's weary work," he wrote 
 to Mr. George Smith. " I don't know whether you 
 or I should be most pitied." When Elwin, the truest 
 of his friends, praised it, Thackeray did not hesitate 
 to expose its weakness. " I have told my tale in the 
 novel department," said he. " I can repeat old things 
 in a pleasant way, but I have nothing fresh to say. I 
 get sick of my task when I am ill, and think. Good 
 heavens ! what is all this stuff about ? " There is a 
 deep pathos in Thackeray's disgust at his own work. 
 Yet the disgust and the pathos were perfectly sincere. 
 To rewrite the early chapters of his autobiography, to 
 tell the thrice-told tale of a young journalist's fight 
 with poverty, was a hopeless task, and one which he 
 probably would not have undertaken, had not ill- 
 health hampered his imagination. 
 
 But when he said that he had " told his tale in the 
 novel department," he was unduly depreciative. In 
 Denis Duval., unhappily left a fragment at his death, 
 he recovered his old mastery, he displayed his old 
 style. Better than this, he suppressed himself more 
 rigidly than he had ever done, save in Barry Lyndon 
 and Esmond. He aimed with perfect deliberation at 
 
228 THACKERAY 
 
 the reproduction of a certain period in which there 
 was no scope for " snarling cynical remarks " nor 
 trite moralities. In other words, he made a return to 
 history, always his favourite pursuit, and he studied 
 his characters and their environment with a rare dili- 
 gence. Moreover, as though to compensate for the 
 broken narrative, Thackeray left behind a set of notes 
 which reveal to us the birth and progress of the story. 
 For once, at any rate, the novelist was master of his 
 material ; for once he refused to follow whither his 
 puppets led him. The germ of his plot may be found 
 in The Annual Register of 1782, where the true history 
 is told of M. de la Motte and the traitor Liitterloh. 
 But how liberally has the author's imagination trans- 
 lated fact into fiction ! With how deft a hand has he 
 dressed the dry bones of truth in the trappings of 
 romance ! And while the notes upon Denis Duval, 
 afterwards published by Mr. Greenwood, are a lucid 
 commentary upon so much of the story as we possess, 
 they prove with how fine a spirit the unwritten chap- 
 ters might have been informed. We should have had 
 an account of Pearson's splendid battle with Paul 
 Jones, the Pirate ; we should have been told how 
 Denis Duval, chained in the hold of a Dutch East 
 Indiaman, was rescued by the captain of a Kingston 
 privateer; nor would this have been the last of 
 Denis's adventures, for he was destined to rise by 
 hard work and hard service, to see fighting in France 
 and Spain and America, to witness the execution of 
 Major Andre, and to prove himself in all latitudes a 
 proper hero of romance. Then he was to encounter 
 
THE VIRGINIANS 229 
 
 horse-thieves and smugglers ; he was to take part in 
 the Deal riots, and to oppose the great Mackerel party, 
 of which his grandfather, the old perruquier, was an 
 eminent member. 
 
 Indeed, the unwritten chapters of the book would 
 have been salt with the sea-spray and red with the 
 blood of fighting men. Above all, as if to show up 
 his own familiar practice, in Denis Duval Thackeray 
 had left nothing to chance. He had studied the 
 topography and government of Winchelsea, the scene 
 of his story, with the utmost care. He had noted its 
 three gates, its mayor and twelve jurats, its privilege 
 of " sending canopy-bearers to a coronation " ; he had 
 made researches into the French Reformed Church, 
 whose members had a settlement at Rye — in brief, he 
 had overlooked nothing which might throw light upon 
 his period and his personages. Yet he subordinated 
 the truth to a romantic effect with so delicate a tact 
 that there is never a suspicion of pedantry in the 
 book. In other words, he is not the slave of facts, 
 and to compare his note-book with the unfinished 
 fragment is an excellent lesson in the art of fiction. 
 Admirable as are the characters who play their parts 
 in the drama, it is the harmoniously consistent atmos- 
 phere of the story which wins our highest respect, 
 and intensifies the regret that so fine a work was 
 cruelly interrupted. Nor did its quality lack appre- 
 ciation. " In respect of earnest feeling," said Charles 
 Dickens, " far-seeing purpose, character, incident, and 
 a certain loving picturesqueness blending the whole, I 
 believe Denis Duval to be much the best of his 
 
230 THACKERAY 
 
 works" ; to which high tribute, generously paid by a 
 great craftsman to his colleague, there is no word to 
 add. 
 
 But besides his novels, Thackeray contributed to 
 The Cornhill a set of essays called The Roundabout 
 Papers^ which contain much of his best writing. 
 Mellower in judgment, maturer in temper, than his 
 earlier essays, they are enlivened by a serious gaiety, 
 an amiable reflection which their author rarely 
 equalled. Their excellence is not suprising, because 
 to write essays was at once the talent and the bane of 
 Thackeray. He held opinions upon all subjects, and 
 he liked to express them — a liking which discursively 
 interrupted the progress of his stories. But in The 
 Roundabout Papers he was preaching about himself, 
 and the world, not about the puppets of his own cre- 
 ation, and he could be as desultory as he chose, with- 
 out defeating his own purpose. FitzGerald declared 
 that as he read them, he heard Thackeray " talking 
 to him," and though " conversation " is not in gen- 
 eral the test of a good book, the essayist may easily 
 be forgiven if he talks to his readers. Thackeray, 
 moreover, was checked by the necessities of the 
 magazine to a concision that you do not often find in 
 his works, and this simple restraint gave a fine meas- 
 ure and rhythm to his prose. Egoism is, as it should 
 be, the essence of the papers. Thackeray discourses 
 of his youth, his travels, and his method of writing, 
 with the regretful geniality of an oldster looking back 
 upon the past. With an affectation of garrulity, he 
 records his pleasant reminiscences. Now, he pictures 
 
THE VIRGINIANS 23 1 
 
 himself as a " lazy, idle boy," living in fancy with 
 Dumas' musketeers, or returning home from school 
 hungry and with an empty pocket. Now, he recalls 
 the golden days of youth, " when the stage was cov- 
 ered with angels, who sang, acted, and danced," 
 when Duvernay and Sontag shone star-like in the 
 theatre. " Ah, Ronzi de Begnis, thou lovely one ! " 
 he exclaims ; " Ah, Caradori, thou smiling angel ! 
 Ah, Malibran ! " Thus he praises the tempus actum^ 
 like the old fogey he liked to think himself; thus he 
 deplores the deterioration of women, and the lament- 
 able taste of the young fellows, who still found beauty 
 in the actresses of a degenerate age. 
 
 Then he strikes a sterner note, and in a panegyric 
 of JVIacaulay and Washington Irving, sings the praises 
 of his own craft. " We may not win the baton or 
 the epaulettes," said he, "but God give us strength 
 to guard the honour of the flag." Or he rises to a 
 just indignation against the policy of America. Or 
 he eloquently advocates, in an essay On' Ribbom^'-'-zn 
 order of Britannia " for the unnamed heroes of the 
 merchant service. But throughout these last essays 
 his sympathies are wider and deeper than you expect 
 in this castigator of human folly. Tom Sayers' vic- 
 tory over Heenan awoke his enthusiasm. " If I 
 were absolute king," says he, " I would send Tom 
 Sayers to the mill for a month, and make him Sir 
 Thomas on coming out of Clerkenwell." He is 
 happy, as usual, in remembering France, and the 
 thought of Desseins' hostelry evokes a sympathetic 
 memory not only of his own youth, but of Sterne, 
 
232 THACKERAY 
 
 Brummel, and other birds of passage, who in days of 
 yore sojourned at Calais. The Roundabout Papers, 
 in brief, show the best side of Thackeray, and sug- 
 gest, that though Thackeray could not refrain from 
 essay-writing even in his novels, how brilliant an es- 
 sayist was lost in the author of Vanity Fair. 
 
 Edward FitzGerald noted as a characteristic of 
 these last papers a quick sensitiveness to adverse crit- 
 icism — a nervous resentment against the misunder- 
 standing of foolish persons. It is not only that 
 Thackeray administers — in an essay On Screens in 
 Dining-Rooms — a well-deserved castigation to Ed- 
 mund Yates, whom he invites to " put up your note- 
 book ; walk out of the hall ; and leave gentlemen 
 alone who would be private, and wish you no 
 harm " ; he displays an inclination to take offence, 
 which was alien to his nature. This FitzGerald at- 
 tributed to ill-health ; and it is true that his friends 
 had observed a recurring fatigue. Yet again and 
 again he rallied, and for a while anxiety was dis- 
 pelled. The respite was not for long ; his work was 
 done; towards the end of the year 1863 he was 
 gravely ill ; and on the morning of Christmas Eve he 
 died without pain or warning. Of death he had no 
 fear ; in Mrs. Ritchie's words, " he was not sorry to 
 go." He had faced the end before with an easy 
 mind and a confident trust. " Those we love can 
 but walk down to the pier with us " — he had written 
 some years before to Mrs. Proctor — " the voyage we 
 must make alone. Except for the young or very 
 happy, I cannot say I'm sorry for any one who dies." 
 
THE VIRGINIANS 233 
 
 Not only did he look upon death with composure ; 
 he could contemplate with satisfaction twenty years 
 of unremitting toil, and reflect that he had built his 
 own monument. Death, then, had less regret for its 
 victim than for his friends. He was mourned by 
 thousands, who knew him only by his works, as well 
 as by those whom intimacy permitted to understand 
 their loss. FitzGerald (the oldest, most faithful of 
 his friends, yet one of how many !) sat moping 
 about him in his " suburb orange," and reading his 
 books, and thinking he would " hear his step up the 
 stairs to this Lodging as in old Charlotte Street thirty 
 years ago." And without doubt or question we may 
 echo FitzGerald's informal epitaph : "a great Figure 
 has sunk under Earth." 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 Thackeray possessed in a greater measure than any 
 other English writer the style coulant, which Baudelaire 
 ascribed in dispraise to George Sand. His words flow 
 like snow-water upon the mountainside. He could 
 no more restrain the current of his prose than a gentle 
 slope could turn a rivulet back upon its course. His 
 sentences dash one over the other in an often aimless 
 succession, as though impelled by a force independent 
 of their author. The style, as employed by Thackeray, 
 has its obvious qualities and defects. It is so easy 
 that it may be followed by the idlest reader, who 
 willingly applies to literature the test of conversation. 
 The thread of argument or of character is so loosely 
 held that it need not elude a half-awakened attention. 
 On the other hand, the style must needs be at 
 times inaccurate and undistinguished. The solecisms 
 of which he is guilty, and they are not few, may 
 readily be forgiven. It is more difficult to pardon the 
 frequent lack of distinction, especially as in Esmond 
 
 ' In this last chapter I propose to regather the threads, to resume 
 as briefly as may be the traits, which marlt Thackeray off from his 
 fellows both as a writer and as a man. Much has been said in the 
 preceding chapters on those subjects, and I may perhaps be for- 
 given if, for the sake of completeness, I am now and again guilty of 
 repetition. 
 234 
 
THE WRITER AND THE MAN 235 
 
 Thackeray proved that he could write, if he would, 
 with perfect artistry. But the method of his more 
 familiar books seems the result less of artifice than of 
 temperament. He seldom gives you the impression 
 that he has studied to produce a certain effect. An 
 effect is there, of course, facile and various, but 
 beyond his management. He is so little conscious 
 of his craft, that he rarely arrives at the right phrase, 
 thus presenting an obvious contrast to Disraeli, who, 
 often careless in composition, yet sowed his pages with 
 pearls of speech which time cannot dim. But how 
 little do we take away from the most of Thackeray 
 beyond a general impression of gentlemanly ease ! 
 
 From this it follows that he possessed no economy 
 of speech. He never used one word, if a page and a 
 half could adequately express the meaning, and at all 
 save his high moments you miss a controlling hand, a 
 settled purpose. Nor is this remarkable, when you 
 recall the shifts and starts in which he did his work. 
 He was of those who write better anywhere than in 
 their own house. He would carry his unfinished 
 manuscript to Greenwich with him, and write a chapter 
 after dinner, or he would go off to Paris, and compose 
 as he went. " I should never be at home," he told 
 Elwin, " if I could help it. ... I write less at 
 home than anywhere. I did not write ten pages of 
 The Nevjcomes in that house at Brompton. 
 This " — meaning a hotel — " is the best place to 
 work in." 
 
 While Thackeray left the words to look after them- 
 selves, he confesses himself the humble slave of his 
 
236 THACKERAY 
 
 own characters. "Once created," said he, "they 
 lead me, and I follow where they direct." He de- 
 vised his actors as by instinct, and without realising 
 the full meaning of the drama in which they played 
 their part. " I have no idea where it all comes from," 
 he told EI win. "I have never seen the people I 
 describe, nor heard the conversations I put down. 
 I am often astonished myself to read it when I have 
 got it on paper." It is not strange, therefore, that he 
 regarded the personages in his own dramas as quite 
 Outside himself. " I have been surprised," says he, " at 
 the observations made by some of my characters. It 
 seems as if an occult power was moving the pen." 
 And it was precisely this externality which linked 
 Thackeray and his characters in the bonds of acquaint- 
 ance. Had they been the deliberate and conscious 
 creations of his brain, they would have been at once 
 more and less familiar to him. He would have re- 
 membered precisely where the strings lay which pulled 
 the figures ; but he could not have said, " I know the 
 people utterly — I know the sound of their voices." 
 He would not have seen Philip Firmin in a chance 
 visitor ; he would not have recognised the drunken 
 swagger of Captain Costigan, when he met him, years 
 after his creation, in a tavern. We may be quite sure 
 that he never encountered Sir Francis or Beatrix Es- 
 mond, for these he made himself; but the majority of 
 his characters grew without his knowledge, and even 
 against his will. " That turning back to the old 
 pages," he murmurs in a passage of genuine lament, 
 " produces anything but elation of mind. Would you 
 
THE WRITER AND THE MAN 237 
 
 not pay a pretty fine to be able to cancel some of 
 them ? Ah, the sad old pages, the dull old pages ! " 
 
 It was this fatality, this frank obedience to his own 
 puppets and his own pen, which explains the frequent 
 formlessness of Thackeray's work. But though he 
 permitted most of his books to write themselves, it 
 must not be thought that his style was uniformly 
 hazardous. Despite its occasional inaccuracy, de- 
 spite its loose texture, it has many shining qualities. 
 It is graphic, various, and at times eloquent. It is 
 easy to recall a hundred passages which would entitle 
 Thackeray to a high place among the writers of Eng- 
 lish. The Waterloo chapters of Vanity Fair, much of 
 Esmond^ Harry Warrington's first visit to England, 
 Denis Duval's journey to London, — these, to name 
 but a few, are touched by the hand of a master, 
 who need fear comparison with none. Even where 
 Thackeray's prose is least under control, it inspires 
 no more than his own regret that he did not write 
 " a completely good book." For it is always the 
 prose of a man of letters. 
 
 Now, in Thackeray's time scholarship was not 
 fashionable. Neither Dickens nor Bulwer (save in 
 his last novels) give you a sense of literary allusion. 
 But Thackeray, in his most careless mood, suggests 
 the classics or hints at the eighteenth century. As he 
 wrote rather as an essayist than as a novelist, as his 
 style was a sincere, untrammelled expression of his 
 mind, he reveals his literary preferences by a thousand 
 light touches. His reading, if not wide, was deep. 
 He was perfectly familiar with both the Augustan 
 
238 THACKERAY 
 
 ages. Horace he knew best of all, and quoted most 
 constantly. Nothing pleases him better than to allude 
 in a phrase to his favourite poet. " Nuper — in former 
 days — I too have militated," thus he writes in The 
 Roundabout Papers, " the years slip away fugacius ; " 
 and again, " to-morrow the diffugient snows will give 
 place to Spring." Above all, he loved the Augustan 
 doctrine of an easy life. The contemner of Swift 
 naturally found Juvenal a " truculent brute," but he 
 felt a natural sympathy for the satirist of Venusia, 
 who timidly avoided unpleasant themes, and who, had 
 he lived in the nineteenth century, would have been 
 a man about town, and have haunted the very clubs 
 to which Thackeray himself belonged. And when he 
 chose to express himself in verse, he echoed with skill 
 and fidelity both the manner and the philosophy of 
 Horace. 
 
 To our own Augustan age his Lectures on the Hu- 
 mourists are an eloquent, if misleading, tribute. He 
 was, after them, the eloquent champion of simplicity. 
 That which he prized most highly in his own work 
 was the rigid exclusion of barbarous or fantastic 
 words, the stern avoidance of involved sentences. 
 And what he avoided himself, he sternly reprobated 
 in others. See how wittily, in his Essay on Thunder 
 and Small Beer, he exposes the turgid sentences of 
 The Times, with how hot an iron he brands the pom- 
 pous Latin of the critic. " That is proper economy," 
 says he of the Thunderer's finest sentence, " as you 
 see a buck from Holywell Street put every pinchbeck 
 pin, ring, and chain which he possesses about his 
 
THE WRITER AND THE MAN 239 
 
 shirt, hands, and waistcoat, and then go out and cut a 
 dash in the park, or swagger with his order to the 
 theatre." But Thackeray would have his ornaments 
 few and appropriate. Maybe the Augustan ideal, 
 simplex munditiis, impoverished his style ; maybe he 
 would have been the greater for a deeper conscious- 
 ness of himself and his appearance. And though he 
 loyally followed the simplifiers of our English tongue, 
 he knew and admired the better models. If we as- 
 sume, as we may, that General Lambert, of The Vir- 
 ginians, was his mouthpiece, he loved Rabelais and 
 Burton with a constant heart, though he did not admit 
 their influence. Lamb he canonised, and he could 
 quote to excellent purpose Richard Graves' Spiritual 
 Quixote, a piece of satire ill deserving the oblivion into 
 which it has fallen. Again, he tells us that Montaigne 
 and Howell's Letters were his " bedside books." " If 
 I wake at night," said he, " I have one or other of 
 them to prattle me to sleep again." But it was not 
 until he attained the serene egoism of The Roundabout 
 Papers that either of these writers directed his foot- 
 steps, and though they solaced his sleepless nights, by 
 temper and sympathy he remained a true Augustan. 
 
 In nothing did he show himself a man of letters 
 more clearly than in his versatility. He could bend 
 his mind to more than one kind of literature. For 
 him the English language was an instrument upon 
 which he could play many measures. In his hands it 
 was apt for satire or reflection, for fiction or criticism. 
 Though he was often careless of his own style, he had 
 a quick perception of style in others, as is proved by 
 
240 THACKERAY 
 
 his imitations of the novelists, the very perfection of 
 criticism. It is doubtful whether Disraeli took much 
 pleasure in Codlingsby, which, nevertheless, touches off 
 the extravagances of his style with a wit which is still 
 modest, with a humour which will never lose its 
 sparkle. Then, again, he was a great hand at a con- 
 troversy, as many a mangled opponent found to his 
 cost. And he could turn easily from a full-length 
 novel to the exquisite fooling of a tale written for 
 children. His Christmas Books, though written in con- 
 formity with a prevailing custom, are by no means the 
 worst of his works, and he seldom surpassed the ami- 
 able drollery and good humour which keep The Rose 
 and the Ring ever fresh. 
 
 Once upon a time he aspired to be a painter ; he 
 had worked in a Parisian studio ; and it is therefore 
 the more remarkable that he is seldom deliberately 
 " picturesque." He does not, like the novelists of our 
 own day, ladle his local colour out from a full bucket. 
 He may weary the reader with tedious sermons ; he 
 never tries his patience with purple passages of irrel- 
 evant description. Indeed, he so sternly suppresses 
 the external world that when you recall his novels, 
 you have but a faint impression of the scene on which 
 the drama is played. The few landscapes which he 
 sketches produce, from their very rarity, an astonish- 
 ing effect. There is, for instance, a picture of Baden 
 by night in The Newcomes, which presents the whole 
 scene without the waste of a word : " The lights 
 twinkle in the booths under the pretty lime avenues," 
 thus the passage runs. " The hum of distant voices 
 
THE WRITER AND THE MAN 24 1 
 
 is heard ; the gambling palace is all in a blaze ; it is an 
 assembly night; and from the doors of the Conversa- 
 tion Rooms, as they open and close, escape gusts of 
 harmony. Behind on the little hill the darkling woods 
 lie calm, the edges of the fir-trees cut sharp against 
 the sky, which is clear with a crescent moon." Again 
 there is a keen sense of the open air in the passage 
 which describes Esmond's departure from Newgate, 
 and Temple Garden looking " like the garden of 
 Eden," and " the busy shining scene of the Thames 
 swarming with boats and barges " ; and best of all 
 there is the picture of Clavering, drawn with careful 
 discrimination, and the artist's eye on the object. For 
 the rest, Thackeray is more deeply interested in his 
 characters than in their environment ; and though his 
 reticence is vastly preferable to the ill-considered 
 picturesqueness, nowadays so popular, we would gladly 
 have exchanged a hundred of his sermons for one deft 
 sketch of an English countryside or foreign watering- 
 place. 
 
 It has been said more than once that Thackeray 
 was impervious to the influences of his time. He 
 never had the literary measles ; he never submitted to 
 the dictation of coteries. He did not find himself by 
 the sedulous imitation of others. What he was at the 
 beginning he was at the end, — a man of letters, to 
 whom time and experience gave not a new style, but 
 merely a better control of his material. He lived 
 through the Romantic movement unscathed, and he 
 borrowed not much else from Balzac than a trick of 
 keeping the characters he had once created for an- 
 
242 THACKERAY 
 
 Other occasion. But he was more intent to preserve 
 their names than their personalities, and got little else 
 from the French literature, which he knew well, than 
 a few superfluous Gallicisms. Of his own fancy he 
 had not a high opinion. " One of Dickens' immense 
 superiorities over me," said he, " is the great fecundity 
 of his imagination. Perhaps Bulwer is better than 
 both of us in this quality ; his last book written at fifty 
 is fresher than anything he has ever done." This 
 statement hardly does justice to Thackeray's talent. 
 It is true that in such works as Philip he merely re- 
 peated himself; but the repetition was the result of 
 fatigue; and if imagination be anything better than the 
 invention of odd types and strange embroilments, 
 Thackeray had his share of it. To put a plain man 
 upon his legs is (maybe) a more difficult feat of fancy 
 than to depict a brigand, and Thackeray's triumph 
 was won in the field of realism. Not that he prac- 
 tised the method as it has been understood since his 
 day, or that he cared for the arid accumulation of 
 superfluous facts. On the contrary, he could neither 
 suppress himself nor forget the familiar tricks of the 
 fairy story. But he aspired always to be a painter of 
 manners, an historian of his own time, and this 
 creditable aspiration gave an air of reality to* his 
 novels. 
 
 His contemporaries believed that he was something 
 more than a novelist. In the simple, trusting view 
 of Charlotte Bronte, for instance, he shone as a 
 social regenerator, and he himself resolutely hoped to 
 better mankind. He complained that Byron never 
 
THE WRITER AND THE MAN 243 
 
 wrote from his heart, and he forgot that the head, not 
 the heart, is the safer place wherefrom to write. So 
 he valued himself and was valued by others, not for 
 his admirable gifts of humorous portraiture, for his 
 careful dissection of human foibles, but for the idle 
 work of " social regeneration," which cannot live out 
 its own day, and for many tedious sermons. The 
 truth is, there were always two men in Thackeray, 
 the sentimental moralist, whose obvious "lessons" 
 were long since forgotten, and the keen-eyed ironist, 
 for whom life was an amusing game, whose rules 
 were independent of virtue, and in which the scoun- 
 drel was most often victorious. It is this twofold 
 character which explains why the most of Thack- 
 eray's work was marred by a kind of uncertainty, and 
 justifies Carlyle's admirable comment : " a beautiful vein 
 of genius lay struggling about in him." The genius 
 never overcame the struggle. When the ironist was 
 disposed to take a large view, the moralist interrupted 
 his vision, and the moralist was so tight bound to the 
 superstitions of his age, that he will probably never 
 appear as great as he did to some of his contempor- 
 aries. 
 
 And as the writer was perplexed by a twofold 
 character, so also was the man. It would be easily 
 possible, without suppressing or twisting a single fact, 
 to draw two distinct and opposing Thackerays. The 
 blackest portrait we have of him is Disraeli's St. 
 Barbe, which is painted in the darkest colours, and 
 without relief. Now St. Barbe, in Endymion's 
 phrase, is "the vainest, most envious, and the most 
 
244 THACKERAY 
 
 amusing of men." He " snarls over the prosperity 
 of every one in this world except the snarler." He 
 is a misanthrope, " because he finds every one getting 
 on in life except himself." When Seymour Hicks 
 goes to a party, " that fellow gets about in a most 
 extraordinary manner," complains St. Barbe. "Is it 
 not disgusting ? . . . No lord ever asked me 
 to dinner. But the aristocracy of this country is 
 doomed." When, however, he dines at the Neucha- 
 tel's, he takes a frank delight in his host's magnifi- 
 cence, and only regrets that he did not know the 
 great man a year ago, when he might have dedicated 
 his novel to him. That is one portrait — of the mali- 
 cious, satirical dog, and it is superfluous to say that it 
 is overcharged. The other portrait, painted in lighter 
 colours, represents a man of infinite sensibility, eager 
 only to do good to his less fortunate neighbours, — a 
 cynic, whose cynicism is but a cloak for kindliness, a 
 modest gentleman, equally alive to his own defects 
 and to the merits of others. Of course neither 
 portrait is true, because both are inhuman, and the 
 truth will be found, as always, between the two. 
 But one thing is certain, if we may judge by the 
 memoirs of the time : Thackeray was not popular. 
 It was generally thought that this David, who had 
 slain many a titled Goliath, took a frank pleasure in 
 the society of the great. He was brusque in speech, 
 and quick in anger. He gave wanton offence to 
 strangers, who would not take the trouble to pierce 
 beneath the surface. When Anthony Trollope was 
 first presented to him, he murmured " How do ? " 
 
THE WRITER AND THE MAN 245 
 
 and turned his back. Trollope, of course, effaced 
 the first impression, but at the time he was justly 
 angry, and declared to George Smith that had he not 
 " been in his house for the first time, he would have 
 walked out of it." 
 
 With Thackeray's dislike of his baser confreres it is 
 possible to sympathise. He loved his craft, but not 
 all his fellow-craftsmen. His vanity was too great to 
 bear the life of Grub Street. From long commerce 
 with those whom he properly deemed his inferiors he 
 was sensitively alive to his own superiority. Though 
 he loved equality as a doctrine, he would permit no 
 equality between himself and his colleagues. " There 
 is a modus in rebus" said he with perfect justice ; 
 " there are certain lines which must be drawn : and I 
 am only half pleased, for my part, when Bob Bow- 
 street, whose connection with letters is through Po- 
 liceman X and Y, and Tom Garbage, who is an 
 esteemed contributor to The Kennel Miscellany^ pro- 
 pose to join fellowship as brother literary men, slap 
 me on the back, and call me old boy, or by my 
 Christian name." One can easily imagine how he 
 winced under the infliction of Tom Garbage, but 
 Tom Garbage and his kind are apt to take their re- 
 venge, and Thackeray never cared to conciliate them. 
 He knew perfectly well that he was not a favourite. 
 " All people do not like me as you do," he wrote to 
 Elwin. " I sometimes think I am deservedly un- 
 popular, and in some cases I rather like it. Why 
 should I want to be liked by Jack and Tom ? . . . 
 I know the Thackeray that those fellows have im- 
 
246 THACKERAY 
 
 agined to themselves — a very selfish, heartless, artful, 
 morose, and designing man." ' 
 
 Indeed, it was in these colours that Thackeray too 
 often presented himself to the world. He appeared 
 morose, and even insolent, to many who had but a 
 superficial acquaintance with him. He was a big 
 man — he stood six feet two — who sometimes behaved 
 like a big boy. For him the world was still Grey 
 Friars, with himself head of the sixth form, and he 
 did not scruple to bully the youngsters. It is not 
 strange, therefore, that he was disliked. Even Lord 
 Houghton admits an " inequality and occasional per- 
 versity in his conduct," which, however, he attributes 
 to illness. On the other hand, he was naturally a 
 man of quick feeling and deep affection. But as 
 irony and morals conflicted in his novels, so superi- 
 ority and amiability fought in his character. He 
 would, and he could, have been at peace with man- 
 kind. " Love," he said, " is a higher intellectual 
 exercise than hatred." When, in 1849, Lady Bless- 
 ington's treasures were sold by auction, the valet 
 wrote to his mistress in these terms : " M. Thackeray 
 est venu aussi, et avait les larmes aux yeux en partant. 
 
 ' It is unnecessary to discuss the dispute between Thackeray and 
 Edmund Yates further than to say that in this public encounter 
 with Grub Street Thackeray seems to have been in tlie right. It 
 is true that Thackeray himself had not scrupled to hold up certain 
 of his contemporaries to ridicule. But fiction and the newspaper 
 should be tried by different standards. Moreover, five-and-forty 
 years ago personal journalism was not yet omnipotent, and Thack- 
 eray had no resource but to protest against what he believed a 
 breach of private confidence. 
 
THE WRITER AND THE MAN 247 
 
 C'est, peut-etre, la seule personne que j'ai vu reelle- 
 ment affectee a votre depart." There is an unso- 
 licited testimonial, the significance of which cannot 
 be overlooked. Moreover, Thackeray was often 
 generous both in deed and thought. His many acts 
 of charity he was stern to conceal, but he did not hide 
 his appreciation of those whom the people called his 
 rivals. 
 
 How, then, shall we harmonise the conflicting 
 opinions ? John Blackwood, who knew and loved 
 him well, declared that he was a mixture of " bitter- 
 ness and warm feeling," which seems no more than 
 the truth. To this one he showed his bitterness, to 
 that his warm feeling, and each went off with his own 
 story. Nor is Mrs. Ritchie's explanation incompati- 
 ble. " He was a diffident man," she says, " sensitive 
 and easily wounded, especially by any one for whom 
 he had a regard," and every one knows how easily 
 diffidence may be mistaken for pride, sensitiveness for 
 ill-temper. Thackeray, moreover, had fits of arro- 
 gance, which may well have astounded the Philistine, 
 and nothing more clearly illustrates his twofold char- 
 acter than an episode to be found in Lord Tennyson's 
 Life. Thackeray and Tennyson had dined together 
 — it was in 1846 — and Thackeray, full of confidence 
 in his own powers, had said of Catullus : " I do not 
 rate him highly. I could do better myself." The 
 morrow brought a more modest reflection. " My dear 
 Alfred," he wrote the next day, " I woke at two 
 o'clock " — it was the other Thackeray who woke — 
 "and in a sort of terror at a certain speech I had 
 
248 THACKERAY 
 
 made about Catullus. When I have dined, some- 
 times I believe myself to be equal to the greatest 
 painters and poets. That delusion goes off, and then 
 I know what a small fiddle mine is, and what small 
 tunes I play upon \t. It was very generous of you to 
 give me an opportunity of recalling a silly speech ; 
 but at the time I thought I was making a perfectly 
 simple and satisfactory observation. Thus far I must 
 unbosom myself: though why should I be uneasy at 
 having made a conceited speech ? It is conceited not 
 to wish to seem conceited." It is a pleasant story, 
 which illustrates both sides of Thackeray's tempera- 
 ment, and helps us to resolve the riddle of his char- 
 acter. 
 
 His contemporaries, then, were compelled to judge 
 him with half the facts before them, and it is the 
 greater pity because many admirable qualities miti- 
 gated the stern view taken by his enemies. He was 
 liberally endowed with the rare and simple virtues. 
 He did not always take himself and his art too 
 seriously. " As for posterity," he once said, " be sure 
 that it will have its own authors to read, and I know 
 one who has very little anxiety about its verdict." 
 And though a belief in immortality was no compen- 
 sation to him, he faced the adversity of his early years 
 with conspicuous courage, content to do his day's 
 work, and win its reward, a reward which would seem 
 paltry in these days of avarice. He never stooped to 
 win an advantage by vain advertisement, nor to 
 achieve success by any means derogatory to his high 
 calling. But when prosperity came he delighted in it 
 
THE WRITER AND THE MAN 249 
 
 with the candour of a big boy who had won a prize ; 
 and nothing could exceed the pleasure which he 
 showed in his house at Kensington, or in the imme- 
 diate triumph of The Cornhill. Early and late he 
 liked to pose as a man of the world, and that he was 
 a haunter of clubs is essential both to his life and 
 work. Indeed, it was this fact, coupled with an in- 
 verted snobbishness, that exposed him to the charge 
 of cynicism. Yet of the two men, the cynic and the 
 sentimentalist, who made up Thackeray, one would 
 have thought that the sentimentalist most often pre- 
 dominated. And let it be remembered, that if he 
 turned the cold shoulder to the passing stranger, the 
 best of his contemporaries — Alfred Tennyson and 
 Edward Fitzgerald — knew him and loved him well. 
 " A big mass of a soul, but not strong in proportion " 
 — such was Carlyle's verdict, which we may accept 
 in sympathy and understanding. 
 
Index 
 
 America, Thackeray's visit to, 
 
 170 et seq. 
 Annual Register ^ The, 228. 
 Anti- Corn- Law Circular ^ Tke^ 
 
 208. 
 
 Black Kitchen, the, 20 et seq.^ 
 
 143- 
 Beauchanip^s Career, 205. 
 Becher, Anne, mother of W. M. 
 
 Thackeray, 1. 
 BlackwooiT s Magazine, 25, 221. 
 Book of Snobs, The, 76, 78, 79, 
 
 81, 83, 89, 116, 128. 
 Boswell, Croker's, 25. 
 
 Capers and Anchovies, 34 n. 
 
 Carmichael-Smyth, Major, 
 Thackeray's stepfather, 3, 15, 
 192 n. 
 
 Catherine, 31 and n., 32, 56, 58. 
 
 Catherine Hayes, 33 et seq., 
 34 n. 
 
 Caution to Travellers, A, 42 n. 
 
 Cave of Harmony, The, 20 et 
 seq., 192, 196. 
 
 Charterhouse School, Thack- 
 eray at, 3 et seq. 
 
 Chimcera, The, 9. 
 
 Chronicle, The, I20, 148, 149. 
 
 Codlingsby, 240. 
 
 Comic Tales and Sketches, 36 n. 
 
 Confessions of the Countess of 
 Strathmore, The, 70 and n. 
 
 Coningsby, 102, 105, no, 114, 
 
 Constitutional, The, 15, 16, 208. 
 Contrast, The, 23. 
 
 Conversations with Lord Byron^ 
 
 145 n- 
 Cornhill, The, 220, 221, 222 and 
 
 n., 223, 225, 226, 230, 249. 
 Cupid and Psyche 36. 
 
 Dandies, The, 19, 23. 
 De Finibus, 137. 
 De Juventute, 5. 
 Denis Duval, 227-229. 
 Devil's Wager, The, 14. 
 Diary of C. Jeames de la 
 
 Pluche, 36 and n. 
 Directions to Servants, 35. 
 
 East, Thackeray's Travels in 
 
 the, 54 et seq. 
 Edinburgh Review, The, 25, 
 
 26, 87, 221. 
 Elizabeth Brownrigge : a Tale, 
 
 29. 
 English Humourists of the 
 
 Eighteenth Century, The, 
 
 157-170, 173, 212, 238. 
 Esmond, 173-186, 212, 214, 
 
 215, 227, 234, 237. 
 Essay on Thunder and Small 
 
 Beer, 238. 
 Ethel Churchill, 23, 26. 
 Examiner, The, 119, 148. 
 
 Fancy, The, 96 n. 
 
 FitzGerald, Edward, references 
 
 to, 7, 9, 12, 52, 222, 230, 232, 
 
 233, 249 — Letters of, 17, 28 
 
 n., 41. 
 Four Georges, The, 168, 172, 
 
 212. 
 
 251 
 
252 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Framley Parsonage, 223, 226. 
 
 Fraser's Magazine, 10, 12, 13, 
 15. 23. 25 and II., 27, 31, 35, 
 36 11., 39 n., 40 n., 42 n., 59, 
 142, 147. 
 
 GalignanVs Messenger, 17. 
 
 Germany, Thackeray's visit to, 
 10 et seq, 
 
 Gilbert Gurney, 146. 
 
 Gownsman, The, 8 and n. 
 
 Gronow's Reviiniscences, 109 n. 
 
 Grub Street, Thackeray's pic- 
 ture of, in Pendennis, 140 et 
 seq. — his dislike of, 245, 246 n. 
 
 History of Jonathan Wild the 
 Great, 32, 56, 58, 69. 
 
 History of Punch, 86 n. 
 
 History of Samuel Titmarsh and 
 the Great Hoggarty Diamond, 
 The, 39 and n., 40, 41. 
 
 Hitherto Unidentified Contribu- 
 tions of W. M. Thackeray to 
 " Punch," 209 n. 
 
 Hoggarty Diamond, The, 119. 
 
 Incognito, The, or Sins and 
 Peccadillos, 22. 
 
 India, Thackeray's early im- 
 pressions of, 2 et seq. 
 
 Ireland Sixty Years Since, 71 n. 
 
 Irish Sketch Book, The, 52, 54. 
 
 La Quinzaine Angloise d Paris, 
 oil V Art de s^y ruiner en peu 
 de terns, 43 n. 
 
 Legend of Jawbrahim Herau- 
 dee, The, 76. 
 
 L^ Empire, ou dix ans sous Na- 
 pol'eon, 63 n. 
 
 Letters, Montaigne and How- 
 ell's, 239. 
 
 Letters of W. M. Thackeray, 
 The, 156 n. 
 
 Letters to the Literati, 35. 
 
 Little Poinsinet, 43 n. 
 
 Lovel the Widower, 223, 226. 
 
 Luck of Barry Lyndon, The, 
 33. 53. 54. 56-73. «Si. 227- 
 
 Matilda, 23. 
 
 Melmoth the Wanderer, 11. 
 
 Memoir of Laman Blanchard, 
 
 150. 
 Memoires of Casanova, The, 64, 
 
 71- 
 Mes Larmes, I2i, 135. 
 Miscellaneous, 38 n. 
 Mississippi Bubble, A, 171. 
 Miss Shum^s Husband, 36. 
 Miss Tickletoby^s Lectures upon 
 
 English History, 76. 
 Modest Proposal, The, 164. 
 Monthly Mirror, The, \A,(i. 
 Morning Chronicle, The, 34 n. 
 Morning Post, The, 35, 76. 
 Mr. Brown's Letters to his 
 
 Nephew, 85. 
 Mr. Deuceace's Amours, 36. 
 Mrs. Perkins's Ball, 87, 138. 
 Museum, The, 15. 
 
 Nation, The, 210. 
 
 National Standard, The, 12-15, 
 40, 42 n. 
 
 Newcomes, The, 187-208, 235, 
 240. 
 
 Newgate Calendar, The, 33. 
 
 New Monthly, The, 31. 
 
 New York Evening Post, The, 
 156 n. 
 
 Notes of a Journey from Corn- 
 hill to Cairo, 54, 55. 
 
 Novels by Eminent Hands, The, 
 84. 
 
 On Half a Loaf, 172. 
 
 On Ribbons, 231. 
 
 On Screens in Dining-Rooms, 
 
 232. 
 On Some Late Great Victories, 
 
 223. 
 Oxford and Cambridge MagO' 
 
 zine. The, 187. 
 
INDEX 
 
 253 
 
 Pall Mall Gazette, The, 141, 
 
 142, 144, 146, 198. 
 Paris Sketch Book, The, 14, 42 
 
 and n., 49, 52, 54. 
 Paris, Thackeray's residence in, 
 
 44 et seq. 
 Pelham, 133. 
 Pendennis, 4, 9, 34 n., 117, 120- 
 
 148, 153, 154. 188. 
 Philip, 31, 38, 226, 242. 
 Pickwick, 22. 
 Pictorial Times, The, 102. 
 Plurality of Worlds, The, 7. 
 Punch, 37 n., 54, 74-76, 84-86, 
 
 209. 
 
 Quarterly Review, The, 25, 86, 
 1 12 and n., 114, 187,221. 
 
 Recollections of Germany, 10. 
 Red Herrings, The, 19, 107. 
 Regina, 27, 151. 
 Revolt of Islam, The, 9. 
 Rose and the Ring, The, 240. 
 Roundabout Papers, The, 49, 
 222 n., 230, 232, 238, 239. 
 
 " Sam Hall," 193 and n. 
 Second Funeral of Napoleon, 
 
 The, 47 and n. 
 Shabby Genteel Story, A, 31,38 
 
 and n., 39. 
 Sharp, John W., 21 and n. 
 Sheep in Wolf's Clothing, A, 
 
 226. 
 
 Sketches by Boz, 22, 44. 
 
 Snob, origin of the word, 8 11., 
 
 76, 77 n., 78, 83. 
 Srtob Papers, The, 7, 82, 83. 
 Snob, The, 8 and n. 
 Spectator, The, 168. 
 Spiritual Quixote, The, 239. 
 Swift, Thackeray's portrait of, 
 
 160-164, 177 "• 
 
 Tancred, 133. 
 
 Taller, The, 177 and n. 
 
 Tennyson, Lord, references to, 
 7, 8, 12, 249 — Life of, 247. 
 
 Thackeray, Richmond, father 
 ofW. M. Thackeray, I. 
 
 Timbuctoo, parody of a prize 
 poem, 8. 
 
 Times, The, 16, 77 n., 238. 
 
 Tobias Correspondence, The, 149. 
 
 Town, The, 126. 
 
 Travels in London, The, 85. 
 
 Tremendous Adventures of Ma- 
 jor Cahagan, The, 35. 
 
 Vanity Fair, 13, 87-II5, I19- 
 121, 127, 151, 175, 188, 237. 
 
 Virginians, The, a Tale of the 
 Last Century, 212-221, 239. 
 
 Way of the World, The, 89. 
 
 Yellowplush Papers, The, 35, 
 36 n. 
 
 THE END 
 
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