VII
I shall attempt in another lecture, Gentlemen, to examine some of Thackeray’s limitations as a novelist; and passing on, to explore the curious, most haunting felicity of his prose. You will have already gathered that I am trying to do what all Professors must and no critic should; which is to discuss an author with whom he has a broken sympathy. The lilt, the cadence, of Thackeray’s prose are to me a rapture, almost. The meanness of his concern with life and his cruelty in handling mean things—as in A Shabby Genteel Story—evoke something like physical nausea. His Paris Sketch Book seems to me about the last word in bumptiousness: his lectures on Swift and on Sterne might, bating reverence for him even in misdeed, be flipped as flies are flipped off a clean page of paper. They needed (as Venables most justly advised) a piano for accompaniment—or a pianola. On the other hand—to omit the great novels—his Roundabout Papers almost touch Horatian perfection.
As for his snobbery—well, I promised you that coming to it, I should waste little of your time. Perhaps I should have called it his “alleged” snobbery, guardedly (as a cautious non-committal journalist once wrote of “an alleged School-Treat”), since my own ears have heard it denied of him. But they have heard with incredulity, since I suppose of this distressing little disease two things to be certain: the first that it is unmistakable, the second that it is incurable. The patient may know—perhaps may feel as acutely as his listeners—that he has it—but in his next sentence it must out: he cannot help himself. Still, it is a human frailty—not ranking in any just condemnation with cruelty (say) or treachery; not worthy to be exalted as a Deadly sin, belonging rather to the peccadilloes about which—if one may misapply Dante’s phrase—we do not reason, but give a look and pass on. Moreover, if you followed the argument of my previous lecture, Thackeray’s was a venial form of the malady because not deliberately acquired, not (as an American said of side-whiskers) “the man’s own fault,” but in his blood, inherited of his Anglo-Indian stock. He never—transferred to Chiswick, the Charterhouse, Cambridge, the Temple, Kensington, Pall Mall—eradicated that family sense of belonging to a governing few set amid an alien race, with a high sense of the duty attached to privilege, but without succour of knowing all sorts and conditions of men and understanding them as neighbours; or let me put it, without just that sense which quite stupid men at home acquire in a Rural Council, or the hunting-field, or a cricket-match on the village green.
I wish we could end with that, and just put it (with W. E. Henley) that Thackeray was ever too conscious of a footman behind his chair. Superficially and in estimating him as a man, that were enough for us. But artistically the trouble goes deeper. There is no reason why an artist should or should not take the squalidest of scenes, provided that the story he sets in it is of serious import. May we agree that of all atmospheres the atmosphere of a cheap boarding-house is perhaps the least inviting—the smell of linoleum and cookery in the well-staircase, the shabby gentility refurbishing itself in the small bedrooms, the pretence, the ceremony at dinner, the rissoles, the talk about the Prince of Wales, the president landlady with “Saturday” written on her brow? Well, Balzac took this sort of thing and made masterpieces of it; and Balzac made masterpieces of it just because he understood that it, also, belonged to human comedy and tragedy, and that there, as well as anywhere else, you may find essentially the wreckage of a King Lear, the dreams of a Napoleon. Thackeray takes a boarding-house merely to savage it, to empty one poor chest-of-drawers after another and hang their pitiable contents on a public wash-line, to hold the dirty saucepans under our noses, to expose the poor servingmaid’s heart along with her hands, its foolish inarticulate yearnings along with her finger-nails—and all for what? That is the point—for what? To tell us that her dreams of a fairy prince oscillated between a flash lodger with a reversible tie and a seedy artist who dropped his “h’s”? We might have guessed that much, surely, without elaborate literary assistance. But suppose the thing worth while, why is the man so cruel about it? His favourite Horace, to be sure, was cruel to his discarded loves. But here is no revulsion of lost love. Here is nothing but gratuitous mocking at a poor girl—
a fifth-rate dabbler in the British gravy—
and nothing else, or nothing we could not have smelt inside the front door. And he finds this worth continuing and expanding into a long novel of Philip!
As a rule, Gentlemen, I hold it idle for a lecturer to talk about an author with whom he has to confess an imperfect sympathy. There are so many others, worth admiring, whom he may help you to admire! But as many of us come to Milton against the grain, conquered by his divine music, so the spell of Thackeray’s prose takes me, often in the moment of angriest revolt and binds me back his slave. I shall try, next time, to speak of its great magic.