I
In the never-ending comparisons and contrasts between Thackeray and Dickens, which show no sign of abating even now, when the younger of the two has been dead for half-a-century, one striking difference between them has often been dwelt upon—Dickens was incessantly theatrical, in his dress, in his novels, in his readings, whereas Thackeray shrank from all theatricality, in his own apparel, in his fiction and in his lecturing. Dickens delighted in reading the most dramatic passages from his novels, actually impersonating the characters, and adjusting the lighting of his reading-desk so as to enable his hearers to see his swiftly changing expression. Thackeray’s lectures were narratives enhanced in interest by anecdote and by criticism; he read them simply, seeking no surcharged effects; and he disliked his task. As he wrote to an American friend, “I shall go on my way like an old mountebank; I get more and more ashamed of my nostrums daily.”
The author of ‘Vanity Fair’ might in his preface feign that he was only a showman in a booth, and he might talk of “putting the puppets away”; but as Austin Dobson phrased it aptly in his centenary tribute:
These are no puppets, smartly dressed,
But jerked by strings too manifest;
No dummies wearing surface skin
Without organic frame within;
Nor do they deal in words and looks
Found only in the story-books.
No! For these beings use their brains,
Have pulse and vigor in their veins;
They move, they act; they take and give
E’en as the master wills; they live—
Live to the limit of their scope,
Their anger, pleasure, terror, hope.
His stories are never puppet-plays and they never have the concentrated color which the theater demands. Nor was this because he was not a constant playgoer, enjoying the drama in all its manifestations. Altho he had no close intimacy with actor-folk, such as Dickens had with Macready and later with Fechter, he was for years meeting at the weekly Punch dinners, Douglas Jerrold, Mark Lemon and Tom Taylor, all of them playwrights by profession.
Nor were his novels influenced in any marked degree by the dramatists, since it was not the plays of Cervantes and Fielding and Balzac that attracted him but their richer and more varied works of fiction. On the other hand, the novels of Dickens reveal the impress made upon him by the melodramas and by the farces which had a fleeting vogue in his early manhood; he relished the boldly melodramatic and he revelled in the broadly farcical. More especially was Dickens under the domination of Ben Jonson, whose plays were still occasionally seen on the stage when Dickens was young and impressionable. It might almost be said that Dickens transferred the method of the comedy-of-humors from the play to the novel; and it is significant that when he made his first appearance as an amateur actor it was to assume the superbly caricatural character of Captain Bobadil. It is perhaps because of Dickens’ theatricality that he exerted a deep and wide influence upon the British playwrights from 1840 to 1870, whereas it was not until Robertson began in 1865 to deal more simply with life than the immediately preceding playwrights of Great Britain, that any of the English writers of comedy allowed himself to profit by Thackeray’s less highly colored portrayals of men and manners.
Yet Thackeray’s enjoyment of the theater was not less than Dickens’. His biographer, Lewis Melville, has recorded that Thackeray once asked a friend if he loved the play, and when he received the qualified answer, “Ye-es, I like a good play,” he retorted, “Oh, get out! You don’t even understand what I mean!” Almost his first published effort as a draftsman was a series of sketches of a ballet, ‘Flore et Zephyr’; and toward the end of his life, in 1858, he presided at the annual dinner of the Royal General Theatrical Fund.
In his days of arduous hack-work he wrote half-a-dozen papers on the French stage. One of these essays was entitled ‘Dickens in France’; and in this he described with abundant gusto the gross absurdities of a Parisian perversion of ‘Nicholas Nickleby,’ produced at the Ambigu. Another is called ‘English History and Character on the French Stage’; and in this he has an easy task to show up the wilful disregard of veracity which taints the ingenious ‘Verre d’Eau’ of Scribe. A third paper is devoted to ‘French Dramas and Melodramas’; and in this he begins by an unfortunate prediction, that French tragedy, the classic plays of Corneille and Racine, “in which half-a-dozen characters appear and spout sonorous alexandrines” was dead or dying, and that Rachel was trying in vain to revive tragedy and
to untomb Racine; but do not be alarmed, Racine will never come to life again, and cause audiences to weep as of yore. Madam Rachel can only galvanize the corpse, not revivify it. Ancient French tragedy, red-heeled, patched and be-periwigged, lies in its grave; and it is only the ghost of it that we see, which the fair Jewess has raised.
Here Thackeray revealed his insularity, his inability to “penetrate French literature by an interior line.” Red-heeled, patched and be-periwigged as French tragedy may be, and as it undoubtedly is in some of its aspects, it is not dead even now, more than three-quarters of a century since Thackeray preached this funeral sermon, nor is it dying. After the fiery fervor of the Romanticist revolt it may have needed the genius of Rachel to bring it back to favor; but to-day it is kept alive by the more modest talent of her successors.