DICKENS AND THACKERAY
An Essay found among Professor Bateman's early papers
To attempt anything like an adequate discussion of two literary giants like Dickens and Thackeray in a short paper of this kind is like undertaking to empty Niagara with a quart pot. It is obvious that I can hope to do no more than indicate in a rather sketchy way some of the main points of difference and resemblance in our two authors. In doing so I shall naturally pay somewhat more attention to Dickens than to Thackeray. With the exception of Esmond, Thackeray's work is all very much of the same kind, and displays a considerably smaller degree of variety and versatility than that of Dickens. One requires less guidance for an intelligent appreciation of Thackeray than for an intelligent appreciation of Dickens. The merits of Thackeray's work are easily seen and easily defined; a recognition of them is largely a matter of reason, and can confidently be expected from any intelligent reader. But Dickens is an author much more difficult to understand. His faults as well as his merits are gigantic; but then he frequently gets credit for faults which are not there, and sometimes even some of his greatest merits are construed as faults. The true appreciation of Dickens requires a larger exercise of the imagination than in the case of Thackeray. In other words, it is more a matter of feeling than of reason. Ask many a lover of Dickens to give a reason for the faith that is in him, and he may find it difficult to satisfy you.
Take, for example, Dickens's humorous characters. There are some who cannot be got to admit that Mr. Toots, Sim Tappertit, Sairey Gamp, and others of that ilk are divinely humorous and inspired creations; some will only admit that at best they are but "excellent fooling"; others will even characterize them as mere buffoonery. It is an inferior class of mind, however, which rejects the abnormal merely on account of its abnormality, and votes the improbable impossible, because it fails to fit in with previously conceived ideas of right and wrong. Criticism is useless in the case of people who hold such a view. I may assert, with all the force of which I am capable, that Mr. Toots is the best thing in Dombey; that age cannot wither Sairey Gamp any more than Cleopatra, and that she will blossom in perennial freshness while the language endures; but if you ask me for a reason, I can give none. It is no more possible to give a reason for liking Sairey Gamp than for disliking Dr. Fell. We can enjoy with Thackeray the skilful dissection of a character like that of Becky Sharp, and penetrate with him the innermost recesses of her mighty little soul; but Dickens himself could not have penetrated the secret of the composition of Sairey Gamp. In her presence criticism is dumb. We must be content to stand in humble and reverent admiration and satisfy ourselves with exclaiming, "Behold, it is very good." I shall return again to this point of characterization, but I must now say something of the position held by Dickens and Thackeray in the historical development of the novel.
Though undoubtedly the two greatest novelists of the Early Victorian school, Dickens and Thackeray are alike in exercising very little apparent influence on the development of the contemporary novel of manners. They both look back rather than forward. They set the crown and consummation on the work of the early eighteenth-century group of writers. Dickens derives from Smollett, and Thackeray from Fielding. When Dickens as a boy discovered in an old garret that precious pile of dusty eighteenth-century books, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker and the rest, which he absorbed with such loving eagerness, he little thought that he was destined to be a second and a greater Smollett.
The characteristic type of English novel was defined by Richardson, Fielding, and their school at the beginning of the eighteenth century. It aimed at a dramatic representation of contemporary life and manners; it took, in fact, the place of the drama as the popular form of literature. With the decay of the Fielding novel came a reaction, and opposed to the lusty and vivid realism of Tom Jones and Humphrey Clinker we get the sham mediaevalism, the dungeon-keeps, the echoing chambers, the hollow-voiced spectres, and the absurd sentiment of Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto, and its imitators. This was a sort of side stream in the history of the novel, which nevertheless created the taste for historical romance, fed later by the novels of Scott. Scott stands apart from the main stream of English fiction, though his style exercised an immense influence on later novelists. After the mediaeval relapse, the contemporary novel of manners was continued at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century by Fanny Burney and Jane Austen. The latter died in 1817; between 1814 and 1832 Scott's novels fill the field of fiction; and then, between about 1835 and 1860, come Dickens and Thackeray with their contemporaries, of whom perhaps the most remarkable were Lytton and Disraeli. In none of these writers, however, must we look for the foundation of the characteristic Victorian novel—the novel of George Eliot and George Meredith. The founder of that novel was Charlotte Brontë. Her Jane Eyre and Thackeray's Vanity Fair were published in the same year, 1848, and were reviewed together in a famous number of the Quarterly. The two works represent two distinct schools of fiction. Between the Dickens-Thackeray novel and the Brontë-Eliot novel there is a great gulf fixed. Dickens and Thackeray stand out from their time like two solitary giants.
Perhaps now it might be well to remind you briefly of the main facts in the literary history of the two men. Dickens's first great work, Pickwick, appeared in 1837, five years after the death of Scott. It was at once received with acclamation. His next book, Oliver Twist, though it must have come as a sort of shock after Pickwick, did not stem the tide of appreciation. Like Oliver himself, every one was soon asking for more. They did not ask in vain. During the next two decades, the forties and fifties, Dickens poured forth novel after novel with surprising rapidity. Pickwick, Sam Weller, Fagin, Squeers, Micawber soon became household words. Dickens won a popularity of which we can form no true conception. There has been nothing like it in our time. England and America were taken by storm; even France was infected with the prevailing enthusiasm.
During the days of Dickens' early popularity a clever young man had been making a name for himself as a humorist and satirist in the pages of Fraser's Magazine, Punch, and similar journals. This was William Makepeace Thackeray. In 1838, the year after Pickwick, Thackeray began a series known as the Yellow Plush Papers; during the next ten years he produced a great variety of journalistic work, short stories, sketches and essays, and wrote, in addition, two satirical novels, Catherine and Barry Lyndon. In 1848 he burst on the world as a great novelist with Vanity Fair, and within ten years more he had published Pendennis, Esmond, The Newcomes, and The Virginians. This brings us up to 1859. By that year Dickens had produced his best work; Thackeray had only four more years to live; and he was followed to the grave by Dickens in 1870. From this account it is apparent that Dickens made a much bigger stir than Thackeray in the contemporary literary world. He was the leviathan who frolicked at will in the sea of popular appreciation. Thackeray was a much smaller fish.
Considering Dickens and Thackeray first strictly as novelists, we find a point of resemblance in the fact that, from the point of view of form, they are both uncommonly bad novelists. A good novel, like any other work of art, must have some unity about it. The incidents must not be bundled in pell-mell, but must all contribute to the working out of some central idea or situation. Then we must have an element of romance, and this ought to regulate the subordination of the characters. The characters in every romance are essentially three, as Chesterton puts it, St. George, the Princess, and the Dragon; that is, St. George, something that loves and fights; the Princess, something that is loved and fought for; while the Dragon represents the opposition. Other characters besides these three there may and must be, but they serve as mere machinery or scenery as far as the romance is concerned.
Now let us consider the novels of Dickens and Thackeray from these points of view. As regards incident they are almost wholly lacking in unity. We cannot exactly deny them plots. They develop stories and interesting stories, but it is not an orderly development. Dickens strings his incidents together almost haphazard, and so, to a large extent, does Thackeray. (By the way, in these remarks on Thackeray I do not include Esmond, which is magnificent, but is not really Thackeray.)
In the greater part of his writing Dickens had no central aim or motive in view; he wrote, so to speak, from hand to mouth. Most of his books in fact were written for periodicals in monthly parts, and it is safe to say that nobody, and least of all Dickens himself, knew exactly what a month would bring forth. I am here again speaking generally; there are some exceptions, notably the Tale of Two Cities—which stands almost as much apart from the rest of Dickens's work as Esmond does from the rest of Thackeray's—and the unfinished Edwin Drood. Of Thackeray we may say that he may have had some central aim or motive in his novels, but if so, he paid little attention to it, and did not allow it to impede his rambling progress in the smallest degree. We may take it, then, as generally true that the novels of Dickens and Thackeray are rough-hewn and sometimes shapeless. In the case of Dickens this characteristic seldom annoys, but it is otherwise with Thackeray. I doubt, for example, if there is anyone here who has read and enjoyed every word of that fearfully digressive and dropsical novel, The Newcomes.
Again, as regards characters, in neither novelist do we get an orderly subordination. Dickens, perhaps, is the worst offender in this respect. In Thackeray, the hero and heroine are usually in a sense the most important personages, though crowds of personages who have really nothing to do with the story bulk very largely, and though in Vanity Fair there is no hero at all. But in Dickens, the personages who ought to be most important have frequently very little to do with the novel. As a rule, the leading characters, hero, heroine, and villain, are lifeless and uninteresting, and only serve to connect loosely a great amount of strictly secondary matter.
The really important characters in Dickens are the unimportant ones, those who are introduced en passant, and who might as well be anywhere else as far as the story is concerned. In Nicholas Nickleby Nicholas himself does not interest me, neither does his sister, neither do Madeline Bray and Mr. Bray, neither does Ralph Nickleby. The people who do interest me are people like Mrs. Nickleby, Mantalini, the Squeers family, the Kenwigs, and Vincent Crummies. In Martin Chuzzlewit the least important character is Martin himself, but his life serves as a string upon which are hung Pecksniff, Todger's Boarding House and all that therein was, Chevy Slime, Esq., Sairey Gamp, Betsy Prigg, Mr. Mould, Elijah Pogram, and many others in whose company there is endless delight. All these, however, might just as well have been hung on the string of Nicholas Nickleby or David Copperfield or Bleak House or almost any of the other books. Similarly all through. In Dombey Florence is a nonentity, Walter Gay is a nonentity, Dombey himself is a "made character," well-made, but not created. In David Copperfield David begins by being a reality, but tails off into an abstraction. In A Tale of Two Cities Darnay does not exist, and Lucie Manette only barely exists. In both Dickens and Thackeray, in fact, the romantic element is really subordinate, in Dickens very much so; and in neither writer do St. George, the Princess, and the Dragon ever become all-important. Both writers, in fact, are to be judged piece-meal, as creators of situations and characters, rather than in the bulk as creators of novels.
The keynote of the work of both our authors was struck in two of their first works of any note. In 1848 Thackeray published in Punch the series of papers entitled the Book of Snobs, which marks his dedication to the especial task of unmasking the pretence and sham which underlay the whole of English public and private life. His definition of the word snob was comprehensive. "The snob," says Thackeray, "is a child of aristocratical societies. Perched on his step of the long social ladder, he respects the man on the step above and despises the man on the step below, without enquiring what they are worth, solely on account of their position; in his innermost heart he finds it natural to kiss the boots of the first, and to kick the second." Starting with this definition, Thackeray lashed unsparingly all classes of society from the highest to the lowest. He discovered and unmasked snobs of all descriptions, church snobs, military snobs, literary snobs, country snobs, political snobs, Continental snobs. In this book Thackeray appears as the caustic satirist of every sort of social hypocrisy, and this character he maintains in his novels. Pendennis, Vanity Fair, and The Newcomes are largely Books of Snobs worked into the form of novels.
Dickens's first important work was his Sketches by Boz, a series of papers in which he describes various aspects and phases of the life of the English lower middle class. Though somewhat crude in style and occasionally even vulgar in tone, these papers are seldom completely commonplace, and many of the characteristics of the mature Dickens can be discerned there in embryo. They have a distinction of manner and a suggestion of creative power which is unmistakable, and they mark the dedication of Dickens to his especial task, the sympathetic though exaggerated painting of the poorer middle classes. While Thackeray took his stand on the universal sham and corruption of our social system, lashing hypocrisy and showing up the rottenness which lay hidden beneath the whited sepulchres of society, Dickens revealed the treasures which were buried beneath the rubbish-heap designated as the "poorer middle classes." Just as Thackeray's novels are glorified Books of Snobs, so Dickens's novels are, for the most part, glorified Sketches by Boz. His early works, though called novels, are undisguisedly a series of sketches loosely strung together. Pickwick, of course, is absolutely episodic. It was begun to supply the letterpress to a series of drawings by a popular artist, and when Dickens commenced he had no aim except to get his characters into such amusing situations as would afford scope to the illustrator. As the book goes on, however, it begins to get hold of Dickens, and the change is seen especially in the character of Pickwick, who begins as an elderly crank about whom Dickens does not care a jot, but develops into one of the most lovable old gentlemen of fiction. However, the fact remains that Pickwick has not the remotest vestige of a plot, and can by no stretch of the imagination be called a novel. Again, Oliver Twist, as Chesterton remarks, is really not a novel, and might, without losing much, have been published as a series of papers entitled The Workhouse, A Thieves' Den, and so on. Nicholas Nickleby might similarly have been published as a series of papers entitled A Yorkshire School, A Provincial Theatre, and so on. The fact that all these sketches are strung together on the lives of those shadowy personages Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby does not at all affect their real character. After Nicholas Nickleby the books begin to lose, to some extent, this sketchiness, that is, the episodes are more closely and skilfully interwoven into a connected whole, but still Dickens, the novelist, never quite emerges from Boz, the essayist.
These remarks about Dickens naturally lead me to say something about the development of our two authors. About Thackeray I cannot say very much. By the time he emerges from the undercurrent of journalistic work, all the essentials of the mature Thackeray seem almost fully developed. Barry Lyndon is almost as mature in style as Vanity Fair. Vanity Fair itself, Thackeray's first work of importance, is also his greatest work. That is, instead of working up to a climax as a novelist, Thackeray began at the top and worked downwards. Of course, we must remember that when he wrote it he had reached the age of thirty-seven. The subsequent novels, with the exception of Esmond, mark a deterioration, and not an advance.
I must here make a slight digression to speak of Esmond. Into this brilliant historical patch Thackeray threw all his great knowledge of, and love for, the eighteenth century. He was soaked in eighteenth-century literature and history—witness his Four Georges and English Humourists; and in Esmond he assumed with consummate skill the eighteenth-century manner.
In this novel Thackeray casts off completely his mask of cynicism, and appears as a man of noble feeling and deep sympathy, who could write a polished, pure, and straightforward English style. We feel, however, that the book is after all only a brilliant freak, and that the real Thackeray is the cynical, the satirical, and the caustic Thackeray of Vanity Fair. Esmond stands to the rest of Thackeray's work somewhat in the relation of Romola to George Eliot's other novels. In both the atmosphere is artificial, the result of long and careful study, and in both the deception is so perfect that the artificiality is almost impossible to detect. In two of his novels Dickens took historical subjects, namely in Barnaby Rudge and the Tale of Two Cities. The latter is the acme of Dickens's attainments in the descriptive style, and is perhaps more restrained and artistic than any of his other works. In brilliant imagination and vivid representation of an historical phase he more than equals Thackeray, though his novel falls short of Esmond in characterization. Esmond, Beatrix, and Lady Castlewood are much better than Darnay, Lucie, and the Doctor, though Sidney Carton, perhaps, is as fine as anything in Thackeray.
To return to the question of development, we may say that Thackeray's style was fully developed during his career as a journalist, essayist, and writer of short stories, and that we find its culminating point in Vanity Fair.
In the case of Dickens, however, we can trace a well-marked, if rapid, advance. Sketches by Boz are distinctly crude. Pickwick Papers are a startling advance on one side of Dickens's art. We find in them the vigour, versatility, and exuberance of a youthful and tremendous imagination. They display inexhaustible resource and gigantic humour. Dickens lavished enough genius on them to do ten ordinary men for a lifetime, and yet he did it with perfect ease. We feel that he enjoyed himself in writing them, that he revelled in the task. Every character, down to the smallest, lives. Mr. John Swanker and Mr. Cyrus Bantam, for example, are as real to us as Mr. Sam Weller and Mr. Pickwick. Pickwick is one of the greatest of humorous portraits in literature. It is as great as the Canterbury Tales. It is wonderful that a young writer who in Sketches by Boz had only been feeling his way should, at one bound, reach the height of excellence which we find in Pickwick. The incidents are commonplace enough. The jokes are the sort of jokes which are still the stock-in-trade of the ha'penny comic—jokes about mothers-in-law, red-nosed curates, and falling on the ice, about getting drunk, and fighting, and fatness, and sitting upon one's hat. But what a difference between the treatment of Dickens and that of the uninspired humorists.
Pickwick, however, as I have said, represents only one side of Dickens's art, but perhaps the greatest side, the humorous delineation of character. There is as yet no trace of Dickens the novelist (for by no stretch of the imagination can Pickwick be called a novel), of Dickens the master of pathos, of Dickens the descriptive artist. There is, however, to be found in Pickwick traces of a youthful phase in Dickens's character, a somewhat morbid leaning towards the horrible and criminal, afterwards toned down and corrected by his strong common sense, but never wholly absent. This trait is to be found in some of the short stories inserted in Pickwick, notably The Madman's Tale. The latter story might have served as a warning to some very discerning critic of the startling change to be found in Dickens's next book, Oliver Twist. In this work the lavish humour of Pickwick dwindles down to very small proportions, and is decidedly overweighed by the horrible and morbid. The murder of Nancy and the death of Bill Sykes are only equalled for vivid awfulness a couple of times in Dickens's later books, notably in Bleak House and in Martin Chuzzlewit. In Oliver Twist appears a new element which was to take a prominent place in Dickens's future work, the element of social reform. Social reform had already produced the workhouse. Dickens started his reform by attacking the workhouse. But Dickens is not yet a novelist. The romantic element is absent in Oliver Twist; the hero is only a child.
It was in his fourth book, Nicholas Nickleby, that we find Dickens definitely deciding to write romance. Accordingly he introduces an impossibly good St. George, throws in a Princess and a Dragon half-way through for his benefit, and tries to make an orthodox novel. He succeeds, however, in making only a very poor imitation of one. Nicholas himself is a hopelessly badly-drawn character; and in fact nearly everywhere in the story that Dickens tries to be definitely romantic and orthodox he sinks below the level of the ha'penny novelette.
In his next book, The Old Curiosity Shop (1840), he almost abandons his good intentions formed with Nicholas Nickleby, and we return to the realm of sketches and sketchiness. He is progressing, however, in the use of forcible and restrained language. Barnaby Rudge (1841) is splendid of its kind, the best bit of actual writing Dickens had yet done, though it is rather a series of brilliant pictures than an orthodox novel. The hero is an idiot, but nevertheless not so idiotic as was Nicholas Nickleby. In Martin Chuzzlewit (1844) we get an attempt at romance. Martin is a hero a little more life-like than the much-abused Nicholas. In this book Dickens's powers of satire come out at their best in his pictures of American society, and his power of humorous characterization is also at its height in Pecksniff, Sairey Gamp, and many of the minor characters. The melodramatic side of Dickens's art unfortunately comes out unpleasantly strong in the description of old Chuzzlewit and his hopeful son, Jonas. At this point all Dickens's characteristic traits may be said to be fully developed. From this time, except in David Copperfield, which marks the culmination of his powers, and in the Tale of Two Cities, there is a distinct decline. Dombey is in parts magnificent, but a sort of gloom hangs over most of the book, relieved only by such bright patches as Mr. Toots, Bunsby, and Susan Nipper. Major Bagstock is the most unpleasant of Dickens's humorous characters. In this novel Dickens trespassed on Thackeray's preserves with disastrous results. His attempted satire on fashionable society and fashionable marriages, in the Cleopatra-Edith-Carker episodes, should be compared with Thackeray's treatment of a similar subject in The Newcomes. Still, there is nothing crude about the style of Dombey; it has the strength and force of maturity. After David Copperfield, which is known and loved by every one, and which is the most purely natural and wholly lovable of Dickens's books, we get a series of what may be called splendid failures in Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Hard Times, Our Mutual Friend, and Great Expectations. They all contain magnificent patches, but they fail to impress one like the earlier books. It is some time now since I read Bleak House, and I must say I have very faint recollections of the greater part of it, whereas the earlier works are unforgettable.
Proceeding now to a consideration of Dickens and Thackeray as humorists, we may say, in a general way, that Thackeray's humour is largely incidental to his style, whereas the humour is the very root and groundwork of Dickens's best and most characteristic writing. It is difficult to define humour, but it seems to me that it consists, to a considerable extent, in an unexpected overthrow of the strictly logical. Mr. Micawber, the weak and foolish, the obvious failure in life, logically ought to be the most despairing and miserable of men. The fact, however, that so far from harbouring self-contempt, Mr. Micawber has a self-confidence which nothing can destroy, and that so far from retiring with disgust from a world which offers him nothing but kicks, he has the most childlike faith in his ultimate acquirement of unlimited halfpence, strikes us as being such a curious and blessed reversal of the logical order of things that we are pleased with Mr. Micawber. Instead of despising him, we love him. Micawber is undoubtedly a fool. Nearly all Dickens's great characters are fools. They are persons whom we should avoid in real life; but the gospel of Dickens, as Chesterton says, "is to suffer fools gladly." "Every instant we neglect a great fool merely because he is foolish. Every day we neglect Tootses and Swivellers, Guppys and Joblings. Every day we are missing a monster whom we might love, and an imbecile whom we should certainly admire." The humour of Dickens took the failures of life and turned them into successes. True humour is seldom far separated from pathos, and with Dickens, even while we laugh, we pity and we love. With Thackeray we laugh, but as a rule we do not love nor pity, we despise. The element of pathos is in general absent from Thackeray's humour; hence it is not really true humour at all; it is an inverted way of looking at things which strikes us as being funny. But the critic is always with Thackeray, hidden beneath the humorist. It is impossible for him to produce a lovable fool, for it is impossible for him to conceal the fact that he knows his character is a fool, and despises him accordingly. Take Jos. Sedley in Vanity Fair. The big Anglo-Indian was just the stuff of which a good Dickens's character is made. He is just the right sort of fool. But Thackeray goes out of his way to make him as contemptible as he is laughable, and in the end we are extremely glad to be rid of Mr. Jos.
In other words, with Thackeray the humour is nearly always overweighed by the satire. Thackeray is always considered as a satirist par excellence. But Dickens also is a satirist of another and perhaps a more effective kind. Thackeray's satire is the keen, cold, pitiless dissection of a surgeon. He lays bare every motive, every contemptible little spring of action. He tries, indeed, by his humorous manner to convince us that he is not all the time desperately in earnest, but behind it all we feel the preacher warning us, holding up examples for us, imploring us not to be or do likewise. In the character of Mr. Osborne, for example, we have the city magnate, self-made and able, but the slave of money. He is under the impression that money can make up for the vulgarity and coarseness of which he is vaguely conscious. When poor Sedley, his old friend, is broken, he casts him off without pity; along with Sedley's money, all his value in Osborne's eyes had disappeared. The latter lavished his wealth in trying to make his son a gentleman, and the result is that miserable cad, George Osborne, who despises his father, disappoints his wishes out of obstinacy, marries Amelia out of bravado, tires of her and proceeds to flirt with Becky Sharp, and dies a hero's death at Waterloo because he cannot help himself. Thackeray shows it all up without mercy, and he is always showing up similar things in great profusion. His satire depends largely for its effect on his manner. He conceals from us his indignation and contempt for the vices he describes, and writes of them carelessly, almost flippantly, as if they were the most natural things in the world. This is another effect gained by the reversal of the logical. But is such satire effective? I doubt it. I doubt that all Thackeray's analysis of the vice and rottenness of fashionable society ever turned one sinner from the evil of his ways. People do not mind being shown up, although they hate to be made ridiculous. Now Dickens's method of satirizing was to make the objects which he attacked ridiculous. He took the weak points of a man or an institution, carried them to extremes and showed their logical absurdity. When people saw in the person of Bumble what workhouse beadles were—not bad, not vicious—but absurd institutions, they desired to get rid of them. Dickens might have abused Yorkshire schools till he was blue in the face, have analysed and shown up their weak points, and written to the papers, and yet might have done little good. Instead, he drew Squeers, and while people laughed consumedly, they also made a mental note that such persons as Squeers were an absurd blot on our social system and should forthwith be abolished. When Dickens wished to satirize America, he did not make an exhaustive analysis of the American system. He simply accepted its absurdities, exaggerated them to the utmost limit, embodied them in Elijah Pogram, Jefferson Brick, and their fellows, and drew a crushing satirical picture of a state of society eaten up with self-conceit. When a man beholds his natural face in a distorting mirror, he is not quite so pleased with himself as before; and when the Americans beheld themselves in the mirror of Martin Chuzzlewit they were not pleased either. If Thackeray had taken on himself to analyse and expose their moral corruption, they would probably have felt flattered. Dickens's method of satire was the reductio ad absurdum, and appealed to the imagination. Further, Thackeray's satire was generally aimed at individuals and had for its object moral reform. We must admit, however, in favour of Thackeray's method that it produced brilliant, consistent, and life-like pictures of society such as Dickens was wholly incapable of drawing. If you want real life, go to Thackeray; but if you wish to get out of this world for a while, and take a short holiday in another and a more pleasant world, go to Dickens. I hope no one will think that I am here belittling the genius of Thackeray. Vanity Fair will ever stand as one of the most brilliant works of fiction in the language. It is more consistently good than anything Dickens ever did. As a humorous and, at the same time, dreadfully caustic picture of society it is incomparable. In breadth of view and variety of incident it rivals Tom Jones; in minute observation of detail it reminds one of Jane Austen.
It is as a creator of character that, in my opinion, Dickens has his greatest advantage over Thackeray. The man who maintains that Dickens is a genius of the first order must be finally driven to take his stand on Dickens's characters. Thackeray's characters are photographic; they are excellent copies of life. Yet, admirable as many of them are, we can never quite get away from the suspicion that they were made for a purpose. Thackeray takes them to pieces with such skill that we are half inclined to think that he also puts them together. But Dickens's characters are pure creatures of the imagination. They are not studies of, but splendid additions to, the human race. Dickens does not analyse their motives, and could not if he would. He describes them, and we feel that they are alive. The very smallest of them is indelibly impressed on our imagination. Dickens conquered Thackeray completely in his minor characters. I have read The Newcomes recently, for example, but I have no clear idea of the distinction between Mrs. Brian Newcome and Mrs. Hobson Newcome; I have read Chuzzlewit less recently, but I am quite clear about Mr. Chevy Slime and Mr. Tigg.
Thackeray produced a tremendous variety of characters, but the large majority of them, I should say, are unpleasant. Thackeray, when all is said and done, was first and last a moralist; and it was his aim as a moralist to make his characters unpleasant. There are few lovable characters in Pendennis; there are none in Vanity Fair. The few respectable characters are all figure-heads, and as for the remainder, if it were not for the humour and dramatic force with which they are pictured to us, the description of such people as Becky Sharp, Sir Pitt Crawley, Lord Steyne, and Jos. Sedley could give little pleasure. As it is, one feels that outside the pages of Thackeray one would give a good deal to avoid meeting them. But who would not give his dearest possession for the privilege of beholding in the flesh Sam Weller, Mr. Micawber, Sairey Gamp, Mr. Dick, and even such unmitigated scoundrels as Jingle and Squeers. There are in Dickens many sorts of characters, but only one sort is great—the characters whom Dickens himself found amusing. The characters he admired, such as Nicholas, are wooden; the characters he hated are too hateful; but the characters, whether pleasant or unpleasant, in whom he found something amusing are all at least interesting. Those whom he found amusing and at the same time lovable are his greatest characters.
The persons in Dickens's pages whom I call his great characters are frequently accused of being impossible. You might as well say that a hippopotamus or a duck-billed platypus is impossible because it does not suit your ideas of what is right and proper. The existence of the hippopotamus is its justification, and it is so also with a Dickens character. It is obviously not copied, nor is it a mere abstraction. It is vividly alive. You could not have created it, and you know that nobody else but Dickens could. I think it quite possible that a very clever man might produce a Colonel Newcome, or a Blanche Amory, or even a Becky Sharp; but I assert that no one but Dickens could produce a Sairey Gamp or a Mr. Toots, and that nobody would be mad enough to try.
Dickens's characters are improbable, that I grant you. But any man with a marked individuality is improbable. It is all the people in the world to one against his being what he is. Dickens's characters are just a little more improbable, that is all. Dickens's work is called by Chesterton rather mythology than history or fiction, the mythology of the lower middle class. Micawber and Pecksniff, like Falstaff and Lear, Hector and Achilles, are immortal realities, an undying possession of humanity. Their alleged impossibility is, in fact, their passport to immortality. Thackeray's exact copies of life may grow faded and out of date; but Dickens's creations will never be any more impossible than when he created them. They will never be too impossible for our acceptance. The glories of a Toots and a Swiveller were veiled from the eyes of Thackeray. If he could have conceived such characters, he would have exposed their weaknesses (an easy task), and covered them with ridicule and contempt. But as depicted by the kindly hand of Dickens, who is not ready to own them as fellow creatures and admit that they are lovable?
The mention of Pecksniff reminds me that Dickens is sometimes accused of merely attaching a label to his characters, of making them living embodiments of some trait or peculiarity; in other words, that Dickens, like Ben Jonson, made his characters mere illustrations of some particular humour. Thus Mark Tapley may be designated by the word "jolly," Micawber will always be "hoping for something to turn up," Pecksniff will always be playing the hypocrite. But though Pecksniff is first and foremost a hypocrite, and though Dickens's purpose is undoubtedly to impress on us and exaggerate his hypocrisy, he has all the other essentials of a human being. He can, for example, get drunk. Let me read a few extracts from that marvellous scene from Martin Chuzzlewit when Mr. Pecksniff gets tipsy at Todgers' Boarding House. If any one, after reading it, can still assert that it is an abstraction or impossible, I give him up in despair.
The gentlemen, after the toasts have been drunk, rejoin the ladies:
Mr. Pecksniff had followed his younger friends up-stairs and taken a chair at the side of Mrs. Todgers. He had also spilt a cup of coffee over his legs without appearing to be aware of the circumstance; nor did he seem to know that there was muffin on his knee.
"And how have they used you down-stairs, sir?" asked the hostess.
"Their conduct has been such, my dear madam," said Mr. Pecksniff, "as I can never think of without emotion, or remember without a tear. Oh, Mrs. Todgers!"
"My goodness!" exclaimed the lady. "How low you are in your spirits, sir!"
"I am a man, my dear madam," said Mr. Pecksniff, shedding tears, and speaking with an imperfect articulation, "but I am also a father. I am also a widower. My feelings, Mrs. Todgers, will not consent to be entirely smothered, like the young children in the Tower. They are grown up, and the more I press the bolster on them, the more they look round the corner of it."
He suddenly became conscious of the bit of muffin, and stared at it intently: shaking his head the while, in a forlorn and imbecile manner, as if he regarded it as his evil genius, and mildly reproached it.
"She was beautiful, Mrs. Todgers," he said, turning his glazed eye again upon her, without the least preliminary notice. "She had a small property."
"So I have heard," said Mrs. Todgers with great sympathy.
"Those are her daughters," said Mr. Pecksniff, pointing out the young ladies, with increased emotion.
Mrs. Todgers had no doubt about it.
"Mercy and Charity," said Mr. Pecksniff, "Charity and Mercy. Not unholy names, I hope?"
"Mr. Pecksniff!" cried Mrs. Todgers. "What a ghastly smile! Are you ill, sir?"
He pressed his hand upon her arm, and answered in a solemn manner, and a faint voice, "Chronic."
"Chronic?" cried the frightened Mrs. Todgers.
"Chron-ic," he repeated with some difficulty. "Chronic. A chronic disorder. I have been its victim from childhood. It is carrying me to my grave."
"Heaven forbid!" cried Mrs. Todgers.
"Yes, it is," said Mr. Pecksniff, reckless with despair. "I am rather glad of it, upon the whole. You are like her, Mrs. Todgers."
"Don't squeeze me so tight, pray, Mr. Pecksniff. If any of the gentlemen should notice us."
"For her sake," said Mr. Pecksniff. "Permit me. In honour of her memory. For the sake of a voice from the tomb. You are very like her, Mrs. Todgers! What a world this is!"
"Ah! Indeed you may say that!" cried Mrs. Todgers.
"I am afraid it is a vain and thoughtless world," said Mr. Pecksniff, overflowing with despondency. "These young people about us. Oh! what sense have they of their responsibilities? None. Give me your other hand, Mrs. Todgers."
The lady hesitated, and said "she didn't like."
"Has a voice from the grave no influence?" said Mr. Pecksniff with dismal tenderness. "This is irreligious! My dear creature."
"Hush!" urged Mrs. Todgers. "Really you mustn't."
"It's not me," said Mr. Pecksniff. "Don't suppose it's me: it's the voice; it's her voice."
Mrs. Pecksniff, deceased, must have had an unusually thick and husky voice for a lady, and rather a stuttering voice, and to say the truth somewhat of a drunken voice, if it had ever borne much resemblance to that in which Mr. Pecksniff spoke just then. But perhaps this was delusion on his part.
"It has been a day of enjoyment, Mrs. Todgers, but still it has been a day of torture. It has reminded me of my loneliness. What am I in the world?"
"An excellent gentleman, Mr. Pecksniff," said Mrs. Todgers.
"There is consolation in that too," cried Mr. Pecksniff. "Am I?"
"There is no better man living," said Mrs. Todgers, "I am sure."
Mr. Pecksniff smiled through his tears, and slightly shook his head.... "Chronic—chronic! Let's have a little drop of something to drink."
"Bless my life, Miss Pecksniffs!" cried Mrs. Todgers, aloud, "your dear pa 's took very poorly!"
Mr. Pecksniff straightened himself by a surprising effort, as every one turned hastily towards him; and standing on his feet, regarded the assembly with a look of ineffable wisdom. Gradually it gave place to a smile; a feeble, helpless, melancholy smile; bland almost to sickliness. "Do not repine, my friends," said Mr. Pecksniff, tenderly. "Do not weep for me. It is chronic." And with these words, after making a futile attempt to pull off his shoes, he fell into the fireplace.
In conclusion, I am sorry that I have not time to discuss the actual style of our two writers. I had hoped to dwell a little on Dickens's descriptive power, in which he far excels Thackeray; on that wonderful photographic imagination of his which impresses on our minds the scenery of his novels down to the smallest details as vividly as it was impressed on his own, on his splendid handling of crowds and big stage effects. I am afraid that in the foregoing remarks I have dwelt too much on Dickens's strong points; I have said nothing of his cheap melodrama, his maudlin pathos, his frequent bad taste; but after all, these are but comparatively small blots on a great genius, and they nearly always occur where Dickens is trying to impress us in a way that does not come naturally to him. I am afraid, also, that I have emphasized mainly Thackeray's weak points and neglected his strong ones. I set off, however, avowedly as a champion of Dickens, and I should find it hard to pose as an impartial judge, for while I only admire Thackeray, I love Dickens.