This is an interesting point of view. To most of us “Vanity Fair” seems about as simple as “Ecclesiastes,” the author of which was also “strictly of his period.” Sir Sidney Low, the most trenchant critic whom the fates have raised to champion the incomparable Becky, is by way of thinking that in so far as Thackeray was a moralist, he was unfair to her; but that in so far as he was a much greater artist than a moralist, she emerges triumphant from his hands. “She is the first embodiment in English fiction of the woman whose emotions are dominated by her intellect. She is a fighter against fate, and she wages war with unfailing energy, passing lightly, as great warriors do, over the bodies of the killed and wounded.”
She does more. She snatches a partial victory out of the jaws of a crushing defeat. The stanchest fighter expects some backing from fate, some good cards to lay on the table. But Becky’s fortunes are in Thackeray’s hands, and he rules against her at every turn. Life and death are her inexorable opponents. Miss Crawley recovers (which she has no business to do) from a surfeit of lobster, when by dying she would have enriched Rawdon, already in love with Rebecca. Lady Crawley lives just long enough to spoil Becky’s chance of marrying Sir Pitt. It is all very hard and very wrong. The little governess had richly earned Miss Crawley’s money by her patient care of that ungrateful invalid. She would have been kind and good-tempered to Sir Pitt, whereas his virtuous son and daughter-in-law (the lady Jane whom Thackeray never ceases to praise) leave the poor old paralytic to the care of a coarse, untrained and cruel servant. Becky is not the only sufferer by the bad luck which makes her from start to finish, “a fighter against fate.”
Sir Sidney is by no means content with the somewhat murky twilight in which we take leave of this great little adventuress, with the atmosphere of charity lists, bazaars and works of piety which depressingly surrounds her. He is sure she made a most charming and witty old lady, and that she eventually won over Colonel Dobbin (in spite of Amelia’s misgivings) by judicious praise of the “History of the Punjaub.” And I am equally sure that she never suffered herself to lose so valuable an asset as young Rawdon. Becky’s indifference to her son is the strongest card that Thackeray plays. By throwing into high relief the father’s proud affection for the boy (who is an uncommonly nice little lad), he deepens and darkens the mother’s unconcern. Becky is impervious to the charm of childhood, and she is not affectionate. Once in a while she is moved by a generous impulse; but the crowded cares and sordid scheming of her life leave no room for sensibility.
Nevertheless, if the Reverend Bute Crawley and his household look upon little Rawdon with deep respect as the possible heir of Queen’s Crawley, “between whom and the title there was only the sickly pale child, Pitt Binkie,” it is unlikely that Rebecca the farseeing would ignore the potential greatness of her son. She cannot afford to lose any chance, or any combination of chances, in the hazardous game she plays. There is nothing like the spectacle of this game in English letters. To watch Becky manipulate her brother-in-law, Sir Pitt, is a never-ending delight. He is dull, pompous, vain, ungenerous. He has inherited the fortune which should have been her husband’s. Yet there is no hatred in her heart, nor any serious malice. Hatred, like love, is an emotional extravagance, and Becky’s accounts are very strictly kept.
Therefore, when she persuades the Baronet to spend a week in the little house on Curzon Street, even Thackeray admits that she is sincerely happy to have him there. She comes bustling and blushing into his room with a scuttle of coals; she cooks excellent dishes for his dinner; she gives him Lord Steyne’s White Hermitage to warm his frozen blood, telling him it is a cheap wine which Rawdon has picked up in France; she sits by his side in the firelight, stitching a shirt for her little son; she plays every detail of her part with the careful and conscientious art of a Dutch painter composing a domestic scene; and she asks no unreasonable return for her labours. Rawdon, who does nothing, is disgusted because his brother gives them no money; but Rebecca, who does everything, is content with credit. Sir Pitt, as the head of the family, is the corner-stone upon which she rears the fabric of her social life.
The exact degree of Becky’s innocence and guilt is a matter of slight importance. There is no goodness in her to be spoiled or saved. To try to soften our judgment by pleading one or two acts of contemptuous kindness is absurd. Her qualities are great qualities: valour, and wit, and audacity, and patience, and an ungrumbling acceptance of fate. No one recognizes these qualities except Lord Steyne, who has a greatness of his own. It will be remembered that on one occasion he gives Rebecca eleven hundred pounds to discharge her indebtedness to Miss Briggs; and subsequently discovers that the amount due the “sheep-dog” is six hundred pounds, and that Rebecca has been far too thrifty to pay any of it out of the sum bestowed on her for that purpose. He is not angry at being outwitted, as a small and stupid man would have been. He is charmed.
“His lordship’s admiration for Becky rose immeasurably at this proof of her cleverness. Getting the money was nothing—but getting double the sum she wanted, and paying nobody—it was a magnificent stroke. ‘What an accomplished little devil it is!’ he thought. ‘She beats all the women I have ever seen in the course of my well-spent life. They are babies compared to her. I am a green-horn myself, and a fool in her hands—an old fool. She is unsurpassable in lies.’”
With which testimony, candid, fervent, and generous withal, Becky’s case can be considered closed. Discredited, humiliated, and punished in the irrepressible interests of morality, she is left stranded amid life’s minor respectabilities which must have irked her sorely; but which Thackeray plainly considered to be far beyond her merits. I hope it comforts her in that shadowy land where dwell the immortals of fiction to know that her shameless little figure, flitting dauntlessly from venture to venture, from hazard to hazard, has never been without appreciative observers. I had almost said appreciative and pitying observers; but Becky’s is the last ghost in Christendom whom I should dare to affront with pity.
The Preacher at Large
The spirit of Hannah More is abroad in the land. It does not preach the same code of morals that the good Hannah preached in her lifetime, but it preaches its altered code with her assurance and with her continuity. Miss More preached to the poor the duty of an unreasonable and unmanly content, and to the rich the duty of personal and national smugness. Her successors are more than likely to urge upon rich and poor the paramount duty of revolt. The essence of preaching, however, is not doctrine, but didacticism. Beliefs and behaviour are subject to geographical and chronological conditions, but human nature lives and triumphs in the sermon.