Everywhere among his early essays and burlesques, his tenderness peeps out, his pathos, his love of children, and of goodness; and his haunting melancholy. These are especially conspicuous in "The Shabby Genteel Story," written at a time of great sorrow and struggle with poverty. "Barry Lyndon" was overlooked, despite its masterly ironic study of the vain-glorious Irish adventurer of the eighteenth century; its pictures, from the gambler's point of view, of Berlin under Frederick the Great, of the little German duchies, of the wild half-ruined Irish gentry; of the Chevalier de Balibari, so perfect as a Catholic, a disillusioned Jacobite, a gentleman, and a swindler. The later adventures of Barry are drawn from Robertson, and the Dowager Lady Strathmore, and their squalid romance. This book, among Thackeray's, corresponds to Fielding's "Jonathan Wild," though the irony is broken by the author's comments, which are deemed inartistic. There are moments when Barry's blackguardism breaks down, and he yields to what some may call sentiment, and others, the soul of good in things evil. Nothing so great and nothing more unlike Dickens, had appeared since Fielding's day, but "Barry Lyndon" passed without a welcome.
"The Irish Sketchbook" (1843) was the best Irish sketchbook since that of Giraldus Cambrensis, but neither that, nor "From Cornhill to Cairo" (1846) "caught this great stupid public by the ears". "Mrs. Perkins's Ball" (1847), a Christmas trifle, contains the immortal figure of The Mulligan, to think of whom is to laugh as one writes. He was sketched from a well-known Irishman of the day. The little vignettes of other guests of Mrs. Perkins are worthy of Addison, down to the greengrocer butler.
In "Punch," Thackeray had been writing and drawing things good and things commonplace. His burlesques of novelists include "George de Barnwell" (Lytton) which he is said to have thought his masterpiece, and "Codlingsby" (Disraeli), which is hardly inferior; but Lever was annoyed by his "Phil Fogarty of the Fighting Onety Oneth". Thackeray is the classic parodist; his gift of imitation is as wonderful in the "Burlesques" as in "Esmond". Scott, who was privately on the side of Rebecca, in "Ivanhoe," and who had deliberately made Rowena "very English," would not have been vexed, like Lever, by Thackeray's "Rowena and Rebecca," wherein, on false news of Wilfrid's death, the English princess espouses Athelstane.
It was "The Book of Snobs," with its cruel satire of our British vice, that came home, when republished from "Punch," to men's bosoms. Thackeray avowed that de me fabula, that he was a snob himself: and, to some readers, it is matter for regret that he dwelt so long and so intensely on the mean admiration of things mean. He told Motley (1858) that he could not read "The Book of Snobs".
At last, in "Vanity Fair," which appeared, like Dickens's novels, in monthly parts (with yellow covers), Thackeray, after so many vain endeavours, "took this great stupid public by the ears". Here was another epic, like "Tom Jones," of English life, from the year preceding Waterloo: though the Marquis of Steyne was too closely studied from a contemporary wicked Marquis. From the first chapter, the scene of Becky with the Dictionary, to the end where (quite out of character, say Becky's admirers) she appears as a melodramatic Clytæmnestra, the author "never stoops his wing". Never, surely, did man create, in a single novel, characters so many, so varied, so justly conceived, so immortal. Fielding has not a quarter of Thackeray's variousness, does not see so wide a vision of life. Think of them; all the Crawleys, the two Sir Pitts, Rawdon (amo Rawdon), Jim Crawley; Miss Crawley, the old patrician Whig and sceptic; the two Osbornes, the little boys, Osborne III. and little Rawdon; Mrs. O'Dowd; the spunging-house keeper; Mr. Wenham, Ensign Stubble, Lord Steyne, the Misses Pinkerton, Briggs, Waterloo Sedley, the Belgian courier, Glorvina, the Lady Bareacres,—the catalogue is endless. Dobbin is as good as that honest gentleman can be made: we can only say that Thackeray's good women are not at once as human and as angelic as Fielding's Sophia and Amelia. Emmy is not clever; Emmy can be jealous; a vice from which Mrs. Rawdon Crawley is nobly free. The nearest woman to Sophia in Thackeray is Theo in "The Virginians". But Sophia is a paragon.
Thackeray was now, by no fault of his, set up as the rival of Dickens, whose works he constantly praised, in season and out of season, in public and in private. But as every man is born an Aristotelian or a Platonist, a Whig or a Tory, so men are born to take one side or other about the Great Twin Brethren of English fiction, in place of admiring and enjoying both. Each has his masterpieces, Dickens with "Pickwick," "David Copperfield," and "Great Expectations"; Thackeray with "Vanity Fair," "Esmond," "The Newcomes," and "Pendennis". That admirable but lengthy picture of the life of school, of the University, literature, and Society, and of Mr. Henry Foker, bears traces, in discrepancies and fatigue, of a severe illness which affected the author's memory of part of the tale, as a malady swept from Scott's the whole of "The Bride of Lammermoor".
The noble tour de force of "Esmond" (1852) was, for the most part, dictated in disturbing conditions, which makes yet greater the marvel of its style of Queen Anne's date; not uniform, to be sure, not all antique (any more than Colonel Esmond's political views are all antique or uniform), but still, a kind of prodigy. Beatrix Esmond is indeed, as her lover said, a "paragon," and it is historically impossible that, in the end, she should have betrayed "the blameless king," King James III., whom Thackeray converted from a melancholy Quietist into a witty and profligate prince. There was no "Queen Oglethorpe". Scott never took this kind of liberty with an historical character, in fiction; and Thackeray rivalled Scott's other licences by making the Duke of Hamilton an unmarried man. But nobody thinks of these things when "Esmond" admits him into the society of the Augustan age, and when Bolingbroke hiccups about Jonathan's readiness to command the fleet.
"The Newcomes" (1855) revived the public taste for Thackeray; the public did not, it is said, quite understand "Esmond". Like all novels published in parts throughout two years, "The Newcomes" is too long, and has its languors, but every one wept over the good Colonel, loathed the Campaigner, delighted in Fred Bayham, wished "to beat Barnes Newcome on the nose," was afraid of Lady Kew; sighed with Clive, was more or less in love with Ethel, and was anxious, vainly anxious, to see no more of Laura Pendennis: an angel perhaps, but a recording angel.
At Rome, in winter, 1853, Thackeray, to amuse some children, wrote "The Rose and the Ring," a classic of the nursery, of the schoolroom, and of the "grown up". He who writes was a child in 1855, and to him Bulbo, Hedzoff, King Valoroso, and the Countess Gruffanuff, with the usual contrasted heroines, Angelica and Rosalba, were not dearer then than they are now. Even then the equation was plain:—
{Angelica Rosalba}
Fair and {Becky Emmy } Dark and
false {Blanche Amory Laura } true and
{Rowena Rebecca} tender.