Thackeray's naughty women are "fair and false," his good women are "dark, and true, and tender".
The novelist's is a "dreadful trade". He has to raise ever new crops from soil more or less exhausted. Dickens had his "Dombey," his "Little Dorrit," his "Mutual Friend"; and Thackeray had his "Virginians," the grandsons of Colonel Esmond, with their kinswoman, Beatrix Esmond, fallen into an old age of cards, and rouge and powder. Beatrix, for her beauty's sake, should have been translated, like the fairest woman of the ancient world, Helen, to the plain Elysian. We do not want to see her in old age, or to hear her last wild words, "Mesdames, Je suis la ——" La Reine, the Queen.
"The Virginians" is full of excellent things, wonderful studies of the later eighteenth century; and Harry is a deal, brave, stupid lad, and George is a sardonic, melancholy descendant of Colonel Esmond, and ancestor of "Stunner Warrington" in Pendennis; and Will Esmond and Chaplain Sampson are worthy of Fielding, but the author was tired; after "Vanity Fair" he was always tired, and the book has barren expanses and languors. "'The Virginians,'" he said to Motley, "is devilish stupid, but at the same time most admirable." Thackeray's health was worn out; as a change of work he founded, but soon wearied of editing, "The Cornhill Magazine"; was at his lowest level in "Lovel the Widower"; was so weary in "Philip" that he styled the hero "Clive" by inadvertence, though he endowed his clumsy Philip with one of his best women, Charlotte. He ventured into melodrama, which he liked, but could not write well; yet his "Roundabout Papers" show that he was, as an essayist, equal to his younger self.
His "Denis Duval" seemed to promise a return of his genius, but Christmas Day, 1863, was a black Christmas, for the author had died, suddenly and alone, in the night of Christmas Eve.
He had a great faculty of enjoyment, a generous heart sorely tried, a melancholy that was not causeless: immense kindness and love of the young, in short the character, in these respects, of Molière and of Charles Lamb. Let us confess that he was unjust to Becky Sharp and Beatrix Esmond. But he had a Shakespearean tenderness for his rogues, and having conceived the draconic design of hanging Colonel Altamont, he respited that bold adventurer. From boyhood he had his own originality of style.
In the cultivated town of Highbury
My father kept a circulating library,
are boyish lines of his, and we recognize him even there, beginning to be what he is in his "Book of Ballads," so various, so merry, so melancholy, so fresh as they are. Though the influences of the prose of Queen Anne and of Fielding helped to form his style, it is entirely his own; with the blended accents of his own humour and pathos, and harmonies before unheard; exquisite passages of verbal music.
The Brontë Sisters.
Concerning the Brontë sisters much, mainly personal, has been written, in proportion to the amount of their works. Their novels, especially those of Charlotte ("Jane Eyre," "Shirley," "Villette," "The Professor"), seem like the extraordinary and almost automatic products of their parentage and surroundings. The father, the Rev. Patrick Prunty or Brontë, was an Irish Protestant of County Down, who, after struggles with circumstances, was educated at St. John's College, Cambridge, and took holy orders. His Protestantism and politics were those of an Orangeman: his hero (who could have a better?) was the Duke of Wellington, and he was addicted to the composition of verse. His wife, a Cornish woman, was of feeble health, and died after giving birth to six children, two of whom, Maria and Elizabeth, died in early youth; the others were Charlotte (1816), Branwell (1817), Emily (1818), and Anne (1820). On the mother's death the father lived a sequestered studious life in a bleak parsonage on the Yorkshire moors, and the children were entirely devoted to drawing, reading books and magazines meant for their elders, to writing, day-dreaming, and to wandering from the grim rectory over the open moors. Their health was blighted by the conditions of the school called Lowood in "Jane Eyre"; their tempers were hardened and sharpened by poverty and the white slave's life of the governess, so much dreaded and so well understood by Miss Austen's Jane Fairfax in "Emma". The unhappy Branwell, in the end, haunted the rectory, an awful presence of intellect degraded, and while Emily wrapped herself up in a kind of Christian stoicism, Charlotte was left to the contrast between the dreams of her fiery genius, and the facts of her narrow life. In 1842 Charlotte and Emily became inmates of the school of Monsieur and Madame Heger at Brussels, which later afforded to Charlotte the scene and two characters in "Villette". In 1846 the three sisters published "Poems, by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell". Of this book two copies were sold, of the poems Emily's alone are still admired for their sombre energy and resolute spirit.