So we come back to Thackeray, and to preaching. Preaching, or lecturing, would seem to be an endemic itch of our nation, first (I am sure) to be cured through attack on the public propensity for listening to lectures and sermons. You will never cure the lecturer. In my own part of the world the propensity to preach is notoriously virulent. As the song puts it, into the mouth of an enthusiastic emigrant—
And I will be the preacher,
And preach, three times a day,
To every living creature
In North Americay.
For a moment let us go back to Thackeray’s humbugging protest that he wished he were able to write a story with “an incident in every other page, a villain, a battle, a mystery, in every chapter.”
I say (with what reverence it leaves me to command) that this is pure, if unconscious, humbug, and a clouding of truth. For what is an “incident”? A murder—say that of Duncan in the castle of Inverness; a ghost on the battlements of Elsinore, stalking; a horseman in the night, clattering; a ghostly tapping, a detective holding a lantern over a reopened grave—all these are incidents and rather obviously so. But so also, if properly used, may be the tearing-up of a letter, the stiffened drop of a woman’s hands, a sigh, a turning-away.
“Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part”—just that, and if you can use that, what more tragic? Thackeray himself—albeit he could borrow hardily enough from Dumas, as when Colonel Esmond breaks his sword—in that very book achieves his topmost height, his most unchallengeable stroke as an artist, by just telling how a brilliant girl steps down a staircase, and ending on two words, half-whispered in French, at the foot of it—as we shall see, by and by.
V
No: I dare to say that this gift of loose, informal, preaching was Thackeray’s bane as a novelist. The ease with which it came to him, and the public’s readiness to accept it, just tempted him to slouch along. Esmond and the first half of Vanity Fair excepted, he never seems (to me at least) to have planned out a novel. He could not sit at home, in his desolated house, and concentrate himself upon a close-knit artistic design: but wrote, as I have said, in hotels or “upon Club paper,” usually behind-time and (as the saying is) with the printer’s devil at his elbow: and so this great melancholy man could, out of his melancholy and his genius, curiously matched with it, of vivacious talk summon up ream upon ream at call. Heaven forbid this should suggest that when he came to facts—more especially when he dealt with his beloved eighteenth century—he was careless. On the contrary, he knew it familiarly as a hand knows its glove. I suppose no later writer (with the possible exception of Austin Dobson) has understood the earlier half of that century better. For certain, again, no writer has, comparably with Thackeray, revivified it. Scholars are always on the pad, with dark lanterns, to catch out writers of imagination: but I observe that these Proctors, encountering Thackeray, carefully edge to the other side of the street. I cannot find that anything in Barry Lyndon, Esmond, The Virginians, the opening of Denis Duval, has ever been seriously challenged by the pedants: and considering Thackeray’s fame and the minute jealousy of pedants, that is a fairly fine record. In the famous chapters on Brussels and Waterloo in Vanity Fair, so far as I discover, every record confirms, not one contradicts, his story.