Again, as it seems to me, this feebleness in construction—this letting the story go at hazard and filling out with chat or preaching—this lazy range of invention in plot—matches with limits in the range of his characters. Here again he is always impeccable when dealing with an Anglo-Indian retired, whether it be Jos. Sedley or Colonel Newcome—high or low; or with a Foker or a Costigan or anyone he has encountered in his own Bohemian life, or in a Pall Mall Club or in an Irish regiment or in any dingy lodging-house, at home or abroad. Any inhabitant of these haunts, haunts of his actual experience, he can exhibit and experiment upon with infinite variety. Within that range, you can say, he almost never went wrong. He could there convert all particulars to a Universal. No shadow of doubt can rest on the literal and actual truth of an anecdote he puts into De Finibus, one of his best Roundabout Papers.
“I was smoking,” says he, “in a tavern parlour one night, and this Costigan came into the room alive, the very man; the most remarkable resemblance of the printed sketches of the man, of the rude drawings in which I had depicted him. He had the same little coat, the same battered hat, cocked on one eye, the same twinkle in that eye. ‘Sir,’ said I, knowing him to be an old friend whom I had met in unknown regions—‘Sir,’ I said, ‘may I offer you a glass of brandy-and-water?’ ‘Bedad ye may,’ says he, ‘and I’ll sing ye a song tu.’ Of course he spoke with an Irish brogue. Of course he had been in the army. In ten minutes he pulled out an army agent’s account, whereon his name was written. A few months later we read of him in a police court. How had I come to know him, to divine him? Nothing shall convince me that I have not seen that man in the world of spirits....”
They used (he adds) to call the good Sir Walter the “Wizard of the North.” What if some writer should appear who can write so enchantingly that he shall be able to call into actual life the people whom he invents?... Well, I think Thackeray could do that: but only, I think, in the small district limited by the Haymarket on the east and Kensington Gardens on the west. He could call spirits from the vasty deep of the Cider Cellars, evoke them from the shadowy recesses of the Reform or the Athenaeum Club. But, like Prospero, he had to draw a ring around him before his best incantations worked. The cautious Trollope remarks that his Sir Pitt Crawley “has always been to me a stretch of audacity which I have been unable to understand. But it has been accepted.” Yes, to be sure, it has been accepted, and old Sir Pitt is wickedly alive and breathing just because (on Thackeray’s own confession) he was drawn from the life. But as a rule, if you take his dukes and duchesses you will find him on ticklish ground, even so far northward as Mayfair, apt (shall we say?) to buttonhole the butler. Always saving Esmond and a part of The Virginians, I ask you to compare anything in Thackeray with the opening of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and you will detect at once which author is dealing with what he supposes and which with what is known to him, so familiar that he cannot mistake his people even as he enters a room.
VI
But now we come to the man’s style; by which I mean, of course, his propriety and grace of writing. It is, as we have seen, a “flowing” style: it has that amplitude which Longinus commended and our Burke practised, as an attribute of the sublime. For defect, as a narrative style, it tells in three or more pages what might as well be told in three sentences and often better. Without insisting that the writers of the ’nineties (of whom I spoke but now) ever managed to justify their painful search for the briefest, most telling phrase, I submit that it is unlikeliest to be found by a man writing against time, for monthly numbers. That (if you will) being granted, we have to ask ourselves why Thackeray’s prose is so beautiful that it moves one so frequently to envy, and not seldom to a pure delight, transcending all envy. For certain the secret lies nowhere in his grammar, in which anyone can find flaws by the score. Half the time his sentences run as if (to borrow a simile of Mr. Max Beerbohm’s concerning Shakespeare’s A Midsummer-Night’s Dream) the man were kicking up a bedroom slipper and catching it again on his toe. The secret lies, if you will follow his sentences and surrender yourselves to their run and lull and lapse, in a curious haunting music, as of a stream; a music of which scarce any other writer of English prose has quite the natural, effortless, command. You have no need to search in his best pages, or to hunt for his purple patches. It has a knack of making music even while you are judging his matter to be poor stuff; music—and frequent music—in his most casual light-running sentences. I protest, Gentlemen, I am not one of your pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerunt fellows: I grudge no man saying a thing of mine before me, even when I know it must be valuable because the anticipator is Mr. George Saintsbury; and so far am I from wishing him to perish that one of my sustaining hopes of life is that of congratulating him on his hundredth birthday. (Do not be afraid: in any event, it shall not be from this desk.) But I protest also that in his History of English Prose Rhythm he surprised a secret which was mine, and shy as love—the conviction that for mastery—unconscious, native mastery, it may be—of “that other rhythm of prose”—no English writer excels Thackeray, and a very few indeed approach him. So you guess that I have to deal at once with a sense of gratitude and a grudge that my secret can now stand expressed and confirmed by so high an authority: and my grudge I shall work off by quoting him.
“When I say,” he affirms, “that I hardly know any master of English prose-rhythm greater, in his way, than Thackeray, and that I certainly do not know any one with so various and pervasive a command, I may seem to provoke the answer, ‘Oh! you are, if not a maniac, at any rate a maniaque.’ Nevertheless, I say it; and will maintain it. The most remarkable thing about Thackeray is his mastery of that mixed style, ‘shot with rhythm.’ Even in his earliest and most grotesque extravaganzas you will rarely find a discordant sentence—the very vulgarisms and misspellings come like solecisms from a pair of pretty lips and are uttered in a musical voice. As there never was a much hastier writer, it is clear that the man thought in rhythm—that the words, as they flowed from his pen, brought the harmony with them. Even his blank verse and his couplets in prose, never, I think, in any one instance unintentional, but deliberately used for burlesque purposes, have a diabolical quality and, as the wine merchants say, ‘breed’ about them, which some very respectable ‘poets’ have never achieved.”
He quotes a short beautiful passage from Vanity Fair—
She was wrapped in a white morning dress, her hair falling on her shoulders and her large eyes fixed and without light. By way of helping on the preparations for the departure [for Waterloo where let me remind you he, her husband, was to fall and lie, with a bullet through his heart], and showing that she too could be useful at a moment so critical, this poor soul had taken up a sash of George’s, from the drawers whereon it lay and followed him to and fro, with the sash in her hand, looking on mutely as the packing proceeded. She came out and stood leaning at the wall, holding this sash against her bosom, from which the heavy net of crimson dropped like a large stain of blood.
He proceeds:
Take another and shorter—not, I hope, impudently short “Becky was always good to him, always amused, never angry.”