And though it seems quite large enough already,
I here declare the Landlord’s purpose steady
Before the novel-writing days are o’er
To raise in this very house one or two stories more.
As we recall the pitiful penury of the English drama in the midyears of the nineteenth century, when the stage relied largely upon misleading adaptations of French plays, we may wonder why Buckstone and Wigan were inhospitable to the ‘Wolves and the Lamb.’ It is true that Thackeray’s little piece was slight in story, devoid of novel situation, obvious in its humor, simple in its character-delineation, and traditional in its methods. But at that time both Buckstone and Wigan were willing enough to risk their money on other plays by authors of less authority, plays which were quite as superficial and quite as artificial as this. Perhaps the two managers were moved to decline it partly because they were disappointed in that it had none of the captivating characteristics of Thackeray’s major fictions. So few of these qualities did the play possess that if it had been published anonymously it might have been attributed to some unknown imitator of Thackeray rather than to Thackeray himself. It revealed more of his mannerisms than of his merits.
Obviously he did not take his little comedy very seriously; he did not put his back into his work; he was content to write no better than his contemporary competitors in comedy and without their experience and their knack. It is difficult to deny that in the ‘Wolves and the Lamb’ most of the characters are only puppets; and that therefore Thackeray was for once well advised to put them away. The real hero of the play, it may be amusing to remark, is John, the butler, who has a soul above his station, and who is a sketchy anticipation of Barrie’s Admirable Crichton.
Setting aside his single venture into playmaking and attempting to estimate Thackeray’s potentiality as a playwright, we cannot help feeling that he lacked the swift concision, the immitigable compression, imposed on the dramatist by the limitation of the traffic of the stage to two hours. Also he rarely reveals his possession of the architectonic quality, the logical and inevitable structure, which is requisite in the compacting of a plot and in the co-ordination of effective incidents. Not often in his novels does he rise to the handling of the great passionate crises of existence, which, so Stevenson has told us, are the stuff out of which the serious drama is made. He is so little theatrical that he is only infrequently dramatic, in the ordinary sense of the word. He prefers the sympathetic portrayal of our common humanity in its moments of leisurely self-revelation.
Finally, if Thackeray had made himself a dramatist, by dint of determination, he would have lost as an artist more than he gained since he would have had perforce to forego the interpretive comment in which his narrative is perpetually bathed. In his unfolding of plot and his presentation of character, Thackeray could act as his own chorus, his own expositor, his own raisonneur (to borrow the French term for the character introduced into a play not for its own sake but to serve as the mouthpiece of its author). “Thackeray,” so W. C. Brownell has asserted in his sympathetic study,
enwraps and embroiders his story with his personal philosophy, charges it with his personal feeling, draws out with inexhaustible personal zest its typical suggestiveness, and deals with his material directly instead of dispassionately and disinterestedly.