The English race has always had a bias in favour of what is known as Puritanism, not only in religion but in life. I think it may be said of us that we dislike intensely to have a thing forbidden by law, but love to have many forbidden by custom. We abhor a number of notices put up to say we must do this or that, that most things are forbidden, we detest a police who interfere with the ordinary affairs of life and force us under penalty to submit to trivial regulations. But we have no objections to the erection of a number of conventions far more irksome than any legal code of morals and we submit to a police system created by ourselves, more vigilant, more inquisitive, more given to informing than any secret service in the world. For what laws were ever devised more drastic in their operation than those of public opinion, and has any vehmgericht or inquisition ever judged unseen and condemned unheard on the report of the police, in a more secret and summary fashion than that of the tea table of Mrs. Grundy? Never was society more under the thrall of these dominating influences than in the Early and Mid-Victorian age.
The reason for this seems plain enough. The eighteenth century had been distinguished for the coarseness of its language, manners, and morals. The upper classes combined a good deal of old world politeness with a surprisingly frank disregard of moral considerations. There were conspicuous exceptions, but the singular impunity enjoyed by men of high rank and position made them often callous as to the opinion of their inferiors. The lower classes were accustomed to brutal sports and cruel amusements and unrestrained by any effective police, besides being entirely uneducated. The middle class, which was daily becoming more and more important to the life of the nation owing to the rapid development of trade and manufacture, was gradually monopolising the political control of the nation. It was in this class that the evangelical and Methodist movements had achieved their chief successes; and those who composed it were fundamentally serious minded. Under the Regency and during the reign of George IV and William IV the court was essentially aristocratic, and neither monarch gave it any prestige on the side of morality. Queen Victoria took a middle-class view of life; domesticity was the key-note of her reign. The Prince Consort was the model husband and father, so correct, so admirable, so exemplary, that even now we are apt to forget how able and wise a man he was and how heavy a debt his adopted country owes him.
One of the effects of the Victorian age was that England awoke to a most amazing sense of its own virtue. People were continually contrasting the present with the past, to the disadvantage of the latter. In the ‘forties,’ and even ‘fifties,’ many people could remember the time when it was unsafe to approach London after dusk on account of the highwaymen, when men, women, and children were hung by the score for the merest trifles, when duels were of almost daily occurrence, when the grossest abuses existed in church and state, when immorality in the highest quarters flaunted itself unashamed before the world. Old men could recall a time when to get drunk and use the foulest possible language was almost necessary, if a man were not to be written down as a milksop. And the contrast was almost too delightful to the newly emancipated middle class in their neat villas with trim gardens, whence they went to church decorously, sat in their select pew, their large families around them, and thanked God that they were not as other people’s wicked ancestors had been.
In one of Lever’s novels—I believe—an Irish solicitor was asked by an Englishman the reason for the success of a famous Counsellor with juries and replied, “He first butthers them up; and then slithers them down.” I am going to take the same liberty with that great novelist W. M. Thackeray, only I protest that my butter is genuine and were I an Irishman myself I should say it came from the heart. I cheerfully bow before the genius of England’s master of fiction. His characters are my friends, his kindly wisdom my delight, his pathos can move me almost to tears, his cynicism is a constant stimulant. His style is to me incomparable and fills me with envy and despair. His books are my best companions in sickness and in health, in depression and in my most cheerful moments. If I am his critic, it is because he is so old a friend that I love him alike for his weaknesses and peculiarities and for his great merits. With the utmost humility I commend his scholarship and appreciation of the literature of the eighteenth century. His “Four Georges” and “English Humorists” are to me models of what literary lectures should be. I could praise him till I wearied my audience, and all my praise would be absolutely genuine.
No student of Thackeray can fail to admire the way in which he prepared himself by study for his historical novels. In “Esmond” and the “Virginians” he saturated himself in the literature of his period. He could catch the style of the pamphleteer, the newspaper writer; he reproduces the conversation of the wits so as occasionally to deceive the very elect. The descriptions of life at Castlewood, of the service in Winchester Cathedral, the letters of the old Marchioness of Esmond, Henry Esmond’s contribution to the Spectator, the account of the battle of Wynandael, etc., are all masterpieces. So are some of the minor characters in these novels—Will Esmond in the “Virginians,” for example, Father Holt, Esmond’s Jesuit tutor and, above all, Parson Sampson in the “Virginians.” But his principal actors are not, I think, of the eighteenth century at all. They are the people Thackeray himself knew, in the garb of their supposed period, but really men and women of the middle of the nineteenth century. Esmond and George Warrington, Rachel, Lady Castlewood, and her incomparable daughter Beatrix are, with all their perfect accessories, modern men and women playing a part, admirably it is true, but still a part, in the comedy of a bygone age. In the days of Anne and the Georges I am confident no one felt or acted or thought as they are represented by our author. It is only when Thackeray is out of sympathy with his heroes that he makes them true to their age. In “Barry Lyndon” we have the genuine article, so we do in his uncle, the Chevalier de Balibari, so again in every character in “Catherine,” which was intended as a burlesque. But in the more serious novels I feel somehow that Thackeray did not really transport his characters into a bygone age.
Of this he seems to have been conscious himself. When he drew pictures to illustrate “Vanity Fair,” he did not depict Rawdon Crawley as a Waterloo guardsman, nor Becky as a lady of fashion in 1816, nor Pitt as an aristocratic member of the Clapham set. He drew them as the people he knew himself and dressed them in the costume of his own time, thus acknowledging how he really regarded his own creations.
The ruling aristocracy came to an end when the Reform Bill was passed in 1832, but their prestige remained. The middle class entered the Promised Land and took their share in its government: but not triumphantly. I may almost say they were abashed by their success. The peers could no more return a great proportion of the House of Commons, they could no more promote or cast down common men much as they pleased. They dare no longer defy public opinion as their predecessors had done. Yet to the middle class they still appeared august enough. Their manners, their breeding, the state in which many lived, inspired no little awe among those immediately below them. Society was divided into castes almost as rigidly, though less formally, than in India to-day. The old Whig nobility still considered themselves divinely called to rule the country and to dictate to the sovereign. The county families held aloof from the inhabitants of the town; and barely tolerated the professional classes. The beneficed clergy, barristers, medical men, lesser army officers, etc., scorned the traders. The wholesale trader held the retail storekeeper in scorn and so on ad infinitum. But in England the barriers of rank were never insurmountable, and in a free country anyone was at liberty to try to climb them. Hence everybody endeavored with varying success to ascend the social ladder, and did not scruple to use other people as stepping stones. Thus arose the fierce fight to get into what is still called “Society” and the rampant snobbery which Thackeray was never tired of denouncing. With this we may begin the investigation of his attitude towards the society of his age.
The great example of this pushfulness is Thackeray’s most delightful creation in “Vanity Fair,” Becky Sharp, though she assuredly was no snob. With all her doubtful antecedents, however, Becky, at least, married into the ranks of the aristocracy; and in her husband our author has created so real a person that one is actually disposed to question whether he was rightly judged by the author of his being. We are told that Rawdon Crawley was stupid, badly educated, unaccustomed to good society, at least when ladies were present. But if he were such an oaf why did his rich aunt Miss Crawley, who had known Sheridan and the wits, make such a fuss about him and make him sit at table with herself and Becky because “we are the only Christians in the county.” Why was he allowed to act in the Charades at Gaunt House on that memorable night of his wife’s triumph? The fact is that Thackeray was obsessed with the idea that all young men of fashion were necessarily stupid. It is a thoroughly middle-class tradition and we find it constantly in his pages. Because of certain mannerisms and affectations, because they cared little for literature, because they fought duels and gambled, all young men about town were not necessarily fools; and it was a mistake to depict Rawdon Crawley as on the one hand uncommonly sharp and also a fool. But it is because Thackeray’s genius has created such a living being that we are indignant at his failure to make him conform to our ideas of what we think he really was. We regard him as a living man whom his creator has misjudged, and not as the figment of the brain of the author.
“Vanity Fair,” however, holds up the mirror to social England in the unrivalled description of Becky’s climb up the rungs of the ladder till she arrived at the very apex of fashionable success. Her husband’s position gave her every opportunity with the men, and with them it was easy enough. Where her genius was seen was in her dealings with her own sex. Apart from the skill displayed in the description of her career, she is interesting to us as an example of the gradual invasion of society by those who were born outside its pale. Men, as we have seen, like Creevey, occasionally managed to make themselves indispensable, but for a woman to do so was a most difficult task. At first Becky was a complete failure so far as her own sex was concerned. Miss Crawley was never taken in for a moment. She recognised her attractions and allowed her to amuse her, but had no idea of regarding Becky as anything more than a sort of upper servant. “She’s just a companion as you are, Briggs, only infinitely more amusing.” When she married Rawdon, she did for herself so far as the old lady’s good graces were concerned. In her early married life she was equally unsuccessful. At Paris, where her husband was in the army of occupation, her success with the men and her popularity with the great ladies of French society, owing to her mastery of the language, only increased the bitterness of her countrywomen against her. When she came back to London, men crowded her little house in Curzon Street, but the ladies held sternly aloof. Social distinctions were very marked in the early “twenties” in London, and the great ladies of the day had no idea of allowing people of doubtful birth to push themselves into their company. You doubtless recollect how Jane Austen describes the dinner party at Lady Caroline de Burgh’s in “Pride and Prejudice” to which Elizabeth and Mr. and Mrs. Collins were invited, and the studied rudeness with which her ladyship treated her guests in order to keep them conscious of their inferiority. We find the same sort of thing in Lord Lytton’s early novel “Pelham,” where the man of fashion treats the people he meets in the country as beings of a different species. Every description of fashionable life tells the same story and we have to realise this to understand “Vanity Fair.”
I must ask you to pardon me if I linger over this theme and try to elaborate it. Becky had had a good deal of experience before her chance came, and she was fit to take it. Her brother-in-law, Pitt Crawley, was always a little smitten by her charm and determined to do the right thing by Rawdon by inviting him and Becky to Queen’s Crawley. Becky strikes the right note at once—they go by coach, “it looks more humble.” Once there, she captivates Lady Jane by affecting interest in her nursery. But these are only the outworks, Lady Jane is kind and soft, Pitt is pompous and easily flattered. But the citadel remained unvanquished in the person of Lady Southdown, Pitt’s mother-in-law. Here we have Thackeray’s counterpart of Lady Caroline de Burgh, a countess of austere evangelical piety, combined with a firm but by no means constant belief in patent medicines and more or less irregular clergy and medical practitioners, who forces her doctrines and her doctorings without mercy upon her dependants and inferiors. “She would order Gaffer Hodge to be converted, as she would order Goody Hicks to take a James’ powder, without appeal, resistance or benefit of clergy.” Our author describes her as “this awful missionary of the Truth,” driving about her estate administering tracts and medicaments.