It is also natural that it should manifest itself at the beginning of a writer’s career, and form a prelude to greater achievement. This is the case for good and sufficient psychological reasons. In youth the exuberant and undisciplined spirit, not yet checked by the reins of reality, riots in the glory of extravagance; the inventive faculty is awake but unfurnished by experience with material for original creation; the critical scent is keen but unpracticed, and impatient of sober, qualified judgment.[114] Such a condition is prime for the production of a Love’s Labour’s Lost, a Joseph Andrews, a Northanger Abbey, a Pickwick, a Barry Lyndon, a Shaving of Shagpat; to be followed by Twelfth Night, Tom Jones, Emma, David Copperfield, Vanity Fair, The Egoist.
Thackeray’s apprenticeship at this desk was rather unduly prolonged, covering about half the period of his literary activity; and its output is difficult to segregate on account of the ambiguous description of much of his early work. But from the large mass of sketches, essays, skits, stories, perhaps half a dozen may be selected as being fairly within the limits of satirico-romance.
Two of them, the Hoggarty Diamond and the Yellowplush Papers, are on the border line, included here only because too exaggerated and irresponsible to be otherwise classed. The same might be said of Barry Lyndon, which is not far from being a real novel. Yet perhaps none of these are more “grotesque” than some phases of legitimate fiction. Much of their humor comes from the dramatic monologue device. Five are roughly definable as burlesques: three—Catherine, A Legend of the Rhine, and The Rose and the Ring, of types; the other two, Novels by Eminent Hands, and Rebecca and Rowena, of individuals; yet here again, classification is misleading, as these latter are versus the forms of certain productions rather than their authors.
Meredith’s Farina is an interesting companion piece to Thackeray’s Rhine Legend, both having a Teutonic and chivalric background, and one might perhaps find a closer parallel there than in the one chosen by Moffat, who traces “reminiscences of Peacock in the fantastic element which occasionally crops up,” in Meredith, and points out that the idea underlying Farina and Maid Marian is “substantially the same—an attempt to reproduce with gentle satire, the medieval romance of sentiment and gay adventure.” It is true, however, that A Legend of the Rhine differs from both these in its mocking parade of anachronisms and telescoped chronology. It was “many, many hundred thousand years ago” that Thackeray’s German knight was pricking o’er the plain, but it was in the time of Richard the Lion-Hearted, and “on the cold and rainy evening of Thursday, the twenty-sixth of October.” In addition to his full armor he was equipped with an oiled silk umbrella and a bag with a brazen padlock.
On a subsequent adventure he halts at a wayside shrine covered with “odoriferous cactuses and silvery magnolias,” and recites “a censer, an ave, and a couple of acolytes before it.” A victim of his mighty lance wishes for a notary-public to take down his dying deposition. And a lost champion is advertised for in the Allgemeine Zeitung.
The Shaving of Shagpat out-Herods Herod in Arabian Nightism, and is not devoid of satiric pith, but we are expressly forbidden by the author himself to allegorize his geyser of ebullient mirth. The humor is Rabelaisian—or American—in its pure love of size; it floats in a gigantic, inflated balloon, to which a small basket of mental cargo is attached. In this, however, is wrapped up the very important secret that continuous laughter releases one from enchantment and restores one’s true form.
The romantic satirist must have, like any other compound, certain more or less inconsistent traits. There must be the inventive wit of romance plus the shrewd logic of satire. Yet this rare combination does not insure the best satiric results. Indeed the contrary is more likely to be the case, as the union at best is somewhat adventitious.
Then, too, there must be a degree of exaggeration, with the strain on our credulity so evenly distributed that it is not felt. The sound sense that satire calls for[115] must maintain her operations, the while she is masquerading as arrant nonsense.
Finally there is the dilemma encountered by the dramatist,—the necessity of concentrating high lights as life never does, yet preserving sufficient effect of dullness and vapid inanity to simulate reality as we know it.
The various kinds of artifice employed in this artificial process are all found in the examples on our list. Remoteness of time lends illusion to Maid Marian, Legend of the Rhine, Farina; remoteness of place, to The Coming Race, and the Erewhons; non-human characters, to Melincourt, Ixion, The Shaving of Shagpat; anomalous situations, to Misfortunes of Elphin and Popanilla. Some are able to combine them all, notably Lytton and Butler.[116] Some, on the other hand, manage to create a maximum impression with a minimum use of the spectacular.