The position of Thackeray in the history of the novel is as different from that of Dickens as the fortunes of the two were in their own progress and development. In fact, though a sort of pseudo-Plutarchian parallel between them is nearly as inevitable as it is common, it is a parallel almost entirely composed of differences, carried out in matter almost incommensurable. In the first place, Dickens, as we have seen, and as Thackeray said (with the generous and characteristic addition "at the head of the whole tribe"), "came and took his place calmly" and practically at once (or with the preliminary only of "Boz") in Pickwick. Whether he ever went further may at least be questioned. But Thackeray did not take his place at once—in fact he conspicuously failed to take it for some sixteen years: although he produced, for at least the last ten of these, work containing indications of extraordinary power, in a variety of directions almost as extraordinary.
To attempt to assign reasons for this comparative failure would be idle—the fact is the only reasonable reason. But some phenomena and symptoms can be diagnosed. It is at least noteworthy that Thackeray—in this approaching Dickens perhaps nearer than in any other point—began with extravaganza—to adopt perhaps the most convenient general name for a thing which cannot be quite satisfactorily designated by any. In both cases the adoption was probably due to the example and popularity of Theodore Hook. But it was also due, in a higher and more metaphysical sense, to the fact that the romance, which had had so mighty a success in Scott's hands, was for the time overblown, and that the domestic novel, despite the almost equally wonderful, though much quieter and less popular achievement of Miss Austen, was not thoroughly and genuinely ready. From extravaganza in a certain sense Dickens, as has been said, never really departed: and he achieved most of his best work in his own peculiar varieties of it. Thackeray was, if not to leave it entirely aside, to use it in his later days merely as an occasional variation and seasoning. But at first he could not, apparently, get free from it: and he might have seemed unable to dispense with its almost mechanical externalities of mis-spelling and the like. It must also be remembered that circumstances were at first curiously unfavourable to him: and that loss of fortune, domestic affliction, and other things almost compelled him to write from hand to mouth—to take whatever commission offered itself: whereas the, if not immediate, speedy and tremendous success of Pickwick put the booksellers entirely at Dickens's feet. Still, a certain vacillation—an uncertainty of design not often accompanying genius like his—must be acknowledged in Thackeray. For a time he hesitated between pen and pencil, the latter of which implements he fortunately never abandoned, though the former was his predestined wand. Then he could not, or would not, for years, get out of the "miscellaneous" style, or patchwork of styles—reviews, short stories, burlesques, what not. His more important attempts seemed to have an attendant guignon.[22] Catherine (1839-1840), a very powerful thing in parts, was ill-planned and could not be popular. A Shabby Genteel Story (1841), containing almost the Thackerayan quiddity, was interrupted partly by his wife's illness, partly, it would seem, by editorial disfavour, and moreover still failed to shake off the appearance of a want of seriousness. Even The Great Hoggarty Diamond (1841-1842) was apparently cut short by request, and still lay open to an unjust, but not quite inexcusable, question on this same point of "seriousness." In all there was, or might seem to be, a queer and to some readers an unsatisfactory blend of what they had not learnt to call "realism" with what they were quite likely to think fooling. During these years Thackeray was emphatically of the class of writers of whom people "do not know what to make." And it is a true saying of English people—though perhaps not so pre-eminently true of them as some would have it—that "not to know what to make" of a thing or a person is sufficient reason for them to distrust, dislike, and "wash their hands of" it or him.
Some would have it that Barry Lyndon (1843) marks the close of this period of indecision and the beginning of that of maturity. The commoner and perhaps the juster opinion is that this position belongs to Vanity Fair (1846-1848). At any rate, after that book there could be no doubt about the fact of the greatness of its writer, though it may be doubted whether even now the quality of this greatness is correctly and generally recognised. It is this—that at last the novel of real life on the great scale has been discovered. Even yet a remnant of shyness hangs on the artist. He puts his scene a little though not very far back; he borrows a little, though not much, historical and romantic interest in the Waterloo part; the catastrophe of the Becky-Steyne business, though by no means outside of the probable contents of any day's newspaper, is slightly exceptional. But on the whole the problem of "reality, the whole reality, and nothing but reality" is faced and grasped and solved—with, of course, the addition to the "nothing but" of "except art."
He had struck his path and he kept to it: even when, as in Esmond (1852) and The Virginians (1858-1859) actually, and in Denis Duval prospectively, he blended the historical with the domestic variety. Pendennis (1849-1850) imports nothing out of the most ordinary experience; The Newcomes (1854-1855) very little; Philip (1861-1862) only its pantomime conclusion; while the two completely historical tales are in nothing more remarkable than in the way in which their remoter and more unfamiliar main subject, and their occasional excursions from everyday life, are subdued to the scheme of the realist novel in the best sense of the term—the novel rebuilt and refashioned on the lines of Fielding, but with modern manners, relying on variety and life, and relying on these only.
There is thus something of similarity (though with attendant differences, of the most important kind) between the joint position of Dickens and Thackeray towards the world of the novel, and the joint position of Scott and Miss Austen. They overlap more than their great forerunners of the preceding generation. Both wrote historical novels: it is indeed Thackeray's unique distinction that he was equally master of the historical novel and of the novel of pure modern society, almost uneventful. In parts of some of his later books, especially Little Dorrit, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend, Dickens at least tried to exchange his picaresque-fantastic cloudland for actual ordinary modern life. But on the whole the method of Thackeray was the method of the novel, though shot with a strong romantic spirit, and the method of Dickens the method of the romance applied, for the most part, to material which could hardly be called romantic. Both, therefore, in a manner, recalled the forces of fiction from the rather straggling and particularist courses which it had been pursuing for the last quarter of a century.
In fact, even in the two mighty men of genius whom we have just been discussing, there may be seen—at their beginnings at least—something of that irresolution, uncertainty, and want of reliance on the powers of the novel, it-by-itself-it, which we have noticed before: and which the unerring craftsmanship of Scott had already pointed out in the "Conversation of the Author of Waverley with Captain Clutterbuck" more than once referred to. They want excuses and pretexts, bladders and spring-boards. Even Dickens, despite his irrepressible self-reliance, burdens himself, at the beginning of Pickwick, with the clumsy old machinery of a club which he practically drops: and, still later, with the still more clumsy framework of "Master Humphrey's Clock" which he has not quietly to drop, but openly to strip off and cast away, before he has gone very far. Thackeray takes sixteen years of experiment before he trusts his genius, boldly and on the great scale, to reveal itself in its own way, and in the straight way of the novel.
Yet in this time also a great advance was made, as is shown not only by the fact that Dickens and Thackeray themselves became possible, but by the various achievements of the principal writers mentioned in this chapter, of one or two who might have been, but are perhaps, on the whole, best postponed to the next, such as Lever, and of the great army of minorities who have been of necessity omitted. In every direction and from every point of view novel is growing. Although it was abused by precisians, the gran conquesta of Scott had forced it into general recognition and requisition. Even the still severe discipline of family life in the first half of the nineteenth century, instead of excluding it altogether, contented itself with prescribing that "novels should not be read in the morning." A test which may be thought vulgar by the super-fine or the superficial, but a pretty good one, is the altered status and position of the writers of novels. In the eighteenth, especially the earlier eighteenth, century the novelist had not merely been looked down upon as a novelist, but had, as a rule, resorted to novel-writing under some stress of circumstance. Even when he was by birth a "gentleman of coat armour" as Fielding and Smollett were, he was usually a gentleman very much out at elbows: the stories, true or false, of Rasselas and Johnson's mother's funeral expenses, of the Vicar of Wakefield and Goldsmith's dunning landlady, have something more than mere anecdote in them. Mackenzie, though the paternity of his famille déplorable of novels was no secret, preserved a strict nominal incognito. Women, as having no regular professions and plenty of time at their disposal, were allowed more latitude: and this really perhaps had something to do with their early prominence in the novel; but it is certain that Scott's rigid, and for a long time successful, maintenance of the mask was by no means mere prudery, and still less merely prudent commercial speculation. Yet he, who altered so much in the novel, altered this also. Of the novelists noticed in the early part of this chapter, one became Prime Minister of England, another rose to cabinet rank, a baronetcy, and a peerage; a third was H.M. consul in important posts abroad; a fourth held a great position, if not in the service directly of the crown, in what was of hardly less importance, that of the East India Company; a fifth was a post-captain in the navy and Companion of the Bath.
And all this had been rendered possible partly by the genius of novel-writers, partly by the appetite of the novel-reader. This latter was to continue unabated: whether the former was to increase, to maintain itself, or slacken must be, to some extent of course, matter of opinion. But we have still two quarter-centuries to survey, in the first of which there may perhaps be some reason for thinking that the novel rose to its actual zenith. Nearly all the writers mentioned in this chapter continued to write—the greater part, in genius, of Thackeray's accomplished work, and the greater part, in bulk, of Dickens's, had still to appear. But these elders were reinforced by fresh recruits, some of them of a prowess only inferior to the very greatest: and a distinct development of the novel itself, in the direction of self-reliance and craftsmanlike working on its own lines, was to be seen. In particular, the deferred influence of Miss Austen was at last to be brought to bear with astonishing results: while, partly owing to the example of Thackeray, the historical variety (which had for the most part been a pale and rather vulgarised imitation of Scott), was to be revived and varied in a manner equally astonishing. More than ever we shall have to let styles and kinds "speak by their foremen"—in fact to some extent to let them speak for themselves with very little detailed notice even of these foremen. But we shall still endeavour to keep the general threads in hand and to exhibit their direction, their crossing, and their other phenomena, as clearly as possible to the reader. For only so can we complete the picture of the course of fiction throughout English literature—with the sole exclusion of living writers, whose work can never be satisfactorily treated in such a book as this—first, because they are living and, secondly, because it is not done.