Thackeray detested pose and strut and sham heroics. He called Byron “a big sulky dandy.” “Lord Byron,” he said, “wrote more cant . . . than any poet I know of. Think of the ‘peasant girls with dark blue eyes’ of the Rhine—the brown-faced, flat-nosed, thick-lipped, dirty wenches! Think of ‘filling high a cup of Samian wine’: . . . Byron himself always drank gin.” The captain in “The White Squall” does not pace the deck like a dark-browed corsair, but calls, “George, some brandy and water!”
And this reminds me of Thackeray’s poetry. Of course one who held this attitude toward the romantic and the heroic could not be a poet in the usual sense. Poetry holds the quintessential truth, but, as Bacon says, it “subdues the shows of things to the desires of the mind”; while realism clings to the shows of things, and satire disenchants, ravels the magic web which the imagination weaves. Heine was both satirist and poet, but he was each by turns, and he had the touch of ideality which Thackeray lacked. Yet Thackeray wrote poetry and good poetry of a sort. But it has beauty purely of sentiment, never of the imagination that transcends the fact. Take the famous lines with which this same “White Squall” closes:
And when, its force expended,
The harmless storm was ended,
And as the sunrise splendid
Came blushing o’er the sea;
I thought, as day was breaking,
My little girls were waking
And smiling and making
A prayer at home for me.