The Georges.—While he was writing The Newcomes, he had prepared a course of four lectures on the Four Georges, kings of England, with which he made his second visit to the United States, and which he delivered in the principal cities, to make a fund for his daughters and for his old age. It was entirely successful, and he afterwards read them in England and Scotland. They are very valuable historically, as they give us the truth with regard to men whose reigns were brilliant and on the whole prosperous, but who themselves, with the exception of the third of the name, were as bad men as ever wore crowns. George III. was continent and honest, but a maniac, and Mr. Thackeray has treated him with due forbearance and eulogy.
In 1857, Mr. Thackeray was a candidate for Parliament from Oxford, but was defeated by a small majority; his conduct in the election was so magnanimous, that his defeat may be regarded as an advantage to his reputation.
In the same year he began The Virginians, which may be considered his failure; it is historically a continuation of Esmond,—some of the English characters, the Esmonds in Virginia, being the same as in that work. But his presentation and estimate of Washington are a caricature, and his sketch of General James Wolfe, the hero of Quebec, is tame and untrue to life. His descriptions of Virginia colonial life are unlike the reality; but where he is on his own ground, describing English scenes and customs in that day, he is more successful. To paint historical characters is beyond the power of his pencil, and his Doctor Johnson is not the man whom Boswell has so successfully presented.
In 1860 he originated the Cornhill Magazine, to which his name gave unusual popularity: it attained a circulation of one hundred thousand—unprecedented in England. In that he published Lovel the Widower, which was not much liked, and a charming reproduction of the Newcomes,—for it is nothing more,—entitled The Adventures of Philip on His Way through the World. Philip is a more than average Englishman, with a wicked father and rather a stupid wife; but "the little sister" is a star—there is no finer character in any of his works. Philip, in spite of its likeness to The Newcomes, is a delightful book.
With an achieved fame, a high position, a home which he had just built at Kensington, a large income, he seemed to have before him as prosperous an old age as any one could desire, when, such are the mysteries of Providence, he was found dead in his room on the morning of December 24, 1863.
Estimate of His Powers.—Thackeray's excellences are manifest: he was the master of idiomatic English, a great moralist and reformer, and the king of satire, all the weapons of which he managed with perfect skill. He had a rapier for aristocratic immunities of evil, arrows to transfix prescriptions and shams; and with snobs (we must change the figure) he played as a cat does with a mouse, torturing and then devouring. In the words of Miss Bronté, "he was the first social regenerator of the day, the very master of that working corps who would restore to rectitude the warped system of things." But this was his chief and glorious strength: in the truest sense, he was a satirist and a humorist, but not a novelist; he could not create character. His dramatic persons do not speak for themselves; he tells us what they are and do. His mission seems to have been to arraign and demolish evil rather than to applaud good, and thus he enlists our sinless anger as crusaders rather than our sympathy as philanthropists. In Dickens we are sometimes disposed to skip a little, in our ardor, to follow the plot and find the dénouement. In Thackeray we read every word, for it is the philosophy we want; the plot and personages are secondary, as indeed he considered them; for he often tells us, in the time of greatest depression of his hero, that it will all come out right at the end,—that Philip will marry Charlotte, and have a good income, while the poor soul is wrestling with the res augusta domi. Dickens and Thackeray seemed to draw from each other in their later works; the former philosophizing more in his Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend, and the latter attempting more of the descriptive in The Newcomes and Philip. Of minor pieces we may mention his Rebecca and Rowena, and his Kickleburys on the Rhine; his Essay on Thunder and Small Beer; his Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo, in 1846, and his published collection of smaller sketches called The Roundabout Papers. That Thackeray was fully conscious of the dignity of his functions may be gathered from his own words in Henry Esmond. "I would have history familiar rather than heroic, and think Mr. Hogarth and Mr. Fielding. [and, we may add, Mr. Thackeray,] will give our children a much better idea of the manners of that age in England than the Court Gazette and the newspapers which we get thence." At his death he left an unfinished novel, entitled Dennis Duval. A gifted daughter, who was his kind amanuensis. Miss Anne E. Thackeray, has written several interesting tales, among which are The Village on the Cliff and The Story of Elizabeth.
Chapter XLI.
The Later Writers.
[Charles Lamb]. [Thomas Hood]. [Thomas de Quincey]. [Other Novelists]. [Writers on Science and Philosophy].
Charles Lamb.—This distinguished writer, although not a novelist like Dickens and Thackeray, in the sense of having produced extensive works of fiction, was, like them, a humorist and a satirist, and has left miscellaneous works of rare merit. He was born in London, and was the son of a servant to one of the Benches of the Inner Temple; he was educated at Christ's Hospital, where he became the warm friend of Coleridge. In 1792 he received an appointment as clerk in the South Sea House, which he retained until 1825, when, owing to the distinction he had obtained in the world of letters, he was permitted to retire with a pension of £450. He describes his feelings on this happy release from business, in his essay on The Superannuated Man. He was an eccentric man, a serio-comic character, whose sad life is singularly contrasted with his irrepressible humor. His sister, whom he has so tenderly described as Bridget Elia, in a fit of insanity killed their mother with a carving-knife, and Lamb devoted himself to her care.