Many of the other faults of Dickens are cognate to this. He sacrifices everything for effect, and hence his proneness to horrors. The pictures are often wonderfully done, but they are unwholesome. The murder by Jonas Chuzzlewit, and still more the murder of Nancy, are examples. Sometimes Dickens goes wholly beyond the reach of pardon, as in the purely horrible and sickening description of spontaneous combustion in Bleak House. More frequently the sin is rather against proportion. We hear too much of the dragging of the river for dead bodies in Our Mutual Friend. Dickens never could learn where to stop. His highly pictorial imagination presented to him every detail of the scene; and, like a Pre-Raphaelite, he forgot that to the reader a general impression conveyed more truth than minute accuracy in every detail.
The faults of Dickens grew with time, his merits tended to decline; but even to the end the characteristic merits are to be found. It was not unjustly said that his death had once more eclipsed the gaiety of nations.
William Makepeace Thackeray
(1811-1863).
While Dickens, as has been seen, leaped into fame, his only contemporary rival, William Makepeace Thackeray, slowly and with difficulty forced his way to it. He was the senior of Dickens by rather more than half a year, having been born at Calcutta on July 18th, 1811. He was educated at the Charterhouse; and if his feelings may be inferred from his works they must have changed considerably. In his earlier writings it is Slaughter House; in The Newcomes it is the celebrated Grey Friars. After leaving school Thackeray went in 1829 to Cambridge, but he left the University in 1830 without taking his degree. While he was there he contributed to The Snob, the name of which suggested to him a title in after years. One of his papers was an amusing burlesque on Timbuctoo, the subject for the prize poem, won by Tennyson, for 1829. In 1830 Thackeray went to Weimar, and he spent a considerable time there and in Paris training himself as an artist. The inaccuracy of his drawing was a fatal bar to his success in art; but he turned his studies to account afterwards in illustrating his own books; and there are probably no works in English in which the illustrations throw more light upon the text. In 1832 he became master of his little fortune of about £500 per annum, all of which was lost within a year or two. Most of it was sunk in an unprofitable newspaper adventure, reference to which is made in Lovel the Widower, and, with less accuracy of circumstance, in Pendennis. But if he lost his money by a newspaper, it was by journalism that he first gained his livelihood. He wrote for The Times, for Fraser’s Magazine, and for the New Monthly Magazine, contributing to the second some of the most important of his early works; and for about eight years (1842-1850) he was one of the principal literary contributors to Punch. In these periodicals there appeared during the ten years, 1837-1847, The Yellowplush Papers, The Great Hoggarty Diamond, Barry Lyndon, The Book of Snobs and The Ballads of Policeman X. Thackeray had also published independently The Paris Sketch-Book and The Irish Sketch-Book.
Vanity Fair (1847-1848) was Thackeray’s first novel on the great scale. Barry Lyndon was indeed an exhibition of the highest intellectual power; but it was not of the orthodox length, and it failed to bring the writer wide fame. Vanity Fair did bring him fame among the more thoughtful readers, though not a popularity rivalling that of Dickens. It was followed by Pendennis (1849-1850), Esmond (1852) and The Newcomes (1854-1855). Esmond was the only one that was published as a whole, and it is significant that it is by far the best constructed of the four usually accepted as Thackeray’s greatest novels. The periodical method of publication had peculiar dangers for him. He was constitutionally indolent, almost always left his work to the last moment, and sometimes had to patch up his part anyhow.
In 1851 Thackeray delivered the lectures on the Humourists of the Eighteenth Century, and repeated the course in America in 1852-1853. The lectures on The Four Georges were delivered first in America (1855-1856). Of all Thackeray’s writings these two courses have probably had the most scanty justice meted out to them. Critics are frequently apologetic, sometimes condescending. Nobody need apologise, and few can afford to condescend with respect to what are really among the richest and best criticisms of this century. Thackeray knew not only the literature but the life of the eighteenth century as few have known it. In minute acquaintance with facts he has doubtless been surpassed by many professional historians; but there is no book to be compared to Esmond as a picture of life in the age of Queen Anne; and the lectures on the humourists are saturated, as Esmond is, with the eighteenth century spirit. The figures of the humourists live and move before our eyes. We may not always agree with the critic’s opinion, but we can hardly fail to understand the subject better through his mode of treatment. Strong objection has been taken, perhaps in some respects with justice, to his handling of Swift. Yet, much as has been written about Swift, where does there exist a picture of him so vivid, so suggestive and so memorable? Who else has done such justice to Steele? Who has written better about Hogarth? Thackeray succeeded because he not only knew the work of these men but felt with them. He was at bottom of the eighteenth century type. Much of Swift himself, softened and humanised, something of Fielding, whom he justly regarded as a model, and a great deal of Hogarth may be detected in Thackeray. The best criticism is always sympathetic; and it is because sympathy is so easy to him here that Thackeray is so excellent. The treatment even of Swift is far from being unsympathetic.
With the four Georges Thackeray was certainly not in sympathy. But they afforded him an ample field for the exercise of his satiric gifts, and he found occasion in his treatment of them for some passages of his most eloquent writing. The objection taken to this course of lectures has been as much political as literary. Thackeray is supposed to have treated the throne with scanty reverence; but it is the throne itself that is lacking in reverence when such lives are led; and the day for the concealment of disagreeable truths has long gone by.
The Virginians, a continuation of Esmond, ran its periodical course from 1857 to 1859. In the latter year Thackeray became editor of the Cornhill, for which he wrote Lovel the Widower (1860), The Adventures of Philip (1861-1862), and the delicious Roundabout Papers, which he contributed occasionally from the beginning of his editorship to his death. Denis Duval had not even begun to appear in the magazine, and only a small part had been written when the author was suddenly cut off at the age of fifty-two.
It would not be easy to name two great contemporary writers, working in the same field of letters, more radically unlike than Dickens and Thackeray. Even the qualities they possess in common diverge as far as qualities bearing the same name can do. Both are humourists; but the humour of Thackeray is permeated through and through with satire; that of Dickens has not infrequently a touch of satire, but its essential principle is pure fun, and it is largely burlesque. We look for it in the absurdities of the Micawber family, in the Jarley wax-works, in the ridiculous adventures of the Pickwick Club, and in the solemn fatuity of Silas Wegg. Thackeray was a master of burlesque too, as his imitations of contemporary novels—Phil Fogarty, Codlingsby, Rebecca and Rowena—and his Ballads of Policeman X prove. But it is a totally different burlesque. That of Dickens moves to laughter, and the laughter is frequently uproarious; Thackeray only excites a smile and a chuckle of intellectual enjoyment.
The two writers differ equally in their pathos. Dickens, as we have seen, draws it out, paragraph after paragraph, chapter piled on chapter. Thackeray concentrates, partly from the artist’s knowledge that concentration is necessary to permanent effect, in greater degree because of a personal dignity, accompanied by reticence, in which Dickens was certainly deficient. Just as there are substances which will not bear light, so there are feelings which seem to be profaned if they are too long exposed to view. All art involves exposure; but the difference between perfect taste and defective taste lies in knowing just in what manner and how long to make the exposure. In The Four Georges two paragraphs contain all we are told about the last tragic years of George III.; and just a few lines of eloquence and pathos rarely equalled close the story.