When we search back from symptom to cause we find the secret of these and many other differences in the fact that the work of Dickens is primarily sentimental, while Thackeray’s is primarily intellectual. This is by no means equivalent to saying that Dickens is deficient in intellect, or Thackeray in sentiment. It means rather that the strong intellect of Dickens is the servant of sentiment, the strong sentiment of Thackeray the servant of intellect. It is another way of saying that Thackeray is essentially of the eighteenth century, the century of predominant understanding. It follows from his satirical way of viewing life; for the satirist must not wholly lose himself even in his sæva indignatio. The effect of his satire depends upon his keeping aloof, critical, superior. The Romans were great satirists because they did so; the English are great satirists in so far as they do so likewise. Something is lost in emotion, as art, something is gained in comprehension, for practical application.
No one can doubt that Thackeray is thus reflective and satirical. Critic after critic has called attention to his habit of staying the course of his story for comment and exposition. Not only so, but there is subdued and disguised comment all through. The artist makes each character criticise itself; and the effect is as if we were walking constantly in the light of those rays which pierce through the opaque and reveal what lies beneath. Thackeray’s satire plays continually over the characters he creates for warning and example. Blanche Amory, Becky Sharp, Major Pendennis, all have their inner motives exposed by this searching and pitiless light. So much is this the case that Thackeray has been described as not properly a novelist at all, but first of all a satirist. The difference is that the novelist primarily exhibits life as it is, while the satirist comments upon it. That Thackeray does the latter is obvious; but it seems an exaggeration to say that he is not properly a novelist. Though most of his stories are loosely constructed, though plot and incident are of subordinate importance, yet without the story his books would be vitally different. Moreover, the pure satirist commonly deals with types rather than individuals. Juvenal does so, Horace does so, Swift does so. So does Thackeray himself in The Book of Snobs. But Becky Sharp and Major Pendennis and Beatrix Esmond all have individuality.
Further, in what may fairly be regarded as Thackeray’s highest effort, satire sinks to a secondary place. Esmond, though not the best known of Thackeray’s works, is his purest piece of art. It is so, partly at least, because the conditions presupposed by the story put a curb upon the satirical tendency, in which undeniably Thackeray was too prone to indulge. In Esmond the writer is restrained in two ways. First, as the hero is himself the narrator, the sentiments have to be fitted to his character. And Henry Esmond was not the familiar compound of weakness and selfishness, crossed with some good nature and with occasional higher impulses, but, on the contrary, Thackeray’s ideal man. He is endowed with a power of satire, but it is rarely exercised. The second restraint arose from the need of unceasing watchfulness to use language consistent with the time in which the story is laid. If Thackeray was tempted to be careless, this necessity must have kept him constantly in check. And so well did he satisfy the requirements that Esmond is admitted on all hands to be, of all books in English, that which most accurately reproduces the style of a past age.
It is remarkable that the same book which contains the noblest figure Thackeray ever drew contains also the most lovable of his good women, and the most brilliant and fascinating of the class that cannot be called good. All critics have been struck with Thackeray’s tendency to make his good women weak and colourless, or else sermons incarnate. Amelia and Helen Pendennis are examples of the former class, Laura of the latter. Lady Castlewood escapes the censure. She has greater strength of character than Amelia or Helen; and her human weaknesses win a sympathy Laura does not command. Moreover, there is no other woman of her type shown in the light of passion as she is in that perfect chapter, The 29th December. Beatrix, on the contrary, ranks among the reprobate. She is not so wonderfully clever as Becky Sharp, but she has what Becky has not, fascination. Becky has only her intellect. Beatrix, clever too, has, besides her social position, splendid beauty, and above all the indescribable magnetic power of attraction. She can win men against themselves, and though they are alive to all the evil of her character. Becky can only win those whom she has blinded.
The other novels, less perfect as pictures of life, are not inferior in sheer intellect. Vanity Fair and Barry Lyndon are superlative examples of force of mind. The latter is so faithfully written from the scoundrel’s point of view that only the excess of scoundrelism prevents Barry from commanding sympathy. The former contains in Becky Sharp the cleverest and most resourceful of all Thackeray’s characters. It also contains, especially in the chapters on the Waterloo campaign, some of the finest English he ever wrote. Pendennis has its special interest in the thread of autobiography interwoven with it; while The Newcomes has its crowning glory in the old colonel, and in the famous scene in Grey Friars. After The Newcomes the quality of Thackeray’s work, or at least of his novels (for the lectures and the Roundabout Papers stand apart) declined. He did not live long enough to demonstrate whether the decline was permanent or not; but certainly there is no lack of power in the Roundabout Papers; and in spite of his own dictum that no man ought to write a novel after fifty, Thackeray should have been just at his best when he died.
Thackeray was a poet and an artist as well as a novelist; and sometimes in a copy of verses or in a sketch the inner spirit of the man may be seen more compendiously, if not more truly and surely, than in longer and more ambitious works. It is so here. The spirit that pervades Vanity Fair is the same that inspired the Ballad of Bouillabaisse, the concluding stanzas of The Chronicle of the Drum, The End of the Play, Vanitas Vanitatum, and others of his more serious verses. There is a touch of satire in these verses, but there is far more of pity than scorn. Still more vividly this spirit shines through a triplet of sketches labelled respectively Ludovicus, Rex and Ludovicus Rex, the shivering little atom of humanity, the imposing trappings of royalty, and then the poor little mortal clothed in this magnificence. Here we have the quintessence of Thackeray’s sermon through all his books, the difference between the humble reality and the vast pretensions, moral, intellectual and social, too often based on it. There is frequently scorn in the sermon, the more in proportion to the greatness of the pretensions. But there is almost always pity behind the scorn. Ludovicus Rex is, after all, the sport of fate. It is fate that decrees
‘How very weak the very wise,
How very small the very great are!’
It is the neglect of this fact that has led to the common judgment that Thackeray is a cynic. The gulf that divides him from cynicism is seen when we compare him with Swift. There is always in Thackeray a sensitive kindliness not to be found in the older writer. Thackeray’s bitterest satire is on individuals who are worse than their neighbours. There is something amiss with society when Barry Lyndon and Becky Sharp are possible; but we are not led to think that all men are Barry Lyndons, or all women Becky Sharps. Gulliver, on the contrary, is a satire on the human race.
William Carleton
(1794-1869).
A group of Irish novelists, rather older than Thackeray and Dickens, may be noticed together for the sake of certain features they have in common. If fineness of literary quality alone were in question, the first place must be assigned to William Carleton, whose Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry are the most carefully executed of their class. Carleton however had neither the verve nor the copiousness of Lever, who has been fixed upon by popular judgment as the leading Irish novelist of his time. Samuel Lover
(1797-1868).Still less can the versatile Samuel Lover, song-writer, dramatist and painter as well as novelist, compete with Lever; for although the former did many things with a certain dexterity he did nothing really well. His Handy Andy is a formless book, and the fun of it grows tedious.