As a poetical commentary on these beautiful passages, every reader of Joanna Baillie will remember the night scene in De Montfort, where the cry of the Owl suggests such different feelings and associations to the two men who listen to it, under such different circumstances. To De Montfort it is the screech-owl, foreboding death and horror,—and he stands and shudders at the “instinctive wailing.” To Rezenvelt it is the sound which recalls his boyish days, when he merrily mimicked the night-bird till it returned him cry for cry,—and he pauses to listen with a fanciful delight.
THACKERAY’S LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH HUMORISTS
(1833.)
95.
A lecture should not read like an essay; and, therefore, it surprises me that these lectures so carefully prepared, so skilfully adapted to meet the requirements of oral delivery, should be such agreeable reading. As lectures, they wanted only a little more point, and emphasis and animation on the part of the speaker: as essays, they atone in eloquence and earnestness for what they want in finish and purity of style.
Genius and sunshine have this in common that they are the two most precious gifts of heaven to earth, and are dispensed equally to the just and the unjust. What struck me most in these lectures, when I heard them, (and it strikes me now in turning over the written pages,) is this: we deal here with writers and artists, yet the purpose, from beginning to end, is not artistic nor critical, but moral. Thackeray tells us himself that he has not assembled his hearers to bring them better acquainted with the writings of these writers, or to illustrate the wit of these wits, or to enhance the humour of these humourists;—no; but to deal justice on the men as men—to tell us how they lived, and loved, suffered and made suffer, who still have power to pain or to please; to settle their claims to our praise or blame, our love or hate, whose right to fame was settled long ago, and remains undisputed. This is his purpose. Thus then he has laid down and acted on the principle that “morals have something to do with art;” that there is a moral account to be settled with men of genius; that the power and the right remains with us to do justice on those who being dead yet rule our spirits from their urns; to try them by a standard which perhaps neither themselves, nor those around them, would have admitted. Did Swift when he bullied men, lampooned women, trampled over decency and humanity, flung round him filth and fire, did he anticipate the time when before a company of intellectual men, and thinking, feeling women, in both hemispheres, he should be called up to judgment, hands bound, tongue-tied? Where be now his gibes? and where his terrors? Thackeray turns him forth, a spectacle, a lesson, a warning; probes the lacerated self-love, holds up to scorn, or pity more intolerable, the miserable egotism, the half-distempered brain. O Stella! O Vanessa! are you not avenged?
Then Sterne—how he takes to pieces his feigned originality, his feigned benevolence, his feigned misanthropy—all feigned!—the licentious parson, the trader in sentiment, the fashionable lion of his day, the man without a heart for those who loved him, without a conscience for those who trusted him! yet the same man who gave us the pathos of “Le Fevre,” and the humours of “Uncle Toby!” Sad is it? ungrateful is it? ungracious is it?—well, it cannot be helped; you cannot stifle the conscience of humanity. You might as well exclaim against any natural result of any natural law. Fancy a hundred years hence some brave, honest, human-hearted Thackeray standing up to discourse before our great-great-grandchildren in the same spirit, with the same stern truth, on the wits, and the poets and the artists of the present time! Hard is your fate, O ye men and women of genius! very hard and pitiful, if ye must be subjected to the scalpel of such a dissector! You, gifted sinner, whoever you may be, walking among us now in all the impunity of conventional forbearance, dealing in oracles and sentimentalisms, performing great things, teaching good things, you are set up as one of the lights of the world:—Lo! another time comes; the torch is taken out of your hand, and held up to your face. What! is it a mask, and not a face? “Off, off ye lendings!” O God! how much wiser, as well as better, not to study how to seem, but how to be! How much wiser and better, not to have to shudder before the truth as it oozes out from a thousand unguessed, unguarded apertures, staining your lawn or your ermine; not to have to tremble at the thought of that future Thackeray, who “shall pluck out the heart of your mystery,” and shall anatomise you, and deliver lectures upon you, to illustrate the standard of morals and manners in Queen Victoria’s reign!
In these lectures, some fine and feeling and discriminative passages on character, make amends for certain offences and inconsistencies in the novels; I mean especially in regard to the female portraits. No woman resents his Rebecca—inimitable Becky!—no woman but feels and acknowledges with a shiver the completeness of that wonderful and finished artistic creation; but every woman resents the selfish inane Amelia, and would be inclined to quote and to apply the author’s own words when speaking of ‘Tom Jones:’—“I can’t say that I think Amelia a virtuous character. I can’t say but I think Mr. Thackeray’s evident liking and admiration for his Amelia shows that the great humourist’s moral sense was blunted by his life, and that here in art and ethics there is a great error. If it be right to have a heroine whom we are to admire, let us take care at least that she is admirable.”