Naturally we are here on ground where the personal equation influences judgment. There can never be complete agreement. Some readers, and excellent people they are, will always be offended by what they never tire of calling the worldly tone of Thackeray; to others, he will be as lovable in his view of life as he is amusing. Speaking, then, merely for myself, it seems to me that for mature folk who have had some experience with humanity, Thackeray is a charming companion whose heart is as sound as his pen is incisive. The very young as a rule are not ready for him and (so far as my observation goes) do not much care for him. That his intention was to help the cause of kindness, truth and justice in the world is apparent. It is late in the day to defend his way of crying up the good by a frank exhibition of the evil. Good and bad are never confused by him, and Taine was right in calling him above all a moralist. But being by instinct a realist too, he gave vent to his passion for truth-telling so far as he dared, in a day when it was far less fashionable to do this than it now is. A remark in the preface to "Pendennis" is full of suggestion: "Since the author of 'Tom Jones' was buried, no writer of fiction among us has been permitted to depict to his utmost power a Man. We must drape him and give him a certain conventional simper. Society will not tolerate the Natural in our Art."
It will not do to say (as is often said) that Thackeray could not draw an admirable or perfect woman. If he did not leave us a perfect one, it was perhaps for the reason alleged to have been given by Mr. Howells when he was charged with the same misdemeanor: he was waiting for the Lord to do it first! But Thackeray does no injustice to the sex: if Amelia be stupid (which is matter of debate), Helen Warrington is not, but rather a very noble creature built on a large plan: whatever the small blemishes of Lady Castlewood she is indelible in memory for character and charm. And so with others not a few. Becky and Beatrix are merely the reverse of the picture. And there is a similar balance in the delineation of men: Colonel Newcome over against Captain Costigan, and many a couple more. Thackeray does not fall into the mistake of making his spotted characters all-black. Who does not find something likable in the Fotheringay and in the Campaigner? Even a Barry Lyndon has the redeeming quality of courage. And surely we adore Beatrix, with all her faults. Major Pendennis is a thoroughgoing old worldling, but it is impossible not to feel a species of fondness for him. Jos. Sedley is very much an ass, but one's smile at him is full of tolerance. Yes, the worst of them all, the immortal Becky (who was so plainly liked by her maker) awakens sympathy in the reader when routed in her fortunes, black-leg though she be. She cared for her husband, after her fashion, and she plays the game of Bad Luck in a way far from despicable. Nor is that easy-going, commonplace scoundrel, Rawdon, with his dog-like devotion to the same Becky, denied his touch of higher humanity. Behind all these is a large tolerance, an intellectual breadth, a spiritual comprehension that is merciful to the sinner, while never condoning the sin. Thackeray is therefore more than story-teller or fine writer: a sane observer of the Human Comedy; a satirist in the broad sense, devoting himself to revealing society to itself and for its instruction. It is easy to use negations: to say he did not know nor sympathize with the middle class nor the lower and outcast classes as did Dickens; that his interest was in peccadilloes and sins, not in courageous virtues: and that he judged the world from a club window. But this gets us nowhere and is aside from the critic's chief business: which is that of an appreciative explanation of his abiding power and charm. This has now been essayed. Thackeray was too great as man and artist not to know that it was his function to present life in such wise that while a pleasure of recognition should follow the delineation, another and higher pleasure should also result: the surprising pleasure of beauty. "Fiction," he declared, "has no business to exist, unless it be more beautiful than reality," And again: "The first quality of an artist is to have a large heart." With which revelatory utterances may be placed part of the noble sentence closing "The Book of Snobs": "If fun is good, truth is better still, and love best of all." To read him with open mind is to feel assured that his works, taken in their entirety, reflect these humane sentiments. It is a pity, therefore, for any reader of the best fiction, through intense appreciation of Dickens or for any other reason, to cut himself off from such an enlightening student of humanity and master of imaginative literature.
CHAPTER X
GEORGE ELIOT
George Eliot began fiction a decade later than Thackeray, but seems more than a decade nearer to us. With her the full pulse of modern realism is felt a-throbbing. There is no more of the ye's and thous with which, when he would make an exordium, Thackeray addressed the world—a fashion long since laid aside. Eliot drew much nearer to the truth, the quiet, homely verity of her scenes is a closer approximation to life, realizes life more vitally than the most veracious page of "Vanity Fair." Not that the great woman novelist made the mistake of a slavish imitation of the actual: that capital, lively scene in the early part of "The Mill on the Floss," where Mrs. Tulliver's connections make known to us their delightsome personalities, is not a mere transcript from life; and all the better for that. Nevertheless, the critic can easily discover a difference between Thackeray and Eliot in this regard, and the ten years between them (as we saw in the case of Dickens and Thackeray) are partly responsible: technique and ideal in literary art were changing fast. George Eliot was a truer realist. She took more seriously her aim of interpreting life, and had a higher conception of her artistic mission. Dickens in his beautiful tribute to Thackeray on the latter's death, speaks of the failure of the author of "Pendennis" to take his mission, his genius, seriously: there was justice in the remark. Yet we heard from the preface to "Pendennis" that Thackeray had the desire to depict a typical man of society with the faithful frankness of a Fielding, and since him, Thackeray states, never again used. But the novelist's hearers were not prepared, the time was not yet ripe, and the novelist himself lacked the courage, though he had the clear vision. With Eliot, we reach the psychologic moment: that deepest truth, the truth of character, exhibited in its mainsprings of impulse and thought, came with her into English fiction as it had never before appeared. It would hardly be overstatement to say that modern psychology in the complete sense as method and interest begins in the Novel with Eliot. For there is a radical difference, not only between the Novel which exploits plot and that which exploits character: but also between that which sees character in terms of life and that which sees it in terms of soul. Eliot's fiction does the latter: life to her means character building, and has its meaning only as an arena for spiritual struggle. Success or failure means but this: have I grown in my higher nature, has my existence shown on the whole an upward tendency?
If so, well and good. If not, whatever of place or power may be mine, I am among the world's failures, having missed the goal. This view, steadily to be encountered in all her fiction, gives it the grave quality, the deep undertone and, be it confessed, at times the almost Methodistic manner, which mark this woman's worth in its weakness and its notable strength. In her early days, long before she made fiction, she was morbidly religious; she became in the fulness of time one of the intellectually emancipated. Yet, emotionally, spiritually, she remained to the end an intensely religious person. Conduct, aspiration, communion of souls, these were to her always the realities. If Thackeray's motto was Be good, and Dickens', Do good, Eliot's might be expressed as: Make me good! Consider for a moment and you will see that these phrases stand successively for a convention, an action and an aspiration.
The life of Mary Ann Evans falls for critical purposes into three well-defined divisions: the early days of country life with home and family and school; her career as a savant; and the later years, when she performed her service as story-teller. Unquestionably, the first period was most important in influencing her genius. It was in the home days at Griff, the school days at Nuneaton nearby, that those deepest, most permanent impressions were absorbed which are given out in the finest of her fictions. Hence came the primal inspiration which produced her best. And it is because she drew most generously upon her younger life in her earlier works that it is they which are most likely to survive the shocks of Time.
The experiences of Eliot's childhood, youth and young womanhood were those which taught her the bottom facts about middle-class country life in the mid-century, and in a mid-county of England; Shakspere's county of Warwick. Those experiences gave her such sympathetic comprehension of the human case in that environment that she became its chronicler, as Dickens had become the chronicler of the lower middle-class of the cities. Unerringly, she generalized from the microcosm of Warwickshire to the life of the world and guessed the universal human heart. With utmost sympathy, joined with a nice power of scrutiny, she saw and understood the character-types of the village, when there was a village life which has since passed away: the yeoman, the small farmer, the operative in the mill, the peasant, the squire and the parson, the petty tradesman, the man of the professions: the worker with his hands at many crafts.
She matured through travel, books and social contact, her knowledge was greatly extended: she came to be, in a sense, a cultured woman of the world, a learned person. Her later books reflected this; they depict the so-called higher strata of English society as in "Middlemarch," or, as in "Romola," give an historical picture of another time in a foreign land. The woman who was gracious hostess at those famous Sunday afternoons at the Priory seems to have little likeness to the frail, shy, country girl in Griff—seems, too, far more important; yet it may be doubted whether all this later work reveals such mastery of the human heart or comes from such an imperative source of expression as do the earlier novels, "Adam Bede" and "The Mill on the Floss." For human nature is one and the same in Griff or London or Florence, as all the amplitude of the sky is mirrored in the dewdrop. And although Eliot became in later life a more accurate reporter of the intellectual unrest of her day, and had probed deeper into the mystery and the burden of this unintelligible world, great novels are not necessarily made in that way and the majority of those who love her cleave to the less burdened, more unforced expression of her power.
In those early days, moreover, her attitude towards life was established: it meant a wish to improve the "complaining millions of men." Love went hand in hand with understanding. It may well be that the somberly grave view of humanity and of the universe at large which came to be hers, although strengthened by the positivistic trend of her mature studies, was generated in her sickly youth and a reaction from the narrow theologic thought with which she was then surrounded. Always frail—subject through life to distressing illness—it would not be fair to ask of this woman an optimism of the Mark Tapley stripe. In part, the grave outlook was physical, temperamental: but also it was an expression of a swiftly approaching mood of the late nineteenth century. And the beginning can be traced back to the autumn evenings in the big farmhouse at Griff when, as a mere child, she wrestled or prayed with what she called her sick soul. That stern, upright farmer father of hers seems the dominant factor in her make-up, although the iron of her blood was tempered by the livelier, more mundane qualities of her sprightly mother, towards whom we look for the source of the daughter's superb gift of humor. Whatever the component parts of father and mother in her, and however large that personal variation which is genius, of this we may be comfortably sure: the deepest in the books, whether regarded as presentation of life or as interpretation, came from the early Warwickshire years.