Studies in Literature and History

by Sir Alfred C. Lyall

But these are slight blemishes upon the surface of an epoch-making book, for Vanity Fair inaugurated a new school of novel-writing in this country, with its combined vigour and subtlety of character-drawing, and with the marvellous dexterity of its scenes and dramatic situations. The army and military life in all its phases had a remarkable attraction for him; in all his larger books one or more officers are brought prominently upon the foreground of his canvas. He hits off the strong and weak points of the profession, in war and peace, with a truth and humour that gave freshness and originality to the whole subject, and the best of these pictures are in Vanity Fair. There is not one of its leading militaires—Dobbin and Osborne, Crawley and Major O'Dowd—in whom a typical representative of well-known varieties may not be recognised. His fine picturesque handiwork, his consistent preference of the real to the romantic, and his reserve in the use of such tempting materials as the battlefield affords to the story-teller, are shown in his treatment of the episode of Waterloo. He is far too good an artist to lay out for us a grand scene of fierce fighting and carnage; nor does he, like Lever, produce Wellington and Bonaparte acting or speaking up to the popular conception of these mighty heroes. He is content to follow his own personages into that famous field, and to show how perilous circumstance brings out the force or feebleness of each character, male and female, whether of the wives left behind at Brussels, or the soldiers in the fighting line at Waterloo. It is only at the end of his chapter, after some seriocomic incidents and dialogues exhibiting the behaviour of the non-combatants—of Jos Sedley, Mrs. O'Dowd, Lady Bareacres, and the rest—that his narrative rises suddenly to the epic note in a brief passage full of admirable energy and pathos:

'All our friends took their share and fought like men in the great field. All day long, whilst the women were praying ten miles away, the lines of the dauntless English infantry were receiving and repelling the furious charges of the French horsemen. Guns which were heard at Brussels were ploughing up their ranks, and comrades falling, and the resolute survivors closing in. Toward evening the attack of the French, repeated and resisted so bravely, slackened in its fury ... they were preparing for a final onset. It came at last, the columns of the Imperial Guard marched up the hill of St. Jean.... Unscared by the thunder of the artillery, which hurled death from the English line, the dark rolling column pressed on and up the hill. It seemed almost to crest the eminence, when it began to wave and falter. Then it stopped, still facing the shot. Then at last the English troops rushed from the post from which no enemy had been able to dislodge them, and the Guard turned and fled.

'No more firing was heard at Brussels; the pursuit rolled miles away. Darkness came down on the field and city; and Amelia was praying for George who was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet through his heart.'

The military critic might pick holes in this description, and Thackeray might as well have thrown the English infantry into squares instead of into line. Yet the passage is instinct with compressed emotion; and the sudden transition from the general battle to the single death is a good touch of tragic art.

In Pendennis (1850) we may discern the slowly softening influences of years that bring the philosophic mind, of a calmer and easier time, and perhaps also of a different class of readers. Thackeray has now discovered that, as he says in his preface, 'to describe a real rascal you must make him too hideous to show;' and that 'Society will not tolerate the Natural in our Art.' Even the attempt to describe, in Pendennis, one of 'the gentlemen of our age, no better nor worse than most educated men,' has startled the prudery of the public for whom he now finds himself writing. 'Many ladies have remonstrated, and subscribers left me, because, in the course of the story, I described a young man resisting and affected by temptation.' Here, again, is another instance of the changes which rules of taste and convention may undergo in the course of a generation; for surely not even the straitest middle-class sect would in our day banish Pendennis on the score of impropriety. Mrs. Ritchie mentions that the author's descriptions of literary life were criticised on the ground that he was trying to win favour with the non-literary classes by decrying his own profession—an absurd accusation which nettled him into replying. The truth seems to be that Thackeray, who poked fun at the weak sides of every class and calling, saw no reason why he should leave out his own; and the men of letters might have been comforted by observing that he dealt with them much more tenderly than with their natural enemy the publisher, who has taken philosophically, for all we have ever heard, the unmerciful caricatures of Bungay and Bacon in Paternoster Row. Yet it may have been annoying to find such a writer confidentially whispering to his readers 'that there is no race of people who talk about books, or perhaps read books, so little as literary men.'

Pendennis is in Thackeray's best style, as the novelist of manners. It opens, like Vanity Fair, with a short amusing scene that poses, as the French say, some leading actor in the play, and encourages the reader to go on. Next follows, as is usual with our author, a short retrospective account of the people and places among whom the plot is laid, with a descriptive pedigree of his hero. In his habit of setting his portraits in a framework of family history (compare the Crawleys, the Newcomes, the Esmonds) he resembles, though with less prolixity, Balzac, and he displays much knowledge and observation of English provincial life. He is, we imagine, the first high-class writer who brought the Bohemian, possibly an importation from France, into the English novel; and the contrast between the seedy strolling adventurer and strait-laced respectability provides him with material for inexhaustible irony, with much good-natured sympathy for the waifs and strays. He has always a soft corner in his heart for reckless hardihood; and every one must be glad that his 'poor friend Colonel Altamont,' who had been doomed to execution, was respited at the last moment, as Thackeray tells us in his preface, on the very technical plea that the author had not sufficient experience of gaol-birds and the gallows. Merciful good nature toward a daring scamp, who was free with his money and kind to women, was probably at the bottom of the condonation. We know from a paper, reproduced (to our thinking unnecessarily) in one of these volumes, that in 1840 Thackeray went to see Courvoisier hanged, and was so much upset by the spectacle that he prayed for the abolition of capital punishment to wipe out its stain of national blood-guiltiness. It may be noticed, moreover, that his stern denunciation of crime and folly has by this time settled down into a philosophic mood that is almost fatalistic, as when he suggests that 'circumstance only brings out the latent defect or quality, and does not create it'; that 'our mental changes are, like our grey hairs and wrinkles, no more than the fulfilment of the plan of mortal growth and decay,' so that each man is born with the natural seed of fortune or failure. The voyage of life

'has been prosperous, and you are riding into port, the people huzzaing and the guns saluting, and the lucky captain bows from the ship's side, and there is a care under the star on his breast that nobody knows of; or you are wrecked and lashed, hopeless, to a solitary spar out at sea; the sinking man and the successful one are thinking each about home, very likely, and remembering the time when they were children; alone on the hopeless spar, drowning out of sight; alone in the midst of the crowd applauding you.'

In such fine passages as these we hear the elegiac strain of the antique world, wherein remorseless fate held dominion over human efforts and destiny. Like other great writers who are touched with humorous melancholy, he falls often into the moralising vein; he stops his narrative to address his reader with some ironical observation, after the manner of Fielding, whose leisurely tone of satire is so audible in the following quotation from Pendennis that he might well have written it:

'Even his child, his cruel Emily, he would have taken to his heart and forgiven with tears; and what more can one say of the Christian charity of a man than that he is actually ready to forgive those who have done him every kindness, and with whom he is wrong in a dispute?'

As we have said that Vanity Fair touches the climax of Thackeray's peculiar genius, so in our judgment Esmond shows the gathered strength and maturity of his literary power, and has won for him an eminent place in the distinguished order of historical novelists. We may say that the art of historical romance was brought to perfection in our own century, although French writers trace far back into the eighteenth century, and even further, the method of weaving authentic events and famous personages into the tissue of a story which turns upon fictitious adventures in love and war. The elder novelists dealt largely in extravagant sentiment, in conventional language, and in marvellous exploits embroidered upon the sober chronicles which served as the framework of their drama; they were content to set upon stilts the traditional hero or heroine of former days, whose ideas and conversation expressed with little disguise the manners, not of the period to which they belonged, but of the author's own time and of the society for whom he was writing. These books are, therefore, full of glaring anachronisms and improbabilities; the knights and dames are sometimes (as in the Grand Cyrus) thinly veiled portraits of contemporary notabilities, but they are often mere lay figures representing the prevailing fashions of thought and feeling. The virtuous hero abounds in judicious reflections; the heroines are chaste and beauteous damsels—Joan of Arc herself appears in one romance as an adorable shepherdess—and love-making is conducted after the model of a Parisian précieuse.