Emerson, commenting upon the old saying that “No man is a hero to his valet,” put the question: “What hero ever had a valet?” This goes to prove that Emerson was not a reader of popular fiction; for if he had been following the novels of William Makepeace Thackeray in “Fraser’s Magazine,” he would have known that it is impossible for any hero to be without a valet. In Dickens we enter into the lives of the poor, and in Thackeray we enter into the lives of the rich, and it is hard for us to decide which class has the greater claim to our pity.
Thackeray was bom in India, his father being a government official. They tried to educate him at Cambridge, but it didn’t take, because he was incorrigibly desultory, a big, good-natured fellow who loved eating and drinking and gambling and good fellowship—everything, in short, but hard work. He early lost his fortune, trying to publish a paper; then he had to work, and became a contributor to “Punch,” and developed a faculty for burlesque verses and satiric sketches.
In my youth there was general complaint that Thackeray was “a cynic.” Let us settle that question at the outset; he was one of the most sentimental souls that ever walked about the world in trousers. But he had a pair of eyes, and he saw in the fashionable society around him a hundred different varieties of snobs; he collected them into a “Book of Snobs”—each one like a butterfly stuck on a pin. He went on to write a series of novels, full of scoldings varied by ridicule of human vanity and folly.
His first great work remains entirely neglected by the critics. “Barry Lyndon” is a marvelous piece of sustained irony, the story of a capable scoundrel, who makes his way in the great world by being just a little sharper than the people he meets, and a little more honest with himself. You recall how Milton, a devout and orthodox Puritan, could not refrain from making Satan heroic, because Satan was a rebel and Milton was another. We notice the same phenomenon in this case of Barry Lyndon, who does every kind of rascal thing; yet the fact remains, he is living by his wits, he is surviving in a world of privilege and power, and Thackeray is secretly thrilled by him. That doubtless accounts for the unpopularity of the story; for the average novel reader likes to have his villains labeled, and not to mix his blacks and his whites.
The instinctive rebel in Thackeray shows himself still more plainly in “Vanity Fair.” This time the villain is Becky Sharp, an utterly heartless intriguer, selling her sex for money and power. Nevertheless, she is a woman “on her own,” a little tiger-cat backed into a corner, with all the world poking sticks at her; she fights back, and gets the best of her enemies, and Thackeray cannot help making her the most interesting figure in the book.
As a respectable Victorian sentimentalist, he did his best to provide us with a foil for Becky, giving us Amelia Sedley, the perfect, submissive, adoring female. The daughter of a wealthy merchant, Amelia has never had a moment’s discomfort in her life. She is a model of the Victorian virtues; she honors and serves the male members of her family, no matter how selfish and worthless they may be. She has the brains of a medium-sized rabbit, and after we have got to know her, we understand why Victorian gentlemen sought refuge in interesting mistresses.
It has been said that in Thackeray’s novels all the good people are fools and all the evil people are clever. Beatrix Esmond, the one woman who rivals Becky Sharp in interest, is a cold, proud beauty, without even Becky’s excuse of poverty; she schemes to marry a duke, and when he is killed in a duel, she seeks to become the mistress of a prince, and ends ignominously as the wife of a tutor and the widow of a bishop. The Anti-Socialist Union of Great Britain, which exists to fight the “Reds,” should begin its labors by excluding from all libraries these devastating pictures of the manners and morals of the ruling classes.
I do not mean by this that Thackeray was consciously a Socialist; quite the contrary. As a member of the ruling classes, he pleads with them to be worthy of their high and agreeable destiny. How completely he believed in the “gentleman” you can see by the treatment he gives to his hero, Pendennis, a perfectly worthless young idler, and to Major Pendennis, a cynical and depraved old rascal. Thackeray condones the former and loves and pities the latter, and expects us to weep over the closing picture of the old martinet, having lost his fortune, obliged to dwell in a charity home with other indigent parasites. I speak for one reader, who could have borne with entire equanimity to see the major at work on the rock-pile, accompanied by all the other idle clubmen of London.
Thackeray in his writings rebelled against some conventions of his world, but in his every-day life he was as helpless as Amelia Sedley. His wife became insane, so he fell victim of that superstition which condemns the innocent partner in such a marriage to life-long celibacy. Thackeray, enduring this infliction, seemed heroic to his friends, and pitiful to us. He left it to a woman novelist, George Eliot, to set the precedent of defiance to this especially idiotic tribal taboo. George Eliot loved George Henry Lewes, who had an insane wife, and she went and lived with Lewes for twenty-four years, until his death, and told all the world about it. Thus we have one pleasant detail to record concerning Victorian England.
In his early days Thackeray had lived poorly, because he had to; but later he acquired a taste for expensive food, and especially drink, and thereby ruined his health and died at the age of fifty-two. This, of course, was devoutly concealed by his daughters, and explains the fact that no biography was published. Like other conventional gentlemen, he felt bound to provide incomes for these daughters, so he wasted his time trying to get some government sinecure, first in the post office, and then in the diplomatic service—the very kind of thing he exposed in his stories. He took to lecturing, following in the foot-steps of Dickens, but not enjoying the work, because he had nothing of the showman in him, but on the contrary the English gentleman’s intense reserve.