The Connecticut Wits and Other Essays

What is left of Thackeray in this hundredth year since his birth? and how much of him has been eaten away by destructive criticism – or rather by time, that far more corrosive acid, whose silent operation criticism does but record? As the nineteenth century recedes, four names in the English fiction of that century stand out ever more clearly, as the great names: Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot. I know what may be said – what has been said – for others: Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters, Charles Reade, Trollope, Meredith, Stevenson, Hardy. I believe that these will endure, but will endure as writers of a secondary importance. Others are already fading: Bulwer is all gone, and Kingsley is going fast.

The order in which I have named the four great novelists is usually, I think, the order in which the reader comes to them. It is also the order of their publication. For although Thackeray was a year older than Dickens, his first novels were later in date, and he was much later in securing his public. But the chronological reason is not the real reason why we read them in that order. It is because of their different appeal. Scott was a romancer, Dickens a humorist, Thackeray a satirist, and George Eliot a moralist. Each was much more than that; but that was what they were, reduced to the lowest term. Romance, humor, satire, and moral philosophy respectively were their starting point, their strongest impelling force, and their besetting sin. Whenever they fell below themselves, Walter Scott lapsed into sheer romantic unreality, Dickens into extravagant caricature, Thackeray into burlesque, George Eliot into psychology and ethical reflection.

I wonder whether your experience here is the same as mine. By the time that I was fourteen, as nearly as I can remember, I had read all the Waverley novels. Then I got hold of Dickens, and for two or three years I lived in Dickens’s world, though perhaps he and Scott somewhat overlapped at the edge – I cannot quite remember. I was sixteen when Thackeray died, and I heard my elders mourning over the loss. “Dear old Thackeray is gone,” they told each other, and proceeded to reread all his books, with infinite laughter. So I picked up “Vanity Fair” and tried to enjoy it. But fresh from Scott’s picturesque page and Dickens’s sympathetic extravagances, how dull, insipid, repellent, disgusting were George Osborne, and fat Joseph Sedley, and Amelia and Becky! What sillies they were and how trivial their doings! “It’s just about a lot of old girls,” I said to my uncle, who laughed in a provokingly superior manner and replied, “My boy, those old girls are life.” I will confess that even to this day, something of that shock of disillusion, that first cold plunge into “Vanity Fair,” hangs about the book. I understand what Mr. Howells means when he calls it “the poorest of Thackeray’s novels – crude, heavy-handed, caricatured.” I ought to have begun, as he did, with “Pendennis,” of which he writes, “I am still not sure but it is the author’s greatest book.” I don’t know about that, but I know that it is the novel of Thackeray’s that I have read most often and like the best, better than “Henry Esmond” or “Vanity Fair”: just as I prefer “The Mill on the Floss” to “Adam Bede,” and “The House of the Seven Gables” to “The Scarlet Letter” (as Hawthorne did himself, by the way); or as I agree with Dickens that “Bleak House” was his best novel, though the public never thought so. We may concede to the critics that, objectively considered, and by all the rules of judgment, this or that work is its author’s masterpiece and we ought to like it best – only we don’t. We have our private preferences which we cannot explain and do not seek to defend. As for “Esmond,” my comparative indifference to it is only, I suppose, a part of my dislike of the genre. I know the grounds on which the historical novel is recommended, and I know how intimately Thackeray’s imagination was at home in the eighteenth century. Historically that is what he stands for: he was a Queen Anne man – like Austin Dobson: he passed over the great romantic generation altogether and joined on to Fielding and Goldsmith and their predecessors. Still no man knows the past as he does the present. I will take Thackeray’s report of the London of his day; but I do not care very much about his reproduction of the London of 1745. Let me whisper to you that since early youth I have not been able to take much pleasure in the Waverley novels, except those parts of them in which the author presents Scotch life and character as he knew them.

I think it was not till I was seventeen or eighteen, and a freshman in college, that I really got hold of Thackeray; but when once I had done so, the result was to drive Dickens out of my mind, as one nail drives out another. I never could go back to him after that. His sentiment seemed tawdry, his humor, buffoonery. Hung side by side, the one picture killed the other. “Dickens knows,” said Thackeray, “that my books are a protest against him: that, if the one set are true, the other must be false.” There is a species of ingratitude, of disloyalty, in thus turning one’s back upon an old favorite who has furnished one so intense a pleasure and has had so large a share in one’s education. But it is the cruel condition of all growth.

The heavens that now draw him with sweetness untold,Once found, for new heavens he spurneth the old.

But when I advanced to George Eliot, as I did a year or two later, I did not find that her fiction and Thackeray’s destroyed each other. I have continued to reread them both ever since and with undiminished satisfaction. And yet it was, in some sense, an advance. I would not say that George Eliot was a greater novelist than Thackeray, nor even so great. But her message is more gravely intellectual: the psychology of her characters more deeply studied: the problems of life and mind more thoughtfully confronted. Thought, indeed, thought in itself and apart from the story, which is only a chosen illustration of a thesis, seems her principal concern. Thackeray is always concrete, never speculative or abstract. The mimetic instinct was strong in him, but weak in his great contemporary, to the damage and the final ruin of her art. His method was observation, hers analysis. Mr. Brownell says that Thackeray’s characters are “delineated rather than dissected.” There is little analysis, indeed hardly any literary criticism in his “English Humorists”: only personal impressions. He deals with the men, not with the books. The same is true of his art criticisms. He is concerned with the sentiment of the picture, seldom with its technique, or even with its imaginative or expressional power.

In saying that Dickens was essentially a humorist and Thackeray a satirist, I do not mean, of course, that the terms are mutually exclusive. Thackeray was a great humorist as well as a satirist, but Dickens was hardly a satirist at all. I know that Mr. Chesterton says he was, but I cannot believe it. He cites “Martin Chuzzlewit.” Is “Martin Chuzzlewit” a satire on the Americans? It is a caricature – a very gross caricature – a piece of bouffe. But it lacks the true likeness which is the sting of satire. Dickens and Thackeray had, in common, a quick sense of the ridiculous, but they employed it differently. Dickens was a humorist almost in the Ben Jonsonian sense: his field was the odd, the eccentric, the grotesque – sometimes the monstrous; his books, and especially his later books, are full of queer people, frequently as incredible as Jonson’s dramatis personae. In other words, he was a caricaturist. Mr. Howells says that Thackeray was a caricaturist, but I do not think he was so except incidentally; while Dickens was constantly so. When satire identifies itself with its object, it takes the form of parody. Thackeray was a parodist, a travesty writer, an artist in burlesque. What is the difference between caricature and parody? I take it to be this, that caricature is the ludicrous exaggeration of character for purely comic effect, while parody is its ludicrous imitation for the purpose of mockery. Now there is plenty of invention in Dickens, but little imitation. He began with broad facetiae– “Sketches by Boz” and the “Pickwick Papers”; while Thackeray began with travesty and kept up the habit more or less all his life. At the Charterhouse he spent his time in drawing burlesque representations of Shakespeare, and composing parodies on L. E. L. and other lady poets. At Cambridge he wrote a mock-heroic “Timbuctoo,” the subject for the prize poem of the year – a prize which Tennyson captured. Later he wrote those capital travesties, “Rebecca and Rowena” and “Novels by Eminent Hands.” In “Fitzboodle’s Confessions” he wrote a sentimental ballad, “The Willow Tree,” and straightway a parody of the same. You remember Lady Jane Sheepshanks who composed those lines comparing her youth to

A violet shrinking meanlyWhere blow the March winds3 keenly —A timid fawn on wildwood lawnWhere oak-boughs rustle greenly.

I cannot describe the gleeful astonishment with which I discovered that Thackeray was even aware of our own excellent Mrs. Sigourney, whose house in Hartford I once inhabited (et nos in Arcadia). The passage is in “Blue-Beard’s Ghost.” “As Mrs. Sigourney sweetly sings: —

“ ‘O the heart is a soft and delicate thing,O the heart is a lute with a thrilling string,A spirit that floats on a gossamer’s wing.’

Such was Fatima’s heart.” Do not try to find these lines in Mrs. Sigourney’s complete poems: they are not there. Thackeray’s humor always had this satirical edge to it. Look at any engraving of the bust by Deville (the replica of which is in the National Portrait Gallery), which was taken when its subject was fourteen years old. There is a quizzical look about the mouth, prophetic and unmistakable. That boy is a tease: I would not like to be his little sister. And this boyish sense of fun never deserted the mature Thackeray. I like to turn sometimes from his big novels, to those delightful “Roundabout Papers” and the like where he gives a free rein to his frolic: “Memorials of Gormandizing,” the “Ballads of Policeman X,” “Mrs. Perkins’ Ball,” where the Mulligan of Ballymulligan, disdaining the waltz step of the Saxon, whoops around the room with his terrified partner in one of the dances of his own green land. Or that paper which describes how the author took the children to the zoölogical gardens, and how

First he saw the white bear, then he saw the black,Then he saw the camel with a hump upon his back.Chorus of Children:Then he saw the camel with the HUMP upon his back.

Of course in all comic art there is a touch of caricature, i.e., of exaggeration. The Rev. Charles Honeyman in “The Newcomes,” e.g., has been denounced as a caricature. But compare him with any of Dickens’s clerical characters, such as Stiggins or Chadband, and say which is the fine art and which the coarse. And this brings me to the first of those particulars in which we do not view Thackeray quite as his contemporaries viewed him. In his own time he was regarded as the greatest of English realists. “I have no head above my eyes,” he said. “I describe what I see.” It is thus that Anthony Trollope regarded him, whose life of Thackeray was published in 1879. And of his dialogue, in special, Trollope writes, “The ear is never wounded by a tone that is false.” It is not quite the same to-day. Zola and the roman naturaliste of the French and Russian novelists have accustomed us to forms of realism so much more drastic that Thackeray’s realism seems, by comparison, reticent and partial. Not that he tells falsehoods, but that he does not and will not tell the whole truth. He was quite conscious, himself, of the limits which convention and propriety imposed upon him and he submitted to them willingly. “Since the author of ‘Tom Jones’ was buried,” he wrote, “no writer of fiction has been permitted to depict, to his utmost power, a Man.” Thackeray’s latest biographer, Mr. Whibley, notes in him certain early Victorian prejudices. He wanted to hang a curtain over Etty’s nudities. Goethe’s “Wahlverwandtschaften” scandalized him. He found the drama of Victor Hugo and Dumas “profoundly immoral and absurd”; and had no use for Balzac, his own closest parallel in French fiction. Mr. G. B. Shaw, the blasphemer of Shakespeare, speaks of Thackeray’s “enslaved mind,” yet admits that he tells the truth in spite of himself. “He exhausts all his feeble pathos in trying to make you sorry for the death of Col. Newcome, imploring you to regard him as a noble-hearted gentleman, instead of an insufferable old fool.. but he gives you the facts about him faithfully.” But the denial of Thackeray’s realism goes farther than this and attacks in some instances the truthfulness of his character portrayal. Thus Mr. Whibley, who acknowledges, in general, that Thackeray was “a true naturalist,” finds that the personages in several of his novels are “drawn in varying planes.” Charles Honeyman and Fred Bayham, e.g., are frank caricatures; Helen and Laura Pendennis, and “Stunning” Warrington are somewhat unreal; Colonel Newcome is overdrawn – “the travesty of a man”; and even Beatrix Esmond, whom Mr. Brownell pronounces her creator’s masterpiece, is a “picturesque apparition rather than a real woman.” And finally comes Mr. Howells and affirms that Thackeray is no realist but a caricaturist: Jane Austen and Trollope are the true realists.

Well, let it be granted that Thackeray is imperfectly realistic. I am not concerned to defend him. Nor shall I enter into this wearisome discussion of what realism is or is not, further than to say that I don’t believe the thing exists; that is, I don’t believe that photographic fiction – the “mirror up to nature” fiction – exists or can exist. A mirror reflects, a photograph reproduces its object without selection or rejection. Does any artist do this? Try to write the history of one day: everything – literally everything – that you have done, said, thought: and everything that you have seen done, or heard said during twenty-four hours. That would be realism, but, suppose it possible, what kind of reading would it make? The artist must select, reject, combine, and he does it differently from every other artist: he mixes his personality with his art, colors his art with it. The point of view from which he works is personal to himself: satire is a point of view, humor is a point of view, so is religion, so is morality, so is optimism or pessimism, or any philosophy, temper, or mood. In speaking of the great Russians Mr. Howells praises their “transparency of style, unclouded by any mist of the personality which we mistakenly value in style, and which ought no more to be there than the artist’s personality should be in a portrait.” This seems to me true; though it was said long ago, the style is the man. Yet if this transparency, this impersonality is measurably attainable in the style, it is not so in the substance of the novel. If an impersonal report of life is the ideal of naturalistic or realistic fiction – and I don’t say it is – then it is an impossible ideal. People are saying now that Zola is a romantic writer. Why? Because, however well documented, his facts are selected to make a particular impression. I suppose the reason why Thackeray’s work seemed so much more realistic to his generation than it does to ours was that his particular point of view was that of the satirist, and his satire was largely directed to the exposure of cant, humbug, affectation, and other forms of unreality. Disillusion was his trade. He had no heroes, and he saw all things in their unheroic and unromantic aspect. You all know his famous caricature of Ludovicus Rex inside and outside of his court clothes: a most majestic, bewigged and beruffled grand monarque: and then a spindle-shanked, pot-bellied, bald little man – a good illustration for a chapter in “Sartor Resartus.” The ship in which Thackeray was sent home from India, a boy of six, touched at St. Helena and he saw Napoleon. He always remembered him as a little fat man in a suit of white duck and a palm-leaf hat.

Thackeray detested pose and strut and sham heroics. He called Byron “a big sulky dandy.” “Lord Byron,” he said, “wrote more cant.. than any poet I know of. Think of the ‘peasant girls with dark blue eyes’ of the Rhine – the brown-faced, flat-nosed, thick-lipped, dirty wenches! Think of ‘filling high a cup of Samian wine’:.. Byron himself always drank gin.” The captain in “The White Squall” does not pace the deck like a dark-browed corsair, but calls, “George, some brandy and water!”

And this reminds me of Thackeray’s poetry. Of course one who held this attitude toward the romantic and the heroic could not be a poet in the usual sense. Poetry holds the quintessential truth, but, as Bacon says, it “subdues the shows of things to the desires of the mind”; while realism clings to the shows of things, and satire disenchants, ravels the magic web which the imagination weaves. Heine was both satirist and poet, but he was each by turns, and he had the touch of ideality which Thackeray lacked. Yet Thackeray wrote poetry and good poetry of a sort. But it has beauty purely of sentiment, never of the imagination that transcends the fact. Take the famous lines with which this same “White Squall” closes:

And when, its force expended,The harmless storm was ended,And as the sunrise splendid  Came blushing o’er the sea;I thought, as day was breaking,My little girls were wakingAnd smiling and making  A prayer at home for me.

And such is the quality of all his best things in verse – “The Mahogany Tree,” “The Ballad of Bouillebaisse,” “The End of the Play”; a mixture of humor and pensiveness, homely fact and sincere feeling.

Another modern criticism of Thackeray is that he is always interrupting his story with reflections. This fault, if it is a fault, is at its worst in “The Newcomes,” from which a whole volume of essays might be gathered. The art of fiction is a progressive art and we have learned a great deal from the objective method of masters like Turgenev, Flaubert, and Maupassant. I am free to confess, that, while I still enjoy many of the passages in which the novelist appears as chorus and showman, I do find myself more impatient of them than I used to be. I find myself skipping a good deal. I wonder if this is also your experience. I am not sure, however, but there are signs of a reaction against the slender, episodic, short-story kind of fiction, and a return to the old-fashioned, biographical novel. Mr. Brownell discusses this point and says that “when Thackeray is reproached with ‘bad art’ for intruding upon his scene, the reproach is chiefly the recommendation of a different technique. And each man’s technique is his own.” The question, he acutely observes, is whether Thackeray’s subjectivity destroys illusion or deepens it. He thinks that the latter is true. I will not argue the point further than to say that, whether clumsy or not, Thackeray’s method is a thoroughly English method and has its roots in the history of English fiction. He is not alone in it. George Eliot, Hawthorne, and Trollope and many others practise it; and he learned it from his master, Fielding.

Fifty years ago it was quite common to describe Thackeray as a cynic, a charge from which Shirley Brooks defended him in the well-known verses contributed to “Punch” after the great novelist’s death. Strange that such a mistake should ever have been made about one whose kindness is as manifest in his books as in his life: “a big, fierce, weeping man,” as Carlyle grotesquely describes him: a writer in whom we find to-day even an excess of sentiment and a persistent geniality which sometimes irritates. But the source of the misapprehension is not far to seek. His satiric and disenchanting eye saw, with merciless clairvoyance, the disfigurements of human nature, and dwelt upon them perhaps unduly. He saw

How very weak the very wise,How very small the very great are.

Moreover, as with many other humorists, with Thomas Hood and Mark Twain and Abraham Lincoln (who is one of the foremost American humorists), a deep melancholy underlay his fun. Vanitas vanitatum is the last word of his philosophy. Evil seemed to him stronger than good and death better than life. But he was never bitter: his pen was driven by love, not hate. Swift was the true cynic, the true misanthrope; and Thackeray’s dislike of him has led him into some injustice in his chapter on Swift in “The English Humorists.” And therefore I have never been able to enjoy “The Luck of Barry Lyndon” which has the almost unanimous praises of the critics. The hard, artificial irony of the book – maintained, of course, with superb consistency – seems to me uncharacteristic of its author. It repels and wearies me, as does its model, “Jonathan Wild.” Swift’s irony I enjoy because it is the natural expression of his character. With Thackeray it is a mask.

Lastly I come to a point often urged against Thackeray. The favorite target of his satire was the snob. His lash was always being laid across flunkeyism, tuft hunting, the “mean admiration of mean things,” such as wealth, rank, fashion, title, birth. Now, it is said, his constant obsession with this subject, his acute consciousness of social distinctions, prove that he is himself one of the class that he is ridiculing. “Letters four do form his name,” to use a phrase of Dr. Holmes, who is accused of the same weakness, and, I think, with more reason. Well, Thackeray owned that he was a snob, and said that we are all of us snobs in a greater or less degree. Snobbery is the fat weed of a complex civilization, where grades are unfixed, where some families are going down and others rising in the world, with the consequent jealousies, heartburnings, and social struggles. In India, I take it, where a rigid caste system prevails, there are no snobs. A Brahmin may refuse to eat with a lower caste man, whose touch is contamination, but he does not despise him as the gentleman despises the cad, as the man who eats with a fork despises the man who eats with a knife, or as the educated Englishman despises the Cockney who drops his h’s, or the Boston Brahmin the Yankee provincial who says haöw, the woman who callates, and the gent who wears pants. In feudal ages the lord might treat the serf like a beast of the field. The modern swell does not oppress his social inferior: he only calls him a bounder. In primitive states of society differences in riches, station, power are accepted quite simply: they do not form ground for envy or contempt. I used to be puzzled by the conventional epithet applied by Homer to Eumaeus – “the godlike swineherd” – which is much as though one should say, nowadays, the godlike garbage collector. But when Pope writes he writes a lying platitude. In the eighteenth century, and in the twentieth, honor and fame do rise from condition. Now in the presence of the supreme tragic emotions, of death, of suffering, all men are equal. But this social inequality is the region of the comedy of manners, and that is the region in which Thackeray’s comedy moves – the comédie mondaine, if not the full comédie humaine. It is a world of convention, and he is at home in it, in the world and a citizen of the world. Of course it is not primitively human. Manners are a convention: but so are morals, laws, society, the state, the church. I suppose it is because Thackeray dwelt contentedly in these conventions and rather liked them although he laughed at them, that Shaw calls him an enslaved mind. At any rate, this is what Mr. Howells means when he writes: “When he made a mock of snobbishness, I did not know but snobbishness was something that might be reached and cured by ridicule. Now I know that so long as we have social inequality we shall have snobs: we shall have men who bully and truckle, and women who snub and crawl. I know that it is futile to spurn them, or lash them for trying to get on in the world, and that the world is what it must be from the selfish motives which underlie our economic life… This is the toxic property of all Thackeray’s writing… He rails at the order of things, but he imagines nothing different.” In other words, Thackeray was not a socialist, as Mr. Shaw is, and Mr. Howells, and as we are all coming measurably to be. Meanwhile, however, equality is a dream.

Honor and fame from no condition rise

All his biographers are agreed that Thackeray was honestly fond of mundane advantages. He liked the conversation of clever, well-mannered gentlemen, and the society of agreeable, handsome, well-dressed women. He liked to go to fine houses: liked his club, and was gratified when asked to dine with Sir Robert Peel or the Duke of Devonshire. Speaking of the South and of slavery, he confessed that he found it impossible to think ill of people who gave you such good claret.