Ivanhoe and the Mousquetaires.  It is possible that he was afraid of passion, and had no manner of interest in crime.  But then, how hard he bore upon snobs, and how vigorously he lashed the smaller vices and the meaner faults!  It may be beyond dispute that he was seldom good at romance, and saw most things—art and nature included—rather prosaically and ill-naturedly, as he might see them who has been for many years a failure, and is naturally a little resentful of other men’s successes; but then, how brilliant are his studies of club humanity and club manners! how thoroughly he understands the feelings of them that go down into the West in broughams!  If he writes by preference for people with a

thousand a year, is it not the duty of everybody with a particle of self-respect to have that income?  Is it possible that any one who has it not can have either wit or sentiment, humour or understanding?  Thackeray writes of gentlemen for gentlemen; therefore he is alone among artists; therefore he is ‘the greatest novelist of his age.’  That is the faith of the true believer: that the state of mind of him that reveres less wisely than thoroughly, and would rather be damned with Thackeray than saved with any one else.

His Critics.

The position of them that wear their rue with a difference, and do not agree that all literature is contained in The Book of Snobs and Vanity Fair, is more easily defended.  They like and admire their Thackeray in many ways, but they think him rather a writer of genius who was innately and irredeemably a Philistine than a supreme artist or a great man.  To them there is something artificial in the man and something insincere in the artist: something which makes it seem natural that his best work should smack of the literary tour de force, and that he should never have appeared to such advantage as when, in Esmond and in Barry Lyndon, he was writing up to a standard and upon a model

not wholly of his own contrivance.  They admit his claim to eminence as an adventurer in ‘the discovery of the Ugly’; but they contend that even there he did his work more shrewishly and more pettily than he might; and in this connection they go so far as to reflect that a snob is not only ‘one who meanly admires mean things,’ as his own definition declares, but one who meanly detests mean things as well.  They agree with Walter Bagehot that to be perpetually haunted by the plush behind your chair is hardly a sign of lofty literary and moral genius; and they consider him narrow and vulgar in his view of humanity, limited in his outlook upon life, inclined to be envious, inclined to be tedious and pedantic, prone to repetitions, and apt in bidding for applause to appeal to the baser qualities of his readers and to catch their sympathy by making them feel themselves spitefully superior to their fellow-men.  They look at his favourite heroines—at Laura and Ethel and Amelia; and they can but think him stupid who could ever have believed them interesting or admirable or attractive or true.  They listen while he regrets it is impossible for him to attempt the picture of a man; and, with Barry Lyndon in their mind’s eye and the knowledge that Casanova and Andrew Bowes suggested no more than that, they wonder if the impossibility was not a piece of luck for him.  They hear him heaping contumely upon the murders and adulteries, the

excesses in emotion, that pleased the men of 1830 as they had pleased the Elizabethans before them; and they see him turning with terror and loathing from these—which after all are effects of vigorous passion—to busy himself with the elaborate and careful narrative of how Barnes Newcome beat his wife, and Mrs. Mackenzie scolded Colonel Newcome to death, and old Twysden bragged and cringed himself into good society and an interest in the life and well-being of a little cad like Captain Woolcomb; and it is not amazing if they think his morality more dubious in some ways than the morality he is so firmly fixed to ridicule and to condemn.  They reflect that he sees in Beatrix no more than the makings of a Bernstein; and they are puzzled, when they come to mark the contrast between the two portraitures and the difference between the part assigned to Mrs. Esmond and the part assigned to the Baroness, to decide if he were short-sighted or ungenerous, if he were inapprehensive or only cruel.  They weary easily of his dogged and unremitting pursuit of the merely conventional man and the merely conventional woman; they cannot always bring themselves to be interested in the cupboard drama, the tea-cup tragedies and cheque-book and bandbox comedies, which he regards as the stuff of human action and the web of human life; and from their theory of existence they positively refuse to eliminate the heroic qualities of romance

and mystery and passion, which are—as they have only to open their newspapers to see—essentials of human achievement and integral elements of human character.  They hold that his books contain some of the finest stuff in fiction: as, for instance, Rawdon Crawley’s discovery of his wife and Lord Steyne, and Henry Esmond’s return from the wars, and those immortal chapters in which the Colonel and Frank Castlewood pursue and run down their kinswoman and the Prince.  But they hold, too, that their influence is dubious, and that few have risen from them one bit the better or one jot the happier.

Which is Right?

Genius apart, Thackeray’s morality is that of a highly respectable British cynic; his intelligence is largely one of trifles; he is wise over trivial and trumpery things.  He delights in reminding us—with an air!—that everybody is a humbug; that we are all rank snobs; that to misuse your aspirates is to be ridiculous and incapable of real merit; that Miss Blank has just slipped out to post a letter to Captain Jones; that Miss Dash wears false teeth and a wig; that General Tufto is almost as tightly laced as the beautiful Miss Hopper; that there’s a bum-bailiff in the kitchen at Number Thirteen; that the

dinner we ate t’other day at Timmins’s is still to pay; that all is vanity; that there’s a skeleton in every house; that passion, enthusiasm, excess of any sort, is unwise, abominable, a little absurd; and so forth.  And side by side with these assurances are admirable sketches of character and still more admirable sketches of habit and of manners—are the Pontos and Costigan, Gandish and Talbot Twysden and the unsurpassable Major, Sir Pitt and Brand Firmin, the heroic De la Pluche and the engaging Farintosh and the versatile Honeyman, a crowd of vivid and diverting portraitures besides; but they are not different—in kind at least—from the reflections suggested by the story of their several careers and the development of their several individualities.  Esmond apart, there is scarce a man or a woman in Thackeray whom it is possible to love unreservedly or thoroughly respect.  That gives the measure of the man, and determines the quality of his influence.  He was the average clubman plus genius and a style.  And, if there is any truth in the theory that it is the function of art not to degrade but to ennoble—not to dishearten but to encourage—not to deal with things ugly and paltry and mean but with great things and beautiful and lofty—then, it is argued, his example is one to depreciate and to condemn.