His Style.

Thus the two sects: the sect of them that are with Thackeray and the sect of them that are against him.  Where both agree is in the fact of Thackeray’s pre-eminence as a writer of English and the master of one of the finest prose styles in literature.  His manner is the perfection of conversational writing.  Graceful yet vigorous; adorably artificial yet incomparably sound; touched with modishness yet informed with distinction; easily and happily rhythmical yet full of colour and quick with malice and with meaning; instinct with urbanity and instinct with charm—it is a type of high-bred English, a climax of literary art.  He may not have been a great man but assuredly he was a great writer; he may have been a faulty novelist but assuredly he was a rare artist in words.  Setting aside Cardinal Newman’s, the style he wrote is certainly less open to criticism than that of any other modern Englishman.  He was neither super-eloquent like Mr. Ruskin nor a Germanised Jeremy like Carlyle; he was not marmoreally emphatic as Landor was, nor was he slovenly and inexpressive as was the great Sir Walter; he neither dallied with antithesis like Macaulay nor rioted in verbal vulgarisms with Dickens; he abstained from technology and what may be called Lord-Burleighism as carefully as George Eliot indulged in them, and he avoided conceits as sedulously as Mr. George Meredith goes out of his way to hunt for them.  He is a better

writer than any one of these, in that he is always a master of speech and of himself, and that he is always careful yet natural and choice yet seemingly spontaneous.  He wrote as a very prince among talkers, and he interfused and interpenetrated English with the elegant and cultured fashion of the men of Queen Anne and with something of the warmth, the glow, the personal and romantic ambition, peculiar to the century of Byron and Keats, of Landor and Dickens, of Ruskin and Tennyson and Carlyle.  Unlike his only rival, he had learnt his art before he began to practise it.  Of the early work of the greater artist a good half is that of a man in the throes of education: the ideas, the thoughts, the passion, the poetry, the humour, are of the best, but the expression is self-conscious, strained, ignorant.  Thackeray had no such blemish.  He wrote dispassionately, and he was a born writer.  In him there is no hesitation, no fumbling, no uncertainty.  The style of Barry Lyndon is better and stronger and more virile than the style of Philip; and unlike the other man’s, whose latest writing is his best, their author’s evolution was towards decay.

His Mission.

He is so superior a person that to catch him tripping is a peculiar pleasure.  It is a satisfaction

apart, for instance, to reflect that he has (it must be owned) a certain gentility of mind.  Like the M.P. in Martin Chuzzlewit, he represents the Gentlemanly Interest.  That is his mission in literature, and he fulfils it thoroughly.  He appears sometimes as Mr. Yellowplush, sometimes as Mr. Fitzboodle, sometimes as Michael Angelo Titmarsh, but always in the Gentlemanly Interest.  In his youth (as ever) he is found applauding the well-bred Charles de Bernard, and remarking of Balzac and Dumas that the one is ‘not fit for the salon,’ and the other ‘about as genteel as a courier.’  Balzac and Dumas are only men of genius and great artists: the real thing is to be ‘genteel’ and write—as Gerfeuil (sic) is written—‘in a gentleman-like style.’  A few pages further on in the same pronouncement (a review of Jérôme Paturot), I find him quoting with entire approval Reybaud’s sketch of ‘a great character, in whom the habitué of Paris will perhaps recognise a certain likeness to a certain celebrity of the present day, by name Monsieur Hector Berlioz, the musician and critic.’  The description is too long to quote.  It sparkles with all the fadaises of anti-Berliozian criticism, and the point is that the hero, after conducting at a private party (which Berlioz never did) his own ‘hymn of the creation that has been lost since the days of the deluge,’ ‘called for his cloak and his clogs, and walked home, where he wrote a critique for the

newspapers of the music which he had composed and directed.’  In the Gentlemanly Interest Mr. Titmarsh translates this sorry little libel with the utmost innocence of approval.  It is The Paris Sketch-Book over again.  That Monsieur Hector Berlioz may possibly have known something of his trade and been withal as honest a man and artist as himself seems never to have occurred to him.  He knows nothing of Monsieur Hector except that he is a ‘hairy romantic,’ and that whatever he wrote it was not Batti, batti; but that nothing is enough.  ‘Whether this little picture is a likeness or not,’ he is ingenuous enough to add, ‘who shall say?’  But,—and here speaks the bold but superior Briton—‘it is a good caricature of a race in France, where geniuses poussent as they do nowhere else; where poets are prophets, where romances have revelations.’  As he goes on to qualify Jérôme Paturot as a ‘masterpiece,’ and as ‘three volumes of satire in which there is not a particle of bad blood,’ it seems fair to conclude that in the Gentlemanly Interest all is considered fair, and that to accuse a man of writing criticisms on his own works is to be ‘witty and entertaining,’ and likewise ‘careless, familiar, and sparkling’ to the genteelest purpose possible in this genteelest of all possible worlds.

DISRAELI

His Novels.

To the general his novels must always be a kind of caviare; for they have no analogue in letters, but are the output of a mind and temper of singular originality.  To the honest Tory, sworn to admire and unable to comprehend, they must seem inexplicable as abnormal.  To the professional Radical they are so many proofs of innate inferiority: for they are full of pretentiousness and affectation; they teem with examples of all manner of vices, from false English to an immoral delight in dukes; they prove their maker a trickster and a charlatan in every page.  To them, however, whose first care is for rare work, the series of novels that began with Vivian Grey and ended with Endymion is one of the pleasant facts in modern letters.  These books abound in wit and daring, in originality and shrewdness, in knowledge of the world and in knowledge of men; they contain many vivid and striking studies of character, both portrait and caricature; they sparkle with speaking phrases and happy epithets; they are aglow with the passion of youth, the love of love, the worship of physical beauty, the admiration of whatever is

costly and select and splendid—from a countess to a castle, from a duke to a diamond; they are radiant with delight in whatever is powerful or personal or attractive—from a cook to a cardinal, from an agitator to an emperor.  They often remind you of Voltaire, often of Balzac, often of The Arabian Nights.  You pass from an heroic drinking bout to a brilliant criticism of style; from rhapsodies on bands and ortolans that remind you of Heine to a gambling scene that for directness and intensity may vie with the bluntest and strongest work of Prosper Mérimée; from the extravagant impudence of Popanilla to the sentimental rodomontade of Henrietta Temple; from ranting romanticism in Alroy to vivid realism in Sybil.