(Sir Pitt Crawley) unnatural, laughed and said that he was ' almost the only exact portrait in the whole book'. (The original is sometimes said to have been Lord Rolle, the owner of Stevenstone and Bicton in Devonshire, of whose eccentricities Thackeray may have heard in his Larkbeare days.1) It will be observed that the limitation has an important bearing on the much more common identifications of Lord Steyne with Lord Hertford, of Wenham with Croker, &c., though no doubt there was a certain indebtedness, as in the case of Wagg to Theodore Hook. The model of Dobbin referred to is given as Archdeacon Allen, Thackeray's schoolfellow, while he himself assigned portions of Amelia to his mother, his wife and Mrs. Brookfield. The foolishest parts certainly did not belong to the third lady: let us hope they did not to the two others. But it is well to say at once, in reference both to this and to all the other books, that it is a great mistake to lay too much stress on these things. Sir Leslie Stephen has already given a caution on the subject; but it needs emphasizing, for the writer has read a German monograph on Thackeray in which almost the entire biography is laboriously, and with the utmost seriousness, built up out of the details of his novels. Now not merely is this unwarranted and unwarrantable, but it involves a complete and disastrous misapprehension of Thackeray's art and genius.2 Only perhaps in his very earliest period and in his immature Becky herself appears to have had a prosperous prototype. Lady Ritchie saw her once alive, fascinating, and, as one would expect, apparently not in the least angry with the author of her second being.

1

2 He, who knew his Spectator by heart, must have read, and might have taken for motto, Addison's statement of his own practice in No. 262. 'When I draw any faulty character . . . I take care to dash it with such particular circumstances as may prevent all ill-natured applications.' Only he would have known very well, as doubtless did Addison, that you cannot 'prevent' them. You can only make them unjustifiable.

work is he guilty-if even there-of this 'lowest imitation' -this mere carrying off of whole figures from the pageant of life, and botching them into the tapestry of literature That a very large number of his traits, incidents, individual details are taken from, or suggested by, actuality, there need be no doubt-it is in fact the secret and reason of his unsurpassed truth to life itself. But these things ar all passed through the alembic or the loom of art-redistilled or rewoven into original and independent composition The mere fact-if in any case it be a fact that this or that point in the behaviour or history of a personage may have, as the children say, 'really happened' will suffice to suggest, in intelligent minds, a strong suspicion that the next did not happen. There are, let it be laid down, two classes of books that can be brought under this category. There are the books which depend for their interest on the fact that their characters have been live men and women and those which depend for it on the fact that they are live men and women. Thackeray's books belong to the second.

Those other vivifying arts of his which have been many times sketched in general, appear to the full in Vanity Fair. Thackeray does not 'set' his scenes and situations with the minute touches of detail as to furniture and the like, which Dickens borrowed from Smollett and from Scott, and made more specially his province. But he has a setting of his own which places things and persons quite firmly in the reader's conception: and he employs it here from the Academy for young ladies in Chiswick Mall to his final (or almost final) scenes at Pumpernickel. It is, however, perhaps not in actual description of any kind that his life-giving and individualizing touch most fully consists. It is in queer nondescript devices-though device' is a bad word for things that come so naturallytricks of names, humorous or fantastic asides—indescribable confidences as it were between himself and his reader, which establish intimate relations. In particular his

6

extraordinary science of names' has rightly attracted attention. Take for instance the quaint whimsy (arising probably from the old slang of quite the cheese') of the tatalogue of Becky's guests the Duchess Dowager of Stilton, Duc de la Gruyère, Marchioness of Cheshire, Marchese Alessandro Strachino, Comte de Brie, Baron Schapsuger and [most whimsical of all] Chevalier Tosti'. And it is very important to notice that this is not done in burlesque fashion-even to the extent in which he himself would have done it earlier. There is no head-over-heelsno tongue-in-cheek even. The passage—or rather the clause -forms part of a perfectly serious paragraph; the author takes not the slightest trouble to draw attention to it; in fact he glides off into more quietly humorous nomenclature of the same kind, leaving this also unadvertisedunheralded by so much as a 'hem' or a wink to invite admiration. Moreover these names (compare the grimmer list of the Marquis of Steyne's titles) are in no respect grotesque or impossible. Baron Pitchley and Grillsby' Why not? Why not 'Pitchley' if Pytchley'? Why not Grillsby' if Grimsby'?

C

It is with these subtle condiments of humour and suggestion that the author seasons his whole book. Whether it has-or has not, the best story' as he himself thoughthe was quite right as to the excellence of the title. In the steady maintenance of the point of view of that title— so admirably defined and described in the Preface-its greatest merit as a book, from the severe old critical standpoint, perhaps consists. Its greatest claim to admiration, with some at least, is in the lavish and masterly presentation of character-too uniformly sombre-tinted it may be, but faultlessly drawn-from the triumph of Becky downwards. But its greatest attraction of all is in the constant procession-pageant of scenes and incidents which serve to bring out these characters, and in the wonderful dexterity and variety of presentation and style—

one or two only of the devices of which have just been pointed out. From the older review-point, perhaps, one objection and not a light or easily removed one, may be brought against a certain stagnation in the narrative between Waterloo and Becky's last stage of triumph and fall. The author does not quite take the gap flying (as his business would have allowed him to do), nor does he fill it sufficiently: and though Becky's career is of the highest interest, its stages are neither very probably nor at all fully made out: while the sordid sufferings of the Sedleys and the dreary prosperity of the Osbornes are rather too like the class of situations which Mr. Arnold stigmatized, in a famous passage, at the expense of his own work. But even here the manner is great. So also the Devil's Advocate may say, with some truth, that in the opening or ante-Waterloo part, which occupies half the book, the action somewhat drags, and that, though the Amelia and Becky stories are ingeniously enough intertwisted, the transitions from one to the other, and even some of the scenes themselves, do not go off trippingly' as Captain Clutterbuck says. Still, once more, the manner saves everything: and so it does in the latest division of the book which succeeds the discovery of Becky's misdoings.

But there is another part where, though the manner is more triumphant than ever, the matter partakes the triumph and is fully worthy of its less unequal partner. From the beginning of Chapter xliv, when Sir Pitt fils comes to stay in Curzon Street, to the great catastrophe itself, the artist is thoroughly inspired, the rider has settled to the race, and is getting every possible effort out of the horse. Not merely is it all good, but there is in it that steady crescendo of expectation and satisfaction which only occurs at the supreme moments of life and of literature. The catastrophe itself is simply beyond praise-it is one of the greatest things in English: but it is perfectly led up to. For, as in other uncertain and accidental matri

monies, when matter and manner do go thoroughly together, then all is indeed well. In these hundred pages-they come to about that in closely printed editions-there is not a line, not a phrase that is weak or wrong. There is nothing like them anywhere-one may know one's Balzac pretty well and look in vain for their equal in him, while anywhere else it is simply vain even to look. The variety, the intensity, the cool equal command, are not only unmatched, they are unmatchable in novel-literature: and the circumstances preclude their being matched in any other. Most novelists stray into fields where they are strangers, and get hedged or ditched: some keep to known but limited ground and are monotonous. Thackeray here is Kúde yaiwv. He cannot go wrong. κύδεϊ γαίων. The very Sedley

Osborne scenes throw up what is now the main plot-the 'splendour and misery' of Becky-like the Porter scene in Macbeth or the Fool and Edgar in Lear. The visit to Queen's Crawley; the irruption of Becky into the highest circles'; her double management of Sir Pitt and Lord Steyne; the charade; the plot; its defeat by Lady Jane's innocent agency; the great catastrophe itself; the almost greater negotiations about the duel; the comic justice of the Coventry Island appointment—all these with minor things hardly less wonderful in their way, do the part of the matter. And the manner plays up in unfailing provision of style and atmosphere, of satire, and pathos, and humour, and criticism of life'.

Not that one would attempt to belittle a hundred things before the departure from Minerva House1; Becky's residence with the Sedleys and the minor catastrophes (warnings too unheeded) of the curry and the Vauxhall punch; the mighty combat of Figs and Cuff; the intro

1

1 Anthony Trollope surely made an amazing blunder when he objected to Becky's return of the 'Dixonary' as unnatural. She would not have done it later as she was then it is one of the most 'inevitable' touches in all fiction.