it be the philosophical movement, it produces at once the conservative utterances of Wordsworth, the stoicism of Southey, or the socialistic utopias of Shelley and the pagan epicureanism of Byron. That which on the one hand has prompted lofty musings on man, sacred through his divine possession and destiny, will on the other hand stimulate hatred and contempt, urging its agent to rend or defy him. "Dogs, or men-for I flatter you by saying This fact, so distinctly visible in the sudden development of the reflective and democratic spirit in the poetry of the commencement of the century, exhibits itself later in the history of the Novel. It produced on the one hand Charles Dickens, the philanthropist, the ardent and expansive lover of men, women, and children; the defender of the poor, the apologist for the wealthy; † with hatred only for hypocrisy and cruelty, and with a sense of justice born of his charity, that will not deny the possession of virtues to the aristocrat nor of vices to the poor, On the other hand it produced Thackeray, the cynic, the satirist, the lover of moral theses, the lay preacher; less devoted to defending the poor, wholly devoted to censuring mankind in general, and the aristocracy in particular; a writer who is nothing if not critical; a man who in the main body of his works affects us less as an artist than does Dickens ; but who, in the strength of his mental attainments, caustic powers of satire, and logical method, looms larger on the intellectual horizon. Herein lies the contrast: Dickens is an idealist, a man who believes in the highest possibilities for his fellowmen; his highest philosopher may be a pedlar, like Wordsworth's, or his greatest hero may be a drunkard; given the divine flame of charity and of love, and there is no height to which a man may not attain. Thackeray is a cynic, a searcher into motives, a critic of human * Byron. Don Juan. Canto vii. Stanza 7. Ralph Nickleby commits suicide through remorse. Mr. Dombey is about o do so, when Florence appears, a goddess out of a machine, at the precise moment when the pistol is at his head. Sir Lester Deadlock. Gentleman."-Bleak House. Read the chapter entitled "The heart and soul of action, who would often fain rob them of their nobility by referring them to ugly sources; a man whom his first success condemned to almost rival in his works the bitterness and the gloom of Swift, and who narrowly escaped, but for his sensitiveness and warmth of heart, from becoming a complete misanthrope. With him the Novel is not a study in psychology, nor of manners; it is a parable, the characters of which are created with the express purpose of illustrating to us the doctrines he would preach. It is a product of the reflective spirit which had entered into the nation's literary life; and its chief weapon is satire. The proper faculty of Satire is reflection. When Dickens broods it is over an action good, evil, or trivial, or over a peculiarity of character, or of manners, or an event. Thackeray does not dwell on these with the same intensity, nor paint them with the same vividness; his reflective powers are chiefly bent on discovering or exposing the motives that underlie them, or lead up to them. Whem he does paint a character with intensity and emphasis of power, it is not so much with the artistic instinct, to show its depth or height in the scale of good or evil, as to heighten the force of the moral he would convey. I suppose quite as many sensitive people have wept over Colonel Newcome, as over any one of Dickens' pathetic figures. And yet it does not require much critical acumen on the part of the reader to see behind this over sensitive creation the cynical smile of the writer. Thackeray emphasized this character not so much because he loves him, as because he detests the spirit of harshness in his persecutors, and by painting strongly the over sensitiveness of the creation, he will make us detest the more the opression to which he is subjected. He has brought this art of hatred to a science: he is in possession of "the motives, and results" of the Villainies he is exposing. He classifies them; they have their genera and species, their habitat; they thrive best in such and such moral atmospheres and temperatures; certain others kill them. His books are the Etiology and Pathology of moral diseases; and his instruments of demonstration are the scalpel, and the microscope. The most natural weapon of Satire is Irony: nothing gives better the sense of concentrated hate. Thackeray's irony is in a style peculiar to himself: he feigns to support his adversary, and to speak against himself: he does this with painstaking seriousness; the more serious the irony the stronger it is. It is the completest method of suggesting excessive scorn; with this style the more you seem to defend your enemy, the more you show how you despise him; the more you seem to support him, the more you crush him. It is the manner of Swift; he approaches you with grave courtesy and deference, and he slays you. No flogging is worse than Swift's praise. It is the same with his best pupil. There are passages in The Book of Snobs worthy of Gulliver. He is defending his colleagues in Literature: the men of letters, he says, are the sole exception in Great Britain to the charges which he levels against all ranks and professions. True, they sometimes, nay, frequently criticise one another, you may even hear one literary man abusing his brother: but why? Not at all out of malice, not out of envy; "merely from a sense of truth and public duty." "That sense of equality and fraternity among Authors has always struck me as one of the most amiable characteristics of the class. It is because we know and respect each other, that the world respects us so much; that we hold such a good position in society, and demean ourselves so irreproachably when there. . . Literary persons are held in such esteem by the nation, that about two of them have been absolutely invited to Court during the present reign; and it is probable that towards the end of the season, one or two will be asked to dinner by Sir Robert Peel,"* In the opening of this chapter you may for the moment be deceived. The manner is so candid and benign you may not at first be aware that this very subject and class is the one which he is thus about to load with most contempt. The writer who adopts this style at the outset is condemned to maintain it to the end. The simple and direct method, free from logical inversions and malice of forethought, will be out of place here. There is a certain lesion of the brain which produces a symptom known as "mirror writing." The sufferer writes left handed, from right to left, and his writing can only be deciphered by normal intelligences when held in front of a mirror. The reader of Thackeray having been taught to estimate truth in an inverse ratio to the author's words, will lose hold of the connection of ideas if the direct method is suddenly thrust upon him. Thackeray, therefore, writes whole books in this style. Were it not for the splendid terseness of his vigorous English, it would be intolerable; and let us confess that at times it grows wearisome. When he hates his women characters, and that is often enough, *The Book of Snobs. Ch. vi. Literary Snobs. : he carries this method to its farthest it is not mere respect, nor pity he feigns for them; he plies them with tendernesses and caresses; he sports with them as a cat does with a mouse :-it is forever" dear Rebecca!" or tender Blanche ! " From serious Irony to caricature is but a short step. Thackeray as a writer of burlesque is the first artist in the language. He has done nothing in its own way greater than "The Rose and the Ring," a burlesque fairy tale for children; but the satire is so supreme and the fun so seriously managed that the children who delight in it most need to be old ones indeed. Nothing is more delightful than this burlesque on Monarchy, Aristocracy, diplomatic relations, and the whole conglomerate of roundabout machinery with which tradition and history have burthened kingdoms: and there are portions where the fun is so rich and vivid that one is tempted almost to wish that Thackeray had devoted himself to this region of Art where he reigns supreme. But though the realms of Burlesque are sacred, and it is given but to a few to enter them, what can be said of a writer who fills onethird of his most popular novels, designed in serious intention, with the inhabitants of this kingdom of "Valoroso II."? He is forever outraging our feelings by asserting some monstrous claims for his characters. This is his method of making a character appear ridiculous, and no claim is too absurd for these creations. The French cook, who believes himself to be a rufugee noble, will make love to the fair Blanche through a serious of symbolic dishes; Mr. Sergeant Buzfuz himself, so skilled in the amatory code of cooking, is a mere tyro beside Thackeray, whose forced and grotesque conceits as to the "hidden meanings" contained in sauces, entrées, and hors d'œuvres, must have relegated him to the pots and pans, and menus of the diners out, for at least a month's study. The Doctor too, how often he will prove to his pupils that idleness and bad construing lead inevitably to the gallows. Mrs. Major O'Dowd, bragging, garrulous, vulgar, and an Irishwoman, which latter is an especial reason why she should be made ridiculous, will marshal before her all the bachelors of the regiment on matrimonial parade, and marry them off whether they will or no. In such society the whole human race is bad or stupid; and instead of filling our hearts with good-natured laughter, afflicts us with nausea or disgust. He will not allow these people any sense of reason or proportion; they are like those strange nondescripts that used to come on during the harlequinade in the pantomimes of twenty years ago, when the stage was darkness, and the bass viol and trombones groaned dismally, and the players crawled silently about, with no object but to confuse and perplex our childish minds. Within ten minutes they will give utterances to diametrically opposite opinions; he will make old Miss Crawley praise with forced ecstasy the charm of unequal marriages-in order that she may appear more ridiculous when, in the next page, she falls in a fit on discovering that her scapegrace nephew has made one. She calls Rebecca her equal, and the next moment peremptorily bids her to put coals on the fire. When the climax of irony comes, and she finds that it is "her dear Rebecca," her slave and factotum, who has captured the scapegrace nephew, and run away with him, she cries out in rage and despair, "Gracious-goodness! Who's to make my chocolate ?" We will accept such malice of forethought from the writer of comedy; it is delightful to witness the see-saw of quarrel and reconciliation between Sir Peter and Lady Teazle. Sheridan makes them become friends that in five minutes he may put them through another scene of bickering; and their modes of reconciliation are so funny, he will make them quarrel again that they may be reconciled. They are not men and women, seriously drawn characters, they are puppets in the hands of a supremely clever showman, we see the strings that work them, and hear his voice from behind the scene. Such incidents as we have seen in Thackeray fall under very much the same heading: they are the scenes of comedy and opera-bouffe, not pictures of life and manners. Men and women do not unmask themselves in this delightfully frank and fearless manner in real life, except indeed in the wards of lunatic asylums. But because we have now and again received vague hints of such motives and feelings through the walls of personal reserve in those around us, we do not resent these grotesque outbursts and candid self-exposures in meanness: this is how our nature would at times wish to see the hypocrites of the world unmasked; and seeing it, we would laugh. If we can laugh at such things, the laughter must be sad: we remember that what we have seen are the weaknesses of our flesh; and the laughter dies on our lips. We ask ourselves what manner of man is this, who has the power of investing with ridicule the primal tragedy of sin? We turn to the author's face for comfort, |