Thackeray | Page 8

of the one was brighter than
that of the other, or, at any rate, that it was more precocious. But
after-judgment has, I think, not declared either of the suggestions to be
true. I will make no comparison between two such rivals, who were so
distinctly different from each, and each of whom, within so very short a
period, has come to stand on a pedestal so high,--the two exalted to so
equal a vocation. And if Dickens showed the best of his power early in
life, so did Thackeray the best of his intellect. In no display of mental
force did he rise above Barry Lyndon. I hardly know how the teller of a
narrative shall hope to mount in simply intellectual faculty above the
effort there made. In what then was the difference? Why was Dickens
already a great man when Thackeray was still a literary Bohemian?
The answer is to be found not in the extent or in the nature of the
genius of either man, but in the condition of mind,--which indeed may
be read plainly in their works by those who have eyes to see. The one
was steadfast, industrious, full of purpose, never doubting of himself,
always putting his best foot foremost and standing firmly on it when he
got it there; with no inward trepidation, with no moments in which he
was half inclined to think that this race was not for his winning, this
goal not to be reached by his struggles. The sympathy of friends was
good to him, but he could have done without it. The good opinion
which he had of himself was never shaken by adverse criticism; and the
criticism on the other side, by which it was exalted, came from the

enumeration of the number of copies sold. He was a firm reliant man,
very little prone to change, who, when he had discovered the nature of
his own talent, knew how to do the very best with it.
It may almost be said that Thackeray was the very opposite of this.
Unsteadfast, idle, changeable of purpose, aware of his own intellect but
not trusting it, no man ever failed more generally than he to put his best
foot foremost. Full as his works are of pathos, full of humour, full of
love and charity, tending, as they always do, to truth and honour and
manly worth and womanly modesty, excelling, as they seem to me to
do, most other written precepts that I know, they always seem to lack
something that might have been there. There is a touch of vagueness
which indicates that his pen was not firm while he was using it. He
seems to me to have been dreaming ever of some high flight, and then
to have told himself, with a half-broken heart, that it was beyond his
power to soar up into those bright regions. I can fancy as the sheets
went from him every day he told himself, in regard to every sheet, that
it was a failure. Dickens was quite sure of his sheets.
"I have got to make it shorter!" Then he would put his hands in his
pockets, and stretch himself, and straighten the lines of his face, over
which a smile would come, as though this intimation from his editor
were the best joke in the world; and he would walk away, with his heart
bleeding, and every nerve in an agony. There are none of us who want
to have much of his work shortened now.
In 1837 Thackeray married Isabella, daughter of Colonel Matthew
Shawe, and from this union there came three daughters, Anne, Jane,
and Harriet. The name of the eldest, now Mrs. Richmond Ritchie, who
has followed so closely in her father's steps, is a household word to the
world of novel readers; the second died as a child; the younger lived to
marry Leslie Stephen, who is too well known for me to say more than
that he wrote, the other day, the little volume on Dr. Johnson in this
series; but she, too, has now followed her father. Of Thackeray's
married life what need be said shall be contained in a very few words.
It was grievously unhappy; but the misery of it came from God, and
was in no wise due to human fault. She became ill, and her mind failed

her. There was a period during which he would not believe that her
illness was more than illness, and then he clung to her and waited on
her with an assiduity of affection which only made his task the more
painful to him. At last it became evident that she should live in the
companionship of some one with whom her life might be altogether
quiet, and she has since