Views and Reviews | Page 4

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