Views and Reviews | Page 5

have only to
open their newspapers to see--essentials of human achievement and
integral elements of human character. They hold that his books contain
some of the finest stuff in fiction: as, for instance, Rawdon Crawley's
discovery of his wife and Lord Steyne, and Henry Esmond's return
from the wars, and those immortal chapters in which the Colonel and
Frank Castlewood pursue and run down their kinswoman and the
Prince. But they hold, too, that their influence is dubious, and that few
have risen from them one bit the better or one jot the happier.

Which is Right?

Genius apart, Thackeray's morality is that of a highly respectable
British cynic; his intelligence is largely one of trifles; he is wise over
trivial and trumpery things. He delights in reminding us--with an
air!--that everybody is a humbug; that we are all rank snobs; that to
misuse your aspirates is to be ridiculous and incapable of real merit;
that Miss Blank has just slipped out to post a letter to Captain Jones;
that Miss Dash wears false teeth and a wig; that General Tufto is
almost as tightly laced as the beautiful Miss Hopper; that there's a
bum-bailiff in the kitchen at Number Thirteen; that the dinner we ate
t'other day at Timmins's is still to pay; that all is vanity; that there's a
skeleton in every house; that passion, enthusiasm, excess of any sort, is
unwise, abominable, a little absurd; and so forth. And side by side with
these assurances are admirable sketches of character and still more
admirable sketches of habit and of manners--are the Pontos and
Costigan, Gandish and Talbot Twysden and the unsurpassable Major,
Sir Pitt and Brand Firmin, the heroic De la Pluche and the engaging
Farintosh and the versatile Honeyman, a crowd of vivid and diverting
portraitures besides; but they are not different--in kind at least--from
the reflections suggested by the story of their several careers and the
development of their several individualities. Esmond apart, there is
scarce a man or a woman in Thackeray whom it is possible to love
unreservedly or thoroughly respect. That gives the measure of the man,
and determines the quality of his influence. He was the average
clubman plus genius and a style. And, if there is any truth in the theory
that it is the function of art not to degrade but to ennoble--not to
dishearten but to encourage--not to deal with things ugly and paltry and
mean but with great things and beautiful and lofty--then, it is argued,
his example is one to depreciate and to condemn.

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,