thackeray social critic

7/30/2019 thackeray social critic

1/17

THACKERAY T H E SAT IRISTHACKERAY is not an easy author to expound, be-T ause of a curious mixture in him of simplicity and

subtlety. On the surface, nothing could be simpler than anovel by Thackeray, but when we inquire into his secret, thatwhich has made him famous, made him loved, we areevaded and baffled. I meet people who do not like Thack-eray. I find there is no arguing the case; he is the leastdemonstrable of the authors. If a person does not likeBrowning, I shall probably not be able to make him likeBrowning, for we cannot argue people into feeling any-thing; but I can at least show him why I like Browning. Ifind it hard to show dissenters why I like Thackeray.Suppose a person says that Thackerays plots are slight,his philosophy thin, his sentiment sloppy, his cynicism cheap,his motivation superficial,-what are we to answer? Well ,of course, we can say that the man has a very disagreeableway of stating the matter. But suppose he asks i f thecharge, when made more politely, is unjust,-can we hon-estly answer, Y es? If I am then asked why, in spite of allthis, I like Thackeray, I suppose I must reply, Because heis Thackeray-a not very convincing reason.I n literature, as in life, it sometimes happens that we havea deep and personal affection f or some one out of all propor-tion to his talents or his virtues. Charles L amb is a notableexample. H i s writing is the expression of a personalitywhich attracts and compels love. Thackeray has some ofthis same magnetism. One sometimes disapproves of whathe says and wearies of his mannerisms, but the man himself,as expressed in his wri tings, is charming. A nd that is the23


2/17

24 Six Nineteenth-Century Fictionistsword which above all others applies to Thaclreray and hiswritings,-charm. I t was the quality which he found in DickSteele, and which made him love poor reckless, faulty, fall-ing Dick. Thackeray is seldom in a happier vein than whenwriting of Dick, whether as a fictitious character in a novelor as the historical subject of an essay. I take a passagefrom that same essay, which expresses what I am trying tosay about Thackeray: If Steele is not our friend, he isnothing. H e is by no means the most brilliant of wits northe deepest of thinkers ; we love him as children love theirlove, with an A because he is amiable. W e might play theold childhood game with Thackeray and say we love himwith a C because he is charming, and i f he is not our friend,he is nothing.So f ar as anything so intangible can be explained, it mustbe explained by Thackerays intimate and informal manner.H e takes us into his confidence. H e seems to be talking tous in the most personal and intimate way. H e oves the per-sonal pronoun you,) the pronoun of direct address. T heliterary art of a man like Thackeray is the art of raisingconversation to the highest potential, and conversationmeans letting the thought flow where it will. T here arepeople who never converse, but talk. T hey talk at us, overus, to us, never with us; they harangue, soliloquize, declaim,argue like lawyers, dissect like doctors, dogmatize likepedagogues; you assent, dissent, query, comply; you try toget away f rom the topic, but are jerked back like a calf on arope; your eye pleads for mercy, but you get none; yourmind wanders to pleasant pastures and stil l waters, but youare called to attention like a raw recruit by an angry drill-sergeant; when at last it ends, you murmur, Thank God,that s over T hen you talk with the real conversationalist;your minds meet and merge as easily as currents of air; you


3/17

Thackeray the Satirist 25pass lightly from subject to subject, grave and gay, sense andnonsense, trivial and weighty,-it all mingles like manytributaries in an unimpeded stream. I t is as natural asbreathing, and as unforced.So it is with Thackeray. H e sits down to that perfecttalk of his, and stories and characters just grow in themost unobtrusive, haphazard way. H e is the least method-ical of the great novelists. If no novel can be great withoutunity and coherence of plot, then Thackerays novels areassuredly not great. But a perfect plot does not of itselfinsure perfect literary art. I t would be difficult to find betterplot-making than the old nursery rhyme:

T he K ing of France went up a hillW i th twenty thousand men;A nd neer went up again.T he K ing of France came down that hil l

T here is plot structure! T here is unity, rising action, cli-max, falling action, catastrophe. I t is safe to say that fewplays produced this season have been so close-woven in plotas that; yet it leaves something to be desired. Thackeraysupplies the something-a personality.Consider, for instance, the opening of T he Newcomes.First there is a fable of crows, frogs, oxen, foxes, lambs, and

wolves, related in the vernacular with a quiet smile; then adiscussion of critics and authors; then half-satiric praise ofthe good old days when he was young and ate late Welshrabbit, and drank brandy and water, and sang gleeful songsat the inn called the Cave of Harmony; then into the Caveof Harmony comes a sun-browned, lean military gentleman,leading a lad. T hey are Colonel Newcome and his sonClive. T he story has begun, but so casually, so conversa-


4/17

26tionally, that you scarcely know it has begun. Y ou wonderif he knows how he is going to carry it on. H e does nt. I nthis same story he kills an old lady in one chapter, and, for-getting this, he has her alive and blithely active in a subse-quent chapter, and then he laughs at his own blunder. H ewas once asked why Becky Sharp behaved in a certain way,and he answered, Dont ask me; Becky is too much forme. It is all negligent and perfect conversation. A critichas defined Thackerays quality as urbane negligence. I tis a happy phrase.

T he perfect conversationalist is generally a man who willsay many true things and wise things and witty things, buthardly the profoundest things. Profundity and conversa-tional ease do not go well together. Profundity belongs tosome more formal method,-for instance, to George Eliotsanalytical method. Thackeray was a wise man in the mel-low, worldly sense of the term. H e was not a deep thinker,nor was he particularly interested in the deeper thoughts ofhis generation. H e was the one great V ictorian writer whoseemed to be untouched by the prevailing national and philo-sophical modes of thought. T he air was surcharged withbig and sometimes disconcerting ideas, and nearly all theother novelists and poets and essayists were inspired or dis-turbed by these ideas. If all other record of the centurywere wiped out, the future historian could reconstruct thecentury in outline by reading Dickens, George Eliot, Ruskin,Tennyson, Browning, and A rnold. But from Thackerayhe would learn little about the political, economic, scientific,philosophical, and religious life of the century, though hewould learn much about the social life, and much aboutThackeray himself.I n The Newcomes we read how young Cl ive Newcomesailed away from India and his papa to England and his

Six Nineteen th-Cen tury Fictionists


5/17

Thackeray the Satirist 27aunts; it is biographical, with this difference, that it wasClives mother who died in I ndia, but Thackerays father.M rs. Thackeray was to take for her second husband M ajorCarmichael Smyth, who was destined to be immortalized byhis stepson as Colonel Newcome. T hen Thackeray took upthe tale of his boyhood in Pendennis, wherein his own fa-mous school, Charterhouse, becomes Greyfriars; his realhome, Ottery St. M ary, becomes Clavering St. M ary; andhis real university, Cambridge, becomes Oxbridge. Ofcourse we understand that he mingles much pure fiction withhis recollections of himself, but at Trinity College, Cam-bridge, Thackerays career was not unlike Pens, a liberalinterpretation of his obligations to the curriculum, a moreliberal expenditure of time and money in social diversion, agood deal of miscellaneous reading, some sketching, andsome writing, especially f or T he Snob, an undergraduatepublication.I n the Sketches and Burlesques we hear of the Court ofPumpernickel, and its oddities arose from memories of hisown travels in Germany after leaving Cambridge, and par-ticularly of his residence at Weimar, where he met the agedGoethe. I t was Paris rather than Weimar that was destinedto be the foreign city of his love, and his object in going toParis was the familiar oneof art study. H e had been a uni-versity man and a student of law like Pendennis, and nowhe will be a student of art like Clive Newcome. H e hadalways loved to sketch, and after he had become sufficientlydisgusted with law he decided that drawing was the onething he could do. Of course we know that it was the onething he could not do in any accepted sense. Probably aworse draftsman never made famous pictures. I t is not sur-prising that his application to illustrate Dickenss PickwickPapers met with a refusal. A nd yet Thackerays pictures


6/17

28 Six Nineteenth-Century Fictionistsare famous, and justly so. They violate most of the prin-ciples of technique, but get their effect notwithstanding, andin this way they may be regarded as a parable of his literaryart.While living in Paris, and as soon as he thought he couldsupport a wife, he had married M iss Shawe, daughter of anI rish colonel. A fter four happy years M rs. Thackeray fellill. T he malady was mental. T here were two years oftravel and nursing and suspense, two years more of hopingagainst hope, then the abandonment of all hope, and thedoors of an asylum finally closed upon her. Thackeraysown words much later were, Though my marriage was awreck, I would do it over again; for, behold, love is thecrown and completion of all earthly good.

A s his home was now broken up, he sent his little girls totheir grandparents in Paris until they should be old enoughto do with only a mans care, and he, joining various clubs,took up the life and habits of a clubman, and his outlook onlife became a clubmans. T hat is not said in condemnation,but neither is it said in commendation. V ery excellent gen-tlemen are frequently habitual clubmen, but a club is not thebest school for a novelist, nor the best place in which toobserve life in its primitive and essential traits. T he club-man is tempted to apply false standards to men, to judgethem according to their clubs and the social register, notaccording to their manhood. H e frequently lays moreweight upon the accidents of l ife than upon its realities. H einclines to grow conventional, fastidious, a little snobbish,perhaps, and painfully punctilious about conduct which isprescribed by neither the moral law nor the civil law.T his is not intended as a portrait of Thackeray, but ratheras a setting. H e was a clubman who had known a home, andhad known Bohemia, where conventionality is as much neg-


7/17

Thackeray the Satirist 29lected as it is overstressed in clubdom. H e was a chastenedand a broadened clubman. But he did get a good deal ofthe clubmans attitude, did view the world too often fromthe club windows, noted the stranger leaning on L ord Fud-dlestones arm and wondered why, perceived the unfamiliarface in the Marquis of Steynes carriage and wondered who,observed that M r. Deuce-aces coat was getting shabby andsmiled a little ironically.No one has anatomized snobs more cunningly, but theBook of Snobs bore on its title-page the statement that itwas written by One of Themselves, and there was morethan a jest in the pseudonym. Thackeray is said to have re-marked that he was a snob. Certainly we who love himwould not go so f ar as that, but it is true that he understoodthe breed better because of an instinctive familiarity withtheir point of view. Perhaps it is only natural to be moreinterested in a man i f he has a title than i f he is plain Mr.;at any rate, with Thackeray it was extremely natural. Someone has remarked that M r. A lexander Pope had a greatdeal of human nature in himself; in his attitude towardworldly place M r. Thackeray had in himself an excess ofhuman nature. Y ou note wi th what gusto he traces thefamily relationships of many of his heroes, frequently withgentle mockery for satirical purposes; but he knew-nonebetter-that his satiric shots had found a vulnerable spot inhis own bosom.Thackerays satire is not the satire of a man who hatedthe thing he was talking about; had he hated it cordially,there were plenty of roads of escape. H i s friend Tennysondisliked society and had no trouble in keeping away from itin Surrey and the Isle of W ight. H i s friend Edward Fi tz-gerald hated it and made himself comfortable at Wood-bridge, where it never came. But Thackeray did not try to


8/17

30 Six Nineteenth-Century Fictionistsescape. H e loved Belgravia and Mayfair, however muchhe satirized them.

So it comes about that this great man has little to sayabout the things that are eternal, much to say of the thingsof a season. A good deal of the difficulty with which hischaracters have to contend is money difficulty. T he heroicand tragic books in literature are not usually woven out ofthe money motive. Of course, Thackeray was not trying forbig effects. Over and over again he protests that there isnothing heroic in his novels, least of all the heroes; butthat is just the point I am making-that he does overlookthe large things, the primal things, the fundamental things.I t must be admitted, however, that he has a sort of magicin making the worldly things interesting, and that the toneof worldliness is much softened by the great heart whichbeat in this big mans bosom,-the real and unaffected re-gard which he had for simple goodness.T he tone of melancholy seems to grow out of the fact thathe sees simple goodness overcrustedsooften with worldliness.M y only criticism is that he would have found it less over-crusted out of clubdom and out of Belgravia. N or is thismeant to say that the people living in Thackerays world wereany worse than those who lived out of it, but it is meant tosay that the people outsideof the fashionable set with whichhe was so familiar did not offend in that special way whichcaused him so much pain, did not sacrifice everything forworldly place, did not sell their daughters to the highestbidder, did not wear themselves out with trying to appearsomething other than what they were.Because Thackeray dwelt so exclusively on the social sideof mens lives and laughed so satirically at their foibles, hewas called a satirist as soon as he began to be read in Eng-land. A nd he immediately earned the reputation of being a


9/17

Thackeray the Satirist 31cynical satirist because people insisted on contrasting himwith Dickens. Dickens was also a satirist, but obviously hewas no cynic. When V anity Fair appeared Dickens hadalready become famous. V anity Fair made it clear thatanother great novelist had entered the lists, and readers,ranging f rom the most intelligent, l ike Mrs. Carlyle, to themost shallow, fell to making comparisons.One of the patent points of contrast lay in the fact thatDickens painted human nature in bold primary colors andhigh lights, while Thackeray painted it in neutral drab.Dickens passionately loved his good characters and pas-sionately hated his mean ones. But Thackeray laughed athis own characters, and painted faults in the good ones andvirtues in the bad ones, with the result that human naturein his books was reduced to a common level. T here were noabsolute heroes and few absolute villains, and at the end ofthe story the good people were but moderately rewardedand the bad were inadequately punished.I t was consoling to find in the pages of Dickens that virtuebrings happiness right here in this world, but Thackeray notonly left the good people imperfectly happy, he even averredover and over again that complete happiness is impossible.Did not that very novel V anity Fair conclude with thisdiscouraging sentiment : A h! V anitas Vanitatum !which ofus is happy in this world? which of us has his desire? or,having it, is satisfied? A nd did not much of the moralizingin the book run to this same tune?

A nd what a state of affairs there is at the end of thisall-important Vanity Fair I T here was pious A meliaSedley, who married George Osborne and loved him withthe dumb worship of an Oriental devotee, while George wasbored by her and trifled with other women, and even whenhe bade her good-by before going to fight at Waterl oo, came


10/17

32 Six Nineteenth-Century Fictionistsout of the room murmuring, Thank heaven, that is over;and then George got killed and poor A melia worshiped hiscanonized memory, and all the time Colonel Dobbin, whohad always loved her, was hovering about her, trying tomake her a little happier, and Amelia was piously inhibitingthe idea of happiness with poor George dead and in hisgrave and his sainted spirit looking down on her fromabove; until after many years M rs. Rawdon Crawley tellsher that she is a fool and that her precious dead husbandwas a selfish humbug and a low-bred cockney dandy,and had tried to get her, M rs. Crawley, to elope with him,and, to prove it, shows poor Amelia the very note in whichGeorge had made this amiable proposition, a note writtenon the very day of his death and passed to prudent M rs.Crawley under his wifes nose. So with a clear conscienceA melia marri es Dobbin (and Thackeray does not refrainfrom telling us that she found it rather a relief to be re-leased from her duty to the dead man in order that shemight marry the living), and as time goes by and the Dob-bins have a little girl, A melia sighs as she thinks she per-ceives that the devoted Dobbin is fonder of the child thanhe is of her,-even he, patient, long-suffering Dobbin! A ndthe best that Thackeray can tell us is: But he never said aword to Amelia that was not kind and gentle, or thought ofa want of hers that he did not try to gratify. A nd that isthe end of pious Amelias story.I n the same novel is wicked Becky Sharp, whose minoradventures were much too numerous f or summarization, butwhose chief escapades included an elopement with thatnotorious rake Captain Rawdon Crawley, and a sad repent-ance when she found that i f she had only waited a littlelonger she might have married Sir Pitt Crawley himself; andthen a disgraceful affair with L ord Steyne, so that her hus-


11/17

Thackeray the Satirist 33band had to leave her; and then a shabby-genteel life oftravel over Europe with huge, gross J oe Sedley, who frit-tered away his property and died so mysteriously that therehad to be an investigation, but nothing was proved, thoughthe judge said it was one of the darkest cases that had evercome before him; and Becky got the insurance money andwent to live at Bath, where a very strong party of excellentpeople consider her a most injured woman. H ere she de-votes her life to works of piety; she goes to church,-and Thackeray adds, never without a footman, as if thatwere an embellishment of piety. H er name is on all theChari ty L ists. T he destitute Orange-girl , the neglectedWasherwoman, the distressed Muffin-man find in her a fastand generous friend. She is always having stalls at FancyFairs for the benefit of these hapless beings. A nd that isthe end of wicked Becky Sharps story.

When the tale is told, is pious A melia much better off thanwicked Becky? Neither is really happy. W hat advantagehath the righteous in such a scheme as this? W e know howdifferently Dickens would have handled these lives, whatdelirium of happiness there would have been for A melia,what depth below depth of disgrace and misery for Becky.So people deduced the inference that Dickens thoroughlybelieved in human goodness and its triumph on earth, andtherefore he was an optimist; while Thackeray did notthoroughly believe in human goodness and its earthly re-ward, and therefore he was a cynic. It was this contrastwhich at the outset went far toward giving Thackeray a badname. To-day the most careless reader of Thackeray, withthe contrast no longer so sharply in mind, penetrates theveneer of cynicism and exposes Thackeray s tender human-ity, which lies just below the surface. W e compare himwith Dean Swift, the real cynic and satirist, the bitter


12/17

34 Six Nineteenth-Century Fictionistsdespiser of mankind, and realize that, by this standard ofmisanthropy, T hackeray was a very superficial cynic. Fur-thermore, we realize that underneath the tone of mockerythere is a sentimentalism as incorrigible as Dickenss own.Thackeray loved humanity and the simple virtues as muchas Dickens. But he was more of a realist than Dickens. H ecould not so cheerfully and confidently divide mankind intogood arid bad. H e was too much impressed with the wayin which qualities blend in actual life.T he real point of it all lies in this, that Thackeray lovedhumanity so deeply that he was grieved to see how much ofits frailty and transgressions are chargeable to society andits standards and exactions. Thackeray instinctively thoughtof men and women in their social relationships, and he foundthat these relationships, while necessary, entail much misery.I t was not so much with basic human nature that Thackerayworked, as with human nature modified by society. Being avery truthful person, he was unwilling to fling over life adrapery of il lusion with.which life had never provided itself.H e was not a philosopher in the metaphysical sense in whichGeorge Eliot and Browning were philosophers, was not try-ing to look behind appearances at ultimate realities. I t washis habit of mind to think most about life as it actually existshere on earth, and for the comparative unsatisfactoriness ofl i fe he held society largely responsible. This, I take it, isthe underlying philosophy of the characteristic satiric tone inthe novels of Thackeray.

T hi s satire, as he drew it, was marked by two constantaims: his desire to depict the average man and his desire toshow the truth. H e was capable of large enthusiasms forsuperior men, and was as much a hero-worshiper of Nelsonor the Duke of Well ington as most Englishmen of his time.But superior men are rare, and, because of their greater


13/17

Thackeray the Satirist 35number, T hackeray felt that the average men are more im-portant in literature. Besides, he disliked heroes in fictionbecause they were associated with the highly romantic styleof novel, for which he never cared. H e, who knew so muchof eighteenth-century literature, was unaffected by the far-reaching romantic movement of that century. H e oved thewriters who depicted daily life and daily manners. H i s firstgreat novel, V anity Fair, had for i ts subtitle, A Novelwithout a Hero, and he closed Pendennis with the state-ment that A rthur Pendennis does not claim to be a hero,but only a man and a brother.I n portraying the average man, Thackeray aimed to be astruthful as possible. L ove of truth was one of his cardinaltraits,-not truth in the philosophic sense of the ultimate,but simply fidelity to the actualities of the world. H e pre-ferred showing things as they are to idealizing them intosomething better than they are. H e had the plain English-mans respect for the facts of things, and a feeling-alsovery Engli sh-that to the truth he owed loyalty. T hi s is hisattitude in all his works, but is perhaps most explicit inPendennis. I n the preface to this novel he says: I askyou to believe that this person writing strives to tell thetruth. If there is not that, there is nothing.

T hat is the Thackeray attitude. I t is the attitude whichsays in effect: T ake care of the truth, and morali ty will takecare of itself. I s it wrong to let a man gamble and drink toomuch and play fast and loose with social standards, and yetpermit him to remain lovable-like my L ord Castlewood?I s it wrong to let a man gamble and drink too much and berough and brutal, and yet so thoroughly manly that we mustadmire him-like Captain Rawdon Crawley1 Does notmorality demand that these people be made hateful and con-temptible in books? Thackeray s answer would be, A re


14/17

36 Six Nineteenth-Century Fictioniststhey always hateful and contemptible in actual life? and isit not immoral to tell lies? I heard a preacher say thatloose-living men are always cowards, and then I remem-bered the soldiers who followed the Duke of M arlboroughinto battle, and, frankly, I think the preacher was less moralthan Mr. Thackeray.

T he worst of it is that boys so quickly find the falsehoodin these forced morals. Nobody insisted more on the beautyof vi rtue than Thackeray, but he could not feel that heenhanced the beauty of vi rtue by telling lies about it. A ndthe plain truth is that sometimes very bad men have somevery endearing qualities. T he wickedest boy in the townthat I grew up in was the bravest, and the way to make theother boys good was not to deny that obvious and much-admired courage. So there are some truths which soundcynical when merely stated, and these happened to be amongthe truths which impressed Thackeray.

T here is no danger in this view, i f we will understand ourown thoughts and discriminations. Thackeray did not con-fuse good and evil . H e understood-none clearer- thatgood is good and evil is evil, and that the two can never shiftidentities this side eternity. W hat he could not see nor saywas, that some men monopolize all the good, and other menmonopolize all the evil. H e had the absolute hatred of sinwhich every man, sobered and saddened by experience andobservation, must have. But because he hated sin he did nottherefore hate sinners; that would seem to him like universalhatred, for there is none righteous; no, not one, says theScripture explicitly, says Thackeray in effect. T o hate sinand love the sinner is simple Christianity-that is all.Thackeray added to his apparent cynicism by taking aBack-stairs V iew of life, by lingering over those intimateand minor personal details which the heroic romancers sel-


15/17

Thackeray the Satirist 37dom observed. L ove and great deeds! T hose were thethemes of the old romancers. But it interested Thackerayto know what the hero was doing in the interim of the greatdeeds, and when love had ceased to be a fever and becomethe sweet and quiet habit of a life. H ow much of even agreat career is made up of romantic events? If we couldstate the ratio in mathematics, it would be startlingly small,and in the life of the average man appallingly small. M orethan one-third of life is spent in sleep, our heads, as Carlylesays, full of the foolishest dreams, and an eighth of theremainder is occupied with giving a human imitation of adumbwaiter, passing food to that insatiable fellow thatdwells under the waistband. From fifteen to twenty years,at the beginning of life, are spent in getting ready to dosomething; five, ten, or f ifteen years, at the close, are spentin resting after doing it. T he nominal period of great deedsis short, and the actual period much shorter.

Thackeray knew that the knight himself spent only amoiety of his time in knightliness, in rescuing fair and dis-tressed maidens from embarrassing circumstances. M uchof the while, the knight was foraging for his horse and him-self, dickering with the blacksmith, quarreling with thearmorer, disputing the price of a nights lodging, digestinghis food and drink. I t was doubtless because the romancersoverlooked these homely realities that Thackeray did notcare f or romances,-one regrets to say not even for so finea romance as T he Bride of L ammermoor. H e said, Ihave never cared for the M aster of Ravenswood or fetchedhis hat out of the water since he dropped it there when I lastmet him ( c i r c a I 825) .Itwas every-day life, with its every-day incidents, only oc-casionally varied by something tense, terrible, or beautiful,

which absorbed Thackeray. By way of parenthesis let me


16/17

38 Six Nineteenth-Century Fictionistsobserve that this modification, occasionally varied, is im-portant. Thackeray, like Balzac, like all great realists,understood that life, though usually commonplace, is occa-sionally dramatic. T he longer stretchesof life are on a lowand level plain, but somewhere in the shadows, for nearlyeverybody, there is lurking the moment. These tensemoments are as essential to the truth of life as are the longerperiods of i ts ordinary courses. Thi s point is sometimesmissed by realists a little less great than the greatest,-evenby admirable M r. A rnold Bennett himself; they are soanxious to tell only the truth that they are afraid of thewhole truth. Thackeray and Balzac did not shun the dra-matic moments, for they knew that these are a part of thetruth. But in the nature of the case, the realist must give upmore of his novel to the ordinary than to the exception,and the ordinary which most appealed to T hackeray was theintimate personal life of the family.

A nd so I call his novels a Back-stairs View of l ife. Y oudont know the family from the front-stairs view, the recep-tion-room and company manners. T he familys history liesback of the drawing-room. T his does not necessarily meanthat there are skeletons in the closet-though there generallyis a skeleton in the closet of a family of which Thackeraywrites the fictitious annals; what it chiefly means is that theintimate and personal life of the individual or the family isnot the life that is paraded on the avenue. A nd it meansthat T hackeray is not content to show you his creatures onparade. H e takes you into his confidence and tells you allabout their private affairs. T hat is why we seem to knowthe Thackeray folk better than we know the people of, say,Scotts novels.T he satire of Thackeray, then, is just that darker shadingto the truth of life as he saw it. W i th calm and steadfast


17/17

Thackeray the Satirist 39eyes and with the most tolerant of spirits, he looked theworld in the face, saw littleness mingled with all greatness,goodness mixed with all meanness, good fortune and ill for-tune chemically combined, and dispassionately recordedwhat he saw. A nd this satire of his, because it was writtenwithout reformatory purpose, because it was written withoutmalice, because, above all, it was written by a great-heartedgentleman, is so broad, somellow, so genial, so urbane, thatit renders trivial most subsequent English social satire, withits smart talk, its forced epigram, and its shrill propaganda.N ot less than his love of truth was his charity. I t was asbroad as humanity. I t was to him an absolutely necessaryvirtue in a world as complicated as this. T here is no otherworking system among the sons of men than charity towardall. T his is the obverse side of the Thackeray satire. I t isimpossible to see Thackeray whole i f we see him only as asatirist. Indeed, one is not sure that the philosophy ofThackeray can be stated at all in terms of satire. One israther inclined to think that the philosophy of Thackeraycan be stated only in terms of charity. So simple is thatphilosophy that it may almost be summed up in the petition,Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.Probably America can never have so comprehensive asatirist as Thackeray. America is too big and varied forany one city to concentrate its qualities as London concen-trated English society in the days of Thackeray. A satiricpicture of New York would not be a satiric picture of SanFrancisco. I t is more likely that each great social center willproduce its own satirist. If he is to be as great as Thack-eray, he must be not only as keen and caustic; he must alsobe as large of nature, as broad in sympathies, as able tolaugh with poor old humanity as to laugh at it.

thackeray social critic

Documents

Transcript of thackeray social critic