Germany, and Italy, to find her and bring her back to duty. But above all, they have an English sentiment, which fails in Frenchmen : they are Christians. It is not only women, as in France, who take refuge in the idea of another world; men turn also their thoughts towards it. In England, where there are so many sects, and every one chooses his own, each one believes in the religion he has made for himself; and this noble sentiment raises still higher the throne, upon which the uprightness of their resolution and the delicacy of their heart has placed them. Take In reality, the novels of Dickens can all be reduced to one phrase, to wit: Be good, and love; there is genuine joy only in the emotions of the heart; sensibility is the whole man. Leave science to the wise, pride to the nobles, luxury to the rich; have compassion on humble wretchedness; the smallest and most despised being may in himself be worth as much as thousands of the powerful and the proud. care not to bruise the delicate souls which flourish in all conditions, under all costumes, in all ages. Believe that humanity, pity, forgiveness, are the finest things in man; believe that intimacy, expansion, tenderness, tears, are the finest things in the world. To live is nothing; to be powerful, learned, illustrious, is little; to be useful is not enough. He alone has lived and is a man who has wept at the remembrance of a benefit, given or received. IV. We do not believe that this contrast between the weak and the strong, or this outcry against society in favour of nature, are the caprice of an artist or the chance of the moment. When we penetrate deeply into the history of English genius, we find that its primitive foundation was impassioned sensibility, and that its natural expression was lyrical exaltation. Both were brought from Germany, and make up the literature existing before the Conquest. After an interval you find them again in the sixteenth century, when the French literature, introduced from Normandy, had passed away: they are the very soul of the nation. But the education of this soul was opposite to its genius; its history contradicted its nature; and its primitive inclination has clashed with all the great events which it has created or suffered. The chance of a victorious invasion and an imposed aristocracy, whilst establishing the enjoyment of political liberty, has impressed in the character habits of strife and pride. The chance of an insular position, the necessity of commerce, the abundant possession of the first materials for industry, have developed the practical faculties and the positive mind. The acquisition of these habits, faculties, and mind, added to the chance of an old hostility to Rome, and an old hatred against an oppressive church, has given birth to a proud and reasoning religion, replacing submission by independence, poetic theology by practical morality, and faith by discussion. Politics, business, and religion, like three powerful machines, have created a new man above the old. Stern dignity, self-command, the need of domination, harshness in dominion, strict morality, without compromise or pity, a taste for figures and dry calculation, a dislike of facts not palpable and ideas not useful, ignorance of the invisible world, scorn of the weaknesses and tendernesses of the heart,—such are the dispositions which the stream of facts and the ascendency of institutions tend to confirm in their souls. But poetry and domestic life prove that they have only half succeeded. The old sensibility, oppressed and perverted, still lives and works. The poet subsists under the Puritan, the trader, the statesman. The social man has not destroyed the natural man. This frozen crust, this unsociable pride, this rigid attitude, often cover a good and tender being. It is the English mask of a German head; and when a talented writer, often a writer of genius, reaches the sensibility which is bruised or buried by education and national institutions, he moves his reader in the most inner depths, and becomes the master of all hearts. CHAPTER II. The Novel continued.-Thackeray. I. Abundance and excellence of novels-Of manners in England-Superiority of Dickens and Thackeray-Comparison between them. II. The satirist-His moral intentions-His moral dissertations. III. Comparison of raillery in France and England - Difference of the two temperaments, tastes, and minds. IV. Superiority of Thackeray in bitter and serious satire-Serious irony-Literary snobs-Miss Blanche Amory—Serious caricature—Miss Hoggarty. V. Solidity and precision of this satirical conception-Resemblance of Thackeray and Swift-The duties of an ambassador. VI. Misanthropy of Thackeray-Silliness of his heroines-Silliness of loveInbred vice of human generosities and exaltations. VII. His levelling tendencies-Default of characters and society in England— Aversions and preferences-The snob and the aristocrat-Portraits of the king, the great court noble, the county gentleman, the town gentleman -Advantages of this aristocratic institution-Exaggeration of the satire. VIII. The artist-Idea of pure art - Wherein satire injures art-Wherein it diminishes the interest-Wherein it falsifies the characters-Comparison of Thackeray and Balzac-Valérie Marneffe and Rebecca Sharp. IX. Attainment of pure art-Portrait of Henry Esmond-Historical talent of Thackeray-Conception of ideal man. X. Literature is a definition of man-The definition according to ThackerayWherein it differs from the truth. THE I. HE novel of manners in England multiplies, and for this there are several reasons: first, it is born there, and every plant grows well in its own soil; secondly, it is an amusement: there is no music there as in Germany, or conversation as in France; and men who must think and feel find it a means of feeling and thinking. On the other hand, women take part in it with eagerness; amidst the nullity of gallantry and the coldness of religion, it gives scope for imagination and dreams. Finally, by its minute details and practical counsels, it opens up a career to the precise and moral mind. The critic thus is, as it were, swamped in this copiousness; he must select in order to grasp the whole, and confine himself to a few in order to embrace the whole. In this crowd two men have appeared of a superior talent, original and contrasted, popular on the same grounds, ministers to the same cause, moralists in comedy and drama, defenders of natural sentiments against social institutions; who, by the precision of their pictures, the depth of their observations, the succession and harshness of their attacks, have renewed, with other views and in another style, the old combative spirit of Swift and Fielding. One, more ardent, more expansive, wholly given up to rapture, an impassioned painter of crude and dazzling pictures, a lyric prose-writer, omnipotent in laughter and tears, plunged into fantastic invention, painful sensibility, vehement buffoonery; and by the boldness of his style, the excess of his emotions, the grotesque familiarity of his caricatures, he has displayed all the forces and weaknesses of an artist, all the audacities, all the successes, and all the oddities of the imagination. The other, more contained, more instructed and stronger, a lover of moral dissertations, a counsellor of the public, a sort of lay preacher, less bent on defending the poor, more bent on censuring man, has brought to the aid of satire a sustained common sense, a great knowledge of the heart, a consummate cleverness, a powerful reasoning, a treasure of meditated hatred, and has persecuted vice with all the weapons of reflection. By this contrast the one completes the other; and we may form an exact idea of the English taste, by adding the portrait of William Makepeace Thackeray to that of Charles Dickens. § 1. THE SATIRIST. No wonder if in England a novelist writes satires. A gloomy and reflective man is impelled to it by his character; he is still further impelled by the surrounding manners. He is not permitted to contemplate passions as poetic powers; he is bidden to appreciate them as moral qualities. His pictures become sentences; he is a counsellor rather than an observer, a judge rather than an artist. You see by what machinery Thackeray has changed novel into satire. I open at random his three great works-Pendennis, Vanity Fair, The Newcomes. Every scene sets in relief a moral truth: the author desires that at every page we should find a judgment on vice and virtue; he has blamed or approved beforehand, and the dialogues or portraits are to him only means by which he adds our approbation to his approbation, our blame to his blame. He is giving us lessons; and under the sentiments which he describes, as under the events which he relates, we continually discover precepts of conduct and the intentions of the reformer. On the first page of Pendennis you see the portait of an old Major, a man of the world, selfish and vain, seated comfortably in his club, at the table by the fire, and near the window, envied by surgeon Glowry, whom nobody invites, seeking in the records of aristocratic entertainments for his own name, gloriously placed amongst those of illustrious guests. A family letter arrives. Naturally he puts it aside, and reads it carelessly after all the rest. He utters an exclamation of horror; his nephew wants to marry an actress. He has places booked in the coach (charging the sum which he disbursed for the seats to the account of the widow and the young scapegrace of whom he was guardian), and hastens to save the young fool. If there were a low marriage, what would become of his invitations? The manifest conclusion is: Let us not be selfish, or vain, or fond of good living, like the Major. Chapter the second: Pendennis, father of the young man, was in his time an apothecary, but of good family, and grieving to be reduced to this trade. He comes into money; passes for a physician, marries the relative of a lord, tries to creep into high families. He boasts all his life of having been invited by Sir Pepin Ribstone to an entertainment. He buys an estate, tries to sink the apothecary, and shows off in the new glory of a landed proprietor. Each of these details is a concealed or evident sarcasm, which says to the reader: 'My good friend, remain the honest John Tomkins that you are; and for the love of your son and yourself, avoid taking the airs of a great nobleman.' Old Pendennis dies. His son, the noble heir of the domain, 'Prince of Pendennis and Grand Duke of Fairoaks,' begins to reign over his mother, his cousin, and the servants. He sends wretched verses to the county papers, begins an epic poem, a tragedy in which sixteen persons die, a scathing history of the Jesuits, and defends church and king like a loyal Tory. He sighs after the ideal, wishes for an unknown maiden, and falls in love with an actress, a woman of thirty-two, who learns her parts mechanically, as ignorant and stupid as can be. Young folks, my dear friends, you are all affected, pretentious, dupes of yourselves and of others. Wait to judge the world until you have seen it, and do not think you are masters when you are scholars. Like The instruction continues as long as the life of Arthur. Lesage in Gil Blas, and Balzac in Le Père Goriot, the author of Pendennis depicts a young man having some talent, endowed with good feelings, even generous, desiring to make a name, and falling in with the maxims of the world; but Lesage only wished to amuse us, and Balzac only wished to stir our passions: Thackeray, from beginning to end, works to correct us. This intention becomes still more evident if we examine in detail one of his dialogues and one of his pictures. You will not find there the impartial energy, bent on copying nature, but the attentive thoughtfulness, bent on transforming into satire objects, words, and events. All the words of the character are chosen and weighed, so as to be odious or ridiculous. He accuses himself, is studious to display his vice, and under his voice we hear the voice of the writer who judges, unmasks, and punishes him. Miss Crawley, a rich old woman, falls VOL. II. 2 A |