Part 6
“Personally [Thackeray] scarce appeals to us as the ideal gentleman; if there were nothing else, perpetual nosing after snobbery at least suggests the snob.”
Most true, beloved R. L. S., but did you forget that this is precisely what Thackeray himself says? He tells us not to be too quick or absolute in our judgments; to acknowledge that we have some faults and failings of our own; to remember that other people have sometimes hinted at a vein, a trace, a vestige of snobbery in ourselves. Search for truth and speak it; but, above all, no arrogance—_faut pas monter sur ses grands chevaux_. Have you ever read the end of the lecture on “Charity and Humour”?
“The author ... has been described by _The London Times_ newspaper as a writer of considerable parts, but a dreary misanthrope, who sees no good anywhere, who sees the sky above him green, I think, instead of blue, and only miserable sinners around him. _So we are, as is every writer and reader I have heard of; so was every being who ever trod this earth, save One._ I cannot help telling the truth as I view it, and describing what I see. To describe it otherwise than it seems to me would be falsehood in that calling in which it has pleased Heaven to place me; treason to that conscience which says that men are weak; that truth must be told; that faults must be owned; that pardon must be prayed for; and that Love reigns supreme over all.”
II
With _Vanity Fair_ begins what some one has called the _quadrilateral_ on which Thackeray’s larger fame rests. The three other pillars are, _Henry Esmond_, _Pendennis_, and _The Newcomes_. Which is the greatest of these four novels? On this question there is dispute among critics, and difference of opinion, even among avowed Thackerayans, who confess that they “like everything he wrote.” Why try to settle the question? Why not let the interesting, illuminating _causerie_ run on? In these furious days when the hysteria of world-problems vexes us, it is good to have some subjects on which we can dispute without ranting or raving.
For my part, I find _Vanity Fair_ the strongest, _Pendennis_ the most intimate, _The Newcomes_ the richest and in parts the most lovable, and _Henry Esmond_ the most admirable and satisfying, among Thackeray’s novels. But they all have this in common: they represent a reaction from certain false fashions in fiction which prevailed at that time. From the spurious romanticism of G. P. R. James and Harrison Ainsworth, from the philosophic affectation of Bulwer, from the gilding and rococo-work of the super-snob Disraeli—all of them popular writers of their day—Thackeray turned away, not now as in his earlier period to satirize and ridicule and parody them, but to create something in a different _genre_, closer to the facts of life, more true to the reality of human nature.
We may read in the preface to _Pendennis_ just what he had in mind and purpose:
“Many ladies have remonstrated and subscribers left me, because, in the course of the story, I described a young man resisting and affected by temptation. My object was to say, that he had the passions to feel, and the manliness and generosity to overcome them. You will not hear—it is best to know it—what moves in the real world, what passes in society, in the clubs, colleges, mess-rooms—what is the life and talk of your sons. A little more frankness than is customary has been attempted in this story; with no bad desire on the author’s part, it is hoped, and with no ill consequence to any reader. If truth is not always pleasant, at any rate truth is best, from whatever chair—from those whence graver writers or thinkers argue, as from that at which the story-teller sits as he concludes his labour, and bids his kind reader farewell.”
It is amusing, in this age of art undressed, to read this modest defense of frankness in fiction. Its meaning is very different from the interpretation of it which is given by disciples of the “show-everything-without-a-fig-leaf” school.
Thackeray did not confuse reality with indecency. He did not think it needful to make his hero cut his toe-nails or take a bath in public in order to show him as a real man. The ordinary and common physical details of life may be taken for granted; to obtrude them is to exaggerate their importance. It is with the frailties and passions, the faults and virtues, the defeats and victories of his men and women that Thackeray deals. He describes Pendennis tempted without making the description a new temptation. He brings us acquainted with Becky Sharp, _enchanteresse_, without adding to her enchantment. We feel that she is capable of anything; but we do not know all that she actually did,—indeed Thackeray himself frankly confessed that even he did not know, nor much care.
The excellence of his character-drawing is that his men and women are not mere pegs to hang a doctrine or a theory on. They have a life of their own, independent of, and yet closely touching his. This is what he says of them in his essay “_De Finibus_”:
“They have been boarding and lodging with me for twenty months.... I know the people utterly,—I know the sound of their voices.”
Fault has been found with him (and that by such high authority as Mr. Howells) for coming into his own pages so often with personal comment or, “a word to the reader.” It is said that this disturbs the narrative, breaks the illusion, makes the novel less convincing as a work of art. Frankly, it does not strike me that way. On the contrary, it adds to the verisimilitude. These men and women are so real to him that he cannot help talking to us about them as we go along together. Is it not just so in actual life, when you go with a friend to watch the passing show? Do you think that what Thackeray says to you about Colonel Newcome, or Captain Costigan, or Helen Pendennis, or Laura, or Ethel, or George Warrington, makes them fade away?
Yes, I know the paragraphs at the beginning and end of _Vanity Fair_ about the showman and the puppets and the box. But don’t you see what the parable means? It is only what Shakespeare said long ago:
All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players.
Nor would Thackeray have let this metaphor pass without adding to it Pope’s fine line:
Act well your part, there all the honour lies.
Of course, there is another type of fiction in which running personal comment by the author would be out of place. It is illustrated in Dickens by _A Tale of Two Cities_, and in Thackeray by _Henry Esmond_. The latter seems to me the most perfect example of a historical novel in all literature. More than that,—it is, so far as I know, the best portrayal of the character of a gentleman.
The book presents itself as a memoir of Henry Esmond, Esq., a colonel in the service of her Majesty, Queen Anne, written by himself. Here, then, we have an autobiographical novel, the most difficult and perilous of all modes of fiction. If the supposed author puts himself in the foreground, he becomes egotistical and insufferable; if he puts himself in the background, he becomes insignificant, a mere Chinese “property-man” in the drama. This dilemma Thackeray avoids by letting Esmond tell his own story in the third person—that is to say, with a certain detachment of view, such as a sensible person would feel in looking back on his own life.
Rarely is this historic method of narration broken. I recall one instance, in the last chapter, where Beatrix, after that tremendous scene in the house of Castlewood with the Prince, reveals her true nature and quits the room in a rage. The supposed author writes:
“Her keen words gave no wound to Mr. Esmond; his heart was too hard. As he looked at her, he wondered that he could ever have loved her.... The Prince blushed and bowed low, as she gazed at him and quitted the chamber. _I have never seen her from that day._”
Thackeray made this slip on purpose. He wanted us to feel the reality of the man who is trying to tell his own story in the third person.
This, after all, is the real value of the book. It is not only a wonderful picture of the Age of Queen Anne, its ways and customs, its manner of speech and life, its principal personages—the red-faced queen, and peremptory Marlborough, and smooth Atterbury, and rakish Mohun, and urbane Addison, and soldier-scholar Richard Steele—appearing in the background of the political plot. It is also, and far more significantly, a story of the honour of a gentleman—namely, Henry Esmond—carried through a life of difficulty, and crowned with the love of a true woman, after a false one had failed him.
Some readers profess themselves disappointed with the dénouement of the love-story. They find it unnatural and disconcerting that the hero should win the mother and not the daughter as the guerdon of his devotion. Not I. Read the story more closely.
When it opens, in the house of Castlewood, Esmond is a grave, lonely boy of twelve; Lady Castlewood, fair and golden-haired, is in the first bloom of gracious beauty, twenty years old; Beatrix is a dark little minx of four years. Naturally, Henry falls in love with the mother rather than with the daughter, grows up as her champion and knight, defends her against the rakishness of Lord Mohun, resolves for her sake to give up his claim to the title and the estate. Then comes the episode of his infatuation by the wonderful physical beauty of Beatrix, the vixen. That madness ends with the self-betrayal of her letter of assignation with the Prince, and her subsequent conduct. Esmond returns to his first love, his young love, his true love, Lady Castlewood. Of its fruition let us read his own estimate:
“That happiness which hath subsequently crowned it, cannot be written in words; it is of its nature sacred and secret, and not to be spoken of, though the heart be ever so full of thankfulness, save to Heaven and the One Ear alone—to one fond being, the truest and tenderest and purest wife ever man was blessed with.”
III
I have left myself scant space to speak of Thackeray’s third phase in writing—his work as a moralist. But perhaps this is well, for, as he himself said, (and as I have always tried to practise), the preacher must be brief if he wishes to be heard. Five words that go home are worth more than a thousand that wander about the subject.
Thackeray’s direct moralizings are to be found chiefly in his lectures on “The Four Georges,” “The English Humourists,” and in the “Roundabout Papers.” He was like Lowell: as a scholastic critic he was far from infallible, but as a vital interpreter he seldom missed the mark.
After all, the essential thing in life for us as real men is to have a knowledge of facts to correct our follies, an ideal to guide our efforts, and a gospel to sustain our hopes.
That was Thackeray’s message as moralist. It is expressed in the last paragraph of his essay “_Nil Nisi Bonum_,” written just after the death of Macaulay and Washington Irving:
“If any young man of letters reads this little sermon—and to him, indeed, it is addressed—I would say to him, ‘Bear Scott’s words in your mind, and _be good, my dear_.’ Here are two literary men gone to their account, and, _laus Deo_, as far as we know, it is fair, and open, and clean. Here is no need of apologies for shortcomings, or explanations of vices which would have been virtues but for unavoidable, etc. Here are two examples of men most differently gifted—each pursuing his calling; each speaking his truth as God bade him; each honest in his life; just and irreproachable in his dealings; dear to his friends; honoured by his country; beloved at his fireside. It has been the fortunate lot of both to give incalculable happiness and delight to the world, which thanks them in return with an immense kindliness, respect, affection. It may not be our chance, brother scribe, to be endowed with such merit, or rewarded with such fame. But the rewards of these men are rewards paid to _our service_. We may not win the bâton or epaulettes; but God give us strength to guard the honour of the flag!”
With this supplication for myself and for others, I leave this essay on Thackeray, the greatest of English novelists, to the consideration of real men.
GEORGE ELIOT AND REAL WOMEN
George Eliot was a woman who wrote full-grown novels for men.
Other women have done and are doing notable work in prose fiction—Jane Austen, George Sand, Charlotte Brontë, Mrs. Stowe, Margaret Deland, Edith Wharton, Katharine Fullerton Gerould, Mrs. Humphry Ward—the list might easily be extended, but it would delay us from the purpose of this chapter. Let me rather make a general salute to all the sisterhood who have risen above the indignity of being called “authoresses,” and, without pursuing perilous comparisons, go directly to the subject in hand.
What was it that enabled George Eliot to enter the field of the English novel at a time when Dickens and Thackeray were at the height of their fame, and win a place in the same class with them?
It was certainly not the hide-and-seek of the sex of the new writer under a pseudonym. You remember, opinions were divided on this question. Carlyle and Thackeray thought that the author of _Scenes of Clerical Life_ was a man. Dickens was sure that it was a woman. But a mystification of this kind has no interest apart from the primary value of the works of the unidentified writer in question. Nor does it last long as an advertisement, unless the following books excel the first; and, in that case, the secret is sure to be soon discovered.
George Eliot’s success and distinction as a novelist were due to three things: first, the preliminary and rather obvious advantage of having genius; second, a method of thinking and writing which is commonly (though perhaps arrogantly) called masculine; third, a quickness of insight into certain things, a warmth of sympathy for suffering, and an instinct of sacrifice which we still regard (we hope rightly) as feminine. A man for logic, a woman for feeling, a genius for creative power—that was a great alliance. But the womanhood kept the priority without which it would not only have died out, but also have endangered, in dying, the other qualities. Dickens was right when he said of certain touches in the work of this pseudonymous writer: “If they originated with no woman, I believe that no man ever before had the art of making himself mentally so like a woman since the world began.”
George Eliot’s profile resembled Savonarola’s. He was one of her heroes. But she was not his brother. She was his sister in the spirit.
Her essential femininity was the reason why the drawing of her women surpassed the drawing of her men. It was more intimate, more revealing, more convincing. She knew women better. She painted them of many types and classes—from the peasant maid to the well-born lady, from the selfish white cat to the generous white swan-sister; from the narrow-minded Rosamund to the deep-hearted, broad-minded Romola; all types, I think, but one—the lewdly carnal Circe. In all her books, with perhaps a single exception, it is a woman who stands out most clearly from the carefully studied and often complex background as the figure of interest. And even in that one it is the slight form of Eppie, the golden-hearted girl who was sent to save old Silas Marner from melancholy madness, that shines brightest in the picture.
The finest of her women—finest not in the sense of being faultless, but of having in them most of that wonderful sacrificial quality which Goethe called _das ewig Weibliche_—were those upon whose spiritual portraits George Eliot spent her most loving care and her most graphic skill.
She shows them almost always in the revealing light of love. But she does not dwell meticulously on the symptoms or the course of the merely physical attraction. She knows that it is there; she confesses that it is potent. But it seems to her, (as indeed it really is,) far more uniform and less interesting than the meaning of love in the _soul_ of a woman as daughter, sister, sweetheart, wife. Were it not for that inward significance there would be little to differentiate the physical act from the mating of the lower animals—an affair so common and casual that it merits less attention than some writers give it. But in the inner life of thought and emotion, in a woman’s intellectual and moral nature,—there love has its mystery and its power, there it brings deepest joy or sharpest sorrow, there it strengthens or maims.
It is because George Eliot knows this and reveals it with extraordinary clearness that her books have an especial value. Other qualities they have, of course, and very high qualities. But this is their proper and peculiar excellence, and the source, if I mistake not, of their strongest appeal to sanely thinking men.
_The Man Who Understood Woman_ is the title of a recent clever trivial story. But of course such a man is a myth, an impostor, or a self-deluder. He makes a preposterous claim.
Thackeray and Dickens, for example, made no such pretension. Some of their women are admirably drawn; they are very lovable, or very despicable, as the case may be; but they are not completely convincing. Thackeray comes nearer than Dickens, and George Meredith, I think, much nearer than either of the others. But in George Eliot we feel that we are listening to one who does understand. Her women, in their different types, reveal something of that thinking, willing, feeling other-half of humanity with whom man makes the journey of life. They do not cover all the possibilities of variation in the feminine, for these are infinite, but they are real women, and so they have an interest for real men.
* * * * *
Let us take it for granted that we know enough of the details of George Eliot’s life to enable us to understand and appreciate certain things in her novels. Such biographical knowledge is illuminating in the study of the works of any writer. The author of a book is not an algebraic quantity nor a strange monster, but a human being with certain features and a certain life-history.
But, after all, the promotion of literary analysis is not the object of these chapters. Plain reading, and the pleasure of it, is what I have in mind. For that cause I love most of George Eliot’s novels, and am ready to maintain that they are worthy to be loved. And so, even if my “taken for granted” a few lines above should not be altogether accurate in these days of ignorant contempt of all that is “Victorian,” I may still go ahead to speak of her books as they are in themselves: strong, fine, rewarding pieces of English fiction: that is what they would remain, no matter who had written them.
It must be admitted at once that they are not adapted to readers who like to be spared the trouble of thinking while they read. They do not belong to the class of massage-fiction, Turkish-bath novels. They require a certain amount of intellectual exercise; and for this they return, it seems to me, an adequate recompense in the pleasurable sense of quickened mental activity and vigour.
But this admission must not be taken to imply that they are obscure, intricate, enigmatical, “tough reading,” like the later books of George Meredith and Henry James, in which a minimum of meaning is hidden in a maximum of obfuscated verbiage, and the reader is invited to a tedious game of hunt-the-slipper. On the contrary, George Eliot at her best is a very clear writer—decidedly not shallow, nor superficial, nor hasty,—like the running comment which is supposed to illuminate the scenes in a moving-picture show,—but intentionally lucid and perspicuous. Having a story to tell, she takes pains to tell it so that you can follow it, not only in its outward, but also in its inward movement. Having certain characters to depict (and almost always mixed characters of good and evil mingled and conflicting as in real life), she is careful to draw them so that you shall feel their reality and take an interest in their strifes and adventures.
They are distinctly persons, capable of making their own choice between the worse and the better reason, and thereafter influenced by the consequences of that choice, which, if repeated, becomes a habit of moral victory or defeat. They are not puppets in, the hands of an inscrutable Fate, like most of the figures in the books of the modern Russian novelists and their imitators. What do I care for the ever-so realistically painted marionettes in the fiction of Messrs. Gawky, Popoff, Dropoff, and Slumpoff? What interest have I in the minute articulations of the dingy automatons of Mijnheer Couperus, or the dismal, despicable figures who are pulled through the pages of Mr. Samuel Butler’s _The Way of All Flesh_? A claim on compassion they might have if they were alive. But being, by the avowal of their creators, nothing more than imaginary bundles of sensation, helpless playthings of irresistible hereditary impulse and entangling destiny, their story and their fate leave me cold. What does it matter what becomes of them? They can neither be saved nor damned. They can only be drifted. There is no more human interest in them than there is in the predestined saints and foredoomed sinners of a certain type of Calvinistic theology.
But this is not George Eliot’s view of life. It is not to her “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.” Within the fixed circle of its stern natural and moral laws there is a hidden field of conflict where the soul is free to discern and choose its own cause, and to fight for it or betray it. However small that field may be, while it exists life has a meaning, and personalities are real, and the results of their striving or surrendering, though rarely seen complete or final, are worth following and thinking about. Thus George Eliot’s people—at least the majority of them—have the human touch which justifies narrative and comment. We follow the fortunes of Dinah Morris and of Maggie Tulliver, of Romola, and of Dorothea Brooke—yes, and of Hetty Sorrel and Rosamund Vincy—precisely because we feel that they are real women and that the turning of their ways will reveal the secret of their hearts.
It is a mistake to think (as a recent admirable essay of Professor W. L. Cross seems to imply) that the books of George Eliot are characteristically novels of argument or propaganda. Once only, or perhaps twice, she yielded to that temptation and spoiled her story. But for the rest she kept clear of the snare of _Tendenz_.
Purpose-novels, like advertisements, belong in the temporary department. As certain goods and wares go out of date, and the often eloquent announcements that commended them suddenly disappear; even so the “burning questions” of the hour and age burn out, and the solutions of them presented in the form of fiction fall down with the other ashes. They have served their purpose, well or ill, and their transient importance is ended. What endures, if anything, is the human story vividly told, the human characters graphically depicted. These have a permanent value. These belong to literature. Here I would place _Adam Bede_ and _Silas Marner_ and _The Mill on the Floss_ and _Middlemarch_, because they deal with problems which never grow old; but not _Robert Elsmere_, because it deals chiefly with a defunct controversy in Biblical criticism.