Part 1

THACKERAY

BY

G. K. CHESTERTON

AND

LEWIS MELVILLE

WITH NUMEROUS ILLUSTRATIONS

NEW YORK JAMES POTT AND COMPANY LONDON HODDER AND STOUGHTON

PRINTED BY HAZELL, WATSON AND VINEY, LD., LONDON AND AYLESBURY, ENGLAND.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY, _circa_ 1853 _Frontispiece_

W. M. THACKERAY (from a drawing by Daniel Maclise about 1840) 1

LARKBEARE, THE HOME OF THACKERAY’S MOTHER 2

THE CHARTERHOUSE IN THE TIME OF THACKERAY 2

RICHMOND THACKERAY, FATHER OF THE NOVELIST 3

W. M. THACKERAY IN 1822 4

THACKERAY AT THE AGE OF THREE, WITH HIS FATHER AND MOTHER 5

THACKERAY AMONG THE FRASERIANS 6

RUE NEUVE ST. AUGUSTIN, PARIS, 1836 7

W. M. THACKERAY (by Frank Stone, 1836) 9

NO. 18, ALBION STREET, HYDE PARK 10

NO. 13, GREAT CORAM STREET, BRUNSWICK SQUARE 11

DRAWING FROM _PUNCH_: AUTHORS’ MISERIES, NO. 6 12

“COMIC TALES AND SKETCHES” 13

BUST OF THACKERAY (after Joseph Durham) 14

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 15

THE STRANGERS’ ROOM, REFORM CLUB 17

NO. 13 (NOW 16), YOUNG STREET, KENSINGTON 18

NO. 36, ONSLOW SQUARE, BROMPTON 19

CHAEAU DE BREQUERECQUE, BOULOGNE-SUR-MER, 1854 20

MR. MICHAEL ANGELO TITMARSH 21

W. M. THACKERAY (from a sketch by Sir John E. Millais, P.R.A.) 23

W. M. THACKERAY (from the painting by Samuel Laurence in the National Portrait Gallery) 24

W. M. THACKERAY (from a photograph) 25

THE WRITING TABLE AND CHAIR USED BY THACKERAY AT YOUNG STREET, ONSLOW SQUARE, AND PALACE GREEN 27

W. M. THACKERAY (from a pencil drawing by Richard Doyle in the British Museum) 28

A POSTHUMOUS PORTRAIT OF THACKERAY (by Sir John Gilbert, R.A.) 29

W. M. THACKERAY (from a photograph) 30

A PAGE OF THACKERAY’S MANUSCRIPT 31

THE HOUSE AT NO. 2, PALACE GREEN, KENSINGTON, IN WHICH THACKERAY DIED 32

THACKERAY’S GRAVE IN KENSAL GREEN CEMETERY 33

W. M. THACKERAY (from the statuette by Sir Edgar Boehm, R.A.) 34

THACKERAY

Amid all the eulogies and all the slanders that are lavished upon the English character, very few people would appear to take any real trouble to obtain a sincere view of it. Rhetorical phrases about its inarticulate strength and nobility do not commonly bring us very much further, for it may be questioned whether it is good for a people excitedly to articulate their own inarticulate disposition. But, when all is said and done, it may truly be said that among all the national temperaments the English is pre-eminently simple and profoundly well-meaning. This well-meaningness combined with this simplicity is responsible for every one of its crimes, and it is the basis of its real and indestructible magnificence. But this union of moral soundness with mental innocence is responsible also for a certain tendency noticeable in all English life and character: the tendency to get hold of the truth, but to get hold of it falsely; to grasp the fact, but to

grasp it somehow by the wrong end. A hundred instances might be given of this. To take a random example. I was taught at my mother’s knee, in the intervals of hymns and childish ballads, that Germans smoked bad cigars. I see now that this is true, and yet unfathomably false: that is to say, there are, if you choose to put it in that way, more bad cigars smoked in Germany than in England, but that is only because, tobacco being cheaper, more cigars of every kind are smoked. It is as if a Hindoo peasant, who had never seen a jewel in his life, were to say that England was a land of false diamonds. In India only the rulers have such things at all; in the Strand any one may have them; and similarly the cigar is in England merely a badge of luxury, while abroad it is often a common possession, like a pipe. In this mere casual instance we have the constant English attitude: the

strong and even humble curiosity which does really know something about foreign nations, but along with it that strange tendency to put the true thing the wrong way round, to seize on the unimportant side of the matter first. It is just as if a foreign critic of England, instead of knowing nothing at all about us, as is usually the case--were to grasp the fact that the most luxurious English people went fox-hunting, and then explain it by saying that these Sybarites had one weird hatred, a venomous hatred of foxes. Such a man would have got the facts right and the truth wrong; and such is our constant national condition with regard to foreign ideas. But there is an even more curious example of it than this, and that is the fact that even in our own discussions, and in the matter of the great reputations of our own country, we

exhibit this same singular tendency to catch hold of truth only by the tail or the hind leg. Our judgments--that is, our current and conventional judgments--on our great men of genius have a singular disposition to begin in enormous letters with the unimportant defect, and miss in comparison the great merit out of which that defect

arises. Thus, for instance, Englishmen have wearied themselves with asserting that Dickens was vulgar and could not describe a gentleman. Dickens could not describe a gentleman, but he was never vulgar except when he attempted that snobbish and unworthy enterprise. Most men do become vulgar when they describe those who are called vulgar people; and it is precisely here that Dickens was never vulgar there is no trace of vulgarity about Silas Wegg or Dick Swiveller. The supreme function of Dickens in the universe was to point out that robust and humorous common life is not vulgar, cannot in its nature be vulgar, and the only thing that his countryman can see about him is that he could not describe a member of the upper classes. We might as well say that Michael Angelo never really painted a chartered accountant. Here again our sincere people have got to the wrong end of the telescope. But of all these examples there is none more perfect and more amusing than the fashion which called Thackeray a cynic. He was a cynic, if the critics will, in the same sense that Leonardo da Vinci was a chemist or Mr. Chamberlain a horticulturalist. But the cynic in him was not merely subordinate to his other characteristics; it was the mere product--nay, the by-product of them. His cynicism was a minor result, a thing left over by his triumphant tendency to sentiment.

Thackeray, from the beginning of his life until the end, consistently and seriously preached a gospel. His gospel, like all deep and genuine ones, may be hard to sum up in a phrase, but if we wished so to sum it up we could hardly express it better than by saying that it was the philosophy of the beauty and the glory of fools. He believed as profoundly as St. Paul that in the ultimate realm of essential values God made the foolish things of the earth to confound the wise. He looked out with lucent and terrible eyes upon the world with all its pageants and achievements; he saw men of action, he saw men of genius, he saw heroes; and amid men of action, men of genius, and heroes he saw with absolute sincerity only one thing worth being--a gentleman. And when we understand what he meant by the phrase, the absolute sufficiency of a limpid kindliness, of an obvious and dignified humility, of a softness for noble memories and a readiness for any minute self-sacrifice, we may, without any affected paradox, but rather with serious respect, sum up Thackeray’s view of life by saying that amid all the heroes and geniuses he saw only one thing worth being--a fool.

The real falsehood--if there be a falsehood--of Thackeray’s view of the world was, in fact, the very opposite of that cynicism and worldliness once attributed to him. In so far as he did misrepresent life, it was rather in the direction of showing too much bold disdain of Vanity Fair and too much absolute faith in the saints, his unworldly women and his easily swindled gentlemen. He permitted this pietism of his to blind him to the vivid atrocities of the character of Helen Pendennis, supposing that her having lived all her life in a country homestead was some kind of preventive against cruelty and paganism and heathen pride. Thackeray is, if anything, too much on the side of the angels. He was a monk who rushed out of his monastery to cry out against a gaudy masquerade that was roaring around it, and ever since his monk’s frock has been mistaken for one of the masquerade dresses and applauded as the best joke in the whole fancy dress ball.

There are, of course, exceptions, or what may appear to be exceptions, to such a generalisation. So deep and genuine was Thackeray’s insight into the normal human spirit that he detected this element of idealism where it might least be expected. The

character of Major Pendennis, for instance, is simply a great lighthouse or beacon tower, not merely of social satire, but of eternal ethical philosophy. In Major Pendennis, consciously or unconsciously, is traced the valuable truth that almost every man is, by the nature of things, an idealist. To go to great houses, to wear the latest and yet the most dignified attire, to know the right people, to do and say at every instant the thing which is most perfectly and exquisitely ordinary, this is a principle of life against which a sane man might have a great deal to say; but one thing he could not say, he could not say that it is materialistic. One moral merit it has: at least it is totally useless. A place in Society is not something to drink; an invitation card from Lord Steyne is not something to eat. Poor old Pendennis did not sleep softer in his incomparable clothing; he was a poor man, lonely and constantly troubled. Nothing supported him but his own monstrous and insane religion. He was, as it were, a glorious heretic, a martyr to false gods; and nothing sadder or more honourable has ever been conceived in fiction than that scene in the end of “Pendennis,” in which the old man, having, with a valour and energy that stirs us like a cavalry charge, defeated all machinations that would have robbed his nephew of name and fame, suddenly finds the nephew himself ready to fling down the whole laborious edifice in the name of an unintelligible scruple. “And Shakespeare was right, and Cardinal Wolsey, begad. If I had served my God as I’ve served you----” It has the pathos of the meeting of two faiths; the good Moslem staring at the good Crusader.

This was the greatness of Thackeray, the man whom sentimentalists without hearts or stomachs have conceived as a mere satirist, that he felt, perhaps, more fully and heavily than any other Englishman the immeasurable and almost unbearable emotion that is involved in the mere fact of human life. Dickens, with his indestructible vanity and boyishness, is always looking forward. Thackeray is always looking back in life. And no man will ever properly comprehend him until he has reached for a moment that state of the soul in which melancholy is the greatest of all the joys.

G. K. CHESTERTON.

THE CHARACTERS AND PLACES OF THACKERAY’S BOOKS

“Since the author of ‘Tom Jones’ was buried, no writer of fiction among us has been permitted to depict to the utmost of his power a MAN. We must drape him and give him a certain conventional simper. Society will not tolerate the Natural in our Art. 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 writer’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.” So runs a passage in the preface to “Pendennis.”

“If truth is not always pleasant, at any rate truth is best.”

There, in a sentence, is the secret underlying all Thackeray’s work. The novelist is inclined to portray the men and women of fiction rather than the men and women of life. This fault of his weaker brethren of the quill Thackeray avoided. His characters are always human. There are no immaculate heroes, no perfect heroines, no utterly unredeemed scoundrels of either sex to be met with in the pages of his books. He conceived it to be his duty to describe the world as he saw it, and to draw the men and women he knew. If he has nowhere joined pure goodness to pure intelligence, if he has not bestowed on any woman the humour of Becky Sharp _and_ the simplicity of Amelia Sedley, it is because he had never met this union of forces in life. To have described the unreal and passed it off as the real would have been an offence against the pen which was able to boast:

Stranger! I never writ a flattery, Nor signed the page that registered a lie.

“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.” This is Thackeray’s confession of literary faith.

“My object is not to make a perfect character of anything like it,” he wrote to his mother when “Vanity Fair” was appearing in monthly parts. “Our friend is not Amadis or Sir Charles Grandison,” he wrote of Philip Firmin, “and I don’t for a moment set him up as a person to be revered or imitated, but try to draw him faithfully as Nature made him.”

The late Anthony Trollope stigmatised Thackeray as an unmethodical writer. Certainly the great man, as author, bound himself by no hard and fast rules. His plan was to create mentally two or three of his chief characters and write from page to page, with only a general notion of the course he would be taking a few chapters later. But then to compensate for the lack of method he lived with his characters, shared their joys and sorrows, and spoke of them as if they were real creatures of flesh and blood. “Being entirely occupied with my two new friends, Mrs. Pendennis and

her son Arthur Pendennis,” he wrote to Mrs. Brookfield from Brighton in 1849, “I got up very early again this morning. He is a very good-natured, generous young fellow, and I begin to like him considerably. I wonder if he is interesting to me from selfish reasons, and because I fancy we resemble each other in many parts.” “I wonder what will happen to Pendennis and Fanny Bolton,” he remarked in another letter to the same correspondent; “writing and sending it to you, somehow it seems as if it were true.” Mrs. Ritchie remembers entering her father’s study one morning about two years later and being motioned away, and how, an hour later, he went to the school-room and, half-laughing, half-ashamed, said: “I do not know what James can have thought of me when he came in with the tax-gatherer after you left, and found me blubbering over Helen Pendennis’s death.”

“I don’t control my characters,” he asserted one day. “I am in their hands, and they take me where they please.” And when a friend remonstrated with him for having made Esmond marry “his mother-in-law,” he only replied: “_I_ didn’t make him do it; they did it themselves.” It may be because the characters were so real to the creator that they live in the memory of the reader. If Thackeray was the first to shed tears over the death of Helen, certainly he has not been the last. Who can read with dry eyes of the reconciliation of mother and son at the death-bed? “As they were talking the clock struck nine, and Helen reminded him how, when he was a little boy, she used to go up to his bed-room at that hour and hear him say Our Father. And once more, oh once more, the young man fell down at his mother’s sacred knees, and sobbed out the prayer which the Divine Tenderness uttered for us, and which has been echoed for twenty ages since by millions of sinful and humble men. And as he spoke the last words of the supplication, the mother’s head fell down on her boy’s, and her arms closed around him, and together they repeated the words ‘for ever and ever’ and ‘Amen.’”

Readers of Thackeray’s works must have noticed how frequently the characters reappear in tales other than that in which they are first introduced. Reference is made to them and to their doings in book after book, until we feel that we know them personally. Thackeray loved to reintroduce his old friends, and it was his intention--frustrated by an all too early death to write a novel of the times of Henry V., in which the ancestors of his Pendennises and Warringtons should have foregathered. A long and fascinating article might be written tracing the subsequent careers of the characters from the glances we obtain of them at odd moments.

How many novelists are there who have such a gallery of characters as can be collected from Thackeray’s books? What admirable realism! What marvellous insight into the natures of men and women!

In his earlier years, however, he was too bitter, and his stories contain far too many scoundrels. “I don’t know where I get all these rascals for my books,” he said apologetically: “I have certainly never lived with such people.” “The Yellowplush Correspondence” does not contain a single man or woman we should like to meet. Yellowplush is a scamp; Dawkins is silly and snobbish; Blewitt, the cardsharper, is a bully and a fool; Lady Griffin is not pleasant, and though she is badly treated, her revenge is too cruel; the Earl of Crabs--the creation of a master hand--is a terrible man, whose sense of humour only makes him more dangerous; and Deuceace himself, cardsharper, swindler, fortune-hunter ... yet with such a father what was he to become? The foolish Mathilda demands some pity; for at least she is loyal to the man who married her only because he thought she had money: “My Lord, my place is with him.”

Who will record the unwritten chapters of the life of the Honourable Algernon Percy Deuceace? There is plenty of material, if not for authentic history, at least for legitimate speculation. It