MARGINAL COMMENTS
By CHRISTOPHER SYKES
NO reputation- is so at nadir, I suppose, as is Thackeray's at this moment. His demi-centenary a few years back passed gloomily enough. There were no banquets, no statues, he did not crop up in conversation much. A few articles appeared, his style was praised, nothing more. It was not surprising. To his " appeal " we are as deaf as the old are to the chirping of bats. Vanity Fair, of course, is still a best seller, but so is Tom Jones or The Cloister and the Hearth, books which are read by the sort of people who don't talk about books. A revived taste for his period does not include him, he represented those qualities of the- Victorian time for which we have no stomach at all : the long hollow sermon is too boring to be funny. And his coyly over- protested promise that he is much more decorous than the people who interested him makes us suspect too easily that the whole of his art is fraudulent, and we do not bother to look for the eternal truths which we are told lie in every real work of creation. And so we neglect miracles.
There is one glimpse of human values in one of the now least read of his books, so rare and clear, that I am astonished that Major Pendennis does not glow with Pecksniff in the immortality of proverbs. The old dandy with his auburn wig and false teeth, limping up to White's day after day, dimly realising that his racy stories are not to the taste of a fiddle-faced new generation—we must go to War and Peace for another picture as fine of the calamity of old age. And the eternal truth is horribly unmistakable here.
The revenges of the whirligig of time involve us poor humans in a great deal of worry and expense. The eighteenth century is, I think, greatly misunderstood. I don't believe in an age of delicate scepticism and fastidious godlessness. To browse in an eighteenth-century library such as you still find in quite a few country houses, is to know the need for pleasure. Yes, you find licentious comedies, and (infinitely dull) pagan tragedies, but the main contents are collections of sermons from out of the dry rational agony of which you cry aloud for the madness of Wesley. You find a Universe, of books written in dismal imitation of The Christian's Whole Duty. George III was, I think, more typical of his age than Lord March and the Fox family. It was not,- as a rule, Parent godlessness which sent the bucks to their' ecstasies of extravagance. And then, as the bucks . aged, came the fiddle-faces again, and as they drooped came " the loose and luxurious Society " of the Edwardian era with its devilish predilections, and then came " our younger generation which seems to live only for cocktails and jazz." And now in a prophetic vision I straighten my wig and make sure of my back teeth, the despised butt of the new young men, stiff and silent in the latest dudgeon, the ComMunist asceticism. It is wrong to attach great importance to the illusory appearance of distinct rytluns in life, yet in some sort these rythms are there. A few years ago young men insisted on being reckoned hilarious—now they will have it that their passions are subordinate to the Communist passion for obedience.
Reactionary, I cannot resist the conclusion that Commun- ism is a forlorn cause in England unless some enormous upheaval tumbles us and everyone else into chaos again. I wonder . why Communism is so modish in our day. Do the new thinkers like only the day-dream of power ? Is it cynical to say that orderly atheists generally end up by adoring a clock ? A quarter true. But the point is that the fiddle- face is with us again introduced, according to custom, by the young. Our fathers chastised us with whips, babes unborn will be chastised with the scorpions of psycho-analysis. But man cannot fashion man and there will arise a company _ of the future which will once more paint the town zed—or perhaps blue, wounding their fathers. I offer these thoughts for the consolation of any who like myself feel a sympathy with the Major whom -I mentioned earlier in these notes.
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