THE ELOGES ON MR. THACKERAY.
WE can scarcely imagine a task of more singular difficulty and delicacy than that which devolves on the family of a great author, such as we have recently lost, in the selection of his
biographer. In the general way, no doubt, personal relations all but independent of specific capacity for the task have, perhaps inevitably, much more weight in determining the choice
than intellectual qualifications of any kind, and even where they have not, there is nothing harder than to determine a priori
what are the special qualifications or special disqualifications for success. We trust that it may be ascribed rather to over-zeal for a great national possession than to any disposition to transgress the proper bounds which public opinion should observe in attempt- ing to influence a private discretion that must in any case be governed by the most genuine tenderness for Mi. Thackeray's
memory and jealousy for his fame, if we avail ourselves of the four attempts which have just been made by peisonal friends of Mr. Thackeray to do honour to his character and genius, to point out at least a few of the most obvious dangers which beset this difficult task. Three literary comrades of Mr. Thackeray and one pro- fessional critic have furnished in the current numbers of the Corn hill and Macmillan's Magazine, each within the limits of two or three pages of eloge, at least three significant warnings of the sort of rocks to be avoided, and if the one exception—the graphic, manly, and perfectly simple expression of grief and personal love for our great satirist from the pen of Mr. Dickens,—is exactly what it aims to be, and aims precisely at what was fitting for such an occasion, neither more nor less, still it reminds us not less vividly than the others how great will be the difficulty of combining in one person even the principal intellectual qualifications for the great task of an adequate biography.
No one who reads these tributes, genuine and hearty as they are, to Mr. Thackeray's memory, can avoid seeing the enormous difficulty of obtaining at once a thoroughly intellectual appreciation of his characteristic personal influence and presence, and also that perfect ease of manner and pleasurable sense of an even exalted capacity in dealing with anything that concerns the subject of the biography, which is the secret of every really good biographic effort. Bad biographyarises quite as often from either an overstrained sense of responsibility, or a painful effort to be up to the occasion, or an unnatural attempt to break the ordinary bounds of reserve lest the writer be thought too cold, or from any one of those nameless personal constraints which will sometimes embarrass the pen or cloud the simplicity and oppress the brain even of a good writer in dealing with a mind with which he does not feel really at home, as in absolute incapacity. One of the most important of the conditions of successful biography is, that the biographer should feel his best self, even more than himself, under the influ- ence of his subject. The opposite state of mind is curiously illustrated in at least two out of these four notices. Mr. Dickens, indeed, writes with a dignity as remarkable as the warmth of his feeling, but then he carefully abstains from anything like criti- cism, and, we trust, may continue to do so ; for scarcely could a humourist so great and so original, a caricaturist at once so subtle and so fertile in creation, possess that perfect balance of intellectual gifts needful for clear artistic criticism ; nor would it be easy to find among literary men producing nominally though not really the same class of works, powers with so very little in common as Mr. Dickens' and Mr. Thackeray's. But the embarrassment we have spoken of, the convulsiveness of an honest admirer, whose mind is constrained instead of enlarged by his subject, is curiously illustrated in Mr. Anthony Trollope's pages. That ordinarily un- affected writer is more than once surprised out of his usual good taste, simplicity, and vigour, by the moral presiure of the occasion. He is too conscious of the demand upon him, becomes giddy, and gaudy colours dance before his eyes. It would be very distressing to find in any permanent biography of Thackeray expressions so unclassical and so distorted in taste as these :—" He who knew Thackeray must have a vacancy in his heart's inmost casket which must remain vacant till he dies." The stammering English, " the vacancy remaining vacant," might be merely the hurry of over-excited feeling,—but the, unusual and ungraceful or nateness which gets a jewel-case inside the auricle or ven- tricle of the heart is so far removed from the language of natural feeling that it suggests immediately, like several other passages in the same short paper, a niind ill at ease with the task before it. " He carried his heart-strings," says Mr. Trollope, " in a crystal case, and when they were wrung, or when they were soothed, all their writhings were seen by friend and foe." Who would believe that the writer of this wonderful sentence was the accomplished author of the " Warden " and " Bar- chester Towers ?" We have heard of a window into a man's heart, but a " crystal case" for the heart-strings, through which they might be watched while they were undergoing tension and soothing, suggests, if anything, Dr. Combea patient, whose digestive system was laid open to the light by a bullet-hole, and well watched in its various action on different kinds of food. Certainly, it is a flight of false rhetoric which, in such a paper, by such a hand, jars us as much with astonishment as with discomfort. And not only is the style strained, but the thought itself betrays the same signs of an over- weighted mind. In recommending that the life shall be entrusted to a true critic, Mr. Trollope states that "that which the world will most want to know of Thackeray is the effect which his writings have produced,"—a want which strikes us as about as unreasonable, and, even if it were not, as little germane to the biographer's task, as a demand on a meteorologist to explain the specific effect of a shower, that has already fallen into the sea and mingled with its great waters, would be unreasonable, and the attempt to satisfy it inappropriate to the task of meteorological inquiry. A Parliamentary blue 'book with the evidence of all classes of Englishman as to the impression produced upon them by Mr. Thackeray's writings might, per- haps, answer Mr. Trollope's question as well as so pointless a ques- tion could be answered ; but certainly no sane biographer would try to discriminate the distinct influences actually exercised by a man of genius over his age, except so far as he might anticipate effects so complex and subtle by studying the fountain from which they sprang. Mr. Trollope's few words, coming as they do from a mind conspicuous for manly sense, fine intelligence, and easy sim- plicity of style,—furnish a very remarkable illustration of the danger that the responsibility of writing Thackeray's biography may embarrass rather than stimulate the intellectual insight of a true friend.
In Mr. Henry Kingsley's spirited and characteristic tribute to Thackeray in Macmillan's Magazine there is certainly no trace at all of a mind overweighted by its own responsibilities. His essay is in general more like the boisterous gambols of an intelli- gent Newfoundland round the person of a loved and respected master than the calm appreciation of a steady and discriminating admiration. There is, indeed, one piece of subtle and delicate criticism in the paper, which the rushing wind which always blows through this author's writings has fortunately not blown away :— "Many other characters in prose fiction, and often, though far less often, in poetry, grow and develop ; but we know of none which enlarges and decreases again like that of Becky Sharp—which alters in quantity
and degree, but never in quality, by the breadth of a hair Her mind, her tact, her power, enlarge according to her circumstances, but her character never developes ; the pupils of her green cat's-eyes may expand and contract according to the light, but they are cat's-eyes
still Any Apprentice can make a more or less successful attempt to develop a character by circumstances; to make it grow un- der his hand,' as the slang goes. It required the hand of an almost perfect master to draw a character which politely declined to develop on any terms whatever,—a sort of Lot's wife of a character, who, though changed into a pillar of salt, persisted in looking back to Sodom, and, what is more, succeeded in the end in getting back there—if not to the old place itself, at least to the most fashionable quarter of Zoar."
But though Mr. Henry Kingsley can now and then hit his mark at full gallop, a mind at full gallop would be the last to dis- criminate, as a whole, the intellectual unity of Mr. Thackeray's character and genius. While enthusiasm, if it be only of that passive kind which renders the mind exquisitely sensitive to every trait that is wanted for the portrait, is one of the most valuable characteristics a biographer can have, there is none more dangerous than this peculiar and very Kingsleyan type of enthusiasm, for it can never grasp the entire picture of a complex mind at rest. You derive just as much idea of what Mr. Thackeray was,—except that his genius was something very stunning indeed,—from reading Mr. Henry Kingsley's clever and scampering paper, as you do of a battle from taking part in a cavalry charge. The eagerness of the critic blows his subject to tatters. He enjoys his theme thoroughly, and darts out brilliant sayings under its influence, but the most you can get from criticism of this kind is a few sparks of random illumination on a figure which stays for the most part in the background. His critical torch illuminates the figure that holds it much more steadily than the form before which it is so swiftly flashed. Zeal of this kind, even though so clever and so affectionate as Mr. Kings- ley's, would only blotch the biography of a great artist.
There is certainly nothing of over-animation about the tribute of the editor of Macmillan's Magazine, nor is there anything of that evident embarrassment and want of ease which affects Mr. Trollops, but it warns us of a still greater danger which an admir- ing critic might incur, that of purely intellectual congestion, such as a Caryatid might incur owing to the too great weight of the superincumbent mass. It is the production of a thoughtful and experienced intellect well versed in literary criticism, but is, never- theless, the most painful example of toilsome and abortive desire to promulgate abstract definitions of Mr. Thackeray which we have ever read from the pen of an intelligent man. The criticism, when at length you have painfully toiled your way to it through a slough of preliminary critical bathos, comes to this, that Thackeray,. on the whole, was a realist in art, and not one of the great dreamers—a vague proposition which may be either true or false according to the exact interpretation we attach to the words, but which, even if so defined as to make it strictly true, does not add more than a single line to the portrait of which we are in search. And through what depths of platitude do we wade to this great truth ! " Thackeray's special place," says his critic, and let us note the word " special," " in British literature is that of a star of the first magnitude, but of a colour and mode- of brilliancy peculiarly its own, in the composite clustre known as our Novelists, our Hurnourists, our Imaginative prose-writers,"— which is like saying that Lord Palmerston's special place among politicians is that of a star of th3 first magnitude in the composite clustre known as our Conservatives, our Liberals, our Constitu- tional Whigs. It is impossible to read such a sentence from a. thoughtful and acute writer without simple amazement, which is. not diminished when we hear that the clustre named being a very numerous one, " there are many ways in which, on examining the clustre, it will resolve itself into groups." Clearly it will resolve itself into three groups, " our Novelists, our Humourists, our Imaginative prose writers," if into no others, and we all know, moreover, that as you may look at five times seven either as- five groups of seven or seven groups of five, so you may look at " our Novelists, our litunourists, our Imaginative prose- writers," either in this way, or as our imaginative novelists, our prose-•humourists, our unimaginative novelists, and our non-prose- humourists, or in any other way we please,—but when we have made this admission, has the critic got us half as far as he would have got us by leaving the space filled up with this much of pre- liminary definition simply blank? Or, if we take a step farther, and allow him to persuade us even so far as this— "Now, although, if we view the cluster entire, without seeking to re- solve it at all, Thackeray will strike us simply by his superior magni- tude, and although, on the other hand, however minutely wo may ana- lyze the cluster, we shall find none precisely like Thackeray, and ho will continue to strike us still by his intense peculiarity of hue, yet, if we do persuade ourselves to attend to such a general subdivision of the cluster into two main classes as has been hinted at, Thackeray will then, on the whole, seem to range himself rather with one of the classes than with the other."
—will any sane being feed with much satisfaction on the instruc- tive admission that Thackeray may be either regarded simply as one of the greatest of our writers, or as great in a particular way rather than in another particular way ? This is the kind of criticism which a really intellectual admirer of Mr. Thackeray's, with intellect congested by the weight of his responsibilities in estimating so great a man, will produce by the yard without any sense of the ludicrousness of the labour.
And surely there is a great warning in all this of the extreme difficulty and delicacy of the task of choosing for one of our greatest authors an adequate biographer. Probably a mind at once poetical and critical,—poetical enough to need to grasp and keep constantly before itself the image of its hero as a whole,— critical enough to take a real pleasure in discriminating Mr. Thackeray's literary characteristics, yet not critical enough to spin the critical yarn so long and fine out of a mere hint taken from the real character, after the fashion of the thinker in Macmillan,— but, above all, at ease with its subject, and not embarrassed by the difficulty or delicacy of the task, would best discharge it. Is there none such among Mr. Thackeray's wide and distinguished circle of literary friends? Private considerations must, of course, have a great weight in affecting the choice, and all that we would urge is that general literary celebrity should not be too hastily taken as a guarantee that the task would be successfully performed. Where three of our four men of known ability have failed so completely to transcribe the impression that was, we suppose, haunting their own minds, it would be folly to assume that the insight, the subtlety, the power of expression, the intellectual pliancy requisite for the task, will be found in any man who can write a good essay or tell a graphic tale.
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