MR. CHESTERTON ON THACKERAY.*

DESTINY and a publisher's enterprise have given Mr. Chester- ton a difficult task. He has had to present. Thackeray in-a series of extracts, and, as he rightly says, there is " no writer, certainly no writer of so high a rank, from whom it is more difficult to make extracts." Compassion, however, would be wasted on Mr. Chesterton, for he has found in this very difficulty an opportunity for a discriminating piece of criticism. "Dickens," he says, "stamped and branded on the brain in a few words all that it was essential to say about anybody. But • Thackeray. Edited by G. N. Chesterton. "Masters of literature.” London : George Bell and Sons. [3e. 6d. net.]

Thackeray worked entirely by diffuseness; by a thousand touches scattered through a thousand pages." This is one of those far-reaching distinctions which, when they are pre- sented to us for the first time, we seem to have known all our lives. Dickens and Thackeray have been compared often enough, but never has the contrast between them been bronght out so well. Dickens's method has no doubt one immense dis- advantage. If it reveals a character as a flash of lightning reveals a landscape, it seldom carries you any further. The whole of what he intends the reader to know about Pecksniff, or Mrs. Gamp, or Silas Wegg is disclosed at the first introduction. One touch of " extravagant lucidity " does for each just what their creator wants. Where this simple method is all that is needed Dickens is supreme. But characters are not always simple, and where they are not Dickens often fails. His object is to make you better acquainted with this or that person in his story, but he

knows no other means of doing this than by insisting on a single feature with the emphasis that comes of repetition. Tha,ckeray, on the contrary, preferred " the million of small touches recurring at intervals," and according to Mr. Chesterton it is this that makes him " always interesting,

even in the passages which are bad."

Mr. Chesterton's introduction is full of good things. Nothing, for example, could be better than his criticism of Amelia Sedley. Some of Thackeray's admirers have tried bard to see in her something which he never meant to give her. Mr. Chesterton has a different and a far more illuminating idea of Thackeray's purpose :—

" His point surely is that Amelia was a fool ; but that there is a certain sanative and antiseptic element in virtue, by which even a fool ma to live longer than a knave. For after all when Amelia anddBecky meet at the end, Amelia has much less energy, but she has much more life. She is younger; she has not lost her

power of happiness ; her stalk is not broken It is better to be open to all emotions as they come than to reach the hell of Rebecca; the hell of having all outward forces open, but all receptive organs closed. For the very definition of hell must be energy without joy."

On this view of Amelia Mr. Chesterton rests his main defence

of Thackeray against the charge of cynicism. " It is absurd to call a man cynical whose whole object it is to show that goodness, even when it is silly, is a healthier thing than wickedness when it is sensible." We should be rather inclined to say that the essence of cynicism is the desire to find bad elements in good people. But what Thackeray busies himself with is the discovery of good elements in bad people,—or at least in people whose goodness is not at all conspicuous. No doubt the two processes lead to results

which are superficially identicaL In both cases good and bad qualities are seen in close neighbourhood. But the identity is only superficial. The disposition which pleases, itself in finding traces of good in evil is as far removed as the poles from the disposition which can take no pleasure in good

because it is alloyed with evil, and it is this latter quality that makes the cynic. The difference is well shown in the essay on George IV. included in this volume. The writer who could condemn the King to an eternity of infamy, while he had nothing but praise for Scott and Southey, was no cynic.

Mr. Chesterton is at his best when he is speaking of Pendennis. Thackeray, he says, " might almost have called it

a novel with nothing else but a hero." Arthur Pendennis "is deliberately meant to be something more than a character, he is a type and a symbol. Nowhere else, I think, has Thackeray this epic breadth. The love of Clive for Ethel is the love of Clive for Ethel; the love of Dobbin for Amelia is the love of Dobbin for Amelia. But the love of Arthur Pendennis for Miss Fotheringay is First Love." In his own way the Major is equally great. Thackeray put his whole strength into this study, and he succeeded in presenting,

" in the person of a not unsuitable man, the fundamental truth that the worship of the world is a superstition, and has all the limitations of a superstition. Religious people speak of worldlings as gay and careless, but such religious people pay the worldlings far too high a compliment. Major Pendennis was not particularly gay ; and he certainly was the very reverse of careless. He had to walk more cautiously and seriously than the adherent of any elaborate theology. Worldliness and the worldlings are in their nature solemn and timid. If you want carelessness you must go to the martyrs."

The Major and Warrington are the two influences by which Arthur is alternately swayed. But there was no need to spend equal labour on both portraits. To paint Warrington was by comparison an easy matter. Pendennis is under no illusions as to the superiority of his friend to his uncle, and no part of the trouble bestowed on the picture of the latter is wasted. It needed the thousand touches to explain Arthur's estimate of him,—so accurate, and at the same time so deferential.

When he comes to The Newcomes Mr. Chesterton's touch does not seem so sure. He recognises, indeed, the exceptional place that Ethel Newcome holds in the Thackeray portrait- gallery. She is " the noblest of Victorian heroines." But he does not lay stress enough upon the fact that she is Thackeray's only heroine. None of his other women can be placed on the same level. Laura Bell comes nearest to her, but the distance between them is immense. It may be true that the public has largely forgotten all the Newcomes except one, the Colonel, who has "taken his place with Don Quixote, Sir Roger de Coverley, Uncle Toby, and Mr. Pickwick in that great catalogue of great attempts to capture and describe the almost eerie fascination of simplicity." But if so, the public deserves a severer censure than Mr. Chesterton has meted out to it. The one woman whom Thackeray painted, of whom it can be said that she " is really a vision " and " walks the world like a Diana," ought to have escaped popular oblivion. Perhaps it is Barnes who has prejudiced readers against The Newcomes. And if so, it is, as Mr. Chesterton says, because as the story goes on he " slips out of the fingers of the writer and the reader." As the ".young fashionable business man, who talks with a drawl when be is discussing levities, but drops his voice to a quieter and simpler note when he is talking business, and speaks quite good-naturedly, unaffectedly, and selfishly," he is perfect. When he beats his wife and lectures on " Mrs. Heinans and the Poetry of the Domestic Affections " be becomes common- place and improbable. " The truth is that Thackeray grew tired of him, and being tired he became conveniionaliy exaggerative and melodramatic." But why did Thackeray grow tired of him The creator of Barry Lyndon and of Mrs. Mackenzie was not wont to lose interest in his characters, because they were unlovable. Why did he feel differently towarda Barnes Newcome and spoil his picture in consequence P The reason surely was that he had got his heroine into a difficulty out of which he could see no other way. How was Ethel to be stopped from becoming Marchioness of Farintosh ? The common reasons which deter a girl from making a great marriage with a man she neither loves nor respects were of no weight with her. She had persuaded herself that she was doing her duty to her family and her position. She must be- made to see the misery of which such a union might be the cause, and to see it close at home. A less melodramatic Barnes. would not have driven the weak and colourless little Clara. to the decisive step; and so would not have provided the shocking example that Thackeray wanted. He is made• exaggerated and inconsistent to rescue Ethel. " Saving the grace of God," says Mr. Chesterton, " a dull, lifeless little cynic he would have remained to the end, and such men never put themselves absurdly in the wrong either by a parade of piety or an orgy of violence." But for the necessity of the story, Thackeray would have agreed with Mr. Chesterton, and would have gone on adding new perfections to the portrait of the " dull, lifeless little cynic " he had originally conceived him.

Of Esmond Mr. Chesterton truly says that it is much the saddest of Thackeray's tales. What is worse, it is much the

least interesting. It is a wonderful piece of imitative work, and his critic claims our admiration for it on the score of the marvel that "a man so apparently casual and conversational

as Thackeray should have written so many thousand words without once using a word that might not have been used at the Court of Queen Anne." The book has other merits than these, but they do not outweigh the fact that the hero has no real hold upon the reader's affection, while the mature heroine whom he ultimately marries has still less. Beatrix no doubt has an attractivenes of her own, but it is only the attractive- ness of a minx, and Mr. Lang has shown that the picture of the Old Pretender has not even the likeness which belongs to a caricature. Of The Virginians and Philip Mr. Chesterton justly says that they are the work of " a rich and reminiscent and strongly coloured autumn." But though this is his criti- cism of them as wholes, he notes the greatness of particular passages in both :—

"In comedy Thackeray never struck a smarter note than when

in The Virginians he created the terrible little Yankee Countess of Castlewood, who says with such a sweet smile to the savage old aunt, Now the Baroness and I are going to have such a nice talk' ; or when in Philip he created the wretched Talbot Twysden, swagger- ing about clubs and saying, 'No longer a hunting man myself. Lost my nerve, by George.' And in tragedy Thackeray never struck a, deeper and more resounding note than that which salutes poor spiteful Mrs. Baynes, sitting as a sentinel outside the sick room of her alienated husband, or which notes with ironic vengeance the last dissolution of Beatrice Esmond."

Mr. Chesterton's choice of extracts is not always beyond impeachment. Thus from Vanity Fair he takes the quarrel between Osborne and his father ; from The Newcomes Lord Kew's duel ; from Esmond the conversations between Steele and Addison and between Addison and Harry Esmond on " The Campaign "; from The Virginians the performance of Douglas at Covent Garden. In each of these cases a better choice might have been made, and some extracts might have been added from the shorter stories. In the main, however, the work of selection has been judiciously done, and so far as Thackeray can be judged by samples, Mr. Chesterton's readers have been well catered for. But the book will be most valued by those who do not go beyond the first thirty pages, and who treat these as an " Introduction " not so much to

the pages that actually follow as to the larger world of Thackeray's whole work.