WAS THACKERAY MOST SATIRIST OR NOVELIST?

MISS AMELIA B. EDWARDS, LL.D., who delivered an interesting lecture at the Birkbeck Institution last week on "The Art of the Novelist," was extremely indignant with the view of Thackeray which classes him as a cynic, and no doubt the word is a complete misnomer. A cynic, we take it, means a man who feels more pleasure in dwelling on the evil in life than on the good, and who exaggerates the amount of evil in the exclusiveness of his interest in it. Rochefoucarild was, we suppose, a cynic ; Swift was a cynic ; Lord Chesterfield was a cynic. Thackeray was not a cynic. But when Miss Edwards adds that " Thaelleray was the greatest master of fiction the world. had ever seen ;" that "the human heart had no secrets for him ; all its weaknesses, all its littlenesses, all its tendernesses were open to him ; no man had a more passionate loathing of all that was base, or a more passionate admiration of all that was lofty, simple-minded, and loyal," her estimate seems to us to overleap the truth and fall on the other side. To our mind, Thackeray is a great novelist, but a still greater satirist. He loves to depict human life as it is, but he loves still more to depict it as it is to the eye which is much more fascinated by the vision of its shortcomings, than by the contemplation of its strength. We frilly admit that he delighted to reeognise the tenderness of the human heart. His own heart was a tender one, and he had the most ready sympathy with the tenderness of others ; but even when be is dwelling on the tenderness of the human heart, what he sees most vividly is the weak side of that tenderness rather than its strong side. There is a vein of weakness in almost all his better men and women, and the number of the better men and women is not nearly so great as the number of the worse. It is surely gross exaggeration to say that "no man had a more passionate loathing of all that was base" than Thackeray. Was not Becky the very impersonation of all that was base, and that, too, in combination with very great strength of purpose and will ?— yet is it possible for any careful reader of "Vanity Fair" to doubt that Thackeray bad a decided weakness for Becky P What does he say of her in the striking preface to "Vanity Fair?" "The famous little Becky puppet has been pronounced to be un- commonly flexible in the joints and lively on the wire." Is it not perfectly evident that he had a secret tenderness for Becky, and was exceedingly proud of his success in making her, in spite of her utter wickedness and baseness, so deeply interesting as she is to all those who read with eyes in their heads? Thackeray is greater as a satirist than he is as a novelist. His picture of life had not the large breadth and. wholesomeness of Sir Walter Scott's. He dwelt with great subtlety and sympathy, no doubt, on the pathos of life ; he exposed its illusions with a depth of compassion for those who were betrayed by them, that could not easily be exceeded : but it was hardly possible for him to paint even a Colonel Newcome without making us feel how needlessly he fell a victim to his own credulousness, or to dwell on the virtues of Lady Castlewood without touching rather satirically on the rivalry between herself and her daughter. Thackeray does not paint human life from the point of view of a mere artist. He paints it from the point of view of an artist who is much more profoundly possessed with the sense of its moral failure than of any other aspect of the vision. On the title-page of "Vanity Fair," the clown is depicted surveying his own weak, haggard, and miserably

jocose face in a cracked looking-glass, which reflects the most ludicrous of his features as it is disfigured by the crack that crosses it. That is Thackeray all over. It may be said that it is appropriate to a book that calls itself "Vanity Fair," and to no other. Be it so ; but then, "Vanity Fair" is quite the greatest of Thackeray's works, and the others are greatest where they approximate most closely to the satire of "Vanity Fair."

Open "Vanity Fair" where you will, without any sort of selection, and nine times out of ten at least, you will light on a picture of pride, emptiness, folly, vulgarity, weaknei3s, or vice, —on Miss Crawley, or Jim or Pitt Crawley, or George Osborne, or Jos Sedley, or Becky, or Lord Stoyne. No one can ever treat Thackeray as anything but a satirist who looks at his own illustrations of his own story, and enters into the spirit of them. We quite admit that they did not do him justice, that they exaggerated greatly the vulgarer aspects of his characters, and obliterated the manlier aspects. Still, that only betrays to which aspect of them his own conception of his own characters really leaned. It leaned to the satirical view of them, not to the mere novelist's view. He felt that his own.

attention was fixed chiefly on the flaws, and in his illus- trations he drew the flaws with an exaggerated emphasis which often seemed to make his dramatis rersonve the actors in a sorry farce. That was unjust to his own literary insight, which was keen enough, but it showed clearly the true drift of his mind. Even in working out his

finest conceptions, he could not let the flaw remain in its natural proportion to the whole ; he could not help giving it an emphasis and a significance which made it the central point even of the nobler figures.

Indeed, the tenderness of sympathy, the warmth of feeling, on which Thaekeray's admirers so justly dwell, is not only not inconsistent with the satirist's attitude of mind, it is essential to the highest kind of satire—the kind of satire in which Thackeray most excelled. Without the tenderness and pathos, the satire would not be half as keen, for the tender- ness and pathos are themselves made subservient to the banter. As Mr. Herman Merivale says in one of the charming chapters on Thackeray's youth which introduce the volume on " Thackeray " in the "Great Writers" series, so soon as Pen- dennis sees Miss Fotheringay relax from her great stage-parts only " to make a poy," she shines all the brighter in Pendeunis's eyes for her "adorable simplicity ;" but then, the point on which Thackeray concentrates attention„—both his own atten- tion and the attention of his readers,—is not the pathos in the lad's illusion, but the extravagance of that illusion, the absolute contrast between the real state of things in Captain Costigan's householA, and the glory in which poor Pen- dennis's imagination bathed them. It is not the pathos of the mistake on which he concentrates the force of his delinea- tion, but the ludicrousness of it ; and without the pathetic aspect of the illusion, the picture of the needy and selfish household would lose half its force. We should read Thaekeray's stories not only by the light of the illustrations with which he himself loved to illustrate them, wherein we see the absurdities of the situatiens exaggerated exactly as he in his own mind exaggerated them, but by the light of the verses which he wrote. We quite agree with Mr. Merivale that Thackeray was a poet, but we should add that he was a satirical poet. Even the tenderest verse that he compose& has a despairing accent given to it by the eelf-mookery per- vading the mood in which it was written. And his strongest impulse in the use of rhyme was to enhance the effect of the farce or tragi-comedy in human fate, by its aid. Mr. Merivale gives us a now and characteristic, specimen of his verse, which was also the first specimen of it :— "It was parody of an intended speech of Laos Shell's upon

Penenden Heath which he was not allowed to deliver but of which, before he left town to attend the meeting in question, ho had taken the precaution to send copies to some of the leading journals for insertion. This little jeu d'esprit' (says Dr. Cornish) 'Thaekeray allowed me to send to the Western Luminary ; and I question -whether this was not the first appearance in print of an author who was destined by-and-by to occupy so distinguished a, place among the most classical writers of the present day.' The verses were those :—

Inual IStruLonr„

(Air, "The MinatiNg Rev")

'Mister Mel into Kent has gone, On Ponenden Heath you'll find him Nor think you that he came alone, There's Doctor Doyle behind him.

"Men of Kent," said the little man, "If you hate Emaneipation,

You're a set of fools." He then began A cut and dry oration. He strove to speak, but the men of Kent Began a grievous shouting, When out of Ids waggon tho little man wont, And put a stop to his spouting.

"What them h those heretics heard me not," Quoth ho to his friend Canonical, "My speech is safe in the Times, I wet, And eke in the Morning Chronicle." "

Indeed, Thackeray hardly ever used verse with so much gusto as when it gave additional emphasis to his satirical humour. Who can read the "Ballads of Policeman X," or the Irish ballads, without noticing the singularly strong relief in which the rhyme throws out those satirical pictures of human folly and infirmity P "Eliza, she informed her master,— Kinder they than missises are,— How in marriage he had est her, Like a galliant British tar," where the satire on masters for their greater kindness to female servants than their wives display, is introduced partly for its own sake, but partly also to give occasion for the vulgarism in the third line which substitutes " ast her" for "asked her." In Thackeray's hands, verse lent as much point to the mockery, as his pencil lent to it in his illus- trations.

On any impartial view of Thackeray's works, his genius will certainly shine out as that of a satirist of human life, rather than as that of a vivid delineator of all the most signifi- cant aspects of that life. Some of his books, like "Barry Lyndon" and "The Book of Snobs," are entirely conceived in the attitude of scorn and contempt. Even the greatest of his books, which we take to be "Vanity Fair," is presented to us predominantly from the same point of view, not, indeed, without

a deep insight into the more loveable aspects of human nature, —for, without that insight the satire would lose half its edge,—but without that level apprehension of all that is good and commonplace, as well as of all that is bad, which marks,

for instance, the genius of Scott, and, in her greater works, the genius of George Eliot. George Eliot was, indeed, more or less diverted from her natural impartiality to the

satiric point of view, by the admiration in which Thackeray was held, at the time she first wrote. But by the time she touched her highest point in " Middlemarch," no one could say that she fixed any excess of attention on the flaws and

blots inhuman nature, to the disadvantage of its disinterested- ness, its earnestness, its strength, and its purity. But even

in"The Newcomes," even in "Esmond," it is impossible not to feel that Thackeray's highest art was the art of the satirist, —a kindly satirist indeed, a satirist who keenly felt the sharp thrusts of his own dissecting-knife,—but still the satirist who could not help spending more time and more labour and more interest on the episodes in which human nature collapsea, and fell as it were to pieces, than he did on the episodes in which human nature displayed its nobler and its more spiritual features.