BOOKS OF THE DAY

The Two Thackerays

The Letters and Private Papers of Wiliam Makepeace Thackeray Edited by Gordon N. Ray. ;Cumberlege : Oxford University Press. 4 vols. £6 6s.)

THACKERAY has never been a popular author in the richest sensa of the word ; but what prevented him from being so in his own time is not the quality that acts aF a barrier today. For us, a hundred years or so after Vanity Fair, Esmond and The Newcomer, it is not his " cynicism " that acts as a deterrent, but his " sentimentality "- and, as a craftsman, his thrusting himelf before the curtain to moralise blatantly. In the result, both the cynicism and the senti- mentality seem to be false. Yet neither of them was. The two Thackerays, the family man, the figure you met, was, if you like to call it so, a sentimentalist: that is, he was genial, tolerant, the best of unassuming companions, with very strong family affections. He was aboundingly generous of his labour, his time and his hard-won money : he never forgot friends or dependants, and bore no rancour against those, such as Forster, who did him literary injury. That was the conscious Thackeray. But apart from that there was the clear-eyed dissector of the society of his time, the critic of social assumptions and hypocrisy. The fact is that when he wrote he became a channel through which ideas subconsciously flowed. Writing to Adelaide Procter on June 4th, 1858, he remarked:

" Why are your verses so very very grey and sad? I have been reading them this morning till the sky has got a crape over it— other folk's prose I have heard has sometimes a like dismal effect, one man's especially I mean with whom I am pretty intimate, and who writes very glumly though I believe he is inwardly a cheerful wine-bibbing easy-going person, liking the wicked world pretty well in spite of all his grumbling. We can't help what we write though ; an unknown something works within us and makes us write so and so."

And in a letter some eighteen months earlier he had written to an unknown young correspondent (the letter is now published for the first time) about

" knowing very well the common cry against me that I am misanthropical, bitter and so forth, whereas, please God, my heart is full of any thing but unkindness towards the people who believe me such a cynic. No human brain is big enough to grasp the whole truth—and mine can take in no doubt but a very infinitesimal portion of it, but such truth as I know that I must tell, and go on telling whilst my pen and lungs last . . ."

His family, and his many firm friends, know better than the " common cry."

His voice was discordant with his age : for the Victorians, however much we may respect them, as we now do (the pendulum is perhaps swinging a little too far away from the derisive contempt of a genera- tion ago), did, we feel, too much like to look at the rosy side of things—at least where respectable people were concerned. You could reveal " the condition of the people," after the manner of Kingsley

and Mrs. Gaskell, or even of Dickens, if you were either evangelistic or pitiful enough, but not the moral condition of the ruling classes. How otherwise could Trollope have written (a rather happy re- dressing of the balance in favour of the Thackeray family): " Miss Broughton's novels are not, sp sweet-savoured as those of Miss Thackeray, and are, therefore, Iess true to nature "? The "there- fore " is revealing. But Thackeray's duality puzzled his contem- poraries, and even gave them offence, just as there is something in him which annoys people now. Yet it would be difficult for anyone to read these letters, and not at least relent. Many will feel warmly towards the man—whatever they may think of the author—which is no less than he deserves.

We get the impression of a man always driven, or for ever driving himself, wearing out his tremendous frame by work and by social life ; often depressed, yet for his family and friends always full of fun and frolic, with something of the boyish left in him to the end ; a man constantly worried by illness : in most ways rather an exces- sive man, living too hard, and more than a little foolishly. There were several things which drove him, and he never spared himself. It is possible that had he been able to settle down to family life— which was really what he most craved for—he could have escaped the tremendous stress. But the unlucky dementia of his wife threw him into the outer social whirl, a giddy vortex which at last he could not do without.

In the third of these volnmes we find him recovering from the blow of the Brookfield affair, having in deep depression written Esmond, which Forster almost killed by a review in The Times. Thus the first American tour came as a relief to him, and there he made many lifelong friendships, especially with the Baxters, in- dulging, sentimentally if you insist, in a kind of paternal love affair with the elder daughter, in whom he saw Beatrice Esmond living again. There was much in America not to his taste ; but, unlike Dickens, he foresaw its tremendous future. It was during this tour that he began to be so driven, ceaselessly delivering his Humorists lectures, but all the while gleefully counting the dollars ; for now he was intent on assuring, besides a maintenance for his wife in the asylum, a competence for his two daughters, to whom he grew daily more devoted. Perhaps the most revealing of the letters in this volume are those (hithertougunpublished) which he wrote to his daughters and to his mother, who was in charge of them in Paris. Thackeray, with that kind of detached Christianity typical of so many eminent Victorians, was distressed by the idea that his children should become victims of the narrow French Calvinism which was his mother's passionate cult, and equally distressed by the idea of hurting his mother.

Then back to England—to travel with his daughters, and to write The Newcomes—and again lectures in America, this tune on The Four Georges, and this tour nearly wore him out. He came to loathe the mountebank performance, and grew infinitely wearied of his lectures ; the only balm was American kindness, the great spur the fattening roll of dollars. Soon his children would be safe! Then England again, and, though the capital was mounting up, yet more lecturing. Would he never be free? He begins to see the goal in sight, with prospects of doing what he wants. Should he go into Parliament? He fights an election at Oxford, to be beaten on the Sabbatarian issue. He dreams of going back to painting ; at least he hopes to be able to write what he likes. But his American invest- ments crash—so on he goes—to The Cornhill, to The Adventures of Philip and " Punch," "Punch," "Punch." When will he be able to write that Life of Queen Anne? The fiction vein is exhausted: but there is Denis Duval to do.

He was now constantly ill ; he dined out far too often and too well, and the end came suddenly, in a fit of apoplexy. But he had re- established his patrimony, and left his family comfortably off. The harried years had after all been successful—in a sense. Yet the picture we get is not of a successful business man, rather of 'a baffled artist. He had little vanity, but he knew where he stood. He recog- nised that Dickens had a greater genius as an imaginative creator, but he knew that he was the better artist. We don't hear much about his work, but we catch glimpses of his tremendous labours, of the real investigation he put into writing Esmond, of the " research " we should call it now, which went to the making of The Virginians, all in the midst of his apparently engulfing social life.

And, throughout, the great pivots of his existence were the affection and love for his mother and his daughters, and the sense of his friendships. The most engaging thing about him, perhaps, is his sense of fun, his gusto, which though it must often have been forced, never seemed so. We are astounded by the energy which adorned so many of his many letters with spirited drawings, which

carried out the epistles in tiny handwriting, and so on. We do, at last, thanks to Mr. Ray, seem to get a complete picture of the man, his power, his warm-heartedness, his excessive living all coming together to procure an impressive balance. Sentimental? Yes, if you like ; but at least he was sentimental about the right things—the family affections and self-respect. His " cynicism " enabled him to see how far these were valid in everyday existence, and to value them accordingly.

The first two volumes of this superb definitive edition were noticed in these pages on August 23rd, 1946. It remains to say only that Dr. Ray is once more to be heartily congratulated on achieving a first-rate piece of work, and that he will issue a supplementary volume consisting of letters culled from private collections in England, to which anyone interested in human beings—one need not say in Thackeray—will look forward with avidity. BONAMY DOBRtE.