in that fragrant bunch of theodore roosevelt’s letters to his children which has just brightened and sweetened our too sadly strenuous times there are some passages on novel-reading which are full of spirited good sense. he says that he can read pendennis, and the newcomes, and vanity fair over and over again; he agrees with his boy in preferring thackeray to dickens, and then he gives the reason—or at least a reason—for this preference:
“of course one fundamental difference ... is that thackeray was a gentleman and dickens was not.”
the damnatory clause in this sentence seems to me too absolute, though roosevelt softens it by adding, “but a man might do some mighty good work without being in any sense a gentleman.” that is certainly true, and beyond a doubt dickens did it—a wonderful plenty of it. it is also true that in several perfectly good senses he was a brave and kind gentleman, despite his faults in manners and dress.
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but it is the laudatory clause in roosevelt’s judgment that interests me. thackeray’s work is pervaded with his personality to an unusual degree. it is a saturated solution of the man. we can taste him in every page. and it is because we like the taste, because we find something strong and true, bracing and stimulant in it, that we love to read him. ’tis like being with a gentleman in any enterprise or adventure; it gives us pleasure and does us unconscious good.
well, then, what do we mean by “a gentleman?” tennyson calls it
the grand old name of gentleman
defamed by every charlatan,
and soil’d with all ignoble use.
in the big new oxford dictionary there is more than a pageful of definitions of the word, and almost every english essayist has tried a shot at it. one thing is sure, its old hereditary use as a title of rank or property is going out, or already gone. “john jones, gent.,” is a vanishing form of address. more and more the word is coming to connote something in character and conduct. inheritance
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may enter into it, and the sense of honour has a great part in it, and its outward and visible sign is an unassuming fitness of behaviour in the various circumstances of life. but its indispensable essence is reality; its native speech, sincerity; and its controlling spirit, good-will.
let us content ourselves with a description instead of a definition. a gentleman is a real man who deals honestly, bravely, frankly, and considerately with all sorts and conditions of other real men.
this is thackeray’s very mark and quality. we can feel it all through his life and works. everything real in the world he recognized and accepted, even though he might not always like it. but the unreal people and things—the pretenders, the hypocrites, the shams, and the frauds (whether pious or impious)—he detested and scoffed away. reality was his quest and his passion. he followed it with unfailing interest, penetration, and good temper. he found it, at least in humankind, always mixed and complicated, never altogether good nor altogether bad, no hero without a fault, and no villain
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without a germ of virtue. life is really made that way. the true realist is not the materialist, the five-sense naturalist, but the man who takes into account the human soul and god as ultimate realities.
thackeray’s personal life had nothing that was remarkable and much that was admirable. it was simply the background of his genius. he was a child of the upper-middle class in england—if you know just what that means. he went to the charterhouse school in london (which he afterward immortalized as greyfriars in the newcomes), and illustrated his passion for reality by getting his nose broken in a fight, which gave his face a permanent socratic cast. at cambridge university he seems to have written much and studied little, but that little to good purpose. he inherited a modest fortune, which he spent, not in riotous living, but in travel, art study in paris, and in the most risky of all extravagances, the starting of new periodicals. when this failed and his money was gone, he lived in london as a hack-writer.
his young wife was taken from him by that saddest
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of all bereavements—the loss of her mind. it became necessary to place her in a private sanitarium, where she outlived her husband by thirty years. to her, and to the two little daughters whom she left him, thackeray was faithful and devoted. he never complained, never flinched into an easy way of escape from his burden. he bent his back to it, and, in spite of natural indolence, he worked hard and was cheerful.
he made a host of friends and kept them, as stevenson puts it, “without capitulation.” of course, this grim condition implies some frictions and some dislikes, and from these thackeray was not exempt. the satire which was his first mode in writing was too direct and pungent to be relished by those who had any streak of self-humbug in their make-up. but, so far as i know, he had only one serious literary quarrel—that unhappy dispute with mr. edmund yates, in which dickens, with the best intentions in the world, became, unfortunately, somewhat involved. thackeray might perhaps have been more generous and forgiving—he could have afforded that luxury. but he could not
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have been more honest and frank, more real, than he was. being very angry, and for a just cause, he said so in plain words. presently the tempest passed away. when thackeray died in 1863, dickens wrote:
“no one can be surer than i of the greatness and goodness of his heart.”
the first period of his life as a man of letters was given almost entirely to satirical and fragmentary writing, under various noms de guerre. hence, he remained for a long time in comparative poverty and obscurity, from which he stepped into fame and prosperity with the publication of his first large novel, vanity fair, in 1847-48. it was like turning the corner of grub street and coming into glory avenue.
henceforth the way was open, though not easy. the succession of his big, welcome novels was slow, steady, unbroken. each one brought him thousands of new readers, and the old ones were semper fideles, even when they professed a preference for the earlier over the later volumes. his lecture tours in great britain and the united states were eminently
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successful—more so, i think, than those of charles dickens. they may have brought in less money, but more of what old william caxton, the prince of printers, called “good fame and renommee.” the last of his completed books, and one of his most delightful, was roundabout papers—a volume of essays that has no superior in english for a light, firm, friendly touch upon the realities of life. his last story begun was denis duval, and on this he was working when he laid down his pen on christmas eve, 1863, and fell asleep for the last time.
it was edmund yates who wrote of him then:
“thackeray was dead; and the purest english prose writer of the nineteenth century and the novelist with a greater knowledge of the human heart, as it really is, than any other—with the exception perhaps of shakespeare and balzac—was suddenly struck down in the midst of us.”
the human heart as it really is—there’s the point! that is what thackeray sought to know, to understand, to reveal, and—no! not to explain, nor to judge and sentence—for that, as he well knew, was
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far beyond him or any of us—but his desire was to show the real heart of man, in its various complexities and perplexities, working its way through the divers realities and unrealities in which we are all entangled.
the acute french critic, edmond scherer, distinguished and divided between george eliot as “a novelist of character,” and thackeray as “a novelist of manners.” the epithet will pass only if we take the word in the sense of william of wykeham’s motto, “manners makyth man.”
for, as surely as there is something in the outward demeanour which unveils and discloses the person within, even so surely is there something in behaviour, the habitual mode of speech and conduct, which moulds the man using it. a false behaviour weaves a texture of lies into the warp of his nature. a true behaviour weakens the hold of his own self-delusions, and so helps him to know what he really is—which is good for him and for others.
it was in this sense that thackeray was interested in manners, and depicted them in his books. go with him to a ball, and you arrive at the hour of
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unmasking; to a club, and you are aware of the thoughts under the conversation; to a play, and you pass behind the footlights and the paint; to a death-bed, and—well, do you remember the death of helen in pendennis? and of the colonel in the newcomes? foolish critics speak of these last two passages as “scenes.” scenes! by heaven! no, they are realities. we can feel those pure souls passing.
let us follow this clew of the passion for reality through the three phases of thackeray’s work.
