permitted to contemplate passions as | having been invited by Sir Pepin Rib poetic powers; he is bidden to appreciate them as moral qualities. His pictures become sentences; he is a counsellor rather than an observer, a judge rather than an artist. We see by what machinery Thackeray has changed novel into satire. stone to an entertainment. He buy a small estate, tries to sink the apothe cary, and shows off in the new glory of a landed proprietor. Each of these details is a concealed or evident sar casm, which says to the reader: My good friend, remain the honest John Tomkins that you are; and for the love of your son and yourself, avoid taking the airs of a great nobleman.” I open at random his three great works-Pendennis, Vanity Fair, The Newcomes. Every scene sets in relief a moral truth: the author desires that at every page we should form a judgment on vice and virtue; he has blamed or approved beforehand, and the dialogues or portraits are to him only means by which he adds our approbation to his approbation, our blame to his blame. He is giving us lessons; and beneath the sentiments which he describes, as beneath the events which he relates, we continually discover rules for our conduct and the inten-known maiden, and falls in love with tions of a reformer. On the first page of Pendennis we see the portrait of an old major, a man of the world, selfish and vain, seated comfortably in his club, at the table by the fire, and near the window, envied by surgeon Glowry, whom nobody ever invites, seeking in the records of aristocratic entertainments for his own name, gloriously placed amongst those of illustrious guests. A family letter arrives. Naturally he puts it aside and reads it carelessly last of all. He utters an exclamation of horror; his nephew wants to marry an actress. He has places booked in the coach (charging the sum which he disburses for the seats to the account of the widow and the young scapegrace of whom he is guardian), and hastens to save the young fool. If there were a low marriage, what would become of his invitations? The manifest conclusion is: Let us not be selfish, or vain, or fond of good living, like the major. Chapter the second: Pendennis, the father of the young man in love, had "exercised the profession of apothecary and surgeon," but, being of good birth, his " secret ambition had always been to be a gentleman." He comes into money; is called Doctor, marries the very distant relative of a lord, tries to get acquainted with high families. He boasts to the last day of his life of Old Pendennis dies. His son, the noble heir of the domain, “ Prince of Pendennis and Grand Duke of Fair oaks," begins to reign over his mother, his cousin, and the servants. He sends wretched verses to the county papers, begins an epic poem, a tragedy in which sixteen persons die, a scathing history of the Jesuits, and defends church and king like a loyal Tory. He sighs after the ideal, wishes for an un an actress, a woman of thirty-two, who learns her parts mechanically, as ig norant and stupid as can be. Young folks, my dear friends, you are all af fected, pretentious, dupes of yourselves and of others. Wait to judge the world until you have seen it, and do not think you are masters when you are scholars. The lesson continues and lasts as long as the life of Arthur. Like Le Sage in Gil Blas, and Balzac in Le Père Goriot, the author of Pendennis depicts young man having some talent, endowed with good feelings, even generous, desiring to make a name, whilst, at the same time, he falls in with the maxims of the world; but Le Sage only wished to amuse us, and Balzac only wished to stir our passions: Thackeray, from beginning to end, labors to correct us. This intention becomes still more evident if we examine in detail one of his dialogues and one of his pictures We will not find there impartial ener gy, bent on copying nature, but attentive thoughtfulness, bent on transforming into satire objects, words, and events. All the words of the character are chosen and weighed, so as to be odious or ridiculous. It accuses itself is studious to display vice, and behind its voice we hear the voice of the writer who judges, unmasks, and pun ishes it. Miss Crawley, a rich old woman, falls ill.* Mrs. Bute Crawley, her relative, hastens to save her, and to save the inheritance. Her aim is to have excluded from the will a nephew, Captain Rawdon, an old favorite, presumptive heir of the old lady. This Rawdon is a stupid guardsman, a frequenter of taverns, a too clever gamFler, a duellist, and a roué. Fancy the capital opportunity for Mrs. Bute, the respectable mother of a family, the worthy spouse of a clergyman, accustomed to write her husband's sermons! From sheer virtue she hates Captain Rawdon, and will not suffer that such a good sum of money should fall into such bad hands. Moreover, are we not responsible for our families? and is it not for us to publish the faults of our relatives? It is our strict duty, and Mrs. Bute acquits herself of hers conscientiously. She collects edifying stories of her nephew, and therewith she edifies the aunt. He has ruined so and so; he has wronged such a woman. He has duped this tradesman; he has killed this husband. And above all, unworthy man, he has mocked his aunt! Will that generous lady continue to cherish such a viper? Will she suffer her numberless sacrifices to be repaid by such ingratitude and such ridicule? We can imagine the ecclesiastical eloquence of Mrs. Bute. Seated at the foot of the bed, she keeps the patient in sight, plies her with draughts, enlivens her with terrible sermons, and mounts guard at the door against the probable invasion of the heir. The siege was well conducted, the legacy attacked so obstinately must be yielded up; the virtuous fingers of the matron grasped beforehand and by anticipation the substantial heap of shining sovereigns. And yet a carping spectator might have found some faults in her management. Mrs. Bute managed rather too well. She forgot that a woman persecuted with sermons, handled like a bale of goods, regulated like a clock, might take dislike to so harassing an authority What is worse, she forgot that a timid old woman, confined to * Vanity Fair. [Unless the original octavo edition is mentioned, the translator has always used the collected edition of Thackeray's works in small octavo, 1855-1868, 14 vols.] the house, overwhelmed with preach ings, poisoned with pills, might die be fore having changed her will, and leave all, alas, to her scoundrelly nephew Instructive and formidable example Mrs. Bute, the honor of her sex, the consoler of the sick, the counsellor of her family, having ruined her health to look after her beloved sister-in-law, and to preserve the inheritance, was just on the point, by her exemplary de votion, of putting the patient in her coffin, and the inheritance in the hands of her nephew. m, Apothecary Clump arrives; he trembles for his dear client; she is worth to him two hundred a year; he is resolved to save this precious life, in spite of Mrs. Bute. Mrs. Bute interrupts and says: "I am sure, my dear Mr. Clump, no efforts of mine have been wanting to restore our dear invalid, whom the ingratitude of her nephew has laid on the bed of sickness. I never shrink from personal discomfort; I never rufuse to sacrifice myself. I would lay down my life for my duty, or for any member of my husband's family.* The disinterested apothecary returns to the charge heroically. Immediately she replies in the finest strain; her eloquence flows from her lips as from an over-full pitcher. She cries aloud : "Never, as long as nature supports me, will I desert the post of duty. As the mother of a family and the wife of an English clergyman, Í humbly trust that my principles are good. When my poor James was in the smallpox, did I allow any hireling to nurse him? No!" The patient Clump scatters about sugared compliments, and pressing his point amidst interruptions, protestations, offers of sacrifice, railings against the nephew, at last hits the mark. He delicately insinuates that the patient "should have change, fresh air, gayety." "The sight of her horrible nephew casually in the Park, where I am told the wretch drives with the brazen partner of his crimes," Mrs. Bute said (letting the cat of selfishness out of the bag of secrecy), "would cause her such a shock, that we should have to bring her back to bed again. She must not go out, Mr. Clump. She shall not go out as long as I remain to * Vanity Fair, ch. xix. general prosperity; and, somehow, during the stay of Miss MacWhirter's fat coachman, the beer is grown much stronger, and the consump tion of tea and sugar in the nursery (where her maid takes her meals) is not regarded in the least. Is it so, or is it not so? Tappeal to the middle classes. Ah, gracious powers! I wish you would send me an old aunt-a maiden aun -an aunt with a lozenge on her carriage, and a front of light coffee-coloured hair-how my Julia and I would make her comfortable! children should work workbags for her, and my Sweet-sweet vision! Foolish fool.st dream!" watch over her. And as for my health, | Even the servants in the kitcaen share in the what matters it? I give it cheerfully, sir. I sacrifice at the altar of my duty." It is clear that the author attacks Mrs. Bute and all legacy-hunters. He gives her ridiculous airs, pompous phrases, a transparent, coarse, and blustering hypocrisy. The reader feels hatred and disgust for her the more she speaks. He would unmask her; he is pleased to see her assailed, driven into a corner, taken in by the polished manœuvres of her adversary, and rejoices with the author, who tears from her and emphasizes the shameful confession of her tricks and her greed. There is no disguising it. The read er most resolved not to be warned, is warned. When we have an aunt with a good sum to leave, we shall value our attentions and our tenderness at III. Having arrived so far, satirical reflection quits the literary form. In or- their true worth. The author has ta der the better to develop itself, it ex-ken the place of our conscience, and hibits itself alone. Thackery now at the novel, transformed by reflection tacks vice himself, and in his own name. becomes a school of manners. No author is more fertile in dissertations; he constantly enters his story to reprimand or instruct us; he adds theoretical to active morality. We might glean from his novels one or two volumes of essays in the manner of La Bruyère or of Addison. There are essays on love, on vanity, on hypocrisy, on meanness, on all the virtues, all the vices; and turning over a few pages, we shall find one on the comedies of legacies, and on too attentive relatives: "What a dignity it gives an old lady, that balance at the banker's! How tenderly we look at her faults, if she is a relative (and may every reader have a score of such), what a kind, good-natured old creature we find her! How the junior partner of Hobbs and Dobbs leads her smiling to the carriage with the lozenge upon it, and the fat wheezy coachman! How, when she comes to pay us a visit, we generally find an opportunity to let our friends know her station in the world! We say (and with perfect truth) I wish I had Miss MacWhirter's signature to a cheque for five thousand pounds. She wouldn't miss it, says your wife. She is ny aunt, say you, in an easy careless way, when your friend asks if Miss MacWhirter is any relative? Your wife is perpetually sending her little testimonies of affection; your little girls work endless worsted baskets, cushions, and foot-stools for her. What a good fire there is in her room when she comes to pay you a visit, although your wife laces her stays without one! The house during her stay assumes a festive, neat, warm, jovial, snug appearance not visible at other seasons. You yourself, dear sir, forget to go to sleep after dinner, and find yourself all of a sudden (though you invariably lose) very fond of a rubber. What good dinners you have game every day, Malm nev-Madeira, and no end of fish from London! The lash is laid on very heavily in this school; it is the English taste. About tastes and whips there is no disputing; but without disputing we may understand, and the surest means of understanding the English taste is to compare it with the French taste. I see in France, in a drawing-room of men of wit,or in an artist's studio, a score of lively people: they must be amused, that is their character. You may speak to them of human wickedness, but on condition of diverting them. If you get angry, they will be shocked; if you teach a lesson, they will yawn. Laugh, it is the rule here-not cruelly, or from manifest enmity, but in good humor and in lightness of spirit. This nimble wit must act; the discovery of a clean piece of folly is a fortunate hap for it. As a light flame, it glides and flickers in sudden outbreaks on the mere surface of things. Satisfy it by imitating it, and to please gay people be gay. Be polite, that is the second commandment, very like the other. You speak to sociable, delicate, vain men, whom you must take care not to offend, but whom you must flatter. You would wound them by trying to carry conviction by force, by dint of solid arguments, by a display of eloquence and indignation. Do them the honor of supposing tha • Vanity Fair, ch. ix. they understand you at the first word, that a hinted smile is to them as good as a sound syllogism, that a fine allusion caught on the wing reaches them better than the heavy onset of a dull geometrical satire. Think, lastly (between ourselves), that, in politics as in religion, they have been for a thousand years very well governed,over governed; that when a man is bored he desires to be so no more; that a coat too tight splits at the elbows and elsewhere. They are critics from choice; from choice they like to insinuate forbidden things; and often, by abuse of logic, by transport, by vivacity, from ill humor, they strike at society through government, at morality through religion. They are scholars who have been too long under the rod; they break the windows in opening the doors. I dare not tell you to please them: I simply remark that, in order to please them, a grain of seditious humor will do no harm. in motion. Let us also not forget that our hearers are practical minds, lovers of the useful; that they come here to be taught; that we owe them solid truths; that their common sense, some. what contracted, does not fall in with hazardous extemporizations or doubtful hints; that they demand worked out refutations and complete explanations; and that if they have paid to come in, it was to hear advice which they might apply, and satire founded on procf. Their mood requires strong emotions; their mind asks for precise demonstra tions. To satisfy their mood, we must not merely scratch, but torture vice; to satisfy their mind we must not rail in sallies, but by arguments. One word more: down there, in the midst of the assembly, behold that gilded, splendid book, resting royally on a velvet cushion. It is the Bible; around it there are fifty moralists, who a while ago met at the theatre and pelted an actor off the stage with apples, who was guilty I cross seven leagues of sea, and of having the wife of a citizen for his here I am in a great unadorned hall, mistress. If with our finger-tip, with with a multitude of benches, with gas all the compliments and disguises in burners, swept, orderly, a debating club the world, we touch a single sacred or a preaching house. There are five leaf, or the smallest moral conventionalhundred long faces, gloomy and sub-ism, immediately fifty hands will fasten dued; and at the first glance it is clear that they are not there to amuse themselves. In this land a grosser mood, overcharged with a heavier and stronger nourishment, has deprived impressions of their swift nobility, and thought, less facile and prompt, has lost its vivacity and its gayety. If we rail before them, we must think that we are speaking to attentive, concentrated men, capable of durable and profound sensations, incapable of changeable and sudden emotion. Those immobile and No writer was better gifted than contracted faces will preserve the same Thackeray for this kind of satire, beattitude; they resist fleeting and half-cause no faculty is more proper to satire formed smiles; they cannot unbend; and their laughter is a convulsion as stiff as their gravity. Let us not skim over our subject, but lay stress upon it; let us not pass over it lightly, but impress it; let us not dally, but strike; be assured that we must vehemently move vehement passions, and that shocks are needed to set these nerves * * Thackeray, in his Book of Snobs, says: "Their usual English expression of intense gloom and subdued agony." themselves on our coat collar and put us out at the door. With Englishmen we must be English, with their passion and their common sense adopt their leading-strings. Thus confined to recognize truths, satire will become more bitter, and will add the weight of public belief to the pressure of logic and the force of indignation. IV. than reflection. Reflection is concen trated attention, and concentrated attention increases a hundredfold the force and duration of emotions. He who is immersed in the contemplation of a vice, feels a hatred of vice, and the intensity of his hatred is measured by the intensity of his contemplation. At first anger is a generous wine, which intoxicates and excites; when preserv. ed and shut up, it becomes a liquor | burning all that it touches, and corrod On ing even the vessel which contains it. | against himself, and constrains himself Of all satirists, Thackeray, after Swift, to take the part of his adversary. is the most gloomy. Even his country- the other hand, this painful and volun men have reproached him with depict- tary attitude is the sign of excessive ing the world uglier than it is.* Indig- scorn; the protection which apparently nation, grief, scorn, disgust, are his is afforded to an enemy is the worst of ordinary sentiments. When he di- insults. The author seems to say: "I gresses, and imagines tender souls, he am ashamed to attack you; you are sc exaggerates their sensibility, in order weak that, even supported, you mus to render their oppression more odious. fall; your reasonings are your shame The selfishness which wounds them and your excuses are your condemna appears horrible, and their resigned tion." Thus the more serious the irony. sweetness is a mortal insult to their the stronger it is; the more you take tyrants: it is the same hatred which care to defend your adversary, the more has calculated the kindliness of the you degrade him; the more you seem to victims and the harshness of the perse-aid him, the more you crush him. Thi cutors.t is why Swift's grave sarcasm is su terrible; we think he is showing respect, and he slays; his approbation is aflagellation. Amongst Swift's pupils, Thackeray is the first. Several chapters in the Book of Snobs-that, for instance, on literary snobs-are worthy of Gulliver. The author has been passing in review all the snobs of England; what will he say of his colleagues, the literary snobs? Will he dare to speak of them? Certainly: the Schoolmaster flog so resolutely as his own "My dear and excellent querist, whom does so? Didn't Brutus chop his offspring's head off? You have a very bad opinion indeed of the present state of Literature and of literary hesitate to stick a knife into his neighbour penmen, if you fancy that any one of us would man, if the latter's death could do the State any servic This anger, exasperated by reflection, is also armed by reflection. It is clear that the author is not carried away by passing indignation or pity. He has mastered himself before speaking. He has often weighed the rascality which he is about to describe. He is in possession of the motives, species, results, as a naturalist is of his classifications. He is sure of his judgment, and has matured it. He punishes like a man convinced, who has before him a heap of proofs, who advances nothing without a document or an argument, who has foreseen all objections and refuted all excuses, who will never pardon, who is right in being inflexible, who is conscious of his justice, and who rests his sentence and his vengeance on all the powers of meditation and "But this, that in the literary profes equity. The effect of this justified and sion there are no Snobs. Look round at the whole body of British men of letters, and I contained hatred is overwhelming. defy you to point out among them a single inWhen we have read to the end of Bal- stance of vulgarity, or envy, or assumption. zac's novels, we feel the pleasure of a them, they are all modest in their demeanour, "Men and women, as far as I have known naturalist walking through a museum, elegant in their manners, spotless in their lives. past a fine collection of specimens and and honourable in their conduct to the world and monstrosities. When we have read to to each other. You may occasionally, it is true. the end of Thackeray, we feel the shud- why? Not in the least out of malice; not at hear one literary man abusing his brother; but de of a stranger brought before a mat- all from envy; merely from a sense of truth bress in the operating-room of an hos- and public duty. Suppose, for instance, I goork pital, on the day when cautery is ap-naturedly point out a blemish in my friend Mr. plied or a limb is taken off. In such a case the most natural weapon is serious irony, because it bears witness to concentrated hatred: he who employs it suppresses his first feeling; he feigns to be speaking * The Edinburgh Review. † See the character of Amelia in Vanity Fair, and of Colonel Newcome in the New Punch's person, and say Mr. P. has a hump back, and his nose and chin are more crooked than those features in the Apollo or Antinous, which we are accustomed to consider as our standards of beauty; does this argue malice on my part towards Mr. Punch? Not in the least. It is the critic's duty to point out defects as well as merits, and he invariably does his duty with the utmost gentleness and can dour. "That sense of equality and fraternity amongst Authors has always struck me as one of the most amiable characteristics of the class. It |