Chapter V

No: I dare to say that this gift of loose, informal, preaching was Thackeray’s bane _as a novelist_. The ease with which it came to him, and the public’s readiness to accept it, just tempted him to slouch along. _Esmond_ and the first half of _Vanity Fair_ excepted, he never seems (to me at least) to have planned out a novel. He could not sit at home, in his desolated house, and concentrate himself upon a close-knit artistic design: but wrote, as I have said, in hotels or “upon Club paper,” usually behind-time and (as the saying is) with the printer’s devil at his elbow: and so this great melancholy man could, out of his melancholy and his genius, curiously matched with it, of vivacious talk summon up ream upon ream at call. Heaven forbid this should suggest that when he came to facts--more especially when he dealt with his beloved eighteenth century--he was careless. On the contrary, he knew it familiarly as a hand knows its glove. I suppose no later writer (with the possible exception of Austin Dobson) has understood the earlier half of that century better. For certain, again, no writer has, comparably with Thackeray, revivified it. Scholars are always on the pad, with dark lanterns, to catch out writers of imagination: but I observe that these Proctors, encountering Thackeray, carefully edge to the other side of the street. I cannot find that anything in _Barry Lyndon_, _Esmond_, _The Virginians_, the opening of _Denis Duval_, has ever been seriously challenged by the pedants: and considering Thackeray’s fame and the minute jealousy of pedants, that is a fairly fine record. In the famous chapters on Brussels and Waterloo in _Vanity Fair_, so far as I discover, every record confirms, not one contradicts, his story.

Again, as it seems to me, this feebleness in construction--this letting the story go at hazard and filling out with chat or preaching--this lazy range of invention in plot--matches with limits in the range of his _characters_. Here again he is always impeccable when dealing with an Anglo-Indian retired, whether it be Jos. Sedley or Colonel Newcome--high or low; or with a Foker or a Costigan or anyone he has encountered in his own Bohemian life, or in a Pall Mall Club or in an Irish regiment or in any dingy lodging-house, at home or abroad. Any inhabitant of these haunts, haunts of his actual experience, he can exhibit and experiment upon with infinite variety. Within that range, you can say, he almost never went wrong. He could there convert all particulars to a Universal. No shadow of doubt can rest on the literal and actual truth of an anecdote he puts into _De Finibus_, one of his best _Roundabout Papers_.

“I was smoking,” says he, “in a tavern parlour one night, and
this Costigan came into the room alive, the very man; the most
remarkable resemblance of the printed sketches of the man, of the
rude drawings in which I had depicted him. He had the same little
coat, the same battered hat, cocked on one eye, the same twinkle in
that eye. ‘Sir,’ said I, knowing him to be an old friend whom I had
met in unknown regions--‘Sir,’ I said, ‘may I offer you a glass of
brandy-and-water?’ ‘_Bedad ye may_,’ says he, ‘_and I’ll sing ye a
song tu._’ Of course he spoke with an Irish brogue. Of course he
had been in the army. In ten minutes he pulled out an army agent’s
account, whereon his name was written. A few months later we read
of him in a police court. How had I come to know him, to divine
him? Nothing shall convince me that I have not seen that man in the
world of spirits....”

They used (he adds) to call the good Sir Walter the “Wizard of the North.” What if some writer should appear who can write so _enchantingly_ that he shall be able to call into actual life the people whom he invents?... Well, I think Thackeray could do that: but only, I think, in the small district limited by the Haymarket on the east and Kensington Gardens on the west. He could call spirits from the vasty deep of the Cider Cellars, evoke them from the shadowy recesses of the Reform or the Athenaeum Club. But, like Prospero, he had to draw a ring around him before his best incantations worked. The cautious Trollope remarks that his Sir Pitt Crawley “has always been to me a stretch of audacity which I have been unable to understand. But it has been accepted.” Yes, to be sure, it has been accepted, and old Sir Pitt is wickedly alive and breathing just because (on Thackeray’s own confession) he was drawn from the life. But as a rule, if you take his dukes and duchesses you will find him on ticklish ground, even so far northward as Mayfair, apt (shall we say?) to buttonhole the butler. Always saving _Esmond_ and a part of _The Virginians_, I ask you to compare anything in Thackeray with the opening of Tolstoy’s _War and Peace_, and you will detect at once which author is dealing with what he supposes and which with what is known to him, so familiar that he cannot mistake his people even as he enters a room.