It was Thackeray’s expressed wish that there should be no biography written of him, a position that might indicate extreme modesty, colossal conceit, or distinct cowardice. Whatever the reason, it has not been entirely obeyed, and rightly. A man of the power of Thackeray cannot live without the world being in some way better; it is only good that those who never knew him in the flesh should at least know him in a book. It is not enough that, as Chesterton points out, he ‘was of all novelists the most autobiographical,’ which is not to say that he wrote unending personal confessions with a very large I, but rather that his books were drawn from the experiences of his life, a field that is productive of the richest literary worth.

  Thackeray was born, we are told, in the year 1811, so that he was a year old when the world received two babies who were like ten thousand other babies, except that they happened to be Browning and Dickens. It was the time when the world trembled, because that mighty soldier Napoleon stood with arms folded, waiting to strike, it knew not where. It was the time when military genius reached its height, a height that could be only brought low by one thing, and that was an English General with a long nose and a cocked hat.

  Although Thackeray was born in Calcutta, he was as English as he could possibly be. But he did not forget his Eastern beginning. ‘A certain vague cosmological quality was always mixed with his experience, and it was his favourite boast that he had seen men and cities like Ulysses.’ Which is to say that he had not only seen the world, he had felt it; if he had not seen a one-eyed giant, he had at least seen a two-eyed Hindu.

  His early life followed the ordinary life of a thousand other boys born of Anglo-Indian parents; that was, he went to school, where ‘a girl broke his heart and a boy broke his nose,’ and he discovered that the nose took longer to mend.

  At Cambridge, Chesterton tells us, Thackeray found that it was a quite easy thing to sit down and play cards and lose £1,500 in an evening, a fact that very probably was more useful to him than twenty degrees. Trinity College was the Thackeray College: it has had no more famous son. It was said that Thackeray could order a dinner in every language in Europe, which is to say he could have dined in comfort in any restaurant in Soho.

  From Cambridge, we learn, he made his way to the Bar, and at the same time wrote articles in the hope that some editor might keep them from the waste-paper basket. Chesterton tells us an interesting legend that about this time Thackeray offered to illustrate the books of Dickens. The offer was declined, which he thinks was ‘a good thing for Dickens’ books and a good thing for Thackeray’s.’ Whether Thackeray ever really did meet Dickens does not matter much; it is at least picturesque; ‘it affects the imagination as much as the meeting with Napoleon.’

  There has always been what is for Chesterton a silly discussion — a controversy as to whether Thackeray was a cynic. This was because he happened to write first about villains, then about heroes; villains are always more interesting than heroes, and not infrequently are much better mannered. A cynic is a person who doesn’t take the trouble to find the motives for things, or he takes it for granted that the motives are never disinterested ones. To say that Thackeray was a cynic because he drew a large number of villains is as untrue as to say Swift was a cynic because he wrote satire. Thackeray wrote about villains because he wished to also write about heroes; Swift was satirical because he had the intelligence to see that his contemporaries were fools when they might have been wise. The cynics are the people of to-day who write books which attribute low motives to every one, which turn love into lust, which care not what is written so long as it can be made certain that there is nothing in the world which has not a hidden meaning.

  The first appearance of Thackeray in literature was in ‘Fraser’s Magazine,’ under the pseudo name of Michael Angelo Titmarsh. It is on these unimportant papers that Chesterton thinks was based the attack on Thackeray for being a cynic.

  In passing, it is not necessary to say more than that Thackeray’s marriage ended in a horrible manner: Mrs. Thackeray was sent to an asylum. ‘I would do it over again,’ said Thackeray; which was a ‘fine thing to say.’ It was really carrying out ‘for better or worse,’ which often enough really means for better only.

  It will now be well at once to plunge into the very heart of Thackeray, that heart which beat beneath the huge, gaunt frame. The two books which have made his name famous, and what Chesterton thinks of them, must be now gone into.

  ‘The Book of Snobs’ was one of those literary rarities that has genius in its very name. No one probably really thinks himself a snob; every one likes to read of one. Thackeray brought snobbishness to a classic. There had been books of scoundrels, there had been books of heroes, there had been books of nincompoops, now there was a book of those people who abound in every community, and who are snobs.

  ‘This work was much needed and very admirably done. The solemn philosophic framework, the idea of treating snobbishness as a science, was original and sound; for snobbishness is indeed a disease in our Society.’

  Unfortunately Chesterton is not nearly hard enough on snobbishness. Were it a disease, it might be excusable as being at times unavoidable; it is nothing of the sort, it is a deliberate thing that undermines society more than anything; it is entirely spontaneous, and flourishes in every community, from the Church to the Jockey Club.

  ‘Aristocracy does not have snobs any more than democracy’; but this ‘Thackeray was too restrained and early Victorian to see.’ There are at the present day a great number of people who will not see that Bolshevism is as snobbish as Suburbia, that the poor man in the Park Lodge is as much a snob as his master, who only knows the county folks. Snobbery is not the monopoly of any one set; even also is it, as Thackeray says,’a mean admiration’ that thinks it is better to be a ‘made’ peer than an honest gardener.

  ‘The true source of snobs in England was the refusal to take one side or the other in the crisis of the French Revolution.’

  The title of ‘Vanity Fair’ was an inspiration. It gives the ideas of the disharmonies that can be found in any market place in any English market town on any English market day. It brings out ‘the irrelevancy of Thackeray.’ A good motto for the book is, for Chesterton, that attributed to Cardinal Newman: ‘Evil always fails by overleaping its aim and good by falling short of it.’ Our critic feels that the critics have been unfair to Thackeray with respect to their denouncement of the character of Amelia Sedley as being much too soft, whereas Chesterton thinks she was really a fool, which is the logical outcome of being the reverse of hard.

  But Amelia was soft in a very delightful way. She was ‘open to all emotions as they came’ — in fact, she was a fool who was wise because she has retained her power of happiness, while the hard Rebecca has arrived at hell, ‘the hell of having all outward forces open, but all receptive organs closed.’

  It is necessary again to refer to the charge of cynicism that is levelled against Thackeray. The mistake is, as our critic points out, ‘taking a vague word and applying it precisely.’ It all depends upon what cynicism really means. ‘If it means a war on comfort, then Thackeray was, to his eternal credit, a cynic’; ‘if it means a war on virtue, then Thackeray, to his eternal honour, was the reverse of a cynic.’ His object is to show that silly goodness is better than clever vice. As I have indicated, the long and the short of the matter is that Thackeray created a lot of villains, and has therefore been called a cynic by those who don’t even know what the word means, or that there is a literary blessedness in the making of villains to bring out the more excellent virtues of the heroes.

  From these two monumental works that were original in every way and might almost be called propaganda, Thackeray passed on to a novel which bore the name of ‘Pendennis.’ It was ‘a novel with nothing else but a hero, only that the hero is not very heroic,’ which makes him all the more interesting, for it makes him all the more human.

  But Pendennis is more than a man — he is a type or symbol. He is ‘the old mystical tragedian of the Middle Ages, Everyman.’ It is an epic, because it celebrates the universal man with all his glorious failings and glorious virtues. The love of Pendennis for Miss Fotheringay is a different thing to the ordinary love of man for woman; it is rather the love that is in every man for every woman. This is what I think Chesterton means when he says ‘it is the veritable Divine disease, which seems a part of the very health of youth.’

  The Everyman of the Middle Ages was a symbol of what man really was. Chesterton feels that every outside force that came to Everyman had to be abnormal — for instance, ‘Death had to be bony’ — so he contends in ‘Pendennis’ that the shapes that intrude on the life of Arthur Pendennis have aggressive and allegorical influences.

  ‘Pendennis’ is an epic because it celebrates not the strength of man but his weakness. In the character of Major Pendennis, Chesterton feels that Thackeray did a great work, because he showed that the life of the so-called man of the world is not the gay and careless one that fiction depicts. It is the religious people who can afford to be careless. ‘If you want carelessness you must go to the martyrs.’ The reason is fairly obvious. The worldling has to be careful, as he wants to remain in the world; the religious man, of whom the martyr was the true prototype, can afford to be careless; he is not necessarily careless of life, but he can put things at their proper value. The martyr facing the lions in the Roman arena knew what life really was; the worldly woman spending her life trying to be in the company of titled people has no real idea of the value of it. It is the religious people who know the world; it is the worldly people who know nothing of it.

  With the publication of ‘Pendennis’ the reputation of Thackeray reached that position which is sought by all authors, that of being able to write a book that should not, on publication, be put to the indignity of being asked who the writer was. Thackeray was now in the delightful position of being well established, a position that very often results in careless and poor work. It has been said with some truth that once a writer is established he can write anything he likes. This is to an extent true, and such work may even be published and fairly popular, but he will find sooner or later that his influence is on the wane.

  In the ‘Newcomes’ Thackeray drew a character in Colonel Newcome, to whom was given the highest of literary honours, that of being spoken of apart from the book — I mean in the way that people speak of Micawber or Scrooge, almost unconsciously, without really having the actual work in which the character appears in mind. Of this book Chesterton says ‘the public has largely forgotten all the Newcomes except one, the Colonel who has taken his place with Don Quixote, Sir Roger de Coverley, Uncle Toby, and Mr. Pickwick.’

  Chesterton feels that Thackeray at times falls into the trick common to many writers, that of repeating himself, a trick that is natural, as it does seem in some ways that the human mind, like history, is apt to move in circles. The reason was that in some way Thackeray became tired of Barnes Newcome; the result was that from being a convincing villain he develops into a stereotyped one, the type who fires pistols into the air and is the squire’s runaway son, so often found at the Lyceum.

  If Thackeray ‘sprawled’ in the Newcomes he atones for this in ‘Esmond,’ if any atonement is needed for sprawling, which is probably only that Thackeray felt that there is nothing so elastic and sprawling as a human person, whether he be a villain or the reverse.

  For Chesterton, ‘Esmond’ is in the modern sense a work of art, which is to say that it was a book that could be read anywhere. ‘It had no word that might not have been used at the court of Queen Anne.’ It is a highly romantic tale, but it is a sad story. It is a great Queen Anne romance; but, ‘there broods a peculiar conviction that Queen Anne is dead.’ The whole tale moves round a complicated situation in which a young man loves a mother and her daughter, and finally marries the mother. This work is, for Chesterton, Thackeray’s ‘most difficult task.’ It is difficult for the reason that the situation of the tale is placed between possibilities of grace and possibilities even of indecency. It is not hard to write a graceful tale, it is easy to write a loose story; it is extremely difficult to write a story that may by a stroke of the pen be either beautiful or merely sordid. But Thackeray manipulates the keys of the tale so that ‘it moves like music,’ an extremely apt metaphor, where harmonies can be made disharmonies by a single note.

  It is a strange fact that a sequel is seldom to be compared to its forerunner: ‘Tom Brown’s Schooldays’ is of a schoolboy who is an eternal type; ‘Tom Brown at Oxford’ is a poor book that does not in the least understand Oxford. The fact is, I think, that an author cannot be inspired twice on the same subject — the gods give but sparingly, their gifts do not fall as the rains.

  The sequel to ‘Esmond’ that Thackeray wrote, ‘The Virginians,’ is an ‘inadequate sequel,’ which is not to say that it is a poor book, but rather that it is an unnecessary one. Yet, as Chesterton says, ‘Thackeray never struck a smarter note than when, in “The Virginians,” he created the terrible little Yankee Countess of Castlewood.’ In the same way as ‘The Virginians’ was a sequel to ‘Esmond,’ so ‘Philip’ was a sequel (also an inadequate one) to the ‘Newcomes.’

  It is strange that in two things at least Thackeray’s life followed the same course as Dickens. Both occupied the editorial chair: Dickens that of the Daily News, Thackeray that of the Cornhill Magazine. Both left unfinished works: Dickens that of ‘The Mystery of Edwin Drood,’ Thackeray that of ‘Denis Duval.’

  Thackeray’s last work, ‘Lovell the Widower,’ is ‘a very clever sketch, but as a novel is rather drawn out.’ ‘The Roundabout Papers’ make very pleasant reading. In one ‘he compares himself to a pagan conqueror driving in his chariot up the Hill of Coru, with a slave behind him to remind him that he is only mortal.’ In 1863, suddenly, Thackeray died, seven years before Dickens also passed away.

  Chesterton has in the space of a short introduction given a very clear account of the chief characteristics of Thackeray’s works; it is no easy matter to give in a few lines the essence of a great novel, and Chesterton is not always the most concise of writers. It will now be convenient to take a few of the characteristics of Thackeray and observe what he says of them.

  At once he is aware of the fact that there is no writer from whom it is more difficult to make extracts than from Thackeray. The reason is that Thackeray worked by ‘diffuseness of style.’ If he wished to be satirical about a character he was not so directly; rather he worked his way to the inside of the character, got to know all about it, and then began to be satirical. This is what Chesterton feels about the matter; it is no doubt the fairest way of being satirical and the most effective. Many people and writers are satirical without first of all demonstrating upon what grounds they have the right to be so. Satire is a wholly laudable thing if it is directed in a fair minded manner, but if it is only an excuse for bitter cynicism it is altogether contemptible. Thus he says of the Thackerean treatment of ‘Vanity Fair,’ ‘he was attacking “Vanity Fair” from the inside.’ It comes to this: if you want to make an extract from Thackeray you must dive about all over the place to make apparent irrelevancy become relevancy.

  If the use of the grotesque was a strength of Browning (as Chesterton contends against other critics), so in the case of Thackeray that which some critics have held to be a weakness — I mean his ‘irrelevancy’ — is for our critic a strength. It was a strength, because it was ‘a very delicate and even cunning literary approach.’ It is the perfect art of Thackeray to get the right situation, not by an assumption of it, but by so approaching it that there is no way out, which is arriving at the situation by the fairest means possible.

  ‘No other novelist ever carried to such perfection as Thackeray the art of saying a thing without saying it. Thus he may say that a man drinks too much, yet it may be false to say that he drinks.’ What he did was not to say that a man had arrived at such and such a state, but rather that things must change. If, as Chesterton says, Miss Smith finds marriage the reverse of the honeymoon, Thackeray does not say that the marriage is a failure, but that joy cannot last for ever; that if there are roses there are also thorns. It is an admirable method, far better than saying a thing straight out. It is better to tell a man who is a cad that there is such a thing as being a gentleman, than to tell him he is a cad.

  In his later life Thackeray was inclined to imitate himself. It is, I think, that the human brain is prone to move in circles. In the case of Thackeray, as our critic points out, in later days he used his rambling style, and, as was to be expected, he rather lost himself. ‘He did not merely get into a parenthesis, he never got out of it,’ which is to say that as Thackeray got older he inherited the tendencies of old age.

  I have said earlier in this chapter that the charge against Thackeray of cynicism was one that was founded on a false premise. The charge that his irrelevancy was a weakness is based on another false but popular premise, that the direct method is always the best. It is usually the worst. It is the worst in warfare, it is the worst in literature, but it is possibly the best in literary criticism.

  Thackeray had another quality that has laid him open to adverse criticism; that is, his ‘perpetual reference to the remote past.’ This repeated reference to the past may be a matter of conceit, or it may be that the influence of the past is genuinely felt. The reason that, as Chesterton points out, Thackeray referred so much to the remote past, was that he wished it to be known that ‘there was nothing new under the sun’; not even, as our critic says, ‘the sunstroke.’ Chesterton admits that at times Thackeray carried this tendency to an excess; also Thackeray wanted to show that the oldest thing in the world was its youth. Thus in writing of a fashionable drawing-room in Mayfair, if he referred to some classic, it was to ‘remind people how many débutantes had come out since the age of Horace.’ It was quite a different thing to the pompous bishop quoting Greek at the squire’s house to show that his doctor’s degree, though an honorary one, had some classical learning behind it, or the small boy translating Horace to avoid the headmaster’s cane. In the case of the bishop and the schoolboy, the use of the classics is, on the one hand, pomposity; on the other, discretion. In the case of Thackeray it was a reverence for the past, that it was a very large part of the present.