MUSINGS WITHOUT METHOD. THACKERAY'S CENTENARY-THE PROGRESS OF THE NOVEL-THE IF the custom of keeping appreciation to the land of centenaries is anything better his birth. While Dickens is than a trick of advertisement, free of all the world, and has we are in duty bound to do been an influence even in Paris, honour this month to the Thackeray must still restrain memory of William Makepeace his conquests to his own country. Thackeray. The author of The paradoxes of his career are 'Vanity Fair,' born a hundred many and not lightly explicyears ago, long since took his able. Having in 'Barry place among the masters of Lyndon' achieved the intelEnglish prose. His works are lectual triumph of his life, he part and parcel of our litera- made no attempt, save in brief ture. All the forms of im- passages, ever again to use his mortality, gay or dull, are his supreme gift of irony. Born by right of conquest. Every without a spice of historical intelligent Briton delights in justice, he was yet intensely his "cynicism," or sheds tears interested in the past. His over his "sentimentality" sketches of Swift and Congreve at the proper time. Never bear no relation save in name again will he be dislodged from to their originals, nor did he the firm place which he holds ever scruple to make the heroes in our text-books of literature. of the eighteenth century the His merits are as intimately pack-saddle-asses of Victorian familiar to the readers of sentiment. Yet in 'Esmond fiction as his faults. The ease he produced by far the best of his picaresque manner, his historical novel of his generalarge canvases packed with a tion, and in 'Vanity Fair' he vast number of well-drawn painted such a picture of characters, his pleasant disdain manners, and with so sure a of plan and hero, will win him hand, that it will survive even unnumbered admirers unto the the superfluous whimperings of the end of time. His tiresome its author. habit of obtruding himself, the furious rage with which he takes moral shies at the Aunt Sallies of his own creation, his ready subservience to his own place and time, will limit his And as we take for granted the genius of Thackeray, we may take the chance his oentenary gives us to look back over the hundred years which have passed since his birth and attempt to estimate what pro- then as now in pursuing a lucrative trade. Mankind is not far divorced from the monkey, and is yet more loyal to the habit of imitation than that wayward beast. When one man has found an idea, there are always a hundred ready to mimic it. "Hobbs hints blue, straight he turtle eats; Dobbs paints blue, claret crowns his cup; Nokes outdoes Stokes in azure feats," and one of them knows or cares who fished the murex up. The great Sir Walter, it is true, came into his inheritance of fame and appreciation at once; but the most of the popular novels which delighted the careless reader a century since were long ago lost in oblivion. gress or retrogression has been made by the novel, his own chosen medium. In 1811 fiction was happy in possessing the energies and illusions of youth. Fielding and Richardson and Smollett were already acknowledged masters. 'The Castle of Otranto,' 'The Mysteries of Udolpho,' and 'The Monk' had sent a shiver of fear and amazement through all Europe. Romance, firmly established in England, had crossed the Channel and held Germany in thrall. The genius of Scott, destined to dominate the whole world of literature, had hitherto expressed itself only in verse. It was Thackeray's great good fortune to grow up, so to say, with the the Waverley Novels. He was three years older than 'Waverley' itself, and he was a young man writing for the Press in London when the pen fell from the Wizard's hand. And side by side with romance the novel of observation was advancing in a parallel line. Miss Burney had already shown, in a return to an older tradition, what excellent material there was lurking in the humours of every day; and Miss Austen, whose Sense and Sensibility' the fools follow it? In the came into being the same year as Thackeray, was touching with a finger of gentle satire the follies of those men and wemen whom she observed in her father's rectory. While the masters of their craft were winning for themselves a deathless fame, the popular novelists were as busy It is an interesting phenomenon, this resolute and sincere flattery of the great, in the history of letters. At every epoch you may mark it, and it gives the literary historian the chance to preach of schools and their tendencies. Its real origin lies no deeper than greed or folly. All the world believes that profit pursues fashion, and if a wise man shows the way to success, why should not late seventeenth century, when the returning king brought back a smile of gaiety to a land submerged in Puritanism, the road to fame lay through the drama. For some sixty years Comedy was the supreme mistress of literary England. Those there were, of course, who pursued other forms of litera ture, as there will always be some to chafe at the chains of a popular slavery. But Comedy seemed the easiest, as well as the most swiftly rewarded, expression of talent, and every man who could hold a pen aspired to be a playwright. And how dull, save the best, are all the productions of that age! Though Dryden and Congreve, Vanbrugh and Farquhar, still hold their place in the world's esteem, the rest have found in oblivion their proper place. That 'The Way of the World,' a perfect masterpiece, should have been jostled by a vast collection of spurious imitations would surprise us if we did not know the habit of literary gentlemen. The age which produced and succeeded it produced also a larger crop of bad plays, both tragedies and comedies, than any save that which parodied Shakespeare and Webster, Ben Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher. That anyone will ever again either read or put upon the stage the facile parodies of Cibber and Nat Lee, of the younger Shadwell and Rowe, of Ravenscroft or Sothern, or half a hundred others, we cannot believe. Their experiments in imitation long since served their turn. They brought their authors now a benefit performance, now a bitter disappointment, and they preserve an interest for none save the patient archeologist. As with the drama of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, so it was with the novel of the early nineteenth. Fiction remaining an art for the few, who practised it with dignity and understanding, became for the vast majority of those who hold a pen, a trade and no more. The novels of that age were like the sand in number. A catalogue, printed in 1819, contains no less than thirty thousand examples of fiction, in French or English. Of these, not one per cent is known to-day even by name. Was there ever a bitterer satire on the vanity of human hopes? To discover what were the qualities and demerits of the thirty thousand is an impossible task, which would require, were it attempted, the skill and energy of the excavator. If we may judge from the titles presented to our eager gaze, we may safely conclude that sobbing sentiment and romance, mysterious and transpontine, were best suited to the taste of the time. When they got hold of a good thing, these simple folk of 1819, they did not always appreciate it. method of classification adopted by the compiler of this catalogue baffles our understanding. What shall we say of the intelligence of one who takes a census of fiction, and classifies 'Guy Mannering' with 'The Monk,' 'Eblis, or the Magic of the Persians,' Astrologue,' 'Don Quixote,' and 'Amadis de Gaul' under the pompous heading of "Magic"? Pedantry, in truth, makes strange bedfellows, and it is difficult to say which gets the worst of it in The this encounter, Cervantes or Sir Walter Scott. But if, without a vast deal of archæological research, we cannot recover those ancient specimens of fiction, their titles are enough to reveal the humour of the time. Not much imagination is required to divine the character of Montbart, the Exterminator, or the Last of the Filibusters'; and none who has ever held in his hand a "penny dreadful" need have much doubt about 'Brick Bolding, or What is Life?' And as we scan the titles of these thirty thousand forgotten masterpieces, what strikes us most foroibly is their remoteness from life. 'Eufrasia, or the Ruins of the Castle of Flousca,'-what had that strange piece of fantasy to say to the readers of 1819? Obviously our grandfathers and grandmothers wished for nothing so much as to be "taken out of themselves," as the phrase has it. And "taken out" they were to such purpose, that they seem to have lived in a conventional fairyland of pasteboard and stagetrappings. Meanwhile the novelists of England were rediscovering the fact that the material of infinite romance lay at their doors; that they, no more than Fielding before them, need disdain the life of the road and the tavern. Whether Dickens heard in Pickwick and Sam Weller an echo of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza or not, the essence of his great work was as purely English as its background. There we have the English town and the English countryside, a comedy of English manners, a satire upon English follies. And English as 'Pickwick' is, it is universal in its appeal. The world sets no barrier against it. Wherever it goes, or whatever it does, it is as eagerly welcomed a8 the romances of Walter Scott. Thackeray also, like Dickens, ranged himself under the ancient banners. He is more closely allied to the great beginners of English fiction than to Ainsworth, the early Bulwer, the young Disraeli, and the rest of his elder contemporaries. He, too, was a painter of manners; he, too, was a satirist in his hours; yet, as we have said, there is something in him of insularity which makes his books almost unintelligible to the foreigner. The English novel and the French had separate qualities and submitted to different influences. Each has progressed in accord with the temperament of the nation which gave it birth. The schools and banners which are necessary always to the life and movement of literary France are unknown on our side the Channel, where every man is wont to fight for his own hand and to win or lose his own battle. indeed, is the Englishman's passion for individuality, that he prefers to be an anarch even in the presence of the greatest leaders. No Briton owed so great a debt to Sir Walter Scott as Balzac gladly confessed, and it must be admitted that no Briton could have So strong, turned the debt to so good an account. And this reflection leads us to confess that against Balzac we can pit no triumphant champion. The author of the Comédie Humaine ' is the greatest historian any country ever had. He has not merely given us a superb picture, large in treatment as it is faithful in detail, of modern France; he might almost be said to be the creator of modern France. He achieved a task far more splendid than that which Dickens and Thackeray achieved between them. But he left no real school, and few disciples. In truth, he is a figure of solitary grandeur, like the figure of Shakespeare. If Dickens and Thackeray, working in our staid English air, followed Balzac in founding no schools, they were plagued each of them by a vast mob of imitators. If a kind enumerator had come along, say, in 1850, and made a census of our novels, he would have discovered far more than thirty thousand, and he would have put his hands upon hundreds of sham - Dickens and shamThackerays. For the process of winnowing we owe a vast debt to the threshing-floor of time. Now and then a mere handful of chaff escapes the flail. Now and then, by a still worse accident, some grains of good corn are lost momentarily. Yet not for ever do they stray. Some pious hand sedulously recovers them, and perchance they seem larger than they are for their disappearance. And even after the flail has done its much work, there remains winnowed corn that we are proud to put into our granaries. A mere mention of those who survive honourably would be too large an encroachment on our space. on our space. But when we recall what was achieved in a brief half-century by the sisters Brontë; by George Eliot, who, if she had stopped short at 'Silas Marner,' would have held a far higher position even than is hers to-day; by Anthony Trollope and Charles Reade, by Mrs Gaskell and Miss Yonge, by Henry and Charles Kingsley, by Wilkie Collins and Blackmore; and finally, by George Meredith and Thomas Hardy, who have carried the novel a step farther on the road of psychology and sound English than most of their predecessors, -have we not a right to feel proud of our countrymen and their genius? And even from this meagre list we have omitted the great name of Benjamin Disraeli, whose novels were never well understood and so highly esteemed as they are to-day. That is one side of the medal. We contemplate the reverse less gladly; for it celebrates a mass of bad works such as no other age and no other country has ever produced. The latter part of Victoria's reign was the golden age of the commercial novelist. saw that there was money in the trade, and when America passed a printers' relief bill and called it a Copyright Act, he discerned another and a greater field of profit. So he left the He |