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And here comes a curious speculation. Where do all the letters come from that go into these collections? Do you keep the letters that you receive? I confess that I burn most of mine as soon as I have read them. Still more, do you keep copies of the letters that you send? I don’t mean typewritten business letters which you put damp into the patent-press-letter-copier to take off an impression to file away for reference, but friendly letters? The typewriting machine, by the way, is perhaps partly responsible for the decay of the letter writing art. It is hard to imagine Charles Lamb, or any other master of this most personal and intimate little art, who would not be disconcerted by this mechanical interposition between his thought and his page. The last generation must certainly have hoarded their letters more carefully than ours. You come across trunks full of them, desks full of them in the garrets of old houses: yellow bundles tied with tape, faded ink, stains of pressed violets, dust and musty odors, old mirth, old sorrows, old loves. Hackneyed themes of pathos, I mention them again, not to drop the tear of sensibility on their already well-moistened paper, but to enquire: Are these, and such as these, the sources of those many printed volumes “Letters of Blank,” “Diary and Correspondence of So and So,” ranging in date over periods of fifty or sixty years, and beginning sometimes in the boyhood of the writer, when the correspondent who preserved the letter could not possibly have foreseen Blank’s future greatness and the value of his autograph?
Women are proverbially good letter writers. The letters of Mme. de Sevigné to her daughter are masterpieces of their kind. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s are among the best of English letters; and Fitzgerald somewhat whimsically mentions the correspondence of a certain Mrs. French as worthy to rank with Horace Walpole’s. “Would you desire at this day,” says De Quincey, “to read our noble language in its native beauty.. steal the mail bags and break open all the letters in female handwriting. Three out of four will have been written by that class of women who have the most leisure and the most interest in a correspondence by the post,” i.e., “unmarried women above twenty-five.” De Quincey adds that “if required to come forward in some public character” these same ladies “might write ill and affectedly… But in their letters they write under the benefit of their natural advantages.. sustained by some deep sympathy between themselves and their correspondents.” “Authors can’t write letters,” says Lowell in a letter to Miss Norton. “At best they squeeze out an essay now and then, burying every natural sprout in a dry and dreary sand flood, as unlike as possible to those delightful freshets with which your heart overflows the paper. They are thinking of their punctuation, of crossing their t’s and dotting their i’s, and cannot forget themselves in their correspondent, which I take to be the true recipe for a letter.” And writing to another correspondent, C. E. Norton, he says: “The habits of authorship are fatal to the careless unconsciousness that is the life of a letter… But worse than all is that lack of interest in one’s self that comes of drudgery – for I hold that a letter which is not mainly about the writer of it lacks the prime flavor.” This is slightly paradoxical, for, I repeat, the best published letters are commonly the work of professional literati. Byron’s letters have been preferred by some readers to his poetry, such are their headlong vigor, dash, verve, spontaneity, the completeness of their self-expression. Keats was par excellence the literary artist; yet nothing can exceed the artlessness, simplicity, and sympathetic self-forgetfulness with which he writes to his little sister. But it is easy to see what Lowell means. Charles Lamb’s letters, e.g., though in many respects charming, are a trifle too composed. They have that trick of quaintness which runs through the “Essays of Elia,” but which gives an air of artificiality to a private letter. He is practising a literary habit rather than thinking of his correspondent. In this most intimate, personal, and mutual of arts, the writer should write to his friend what will interest him as well as himself. He should not dwell on hobbies of his own; nor describe his own experiences at too great length. It is all right to amuse his friend, but not to air his own cleverness. Lowell’s letters are delightful, and, by and large, I would place them second to none in the language. But they are sometimes too literary and have the faults of his prose writing in general. Wit was always his temptation, misleading him now and then into a kind of Yankee smartness and a disposition to show off. His temperament was buoyant, impulsive; there was to the last a good deal of the boy about Lowell. Letter writing is a friendly art, and Lowell’s warm expressions of love for his friends are most genuine. His epistolary style, like his essay style, is lavish and seldom chastened or toned down to the exquisite simplicity which distinguishes the best letters of Gray and Cowper. And so Lowell is always getting in his own way, tripping himself up over his superabundance of matter. Still, as a whole, I know no collected letters richer in thought, humor, and sentiment. And one may trace in them, read consecutively, the gradual ripening and refining of a highly gifted mind and a nature which had at once nobility and charm of thought.
Lowell speaks admiringly of Emerson’s “gracious impersonality.” Now impersonality is the last thing we expect of a letter writer. Emerson could write a good letter on occasion, as may be seen by a dip almost anywhere into the Carlyle-Emerson correspondence. But when Mr. Cabot was preparing his life of Emerson and applied to Henry James, Senior, for permission to read his letters to Emerson, Mr. James replied, not without a touch of petulance: “Emerson always kept one at such arm’s length, tasting him and sipping him and trying him, to make sure that he was worthy of his somewhat prim and bloodless friendship, that it was fatiguing to write him letters. I can’t recall any serious letter I ever sent him. I remember well what maidenly letters I used to receive from him.” We know what doctrine Emerson held on the subject of “persons.” But it is just this personality which makes Lowell the prince of letter writers. He may attract, he may irritate, but he never fails to interest us in himself. Even in his books it is the man in the book that interests most.
Women write good letters because they are sympathetic; because they take personal rather than abstract views; because they stay at home a great deal and are interested in little things and fond of exchanging confidences and news. They like to receive letters as well as to write them. The fact that Richardson found his most admiring readers among the ladies was due perhaps not only to the sentimentality of his novels, but to their epistolary form. Hence there is apt to be a touch of the feminine in the most accomplished letter writers. They are gossips, like Horace Walpole, or dilettanti like Edward Fitzgerald, or shy, reserved, sensitive persons like Gray and Cowper, who live apart, retired from the world in a retirement either cloistral or domestic; who have a few friends and a genius for friendship, enjoy the exercise of their pens, feel the need of unbosoming themselves, but are not ready talkers. Above all they are not above being interested in trifles and little things. Cowper was absorbed in his hares, his cucumber frames and gardening, country walks, tea-table chat, winding silk for Mrs. Unwin. Lamb was unceasingly taken up with the oddities and antiquities of London streets, the beggars, the chimney sweeps, the old benchers, the old bookstalls, and the like. Gray fills his correspondence with his solitary pursuits and recreations and tastes: Gothic curiosities, engravings, music sheets, ballads, excursions here and there. The familiar is of the essence of good letter writing: to unbend, to relax, to desipere in loco, to occupy at least momentarily the playful and humorous point of view. Solemn, prophetic souls devoted to sublimity are not for this art. Dante and Milton and “old Daddy” Wordsworth, as Fitzgerald calls him, could never have been good letter writers: they were too great to care about little things, too high and rigid to stoop to trifles.
Letter writing is sometimes described as a colloquial art. Correspondence, it is said, is a conversation kept up between interlocutors at a distance. But there is a difference: good talkers are not necessarily good letter writers, and vice versa. Coleridge, e.g., was great in monologue, but his letters are in no way remarkable. Cowper, on the other hand, did not sparkle in conversation, and Gray was silent in company, “dull,” Dr. Johnson called him. Johnson himself, notoriously a most accomplished talker, does not shine as a letter writer. His letters, frequently excellent in substance, are ponderous in style. They are of the kind best described as “epistolary correspondence.” The Doctor needed the give and take of social intercourse to allay the heaviness of his written discourse. His talk was animated, pointed, idiomatic, but when he sat down and took pen in hand, he began to translate, as Macaulay said, from English into Johnsonese. His celebrated letter of rebuke to Lord Chesterfield labors under the weight of its indignation, is not free from pomposity and pedantry, and is written with an eye to posterity. One can imagine the noble lord, himself an accomplished letter writer, smiling over this oracular sentence: “The shepherd in Virgil grew at last acquainted with Love, and found him a native of the rocks.” Heine’s irony, Voltaire’s light touch would have stung more sharply, though somewhat of Johnson’s dignified pathos would perhaps have been lost. Orators, in general, are not good letter writers. They are accustomed to the ore rotundo utterance, the “big bow-wow,” and they crave the large audience instead of the audience of one.
The art of letter writing, then, is a relaxation, an art of leisure, of the idle moment, the mind at ease, the bow unbent, the loin ungirt. But there are times in every man’s life when he has to write letters of a tenser mood, utterances of the passionate and agonized crises of the soul, love letters, death messages, farewells, confessions, entreaties. It seems profane to use the word art in such connections. Yet even a prayer, when it is articulate at all, follows the laws of human speech, though directed to the ear that heareth in secret. The collects of the church, being generalized prayer, employ a deliberate art.
Probably you have all been called upon to write letters of condolence and have found it a very difficult thing to do. There is no harder test of tact, delicacy, and good taste. The least appearance of insincerity, the least intrusion of egotism, of an air of effort, an assumed solemnity, a moralizing or edifying pose, makes the whole letter ring false. Reserve is better here than the opposite extreme; better to say less than you feel than even to seem to say more.
There is a letter of Lincoln’s, written to a mother whose sons had been killed in the Civil War, which is a brief model in this kind. I will not cite it here, for it has become a classic and is almost universally known. An engrossed copy of it hangs on the wall of Brasenose College, Oxford, as a specimen of the purest English diction – the diction of the Gettysburg address.
THACKERAY’S CENTENARY
AFTER all that has been written about Thackeray, it would be flat for me to present here another estimate of his work, or try to settle the relative value of his books. In this paper I shall endeavor only two things: first, to enquire what changes, in our way of looking at him, have come about in the half century since his death. Secondly, to give my own personal experience as a reader of Thackeray, in the hope that it may represent, in some degree, the experience of others.
What is left of Thackeray in this hundredth year since his birth? and how much of him has been eaten away by destructive criticism – or rather by time, that far more corrosive acid, whose silent operation criticism does but record? As the nineteenth century recedes, four names in the English fiction of that century stand out ever more clearly, as the great names: Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot. I know what may be said – what has been said – for others: Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters, Charles Reade, Trollope, Meredith, Stevenson, Hardy. I believe that these will endure, but will endure as writers of a secondary importance. Others are already fading: Bulwer is all gone, and Kingsley is going fast.
The order in which I have named the four great novelists is usually, I think, the order in which the reader comes to them. It is also the order of their publication. For although Thackeray was a year older than Dickens, his first novels were later in date, and he was much later in securing his public. But the chronological reason is not the real reason why we read them in that order. It is because of their different appeal. Scott was a romancer, Dickens a humorist, Thackeray a satirist, and George Eliot a moralist. Each was much more than that; but that was what they were, reduced to the lowest term. Romance, humor, satire, and moral philosophy respectively were their starting point, their strongest impelling force, and their besetting sin. Whenever they fell below themselves, Walter Scott lapsed into sheer romantic unreality, Dickens into extravagant caricature, Thackeray into burlesque, George Eliot into psychology and ethical reflection.
I wonder whether your experience here is the same as mine. By the time that I was fourteen, as nearly as I can remember, I had read all the Waverley novels. Then I got hold of Dickens, and for two or three years I lived in Dickens’s world, though perhaps he and Scott somewhat overlapped at the edge – I cannot quite remember. I was sixteen when Thackeray died, and I heard my elders mourning over the loss. “Dear old Thackeray is gone,” they told each other, and proceeded to reread all his books, with infinite laughter. So I picked up “Vanity Fair” and tried to enjoy it. But fresh from Scott’s picturesque page and Dickens’s sympathetic extravagances, how dull, insipid, repellent, disgusting were George Osborne, and fat Joseph Sedley, and Amelia and Becky! What sillies they were and how trivial their doings! “It’s just about a lot of old girls,” I said to my uncle, who laughed in a provokingly superior manner and replied, “My boy, those old girls are life.” I will confess that even to this day, something of that shock of disillusion, that first cold plunge into “Vanity Fair,” hangs about the book. I understand what Mr. Howells means when he calls it “the poorest of Thackeray’s novels – crude, heavy-handed, caricatured.” I ought to have begun, as he did, with “Pendennis,” of which he writes, “I am still not sure but it is the author’s greatest book.” I don’t know about that, but I know that it is the novel of Thackeray’s that I have read most often and like the best, better than “Henry Esmond” or “Vanity Fair”: just as I prefer “The Mill on the Floss” to “Adam Bede,” and “The House of the Seven Gables” to “The Scarlet Letter” (as Hawthorne did himself, by the way); or as I agree with Dickens that “Bleak House” was his best novel, though the public never thought so. We may concede to the critics that, objectively considered, and by all the rules of judgment, this or that work is its author’s masterpiece and we ought to like it best – only we don’t. We have our private preferences which we cannot explain and do not seek to defend. As for “Esmond,” my comparative indifference to it is only, I suppose, a part of my dislike of the genre. I know the grounds on which the historical novel is recommended, and I know how intimately Thackeray’s imagination was at home in the eighteenth century. Historically that is what he stands for: he was a Queen Anne man – like Austin Dobson: he passed over the great romantic generation altogether and joined on to Fielding and Goldsmith and their predecessors. Still no man knows the past as he does the present. I will take Thackeray’s report of the London of his day; but I do not care very much about his reproduction of the London of 1745. Let me whisper to you that since early youth I have not been able to take much pleasure in the Waverley novels, except those parts of them in which the author presents Scotch life and character as he knew them.
I think it was not till I was seventeen or eighteen, and a freshman in college, that I really got hold of Thackeray; but when once I had done so, the result was to drive Dickens out of my mind, as one nail drives out another. I never could go back to him after that. His sentiment seemed tawdry, his humor, buffoonery. Hung side by side, the one picture killed the other. “Dickens knows,” said Thackeray, “that my books are a protest against him: that, if the one set are true, the other must be false.” There is a species of ingratitude, of disloyalty, in thus turning one’s back upon an old favorite who has furnished one so intense a pleasure and has had so large a share in one’s education. But it is the cruel condition of all growth.
The heavens that now draw him with sweetness untold,
Once found, for new heavens he spurneth the old.
But when I advanced to George Eliot, as I did a year or two later, I did not find that her fiction and Thackeray’s destroyed each other. I have continued to reread them both ever since and with undiminished satisfaction. And yet it was, in some sense, an advance. I would not say that George Eliot was a greater novelist than Thackeray, nor even so great. But her message is more gravely intellectual: the psychology of her characters more deeply studied: the problems of life and mind more thoughtfully confronted. Thought, indeed, thought in itself and apart from the story, which is only a chosen illustration of a thesis, seems her principal concern. Thackeray is always concrete, never speculative or abstract. The mimetic instinct was strong in him, but weak in his great contemporary, to the damage and the final ruin of her art. His method was observation, hers analysis. Mr. Brownell says that Thackeray’s characters are “delineated rather than dissected.” There is little analysis, indeed hardly any literary criticism in his “English Humorists”: only personal impressions. He deals with the men, not with the books. The same is true of his art criticisms. He is concerned with the sentiment of the picture, seldom with its technique, or even with its imaginative or expressional power.
In saying that Dickens was essentially a humorist and Thackeray a satirist, I do not mean, of course, that the terms are mutually exclusive. Thackeray was a great humorist as well as a satirist, but Dickens was hardly a satirist at all. I know that Mr. Chesterton says he was, but I cannot believe it. He cites “Martin Chuzzlewit.” Is “Martin Chuzzlewit” a satire on the Americans? It is a caricature – a very gross caricature – a piece of bouffe. But it lacks the true likeness which is the sting of satire. Dickens and Thackeray had, in common, a quick sense of the ridiculous, but they employed it differently. Dickens was a humorist almost in the Ben Jonsonian sense: his field was the odd, the eccentric, the grotesque – sometimes the monstrous; his books, and especially his later books, are full of queer people, frequently as incredible as Jonson’s dramatis personae. In other words, he was a caricaturist. Mr. Howells says that Thackeray was a caricaturist, but I do not think he was so except incidentally; while Dickens was constantly so. When satire identifies itself with its object, it takes the form of parody. Thackeray was a parodist, a travesty writer, an artist in burlesque. What is the difference between caricature and parody? I take it to be this, that caricature is the ludicrous exaggeration of character for purely comic effect, while parody is its ludicrous imitation for the purpose of mockery. Now there is plenty of invention in Dickens, but little imitation. He began with broad facetiae– “Sketches by Boz” and the “Pickwick Papers”; while Thackeray began with travesty and kept up the habit more or less all his life. At the Charterhouse he spent his time in drawing burlesque representations of Shakespeare, and composing parodies on L. E. L. and other lady poets. At Cambridge he wrote a mock-heroic “Timbuctoo,” the subject for the prize poem of the year – a prize which Tennyson captured. Later he wrote those capital travesties, “Rebecca and Rowena” and “Novels by Eminent Hands.” In “Fitzboodle’s Confessions” he wrote a sentimental ballad, “The Willow Tree,” and straightway a parody of the same. You remember Lady Jane Sheepshanks who composed those lines comparing her youth to
A violet shrinking meanly
Where blow the March winds3 keenly —
A timid fawn on wildwood lawn
Where oak-boughs rustle greenly.
I cannot describe the gleeful astonishment with which I discovered that Thackeray was even aware of our own excellent Mrs. Sigourney, whose house in Hartford I once inhabited (et nos in Arcadia). The passage is in “Blue-Beard’s Ghost.” “As Mrs. Sigourney sweetly sings: —
“ ‘O the heart is a soft and delicate thing,
O the heart is a lute with a thrilling string,
A spirit that floats on a gossamer’s wing.’
Such was Fatima’s heart.” Do not try to find these lines in Mrs. Sigourney’s complete poems: they are not there. Thackeray’s humor always had this satirical edge to it. Look at any engraving of the bust by Deville (the replica of which is in the National Portrait Gallery), which was taken when its subject was fourteen years old. There is a quizzical look about the mouth, prophetic and unmistakable. That boy is a tease: I would not like to be his little sister. And this boyish sense of fun never deserted the mature Thackeray. I like to turn sometimes from his big novels, to those delightful “Roundabout Papers” and the like where he gives a free rein to his frolic: “Memorials of Gormandizing,” the “Ballads of Policeman X,” “Mrs. Perkins’ Ball,” where the Mulligan of Ballymulligan, disdaining the waltz step of the Saxon, whoops around the room with his terrified partner in one of the dances of his own green land. Or that paper which describes how the author took the children to the zoölogical gardens, and how
First he saw the white bear, then he saw the black,
Then he saw the camel with a hump upon his back.
Chorus of Children:
Then he saw the camel with the HUMP upon his back.
Of course in all comic art there is a touch of caricature, i.e., of exaggeration. The Rev. Charles Honeyman in “The Newcomes,” e.g., has been denounced as a caricature. But compare him with any of Dickens’s clerical characters, such as Stiggins or Chadband, and say which is the fine art and which the coarse. And this brings me to the first of those particulars in which we do not view Thackeray quite as his contemporaries viewed him. In his own time he was regarded as the greatest of English realists. “I have no head above my eyes,” he said. “I describe what I see.” It is thus that Anthony Trollope regarded him, whose life of Thackeray was published in 1879. And of his dialogue, in special, Trollope writes, “The ear is never wounded by a tone that is false.” It is not quite the same to-day. Zola and the roman naturaliste of the French and Russian novelists have accustomed us to forms of realism so much more drastic that Thackeray’s realism seems, by comparison, reticent and partial. Not that he tells falsehoods, but that he does not and will not tell the whole truth. He was quite conscious, himself, of the limits which convention and propriety imposed upon him and he submitted to them willingly. “Since the author of ‘Tom Jones’ was buried,” he wrote, “no writer of fiction has been permitted to depict, to his utmost power, a Man.” Thackeray’s latest biographer, Mr. Whibley, notes in him certain early Victorian prejudices. He wanted to hang a curtain over Etty’s nudities. Goethe’s “Wahlverwandtschaften” scandalized him. He found the drama of Victor Hugo and Dumas “profoundly immoral and absurd”; and had no use for Balzac, his own closest parallel in French fiction. Mr. G. B. Shaw, the blasphemer of Shakespeare, speaks of Thackeray’s “enslaved mind,” yet admits that he tells the truth in spite of himself. “He exhausts all his feeble pathos in trying to make you sorry for the death of Col. Newcome, imploring you to regard him as a noble-hearted gentleman, instead of an insufferable old fool.. but he gives you the facts about him faithfully.” But the denial of Thackeray’s realism goes farther than this and attacks in some instances the truthfulness of his character portrayal. Thus Mr. Whibley, who acknowledges, in general, that Thackeray was “a true naturalist,” finds that the personages in several of his novels are “drawn in varying planes.” Charles Honeyman and Fred Bayham, e.g., are frank caricatures; Helen and Laura Pendennis, and “Stunning” Warrington are somewhat unreal; Colonel Newcome is overdrawn – “the travesty of a man”; and even Beatrix Esmond, whom Mr. Brownell pronounces her creator’s masterpiece, is a “picturesque apparition rather than a real woman.” And finally comes Mr. Howells and affirms that Thackeray is no realist but a caricaturist: Jane Austen and Trollope are the true realists.
Well, let it be granted that Thackeray is imperfectly realistic. I am not concerned to defend him. Nor shall I enter into this wearisome discussion of what realism is or is not, further than to say that I don’t believe the thing exists; that is, I don’t believe that photographic fiction – the “mirror up to nature” fiction – exists or can exist. A mirror reflects, a photograph reproduces its object without selection or rejection. Does any artist do this? Try to write the history of one day: everything – literally everything – that you have done, said, thought: and everything that you have seen done, or heard said during twenty-four hours. That would be realism, but, suppose it possible, what kind of reading would it make? The artist must select, reject, combine, and he does it differently from every other artist: he mixes his personality with his art, colors his art with it. The point of view from which he works is personal to himself: satire is a point of view, humor is a point of view, so is religion, so is morality, so is optimism or pessimism, or any philosophy, temper, or mood. In speaking of the great Russians Mr. Howells praises their “transparency of style, unclouded by any mist of the personality which we mistakenly value in style, and which ought no more to be there than the artist’s personality should be in a portrait.” This seems to me true; though it was said long ago, the style is the man. Yet if this transparency, this impersonality is measurably attainable in the style, it is not so in the substance of the novel. If an impersonal report of life is the ideal of naturalistic or realistic fiction – and I don’t say it is – then it is an impossible ideal. People are saying now that Zola is a romantic writer. Why? Because, however well documented, his facts are selected to make a particular impression. I suppose the reason why Thackeray’s work seemed so much more realistic to his generation than it does to ours was that his particular point of view was that of the satirist, and his satire was largely directed to the exposure of cant, humbug, affectation, and other forms of unreality. Disillusion was his trade. He had no heroes, and he saw all things in their unheroic and unromantic aspect. You all know his famous caricature of Ludovicus Rex inside and outside of his court clothes: a most majestic, bewigged and beruffled grand monarque: and then a spindle-shanked, pot-bellied, bald little man – a good illustration for a chapter in “Sartor Resartus.” The ship in which Thackeray was sent home from India, a boy of six, touched at St. Helena and he saw Napoleon. He always remembered him as a little fat man in a suit of white duck and a palm-leaf hat.
Thackeray detested pose and strut and sham heroics. He called Byron “a big sulky dandy.” “Lord Byron,” he said, “wrote more cant.. than any poet I know of. Think of the ‘peasant girls with dark blue eyes’ of the Rhine – the brown-faced, flat-nosed, thick-lipped, dirty wenches! Think of ‘filling high a cup of Samian wine’:.. Byron himself always drank gin.” The captain in “The White Squall” does not pace the deck like a dark-browed corsair, but calls, “George, some brandy and water!”
And this reminds me of Thackeray’s poetry. Of course one who held this attitude toward the romantic and the heroic could not be a poet in the usual sense. Poetry holds the quintessential truth, but, as Bacon says, it “subdues the shows of things to the desires of the mind”; while realism clings to the shows of things, and satire disenchants, ravels the magic web which the imagination weaves. Heine was both satirist and poet, but he was each by turns, and he had the touch of ideality which Thackeray lacked. Yet Thackeray wrote poetry and good poetry of a sort. But it has beauty purely of sentiment, never of the imagination that transcends the fact. Take the famous lines with which this same “White Squall” closes:
And when, its force expended,
The harmless storm was ended,
And as the sunrise splendid
Came blushing o’er the sea;
I thought, as day was breaking,
My little girls were waking
And smiling and making
A prayer at home for me.
And such is the quality of all his best things in verse – “The Mahogany Tree,” “The Ballad of Bouillebaisse,” “The End of the Play”; a mixture of humor and pensiveness, homely fact and sincere feeling.
Another modern criticism of Thackeray is that he is always interrupting his story with reflections. This fault, if it is a fault, is at its worst in “The Newcomes,” from which a whole volume of essays might be gathered. The art of fiction is a progressive art and we have learned a great deal from the objective method of masters like Turgenev, Flaubert, and Maupassant. I am free to confess, that, while I still enjoy many of the passages in which the novelist appears as chorus and showman, I do find myself more impatient of them than I used to be. I find myself skipping a good deal. I wonder if this is also your experience. I am not sure, however, but there are signs of a reaction against the slender, episodic, short-story kind of fiction, and a return to the old-fashioned, biographical novel. Mr. Brownell discusses this point and says that “when Thackeray is reproached with ‘bad art’ for intruding upon his scene, the reproach is chiefly the recommendation of a different technique. And each man’s technique is his own.” The question, he acutely observes, is whether Thackeray’s subjectivity destroys illusion or deepens it. He thinks that the latter is true. I will not argue the point further than to say that, whether clumsy or not, Thackeray’s method is a thoroughly English method and has its roots in the history of English fiction. He is not alone in it. George Eliot, Hawthorne, and Trollope and many others practise it; and he learned it from his master, Fielding.
