MR. THACKERAY'S NEW NOVEL.

Lyttelton Times, Volume III, Issue 128, 18 June 1853, Page 9

MR. THACKERAY'S NEW NOVEL.

[From the • Times.'] We are neither surprised nor disappointed by this first complete novel from the skilful pen of the author of Vanity Fair, We knew the level below which the genius of Mr. Thackeray would not fall, and above which its wings are not solicitous to soar. Every intelligent reader of Pendinnis must have taken a tolerably fair gauge of the writer's powers and aspirations when he closed the last page of that volume. It had followed, with the accustomed celerity of popular serials, close npon the heels of Vanity Fair, and all the faults, as well as some of the good points of the first—in many respects most admirable—production were repeated. In both works we had that incomparably easy and unforced style in which. Mr. Thackeray has courage to narrate his story and describe his incidents ; in both we had the same partial and unpleasant view of men and things; in both there presented themselves to our unquestionable annoyance and for our improper delight virtuous characters as insipid as they were good, and wicked personages as amusing as they were naughty.

If before the appearance of Esmond we had been asked to define the limits of Mr. Thackeray's field of operations, we should have said that it was bounded on the North by Bakerstreet, and on the South by Pall-mall. Nowhere had this novelist seemed more at home than in the drawing-rooms of the Baker-street district, and in the coffee rooms of the Pall-mall Clubhouse. The petty vices and disagreeable foibles of the middle classes were as familiar to him as his own countenance, and to speak the truth, it would really seem that he loved to contemplate them with as much enjoyment as a fond woman might her face. Life drawn by the pencil of Mr. Thackeray was life without the bright light of heaven upon it; it was life looked upon with a disbelieving, a disappointed, and a jaundiced eye. It was real, but only as sickness is real, or any other earthly visitation. Travel whithersoever we might with our clever but sceptical companion, it was impossible to feel happy or at ease. We dared not believe in heroism, for he rebuked the belief with a sneer; we could net talk of human perfectibility, for he pooh poohed the idea with a smile of contempt. If he introduced us to a clever girl, it was simply that we might detect hideous selfishness in its most delicate form. Did we note goodness in man or woman, it was only to be reminded that we gazed upon fools. Generous impulses crossed our path, but invariably allied with sottishness or worse. Inquiring minds were pointed out to us, listening industriously at keyholes, and ambition was deemed to have a fit illustration in the career of an aspiringswindler. It was not easy to proceed for an hour with Mr. Thackery without being fascinated by the tranquil and self-confident flow of his discourse, and without deriving instruction from his words :' but the most cheerful was doomed to lose all comfort in his walk. Who can be comfortable in a hospital? Who can be comfortable spending his days with people not passionate enough for the perpetration of great faults, and not sufficiently pure for the performance of the humblest virtues ? Who is comfortable in a sponging house, in a gambling booth, in any place on earth where the least creditable of man's great faculties are in full play, and where the highest and most ennobling are for the time annihilated and extinct ?

Boswell tells us that Dr. Johnson used to quote with great approbation the saying of a novelist, " that the virtues of Fielding's heroes were the vices of a truly good man." We could not say even that of Mr. Thackeray's heroes. Their virtues are rather the weaknesses of the truly stupid. We affirm that few things could be duller than Mr. Thackeray's pen engaged in the delineation of heroine or hero. We looked at the picture in the spirit of unconquerable incredulity. No matter how strongly the author insisted upon the genuineness of the article, we were unmoved by his pertinacity and proof against his assertions. Twenty times in the course of Vanity Fair he stops in order to look slyly into the reader's face, and to ascertain whether he is smiling at, or sympathising with, that very interesting widow, Mrs. Osborne. " You think," he vehemently exclaims, " that this isn't a heroine. I assure you she is. You mayn't believe it; she doesn't look like one,but take my word you are mistaken." The reader is not mistaken. Mr* Thackeray is not mista-

ken. Nobody is mistaken. In spite of his vehemence the author is quite as incredulous as everybody else. How shall he inspire faith when he is no believer ? How shall he hope to persuade others when he has not the power, even if he had the desire, to persuade himself? The temper and spirit with which the author of Vanity Fair is wont to approach our poor humanity are fraught with peril; for the undoubted genius and capability of the sceptic simply add to his power for mischief. It is a terrible thing to be taught by a master of his craft that in life there is little to excite admiration—nothing to inspire enthusiasm. It is fearful to have an insight into the human heart, and to detect in that holy of holies not even . one solitary spark of the once pure flame. We live and are supported by the conviction that goodness still prevails in the earth, and that the soul of man is still susceptible of the noblest impulses. Guilt is among us—crime abounds —falsehood is around and about us ; but, conscious as we are of these facts, we know and feel that man may yet trust to his fellow man, and that evil is not permitted to outweigh good. A series of novels, based upon the principle which Mr. Thackeray delights to illustrate, would utterly destroy this knowledge and render us a race of unbelievers—-animals less happy than the brutes who, dumb and unreasoning as they are, can still consort together and derive some consolation from their companionship. To the unreflecting, Thackeray and Dickens represent one school of fiction. But a greater mistake cannot be made. The two novelists have little or nothing in common. Their styles of composition are as opposed as their views of life. We have already spoken of the matchless and courageous ease with which Mr. Thackeray is content to tell his story. Too much praise cannot be awarded to him for this evidence of intellectual independence. His story may not be good, his philosophy may be tainted; but, whatever his subject matter, you have it before you with no factitious adornment in order to make it appear other than it is. Not so the inimitable author of Pickioick, whose style betrays effort and constant straining for effect. Again, Mr. Dickens sympathises deeply with his species, and is never so happy as when dealing with its better qualities. Mr. Thackeray never recognises such qualities, or when he finds tliem knows not what to do with them. Another and still more striking difference yet remains. It was said of Richardson, years ago, that the characters he drew were characters of nature, while those drawn, by Fielding were characters of manners. At the present day we may have another opinion on this subject; but, undoubtedly, as regards Mr. Thackeray aud , Mr. Dickens, the distinction, to a great extent holds good. The longer Mr. Dickens lives, and the more he writes, the more prone he becomes to leave the broad field of nature for the narrower path of art. The great Sam Weller, delightful as he is, after all is but a character of manners, one which, while it affords inexr pressible amusement to the readers of the present day, may be utterly untranslateable to the readers of a century hence. But Sam Weller will be understood and appreciated years after the later grotesque creations of the same gifted author, wdio would seem in his more recent productions to prefer the strange, the wonderful, the abnormal, and the exaggerated, to the familiar, the natural, the obvious, and the easily understood. Now, whatever may be the faults of Mr. Thackeray, no one can accuse him of making his books vehicles for the exhibition of monstrosities. His characters are often disagreeable enough, but the stamp of nature and of truth is upon them. Our quarrel with him is not that he is unreal, but that what is exceptional in life becomes under his treatment the abiding rule; not that Captain Crawley, Mr. Foker, Mr. Costigan,and Colonel Altamont are creatures that do not occasionally jostle against us in the streets, but that he would have us believe that the world is peopled with few but Fokers, Costigans, Altamonts, and Crawleys. We were gratified with the announcement which reached us about a twelvemonth siuce, that the author of Vanity Fair had resolved to eschew the serial form of publication and to make his next venture under the circumstances best calculated to display a writer's powers and to achieve permanent success. Month to month writing is but hand to mouth work, and satisfies neither author nor reader. But the announcement was accompanied by another not altogether so agreeable. Mr. Thackeray had enter-

tabled the town with some lively lectures upon the humourists of the days of Queen Anne, and had grown so familiar and fascinated with the period during the interesting process, that he resolved not only to write a Queen Anne novel, but positively to write it with a Queen Anne quill, held by a Queen Anne penman. In other words, the distinguished novelist, whose very breath of life is the atmosphere in which he lives, and whose most engaging quality is his own natural style, had suicidally determined to convey himself to a strange climate and to take absolute leave of his choicest characteristic. We confess that a more desperate venture we could hardly conceive it possible for a popular writer to make. We have a great respect for Queen Anne and for the writers of Her Majesty's augustan age, and when we read Addison and Swift we are charmed with the classic grace of the one, and made strong by the bold English of the other. But why lose our genuine Thackeray in order to get a spurious Steele or Budgeil ? Having made up his mind to write a novel in monthly parts no more, and to do as Scott and Fielding did before him, why, Mr. Thackeray, in the name of all that is rational, why write in fetters ? Why have your genius in leading strings ? Why have the mind and hand crippled ? Why pursue the muse under difficulties? Garrick must have been a great actor; so was John Kemble ; but what would our fathers have said to Kemble had he undertaken to destroy for a season his own identity, in order to. present a counterfeit of'his great predecessor ? We decline to judge Mr. Thackeray's powers from his present exhibition. He shall have justice from us, though he has none from himself. We reserve our opinion whether or not Mr. Thackeray is equal to a masterly and complete work of fiction until he attempts the labour with the energies of his spirit free. We wanted no assurance of the imitative skill of the author of Vanity Fair. If imitation were the highest kind of art Mr. Thackeray would be the first of living artists. Who can have'forgotten those piquant chapters in Punch, in which Mr. James, Mr. Disraeli, and Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, looked rather more original and like themselves than in their own works ? Had the imitator thought proper to continue the series, and to give us a specimen of every known author of eminence, we should have welcomed the samples, for we are sure they would have been perfect. But a sample of goods is not a bale. Horace Smith and his brother, though they did not hesitate in The Rejected Addresses to amuse the public with a specimen of Wordsworth in the shape of The Babjfs Debut, would never have daved to approach them with a close copy of Tne Excursion. Surely the least imaginative among us can fancy the probable result of that experiment!

The inconvenience of the. plan to which Mr. Thackeray has chanied down his intellect is made manifest in every part of his work. It is no disparagement to say that his disguise is too cumbrous to be perfect. That it is maintained so well is marvellous. The patience and perseverance of the writer must have been incessant, and infinite skill has been thrown away, which we feel with vexation and disappointment might have been devoted to the noblest uses. But in .spite of all the cleverness and industry, discrepancies and anomalies are inevitable; and one discrepancy in such a work is sufficient to take the veil from the reader s eyes and to put an end to the whole illusion. That Steele should be described as a private in the Guards in the year 1690, when he was only 15 years old and a school-buy at the Charter-house, is, perhaps, no great ofience in a work of fiction; but a fatal smile involuntarily crosses the reader's cheek, when he learns, in an early part of the story, that a nobleman is " made to play at ball and billiards by sharpers, who take his nionev," and is informed sometime afterwards that the same lord has " gotten a new game from London, a French game, called a billiard." It is not surprising that for a moment Mr. Thackeray should forget that he is Mr. Esmond, and speak of " vapid new coaches" that " performed the journey between London and the University in a single day," when he means to say " perform •" neither is it astonishing that the writer of 1852 should announce it as a memorable fact, that in the days of Queen Anne young fellows would " make merry at their taverns and call toasts," although it is quite out of place for the writer of 1742-"to marvel at the same custom, seeing that Colonel Esmond must have known the fashion to be in vogue in the time of George 11. A less pardonable oversight certainly occurs in the second

volume, when (at p. 40) the reign of William 111. and that of Queen Anne seem unaccountably jumbled together in the same paragraph; but were such faults as we have indicated to present themselves with tenfold frequency, it would be idle and unfair to insist upon imperfections inseparable from such an effort as that to which Mr. Thackeray has doomed himself for no better reason that we can discern than that of demonstrating how much more amusing, lively, and companionable he is in his own easy attire than when tricked out with the wig, buckles, and other accoutrements of our deceased and venerated ancestors. (To be continued')