PENDENNIS AND FRIENDS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 815, 11 March 1955, Page 13

PENDENNIS AND FRIENDS

THACKERAY THE NOVELIST, by Geoffrey Tillotson; Cambridge University Press, English price, 22/6. " HACKERAY’S work is examined with thoroughness . and great sympathy. Professor Tillotson is concerned mainly with the six long novels, which he sees as a unity: they are to be read, he suggests, as "one immense saga." Further, the continuity is a response to the demands of Thackeray’s own nature. "They (the novels) indicate how well he himself was aware of the streamingness of experience. Not surprisingly, for he was one of those for whom narrative is as natural as the flow of the blood." The book is an elaboration of this judgment. There are other matters to be touched on-Thackeray’s conservatism, his willingness to take the world as it is, and his appeal ‘to ordinary human nature; but these come easily, and with a sort of necessity, from that first appraisal of Thackeray as a writer. Some critics have found him shallow: they see no evidence of social conscience, and deny him any power of sustained thought. It is doubtful if a man who lived so much in narrative could have been a systematic thinker; and I can see no reason why a weakness of philosophy should be held against him. A great novelist’ has an understanding of human nature which is revealed through his characters. For Thackeray, ideas passed immediately into illustration, so that even in his commentaries-as Professor Tillotson explains-his thoughts ‘were expressed in pictures. _ It is true that a writer who feels "the of experience" will reflect attitudes which may not be acceptable to a later generation, His treatment of Helen Pendennis, for instance, seems over-sentimental today, though it pleased the Victorians. But the abundant vitality and the richness of detail should remove barriers of taste set up by the years. It is very easy to slip into the world of Vanity Fair, or to move Without con-

straint in Pendennis. And in Esmond, thought by some to be the best historical novel in English, the power of the author’s imagination is irresistible. In that novel alone, is the answer to those who say that Thackeray’s place among

the great has become insecure.

H.