A History of English Literature

puppets, for our play is played out.'
Yet in reality Thackeray is not a cynic and the permanent impression left
by his books is not pessimistic. Beneath his somewhat ostentatious manner
of the man of the world were hidden a heart and a human sympathy as warm as
ever belonged to any man. However he may ridicule his heroes and his
heroines (and there really are a hero and heroine in 'Vanity Fair'), he
really feels deeply for them, and he is repeatedly unable to refrain from
the expression of his feeling. Nothing is more truly characteristic of him
than the famous incident of his rushing in tears from the room in which he
had been writing of the death of Colonel Newcome with the exclamation, 'I
have killed the Colonel!' In his books as clearly as in those of the most
explicit moralizer the reader finds the lessons that simple courage,
honesty, kindliness, and unselfishness are far better than external show,
and that in spite of all its brilliant interest a career of unprincipled
self-seeking like that of Becky Sharp is morally squalid. Thackeray
steadily refuses to falsify life as he sees it in the interest of any
deliberate theory, but he is too genuine an artist not to be true to the
moral principles which form so large a part of the substratum of all life.
Thackeray avowedly took Fielding as his model, and though his spirit and
manner are decidedly finer than Fielding's, the general resemblance between
them is often close. Fielding's influence shows partly in the humorous tone
which, in one degree or another, Thackeray preserves wherever it is
possible, and in the general refusal to take his art, on the surface, with
entire seriousness. He insists, for instance, on his right to manage his
story, and conduct the reader, as he pleases, without deferring to his
readers' tastes or prejudices. Fielding's influence shows also in the
free-and-easy picaresque structure of his plots; though this results also
in part from his desultory method of composition. Thackeray's great fault
is prolixity; he sometimes wanders on through rather uninspired page after
page where the reader longs for severe compression. But when the story
reaches dramatic moments there is ample compensation; no novelist has more
magnificent power in dramatic scenes, such, for instance, as in the
climactic series in 'Vanity Fair.' This power is based largely on an
absolute knowledge of character: in spite of a delight in somewhat fanciful
exaggeration of the ludicrous, Thackeray when he chooses portrays human
nature with absolute finality.
'Henry Esmond' should be spoken of by itself as a special and unique
achievement. It is a historical novel dealing with the early eighteenth
century, and in preparing for it Thackeray read and assimilated most of the
literature of the period, with the result that he succeeded in reproducing
the 'Augustan' spirit and even its literary style with an approach to
perfection that has never been rivaled. On other grounds as well the book
ranks almost if not quite beside 'Vanity Pair.' Henry Esmond himself is
Thackeray's most thoroughly wise and good character, and Beatrix is as real
and complex a woman as even Becky Sharp.
GEORGE ELIOT. The perspective of time has made it clear that among the
Victorian novelists, as among the poets, three definitely surpass the
others. With Dickens and Thackeray is to be ranked only 'George Eliot'
(Mary Anne Evans).
George Eliot was born in 1819 in the central county of Warwick from which
Shakspere had sprung two centuries and a half before. Her father, a manager
of estates for various members of the landed gentry, was to a large extent
the original both of her Adam Bede and of Caleb Garth in 'Middlemarch,'
while her own childish life is partly reproduced in the experiences of