Paper Sorrows
Jane Frith, the daughter of the painter William Powell Frith, whom John Forster commissioned to do a portrait of Dickens, saw the famous novelist many times at parties. As a young woman, intent on becoming a writer, she found herself drawn to Dickens’ readings, though she admired Dickens as a writer less than she did William Makepeace Thackeray.
[I] went more than once to [Dickens’] celebrated readings, and I must confess that while Nancy’s murder made me ill, it was so truly ghastly that I only went once; I “could not away with” the pathos of Little Nell and Paul Dombey, and while I have seen everyone in the hall in floods of tears, and furthermore noticed that Dickens himself could hardly bear up under the weight of the woes he was creating, I could not share the sentimental wave, and could not hear that the pathos rang true. But then I fear I have not much sympathy with paper sorrows.1
Frith maintained a strong reserve about “paper sorrows,” partly to assert her independence of the Dickens vogue, partly to affirm her belief that fiction could not afford to weaken the power of its moral idealizations by a sentimentality that produced pathos without emphasizing its moral base. As a counter to Dickens’ “paper sorrows,” she advocated what she believed to be Thackeray’s more realistic view of the human situation. Hovering between the lines of her contrast is the modern critical argument about mimesis in art. Should the novel attempt to represent the real world directly or indirectly? And how are we to recognize what is real in relation to individual and to universal experience? Much of Western literature, until the birth of the novel as a literary genre, focused on ideal, transcendental dimensions, the interaction between the physical and the spiritual, between man and God. Not until the eighteenth century did literature begin to place primary emphasis on the depiction of the physical, historical world in mimetic narratives. Traditionally, reality in literature did not inhere in fidelity to the material facts of daily life but rather to the representation of widely accepted beliefs about the moral and spiritual structure of the universe and the place of human beings in it.
Alert to such matters, the Victorians felt both the tension and the complexity of the problem: how to deal with the gap between their desire to affirm the moral ideal as the highest reality and the growing disbelief in the validity of any experience other than that based on the patterns of daily life and the evidence of the senses. The effort to maintain a consonance between the ideal and the real provides one of the constant tensions within Victorian literature, for it is a central cultural question, expressed not only in fiction and poetry but also in the expository discussions of Carlyle, Mill, Newman, and Ruskin. The novel’s popularity as a literary genre reveals the closeness of the issue to the public consciousness, on the one hand because it was central to the two most admired novelists, Dickens and Thackeray, on the other hand because the popularity of novelists like Wilkie Collins attests to with what relief the public turned in large numbers to fiction that disregarded the problem. In fact, the culture as a whole was gradually dismissing the problem, either by a return to religious fundamentalism or by a materialist denial that the problem existed at all. The major novelists, Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, and Trollope, fought that dismissal.
Though Thackeray is more keenly self-conscious than Dickens that sentimentality may degenerate into “paper sorrows,” he is just as much as Dickens a sentimentalist who believes that human beings have innate moral sentiments. The distancing voice of his ironic narrator may sometimes mislead modern readers. But his irony is a defense against the widespread attack on the moral sentiments rather than a weapon in its service. Alert to the unnatural, self-serving misuses in literature and in life of natural feeling, the moral sentiments, and sentimentality, Thackeray’s narrators frequently use irony to alert his readers to hypocrisy and to affirm that genuine feelings are the source of moral performance.
Though in 1858 Dickens and Thackeray argued on a personal matter, Thackeray always acknowledged their common struggle to affirm the moral sentiments and the ideal. “There are creations of Mr. Dickens’s,” he wrote in 1853 for his American audience,
which seem to me to rank as personal benefits; figures so delightful, that one feels happier and better for knowing them, as one does for being brought into the society of very good men and women. The atmosphere in which these people live is wholesome to breathe in; you feel that to be allowed to speak to them is a personal kindness; you come away better for your contact with them; your hands seems cleaner from having the privilege of shaking theirs.… I may quarrel with Mr. Dickens’s art a thousand and a thousand times; I delight and wonder at his genius; I recognize in it—I speak with awe and reverence—a commission from that Divine Beneficence, whose blessed task we know it will one day be to wipe every tear from every eye.2
Thackeray means his claim that Dickens had a commission from divinity to be taken seriously, if still somewhat metaphorically. The dramatization of moral ideals is a sacred task given to novelists whose duty it is to provide models of innate goodness, the “very good men and women” from whose company “you come away better.” Thackeray hoped that his novels would provide a mirror of the full range of human nature in which each individual could find the moral images against which to evaluate himself. Though granting that God eventually wipes away all tears, Thackeray believed that one of the functions of art in fostering moral improvement is to loosen the tears of feeling whose source is the innate moral sentiments. Those tears are a necessary part of the moral life. Thackeray detests false tears (“one tires of a sentimentalist who is always pumping the tears from his eyes or your own”).3 But genuine “tears are sacred.”
In his response to David Masson’s review, “Pendennis and Copperjield: Thackeray and Dickens,” Thackeray expressed his “quarrel with Mr. Dickens’s art”
which I don’t think represents Nature duly; for instance Micawber appears to me an exaggeration of a man, as his name is of a name. It is delightful and makes me laugh; but it is no more a real man than my friend Punch is: and in so far I protest against him … holding that the Art of Novels is to represent Nature: to convey as strongly as possible the sentiment of reality.4
Fortunately, his argument here for a more literal realism did not prevent him from creating characters who are also exaggerations, caricatures, and even sometimes semi-allegorical representations of vices and virtues. Though Thackeray sincerely believed his novels to be more realistic than Dickens’, probably he exaggerated the degree of difference, partly for the advantage of distinguishing himself from Dickens. Nevertheless, he recognized that his own focus on moral paradigms and on the moral sentiments, as well as his definition of the novel as filling a “commission” from divinity, made the difference less important than would appear on first look. Thackeray does pay more attention than Dickens to verisimilitude, for while in Dickens’ fiction “a coat is a coat and a poker is a poker,” it is also an element in a psychological characterization. Thackeray, of course, depicts Nature much as Fielding does, a stable external environment fixed by the reliable vision of the objective author-narrator. Dickens animates and interiorizes Nature, projecting onto it the state of the nervous system of the character or narrator. To the extent, then, that Thackeray is more of a realist than Dickens, his realism inheres in style and narrative point of view rather than in a material view of life. Actually, Thackeray’s definition of human nature is strikingly similar to Dickens’. He too subscribes to the doctrine of the moral sentiments and to an idealistic definition of human nature. And the role of the novelist is to oppose the corrupting influence of Victorian culture by deflationary methods that never obscure the ideal and affirm the eventual triumph of “Truth, the champion, shining and intrepid” (EH, chap. 4). Like Dickens, he believes that there is “Truth”—the “Truth.” But the defense and affirmation of the “Truth” against formidable opposition challenges both art and consistency.
Thackeray, whose personal library contained most of the classics of the previous century, absorbed deeply the eighteenth-century literature and philosophy he read from childhood on. His letters and essays record the development of his feelings and ideas about his eighteenth-century legacy, part of the living culture that shaped him as a writer to the extent that his consciousness about his predecessors became an important subject for his own writings.5
In a favorable review of J. H. Burton’s Life and Correspondence of David Hume (1846), revealing his familiarity with both Hume and Smith, Thackeray admitted his special admiration for Hume, who was “good-natured …, one of the most generous, simple, honest, and amiable of men.” Some years later, in The Newcomes (1853), he created Mr. Binnie, “a disciple of David Hume (whom he admired more than any other mortal).”6 “Very much pleased” with Hume’s essays on moral philosophy, “not for the language but for the argument,” he shared his friend Edward Fitzgerald’s admiration of Pope …“more and more for his sense.” And though Hume was “the most amiable & honest of heathens,” his opposition to Christianity as a theological system did not at all undercut his value to Thackeray as a source of wisdom about nature and human nature.7
Behind Thackeray’s depiction of the fallen community in Vanity Fair (1848) is less the Augustinian City of God than the city of social harmony of the eighteenth-century moral philosophers. Like Dickens, Thackeray drew on the eighteenth-century image of the mirror of Nature to dramatize the failure of Victorian society to provide a mirror that accurately represents nature and the natural. In Vanity Fair (chap. 42),
the great glass over the mantel-piece, faced by the other great console glass at the opposite end of the room, increased and multiplied between them the brown Holland bag in which the chandelier hung; until you saw these brown Holland bags fading away in endless perspectives, and this apartment of Miss Osborne’s seemed the centre of a system of drawing rooms.
The shifting, multiplied perspectives, making it difficult to distinguish the real from the unreal, signal the collapse of an objective and unitary social order into subjective illusions and mirror tricks. In this world, there is no stable mirror into which we can look for moral guidance, no “impartial spectator” among the characters to provide a representation of Nature against which to measure our own naturalness. The “system of drawing rooms” is an optical illusion, a manipulative deceit. Everything and everyone, except the narrator, is made unreliable by the optical distortions, and only the narrator-author, positioned partly outside the false “system,” can serve as the “impartial spectator” for this world.8 Without a trustworthy social mirror, the artist must look for the “centre” in himself.
Thackeray’s fascination with eighteenth-century culture derived partly from his belief that it offered helpful models of a consonance between Nature, human nature, and society. When he chose to lecture in England and America on the English humorists of the eighteenth century, he had a didactic, moral purpose, similar to his purpose in Vanity Fair. The choices he made about which authors to focus on reflect his commitment to tackle directly the questions about human nature that his novels dramatize. To some extent, the effort is a self-serving corrective. Confident that “human nature” can be meaningfully described and defined, he felt the need to shape his Victorian audience by creating and fortifying between author and audience a common ground of literary experience. Without such a common ground, his own novels might be misunderstood, particularly the role of the ironic narrator. In fact, the subtitle of Vanity Fair, “A Novel Without A Hero,” had prompted some readers to conclude that the author believed human beings incapable of moral performance, and that neither life nor literature permitted moral ideals. The charge of cynicism, even nihilism, had been raised, as if Thackeray’s exposure of human weakness and social corruption meant that he believed human nature to be irredeemably nasty.
Thackeray also suffered the advantages and disadvantages of his serious reputation being founded mainly on Vanity Fair, his greatest critical success. Victorian opinion in general held that the voice of the narrator of that novel was the voice of the author. Though the assumption was not unfair, the misinterpretation of the narrator’s irony made Thackeray the target of criticism to which he was particularly sensitive, because it contradicted his actual beliefs about human nature and the function of literature. Thackeray shared the widespread Victorian conviction that authorship is a moral responsibility, a public revelation of one’s values for didactic purposes. And he emphasizes in The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century (1853) that literary criticism is not as central a concern of the writer and his audience as are the extra-literary “truths” embodied in the author’s works and in his biography. Literary criticism for Thackeray is biography. The moral core is indivisible, the life and the works coextensive. That moral core, or innate moral sentiment, is an exemplar around which the fruit of Victorian fiction, biography, and autobiography grows. It can be argued, indeed, that biography was the model for fiction from Richardson to Joyce. But it was particularly dominant in Victorian fictional and nonfictional prose, partly because the relationship between models in life and models in literature was being questioned and the traditional relationship cast into doubt. Vanity Fair dramatizes that doubt, though Thackeray never has the slightest intention of letting that doubt triumph. In his essays and fiction, he defends the moral sentiments as innate and sentimentality as a way of expressing them. And just as human beings reveal themselves both in action and in temperament in the register of each individual’s prevailing tone, so too do literary works, whose moral record and tonal register are coextensive representations of their authors. To talk about one is to talk about the other. For Thackeray, all literature is autobiographical mimesis.
In the first chapter of The English Humourists, which is devoted to Swift, Thackeray remarks that
the humorous writer professes to awaken and direct your love, your pity, your kindness—your scorn for untruth, pretension, imposture—your tenderness for the weak, the poor, the oppressed, the unhappy. To the best of his means and ability he comments on all the ordinary actions and passions of life almost. He takes upon himself to be the week-day preacher, so to speak. Accordingly, as he finds, and speaks, and feels the truth best, we regard him, esteem him—sometimes love him. And, as his business is to mark other people’s lives and peculiarities, we moralize upon his life when he is gone—and yesterday’s preacher becomes the text for today’s sermon. (EH, chap.1)
But who can “love” Swift even “sometimes?” The Victorians desired to love those whom they admired, to believe that those worthy of admiration for whatever their achievement are also worthy of love. Swift, in Thackeray’s view, loved neither himself nor others, for “he was always alone—alone and gnashing in the darkness, except when Stella’s sweet smile came and shone upon him,” that idealized Stella who in Thackeray’s mind had the beneficent power of an Amelia Sedley, Laura Bell, or Little Dorrit. Though Thackeray had great respect for Swift’s genius, he viewed him, as did Dickens, as a Hobbesian figure of darkness. Swift promoted a “gloomy” misanthropy that subverted moral conduct, denied the moral sentiments, and discharged the moral temperament from what Thackeray believed was its obligation to be hopeful.
We view the world with our own eyes, each of us; and we make from within us the world we see. A weary heart gets no gladness out of sunshine; a selfish man is skeptical about friendship, as a man with no ear doesn’t care for music. A frightful self-consciousness it must have been, which looked on mankind so darkly through those keen eyes of Swift. (EH, chap. 1)
Thackeray, of course, prefers “humourists” in the cheerful Horatian mode partly because he believes that a true awareness of our own innate moral sentiments and their potential gives cause for cheer.
Like Dickens, Thackeray is persistently anti-theological. In general, the evangelical temperament repels him. Also, he believes that the innate moral sentiments rather than spiritual grace are the source of individual and social happiness. His characters live in a world without God—a world in which personal goodness is superior to divine grace. The transcendental mechanism is completely unavailable to Thackeray. Like Fielding, he has no sympathy for “Abraham’s bosom” or heaven as a motive for action, a perceived reality, or a reasonable destination. He prefers not to deal with death, certainly not to linger over it, as if the disposition of human nature after death is more uninteresting, and certainly more troublesome, than it is in life. Usually in Thackeray’s fiction death provides only an ironic coda to the moral conditions of the life that has ceased; it facilitates plots, not themes. And the eighteenth-century “humourists” whom Thackeray most admires use it in much the same way.
Richardson is notably absent from The English Humourists, who apparently qualify for inclusion either by being satiric like Swift or comedic like Fielding. Thackeray’s distaste for Richardson mainly derives from his distaste for the tragic mode. It was the Richardson of Clarissa rather than of the co-medic Pamela and Sir Charles Grandison that Thackeray and his contemporaries knew. The resolution of conflict through death and the tragic vision of life that such a strategy entails implied for the Victorians an unhappy disconsonance between the individual and society—an unhappiness Victorian tragic drama dealt with by emphasizing moral models in which tragic necessity is minimized and loss affirms rather than questions the society’s basic values. Even the great Victorian Shakespeare revival, led by William Macready and Sheridan Knowles and strongly supported by Dickens and Forster, temporized with the conclusions of Shakespeare’s major tragedies. Dickens’ friend Charles Fechter became a popular Hamlet. Macready gave stunning performances as Lear, Othello, and Macbeth, Macbeth’s destruction represented as a triumph of the moral norms that the Victorians could applaud. But the deaths of Lear, Othello, and Hamlet dramatized different aspects of the conflict between the individual and society and presented definitions of human nature that many Victorians found disturbing. Some desired that representations of death contain assurances that death will be crowned with the rewards of heaven or the punishments of hell. Others sought in the depiction of death affirmation of the victory of the moral sentiments in life. Since tragedy as a literary genre provided neither, the Victorians both embraced melodrama as their favorite dramatic form and Victorianized the classic tragedies.
Thackeray respected the widespread Victorian preference that literature please rather than distress. Pleasure derives from moral models and moral guidance, for “human nature,” Thackeray writes, “is always pleased with the spectacle of innocence rescued by fidelity, purity, and courage.”9 In Clarissa, Richardson offered his readers no such pleasure, and his depiction of a society so alienated from these virtues that it destroys the one person who possesses them Thackeray found unhelpful and painful. For Thackeray, Clarissa’s tragic end does not justify the intensity of her emotional life, sentimental in the pejorative sense that it dramatizes feelings that are not validated by a comedic resolution. Thackeray, who admires “benevolence, practical wisdom, and generous sympathy with mankind,” does not find these qualities in Swift and Richardson, partly because of their darkness. He also does not find them in Sterne, whom he takes as his primary target; mainly because of what he believes to be Sterne’s dishonesty about the feelings. Because Sterne substitutes self-conscious, false sensibility for sincere sentiment, Thackeray criticizes him for dishonest manipulation of the “sentimental faculties.” His feelings are in the service of a performance rather than the performance being in the service of the moral sentiments.
How much was deliberate calculation and imposture— how much was false sensibility—and how much true feeling? … Some time since I was in the company of a French actor, who began after dinner … to sing … a sentimental ballad—it was so charmingly sung that it touched all persons present, and especially the singer himself, whose voice trembled, whose eyes filled with emotion, and who was snivelling and weeping quite genuine tears by the time his own ditty was over. I suppose Sterne has this artistical sensibility; he used to blubber perpetually in his study, and finding his tears infectious, and that they brought him a great popularity, he exercised the lucrative gift of weeping.… I own I don’t value or respect much the cheap dribble of those fountains. He fatigues me with his … uneasy appeals to my … sentimental faculties. He is always looking in my face, watching his effect … and imploring me: “See what sensibility I have—own now that I’m very clever— do cry now, you can’t resist this.” (EH, chap. 6)
A full discussion of Richardson is omitted from The English Humourists because he writes in a mode that makes his omission sensible. He is, in effect, playing in a different league. Sterne, Thackeray believes, is playing in the same league and cheating. And his dishonesty is compounded by his indecency, for “the foul satyr’s eyes leer out of the leaves constantly.… I think … of one who lives amongst us now and am grateful for the innocent laughter and the sweet and unsullied page which the author of David Copperfield gives to my children” (EH, chap. 6).
There does exist between the lines of The English Humourists a subtext that is less well-disposed to Dickens. Thackeray, in 1853, had no desire for either private or public conflict with his fellow novelist, even on seemingly impersonal aesthetic grounds. For the Victorians, though, aesthetic disagreements almost always had moral and personal implications. In his attack on Sterne, Thackeray did not distinguish aesthetic from moral matters and in general did not recognize any division between an author’s works and his life. To be hypocritical in literature is to be a hypocritical person. To be thought a bad writer is a moral as well as an aesthetic judgment. Until the rupture between the two writers, in 1858, Thackeray strained to keep up good relations with Dickens.10 Where he could praise, mainly in regard to moral purity and imaginative vividness, he always did. And for his depiction of the triumph of the moral sentiments, Dickens received Thackeray’s uninhibited approval.
In practice, Dickens’ sentimentality differed considerably from Thackeray’s, and Thackeray, I suspect, struggled to find indirect ways to express, if he could not completely suppress, his sense of that. Describing in The English Humourists the differences between Fielding and Richardson, he implies that he has in mind his own differences with Dickens, concluding that “Richardson’s sickening antipathy for Henry Fielding is quite as natural as the other’s laughter and contempt at the sentimentalist.” Thackeray, of course, identified himself with Fielding and Dickens with Richardson, though in the development of the comparison the similarities are neglected, the differences exaggerated. In basic philosophy, both pairs of writers are sentimentalists and idealists, believing in the moral sentiments as the key to moral action and human nature. But to Thackeray, the dark drama of Old Curiosity Shop must have seemed remarkably similar to the dark drama of Clarissa. And Richardson and Dickens must have appeared to Thackeray masters of the same techniques, the philosophical base of which was sound but the manipulative powers of which were suspect. Dickens’ debts to Richardson were considerable. Thackeray’s sympathies were too closely aligned with Fielding to permit him to have approved of the Richardsonian element within Dickens’ fiction and to prevent him from transferring the lines of opposition between the eighteenth-century novelists to his own frequent comparison of himself with his rival.
Thackeray makes clear in his essay on “Fielding’s Works” and in his discussion of Fielding in The English Humourists that he believes in the theory of the moral sentiments and in the selective depiction in fiction of idealized models of human nature. His crucial text is Fielding’s Amelia (1752), for “the picture of Amelia … is … the most beautiful and delicious description of a character [Thackeray means here the worth of her character rather than the manner in which she is described] that is to be found in any writer, not excepting Shakespeare.”11 Amelia Sedley in Vanity Fair and Laura Bell in Pendennis are probably meant to evoke the moral perfection of Fielding’s Amelia whom Thackeray and many others believed to be a portrait of Fielding’s deceased wife, just as Amelia in Vanity Fair is said to be derived from Thackeray’s “memories of his wife.” For Thackeray, life and literature are mutually enriched by being identified with one another; life provides the moral paradigms for literary portraits. But what is it that makes Fielding’s Amelia “the most beautiful and delicious description of a character … found in any writer, not excepting Shakespeare”? In Thackeray’s eyes, Amelia embodies the highest degree of virtue as innate moral sentiment that any human being can possess, so powerful in its absoluteness that it cannot be corrupted or even undermined either by the pressures of environment or by other aspects of her own nature. Uncontaminated by realism or by Puritan theology, her innate moral sentiments define her essence. But she is neither angel nor angelic. Her needs and inclinations are of this world; her role is to demonstrate that worldly satisfactions are morally viable on the highest level. Instinctively distinguishing right from wrong, good from evil, life from death, she cannot be other than true to her moral feelings.
Fielding’s Amelia is a creation of moral philosophy. When she expresses her heart-weariness at the failure of others to act on their moral sentiments, she is reminded by Dr. Harrison what “the nature of man is.”
“Indeed, my dear sir, I begin to grow entirely sick of it,” cries Amelia: “for sure all mankind almost are villains in their hearts.”
“Fie, child,” cries the doctor. “Do not make a conclusion so much to the dishonour of the great Creator. The nature of man is far from being in itself evil; it abounds with benevolence, charity, and pity, coveting praise and honour, and shunning shame and disgrace. Bad education, bad habits, and bad customs, debauch our nature, and drive it headlong as it were into vice. The governors of the world, and I am afraid the priesthood, are answerable for the badness of it.”
“You understand human nature to the bottom,” answered Amelia; “and your mind is a treasury of all ancient and modern learning.” (Amelia, chap. 9)
This is also Thackeray’s view of human nature. He prefers to believe in innate goodness rather than innate corruption. But, like Dickens, he also is baffled by first causes and occasionally is ambivalent about the role of environment. Are human beings always born with good natures? And why do some seem to have better natures than others? In Thackeray’s fiction, the evidence pertaining to these matters is ambivalent, especially in regard to those characters who embody the mixed nature of human nature. The evidence from his nonfiction is considerably less ambivalent in its expository directness, the reductive knife of analysis cutting more sharply through the problems than do the novels, which are responding to the pressures of literary realism and the complexity of human experience. He again quotes Fielding’s Amelia to make his point. For though “Mandeville hath represented human nature in a picture of the highest deformity,” Bob Jones, “who can never be supposed to act from any motive of virtue or religion, since he constantly laughs at both,” in “his conduct … demonstrates a degree of goodness” which proves that his “human nature” is innately moral. All he need do is act in consonance with how he feels, with his moral sentiments, for “all men act entirely from their passions” (Amelia, chap. 13). The same is true of William Dobbin, Amelia Sedley, and Laura Bell, and would be true for George Osborne, Pitt Crawley, and, I suppose, even Lord Steyne, if “bad education, bad habits, and bad customs” had not driven them “headlong as it were into vice. The governors of the world … are answerable for the badness of it.”
Why, though, do the “governors of the world” govern badly? Greed? Pleasure? The satisfactions of power? To say that environment or “the governors of the world” are at fault means no more than that these human beings, whose natures are supposedly “moral,” have been massively immoral in the past and continue to be so in the present in ways that subvert the natural goodness of large numbers of people. Like Dickens, Thackeray is baffled by the difficulty of harmonizing an ideal model of human nature with the existence of crime and nastiness. All he can do, in this regard, is to recognize the novelist’s limitations. “He tries to give you,” Thackeray writes of Fielding, “as far as he knows it, the whole truth about human nature: the good and evil of his characters are both practical.”12 Aware that we cannot fathom the origin or understand the mechanism of the distribution of elements within human nature, the novelist commits himself to a literary genre that places emphasis on depiction rather than on explanation. For the novelist, “good” and “evil” are of this world, practical matters that concern the community of mankind rather than the theories of philosophy or the topography of God. The practical reality that the novelist and his audience must absorb into their world view is that most people are neither very good nor very bad. But Thackeray believed that one of the functions of the novel is to remind us of the potential for the full recovery and expression of the moral sentiments as the dominant constituent of human nature. That some of his contemporaries thought of him as a misanthropic Swift bewildered him. The author of Vanity Fair
has lately been described … as a … dreary misanthrope, who sees no good anywhere … and only miserable sinners round about him. So we are; so is every writer and every reader I ever heard of; so was every being who ever trod this earth, save One. I can’t help telling the truth as I view it, and describing what I see … that truth must be told; that fault must be owned; that pardon must be prayed for; and that love reigns supreme over all.13
Outside religious myth no one is perfect, even Laura Bell, to whom Pendennis says, “I think for some of you there has been no fall” (Pen, chap. 3). Thackeray the satirist depicts our vices. Thackeray the humorist reminds us of our potential for virtue.
The humorist, though, must not overvalue human nature, though the degree of our distance from the ideal is a measure of our situation, not our potential. Thackeray’s literary realism demands that he depict the mixed nature of human nature, the normative probabilities within the world of experience. Still, for Thackeray, normative probability takes its value from its interaction with the ideal, and it is the function of literature, in a secular age, to provide a moral mirror against which mankind can measure itself. But for the mirror to be corrective, it must be supportive, and to be supportive it must be good-humored. Good humor is a manifestation of the moral sentiments, and the appeal to the moral sentiments is an appeal to love of others, to the congruence between the needs of the individual and those of the community. Thackeray grants that worldly experience cannot prove that human nature is innately good. Only the evidence of the feelings demonstrates that. Do we not always want, Thackeray implies in the terms of eighteenth-century moral philosophy, to do the right thing, to do the good thing? Do we not know that we will feel good by doing good, that we have within us the capacity to get the highest pleasure from moral actions, separate from all considerations of religious tone and theological doctrine? It is, Thackeray concludes, the novelist’s responsibility to deepen his audience’s awareness of its innate pleasurable response to goodness and its innate hostility to evil. The highest level of authorial trust is moral, and the devices of sentimentality are among the most effective that an author has to fulfill his duty, the awakening and strengthening of our moral sentiments. “Accordingly, as he finds, and speaks, and feels the truth best, we regard him, esteem him—sometimes love him” (EH, chap. 1).
As an author, Thackeray would have liked to have been loved, as he felt Dickens was. But in this he did not succeed, in his own judgment, to any satisfactory extent. Readers like Jane Frith found his representations of idealism more attractive than Dickens’. But Thackeray knew that many of his readers thought his novels admirable for the very cautiousness of temper and tone that made their favorite author and his readers less susceptible to “the sentimental wave” than were Dickens and his. The “sentimental” author most loved by the Victorians, and with whom Thackeray felt a close sympathy, he reserved for the place of final emphasis in The English Humourists. Structurally, the misanthropic Swift was to be balanced by the “philanthropic” Goldsmith. Thackeray, like Dickens, believed that Goldsmith’s optimism and “Good-nature” were the ultimate model for emulation. Goldsmith’s moral sentiments seemed to the Victorians the same in life as in literature, the essence of human nature as morally good in its instinctive feelings, eliciting and returning love. “Who, of the millions whom he has amused, doesn’t love him? … To be the most beloved of English writers, what a title that is for a man!” Thackeray approvingly quotes Sir Walter Scott’s remark that “we read The Vicar of Wakefield in youth and in age—we return to it again and again, and bless the memory of an author who contrives so well to reconcile us to human nature” (EH, chap. 6).
Thackeray felt a close identification with Goldsmith, whose early struggles as a writer reminded him of his own before the success of Vanity Fair, for, “except in rare instances, a man is known in our profession, and esteemed as a skillful workman, years before the lucky hit which trebles his usual gains, and stamps him a popular author” (EH, chap. 6). Constantly evaluating himself in the mirror of Goldsmith, he sometimes found himself wanting, as a matter of temperament rather than message, and Thackeray gracefully conceded that Dickens had taken up in the popular affections the ground that Goldsmith had stood on. Like Dickens, Goldsmith was “merciful, gentle, generous, full of love and pity.… His benevolent spirit seems still to smile upon us: to do gentle kindness: to succor with sweet charity: to sooth, caress, and forgive” (EH, chap. 6). His own temperament Thackeray thought too self-conscious and controlled for such a range of good works, but he was capable of expressing his generosity, his moral feeling, and his self-deprecating good humor in a touchingly personal way, conceding that Dickens is closer to Goldsmith than he.
All children ought to love him. I know two that do, and read his books ten times for once that they peruse the dismal preachments of their father. I know one who, when she is happy, reads Nicholas Nickleby; when she is unhappy, reads Nicholas Nickleby; when she is in bed, reads Nicholas Nickleby; when she has nothing to do, reads Nicholas Nickleby; and when she has finished the book, reads Nicholas Nickleby over again. This candid young critic, at ten years of age, said: “I like Mr. Dickens’s books much better than yours, papa;” and frequently expressed her desire that the latter author should write a book like Mr. Dickens’s books. Who can? Every man must say his own thoughts in his own voice, in his own way; lucky is he who has such a charming gift of nature as this, which brings all the children in the world trooping to him, and being fond of him.14
It is at the conclusion of The English Humourists that Thackeray most strongly avows his belief in the view of human nature and human society expressed by the eighteenth-century moral philosophers. For “the great world, the aggregate experience, has its good sense, as it has its good humour.… It gives you a fair place and fair play.” All seeming malevolence is produced by “mistake, and not ill will” (EH, chap. 6). The faults of this world are neither theological nor purposeful, and they are not inherent in human nature or in society. Though his acceptance of the inevitability of mistakes has sometimes been thought cynicism, leading some readers to conclude that his sentimental characters and situations are to be taken ironically, Thackeray never satirizes fundamental goodness. He is committed to the moral sentiments as the essence of human nature and to a view of society in which “the great world, the aggregate experience, has its good sense, as it has its good humour.” Sometimes, perhaps, he does not sufficiently emphasize the “good sense” and “good humour” to make his theme explicitly clear. But that William Dobbin and Amelia Sedley will not be perfectly happy forever after is not an expression of Thackerayan cynicism but his good-humored recognition that this is an imperfect world which literature must recognize while at the same time attempting to improve. Yet even amidst the corruptions of Vanity Fair, as in Rape of the Lock, good sense and good humour ultimately do prevail, providing idealized models against which we can evaluate our own moral sentiments. In that sense, Thackeray is as sentimental and as idealistic as Dickens, and there are no dark corners in his fiction that challenge the distinction between “mistakes” and “ill will.”
Since all sorrows in literature are “paper sorrows,” Jane Frith’s distinction between Dickens and Thackeray misses the fundamental similarity between them. Thackeray humorously satirizes “Mes larmes” when they are false; he reveres them deeply when they are sincere. Then they are “sacred.” So too does Dickens, for natural tears water the moral sentiments while unnatural expressions of feeling mock and pervert the true nature of human nature. Though it might be possible to construct a barometer that would measure comparatively the amount of sentimental moisture in Dickens’ and Thackeray’s works, the basic premise of both is sentimental in the philosophical sense. Like Dickens, Thackeray believes that human nature is innately moral, and that moral action is the result of moral feeling.
