The Water Works
Thackeray hoped that secular literature might replace society and scripture in serving to provide the models against which to measure our moral sentiments. As a conscious sentimentalist, who believed that such sentiments are an innate part of human nature, he appreciated the challenge that such a responsibility entails. Unlike Dickens, he was particularly conscious of false sentimentality, partly because he sensed how damaging it is to the values of the sentiments and the role of literature, partly because he was also a literary historian, alert to the frequent unnatural separation of sentiment from moral considerations by popular writers and manipulative cultural forces. Sentimentality, Thackeray insisted, should never be divorced from moral vision and the definition of human nature that makes it meaningful, and his idealizations of human nature were intended to be a thrust against the materialism and cynicism of which he was frequently accused.
Like Fielding’s, Thackeray’s diction often rests good-humoredly on the dividing line between worldly irony and emotional sincerity. Sometimes he is so uncomfortable with the possibility that he will be thought sentimental in the pejorative sense that he wraps his deeply felt moral sentimentality in a protective blanket of worldly irony. His sense of language is more social than psychological. Even in his sentimentalism, he is interested in creating characters from the outside, in seeing the external world clearly and sometimes ironically, rather than in creating the subjective feel of the inner life. Thackeray’s sentimentality has some of the rigor of neoclassical objectivity, of a style calling attention to its common sense rather than to its tremulousness, and it is a style that rejects the compounding of emotional adjectives and sparingly utilizes the nouns of the heart. His is an accretively judgmental art in which narrative is transformed into moral evaluation, the art of the “week-day preacher” who minimizes sentimental diction because it may detract from the impact of the moral point.
Thackeray was aware that falsified sentiment frequently masquerades as sincere feeling in a meretricious combination of affectation, selfishness, and feigned nostalgia.
They talked about the days of their youth, and Blanche was prettily sentimental. They talked about Laura, dearest Laura.… Blanche had loved her as a sister: was she happy with old Lady Rockminster? Wouldn’t she come and stay with them at Tunbridge Wells? Oh, what walks they would take together! What songs they would sing—the old, old songs. Laura’s voice was splendid. Did Arthur—she must call him Arthur—remember the songs they sang in the happy old days, now he was grown such a great man, and had such a success? Etc., etc. (Pen, chap. 3)
But false as it is here, Thackeray does not believe that the retrospective note is inevitably insincere. More often than not, it is Thackeray as narrator who provides the retrospective sentimental perspective.
“We must go and ask Barnes Newcome’s pardon,” the Colonel says, “and forgive other people’s trespasses, my boy, if we hope forgiveness of our own.” His voice sank down as he spoke, and he bowed his head reverently. I have heard his son tell the simple story years afterwards, with tears in his eyes. (New, chap. 1)
As narrator, Thackeray purposely inserts himself into and on both sides of his characters’ sentimental speeches, implying that his moral mission cannot be advanced by authorial distance or aloofness, though it can be advanced by satirical displacement. In a striking descriptive passage in Pendennis, Thackeray provides a lesson in both false sentimentality and careful modulation of irony in the service of the idealizing moral sentiments embodied in Laura Bell.
After the scene with little Frank, in which that refractory son and heir of the house of Clavering had received the compliments in French and English, and the accompanying box on the ear from his sister, Miss Laura, who had plenty of humour, could not help calling to mind some very touching and tender verses which the Muse had read to her out of Mes Larmes [the volume of falsely sentimental poems written by Blanche], and which began, “My pretty baby brother, may angels guard thy rest,” in which the Muse, after complimenting the baby upon the station in life which it was about to occupy, and contrasting it with her own lonely condition, vowed nevertheless that the angel boy would never enjoy such affection as hers was, or find in the false world before him anything so constant and tender as a sister’s heart. “It may be,” the forlorn one said, “it may be, you will slight it, my pretty baby sweet. You will spurn me from your bosom, I’ll cling around your feet! Oh, let me, let me love you! the world will prove to you as false as ’tis to others, but I am ever true.” And behold the Muse was boxing the darling brother’s ears instead of kneeling at his feet, and giving Miss Laura her first lesson in the Cynical Philosophy—not quite her first, however—something like this selfishness and waywardness, something like this contrast between practice and poetry, between grand versified aspirations and everyday life, she had witnessed at home in the person of our young friend Mr. Pen. (Pen, chap. 1)
Laura’s “first lesson in the Cynical Philosophy” does not, of course, make her a cynic. Her optimism about human nature and the moral sentiments dominates the novel.
In Thackeray’s fiction, characters like Laura Bell, who have genuine moral sentiments, tend to be less expressive than those, like the “Muse,” who falsely affect them. Verbal fluency usually signifies cunning rather than sincerity; the arts of speech are the arts of deceit. Becky Sharp, for example, can dazzle with verbal fluency, with the gift of turning language. She embodies the talented insincerity of the trickster who can create the conditions of sentimentality without the moral base to support it, precisely the sin for which Thackeray castigates Sterne in The English Humourists. To divorce the gift of language from the moral imperative is to be guilty of more than glibness. Too much talk of the “affections” (the moral sentiments) signals that the affections have been corrupted, and “she who is always speaking of her affections can have no heart” (Pen, chap. 1). The resolution of Dobbin’s twenty-year long devotion to Amelia Sedley is expressed in a few lines of economical dialogue.
“It was time you sent for me, dear Amelia,” he said.
“You will never go again, William.”
“No, never,” he answered: and pressed the dear little soul once more to his heart. (VF, chap. 67)
If modern readers find the blissful moment and “the dear little soul” cloying, they miss the Victorian point—that such unions and reunions are blessed, and that the language of sentimentality embodies one of the precious realities of human nature.
Three brilliant passages from The Newcomes readily serve to illustrate Thackeray’s delight in “sentimental scenes.”1 The first is an instance of retrospective nostalgia, untouched by the slightest breath of irony.
In the faded ink, on the yellow paper that may have crossed and recrossed oceans, that has lain locked in chests for years, and buried under piles of family archives, while your friends have been dying and your head has grown white—who has not disinterred mementoes like these—from which the past smiles at you so sadly, shimmering out of Hades an instant but to sink back again into the cold shades, perhaps with a faint, faint sound as of a remembered tone—a ghostly echo of a once familiar laughter? I was looking, of late, at a wall in the Naples Museum, whereon a boy of Herculaneum eighteen hundred years ago had scratched with a nail the figure of a soldier. I could fancy the child turning round and smiling on after having done his etching. Which of us that is thirty years old has not had his Pompeii? Deep under ashes lies the Life of Youth—the careless Sport, the Pleasure, and Passion, the darling Joy. You open an old letterbox and look at your childish scrawls, or your mother’s letters to you when you were at school; and excavate your heart! (New, chap. 2)
Such retrospective sentimentality Thackeray presents as a direct route to the moral sentiments. He cannot imagine an intact human being unresponsive to the feelings that the passage describes, and the train of sentiment carries just those moral qualities of feeling that Thackeray believes are givens of human nature.
In an earlier passage in The Newcomes, Thackeray plays another variation on authorial sentimentality. The voice of compassion and forgiveness weaves a dramatic counterpoint with the voice of satire. The topic is the communal significance of Colonel Newcome’s disappointment in his son Clive.
The young fellow, I dare say, gave his parent no more credit for his long self-denial than many other children award to theirs. We take such life-offerings as our due commonly. The old French satirist avers that, in a love-affair, there is usually one person who loves, and the other qui se laisse aimer; it is only in later days, perhaps, when the treasures of love are spent, and the kind hand cold which ministered them, that we remember how tender it was; how soft to soothe; how eager to shield; how ready to support and caress. The ears may no longer hear which, would have received our words of thanks so delightedly. Let us hope those fruits of love, though tardy, are yet not all too late; and though we bring our tribute of reverence and gratitude, it may be to a gravestone, there is an acceptance even there for the stricken heart’s oblation of fond remorse, contrite memories, and pious tears. I am thinking of the love of Clive Newcome’s father for him (and, perhaps, young readers, of that of yours and mine for ourselves); how the old man lay awake, and devised kindnesses, and gave his all for the love of his son; and the young man took, and spent, and slept, and made merry. Did we not say, at our tale’s commencement, that all stories were old? Careless prodigals and anxious elders have been from the beginning; and so may love, and repentance, and forgiveness endure even till the end. (New, chap. 1)
Practicing his artistry as a “week-day preacher,” Thackeray offers a substitute for what scripture and the social mirror no longer provide. He defines fiction as the wisdom of distilled experience combined with the power of the moral sentiments. The authorial voice speaks to us of beginnings and endings, and it extracts from experience universal resolutions.
Though it is Clive Newcome’s misfortune that he can bring his contrition and gratitude only to his father’s “gravestone,” Thackeray prefers to emphasize and dramatize the tributes that can be received in life. He usually protects the warm language of the moral sentiments from the cold hand of death. In a passage late in The Newcomes, one of the rare funeral scenes in his novels, he beautifully evokes the moral paradigms that death provides with a strength of feeling that he usually reserves for descriptions of life.
So, one day, shall the names of all of us be written there; to be deplored by how many?—to be remembered how long?—to occasion what tears, praises, sympathy, censure?—yet for a day or two, while the busy world has time to recollect us who have passed beyond it. So this poor little flower has bloomed for its little day, and pined, and withered, and perished. There was only one friend by Clive’s side following the humble procession which laid poor Rosey and her child out of sight of a world that had been but unkind to her. Not many tears were there to water her lonely little grave. A grief that was akin to shame and remorse humbled him as he knelt over her. Poor little harmless lady! no more childish triumphs and vanities, no more hidden griefs are you to enjoy or suffer; and earth closes over your simple pleasures and tears! The snow was falling and whitening the coffin as they lowered it into the ground. It was at the same cemetery in which Lady Kew was buried. I dare say the same clergyman read the same service over the two graves, as he will read it for you or any of us to-morrow; and until his own turn comes. Come away from the place, poor Clive! Come sit with your orphan little boy, and bear him on your knee, and hug him to your heart. He seems yours now, and all a father’s love may pour out upon him. Until this hour, Fate uncontrollable and home tyranny had separated him from you. (New, chap. 3)
Thackeray’s art transforms potential clichés into shared experience and moral feeling, and Thackeray takes some of the sting out of death by dramatizing the theme of mutability rather than the process of dying. He prefers to reserve the language of the moral sentiments for acts of life or for philosophical generalizations. To the extent that he recognizes that Victorian commercialism exploits sentimental associations in elaborate, expensive funerals, he prefers to send those characters he thinks well of to simple graves. Unlike Dickens, he never provides death with a transcendental glow, and the disposition of the body is only of dramatic interest when its removal to the grave provides ironic comment on the moral quality of the deceased. Revolted by elaborate funerals for rotten souls, Thackeray provides Sir Pitt Crawley in Vanity Fair with a heartless funeral, as unsentimental as the long atrophied heart that is being buried. “The black coaches … ropes, palls, velvets, ostrich feathers, and other mortuary properties” bear and accompany to his grave a reprobate for whom no one mourns, except perhaps his “old pointer,” who, like humankind, has a short memory. “And so Sir Pitt was forgotten—like the kindest and best of us—only a few weeks sooner.” That even “the kindest and best of us” will not remain long in memory is not a statement about death or ingratitude but a gentle reminder that an awareness of universal mutability should encourage us to place our emphasis not on the anxieties of transience but on the needs of the feeling heart. Sir Pitt goes to his elaborate grave to the funereal accompaniment of moral vacuousness, the moral sentiments conspicuously absent, “the family in black coaches, with their handkerchiefs up to their noses, ready for the tears which did not come.”
What Thackeray calls “sacred tears” flow frequently in his novels. The desolate, though, always have “dry eyes.” Ironically, “some of the most genuine tears that ever fall from” Becky Sharp flow when she learns, after she has wed Rawdon Crawley, that Sir Pitt is eager to marry her. Such tears, of course, are “genuine” expressions of selfish regret rather than of moral feeling. For the wasteland of the atrophied heart has no revivifying waters, and an insufficiency of moral sentiment produces emotional aridity.
Thackeray can be playfully ironic about the sacredness of tears, provided that the irony reinforces rather than denies their sacredness. When her brother hints at the possibility that she may remarry, Amelia Sedley has, “as usual, recourse to the water-works” (VF, chap. 59). Her eyes blur with a sincerity of moral feeling that makes Thackeray’s gentle irony an affirmation of the value of her tears. To repress tears is unnatural, to misuse them is perverse. Thackeray connects the calculated misuse of tears to the misuse of sentimentality for self-serving ends, the separation, as in Sterne, of the techniques of sentimentality from the moral sentiments. When Amelia parts from her son, “the tender heart overflowed, and taking the boy to her breast, she … wept silently over him in a sainted agony of tears” (VF, chap. 50). Becky willingly parts from her son, without shedding a tear for anyone. Blanche Amory proudly authors a book of poems called Mes Larmes, cultivating her sentiments for public display. But “this young lady,” Thackeray tells us, “was not able to carry out any emotion to the full; but had a sham enthusiasm, a sham hatred, a sham love, a sham taste, a sham grief, each of which flared and shone very vehemently for an instant, but subsided and gave place to the next sham emotion” (Pen, chap. 3).
Conscious of the frequency of the “water-works” and the potential for misunderstanding, Thackeray was alert to the possibility that he himself might be accused of insincerely manipulating his reader’s feelings.2 Like other Victorian sentimental writers, however, he believed that the artist instinctively makes craftsmanship an expression of moral feeling. The devices of sentiment develop naturally from the core of feeling that is the source of art. Sentimental writers like Thackeray strongly identify with the moral worth of their characters and establish a bond of sincerity between themselves and their readers, creating a community of three classes—characters, readers, and authors—the latter two of which acknowledge that they share a definition of human nature. Genuine tears are not a literary manipulation, and, though all sorrows in fiction are “paper sorrows,” art does not mediate between artifice and reality, between sentimental devices and the moral sentiments. True art reveals their inseparability. The mirror held up to Human Nature is either true to Human Nature or not.
Aware that the author’s claim to sincerity is subject to the same skepticism as his characters’ tears, that they are, in fact, the same issue, Thackeray exerts himself to find some convincing way to affirm the sincerity of Amelia’s tears and to disarm dry-eyed skepticism. Unlike Dickens, he finds the direct assault unattractive. He does not, usually, attempt to overcome resistance with a full-scale, unmediated, single-toned barrage of emotional ammunition. His model is Fielding, not Richardson. With the resources of a formal education and an urbane temperament, he makes his appeal for credibility with humor, pathos, gentle irony, a mixture of the comic and the serious, and with literary allusions. When Dobbin proclaims that Amelia and he will never part again, Little George “flung his arms around his mother. As for that lady: let us say what she did in the words of a favourite poet—Askpruoev Yellassa (smiling through her tears).” As in Fielding’s description of Sophia, the mock-heroic allusion to the Iliad elevates rather than deflates. Though we may smile at and, from our superior worldly position, sometimes even condescend to Amelia, we are never to doubt that she or Thackeray are any the less sincere in their sentiments because of her “water-works” or his indirect, slightly ironic presentation.
Thackeray does share the Victorian belief that women cry more readily than men for reasons that have to do with the special aspects of human nature that are feminine rather than with cultural conditioning. Women by nature have their moral sentiments closer to the surface of expression than men and have not been as subject to the eroding contaminations of institutional education and the marketplace. Since women, then, lend themselves more easily than men to idealization in fiction, Thackeray not only finds it easier to locate their moral sentiments but also associates “the floodgates” with gender rather than with the individual.
How the floodgates were opened and mother and daughter wept, when they were together embracing each other in this sanctuary, may readily be imagined by every reader who possesses the least sentimental turn. When don’t ladies weep? At what occasion of joy, sorrow, or other business of life? and, after such an event as a marriage mother and daughter were surely at liberty to give way to a sensibility which is as tender as it is refreshing. About a question of marriage I have seen women who hate each other kiss and cry together quite fondly. How much more do they feel when they love! Good mothers are married over again at their daughters’ weddings: and as for subsequent events, who does not know how ultra-maternal grandmothers are?—in fact a woman, until she is a grandmother, does not often really know what to be a mother is. Let us respect Amelia and her mama whispering and whimpering and laughing and crying in the parlour and the twilight. (VF, chap. 26)
Though “genuine tears” are redemptive and women have more ready access to them than men, not all women, of course, remain true to their innate moral sentiments. If there are women whose moral sentiments cannot be diminished, there are also those who cannot withstand the pressure of a corrupt or deprived environment. The world frequently barters with feeling, and tears are calculatingly regulated by the social marketplace. Becky, for example, cannot cry, her natural sentiments unnaturally repressed. “Miss Bullock knows how to regulate her feelings better than [Amelia].… Miss B. would never have committed herself as that imprudent Amelia had done; pledged her love irretrievably; confessed her heart away, and got nothing back.” The narrative provides the ironic distancing and the affirmation of the sentiments: “Be cautious then, young ladies; be wary how you engage. Be shy of loving frankly; never tell all you feel, or (a better way still) feel very little” (VF, chap. 18). For if one practices repression of the feelings, one will soon have very little left to practice on.
Men resort to the “water-works” so infrequently that their tears cannot be the subject of even gentle irony. Thackeray’s male characters cry only in the most desperate or passionate circumstances. In Rawdon Crawley, Thackeray provides his most effective dramatization of genuine tears as the visible expression of the moral sentiments. Rawdon’s male credentials are impeccable: soldier, adventurer, gambler, lover, a talented, much-admired expert at all the minor masculine arts of survival practiced by the wellborn. His social milieu has successfully repressed his moral feeling. Surviving on “nothing a year,” Rawdon’s predatory habits adhere to the code of the society and the family that have created him. He is a victim of the society that approves his victimization of others.
Thackeray is marvelously adroit in creating in Rawdon a character whose reserves of moral sentiment have been obscured but not obliterated by gentlemanly sloth and social corruption. Though it operates within the limits of his social code, Rawdon’s sincerity is never in question. By maintaining Rawdon’s basic likability, Thackeray reserves the possibility, without being explicit, that the time will come when Rawdon will redeem himself. At his worst, Rawdon never acts in a way that excludes the possibility of our feeling moral affection for him. The time does come. Rawdon is imprisoned for debt and expects Becky to obtain his release. When Jane Southwood comes instead, Rawdon, aware now that his wife does not respect let alone love him, “was quite overcome by that kind voice and presence. He ran up to her—caught her in his arms—gasped out some inarticulate words of thanks, and fairly sobbed on her shoulder.” Rawdon’s tears reflect the awakening of his innate moral sentiments. He
thanked his sister a hundred times, and with an ardour of gratitude which touched and almost alarmed that softhearted woman. “Oh,” said he, in his rude, artless way, “you—you don’t know how I’m changed since I’ve known you—and Little Rawdy. I—I’d like to change somehow. You see I want—I want—to be—.” He did not finish the sentence, but she could interpret it. (VF, chap. 53)
What he wants to be is “good.” In fact, at that moment he already is good. Having discovered his moral sentiments, he has become a moral man and possesses a means of expressing them that transcends words. Determined to duel with Lord Steyne, Rawdon discusses his son with Captain Macmurdo.
“He’s a regular trump, that boy.… I say, Mac, if anything goes wrong—if I drop—I should like you to—to go and see him, you know: and say that I was very fond of him, and that. And—dash it—old chap, give him these gold sleeve-buttons; it’s all I’ve got.” He covered his face with his black hands; over which the tears rolled and made furrows of white. Mr. Macmurdo had also occasion to take off his silk night-cap and rub it across his eyes. (VF, chap. 54)
Many dramatic incidents in Thackeray’s novels turn on the question of whether the heart will have and act on moral sentiments. The commitment to the moral sentiments demands an optimistic social paradigm, and Thackeray, like Dickens, invests so heavily in the innateness of the moral sentiments that he can do nothing other than provide happy endings for his novels. He may qualify the happiness with gentle irony, as in the union of Amelia and William in Vanity Fair, but the irony reinforces rather than undermines the victory of the moral sentiments. Not surprisingly, the social paradigm that Thackeray most frequently uses to represent the victory of the moral sentiments is the joining of lovers in marriage. Society provides the ritual affirmation of its belief that the moral sentiments may be enriched in a special union which symbolizes that all division and discord can be made whole and harmonious. For the Victorians in general, an art that embodied such harmonies was not a compromise with popular taste or commercial demand but an affirmation of the inseparability of aesthetic and moral vision.
Thackeray conceives of plot partly as a system for allocating rewards and punishments in a serial development that concludes with an affirmation of the moral sentiments. Undeserving characters usually receive banal punishments, and for Becky and Lord Steyne the appropriate punishment is the absence of rewards. They are deprived of the blessings of the moral sentiments. But Laura and Pendennis, Ethel and Clive, and Amelia and Dobbin marry, the highest reward, and Henry Esmond is united with “the truest and tenderest and purest wife ever man was blessed with” (HE, chap. 3). That Thackeray makes it clear that Dobbin’s marriage will have its exasperating moments does not detract from the marriage as an ideal model and from Amelia as a representation of the ideal moral sentiments. Thackeray never loses sight of the realities of daily life and of the minor crosses one may have to bear as the price of great virtues. Though Amelia may sometimes be a burden to Dobbin, the qualities that make some modern readers ambivalent about her are those that Dobbin and the Victorians regard as the highest of human nature. Some modern readers may find Amelia vapid, weepy, even wearisome. Thackeray recognizes this aspect of Amelia. But he values goodness more than interestingness: goodness comes before dullness. And Dobbin clearly would rather have a good dull wife than a bad exciting one. From the Victorian point of view, no man can have a wife who is both good and exciting.
Unlike some modern readers, Thackeray thinks this no loss at all. The focus of human interest should be, he believes, moral attractiveness. Mrs. Pendennis is one of these idealized women who have “natural sweetness and kindness,” and “in whose angelical natures there is something awful as well as beautiful, to contemplate … that adorable purity which never seems to do or to think wrong” (Pen, chap. 1). She is fully defined in terms of her moral sentiments. That she must maintain her “purity” within the confines of domestic life seems quite acceptable to Thackeray. Women, like Becky, who roll up their sleeves to work in the world, usually dirty their hands. In Becky’s case, the erosion of innate moral sentiments and a pattern of self-calculating aggression have made her into an appropriate companion for Lord Steyne rather than for Rawdon Crawley. But there are instances of “angelical natures” that are human natures, and the more we allow our innate moral sentiments to flourish, the closer we come to being compared justifiably to angelic natures idealized beyond their humanness. The comparison comes easily to Victorian sentimentalists.
For Dobbin was very soft-hearted. The sight of women and children in pain always used to melt him. The idea of Amelia broken-hearted and lonely, tore that good-natured soul with anguish. And he broke out into an emotion, which anybody who likes may consider unmanly. He swore that Amelia was an angel.… And for himself, he blushed with remorse and shame, as the remembrance of his own selfishness and indifference contrasted with that perfect purity. (VF, chap. 18)
The hagiography needs to be taken seriously as a Victorian cultural image, though Thackeray makes clear throughout Vanity Fair that Amelia is also a fallible creature whose faults are of the sort that do not detract from but actually strengthen her role as an idealization of the moral sentiments. The more Thackeray sees men as deficient in moral sentiment and repressed in their ability to express whatever sentiment they do have, the more use he has for female idealizations. The same gender-based iconography supports Pendennis’ sense of the moral splendor of both his mother’s and Laura Bell’s natures.
Ah, sister, how weak and wicked we [men] are; how spotless and full of love and truth, Heaven made you! I think for some of you there has been no fall.… You can’t help having sweet thoughts, and doing good actions. Dear creature! they are the flower which you bear. (Pen, chap. 3)
Though aware that some women might refuse to bear such flowers, or even might prefer “fleurs de mal,” Thackeray did not imagine that his readers might think them too heavy or too sweet. He appreciated the possibility that some might find such idealizations aesthetically uninteresting, “namby-pamby milk-and-water affected” creatures (VF, chap. 42). But Thackeray, who was not of Becky’s “party without knowing it,” most respected moral energy, for the expenditure of energy itself is an authentication of neither being nor worth, except to the extent that it serves a moral purpose.3 What do we admire more, he asked, and what do we get more pleasure from, intellect or goodness? The evidence of experience, Thackeray believed, supports the conclusion that intellect is rarely in the service of the moral sentiments, and that we derive the highest pleasure from and have the most admiration for moral performance. Inevitably, then, Thackeray would rather we be good—and true to our innate natures—than be interesting. If we are good, however, and value goodness, then we will take pleasure in such feelings, as Adam Smith claims our natures demand, and change our definition of what is interesting.
Thackeray’s sophistication in playing with the various levels of truth in fiction and subordinating literal reality to moral models is nowhere more effectively realized than at the conclusion of The Newcomes (chap. 3). The narrator, who claims that he has heard Clive Newcome’s story from Pendennis, asks, with some disappointment, “might he not have told us whether Miss Ethel married anybody finally? It was provoking that he should retire to the shades without answering that sentimental question.” The narrator, though, does have some vague impressions on the matter, which he grants may or may not be accurate, and he thinks it likely that Clive and Ethel married. “But have they any children?” the narrator asks. And the voice of Thackeray as narrator puts an end to the inquiry by reminding us that all such questions deal with hopes, with “paper sorrows,” in a genre that, for Thackeray, is about providing models rather than simple mirrors.
But for you, dear friend, it is as you like. You may settle your fable-land in your own fashion.… And the poet of fable-land rewards and punishes absolutely. He splendidly deals out bags of sovereigns, which won’t buy anything; belabors wicked backs with awful blows, which do not hurt: endows heroines with preternatural beauty, and creates heroes, who, if ugly sometimes, yet possess a thousand good qualities, and usually end by being immensely rich; makes the hero and heroine happy at last, and happy ever after. Ah, happy harmless fable-land, where these things are! Friendly reader! may you and the author meet there on some future day! He hopes so; as he yet keeps a lingering hold of your hand, and bids you farewell with a kind heart.
Thackeray dramatizes simultaneously the text and the text-creator, the fable and the reality out of which the fable arises. In the conflation, the reader both participates in and creates personal variations on the fable whose ultimate text is the “fable-land” of literature. One of Thackeray’s earliest appreciators remarked that “he could not have painted Vanity Fair as he has, unless Eden had been shining brightly in his eyes.”4 Thackeray’s Eden has no transcendental location; it is the imagined “fable-land,” the fiction that provides models of human nature and the moral sentiments.
Defining goodness as a function of social approval, Becky Sharp claims that she would have been “a good woman” if only she had “had 5000 a year.”
“I could pay everybody if I had but the money. This is what the conjurors here pride themselves upon doing. They look down with pity upon us miserable sinners who have none. They think themselves generous if they give our children a five pound note, and us contemptible if we are without one.” And who knows but Rebecca was right in her speculations—and that it was only a question of money and fortune which made the difference between her and an honest woman? If you take temptations into account, who is to say that he is better than his neighbor? … An alderman coming from a turtle feast will not step out of his carriage to steal a leg of mutton; but put him to starve, and see if he will not purloin the load. Becky consoled herself by so balancing the changes and equalizing the distribution of good and evil in the world. (VF, chap. 41)
But that it is not only a question of money Thackeray states clearly throughout Vanity Fair. When poor, Amelia retains her goodness. When relatively prosperous, Becky acts badly. Her behavior is not criminal, however, but immoral, and Thackeray provides the contrast between the well-fed and the starving alderman as an ironic dramatization of the putative extremes of “good” and “evil” rather than as an example relevant to Becky’s situation. Thackeray, in fact, hardly believes in good and evil at all, but in good and less good, and eventually so little good that we seem to have lost sight of good entirely. Though he hopes for a world in which theft will not be necessary, he does not have a serious argument with those who steal in order to feed themselves. Criminal liability is irrelevant to moral feeling, and Becky, who always remains within the law, is condemned for acting against a higher law, natural law.
What is “human nature?” What is “natural” human behavior and what is “unnatural” human behavior? Thackeray constantly asks in providing moral glosses for his characters. Though, like many of his contemporaries, he occasionally gives “nature,” “natural,” and “unnatural” some local meaning, generally he uses the terms to mean that human beings have innate dispositions. “Nature” in this sense usually has an adjectival qualification. “Dobbin,” for example, “was of too simple and generous a nature,” “Mr. Jos … was by no means an ill-natured person,” and Amelia has a “sweet and affectionate nature” (VF, chaps. 60, 58, 31). Thackeray posits an underlying constant, human nature, from which all actions and states derive. His characters act out of their natures rather than have their natures formed or modified by their actions. Thus “it was this young woman’s [Amelia’s] nature … to sacrifice herself and to fling all that she had at the feet of the beloved object,” whereas Becky “was of a wild, roving nature, inherited from father and mother, who were both Bohemians, by taste and circumstance” (VF, chaps. 57, 65). Dobbin provides the definitive Thackerayan comment, the distillation of authorial wisdom, on the matter.
In reply to some faint objection of Mrs. Amelia’s (taken from certain theological works like the “Washerwoman of Finchley Common” and others of that school, with which Mrs. Osborne had been furnished during her life at Brompton) he told her an eastern fable of the owl who thought that the sunshine was unbearable for the eyes, and that the Nightingale was a most over-rated bird. “It is one’s nature to sing and the other to hoot,” he said, laughing, “and with such a sweet voice as you have yourself, you must belong to the Bulbul [nightingale] faction.” (VF, chap. 62)
Though Thackeray shares Dickens’ belief in the moral sentiments, he allows to a greater degree that even someone who has strong moral sentiments can make a serious mistake in which the heart bestows itself upon an unworthy object. Amelia does belong to the “Bulbul faction.” The nightingale, though, sings in an ordinary garden and sometimes misinterprets the local cacophony. Those for whom there has been “no fall” may make the occasional errors of the innocent, for their innate moral sentiments cannot always protect them from misjudgment. Even more than Dickens’, Thackeray’s characters are born into the hard shells of their natures, which give them very little room for growth and little potential for shedding their old natures and growing new ones. Rather than grow better selves, they at best divest themselves of what the world has done to them, like taking off a layer of clothes that belongs to someone else. When Dickens’ characters need to divest themselves of environmental clothes, there always turn out to be many layers, one of which may be a straitjacket. And when they strip, they find either that they have a more complicated, mysterious nakedness or human nature to work with or, simply, that stripping completely is impossible. The environmental clothes cling to the body and there are more of them.
The characters in Thackeray’s fiction, then, seem to have been born into their natures, some to sing, others to hoot. Environment can influence action. But, though “remorse is the least active of all a man’s moral sense—the very easiest to be deadened when wakened,” in some it is “never wakened at all” (VF, chap. 42). The inevitable question, why do some people have more and some less of the moral sentiments, and who or what is responsible for both the amounts and the distribution, Thackeray responds to by saying, in effect, that answering such questions is not the function of the novelist or at least that his self-definition as a novelist does not require that he provide answers. Insofar as an answer might be physiological, he claims incompetence; insofar as an answer might be theological, he claims that it is outside his province. Thackeray assumes that such complications are beyond human unraveling, and though the complications may rise to mysteries, as they do for Dickens, Thackeray prefers to see the situation in the most pragmatic, local terms possible. Since there is no way of determining responsibility for the schema, including the unequal number and the odd distribution of nightingales and owls, he finds it pointless to be too hard on the owls and unwise not to admire the nightingales. At the same time, he posits an available moral yardstick, the distinction between “natural” and “unnatural” performance. The former is the spontaneous expression of the innate moral sentiments. Those who do not honor nature’s most life-giving and life-preserving feelings and relationships are “unnatural.”
Becky’s inability to “like” her son is the most telling comment Thackeray can make on her “unnaturalness.” And Lady Jane, remonstrating with Sir Pitt, who has defended Becky, emphasizes that Becky’s wickedness resides in her being “a heartless mother, a false wife.” For “she never loved her dear little boy, who used to fly here and tell me of her cruelty to him” (VF, chap. 55). When, to Becky’s technically correct claim that she “is innocent,” Rawdon responds that she is in fact “as bad as guilty,” Thackeray intends to raise the discourse to the ultimate distinction between “natural” and “unnatural,” which no technicalities can possibly address. Becky has rejected the highest obligation of human nature, which is to accept its nature, to allow the natural moral sentiments to flourish.
It is best, of course, to belong to, to be born into, the “Bulbul faction.” But the world has many owls, and Thackeray finds a necessary place for them. Becky, who is one of the owls, helps to provide, in the interactions between the owls and the nightingales, the tension and the dialectic that allow the novelist to create the “fable-land” of idealization. Thackeray denies that the nightingale’s song is overrated. On the contrary, the idealization can never be over-appreciated or too highly valued. Though the mixed nature of most human beings provides the background for the counterpoint between the owls and the nightingales, Thackeray never wants the realistic background to overshadow the idealistic foreground. Becky sings the coarse songs of this world; Amelia sings to “the spirit ditties of no tone.” Thackeray is aware of the difficulty his contemporaries have in hearing Amelia’s melody, to which modern readers are generally even more tone-deaf than Victorian readers. But he expects that the response to both Becky and Amelia will be through the instinctive moral sentiments, and there Amelia has the advantage.