William Makepeace Thackeray was born at Calcutta,
July 18, 1811, the only child of Richmond and Anne
Thackeray. He received the main part of his education
at the Charterhouse, as we know to our profit.
Thence he passed to Cambridge, remaining there from
February 1829 to sometime in 1830. To judge by
quotations and allusions, his favourite of the classics
was Horace, the chosen of the eighteenth century,
and generally the voice of its philosophy in a prosperous
country. His voyage from India gave him sight
of Napoleon on the rocky island. In his young
manhood he made his bow reverentially to Goethe of
Weimar; which did not check his hand from setting
its mark on the sickliness of Werther.
He was built of an extremely impressionable nature
and a commanding good sense. He was in addition
a calm observer, having ’the harvest of a quiet
eye.’ Of this combination with the flood
of subjects brought up to judgement in his mind, came
the prevalent humour, the enforced disposition to
satire, the singular critical drollery, notable in
his works. His parodies, even those pushed to
burlesque, are an expression of criticism and are
more effective than the serious method, while they
rarely overstep the line of justness. The Novels
by Eminent Hands do not pervert the originals they
exaggerate. ’Sieyes an abbe, now a ferocious
lifeguardsman,’ stretches the face of the rollicking
Irish novelist without disfeaturing him; and the mysterious
visitor to the palatial mansion in Holywell Street
indicates possibilities in the Oriental imagination
of the eminent statesman who stooped to conquer fact
through fiction. Thackeray’s attitude in
his great novels is that of the composedly urbane
lecturer, on a level with a select audience, assured
of interesting, above requirements to excite.
The slow movement of the narrative has a grace of
style to charm like the dance of the Minuet de la
Cour: it is the limpidity of Addison flavoured
with salt of a racy vernacular; and such is the veri-similitude
and the dialogue that they might seem to be heard
from the mouths of living speakers. When in this
way the characters of Vanity Fair had come to growth,
their author was rightly appreciated as one of the
creators in our literature, he took at once the place
he will retain. With this great book and with
Esmond and The Newcomes, he gave a name eminent, singular,
and beloved to English fiction.
Charges of cynicism are common against all satirists,
Thackeray had to bear with them. The social world
he looked at did not show him heroes, only here and
there a plain good soul to whom he was affectionate
in the unhysterical way of an English father patting
a son on the head. He described his world as
an accurate observer saw it, he could not be dishonest.
Not a page of his books reveals malevolence or a sneer
at humanity. He was driven to the satirical task
