In My Good Books

by V. S. Pritchett

  Later Kilvert was asked to read the Testament and pray:

  The reading was accompanied by a running fire of ejaculations and devout utterances from Prissy. She put a mat on the floor for me to kneel on and knelt down herself with some pain and difficulty, having sprained her knee. I begged her to be seated. “No,” she said. “I will kneel. I must punish the body. Kneel down, my dear,” she said reprovingly to the idiot. The idiot knelt humbly down in front of the fire with her head almost in the ashes.

  There were other meetings like this. Priscilla collected old lore. She told the story of a man at Staunton-by-Wye who had seen the oxen kneel down at midnight on Christmas Eve and stay there moaning, the tears running down their faces.

  Those especially Victorian words, words which bring back a whole period: “radiant, glorious, infinite, innocence, picturesque,” are common in Kilvert’s descriptions of scenery or of his sentiment. “A splendid romp with Polly Taverner”—that is an authentic note from the time. His broken romances belong to the period too. Where Kilvert is superior to many of the novelists is that he is writing straight from nature, idealising often but never falsifying, for he moralises very little. His piety like his sentiment is firm but unprofessional. A being who feels, he does not go into the muddy introspections which many diary writers love, he has humour but he does not make insincere, defensive diary jokes against himself. One likes him in the end, I am convinced, because entirely without self importance or self-consciousness, he is serious about himself. That supremely difficult art! Putting those three volumes down, one reflects that too many diarists are not content to work within a small field. A diary needs a frame and they are not willing to make it anything less than the universe. It is a pity, for the village is more interesting.

  The Great Flunkey

  Judged by their portraits, what a large number of the Victorian writers seem not to be writers at all, but creatures from the Green Room and the stage! There are the haggard, Irving-like grimaces of Dickens, the dank, baleful ringlets, so Siddonish, of George Eliot and Elizabeth Barrett. Tennyson glowers like the bearded villain from the Lyceum. They were a histrionic generation and in a way the habit embellishes them. But not all. Every prejudice we feel about Thackeray is confirmed by his disastrous portraits. Did ever a snob look more like a footman, was ever a man of the world more easily mistaken—as so often occurs to men of the world—for one of the servants? Take the very literary steel spectacles from Thackeray’s nose in Samuel Lawrence’s portrait, and what is more damning than that episcopal look of his, as if he were at once a bishop, bland and patronising, at a ducal christening, and Mr. Yellowplush himself announcing in the long soirée of Victorian letters, that the carriage has arrived? What a rôle to have chosen—to be the great flunkey of God and Mammon, the whited expert on the whited sepulchres.

  There is, naturally, more in the portrait than that. Bishops and footmen have not that sensibility; his eyes have not the vacant stare of servitude; and the chin, which Thackeray raises so high, seems to be raised defensively rather than superciliously. Like an actor’s, it suggests the pride of a personal style. People who knew Thackeray well said that they had never got to the bottom of him, and one can well believe it. One is held off. And yet one cannot escape him. Other novelists conceal themselves, but the figure of Thackeray is pushed forward in advance of his characters. We simply have to make up our minds about him personally because in all those novels “without a hero” he is the hero himself, the compère of his own show. We are obliged to know the flow of his egoism better than we shall know the Osbornes and the Sedleys or any of his characters.

  Re-reading Vanity Fair again, one realises what a brilliant innovation this was in the English novel. Vanity Fair is, as the traditional usually turns out to be, a new experiment. A new experiment in the manner of Sterne. Before everything, Thackeray was a versatile journalist, the author of clever sketches and short pieces which are still sharp and pungent in their satire after three generations. Egoistical but detached, he is alive to the current of life, the stream on which the curious fragments called human beings are borne. He observes. He does not appear to have a sustained imaginative power which can create a character larger than life, like one of Balzac’s, though his interests resemble Balzac’s. (He has more in common with Balzac than with Dickens.) Thackeray is like the modern novelists who derive from James and Proust, in his power of dissecting (and of desiccating!) character, in the refusal to inflate it. For a Victorian, we feel this had to be a fatal originality. The long novel, the great theme, the crowded canvas, were essential. Thackeray can see this, yet he must realise that his genius is for the fragmentary. And so he disguises his inability to create the proper paraphernalia of fiction, by introducing himself as the raconteur, who, having got you to listen, can distract, delude and beguile you with an atmosphere—an atmosphere which lifts like a haze from time to time upon one of those interludes of real talk, action and character which are as true as life itself. A voice talks on, going forward, winding backward, playing with scene and time. We see that this is not merely a new kind of narrative, but that Thackeray catches the illusion of living as none of his contemporaries ever did. They were inclined too much to be interested in the outsize thing called Life.

  Another innovation—and Thackeray seems always to be innovating—is his attitude of character. There are no fixed characters in Vanity Fair. Amelia, Becky, that grim wreck Miss Crawley, the egotistical young soldier, George Osborne, old Sedley the virtuous bankrupt, and Jos, his son, the Regency dandy and glutton—they are not defined once and for all. They change with the story, they change in time, their view of one another changes. Thackeray makes them fluid and unexpected. It is a wicked concession to melodrama and humbug that Becky apparently murders Jos Sedley at the end. And yet, what is more perfect than the career of this buffoon? Comically drunk at Vauxhall at the beginning, then respectably in flight from his errors, he turns up dressed for the part in Brussels before Waterloo. Then panic again. Clothes, “dashed fine gals and ices” become the ruling passions of this windy, fat and simple hypochondriac. Food-poisoning in low company is the fitting end, even if it is incredible that Becky had been studying Jos Sedley’s liver all these years in order to commit the crime. Becky and Rawdon are greater examples of Thackeray’s eye for the unexpected in character. It is a pity that Thackeray had to preach to us about Becky for, whether taking her side or not, he was capable of letting her live for herself. The stay at Crawley, when she is received into the family and listens to Lady Southdown’s homilies, winds the wool and sings Haydn in the evenings, is made perfect by Becky’s pleasure in it. It is a brief pleasure, for Becky is no fool. “I could be good”, she reflects, “if I had £5,000 a year.” Then again there is Rawdon, the brainless Guardsman, the “Mayfair playboy” with “no harm” in him. His famous bequest of his horse to Becky as he goes off to battle, is the crown of stumbling humanity upon his character:

  “Look here,” said he. “If I drop, let us see what there is for you. I have had a pretty good run of luck here, and here’s two hundred and thirty pounds. I have got two Napoleons in my pocket. That is as much as I shall want; for the General pays everything like a prince; and if I’m hit, why you know I cost nothing. Don’t cry, little woman; I may live to vex you yet. Well, I shan’t take either of my horses, but shall ride the General’s grey charger; it’s cheaper, and I told him mine was lame. If I’m done, those two ought to fetch you something. Grigg offered ninety for the mare yesterday, before this confounded news came, and like a fool I wouldn’t let her go under the two 0’s. Bullfinch will fetch his price any day, only you’d better sell him in this country, because the dealers have so many bills of mine, and so I’d rather he shouldn’t go back to England. Your little mare the General gave you will fetch something, and there’s no d—d livery-stable bills here, as there are in London,” Rawdon added with a laugh. “There’s that dressing-case cost me two hundred—that is, I owe two for it; and the gold tops and bottles m
ust be worth thirty or forty. Please to put that up the spout, ma’am, with my pins and rings, and watch and chain, and things. They cost a precious lot of money. Miss Crawley, I know, paid a hundred down for the chain and ticker. Gold tops and bottles, indeed! dammy. I’m sorry I didn’t take more now. Edwards pressed on me a silver-gilt boot-jack, and I might have had a dressing-case fitted up with a silver warming-pan, and a service of plate. But we must make the best of what we’ve got, Becky, you know.”

  And so, making his last dispositions, Captain Crawley, who had seldom thought about anything but himself until the last few months of his life, when Love had obtained the mastery over the dragoon, went through the various items of his little catalogue of effects, striving to see how they might be turned into money for his wife’s benefit, in case any accident should befall him. He pleased himself by noting down with a pencil, in his big schoolboy handwriting, the various items of his portable property which might be sold for his widow’s advantage—as, for example, “My double-barril by Manton, say 40 guineas; my driving cloak, lined with sable fur, £50; my duelling pistols in rosewood case (same which I shot Captain Marker) £20; my regulation saddle-holsters and housings; my Laurie ditto” and so forth, over all of which articles he made Rebecca the mistress.

  Faithful to his plan of economy, the Captain dressed himself in his oldest and shabbiest uniform and epaulets, leaving the newest behind under his wife’s (or it might be his widow’s) guardianship. And this famous dandy of Windsor and Hyde Park went off on his campaign with a kit as modest as that of a sergeant, and with something like a prayer on his lips for the woman he was leaving. He took her up from the ground, and held her in his arms for a minute, tight pressed against his strong-beating heart. His face was purple and his eyes dim as he put her down and left her. He rode by his General’s side, and smoked his cigar in silence as they hastened after the troops of the General’s brigade, which preceded them; and it was not until they were some miles on their way that he left off twirling his mustachio and broke silence.

  The virtue of such incidents is not merely their comedy; it is their reality. With every line in these portraits—and, I say, in the portraits not in the disquisitions Thackeray wrote under them—there is an extension of reality, the excitement of the detective who goes from clue to clue. And still the honeymoon at Brighton with Becky being witty about the moon while her husband sharps at cards in the room behind her, and the Brussels chapters, stand out as a culminating height in English comic writing. The bullet in George Osborne’s heart is not so good; but the rest—well, in the first year of this war we saw the whole Thackerean scene enacted again.

  Thackeray and Balzac: they are like the opposite sides of the same penny. Here is young George Osborne speaking to Amelia:

  “Ours is a ready money society. We live among bankers and city big-wigs, and be hanged to them, and every man as he talks to you jingles his guineas in his pocket.”

  Money in Balzac is as dynamic as a passion; in Thackeray it is less massive; it is as ubiquitous as the senses. True, it is reduced in his philosophy to the common level of vanity, another factor which the moralist washes down with another glass of vintage sadness; but in the narrative Thackeray understands money and its place in the contemporary situation. Waterloo must have looked romantic in 1840, yet Thackeray also knew who won that battle. It is not an accident that Osborne and Sedley are Stock Exchange speculators, the newest representatives of middle-class finance. And in the cut-throat stage, too. He knows the anxiety of the aristocracy—“make them pay up first and cut them afterwards”—and the anxiety of speculators to get their sons and daughters into the class above them. Thackeray’s picture of the Regency aristocracy is a caricature, as we know from the memoirs of the time; it is a middle-class view which understands the aristocrats only when, like Lady Southdown, they catch the infection of middle-class piety. But how proper is the distinction he makes between the attitude of the various members of the Crawley family to Miss Crawley’s fortune, and the attitude of old Osborne to his fortune. The portrait of Miss Crawley—the greatest character in the book to my mind—makes one wonder if Thackeray did always go wrong about aristocrats. (I take it she was one? An old-fashioned revolutionary aristocrat, already an anachronism before Waterloo.) She is the one character who understands Becky, and it is the older, shrewder feeling of her generation for money which sharpens Miss Crawley’s eyes. One seems to see wills becoming deeds, deeds becoming notes, notes dissolving into coins and passing from above from hand to hand until they reach the dress-wiping palms of the servants, in nearly every page of this novel. It was a perception which was no doubt heightened in Thackeray by the taboo on sex; so that socially the background is perfect, where the individuals are castrated.

  One does not say that the inability to write about love as a sexual passion is fatal to a novelist; but in Thackeray the people do become, as he says, “Puppets”. They are small to the eye, figures seen through the wrong end of a telescope. As egotists, they are made mean by their sexlessness; for there is a generosity about sexual egotism. We recall the terrible crime of Becky, even in her schooldays: “she was old in life and experience”. After the hush caused by that remark, we do not to-day rise, as we were intended to do, to nobler heights; on the contrary, we sink to that plane where the “quid” dominates its unmentionable partnership with the “pro quo”.

  But the pleasure of Thackeray is in the sense of Style, in the intimacy with an educated mind. It is absurd to condemn the educated for being humbugs: they are merely more skilful humbugs. Since when have the educated been observed to “know better”, to be any more than a more self-conscious product of their times? Remove the vices of a novelist and his virtues vanish too. To us, and especially since the two wars, Thackeray is the great sedentary novelist, a moralist to whom adventure and physical action are alien; and that cuts him off. He is cut off by his melancholy—a peacetime luxury: our emotion is sharp, dramatic and tragic. But in Vanity Fair, in those hundreds of fragmentary pictures where scenes are crystallised and people talk, there is the original journalist Thackeray. Here are Rawdon and Becky again, first Thackeray the compère, then the reporter:

  An article as necessary to a lady in this position as her brougham or her bouquet, is her companion. I have always admired the way in which the tender creatures, who cannot exist without sympathy, hire an exceedingly plain friend of their own sex from whom they are almost inseparable. The sight of that inevitable woman in her faded gown seated behind her dear friend in the opera-box, or occupying the back seat of the barouche, is always a wholesome and moral one to me, as jolly a reminder as that of the Death’s-head which figured in the repasts of Egyptian bons vivants, a strange sardonic memorial of Vanity Fair. What?—even battered, brazen, beautiful conscienceless, heartless Mrs. Firebrace, whose father died of her shame; even lovely, daring Mrs. Mantrap, who will ride at any fence which any man in England will take, and who drives her greys in the Park, while her mother keeps a huckster’s stall in Bath still;—even those who are so bold, one might fancy they could face anything, dare not face the world without a female friend. They must have somebody to cling to, the affectionate creatures! And you will hardly see them in any public place without a shabby companion in a dyed silk, sitting somewhere in the shade close behind them.

  “Rawdon”, said Becky, very late one night, as a party of gentlemen were seated round her crackling drawing-room fire (for the men came to her house to finish the night; and she had ice and coffee for them, the best in London): “I must have a sheep-dog.”

  “A what?” said Rawdon, looking up from an écarté table

  “A sheep-dog!” said young Lord Southdown. “My dear Mrs. Crawley, what a fancy! What not have a Danish dog? I know of one as big as a camel-leopard, by Jove. It would almost pull your brougham. Or a Persian greyhound, eh? (I propose, if you please); or a little pug that would go into one of Lord Steyne’s snuff-boxes? There’s a man at Bayswater got one with such a nose that you might—I
mark the king and play,—that you might hang your hat on it.”

  “I mark the trick,” Rawdon gravely said. He attended to his game commonly, and didn’t much meddle with the conversation except when it was about horses and betting.

  “What can you want with a shepherd’s dog?” the lively little Southdown continued.

  “I mean a moral shepherd’s dog,” said Becky, laughing, and looking up at Lord Steyne.

  “What the devil’s that?” said his Lordship.

  “A dog to keep the wolves off me,” Rebecca continued. “A companion.”

  “Dear little innocent lamb, you want one,” said the Marquis; and his jaw thrust out, and he began to grin hideously, his little eyes leering towards Rebecca.

  The great Lord of Steyne was standing by the fire sipping coffee. The fire crackled and blazed pleasantly. There was a score of candles sparkling round the mantelpiece, in all sorts of quaint sconces, of gilt and bronze and porcelain. They lighted up Rebecca’s figure to admiration, as she sate on a sofa covered with a pattern of gaudy flowers. She was in a pink dress, that looked as fresh as a rose; her dazzling white arms and shoulders were half-covered with a thin hazy scarf through which they sparkled; her hair hung in curls round her neck; one of her little feet peeped out from the fresh crisp folds of silk: the prettiest little foot in the prettiest little sandal in the finest silk stockings in the world.

  The candles lighted up Lord Steyne’s shining bald head, which was fringed with red hair. He had thick bushy eyebrows, with little twinkling bloodshot eyes, surrounded by a thousand wrinkles. His jaw was underhung, and when he laughed, two white buck-teeth protruded themselves and glistened savagely in the midst of the grin. He had been dining with royal personages, and wore his garter and ribbon. A short man was his Lordship, broad-chested, and bow-legged, but proud of the fineness of his foot and ankle, and always caressing his garter-knee.