by Edward Short
In Vanity Fair, bankruptcy banishes old Mr. Sedley and his wife to the Fulham Road, “where the houses look like baby-houses; where the people, looking out of the first-floor windows, must infallibly, as you think, sit with their feet in the parlours; where the shrubs in the little gardens in front bloom with a perennial display of little children’s pinafores … whence you hear the sound of jingling spinets and women singing; where little porter pots hang on the railings sunning themselves; whither of evenings you see City clerks padding wearily …” Only the prospect of death invokes the “kingdom of God … among us.”
Suppose you are particularly rich and well-to-do and say on that last day, “I am very rich; I am tolerably well known; I have lived all my life in the best society, and thank Heaven, come of a most respectable family. I have served my King and country with honour. I was in Parliament for several years, where, I may say, my speeches were listened to and pretty well received. I don’t owe any man a shilling: on the contrary, I lent my old college friend, Jack Lazarus, fifty pounds, for which my executors will not press him. I leave my daughters with ten thousand pounds apiece—very good portions for girls; I bequeath my plate and furniture, my house in Baker Street, with a handsome jointure, to my widow for her life; and my landed property, besides money in the funds, and my cellar of well-selected wine in Baker Street, to my son. I leave twenty pound a year to my valet; and I defy any man after I have gone to find anything against my character.” Or suppose, on the other hand, your swan sings quite a different sort of dirge and you say, “I am a poor blighted, disappointed old fellow, and have made an utter failure through life. I was not endowed either with brains or with good fortune, and confess that I have committed a hundred mistakes and blunders. I own to having forgotten my duty many a time. I can’t pay what I owe. On my last bed I lie utterly helpless and humble, and I pray forgiveness for my weakness and throw myself, with a contrite heart, at the feet of the Divine Mercy.” Which of these two speeches, think you, would be the best oration for your own funeral? Old Sedley made the last; and in that humble frame of mind, and holding by the hand of his daughter, life and disappointment and vanity sank away from under him.63
Newman’s sense of the fallen world as a place at profound odds with his Christian faith was strong before he converted to Catholicism, but after his conversion it became even stronger. Nowhere did he give this more dramatic expression than in the same lecture in which he cited the pious beggar-woman, which was expressly written to expose the Pharisaical streak in English Protestantism. If the English looked down their noses at pious beggary, and congratulated themselves on being free of improvidence and superstition, Newman knew that they would not take kindly to being told that the ragged devout might be nearer God’s grace than “Polished, delicate-minded ladies, with little of temptation around them, and no self-denial to practise, in spite of their refinement and taste …”64 For Newman, these eminently respectable ladies, “if they be nothing more, are objects of less interest to [the Church], than many a poor outcast who sins, repents, and is with difficulty kept just within the territory of grace … . My brethren, you may think it impolitic in me thus candidly to state what may be so strange in the eyes of the world;—but not so, my dear brethren, just the contrary … . The Church aims at realities, the world at decencies …”65
With Newman, this critical view of the English would culminate in an understanding of history that radically differed from the Whig version of history, according to which all events in English history could be shown to be an ushering in and vindication of the triumphant Whig oligarchy. “The total result of this method,” as Herbert Butterfield wrote in his classic book The Whig Interpretation of History (1931), “is to impose a certain form upon the present—all demonstrating throughout the ages the workings of an obvious principle of progress, of which the Protestants and whigs have been the perennial allies while Catholics and tories have perpetually formed obstruction. A caricature of this result is to be seen in a popular view that is still not quite eradicated”—in Newman’s nineteenth century John Lingard and William Cobbett had only just begun to eradicate it—“the view that the Middle Ages represented a period of darkness when man was kept tongue-tied by authority—a period against which the Renaissance was the reaction and the Reformation the great rebellion.”66 Macaulay was the great champion of this point of view, seeing in post-Reformation England “the history of physical, of moral, and of intellectual improvement.”67
Newman’s view of English history could not have been more different: he saw a people, who, after a thousand years, “grew tired of the heavenly stranger who sojourned among them;” a people who “had had enough of blessings and absolutions, enough of the intercession of saints, enough of the grace of the sacraments, enough of the prospect of the next life. They thought it best to secure this life in the first place, because they were in possession of it, and then to go on to the next, if time and means allowed. And they saw that to labour for the next world was possibly to lose this; whereas, to labour for this world might be, for what they knew, the way to labour for the next also. Anyhow, they would pursue a temporal end, and they would account any one their enemy who stood in the way of their pursuing it. It was a madness; but madmen are strong, and madmen are clever …”68 For Newman, this worldly madness was of a piece with England’s new “temporal end.”
And so with the sword and the halter, and by mutilation and fine and imprisonment, they cut off, or frightened away from the land, as Israel did in the time of old, the ministers of the Most High, and their ministrations: they ‘altogether broke the yoke, and burst the bonds.’ ‘They beat one, and killed another, and another they stoned,’ and at length they altogether cast out the Heir from His vineyard, and killed Him, ‘that the inheritance might be theirs.’ And as for the remnant of His servants whom they left, they drove them into corners and holes of the earth, and there they bade them die out; and then they rejoiced and sent gifts either to other, and made merry, because they had rid themselves of those ‘who had tormented them that dwelt upon the earth.’ And so they turned to enjoy this world, and to gain for themselves a name among men, and it was given unto them according to their wish. They preferred the heathen virtues of their original nature, to the robe of grace which God had given them: they fell back, with closed affections, and haughty reserve, and dreariness within, upon their worldly integrity, honour, energy, prudence, and perseverance; they made the most of the natural man, and they ‘received their reward.’ Forthwith they began to rise to a station higher than the heathen Roman, and have, in three centuries, attained a wider range of sovereignty; and now they look down in contempt on what they were, and upon the Religion which reclaimed them from paganism.69
In Vanity Fair, the Thackerayan narrator reports on how the English are faring in their pursuit of this “temporal end.” Old Mr. Osborne is a fair specimen. “He firmly believed that everything he did was right, that he ought on all occasions to have his own way—and like the sting of the wasp or serpent his hatred rushed out armed and poisonous against anything like opposition. He was proud of his hatred as of everything else. Always to be right, always to trample forward, and never to doubt, are not these the great qualities with which dullness takes the lead in the world?”70 By the same token, the narrator is careful not to be unduly censorious. Speaking of the presumed sins of the book’s heroine, Becky Sharp, he remarks: “I protest it is quite shameful in the world to abuse a simple creature, as people of her time abuse Becky, and I warn the public against believing one-tenth of the stories against her.
If every person is to be banished from society who runs into debt and cannot pay—if we are to be peering into everybody’s private life, speculating upon their income, and cutting them if we don’t approve of their expenditure—why, what a howling wilderness and intolerable dwelling Vanity Fair would be! Every man’s hand would be against his neighbour in this case, my dear sir, and the benefits of civilization would be done away with. We should be quarrel
ling, abusing, avoiding one another. Our houses would become caverns, and we should go in rags because we cared for nobody. Rents would go down. Parties wouldn’t be given any more. All the tradesmen of the town would be bankrupt. Wine, wax-lights, comestibles, rouge, crinoline-petticoats, diamonds, wigs, Louis-Quatorze gimcracks, and old china, park hacks, and splendid high-stepping carriage horses—all the delights of life, I say,—would go to the deuce, if people did but act upon their silly principles and avoid those whom they dislike and abuse. Whereas, by a little charity and mutual forbearance, things are made to go on pleasantly enough: we may abuse a man as much as we like, and call him the greatest rascal unhanged—but do we wish to hang him therefore? No. We shake hands when we meet. If his cook is good we forgive him and go and dine with him, and we expect he will do the same by us. Thus trade flourishes—civilization advances; peace is kept; new dresses are wanted for new assemblies every week; and the last year’s vintage of Lafitte will remunerate the honest proprietor who reared it.71
Together with this sensible counsel, the reader encounters something else in the book: a deep appreciation for the bond between mother and child, which shows that if religion per se is largely absent among the denizens of Vanity Fair, the religious impulse is not. “How his mother nursed him, and dressed him, and lived upon him;” the narrator observes of Amelia Sedley and her newborn, “how she drove away all nurses, and would scarce allow any hand but her own to touch him; how she considered that the greatest favour she could confer upon his godfather, Major Dobbin, was to allow the Major occasionally to dandle him, need not be told here. This child was her being. Her existence was a maternal caress. She enveloped the feeble and unconscious creature with love and worship. It was her life which the baby drank in from her bosom. Of nights, and when alone, she had stealthy and intense raptures of motherly love, such as God’s marvellous care has awarded to the female instinct—joys how far higher and lower than reason—blind beautiful devotions which only women’s hearts know.”72 When Lady Jane meets Rawdy, Becky’s boy, she also affirms the power of maternal love, but from a different perspective: “Oh, thou poor lonely little benighted boy! Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children; and here was one who was worshipping a stone!”73 (As Carey shrewdly observes, the little rich girls of Chiswick Hall, to whom Becky was obliged to teach music and French, robbed her of any maternal instinct she might have had.74) In these passages, Newman might have seen Thackeray nearing the Nativity and the Incarnation—even though his tendency to sentimentalize maternity often blinded him to the true import of these Christian realities.75
Notwithstanding the Christian undertones of Vanity Fair, Thackeray did not share Newman’s Catholic reading of English history. In Henry Esmond, he endorsed the Whig view of history, even if in a sardonic, backhanded way.76 Nevertheless, he did share Newman’s recognition of the presence of the past. For Thackeray, the collapse of the old order was prefigured in the factions of the eighteenth century, in much the same way that Newman saw the heresies of the fourth prefiguring the heresies of the nineteenth century. In Henry Esmond, Thackeray considered these factions from the standpoint of the American colonies.
A strange series of compromises is that English History; compromise of principle, compromise of party, compromise of worship! … The Tory and High Church patriots were ready to die in defence of a Papist family that had sold us to France; the great Whig nobles, the sturdy republican recusants who had cut off Charles Stuart’s head for treason, were fain to accept a king whose title came to him through a royal grandmother, whose own royal grandmother’s head had fallen under Queen Bess’s hatchet. And our proud English nobles sent to a petty German town for a monarch to come and reign in London and our prelates kissed the ugly hands of his Dutch mistresses, and thought it no dishonor. In England you can but belong to one party or t’other, and you take the house you live in with all its encumbrances, its retainers, its antique discomforts, and ruins even; you patch up, but you never build up anew. Will we of the new world submit much longer, even nominally, to this ancient British superstition? There are signs of the times which make me think that ere long we shall care as little about King George here, and peers temporal and peers spiritual, as we do for King Canute or the Druids.77
Here Thackeray speaks of the incoherence of the Protestant Establishment with a lucidity that recalls that memorable passage in Anglican Difficulties, where Newman tells the Tractarians to look at what they are defending clearly, without romantic self-deception. “For this is the truth: the Establishment, whatever it be in the eyes of men, whatever its temporal greatness and its secular prospects, in the eyes of faith is a mere wreck. We must not indulge our imagination, we must not dream: we must look at things as they are; we must not confound the past with the present, or what is substantive with what is the accident of a period. Ridding our minds of these illusions, we shall see that the Established Church has no claims whatever on us, whether in memory or in hope; that they only have claims upon our commiseration and our charity whom she holds in bondage, separated from that faith and that Church in which alone is salvation. If I can do aught towards breaking their chains, and bringing them into the Truth, it will be an act of love towards their souls, and of piety towards God.”78
Thackeray was a lackluster advocate of the Protestant Establishment because he was never comfortable with what he saw as the humbug at the heart of the Church of England. (Newman wrote to the Liberal politician William Monsell of what he thought Thackeray’s “utter contempt of Protestantism.”79) This was why Thackeray found the poet Arthur Hugh Clough sympathetic. After Clough resigned his Oriel fellowship, in February 1849, Provost Edward Hawkins, who had received Newman’s resignation four years before, wrote to him, “Will you excuse my telling you that I have been reading your poem ‘The Bothie, etc.’, and cannot but say that what I was told of it was true, that there are parts of it rather indelicate; and I very much regretted to find that there were frequent allusions to Scripture, or rather parodies of Scripture, which you should not have put forth. You will never be secure from misbelief, if you allow yourself liberties of this kind.”80 Here was a humbug on which the satirist in Thackeray could not have improved. For Thackeray, Clough was admirable precisely because he “he gave up his Fellowship and university prospects on religious scruples. He is one of those thinking men, who I daresay will begin to speak out before many years are over, and protest against Gothic Xtianity.”81 Yet if Thackeray shared Clough’s dismissive view of the Church of England, he also shared his paralyzing skepticism. Speaking of the symptoms of this pre-eminently modern malady, Walter Bagehot wrote: “If you offer them any known religion, they ‘won’t have that;’ if you offer them no religion, they will not have that either; if you ask them to accept a new and as yet unrecognised religion, they altogether refuse to do so. They seem not only to believe in an ‘unknown God,’ but in a God whom no man can ever know.”82 In quoting from Clough’s poetry to describe what he called his friend’s “essential religion,” Bagehot could have been describing something of Thackeray’s as well:
O thou that in our bosom’s shrine
Dost dwell, because unknown divine!
I thought to speak, I thought to say,
‘The light is here,’ ‘behold the way,’
‘The voice was thus,’ and ‘thus the word,’
And ‘thus I saw,’ and ‘that I heard,’—
But from the lips but half essayed
The imperfect utterance fell unmade.
O thou in that mysterious shrine
Enthroned, as we must say, divine!
I will not frame one thought of what
Thou mayest either be or not.
I will not prate of ‘thus’ and ‘so,’
And be profane with ‘yes’ and ‘no.’
Enough that in our soul and heart
Thou, whatsoe’er thou may’st be, art.
Nevertheless, if Thackeray was skeptical, he was also shrewd: he had
no illusions about the pretensions of his increasingly unbelieving contemporaries, and this was an aspect of his fiction that doubtless appealed to Newman. If Thackeray could not testify to the reality of belief, he could testify to the unreality of unbelief—another theme which exercised Clough.83 “Search, search within your own waistcoats, dear brethren,” Thackeray exhorts his readers, in his best parsonical manner, “you know in your hearts, which of your ordinaire qualities you would pass off, and fain consider as first-rate port.” In an essay called “Small-Beer Chronicle” from his Roundabout Papers (1860–1863), which Carey unjustly dismisses as so much “banter and garrulity,” Thackeray shows how military heroes now absorbed the nation’s esteem.84
Some years ago a famous and witty French critic was in London, with whom I walked the streets. I am ashamed to say that I informed him (being in hopes that he was about to write some papers regarding the manners and customs of this country) that all the statues he saw represented the Duke of Wellington. That on the arch opposite Apsley House? the Duke in a cloak, and cocked hat, on horseback. That behind Apsley House in an airy fig-leaf costume? the Duke again. That in Cockspur Street? the Duke with a pigtail—and so on. I showed him an army of Dukes. There are many bronze heroes who after a few years look already as foolish, awkward, and out of place as a man, say at Shoolbred’s or Swan and Edgar’s. For example, those three Grenadiers in Pall Mall, who have been up only a few months, don’t you pity those unhappy household troops, who have to stand frowning and looking fierce there; and think they would like to step down and go to barracks? That they fought very bravely there is no doubt; but so did the Russians fight very bravely; and the French fight very bravely; and so did Colonel Jones and the 99th, and Colonel Brown and the 100th; and I say again that ordinaire should not give itself port airs, and that an honest ordinaire would blush to be found swaggering so.85