by Edward Short
Even allowing for Thackeray’s bias against Wellington—he could never forgive the man for claiming that Charterhouse was “the best school of them all”—this was a fair, if mocking, characterization of Britain’s growing idolatry of its great men, an idolatry that Newman also observed, though he always admired the bravery of soldiers. “A Protestant blames Catholics for showing honour to images; yet he does it himself,” Newman remarked in The Present Position of Catholics. Indeed, “after preaching against the Catholic who crowns an image of the Madonna, he complacently goes his way, and sets light to a straw effigy of Guy Fawkes. But this is not all; Protestants actually set up images to represent their heroes, and they show them honour without any misgiving. The very flower and cream of Protestantism used to glory in the statue of King William on College Green, Dublin; and, though I cannot make any reference in print, I recollect well what a shriek they raised some years ago, when the figure was unhorsed. Some profane person one night applied gunpowder, and blew the king right out of his saddle; and he was found by those who took interest in him, like Dagon, on the ground. You might have thought the poor senseless block had life, to see the way people took on about it, and how they spoke of his face, and his arms, and his legs; yet those same Protestants, I say … would call me one of the monsters described in the Apocalypse, did I but honour my living Lord as they their dead king.”86
Newman saw his contemporaries’ self-satisfaction as more than merely comical; he saw it as an expression of their worship of self. In a brilliant sermon entitled “The Religion of the Pharisee, The Religion of Mankind,” which Newman delivered in the University Church, Dublin in 1856, he anticipated Charles Kingsley’s response to his distinction between natural virtue and God’s grace and saw it stemming from what he nicely called “Pharisaical excellence.”
I know men profess a great deal, and boast that they are Christians, and speak of Christianity as being a religion of the heart; but, when we put aside words and professions, and try to discover what their religion is, we shall find, I fear, that the great mass of men in fact get rid of all religion that is inward; that they lay no stress on acts of faith, hope, and charity, on simplicity of intention, purity of motive, or mortification of the thoughts; that they confine themselves to two or three virtues, superficially practised; that they know not the words contrition, penance, and pardon; and that they think and argue that, after all, if a man does his duty in the world, according to his vocation, he cannot fail to go to heaven, however little he may do besides, nay, however much, in other matters, he may do that is undeniably unlawful. Thus a soldier’s duty is loyalty, obedience, and valour, and he may let other matters take their chance; a trader’s duty is honesty; an artisan’s duty is industry and contentment; of a gentleman are required veracity, courteousness, and self-respect; of a public man, high-principled ambition; of a woman, the domestic virtues; of a minister of religion, decorum, benevolence, and some activity. Now, all these are instances of mere Pharisaical excellence; because there is no apprehension of Almighty God, no insight into His claims on us, no sense of the creature’s shortcomings, no self-condemnation, confession, and deprecation, nothing of those deep and sacred feelings which ever characterize the religion of a Christian, and more and more, not less and less, as he mounts up from mere ordinary obedience to the perfection of a saint.87
When Thackeray attended Newman’s lectures in King William Street, he must have listened to the passage about the pious beggar-woman with particular interest because it echoed something from his own work. In The Irish Sketchbook, Thackeray had also spoken of the piety of a beggar-woman, which he actually encountered outside the Cathedral of Carlow. “There is a convent by the side of the cathedral,” he recalled, “and, of course, a parcel of beggars all about … profuse in their prayers and invocations of the Lord, and whining flatteries of the persons whom they address. One wretched, old, tottering hag began whining the Lord’s prayer as a proof of her sincerity, and blundered in the very midst of it, and left us thoroughly disgusted after the very first sentence.”88 This was hardly sympathetic to the devotions of an old and doubtless confused woman, but still it was responsive to experience. Thackeray’s response to Newman’s passage about his beggar woman had no basis in experience and relied instead on caricature.
A man who admits that a lousy lying beggarwoman who goes to confess and says her prayers is more likely of salvation than a good wise honest humble conscientious man earnestly trying to fulfill his duty: a man who glories in asserting that every scoundrel who has been executed at Rome goes straightway and secure with the sacerdotal passport to Heaven, while his denouncer very likely goes to the Devil, ought to be let go on. The more he preaches in this way, the better for the Truth: the more he shows what the figure is under those fine copes and embroideries and behind all that chandlery and artificial flower-show, the better for the people who are now attracted by the splendour and the ceremonial and the sweet-chanted litanies and the charms of the orator’s rhetoric. Put out the lights and lock up the incense pots. Stop the organ and take off the priest’s fine clothes—and when we come to Mr. Newman’s naked beau ideal, it seems to me we get a creature so hideous degraded and despicable, that the public scorn will scout him out of the world again.89
Thackeray’s letter is as revealing for what it says as for whom it was written. Robert Montgomery (1807–1855) the recipient, was in many respects a rather Thackerayan character. Born in Bath, the illegitimate son of the resident clown at the Bath Theatre, who also appeared on the stage of the Haymarket and the English Opera at the Lyceum, Montgomery realized, at an early age, that he should have to make his way in the world on his wits. In this, he was rather similar to Becky Sharp. After meeting with early success with a book of poems entitled Poetical Trifles (1825), he wrote three more full-length books of verse, The Omnipotence of the Deity, A Universal Prayer and Death: A Vision of Heaven, all of which were extravagantly praised by Southey and Crabbe. Once he became famous, he tried to highlight what many saw as his physical resemblance to Lord Byron. Montgomery also produced numerous works of sermons and theology. In the pulpit, he could be memorably droll, once likening dead humanity to a “decayed Stilton cheese” which would only be restored to its proper ripeness by trumpeting angels at the Last Day.90 In his own lifetime Montgomery commanded a huge audience. The Omnipresence of the Deity alone went into 28 editions. At a time when so much Evangelical belief was being eroded by an industrializing culture hostile to Christianity, Montgomery’s poems offered consolation amidst growing apostasy.
That the author of Vanity Fair went out of his way to concur with this versifying preacher is revealing. In sending off his letter, Thackeray was defending something of the undogmatical faith that his mother had taught him when he was a child, a faith to which he resorted, fleetingly, after his wife lost her mind and, then again, when he was gravely ill with gastric fever in 1849. Indeed, his mother might have been one of the many readers who sent Montgomery’s verses into so many popular editions. Thackeray was also showing support for the Broad Church, though that heterogeneous communion could only have welcomed seeing the newly converted Newman taking the Tractarians to task for unreality and imposture. Nonetheless, to another correspondent, Thackeray described his sense of kinship in terms that were almost tribal. “Newman,” Thackeray complained, “is obliged to condemn the best and purest of all of us, his own mother, friends, brethren,—everybody.—Will we subscribe to that? Will we let that Lie go unquestioned among us?”91 Here was the nationalist defense of Anglicanism—Anglicanism as inseparable from Englishry, from family, from friends, from home—which Gladstone, Keble, Pusey, and so many other Anglicans mounted to parry what they considered Newman’s foreign Romanizing.
In his sermons, Newman warned against making the sentiments of men the measure of faith, insisting that “such is the religion of the natural man in every age and place;—often very beautiful on the surface, but worthless in God’s sight; good, as far as it goes, but worthles
s and hopeless, because it does not go further, because it is based on self-sufficiency, and results in self-satisfaction.”
I grant, it may be beautiful to look at, as in the instance of the young ruler whom our Lord looked at and loved, yet sent away sad; it may have all the delicacy, the amiableness, the tenderness, the religious sentiment, the kindness, which is actually seen in many a father of a family, many a mother, many a daughter, in the length and breadth of these kingdoms, in a refined and polished age like this; but still it is rejected by the heart-searching God, because all such persons walk by their own light, not by the True Light of men, because self is their supreme teacher, and because they pace round and round in the small circle of their own thoughts and of their own judgments, careless to know what God says to them, and fearless of being condemned by Him, if only they stand approved in their own sight. And thus they incur the force of those terrible words, spoken not to a Jewish Ruler, nor to a heathen philosopher, but to a fallen Christian community, to the Christian Pharisees of Laodicea,—‘Because thou sayest I am rich, and made wealthy, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked; I counsel thee to buy of Me gold fire-tried, that thou mayest be made rich, and be clothed in white garments, that thy shame may not appear, and anoint thine eyes with eye-salve, that thou mayest see. Such as I love, I rebuke and chastise; be zealous, therefore, and do penance.’92
Months after writing to Montgomery about the King William Street lectures, Thackeray gave proof of the ambivalence that always characterized his response to Catholicism. “After making a great noise myself,” Thackeray wrote to the diarist Allingham, “I begin to wonder why we have made so much to-do about the Cardinal [Cardinal Wiseman, whose reconstitution of the English hierarchy instigated the period known as Papal Aggression]. Why shouldn’t he come and set up a winking Virgin in the Strand? The claims of the Bishop of Oxford … are not much less preposterous: and Dr. Pusey says ‘quite right, it’s not Popery the parsons have to fear but universal Protestantism.’—Is it coming?—it must, to get rid of these Papists—the old sixteenth century Protestantism can fight them: they’ve the best of that battle.”93 By the same token, Thackeray was a conventional enough Englishman to revile monasticism. Speaking of the Imitation of Christ of St. Thomas À Kempis, he observed: “The scheme of that book carried out would make the world the most wretched useless dreary doting place of sojourn—there would be no manhood no love no tender ties of mother & child no use of intellect no trade or science—a set of selfish beings crawling about avoiding one another, and howling a perpetual misere.”94
Then, again, two years after attending the King William Street lectures, Thackeray read Newman’s Anglican letters and wrote to Mary Holmes, the governess, “I am sure Newman’s is a great honest heart … [his] letters read very honest—better than that poor Bulwer with his bosh. It is very difficult for literary men to keep their honesty. We are actors more or less all of us …” Newman would have agreed but not in the theatrical sense. He would certainly have agreed with the novelist that literary men “get to be public personages malgré lui nous.”95 Newman may not have been as reluctant a saint as some have claimed—his understanding of sanctity, after all, was eminently practical, even humdrum—but he was always a reluctant public man.96
However ambivalent about the world, which he both courted and scorned, Thackeray never imagined himself immune from its follies. To the journalist Robert Bell, who had taken exception to what he thought the satirical severity of Vanity Fair, Thackeray explained that his object in the book was “to indicate, in cheerful terms, that we are for the most part an abominably foolish and selfish people ‘desperately wicked’ and all eager for vanities … Good God don’t I see (in that may-be cracked and warped looking glass in which I am always looking) my own weaknesses lusts follies shortcomings? … We must lift up our voices about these and howl to a congregation of fools … You have all of you taken my misanthropy to task—I wish I could myself: but take the world by a certain standard … and who dares talk of having any virtue at all.”97
The significance of Thackeray’s including himself in the brunt of his satire was not lost on Chesterton. “The one supreme and even sacred quality in Thackeray’s work,” Chesterton wrote, “is that he felt the weakness of all flesh. Wherever he sneers it is at his own potential self. When he rebukes, it is self-rebuke; when he indulges, he knows it is self-indulgence … . Here then was his special contribution to that chaos of morality which the nineteenth century muddled through: he stood for the remains of Christian humility, as Dickens stood for the remains of Christian charity.”98
If Victorian critics like Bell found Thackeray too misanthropic, more modern critics tended to find him too forgiving. “Every novelist has a knack for doing some one stunt,” T. S. Eliot wrote to a correspondent in 1918. “Thackeray could do the Yellowplush Papers and the Steyne part of Vanity Fair, but he had a picture of himself as a kindly satirist. Not at all, he hadn’t brains enough, nor courage enough to find out really what he could do well, which was high society sordidness, and do it.”99 This shows how little Eliot understood the charity behind Thackeray’s satire, which is not the same thing as kindliness. Charles Kingsley was no more perceptive. When he took exception to what he thought Sir Pitt Crawley’s improbable coarseness, Thackeray replied that he was “almost the only exact portrait in the whole book.”100 Knowing what a hodge-podge he himself was of virtue and vice, generosity and meanness, pride and humility, good sense and folly, refinement and baseness, Thackeray never portrayed his characters without similar contradictions.
Thackeray’s brilliant portrait of Sir Pitt Crawley shows the extent to which he shared Newman’s fascination with that once elaborate thing, the English gentleman. In Vanity Fair, he reported on the fortunes of the English gentleman abroad. “The respect in those happy days of 1817–18 was very great for the wealth and honour of Britons. They had not then learned, as I am told, to haggle for bargains with the pertinacity which now distinguishes them. The great cities of Europe had not been as yet open to the enterprise of our rascals. And whereas, there is now hardly a town of France or Italy in which you shall not see some noble countryman of our own, with that happy swagger and insolence of demeanour with we carry everywhere, swindling inn-landlords, passing fictitious cheques upon credulous bankers, robbing coach-makers of their carriages, goldsmiths of their trinkets, easy travelers of their money at cards,—even public libraries of their books:—thirty years ago you needed but to be a Milor Anglais, travelling in a private carriage, and credit was at your hand wherever you chose to seek it, and gentlemen, instead of cheating, were cheated.”101 In the Idea of a University, Newman also broke with convention on the subject by arguing how the gentleman might “have a cultivated intellect, a delicate taste, a candid, equitable dispassionate mind, a noble and courteous bearing in the conduct of life …” but these things were “no guarantee for sanctity, or even for conscientiousness:” they could just as easily “attach to the man of the world, the profligate, the heartless.”102 And the moral for Newman was inescapable: “Taken by themselves,” these attributes “do but seem to be what they are not; they look like virtue at a distance, but they are detected by close observers, and on the long run; and hence it is that they are popularly accused of pretence and hypocrisy, not, I repeat, from their own fault, but because their professors and their admirers persist in taking them for what they are not, and are officious in arrogating for them a praise to which they have no claim. Quarry the granite rock with razors, or moor the vessel with a thread of silk; then may you hope with such keen and delicate instruments as human knowledge and human reason to contend against those giants, the passion and the pride of man.”103
None of Newman’s contemporaries brought to life this passion and pride more brilliantly than Thackeray. In Vanity Fair, when Mr. Osborne learns that the son he has disinherited has been killed at Waterloo, we see these two giants in all their fury.
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The gloom-stricken old father was still more borne down by his fate and sorrow. He strove to think that a judgment was on the boy for his disobedience. He dared not own that the severity of the sentence frightened him, and that its fulfillment had come too soon upon his curses. Sometimes a shuddering terror struck him, as if he had been the author of the doom which he had called down on his son. There was a chance before of reconciliation. The boy’s wife might have died; or he might have come back and said, Father I have sinned. But there was no hope now. He stood on the other side of the gulf impassable, haunting his parent with sad eyes. He remembered them once before so in a fever, when every one thought the lad was dying, and he lay on his bed speechless, and gazing with a dreadful gloom. Good God! how the father clung to the doctor then, and with what a sickening anxiety he followed him: what a weight of grief was off his mind when, after the crisis of the fever, the lad recovered, and looked at his father once more with eyes that recognised him. But now there was no help or cure, or chance of reconcilement: above all, there were no humble words to soothe vanity outraged and furious, or bring to its natural flow the poisoned, angry blood. And it is hard to say which pang it was that tore the proud father’s heart most keenly—that his son should have gone out of the reach of his forgiveness, or that the apology which his own pride expected should have escaped him.104
In The History of Pendennis (1848–1850), Thackeray turned away from such home truths, convinced that they would not endear him to the upper-class readership he meant to buy his books. Instead, he gave his readers more palatable fare: the coming of age of a would-be litterateur who only incidentally resembled himself as a young man.105 In this ramshackle Bildungsroman, Arthur Pendennis is young Thackeray considerably sanitized and expurgated. And almost as if to justify his abandonment of his former truth telling, Thackeray boldly cited the example of Newman and his brother Frank to illustrate what he now claimed was the elusiveness of truth.