Walter Herries Pollock

“ A man of greater strength and with equal belief in his own genius might have gone on appealing to the public until he compelled them to hear him. Musset gave up the attempt in disgust, and waited until the public were eager to hear him without any invitation on his part. In the case of his finest plays this did not happen until after his death; but long before that he was fully recognized as a poet of the first rank and as an extraordinary master of character and language in prose writing. ”

“ Here, as in Vanity Fair, the heroism has been found a little insipid; and there may be good ground for finding Laura Pendennis dull, though she has a spirit of her own. In later books she becomes, what Thackeray's people very seldom are, a tiresome as well as an uninviting person. Costigan is unique, and so is Major Pendennis, a type which, allowing for differences of period and manners, will exist as long as society does, and which has been seized and depicted by Thackeray as by no other novelist. ”

“ It is probable that on Vanity Fair has been largely based the foolish cry, now heard less and less frequently, about Thackeray's cynicism, a cry which he himself, with his keen knowledge of men, foresaw and provided against, amply enough as one might have thought, at the end of the eighth chapter, in a passage which is perhaps the best commentary ever written on the author's method. He has explained how he wishes to describe men and women as they actually are, good, bad and indifferent, and to claim a privilege. ”

“ In opposition to the worldliness of the major, with which Pendennis does not escape being tainted, we have Warrington, whose nobility of nature has come unscathed through a severe trial, and who, a thorough gentleman if a rough one, is really the guardian of Pendennis's career. ”

“ The man is so infatuated with and so blind to his own roguery, he has so much dash and daring, and is on occasions so infamously treated, that it is not easy to look upon him as an entirely detestable villain until, towards the end of his course, he becomes wholly lost in brutish debauchery and cruelty. His latter career is founded on that of Andrew Robinson Stoney Bowes, who married the widow of John, 9th earl of Strathmore. There is also no doubt a touch of Casanova in Barry Lyndon's character. Thackeray became a contributor to Punch within the first year of its existence. ”

“ Vanity Fair was followed by Pendennis, Esmond and The Newcomes, which appeared respectively in 1850, 1852 and 1854. It might be more easy to pick holes critically in Pendennis than in Vanity Fair. Pendennis himself, after his boyish passion and university escapades, has disagreeable touches of flabbiness and worldliness; and the important episode of his relations with Fanny Bolton, which Thackeray could never have treated otherwise than delicately, is so lightly and tersely handled that it is a little vague even to those who read between the lines. ”

“ Such people there are living and flourishing in the world—Faithless, Hopeless, Charityless: let us have at them, dear friends, with might and main. Some there are, and very successful too, mere quacks and fools: and it was to combat and expose such as those, no doubt, that laughter was made. ”

“ The Adventures of Philip is, as has been before said, in the nature of a sequel to or a completion of A Shabby Genteel Story. As with the other direct sequel, it is a work of great inequality. It contains scenes of humour, pathos, satire, which rank with Thackeray's best work; some old friends from others of the novels make brief but pleasant reappearances in its pages; there are fine sketches of journalistic, artistic and diplomatic life, and the scene from the last-named in Paris is inimitable. The Little Sister is altogether delightful ”

“ There is, it should be added, a distinct touch of good in Becky's conduct to Amelia at Ostend in the last chapter of the book, and those who think that too little punishment is meted out to the brilliant adventuress in the end may remember this to her credit. It is supreme art in the treatment of her character that makes the reader understand and feel her attractiveness, though he knows her extraordinarily evil qualities; and in this no writer subsequent to Thackeray who has tried to depict one of the genus Becky Sharp has even faintly succeeded. ”

“ Occasionally to step down from the platform, and talk about them: if they are good and kindly, to love and shake them by the hand; if they are silly, to laugh at them confidentially in the reader's sleeve; if they are wicked and heartless, to abuse them in the strongest terms politeness admits of. ”

“ Osborne is, and is meant to be, a poor enough creature, but he is an eminently human being, and one whose poorness of character is developed as he allows bad influences to tell upon his vanity and folly. ”

“ There can be little doubt that Thackeray will always be ranked among the foremost English writers of fiction, or that his more infrequent work as essayist and poet will go hand in hand with his wider achievements as a novelist. ”

“ The characters, from Lady Drum, Lady Fanny, Lady Jane, and Edmund Preston down to Brough, his daughter, Mrs Roundhand, Gus Hoskins, and, by no means least, Samuel Titmarsh's pious aunt with her store of "Rosolio," are living; the book is crammed with honest fun; and, for pure pathos, the death of the child, and the meeting of the husband and wife over the empty cradle (a scene illustrated by the author himself with that suggestion of truth which no shortcoming in drawing could spoil) , stands, if not alone in its own line, at least in the company of very few such scenes in English fiction. ”

“ To the supreme power of Napoleon he in this work attributed that moral sickness of the time which he described. “One man,” he wrote, “absorbed the whole life of Europe; the rest of the human race struggled to fill their lungs with the air that he had breathed.” ”

“ Musset said, “for a third school which should unite the merits of each.” And in Les Caprices de Marianne these merits are most curiously and happily combined. It has perhaps more of the Shakespearian quality—the quality of artfully mingling the terrible, the grotesque, and the high comedy tones—which exists more or less in all Musset’s long and more serious plays, than is found in any other of these. ”

“ Philip himself is impossible; one cannot say that the character is ill-drawn — it is not drawn at all. It is an entirely different personage in different chapters; and it has here and there a very unpleasant touch which may perhaps have come of rapid writing. Yet so admirable are many parts of the book that Philip cannot be left out of the list of Thackeray's most considerable works. Denis Duval, which reached only three numbers, promised to be a first-rate work, more or less in the Esmond manner. ”

“ Berry himself and old Hawkins both have a touch of the heroic, and in this story the bully whom Berry gallantly challenges is completely defeated, and one hears no more of him. In Vanity Fair Cuff the swaggerer is defeated as completely as is Berry's opponent, but regains his popularity by one well-timed stroke of magnanimity, and afterwards shows the truest kindness to his conqueror. Thackeray left Charterhouse in 1828 to join his mother and her husband at Larkbeare in, Devonshire, near Ottery St Mary. ”

“ Rolla, for all the smack which is not to be denied of Wertherism, has yet a decided individuality. The poem was written at the beginning of Musset’s liaison with George Sand, and in December 1833 Musset started on the unfortunate journey to Italy. It was well known that the rupture of what was for a time a most passionate attachment had a disastrous effect upon Musset, and brought out the weakest side of his moral character. ”

“ It was under Hugo’s influence, no doubt, that he composed a play. The scene was laid in Spain, and some lines, showing a marked advance upon his first effort, are preserved. In 1828, when the war between the classical and the romantic school of literature was growing daily more serious and exciting, Musset had published some verses in a country newspaper, and boldly recited some of his work to Sainte-Beuve, who wrote of it to a friend, “There is amongst us a boy full of genius.” At eighteen years old Musset produced a translation, with additions of his own, of De Quincey’s “Opium-Eater.” ”

“ This accords with the fact that all through Thackeray's writings the student may find traces of the sensitiveness which often belongs to the creative mind, and which, in the boy who does not understand its meaning and its possible power, is apt to assume the guise of a shrinking disposition. ”