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Beatrix Esmond is almost as wonderful a creation as Becky Sharp; though, if formed on a grander mould, she has less fascination than that incorrigible minx. The Newcomes, if in some ways the most genial of the longer pieces, is plainly without the power of Vanity Fair. And if Barry Lyndon has this power, it is an awful picture of cruelty and meanness.
When I was fifteen I wouldn't read anything but Scott. Don't you like Thackeray? Oh, he's so cynical! It's perfectly delightful." "Cynical?" repeated Colville thoughtfully. "I was looking into The Newcomes the other day, and I thought he was rather sentimental" "Sentimental! Why, what an idea! That is the strangest thing I ever heard of.
He has fairly discovered that he cannot, like Thackeray, narrate a story as if he were a mere looker-on, a mere "knowing" observer of what he describes and represents; and he has therefore taken observation simply as the basis of his plot and his characterization. As we read "Vanity Fair" and "The Newcomes," we are impressed with the actuality of the persons and incidents.
Yet in this historical study, the eighteenth century setting relieves the effect and one does not feel that the author is speaking with that direct earnestness one encounters in "Pendennis" and "The Newcomes." The many essays, of which the "Roundabout Papers" are a type, exhibit almost exclusively the sunnier and more attractive side of Thackeray's genius.
There are days when she looks surprisingly young and blooming. Why should Theo and I have been so happy, and thou so lonely? Vanity Fair "Vanity Fair" was published in 1848, and at once placed its author in the front rank of novelists. It was followed by "Pendennis" in 1850, "Esmond" in 1852, "The Newcomes" in 1855, and "The Virginians" in 1859.
It seemed to him that human nature lay between the two extremes. In "Vanity Fair," in "Pendennis" and in "The Newcomes" he resolved to describe man as he was, with virtues and failings, with occasional glimpses of the noble, and more common exhibitions of the mean and the little.
There may in its absence be life, incontestably, as The Newcomes has life, as Les Trois Mousquetaires, as Tolstoi's Peace and War, have it; but what do such large, loose, baggy monsters, with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary, artistically mean?
For though these Newcomes have got a pedigree from the College, which is printed in Budge's Landed Aristocracy of Great Britain, and which proves that the Newcome of Cromwell's army, the Newcome who was among the last six who were hanged by Queen Mary for Protestantism, were ancestors of this house; of which a member distinguished himself at Bosworth Field; and the founder, slain by King Harold's side at Hastings, had been surgeon-barber to King Edward the Confessor; yet, between ourselves, I think that Sir Brian Newcome, of Newcome, does not believe a word of the story, any more than the rest of the world does, although a number of his children bear names out of the Saxon Calendar.
A world in which all those pretty and gracious women dwelt, among the figures of the waltz and the lancers, with chat between about the last instalment of 'The Newcomes, was good enough world for me; I was only afraid it was too good.
He took Lady Kew to Paris, for a marriage trip; but they lived almost altogether at Kewbury afterwards, where his lordship sowed tame oats now after his wild ones, and became one of the most active farmers of his county. He and the Newcomes were not very intimate friends; for Lord Kew was heard to say that he disliked Barnes more after his marriage than before.
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