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I told him that on the occasion of my last visit to the Megatherium Thackeray, I explained a Royal Academician, with whom I had a slight acquaintance, reading desolate "The Hibbert Journal" in the smoking-room, embraced me as fondly as the austerity of the place permitted and related a non-drawing-room story which was current at my preparatory school and that in the library I ran into an equally desolate, though even less familiar Archdeacon, who seized me, like the Ancient Mariner, and never let me go until he had impressed upon my mind the name and address of the only man in London who could cut clerical gaiters.
He knew Thackeray as he knew Curtis and Lowell, and was once dining with him in a London chop-house, when Thackeray said: "Have you read the last number of The Newcombs? if not, I will read it to you." Accordingly he gave the waiter a shilling to obtain the document, and read it aloud to Cranch and a friend who was with him.
In all there was, or might seem to be, a queer and to some readers an unsatisfactory blend of what they had not learnt to call "realism" with what they were quite likely to think fooling. During these years Thackeray was emphatically of the class of writers of whom people "do not know what to make."
"Thackeray in 'The Newcomes' speaks of 'matrimonial crimes where the woman is not felled by the actual fist, though she staggers and sinks under the blows quite as cruel and effectual, where with old wounds still unhealed, she strives to hide under a smiling face to the world.
His parliamentary history since 1818 has been that of a reformer of abuses and enemy of monopoly, and he is respected even by those who differ from him in opinion. Our next specimen is 'Thackeray, William Makepeace, author, was born in India, in 1811. He is of good family, and was originally intended for the bar, of which he is now a member.
For a nearer sight of it I go back to Vanity Fair. The chapters that are concerned with Becky's determined siege of London "How to live well on nothing a year" are exactly to the point; the wonderful things that Thackeray could do, the odd lapse of his power when he had to go beyond his particular province, both are here written large. Every one remembers the chapters and their place in the book.
Indeed, one of the pleasantest things to a reader of Thackeray is the way which his characters have of re-appearing, as old acquaintances, in his different books; just as, in real life, people drop out of mind and then turn up again in other years and places. Vanity Fair is Thackeray's masterpiece, but it is not the best introduction to his writings.
London also might be thus spaced out the London of Richardson, and Fielding, and Miss Burney, as well as the London of Thackeray or Dickens. Already, to speak of to-day, Rupert Street is more interesting, because there, fallen in fortune, but resolute of heart and courtly as ever, Prince Florizel of Bohemia held his cigar divan.
Gibbon described the book as "the first of ancient or modern romances"; and, as we have seen, declared that its pages would outlive the Imperial Eagle of those Hapsburgs from whom Fielding was said to be descended. "There can be no gainsaying the sentence of this great judge," wrote Thackeray. "To have your name mentioned by Gibbon is like having it written on the dome of St Peter's.
And the snob of our day is quite a different person, more likely than not to be found hobnobbing with dukes and duchesses as irreproachable in dress and demeanour as Leech himself. Thackeray discovered and christened him for us long ago; and he is related to most of us, and moves in the best society.
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