What flatters the worldly pride in a young man is what fascinates him with Thackeray. With his air of looking down on the highest, and confidentially2 inviting3 you to be of his company in the seat of the scorner he is irresistible4; his very confession5 that he is a snob6, too, is balm and solace7 to the reader who secretly admires the splendors8 he affects to despise. His sentimentality is also dear to the heart of youth, and the boy who is dazzled by his satire11 is melted by his easy pathos12. Then, if the boy has read a good many other books, he is taken with that abundance of literary turn and allusion13 in Thackeray; there is hardly a sentence but reminds him that he is in the society of a great literary swell14, who has read everything, and can mock or burlesque15 life right and left from the literature always at his command. At the same time he feels his mastery, and is abjectly16 grateful to him in his own simple love of the good for his patronage17 of the unassuming virtues18. It is so pleasing to one’s ‘vanity, and so safe, to be of the master’s side when he assails19 those vices21 and foibles which are inherent in the system of things, and which one can contemn22 with vast applause so long as one does not attempt to undo23 the conditions they spring from.
I exulted24 to have Thackeray attack the aristocrats25, and expose their wicked pride and meanness, and I never noticed that he did not propose to do away with aristocracy, which is and must always be just what it has been, and which cannot be changed while it exists at all. He appeared to me one of the noblest creatures that ever was when he derided26 the shams28 of society; and I was far from seeing that society, as we have it, was necessarily a sham27; when he made a mock of snobbishness29 I did not know but snobbishness was something that might be reached and cured by ridicule30. Now I know that so long as we have social inequality we shall have snobs31; we shall have men who bully32 and truckle, and women who snub and crawl. I know that it is futile33 to, spurn34 them, or lash35 them for trying to get on in the world, and that the world is what it must be from the selfish motives36 which underlie37 our economic life. But I did not know these things then, nor for long afterwards, and so I gave my heart to Thackeray, who seemed to promise me in his contempt of the world a refuge from the shame I felt for my own want of figure in it. He had the effect of taking me into the great world, and making me a party to his splendid indifference38 to titles, and even to royalties39; and I could not see that sham for sham he was unwittingly the greatest sham of all.
I think it was ‘Pendennis’ I began with, and I lived in the book to the very last line of it, and made its alien circumstance mine to the smallest detail. I am still not sure but it is the author’s greatest book, and I speak from a thorough acquaintance with every line he has written, except the Virginians, which I have never been able to read quite through; most of his work I have read twice, and some of it twenty times.
After reading ‘Pendennis’ I went to ‘Vanity Fair,’ which I now think the poorest of Thackeray’s novels — crude, heavy-handed, caricatured. About the same time I revelled40 in the romanticism of ‘Henry Esmond,’ with its pseudo-eighteenth-century sentiment, and its appeals to an overwrought ideal of gentlemanhood and honor. It was long before I was duly revolted by Esmond’s transfer of his passion from the daughter to the mother whom he is successively enamoured of. I believe this unpleasant and preposterous41 affair is thought one of the fine things in the story; I do not mind owning that I thought it so myself when I was seventeen; and if I could have found a Beatrix to be in love with, and a Lady Castlewood to be in love with me, I should have asked nothing finer of fortune. The glamour42 of Henry Esmond was all the deeper because I was reading the ‘Spectator’ then, and was constantly in the company of Addison, and Steele, and Swift, and Pope, and all the wits at Will’s, who are presented evanescently in the romance. The intensely literary keeping, as well as quality, of the story I suppose is what formed its highest fascination43 for me; but that effect of great world which it imparts to the reader, making him citizen, and, if he will, leading citizen of it, was what helped turn my head.
This is the toxic44 property of all Thackeray’s writing. He is himself forever dominated in imagination by the world, and even while he tells you it is not worth while he makes you feel that it is worth while. It is not the honest man, but the man of honor, who shines in his page; his meek45 folk are proudly meek, and there is a touch of superiority, a glint of mundane46 splendor9, in his lowliest. He rails at the order of things, but he imagines nothing different, even when he shows that its baseness, and cruelty, and hypocrisy47 are well-nigh inevitable48, and, for most of those who wish to get on in it, quite inevitable. He has a good word for the virtues, he patronizes the Christian49 graces, he pats humble50 merit on the head; he has even explosions of indignation against the insolence51 and pride of birth, and purse-pride. But, after all, he is of the world, worldly, and the highest hope he holds out is that you may be in the world and despise its ambitions while you compass its ends.
I should be far from blaming him for all this. He was of his time; but since his time men have thought beyond him, and seen life with a vision which makes his seem rather purblind52. He must have been immensely in advance of most of the thinking and feeling of his day, for people then used to accuse his sentimental10 pessimism53 of cynical54 qualities which we could hardly find in it now. It was the age of intense individualism, when you were to do right because it was becoming to you, say, as a gentleman, and you were to have an eye single to the effect upon your character, if not your reputation; you were not to do a mean thing because it was wrong, but because it was mean. It was romanticism carried into the region of morals. But I had very little concern then as to that sort of error.
I was on a very high esthetic55 horse, which I could not have conveniently stooped from if I had wished; it was quite enough for me that Thackeray’s novels were prodigious56 works of art, and I acquired merit, at least with myself, for appreciating them so keenly, for liking57 them so much. It must be, I felt with far less consciousness than my formulation of the feeling expresses, that I was of some finer sort myself to be able to enjoy such a fine sort. No doubt I should have been a coxcomb58 of some kind, if not that kind, and I shall not be very strenuous59 in censuring60 Thackeray for his effect upon me in this way. No doubt the effect was already in me, and he did not so much produce it as find it.
In the mean time he was a vast delight to me, as much in the variety of his minor61 works — his ‘Yellowplush,’ and ‘Letters of Mr. Brown,’ and ‘Adventures of Major Gahagan,’ and the ‘Paris Sketch62 Book,’ and the ‘Irish Sketch Book,’ and the ‘Great Hoggarty Diamond,’ and the ‘Book of Snobs,’ and the ‘English Humorists,’ and the ‘Four Georges,’ and all the multitude of his essays, and verses, and caricatures — as in the spacious63 designs of his huge novels, the ‘Newcomes,’ and ‘Pendennis,’ and ‘Vanity Fair,’ and ‘Henry Esmond,’ and ‘Barry Lyndon.’
There was something in the art of the last which seemed to me then, and still seems, the farthest reach of the author’s great talent. It is couched, like so much of his work, in the autobiographic form, which next to the dramatic form is the most natural, and which lends itself with such flexibility64 to the purpose of the author. In ‘Barry Lyndon’ there is imagined to the life a scoundrel of such rare quality that he never supposes for a moment but he is the finest sort of a gentleman; and so, in fact, he was, as most gentlemen went in his day. Of course, the picture is over-colored; it was the vice20 of Thackeray, or of Thackeray’s time, to surcharge all imitations of life and character, so that a generation apparently65 much slower, if not duller than ours, should not possibly miss the artist’s meaning. But I do not think it is so much surcharged as ‘Esmond;’ ‘Barry Lyndon’ is by no manner of means so conscious as that mirror of gentlemanhood, with its manifold self-reverberations; and for these reasons I am inclined to think he is the most perfect creation of Thackeray’s mind.
I did not make the acquaintance of Thackeray’s books all at once, or even in rapid succession, and he at no time possessed66 the whole empire of my catholic, not to say, fickle67, affections, during the years I was compassing a full knowledge and sense of his greatness, and burning incense68 at his shrine69. But there was a moment when he so outshone and overtopped all other divinities in my worship that I was effectively his alone, as I have been the helpless and, as it were, hypnotized devotee of three or four others of the very great. From his art there flowed into me a literary quality which tinged70 my whole mental substance, and made it impossible for me to say, or wish to say, anything without giving it the literary color. That is, while he dominated my love and fancy, if I had been so fortunate as to have a simple concept of anything in life, I must have tried to give the expression of it some turn or tint71 that would remind the reader of books even before it reminded him of men.
It is hard to make out what I mean, but this is a try at it, and I do not know that I shall be able to do better unless I add that Thackeray, of all the writers that I have known, is the most thoroughly72 and profoundly imbued73 with literature, so that when he speaks it is not with words and blood, but with words and ink. You may read the greatest part of Dickens, as you may read the greatest part of Hawthorne or Tolstoy, and not once be reminded of literature as a business or a cult74, but you can hardly read a paragraph, hardly a sentence, of Thackeray’s without being reminded of it either by suggestion or downright allusion.
I do not blame him for this; he was himself, and he could not have been any other manner of man without loss; but I say that the greatest talent is not that which breathes of the library, but that which breathes of the street, the field, the open sky, the simple earth. I began to imitate this master of mine almost as soon as I began to read him; this must be, and I had a greater pride and joy in my success than I should probably have known in anything really creative; I should have suspected that, I should have distrusted that, because I had nothing to test it by, no model; but here before me was the very finest and noblest model, and I had but to form my lines upon it, and I had produced a work of art altogether more estimable in my eyes than anything else could have been. I saw the little world about me through the lenses of my master’s spectacles, and I reported its facts, in his tone and his attitude, with his self-flattered scorn, his showy sighs, his facile satire. I need not say I was perfectly75 satisfied with the result, or that to be able to imitate Thackeray was a much greater thing for me than to have been able to imitate nature. In fact, I could have valued any picture of the life and character I knew only as it put me in mind of life and character as these had shown themselves to me in his books.
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1
deplored
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| v.悲叹，痛惜，强烈反对( deplore的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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confidentially
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| ad.秘密地，悄悄地 | |
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inviting
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| adj.诱人的，引人注目的 | |
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irresistible
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| adj.非常诱人的，无法拒绝的，无法抗拒的 | |
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confession
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| n.自白，供认，承认 | |
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snob
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| n.势利小人，自以为高雅、有学问的人 | |
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solace
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| n.安慰；v.使快乐；vt.安慰(物)，缓和 | |
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splendors
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| n.华丽( splendor的名词复数 )；壮丽；光辉；显赫 | |
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splendor
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| n.光彩；壮丽，华丽；显赫，辉煌 | |
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sentimental
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| adj.多愁善感的，感伤的 | |
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satire
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| n.讽刺，讽刺文学，讽刺作品 | |
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pathos
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| n.哀婉，悲怆 | |
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allusion
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| n.暗示，间接提示 | |
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swell
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| vi.膨胀，肿胀；增长，增强 | |
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burlesque
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| v.嘲弄，戏仿；n.嘲弄，取笑，滑稽模仿 | |
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16
abjectly
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| 凄惨地； 绝望地； 糟透地； 悲惨地 | |
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patronage
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| n.赞助，支援，援助；光顾，捧场 | |
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virtues
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| 美德( virtue的名词复数 )； 德行； 优点； 长处 | |
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assails
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| v.攻击( assail的第三人称单数 )；困扰；质问；毅然应对 | |
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20
vice
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| n.坏事；恶习；[pl.]台钳，老虎钳；adj.副的 | |
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21
vices
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| 缺陷( vice的名词复数 )； 恶习； 不道德行为； 台钳 | |
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22
contemn
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| v.蔑视 | |
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23
undo
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| vt.解开，松开；取消，撤销 | |
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24
exulted
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| 狂喜，欢跃( exult的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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aristocrats
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| n.贵族( aristocrat的名词复数 ) | |
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derided
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| v.取笑，嘲笑( deride的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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sham
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| n./adj.假冒(的)，虚伪(的) | |
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shams
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| 假象( sham的名词复数 )； 假货； 虚假的行为（或感情、言语等）； 假装…的人 | |
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snobbishness
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| 势利； 势利眼 | |
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ridicule
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| v.讥讽，挖苦；n.嘲弄 | |
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snobs
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| （谄上傲下的）势利小人( snob的名词复数 )； 自高自大者，自命不凡者 | |
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32
bully
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| n.恃强欺弱者，小流氓；vt.威胁，欺侮 | |
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33
futile
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| adj.无效的，无用的，无希望的 | |
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34
spurn
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| v.拒绝，摈弃；n.轻视的拒绝；踢开 | |
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35
lash
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| v.系牢；鞭打；猛烈抨击；n.鞭打；眼睫毛 | |
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motives
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| n.动机，目的( motive的名词复数 ) | |
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underlie
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| v.位于...之下，成为...的基础 | |
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indifference
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| n.不感兴趣，不关心，冷淡，不在乎 | |
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royalties
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| 特许权使用费 | |
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40
revelled
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| v.作乐( revel的过去式和过去分词 )；狂欢；着迷；陶醉 | |
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41
preposterous
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| adj.荒谬的，可笑的 | |
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42
glamour
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| n.魔力，魅力；vt.迷住 | |
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43
fascination
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| n.令人着迷的事物，魅力，迷恋 | |
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toxic
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| adj.有毒的，因中毒引起的 | |
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45
meek
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| adj.温顺的，逆来顺受的 | |
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46
mundane
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| adj.平凡的；尘世的；宇宙的 | |
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47
hypocrisy
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| n.伪善，虚伪 | |
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48
inevitable
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| adj.不可避免的，必然发生的 | |
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49
Christian
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| adj.基督教徒的；n.基督教徒 | |
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50
humble
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| adj.谦卑的，恭顺的；地位低下的；v.降低，贬低 | |
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51
insolence
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| n.傲慢；无礼；厚颜；傲慢的态度 | |
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52
purblind
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| adj.半盲的；愚笨的 | |
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53
pessimism
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| n.悲观者，悲观主义者，厌世者 | |
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54
cynical
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| adj.(对人性或动机)怀疑的，不信世道向善的 | |
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55
esthetic
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| adj.美学的，审美的；悦目的，雅致的 | |
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56
prodigious
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| adj.惊人的，奇妙的；异常的；巨大的；庞大的 | |
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57
liking
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| n.爱好；嗜好；喜欢 | |
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58
coxcomb
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| n.花花公子 | |
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59
strenuous
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| adj.奋发的，使劲的；紧张的；热烈的，狂热的 | |
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60
censuring
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| v.指责，非难，谴责( censure的现在分词 ) | |
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minor
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| adj.较小(少)的，较次要的；n.辅修学科；vi.辅修 | |
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62
sketch
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| n.草图；梗概；素描；v.素描；概述 | |
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63
spacious
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| adj.广阔的，宽敞的 | |
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64
flexibility
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| n.柔韧性，弹性，（光的）折射性，灵活性 | |
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65
apparently
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| adv.显然地；表面上，似乎 | |
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66
possessed
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| adj.疯狂的；拥有的，占有的 | |
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fickle
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| adj.(爱情或友谊上)易变的，不坚定的 | |
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68
incense
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| v.激怒；n.香，焚香时的烟，香气 | |
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69
shrine
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| n.圣地，神龛，庙；v.将...置于神龛内，把...奉为神圣 | |
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70
tinged
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| v.（使）发丁丁声( ting的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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71
tint
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| n.淡色，浅色；染发剂；vt.着以淡淡的颜色 | |
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72
thoroughly
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| adv.完全地，彻底地，十足地 | |
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73
imbued
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| v.使（某人/某事）充满或激起（感情等）( imbue的过去式和过去分词 )；使充满；灌输；激发（强烈感情或品质等） | |
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74
cult
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| n.异教，邪教；时尚，狂热的崇拜 | |
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75
perfectly
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| adv.完美地，无可非议地，彻底地 | |
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