MR. THEODORE TAYLOR'S LIFE OF THACKERAY. Tam little book effects

admirably what it professes to effect, namely, to fill the place between the newspaper notices of Thackeray which appeared upon his death and the larger and completer biography to which we must eventually look for our full-length picture of the tastes, habits, genius, and convictions of one of the greatest of English literary men. It is a long quarterly. review article, minus the criticism, and illustrated with original materials both in the way of engravings, and of extracts from Thackeray's earlier and less accessible productions. It is done with skill and good taste, giving us nothing that is not of interest, and little that it would be easy for the general public to obtain elsewhere. Mr. Theodore Taylor never once puts himself forward, allowing Thackeray to illustrate his own character throughout the volume ; but the manner in which he has done this is exceedingly creditable to his judgment. Though there are, of course, a hundred subjects on which we wish for further knowledge, and may reasonably expect to obtain it whenever a full biography containing extracts from his private correspondence may appear, we shall be thoroughly satisfied if that far more delicate and difficult task is discharged as successfully as the present attempt to allay the immediate hunger of the public for a better knowledge of the great author they have lost. Of course there can be no comparison between the difficulty of the two duties, but for a hasty preliminary sketch it could scarcely have been better executed. The photograph prefixed is some- what forbidding ; but.it is a very powerful though not a pleasant * nackeray, the Hrtnottrist and the Man of Letters. The story of his life; including a selection from his characteristic speeches, now for the first time gathered together. ByBy Theodore Taylor, E.q.; with photograph from life by Ernest Edwards, B.A., and Theodore iiiustrattons. London ; John Camden Hawn.

likeness, nevertheless. We wish Mr. Taylor had inserted a few more vignettes from Mr. Thackeray's own drawings.

Mr. Taylor gives us some little fresh information on two points upon which the admirers of Thackeray's genius cannot but

be deeply interested,—his love of art, and especially of caricature, and his earliest literary efforts as a lad at school and at Cambridge. Boys are almost always fond of parody and burlesque, and the first thing we can trace to Thackeray's

schoolboy pen is a political parody on Moore's "Minstrel Boy," intended to ridicule Mr. Shell's prepared speech to a Catholic Emancipation meeting on Penenden Heath, which is, how- ever, by no means above the level of clever boys' ordinary parodies. Nor is the mock Cambridge prize poem on Timbuctoo, published in "The Snob,"—the same subject, we think, for which Arthur Hallam received the prize,—at all a remarkable performance. There are few young University men of any sort of talent who could not have composed fun of this kind :-

"Desolate Afric, thou art lovely yet,

One heart yet beats which ne'er thee shall forget. What though thy maidens are a blackish brown, Does virtue dwell in whiter breasts alone? Oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no!

It shall not, must not, cannot, e'er be so.

The day shall come when Albion's self shall feel Stern Afric's wrath and writhe 'neath Afric's steeL I see her tribes the hill of glory mount, And sell their sugars on their own account ; While round her throne the prostrate nations come, Sue for her rice, and barter for her rum !"

Even the Malaprop letters in the " Snob," which now, of course, strike the reader as a sort of early anticipation of the adroitly managed blunders in the spelling of " Jeames " and " Pleaseman X," show none of that peculiar skill in distorting both language and meaning with a single view to the vulgarizing effect of the blunders, —in finding for almost every word a big vulgar shadow, as we may say,—that makes so seemingly coarse a literary instrument into one worthy of a great satirist.

The traces of fun in Thackeray's early years give little promise of his future greatness. Indeed, even in the maturity of his powers he was never really at his best when he abandoned him- self to the sense of the ridiculous. Mr. Taylor tells us, for instance, that " Level the Widower," published in the Cornhill, was meant originally for a comic drama, and offered to Mr. Wigan of the Olympic Theatre under the title of " The Wolf and the Lamb." Probably it is the only piece written in the maturity of his powers in which he did fully give the rein to his sense of the ridiculous,—the last scene, where Miss Eliza- beth's box is corded in the passage ready for her departure, and the three old ladies, mother, mother-in-law, and mother of the bride elect, are all fighting for their supremacy over the poor widower, approaching very close to the ordinary dgnouement of a farce. But the effect, so far as it passes beyond satire, is not good. There is too much scorn mingled with the laughter for hearty caricature, and too much laughter mingled with the scorn for that covert sting in the force of which Thackeray could, if he pleased, excel every name in English literature. Nor are his draw- ings really more successful in genuine caricature than his writings. Theyare exaggerated, they are sometimes vulgar; they do not follow the true rule of caricature—to remind you forcibly, even in the cari- cature itself, of the species of commonplace from which the carica- ture is a deviation. It is true there is sometimes a grotesque irony in them, as, for example, in that quaint little squat vignette of himself on Mr- Taylor's title-page, which is all head and spectacles, and only just legs enough for a dwarf to cross, as he sits enthroned on his pile of big books engaged in perplexed and rueful study of some smaller volume. But even this is in no sense caricature, though it is a quaint fancy ; it does not magnify any characteristic expression of his own into laughable dimensions, but surprises you with a contrast between the easy masterful expression of his natural face and that of an intellec- tually over-weighted and oppressed pigmy. Yet it is in these gro- tesqueries chiefly that he excels ; the common ran of his illustra- tions to "Vanity Fair" or " Pendennis" suit those marvellous stories but ill. The charm of his ridicule, which is not caricature at all, but a constant vein of irony, lies in the self-restraint ; the essence of his pictures is exaggeration. For example, when Pendennis is seen by the Reverend Doctor Portman and the Dean's wife, as they walk in the Dean's garden, making very strong love to Miss Costigan, we are told by the author that their attention was drawn to Mr. Pen's proceedings by Master Ridley Roset, the Dean's son, who "pulled his mother by the back of her capacious dress and said, ' I say, ma, look up there !' —and he waggled his innocent head." The picture which illus- trates the little lad's innocent investigations into Mr. Pen's pro- ceedings makes him an impudent and vulgar little boy, gazing with quite a knowing grin at the window indicated. Now of course Thackeray meant to imply that the little urchin was not quite so innocent of mischief in calling attention to Mr. Pen's proceedings as his age might suggest, but the finesse of the written satire, which implies a sort of general accusation against children that they are not half so innocent of mischief as they seem, is utterly lost in the engraving, which is only an accusation of impudence and vulgarity against the particular

urchin in question. It does not and possibly could not

carry with it that delicate flavour of general insinuation against the race which is conveyed by the author. The truth is, Thackeray with his pencil was always broad, and sometimes

even coarse in his ridicule ; with his pen he was almost always subdued in his irony. He smothered into an un- emphatic epithet what his pencil dilated into the prominent point. In one way his own illustrations are instructive ; they show you where Thackeray considered the point of his wit to be ; but then they do so by making the point protrude, whereas the very essence of the intellectual skill displayed in the fiction is that the point does not protrude, but rankles like a barb lost in the wound. He was a master of indirect sting, and his pictures translate the indirect sting into the direct, in a very glaring and self- defeating way. Yet few men understood the true essence of carica- ture better than Thackeray when he saw it in others, as is shown

by his constant delight in both Cruikahank as an artist and in

Dickens as a humourist. Mr. Taylor gives a most amusing and subtle criticism of Thackeray's on one of Cruikshank's happiest de- signs, and kindly gives us Cruikshank's plate also, in order to help us to understand the criticism. We could not, to any good purpose, quote the one without the other, but we refer our readers to Mr. Theodore Taylor's pages for the illustration of what we have said. But though Thackeray aspired to caricature, the more reserved

and subtle weapon was the only one be wielded with first-rate power.

And yet we understand well why, with all his marvellous power of infusing a bitter flavour of ridicule into his praise or his sentiment, he had a sort of insatiable yearning after the use of the more direct and in many respects coarser weapon. There is nothing more characteristic of Thackeray or more powerful than the scenes,—(there are some of them in almost every one of his greater works),—in which the love, or hatred, or contempt, or whatever emotion it may be, which is the leading, though con- trolled, one, in his characters, throws off all pretence of subordi- nation, bursts open the safety-valve, and rises into a kind of shrill key-note of passion. In "Vanity Fair" there is one such scene placed with great art by the satirist at the very outset, where Becky shows her real fearlessness and vindictiveness and utter selfishness, by flinging back the parting present which poor Miss Jemima has pressed upon her, into her schoolmistress's garden as the carriage bears her away from the door. In the encounter between Lord Steyne and Rawdon Crawley we have another such burst of long suppressed rage. In " Esmond, " perhaps, the finest scene is that in which Lady Castlewoed's passion for young Esmond bursts vehemently forth on his return from the war. And there are probably half a dozen such critical scenes in " Pendennis." It is one of Thackeray's greatest powers this of delineating the moment when a passion long kept under bursts its banks and inundates the mind; it is a power in which he specially delighted,—the suppressed satiric stage being really little to his mind, though much to that of his readers. Caricature was to hiba &letting loose of the contempt or ridicule which he felt ; while in the inuendo it was still kept under control, though used for a pur- pose. We doubt if this complete self-mastery, which gives the greatest power to his writings, was ever quite to his own mind. There is a frequent surging of love, or pity, or scorn even when they do not break out, which seems to fret against the fetteri of his intellectual style, and yearn for some freer expression. Take, for instance, the few characteristic and caustic lines against capital punishment or public executions (whichever it might be) that Mr. Taylor has published for us :—

" They arrived too late on the ground to be present at the execution of Lactfmaire and his co-mate in murder, Avril. But as they came to the spot (a gloomy round space, within the barrier—three roads led to it—and, outside, they saw the wine-shops and restaurateurs of the barrier looking gay and inviting), they only found, in the midst of it, a little pool of ice, just partially tinged with red. Two or three idle street boys were dancing and stamping about this pool; and when the Englishmen asked one of them whether the execution had taken place, he began dancing more madly than ever, and shrieked out with a loud fantastical theatrical voice, Yaw toss Messieurs et Dames, voyez ici is sang du =noire Lac/noire, et de son compagnon, le traitre Avril;' and

straightway all the other gamins screamed out the words in chorus, and took hands and danced round the little puddle. Oh! august Jus- tice !' exclaimed the young art-student, your meal was followed by an appropriate grace ! Was any man who saw the show deterred, or frightened, or moralized in any way? He had gratified his appetite for blood, and this was all. Remark what a good breakfast you oat after an execution ; how pleasant it is to cut jokes after it, and upon it. This merry, pleasant mood, is brought on by the blood-tonic.' "

How bitterly that is said, and how clearly Thackeray is con- scious of the wish to denounce, and express utter hate of, capital punishment in language of vehement invective, but is also conscious that, in his own person at least, he could say nothing half so effective and poignant. Drama- tically, and when speaking through others, Thackeray's pathos and his passion are eloquent and almost perfect. But when directly expressed in his own person, they fail from a little over-tinge of self-consciousness, and so to say egoism, which the cover of the dramatic veil removes. For example, Mr. Theodore Taylor gives us, as a specimen of his finest pathos, the following passage from his lecture on George M. :—

" But where in English literature could we find anything more' solemn and affecting than his picture of the old King, the last of that name ? When all light, all reason, all sound of human voices, all the pleasures of this world of God were taken from him '—concluding with the affecting appeal to his American audience= 0 brothers ! speaking the same dear mother tongue-0 comrades ! enemies no more, let us take a mournful hand together as we stand by this royal corpse, and call a truce to battle ! Low he lies to whom the proudest used to kneel once, and who was cast lower than the poorest—dead whom millions prayed for in vain. Hush, Strife and Quarrels over the solemn grave ! Sound Trumpets, a mournful march. Fall, Dark Curtain, upon his pageant, his pride, his grief, his awful tragedy!' " To our minds this is not by any means a favourable specimen of Thackeray's pathos, and it fails probably because it is neither disguised under a dramatic veil nor expressed in the sub- dued fashion in which he usually indicates rather than makes an appeal to his reader's feelings. When he speaks in his own name, there is a certain theatrical and self-conscious air about it which we do not find when ho pours his passion through the heart and mouth of an imaginary figure. It is one of the most essential conditions of success with Thackeray that lie must ventriloquize the stronger feelings ; or, if he speaks in his own name, speak with the finesse and under the pressure of ironic reserve. When he attempts to embody either fun or feeling more directly, the fine touch of the great artist is seen no more.