A reading
of Thackeray
Gabriel Pearson
The Exposure of Luxury: Radical Themes in Thackeray Barbara Hardy (Peter Owen £3.25) "The evidence of the biography and the evidence of the fiction are two different things." Mrs Hardy makes the point with characteristic unassertiveness when she argues her own view of Thackeray's moral radicalism in his fictions against Gordon Ray's evidence for Thackeray's deepening conservatism in his life. Ray's Life is the received scholarship, another of those exhaustive American accumulations which pass for biography and are in fact chronologised card index systems. And very useful, in their own way. But such scholarly bulks do tend to becalm lighter craft and Mrs Hardy has to snatch the faintest of breezes to get by. The effect of permitting a (usually biographical) dead weight of assembled fact a logical priority over works of imagination is to mute just that quality of discovery which justifies them and which evolves beyond the reach of an author's conscious calculation or opinion.
This is not to argue the substitution of self-display for the works being read: that is to miss the experience of literature another way. Criticism need not be uninformed by even the most mechanically accumulated scholarship. And the personality that Mrs Hardy reveals here is one so fiercely attached to what she encounters in her reading, so free from merely luxurious self-expression, that it strikes one as precisely what is needed to meet and discover Thackeray's own repudiation of juxury and suppression of ego. Her case is that Thackeray was a writer who, despite surface foibles and fripperies, feelingly attended to human behaviour with a discretion and precision that noted both its unexpectedness as well as its habitudes. The qualities of the critic and writer are well matched. As it happens she has absorbed the standard scholarship and this book is quietly grounded in a thorough acquaintance with facts about Thackeray and in the more specialised critical studies of recent decades. Still, the point to hold on to is the one that this book in its essence everywhere makes: that the only true knowledge of writers is their work, and all the rest is vanity. This study then is a reading of Thackeray intended to rectify his "relative neglect," which in turn partly arises from what Barbara Hardy, in an arresting phrase, describes as Thackeray's "explicit refusal to use fiction for high moral triumphs." The aim was rather, in his own words, "to make us dissatisfied." His is essentially a "muted, moderate and realistic vision," Which creates "no virtuous characters and no intact virtue within characters." Certainly this vision leaves — but only just" some little room for certain attempts at loving," and Mrs Hardy's last. chapter is appropriately devoted to a loving account of these attempts. Otherwise, Thackeray's fiction concentrates in its finest effects on the social and psychological consequences of lovelessness and the predatory shifts and stubborn reflexes of egoism. This does not make Thackeray an explicitly social critic in the sense that Dickens was, nor do his novels feature spokesmen for a radical consciousness. Nevertheless, Mrs Hardy holds that what Thackeray shows us, dramatically and cumulatively, involves "a radical disgust, rejection or despair," which can fairly be called, whatever his conscious standpoint, " one of the most revolutionary statements in the Victorian novel." It is only possible to assert this if the difference between Thackeray the man and the Thackeray of the novels is firmly grasped. Otherwise, it Is almost impossible to spot the radical pessimism of his fictional account of objects of consumption and display — clothes, food, furniture, art objects and decor. In life, Thackeray enjoyed and esteemed these things: he was bon viveur, collector, fancier. Hence the inside dope that helps him ticket, price and docket all his objects. Yet what he enjoyed in life became, in his art, an expression of that vanity which sickens and wearies. Mrs Hardy makes the point categorically, and it seems absolutely right, that "there is no good appreciation of objects in the novels. . . . Relics, icons, presents, costly articles, they Show the greed and heartlessness of a Period of aggression and rapid expansion." Perhaps the last phrase is a little loose. Thackeray, despite his uniquely acute sense of period, including his own, does not strike me as having much contemporaneity. Mrs Hardy is more accurate when she talks of him "as a chronicler of surfaces, as informative and rich as Ben Jonson or Zola." That neatly suggests how traditional Thackeray's critique of novelties was. As in Jonson (I'm less sure about Zola), objects are " psychologically expressive and morally emblematic" without losing their specific qualities as objects whose essence lies in their failure to express any life beyond themselves — merely vain, dead, gaudy things. Thackeray's art is firmly literal — allegorical sometimes, but not symbolic. This points the difference from Dickens who is obsessed by a contemporaneity where objects are always animated by an alienated life beyond themselves.
Modern criticism, labouring in the rear of the novels themselves, has become very adept in the handling of symbolic dimensions. But it tends to be at a loss when confronted by a determinedly unsymbolic art like Thackeray's. One of the successes of Mrs Hardy's book is the way in which she describes meanings that reside in the turns and counterturns, the surprises and reverses of narrated events. The "radical themes" of the subtitle perhaps does her achievement some disservice. She complains that Thackeray's themes have been too little studied and that they are worth isolating as of interest in their own right. I am not sure that there are such things as themes with priority to their narrative embodiment. Are they not really a way of structuring a critical book — the authorial equivalent to the card index? The confusion arises perhaps because only a symbolic art has been deemed fully to embody its meaning, but in her analysis of the long passages she quotes, ostensibly as illustration of her themes, Barbara Hardy shows meaning to be strictly embodied in the linear movement of plot and the author's conduct of his fiction.
The success of this study lies in the examination of this conduct in the interplay — and meaningful abstention from interplay — between the narrator and his drama, in the radical implications of Thackeray's refusal to enter the inner lives of his characters, and in his silent demonstration of the brutalities, and incongruities of power, possession and status. She brilliantly defines Thackeray's anatomy of character as artifice and display and relates this to his own self-conscious and admittedly mercenary practice of his art.
She also convinces me — and I was a sceptic — that the dimensions that Thackeray lacks are somehow a necessary price to be paid for unique virtue. An essentially appreciative and generous critic, she denies herself the luxury of carping.
Where I would want to complain of a certain sameness in Thackeray's moral climate, and a want of concentration which makes a novel like The Newcomes, though brilliant in conception and interesting to remember, ponderously serpentine to read, Mrs Hardy returns us to Thackeray's great strengths and renews an appetite for his individual flavour and savour. Her reading Incites to rereading, which is what criticism properly exists to do.
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