The Sun.
London, England, 1864-01-04 00:00:00

RECOLLECTIONS OF THACKERAY

And Tributes to him.

LONDON WILL MISS HIMI
When we image to ourselves what London is and wine'
has been its history, it is astonishing bow much of what is
fondest in our representations consists of recollections of
the succesive clusters of eminent men, and especially of
eminent men of letters, that have there passed their lives.
As far back as the days of Chaucer and Gower the tradition
begins ; it is but faintly kept up from that period till it
bursts forth afresh in the glozions London of Shakespeare,
Ben Jonson, and all the Elizabethans ; since which time
what is London, in the popular notion of its history, but
that ever-growing, ever-roaring city in the midst of which
company after company of the natural successors of those
poetic and dramatic Elizabethans have found their habi-
tations and inducements, their hard or easy livelihood, and
their noted or unnoted graves ? To the Elizabethans
succeeded the Wits of the Restoration, apart from whom,
in an obscure outskirt, sat Milton, old and blind ; to these
the Wits of Queen Anne's reign ; and to these the
Georgians, elder, middle, and later, to the verge of our
own times. In each generation, of course, there have been
men of literary celebrity, not congregated in London, but
distributed over the rest of the land, whether in other
cities or in country-neighbourhoods; and sometimes the
centre of greatest intellectual power has certainly not been
in the metropolis. But, in the main, the greatest quantity
of British literary talent, at any one time, has always, for
natural reasons, been aggregated in London ; and the con-
spicuous literary cluster of any one time has consisted of
men and women;whom their contemporaries could recognise
as Londoners. In our own age, more expressly than in most
others, this has been the case. If we reckon this age from
the beginning of our present severeign's reign in 1337, and
if, adopting a collective name that has been proposed, we
call the British authors of the last 26 years " the Victo-
rians," then a more than usual proportion of these Victo-
rians have belonged, or are still belonging, to London. It
is a cluster to be proud of—a cluser that will shine in our
literary history, even when the lustre of the preceding
Georgian era of Dr. Samuel Johnson, and that of the earlier
era of Queen Anne's Wits, are still remembered in the
comparison. Who shall venture to draw up now a com-
plete list of these eminent Victorians—including alike the
historians, the poets, the novelists, the moralists, and the
philosophers whom future times are likely to take account
of under that designation? Or who so bold as, out of the
40 or 50 of all orders that might compose such a list of the
indubitably eminent, to select five or six, and aver, " These
are they that will be looked back upon as the pre-eminent
of our era, as the Victorian stars of the greatest magnitude?'
We are in the noise and dust of the present ; the most
blatent and sociable have it their own way for a season ;
and in the fall and click of a thousand hammers, few can
tell who is working in pinchbeck, and who is beating and
shaping the finest gold. Time will find out; or, if even
Lime should not trouble itself to do so, what does it matte' ?
One of our Victorians, however, we can all at this moment
speak of with certainty as sure to rank among the pre-
eminent of that designation, however strict may be the
posthumous criticism. We have laid him this week in the
cemetery of Kensal-green.— The Reader.
HIS LAST WORK—LEFT UNFINISHED.
We are told in the newspapers that Mr, Thackeray had
just rejoiced over the completi'n of the fourth monthly
portion of his story, seeing in it, no doubt, the promise of
a work which would not be found, when completed, to
fall short even of his fame. It was, we believe, like the
Virginians, a story of the times of George I. and George 11.
Some months ago it was rumoured that the next work from
his pen would relate to an early period of English history—
a statement which a bold guesser subsequently enlarged
into the assertion that its scene would be laid in the times
of the Anglo-Saxons. Mr. Thackeray was doubtless amused
at the paragraph which made the customary tour through
the press of London and the provinces, gravely informing
the world that the author of " Esmond," and the " Essays
on the liumourists," who had hitherto delighted in the
times of elaborate flowing wigs, and swords, and coats with
huge lapels, had suddenly betaken himself to those misty
days of savage manners and scanty clothing. The rumour,
in its unembellished form, was however not without foun-
dation. Mr. Thackeray had, we believe, recently contem-
plated writing a story of the days of Henry the Fifth, in
which period of our history some accidental bent of his
reading had led him to take a special interest. He had even
thought of some of its details, and had amused himself in
imagination with a grotesque scene in one of the old chro-
niclers of a famous royal lady, who rode into a fair city of
Normandy upon a cow. But the notion was laid aside. His
old passion for recreating the life and manners of the last
century was too powerful to be resisted, and he finally
found himself at homd in a story of English life of the old
period, in which the elaborate imitation of the style of the
Augustan ago would not be allowed, as in the "Adventures
of Henry Esmond," to interfere with the development of a
story of a good and heroic stamp, in the presence of which
the old complaints from' adverse critics of cynicism and cold-
ness should be heard no more.—Publishers' Circular.
HIS KNOWLEDGE OF CHARACTER,
Was minute and accurate, but it was confined to
the limits of his own experience. He had lived among
artists, men of letters, native and foreign adventurers,
and in the best society of London ; but he knew
nothing of peasants or artisans, and he never attempted to
describe them. The variety of his creations has been under-
valued, because his later novels were too exclusively occu-
pied with a single phase of existence ; but the humble clerk
who is the hero of the "Great Hoggarty Diamond" is re-
moved by many degrees in the social scale from the Mar-
quis ef Steyne and Lady Kew. The artificial ingenuity by
which accuracy of costume is preserved in "Esmond" and
"The Virginians" might have raised a doubt of Mr.
Thackeray's prudence in attempting historical fiction; but
the "Luck of Barry Lyndon" contains an admirable pic-
ture of Continental life in the last century, although the
story has failed to obtain popularity in consequence of the
error of making the villain of the story, like Smollett's
" Count Fathom," also its hero or centre. In Becky
Sharp, Mr. Thackeray performed a feat which has rarely
been accomplished in fiction, by endowing the creature of his
imagination with a portion of his own genius and wit. Per-
haps the reality of life which is imparted to the thoroughly
commonplace George Osborne is almost an equally
difficult achievement. Caricatures, even when they sym
bolise whole classes by a skilful exaggeration of their pe-
culiarities, rank below the natural and breathing portraits
of the highest order of artists. In the power of arranging
the accessories of scenery and incident, Mr. Thackeray
had many superiors, yet there is no more perfect passage
in modern literature than the Waterloo chapter in" Vanity
Fair," where the rumours of the unseen battle form an
accompaniment to the anxieties and projects of the perso-
nages of the story, as they wait for the results at Brussels.