The republic. [volume] (Washington [D.C.]) 1849-1853, 1849-08-21
w. M. THACKERAY.

novelists, of the day. No one hits off the
follies and vices of fashionable life with
such cleverness no one describes the
scenes and manners of society with such
curious felicity. His characters are not
sketches, but pictures. They are delln-
Gated with boldness and freedom, but they
are finished with an exquisite minuteness
of detail. They can hardly be called pic
lures; they are realities. They become as
familiar to US, in his life-like portraitures,
as if we had danced and dinnered with
them a dozen winters. Above most of
the living English writers, he is distin-
guished for the perfect naturalness of his
style. His humor never runs into carl
cature-his sentiment never drivels into
sentimentality. There are those sweet
touches in his pathos, which tell on the
most world-worn. He is never so very
fine as not to understand his own mean
ing, or as to make it unintelligible to others.
There is nothing strained, awkward, or
overdone in his handiwork. His charac-
tiers are studies from life, and vary from
each other as individuals vary in real life,
in the entirety. There is no perpetual re-
production Of the same persons under diff
ferent names or costumes. He is as fer
tile in his designs as he is skilful in exc
cution. He does not give one man big
red nose, and lay himself out on that fea-
ture as the inspiration of all his fun. The
big nose always plays subordinate part.
1t is the popularity of mind, manners,
and character, that he seeks to illustrate !;
and in all this we know not where to look
for his rival. BULwER, with all his ge-
MUS, sometimes celebrates to stiffness, and
is often fine to tawdriness. D'ISRAELI al
ways runs into extravagances, and his
later works give us little too much arid
speculation to be entertaining. 1t is in
vain to cheat ourselves with the idea that
we are very much amused with novel,
when we are only being very much bored
with an essay on political economy. We
suppose it will be esteemed literary her
esy to intimate that DICKENS intenSifes
both his humor and his pathos to degree
that too often, to our taste, makes his hui
NOR sad and his sentiment absurd Be-
tween his delineations and those of THACK-
ERAY, there is all the difference that we
find between nature seen through mag
nifying- glass, and nature seen with the
naked eye. He makes you roar with
laughter-he melts you to tears (; and yet
there is an uncomfortable feeling all the
time, as if his pathos were just trembling
on the verge of the ridiculous, and his hu-
NOR on the extreme of absurdity. He is
great painter but he now and then lays
on the paint with trowel. He is great
writer, with monstrous defects. But
THAcKERAY never "o'ersteps the modesty
of nature" You are never suspicious
that his sentiment is maudlin-you never
feel that his broadcast sketches are carica-
lures.
We did not sit down to an essay, how
ever, when we took our pen to write mere
ly word or two on the History Of Penden-
ms. Serials are losing their popularity.
1t is risk for a writer to undertake a
work in numbers; for the chances are that
he will lose his readers long before he gets
to the end of his story. So it may be
with THAcKERAY in his present work; but
if all, and more than all the merits which
have made Van,fy Fair SO popular can
give am equal popularity to Pendennis, it
will continue to be read with avidity,
should it stretch to seventy instead of
seven numbers.