Public ledger. [volume] (Memphis, Tenn.) 1865-1893, 1871-06-15
Thackeray's Creations.

The great test of being able to create
characters to live forever, Thackeray
stands bravely, and nowhere so wonder
fully as in these historic romances to
which we have confined our attention.
/ pass by Becky Sharpe and Major PEN
dennis, and Colonel Nowcomb, grandest
of men, and Ethel loveliest of women,
even in her infrmites, and Costigan
and Foker, to dwell for an instant on
the most perfectly drawn character, with
all its shading, ever realized, Beatrix.
"She was imperious, she was light
minded, she was fighty, she was false,
she had no reverence for character, and
she was very beautiful" E" We know OF
no other experiment in imaginable
writing like this. Heroines or leading
female parts are ordinarily dismissed
when the bloom of youth and beauty
has passed, or introduced as old folks.
Lady Kew and Miss Crawley in the
pages of fiction are horn old. But in
Beatrix the beautiful and bad-Thacke-
ray did what, we repeat, no one else has
attempted, and painted her from the
cradle to the grave-and what a picturel
It's very contrasts are marvellous. At
four years old the little girl looked at
Henry Esmond solemnly, pair of large
eyes, with smile shining over a face
which was as beautiful as cherub's,
and then came up and put out a
little hand to greet him" AT twenty,
when Kneller painted her, but did not,
as she says, do her justice, when the
great duke came to the play house, and
all eyes were turned to her, and not to
him, she was brown beauty; that is,
her eyes, hair and eyebrows and eye
lashes were dark; her hair curling with
rich undulations, and waving over her
shoulders; but her complexion was a
dazzling white, as snow in sunshine, ex-
cept her cheeks, which were bright
red, and her lips, which were of deeper
crimson. Her mouth and chin, they
said, were too large and full; and so
they might be for goddess in marble,
but not for woman whose eyes were
fire, whose look was love, whose voice
was the sweetest love song, whose shape
was perfect symmetry, health, decision,
activity; whose foot as it planted itself
on the ground, was firm, but flexible,
and whose motion, whether it was rapid
or slow was always perfect grace-agile
as nymph, lofty as a gueen-now
melting, now imperious, now sarcastic,
there was no single movement of her
but was beautiful. As he thinks of her,
he, who writes, feels young again.
This is very lovely, and Beatrix seems
like Burke's queenly heroine-a bright
vision lighting on an orb she scarcely
seemed to touch-and yet she was of the
EARTH very earthly, and no one but
Thackeray would dare to follow on the
dreary, selfish, worldly course of this
woman for fifty years; for it was as near
may be that interval between the fierce,
defiant farewell in Esmond as the still
lovely Beatrix, to her reappearance as
the old Baroness Bernstein, with her
face red and rough, and redder with
punch, hobbling about on her tortoise
shell cane, and making modest boys and
girls blush for her coarseness. And
then, the end Of three-seore and fifteen
years of folly and self-indulgence, what
preacher need moralize that theory2'
No English writer ever drew such pic
ture. 1t is a great triumph Of genius to
tell a sad tale so simply and so well.
Here it is: LET us draw the curtain
round this bed. | think with awe still Of
those rapid words, uttered in the shadow
of the canopy as my pallid wife sits by,
her prayer book on her knee; as the at
tendants moved to and fro noiselessly;
as the clock ticks without and strikes the
fieeting hours; as the sun falls upon the
Kneller picture of Beatrix in her beauty,
with the blushing cheeks, the smiling
lips, the waving auburn tresses and the
eyes which seemed to look toward the
dim figure moving in the bed."-James
Russell LOpeU