Thackeray Part 3

Mother beside the fire Sat, her night-cap in; Father in easychair, Gloomily napping; When at the window-sill Came a light tapping.

Presently came the night, Sadly to greet her,-- Moon in her silver light, Stars in their glitter.

Then sank the moon away Under the billow.

Still wept the maid alone-- There by the willow!

And a pale countenance Looked through the cas.e.m.e.nt.

Loud beat the mother's heart, Sick with amazement, And at the vision which Came to surprise her!

Shrieking in an agony-- "Lor'! it's Elizar!"

Through the long darkness, By the stream rolling, Hour after hour went on Tolling and tolling.

Long was the darkness, Lonely and stilly.

Shrill came the night wind, Piercing and chilly.

Yes, 'twas Elizabeth;-- Yes, 'twas their girl; Pale was her cheek, and her Hair out of curl.

"Mother!" the loved one, Blushing, exclaimed, "Let not your innocent Lizzy be blamed.

Yesterday, going to Aunt Jones's to tea, Mother, dear mother, I Forgot the door-key!

And as the night was cold, And the way steep, Mrs. Jones kept me to Breakfast and sleep."

Shrill blew the morning breeze, Biting and cold.

Bleak peers the gray dawn Over the wold!

Bleak over moor and stream Looks the gray dawn, Gray with dishevelled hair.

Still stands the willow there-- The maid is gone!

Whether her pa and ma Fully believed her, That we shall never know.

Stern they received her; And for the work of that Cruel, though short, night,-- Sent her to bed without Tea for a fortnight.

Domine, Domine!

Sing we a litany-- Sing for poor maiden-hearts broken and weary; Sing we a litany, Wail we and weep we a wild miserere!

MORAL.

Hey diddle diddlety, Cat and the fiddlety, Maidens of England take caution by she!

Let love and suicide Never tempt you aside, And always remember to take the door-key!

Mr. George Fitz-Boodle gave his name to other narratives beyond his own _Confessions_. A series of stories was carried on by him in _Fraser_, called _Men's Wives_, containing three; _Ravenwing_, _Mr. and Mrs.

Frank Berry_, and _Dennis Hoggarty's Wife_. The first chapter in _Mr.

and Mrs. Frank Berry_ describes "The Fight at Slaughter House."

Slaughter House, as Mr. Venables reminded us in the last chapter, was near Smithfield in London,--the school which afterwards became Grey Friars; and the fight between Biggs and Berry is the record of one which took place in the flesh when Thackeray was at the Charter House. But Mr.

Fitz-Boodle's name was afterwards attached to a greater work than these, to a work so great that subsequent editors have thought him to be unworthy of the honour. In the January number, 1844, of _Fraser's Magazine_, are commenced the _Memoirs of Barry Lyndon_, and the authorship is attributed to Mr. Fitz-Boodle. The t.i.tle given in the magazine was _The Luck of Barry Lyndon: a Romance of the last Century_.

By Fitz-Boodle. In the collected edition of Thackeray's works the _Memoirs_ are given as "Written by himself," and were, I presume, so brought out by Thackeray, after they had appeared in _Fraser_. Why Mr.

George Fitz-Boodle should have been robbed of so great an honour I do not know.

In imagination, language, construction, and general literary capacity, Thackeray never did anything more remarkable than _Barry Lyndon_. I have quoted the words which he put into the mouth of Ikey Solomon, declaring that in the story which he has there told he has created nothing but disgust for the wicked characters he has produced, and that he has "used his humble endeavours to cause the public also to hate them." Here, in _Barry Lyndon_, he has, probably unconsciously, acted in direct opposition to his own principles: Barry Lyndon is as great a scoundrel as the mind of man ever conceived. He is one who might have taken as his motto Satan's words; "Evil, be thou my good." And yet his story is so written that it is almost impossible not to entertain something of a friendly feeling for him. He tells his own adventures as a card-sharper, bully, and liar; as a heartless wretch, who had neither love nor grat.i.tude in his composition; who had no sense even of loyalty; who regarded gambling as the highest occupation to which a man could devote himself, and fraud as always justified by success; a man possessed by all meannesses except cowardice. And the reader is so carried away by his frankness and energy as almost to rejoice when he succeeds, and to grieve with him when he is brought to the ground.

The man is perfectly satisfied as to the reasonableness,--I might almost say, as to the rect.i.tude,--of his own conduct throughout. He is one of a decayed Irish family, that could boast of good blood. His father had obtained possession of the remnants of the property by turning Protestant, thus ousting the elder brother, who later on becomes his nephew's confederate in gambling. The elder brother is true to the old religion, and as the law stood in the last century, the younger brother, by changing his religion, was able to turn him out. Barry, when a boy, learns the slang and the gait of the debauched gentlemen of the day. He is specially proud of being a gentleman by birth and manners. He had been kidnapped, and made to serve as a common soldier, but boasts that he was at once fit for the occasion when enabled to show as a court gentleman. "I came to it at once," he says, "and as if I had never done anything else all my life. I had a gentleman to wait upon me, a French _friseur_ to dress my hair of a morning. I knew the taste of chocolate as by intuition almost, and could distinguish between the right Spanish and the French before I had been a week in my new position. I had rings on all my fingers and watches in both my fobs, canes, trinkets, and snuffboxes of all sorts. I had the finest natural taste for lace and china of any man I ever knew."

To dress well, to wear a sword with a grace, to carry away his plunder with affected indifference, and to appear to be equally easy when he loses his last ducat, to be agreeable to women, and to look like a gentleman,--these are his accomplishments. In one place he rises to the height of a grand professor in the art of gambling, and gives his lessons with almost a n.o.ble air. "Play grandly, honourably. Be not of course cast down at losing; but above all, be not eager at winning, as mean souls are." And he boasts of his accomplishments with so much eloquence as to make the reader sure that he believes in them. He is quite pathetic over himself, and can describe with heartrending words the evils that befall him when others use against him successfully any of the arts which he practises himself.

The marvel of the book is not so much that the hero should evidently think well of himself, as that the author should so tell his story as to appear to be altogether on the hero's side. In _Catherine_, the horrors described are most truly disgusting,--so much that the story, though very clever, is not pleasant reading. _The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon_ are very pleasant to read. There is nothing to shock or disgust. The style of narrative is exactly that which might be used as to the exploits of a man whom the author intended to represent as deserving of sympathy and praise,--so that the reader is almost brought to sympathise. But I should be doing an injustice to Thackeray if I were to leave an impression that he had taught lessons tending to evil practice, such as he supposed to have been left by _Jack Sheppard_ or _Eugene Aram_. No one will be tempted to undertake the life of a _chevalier d'industrie_ by reading the book, or be made to think that cheating at cards is either an agreeable or a profitable profession. The following is excellent as a tirade in favour of gambling, coming from Redmond de Balibari, as he came to be called during his adventures abroad, but it will hardly persuade anyone to be a gambler;

"We always played on parole with anybody,--any person, that is, of honour and n.o.ble lineage. We never pressed for our winnings, or declined to receive promissory notes in lieu of gold. But woe to the man who did not pay when the note became due! Redmond de Balibari was sure to wait upon him with his bill, and I promise you there were very few bad debts.

On the contrary, gentlemen were grateful to us for our forbearance, and our character for honour stood unimpeached. In latter times, a vulgar national prejudice has chosen to cast a slur upon the character of men of honour engaged in the profession of play; but I speak of the good old days of Europe, before the cowardice of the French aristocracy (in the shameful revolution, which served them right) brought discredit upon our order. They cry fie now upon men engaged in play; but I should like to know how much more honourable _their_ modes of livelihood are than ours.

The broker of the Exchange, who bulls and bears, and buys and sells, and dabbles with lying loans, and trades upon state-secrets,--what is he but a gamester? The merchant who deals in teas and tallow, is he any better?

His bales of dirty indigo are his dice, his cards come up every year instead of every ten minutes, and the sea is his green-table. You call the profession of the law an honourable one, where a man will lie for any bidder;--lie down poverty for the sake of a fee from wealth; lie down right because wrong is in his brief. You call a doctor an honourable man,--a swindling quack who does not believe in the nostrums which he prescribes, and takes your guinea for whispering in your ear that it is a fine morning. And yet, forsooth, a gallant man, who sits him down before the baize and challenges all comers, his money against theirs, his fortune against theirs, is proscribed by your modern moral world! It is a conspiracy of the middle-cla.s.s against gentlemen. It is only the shopkeeper cant which is to go down nowadays. I say that play was an inst.i.tution of chivalry. It has been wrecked along with other privileges of men of birth. When Seingalt engaged a man for six-and-thirty hours without leaving the table, do you think he showed no courage? How have we had the best blood and the brightest eyes too, of Europe throbbing round the table, as I and my uncle have held the cards and the bank against some terrible player, who was matching some thousands out of his millions against our all, which was there on the baize! When we engaged that daring Alexis Kossloffsky, and won seven thousand louis on a single coup, had we lost we should have been beggars the next day; when _he_ lost, he was only a village and a few hundred serfs in p.a.w.n the worse. When at Toeplitz the Duke of Courland brought fourteen lacqueys, each with four bags of florins, and challenged our bank to play against the sealed bags, what did we ask? 'Sir,' said we, 'we have but eighty thousand florins in bank, or two hundred thousand at three months. If your highness's bags do not contain more than eighty thousand we will meet you.' And we did; and after eleven hours' play, in which our bank was at one time reduced to two hundred and three ducats, we won seventeen thousand florins of him. Is _this_ not something like boldness? Does this profession not require skill, and perseverance, and bravery? Four crowned heads looked on at the game, and an imperial princess, when I turned up the ace of hearts and made Paroli, burst into tears. No man on the European Continent held a higher position than Redmond Barry then; and when the Duke of Courland lost he was pleased to say that we had won n.o.bly. And so we had, and spent n.o.bly what we won." This is very grand, and is put as an eloquent man would put it who really wished to defend gambling.

The rascal, of course, comes to a miserable end, but the tone of the narrative is continued throughout. He is brought to live at last with his old mother in the Fleet prison, on a wretched annuity of fifty pounds per annum, which she has saved out of the general wreck, and there he dies of delirium tremens. For an a.s.sumed tone of continued irony, maintained through the long memoir of a life, never becoming tedious, never unnatural, astounding us rather by its naturalness, I know nothing equal to _Barry Lyndon_.

As one reads, one sometimes is struck by a conviction that this or the other writer has thoroughly liked the work on which he is engaged. There is a gusto about his pa.s.sages, a liveliness in the language, a spring in the motion of the words, an eagerness of description, a lilt, if I may so call it, in the progress of the narrative, which makes the reader feel that the author has himself greatly enjoyed what he has written. He has evidently gone on with his work without any sense of weariness, or doubt; and the words have come readily to him. So it has been with _Barry Lyndon_. "My mind was filled full with those blackguards,"

Thackeray once said to a friend. It is easy enough to see that it was so. In the pa.s.sage which I have above quoted, his mind was running over with the idea that a rascal might be so far gone in rascality as to be in love with his own trade.

This was the last of Thackeray's long stories in _Fraser_. I have given by no means a complete catalogue of his contributions to the magazine, but I have perhaps mentioned those which are best known. There were many short pieces which have now been collected in his works, such as _Little Travels and Roadside Sketches_, and the _Carmen Lilliense_, in which the poet is supposed to be detained at Lille by want of money. There are others which I think are not to be found in the collected works, such as a _Box of Novels by t.i.tmarsh_, and _t.i.tmarsh in the Picture Galleries_.

After the name of t.i.tmarsh had been once a.s.sumed it was generally used in the papers which he sent to _Fraser_.

Thackeray's connection with _Punch_ began in 1843, and, as far as I can learn, _Miss Tickletoby's Lectures on English History_ was his first contribution. They, however, have not been found worthy of a place in the collected edition. His short pieces during a long period of his life were so numerous that to have brought them all together would have weighted his more important works with too great an amount of extraneous matter. The same lady, Miss Tickletoby, gave a series of lectures. There was _The History of the next French Revolution_, and _The Wanderings of our Fat Contributor_,--the first of which is, and the latter is not, perpetuated in his works. Our old friend Jeames Yellowplush, or De la Pluche,--for we cannot for a moment doubt that he is the same Jeames,--is very prolific, and as excellent in his orthography, his sense, and satire, as ever. These papers began with _The Lucky Speculator_. He lives in The Albany; he hires a brougham; and is devoted to Miss Emily Flimsey, the daughter of Sir George, who had been his master,--to the great injury of poor Maryanne, the fellow-servant who had loved him in his kitchen days. Then there follows that wonderful ballad, _Jeames of Backley Square_. Upon this he writes an angry letter to _Punch_, dated from his chambers in The Albany; "Has a reglar suscriber to your amusing paper, I beg leaf to state that I should never have done so had I supposed that it was your 'abbit to igspose the mistaries of privit life, and to hinger the delligit feelings of umble individyouls like myself." He writes in his own defence, both as to Maryanne and to the share-dealing by which he had made his fortune; and he ends with declaring his right to the position which he holds. "You are corrict in stating that I am of hancient Normin fam'ly. This is more than Peal can say, to whomb I applied for a barnetcy; but the primmier being of low igstraction, natrally stikles for his horder." And the letter is signed "Fitzjames De la Pluche." Then follows his diary, beginning with a description of the way in which he rushed into _Punch's_ office, declaring his misfortunes, when losses had come upon him. "I wish to be paid for my contribewtions to your paper.

Suckmstances is altered with me." Whereupon he gets a cheque upon Messrs. Pump and Aldgate, and has himself carried away to new speculations. He leaves his diary behind him, and _Punch_ surrept.i.tiously publishes it. There is much in the diary which comes from Thackeray's very heart. Who does not remember his indignation against Lord Bareacres? "I gave the old humbug a few shares out of my own pocket. 'There, old Pride,' says I, 'I like to see you down on your knees to a footman. There, old Pomposity! Take fifty pounds. I like to see you come cringing and begging for it!' Whenever I see him in a very public place, I take my change for my money. I digg him in the ribbs, or clap his padded old shoulders. I call him 'Bareacres, my old brick,' and I see him wince. It does my 'art good." It does Thackeray's heart good to pour himself out in indignation against some imaginary Bareacres. He blows off his steam with such an eagerness that he forgets for a time, or nearly forgets, his cacography. Then there are "Jeames on Time Bargings," "Jeames on the Gauge Question," "Mr. Jeames again." Of all our author's heroes Jeames is perhaps the most amusing. There is not much in that joke of bad spelling, and we should have been inclined to say beforehand, that Mrs. Malaprop had done it so well and so sufficiently, that no repet.i.tion of it would be received with great favour. Like other dishes, it depends upon the cooking. Jeames, with his "suckmstances," high or low, will be immortal.

There were _The Travels in London_, a long series of them; and then _Punch's Prize Novelists_, in which Thackeray imitates the language and plots of Bulwer, Disraeli, Charles Lever, G. P. R. James, Mrs. Gore, and Cooper, the American. They are all excellent; perhaps Codlingsby is the best. Mendoza, when he is fighting with the bargeman, or drinking with Codlingsby, or receiving Louis Philippe in his rooms, seems to have come direct from the pen of our Premier. Phil Fogerty's jump, and the younger and the elder hors.e.m.e.n, as they come riding into the story, one in his armour and the other with his feathers, have the very savour and tone of Lever and James; but then the savour and the tone are not so piquant. I know nothing in the way of imitation to equal Codlingsby, if it be not The Tale of Drury Lane, by W. S. in the _Rejected Addresses_, of which it is said that Walter Scott declared that he must have written it himself. The scene between Dr. Franklin, Louis XVI., Marie Antoinette, and Tatua, the chief of the Nose-rings, as told in _The Stars and Stripes_, is perfect in its way, but it fails as being a caricature of Cooper. The caricaturist has been carried away beyond and above his model, by his own sense of fun.

Of the ballads which appeared in _Punch_ I will speak elsewhere, as I must give a separate short chapter to our author's power of versification; but I must say a word of _The Sn.o.b Papers_, which were at the time the most popular and the best known of all Thackeray's contributions to _Punch_. I think that perhaps they were more charming, more piquant, more apparently true, when they came out one after another in the periodical, than they are now as collected together. I think that one at a time would be better than many. And I think that the first half in the long list of sn.o.bs would have been more manifestly sn.o.bs to us than they are now with the second half of the list appended. In fact, there are too many of them, till the reader is driven to tell himself that the meaning of it all is that Adam's family is from first to last a family of sn.o.bs. "First," says Thackeray, in preface, "the world was made; then, as a matter of course, sn.o.bs; they existed for years and years, and were no more known than America. But presently,--ingens patebat tellus,--the people became darkly aware that there was such a race. Not above five-and-twenty years since, a name, an expressive monosyllable, arose to designate that case. That name has spread over England like railroads subsequently; sn.o.bs are known and recognised throughout an empire on which I am given to understand the sun never sets. _Punch_ appears at the right season to chronicle their history; and the individual comes forth to write that history in _Punch_.

"I have,--and for this gift I congratulate myself with a deep and abiding thankfulness,--an eye for a sn.o.b. If the truthful is the beautiful, it is beautiful to study even the sn.o.bbish;--to track sn.o.bs through history as certain little dogs in Hampshire hunt out truffles; to sink shafts in society, and come upon rich veins of sn.o.b-ore.

Sn.o.bbishness is like Death, in a quotation from Horace, which I hope you never heard, 'beating with equal foot at poor men's doors, and kicking at the gates of emperors.' It is a great mistake to judge of sn.o.bs lightly, and think they exist among the lower cla.s.ses merely. An immense percentage of sn.o.bs, I believe, is to be found in every rank of this mortal life. You must not judge hastily or vulgarly of sn.o.bs; to do so shows that you are yourself a sn.o.b. I myself have been taken for one."

The state of Thackeray's mind when he commenced his delineations of sn.o.bbery is here accurately depicted. Written, as these papers were, for _Punch_, and written, as they were, by Thackeray, it was a necessity that every idea put forth should be given as a joke, and that the satire on society in general should be wrapped up in burlesque absurdity. But not the less eager and serious was his intention. When he tells us, at the end of the first chapter, of a certain Colonel Sn.o.bley, whom he met at "Bagnigge Wells," as he says, and with whom he was so disgusted that he determined to drive the man out of the house, we are well aware that he had met an offensive military gentleman,--probably at Tunbridge.

Gentlemen thus offensive, even though tamely offensive, were peculiarly offensive to him. We presume, by what follows, that this gentleman, ignorantly,--for himself most unfortunately,--spoke of Public[=o]la.

Thackeray was disgusted,--disgusted that such a name should be lugged into ordinary conversation at all, and then that a man should talk about a name with which he was so little acquainted as not to know how to p.r.o.nounce it. The man was therefore a sn.o.b, and ought to be put down; in all which I think that Thackeray was unnecessarily hard on the man, and gave him too much importance.

So it was with him in his whole intercourse with sn.o.bs,--as he calls them. He saw something that was distasteful, and a man instantly became a sn.o.b in his estimation. "But you _can_ draw," a man once said to him, there having been some discussion on the subject of Thackeray's art powers. The man meant no doubt to be civil, but meant also to imply that for the purpose needed the drawing was good enough, a matter on which he was competent to form an opinion. Thackeray instantly put the man down as a sn.o.b for flattering him. The little courtesies of the world and the little discourtesies became sn.o.bbish to him. A man could not wear his hat, or carry his umbrella, or mount his horse, without falling into some error of sn.o.bbism before his hypercritical eyes. St. Michael would have carried his armour amiss, and St. Cecilia have been sn.o.bbish as she tw.a.n.ged her harp.

I fancy that a policeman considers that every man in the street would be properly "run in," if only all the truth about the man had been known.

The tinker thinks that every pot is unsound. The cobbler doubts the stability of every shoe. So at last it grew to be the case with Thackeray. There was more hope that the city should be saved because of its ten just men, than for society, if society were to depend on ten who were not sn.o.bs. All this arose from the keenness of his vision into that which was really mean. But that keenness became so aggravated by the intenseness of his search that the slightest speck of dust became to his eyes as a foul stain. Public[=o]la, as we saw, d.a.m.ned one poor man to a wretched immortality, and another was called pitilessly over the coals, because he had mixed a grain of flattery with a bushel of truth.

Thackeray tells us that he was born to hunt out sn.o.bs, as certain dogs are trained to find truffles. But we can imagine that a dog, very energetic at producing truffles, and not finding them as plentiful as his heart desired, might occasionally produce roots which were not genuine,--might be carried on in his energies till to his senses every fungus-root became a truffle. I think that there has been something of this with our author's sn.o.b-hunting, and that his zeal was at last greater than his discrimination.

The nature of the task which came upon him made this fault almost unavoidable. When a hit is made, say with a piece at a theatre, or with a set of ill.u.s.trations, or with a series of papers on this or the other subject,--when something of this kind has suited the taste of the moment, and gratified the public, there is a natural inclination on the part of those who are interested to continue that which has been found to be good. It pays and it pleases, and it seems to suit everybody. Then it is continued usque ad nauseam. We see it in everything. When the king said he liked partridges, partridges were served to him every day. The world was pleased with certain ridiculous portraits of its big men. The big men were soon used up, and the little men had to be added.

We can imagine that even _Punch_ may occasionally be at a loss for subjects wherewith to delight its readers. In fact, _The Sn.o.b Papers_ were too good to be brought to an end, and therefore there were forty-five of them. A dozen would have been better. As he himself says in his last paper, "for a mortal year we have been together flattering and abusing the human race." It was exactly that. Of course we know,--everybody always knows,--that a bad specimen of his order may be found in every division of society. There may be a sn.o.b king, a sn.o.b parson, a sn.o.b member of parliament, a sn.o.b grocer, tailor, goldsmith, and the like. But that is not what has been meant. We did not want a special satirist to tell us what we all knew before. Had sn.o.bbishness been divided for us into its various attributes and characteristics, rather than attributed to various cla.s.ses, the end sought,--the exposure, namely, of the evil,--would have been better attained. The sn.o.bbishness of flattery, of falsehood, of cowardice, lying, time-serving, money-worship, would have been perhaps attacked to a better purpose than that of kings, priests, soldiers, merchants, or men of letters. The a.s.sault as made by Thackeray seems to have been made on the profession generally.

The paper on clerical sn.o.bs is intended to be essentially generous, and is ended by an allusion to certain old clerical friends which has a sweet tone of tenderness in it. "How should he who knows you, not respect you or your calling? May this pen never write a pennyworth again if it ever casts ridicule upon either." But in the meantime he has thrown his stone at the covetousness of bishops, because of certain Irish prelates who died rich many years before he wrote. The insinuation is that bishops generally take more of the loaves and fishes than they ought, whereas the fact is that bishops' incomes are generally so insufficient for the requirements demanded of them, that a feeling prevails that a clergyman to be fit for a bishopric should have a private income. He attacks the sn.o.bbishness of the universities, showing us how one cla.s.s of young men consists of fellow-commoners, who wear lace and drink wine with their meals, and another cla.s.s consists of sizars, or servitors, who wear badges, as being poor, and are never allowed to take their food with their fellow-students. That arrangements fit for past times are not fit for these is true enough. Consequently they should gradually be changed; and from day to day are changed. But there is no sn.o.bbishness in this. Was the fellow-commoner a sn.o.b when he acted in accordance with the custom of his rank and standing? or the sizar who accepted aid in achieving that education which he could not have got without it? or the tutor of the college, who carried out the rules entrusted to him? There are two military sn.o.bs, Rag and Famish.

One is a swindler and the other a debauched young idiot. No doubt they are both sn.o.bs, and one has been, while the other is, an officer. But there is,--I think, not an unfairness so much as an absence of intuition,--in attaching to soldiers especially two vices to which all cla.s.ses are open. Rag was a gambling sn.o.b, and Famish a drunken sn.o.b,--but they were not specially military sn.o.bs. There is a chapter devoted to dinner-giving sn.o.bs, in which I think the doctrine laid down will not hold water, and therefore that the sn.o.bbism imputed is not proved. "Your usual style of meal," says the satirist--"that is plenteous, comfortable, and in its perfection,--should be that to which you welcome your friends." Then there is something said about the "Brummagem plate pomp," and we are told that it is right that dukes should give grand dinners, but that we,--of the middle cla.s.s,--should entertain our friends with the simplicity which is customary with us. In all this there is, I think, a mistake. The duke gives a grand dinner because he thinks his friends will like it, sitting down when alone with the d.u.c.h.ess, we may suppose, with a retinue and grandeur less than that which is arrayed for gala occasions. So is it with Mr. Jones, who is no sn.o.b because he provides a costly dinner,--if he can afford it. He does it because he thinks his friends will like it. It may be that the grand dinner is a bore,--and that the leg of mutton with plenty of gravy and potatoes all hot, would be nicer. I generally prefer the leg of mutton myself. But I do not think that sn.o.bbery is involved in the other. A man, no doubt, may be a sn.o.b in giving a dinner. I am not a sn.o.b because for the occasion I eke out my own dozen silver forks with plated ware; but if I make believe that my plated ware is true silver, then I am a sn.o.b.

In that matter of a.s.sociation with our betters,--we will for the moment presume that gentlemen and ladies with t.i.tles or great wealth are our betters,--great and delicate questions arise as to what is sn.o.bbery, and what is not, in speaking of which Thackeray becomes very indignant, and explains the intensity of his feelings as thoroughly by a charming little picture as by his words. It is a picture of Queen Elizabeth as she is about to trample with disdain on the coat which that sn.o.b Raleigh is throwing for her use on the mud before her. This is intended to typify the low parasite nature of the Englishman which has been described in the previous page or two. "And of these calm moralists,"--it matters not for our present purpose who were the moralists in question,--"is there one I wonder whose heart would not throb with pleasure if he could be seen walking arm-in-arm with a couple of dukes down Pall Mall? No; it is impossible, in our condition of society, not to be sometimes a sn.o.b." And again: "How should it be otherwise in a country where lordolatry is part of our creed, and where our children are brought up to respect the 'Peerage' as the Englishman's second Bible." Then follows the wonderfully graphic picture of Queen Elizabeth and Raleigh.

In all this Thackeray has been carried away from the truth by his hatred for a certain meanness of which there are no doubt examples enough. As for Raleigh, I think we have always sympathised with the young man, instead of despising him, because he felt on the impulse of the moment that nothing was too good for the woman and the queen combined. The idea of getting something in return for his coat could hardly have come so quick to him as that impulse in favour of royalty and womanhood. If one of us to-day should see the queen pa.s.sing, would he not raise his hat, and a.s.sume, unconsciously, something of an altered demeanour because of his reverence for majesty? In doing so he would have no mean desire of getting anything. The throne and its occupant are to him honourable, and he honours them. There is surely no greater mistake than to suppose that reverence is sn.o.bbishness. I meet a great man in the street, and some chance having brought me to his knowledge, he stops and says a word to me. Am I a sn.o.b because I feel myself to be graced by his notice? Surely not. And if his acquaintance goes further and he asks me to dinner, am I not ent.i.tled so far to think well of myself because I have been found worthy of his society?

They who have raised themselves in the world, and they, too, whose position has enabled them to receive all that estimation can give, all that society can furnish, all that intercourse with the great can give, are more likely to be pleasant companions than they who have been less fortunate. That picture of two companion dukes in Pall Mall is too gorgeous for human eye to endure. A man would be scorched to cinders by so much light, as he would be crushed by a sack of sovereigns even though he might be allowed to have them if he could carry them away. But there can be no doubt that a peer taken at random as a companion would be preferable to a clerk from a counting-house,--taken at random. The clerk might turn out a scholar on your hands, and the peer no better than a poor spendthrift;--but the chances are the other way.

A tufthunter is a sn.o.b, a parasite is a sn.o.b, the man who allows the manhood within him to be awed by a coronet is a sn.o.b. The man who worships mere wealth is a sn.o.b. But so also is he who, in fear lest he should be called a sn.o.b, is afraid to seek the acquaintance,--or if it come to speak of the acquaintance,--of those whose acquaintance is manifestly desirable. In all this I feel that Thackeray was carried beyond the truth by his intense desire to put down what is mean.