ABSTRACT
Mr. Thackeray, though more competent, according to our view of him, to appear in the character of a general critic or essayist, seems far more of a pococurante than Mr. Dickens. Whether it is that he is naturally disposed to take the world as he finds it, or that, having at some time or other had very unsatisfactory experience of the trade of trying to mend it, he has taken up pococurantism as a theory, we have no means of saying; but certain it is, that in the writings he has given forth since he became known as one of our most distinguished literary men, he has meddled far less with the external arrangements of society than Mr. Dickens, and made far fewer appearances as a controversialist or reformer. An exception might, indeed, be taken to this remark with reference to certain essays in Punch, and particularly certain recent satirical sketches there of Jesuits and Jesuitism, which bear the stamp of Thackeray’s manner. But generally, and even with regard to these particular papers, it will be found that it is not of the social arrangements and conventions amid which men and women move, so much as of men and women themselves, that Mr. Thackeray is the satirist. The foibles and vices of individual human beings; the ugly things that are transacted and the commotions that go on in that little world, twentythree inches or thereby in circumference, which each man carries under his own hat1-these, and not the storms and discussions of the big world without, are the stuff out of which Mr. Thackeray weaves his fictions. His care is not about the conditions, political or social, to which this conceited young dandy, that old debauchee, that sentimental little minx, and all the rest of us, must submit during our little bit of life; what he delights to do is to follow these various personages as they get on amid these conditions-to watch, with an interest half humorous, half sad, the dandy as he struts along Pall Mall;
to trace the old wretch to his haunts; to detect the young minx boxing her brother’s ears in private. And here, certainly, he is fierce and pitiless enough. What he likes in men and women, what he hates, what he will tolerate, and what moves his indignation and contempt, are indicated with too great clearness to be mistaken. But he does not carry his polemics into the field of exterior circumstances. The ‘snob,’ as such, is his quarry, and as he hovers aloft on the watch for him, it matters nothing whether he descries him in Crim Tartary or in England-on this side or on that side of any political frontier; the snob, and not his environment, is the object of his attention; hawk-like he gives chase and pins the victim. ‘Let us cease to be snobs; till then, whether we are in Crim Tartary or in England, whether we have liberal institutions or live under a despot, is of very secondary consequence;’ such is virtually the rule according to which he writes. How in his more private and unprofessional character he may think it right to act; whether or not he would make a busy vestryman if elected, or whether he regards all partisanship in public politics as a mere Hoolan and Doolan1 affair, to be left to the editors of newspapers, we have no means of knowing; the impression made by his writings, however, is that, in these matters, like many more of our best men, he is far gone in a kind of grim, courteous pococurantism….
