shocking-and excessively human. Indeed, the fact is that Rachel is as human as Beatrix, though in a different way. You may not only love her less, but-in a different sense of contrast from that of the Roman poet-like her a little less. But you cannot, if you have any knowledge of human nature, call her unnatural. And really I do not know that the third lady of the family, Isabel Marchioness of Esmond, though there is less written about her, is not as real and almost as wonderful as the other two. She is not so fairly treated, however, poor thing! for we have her Bernstein period without her Beatrix one.

As for my Lords Castlewood-Thomas, and Francis père et fils—their creator has not taken so much trouble with them; but they are never' out'. The least of a piece, I think, is Rachel's too fortunate or too unfortunate husband. The people who regard Ibsen's great triumph in the Doll's House as consisting in the conduct of the husband as to the incriminating documents, ought to admire Thackeray's management of the temporary loss of Rachel's beauty. They are certainly both touches of the baser side of human nature ingeniously worked in. But the question is, What, in this wonderful book, is not ingeniously worked in-character or incident, description or speech?

If the champions of Unity' were wise, they would take Esmond as a battle-horse, for it is certain that, great as are its parts, the whole is greater than almost any one of them which is certainly not the case with Pendennis. And it is further certain that, of these parts, the personages of the hero and the heroine stand out commandingly, which is certainly not the case with Pendennis, again. The unity, however, is of a peculiar kind and differs from the ordinary non-classical'Unity of Interest' which Thackeray almost invariably exhibits. It is rather a Unity of Temper, which is also present (as the all-pervading motto Vanitas Vanitatum almost necessitates) in all the books, but here reaches a transcendence not else

where attained. The brooding spirit of Ecclesiastes here covers, as it were, with the shadow of one of its wings the joys and sorrows, the failures and successes of a private family and their friends, with the other the fates of England and Europe; the fortunes of Marlborough and of Swift on their way from dictatorship, in each case, to dotage and death; the big wars and the notable literary triumphs as well as the hopeless passions or acquiescent losses. It is thus an instance-and the greatest-of that revival of the historical novel which was taking place, and in which the novel of Scott 1-simpler, though not so very simple as is sometimes thought-is being dashed with a far heavier dose of the novel-element as opposed to the romance, yet without abandonment of the romancequality proper. Of these novel-romance scenes, as they may be called, the famous mock-duel at the end is of course the greatest. But that where the Duke of Hamilton has to acknowledge the Marquis of Esmond, and where Beatrix gives the kiss of Beatrix, is almost as great: and there are many others. It is possible that this very transcendence accounts to some extent for the somewhat lukewarm admiration which it has received. The usual devotee of the novel of analysis dislikes the historic, and has taught himself to consider it childish; the common lover of romance (not the better kind) feels himself hampered by the character-study, as Émile de Girardin's subscribers felt themselves hampered by Gautier's style. All the happier those who can make the best of both dispensations !

Nothing, however, has yet been said of one of the most

1 The influence of Scott on Thackeray is undoubted and freely confessed. But I cannot fall in with certain persons of distinction' in making Esmond very specially indebted to Woodstock. Woodstock is a very great book in itself and amazing when one knows its circumstances: but it is, even for Scott, very specially and exclusively objective. Esmond is subjective also in the highest degree.

salient characteristics of Esmond-one, perhaps, which has had as much to do with the love of its lovers and the qualified esteem of those who do not quite love it, as anything else. This is, of course, the attempt, certainly a very audacious one, at once to give the very form and pressure of the time of the story-sometimes in actual diction-and yet to suffuse it with a modern thought and colour which most certainly were not of the time. The boldness and the peril of this attempt are both quite indisputable; and the peril itself is, in a way, double. There is the malcontent who will say This may be all very fine but I don't like it. It bothers and teases me. I do not want to be talked to in the language of Addison and Steele'. And there will be the possibly less ingenuous but more obtrusive malcontent who will say that it ought never to have been done, or that it is not, as it is, done well. With the first, who probably exists 'in squadrons and gross bands', argument is, of course, impossible. He may be taught better if he is caught young, but that is all and certainly the last thing that any honest lover of literature would wish would be to make him say that he likes a thing when he does not. That may be left to those who preach and follow the fashions of the moment. Nor, perhaps, is there very much to do with those who say that the double attempt is not successful-except to disable their judgement. But as for the doctrine that this attempt deserves to fail, and must fail—that it is wrong in itself—there one may take up the cudgels with some confidence.

So far from there being anything illegitimate in this attempt to bring one period before the eyes of another in its habit as it lived, and speaking as it spoke, but to allow those eyes themselves to move as they move and see as they see-it is merely the triumph and the justification of the whole method of prose fiction in general, and of the historical novel in particular. For that historical novel is itself the result of the growth of the historic sense

acting upon the demand for fiction. So long as people made no attempt to understand things and thoughts different from those around and within them; so long as, like the men of the Middle Ages, they blandly threw everything into their own image, or, like those of the Renaissance to some extent and the Augustan period still more, regarded other ages at worst with contempt, and at best with indulgence as childish-the historical novel could not come into being, and did not. It only became possible when history began to be seriously studied as something more than a chronicle of external events. When it had thus been made possible, it was a perfectly legitimate experiment to carry the process still further; not merely to discuss or moralize, but to represent the period as it was, without forfeiting the privilege of regarding it from a point of view which it had not itself reached. The process of Thackeray is really only an unfolding, and carrying further into application, of the method of Shakespeare. Partly his date, partly his genius, partly his dramatic necessities, obliged Shakespeare to combine his treatment -to make his godlike Romans at once Roman and Elizabethan, and men of all time, and men of no time at all. Thackeray, with the conveniences of the novel and the demands of his audience, dichotomizes the presentation while observing a certain unity in the fictitious person, now of Henry Esmond, now of William Makepeace Thackeray himself. If anybody does not like the result, there is nothing to be said. But there are those who regard it as one of the furthest explorations that we yet possess of human genius-one of the most extraordinary achievements of that higher imagination which Coleridge liked to call esenoplastic.1 That a man should have the faculty of reproducing contemporary or general life is wonderful;

1 This form, which he used elsewhere than in the Biographia Literaria, is better than esemplastic which he employed there.

that he should have the faculty of reproducing past life is wonderful still more. But that he should thus revive the past and preserve the present-command and provide at once theatre and company, audience and performance— this is the highest wizardry of all. And this, as it seems to me, is what Thackeray had attempted, and more, what he has done, in the History of Henry Esmond.1

He could not have done it without the pains' to which he refers in the saying quoted above; but these pains, as usual, bore fruit more than once. It has been thought desirable to include in the present volume the two main after-crops, The English Humourists and The Four Georges. Exactly how early Thackeray's attention was drawn to the eighteenth century it would, in the necessarily incomplete state of our biographical information about him, be very difficult to say. We have pointed out that the connexion was pretty well established as early as Catherine. But it was evidently founded upon that peculiar congeniality, freshened and enlivened with a proper dose of difference, which is the most certain source and the purest maintainer of love in life and literature.

At the same time, the two sets of lectures are differentiated from the novel not so much by their form-for Thackeray as a lecturer had very little that smacked of the platform, and as a novelist he had a great deal that smacked of the satiric conversation-scene-as by their purport. Esmond, though partly critical, is mainly and in far the greater part

1 The justice or accuracy of his individual presentments and even of his general view of the time is quite another matter. We may touch on part of it presently. But the real point is that the whole is of a piece at least in potentia: that it gives a world that might have existed.

* The lectures on the Humourists were, of course, delivered before Esmond was published; but, in another sense, they are only aftercrops or by-products. The notes, sometimes very interesting, are James Hannay's.