Miscellanies [Five Volumes.]/Catherine; A Story
By . Household Edition. Boston : Fields, Osgood, & Co.
By , Esq., Junior. [W. M. Thackeray.] Boston ; Fields, Osgood, & Co.
WHETHER Thackeray’s novels or his shorter stories and sketches are better is a question each reader will settle in favor of whichever he happens to be reading. We, for example, do not think he wrote anything more perfect than “ The Luck of Barry Lyndon”; but then we have just been reading that over again, and it is some time since we looked at “ Henry Esmond.” We will only be certain that nearly all he did was masterly, and is inestimably precious now that he can do no more. They may say that his later gifts were somewhat poor and stale in quality ; but we would rather have the rinsings — if " Philip ” is to be so called — of that magical flask out which he poured such wonderful and various liquors, than the fulness and prime spirit of many a famous tap we could name. We will own even that he had not a good knack at invention : what need had he of it who could give us real men and women, and could portray life so truly that we scarcely thought of asking about a plot ? We almost think that if he who rarely struck the wrong note in character had often been out of time and tune there, there would have been enough delight in his style to have atoned for all, — so much it seems compact of what is vigorous in men’s daily speech and what is simple and elegant in literary art.
This style was never better than in the different tales and studies which are known as Thackeray’s Miscellanies, and which are here produced anew with various papers not previously collected. Here is its earlier brilliancy and its later mellowness ; and in these stories and essays is also to be noted that gradual change of Thackeray’s humor, from what he called the “ bumptiousness ” ot the period in which he laughed poor Bulwer to scorn, and fiercely attacked social shams in the “ Book of Snobs ” and other places, to the relenting or the indifference of the time in which he wrote the “ Roundabout Papers ” and “ Philip.” But what a marvellous savor in all ! The first line is an appetizer that carries you hungry through the feast, whatever it is, and makes you wish for the time being there were no other dish but that in the world. Over “ Barry Lyndon,” or “ Major Gahagan,” or “ Dennis Haggarty,” you lament that he ever wrote anything but stories of Irish character (what lamentable comedy, what tragical mirth, are in the first and the last!) ; and, delaying yourself as much as you can in “The Four Georges,” you feel that a man who could revive the past in that way ought to have written only social history. In the riot of his burlesques, and the caricatured Fitz-Boodle papers, he is not seen at his best, but his second-rate is much better than the first-rate of any one else in the same way. He has set up many smaller wits in that sort of humor which he maybe said to have invented; and we cannot in our weariness of them do him complete justice ; but this is not his fate in the quieter essays and sketches where no one could follow him. “ From Cornhill to Cairo,” “ Coxe’s Diary,” the “Little Travels,” “The Irish Sketches,” “The Paris Sketch-Book,” “Sketches and Travels in London,” are still sole of their kind; and as for “The Great Hoggarty Diamond,” some people think that not only stands alone, but is unsurpassed among its author’s works. These may be people who have just been reading it, or who like the company of rather a greater number of kind-hearted and sensible women than Thackeray commonly allows us to know; but certainly he has not portrayed a finer and truer fellow than Samuel Titmarsh, and we do not dispute any one’s good opinion of the book, while we do not relinquish our own concerning different ones.
Not that we are inclined to a great affection for the story of “Catherine,” though this is very different from the tale last named. There is not a lovable person, high or low, in it,—not a soul to respect or even pity ; and such purpose as Thackeray had in rebuking the romantic use of rascality in fiction, by depicting rogues and their female friends in their true characters, would seem to have been sufficiently served by it. We are far enough now from the days of “Eugene Aram” and the novels with murderers for heroes, but we have by no means got rid of immoral heroines, and the unvarnished adventures of “ Catherine” may still he read with profit. She is in brief a bad young person, pretty, vain, and heartless, who becomes the mistress of a nobleman, and who, when deserted by him, marries an old rustic lover, and survives to meet her paramour many years after. In hopes of becoming his wife, she murders her husband with the help of her natural son, in whose company she is hanged. It is a horrible story from first to last; so horrible that there seems no sufficient reason for suppressing (as has been done by Thackeray’s English publishers, whom Messrs. Fields, Osgood, & Co. have naturally followed) the account of the murder and execution, which Thackeray copied from newspapers describing actual occurrences, and the effect of which the reader misses. In this dreadful history, the author tears from the essential ugliness of sin and crime the veil of romance, and shows them for what they are ; but while there is not the least glamour of sentiment in the book, it is full of the fascination of his wonderful art. The scene is laid in that eighteenth century which he loved to paint, and he has hardly ever caused certain phases of its life to be better acted or costumed. The Count Galgenstein, Catherine’s lover, the handsome, stupid profligate, with all the vices of the English and German blood that mingled in his veins, who lapses at last into a garrulous, sickly, tedious, elegant old reprobate; Catherine, with no more morality or conscience than an animal, — pretty, ambitious, scheming, thrifty, and fond of her brutal son, who grows to manhood with whatever is bad from either parent become worse in him ; Brock, Galgenstein’s corporal and her Majesty’s recruiting-sergeant, subsequently convict, and highwayman, and finally accomplice in the murder of Catherine’s husband ; this husband himself, with his avarice and cunning and cowardice, — are persons whose character and accessories are powerfully painted, and about whom are grouped many others more sketchily drawn, but still completely suggested. The book is one that will not let the reader go, horrible as it is, and little as it is to be liked for anything but its morality. This is admirable, to our thinking; it is very simple and obvious, as the morality is in all Thackeray’s books ; whence those who think that there is some mighty subtle difference between right and wrong have begun to say he is a shallow moralist.
Among the books satirized in “ Catherine” is “Oliver Twist,” and Nancy is laughed at as an impossibility. The reader will remember how a sort of reparation is afterwards made in “The Newcomes,” where this novel is praised. We believe Thackeray felt no compunctions concerning Bulwer’s romances, which here come in for a far larger share of his scorn.