THACKERAY [Published in "The Christian Examiner," 1864. Reprinted in "Character and Characteristic Men," 1866. Copyright, 1894, by Charlotte B. Whipple.] THE HE death of Thackeray has elicited from the press both of England and the United States a series of warm testimonials to the genius of the writer and the character of the man. The majority of them bear the marks of proceeding from personal friends or acquaintances, and the majority of them resent with special heat the imputation that the object of their eulogy was, in any respect, a cynic. A shrewd suspicion arises that such agreement in selecting the topic of defence indicates an uneasy consciousness of a similar agreement, in the reading public, as to the justice. of the charge. If this were so, we should think the question was settled against the eulogists. As the inmost individuality of a man of genius inevitably escapes in his writings, and as the multitude of readers judge of him by the general impression his works have left on their minds, their intelligent verdict in regard to his real disposition and nature carries with it more authority than the testimony of his chance companions. Acres of evidence concerning the correct life and benevolent feelings of Smollett and Wieland can blind no discerning eye to the palpable fact that sensuality and misanthropy entered largely into the composition of the author of "Roderick Random," and that a profound disbelief in what commonly goes under the name of virtue, and a delight in toying with voluptuous images, characterized the historian of " Agathon." The world has little to do with the outward life a man of genius privately leads, in comparison with the inward life he universally diffuses; and an author who contrives to impress fair-minded readers that his mind is tainted with cynical views of man and society, can hardly pass as a genial lover of his race on the strength of certificates that he has performed individual acts of kindness and good-will. The question relates to the kind of influence he exercises on those he has never seen or known. What this influence is, in the case of Thackeray, we by no means think is expressed in so blunt and rough a term as "cynical," and those who use it must be aware that it but coarsely conveys the notion they have of the individuality of the writer they seek to characterize. But clear perceptions often exist in persons who lack the power, or shirk the labor, of giving exact definitions; and among the readers of Thackeray who quietly take in the subtile essence of his personality, there is less disagreement in their impressions than in their statements. To give what seems to us a fair transcript of the general feeling respecting the writer and the man will be the object of the present paper. And, first, to exclude him at once from the class and company of the great masters of characterization, we must speak of his obvious limitations. He is reported to have said of himself, that he "had no head above his eyes"; and a man who has no head above his eyes is not an observer after the fashion of Shakespeare, or Cervantes, or Goethe, or Scott, or even of Fielding. The eye observes only what the mind, the heart, and the imagination are gifted to see; and sight must be reinforced by insight before souls can be discerned as well as manners, ideas as well as objects, realities and relations as well as appearances and accidental connections. But, without taking an epigram of humorous self-depreciation as the statement of a fact, it is still plain that Thackeray was not a philosopher or a poet, in the sense in which a great novelist or dramatist possesses the qualities of either. He had no conception of causes and principles, no grasp of human nature, as distinguished from the pe |