Back to the Classics 2021 #11

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2021.

A 19^th Century Classic. I like literary criticism written by novelists. For instance, I always liked George Orwell better as a critic than a novelist. On his advice, I’ve read Smollet, Shaw (here and here), and Ernest Bramah. See the classic essay Good Bad Books. Also, I read The Good Companions by J.B. Priestley and Gone to Earth by Mary Webb because they were mentioned in Roald Dahl's Matilda.

The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century - William Makepeace Thackeray

This collects six lectures on 1) Swift; 2) Congreve and Addison; 3) Steele; 4) Prior, Gay, and Pope; 5) Hogarth, Smollett, and Fielding; and 6) Sterne and Goldsmith. Thackeray respects his forbearers. It’s clear he did his homework while preparing for these talks. He read the works of the subjects, old newspapers and magazines, memoirs and collections of anecdotes.

Thackeray excels in the judicious quotation from the works. From Addison in the Spectator:

I have always preferred cheerfulness to mirth. The latter I consider as an act, the former as an habit of the mind. Mirth is short and transient, cheerfulness fixed and permanent. Those are often raised into the greatest transports of mirth who are subject to the greatest depression of melancholy: on the contrary, cheerfulness, though it does not give the mind such an exquisite gladness, prevents it from falling into any depths of sorrow. Mirth is like a flash of lightning that breaks through a gloom of clouds, and glitters for a moment; cheerfulness keeps up a kind of daylight in the mind, and fills it with a steady and perpetual serenity.

Marvelous that cheerfulness can be as dauntless as courage. What a great way to look at cheerfulness, as a virtue perhaps not up there wisdom and endurance but a good things to cultivate ue nevertheless like sympathy and relish of life.

Even some footnotes are hilarious:

Besides these famous books of Scott's and Johnson's, there is a copious Life by Thomas Sheridan (Dr. Johnson's “Sherry”), father of Richard Brinsley, and son of that good-natured, clever, Irish Doctor, Thomas Sheridan, Swift's intimate, who lost his chaplaincy by so unluckily choosing for a text on the king's birthday, “Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof!”

As for his criticism, he doesn’t have a theory and sometimes he’s didactic. But he does have an orientation that values ethics and literary taste.

when Mr. Punch, that godless old rebel, breaks every law and laughs at it with odious triumph, outwits his lawyer, bullies the beadle, knocks his wife about the head, and hangs the hangman—don't you see in the comedy, in the song, in the dance, in the ragged little Punch's puppet-show—the Pagan protest? Doesn't it seem as if Life puts in its plea and sings its comment? Look how the lovers walk and hold each other's hands and whisper! Sings the chorus—“There is nothing like love, there is nothing like youth, there is nothing like beauty of your spring-time. Look! how old age tries to meddle with merry sport! Beat him with his own crutch, the wrinkled old dotard! There is nothing like youth, there is nothing like beauty, there is nothing like strength. Strength and valour win beauty and youth. Be brave and conquer. Be young and happy. Enjoy, enjoy, enjoy! Would you know the segreto per esser felice (it’s better to laugh than be sighing)? Here it is, in a smiling mistress and a cup of Falernian.” As the boy tosses the cup and sings his song—hark! what is that chaunt coming nearer and nearer? What is that dirge which will disturb us? The lights of the festival burn dim—the cheeks turn pale—the voice quavers—and the cup drops on the floor. Who's there? Death and Fate are at the gate, and they will come in.

Maybe it’s the pandemic talking, but I find the run-up to that last sentence superb. Yes, they will come in.

Besides readers like me who habitually mine all the books they read lately for nuggets to deal with everything that’s going on now, who will read Thackeray’s appreciations of his – and Dickens’ and Trollope’s - forebears? Hardcore readers who are seriously into the 18^th century will deeply enjoy this. Though a sensitive Victorian in most ways, Thackeray had a nostalgia for the rough, gamy 18^th century. He brings to life everyday life in Queen Anne’s time – travel, banquets, fast noblemen. Wonderful stuff to take us away from virus, distancing, N95, diagnostics, stay at home, zoom, PPE, community spread, mask slackers and the vaccine ignorant.