LITERARY GOSSIP.

Press, Volume XLVIII, Issue 7863, 14 May 1891, Page 6

LITERARY GOSSIP.

Mm Ritchie's anecdote of Charlotte Bronte as lioness and wet blanket »t Thackeray's party, β-nd Messrs Merivale and Marzlals' well-meant little rnakenhift for tbac JLife -svliicli none but Mm .Kitchie may give, have set tongues talking faster than ever about Thackeray. There has been something of the old taking of sides. Some still can see only the cynicism and satire, others only the tenderness, of the man. Such disputants miss tbe truth that the tenderness and the sarcasm were but the inside and the outside of the same character. Thackeray was, in a manner, the English Cervantes of a later age. His first novel was expressly and significantly a novel without a hero. It was not for nothing that he had burlesqued the romancers, from Scott and Dumas down to Lyiton and James and Disraeli. In the recoil from heroics, he understates heroism. Over aud over the world has witnessed this sequel to romance. But Thackeray wrote Esmond " too. He was none of your literary lean kine, for ever comparing themselves with the fat kine of the previous period and boasting how much healthier ie is to be lean than fat.

Thackeray was, no doubt, influenced by another recoil. For a dozen years before the publication of "Vanity Fair" Dickens had been carrying the world before him with uproarious laughter and a luxury of rt*«rs. Becky married, if we recollect aright, the year Paul Dorabey died. Not ; hat. Thackeray did not admire Dickens's zeni'is and generously praise it. His story of his own child asking him to write ->rorie<* like Mr Dickens's is surely one of he prettiest in all the gossip of literature. But the emotional exuberance of the one could not but intensify the reserve of the other. Mr Traill has made Sterne retort oa Thackeray's criticism of hfo excessive sensibility, that understatement is as much a bit of rhetoric as overstatement. Thackeray's smile is. to say r.he least, no ie»B a sign of sensibility than Dickens's tears and laughter, xhe real Thackeray in hi 3 books, no less than his life, is very reverent, very tender. Bat reverence and enderness torn to satire in " Vanity Fair."