LIST OF PLATES W. M. THACKERAY. From a drawing by E. Goodwyn Lewis in the - LOVEL THE WIDOWER Frontispiece INTRODUCTION THE contents of our last volume are of unusual though varying interest, and of excellence more various almost than their interest itself. 6 The Wolves and the Lamb is a curious comparative study. I suppose that, as the knowing ones say so, it is not a play'; yet, speaking as a babe and suckling in that matter, I should say it was much more like the plays of 1908 than like those of 1854. But no doubt it is still rather a novel thrown into dialogue than an actual drama. And it has distinct advantages over its remaniement. Julia is certainly rather more human than Elizabeth: though the objection taken by some to Elizabeth herself, that she is almost engaged to three people at once, and marries a fourth, will not hold for a moment. There is ample warrant for that. Touchit, less ambitious, is certainly more satisfactory than Batchelor: and if Bedford is pruned to some advantage in the novel, his presentation in the play has the interest of connecting more closely 1 Denis Duval, though a posthumous work and left unfinished, is put before the Roundabout Papers for two reasons:-first because it completes, and naturally goes with, the Novel-series to which Lovel the Widower also belongs; but secondly, and still more, because it is unfinished and cannot (even in the part that we have) be considered to represent Thackeray's final judgement and intentions, as these are represented by the last 'Roundabout' which he sent to press. The Wolves and the Lamb, though earlier even than The Newcomes as a whole, necessarily shows the way to Lovel, the connexion being much closer than that of the Shabby Genteel Story and Philip. with his great elder brethren the Plushes or Pluches. Undoubtedly, however, the double presentation has a peculiar interest of its own: and it is a great advantage to be able to set it before the reader.1 Lovel the Widower itself has, I think, very few thoroughgoing partisans, except such as simply point to the things in it which, being Thackeray's, are indispensable. They exist, and in fair measure: but there is certainly not much to be said for it as a whole performance by such a performer. It was probably knocked together in some haste to supply a necessary contribution to the newly-designed Cornhill Magazine: and, on a not unthrifty variation of the well-known French proverb, he made his arrow out of wood that had been wasted. Although some good plays have been made out of novels, the contrary process has seldom succeeded and indeed it is not very common for complete rehandlings of any kind to be great successes. Thackeray, who had handicapped himself rather heavily in the play, more than doubled the handicap in the novel. His hero (who, though the names are changed, had first appeared in The Kickleburys on the Rhine) is very much the same in both, but his amiable nincompoopery is better suited to the stage than to the page. His heroine has great capabilities, but is insufficiently developed—which is rather hard on her. If Bessy had had the scope of Becky, Blanche, and Beatrix, she might have completed the rubber not unworthily. But perhaps Thackeray's greatest mistake (though one sees the temptation to it, and it has engulfed others) is the transformation he effected of the personage of Captain Touchit into that of Mr. Batchelor. The onlooker in The Wolves and the Lamb naturally does not tell the story 1 This and some other copyright matter, Mrs. Katherine's Lantern' and 'Catherine Hayes', among the Ballads in vol. vii, ‘The Orphan of Pimlico', and some other drawings in vol. x, and Mr. Greenwood's notes to 'Denis Duval ',-are inserted by arrangement with Messrs. Smith, Elder & Co. -seeing that it is not a story but a drama; and he has merely to act his own part in it. Moreover he is—if not a hero or the player of a specially beau rôle at any rate a personage who has to support none that is essentially not beau. To Mr. Batchelor Thackeray-probably not least because he put a certain portion of himself into him, and more, perhaps, than the mere succumbing to the temptation of buying a paper-has been whimsically unkind. He is represented as an elderly and vacillating philanderer; as something very like a coward; as something very much more like a fogy, with a tendency to twaddle greater than his forerunner by many years, Dr. Solomon Pacifico (who boldly assumed the title), had ever shown. In fact, though in a different way, he doubles the attempt in Philip to keep constantly in front a figure which is not acceptable. In parts, however, his creator can never go wrong; and he does not here. If the principals leave to desire', the supporters are inimitable and inestimable. Who but Thackeray could have created, or would have set to work in one almost trifling book, such a triumfeminate as Lady Baker, Mrs. Bonnington, and Mrs. Prior? Clarence Baker (as indeed they all are more or less) is of an old Thackeray house but he is absolutely individual and differentiated from his elders. When Lady Kicklebury changed her title, and had a second son, she certainly did not improve matters. This little wretch would never have walked a hundred miles, or drunk a hundred pints of strong beer, in as many hours. But he is a perfectly live little wretch for all that. Bedford the Butler is, as has been said, an improvement on his original in the Wolves; and, as always, the scattered gems of trait and phrase are inexhaustible. One is indeed bound to differ with Thackeray as to the virtues of second sleep-lie as long as you like, awake or half-awake, 'cooking yourself for the day,' as some famous physician is said to have said: but don't go to sleep again after it is light. This, however, is controversial and not literary. The sketch of the lieutenant of the Bom-Retiro Caçadores; the scene with the Master of Boniface; the semi-dramatized conversation in the schoolroom; the admirable utilization of Cecilia's harp, which is almost a dramatis persona; the apostrophe (referred to in the first of these Introductions) to the comet of Fifty-eight; and the conclusion where the Harp asserts itself, are all, in the familiar words, 'good enough for anything' and too good for almost anything but sometning of Thackeray's. If the adversary insists on the last word, and says that they are too good for the something itself-why, there is nothing to do with a person who will have the last word but to let him have it. It has been usual, even with no extreme admirers of Thackeray, to compound for dispraise of Lovel the Widower and Philip by expressing the highest anticipations of what Denis Duval might have been, and all but the highest approbation of that part of it which exists. Nor is this by any means to be set down to mere respect humain, or to the natural, laudable, and almost irresistible interest of a tale half-told in such circumstances. In many ways its advent was to be welcomed, and its death ere prime to be lamented. In the first place, it would have given— has actually given-scope for yet further utilizing of that marvellous acquaintanceship with the tones and manners of the eighteenth century; and would thus have helped to complete Esmond and The Virginians, still leaving room for another to fill the space between 1715 and 1755. Moreover, as has been more fully revealed of late, but as appears to some extent in the book itself, and in the valuable Notes' on the book which Mr. Greenwood published in the Cornhill Magazine after the author's death, there would have been something in it from that private stock of experience and reminiscence on which Thackeray knew how to draw so effectively. But it does not want considerations' of this ' |