Famous Reviews by Editor: R. Brimley Johnson

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But if these performers give us pain, we are not ashamed to own, as we
are speaking openly, that the chief actress herself gives us none at
all. For there is of course a principal pilgrim in Vanity Fair, as much
as in its emblematical original, Bunyan's "Progress"; only unfortunately
this one is travelling the wrong way. And we say "unfortunately" merely
by way of courtesy, for in reality we care little about the matter. No,
Becky--our hearts neither bleed for you, nor cry out against you. You
are wonderfully clever, and amusing, and accomplished, and intelligent,
and the Soho _ateliers_ were not the best nurseries for a moral
training; and you were married early in life to a regular blackleg, and
you have had to live upon your wits ever since, which is not an
improving sort of maintenance; and there is much to be said for and
against; but still you are not one of us, and there is an end to our
sympathies and censures. People who allow their feelings to be lacerated
by such a character and career as yours, are doing both you and
themselves great injustice. No author could have openly introduced a
near connexion of Satan's into the best London society, nor would the
moral end intended have been answered by it; but really and honestly,
considering Becky in her human character, we know of none which so
thoroughly satisfies our highest _beau ideal_ of feminine wickedness,
with so slight a shock to our feelings and properties. It is very
dreadful, doubtless, that Becky neither loved the husband who loved her,
nor the child of her own flesh and blood, nor indeed any body but
herself; but, as far as she is concerned, we cannot pretend to be
scandalized--for how could she without a heart? It is very shocking of
course that she committed all sorts of dirty tricks, and jockeyed her
neighbours, and never cared what she trampled under foot if it happened
to obstruct her step; but how could she be expected to do otherwise
without a conscience? The poor little woman was most tryingly placed;
she came into the world without the customary letters of credit upon
those two great bankers of humanity, "Heart and Conscience," and it was
no fault of hers if they dishonoured all her bills. All she could do in
this dilemma was to establish the firmest connexion with the inferior
commercial branches of "Sense and Tact," who secretly do much business
in the name of the head concern, and with whom her "fine frontal
development" gave her unlimited credit. She saw that selfishness was the
metal which the stamp of heart was suborned to pass; that hypocrisy was
the homage that vice rendered to virtue; that honesty was, at all
events, acted, because it was the best policy; and so she practised the
arts of selfishness and hypocrisy like anybody else in Vanity Fair, only
with this difference, that she brought them to their highest possible
pitch of perfection. For why is it that, looking round in this world, we
find plenty of characters to compare with her up to a certain pitch, but
none which reach her actual standard? Why is it that, speaking of this
friend or that, we say in the tender mercies of our hearts, "No, she is
not _quite_ so bad as Becky?" We fear not only because she has more
heart and conscience, but also because she has less cleverness.

No; let us give Becky her due. There is enough in this world of ours, as
we all know, to provoke a saint, far more a poor little devil like her.
She had none of those fellow-feelings which make us wondrous kind. She
saw people around her cowards in vice, and simpletons in virtue, and she
had no patience with either, for she was as little the one as the other
herself. She saw women who loved their husbands and yet teazed them, and
ruining their children although they doated upon them, and she sneered
at their utter inconsistency. Wickedness or goodness, unless coupled
with strength, were alike worthless to her. That weakness which is the
blessed pledge of our humanity, was to her only the despicable badge of
our imperfection. She thought, it might be, of her master's words,
"Fallen Cherub! to be weak is to be miserable!" and wondered how we
could be such fools as first to sin and then to be sorry. Becky's light
was defective, but she acted up to it. Her goodness goes as far as good
temper, and her principles as far as shrewd sense, and we may thank her
consistency for showing us what they are both worth.

It is another thing to pretend to settle whether such a character be
_prima facie_ impossible, though devotion to the better sex might well
demand the assertion. There are mysteries of iniquity, under the
semblance of man and woman, read of in history, or met with in the
unchronicled sufferings of private life, which would almost make us
believe that the powers of Darkness occasionally made use of this earth
for a Foundling Hospital, and sent their imps to us, already provided
with a return-ticket. We shall not decide on the lawfulness or otherwise
of any attempt to depict such importations; we can only rest perfectly
satisfied that, granting the author's premises, it is impossible to
imagine them carried out with more felicitous skill and more exquisite
consistency than in the heroine of "Vanity Fair." At all events, the
infernal regions have no reason to be ashamed of little Becky, nor the
ladies either: she has, at least, all the cleverness of the sex.

The great charm, therefore, and comfort of Becky is, that we may study
her without any compunctions. The misery of this life is not the evil
that we see, but the good and the evil which are so inextricably twisted
together. It is that perpetual memento ever meeting one--

How in this vile world below
Noblest things find vilest using,

that is so very distressing to those who have hearts as well as eyes.
But Becky relieves them of all this pain--at least in her own person.
Pity would be thrown away upon one who has not heart enough for it to
ache even for herself. Becky is perfectly happy, as all must be who
excel in what they love best. Her life is one exertion of successful
power. Shame never visits her, for "'Tis conscience that makes cowards
of us all"--and she has none. She realizes that _ne plus ultra_ of
sublunary comfort which it was reserved for a Frenchman to define--the
blessed combination of _"le bon estomac et le mauvais coeur"_: for Becky
adds to her other good qualities that of an excellent digestion.

Upon the whole, we are not afraid to own that we rather enjoy her _ignis
fatuus_ course, dragging the weak and the vain and the selffish
[Transcriber's note: sic], through mud and mire, after her, and acting
all parts, from the modest rushlight to the gracious star, just as it
suits her. Clever little imp that she is! What exquisite tact she
shows!--what unflagging good humour!--what ready self-possession! Becky
never disappoints us; she never even makes us tremble. We know that her
answer will come exactly suiting her one particular object, and
frequently three or four more in prospect. What respect, too, she has
for those decencies which more virtuous, but more stupid humanity, often
disdains! What detection of all that is false and mean! What instinct
for all that is true and great! She is her master's true pupil in that:
she knows what is really divine as well as he, and bows before it. She
honours Dobbin in spite of his big feet; she respects her husband more
than ever she did before, perhaps for the first time, at the very moment
when he is stripping not only her jewels, but name, honour, and comfort
off her.

We are not so sure either whether we are justified in calling hers _"le
mauvais coeur."_ Becky does not pursue any one vindictively; she never
does gratuitous mischief. The fountain is more dry than poisoned. She is
even generous--when she can afford it. Witness that burst of plain
speaking in Dobbin's favour to the little dolt Amelia, for which we
forgive her many a sin. 'Tis true she wanted to get rid of her; but let
that pass. Becky was a thrifty dame, and liked to despatch two birds
with one stone. And she was honest, too, after a fashion. The part of
wife she acts at first as well, and better than most; but as for that of
mother, there she fails from the beginning. She knew that maternal love
was no business of hers--that a fine frontal development could give her
no help there--and puts so little spirit into her imitation that no one
could be taken in for a moment. She felt that that bill, of all others,
would be sure to be dishonoured, and it went against her conscience--we
mean her sense--to send it in.

In short, the only respect in which Becky's course gives us pain is when
it locks itself into that of another, and more genuine child of this
earth. No one can regret those being entangled in her nets whose vanity
and meanness of spirit alone led them into its meshes--such are rightly
served; but we do grudge her that real sacred thing called _love_, even
of a Rawdon Crawley, who has more of that self-forgetting, all-purifying
feeling for his little evil spirit than many a better man has for a good
woman. We do grudge Becky _a heart_, though it belong only to a
swindler. Poor, sinned against, vile, degraded, but still true-hearted
Rawdon!--you stand next in our affections and sympathies to honest
Dobbin himself. It was the instinct of a good nature which made the
Major feel that the stamp of the Evil One was upon Becky; and it was the
stupidity of a good nature which made the Colonel never suspect it. He
was a cheat, a black-leg, an unprincipled dog; but still "Rawdon _is_ a
man, and be hanged to him," as the Rector says. We follow him through
the illustrations, which are, in many instances, a delightful
enhancement to the text--as he stands there, with his gentle eyelid,
coarse moustache, and foolish chin, bringing up Becky's coffee-cup with
a kind of dumb fidelity; or looking down at little Rawdon with a more
than paternal tenderness. All Amelia's philoprogenitive idolatries do
not touch us like one fond instinct of "stupid Rawdon."

Dobbin sheds a halo over all the long-necked, loose-jointed,
Scotch-looking gentlemen of our acquaintance. Flat feet and flap ears
seem henceforth incompatible with evil. He reminds us of one of the
sweetest creations that have appeared from any modern pen--that plain,
awkward, loveable "Long Walter," in Lady Georgina Fullerton's beautiful
novel of "Grantley Manor." Like him, too, in his proper self-respect; for
Dobbin--lumbering, heavy, shy, and absurdly over modest as the ugly fellow
is--is yet true to himself. At one time he seems to be sinking into the
mere abject dangler after Amelia; but he breaks his chains like a man, and
resumes them again like a man, too, although half disenchanted of his
amiable delusion.

But to return for a moment to Becky. The only criticism we would offer
is one which the author has almost disarmed by making her mother a
Frenchwoman. The construction of this little clever monster is
diabolically French. Such a _lusus naturae_ as a woman without a heart
and conscience would, in England, be a mere brutal savage, and poison
half a village. France is the land for the real Syren, with the woman's
face and the dragon's claws. The genus of Pigeon and Laffarge claims it
for its own--only that our heroine takes a far higher class by not
requiring the vulgar matter of fact of crime to develop her full powers.
It is an affront to Becky's tactics to believe that she could ever be
reduced to so low a resource, or, that if she were, anybody would find
it out. We, therefore, cannot sufficiently applaud the extreme
discretion with which Mr. Thackeray has hinted at the possibly assistant
circumstances of Joseph Sedley's dissolution. A less delicacy of
handling would have marred the harmony of the whole design. Such a
casualty as that suggested to our imagination was not intended for the
light net of Vanity Fair to draw on shore; it would have torn it to
pieces. Besides it is not wanted. Poor little Becky is bad enough to
satisfy the most ardent student of "good books." Wickedness, beyond a
certain pitch, gives no increase of gratification even to the sternest
moralist; and one of Mr. Thackeray's excellences is the sparing quantity
he consumes. The whole _use_, too, of the work--that of generously
measuring one another by this standard--is lost, the moment you convict
Becky of a capital crime. Who can, with any face, liken a dear friend to
a murderess? Whereas now there are no little symptoms of fascinating
ruthlessness, graceful ingratitude, or ladylike selfishness, observable
among our charming acquaintance, that we may not immediately detect to
an inch, and more effectually intimidate by the simple application of
the Becky gauge than by the most vehement use of all ten commandments.
Thanks to Mr. Thackeray, the world is now provided with an _idea_,
which, if we mistake not, will be the skeleton in the corner of every
ball-room and boudoir for a long time to come. Let us leave it intact in
its unique fount and freshness--a Becky, and nothing more. We should,
therefore, advise our readers to cut out that picture of our heroine's
"Second Appearance as Clytemnestra," which casts so uncomfortable a
glare over the latter part of the volume, and, disregarding all hints
and inuendoes, simply to let the changes and chances of this moral life
have due weight in their minds. Jos had been much in India. His was a
bad life; he ate and drank most imprudently, and his digestion was not
to be compared with Becky's. No respectable office would have ensured
"Waterloo Sedley."

"Vanity Fair" is pre-eminently a novel of the day--not in the vulgar
sense, of which there are too many, but as a literal photograph of the
manners and habits of the nineteenth century, thrown on to paper by the
light of a powerful mind; and one also of the most artistic effect. Mr.
Thackeray has a peculiar adroitness in leading on the fancy, or rather
memory of his readers from one set of circumstances to another by the
seeming chances and coincidences of common life, as an artist leads the
spectator's eye through the subject of his picture by a skilful
repetition of colour. This is why it is impossible to quote from his
book with any justice to it. The whole growth of the narrative is so
matted and interwoven together with tendril-like links and bindings,
that there is no detaching a flower with sufficient length of stalk to
exhibit it to advantage. There is that mutual dependence in his
characters which is the first requisite in painting every-day life: no
one is stuck on a separate pedestal--no one is sitting for his portrait.
There may be one exception--we mean Sir Pitt Crawley, senior; it is
possible, nay, we hardly doubt, that this baronet was closer drawn from
individual life than anybody else in the book; but granting that fact,
the animal was so unique an exception, that we wonder so shrewd an
artist could stick him into a gallery so full of our familiars. The
scenes in Germany, we can believe, will seem to many readers of an
English book hardly less extravagantly absurd--grossly and gratuitously
overdrawn; but the initiated will value them as containing some of the
keenest strokes of truth and humour that "Vanity Fair" exhibits, and not
enjoy them the less for being at our neighbour's expense. For the
thorough appreciation of the chief character they are quite
indispensable too. The whole course of the work may be viewed as the
_Wander-Jahre_ of a far cleverer female, _Wilhelm Meister_. We have
watched her in the ups-and-downs of life--among the humble, the
fashionable, the great, and the pious--and found her ever new, yet ever
the same; but still Becky among the students was requisite to complete
the full measure of our admiration.

"Jane Eyre," as a work, and one of equal popularity, is, in almost every
respect, a total contrast to "Vanity Fair." The characters and events,
though some of them masterly in conception, are coined expressly for the
purpose of bringing out great effects. The hero and heroine are beings
both so singularly unattractive that the reader feels they can have no
vocation in the novel but to be brought together; and they do things
which, though not impossible, lie utterly beyond the bounds of
probability. On this account a short sketch of the plan seems requisite;
not but what it is a plan familiar enough to all readers of novels--
especially those of the old school and those of the lowest school of our
own day. For Jane Eyre is merely another Pamela, who, by the force of
her character and the strength of her principles, is carried
victoriously through great trials and temptations from the man she
loves. Nor is she even a Pamela adapted and refined to modern notions;
for though the story is conducted without those derelictions of decorum
which we are to believe had their excuse in the manners of Richardson's
time, yet it stamped with a coarseness of language and laxity of tone
which have certainly no excuse in ours. It is a very remarkable book: we
have no remembrance of another combining such genuine power with such
horrid taste. Both together have equally assisted to gain the great
popularity it has enjoyed; for in these days of extravagant adoration of
all that bears the stamp of novelty and originality, sheer rudeness and
vulgarity have come in for a most mistaken worship.

The story is written in the first person. Jane begins with her earliest
recollections, and at once takes possession of the readers' intensest
interest by the masterly picture of a strange and oppressed child she
raises up in a few strokes before him. She is an orphan, and a dependant
in the house of a selfish, hard-hearted aunt, against whom the
disposition of the little Jane chafes itself in natural antipathy, till
she contrives to make the unequal struggle as intolerable to her
oppressor as it is to herself. She is, therefore, at eight years of age,
got rid of to a sort of Dothegirls Hall, where she continues to enlist
our sympathies for a time with her little pinched fingers, cropped hair,
and empty stomach. But things improve: the abuses of the institution are
looked into. The Puritan patron, who holds that young orphan girls are
only safely brought up upon the rules of La Trappe, is superseded by an
enlightened committee--the school assumes a sound English character--
Jane progresses duly from scholar to teacher, and passes ten profitable
and not unhappy years at Lowood. Then she advertises for a situation as
governess, and obtains one immediately in one of the midland counties.
We see her, therefore, as she leaves Lowood, to enter upon a new life--a
small, plain, odd creature, who has been brought up dry upon school
learning, and somewhat stunted accordingly in mind and body, and who is
now thrown upon the world as ignorant of its ways, and as destitute of
its friendships, as a shipwrecked mariner upon a strange coast.

Thornfield Hall is the property of Mr. Rochester--a bachelor addicted to
travelling. She finds it at first in all the peaceful prestige of an
English gentleman's seat when "nobody is at the hall." The companions
are an old decayed gentlewoman housekeeper--a far away cousin of the
squire's--and a young French child, Jane's pupil, Mr. Rochester's ward
and reputed daughter. There is a pleasing monotony in the summer
solitude of the old country house, with its comfort, respectability, and
dulness, which Jane paints to the life; but there is one circumstance
which varies the sameness and casts a mysterious feeling over the scene.
A strange laugh is heard from time to time in a distant part of the
house--a laugh which grates discordantly upon Jane's ear. She listens,
watches, and inquires, but can discover nothing but a plain matter of
fact woman, who sits sewing somewhere in the attics, and goes up and
down stairs peaceably to and from her dinner with the servants. But a
mystery there is, though nothing betrays it, and it comes in with
marvellous effect from the monotonous reality of all around. After
awhile Mr. Rochester comes to Thornfield, and sends for the child and
her governess occasionally to bear him company. He is a dark,
strange-looking man--strong and large--of the brigand stamp, with fine
eyes and lowering brows--blunt and sarcastic in his manners, with a kind
of misanthropical frankness, which seems based upon utter contempt for
his fellow-creatures and a surly truthfulness which is more rudeness than
honesty. With his arrival disappears all the prestige of country
innocence that had invested Thornfield Hall. He brings the taint of the
world upon him, and none of its illusions. The queer little governess is
something new to him. He talks to her at one time imperiously as to a
servant, and at another recklessly as to a man. He pours into her ears
disgraceful tales of his past life, connected with the birth of little
Adele, which any man with common respect for a woman, and that a mere
girl of eighteen, would have spared her; but which eighteen in this case
listens to as if it were nothing new, and certainly nothing distasteful.
He is captious and Turk-like--she is one day his confidant, and another
his unnoticed dependant. In short, by her account, Mr. Rochester is a
strange brute, somewhat in the Squire Western style of absolute and
capricious eccentricity, though redeemed in him by signs of a cultivated
intellect, and gleams of a certain fierce justice of heart. He has a
_mind_, and when he opens it at all, he opens it freely to her. Jane
becomes attached to her "master," as Pamela-like she calls him, and it
is not difficult to see that solitude and propinquity are taking effect
upon him also. An odd circumstance heightens the dawning romance. Jane
is awoke one night by that strange discordant laugh close to her ear--
then a noise as if hands feeling along the wall. She rises--opens her
door, finds the passage full of smoke, is guided by it to her master's
room, whose bed she discovers enveloped in flames, and by her timely aid
saves his life. After this they meet no more for ten days, when Mr.
Rochester returns from a visit to a neighbouring family, bringing with
him a housefull of distinguished guests; at the head of whom is Miss
Blanche Ingram, a haughty beauty of high birth, and evidently the
especial object of the Squire's attentions--upon which tumultuous
irruption Miss Eyre slips back into her naturally humble position.

Our little governess is now summoned away to attend her aunt's death-bed,
who is visited by some compunctions towards her, and she is absent
a month. When she returns Thornfield Hall is quit of all its guests, and
Mr. Rochester and she resume their former life of captious cordiality on
the one side, and diplomatic humility on the other. At the same time the
bugbear of Miss Ingram and of Mr. Rochester's engagement with her is
kept up, though it is easy to see that this and all concerning that lady
is only a stratagem to try Jane's character and affection upon the most
approved Griselda precedent. Accordingly an opportunity for explanation
ere long offers itself, where Mr. Rochester has only to take it. Miss
Eyre is desired to walk with him in shady alleys, and to sit with him on
the roots of an old chestnut-tree towards the close of evening, and of
course she cannot disobey her "master"--whereupon there ensues a scene
which, as far as we remember, is new equally in art or nature; in which
Miss Eyre confesses her love--whereupon Mr. Rochester drops not only his
cigar (which she seems to be in the habit of lighting for him) but his
mask, and finally offers not only heart, but hand. The wedding day is
soon fixed, but strange misgivings and presentiments haunt the young
lady's mind. The night but one before her bed-room is entered by a
horrid phantom, who tries on the wedding veil, sends Jane into a swoon
of terror, and defeats all the favourite refuge of a bad dream by
leaving the veil in two pieces. But all is ready. The bride has no
friends to assist--the couple walk to church--only the clergyman and the
clerk are there--but Jane's quick eye has seen two figures lingering
among the tombstones, and these two follow them into church. The
ceremony commences, when at the due charge which summons any man to come
forward and show just cause why they should not be joined together, a
voice interposes to forbid the marriage. There is an impediment, and a
serious one. The bridegroom has a wife not only living, but living under
the very roof of Thornfield Hall. Hers was that discordant laugh which
had so often caught Jane's ear; she it was who in her malice had tried
to burn Mr. Rochester in his bed--who had visited Jane by night and torn
her veil, and whose attendant was that same pretended sew-woman who had
so strongly excited Jane's curiosity. For Mr. Rochester's wife is a
creature, half fiend, half maniac, whom he had married in a distant part
of the world, and whom now, in self-constituted code of morality, he had
thought it his right, and even his duty, to supersede by a more
agreeable companion. Now follow scenes of a truly tragic power. This is
the grand crisis in Jane's life. Her whole soul is wrapt up in Mr.
Rochester. He has broken her trust, but not diminished her love. He
entreats her to accept all that he still can give, his heart and his
home; he pleads with the agony not only of a man who has never known
what it was to conquer a passion, but of one who, by that same
self-constituted code, now burns to atone for a disappointed crime. There
is no one to help her against him or against herself. Jane had no friends
to stand by her at the altar, and she has none to support her now she is
plucked away from it. There is no one to be offended or disgraced at her
following him to the sunny land of Italy, as he proposes, till the
maniac should die. There is no duty to any one but to herself, and this
feeble reed quivers and trembles beneath the overwhelming weight of love
and sophistry opposed to it. But Jane triumphs; in the middle of the
night she rises--glides out of her room--takes off her shoes as she
passes Mr. Rochester's chamber;--leaves the house, and casts herself
upon a world more desert than ever to her--