One hopes never to read "Lovel the Widower" again,
and one gladly skips some of the speeches of the Old Campaigner in
"The Newcomes." They are terrible, but not more terrible than life.
Yet it is hard to understand how Mr. Ruskin, for example, can let
such scenes and characters hide from his view the kindness,
gentleness, and pity of Thackeray's nature. The Letters must open
all eyes that are not wilfully closed, and should at last overcome
every prejudice.
In the Letters we see a man literally hungering and thirsting after
affection, after love--a man cut off by a cruel stroke of fate from
his natural solace, from the centre of a home.
"God took from me a lady dear,"
he says, in the most touching medley of doggerel and poetry, made
"instead of writing my Punch this morning." Losing "a lady dear,"
he takes refuge as he may, he finds comfort as he can, in all the
affections within his reach, in the society of an old college friend
and of his wife, in the love of all children, beginning with his
own; in a generous liking for all good work and for all good
fellows.
Did any man of letters except Scott ever write of his rivals as
Thackeray wrote of Dickens? Artists are a jealous race. "Potter
hates potter, and poet hates poet," as Hesiod said so long ago.
This jealousy is not mere envy, it is really a strong sense of how
things ought to be done, in any art, touched with a natural
preference for a man's own way of doing them.
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