Whether Clive does or does not marry Ethel, or Esmond,
Beatrix, does not very greatly excite our curiosity. We cannot ring
the bells for Clive's second wedding as the villagers celebrated the
bridal of Pamela. It is the development of character, it is the
author's comments, it is his own personality and his unmatched and
inimitable style, that win our admiration and affection. We can
take up "Vanity Fair," or "Pendennis," or "The Newcomes," just where
the book opens by chance, and read them with delight, as we may read
Montaigne. When one says one can take up a book anywhere, it
generally means that one can also lay it down anywhere. But it is
not so with Thackeray. Whenever we meet him he holds us with his
charm, his humour, his eloquence, his tenderness. If he has not, in
the highest degree, the narrative power, he does possess, in a
degree perhaps beyond any other writer of English, that kind of
poetic quality which is not incompatible with prose writing.
A great deal has been said about prose poetry. As a rule, it is
very poor stuff. As prose it has a tendency to run into blank
verse; as poetry it is highly rhetorical and self-conscious. It
would be invidious and might be irritating to select examples from
modern masters of prose-poetry. They have never been poets. But
the prose of a poet like Milton may be, and is, poetical in the true
sense; and so, upon occasions, was the prose of Thackeray.
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