ART. VII.-1. The Life of William Makepeace Thackeray. By Lewis Melville. Two vols. London: Hutchinson and Co., 1899.

2. The Works of William Makepeace Thackeray, with Biographical Introductions by his daughter, Anne Ritchie. Thirteen vols. London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1898-99.

MR

R. LEWIS MELVILLE, who has just published a 'Life' of Thackeray in two thick volumes, has not presented the public with a living portrait, but he has done several other things. He has, for instance, put a rather doubtful word to heroic use. Though,' he begins his preface, 'it is more than five and thirty years since his death, until now there has never been published a Life of Thackeray which has had any pretensions to finality.' Are we to interpret this as meaning that the last word about Thackeray had not been spoken before Mr. Melville published his Life,' and that Mr. Melville has at length spoken it? If so, we have only the author's own testimony that his work is final, and it remains to be seen whether it has anything more than the 'pretensions' to finality which, according to him, have as yet been unknown.

It is courageous of this new writer to challenge comparisons by publishing his book whilst the reading world is still enjoying Mrs. Richmond Ritchie's biographical introductions to the last edition of her father's works. Her knowledge of every intimate or important fact, not to speak of her enchanted pen, might have daunted men more talented than Mr. Melville. Not so; he is without fear-if not without reproach—for, while gleaning much from Mrs. Ritchie's pages, he claims to have produced a work of a higher order. He brushes away his obligations with the somewhat contemptuous remark: Mrs. Ritchie's interesting biographical Introductions are little else than material for a full Life.'

What then, we must ask, is Biography? Is it a picture which conveys the living presence of a man, or is it a discursive collection of remarks and facts? And what are the qualities necessary to a biographer? Not only courage of this, as we have pointed out, Mr. Melville has enough. Not only industry and hero-worship, for of these virtues also he possesses full measure; and if they sufficed to create a work of art he might found an artistic reputation. But these qualities are not enough, though many recent examples seem to show a widespread opinion that industry and hero-worship are sufficient capital to begin writing upon, and some recent 'Lives are little more than bundles of excellent testimonials tendered to

posterity. These are not the biographies that live, that possess finality. Yet there have been, in comparatively recent times, not a few biographies which, if not 'final,' are at least permanent-not merely chronicles of a man's life, but literary achievements, sometimes literary monuments. To confine ourselves to our own century, we can quote such different examples as Scott's Life of Swift,' Lockhart's of Scott, Stanley's of Arnold, and Mrs. Gaskell's of Charlotte Brontë, besides Carlyle's 'Sterling,' Froude's Carlyle,' Trevelyan's Macaulay,' Canon Ainger's Lamb,' and Mrs. Oliphant's Edward Irving.' All of these books leave us with a vital impression of their subjects, not because of the actual facts that they contribute-for inferior works may contain as many or more-but because the facts are stamped with the biographer's personality; and art may be said to consist in this impress of an individual mind upon its material. It is obvious, too, that the biographer must be in strong sympathy with the man whose life he is recording; and, for this purpose-though proximity is not without its disadvantages the closer they have actually stood to one another in life the better. Nearly all the books we have just cited were the result of long friendship; and the three exceptions (Scott's 'Life of Swift' and the two last-mentioned works) are inspired by the only valuable substitute for personal knowledge -a strong sympathetic imagination, which gains in a flash the insight that months of intercourse may fail to produce. There are, if we may so express ourselves, friendships of the soul, independent of time and space. They are the most enduring of relationships; and great men remain magnetic after death. Canon Ainger, we feel, knew Charles Lamb as intimately as did Coleridge, and more intimately than Wordsworth.

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Imagination, delicacy, and vigour, such are the qualities which go to make good biography and good style; and personal acquaintance or, if that is impossible, a rare intellectual and moral sympathy, are indispensable to the biographer. cannot be said that these qualifications belong to Mr. Melville. Personally unacquainted with Thackeray, he appears to know as little of those who were near to him. This, if his misfortune, is not his fault; but, instead of being content to write from the outside point of view, with warmth for the writer and respect for the man, he has endeavoured to make up for the want of intimacy by adopting an air of familiarity and a tone of hearty assurance which is sometimes apparent in persons new to the society in which they find themselves. His authorities, when not the books of others, seem to be of the

mysterious kind whose friends have known friends of the great, as, for example, the daughter of a doctor who at one time saw Thackeray at Boulogne.

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This is a pity—the more so after the recent appearance of so much new and authentic information in Mrs. Ritchie's work. Literary traditions are within everybody's reach; they are indeed the business of a biographer; yet our writer can hardly be familiar with the memoirs concerning the circle he is describing. Nor, when he touches on that circle, can his observations be described as happy. When, a little before the end,' he writes, one of his daughters asked Thackeray which of his friends he had loved the best, he replied, "Why, dear old Fitz, of course, and Brookfield."' 'It is a singular fact,' adds Mr. Melville, in a note to the word Fitz,' that Tennyson also regarded "dear old Fitz"-after the death of Arthur Hallam-as "his best-loved friend," though, like Thackeray, he saw but little of the Recluse of Woodbridge in later life.' We are at a loss to discover why it is 'a singular fact that three men of genius, who have been warm friends at Cambridge, should remain true and sympathetic to each other through life, especially as the 'Recluse of Woodbridge' (who would have been the first to laugh at such a pompous title) was in every way made to be the crony of the two others. It seems also unnecessary to announce to 'Sir Walter Besant and many others' that Thackeray did not owe his knowledge of the manner of the Upper Ten' to the position brought him by Vanity Fair,' and that there were other reasons: his University friends, Edward Fitzgerald, Monckton Milnes, W. H. Thompson, R. C. Trench, John Sterling, Alfred Tennyson, James Spedding, John Allen, William Brookfield, ... were all gentlemen of good social standing.'

The imagination which is a substitute for personal knowledge has evidently not been vouchsafed to Mr. Melville, but, even apart from this, there is another and an excellent way. The best moments of biography are when a great man speaks for himself, and there are plenty of Thackeray's delightful letters in print. As Mr. Melville's book is made up of extracts, some acknowledged and some unacknowledged, as well from other volumes as from the countless articles he enumerates at the end

Vol. ii, p. 71. Mrs. Ritchie thus recounts the incident in her Introduction to the Christmas Books': In the autumn of 1863 some impulse one day made me ask my father which of his old friends he cared for most. He was standing near the window in the dining-room at Palace Green. He paused a moment, then he said in a gentle sort of way, that of all his friends he had best loved "Old Fitz" and Brookfield," he added.'

of his work, the reprinting of Thackeray's correspondence would hardly have been objectionable to him. Yet he has given us the fewest possible letters in the largest possible space.

Mr. Melville's passion for scissors and paste is astonishing: he not only gives us his own cuttings, but those of other people -scissors and paste to the second and third generation. We do not mean to be ungrateful, far from it. Good extracts are excellent in their place, and scissors are an instrument which Mr. Melville wields more skilfully than his pen; and for much of his work in this line we are truly thankful. His quotations from Thackeray are remarkably well chosen, and we owe him a debt for collecting the novelist's art criticisms and putting them all together in one interesting chapter. We owe him another debt for his model bibliography, a monument of patient research. And when his hero-worship gets the better of him, he can write simply enough.

'He was a man!' he says of Thackeray in his second volume. 'There have been great men who, for goodness (in the right sense of the word), for kindness and tenderness and thoughtfulness, can be compared with him; there have been some men of genius as good, as kind, as tender, and as thoughtful; but, as far as I know, there have been none who have possessed these qualities in a greater degree.'

So far, so good; these remarks show a capacity for admiration, the lack of which has been well said to be a sure sign of a dull man. But the quality is also found in connexion with a tendency to platitudes, and is not necessarily an accompaniment of literary gifts. The want of these is only too apparent in the primitive clumsiness of such chapters as 'Thackeray and his Friends,' 'Thackeray and the Theatre,' 'Club-life,' and others; and if a young adventurer in letters should ever wish to make an Anthologia of Platitudes, he would find good material in these pages. Our readers will be pleased with a few specimens. Thackeray had a fine instinct for high art.' 'Thackeray's sense of humour seems to have been very early developed ' (which does not appear to have been the case with his biographer). To take a mean view of Thackeray because he could so thoroughly understand Becky Sharp is as though we were to denounce Shakespeare as a treacherous dissimulator because in lago he has portrayed that type of character with marvellous fidelity.' The profound admiration of Thackeray has always been a tradition in the late Poet-Laureate's family. Not long ago the present Lord Tennyson remarked to a friend that "he always regarded Thackeray as the head of English literature of the Victorian Era."'

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From what has been said it will be evident that Mr. Melville has taken great pains. His is a new and conscientious departure -Suburban Biography we may perhaps call it—and in this genre he has succeeded. Still, it is to be regretted that Mr. Melville did not consult Thackeray's relations before bringing out his book; had he done so he would have avoided several blunders about family matters. In other cases a closer study of already printed material would have sufficed to set him right. In Vol. I, for instance, he states that Thackeray's eldest daughter was born in Albion Street, but, as Mr. Merivale tells us, the event took place in Great Coram Street. Later we learn that Thackeray's wife is buried at Kensal Green, instead of near Southend, where her grave really is. In his second volume Mr. Melville alludes to the marriage of Miss Amy Crowe with Colonel, Edward Thackeray, V.C., and their departure for India, where' (he informs us) 'the gallant soldier succumbed to the tropical climate.' But, fortunately for his friends, the gallant soldier' (who lost his wife in India) survived all vicissitudes and is still in the full possession of his strength. We are also bidden to lament that Thackeray was not alive to smile approval' upon the authoress of the Story of Elizabeth'; yet all of it, except the last instalment, came out in the Cornhill' before his death and rejoiced him by its success. Five pages further on we hear that when Thackeray resigned his editorship of the Cornhill,' 'Leslie Stephen reigned in his stead'; but for eight years after Thackeray's retirement the magazine was managed by Mr. Greenwood and others, and Mr. Leslie Stephen only became editor in 1871. Again Mr. Melville says that soon after Thackeray left Cambridge he went abroad and spent several months at Dresden and Rome and Paris and Weimar.' To Weimar he certainly went-it was in the year 1830-but he did not go to Rome till fourteen years later, in 1844.

Taking everything into consideration, we find ourselves wondering why Mr. Melville undertook to give us a 'Life of Thackeray,' especially when we remember the great author's well-known wishes to the contrary. It might have been because he had found something new to tell us; but, excepting a few stray anecdotes of little importance, he has told us nothing new. No, we must seek the reason elsewhere, and Mr. Melville himself enlightens us. We are to understand that he has 'endeavoured to fill a void in the literary history of the century.' He may be allowed to regret the void, and, like Quintus Curtius, he has leaped into it; but then it must also be acknowledged that once there he has failed to fill it. Nor