Lincoln, liberator of men, loved the motley. In fact, the individual who is incapable of viewing the world from a jocular basis is unsafe, and can be trusted only when the opposition is strong enough to laugh him into line.
In the realm of English letters, Thackeray is prince of humorists. He could see right through a brick wall, and never mistook a hawk for a hernshaw. He had a just estimate of values, and the temperament that can laugh at all trivial misfits. And he had, too, that dread capacity for pain which every true humorist possesses, for the true essence of humor is sensibility.
In all literature that lives there is mingled like pollen an indefinable element of the author's personality. In Thackeray's "Lectures on English Humorists" this subtle quality is particularly apparent. Elusive, delicate, alluring--it is the actinic ray that imparts vitality.
When wit plays skittles with dulness, dulness gets revenge by taking wit at his word. Vast numbers of people taking Thackeray at his word consider him a bitter pessimist.
He even disconcerted bright little Charlotte Bronte, who went down to London to see him, and then wrote back to Haworth that "the great man talked steadily with never a smile. I could not tell when to laugh and when to cry, for I did not know what was fun and what fact."
But finally the author of "Jane Eyre" found the combination, and she saw that beneath the brusk exterior of that bulky form there was a woman's tender sympathy.
Thackeray has told us what he thought of the author of "Jane Eyre," and the author of "Jane Eyre" has told us what she thought of the author of "Vanity Fair." One was big and whimsical, the other was little and sincere, but both were alike in this: their hearts were wrung at the sight of suffering, and both had tears for the erring, the groping, and the oppressed.
A Frenchman can not comprehend a joke that is not accompanied by grimace and gesticulation; and so M. Taine chases Thackeray through sixty solid pages, berating him for what he is pleased to term "bottled hate."
Taine is a cynic who charges Thackeray with cynicism, all in the choicest of biting phrase. It is a beautiful example of sinners calling the righteous to repentance--a thing that is often done, but seldom with artistic finish.