rit for
Thackeray. He is one of the greatest of novelists; he displays human
nature and human conduct so that we forget ourselves in his persons, but
he does not make us forget ourselves in their fortunes. 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. Some examples linger always in the memory, and
dwell with their music in the hearing. One I have quoted elsewhere; the
passage in "The Newcomes" where Clive, at the lecture on the Poetry of
the Domestic Affections, given by Sir Barnes Newcome, sees Ethel, whom he
has lost.

"And the past, and its dear histories, and youth and its hopes and
passions, and tones and looks, for ever echoing in the heart and present
in the memory--those, no doubt, poor Clive saw and heard as he looked
across the great gulf of time and parting and grief, and beheld the woman
he had loved for many years." "The great gulf of time, and parting, and
grief,"--some of us are on the farther side of it, and our old selves,
and our old happiness, and our old affections beyond, grow near, grow
clear, now and then, at the sight of a face