Explain what devices Thackeray resorts to in order to modulate his prose to that of the early 18th century. Do these devices serve to identify Thackeray with the story-teller?
Explain how you understand the given statements and express your agreement or disagreement with them (one at a time).
a) "Dickens was above all things CREATIVE; Thackeray was above all things RECEPTIVE. Both are modes of truth..." (G.Chesterton)
b) "We have but to change the point of view, and the greatest action looks mean, as we turn the perspective glass, and a giant appears a pigmy." (Thackeray)
c) "Thackeray, who hunted snobs all his life, was neither a snob nor a cynic." (J.B.Priestley)
William Makepeace Thackeray (Born 1811 - Died 1863) (Arnold)
The History of Henry Esmond (1852)
After a series of novels and sketches bitterly satirical of his own times Thackeray brought out a historical novel whose action took the reader as far back as the final decade of the 17th and the early portion of the 18th century. The showman of Vanity Fair had more than one motive for resorting to history. For one thing, he was bent on proving that in all times and settings men were actuated by snobbishness & low greed, the few exceptions among them only confirming the general rule. The so-called great men, according to Thackeray, differed from their fellow creatures only in so far as chance had placed them higher and given them a wider scope for their activities. The past therefore had no charms for Thackeray and he held it to be the novelist's duty to speak of that past in the same disillusioned and incisive manner that he adopted towards modern problems. To present history unadorned, to describe political upheavals and grand battles in a strain deliberately unheroic was the author's prime motive. In the past the writer sought the clue to the present, in the period of England’s efflorescence - the source of future troubles.
The present excerpt treats the subject of the war fought between the allied powers of England, Holland and Austria on the one hand and France and Bavaria on the other. The so-called war of the Spanish Succession (1702-1713) that was to decide whether Austria or France or Bavaria would inherit the Crown of Spain after the death of Charles the Second, had been fought by the English for the sake of the “moneyed men of the City” (Swift). Apassionate humanist, Thackeray portrays the war as a calamity of the worst description. It is brought on by conflicting mercenary interests and it is falsely praised by poets.
The idea is nowhere more emphatically expressed than in the severe words of reproof uttered by Colonel Esmond when commenting on Addison's poem The Campaign: “I admire your art: the murder of the campaign is done to military music, like a battle at the opera, and the virgins shriek in harmony as our victorious grenadiers march into their villages. Do you know what a scene it Was? ... what a triumph you are celebrating? What scenes of shame and horror were enacted... You great poets should show it as it is - ugly and horrible not beautiful and serene.”(p.340)
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The closing piece of advice might do very well as a motto of Thackeray the historical novelist. In the passage below the action takes place in the summer of 1704, after one of the important victories won by the Allies under the command of John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough (1650-1722). Thackeray's picture of the Duke is perfectly true to fact: all historians agree in recognizing the latter's outstanding talents in statesmanship as well as in warfare, but unanimously accuse him of greed and peculation. He is known to have sold the secrets of the English to the French and to have treacherously led his army to be butchered.
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