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to them in a thousand artful ways. She knows your obstinate points, and marches round them, with the most curious art and patience, as you will see an ant on a journey turn round an obstacle. Every woman manages her husband; every person who manages another is a hypocrite. Her smiles, her submission, her good humor, for all which we value her, what are they but admirable duplicity. We expect falseness from her, and order and educate her to be dishonest. Should he upbraid, I'll own that he prevail; say that he frown, I'll answer with a smile; what are these but lies, that we expect from our slaves? Lies, the dexterous performance of which we announce to be the female virtues brutal Turks that we are! I do not say that Mrs. Brown ever obeyed me on the contrary; but I should have liked it, for I am a Turk like my neighbor. I will instance your mother now. When my brother comes in to dinner, after a bad day's sport, or after looking over the bills of some of you boys, he naturally begins to be surly with your poor dear mother, and to growl at the mutton. What does she do? She may be hurt, but she doesn't show it. She proceeds to coax, to smile, to turn the conversation, to stroke down Bruin, and get him in a good humor. She sets him on his old stories, and she and all the girls poor dear little Saphiras-set off laughing; there is that story about the goose walking into church, which your father tells, and your mother and sisters laugh at, until I protest I am so ashamed that I hardly know where to look. On he goes with that story time after time; and your poor mother sits there, and knows that I know she is a humbug, and laughs on, and teaches all the girls to laugh too. Had that dear creature been born to wear a nose-ring and bangles instead of a muff and bonnet, and a brown skin in the place of that fair one with which nature has endowed her, she would have done Suttee, after your brown Brahmin father had died, and thought women very irreligious too, who refused to roast themselves for their masters and lords. I do not mean to say, that the late Mrs. Brown would have gone through the process of incremation for me- far from it; by a timely removal she was spared the grief which her widowhood would have doubtless caused her, and I acquiesce in the decrees of Fate, in this instance, and have not the least desire to have preceded her. . . My dear Nephew, as I grow old, and consider these things, I know which are the stronger, men or women; but which are the cleverer, I doubt."

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If men are unable to penetrate the important secrets of the sex, women are no less unwilling to reveal them. It is only one who has herself overleaped the bounds of tyrannical custom, who ever ventures to depict that struggle which, at some

period of life, a proud and ardent woman can hardly fail to pass through. And when such a picture is presented by a Dudevant or a Hahn-Hahn, the sex itself is always foremost to cry out against it, as unfeminine and monstrous. It is in fact a betrayal - a revelation of internal weakness to the common foe. To suffer with a smiling face, is the supreme duty of womanhood. The femme incomprise, who whimpers and complains, is an object of scorn to her sisters; just as the Indians repudiate one of their own tribe, who, captured and tormented by the enemy, is unable to repress his groans. Ambition,-aspirations for self- by which the angels fell, is also the deadliest sin of our terrestrial angels; while in man, it is a virtue that leads to honor and reward. Hence women are divided by a strong barrier into two classes; women who submit, and women who rebel; women who are tender, loving, devoted, who sacrifice self, and think only of their husbands and their children; and women who are ambitious, independent, indignant at their trammels, who seek for a career, who cannot sink their own aspirations in those of another, and who think and strive only for themselves; women whom soci ety smiles upon and approves, and women whom society suspects, and in extreme cases disowns. Whether all the restrictions from which this great breach originates, are necessary and natural, or whether the victims only are to blame, it is not our province to inquire. Thackeray, who paints the world as he finds it, reproduces again and again these two contrasted classes of women. His Becky and Amelia, his Beatrix and Lady Castlewood, are the magnetic poles of repulsion and attraction. If the former class display intellect superior to that of the latter, this we think is entirely natural. It is the active and original mind that is most likely to stray beyond the limits which a law, not altogether free from an arbitrary character, has assigned to it; and the experience that it thus gains, sharpens powers which might have rusted from want of exercise. After all, the qualities of Becky Sharp are just those by which men commonly attain success in life, especially in political life; her maxim was the same as that which every obscure man adopts who looks forward to fame; "she had her own way to make in the world; there was no

one to take care of her." And if she sometimes makes use of methods not quite legitimate, consider the difficulties of one who had no beaten track to walk on, but was forced to make the ladder by which she was to climb. Had she been placed in a position which afforded free play to her talents, mankind would have applauded the very character which it now condemns. There is no great queen whose actions are recorded by history, who, if she had developed in a private sphere those qualities by which she acquired glory on a throne, would not have been put under the ban of society; while a Mary Tudor is made infamous for having done what all the good women— the Amelias and Lady Castlewoods — would have done, had they been in her place, sacrificed her own better feelings to the obligations imposed on her by the superior sex.

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The picture, therefore, which Thackeray gives us of the female mind, is a correct, but, as we have already said, not a complete picture. The struggle that ends in resignation, the impatience that at length folds its wings in despair mind, in short, of which we obtain a glimpse in "Jane Eyre" and "Villette," that, with intellect and imagination chafing beneath their trammels, is yet curbed by the pious consciousness that abnegation is the highest act of the free will — Thackeray does not attempt to exhibit. On one side, is the woman who triumphs over the prejudice of education, because she has never known the restraint of principle; and on the other, the willing slave who never questions the righteousness of her destiny, whose heart may sometimes beat a little against the bars, but whose intellect is always quiescent. But the world cries out against this representation, and finds these fond mothers and devoted wives weak and foolish. Yet this we think one of Thackeray's highest merits, that he has not, as most writers have done, put into one category the folly that springs from love, and the folly that has its source in selfish blindness; that he has shown how love and self-sacrifice are holy and beautiful things, even when they are but instincts, and receive no light from the intellect. Besides, Thackeray's aim is not to cultivate our taste for what is rare, but to quicken our appreciation of what is common; and we cannot but think that the ordinary effect of the existing

constitution of society, is to divorce the intellect from the affections. Where there is no weakness there will be no submission; where there is no folly, there will be no blindness; where there is no blindness there will be precious little love. Amelia is a fool, you say, to make an idol of Osborne, and bring her daily offering to his selfish shrine; a fool to let that boy who succeeds to his father's place in her heart, grasp its tender fibres with the same rude and heedless hand, and thus prodigally to sow where she could reap no harvest but bitter tears. We grant the folly. But ask your own heart what is its sweetest yet most painful memory. Do you never dream that you are back again in those old years, when thoughtless love was thus squandered upon you? Do you never wake with a remorseful pang, sharper than any that the ambiguous deeds of the hardened present can inflict, and think what a blessed thing it would be if you could stanch the wounds which your barbed arrow made, and expiate that ignorance and self-engrossment by watchful, tender care? And if this be so, can you now criticize the extravagant love which you abused, and sneer at it as folly, and blame the indulgence which spoilt you, and made you selfish, and tell how you would have been a wiser and a better man, if you had been more wisely trained? But you have had no such experience you never suffered from such indiscreet affection, or you were thoughtful and grateful, and have no need to look penitently at the past? You are fortunate. But others are less so; and among these is Thackeray. For it is not the voice of a mere observer that we recognize in this reiterated tale of the fond desperation of a loving nature torn by the jagged rock to which it clings, but the trembling tones of one who speaks from the emotions of his own heart. Here, if anywhere, we get an insight into the man himself, and catch the echo of his own experience, his sufferings, and his errors,

"Was er irrte, was er strebte,

Was er litt, und was er lebte."

However different the persons and the scene, this tale interweaves itself more or less with the action. Osborne, Pendennis, Esmond, Barry Lyndon, contrasted as they are in character and fate, this experience is common to them all; or rather

it is the author himself whose hand, at the slightest suggestion, strikes involuntarily the mournful chords of vain regret and self-reproach.

In truth, with all his great powers of observation, Thackeray is in a remarkable degree subjective. And this is the source of the great artistic defects from which none of his works are free. He sees deep into the characters he conceives, but he never loses his own individuality in theirs, never allows them to move freely along, and pass the thread of the story from hand to hand. He is a spectator, as we have said, but a noisy one, who continually interrupts the performance by his commentaries. The persons of his drama never soliloquize, never make such reflections as the scene would naturally provoke from them. Soliloquy and reflection abound, but it all falls to the share of the author, or of his fictitious representative. Hence the failure, to a certain extent, when he adopts the autobiographical form of relation. Esmond, Barry Lyndon, even Yellowplush, talk always in the Thackerayan vein, utter statements peculiar to him, and seldom very appropriate in them. The story does not flow with a steady current, like Fielding's; there is no succession of scenes, connected only by sufficient explanatory remarks, as in Miss Austen. Scene, narration, and remark are presented to us in bits, and so intermixed with one another as to form a quartum quid. The Aristotelian rule, that there should in every work be a beginning, a middle, and an end, was never so sinned against as by Thackeray. Except by the number of pages, you have seldom any clue by which to conjecture how far you have advanced, or when you are to expect the dénouement. Two thirds of Pendennis seems more

the prelude than the actual story; all the important tion is crowded into the rapid and masterly scenes at the ose. Esmond is still more tantalizing. The story is never irly set agoing throughout the three volumes. We make everal successive starts, under the guidance of a train of incidents, and in company with certain personages; but before we have got far the steam is let off, the passengers all leave, nd we are obliged to take a new conveyance, with precisely same results. If the style be the purest, the plot is the

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