et you know that
he was actuated by the sweetest and purest motives. Many people cannot
read "Barry Lyndon" a second time; but those who are nervous should
screw their courage to the sticking-place, and give grave attention to
that awful moral lesson, for all of us have a little of Barry in our
composition. Thackeray's sudden inspiration enabled him to plumb the
deeps of the scoundrel nature, and he saw with the eye of genius that
the very quality which makes a bad man dangerous is his belief in his
own goodness. If you look at the appalling narrative of Lyndon's life
in this country, you see, with a shudder, that the man regards his
cruelty to his wife, his villainy towards his step-son, as the
inevitable outcome of stern virtue; he tells you things that make you
long to stamp on the inanimate pages; for he rouses such a passion of
wild scorn and wrath as we feel against no other artistic creation.
Yet all the while, like a low under-song, goes on his monotonous
assertion of his own goodness and his own injuries. No sermon could
teach more than that hateful book; if it is read aright, it will
supply men or women with an armoury of warnings, and enable them to
start away from the semblance of self-deception as they would from a
rearing cobra when the hood is up, and the murderous head flattened
ready to strike. Thackeray worked on the same theme in his story of
little Stubbs. Lyndon is the Lucifer of rascals; Stubbs--well, Stubbs
beggars the English vocabulary; he is too low, too mean for adjectives
to describe him, and I could almost find it in my heart to wish that
his portraiture had never been placed before the horrified eyes of
men. Yet this Stubbs--a being who was drawn from life--has a profound
belief in the rectitude of everything that he does. Even when he tells
us how he invited his gang of unspeakables home, to drink away his
mother's substance, he takes credit to himself for his fine display of
British hospitality. How Thackeray contrived to live through the
ordeal of composing those two books I cannot tell; he must have had a
nerve of steel, with all his softness of heart and benevolence. At all
events, he did live to complete his gruesome feat; and he has given
us, in a vivid pictorial way, such a picture of scoundreldom as should
serve as a beacon to all men. It may seem like a paradox; but I am
inclined to think that our non-success in putting down actual crime
and wickedness which do not come within rang