There was
a universal feeling that we had lost something even rarer and better,--a
true man.
Thackeray was not a cynic, for the simple reason that he was a humorist,
and could not have been one if he would. Your true cynic is a sceptic
also; he is distrustful by nature, his laugh is a bark of selfish
suspicion, and he scorns man, not because he has fallen below himself,
but because he can rise no higher. But humor of the truest quality
always rests on a foundation of belief in something better than it sees,
and its laugh is a sad one at the awkward contrast between man as he is
and man as he might be, between the real snob and the ideal image of his
Creator. Swift is our true English cynic, with his corrosive sarcasm;
the satire of Thackeray is the recoil of an exquisite sensibility from
the harsh touch of life. With all his seeming levity, Thackeray used to
say, with the warmest sincerity, that Carlyle was his master and
teacher. He had not merely a smiling contempt, but a deadly hatred, of
all manner of _shams_, an equally intense love for every kind of
manliness, and for gentlemanliness as its highest type. He had an eye
for pretension as fatally detective as an acid for an alkali; wherever
it fell, so clear and seemingly harmless, the weak spot was sure to
betray itself. He called himself a disciple of Carlyle, but would have
been the first to laugh at the absurdity of making any comparison
between the playful heat-lightnings of his own satire and that lurid
light, as of the Divine wrath over the burning cities of the plain, that
flares out on us from the profoundest humor of modern times.
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