Mr. Thackeray's visit at least demonstrates that if we are unwilling to
pay English authors for their books, we are ready to reward them
handsomely for the opportunity of seeing and hearing them. If Mr.
Dickens, instead of dining at other people's expense, and making
speeches at his own, when he came to see us, had devoted an evening or
two in the week to lecturing, his purse would have been fuller, his
feelings sweeter, and his fame fairer. It was a Quixotic crusade, that
of the Copyright, and the excellent Don has never forgiven the windmill
that broke his spear.
Undoubtedly, when it was ascertained that Mr. Thackeray was coming, the
public feeling on this side of the sea was very much divided as to his
probable reception. "He'll come and humbug us, eat our dinners, pocket
our money, and go home and abuse us, like that unmitigated snob
Dickens," said Jonathan, chafing with the remembrance of that grand ball
at the Park Theater and the Boz tableaux, and the universal wining and
dining, to which the distinguished Dickens was subject while he was our
guest.
"Let him have his say," said others, "and we will have our look. We will
pay a dollar to hear him, if we can see him at the same time; and as for
the abuse, why, it takes even more than two such cubs of the roaring
British Lion to frighten the American Eagle. Let him come, and give him
fair play."
He did come, and had fair play, and returned to England with a
comfortable pot of gold holding $12,000, and with the hope and promise
of seeing us again in September, to discourse of something not less
entertaining than the witty men and sparkling times of Anne. We think
there was no disappointment with his lectures. Those who knew his books
found the author in the lecturer. Those who did not know his books were
charmed in the lecturer by what is charming in the author--the
unaffected humanity, the tenderness, the sweetness, the genial play of
fancy, and the sad touch of truth, with that glancing stroke of satire
which, lightning-like, illumines while it withers. The lectures were
even more delightful than the books, because the tone of the voice and
the appearance of the man, the general personal magnetism, explained and
alleviated so much that would otherwise have seemed doubtful or unfair.
For those who had long felt in the writings of Thackeray a reality quite
inexpressible, there was a secret delight in finding it justified in his
speaking; for he speaks as he writes--simply, directly, without
flourish, without any cant of oratory, commending what he says by its
intrinsic sense, and the sympathetic and humane way in which it was
spoken. Thackeray is the kind of "stump orator" that would have pleased
Carlyle. He never thrusts himself between you and his thought. If his
conception of the time and his estimate of the men differ from your own,
you have at least no doubt what his view is, nor how sincere and
necessary it is to him. Mr. Thackeray considers Swift a misanthrope; he
loves Goldsmith and Steele and Harry Fielding; he has no love for
Sterne, great admiration for Pope, and alleviated admiration for
Addison. How could it be otherwise? How could Thackeray not think Swift
a misanthrope and Sterne a factitious sentimentalist? He is a man of
instincts, not of thoughts: he sees and feels. He would be
Shakespeare's call-boy, rather than dine with the Dean of St. Patrick's.
He would take a pot of ale with Goldsmith, rather than a glass of
burgundy with the "Reverend Mr. Sterne," and that simply because he is
Thackeray. He would have done it as Fielding would have done it, because
he values one genuine emotion above the most dazzling thought; because
he is, in fine, a Bohemian, "a minion of the moon," a great, sweet,
generous heart.
We say this with more unction now that we have personal proof of it in
his public and private intercourse while he was here.
The popular Thackeray-theory, before his arrival, was of a severe
satirist, who concealed scalpels in his sleeves and carried probes in
his waistcoat pockets; a wearer of masks; a scoffer and sneerer, and
general infidel of all high aims and noble character. Certainly we are
justified in saying that his presence among us quite corrected this
idea. We welcomed a friendly, genial man; not at all convinced that
speech is heaven's first law, but willing to be silent when there is
nothing to say; who decidedly refused to be lionized--not by sulking,
but by stepping off the pedestal and challenging the common sympathies
of all he met; a man who, in view of the thirty-odd editions of Martin
Farquhar Tupper, was willing to confess that every author should "think
small-beer of himself." Indeed, he has this rare quality, that his
personal impression deepens, in kind, that of his writings. The quiet
and comprehensive grasp of the fact, and the intellectual impossibility
of holding fast anything but the fact, is as manifest in the essayist
upon the wits as in the author of _Henry Esmond_ and _Vanity Fair_.
Shall we say that this is the sum of his power, and the secret of his
satire? It is not what might be, nor what we or other persons of
well-regulated minds might wish, but it is the actual state of things
that he sees and describes. How, then, can he help what we call satire,
if he accept Mrs. Rawdon Crawley's invitation and describe her party?
There was no more satire in it, so far as he is concerned, than in
painting lilies white. A full-length portrait of the fair Lady Beatrix,
too, must needs show a gay and vivid figure, superbly glittering across
the vista of those stately days. Then, should Dab and Tab, the eminent
critics, step up and demand that her eyes be a pale blue, and her
stomacher higher around the neck? Do Dab and Tab expect to gather pears
from peach-trees? Or, because their theory of dendrology convinces them
that an ideal fruit-tree would supply any fruit desired upon
application, do they denounce the non-pear-bearing peach-tree in the
columns of their valuable journal? This is the drift of the fault found
with Thackeray. He is not Fénelon, he is not Dickens, he is not Scott;
he is not poetical, he is not ideal, he is not humane; he is not Tit, he
is not Tat, complain the eminent Dabs and Tabs. Of course he is not,
because he is Thackeray--a man who describes what he sees, motives as
well as appearances--a man who believes that character is better than
talent--that there is a worldly weakness superior to worldly
wisdom--that Dick Steele may haunt the ale-house and be carried home
muzzy, and yet be a more commendable character than the reverend Dean of
St. Patrick's, who has genius enough to illuminate a century, but not
sympathy enough to sweeten a drop of beer. And he represents this in a
way that makes us see it as he does, and without exaggeration; for
surely nothing could be more simple than his story of the life of
"honest Dick Steele." If he allotted to that gentleman a consideration
disproportioned to the space he occupies in literary history, it only
showed the more strikingly how deeply the writer-lecturer's sympathy was
touched by Steele's honest humanity.
An article in our April number complained that the tendency of his view
of Anne's times was to a social laxity, which might be very exhilarating
but was very dangerous; that the lecturer's warm commendation of
fermented drinks, taken at a very early hour of the morning in
tavern-rooms and club houses, was as deleterious to the moral health of
enthusiastic young readers disposed to the literary life as the beverage
itself to their physical health.
But this is not a charge to be brought against Thackeray. It is a
quarrel with history and with the nature of literary life. Artists and
authors have always been the good fellows of the world. That mental
organization which predisposes a man to the pursuit of literature and
art is made up of talent combined with ardent social sympathy,
geniality, and passion, and leads him to taste every cup and try every
experience. There is certainly no essential necessity that this class
should be a dissipated and disreputable class, but by their very
susceptibility to enjoyment they will always be the pleasure lovers and
seekers. And here is the social compensation to the literary man for the
surrender of those chances of fortune which men of other pursuits enjoy.
If he makes less money, he makes more juice out of what he does make. If
he cannot drink burgundy he can quaff the nut-brown ale; while the most
brilliant wit, the most salient fancy, the sweetest sympathy, the most
genial culture, shall sparkle at his board more radiantly than a silver
service, and give him the spirit of the tropics and the Rhine, whose
fruits are on other tables. The golden light that transfigures talent
and illuminates the world, and which we call genius, is erratic and
erotic; and while in Milton it is austere, and in Wordsworth cool, and
in Southey methodical, in Shakespeare it is fervent, with all the
results of fervor; in Raphael lovely, with all the excesses of love; in
Dante moody, with all the whims of caprice. The old quarrel of Lombard
Street with Grub Street is as profound as that of Osiris and Typho--it
is the difference of sympathy. The Marquis of Westminster will take good
care that no superfluous shilling escapes. Oliver Goldsmith will still
spend his last shilling upon a brave and unnecessary banquet to his
friends.
Whether this be a final fact of human organization or not, it is
certainly a fact of history. Every man instinctively believes that
Shakespeare stole deer, just as he disbelieves that Lord-mayor
Whittington ever told a lie; and the secret of that instinct is the
consciousness of the difference in organization. "Knave, I have the
power to hang ye," says somebody in one of Beaumont and Fletcher's
plays. "And I do be hanged and scorn ye," is the airy answer. "I had a
pleasant hour the other evening," said a friend to us, "over my cigar
and a book." "What book was that?" "A treatise conclusively proving the
awful consequences of smoking." De Quincey came up to London and
declared war upon opium; but during a little amnesty, in which he lapsed
into his old elysium, he wrote his best book depicting its horrors.
Our readers will not imagine that we are advocating the claims of
drunkenness nor defending social excess. We are only recognizing a fact
and stating an obvious tendency. The most brilliant illustrations of
every virtue are to be found in the literary guild, as well as the
saddest beacons of warning; yet it will often occur that the last in
talent and the first in excess of a picked company will be a man around
whom sympathy most kindly lingers. We love Goldsmith more at the head of
an ill-advised feast than Johnson and his friends leaving it, thoughtful
and generous as their conduct was. The heart despises prudence.
In the single-hearted regard we know that pity has a larger share. Yet
it is not so much that pity which is commiseration for misfortune and
deficiency, as that which is recognition of a necessary worldly
ignorance. The literary class is the most innocent of all. The contempt
of practical men for the poets is based upon a consciousness that they
are not bad enough for a bad world. To a practical man nothing is so
absurd as the lack of worldly shrewdness. The very complaint of the
literary life that it does not amass wealth and live in palaces is the
scorn of the practical man, for he cannot understand that intellectual
opacity which prevents the literary man from seeing the necessity of the
different pecuniary condition. It is clear enough to the publisher who
lays up fifty thousand a year why the author ends the year in debt. But
the author is amazed that he who deals in ideas can only dine upon
occasional chops, while the man who merely binds and sells ideas sits
down to perpetual sirloin. If they should change places, fortune would
change with them. The publisher turned author would still lay up his
thousands; the publishing author would still directly lose thousands. It
is simply because it is a matter of prudence, economy, and knowledge of
the world. Thomas Hood made his ten thousand dollars a year, but if he
lived at the rate of fifteen thousand he would hardly die rich. Mr.
Jerdan, a gentleman who, in his _Autobiography_, advises energetic youth
to betake themselves to the highway rather than to literature, was, we
understand, in the receipt of an easy income, and was a welcome guest in
pleasant houses; but living in a careless, shiftless, extravagant way,
he was presently poor, and, instead of giving his memoirs the motto,
_peccavi_, and inditing a warning, he dashes off a truculent defiance.
Practical publishers and practical men of all sorts invest their
earnings in Michigan Central or Cincinnati and Dayton instead, in steady
works and devoted days, and reap a pleasant harvest of dividends. Our
friends the authors invest in prime Havanas, Rhenish, in oyster
suppers, love and leisure, and divide a heavy percentage of headache,
dyspepsia, and debt.
This is as true a view, from another point, as the one we have already
taken. If the literary life has the pleasures of freedom, it has also
its pains. It may be willing to resign the queen's drawing-room, with
the illustrious galaxy of stars and garters, for the chamber with a
party nobler than the nobility. The author's success is of a wholly
different kind from that of the publisher, and he is thoughtless who
demands both. Mr. Roe, who sells sugar, naturally complains that Mr.
Doe, who sells molasses, makes money more rapidly. But Mr. Tennyson, who
writes poems, can hardly make the same complaint of Mr. Moxon, who
publishes them, as was very fairly shown in a number of the _Westminster
Review_, when noticing Mr. Jerdan's book.
What we have said is strictly related to Mr. Thackeray's lectures, which
discuss literature. All the men he commemorated were illustrations and
exponents of the career of letters. They all, in various ways, showed
the various phenomena of the temperament. And when in treating of them
the critic came to Steele, he found one who was one of the most striking
illustrations of one of the most universal aspects of literary life--the
simple-hearted, unsuspicious, gay gallant and genial gentleman; ready
with his sword or his pen, with a smile or a tear, the fair
representative of the social tendency of his life. It seems to us that
the Thackeray theory--the conclusion that he is a man who loves to
depict madness, and has no sensibilities to the finer qualities of
character--crumbled quite away before that lecture upon Steele. We know
that it was not considered the best; we know that many of the delighted
audience were not sufficiently familiar with literary history fully to
understand the position of the man in the lecturer's review; but, as a
key to Thackeray, it was, perhaps, the most valuable of all. We know in
literature of no more gentle treatment; we have not often encountered in
men of the most rigorous and acknowledged virtue such humane tenderness;
we have not often heard from the most clerical lips words of such
genuine Christianity. Steele's was a character which makes weakness
amiable: it was a weakness, if you will, but it was certainly
amiability, and it was a combination more attractive than many
full-panoplied excellences. It was not presented as a model. Captain
Steele in the tap-room was not painted as the ideal of virtuous manhood;
but it certainly was intimated that many admirable things were consonant
with a free use of beer. It was frankly stated that if, in that
character, virtue abounded, cakes and ale did much more abound. Captain
Richard Steele might have behaved much better than he did, but we should
then have never heard of him. A few fine essays do not float a man into
immortality, but the generous character, the heart sweet in all excesses
and under all chances, is a spectacle too beautiful and too rare to be
easily forgotten. A man is better than many books. Even a man who is not
immaculate may have more virtuous influence than the discreetest saint.
Let us remember how fondly the old painters lingered round the story of
Magdalen, and thank Thackeray for his full-length Steele.
We conceive this to be the chief result of Thackeray's visit, that he
convinced us of his intellectual integrity; he showed us how impossible
it is for him to see the world and describe it other than he does. He
does not profess cynicism, nor satirize society with malice; there is no
man more humble, none more simple; his interests are human and concrete,
not abstract. We have already said that he looks through and through at
the fact. It is easy enough, and at some future time it will be done, to
deduce the peculiarity of his writings from the character of his mind.
There is no man who masks so little as he in assuming the author. His
books are his observations reduced to writing. It seems to us as
singular to demand that Dante should be like Shakespeare as to quarrel
with Thackeray's want of what is called ideal portraiture. Even if you
thought, from reading his _Vanity Fair_, that he had no conception of
noble women, certainly after the lecture upon Swift, after all the
lectures, in which every allusion to women was so manly and delicate and
sympathetic, you thought so no longer. It is clear that his sympathy is
attracted to women--to that which is essentially womanly, feminine.
Qualities common to both sexes do not necessarily charm him because he
finds them in women. A certain degree of goodness must always be
assumed. It is only the rare flowering that inspires special praise. You
call Amelia's fondness for George Osborne foolish, fond idolatry.
Thackeray smiles, as if all love were not idolatry of the fondest
foolishness. What was Hero's--what was Francesca da Rimini's--what was
Juliet's? They might have been more brilliant women than Amelia, and
their idols of a larger mold than George, but the love was the same old
foolish, fond idolatry. The passion of love and a profound and sensible
knowledge, regard based upon prodigious knowledge of character and
appreciation of talent, are different things. What is the historic and
poetic splendor of love but the very fact, which constantly appears in
Thackeray's stories, namely, that it is a glory which dazzles and
blinds. Men rarely love the women they ought to love, according to the
ideal standards. It is this that makes the plot and mystery of life. Is
it not the perpetual surprise of all Jane's friends that she should love
Timothy instead of Thomas? and is not the courtly and accomplished
Thomas sure to surrender to some accidental Lucy without position,
wealth, style, worth, culture--without anything but heart? This is the
fact, and it reappears in Thackeray, and it gives his books that air of
reality which they possess beyond all modern story.
And it is this single perception of the fact which, simple as it is, is
the rarest intellectual quality that made his lectures so interesting.
The sun rose again upon the vanished century, and lighted those historic
streets. The wits of Queen Anne ruled the hour, and we were bidden to
their feast. Much reading of history and memoirs had not so sent the
blood into those old English cheeks, and so moved those limbs in proper
measure, as these swift glances through the eyes of genius. It was
because, true to himself, Thackeray gave us his impression of those wits
as men rather than authors. For he loves character more than thought. He
is a man of the world, and not a scholar. He interprets the author by
the man. When you are made intimate with young Swift, Sir William
Temple's saturnine secretary, you more intelligently appreciate the Dean
of St. Patrick's. When the surplice of Mr. Sterne is raised a little,
more is seen than the reverend gentleman intends. Hogarth, the bluff
Londoner, necessarily depicts a bluff, coarse, obvious morality. The
hearty Fielding, the cool Addison, the genial Goldsmith, these are the
figures that remain in memory, and their works are valuable as they
indicate the man.
Mr. Thackeray's success was very great. He did not visit the West, nor
Canada. He went home without seeing Niagara Falls. But wherever he did
go he found a generous and social welcome, and a respectful and
sympathetic hearing. He came to fulfill no mission, but he certainly
knit more closely our sympathy with Englishmen. Heralded by various
romantic memoirs, he smiled at them, stoutly asserted that he had been
always able to command a good dinner, and to pay for it; nor did he seek
to disguise that he hoped his American tour would help him to command
and pay for more. He promised not to write a book about us, but we hope
he will, for we can ill spare the criticism of such an observer. At
least, we may be sure that the material gathered here will be worked up
in some way. He found that we were not savages nor bores. He found that
there were a hundred here for every score in England who knew well and
loved the men of whom he spoke. He found that the same red blood colors
all the lips that speak the language he so nobly praised. He found
friends instead of critics. He found those who, loving the author, loved
the man more. He found a quiet welcome from those who are waiting to
welcome him again and as sincerely.
[From _Literary and Social Essays_, by George William Curtis.
Copyright, 1894, by Harper & Brothers.]