"I thought how some people's towering intellects and splendid cultivated
geniuses rise upon simple, beautiful foundations hidden out of sight."
Thus, in his Letters to Mrs. Brookfield, Mr. Thackeray wrote, after
visiting the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral, with its "charming,
harmonious, powerful combination of arches and shafts, beautiful
whichever way you see them developed, like a fine music." The simile
applies to his own character and genius, to his own and perhaps to that
of most great authors, whose works are our pleasure and comfort in this
troublesome world. There are critics who profess a desire to hear
nothing, or as little as may be, of the lives of great artists, whether
their instrument of art was the pen, or the brush, or the chisel, or the
strings and reeds of music. With those critics perhaps most of us agree,
when we read books that gossip about Shelley, or Coleridge, or Byron.
"Give us their poetry," we say, "and leave their characters alone: we do
not want tattle about Claire and chatter about Harriet; we want to be
happy with 'The Skylark' or 'The Cloud.'" Possibly this instinct is
correct, where such a poet as Shelley is concerned, whose life, like his
poetry, was as "the life of winds and tides," whose genius, unlike the
skylark's, was more true to the point of heaven than the point of home.
But reflection shows us that on the whole, as Mr. Thackeray says, a man's
genius must be builded on the foundations of his character. Where that
genius deals with the mingled stuff of human life--sorrow, desire, love,
hatred, kindness, meanness--then the foundation of character is
especially important. People are sometimes glad that we know so little
of Shakespeare the man; yet who can doubt that a true revelation of his
character would be not less worthy, noble and charming than the general
effect of his poems? In him, it is certain, we should always find an
example of nobility, of generosity, of charity and kindness and
self-forgetfulness. Indeed, we find these qualities, as a rule, in the
biographies of the great sympathetic poets and men of genius of the pen--I
do not say in the lives of rebels of genius, "meteoric poets" like Byron.
The same basis, the same foundations of rectitude, of honour, of
goodness, of melancholy, and of mirth, underlie the art of Moliere, of
Scott, of Fielding, and as his correspondence shows, of Thackeray.
It seems probable that a complete biography of Thackeray will never be
written. It was his wish to live in his works alone: that wish his
descendants respect; and we must probably regard the Letters to Mr. and
Mrs. Brookfield as the last private and authentic record of the man which
will be given, at least to this generation. In these Letters all
sympathetic readers will find the man they have long known from his
writings--the man with a heart so tender that the world often drove him
back into a bitterness of opposition, into an assumed hardness and
defensive cynicism. There are readers so unluckily constituted that they
can see nothing in Thackeray but this bitterness, this cruel sense of
meanness and power of analysing shabby emotions, sneaking vanities,
contemptible ambitions. All of us must often feel with regret that he
allowed himself to be made too unhappy by the spectacle of failings so
common in the world he knew best, that he dwelt on them too long and
lashed them too complacently. One hopes never to read "Lovel the
Widower" again, and one gladly skips some of the speeches of the Old
Campaigner in "The Newcomes." They are terrible, but not more terrible
than life. Yet it is hard to understand how Mr. Ruskin, for example, can
let such scenes and characters hide from his view the kindness,
gentleness, and pity of Thackeray's nature. The Letters must open all
eyes that are not wilfully closed, and should at last overcome every
prejudice.
In the Letters we see a man literally hungering and thirsting after
affection, after love--a man cut off by a cruel stroke of fate from his
natural solace, from the centre of a home.
"God took from me a lady dear,"
he says, in the most touching medley of doggerel and poetry, made
"instead of writing my _Punch_ this morning." Losing "a lady dear," he
takes refuge as he may, he finds comfort as he can, in all the affections
within his reach, in the society of an old college friend and of his
wife, in the love of all children, beginning with his own; in a generous
liking for all good work and for all good fellows.
Did any man of letters except Scott ever write of his rivals as Thackeray
wrote of Dickens? Artists are a jealous race. "Potter hates potter, and
poet hates poet," as Hesiod said so long ago. This jealousy is not mere
envy, it is really a strong sense of how things ought to be done, in any
art, touched with a natural preference for a man's own way of doing them.
Now, what could be more unlike than the "ways" of Dickens and Thackeray?
The subjects chosen by these great authors are not more diverse than
their styles. Thackeray writes like a scholar, not in the narrow sense,
but rather as a student and a master of all the refinements and resources
of language. Dickens copies the chaff of the street, or he roams into
melodramatics, "drops into poetry"--blank verse at least--and touches all
with peculiarities, we might say mannerisms, of his own. I have often
thought, and even tried to act on the thought, that some amusing
imaginary letters might be written, from characters of Dickens about
characters of Thackeray, from characters of Thackeray about characters of
Dickens. They might be supposed to meet each other in society, and
describe each other. Can you not fancy Captain Costigan on Dick
Swiveller, Blanche Amory on Agnes, Pen on David Copperfield, and that
"tiger" Steerforth? What would the family solicitor of "The Newcomes"
have to say of Mr. Tulkinghorn? How would George Warrington appreciate
Mr. Pickwick? Yes, the two great novelists were as opposed as two men
could be--in manner, in style, in knowledge of books, and of the world.
And yet how admirably Thackeray writes about Dickens, in his letters as
in his books! How he delights in him! How manly is that emulation which
enables an author to see all the points in his rival, and not to carp at
them, but to praise, and be stimulated to keener effort!
Consider this passage. "Have you read Dickens? O! it is charming! Brave
Dickens! It has some of his very prettiest touches--those inimitable
Dickens touches which make such a great man of him, and the reading of
the book has done another author a great deal of good."
Thackeray is just as generous, and perhaps more critical, in writing of
Kingsley. "A fine, honest, go-a-head fellow, who charges a subject
heartily, impetuously, with the greatest courage and simplicity; but with
narrow eyes (his are extraordinarily brave, blue and honest), and with
little knowledge of the world, I think. But he is superior to us
worldlings in many ways, and I wish I had some of his honest pluck."
I have often wished that great authors, when their days of creation were
over, when "their minds grow grey and bald," would condescend to tell us
the history of their books. Sir Walter Scott did something of this kind
in the prefaces to the last edition of the Waverley Novels published
during his life. What can be more interesting than his account, in the
introduction to the "Fortunes of Nigel," of how he worked, how he
planned, and found all his plots and plans overridden by the demon at the
end of his pen! But Sir Walter was failing when he began those literary
confessions; good as they are, he came to them too late. Yet these are
not confessions which an author can make early. The pagan Aztecs only
confessed once in a lifetime--in old age, when they had fewer temptations
to fall to their old loves: then they made a clean breast of it once for
all. So it might be with an author. While he is in his creative vigour,
we want to hear about his fancied persons, about Pendennis, Beatrix,
Becky, not about himself, and how he invented them. But when he has
passed his best, then it is he who becomes of interest; it is about
himself that we wish him to speak, as far as he modestly may. Who would
not give "Lovel the Widower" and "Philip" for some autobiographical and
literary prefaces to the older novels? They need not have been more
egotistic than the "Roundabout Papers." They would have had far more
charm. Some things cannot be confessed. We do not ask who was the
original Sir Pitt Crawley, or the original Blanche Amory. But we might
learn in what mood, in what circumstances the author wrote this passage
or that.
The Letters contain a few notes of this kind, a few literary confessions.
We hear that Emmy Sedley was partly suggested by Mrs. Brookfield, partly
by Thackeray's mother, much by his own wife. There scarce seems room for
so many elements in Emmy's personality. For some reason ladies love her
not, nor do men adore her. I have been her faithful knight ever since I
was ten years old and read "Vanity Fair" somewhat stealthily. Why does
one like her except because she is such a thorough woman? She is not
clever, she is not very beautiful, she is unhappy, and she can be
jealous. One pities her, and that is akin to a more tender sentiment;
one pities her while she sits in the corner, and Becky's green eyes
flatter her oaf of a husband; one pities her in the poverty of her
father's house, in the famous battle over Daffy's Elixir, in the
separation from the younger George. You begin to wish some great joy to
come to her: it does not come unalloyed; you know that Dobbin had bad
quarters of an hour with this lady, and had to disguise a little of his
tenderness for his own daughter. Yes, Emmy is more complex than she
seems, and perhaps it needed three ladies to contribute the various
elements of her person and her character. One of them, the jealous one,
lent a touch to Helen Pendennis, to Laura, to Lady Castlewood. Probably
this may be the reason why some persons dislike Thackeray so. His very
best women are not angels. {109} Are the very best women angels? It is
a pious opinion--that borders on heresy.
When the Letters began to be written, in 1847, Thackeray had his worst
years, in a worldly sense, behind him. They were past: the times when he
wrote in _Galignani_ for ten francs a day. Has any literary ghoul
disinterred his old ten-franc articles in _Galignani_? The time of
"Barry Lyndon," too, was over. He says nothing of that masterpiece, and
only a word about "The Great Hoggarty Diamond." "I have been re-reading
it. Upon my word and honour, if it doesn't make you cry, I shall have a
mean opinion of you. It was written at a time of great affliction, when
my heart was very soft and humble. Amen. Ich habe auch viel geliebt."
Of "Pendennis," as it goes on, he writes that it is "awfully stupid,"
which has not been the verdict of the ages. He picks up materials as he
passes. He dines with some officers, and perhaps he stations them at
Chatteris. He meets Miss G---, and her converse suggests a love passage
between Pen and Blanche. Why did he dislike fair women so? It runs all
through his novels. Becky is fair. Blanche is fair. Outside the old
yellow covers of "Pendennis," you see the blonde mermaid, "amusing, and
clever, and depraved," dragging the lover to the sea, and the nut-brown
maid holding him back. Angelina, of the "Rose and the Ring," is the
Becky of childhood; she is fair, and the good Rosalba is _brune_. In
writing "Pendennis" he had a singular experience. He looked over his own
"back numbers," and found "a passage which I had utterly forgotten as if
I had never read or written it." In Lockhart's "Life of Scott," James
Ballantyne says that "when the 'Bride of Lammermoor' was first put into
his hands in a complete shape, he did not recollect one single incident,
character, or conversation it contained." That is to say, he remembered
nothing of his own invention, though his memory of the traditional parts
was as clear as ever. Ballantyne remarks, "The history of the human mind
contains nothing more wonderful." The experience of Thackeray is a
parallel to that of Scott. "Pendennis," it must be noted, was
interrupted by a severe illness, and "The Bride of Lammermoor" was
dictated by Sir Walter when in great physical pain. On one occasion
Thackeray "lit upon a very stupid part of 'Pendennis,' I am sorry to say;
and yet how well written it is! What a shame the author don't write a
complete good story! Will he die before doing so? or come back from
America and do it?"
Did he ever write "a complete, good story"? Did any one ever do such a
thing as write a three-volume, novel, or a novel of equal length, which
was "a complete, good story"? Probably not; or if any mortal ever
succeeded in the task, it was the great Alexander Dumas. "The Three
Musketeers," I take leave to think, and "Twenty Years After," are
complete good stories, good from beginning to end, stories from beginning
to end without a break, without needless episode. Perhaps one may say as
much for "Old Mortality," and for "Quentin Durward." But Scott and Dumas
were born story-tellers; narrative was the essence of their genius at its
best; the current of romance rolls fleetly on, bearing with it persons
and events, mirroring scenes, but never ceasing to be the main thing--the
central interest. Perhaps narrative like this is the chief success of
the novelist. He is triumphant when he carries us on, as Wolf, the
famous critic, was carried on by the tide of the Iliad, "in that pure and
rapid current of action." Nobody would claim this especial merit for
Thackeray. He is one of the greatest of novelists; he displays human
nature and human conduct so that we forget ourselves in his persons, but
he does not make us forget ourselves in their fortunes. Whether Clive
does or does not marry Ethel, or Esmond, Beatrix, does not very greatly
excite our curiosity. We cannot ring the bells for Clive's second
wedding as the villagers celebrated the bridal of Pamela. It is the
development of character, it is the author's comments, it is his own
personality and his unmatched and inimitable style, that win our
admiration and affection. We can take up "Vanity Fair," or "Pendennis,"
or "The Newcomes," just where the book opens by chance, and read them
with delight, as we may read Montaigne. When one says one can take up a
book anywhere, it generally means that one can also lay it down anywhere.
But it is not so with Thackeray. Whenever we meet him he holds us with
his charm, his humour, his eloquence, his tenderness. If he has not, in
the highest degree, the narrative power, he does possess, in a degree
perhaps beyond any other writer of English, that kind of poetic quality
which is not incompatible with prose writing.
A great deal has been said about prose poetry. As a rule, it is very
poor stuff. As prose it has a tendency to run into blank verse; as
poetry it is highly rhetorical and self-conscious. It would be invidious
and might be irritating to select examples from modern masters of prose-
poetry. They have never been poets. But the prose of a poet like Milton
may be, and is, poetical in the true sense; and so, upon occasions, was
the prose of Thackeray. Some examples linger always in the memory, and
dwell with their music in the hearing. One I have quoted elsewhere; the
passage in "The Newcomes" where Clive, at the lecture on the Poetry of
the Domestic Affections, given by Sir Barnes Newcome, sees Ethel, whom he
has lost.
"And the past, and its dear histories, and youth and its hopes and
passions, and tones and looks, for ever echoing in the heart and present
in the memory--those, no doubt, poor Clive saw and heard as he looked
across the great gulf of time and parting and grief, and beheld the woman
he had loved for many years." "The great gulf of time, and parting, and
grief,"--some of us are on the farther side of it, and our old selves,
and our old happiness, and our old affections beyond, grow near, grow
clear, now and then, at the sight of a face met by chance in the world,
at the chance sound of a voice. Such are human fortunes, and human
sorrows; not the worst, not the greatest, for these old loves do not
die--they live in exile, and are the better parts of our souls. Not the
greatest, nor the worst of sorrows, for shame is worse, and hopeless
hunger, and a life all of barren toil without distractions, without joy,
must be far worse. But of those myriad tragedies of the life of the
poor, Thackeray does not write. How far he was aware of them, how deeply
he felt them, we are not informed. His highest tragedy is that of the
hunger of the heart; his most noble prose sounds in that meeting of Harry
Esmond with Lady Castlewood, in the immortal speech which has the burden,
"bringing your sheaves with you!" All that scene appears to me no less
unique, no less unsurpassable, no less perfect, than the "Ode to the
Nightingale" of Keats, or the _Lycidas_ of Milton. It were superfluous
to linger over the humour of Thackeray. Only Shakespeare and Dickens
have graced the language with so many happy memories of queer, pleasant
people, with so many quaint phrases, each of which has a kind of
freemasonry, and when uttered, or recalled, makes all friends of
Thackeray into family friends of each other. The sayings of Mr. Harry
Foker, of Captain Costigan, of Gumbo, are all like old dear family
phrases, they live imperishable and always new, like the words of Sir
John, the fat knight, or of Sancho Panza, or of Dick Swiveller, or that
other Sancho, Sam Weller. They have that Shakespearian gift of being
ever appropriate, and undyingly fresh.
These are among the graces of Thackeray, these and that inimitable style,
which always tempts and always baffles the admiring and despairing
copyist. Where did he find the trick of it, of the words which are
invariably the best words, and invariably fall exactly in the best
places? "The best words in the best places," is part of Coleridge's
definition of poetry; it is also the essence of Thackeray's prose. In
these Letters to Mrs. Brookfield the style is precisely the style of the
novels and essays. The style, with Thackeray, was the man. He could not
write otherwise. But probably, to the last, this perfection was not
mechanical, was not attained without labour and care. In Dr. John
Brown's works, in his essay on Thackeray, there is an example of a proof-
sheet on which the master has made corrections, and those corrections
bring the passage up to his accustomed level, to the originality of his
rhythm. Here is the piece:--
"Another Finis, another slice of life which _Tempus edax_ has
devoured! And I may have to write the word once or twice, perhaps,
and then an end of Ends. [Finite is ever and Infinite beginning.] Oh,
the troubles, the cares, the _ennui_, [the complications,] the
repetitions, the old conversations over and over again, and here and
there all the delightful passages, the dear, the brief, the forever-
remembered!
"[And then] A few chapters more, and then the last, and behold Finis
itself coming to an end, and the Infinite beginning."
"How like music this," writes Dr. John Brown--"like one trying the
same air in different ways, as it were, searching out and sounding all
its depths!" The words were almost the last that Thackeray wrote,
perhaps the very last. They reply, as it were, to other words which
he had written long before to Mrs. Brookfield.
"I don't pity anybody who leaves the world; not even a fair young girl
in her prime; I pity those remaining. On her journey, if it pleases
God to send her, depend on it there's no cause for grief, that's but
an earthly condition. Out of our stormy life, and brought nearer the
Divine light and warmth, there must be a serene climate. Can't you
fancy sailing into the calm?"
Ah! nowhere else shall we find the Golden Bride, "passionless bride,
divine Tranquillity."
As human nature persistently demands a moral, and, as, to say truth,
Thackeray was constantly meeting the demand, what is the lesson of his
life and his writings? So people may ask, and yet how futile is the
answer! Life has a different meaning, a different riddle, a different
reply for each of us. There is not one sphinx, but many sphinxes--as
many as there are women and men. We must all answer for ourselves.
Pascal has one answer, "Believe!" Moliere has another, "Observe!"
Thackeray's answer is, "Be good and enjoy!" but a melancholy enjoyment
was his. Dr. John Brown says:
"His persistent state, especially for the later half of his life, was
profoundly _morne_, there is no other word for it. This arose in part
from temperament, from a quick sense of the littleness and wretchedness
of mankind . . . This feeling, acting on a harsh and savage nature, ended
in the _saeva indignatio_ of Swift; acting on the kindly and sensitive
nature of Mr. Thackeray, it led only to compassionate sadness."
A great part of his life, and most of his happiness, lay in love. "Ich
habe auch viel geliebt," he says, and it is a hazardous kind of happiness
that attends great affection. Your capital is always at the mercy of
failures, of death, of jealousy, of estrangement. But he had so much
love to give that he could not but trust those perilous investments.
Other troubles he had that may have been diversions from those. He did
not always keep that manly common sense in regard to criticism, which he
shows in a letter to Mrs. Brookfield. "Did you read the _Spectator's_
sarcastic notice of 'Vanity Fair'? I don't think it is just, but think
Kintoul (Rintoul?) is a very honest man, and rather inclined to deal
severely with his private friends lest he should fall into the other
extreme: to be sure he keeps out of it, I mean the other extreme, very
well."
That is the way to take unfavourable criticisms--not to go declaring that
a man is your enemy because he does not like your book, your ballads,
your idyls, your sermons, what you please. Why cannot people keep
literature and liking apart? Am I bound to think Jones a bad citizen, a
bad man, a bad householder, because his poetry leaves me cold? Need he
regard me as a malevolent green-eyed monster, because I don't want to
read him? Thackeray was not always true in his later years to these
excellent principles. He was troubled about trifles of criticisms and
gossip, _bagatelles_ not worth noticing, still less worth remembering and
recording. Do not let us record them, then.
We cannot expect for Thackeray, we cannot even desire for him, a
popularity like that of Dickens. If ever any man wrote for the people,
it was Dickens. Where can we find such a benefactor, and who has
lightened so many lives with such merriment as he? But Thackeray wrote,
like the mass of authors, for the literary class--for all who have the
sense of style, the delight in the best language. He will endure while
English literature endures, while English civilisation lasts. We cannot
expect all the world to share our affection for this humourist whose
mirth springs from his melancholy. His religion, his education, his life
in this unsatisfying world, are not the life, the education, the religion
of the great majority of human kind. He cannot reach so many ears and
hearts as Shakespeare or Dickens, and some of those whom he reaches will
always and inevitably misjudge him. _Mais c'est mon homme_, one may say,
as La Fontaine said of Moliere. Of modern writers, putting Scott aside,
he is to me the most friendly and sympathetic. Great genius as he was,
he was also a penman, a journalist; and journalists and penmen will
always look to him as their big brother, the man in their own line of
whom they are proudest. As devout Catholics did not always worship the
greatest saints, but the friendliest saints, their own, so we scribes
burn our cheap incense to St. William Makepeace. He could do all that
any of us could do, and he did it infinitely better. A piece of verse
for _Punch_, a paragraph, a caricature, were not beneath the dignity of
the author of "Esmond." He had the kindness and helpfulness which I, for
one, have never met a journalist who lacked. He was a good Englishman;
the boy within him never died; he loved children, and boys, and a little
slang, and a boxing match. If he had failings, who knew them better than
he? How often he is at once the boy at the swishing block and Dr. Birch
who does not spare the rod! Let us believe with that beloved physician,
our old friend Dr. John Brown, that "Mr. Thackeray was much greater, much
nobler than his works, great and noble as they are." Let us part with
him, remembering his own words:
"Come wealth or want, come good or ill,
Let young and old accept their part,
And bow before the awful Will,
And bear it with an honest heart."