to say that it was a book that could be read anywhere. 'It had no word
that might not have been used at the court of Queen Anne.' It is a
highly romantic tale, but it is a sad story. It is a great Queen Anne
romance; but, 'there broods a peculiar conviction that Queen Anne is
dead.' The whole tale moves round a complicated situation in which a
young man loves a mother and her daughter, and finally marries the
mother. This work is, for Chesterton, Thackeray's 'most difficult task.'
It is difficult for the reason that the situation of the tale is placed
between possibilities of grace and possibilities even of indecency. It
is not hard to write a graceful tale, it is easy to write a loose
story; it is extremely difficult to write a story that may by a stroke
of the pen be either beautiful or merely sordid. But Thackeray
manipulates the keys of the tale so that 'it moves like music,' an
extremely apt metaphor, where harmonies can be made disharmonies by a
single note.
It is a strange fact that a sequel is seldom to be compared to its
forerunner: 'Tom Brown's Schooldays' is of a schoolboy who is an eternal
type; 'Tom Brown at Oxford' is a poor book that does not in the least
understand Oxford. The fact is, I think, that an author cannot be
inspired twice on the same subject--the gods give but sparingly, their
gifts do not fall as the rains.
The sequel to 'Esmond' that Thackeray wrote, 'The Virginians,' is an
'inadequate sequel,' which is not to say that it is a poor book, but
rather that it is an unnecessary one. Yet, as Chesterton says,
'Thackeray never struck a smarter note than when, in "The Virginians,"
he created the terrible little Yankee Countess of Castlewood.' In the
same way as 'The Virginians' was a sequel to 'Esmond,' so 'Philip' was a
sequel (also an inadequate one) to the 'Newcomes.'
It is strange that in two things at least Thackeray's life followed the
same course as Dickens. Both occupied the editorial chair: Dickens that
of the _Daily News_, Thackeray that of the _Cornhill Magazine_. Both
left unfinished works: Dickens that of 'The Mystery of Edwin Drood,'
Thackeray that of 'Denis Duval.'
Thackeray's last work, 'Lovell the Widower,' is 'a very clever sketch,
but as a novel is rather drawn out.' 'The Roundabout Papers' make very
pleasant reading. In one 'he compares himself to a pagan conqueror
driving in his chariot up the Hill of Coru, with a slave behind him to
remind him that he is only mortal.' In 1863, suddenly, Thackeray died,
seven years before Dickens also passed away.
Chesterton has in the space of a short introduction given a very clear
account of the chief characteristics of Thackeray's works; it is no
easy matter to give in a few lines the essence of a great novel, and
Chesterton is not always the most concise of writers. It will now be
convenient to take a few of the characteristics of Thackeray and observe
what he says of them.
At once he is aware of the fact that there is no writer from whom it is
more difficult to make extracts than from Thackeray. The reason is that
Thackeray worked by 'diffuseness of style.' If he wished to be satirical
about a character he was not so directly; rather he worked his way to
the inside of the character, got to know all about it, and then began to
be satirical. This is what Chesterton feels about the matter; it is no
doubt the fairest way of being satirical and the most effective. Many
people and writers are satirical without first of all demonstrating upon
what grounds they have the right to be so. Satire is a wholly laudable
thing if it is directed in a fair minded manner, but if it is only an
excuse for bitter cynicism it is altogether contemptible. Thus he says
of the Thackerean treatment of 'Vanity Fair,' 'he was attacking "Vanity
Fair" from the inside.' It comes to this: if you want to make an extract
from Thackeray you must dive about all over the place to make apparent
irrelevancy become relevancy.
If the use of the grotesque was a strength of Browning (as Chesterton
contends against other critics), so in the case of Thackeray that which
some critics have held to be a weakness--I mean his 'irrelevancy'--is
for our critic a strength. It was a strength, because it was 'a very
delicate and even cunning literary approach.' It is the perfect art of
Thackeray to get the right situation, not by an assumption of it, but by
so approaching it that there is no way out, which is arriving at the
situation by the fairest means possible.
'No other novelist ever carried to such perfection as Thackeray the art
of saying a thing without saying it. Thus he may say that a man drinks
too much, yet it may be false to say that he drinks.' What he did was
not to say that a man had arrived at such and such a state, but rather
that things must change. If, as Chesterton says, Miss Smith finds
marriage the reverse of the honeymoon, Thackeray does not say that the
marriage is a failure, but that joy cannot last for ever; that if there
are roses there are also thorns. It is an admirable method, far better
than saying a thing straight out. It is better to tell a man who is a
cad that there is such a thing as being a gentleman, than to tell him he
is a cad.
In his later life Thackeray was inclined to imitate himself. It is, I
think, that the human brain is prone to move in circles. In the case of
Thackeray, as our critic points out, in later days he used his rambling
style, and, as was to be expected, he rather lost himself. 'He did not
merely get into a parenthesis, he never got out of it,' which is to say
that as Thackeray got older he inherited the tendencies of old age.
I have said earlier in this chapter that the charge against Thackeray of
cynicism was one that was founded on a false premise. The charge that
his irrelevancy was a weakness is based on another false but popular
premise, that the direct method is always the best. It is usually the
worst. It is the worst in warfare, it is the worst in literature, but it
is possibly the best in literary criticism.
Thackeray had another quality that has laid him open to adverse
criticism; that is, his 'perpetual reference to the remote past.' This
repeated reference to the past may be a matter of conceit, or it may be
that the influence of the past is genuinely felt. The reason that, as
Chesterton points out, Thackeray referred so much to the remote past,
was that he wished it to be known that 'there was nothing new under the
sun'; not even, as our critic says, 'the sunstroke.' Chesterton admits
that at times Thackeray carried this tendency to an excess; also
Thackeray wanted to show that the oldest thing in the world was its
youth. Thus in writing of a fashionable drawing-room in Mayfair, if he
referred to some classic, it was to 'remind people how many _debutantes_
had come out since the age of Horace.' It was quite a different thing
to the pompous bishop quoting Greek at the squire's house to show that
his doctor's degree, though an honorary one, had some classical learning
behind it, or the small boy translating Horace to avoid the headmaster's
cane. In the case of the bishop and the schoolboy, the use of the
classics is, on the one hand, pomposity; on the other, discretion. In
the case of Thackeray it was a reverence for the past, that it was a
very large part of the present.
There are, then, roughly three main characteristics of Thackeray: his
irrelevancy, his rambling style, and his frequent reference to the past.
All these, Chesterton makes it clear, are matters in which the strength
of Thackeray lies. Not that they are free always from exaggerations.
Sometimes Thackeray became lost in his irrelevancy, sometimes he became
almost unintelligible in his rambling style, now and then his use of
ancient quotation became irritating. 'Above all things, Thackeray was
receptive. The world imposed on Thackeray, and Dickens imposed on the
world.' But it could not be put more truly than that Thackeray
represents, in that gigantic parody called genius, the spirit of the
Englishman in repose. 'This spirit is the idle embodiment of all of us;
by his weakness we shall fail, and by his enormous sanities we shall
endure.' This is the crux of the matter which Chesterton brings out,
that the weaknesses of Thackeray are his strength. He loved liberty, not
because it meant restraint from law, but because he 'was a novelist'; he
was open to all the influences round him, not because he had no
standpoint, but because he could see merit in selection; he had an open
mind, but knew when to shut it.
* * * * *
The passages selected from the various works have been chosen with care.
It was evidently by no means an easy task. The passage chosen to show
Colonel Newcome in the 'Cave of Harmony' gives in one poignant incident
his character; the selection from 'Pendennis' does much the same. In the
passage from 'Esmond' the story of the duel is a fine selection; the
chapter on 'Some Country Snobs' is an apt choosing; the celebrated
'Essay on George IV' demonstrates Thackeray in a very different mood.
The 'Fall of Becky Sharp,' taken from 'Vanity Fair,' has not been
included without forethought.
Of Thackeray's poems, Chesterton has included the most significant, and
not without due 'The Cane-Bottomed Chair' finds a prominent place.
Enough has been said to show that Chesterton is not a critic of
Thackeray who has no discrimination in choosing from his works. He knows
what Thackeray was, wherein lay his strength and weakness. He has added
a worthy companion to his fuller works on Browning and Dickens.
_Chapter Four_
BROWNING
It will be convenient for our purpose to adhere as closely as possible
to the order of Chesterton's book. It is a hard task to do justice to
Browning even in a long book; the task is not simplified when, in a
chapter, it is hoped to give a criticism of an intricate criticism of
Browning.
There are two ways to approach such a task: The first is to take the
book as a whole and write a review of it, which is a method liable to a
superficiality; the second is to take such a work chapter by chapter,
and to piece the various criticisms into an ordered whole. This I have
attempted to do. I make no attempt to criticize the method of
Chesterton's approach to Browning, or his combination of the effect of
his life on his work; rather I wish to take what the critic says and
comment on his remarks.
There is undoubtedly a fundamental difference between Browning and
Dickens which is at once clear to any critic of these two writers.
Dickens was, as I have said in an earlier chapter, born at the
psychological moment. Browning happened to be born early in the
nineteenth century. I cannot see that it would have mattered had he been
born at the beginning of the twentieth. His early life, unlike Dickens,
was normal, but it did not affect Browning adversely. Had Dickens' life
been uneventful, I think it not improbable that his literary output
would have been commonplace instead of, as nearly as possible, divine.
There is no particular account of Browning's family, which was probably
a typical middle-class family, which is to say that they were, like many
thousands of their kind, lovers of the normal--a very good reason why
later Browning should have acquired a love for the grotesque, which many
people quite wrongly define as the abnormal.
The grotesque is a queer psychological state of mind; the abnormal is an
extreme kind of individualism that is probably insane, provided the
opposite is sane.
What is important, as Chesterton feels, is that we shall get some
account of Browning's home. It is in the home that we can usually detect
the embryo of future activity. The germ, although sometimes hidden, is
nevertheless there, which is exactly why the commonplace home life of a
genius, before the public has discovered the fact, is interesting.
To quote our critic: 'Browning was a thoroughly typical Englishman of
the middle class,' and he remained so through his life.
But this middle-class Englishman walking through the streets of
Camberwell, as the boys played in the gutters, was Browning, not then
the master poet of the Victorian Era, but the young man who could 'pass
a bookstall and find no thrill in beholding on a placard the name of
Shelley.'
Browning found his early life in an age 'of inspired office boys,' an
age that emerged from the shadow of the French Revolution, that extreme
method of optimism which Chesterton believes no Englishman can
understand, not even Carlyle himself. It was an optimism that was so,
because it held that man was worthy of liberty, which is to say that no
man is by his nature ever meant to be a slave.
While Browning was living his daily life in Camberwell, Dickens was
existing in the blacking factory; yet again it was an age of the
beginning of intellectual giants.
The Chestertonian standpoint with regard to the early days of Browning
is interesting. It is a ready acknowledgment of the poetic instinct that
was being slowly but surely nurtured in the heart of the unknown young
man of Camberwell.
It is in this early period of his life that Browning attempts what
Chesterton rightly describes as the most difficult of literary
propositions, that of writing a good political play. This Browning
essayed to do, and wrote 'Strafford,' a play that dealt with that most
controversial part of history, the time when kings could be executed in
Whitehall under the shadow of their own Parliament.
For our critic, Strafford was one of the greatest men ever born with the
sacred name of England on his brow. The play was not a gigantic success,
it was not a failure; it was, as was to be expected, popular with a
limited public, which is very often one of the surest criterions of
merit in a book or play. The success of the play was sufficient to
assure the public that Browning had brains and, what was more unusual,
could put them to a good advantage.
Browning became then 'a detached and eccentric personality who had
arisen on the outskirts; the world began to be conscious of him at this
time.'
In 1840 our critic tells us 'Sordello' was published. It was a poem that
caused people to wonder whether it was really deep, or merely pure
nonsense, a distinction some people cannot ever discover in regard to
Browning.
Of this poem, its unique reception by the literary world lies in the
fact 'that it was fashionable to boast of not understanding,' which, as
I have said, was an indication that it might be termed extremely clever
or extremely stupid. It was not a poem, as has been held by some
critics, that was a piece of intellectual vanity. Browning was far too
great a man to stoop down to such mere banal conceit. The poem was a
very different thing. It was a creature created by the obscurity of
Browning's mind, which, as Chesterton thinks, was the natural reaction
for a genius, born in a villa street in South London.
What is the explanation of this poem? What is its meaning? Wherein lies
its soul? These are questions every lover of Browning has constantly to
ask. Our critic supplies an answer, an answer that is original, and is,
I think, true--the poem is an epic on 'the horror of great darkness,'
that darkness that strangely enough seems to attack the young more
frequently than the old.
That which is levelled against Browning, his obscurity, is a very
bulwark protecting a subtle and clear mind. This is specially so with a
poet who probably of all men so lives in his own poetic world that he
forgets his ideas, though clear to himself, are vague to the world
occupied with conventionalities.
The real difficulty of 'Sordello' lies in the fact that it is written
about an obscure piece of Italian history of which Browning happened to
have knowledge--the struggles of mediaeval Italy. This obscurity is not
studied, as in the case of academic distinction; it is natural. The
obscurity of many of the passages of St. John's Gospel is natural
because the mind of St. John dwelt on the 'depths,' as did Browning's
dwell on the grotesque. The result is the same. Each needs an
interpreter, each has an abundance of the richest philosophy, each has
an imprint of the Finger of God.
With all the controversy it has caused, 'Sordello' has had no great
influence on Browningites; its name has passed into almost contempt.
Chesterton has done much to give the true meaning of this strange work.
With his next poem Browning spoke with a voice that, as our critic says,
proved that he had found that he was not Robinson Crusoe, which is to
say that he had found that the world contained a great number of people.
Despite the 1,500 millions amongst whom we 'live and move and have our
being' we are apt to think that we alone are important, which is not
conceit but a mere proposition demonstrating that man is a universe in
himself while being but an infinitesimal part of the universe.
'Pippa Passes' is a poem which expresses a love of humanity; it is an
epic of unconscious influence which, no doubt, Browning felt was the key
to all that is best and noble in human activity. 'The whole idea of the
poem lies in the fact that "Pippa Passes" is utterly remote from the
grand folk whose lives she troubles and transforms.'
Browning's poetry in the poetical sense was now nearing its zenith. The
'Dramatic Lyrics' were published in 1842, possibly about the time that
Dickens was returning from his triumphant American tour. These showed,
Chesterton thinks, the two qualities most often denied to Browning,
passion and beauty. They are the contradiction to critics, other than
ours, who regard Browning as wholly a philosophic poet, which is to say
a poet who wrote poetry not for its own sake but for purely utilitarian
purpose; not that poetry of the emotions is not useful--it is on a
different plane.
The poems were those that 'represent the arrival of the real Browning of
literary history'; for in these he discovered what was, for Chesterton,
Browning's finest achievement, his dramatic lyrical poems.
Critics have said that Browning's poetry lacks passion and the most
poignant emotion of human nature, love. Chesterton, on the other hand,
considers that Browning was the finest love poet of the world. It is
real love poetry, because it talks about real people, not ideals; it
does not muse of the Prince Charming meeting the Fairy Princess, and
forget the devoted wife meeting her husband on the villa doorstep with
open arms and a nice dinner in the parlour. Sentiment must be based on
reality if it is to have worth. This is the strong point, for our
critic, of Browning's love poetry.
The next work of importance that came from Browning's pen was the
'Return of the Druses,' which shows Browning's interest in the strange
religions of the East, that queer phantastic part of the world that gave
birth to a Western religion which has transformed the West, leaving the
East to gaze afar off. This poem is, for Chesterton, a psychological
one. It is an attempt to give an account of a human being; perhaps the
most difficult task in the world, because it can never hope to solve all
sides of the question. The central character of this splendid poem is
one 'Djubal,' a queer mixture of the virtues of the Deity with the vices
of Humanity. He is for Browning the first of a series of characters on
which he displays his wonderful powers of apologizing for apparently
bad men.
He attempted, to quote our critic, 'to seek out the sinners whom even
sinners cast out,' which Christ always did, and which His Church does
not always do.
Again Browning turned his hand to writing plays, but he was always a
'neglected dramatist' in the sense that he had to push his plays; his
plays did not push him.
His next play, 'A Blot on the "Scutcheon,"' is chiefly interesting, as
it was the occasion of a quarrel between its author and that most
eccentric of theatrical personalities, Macready. The quarrel was, our
critic points out, a matter of money. But Browning failed to see this;
he was a man of the world in his poems, but not in his life.
It is interesting here to see what our critic says of Browning about
this period before we consider the question of his marriage. 'There were
people who called Browning a snob. He was fond of wealth and fond of
society; he admired them as the child who comes in from the desert. He
bore the same relation to the snob that the righteous man bears to the
Pharisee--something frightfully close and similar and yet an everlasting
opposite.'
It has been left for Chesterton to give the truest definition of a
Pharisee that has yet been penned, because it is exactly what every man
feels but has never expressed in so brilliant a paradox.
* * * * *
That Browning had faults Chesterton would be the last to deny. Faults
are as much a part of a great man as virtues. The more pronounced the
fault, the more exquisite is the virtue, especially in a man of the
character of Browning, a character that had a certain 'uncontrollable
brutality of speech,' together with a profound and unaffected respect
for other people.
Chesterton's chapter on Browning and his marriage is one of the most
homely chapters of the book; it gives the lie to those critics who have
glibly said that he has no way in which to reach our hearts or cause a
lump in our throats.
The very method of describing how a great man wooed a great woman, how
the two loved, married, and disagreed upon certain matters, is one that
has an essential appeal to the heart. The exquisite description of the
effect of the death of his wife on Browning is pathetic by its very
simplicity.
It is enough to say that Browning's marriage was a successful one, which
is not to say that it was entirely free from certain disagreements. The
domestic relations of great writers and poets have not always been of
the rosiest. Swift did not make an ideal marriage--at least, not on
conventional lines. Milton had a wife who utterly misunderstood that her
husband was a genius. Dickens was not blessed with matrimonial bliss.
Shelley found faith in one woman hard.
But Browning and his wife had no disagreements on their life interests.
They were both poets, though of a different calibre. What they really
did not see eye to eye upon was something which the human race is still
much divided about. This great point of difference was with regard to
spiritualism. Browning did not dislike spiritualism; he disliked
spiritualists. The difference is tremendous. Unfortunately many of the
interpreters of spiritualism have degraded it into a kind of blatant
necromancy which is in no way dignified or useful. It is entirely
opposed to proper psychic research.
Miss Barrett had been an invalid. Therefore Browning feared that
spiritualism might have a really bad effect on his wife. 'He was
sensible to put a stop to it.'
The theory, on the other hand, held by other critics of Browning than
Chesterton was that his dislike of spiritualism was fostered by a direct
disbelief in immortality, which is as absurd a statement as is possible
to make. Spiritualism and Immortality have no necessary connection
whatever, though to a certain extent Spiritualism is presumed on the
belief in a future life.
But this, as Chesterton points out, was not the reason for Browning's
position; it was entirely that Browning thought 'if he had not
interposed when she was becoming hysterical she might have ended in a
lunatic asylum.'
As Browning spent so much of his life in Italy it will be well to see
what our critic considers he thought of that country under the blue
skies jutting on to the blue seas of the Mediterranean.
'Italy,' says Chesterton, 'to Browning and his wife, was not by any
means merely that sculptured and ornate sepulchre that it is to so many
of those cultured Englishmen who live in Italy and despise it. To them
it was a living nation, the type and centre of the religion and politics
of a continent, the ancient and flaming heart of Western history, the
very Europe of Europe.'
Browning's life in Italy was more or less uneventful. It consisted of a
conventional method--the meeting of famous Englishmen visiting Italy,
the writing of numerous poems, the pleasant domestic life of a literary
genius and his wife.
There was only one thing that could break it, and it came in 1861. Mrs.
Browning died. 'Alone in the room with Browning. He, closing the door of
that room behind him, closed a door in himself, and none ever saw
Browning upon earth again but only a splendid surface.'
* * * * *
During his wife's life Browning had planned his great work, that of the
'Ring and the Book.' In the meantime came the death of his wife, and
Browning moved on the earth alone. Of this period of his life, shortly
after the death of Mrs. Browning, Chesterton gives us a clear picture.
'Browning liked social life, he liked the excitement of the dinner, the
exchange of opinions, the pleasant hospitality that is so much a part of
our life. He was a good talker because he had something to say.'