strictly for her purpose--strictly, mind you for their purpose--Mrs.
Chivery’s parallelisms of speech will match those of the prophet
Jeremiah at his literary best. “Ah,” say you, “but Dickens is dealing
out humorous reported speech. Can he write prose of his own?” Well,
yes, and yes most certainly. If you will search and study his passages
of deliberate writing you will scarcely miss to see how he derives
in turn of phrase as in intonation from the great eighteenth-century
novelists and translators whose works, if you remember, were the small
child’s library in the beautiful fourth chapter of _David Copperfield_:
My father had left a small collection of books in a little room
upstairs ... which nobody else in our house ever troubled. From
that blessed little room, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle,
Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, the Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote,
Gil Blas, and Robinson Crusoe came out, a glorious host, to keep me
company....
The whole passage, if you will turn to it, you will recognise as
delicate English prose. But it is also a faithful, if translated,
record. From this line of English writers, the more you study him,
the more clearly you will recognise Dickens as standing in the direct
descent of a pupil. He brings something of his own, of course, to
infuse it, as genius will: and that something is usually a hint of
pathos which the eighteenth-century man avoided. But (this touch of
pathos excepted) you will find little, say, to distinguish Fielding’s
sketch of Squire Allworthy on his morning stroll from this sketch,
which I take casually from _The Old Curiosity Shop_, of an aged woman
punctually visiting the grave of her husband who had died in his prime
of twenty-three:
“Yes, I was his wife. Death doesn’t change no more than life, my
dear.”... And now that five-and-fifty years were gone, she spoke of
the dead man as if he had been her son or grandson, with a kind of
pity for his youth growing out of her own old age, and an exalting
of his strength and manly beauty, as compared with her own weakness
and decay; and yet she spoke of him as her husband too, and
thinking of herself in connection with him, as she used to be and
not as she was now, talked of their meeting in another world, as
if he were dead but yesterday, and she, separated from her former
self, were thinking of the happiness of that comely girl who seemed
to have died with him.
X
No, we can none of us afford to despise Dickens’ prose. This passage
comes from one of his earliest books: if you would learn how he (ever
a learner) learned to consolidate his style, study that neglected
work of his, _The Uncommercial Traveller_--study such essays as that
on “Wapping Workhouse” or that on “The City Churchyards”--study
them with Thackeray’s _Roundabout Papers_--and tell me if these two
great Victorian novelists, after shaking the dust of an _Esmond_ or
a _David Copperfield_ off their palms, cannot, as a parergon, match
your Augustans--your Steele or your Addison--on their own ground. Few
recognise it, this pair being otherwise so great: but it is so.
And because you will probably disbelieve me at first going-off, I
shall add the testimony of one you will be apter to trust--that of
George Gissing. I have spoken of one chapter in _David Copperfield_, to
commend it.
But, says Gissing:
In the story of David Copperfield’s journey on the Dover road
we have as good a piece of narrative prose as can be found in
English. Equally good, in another way, are those passages of
rapid retrospect in which David tells us of his later boyhood, a
concentration of memory perfumed with the sweetest humour. It is
not an easy thing to relate, with perfect proportion of detail,
with interest that never for a moment drops, the course of a year
or two of wholly uneventful marriage: but read the chapter entitled
_Our Domestic Life_ and try to award adequate praise to the great
artist who composed it. One can readily suggest how the chapter
could have been spoiled; ever so little undue satire, ever so
little excess of sentiment; but who can point to a line in which it
might be bettered? It is perfect writing: one can say no more and
no less.
XI
I am glad, Gentlemen, on the verge of concluding these talks about
Dickens, to quote this from Gissing--a genuine genius, himself an
author of what Dr. Johnson would have described as “inspissated
gloom.” There is, I daresay, some heaven of recognition in which all
true artists meet; and at any rate it pleases one to think that the
author of _The New Grub Street_ should, in this sublunary sphere, have
been comforted on his way (it would even seem, entranced) by such
children of joy as Sam Weller and Mr. Toots. And I, at any rate, who
admired Gissing in life, like to think of him who found this world
so hard, now, by virtue of his love for Dickens, reconciled to look
down on it from that other sphere, with tolerant laughter--upon this
queer individual England, at least. For Providence has made and kept
this nation a comfortable nation, even to this day: and if you take
its raciest literature from Chaucer down, you may assure yourselves
that much of its glorious merit rests on the “triple pillar” of
common-sense, religious morality and hearty laughter. I for my part
hold that we shall help a great deal to restore our commonwealth by
seeking back to that last “Godlike function” and re-learning it. To
promote that laughter, with good sense and good morality, was ever
Dickens’ way, as to kill wherever he could what he once called “this
custom of putting the natural demand for amusement out of sight, as
some untidy housekeepers put dust, and pretending that it was swept
away.” And I think of Dickens as a great Englishman not least in this,
that he was a man of his hands, with a great laugh scattering humbug to
make place for mirth and goodwill; “a clean hearth and [to adapt Mrs.
Battle] the _spirit_ of the game.”
XII
I conclude these lectures on Dickens with a word or two casually
uttered in conversation by a great man--possibly the greatest--of the
generation that succeeded Dickens; himself a superb novelist, and a
ruthless thinker for the good of his kind; a Russian, moreover, to whom
the language alone of Sam Weller or of Mrs. Gamp must have presented
difficulties well-nigh inconceivable by us. Some nineteen years ago a
friend of mine visited Tolstoy at his home and, the talk falling upon
Dickens, this is what Tolstoy said:
All his characters are my personal friends. I am constantly
comparing them with living persons, and living persons with them.
And what a _spirit_ there was in all he wrote!
This having been reported to Swinburne, here is a part of Swinburne’s
answer:
What a superb and crushing reply to the vulgar insults of such
malignant boobies and poetasters as G. H. Lewes and Co. (too
numerous a Co.!) is the witness of ... such a man among men!...
After all, like will to like--genius will find out genius, and
goodness will recognise goodness.
Tolstoy to Dickens.... _That_ is how the tall ships, the grandees of
literature, dip their flags and salute as they pass. Gentlemen, let us
leave it at that!
THACKERAY (I)
I
Among many wise sayings left behind him by the late Sir Walter
Raleigh--_our_ Sir Walter and Oxford’s of whom his pupils there would
say, “But Raleigh is a prince”--there haunts me as I begin to speak of
Thackeray, a slow remark dropped as from an afterthought upon those
combatants who are for ever extorting details of Shakespeare’s private
life out of the Plays and the Sonnets, and those others (Browning, for
example, and Matthew Arnold) who in revulsion have preached Shakespeare
up for the grand impersonal artist who never unlocked his heart, who
smiles down upon all questioning and is still
Out-topping knowledge.
Such a counter-claim may be plausible--is at any rate excusable if only
as an oath upon the swarm of pedlars who infest Shakespeare and traffic
in obscure hints of scandal. Yet, it will not work. “It would never be
entertained,” says Raleigh, “by an artist, and would have had short
shrift from any of the company that assembled at the Mermaid Tavern.
No man can walk abroad save on his own shadow. No dramatist can create
live characters save by bequeathing the best of himself to the children
of his art, scattering among them a largess of his own qualities,
giving, it may be, to one his wit, to another his philosophic doubt,
to another his love of action, to another the simplicity and constancy
that he finds deep in his own nature. There is no thrill of feeling
communicated from the printed page but has first been alive in the
mind of the author: there was nothing alive in his mind that was
not intensely and sincerely felt. Plays like Shakespeare’s cannot
be written in cold blood; they call forth the man’s whole energies,
and take toll of the last farthing of his wealth of sympathy and
experience.”
II
_No man can walk abroad save on his own shadow._ That is the sentence,
of truly Johnsonian common-sense, which bears most intimately on our
subject this morning. The story runs that Thackeray, one day tapping
impatiently upon the cover of some adulatory memoir of somebody, warm
from the press, enjoined upon his family, “None of this nonsense
about me, after my death”: and the injunction was construed by his
daughter, Lady Ritchie, most piously beyond a doubt, perhaps too
strictly, for certain not with the happiest results. For this denial
of any authoritative biography--of a writer and a clean-living English
gentleman who might, if any human being can or could, have walked up
to the Recording Angel and claimed his _dossier_ without a blush--has
not only let in a flood of spurious reminiscences, anecdotes, sayings
he most likely never uttered or at least never uttered with meaning or
accent to give pain that, as reported, they convey. It has led to a
number of editions with gossipy prefaces and filial chat (I fear I must
say it) none the more helpful for being tinctured by affection and
qualified by reserve.
This happens to be the more unfortunate of Thackeray since, as I
suppose, no writer of the Victorian age walked abroad more sturdily on
his own tall shadow, or trusted more on it. It was a shadow, too: dark
enough for any man’s footstep. I do not wish--nor is it necessary--to
break in upon any reticence. But you probably know the main outline
of the story--of a Cambridge youth, of Trinity, who living moderately
beyond his means (as undergraduates will) lost his affluence, lost the
remains of it when, bolting to London, he dared to run a newspaper--two
newspapers. _The National Standard_ had soon (in his own phrase) to
be hauled down, and _The Constitutional_ belied its title by a rapid
decline and decease. Thus he lost a moderate patrimony, and we find him
next as a roving journalist in Paris, divided between pen and pencil,
with an almost empty pocket. There, in August, 1836, at the British
Embassy, he made a most imprudent but happy marriage--most happy, that
is for a while. Years afterwards he wrote to a young friend:
I married at your age with £400 paid by a newspaper which failed
six months afterwards, and always love to hear of a young man
testing his fortune in that way. Though my marriage was a wreck,
as you know, I would do it over again, for behold Love is the
crown and completion of all earthly good.... The very best and
pleasantest house I ever knew in my life had but £300 to keep it.
Here, then, comes in the tragedy of Thackeray’s life. Daughters were
born to him amid those pleasures and anxieties which only they can
taste fully who earn their daily bread in mutual love on the future’s
chance. As he beautifully wrote, long after, in _Philip_:
I hope, friend, you and I are not too proud to ask for our daily
bread, and to be grateful for getting it? Mr. Philip had to work
for his, in care and trouble, like other children of men:--to
work for it, and I hope to pray for it too. It is a thought to me
awful and beautiful, that of the daily prayer, and of the myriads
of fellow-men uttering it, in care and in sickness, in doubt and
in poverty, in health and in wealth. _Panem nostrum da nobis
hodie._ Philip whispers it by the bedside where wife and child lie
sleeping, and goes to his early labour with a stouter heart: as he
creeps to his rest when the day’s labour is over, and the quotidian
bread is earned, and breathes his hushed thanks to the bountiful
Giver of the meal. All over this world what an endless chorus is
singing of love, and thanks, and prayer. Day tells to day the
wondrous story, and night recounts it unto night. How do I come to
think of a sunrise which I saw near twenty years ago on the Nile
when the river and sky flushed with the dawning light and, as the
luminary appeared, the boatmen knelt on the rosey deck and adored
Allah? So, as thy sun rises, friend, over the humble housetops
round about your home, shall you wake many and many a day to duty
and labour. May the task have been honestly done when the night
comes; and the steward deal kindly with the labourer.
Always this refrain in Thackeray--the text which Dr. Johnson once had
inscribed on his watch, _ΝΥΞ ΓΑΡ ΕΡΧΕΤΑΙ_, “For the night cometh.”
With the birth of her third child, however, Mrs. Thackeray fell
under a mental disease not violent at first, but deepening until it
imperatively required removal and restraint.
III
I have been as short over this as could be: but the simple fact must
be taken into account if we would understand Thackeray at all. Without
knowledge of it, for instance, how can we interpret the ache behind his
jolly _Ballad of Bouillabaisse_?
This Bouillabaisse a noble dish is--
A sort of soup, or broth, or brew,
Or hotchpotch, of all sorts of fishes,
That Greenwich never could outdo;
Green herbs, red peppers, mussels, saffern,
Soles, onions, garlic, roach, and dace;
All these you eat at Terré’s tavern,
In that one dish of Bouillabaisse...
Ah me! how quick the days are flitting!
I mind me of a day that’s gone,
When here I’d sit, as now I’m sitting,
In this same place--but not alone.
A fair young form was nestled near me,
A dear, dear face looked fondly up,
And sweetly spoke and smiled to cheer me
--There’s no one now to share my cup.
If you wish, taking him at his best, to envisage Thackeray in the days
of his assured triumph, you must understand him as a desolated man;
as a man who, having built a fine house for himself in Kensington
Palace Gardens, could never fit it for a real home. If he built himself
a house, he could not sit and write in it; scarcely a page of _The
Newcomes_ was written but on Club paper or at a hotel. It would seem
as if the very anguish of the hearth drove this soul, so domestic by
instinct, into the waste of Club-land, Pall Mall, the Reform Club,
where his portrait now so pathetically hangs. For above all (let _The
Rose and the Ring_ with its delightful and delicate occasion attest)
Thackeray was born to be beloved of a nursery--the sort of great fellow
to whom on entrance every child, as every dog, takes by instinct. In
the nursery, quite at home, he rattles off the gayest unforgettable
verses:
Did you ever hear of Miss Symons?
She lives at a two-penny pieman’s:
But when she goes out
To a ball or a rout
Her stomacher’s all covered with di’monds.
Or, for elder taste,
In the romantic little town of Highbury,
My father kept a Succulating Libary.
He followed in his youth the Man immortal who
Conquered the Frenchman on the plains of Waterloo
--with similar fooling. Some men at Cambridge had the gift of this
fooling--in Tennyson’s day, too--and not the least of them was Edward
Lear, incomparable melodist of nonsense--nursery Mozart of the Magic
Flute--to whom, on his Travels in Greece, Tennyson dedicated those very
lovely stanzas beginning:
Illyrian woodlands, echoing falls
Of water, sheets of summer glass,
The long divine Peneian pass,
The vast Acroceraunian walls....
He must be an unsympathetic critic (I think) and therefore an
incomplete critic, if indeed a critic at all, who feels any real
incongruity as in his mind he lets those lines fade off into
Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live, etc.;
for as Shelley once assured us, more or less:
Many a green isle needs must be
In the deep wide sea of--Philistie,
and to anyone who remembers the imaginary horizons of his nursery I
dare say the Blessed Isles of Nonsense and the land where the Bong tree
grows lie not far from Calypso’s grot, or the house of Circe
In gardens near the pale of Proserpine,
Where that Æaean isle forgets the main....
or the yellow sands of Prospero’s island where the elves curtsy, kiss
and dance, or Sindbad’s cave, or those others “measureless to man”
rushed through by Alph the sacred river to where we
see the children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.
IV
No: I am not talking fantastically at all. Let us be sober-serious,
corrugating our brows upon history: and at once see that these
Cambridge men of Thackeray’s generation--FitzGerald (to whom he was
“old Thack”), Tennyson, Brookfield, Monckton Milnes, Kinglake--all
with the exception of Arthur Hallam (whom I sadly suspect to have been
something of a prig) cultivated high fooling and carried it to the
nth power as a fine art. Life, in that Victorian era of peace between
wars, was no lull of lotus-eating for them--the England of Carlyle,
Newman, Ruskin admitted no lull of the young mind--but a high-spirited
hilarious game. As one of them, Milnes, wrote of “The Men of Old”:
They went about their gravest deeds
As noble boys at play.
A plenty of English writers--some of them accounted highly serious
writers--had indulged in what I may call similar “larks” before them.
Swift, for example, has a glorious sense of the high-nonsensical;
Cowper has it, of course. I regret to say that I even suspect Crabbe.
Canning had it--take, for example, a single stage-direction in _The
Rovers_:
Several soldiers cross the stage wearily, as if returning from the
Thirty Years’ War.
Lamb of course had it; and in his letters will carry it to a _delirium
in excelsis_. But this Cambridge group would seem to have shared and
practised it as a form, an exercise, in their free-masonry. Take for a
single instance James Spedding’s forehead. James Spedding, afterwards
learned editor of Bacon, and a butt in that profane set, had a brow
severe and high, of the sort (you know) that tells of moral virtue with
just a hint of premature baldness. It was very smooth; it rose to a
scalp all but conical. His admiring friends elected to call it Alpine.
Now hear FitzGerald upon it, in a letter:
That portrait of Spedding, for instance, which Lawrence has given
me: not swords, nor cannon, nor all the Bulls of Bashan butting
at it, could, I feel sure, discompose that venerable forehead. No
wonder that no hair can grow at such an altitude: no wonder his
view of Bacon’s virtue is so rarefied that the common consciences
of men cannot endure it. Thackeray and I occasionally amuse
ourselves with the idea of Spedding’s forehead: we find it somehow
or other in all things, just peering out of all things: you see it
in a milestone, Thackeray says. He also draws the forehead rising
with a sober light over Mont Blanc, and reflected in the lake of
Geneva. The forehead is at present in Pembrokeshire, I believe: or
Glamorganshire: or Monmouthshire: it is hard to say which. It has
gone to spend its Christmas there.
And later, May 22, 1842:
You have of course read the account of Spedding’s forehead landing
in America. English sailors hail it in the Channel, mistaking it
for Beachy Head.
I have quoted this just to enforce my argument that, to understand
Thackeray’s work, you must understand just what kind of a man he was
in his upbringing and the way of his early friendships. And when I
add that his gift for nursery folly was expended upon a widowed and
desolate home--on a home from which his heart drove him to flee, no
matter how ambitiously he rebuilt and adorned it, to scribble his
novels on Club paper or in hotels, you may get (I hope) a little closer
to understanding his generous, but bitter and always sad heart.
V
I must dwell on another point, too. The Thackerays (or Thackwras--which
I suppose to be another form of Dockwras) had for some generations
prospered and multiplied as Anglo-Indians in the service of the old
East India Company. Their tombs are thick in the old graveyard of
Calcutta, and I would refer anyone who would ponder their epitaphs, or
is interested in the stock from which Thackeray sprang, to a little
book by the late Sir William Hunter entitled _The Thackerays in India
and some Calcutta Graves_ (Henry Frowde, London: 1897). Thackeray
himself was born at Calcutta on the 18th of July, 1811, and, according
to the sad fate of Anglo-Indian children, was shipped home to England
at the age of five, just as Clive Newcome is shipped home in the novel;
and when he pictured the sad figure of Colonel Newcome tottering back
up the _ghaut_, or river-stairs, Thackeray drew what his own boyish
eyes had seen and his small heart suffered. Turn to the “Roundabout
Paper” _On Letts’s Diary_ and you will read concerning that parting:
I wrote this, remembering in long, long distant days, such a
_ghaut_, or river-stair, at Calcutta, and a day when down those
steps, to a boat which was in waiting, came two children, whose
mothers remained on the shore. One of those ladies was never to see
her boy more.... We were first cousins; had been little playmates
and friends from the time of our birth; and the first house in
London to which I was taken was that of our aunt, the mother of his
Honour the Member of Council.
This young cousin and playmate returned in time, as Thackeray never
did, to the shore they were leaving; and died Sir Richmond Shakespeare
(no _vile nomen_!), Agent to the Governor-General for Central India.
The news of his death gave occasion to the tender little essay from
which I have been quoting.
On the passage their ship touched at St. Helena, and their black
servant took them a long walk over rocks and hills “until we reached a
garden, where we saw a man walking. ‘That’s he,’ said the black man:
‘that is Bonaparte! He eats three sheep every day, and all the little
children he can lay hands upon.’”--After which terrible vision no doubt
the youngsters resumed their Odyssey--as Homer would put it--
ἀκαχήμενοι ἦτορ,
ἄσμενοι ἐκ θανάτοιο.
“Stricken at heart yet rejoicing to have escaped perdition.” They
reached London to find it plunged in mourning (and, for many reasons,
in very genuine mourning) by the death of the Princess Charlotte:
and young Thackeray proceeded to Chiswick, to the charge and care
of his aunt Mrs. Ritchie. One day she caught the child trying on
his uncle’s large hat, and, finding to her alarm that it accurately
fitted him, swept him off to the fashionable physician, Sir Charles
Clark: “Reassure yourself, madam,” the doctor is reported as saying:
“he has, to be sure, an abnormal head; but I think there’s something
in it.” He was put to school first at a young gentlemen’s academy
at Chiswick, maybe next door to Miss Pinkerton’s Seminary for Young
Ladies through the portals of which (if you remember, and into the
garden) Miss Rebecca Sharp hurled back her “leaving copy” of Dr.
Johnson’s “Dixonary.” The master would seem to have been a Dr.
Swishtail, compounded of negligence and tyranny, as so many “private
schoolmasters” chose to be even to days of my own experience. But here
is the child’s first letter, dated February 18, 1818, to his mother in
India and composed in a round hand between ruled lines:
My dear Mama--I hope you are quite well. I have given my dear
Grandmama a kiss. My aunt Ritchie is very good to me. I like
Chiswick, there are so many good boys to play with. St. James’s
Park is a very nice place. St. Paul’s Church, too, I like very
much. It is a finer place than I expected. I hope Captain Smyth is
well: Give my love to him and tell him he must bring you home to
your affectionate little son.
WILLIAM THACKERAY.
The separating sea was wide: but what a plucky little letter!
VI