we read between the childish lines, they not only evince the pluck
of the child, and not only breathe a waft of the infinite pathos of
English children, Indian born: but because I hold that no one who would
understand Thackeray can afford to forget that he was of Anglo-Indian
stock, bone and marrow.
Now I want, avoiding so much of offence as I may, to say a word or two
(and these only as a groping through private experience, to illustrate
Thackeray) about the retired Anglo-Indian as he has come within the
range of a long experience at an English town by the seashore. On the
whole I know of no human being more typically pathetic. His retirement
may be happier in some places such as Cheltenham, where he has a Club
in which he can meet old Indian cronies or men from “the other side,”
and tell stories and discuss the only politics which interest them. But
in any odd angle of this capital yet most insular isle his isolation is
horrible and fatal. Compared with it, the sorrows of a British child
“sent home” (as conveyed, and to the very heart, in Mr. Kipling’s _Wee
Willie Winkie_, for example) are tragically insignificant. Youth is
elastic and can recover. But this grown man, through the “long, long
Indian days,” has toiled and supported himself upon a hope, to end in
England with fishing or shooting and a share of that happy hospitality
which (God knows) he has earned.
What happens? The domestic servant question (always with us), cold
rooms, dinner-parties at which stories about Allahabad are listened to
patiently by ladies who confuse it with Lahore, polite men who suggest
a game of “snooker pool” as a relief, hoping for not too many anecdotes
in the course of it. And for this your friend and his admirable wife
have been nursing, feeding themselves on promise for, maybe, thirty
years and more, all the time and day after day--_there_ lies the
tragedy--dutifully giving all their best, for England, in confidence of
its reward.
It is not altogether our fault. It is certainly not our fault that the
partridges do not rise on the stubble or the salmon leap up and over
the dams in such numbers as the repatriated fondly remember. To advise
a lady accustomed to many Indian servants upon tact with a couple or
three of English ones--post-War too--is (as Sir Thomas Browne might
say) to bid her sleep in Epicurus his faith, and reacclimatise her
notion. But, to be short, they talk to us politics which have no basis
discoverable in this country.
Yet, withal, they are so noble! So simple in dignity! Far astray
from any path of progress as we may think him; insane as we may deem
his demand to rule, unreasonable his lament over the lost England of
his youth which for so long he has sentimentalised, or domestic his
interest in his nephews, the Anglo-Indian has that key of salvation
which is loyalty. He is for England: and for that single cause I
suppose no men or women that ever lived and suffered on earth have
suffered more than those who lie now under the huddled gravestones of
Calcutta.
VII
I am coming to this: that those who accuse Thackeray of being a snob
(even under his own definition) should in fairness lay their account
that he came of people who, commanding many servants, supported the
English tradition of rule and dominance in a foreign land.
I believe this to explain him in greater measure than he has generally
been explained or understood. Into a class so limited, so exiled,
so professional in its aims and interests--so _borné_ and repugnant
against ideas that would invade upon the tried order of things and
upset caste along with routine--so loyal to its own tradition of
service, so dependent for all reward upon official recognition (which
often means the personal caprice of some Governor or Secretary of
State or Head of Department), some Snobbery--as we understand the word
nowadays--will pretty certainly creep; to make its presence felt, if
not to pervade. But I am not going to discuss with you the question,
“Was Thackeray that thing he spent so much pains, such excessive
pains, in denouncing?”--over which so many disputants have lost their
tempers. It is not worth our while, as the whole business, to my
thinking, was not worth Thackeray’s while. When we come to it--as we
must, because it bulks so largely in his work--we shall quickly pass on.
To me it seems that Thackeray’s geniture and early upbringing--all
those first impressions indelible in any artist--affected him in
subtler ways far better worth our considering. Let me just indicate two.
VIII
For the first.--It seems to me that Thackeray--a social delineator or
nothing--never quite understood the roots of English life or of the
classes he chose to depict; those roots which even in Pall Mall or
Piccadilly or the Houses of Parliament ramify underground deep and
out, fetching their vital sap from the countryside. Walter Bagehot,
after quoting from _Venus and Adonis_ Shakespeare’s famous lines on a
driven hare, observes that “it is absurd to say we know _nothing_ about
the man who wrote that: we know he had been after a hare.” I cannot
find evidence in his works that this child, brought from Calcutta to
Chiswick, transferred to the Charterhouse (then by Smithfield), to
Cambridge, Paris, Fleet Street, Club-land, had ever been after a hare:
and if you object that this means nothing, I retort that it means a
great deal: it means that he never “got off the pavement.” It means
that he is on sure ground when he writes of Jos. Sedley, demi-nabob,
but on no sure ground at all when he gets down to Queen’s Crawley: that
in depicting a class--now perhaps vanishing--he never, for example,
got near the spirit that breathes in Archdeacon Grantly’s talk with
his gamekeeper:
“I do think, I do indeed, sir, that Mr. Thorne’s man ain’t dealing
fairly along of the foxes. I wouldn’t say a word about it, only
that Mr. Henry is so particular.”
“What about the foxes? What is he doing with the foxes?”
“Well, sir, he’s a trapping on ’em. He is, indeed, your reverence.
I wouldn’t speak if I warn’t well nigh mortial sure.”
Now the archdeacon had never been a hunting man, though in his
early days many a clergyman had been in the habit of hunting
without losing his clerical character by doing so; but he had lived
all his life among gentlemen in a hunting county, and had his own
very strong ideas about the trapping of foxes. Foxes first, and
pheasants afterwards, had always been the rule with him as to any
land of which he himself had had the management.... But now his
heart was not with the foxes,--and especially not with the foxes
on behalf of his son Henry. “I can’t have any meddling with Mr.
Thorne,” he said; “I can’t and I won’t ... I’m sure he wouldn’t
have the foxes trapped.”
“Not if he knowed it, he wouldn’t, your reverence. A gentleman of
the likes of him, who’s been a hunting over fifty year, wouldn’t
do the likes of that; but the foxes is trapped ... a vixen was
trapped just across the field yonder, in Goshall Springs, no later
than yesterday morning.” Flurry was now thoroughly in earnest; and,
indeed, the trapping of a vixen in February is a serious thing.
“Goshall Springs don’t belong to me,” said the archdeacon.
“No, your reverence; they’re on the Ullathorne property. But a word
from your reverence would do it. Mr. Henry thinks more of the foxes
than anything. The last word he told me was that it would break
his heart if he saw the coppices drawn blank....”
“I will have no meddling in the matter, Flurry.... I will not have
a word said to annoy Mr. Thorne.” Then he rode away....
But the archdeacon went on thinking, thinking, thinking. He could
have heard nothing of his son to stir him more in his favour than
this strong evidence of his partiality for foxes. I do not mean
it to be understood that the archdeacon regarded foxes as better
than active charity, or a contented mind, or a meek spirit, or than
self-denying temperance. No doubt all these virtues did hold in his
mind their proper places, altogether beyond contamination of foxes.
But he had prided himself on thinking that his son should be a
country gentleman.... On the same morning the archdeacon wrote the
following note:--
DEAR THORNE,--My man tells me that foxes have been trapped on
Darvell’s farm, just outside the coppices. I know nothing of it
myself, but I am sure you’ll look to it.--
Yours always,
T. GRANTLY.
Absurd? Very well--but you will never understand the politics of the
last century--that era so absurdly viewed out of focus, just now, as
one of mere industrial expansion--unless you lay your account with it
better than Thackeray did. As you know, he once stood for Parliament,
as Liberal candidate for the City of Oxford: and it is customary to
rejoice over his defeat as releasing from party what was meant for
mankind. In fact he never had a true notion of politics or of that
very deep thing, political England. Compare his sense of it--his
_novelist’s_ sense--with Disraeli’s. He and Disraeli, as it happens,
both chose to put the famous-infamous Marquis of Hertford into a
novel. But what a thing of cardboard, how entirely without atmosphere
of political or social import, is Lord Steyne in _Vanity Fair_ as
against Lord Monmouth in _Coningsby_!
IX
The late Herman Merivale, in a very brilliant study, interrupted
by death and left to be completed by Sir Frank Marzials, finds
the two key-secrets (as he calls them) of Thackeray’s life to be
these--Disappointment and Religion. I propose ten days hence to examine
this, and to speak of both. But I may premise, here and at once, that
Thackeray was a brave man who took the knocks of life without flinching
(even that from young Venables’ fist, which broke his nose but not
their friendship), and that to me the melancholy which runs through
all his writing--the melancholy of Ecclesiastes, the eternal Mataiotes
Mataioteton--Vanity of Vanities, all is Vanity--was drawn by origin
from the weary shore of Ganges and brought in the child’s blood to us,
over the sea.
“Vanity of vanities,” saith the Preacher--Thackeray was before all else
a Preacher: and that is the end of it, whether in a set of Cornhill
verses or in his most musical, most solemn, prose--
How spake of old the Royal Seer?
(His text is one I love to treat on.)
This life of ours, he said, is sheer
Mataiotes Mataioteton ..., etc.
And now hear the burden of it on that famous page telling how Harry
Esmond walked home after breaking the news of Duke Hamilton’s duel and
death:
As Esmond and the Dean walked away from Kensington discoursing of
this tragedy, and how fatal it was to the cause which they both had
at heart, the street-criers were already out with their broadsides,
shouting through the town the full, true, and horrible account of
the death of Lord Mohun and Duke Hamilton in a duel. A fellow had
got to Kensington, and was crying it in the square there at very
early morning, when Mr. Esmond happened to pass by. He drove the
man from under Beatrix’s very window, whereof the casement had
been set open. The sun was shining, though ’twas November: he had
seen the market-carts rolling into London, the guard relieved at
the palace, the labourers trudging to their work in the gardens
between Kensington and the City--the wandering merchants and
hawkers filling the air with their cries. The world was going to
its business again, although dukes lay dead and ladies mourned for
them, and kings, very likely, lost their chances. So night and day
pass away, and to-morrow comes, and our place knows us not. Esmond
thought of the courier now galloping on the North road, to inform
him who was Earl of Arran yesterday that he was Duke of Hamilton
to-day; and of a thousand great schemes, hopes, ambitions, that
were alive in the gallant heart, beating a few hours since, and now
in a little dust quiescent.
A heavy passage, Gentlemen--and commonplace? Ah! as you grow older you
will find that most of the loveliest, most of the most sacred passages
in literature are commonplaces exquisitely turned and tuned to catch
and hold new hearts.
THACKERAY (II)
I
I left off, Gentlemen, upon a saying of Herman Merivale’s that the two
key-secrets of Thackeray’s life were Disappointment and Religion, and I
proposed, examining this to-day, to speak of both.
Well, for the first, I have already (I think) given full room in the
account to that domestic sorrow which drove him, great boon favourite
of the nursery, to flee from his grand new house in Kensington Gardens--
Cedes coemptis saltibus et domo
Villaque--
to write his novels anywhere rather than at home. In the words of
Barnes’ beautiful lament, which I here make free to divorce from its
native dialect--
Since now beside my dinner-board
Your voice does never sound,
I’ll eat the bit I can afford
Afield upon the ground;
Below the darksome bough, my love,
Where you did never dine,
And I don’t grieve to miss you now
As I at home do pine.
II
But those who stress this Disappointment in Thackeray go on to allege
other causes, additional causes, for it: as that he lost a comfortable
patrimony early in life, and that, conscious of great powers, he felt
them for many years unappreciated, and, when appreciated, partially
eclipsed by the popularity of his great rival, Dickens. Now I don’t
deny that one disappointment may accumulate upon another on a man:
but I ask you to consider also that in criticism one nail may drive
out another, and that in ordinary one explanation is better than two,
almost always far better than three: the possible conclusion being that
not one of the three--not even the first--is the right one.
Actually, then, Thackeray as a young man lost his patrimony by flinging
the hazard quite gallantly and honourably, as a young man should;
foolishly perhaps, as a young man will, but having been just as young
and foolish I am even now not turned Cato enough to condemn a boy for
that. Let us see just what happened.
From the Charterhouse he came up here, to Trinity. His means have been
variously computed: but you may put it down pretty safely at £500
a year--a very pretty sum indeed for an undergraduate. What he did
with it you may find for yourselves in those brilliant chapters in
_Pendennis_--perhaps the very best written on University life--which
treat of Pen’s career at Cambridge.
(For it is Cambridge, of course, though he calls it Oxbridge. And here
may I parenthetically drop a long-hoarded curse upon that trick of the
Victorian novelists of sending up their young heroes to Oxbridge or
Camford, entering them usually at the College of St. Boniface, head of
the river or just about to be head. If, from the pages of Victorian
fiction, a crew could be mustered to unmoor and paddle down the dear
old ’Varsity barge, in the early June twilight, past the Pike and Eel
to Iffley, there to await the crack of the rifle that loosens the
tense muscles,--heavens! what a crew!--or, as Matthew Arnold would
say, “what a set!”--all so indifferent to the rules of training, so
like in appearance to young Greek gods, so thirsty!--and, on the run
of it, what laurels for dear old St. Boniface!... I don’t know why
these hermaphrodite names “Oxbridge” and “Camford” have always been so
peculiarly repugnant to me: but they always have been, and are. I feel
somehow as if to be a graduate of either were to offend against the
Table of Forbidden Degrees. But Thackeray achieved one success in the
blending--when he combined “scout” and “gyp” into “skip.”)
Oxbridge, then, in _Pendennis_ is Cambridge. Thackeray came up in
February, 1829--in the Lent term, that is, instead of in the previous
October--I cannot discover for what reason. It made him, however, by
the rules then prevailing, a _non ens_ or _non annus_ man for that
year: and being also a non-reading man, he decided after two years of
genially unprofitable residence, to refuse the Tripos and a degree, and
retire on London, and took chambers at Hare Court in the Temple. His
age was twenty.
III
Sainte-Beuve--I have read reasonably in his voluminous works, but
without as yet happening on the passage which, quoted by Stevenson in
his _Apology for Idlers_, really needs no verification by reference,
being just an opinion dropped, and whoever dropped it and when,
equally valuable to us--Sainte-Beuve, according to Stevenson, as he
grew older, came to regard all experience as a single great book,
in which to study for a few years before we go hence: and it seemed
all one to him whether you should read in Chapter XX, which is the
Differential Calculus, or in Chapter XXXIX, which is hearing the band
play in the gardens. Note well, if you please, that I am not endorsing
this as a word of advice for Tripos purposes. I am but applying it to
Thackeray, who never sat for his degree, but left Cambridge to write
_Vanity Fair_, _Pendennis_, _Esmond_, sundry other great stories,
with several score of memorable trifles--ballads, burlesques, essays,
lectures, _Roundabout Papers_, what-not. If I may again quote from Sir
Walter Raleigh, “there are two Days of Judgment, of which a University
examination in an Honours School is considerably the less important.”
The learning we truly take away from a University is (as I conceive)
the talent, whatever it be, we use (God helping), and turn to account.
Says Mr. Charles Whibley of Thackeray’s two years here:
The friendships that he made ended only with his life, and he must
have been noble, indeed, who was the friend of Alfred Tennyson and
of Edward FitzGerald. Moreover, Cambridge taught him the literary
use of the university, as the Charterhouse had taught him the
literary use of a public school. In a few chapters of _Pendennis_
he sketched the life of an undergraduate, which has eluded all his
rivals save only Cuthbert Bede. He sketched it, moreover, in the
true spirit of boyish extravagance, which he felt at Cambridge and
preserved even in the larger world of London; and if Trinity and
the rustling gown of Mr. Whewell had taught him nothing more than
this, he would not have contemplated them in vain.
As a matter of fact, of course, the Charterhouse and Cambridge had
taught him much more, even of scholarship. “Scholarship,” is, to be
sure, a relative term which, if lifted to the excellent heights--to
scorn lower degrees of comparison--(as heaven forbid it should not be)
will exclude all who have so learnt their Horace at school that in
after life merely to rehearse and patch together from memory an Ode
of his, long ago learnt for “repetition,” brings comfort to the soul
and can steel it, Romanly, under the stars even on Himalayan outposts.
But if there be aught worthy the name of scholarship to have that one
author bred into your bones--why, then, I challenge that Thackeray did
carry away a modicum of scholarship (and a very pure modicum, too) from
school and university. I shall come to his prose cadences by and by,
and will say no more of them here than that--in _Esmond_ especially,
but in general and throughout his prose--they are inconceivable by
me save as the cadences of a writer early trained upon Greek and
Latin. For blunter evidence, you will find the _Roundabout Papers_
redolent--in quotation, reminiscences, atmosphere--of Horace on every
page; and for evidence yet more patent take his avowed imitation of
Horace (_Odes_ i. 38), the two famous, jolly Sapphic stanzas beginning
_Persicos odi_. Turn to your Conington (say) and you will find them
most neatly and adequately rendered: and then take your Thackeray--
But a plain leg of mutton, my Lucy,
I prithee get ready at three;
Have it smoking and tender and juicy,
And what better meat can there be?
And when it has feasted the master,
’Twill amply suffice for the maid:
Meanwhile I will smoke my canaster,
And tipple my ale in the shade.
Years ago, I discoursed, standing here, on the Horatian Model in
English Verse, attempting to show you how this man and that man--Andrew
Marvell, for example, and Matthew Prior, had attempted it here and
there and how nearly achieved it: of Milton, again, how he tried to
build his Sonnet, redeeming it from the Petrarcan love-business upon
the model of the Horatian Ode; how some sonnets of his (familiar or
political--that _To Mr. Lawrence_ for instance, as a specimen in one
mode, or those _To the Lady Margaret Ley_, or _On the Late Massacre in
Piedmont_ as specimens in another) are deliberately, experimentally
Horatian; and how narrowly--how very narrowly--William Cowper, by
deflection of religious mania, missed to be our purest Horace of
all. But Thackeray is of the band. To alter a word of Carlyle’s, “a
beautiful vein of _Horace_ lay struggling about him.”
IV
But, to return upon the first of the two “key-secrets”--Disappointment
and Religion--and to leave Religion aside for a moment--I cannot find
that, save in his domestic affliction, Thackeray can rightly be called
a disappointed man. There is of course a sense--there is of course a
degree--in which every one of us, if he be worth anything, arrives at
being a disappointed man. We all have our knocks to bear, and some the
most dreadful irremediable wounds to bind up and hide. But whatever
Thackeray spent or owed at Cambridge (to pay in due time), he took
away, with his experience, a most gallant heart. He went to London,
lost the rest of his money in journalistic adventures, and fared out as
a random writer, without (as they say) a penny to put between himself
and heaven. What does he write later on in reminiscence to his mother,
but that these days of struggle were the jolliest of all his life?--
Ye joys that Time hath swept with him away,
Come to mine eyes, ye dreams of love and fun;
For you I pawned my watch full many a day,
In the brave days when I was twenty-one.
That is good gospel. “Fall in love early, throw your cap over the mill;
take an axe, spit on your hands; and, for some one, make the chips fly.”
V
But (say the critics) he was disappointed, soured because--conscious
of his powers of “superior” education and certain gifts only to be
acquired through education, he felt that Dickens--whom certain foolish
people chose to talk of endlessly as his rival--was all the time
outstripping him in public favour. Now, as for this, I cannot see how
Thackeray, in any wildest dream, could have hoped to catch up with
Dickens and pass him in popularity. To begin with, he came to fruition
much later than Dickens: in comparison with the precocity of _Pickwick_
Thackeray was in fact thirty-seven before he hit the target’s gold
with _Vanity Fair_. His earlier serious efforts--_Catherine_, _Barry
Lyndon_, _The Book of Snobs_--are sour and green stuff, call them
what else you will. They deal with acrid characters and (what is more)
deal with them acridly. But even supposing them to be masterpieces
(which title to two of the three I should certainly deny) where was
the audience in comparison with that to which Dickens appealed? Where,
outside a few miles’ radius of Club-land, did men and women exist in
any numbers to whom Thackeray’s earlier work could, by any possibility,
appeal? The dear and maiden lady in _Cranford_, Miss Jenkyns, as
you remember, made allowances for _Pickwick_ in comparison with Dr.
Johnson’s _Rasselas_. “Still perhaps the author is young. Let him
persevere, and who knows what he may become, if he will take the Great
Doctor for his model.” But what--what on earth would she have made of
_Barry Lyndon_? And what would good Captain Brown himself have made of
it? I can almost better see the pair, on the sly, consenting to admire
_Tristram Shandy_.
Now Dickens and Thackeray were both thin-skinned men in their
sensitiveness to public approbation. On at least one occasion each
made a fool of himself by magnifying a petty personal annoyance into
an affair of the world’s concern. As if _anybody_ mattered to that
extent!--
Hi motus animorum atque haec certamina tanta
Pulveris exigui jactu compressa quiescunt.