who will estrange great men if they can; and, the cause of quarrel
once set up, I still more regret to say that the great men quite as
often as not come most foolishly out of it. Thackeray’s estrangement
from Dickens happened over an article by a young journalist of
twenty-seven--Mr. Edmund Yates, afterwards Editor of _The World_, a
society newspaper--and Thackeray’s foolish insistence, in the teeth of
remonstrances by Dickens and Wilkie Collins, that young Yates should be
expelled from the Garrick Club. A week before Thackeray’s death, he and
Dickens met on the steps of the Athenæum, passed, turned, and looked at
each other. Thackeray held out a hand, which Dickens did not refuse.
Now may I put in here, Gentlemen, and in parenthesis, a word of which
I have often wanted to unburden myself?... Some of you--some of the
best of you, I hope--may leave Cambridge for Fleet Street, a street
which I too have trodden. It is a street of ambitions; but withal the
centre of our English Republic of Letters, in the motto of which,
though there can be no “Equality,” let us neither exclude the “Liberty”
that Milton fought for, nor the “Fraternity” of elder and younger
brethren. I remember this plea for Fraternity being put up by an
eminent man of letters, still with us; and being so much impressed by
it that it outlasted even the week-after-next, when I found him taking
off the gloves to punish a rival scribe. But these two were musical
critics, arguing about music: and I have sometimes, pondering, thought
that there must really be something naturally akin between music and
prosody (arts of which I know so little), seeing that the professors
of both pelt each other in terms of insult so amazingly similar and
with a ferocity the likeness of which one has to recognise even while
murmuring, “Come, come! What is this all about, after all?” I suppose
the average Musical Review in the weekly papers to contain more mud to
the square inch than even _The Dunciad_! And you must acknowledge,
Gentlemen, _The Dunciad_, for all its wit, to be on the whole a pretty
wearisome heap of bad breeding. It kicks: but as they say in the
country, there is “plenty hair on the hoof.” What I plead is that all
we engaged in _literature_ take some warning from the discourtesies
of the past, and that you, at any rate, who pass out into literary
practice from this Tripos of ours, shall pass out as a confraternity of
gentlemen. Consider, if you will, that Literature, our mistress, is a
goddess greater than any of us. She is Shakespeare and Ben Jonson too;
Milton and Dry den; Swift, Addison, Steele; Berkeley and Goldsmith;
Pope and John Gay; Johnson, Gibbon, Burke, Sheridan; Cowper and Burns;
Blake and Wordsworth and Coleridge; Landor, Scott, Keats, Shelley and
Byron; Carlyle, Ruskin, Tennyson, Browning, all, says the Preacher,
“giving counsel by their understanding and declaring prophecies.” I
name but a few of the procession, but all were her knights; and each,
in his time, fought for his ideal of her--
Blue is Our Lady’s colour,
White is Our Lord’s:
Tomorrow I will make a knot
Of blue and white cords;
That you may see it where I ride
Among the flashing swords.
Or let me lower the key and put it thus--addressing you as plain
apprentices and setting the ground no higher than an appeal for the
credit of our craft. I once wrote of Robert Louis Stevenson, and with
truth, that he never seemed to care who did a good piece of work so
long as a good piece of work got itself done. Consider, on top of this,
the amount of loss to the world’s benefit through those literary
broils and squabbles. You are expected, for example, to know something,
at least, of _The Dunciad_ in your reading for the English Tripos: and
I dare say many of you have admired its matchless conclusion:
Lo! thy dread empire CHAOS is restor’d:
Light dies before thy uncreating word:
Thy hand, great Anarch, lets the curtain fall.
But turn your admiration about and consider what a hand capable of
writing _so_ might have achieved in the long time it had wasted,
turning over an immense buck-basket of foul linen. No, Gentlemen--take
the example of poor Hazlitt--contemporary misunderstandings,
heart-burnings, bickerings make poor material for great authors. I
cannot find that, although once, twice or thrice, led astray into these
pitfalls, Thackeray (and this is the touchstone) ever really envied
another man’s success.
“Get _David Copperfield_,” he writes in a familiar letter: “by jingo,
it’s beautiful; it beats the yellow chap (_Pendennis_) of this month
hollow.”
And again, “Have you read Dickens? Oh, it’s charming. Bravo Dickens!
it (_David Copperfield_ again) has some of his very prettiest
touches--those inimitable Dickens’ touches which make such a great man
of him.”
In truth there was in this tall fellow of six-feet-four a strain of
melancholy not seldom observable in giants.[2] Add to this that touch
of inherited Anglo-Indian melancholy of which I spoke a fortnight ago;
add the tragedy of his marriage; and I think we need not seek amid any
literary disappointments for the well of the song of “Vanity, vanity,
all is vanity” which, springing evident in the title of his first great
novel, runs an undercurrent through all that he wrote.
[2] He was remarkable for height and bulk: a lumbering,
unathletic figure with a slouch. One day being at a fair
with his friend “Big Higgins” (_Jacob Omnium_) they
approached a booth and Higgins felt in his pockets for
small change. “Oh!” said Thackeray, “they’ll pass us in
free, as two of the profession.”
It was not for nothing that he translated Uhland’s
_The King on the Tower_
The cold grey hills they bind me around,
The darksome valleys lie sleeping below,
But the winds as they pass o’er all this ground,
Bring me never a sound of woe!
Oh! for all I have suffered and striven,
Care has embittered my cup and my feast;
But here is the night and the dark blue heaven,
And my soul shall be at rest.
O golden legends writ in the skies!
I turn towards you with longing soul,
And list to the awful harmonies
Of the Spheres as on they roll.
My hair is grey and my sight nigh gone;
My sword it rusteth upon the wall;
Right have I spoken, and right have I done:
When shall I rest me once for all?
O blessed rest! O royal night!
Wherefore seemeth the time so long
Till I see yon stars in their fullest light,
And list to their loudest song?
VI
This leads us naturally to the second “key-secret” which Mr. Merivale
found in Thackeray--his Religion. That is all very well, but what do
we understand by it? That Thackeray was very simply devout no reader
of his novels will question for a moment. Philip, for instance, flings
himself quite naturally on his knees in prayer: and, I am sure, quite
as naturally did Thackeray in any moment of trouble, as he might be
seen religiously walking with his daughters to public worship. But
again, what is prayer? or what was it to Thackeray?--forgive me that
I raise this question, since religion has been claimed as one of his
two “key-secrets.” What is prayer, then? Is it that which, in Jeremy
Taylor, “can obtain everything,” can “put a holy constraint upon God,
and detain an angel till he leave a blessing ... arrest the sun in the
midst of his course and send the swift-wing’d winds upon our errand;
and all those strange things, and secret decrees, and unrevealed
translations which are above the clouds and far beyond the region of
the stars, shall combine in ministry and advantages for the praying
man”? Is it with Thackeray so forcible a power as that? Or is it
just the humble yet direct petition of the Athenians, commended by
Marcus Aurelius--“Rain, rain, dear Zeus, on the ploughed fields of the
Athenians”--in truth, says the Emperor, for his part, “we ought not to
pray at all, or to pray in this simple and noble fashion.”
There is a considerable difference, you see: and for my part I have,
searching Thackeray’s works, no doubt that Thackeray’s prayer was
ever direct, devout, unabashed and as simple, as anything in _Tom
Brown’s School Days_ transferred to a big grown man. You may at most
put him down as a guest at the inn of Emmaus. But he lived through
the time of Newman, Manning, Martineau; and all I can say is that if
Religion involve any conflict at all of the soul, in his novels I
detect nothing of the sort: nothing even resembling those spiritual
tortures which, afflicting men so various and differing (if you will)
in degree as Newman, Clough, and yet later Richard Jefferies, were a
real and dreadful burden of the soul to our fathers and grandfathers.
Thackeray lived up to the very thick of the conflict: it touched
him not. He was devout just as--shall we say?--we elders have known
certain Anglo-Indian Captains who went through the Mutiny and during
it saw things upon which, coming home, they locked their lips, gallant
gentlemen!
So Thackeray walked and knelt, as it seems to me in the very simplest
of Creeds. Its summary is no more--and no less--than old Colonel
Newcome’s dying _Adsum_! Says a reviewer in the _North British_:
We cannot resist here recalling one Sunday evening in December,
when he was walking with two friends along the Dean road to the
west of Edinburgh--one of the noblest outlets to any city. It was
a lovely evening, such a sunset as one never forgets; a rich dark
bar of cloud hovered over the sun, going down behind the highland
hills, lying bathed in amethystine bloom; between this cloud and
the hills there was a narrow slip of the pure ether, of a tender
cowslip colour, lucid, and as if it were the very body of heaven
in its clearness; every object standing out as if etched upon the
sky. The north-west of Corstorphine Hill, with its trees and rocks,
lay in the heart of this pure radiance, and there a wooden crane,
used in the quarry below, was so placed as to assume the figure
of a cross: there it was, unmistakable, lifted up against the
crystalline sky. All three gazed at it silently. As they gazed,
he gave utterance in a tremulous, gentle, and rapid voice, to what
all were feeling, in the word “Calvary”! The friends walked on in
silence, and then turned to other things. All that evening he was
very gentle and serious, speaking, as he seldom did, of divine
things,--of death, of sin, of eternity, of salvation; expressing
his simple faith in God, and in his Saviour.
VII
I shall attempt in another lecture, Gentlemen, to examine some of
Thackeray’s limitations as a novelist; and passing on, to explore
the curious, most haunting felicity of his prose. You will have
already gathered that I am trying to do what all Professors must and
no critic should; which is to discuss an author with whom he has a
broken sympathy. The lilt, the cadence, of Thackeray’s prose are to
me a rapture, almost. The meanness of his concern with life and his
cruelty in handling mean things--as in _A Shabby Genteel Story_--evoke
something like physical nausea. His _Paris Sketch Book_ seems to me
about the last word in bumptiousness: his lectures on Swift and on
Sterne might, bating reverence for him even in misdeed, be flipped as
flies are flipped off a clean page of paper. They needed (as Venables
most justly advised) a piano for accompaniment--or a pianola. On the
other hand--to omit the great novels--his _Roundabout Papers_ almost
touch Horatian perfection.
As for his snobbery--well, I promised you that coming to it, I
should waste little of your time. Perhaps I should have called it
his “alleged” snobbery, guardedly (as a cautious non-committal
journalist once wrote of “an alleged School-Treat”), since my own ears
have heard it denied of him. But they have heard with incredulity,
since I suppose of this distressing little disease two things to be
certain: the first that it is unmistakable, the second that it is
incurable. The patient may know--perhaps may feel as acutely as his
listeners--that he has it--but in his next sentence it must out: he
cannot help himself. Still, it is a human frailty--not ranking in any
just condemnation with cruelty (say) or treachery; not worthy to be
exalted as a Deadly sin, belonging rather to the peccadilloes about
which--if one may misapply Dante’s phrase--we do not reason, but give
a look and pass on. Moreover, if you followed the argument of my
previous lecture, Thackeray’s was a venial form of the malady because
not deliberately acquired, not (as an American said of side-whiskers)
“the man’s own fault,” but in his blood, inherited of his Anglo-Indian
stock. He never--transferred to Chiswick, the Charterhouse, Cambridge,
the Temple, Kensington, Pall Mall--eradicated that family sense of
belonging to a governing few set amid an alien race, with a high sense
of the duty attached to privilege, but without succour of knowing all
sorts and conditions of men and understanding them as neighbours; or
let me put it, without just that sense which quite stupid men at home
acquire in a Rural Council, or the hunting-field, or a cricket-match on
the village green.
I wish we could end with that, and just put it (with W. E. Henley)
that Thackeray was ever too conscious of a footman behind his chair.
Superficially and in estimating him as a man, that were enough for us.
But artistically the trouble goes deeper. There is no reason why an
artist should or should not take the squalidest of scenes, provided
that the story he sets in it is of serious import. May we agree
that of all atmospheres the atmosphere of a cheap boarding-house is
perhaps the least inviting--the smell of linoleum and cookery in the
well-staircase, the shabby gentility refurbishing itself in the small
bedrooms, the pretence, the ceremony at dinner, the _rissoles_, the
talk about the Prince of Wales, the president landlady with “Saturday”
written on her brow? Well, Balzac took this sort of thing and made
masterpieces of it; and Balzac made masterpieces of it just because he
understood that it, also, belonged to human comedy and tragedy, and
that there, as well as anywhere else, you may find essentially the
wreckage of a King Lear, the dreams of a Napoleon. Thackeray takes a
boarding-house merely to savage it, to empty one poor chest-of-drawers
after another and hang their pitiable contents on a public wash-line,
to hold the dirty saucepans under our noses, to expose the poor
servingmaid’s heart along with her hands, its foolish inarticulate
yearnings along with her finger-nails--and all for _what_? That is
the point--for _what_? To tell us that her dreams of a fairy prince
oscillated between a flash lodger with a reversible tie and a seedy
artist who dropped his “h’s”? We might have guessed that much, surely,
without elaborate literary assistance. But suppose the thing worth
while, why is the man so cruel about it? His favourite Horace, to be
sure, was cruel to his discarded loves. But here is no revulsion of
lost love. Here is nothing but gratuitous mocking at a poor girl--
a fifth-rate dabbler in the British gravy--
and nothing else, or nothing we could not have smelt inside the front
door. And he finds _this_ worth continuing and expanding into a long
novel of _Philip_!
As a rule, Gentlemen, I hold it idle for a lecturer to talk about an
author with whom he has to confess an imperfect sympathy. There are so
many others, worth admiring, whom he may help you to admire! But as
many of us come to Milton against the grain, conquered by his divine
music, so the spell of Thackeray’s prose takes me, often in the moment
of angriest revolt and binds me back his slave. I shall try, next time,
to speak of its great magic.
THACKERAY (III)
I
I fear, Gentlemen, that you will have to take my earlier remarks to-day
with some sympathy for your lecturer’s time of life, even though you
refuse that respect for greying hairs which I shall never claim of you.
If you hereafter remember at all, you will remember that never from
this desk was preached anything but confidence in you, never a word to
bind you with any old or middle-aged rules of wisdom. “Earth loves her
young,” says Meredith:
Her gabbling grey she eyes askant, nor treads
The ways they walk, by what they speak oppressed
--which is well and hopeful and in the way of nature. But since
Professors do not come by nature you have to forgive them a certain
maturity, a date, a crust in the bottle, and handle them gently if you
would know the vintage.
I shall ask you, then, to discount what follows in apparent
depreciation of Thackeray: to remind yourselves that we are all too
prone to destroy the age just preceding our own; with something of
that primitive instinct which (they say), translated into legislation
amid the South Seas, commands a grandfather to scale a tree and hold
on, if he can, while his prehensile young sway the trunk and jerk it.
I do not myself believe in these rude communal tests, that they ever
were, or indeed that, even in our time, natural science has arrived,
for instance, at any fixable limit for a Professor’s incapacity--and
tenacity.
I am simply stating a plain historical fact when I say that the men
who were young and practised writing in the later days of Queen
Victoria--and as devotedly as any of you can be practising it
to-day--found their most peculiar, most dearly cherished, anathema
in the “preachiness” of the _mid_-Victorian novelists--of which
“preachiness” Thackeray had been perhaps the most eminent practitioner
and exemplar. He confesses it, indeed, in one of the _Roundabout
Papers_. Says he:
Perhaps of all the novel-spinners now extant, the present speaker
is the most addicted to preaching. Does he not stop perpetually in
his story and begin to preach to you? When he ought to be engaged
with business, is he not for ever taking the Muse by the sleeve,
and plaguing her with one of his cynical sermons? I cry peccavi
loudly and heartily. I tell you I would like to be able to write a
story which should show no egotism whatever, in which there should
be no reflections, no cynicism, no vulgarity (and so forth) but an
incident in every other page, a villain, a battle, a mystery, in
every chapter.
II
That last sentence quite misses the point--or at least seemed to miss
it quite hopelessly to those who were young in the ’nineties: whose
favourite models were French or Russian--Balzac, Stendhal, Mérimée,
Flaubert, de Maupassant, Turgueniev, the Tolstoy of _Sevastopol_ and
_War and Peace_.
It is a long while ago: but passions of faith we had; the first
commanding us (poor fellows!) to agonise in search of the right or
most expressive word; the second to keep _our_selves out of any given
story making the persons exhibit their characters of themselves and by
the actions, the actions again explain themselves by what the persons
had said or done previously. In other words these young men attempted
to apply to the novel Aristotle’s dictum concerning the Epic, of
which they conceived the novel to be (as Fielding had maintained) the
artistic successor. (And here let me advise all you who have read the
_Poetics_ to study Fielding’s reasoned application of that treatise in
his prefaces to the several Books of _Tom Jones_):
“Admirable on all counts,” says Aristotle, “Homer has the special
merit of being the only poet who understands the part he should
take himself. In his own person he should intrude as little as
possible. It is not in _that_ way he imitates life. Other writers
force themselves into the business throughout and imitate but
little and rarely. Homer, after a few words of preface, at once
brings in a man or a woman as it may be, never characterless but
each distinctively characteristic.”
To put it in another way--and to employ for once a couple of terms
which as a rule these discourses banish, a story should be as purely
objective as possible, the author’s meaning infused indeed (as it must
be in any story worth the telling) but his own person, with his own
commentary, as rigidly excluded as from a stage-play--say, as from
_King Lear_ or _Tartuffe_. _Madame Bovary_ and _Boule de Suif_ were the
exemplars (to name but two); any chat by the author himself ranked as
an offence against art.
III
Now, just accepting this as a historical fact, without question for the
moment of its Tightness or wrongness, you will easily see how impatient
it made that generation with many things to which their fathers had
been prone. Let me mention two or three.
(1) To begin with, it made them abhor those detailed descriptions
of hero, heroine and others--those page-long introductions to which
the great Sir Walter was prone: the philosophical reason for this
being that no art should attempt that which can be far better done by
another. “Her hair, of a raven gloss, concealed its luxuriance within
the confines of a simple ribbon. Loosened, it fell below her waist. The
upper part of her face, with its purely-arched eyebrows, suggested a
Cleopatra. A lover of the antique might have cavilled, perchance, at
the slight uptilt of the nose, which indeed, etc.: or again at the pout
of the pretty, provocative mouth reminiscent”--well, of some picture of
Greuze rather than of some statue or other with which the reader was
presumably acquainted. “But as she burst upon Harold’s vision in a gown
of some simple soft white clinging material--” and so on. It seemed
that a drawing could do that sort of thing better and, for the reader,
in one-twentieth part of the time.
(2) Secondly, our theory cut out long descriptions of “natural
scenery.” Hardy’s preliminary Chapter of Egdon Heath would, of course,
be judged for what it was--a deliberate and magnificent setting of
slow, perdurable nature as background to the transitory life of man,
the stern breast that has suckled so many fretful children and seen
them pass. And again, as in _The Woodlanders_ all the sap of English
woodland--all its spirits of Dryad and Hamadryad--all its aeolian
murmurs in the upper boughs--might be evoked to dignify a most simple
country story. But the sort of romanticism that used to enjoy itself in
the Alps, amid thunderstorms, the solitary communings of the tortured
breast with the grander aspects of peak and ravine, of the atrabilious
or merely bilious, with the avalanche--all this [shall I call it
the Obermann nonsense?] was wiped out even as the terrors of that
gentleman who making an early ascent of the tall but inconsiderable
slope of Glaramara, sat down and demanded to be “let blood.” In short,
lengthy descriptions of scenery passed out of vogue along with lengthy
descriptions of feminine charms.
(3) Thirdly--and to be very brief about this--the names of invented
characters came to be real, or at least plausible names. Such
names as those with which Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, spoilt the
verisimilitude of their novels--“Lord Frederick Verisopht,” “Mr.
Quiverful” or the list of Becky’s guests in _Vanity Fair_--“the Duchess
Dowager of Stilton, Duc de la Gruyère, Marchioness of Cheshire,
Marchese Allessandro Strachino, Comte de Brie, Baron Schapsugar and
Chevalier Tosti”--all in the slang of that day “quite the _cheese_.”
You may say what you like against the old realistic novel, but anyhow
it earned a living in its day if only by cutting out this detestable
boil inherited from Ben Jonson, with his type names of Brain-worm,
Well-bred, La Foule, Sir Epicure Mammon, and so on....
(4) But above all this passion of one’s youth for purely objective
treatment of narrative fell as a denunciatory curse upon Thackeray’s
incurable habit of _preaching_. And here, if we were right (which I
shall not here contend), we blithely damned ourselves to the permanent
unpopularity we are beginning to enjoy. Take warning: for if there be
one vice this nation has in its bones it is a fondness for preaching.
An inscrutable addiction, an unholy habit! I observe even in railway
trains that nine of our nation will swallow a column of propaganda,
unashamed in its cookery, for one that will relish a clean news-report.
And yet, Gentlemen, the mind that can separate clean news from
propaganda and suggestion is the only mind we should seek to send forth
from this city of ours, as the only mind that shall save our state.
This awful propensity to preaching!--and but yesterday an attempt to
force upon all Professors no less than forty preachments a year--a
gluttony of misemployment in a land of unemployed!