Island_, over which a number of those young men of whom I have been
talking waxed enthusiastic, just because it told a plain tale neatly as
(they held) a tale should be told. But _Treasure Island_ cut (as they
say) very little ice with the General Public. What fetched the General
Public and made Stevenson popular was _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_, and
that because the General Public read into it a religious lesson which
the author had never intended. Thereafter he, having ever in him a
strain, as W. E. Henley noted, a
something of the Shorter Catechist,
gave way to preachment--to the composition of collects and Christmas
sermons and (as apparently any of us can do--it is a career open to
all the talents) thereby attracted audiences. But where had gone the
economy of description, the directness of narrative, the sudden
incisiveness of a speaking voice? Take this, for example, of the
_Hispaniola’s_ working her way in to anchorage:
All the way in, Long John stood by the steersman and conned the
ship. He knew the passage like the palm of his hand; and though the
man in the chains got everywhere more water than was down in the
chart, John never hesitated once.
“There’s a strong scour with the ebb,” he said, “and this here
passage has been dug out, in a manner of speaking, with a spade.”
We brought up just where the anchor was in the chart, about a third
of a mile from either shore, the mainland on one side, and Skeleton
Island on the other. The bottom was clean sand. The plunge of our
anchor sent up clouds of birds wheeling and crying over the woods;
but in less than a minute they were down again, and all was once
more silent.
The place was entirely land-locked, buried in woods, the trees
coming right down to a high-water mark, the shores mostly flat,
and the hill-tops standing round at a distance in a sort of
amphitheatre, one here, one there. Two little rivers, or rather,
two swamps, emptied out into this pond, as you might call it; and
the foliage round that part of the shore had a kind of poisonous
brightness. From the ship we could see nothing of the house or
stockade, for they were quite buried among trees; and if it had not
been for the chart on the companion, we might have been the first
that had ever anchored there since the island arose out of the seas.
There was not a breath of air moving, nor a sound but that of the
surf booming half a mile away along the beaches and against the
rocks outside. A peculiar stagnant smell hung over the anchorage--a
smell of sodden leaves and rotting tree-trunks. I observed the
doctor sniffing and sniffing like some one tasting a bad egg.
“I don’t know about treasure,” he said, “but I’ll stake my wig
there’s fever here.”
You will remark, first, how the mere description moves with the
story, following the crew in and just noting the landscape as _they_
saw it after the long sea-passage: quite in the fashion of Homer who
(as Lessing observed) does not in the _Iliad_ weary with any long
description of the finished shield of Achilles but coaxes us up to the
forge of Hephaestus, so that like the children at the open door of
Longfellow’s village smithy we see the work shaping under the workman’s
hammer, and--forgive the trite old verse--
love to see the flaming forge
And hear the bellows roar,
And catch the burning sparks that fly
Like chaff from a threshing-floor:
quite in the fashion of the _Odyssey_, too, where the Wanderers, _and
we with them_, make landfall
on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn
and beach the black ship and disembark and wonder at cliff, glade and
waterfall, we wondering (that is) through their eyes.
You will remark, secondly, in the casual passage I quoted, how the
very few words spoken--those by John Silver, the villain, those by
the Doctor who is the true _punctum indifferens_, the normal sane
man of the story as truly as is Horatio in _Hamlet_--bite in, as by
sharp acid, the impression of the story--the _meaning_ of it, at that
moment, to the mutineer and to the simply honest man.
Am I comparing small things with great? Why, Gentlemen, of course I
am, and purposely; to convince you, if I can, that in small as in
great--the same laws rule true narrative art.
IV
So we come back to Thackeray, and to preaching. Preaching, or
lecturing, would seem to be an endemic itch of our nation, first (I am
sure) to be cured through attack on the public propensity for listening
to lectures and sermons. You will never cure the lecturer. In my own
part of the world the propensity to preach is notoriously virulent. As
the song puts it, into the mouth of an enthusiastic emigrant--
And I will be the preacher,
And preach, three times a day,
To every living creature
In North Americay.
For a moment let us go back to Thackeray’s humbugging protest that he
wished he were able to write a story with “an incident in every other
page, a villain, a battle, a mystery, in every chapter.”
I say (with what reverence it leaves me to command) that this is
pure, if unconscious, humbug, and a clouding of truth. For what is an
“incident”? A murder--say that of Duncan in the castle of Inverness;
a ghost on the battlements of Elsinore, stalking; a horseman in the
night, clattering; a ghostly tapping, a detective holding a lantern
over a reopened grave--all these are incidents and rather obviously so.
But so also, if properly used, may be the tearing-up of a letter, the
stiffened drop of a woman’s hands, a sigh, a turning-away.
“Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part”--just that, and
if you can use that, what more tragic? Thackeray himself--albeit he
could borrow hardily enough from Dumas, as when Colonel Esmond breaks
his sword--in that very book achieves his topmost height, his most
unchallengeable stroke as an artist, by just telling how a brilliant
girl steps down a staircase, and ending on two words, half-whispered in
French, at the foot of it--as we shall see, by and by.
V
No: I dare to say that this gift of loose, informal, preaching was
Thackeray’s bane _as a novelist_. The ease with which it came to him,
and the public’s readiness to accept it, just tempted him to slouch
along. _Esmond_ and the first half of _Vanity Fair_ excepted, he never
seems (to me at least) to have planned out a novel. He could not sit at
home, in his desolated house, and concentrate himself upon a close-knit
artistic design: but wrote, as I have said, in hotels or “upon Club
paper,” usually behind-time and (as the saying is) with the printer’s
devil at his elbow: and so this great melancholy man could, out of his
melancholy and his genius, curiously matched with it, of vivacious talk
summon up ream upon ream at call. Heaven forbid this should suggest
that when he came to facts--more especially when he dealt with his
beloved eighteenth century--he was careless. On the contrary, he knew
it familiarly as a hand knows its glove. I suppose no later writer
(with the possible exception of Austin Dobson) has understood the
earlier half of that century better. For certain, again, no writer
has, comparably with Thackeray, revivified it. Scholars are always on
the pad, with dark lanterns, to catch out writers of imagination: but
I observe that these Proctors, encountering Thackeray, carefully edge
to the other side of the street. I cannot find that anything in _Barry
Lyndon_, _Esmond_, _The Virginians_, the opening of _Denis Duval_,
has ever been seriously challenged by the pedants: and considering
Thackeray’s fame and the minute jealousy of pedants, that is a fairly
fine record. In the famous chapters on Brussels and Waterloo in
_Vanity Fair_, so far as I discover, every record confirms, not one
contradicts, his story.
Again, as it seems to me, this feebleness in construction--this letting
the story go at hazard and filling out with chat or preaching--this
lazy range of invention in plot--matches with limits in the range of
his _characters_. Here again he is always impeccable when dealing
with an Anglo-Indian retired, whether it be Jos. Sedley or Colonel
Newcome--high or low; or with a Foker or a Costigan or anyone he has
encountered in his own Bohemian life, or in a Pall Mall Club or in an
Irish regiment or in any dingy lodging-house, at home or abroad. Any
inhabitant of these haunts, haunts of his actual experience, he can
exhibit and experiment upon with infinite variety. Within that range,
you can say, he almost never went wrong. He could there convert all
particulars to a Universal. No shadow of doubt can rest on the literal
and actual truth of an anecdote he puts into _De Finibus_, one of his
best _Roundabout Papers_.
“I was smoking,” says he, “in a tavern parlour one night, and
this Costigan came into the room alive, the very man; the most
remarkable resemblance of the printed sketches of the man, of the
rude drawings in which I had depicted him. He had the same little
coat, the same battered hat, cocked on one eye, the same twinkle in
that eye. ‘Sir,’ said I, knowing him to be an old friend whom I had
met in unknown regions--‘Sir,’ I said, ‘may I offer you a glass of
brandy-and-water?’ ‘_Bedad ye may_,’ says he, ‘_and I’ll sing ye a
song tu._’ Of course he spoke with an Irish brogue. Of course he
had been in the army. In ten minutes he pulled out an army agent’s
account, whereon his name was written. A few months later we read
of him in a police court. How had I come to know him, to divine
him? Nothing shall convince me that I have not seen that man in the
world of spirits....”
They used (he adds) to call the good Sir Walter the “Wizard of
the North.” What if some writer should appear who can write so
_enchantingly_ that he shall be able to call into actual life the
people whom he invents?... Well, I think Thackeray could do that: but
only, I think, in the small district limited by the Haymarket on the
east and Kensington Gardens on the west. He could call spirits from the
vasty deep of the Cider Cellars, evoke them from the shadowy recesses
of the Reform or the Athenaeum Club. But, like Prospero, he had to draw
a ring around him before his best incantations worked. The cautious
Trollope remarks that his Sir Pitt Crawley “has always been to me a
stretch of audacity which I have been unable to understand. But it has
been accepted.” Yes, to be sure, it has been accepted, and old Sir
Pitt is wickedly alive and breathing just because (on Thackeray’s own
confession) he was drawn from the life. But as a rule, if you take his
dukes and duchesses you will find him on ticklish ground, even so far
northward as Mayfair, apt (shall we say?) to buttonhole the butler.
Always saving _Esmond_ and a part of _The Virginians_, I ask you to
compare anything in Thackeray with the opening of Tolstoy’s _War and
Peace_, and you will detect at once which author is dealing with what
he supposes and which with what is known to him, so familiar that he
cannot mistake his people even as he enters a room.
VI
But now we come to the man’s style; by which I mean, of course, his
propriety and grace of writing. It is, as we have seen, a “flowing”
style: it has that amplitude which Longinus commended and our Burke
practised, as an attribute of the sublime. For defect, as a _narrative_
style, it tells in three or more pages what might as well be told in
three sentences and often better. Without insisting that the writers
of the ’nineties (of whom I spoke but now) ever managed to justify
their painful search for the briefest, most telling phrase, I submit
that it is unlikeliest to be found by a man writing against time, for
monthly numbers. That (if you will) being granted, we have to ask
ourselves _why_ Thackeray’s prose is so beautiful that it moves one
so frequently to envy, and not seldom to a pure delight, transcending
all envy. For certain the secret lies nowhere in his grammar, in which
anyone can find flaws by the score. Half the time his sentences run as
if (to borrow a simile of Mr. Max Beerbohm’s concerning Shakespeare’s
_A Midsummer-Night’s Dream_) the man were kicking up a bedroom slipper
and catching it again on his toe. The secret lies, if you will follow
his sentences and surrender yourselves to their run and lull and lapse,
in a curious haunting music, as of a stream; a music of which scarce
any other writer of English prose has quite the natural, effortless,
command. You have no need to search in his best pages, or to hunt for
his purple patches. It has a knack of making music even while you are
judging his matter to be poor stuff; music--and frequent music--in his
most casual light-running sentences. I protest, Gentlemen, I am not
one of your _pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerunt_ fellows: I grudge
no man saying a thing of mine before me, even when I know it _must_
be valuable because the anticipator is Mr. George Saintsbury; and so
far am I from wishing him to perish that one of my sustaining hopes
of life is that of congratulating him on his hundredth birthday. (Do
not be afraid: in any event, it shall not be from this desk.) But I
protest also that in his _History of English Prose Rhythm_ he surprised
a secret which was mine, and shy as love--the conviction that for
mastery--unconscious, native mastery, it may be--of “that other rhythm
of prose”--no English writer excels Thackeray, and a very few indeed
approach him. So you guess that I have to deal at once with a sense
of gratitude and a grudge that my secret can now stand expressed and
confirmed by so high an authority: and my grudge I shall work off by
quoting him.
“When I say,” he affirms, “that I hardly know any master of
English prose-rhythm greater, in his way, than Thackeray, and that
I certainly do not know any one with so various and pervasive a
command, I may seem to provoke the answer, ‘Oh! you are, if not
a maniac, at any rate a _maniaque_.’ Nevertheless, I say it; and
will maintain it. The most remarkable thing about Thackeray is
his mastery of that mixed style, ‘_shot_ with rhythm.’ Even in
his earliest and most grotesque extravaganzas you will rarely
find a discordant sentence--the very vulgarisms and misspellings
come like solecisms from a pair of pretty lips and are uttered
in a musical voice. As there never was a much hastier writer,
it is clear that the man thought in rhythm--that the words, as
they flowed from his pen, brought the harmony with them. Even his
blank verse and his couplets in prose, never, I think, in any
one instance unintentional, but deliberately used for burlesque
purposes, have a diabolical quality and, as the wine merchants say,
‘breed’ about them, which some very respectable ‘poets’ have never
achieved.”
He quotes a short beautiful passage from _Vanity Fair_--
She was wrapped in a white morning dress, her hair falling on her
shoulders and her large eyes fixed and without light. By way of
helping on the preparations for the departure [for Waterloo where
let me remind you he, her husband, was to fall and lie, with a
bullet through his heart], and showing that she too could be useful
at a moment so critical, this poor soul had taken up a sash of
George’s, from the drawers whereon it lay and followed him to and
fro, with the sash in her hand, looking on mutely as the packing
proceeded. She came out and stood leaning at the wall, holding this
sash against her bosom, from which the heavy net of crimson dropped
like a large stain of blood.
He proceeds:
Take another and shorter--not, I hope, impudently short “Becky was
always good to him, always amused, never angry.”
Anybody can do that? Perhaps; but please find something like it for
me before 1845, and out of Thackeray, if you will kindly do so.
_In_ him it is everywhere.
But, for the cadence of it--since all true prose demands prolonged
cadences--let me try to read you a passage or two from the exquisite
sixth and seventh chapters of _Esmond_. Harry Esmond is home from his
campaigning, has been to service in the old cathedral, and meets his
dear mistress outside as the service is done and over. Mark, I say, the
cadences of that scene of reconciliation--
She gave him her hand, her little fair hand: there was only her
marriage ring on it. The quarrel was all over. The year of grief
and estrangement was passed. They never had been separated. His
mistress had never been out of his mind all that time. No, not
once. No, not in the prison; nor in the camp; nor on shore before
the enemy; nor at sea under the stars of solemn midnight; nor as
he watched the glorious rising of the dawn: not even at the table,
where he sat carousing with friends, or at the theatre yonder,
where he tried to fancy that other eyes were brighter than hers.
Brighter eyes there might be, and faces more beautiful, but none
so dear--no voice so sweet as that of his beloved mistress, who
had been sister, mother, goddess to him during his youth--goddess
now no more, for he knew of her weaknesses; and by thought, by
suffering, and that experience it brings, was older now than she;
but more fondly cherished as woman perhaps than ever she had been
adored as divinity. What is it? Where lies it? the secret which
makes one little hand the dearest of all? Who ever can unriddle
that mystery? Here she was, her son by his side, his dear boy. Here
she was, weeping and happy. She took his hand in both hers; he felt
her tears. It was a rapture of reconciliation.
They walked as though they had never been parted, slowly, with the
grey twilight closing round them.
“And now we are drawing near to home,” she continued, “I knew you
would come, Harry, if--if it was but to forgive me for having
spoken unjustly to you after that horrid--horrid misfortune. I was
half frantic with grief then when I saw you. And I know now--they
have told me. That wretch, whose name I can never mention, even has
said it: how you tried to avert the quarrel, and would have taken
it on yourself, my poor child: but it was God’s will that I should
be punished, and that my dear lord should fall.”
“He gave me his blessing on his death-bed,” Esmond said. “Thank God
for that legacy!”
“Amen, amen! dear Henry,” said the lady, pressing his arm. “I knew
it. Mr. Atterbury, of St. Bride’s, who was called to him, told me
so. And I thanked God, too, and in my prayers ever since remembered
it.”
“You had spared me many a bitter night, had you told me sooner,”
Mr. Esmond said.
“I know it, I know it,” she answered, in a tone of such sweet
humility, as made Esmond repent that he should ever have dared
to reproach her. “I know how wicked my heart has been; and I
have suffered too, my dear. I confessed to Mr. Atterbury--I must
not tell any more. He--I said I would not write to you or go to
you--and it was better even that, having parted, we should part.
But I knew you would come back--I own that. That is no one’s fault.
And to-day, Henry, in the anthem, when they sang it, ‘When the
Lord turned the captivity of Zion, we were like them that dream,’
I thought yes, like them that dream--them that dream. And then it
went, ‘They that sow in tears shall reap in joy; and he that goeth
forth and weepeth, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing,
bringing his sheaves with him;’ I looked up from the book and saw
you. I was not surprised when I saw you. I knew you would come, my
dear, and saw the gold sunshine round your head.”
She smiled an almost wild smile as she looked up at him. The moon
was up by this time, glittering keen in the frosty sky. He could
see for the first time now clearly, her sweet careworn face.
“Do you know what day it is?” she continued. “It is the 29th of
December--it is your birthday! But last year we did not drink
it--no, no. My lord was cold, and my Harry was likely to die: and
my brain was in a fever; and we had no wine. But now--now you are
come again, bringing your sheaves with you, my dear.” She burst
into a wild flood of weeping as she spoke: she laughed and sobbed
on the young man’s heart, crying out wildly, “bringing your sheaves
with you--your sheaves with you!”
So they fare to the lit house, and to the tragedy which is the tragedy
of all womankind; of beauty fading while desire endures, the passion to
be loved persists; most tragic of all when a mother meets in a daughter
her careless conquering rival.
As they came up to the house at Walcote, the windows from within
were lighted up with friendly welcome; the supper-table was spread
in the oak parlour; it seemed as if forgiveness and love were
awaiting the returning prodigal. Two or three familiar faces of
domestics were on the look-out at the porch--the old housekeeper
was there, and young Lockwood from Castlewood, in my lord’s livery
of tawny and blue. His dear mistress pressed his arm as they
passed into the hall. Her eyes beamed out on him with affection
indescribable. “Welcome,” was all she said, as she looked up,
putting back her fair curls and black hood. A sweet rosy smile
blushed on her face; Harry thought he had never seen her look so
charming. Her face was lighted with a joy that was brighter than
beauty--she took a hand of her son, who was in the hall waiting his
mother--she did not quit Esmond’s arm.
“Welcome, Harry!” my young lord echoed after her. “Here we are all
come to say so. Here’s old Pincot: hasn’t she grown handsome?” and
Pincot, who was older, and no handsomer than usual, made a curtsey
to the Captain, as she called Esmond, and told my lord to “Have
done, now.”
“And here’s Jack Lockwood. He’ll make a famous grenadier, Jack;
and so shall I; we’ll both ’list under you, Cousin. As soon as
I am seventeen, I go to the army--every gentleman goes to the
army. Look! who comes here--ho, ho!” he burst into a laugh. “’Tis
Mistress Trix, with a new ribbon; I knew she would put one on as
soon as she heard a captain was coming to supper.”
This laughing colloquy took place in the hall of Walcote House,
in the midst of which is a staircase that leads from an open
gallery, where are the doors of the sleeping chambers: and from
one of these, a wax candle in her hand, and illuminating her, came
Mistress Beatrix--the light falling indeed upon the scarlet ribbon
which she wore, and upon the most brilliant white neck in the world.
Esmond had left a child and found a woman, grown beyond the common
height, and arrived at such a dazzling completeness of beauty,
that his eyes might well show surprise and delight at beholding
her. In hers there was a brightness so lustrous and melting, that
I have seen a whole assembly follow her as if by an attraction
irresistible: and that night the great Duke was at the playhouse
after Ramillies, every soul turned and looked (she chanced to enter
at the opposite side of the theatre at the same moment) at her,
and not at him. She was a brown beauty: that is, her eyes, hair
and eyebrows and eye-lashes were dark: her hair curling with rich
undulations, and waving over her shoulders; but her complexion was
as dazzling white as snow in sunshine; except her cheeks, which
were a bright red, and her lips, which were of a still deeper
crimson. Her mouth and chin, they said, were too large and full,
and so they might be for a goddess in marble, but not for a
woman whose eyes were fire, whose look was love, whose voice was
the sweetest low song, whose shape was perfect symmetry, health,
decision, activity, whose foot as it planted itself on the ground
was firm but flexible, and whose motion, whether rapid or slow,
was always perfect grace--agile as a nymph, lofty as a queen--now
melting, now imperious, now sarcastic--there was no single movement
of hers but was beautiful. As he thinks of her, he who writes feels
young again, and remembers a paragon.
So she came holding her dress with one fair rounded arm, and her
taper before her, tripping down the stair to greet Esmond.
“She hath put on her scarlet stockings and white shoes,” says
my lord, still laughing. “Oh, my fine mistress! is this the way
you set your cap at the Captain?” She approached, shining smiles
upon Esmond, who could look at nothing but her eyes. She advanced
holding forward her head, as if she would have him kiss her as he
used to do when she was a child.
“Stop,” she said, “I am grown too big! Welcome, Cousin Harry,”
and she made him an arch curtsey, sweeping down to the ground
almost, with the most gracious bend, looking up the while with the
brightest eyes and sweetest smile. Love seemed to radiate from her.
Harry eyed her with such a rapture as the first lover is described
as having by Milton.
“N’est-ce pas?” says my lady, in a low, sweet voice, still hanging
on his arm.
Esmond turned round with a start and a blush, as he met his
mistress’s clear eyes. He had forgotten her, rapt in admiration of
the _filia pulcrior_.